The Suicide of Claire Bishop

by Carmiel Banasky

  But maybe the items of the code aren’t laid out properly. Like the comic books—they were hardly ever in their sleeves. I get up and spread them across the desk. And the box of cars and dolls was to the right of the electronics, not left. I move the bins just so. Still, nothing happens. I try to imagine I’m already in the past. I’m watching Dallas and Matlock while I wait for my mom to come home from her animal-rights “activities.” “Honey, I’m home,” she calls in a Ricky Ricardo voice. In my room, she tells me some version of what she did that night—targeting a pet shop chain in Tacoma, spray-painting figures of dead cats and dogs with X’s for eyes, breaking into an animal-testing center, firebombing a car in a lab parking lot. She’d go on weekend raids to mink farms around the state, freeing tens of thousands of animals. It is a fairy tale in the dark, imagining those furry friends dancing around her, their princess, in dewy midnight fields, silk tails sparkling with moonlight. After one raid in Snohomish County, there was a reward out for her, which was exciting.

  The portal still isn’t working. It’s like I’m at the station doors to my past but they won’t let me on the train. Where’s your ticket, sir, you need a ticket! But I have a ticket! I unroll the painting and drape it over me like a blanket.

  Some nights, during the divorce, she’d talk about how much she missed my dad. Scratching my back absentmindedly, her fingernails jagged from biting, she told me how handsome he was when she first saw him fight at the local dojo, but he’d swept her off her feet only when he promised to give up his black-belt training for her—she didn’t believe in fighting. Other nights she’d tell me what a motherfucker he was: he couldn’t do any better than her, just let him try, and he was a terrible father and she was sad she even brought me into the world with his DNA.

  I’d listen with eyes half closed as my mother sat on my bed in the near dark, always a cat on her lap, and that nightlight in the hall, and the wispy top of her hair lit from behind like the frazzled ends of comets. Her voice would fall on my dreams, pebbles of information would turn into skipping stones in a creek, or rain, or an army of robots marching to destroy the world.

  “It’s ten o’clock, come on,” she says. But I can’t move. I’m paralyzed. “Your dad would throw a soaking wet towel on you to get you up for school. Should I do that?”

  I sit up straight in bed, breathing hard. I’m in my childhood room. The real deal.

  “I was just joking,” Mom says.

  “What day is it?”

  “Wednesday.”

  “No, what date? What year?”

  “Don’t be silly. Get up now, I’m starving.” She picks up the loose canvas from the bed and studies it. “What’s this?” She touches the woman’s face closest to the bottom.

  In the mirror above the broken dresser, my face is the same as in 2004, except with dark circles under the eyes. But maybe that’s only my own perception. I wouldn’t look different to myself when I time travel, would I? Only to other people?

  “Where did you get this?” she asks about the painting. “It’s creepy.”

  “Mom? How old do I look?”

  “It’s creepy, but it’s not. You know? I think I like it.”

  “Mom.”

  “You’ve always looked younger than you are, nothing wrong with that.” Then she walks out, calling behind her, “Get dressed already.”

  I don’t want to freak her out. Timeline wise, we must be after the divorce, since she talked about my dad like that. But there’s no other clue in her face. She looks young and old.

  My enemies are catching up to me and I’m making no progress! I didn’t time travel, which is evident when we leave the new house. Mom drags me to a late breakfast at the airport café, a little diner on the landing field where Cessnas fly in and out. We sit on the porch and watch the green, matted ground send up sparks of insects. The sky is gray and I can just make out the peaks buried in the thick cloud cover—the Olympic Mountains like stones under a blanket. Mom and I both order the same thing and smile at the tired waitress: two eggs over easy with home fries and a piece of pie. It’s the best marionberry pie in the world. It’s what I think of when I’m eating street falafel in the city and I miss home.

  A man in a black suit is sitting at the table next to us behind my mom, facing me. Did you see him sit down and not tell me? He folds his chubby hands together under his chin and sits very still. Not many people in this town wear suits like that, especially at the airport.

  I have to think quicker. Of course I didn’t time travel because she would never leave such a simple clue for just anyone to find. But I’m on the right track. Nicolette has been meddling with my past—slipping herself into my yearbook, reassembling my room. But the bedroom alone is too easy. Remember it’s all about the image with her. Maybe my room is just one of many scenes she left for me to find here. Maybe there isn’t just one moment of original pain, maybe there are many puzzle pieces that make it up. I have to collect the other tableaux. I have one—but how do I know how many more there are and where to find them?

  A plane rumbles from the overcast and lands shakily on the runway. The gnats and bees are out in full bloom. Bees everywhere, even though they’re supposed to be disappearing. The waitress brings our food. I can’t take that first bite of pie quick enough, mouth runny with expectation. The man in black is reading the menu but looks over at me every now and then.

  “As good as you remember?” my mom asks.

  It is not. A little dry, a little fake-sweet. I nod. “So where’s Dad living now?”

  She looks down at her pie. “Is yours warm? Mine doesn’t seem warm.”

  “You haven’t tried it yet. Does he want to see me?”

  She takes a bite. “It’s warm.” I give her a look. “Of course your father wants to see you. I’m just not sure he’s in town this week. Always something. Fishing. Don’t worry about him. I’ll give him a call and see if he can’t come by tomorrow. I thought you two were writing again.”

  The waitress comes by with coffee and whispers something about biting off my head, but my mom doesn’t hear. When the screen door slams behind her, I ask the big question: “Mom?”

  “Yeah, honey? You like the potatoes?”

  I lower my voice to nearly a whisper. “Have you been contacted by anyone from New York? The cops? Or any Hasid people, Mom? Besides Jules? Think carefully. Has anyone talked to you about a painting? Did you ever go out there without me knowing?”

  Her eyes pucker and she’s shaking her head. “I wanted to see you, honey. But I couldn’t. I go crazi on airplanes. You know that. I’m sorri I never came out. Please don’t be mad at me. Not about that. Be mad for other reasons.” Her breath quickens and her face turns a very pretty shade of red.

  “I’m not mad at you. Calm down.” She has the words too. “I was never mad.”

  She cries into her marionberry pie.

  “I said I wasn’t mad. Don’t cry here.” I glance over her shoulder at the man. He’s pretending to look at the planes.

  “I’m not crying,” she says through her tears. She wipes her runny nose with her hands and then wipes her eyes, which is gross. “I’m not crying, see?” She sniffles and smiles at me.

  “Just be careful of strangers is all I’m saying. You can’t trust them. I mean it.”

  “Don’t be silly. There are no strangers here,” my mom says. “Are you seeing Miles tonight?”

  “Did you tell him about me being sick?”

  In slow motion, her face starts to scrunch and morph again, invisible fingers pushing her flesh around.

  “It’s fine,” I say. “I just want to know before I see him.”

  Her face relaxes. “Was I not supposed to? He asked how you were and I didn’t want to lie. Should I have lied?” She looks at me intensely then, trying to read my thoughts. But I know she can’t.

  Both Miles and Ralph are working at the mill these days. They’ll probably always work there, but who am I to say they should get out of town? They’re in a different d
epartment than my dad, though; he’s not trapped in the same way.

  Outside Ralph’s crappy prefab, I can see their silhouettes in the window. They look like they’re doing the monkey dance with their arms, but probably not. I watch, missing the guys for the first time, even though I’m right here.

  The door swings open and it’s Miles shouting, “Hey, buddy. What are you doing? Come inside.”

  It’s me and Miles and Ralph at Ralph’s house. We drink homebrew from water glasses around a smudgy glass coffee table—Ralph and Miles in chairs on one side, legs splayed open the same, and me alone on the lumpy futon opposite them, smack in the middle. They look at me carefully, like I’m an extraterrestrial and they’re FBI agents who have to pretend they don’t know what I really am, and the whole scenario of this visit, them being so-called friends and this beer, is made up for my benefit. But the couch is safe enough. Yellow-level.

  Miles asks what New York is like and jokes that I must be clubbing a lot, and I tell him I about my job. “But I’m not allowed to talk about it. Lots of big corporate secrets.”

  “Yeah, like what?” Ralph asks.

  Ralph was always the one getting in fights and Miles was always the one getting him out of them. Nothing much has changed, I don’t think.

  I tell them everything. About and Mr. Fox and his oranges. Miles laughs at that. Even some more secret stuff about trends and the future of skinny jeans and orchids, which I’m not necessarily supposed to tell even though there’s no written contract. Three and a half beers later, I’m no longer pushing heavy stones around just to say a sentence.

  “You should come visit sometime. I have an apartment in the city. It’s not that big, but—”

  “Might have some vacation days.” Miles shrugs and tips back his beer. “Money’s tight.”

  “I’d never live there,” Ralph says. “People are assholes.”

  “And what the hell,” Miles says. “You’d have to be half-crazi to stay in the center of the Muslim bullseye.”

  He turns bright red when he notices his word choice. But I don’t make any indication that it bothers me, because it doesn’t, just because that word is back and I don’t like it. And then I know: this room with Miles and Ralph—it’s another Rosetta stone to finding and unlocking the portal.

  “Want another beer?” Miles asks. “Next I’ll try to make cherry flavor. For the girls.” He looks at my still-full glass. “You don’t like it? You think it’s too bitter.”

  “No, I like it a lot.” I take another sip to prove it. “What girls?”

  “Are you even supposed to drink?” Ralph asks. “With your meds.”

  Miles slaps him on the shoulder, then looks at me sheepishly. “We heard,” he says. “You know, but your mom said you’re doing good.”

  Before Ralph was my friend, Miles helped me beat him up. That was back in middle school, when Ralph stole my stick. We each had sticks that we took good care of, weapons that we used in epic recess battles against one another. Mine was curved at the end with a sharp hook. Ralph never let on where he’d hid it. I never saw it again.

  I tell them to chill and that I’m totally fine to drink but can’t go nuts or anything. “I’m still me. You can ask me stuff.”

  “Yeah, we know. That’s why we were wanting to ask you,” Ralph says, all serious. “Because you’re the expert. But if you’re not comfortable answering, that’s cool…how are those East Coast chicks?” He grins like

  he’s so pleased with himself.

  Miles says, “I heard they put out more.”

  I decide to go invisible while they compare the girls they fucked since high school. I think of asking them about Nicolette, to see if they remember her like Jules does. If she inserted herself into everyone’s memory but mine. But I’m afraid they’d take her away from me if I do. Take away anything sacred about her.

  Instead I ask them about Helen Morgan, the first girl I ever slept with, and they laugh until they remember something and then they say she got postpartum depression pretty bad, like as bad as you can get it after her third kid, and she tried to kill her baby but didn’t manage to and now she’s in jail in Seattle. And since we have someone with even bigger problems to talk about, they start to act like they know me again. They get comfortable, maybe too comfortable, and they’re on their sixth beer when they start trying to figure things out.

  “So, are you sick like right now?” Miles says. “Right this second?”

  I say no, but that “sick” isn’t really the right word.

  “What is the right word?”

  “‘Sick’ is just kind of loaded,” I say.

  “What word then?”

  “I mean ‘sick’ makes it sound like I have a cold and it’ll go away in a day.”

  “So? What word?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Ralph is looking out the window, and it’s really dark outside, so he’s looking at nothing. “Were you sick when we were young and just didn’t know it yet?”

  “He only got sick a year ago,” Miles says, then adds, “dumbass.”

  But I don’t need Miles’s protection. Maybe Ralph is on to something.

  I’m thinking about the time I pulled Jules’s hair. “Was that because I was sick?” I ask Ralph. He and Miles look back at me, too drunk to understand what I’m saying. We were fighting over a toy, I think, so I scribbled on a drawing Jules had made, and she got so mad she said I deserved to die. I pleaded with her, Jules take it back, say I’m not going to die. But she wouldn’t take it back. I tried to reason with her that if she didn’t, it might come true and wouldn’t she feel bad and she said, I want it to come true and I won’t take it back. And I pulled her hair so hard it came out in my hands.

  I was just a kid then, but when I look back and remember that day, I’m standing inside the memory, and I look like I do now, hunched shoulders and glasses and scruff. A grown man pulling the hair of an eight-yearold girl.

  Is that the moment of original pain? One of the tableaux? They made us go to family therapy after the hair-pulling day, and right after that, Jules moved out because they thought she’d be safer with my dad. Jules has said that isn’t true. She said we went to counseling because of their marriage trouble, and it was at least a year before she moved—a custody issue, nothing to do with me. Jules said, “You think I moved because I was afraid of you? Did Mom tell you that? You’re always trying to protect her.” Jules has always wanted me to be the good guy. But I’m not. She’s never gotten that through her thick skull.

  I feel like hurting her again. “Jules is a religious nut now,” I tell Ralph and Miles. “She cut her hair off and wears wigs.”

  “That sounds badass. Like G.I. Jane,” Ralph says.

  “No,” I say.

  “She was always Demi Moore hot,” Miles slurs.

  I say, “But that’s not the worst part.”

  “Hey.” Ralph sits up straight like a brilliant idea knocked him sober. “So what kind of drugs do they got you on? Do they make you better?”

  “Yeah, totally. They did,” I say.

  “Would it do anything, you know, to someone like us?” Ralph asks.

  I reach in my jacket pocket and pull out the pill bottle and rattle it for effect. “Ho-ho-ho. A Zyprexa for you, and a Zyprexa for you, ho-ho-ho,” I say, one hand on my belly, handing them each a pill. My last two.

  “You sure it’s okay?” Miles asks.

  “Probably illegal,” I say.

  They down the pills with beer. “I mean do you have enough? You aren’t going to run out?”

  “Nope.” I don’t tell them which question I was answering. “Anyway, I barely need them anymore. Today I didn’t take one. Or yesterday.”

  “But what if?” Miles says.

  “I just feel super awake. More awake-awake than I’ve felt all year.”

  “I don’t feel anything,” Ralph says.

  Miles says, “It’s not in your bloodstream yet.”

  Ralph grabs two bottles from th
e fridge. Out of homebrew and onto High Life.

  “That’s your number eight,” I say to Miles.

  “So?” Ralph says. He bends over the stereo on the floor and puts on Pink Floyd.

  “So I was saying,” I say, “the most awful part about the Hasid thing is that they’re worse than the mafia. The Hasids have their own mafia and they have spies all over the place and do all sorts of covert stuff. Not bad stuff like the Italian mafia. Good stuff, usually.”

  “Are you serious? There’s a Jewish mafia?” Miles hiccups.

  “Yeah, they followed me here.”

  “Who’s their arch nemesis? The German mafia?” Miles whoops and slaps his knee.

  Ralph sits back down and laughs loudly. “You’re fucking batshit,” Ralph says.

  Then I say, “Do you think it’s my fault? About what happened to Helen Morgan?”

  Ralph stops laughing. “It’s got nothing to do with you.”

  “I know, but what if?”

  “Because you fucked her once?”

  I’m about to say, what if I gave her my disease somehow, but something red-level dangerous is throbbing behind Ralph’s eyelid.

  “Hey, let’s see the scars,” Miles says, sticking out the top of his left hand to us. We examine each other’s cigarette burns and then our own.

  We burned twice before, back in high school. All that’s left of our past “brotherhood” ritual is an embossment of spongy skin.

  “They’ve faded,” Ralph says, grinning. “Let’s do it again.” It was Ralph’s idea years ago, too. But he’s always burning himself on purpose anyway.

  I laugh. “We’re too old for that now, right?”

  “Hell, no,” Miles says. “We can’t ever be too old. Okay?”

  We each light a cigarette and stand in a circle. Miles holds his hand out to me, I hold mine to Ralph, and Ralph holds his to Miles. I wonder, if aliens came to Earth right now and observed this, what would they think? This thought isn’t so weird that it won’t make them laugh, so I say, “I wonder if aliens came to Earth right now and observed this, what would they think?”