The Suicide of Claire Bishop

And that’s why I’m telling you all this truth stuff, Dear Listeners, partly because I have no clue what you do or do not already know. Maybe you know everything I do. Maybe you’ve been with me since I was born a squirming baby boy, or, who knows—before. But I’m not interested in objective Truth with a capital T. I’m talking about truth, subjective and hairy. And here it starts, because today I’m going to see Nicolette.

Truth: My name is West Butler and I am not like most people. I’ve worked as a data miner and network engineer in New York City for the last ten years, ever since I left my home of Port Townsend, Washington (a little Victorian thing on the Olympic Peninsula), and I am in love with an artist.

The last time I saw Nicolette, nearly a year ago, she said it would be dangerous for me if I tried to find her. But that doesn’t stop me from getting on the 1 train to the Bronx. I have the whole orange plastic row to myself until a woman sits down beside me. At first I want to pull her hair, but I’m not willing to give up my seat. And I don’t mind it after a minute, being that close to someone, sharing space and time. She sees me looking at her but I don’t look away. I’m trying to remember her face because there’s something odd about it—she has large pores, a map on her skin. There’s a message I want to memorize, there’s a clue to find. But her face doesn’t stick. If I look away, she’ll disappear.

I tracked down Nicolette’s new number from a gallery that used to represent her, and we made plans via text message (though she’s not very good at it yet) to meet in public at her current installation—what bloggers call the “landmine house.” She said she had to go there anyway to fix something that got knocked down in the wind, and we could grab coffee and talk after—because I’m healthier now, and we’re both ready to see each other again.

Do you remember how, when she left, my heart crawled across the floor like a crab? At least I could find it again if I needed it, follow those tracks behind the bookshelf.

Something is about to change. And not the way something is always about to change. I feel it in my toes, which have turned to ice chips. The melting and melding of seats and bodies in the humid underground.

I feel like I’m about to meet Nicolette for the first time again. This is her first installation in over a year. She painted dozens of portraits of me back when we were together, but I haven’t seen them since she took them with her when she left, back when I was in the hospital.

What if she doesn’t show? What if the landmine house isn’t even up anymore and I can’t find her? I waited too long to reach her. Not that I haven’t tried before.

I dig out my little pad and pen. The woman next to me tries to look over my shoulder to see what I’m writing, so I write messier than usual.

All thoughts are potential clues. Pebbles dropped along a path of pebbles leading back to my true self fixed high above me. I must document these clues or they will be lost, forgotten, unwritten from time. My love will never have existed.

In this particular subway car, two clues shine out: 1) the woman’s map of a face and 2) the graffiti. Riding the 1 train feels like stepping into a child’s drawing: the windows are covered in scratch graffiti and the floors in loopy black, and every advertisement has at least one moustache penned across a model’s lip. And, like a child’s drawing, the train doesn’t quite make sense: who’s that guy in the seat across from me with the top hat, and why does he have no shoes? I wish I were a graffiti artist, here but not here, shouting out my unknowability. I am unlocatable! Just try to find me.

But what if it’s awkward, because we’re not supposed to see each other and everyone knows that? What if I see the installation and don’t get it and can’t fake it?

All fears are clues. I write them down. Like Buckminster Fuller, who archived his life, organizing every slip of paper, every bill, every letter, every idea into clues and proofs as evidence for his existence. Forty-five tons of material. He couldn’t judge what was valid, so he included everything, what he ate then what he shat. He didn’t know MySpace was coming. He wasn’t trying to write a book. He was trying to tell the Grand Story, and not for us—for people or aliens to dig up a hundred years from now, to see how much changed in one lifetime, how the world could go from genocide to civil rights to genocide. How one person could change everything. Or not.

Personally, I keep records of what I ate and shat only if there is a disparity between the two.

But even as he archived every detail, I wonder if Bucky really knew himself. Maybe he wrote to get to know himself, and he was afraid he never would. Maybe he was like me. If you’re like me, everyone thinks they know you better than you know you.

The streets are strangely empty. Except they aren’t empty at all. They’re filled with so many shadows there’s barely room to walk. The street signs, the whites of them like the white of an eye, pulse electrically for my attention. The stale breath of traffic outside the 231st Street Station. Someone’s hand-held radio jibes at me. Something old and jazzy. It pushes out a tune that reminds me of a man hunting buffalo. But the hunter is blind and wrongly aiming at me.

I should turn back now—it would be safer than shuffling around the booby-trapped shadow of a sidewalk tree. The landmine house is a block away, off Tibbett Avenue, but there’s a train grinding in my head—are you driving it? I rub at my temples, try to scratch graffiti on it, vandalize it, hide it away.

On the corner, a gray-haired woman with peach fuzz on her chin rummages through a garbage can, organizing aluminum cans and bottles into two sections of a baby stroller meant for twins. She is listening in on my thoughts even though I know she’s not. Someone is not always watching me. She is not watching me.

The landmine house is situated in the middle of the block. Just one house in a row of houses. White with green trim. Barbed wire runs chest level along X-shaped crossbeams around the manicured lawn. I’m as close as I can be without touching the wire. There’s a sign sticking up from the grass in Nicolette’s handwriting: danger: live minefield, keep out. And beside it—a crater she caused by an explosion.

When I was released from the hospital, there were puddles all over the street but I’d missed the rain. Big dazzling eyes staring up at me from the ground. They weren’t so different from Nicolette’s eyes.

But that was last autumn and this is summer, in the Bronx between the projects and the wealthy Jewish neighborhood.

It’s only me here, and I press in closer, until I feel the prick of the barbed wire through my shirt. I have to get closer because the whole trim of the house—do you see it?—is made up of words. Microscopic negative spaces between the letters. Tiny green inscriptions that hold some inviolable meaning that no one will ever get close enough to read. Except me.

Nicolette cannot scare me. I make my fear whimper at my feet. I want to kick it. It’s just like her to give me something only if I’m willing to die for it. The unreadable word.

I duck under the wire and inch along the grass. Just a little. The barbed wire glistens around me. I listen to the summer heat buzzing in the wings of insects and I hear footsteps reverberating in the wings and I stare at the words that will never be mine unless I move now, I have to move now, and my feet begin to sweat and burn and I start to feel real wild and hot inside like my body is picking a fight with me, and I look up and down the street and something is coming or has already come and I edge closer to the house—am I not afraid to die? Do I need her words that badly? Would I risk my life for them? Or would I risk knowing there are no landmines at all?

Footsteps, voices in the distance, and I duck back under the wire, but it’s not Nicolette.

Men in black hats are coming around the corner. They’re approaching like B-movie monsters—slow and in packs. They could be on their way to shul, someone might say. But I know better. No one goes to synagogue in the middle of the afternoon on a Sunday. They’re marching. I can feel the street vibrating. It rings up and down my body. I turn and stare at their leader, the man at the head of the pack. He’s looking right at me. He’s a few feet away but his eyes catch the sun like tin and glow through the distance between us.

Of all the hours and days they could have visited and here they are next to me. They pant dangerously in the heat, but I can’t get a read on their threat level. It’s hard to tell how many there are out of the corner of my eye—there could be five or twenty men. They are one blob, one giant black-suited being. Do they mean to keep me from her? Of course they don’t, why would they care?

“What is this?” one of the Hasidim exclaims in disapproval. His face is tree bark. “It is like a box you cannot open. Call it art if you want.” The others send out a low hum of agreement. Even their throat clearings are layered in decades of Eastern Europe. “And the tiny words—a cheap trick. She absolves herself of having to say anything real.”

They all turn to a small man in the middle of the pack with a mole on his cheek. “Don’t you see?” he asks excitedly. “She hints at that unbridgeable gulf between the artist and the consumer. Between conception and experience.”

“But she says nothing of interest about that gulf,” the other says. “It is just vague enough to seem thought-provoking. But I am unmoved.”

The small, moled Hasid turns to me. “You agree with me, don’t you?” They are testing me. What do I say? Yes? I try to read the unreadable words. I touch the barbed wire. And then he grabs onto my shoulder. They yank me back and I’m cast to the ground, flailing at their feet. They kick me with their leather shoes, kick in my sides. Their beards shift and move, made up of a thousand black, vibrating bees.

I stand with them, the man’s hand on my back, motherly. “What are you doing?” they ask, a chorus of concern. “You aren’t supposed to touch. It’s art.”

“And it could be dangerous,” the small Hasid says. “You see, don’t you?”

It’s my duty—especially if Nicolette is nearby, listening in—to make them see. “We all put up wires and go to extremes to hide who we are. We don’t know our neighbors. We never will. And we’ll never let them know us. There’s no such thing as community.” I say this in a neighborly voice, trustworthy. A voice that does not sound like it belongs to a man who is somewhere he shouldn’t be. And then I add, “She’s putting up landmines to protect herself. But she’s lying. It’s all a lie. But the truth is here somewhere.”

I understand now what those microscopic words are for, and I must have them. They are instructions. I just don’t know what to.

“You have her art?” I say, letting slip a bit of panic. How could I not have known she was showing work in the city? I would have heard about a gallery show.

The small Hasid pinches the other’s arm. “We don’t know that yet. There’s a small, quite negligible dispute over attribution,” he explains to me.

Still no sign of Nicolette. Did she forget? But she couldn’t have, this was important to her. Do they know where she is? Have they done something? Of course they haven’t done anything. “Where is she?” I ask the men.

“Here is our card. Take our card,” the others say as if handing me a Band-Aid or a ransom note. I take three. Someone laughs. And then I turn and run.

I’ve gone the wrong way on the subway again—or they changed the signs. I stay in the same car, waiting for the train to return south, a sitting duck above ground. I gave too much away. I shouldn’t have spoken to those men at all.

The Bronx is a sunken ship. That’s another truth for you. There is something drowned, underwater about it. We’ve stayed out of water so long we’ve forgotten we’re fish. But we’ll be underwater again soon enough. The glaciers will melt and the ocean will run us down.

There are always others who spend their days riding the train to the end and back again. People who don’t have to check the time—no one’s expecting them, no one cares where they are. The odyssey of the underground transportation system but no Penelope waiting at home. Take that fat white man in the suit, resting one chin on the other, dozing. Or the strung-out girl making pictures with her finger on the dusty window. She sees the fish too. She’s watching the mackerel fight for a bit of food, the osprey spying from above. Across from her, a woman who’s just come from a job interview and knows she didn’t get it. She has that look people perfect for the subway. The one no one will ask you about.

If Nicolette were here she would argue that this woman wasn’t coming from some boring interview. Why would she go to an interview when she just found out her husband was dying and she’s been riding all day to avoid the pain of it? And I would say, actually she hates her husband and got a voicemail saying the operation was a success and now she’s pretending she didn’t feel that pang of disappointment, and she’ll lie and say she didn’t get the call, no cell service. Then Nicolette would say that I can’t see the magic and beauty in life because I want another magic that doesn’t exist. And I would try to say something about her being beautiful, but I would fail.

I check my phone. I check it twice. And then we’re underground and out of range. I’m afraid something horrible has happened.

It’s true I have a love for the secrecy of the world. Even on 10mg of Zyprexa, everything is infected with secrets. And Nicolette is the biggest secret of all.

Everyone has an origin story. Everyone but Nicolette. I don’t know where she came from. I don’t even know how old she is, but when I met her she was twenty-six and acted as if she’d lived a century—she was wise enough. I think she let herself fall in love with me because she knew how I was and maybe she felt like she owed something to the world. She wanted to save me. Cheers to that ill-conceived good intention.

But all I added to her life was trouble. When I’m interviewed for her biography someday, I will color it with idiosyncrasies like: and then she fell in love with a boy who went schizo on her.

When I get to my Chinatown apartment, it’s thick into dusk and I have mail. I take my little stack of bills and reminders of bills from the entranceway mailbox and sit out on the stoop. The day is a deflated balloon. New York in summer: shriveled and sexual. I feel scattered. The street gives off its street smell: three parts fortune cookie from the factory next to my apartment, one part leather soles, ten parts piss. The Bowery is breaking down. All the shops selling restaurant supplies and lighting fixtures, I’m worried they aren’t long for this world. Across the street, the red neon sign flashes—Psychic Open—which I can see without fail from my apartment and which definitely means nothing but makes it very hard to sleep. There’s old Tachi with his remote-controlled car—the balding Chinese man is never without it. I don’t know his real name, so I gave him one: Tachi. There hasn’t been one night this summer when he hasn’t been racing his car, holding it all together, surveying the neighborhood with his little monster truck the size of a human head. Tachi is out of sight, but his car bounds toward me down Broome Street, heading for Bowery. It sounds like it needs a tune-up. Bowery is a big street and this little truck could easily be crushed. It bounces over the cobblestones, digs into dips and comes up soaring, louder than any real car, piercing and monotone. But the humidity drowns it out, the weight of the air is deafening. It’ll rain soon, there’s no way around it. A hot summer rain.

My cell vibrates—finally Nicolette. She apologizes, says she’s very busy. But the way she says it nearly gives me a heart attack. “_____, _____ busy.” The two blanks? Words that are seemingly normal. But they aren’t normal at all. They are lost words. How could she know them again? I hate those words.

Dear Courteous Voices: Won’t you be less courteous and interrupt once in a while? I could use a little help. I’d like to know if you’re out (or in) there. I can only assume you are with me and listening, though I can’t hear you. Which I attribute to Zyprexa interference. Like duct tape over your mouths. Riding along in my brain like a person trapped in the trunk of the car.

I cannot repeat the words to you, but I will write them down as anagrams, to be safe, in two places: in my little notepad with the spiral on top and lines too faint to use, and on my left palm:

My skin is very moist and no one but I will ever be clever enough to read the blurry letters.

Here is another truth: someone or something is always trying to block Nicolette and me from coming together. But this time, I won’t let them.

You see that girl shaded in the front seat of that parked car? I think she’s crying, her head bobbing that way. The shadows of a sidewalk tree dance on her little face in a hot breeze. No, a reflection that looks like a shadow. I’m afraid she’ll be swallowed by it. If Nicolette were to place landmines around New York, they would take the shape of shadows like that. Sinister, bloodless. Everything would be the inverse of itself. But not everything is a Nicolette installation—an easy thing to forget. All the overweight men stand in front of their shop fronts, hands on their bellies. They look worried and Tachi’s car is still missing down Bowery. Somehow. Sometimes I’m the only living man. Everything is in its place, laced and placed, old Tachi outside searching for his car, and the vendors all talk and no sale, their coats blazing in the wind, and there are cars but they aren’t driving. No one’s buying. The girl crying in the front seat of one, and a kid standing by the door of another waiting for someone, but they aren’t coming. Hey, I want to say to him. Hey, get out of here, they ain’t coming. No one’s coming, no one’s buying. And still no monster truck. Sometimes I feel that way, like telling everyone how it is. Their suffering is mine. And then I think of Nicolette and I’m confused because there’s this little fleck of hope in the back of my throat choking me. Hope for the little kid staring at his reflection in the empty car, hope for Tachi’s truck, hope for the cobblestone that isn’t pavement yet and with any luck may never be, and I think then, I think I’ll say to them, “Don’t worry, you’ll get to your plane on time, you’ll get a seat on the bench when you’re tired, you’ll find the words to ask forgiveness, no one dies during childbirth, no cancer, no famine, you’ll get another chance, there will be another, hope that the weather is just kidding and your parents will remember you and someone will remember you and pick you up and take you home, we’re all okay, it’s going to be all right. It’s going to be all right, all right?”

The stairs count me. Two at a time up five flights, my breath a pendulum, and I’m sweating. The stairwell is known for being dangerous. Orange-level-terrorist-threat-o-meter dangerous. Today, however, it’s green. I’m about to turn the key in my lock when I remember, the thought coming at me like a draft under the door: dinner at Jules’s, and I’m late. Back downstairs, the night is an old dog pressing into me.

I’ll be the first to admit I’m an idiot at times. But I don’t have time to go back upstairs now; Jules lives all the way in the Upper East Side, Yorkville. One pill at lunch and one at dinner each day. But being off a couple hours won’t kill me. I’ll take it later when I get home, if I think of it. In my messenger bag, my other equally important belongings are all accounted for: wallet, keys, Xanax for just-in-cases, stack of café drink cards with almost-free tenth items, and a copy of A Brief History of Time, as many pages ripped out as dog-eared.

As if berating me for my forgetfulness, the smell from the Golden Fortune Cookie Corp. next door drifts after me as I speed-walk to the 6 train. I plug my nose in order not to think of my father.

There I go thinking about him. He wins every time just because I’m trying not to think of him. All because of one measly joke he told whenever we had Chinese takeout. My sister and I would ask what his fortune said and he’d look up at us, surprised. “No, it can’t be, I can’t believe it.” Our mom would yell preemptively from the kitchen, “Don’t you get them wild.” And we’d pretend to fall for it, colluding with our dad to rile our mom, shouting, “What? What does it say?” and he would fall back, feigning heart attack and gasp, “It says…it says here…” We’d dance around his chair and try to snatch it from him, but he’d hold it tight to his chest. “It says, right here in plain letters: Help, I’m trapped in a fortune cookie factory!” And we would die. The last time I heard the joke, before the split, we rolled on the floor in hysterics, forced laughter until it was real and my mom was irate. “You’re teaching them it’s fun to laugh at sweatshops,” she yelled. And Dad yelled back louder, “Better get off that high horse or someone might think you like animal husbandry!” He rose from the table like he’d have lived in that chair if she hadn’t maddened him so. Shoulders bunched, he stormed outside for a smoke, leaving the door open so one of the foster cats escaped. My dad could never keep them straight, since we had ten cats at a time sometimes, and he called them all Bernie. That night, I remember, my mom, close to tears, punched him in the shoulder over and over, then they stood on the porch side by side, my dad calling for Bernie, my mom calling the real name.

The only thing my father ever said about my illness was, “You’re lucky you’re a handsome guy.”

Waiting for Jules to answer the buzzer, I ready a list of excuses for my lateness: stuck on the subway, heatstroke, piano falling from third-story apartment, short-term coma. Julie, Jules, my little sister. I let her think she takes care of me instead of the other way around. She likes to think she has some control over the whole thing, even though she’s only twenty-eight, four years younger than me. She’s always been four years younger, but now I don’t know—it feels like maybe she’s catching up.

Jules grew up convincing me that God didn’t exist and then three years ago she went and married a Hat. I mean a Hasid. She’d get very angry if she heard me say that. A Lubavitcher Hasid, it’s called. She only knew him a few months.

And then the first time I met him—all right, he was a nice guy. I don’t want to say otherwise, but there’s something about him I still can’t grasp. He has a spy’s eyes. His motives are beyond me. But he says Orthodox Jews don’t marry for love, they marry for respect, and, without fail, love blooms from respect. He calls her his ba’al teshuva. She introduced me to him as a computer artist, even though I just make nothing collages on Photoshop for fun, and he always asks to see my stuff but I haven’t shown him anything. I don’t want to scare him. I’m not much of a collagist these days, anyhow.

“West.” Jules shakes her head as she says my name, they’re the same gesture. “We weren’t supposed to have dinner.”

“Really. I haven’t heard from you in two weeks. How could we have made plans?” She puts her hands on her hips like a mom, but not like our mom. Jules would make a good mother.

“Are you kidding? I got home and freaked out I was going to be late and made up all these excuses on the way up here. Do you want to hear them?”

“I’m on my way out,” she says, turning around. She does look nicer than usual, though shorter. But that’s not the change I mean. Jules shows no skin even in the dead of summer. I follow her into the main room, where she picks up her hat from the back of the couch. A large, felt purple thing, as ugly as it sounds.

“Don’t say a word,” she says. She knows I hate all of her hats. And her wigs.

The brim of her hat curves up into a smile, and locks of her wig curve up at the ends too, mocking me, dozens of fake little smiles.

“I don’t know, he always has to have his seltzer water. I’m supposed to meet him downstairs with the car in a minute.” She’s not telling me something—I can tell by the way she pinches her mouth, locking it inside. Jules has always been a terrible liar. She adjusts her hat in front of me like I’m a mirror, then stops and finds my eyes. “Why do you have to do these things?” She breathes out audibly from her nose. In another world she would have been a dragon, without secrets. “You’re taking your medicine?”

“I’m not stupid,” I say softly. “I went to see an installation today. You should go see it.”

Jules says, “You know what I have to say about that. What do I have to say about that?”

“There’s an open memorial service. One of our members’ sons passed away yesterday. A veteran. And another congregation lost two soldiers in Iraq this month. Two young boys. Anyone can come.”

“I’m always running late.” She adjusts her hat again and sighs. “It would be nice if you joined us. Since you’re here.”

“Can I stay here and watch TV while you’re out? Don’t make me get back on the train yet. I’ve been on the train all day it feels like.”

Then Dan walks in with his black fedora and a white button-down shirt, carrying a plastic bag, box corners angling through. Dan is a big-boned guy, and he always looks to me like he’s still growing. He’s growing and my sister’s shrinking. “West!” he booms. “What are you doing here?” He says this all jolly-like, even though I know he’s annoyed the second my name comes tripping out of his mouth. But he does a decent job of not showing that he thinks I’ve screwed up his night. Jules pokes me with her purse.

“I thought we were having dinner,” I say down into my neck. Sometimes I pretend I’m embarrassed, mumbling like that so he doesn’t feel bad for treating me like a kid. And I have to be nice because he got me my job. He’ll never let me forget it.

“I did, no thanks to the cashier,” Dan says. “They ought to have IQ tests for these types of jobs. A black man with this Afro-type beard. Avoid that one next time you go in there.”

“Being specific does not make me racist,” Dan says. “I’ve come across plenty of idiotic white cashiers in my day. More idiotic, in fact.”

Dan grunts a begrudging approval. Not that he should care. It won’t affect them unless I eat their food.

Did I project that thought by accident? But I know I didn’t, because projecting thoughts is not a thing. Being around Dan, I slip sometimes. He has this way of sucking away my power from the inside out with an invisible straw. Whatever Jules is hiding, Dan is behind it.

He leans down, not touching Jules in front of me, and whisper-mumbles something. Jules nods and says, “But not the whitefish salad. That’s for Dan’s lunch tomorrow. The front door locks when you close it, but check to make sure. And, West?”

The strands of her wig wave toward me in snaky smiles. I glare at her. I know what she’s about to say.

“Call Mom? She’s worried, like always. It won’t kill you to talk to her.”

“I will,” I say. “How are you anyway?” But they’re already gone. I always miss the closing of doors.

The light echoing against the sleek brown of their furniture makes me nervous and I turn the dimmer down. I’ve never been here alone before. It’s like the parents have just left and I’m the babysitter, but there are no babies. Mom is always bugging everyone, me included, about if and when she’ll get to be a grandmother. Jules won’t talk about not having babies yet, but I’m glad they haven’t.

Just in case they come back in to check, I flip to the middle of a sitcom about doctors. The laugh track doesn’t make sense when it happens, like they made a mistake at the studio—but I know it’s just me. I waddle around the perimeter of the room looking for clues. The sound of my feet swishing on the wood gets mixed up in the low volume of the TV. Canned laughter coming from my shoes.

The only framed photos in the room are wedding pictures, as if Dan and Jules had no lives before they met each other. As if they’ve had nothing to take pictures of since. There’s one of me between them, smiling sideways, my suit a little too big.

When Jules told me they were engaged, I told her, “You can’t marry Dan, you don’t even believe in God.” And she said, “I believe in Dan, and I will grow to believe in God.” You can’t grow into belief, I insisted. But I was wrong. Now she believes. “Where’d you find God?” I once asked meanly. “In the laundry hamper?” It’s something Nicolette might have put into my head to say. But Jules only touched my forehead like I had a fever and said, “You’ll never understand, will you?”

What I want to know is why doctors never diagnose religious people as delusional.

We aren’t even really Jewish. My great-grandmother was a forced convert during the Pogroms, so my grandma was raised Catholic, my mom in turn, and Jules and I were raised some version of fundamentalist-atheism. So you might say Jules felt it was on her to make up for this forced loss of faith, identity. Once she learned about it, it took over her life. It was all she read about and talked about. She got the paperwork to prove she was really Jewish. She is what my great-grandmother could never be. She became the thing we lost.

There was even something different in the way Jules smelled tonight. But there’s always a clue in the things people buy. It doesn’t count as snooping since Dan left the plastic bag by the door, the contents nearly tipping out anyway. I nudge it open a little more with my foot and peek in: scent-free lotion, scent-free soap, hand sanitizers, a king-size bag of cotton balls, magnesium and calcium supplements, and a box of cinnamon hard candies. I smash the bag of cotton balls against my head.

I bet you’re thinking a couple items from the pharmacy aren’t enough to prove Jules is what I think she is. Well, if you don’t believe me yet, there are bound to be two more clues lying around here. Clues come in threes. Always.

There’s a stack of ads and bills on the coffee table, but one person’s junk mail is another’s evidence. And just as I suspected, next to ads for an umbrella and a portable power tool set, there’s clue #2: an ad for a white noise machine and electrical outlet safety guards—all intended, nay, calculated, for Jules. These companies don’t want you to know how much they know. They’re just as good at spying on you as pretending they’re not. They slip in ads that seem random and unrelated, making you think everyone in the building got the same coupons. Think again, buster. They’re running your purchases through statistical algorithms. They’ve got you pinned down to the week. Sometimes they know before you do.

In their bedroom, the laundry basket is clean of clues. The only outof-place item is inside the top drawer of the dresser—lacy underwear!—I hide it from myself quickly. On Dan’s nightstand are piles of spreadsheets and papers that look familiar, from the same database I use at work. On the wall is a photograph of a rabbi. Rabbi Menachem Schneerson—Dan has told me about him a dozen times. This photograph in place of a mirror, Dan says: “To reflect back my potential instead of the nincompoop I am!”

I throw myself on their bed and lie on my stomach, curling myself over so I can see into the dark underneath. The blood rushes to my eyes. Upside down, I rummage under the bed for more clues. Beside stacks of photo albums and an old tattered briefcase, there’s a tin box. Right-side up, I set it gently on my lap and lift the lid. Inside is something dark and dead. No, not a rat, don’t be gross. It’s a piece of hair.

I cried when Jules cut her hair so short. I loved her hair. I miss her hair. I was mean to her hair once, but that’s a truth for another time. It was thick and molasses-colored and sometimes stuck up all over the place enough to make her scream that she hated herself. When she cut it I was there and picked up a piece from the floor, and I tucked a lock of it into my pocket. I didn’t know she’d done the same, saved a lock for herself. I still carry mine around in my wallet. It’s old and knotted now, like a dreadlock.

But that’s not the third clue. Without it, there’s still a chance I’m wrong about Jules. The bathroom is immaculate; I can almost see my face in their floor tiles, though my glasses slide down my nose when I peer into them. I don’t look at myself in the mirror while I sift through razor attachments and make-up removers.

Finally, on top of the toilet tank, is the mother of all clues, excuse the pun: a book called, Nine Jewish Months: How to Keep Gestation Holy—a Halachic Guide to Pregnancy.

Did you know I would brush her hair when we were growing up, and she’d know exactly what that meant—Mom wasn’t coming home that night from one of her animal-rights protests—but at least Jules would get something good out of it. Except for that one time when I was mean to her hair. Which I never apologized for. And I can’t say it yet.

I was walking along a narrow path toward the bluff—this was years ago, back at home on the West Coast—when wildflowers on either side caved in toward my feet, trapping me. A dozen yards away was the edge of the bluff, then the sea. The gangly grass in my foreground.

And then there was the girl. She was standing on the overhang, wavering like the tall grass I saw her through. She was leaning over, looking down at the sea and rocks hundreds of feet below. What was she doing so close to the edge? But I wasn’t afraid. I knew there must be a reason and that the wildflowers knotting near my feet were trapping me where I was for my own protection. I felt a kind of kinship with the path, like it was my brother, or it was me. Since I couldn’t go any farther, I admired the view and the girl from where I was.

I couldn’t see who she was from the back, but something about her was familiar. Her dark hair whipped in the breeze. My chest pounded double-time. But the wildflowers would not let me move to her. I didn’t call out. I couldn’t, though she probably wouldn’t have heard me over the wind anyway. The wildflowers dripped from my brow. Something inside me was rousing from a long sleep, awakened by a twang that said home. And then she jumped.

I told Jules and my mom, and they made me tell the police. The entire town was watching as the boats trolled the waters by the bluff, searching for the remains of the girl. A man, scrubby and worn down with booze, came forward saying he couldn’t find his daughter—a girl from my school whose name I can’t remember—and I was questioned some more. What did you see? A girl with black hair. What did you see? Nothing! I missed school and spent days at the police station, an officer with eyes the color of the shaded sea, leaning his face so close I would have thought he was trying to kiss me if it had been any other room or reason. They felt sorry for me, or they didn’t believe what I saw. No one ever found the body. Washed out to sea, I guess. Or maybe she flew away.

And that’s when I met Nicolette. I wasn’t there, on the Puget Sound in spring, but I was in the moment of that memory when I met her in New York, on Clinton Street, next to the car lots. She’d busted the front tire of her bike and was frowning over it. The chain gates and barbed wire that kept the towed cars caged did the same work the flowers did on the bluff. They made me feel safe, kept from danger. I knew where I was stepping. The world was ready for me.

“Look at me weeping over my tire like this.” She spoke softly but assuredly, smiled when I asked if she needed help. She looked directly in my eyes. “I know you,” she said.

My chest opened like a pair of oiled gates and wildflowers came pouring out. I know she felt it; she was swimming in my flowers.

She said, “Walk with me,” but I didn’t know where we were going. I was nervous and happy. I sweated. My hands ran waterfalls; I almost drowned us. But I walked with her, rolling the bike for her. She smoked a hand-rolled cigarette she’d plucked from her jacket pocket, soiled and foreign-looking in her mouth. And her mouth gaped, the smoke escaping, the same smoke from the fires I’d lit in my childhood bathtub—it was an extension of myself, an extension of the sulfurs from the earth. She was so strange, her face shifting in the light from young to old and back to young.

I remember then we walked by a man who was talking to himself—gibberish about the sky and the smell and how they were the very same thing. She said, “You never know if people are nuts anymore or not. Everyone talks to themselves. Blue-toothed.” And I said, “Guess it never mattered who’s what anyway,” because I couldn’t think of anything smarter to say.

She tried to take her bike back but I kept a hold until she gave in and let me keep rolling it for her, not knowing where she was leading us, having to trust her. An insufficient gesture to say I knew: I knew she was the one who would listen to my story, my illness—even though I didn’t know my illness then. She wouldn’t dismiss it or say, “That’s invisible.” She wouldn’t question me because telling my story is survival.

And I could always tell her my story anew. Because I was always meeting Nicolette for the first time.

But it’s true, it was a serious day. Right there, where we parted in the middle of the sidewalk, I almost swallowed the sky. I felt, meeting her and leaving her, that if I wasn’t careful, I could open wide and the world would suddenly and violently fill me up, and I wouldn’t survive to feel it withdraw.

Mr. Fox, my supervisor, calls me in for a meeting. I stare at the empty chair across from him. It sends a low pulse, but it’s not dangerous. I sit. He smiles at me, condescending. He thinks I have no social skills whatsoever, so I make sure to meet his expectations. Mr. Fox is a bald crocodile of a man who won’t hesitate to use my problem against me. “I need to talk to you, West.” I need to talk to you, West.

Three months ago, Dan got me this job as a data miner for a predictive market firm. All day I sit in front of a computer screen, digging through other people’s virtual trash. The things they didn’t know they never properly threw away. When I lost my last job, I would have done anything. I would have organized and sold someone’s real garbage on the street if they paid me to. Anything not to depend on Jules. That was part of my exit strategy.

And so I search through charts of digital exhaust, consumer behaviors and cross sections of behaviors, frequent buyer purchases at major grocery and department stores and online conglomerates, probing for patterns. Patterns within patterns. Or rather, I tell the computer to do all that. Then I double-check the data and weed out the irrelevancies, making the spreadsheets shine with pure meaning that will predict our consumer future. Then we sell our findings to clients, who in turn determine what next to market. They predict, or decide, what’s to come from the trash I filter. Which means that I am responsible for the future.

And yet the web-based social computing software can do all of that without me. I am redundant. Which no one else knows. Don’t tell. I cannot let Mr. Fox find out. I cannot lose another job.

“I know you’re a smart guy, that’s what everyone says,” Mr. Fox is saying. He waits to see how I’ll react to this news. In reality, the other guys in the office resent me—it makes them feel stupid that a lunatic can do their job. “How have you been lately?”

Sometimes, the search goes deeper. Like spying on eighteen-year-olds posting on MySpace about whether or not they like Pizza Craver–flavored Doritos. Their preferences can be linked to their status in life and therefore other purchasing habits. We know if a consumer is going through a breakup or if they recently switched careers based on the amount of ice cream or ramen purchased. But my bosses are particularly interested in pregnant women in their first and second trimesters, like Jules. It is, hands down, the most profound period in a person’s life—for marketers. It’s when people are most likely to switch brands, vulnerable to any ad campaign you throw at them. Hormones and routines all in flux.

“Your work’s gotten sloppy,” Mr. Fox says. “I don’t want to have to call up Dan and tell him we may have made a mistake. Your sister wouldn’t be happy.”

I think I’m supposed to feel guilty for data mining, but I don’t feel anything about it at all.

Mr. Fox doesn’t understand that my last employer and I simply had different priorities and I was fired for doing too beautiful of a job. I was a network setup technician, and I can’t help it if the most aesthetically pleasing connection topologies aren’t the most efficient. I once linked up a partial mesh to a distributed bus network, all within the macro topology of a ring network! Arranging a conversation between computers is as delicate as any social interaction. There are always at least three players, never two, even if that third player is an Ethernet hub or an ex-girlfriend or a baby between a married couple or, say, an illness that both expands and distorts communication.

I nudge Mr. Fox’s wastebasket with my toe. It’s filled with empty cans of mandarin oranges, which he eats every day at his desk. I want to ask if he believes in God like Dan and Jules. But he’s not the same kind of Jewish.

Mr. Fox also knows the system is irrational. The problem is that the patterns are not really patterns. Which, in and of itself, is a pattern. As a hive we follow trends, but if you zoom in on the micro level we’re unpredictable, erratic. What sense does it make for a person to one day want pants that are comfortable and roomy and then wear tapered things that pull at the ankles? To want a little yappy lap dog and then a Labrador Retriever? There is little logic behind our consumption. I search out patterns that are not there.

Mr. Fox picks up a pair of scissors from his desk. Opening and closing them, steel scraping steel. They’re big and industrial. He looks at them, hungry; he runs his hand over them.

So that’s how I’ll die. That’s how they would have me killed. At the bitter, shining end of Mr. Fox’s office scissors.

He puts the scissors down, smiles. “That’s all I want to hear. Let’s see what you have by the end of the day.”

Looking at him, I think of a zebra being chased by a lion, the kind of quick scene you’d catch flipping past the Discovery channel, but I’m not sure which animal he’s supposed to be. Mr. Fox is sometimes afraid I can read his mind.

• speak to someone when my listeners start interrupting

• make a list or catalogue in your head of real things around you

• hum or sing quietly to yourself or listen to music

• count your breath

• repeat a mantra to yourself: I AM OKAY, I AM SAFE, I AM A GOOD PERSON

• read out loud

• do a task that requires your full attention such as housework, reading, busywork

• change your environment, if inside go outside, change rooms, if outdoors take a walk

• use an earplug in one ear, then take it out

Sometimes, Dear Listeners, you have been mean to me. I keep this list in my drawer for those moments. But it’s not that simple: music listens to me instead of me to it. I wonder what people like me thought about before technology. What were they scared of before radios and speakers and computers could eavesdrop in?

But I haven’t heard from you in a while. I wonder where you are now. I wonder about you a lot. For instance, are you omniscient? Do you have an all-encompassing calendar for a brain? Some people, I know, would call you a part of me, but it’s more complicated than all that.

I’m unsupervised most of the day, and that’s when I make things. I write lists and construct shrines. I drew a visual list of the organs in my body and called it “Ten things I hate about myself.” It made me think about what I actually hate about myself. And I make shrines for my brain. Two of them side by side, right and left. And a third shrine to be placed between the two hemispheres, for the disease inside.

Or I see how few clicks it takes to move from one site on data mining to one about Nicolette, only following hyperlinks. I start small, browsing sites that could be considered relevant to my job, the newest software, consumer reviews. Which lead me to technological design, graphic design, industrial design, industrial art, site-specific art and, finally, Nicolette.

Last week I graphed out my first meetings with Nicolette. She always seemed to appear out of nowhere, like she truly hadn’t existed before. There were so many first meetings—the hospital, the car lots, my apartment, another time in line for standing-room-only opera tickets. Normally, when you first meet and learn about a person, it’s like the way you learn to see a painting—all the information is available from the very first sighting, but the significance and interconnections only become apparent by registering the data over time. First meeting a person is an influx of this data (i.e. how she wrinkles her nose, her favorite band, childhood traumas). But the rate of new data acquisition about a person is a limit approaching infinity towards zero data-influx.

But in charting Nicolette, you’ll find that her line doesn’t decrease and level off at all. Every time we met I learned it all new! Starting and staying at maximum data influx.

But Mr. Fox found the chart and I had to convince him “Nicolette” was a scenario. None of that today.

But none of that today. Mr. Fox watches me through his office window. It is rare, and almost comforting, to not have to convince myself that no one is actually watching me.

The card the Hasidim gave me is tucked into the corner of my monitor. Google says the gallery is in Chelsea, a good walk from work. I compose an email:

Dear Nicolette, I am just checking in. I hope you are all right. Gimme a call.

Dear Nicolette, I’m sure you’re fine, of course you are, because there’s no reason you wouldn’t be, but just in case

Dear Nicolette, please know I’m here for you. You know where to reach me. But if not, here is my number and address.

Where is she? I used to be able to time-travel by conjuring her body. But now I no longer feel her. Maybe she’s in India. Or Israel or Home Depot or the moon. If I’m right, clap twice. I try to think straight into her mind. All I find is an ocean empty of her.

She never texted back or answered my calls. I tried her six times—five if one doesn’t count the number four, which I don’t sometimes. But whatever art is hanging in Chelsea has to be a clue as to what happened to her that day. A clue leading me (to me to me to me) to her.

There’s the breath from the AC coating the office; there’s the secret calendar of naked girls in the men’s bathroom; there’s the powder soap dispenser and fingers that smell like powder soap clacking away at keyboards; there are the keyboards clicking like hundreds of watches all going at different times.

Lunch by myself in the break room is as quick as I can slurp my cup-of-noodles. Food with more hyphens than nutritional value.

I spend the rest of my forty-five minutes, like any genuine loser, hiding in the bathroom. It’s quiet in here except for some people fighting somewhere about their marriage. I can hear them through the vents. I’ve spread my pills out on the little metal shelf attached to the mirror above the sink. One pill twice daily, by mouth, 5mg apiece. I’ll have to refill my prescription soon. Without even looking, I know there are sixteen pills left. I’ve been thinking about that number a lot, and I’ve been thinking even more about cutting back. I’ve been feeling good. Really good. Last month, the doctor said that eventually I could lower my dosage, that we’d talk about it, but I haven’t seen him since. I’m one of the lucky ones, he says. I’ve taken to the medication and have been doing well for eight months mostly symptom-free. Really well.

I might drop all my pills down the drain right now, because accidents happen. In the mirror, the pills are doubled. All lined up in salute, they spell ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. I pluck one from the middle and pop it. Now they spell: ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

The door opens behind me. With the side of my palm, I slide the pills back into the bottle, but one slips off and bounces on the tile floor.

It’s Orange-Socks Dave, looking at me in the mirror. I turn to him, the bottle in my fist behind my back. The pill landed just a few inches from my foot but I can’t pick it up with him here.

The other eight guys in their cubicles don’t bother about me too much, unless they’re trying to scare me about the Homeland Security Advisory. They keep a live color-coded Terrorist Threat Level on a few of their monitors. They think it’s funny. When they raised the Threat Level from Yellow to Orange the other week, Dave started wearing only orange socks. He either has a bunch of pairs or wears the same ones every day. I made my own Sesame Street version of the threat level system, Big Bird for yellow, Oscar, etcetera. The guys liked that.

He stops smiling. “It was a joke,” he says. “Because you’re looking in the mirror?”

“Okay,” I say and leave the bathroom, the pill still resting on the floor. One obvious point in the category of lowering my dosage.

A decades-long plunge. The woman falls elegantly. Each frame, a segment of the woman’s fall, disconnected like a shattered mirror. She changes as she falls, but not in any pattern I can discern. She is old in one frame, young in the next, echoing, perhaps, a life flashing before one’s eyes—if a person’s whole life is one giant fall.

I can tell it’s Nicolette’s immediately. The hogs-hair brushstrokes. The untrimmed fan brush edging the faces. The faces. So many faces of the same woman, unknown to me but familiar.

In the gallery and the hall outside, there are no Hasidim in sight. Their absence makes me nervous. Are they trying to stay scarce?

The gallery-sitter—not a Hasid—stands behind me. I fiddle with my camera phone and put it back in my pocket and he glares at me.

The woman, dead in the street, stretches her head toward me; she is spilling out of the painting. Her chin and chest pushed out, her eyes closed, sensual even in death. She’s so close to me I can almost touch her, catch her. Her left arm is outside of the painting, unseen, reaching above her, maybe reaching for her true self—though if you’re dead, there ends truth.

A piece from the corner of the painting is missing. The line is careful, like it had been deliberately cut out. Only the N of her name remains.

The gallery-sitter sees me looking at the missing corner. “The integrity of the painting remains intact.” He sneers in a way that makes me want to flick his ears. As if I’m not good enough to be in his gallery. He’s trying to seem Yellow-level dangerous but he’s not an inch above Green. He’s afraid of me.

He walks around the big glass desk in the center of the room and pushes a three-ringed binder across it. Then he sits down in his big ergonomic throne. In the binder, one laminated page is dedicated to each of the six paintings in the room, all by different artists, with little blurbs and photos of the painters next to thumbnails of their work.

Nicolette’s is aptly called The Suicide of _____. But there’s no photograph of her, no artist name. The blurb says the painting was donated anonymously, and that mystery shrouds the painter. It says the work had been wrongly attributed to a contemporary artist, but it has since been dated to the late fifties or early sixties.

The man raises his eyebrows, shrugs. “She came in herself and made a big event of denying it was hers. It’s an impressive work with or without her name attached.” And he nods like that’s the end of the discussion.

Truth encroaches like a shadow. What if I became the inverse of myself? What would I look like? What would become of Chinatown or the Bronx? Or my sister?

It’s hers all right. Doesn’t matter what they say or what she said. She was always protective about what she put her name on. She’d say that her masterpieces weren’t hers all the time, that they were another Nicolette’s—the Nicolette she was six months or a year ago.

But this feels darker than that. Could she be in trouble? The painting is a link to her, and disavowing it severs that link. It is hers. I can tell by the way it looks at me. And speaks to me with this controlling voice just like Nicolette’s. By the softness you could mistake for cruelty. Someone could be after her, and she’s gone into hiding.

But the 1950s. It’s not possible. Tapping my finger on the desk, I ask, “Who was the anonymous donor?”

I want to talk about the wilderness. Negative space would turn solid. Solid would become open. I would walk through buildings but not on the street. I would sit inside a brick. My insides would float around me in orbit. My muscles on the outside of my skin and my brain the center pulling like the sun.

“An invention of the artist, most likely.” So quick to answer. Almost rehearsed.

“You know, it’s called The Suicide, but it could easily be called The Murder. Who’s to say someone didn’t push her off the bridge?” But the gallery man is shrugging over his cell phone, a little sad at some call that never came, probably his girlfriend ditching him for someone more attuned to an artist’s intentions.

Nicolette never painted from her imagination, and she certainly never invented a subject. When she painted, she painted what was there but lost to obscurity. That’s what she always said. Everything is what it is, not what it symbolizes. There are no symbols. “No ideas but in things.” I am me, but I am also a thousand things behind me. The falling woman existed, exists. But is she alive or dead?

I tell none of this to the gallery-sitter, who sits on in his cushy office chair, looking at me askance. I don’t tell him that they’ll come to me someday to help write her biography. And I don’t tell him this painting is the only thing I don’t know about her.

I get out my camera phone and pretend he’s not the only one waiting for a call, and I take three photos of the painting, and then I leave the room. I don’t say goodbye because I promise myself, and the painting, that I’ll visit at least once a week like it’s a sick old woman.

The stairs are at the end of the hall, but the elevator opens just as I’m walking past, it knew I was coming. It’s a service-type elevator and I step inside beside a man, in his sixties maybe, with a funny moustache and thick gray hair, and the ground-floor button is already lit. The doors close. A black garbage bag leans against his shins, blending into his black pants. And he has on a janitor-type blue button-up open at the neck so some silver chest hair shows. The old elevator eases down from the ninth floor.

That’s easy enough information to break down. I know this man in a split second, have him figured out. Still, my deductive skills have been off. I have always been a skilled detective, but I can’t draw connections like I once could. Ever since I started the pills. I don’t want to see all connections because sometimes I make them up and can’t tell the difference, I have learned that. But I’m always missing something now. Zyprexa blindness.

The man’s graying moustache wraps around his mouth. He has a soft, chubby face. Maybe he was okay-looking once but it’s hard to say. The veins in his forehead come together just above the bridge of his nose in a V. It seems to me like he must always be frowning, that his mouth can’t do any other thing, until he smiles at me, big and joking, and then it seems like he can’t do any other thing but smile. He shows me his yellowing teeth. He must smoke a lot. Then his face is softer, melting as if in recognition. Does he know me?

He starts jamming the heel of his palm into a lever beside the buttons. The V of veins deepens. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “Happens all the time.”

I try to say, “I’m not worried,” but the words get stuck in my throat like phlegm and I can’t spit it out. I’m chewing on it. He bangs on the lever again and a bright shiny brick of gold falls out of his back pocket. But it’s not a brick of gold, it’s a National Geographic that’s been rolled and bent and loved. There’s a huge macro photograph of a bee on the cover.

“Bee,” I say and point. There was a sentence that went around that word in my head.

He bends down to pick it up, forgetting the lever. “They’re disappearing. Did you know that?” He shakes the magazine and I shake my head. “A friend got me interested. She keeps a hive in the city. Totally illegal. They’re just vanishing. Poof.” I shake my head again. He hits the magazine against his palm a couple times. “Here, take it.” He shoves it in my hand. “I’m finished with it.”

There’s a groaning noise, the elevator is talking and jerking and I let my mouth hang. But he just smiles wider and we start moving down, slow and smooth. It takes forever, actually. And when it seems we’re almost at the bottom, I say, “Hey, thanks.”

But we’re not down yet like I thought. I look at the doors. “So, is this your building?”

He looks at me like he’s never been asked that before and shrugs. “Something like that. Custodian.” I can’t help staring at his thick head of hair while he talks. It’s wavy and gray, short but not too short. Exactly the kind of gray I want to have. It seems to light up when I look at it and is so full I almost touch it. Then, as if he can read my thoughts, he runs his own hand through his hair. “Yeah. It’s all right. Just started a few weeks ago. I can get into any gallery. I can look at art in the middle of the night if I want.”

He stares at me for a moment, nervous-looking, his face shining with sweat, giving off light like his hair. He takes a breath like someone trying to not get angry. Then he reaches out his hand. “My name’s Jill.”

I give him my hand but I can’t give him my name. Not until I know it’s safe.

“Yeah, yeah. My folks wanted a girl, I guess.” Jill laughs at that, then says, “I guess you like her art?”

“Yeah.” My best nonchalant voice, juggling the magazine in my hands. “Don’t you?”

“I know her,” I say. And then we hit bottom and I want to pull my ears out for telling him that. Jill doesn’t even respond. Actually, and this can’t be right, he looks ready to cry.

I mumble thanks and hurry out into the street and the stupid day without her painting.

In the hospital last year, my psychiatrist asked what words were the most hurtful. He called it a wellness strategy—to pick the words that I found the most harmful concerning my disease, and to take them out of my vocabulary. He was a young guy fresh out of med school and had the weekend shift. Bursting with unconventional ideas. They’d just switched my diagnosis from schizophreniform to schizophrenia. And I felt kind of at a loss. They could just take away or replace.

We settled on the two words. “Let’s rip them out of the dictionary,” he said excitedly, “to make it official.” He brought over a big old Webster’s, its hard cloth cover frayed at the corners. “It’s okay. I got it used.” Scissors weren’t allowed, but the pages were thin enough I could use my fingers (though there may have been some extra, inadvertent victim words). He sat back with his hands clasped behind his head and watched me flip first to the S’s, then to the C’s. I extracted those two normal-seeming words. The ones that had disappeared until Nicolette texted them the other day. The ones she shouldn’t have. All it took was a thumbnail.

The Chelsea lofts are gray clouds against a gray twilight sky. Far away, black birds drift like a man’s stubble. If only I had the painting under my arm.

The 1950s. How can it be hers? Had I not held her just a year ago? But it is her painting. It doesn’t matter if it was painted in 1952 or 26 B.C. It is possible. No one will believe me, not the gallery sitter or the Hasidic owners or her fans on her guerilla art website. But it is hers.

A bee buzzes near my ear and I flick the National Geographic to shoo it, but when I look around I don’t see anything.

I have a talent for memorizing the weather. I get real cold and can feel the sleet in my hair when I think about the day my mom forgot to pick me up after a chess tournament in Tacoma. Or I sweat when I remember Jules’s wedding day three summers ago in a synagogue without air conditioning. I memorize weather like I’m cramming for a test, but maybe more like recalling the taste of grapefruit when you haven’t had one in months, tongue puckering. As for today, I’ll never shake the humidity.

It’s not dark yet, but the sun is down. Dusk is the truest time. All that ambiguity freshly unmasked from the seeming certainty of daylight. The certainty the sun imposes on lines. At dusk, lines meld together, you can’t tell the beginnings or ends of things, buildings melt into streets melt into telephone poles melt into my body. And the reality of the physical world, the day, it says, So long, Chelsea town, so long.

I walk down Eighth Avenue until the sky is the color of the street. Past the nearest subway stop, down on to the next. I want to walk. I want to feel the bones in my feet, because she’s here, she’s out here. I pause as a few notes drift out of a lit-up shopfront, trumpeting the sidewalk, looping in and out as if the night were at moments muting the music, at moments inviting it to move in and rise, like a fellow player at a jazz club, taking a solo, giving one. The repeated phrase takes a turn and it’s coming for me, violent for a moment, but the crescendo relaxes, sinks a bit in on itself. And there, in the display case of that shop window, is a large vase, and the design on that vase is exactly the visual representation of the song being played. It is blue and white with loops along the top, dots in the center, loops again below, a Dutch pattern but it’s all jazz. Art and intention all around—that craftsman knew I’d be looking at that vase at the end of dusk with jazz in my ears. How all things, all senses come together—when that happens I fill up and am so grateful for the pulse and life of the city.

I must lower my dosage. One pill per day instead of two and we’ll see how it goes. How else will I be able to find the truth? It all makes sense. But the sense of it is so heavy. I can barely hold it in my head. It makes so much sense I’m scared of it. But I will find the truth. I will find Nicolette. And you’ll help me, Loyal Voices.

I spread the magazine over my head. A light drizzle starts, and tonight will be wretched. All the summered people in the street, we all watch the city through a thin screen, gray and lit from afar like a movie, but the screen is also touching all of us, connecting us. Threading us through with water from the same cloud. This is what I’ve missed. Monday almost over. Tonight it will rain. Tomorrow the street will be different.