But Jules is why I must do this. To time travel, to sidestep reality and slip through into elsewhen.
I close my eyes and hold tight to the painting. I feel the grass slicing along my ankles as I run, the air whipping the hairs on my face, the edge of the bluff on the ball of one foot and then the other. And then nothing. Nothing. I am in the air. I am the air. I am wildly open. I am heavy. All my organs are in my head. The weirdest part being I have time to think there is a weirdest part, that I am in the air, I am falling through it, this could be forever, I am scared.
I’m standing on the cliff, toes nearly cresting the ridge—again, or still? My face feels raw.
I traveled back in time twenty seconds to when I was first on the edge, about to jump. Or did I never jump at all?
I wonder if the wind would have carried my voice, the day I saw her jump. If I’d called out, if I’d tried to stop her.
The one smart thing my dad said was that I should be protecting Jules.
The trees are spilled paint when Mom and I get out of town and pick up speed. The only car on the road for tens of miles.
The jump only carried me back twenty seconds. It was, like you said, an instructional video—training for a much bigger jump. A bigger risk. But where and when?
A bee is crawling across my window. How did you get in here? You’re supposed to have disappeared, bee, you’re one of the disappeared—for what are you following me around? Don’t buzz at me, I know your pain. But perhaps the bee is on to something.
“I wish you weren’t going back so soon,” my mom says for the one-hundredth time.
“You’re the one who’s making me!”
Which isn’t true—I don’t know where next to go, but the portal isn’t here. I must head east, back towards my future Nicolette.
“You’ll find a way to give that thing back without getting in trouble, right? West?”
I tap the window with my knuckle near the bee. “So, Dad’s seeing someone new? What happened to Kathy?”
“Who knows?”
“I think Dad must be unhappy.”
She cackles like it’s a joke. “You’re right, he must be. But it’s no excuse for the way he acts.”
“But he hasn’t seen me since before.”
“What about me? You think it’s not hard on me?”
Her cell vibrates in the cup holder. It’s him—I can tell from the way her nostrils flare. He’s listening in and doesn’t want us talking about him behind his back. His voice is muffled, squashed between the phone and her ear, he’s speaking from deep inside my pocket. By this point, my dad’s probably saying, “What’s this about Jules being pregnant? I can’t believe she told you and not me.”
My mom gapes at me. “What? Jules is pregnant?”
I take the phone from her hand and hang it up.
“Honey, what?” My mom keeps turning her whole body toward me but tries to keep her eyes on the road. “Jules is what?”
“She’s not pregnant. I was lying. I don’t know why. I was mad.” I watch her face scrunch, thinking about this.
“That’s not very nice, even if your dad is a jerk.” She hits the top of the steering wheel. “You shouldn’t have seen him. I knew it would upset you.”
“It’s fine. We talked about the toilet seat.”
“Not the rats again.”
Along the road the forests are swallowed by farmland. I try to smile at her. She pulls down her windshield visor. “Let’s talk about something more pleasant. Are you seeing anyone? I’m sure there are plenty of fish in the big concrete sea.” Her smile takes forever to spread across her face. I watch the origin of it, each fold of skin and segment of lip stretching almost to breaking, all these movements affecting the next but also the prior, the slow pull of face.
“No,” I say. “I was, but not now.” The bee is a professional eavesdropper. I open my window until it flies out.
“You were? You never told me that.”
“Why would I?”
“Because we tell each other things. Don’t we? What’s her name? What was her name?”
Suddenly every cloud in the sky morphs into Nicolette’s face. If it wasn’t real and therefore scary, it might be romantic. Don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it. “Nicolette,” I say.
Nicolette has taken the place of my hazy reflection in the partly rolled-down passenger window. If I tell my mom about Nicolette would we all vanish? Beside me, Nicolette nods, telling me it’s all right. “I’m trying to find her again,” I say.
“Where is she?”
“Disappeared.”
“You know what your father used to do to win me over in a fight? He’d show up at my door just like we were old friends. I had no choice but to invite him in, and things were right back how they always were. Maybe she’d think that’s romantic.” My mom is bobbing her head like we’re listening to music. “Nicolette. That name sounds familiar.”
The birds are on the wires. Wires stretching out before us—strings on a guitar and the road is the fret board.
The phone starts vibrating again. “It’s him,” she says.
“Don’t answer it.”
“I want to tell him you were kidding. What if he calls Jules?”
“Let him then. Don’t answer. Answer is the key. And keys open or lock.” She squints at the road but doesn’t touch the phone.
I feel strong. Just like I always felt with Nicolette. Like she’s holding my hand again and we’re running across a big freeway, laughing. I don’t know where to go, but she is guiding me.
Instead of speaking to my mom, I try to think to her. I tell her to veer left, and she does. I tell the trees to give us shade, and they do. I tell the wind to whistle a tune from my childhood and it picks up “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” I feel an overwhelming sorrow for the birds on the wires—for all birds. I pity them so much I could cry.
You say, Fly, bird. “That’s funny,” I say.
“What is?”
How the trees listen but aren’t silent.
How the road is a song beneath us.
How there’s a man with a shadow for a face sitting outside my window.
I say this: “What would you say if I ran out of pills? Ran away from home.”
“Did you forget them? Should we turn around?” Her mouth moves even after she finishes speaking, a dubbed-over kung fu movie.
“They’re waiting for me in New York. Waiting happens all the time. We’re always waiting. It’s not hard.” For tomorrow will be new again. That’s good. I can’t wait, really. I will hit my cheek on concrete. Just to feel it. I will rub my cheek on New York bubblegummed cobblestone. I’m there now already, as I’m here in the car. I can feel it right now, thrown out of my seat in an accident, the cement on my face. The sting of those darts of light in stone. The beautiful light inside asphalt: bees. Hundreds of bees. Swarming underground, waiting for their moment.
Causation is reversed. Things yet to happen upset moments in the past. I feel so close to Nicolette. Can you feel her too? She’s near, telling me to follow the sound of her voice. But not too close. To touch her would be to evaporate. To hold onto her would be to hold onto the infinity between moments.
The world is opening its locked doors. Secrets are being revealed.
“What do you do if you miss a pill? What does your doctor say?” My mother is looking at me and the road both. She has two faces, one for each direction. “Stop looking at me like that,” she says.
Here’s the truth: we’re all connected, but not in a straight line. More like constellations, or islands. My thoughts fill the gaps like water; each movement of hers is connected to mine.
The man with the shadow for a face is sitting in my window. Is that you taking over my reflection? Nicolette got evicted. You, shadow face, are telling me to fly.
So I do. I unbuckle my seatbelt and leave myself behind. But, you remind me, I didn’t need to unbuckle because seatbelts don’t hold in essences.
Below me, I’m sitti
ng by my mother in the van. The shadow fills me up. It’s you, filling me up. I see that frail, encumbered body, the top of a head—you have dandruff! My mother keeps glancing at that body sitting next to her, thinking it’s me. That’s not me, that’s just West, that’s just the empty vessel, the frame that holds the work of art. But it’s not necessary anymore. From up here, I hear someone say, What word then? Let’s see the scars. Rats coming up from the sewers. Honey, what’s wrong?
“Should I pull over? Tell me now.”
“I’m fine, Mom. Just drive,” vessel-me says.
“You’re scaring me. You scared me there for a second.”
It’s blinding, the cracks in the universe, the golden thread stretching on the verge of breaking. The blinding light. Underneath the light is shadow. Something is breaking apart.
“Buckle your seatbelt,” she says.
“Just drive,” you say.
You try to tell her. You try to tell her everything. You know about hollering.
You know about being quiet, too. You have to know about hollering to know about being quiet.
You board the plane, bag slung over your shoulder. In first class they glare at you and gnash their teeth, you can see their breath filling the cabin, turning into microscopic bees, making it hard to breathe. An older woman in a fur shawl, which your mother would spray with fake blood if she were here, takes a good look at you then whispers to the woman next to her: That one’s dangerous.
Down the aisle, toward your seat. Someone growls behind you. You aren’t prepared for that and stop short and the man runs right into you and yells, Hey! It echoes off the cabin walls and the overhead bins and returns to you as, Go away!
Seat 23C, aisle on the port side. You stow your bag above the noise along with the painting—the tube now adorned in new birthday wrapping paper from your mom’s—and you wish you could crawl up there, too. You look up and down the aisle for good measure. In the rear of the plane, a wide-brimmed black hat arcs above a seat, the face obscured. Next to him, a cop’s cap. You duck into your seat before they see you. The sun has nearly set.
The little wool flap with the airline logo covers the headrest. Because of the lice and gnats and bees, you try to pull it off, but it won’t give. You try to blow away all possible bees. You try to relax. You try to ignore the voice-pollution that fills up the place: You don’t belong here, get off the plane, jump out while you still can, off the plane.
The row in front of you is an exit row. That’s good. You can be one of the first off in case the sides of the plane rip free—you read about that happening somewhere. The people in the row ahead are too short but you can see their fat arms in the cracks between the seats. The two people in your row to your left are fat also but they are already pretending to sleep. To your right, across the aisle, is not a fat person but a young girl maybe fifteen. Alone. Really and fully alone. You look around but can’t see anyone who might belong to this girl with sky-blue fingernails. Looking at her makes the rest go still—she is safe and good to you. She wears blue wire-framed glasses and is reading The Great Gatsby. The plane pulls back from the gate and starts to taxi. The paint on the girl’s nails is chipped away in mountain shapes from biting, which means that she has eaten that paint, which worries you. You take out your headphones and listen to Charles Mingus in case the voices of the passengers start up again, in case the girl should say you ought to get out of here. You can tell yourself it isn’t real, that you are making it up, but it is equally plausible that the 193 people on this plane are right now unbuckling their just-buckled seat-belts in order to grab you and throw you off or kill you with a travel-size toothbrush. But they’re only pawns; it isn’t their fault they were chosen to off you because of how much you know. Now you’ve pissed off Charles Mingus, he sounds angry, so you switch to Bach’s Goldberg Variations because you feel that is triumphant music and the songs are short like pop songs.
The plane is still taxiing. In front of the girl are two very large Indian women and one skinny man between them. The two women lean over the man and speak so loudly to each other that you can hear a murmur over the music. They gesticulate wildly, their hands flinging the compressed cabin air like water. The woman on the aisle seat keeps turning around as she speaks so her voice rises and falls as she eyeballs the people around her. Her gaze falls on you and you look away. Small TVs descend from the cabin ceiling. A spokeswoman shows you how to breathe. You cannot hear the words but know she is saying, “Have you or any of your belongings been out of your sight? If so, you must report yourself to the proper authorities.” Yes, yes, you want to say, you have been out of your own sight. You slept too much, why did you do that? You must have been drugged, a bomb placed under your eyelids. You are at red-level danger.
Out of the corner of your eye you see the girl put down The Great Gatsby and lean forward in her seat, staring at the screen with her head tilted back. You take off your earphones and look at her smooth, flawless girl-cheek. Then, in one motion, she flicks her head to stare at you and raises her hand to push a button with the tip of a blue fingernail. You follow the finger’s path—the flight attendant call button. Now they are most certainly coming for you. You shouldn’t have been staring at her like that. You are helpless, nowhere to go. You are such an idiot. You gulp at the stale air, cotton-mouthed.
“Water,” you say out loud.
The stewardess has come into profile. She says, curtly, “Sir, you’ll have to wait.” She leans down and the girl whispers something but her mouth is pointing more at the stewardess’s sloped breasts than at her ear. “You’ll have to speak up,” the stewardess says.
“I was told,” says the girl, loud enough for you to hear, but still quiet, “to report anything suspicious to an airline employee.”
The airline employee stands up stick straight. Her voice descends a note. “Yes, go on.”
You close your eyes, waiting for your execution.
“They,” the girl says, and you open your eyes to see her pointing not at you, but directly in front of her, “have been talking about starting a fire on the plane.”
The cabin is an ocean-roar of whispers. You catch the words “slaughter” and “pregnant.”
The Indian woman on the aisle has turned around in one of her curious swivels and has been listening in. “What?” comes the deep growl. “Are you talking about us?”
“I overheard you,” the girl says. “I’m sorry.”
There it is, small and naked, “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry,” you say in the same voice as the girl.
All the players turn to you and stare.
“Did you hear this as well? Sir? Speak up if you did,” the stewardess demands.
“I’m sorry,” you say again, trying to be quieter, but it comes out amplified. You shake your head and hold your earphones up for her to see.
The other woman-in-question sticks her head above the window seat to say, “This is ridiculous.”
The aisle woman says, “She has no clue what she’s talking about. She’s just a little girl. We were talking about how this exit row is actually not ideal if there is a fire in the cabin because only the front exit can be used. We were arguing whether or not we were in the safest part of the plane and my sister said not if we have to help everyone else off first, didn’t you say that.” But the sister only glares.
The stewardess says, “I’m going to have to ask you—”
The man between the sisters takes off his seatbelt and stands calmly in a half-bend under the overhead bins. “You’re aware this is racial profiling,” he says in a mild accent.
“Sir, you must sit down.”
The man straightens his shoulders instead, his head still tilted to fit. “This girl has been watching Fox News far past her bedtime. That is what I’m saying. She has been brainwashed and we are brown. Do you know we’re not even Muslim, little girl? I’m Hindu. And my sister-in-law here is Christian. This is crazy talk.” The man’s voice has raised an octave. “Not that
it should matter, but I’m a professor at Rutgers University. In New Jersey. Did you know that when you pushed that button?”
The captain or someone in a different outfit appears. The stewardess whispers to him and the captain-or-someone says to the man, “I’m terribly sorry but this is protocol. When something like this occurs, we must follow protocol. You’ll have to step off the plane. I’m sure it’s just a little miscommunication.”
“We’ll continue this miscommunication in court,” the man says.
They grab their carry-ons and are escorted off. After the three leave, the stewardess helps the girl with the blue nails to get her things. “Is this yours?” she asks, reaching above for a bag with Girl Scout badges and a tube with birthday wrap.
“Not the birthday one,” she says. She looks around tearfully and her eyes finally land on you, sitting with your mouth open, staring. “I’m sorry,” she says to you, and walks down the aisle after the woman. Don’t go, you want to say. You would give her the birthday painting if it would stop her tears.
Over the intercom comes an announcement. “We’re sorry for the delay folks, just a routine safety check and we’ll be on our way. Nothing at all to worry about.” Over the speakers, another announcement, “The man in seat 23C is highly dangerous. We will perform a routine safety check on him, too. Do not attempt to probe him. We must get him off the plane. Off—” You open your mouth very wide.
The engines whir and the whispering bares its teeth. You can hear them all, every word. You can hear Jill talking about following himself on the FBI site, and Mr. Fox about his vacation, and the Indian family and the white girl arguing in an office inside the airport; they stop and stare together out the window when they see the plane leaving them behind. You can hear your mother crying in the car, and your sister crying over the baby in her belly, your father berating himself as he divides daylilies, showering soil around his feet. Some of it catches inside the cuff of his sock. You can hear strangers screech their tires and roll their eyes and yell at their children. Thousands of voices, a tower of them stacked and teetering, calling for help and blaming. It is too much to take in all at once, all those demands like prayers and none directed to a god. It’s surprising so many people get up in the morning.
The Suicide of Claire Bishop Page 29
