PART IV: THE TIMELESS HANDBAG OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS 2004

The day Nicolette left me, I’d been seeing the reflection men for a week or more. They look how your face looks warped on the side of a shiny mug. Bottle-necked, hourglass, fun-house. They visited my room and sat farting on my pillow, telling me secrets. They had vague red eyes with which they read my books. They had no noses.

But I don’t blame her.

Those weren’t you, Dear Voices, surely. You were still inside of me, muttering quietly about pancakes and the Pope, and they were outside. They could not have been you or you them.

My own danger level was on the fritz. I hadn’t been sleeping, afraid they’d tamper with me if I was out of my own sight for too long, but I hadn’t gotten out of bed for days, in case I might do the things they told me to do. That morning Nicolette coaxed me with pancakes. I touched her face to make sure she was real. She was, but her pancakes tasted like a trick.

“Why won’t you look at me?” she said.

I bulged my eyes at her in response.

“You’re a child,” she said.

She let me read while she mixed paints across the room. On her palette they sounded like spit in her mouth. She was wearing bright blue plastic gloves. The letters flitted on the page. She tried to nuzzle me and I pushed her away.

She said I was cold to her. She asked, “What’s wrong with you?” Then she was quiet for a while. She scraped and cleaned her glass palette with a razor. “Maybe you should go back to the hospital.”

It was very dark even though it was day. She said, “There’s a man looking at you,” but she said she didn’t say that. She cleaned her special sable brushes with baby oil and set them to dry in empty chickpea cans. “You’re freaking me out,” she said matter-of-factly, and came to sit beside me on the couch. “I could try to paint you again.”

I rattled my head. She rubbed baby oil on my neck to make me laugh. The laugh was razors in my torso. The room smelled of turpentine. “You’re trying to kill me with that stuff,” I said. She started crying. To make her feel better, I said, “I’ll let you hit me in the head with a glass ball.”

She dried her eyes but then there was baby oil under them and it looked like movie tears. “What we both need is some fresh air,” she said, her cheery voice a mask.

And so we went to the theater. A Chekhov play and we got cheap seats the hour before.

All the people were fuzzy and I was seeing everything through a thick sheet of music. The usher showed us to our seats in the center of the mezzanine. The red plush tickled me through my shirt. I could hear my organs giggling like schoolgirls. I held her hand. Then in the second act, when Masha ran across the stage, I had to pee badly. But the reflection men wouldn’t let me go, wouldn’t let me miss the transition into Act Three, and the usher stared at me, choking me with that look, squeezing my bladder. Then the shuffling dark moments behind the curtain. I concentrated on those sounds because if I missed anything a crack would appear and Masha—no, the actress—she ran across the stage and looked straight at me to let me know I would fall through it, so don’t try anything funny. I thought I could hold it, I was determined to hold it—but then everyone in the audience began to whisper. They said, you are such an idiot. They said that I would lose it, that I deserved to lose it, and then the usher’s voice rose above the taunts and jeers. Pathetic, he said. Pathetic, ugly killer child—then she saw the warm wet patch on the front of my pants. Or maybe she smelled it first and she turned and found the source. She was so embarrassed she flapped her hands around, but low, no one saw those hands flapping, mimicking her disgusted heart, those hands that had touched me everywhere. She started crying. I saw a wet cheek gleaming in the dark, sun through fog, and then suddenly she stood up and left. She left. She left me there and ran in silence out of the theater, which caused a bigger scene than it would have otherwise, no one would have noticed if she’d only kept still, and there I was alone. I ran after her, a crack forming behind me, chasing me up the red aisle, and everyone stared—of course they stared. I ran wet and feet sinking. I ran and ran and ran right into the usher. He growled two words, those two words, in my ear, his teeth gnarled and jagged in the red glow of the door.

Grid of light. Broadway. Times Square. I don’t know how long I searched for her on the street that night. I was certain she was lost in the grid of light. I must have walked eighty blocks. Maybe part of me knew I shouldn’t go home, would have died if I found her there packing her things. I am still on that street, looking.

She left books. When I finally returned to the apartment, I went through each one, dozens of them, and ripped out every page that contained the two words, and when I got tired of that, I ripped blindly. The reflection men told me to, and I happily agreed. After the doctor and his dictionary, those words fought back, angry I’d tried to destroy them. And so I officially extracted them from the English language by throwing out those books. Words like rotten teeth.

Paper cuts and raw palms. I carried the books like babies stolen from the hospital, like little porcelain clowns, then opened my arms and threw them out the window. The pages glistened in the faraway light, suspended momentarily in the air until they realized the pull and fall, and then disappeared into the dark tunnel of bricks. I never saw them hit the ground. I remember how the clock—which had been my sad soundtrack then and stayed with me like a taunting sibling—I remember how it seemed to pause as it rained Hawking, Kafka, Asimov, and Doyle on the alley off Broome.

I didn’t hear those two words again until she texted me after her landmine house.

When she left, she took all her paintings but forgot her paints. I would use one of her palettes and throw a few brushstrokes on an unstretched canvas tacked to the wall, not enough to see that I lacked her skill, then would leave the apartment. I don’t know where I went—for hours I was somewhere, because I could not have been nowhere—and when I returned home I saw the canvas and knew she’d been there while I was away, painting alone in the dark.

That-time collides with now-time. I get confused. And I don’t blame her, then or now. It wasn’t just the theater where the stage gaped like her mouth. Not being near her and remembering that night makes all the blood burst from my spine. I’m a park fountain. And the theater seats, all 922 of them, are stacked precariously on my nose. The phone rings and rings and I always think it will be her, but no one is on the other end of the line. The hollow ocean sound of the empty receiver, like holding a conch shell to my ear.

But I will remember her quaking bird hands. I will take those, those homing pigeons flapping in the theater, and send them out to find her.

That night, after the books, I remember a big breeze swept through the open window and all the loose pages I’d strewn about the floor lifted like leaves and clattered in chorus. Applauding the end of the scene.

Mr. Fox leaves before lunch for a meeting. Before he does, he’s all eyes. He waves an empty can of oranges and a plastic spoon in his left hand while he’s talking to us. He says he’s got spies in the vents and then adds just kidding, and there’s scattered laughter. He makes sure to tell me that he’s counting on me and then adds under his breath, “I’ll be watching you. Even when I’m gone, I have my ways. Not kidding.” The corners of the Fox’s smile stretch hideously up to his eyes—and then he’s gone. He doesn’t say when he’ll return, it could be any time. But I’m not scared.

The air conditioner gives a perfunctory hiccup.

Nicolette doesn’t pick up when I call her from the landline at work or when I route calls from various area codes via my computer. First try, it rings seven times then nothing. The other eight calls go straight to voice-mail. Of those eight, I leave three messages using different voices. One as me: “Nicolette, just calling to say hi, see if you want to reschedule, because, you know I get worried and I hope you didn’t not show the other day because something is wrong. Okay.” Stupid. Later, one as a gallery rep: “We’re really interested in talking to you, Ms. Bernhardt, very excited about your work. All of us here at Schmidt Wilson.” And one as her landlord: “You missed rent again, or did it get lost in the mail? Please call me to clear this up.”

I google Nicolette—on a thread some jerkwad posted an address for her, requesting she get an egging for stealing an idea of his, which I know absolutely is a lie. But he’s good for something: I write down the address in my notepad.

I realize all this sounds stalkerish, but what if she’s not merely avoiding me? I’m afraid her unanswered emails and calls from different people prove something far more sinister is going on. She’s avoiding everyone in the world? Even a potential solo show? I highly doubt that. Honestly, it would be great if she were avoiding only me. If she would call back thinking I was a gallery owner (in which case I’d hang up, satisfied she called at all), or even if she called to say, “West, leave me the hell alone or I’ll call the cops,” I would love that because it would mean she’s safe and here in the world where she’s supposed to be. But she’s not. See? She’s not. Because she’s gone.

The guys start throwing the Nerf ball over the cubicle walls, playing an increasingly complex game of H.O.R.S.E. Off the door, off the monitor, into the waste bin.

I google “1950s Nicolette artist.” Someone named Nicolette, who goes by just her first name, does pop up. But the record is spotty—it’s as if she were only there for a few months or a year. There are reviews and shows for a brief period—then nothing. Just like now.

The ball bounces off Fox’s door, off the cubicle wall, into the waste bin.

“You’re up!” Orange-Socks Dave says to me, juggling the ball.

I spin around to him in my chair. “I’m working.” When I spin back, my foot kicks my messenger bag and out flops Nicolette’s old copy of A Brief History of Time. Of course I pick it up. I wouldn’t be surprised if she left a clue in there.

“Come on. You’re not really working. What are you doing?” The way Orange-Socks Dave is pressuring me, it sounds like a test. Mr. Fox’s test, to see if I’ll screw around like they will. And hence lose my job. Or someone’s test, to sidetrack me from finding Nicolette.

“I’m working,” I say again. He makes as if to throw the ball at me but doesn’t.

Chapter ten, Wormholes and Time Travel, only takes me a couple minutes to read because that’s where most of the pages are ripped out. Hawking is smarter than I am but there are things he doesn’t even know he’s teaching. For instance: if there are societal laws and people who break those laws, it only follows that for the laws of the universe there may be atoms or even people who break those laws.

Let’s think about stars. We impose constellations on stars because of our perspective, when in fact they are so far away from each other, the connection is false—those stars aren’t even next to each other; they’re behind or in front, we can’t tell. We have no depth perception when viewing outer space. But we are very good at constructing patterns where none exist—especially patterns resembling ourselves: Orion, a monkey’s face on the surface of Mars, the Virgin Mary in a potato chip.

False pattern-making isn’t just spatial. Our word “time” is one way of denoting the linear movement through the events of the universe. One cannot experience two or more events simultaneously. But that doesn’t mean point A to point B is the only way to move. There are progressions more meaningful than that of second to second. But we must live as if time were linear.

To get at the truth of Nicolette, we must think like a scientist, employing formal logic and deductive reasoning.

PREMISE 1: NICOLETTE, THOUGH 26 YEARS OLD IN 2004, PAINTED “THE SUICIDE” IN THE LATE FIFTIES.

I know what you’re thinking: no way. And I can’t expect you to feel it the way I do. But stick with me for just a minute.

Where is Nicolette? I haven’t seen or talked to her in almost a year, except for texting the other day. At her big solo exhibition in Brooklyn this past winter, she never showed. I overheard the curator say they couldn’t get hold of her. And she didn’t come to the landmine house. And now I’ve called and sent her all variety of innocuous requests from a range of email addresses and phone numbers. No one knows where she is. Because she’s nowhere.

So and therefore:

PREMISE 2: NICOLETTE DISAPPEARS FOR LARGE BLOCKS OF TIME.

My cell vibrates—my mom.

Of course she would interrupt when I’m on the verge of discovery.

I have a phone voice for my mom, another for my girlfriends (real or hypothetical), another for the guys at work. I take the phone out into the hall.

“Honey, how are you, are you taking your meds…no, that’s not why I called, don’t get upset, I know you’re smart…yes, you are not stupid, you haven’t called in weeks, honey, honey, listen, your sister, listen, I need you to come home.”

I haven’t been home since before I was sick.

“Not sure that’s a good idea, Mom.”

She says it’s a great idea and that she has a surprise for me and not to come on one of her “mall days,” by which she means don’t come when she’s busy yelling at rich ladies in fur. “You can find a cheap last-minute flight. And don’t miss your plane.” That’s her attempt at a joke about when she missed her plane the one time she was supposed to visit me, which was when I got out of the hospital for the second time last year. She never rebooked. She’s always been afraid to fly. “What else? Are you seeing anyone?”

“How’s Dad?” I ask. “You talked to him lately?”

She answers by telling me about Cinder, her oldest foster cat. “She’s so sick, I don’t know what to do. Diarrhea all over the house.” When she starts crying I hang up, pretending the connection is bad. Cinder’s been with her a long time. But she can’t cry like that for every cat. She’s had at least fifty over the years. And anyway, Cinder might be okay.

But maybe she was helping me get on track with Nicolette, asking if I was seeing anyone. Maybe I’m on the right track. I go back to my desk. I can’t find Nicolette just by thinking hard, which is how it used to feel. She could be anywhere. Maybe she’s in India. Or Israel or Home Depot. If I’m right, clap twice. I try to think straight into her mind. Maybe she joined a band of Luddites in the desert and stopped using language. Maybe she made it into the space program and now she’s on the moon. But that can’t be right. The truth is that I’ve looked everywhere. But not everywhen.

Off the computer, off West’s head, into the wastebasket.

Smack in the face. The ball falls to the floor, not the bin. Dave, in his terrorist-threat-o-meter orange socks, starts laughing. “You in or not?” he asks me.

I don’t answer. I miss the time when Dave’s socks were yellow. But is that time gone or simply stuck in the blind spot of my brain?

The laws of the universe are indifferent to the direction of time. Because we’re unable to measure the universe completely at any given point, and are therefore unable to perceive everything at once, it seems as if time moves in one direction. But that’s as silly as saying space moves in one direction. The math clearly shows time as a continuum. Time doesn’t move at all. It just is; we’re the ones moving through it.

But even through is wrong. Through is only our perception; through wouldn’t exist if we weren’t here to perceive it as such.

Nicolette knew all this. She painted with it in her heart.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?” Dave says. But I have nothing to say to these jerkwads unless they want to hear what is finally so clear to me!

CONCLUSION 1 (FROM P1 & P2): NICOLETTE TRAVELS THROUGH TIME.

Don’t freak out, I’m just putting it out there. At the very least, it resonates.

“Nothing? Really?” he says. “You’re not going to stick up for yourself?” Then Dave doesn’t find this funny anymore and yells to the guys, “That’s enough.” He rubs the bridge of his nose. I watch him and take off my glasses to rub my nose, too. The game is over. I’ve passed the test.

13 pills left, 157 lbs., cup-of-noodles for lunch plus bodega ice cream sandwich, 23 rings on office phone, 3 guys asleep at desks, 1 dreaming he’s a dog.

The gallery-sitter taps his pencil like he’s keeping time, counting how long I’ll stay. He doesn’t seem to recognize me, which is ludicrous; I have a very memorable face.

The Hasidim are right outside the door and I try to be quick about it; the last thing I want is them finding me in here with Nicolette’s art. But I’m a senile Holmes, scanning the painting for clues. What am I missing?

Holding two warring truths in your brain can give you one hell of an ice cream headache. They—the truths—are pulsing and repelling magnets. How could Nicolette have time traveled in order to paint this? If I can just find out why she painted it. Or broader: why did she paint anything? Why did she paint me?

The gallery-sitter’s antsiness takes up most of the room and I can’t concentrate. Each time he looks up from his computer to the window behind him, wishing the sun into setting, his face adds or loses decades. He’s in his twenties; a second later he’s sixty-something. He doesn’t know much about what will happen to him. He doesn’t know that in forty-two years, he’ll die from his third heart attack just after he’s mugged on Pitt Street in the Lower East Side. He’ll have lived in New York, and Jersey that one regrettable year, for most of his life and never have been mugged. When he first moved here after high school, he’d cross his fingers with one hand and held his keyring in the other like claws, like his mother showed him—but he’d stopped doing that years ago. So when this happens, this final event of his life, his body retaliates in disbelief. And since the mugger has taken his personals, including his phone and wallet with ID, days pass before he’s identified and his children are contacted, followed by his ex-wife who left him for a woman after ten years of marriage. You see, no one was expecting him. He never received an identification chip everyone will have implanted by then, tucked into the cleft of the wrist or behind the ear. He never wanted to be known like that, and this is what he gets. He’s survived by two children and four grandchildren, all of whom received their implants as soon as they turned fourteen, the new statutory age. Three of those grandchildren will turn out to be unimpressive citizens and nearly as miserable as their grandfather, but one of them, a red-haired boy named Albert, will be one of the first men to live on a space station for more than five years. And he will be lonely, but also very fulfilled by his work testing soil samples in space, and he won’t have any children.

The gallery-sitter grimaces like he’s just heard his fortune. I don’t know for sure, I want to tell him. I’m just guessing. But I’m a very good guesser.

And I’m imagining the gallery sitter lying dead on the street as an old man, and that’s when I really see it…in the background of the painting, just below the falling woman’s ribcage, on the street she lands on from the bridge, there is something so familiar, so common, I can’t believe I missed it: cobblestone.

With this clue, I can find the location of the painting, which will lead me to Nicolette then and now. I touch the thick gold frame. I whisper to the painting: I will find you, falling woman.

The other first time I met Nicolette, I remember she wore a bright red sundress peeking out from under a blue patient’s robe. This was when she came to paint me in the hospital. Her black hair was cropped short and greasy with summer and she didn’t belong there. We were in the activity room, the half-dozen patients who volunteered to sit for a portrait. She was whispering something to the art therapist when her eyes caught mine. She chose me first, you see.

She set up her easel in the corner of the dayroom. As I sat, I tried to be graceful, a regular ballerina. She laughed. “You look like you have fishhooks in your shoulders. Sit normal. Go on.” Sitting normal, it turned out, takes a tremendous amount of energy. She said she was going to ask me some questions while she worked if that was all right with me and that she’d start with an easy one: “Do you want to be here?”

The others watched us from across the room while the art therapist tried to draw their attention back to their pre-cut paper and popsiclestick collages. “No,” I said, “but you knew that. So it’s my turn to ask a question?”

She pulled her chair an inch closer to her canvas then pushed it away again. “Okay, why not? Ask me.” That was the only time I ever saw her nervous.

“Why are you wearing that patient gown?”

“I wanted to see what it felt like. Probably in poor taste. But so is the gown.”

“We only wear those the first day,” I said.

“Good, since it’s my first day. My turn. Why did you volunteer to be my subject?”

“Because you’re beautiful.”

She smiled and hid a blush and said, “Thank you, but that’s not—”

So I asked, “Why do you want to paint us?”

“Same answer as the robe. I’m trying on an experience that’s not my own.” She talked like I thought her paints might talk if given the gift of speech. She sounded British without the accent, old-fashioned without old jargon. “The hospital rejected my proposal for years. It’s like a fancy nightclub—you have to wait in line forever to get in.” With her left hand, she pushed her hair behind her ear two and a half times until it fell back toward her cheek and she left it there. “I’m sorry. That was—” Her right hand was meanwhile moving deftly across the canvas, which I couldn’t see. “Do you have visitors who come around?”

“My sister Jules comes to see me every day. She’s Jewish now.”

“But you aren’t?”

I told her how my mother’s religion was cats and Nicolette asked what I meant by that and I said, “That’s three questions in a row.” But I told her anyway about how my mother helped start the first covert cells of the Animal Liberation Front of the Puget Sound. “Those people in shopping malls who spray fake blood on fur coats? That’s her.” And how, in our feline foster home, my mom used to call me by the cats’ names by accident. Once, I was Piper for a whole week.

As I spoke, Nicolette put down her brush and paints and closed her eyes and swayed a little in her chair. Which, to be one hundred percent truthful, gave me just enough wood that I had to cross my legs. She was hungry for my past. I saw that in her again and again. That’s when I first realized what fueled her: other people’s stories, unfortunate stories more often than not. Only I didn’t know then what exactly was being fueled.

So I told her about the girl who jumped off the bluff, or what little I could remember—because I had to keep Nicolette just the way she was, eyes closed, lip bit—how I watched her body swing into the abyss like a dandelion seed.

Later, when I got out of the hospital, she started coming to my apartment to continue our sessions. I would do anything she told me to. She had me naked a lot of the time. I was cold, sprawled on the kitchen floor, but that didn’t matter. She didn’t care what I looked like down there. She’d handle me, touch me, moving different body parts around as if adjusting objects for a still life. Sometimes she put me in women’s clothing. Or on all fours. There was a cat series—I was the cat. She said I fell asleep once, lying supine on the wood floor beneath my south-facing window, limbs in the air. I was her best model. And her most difficult. She said so.

Nicolette was always listening. She’d ask me questions to get me talking about my family or my job or my reflection men and before I knew it the sun had set and she’d finished another painting. There were therapists and social workers and doctors who asked me questions, too. But no one listened like Nicolette. There was anguish in her listening. There was fear.

And even though she told me very little about herself, I listened too. I knew more of what was going on in that head of hers than anyone. No one will remember my name. No one ever remembers the name of the model or subject. But with her, I was part of a greater whole. A very important link in the infinite chain of her. Without me, it would all fall apart.

In the hospital that day, as she painted my fish-hooked shoulders, she finally looked up and said apologetically, “I think I have to stop.”

“Why?” I said, standing so she’d see how tall I was. Which wasn’t much taller than her.

She stared up at me a long time like I’d spoken another language and she had to translate it into her own, and she swayed back and forth a little, between the two poles of some decision she was silently making. I swayed too. Finally, she said, “I’m afraid I’ll fail to paint you.”

I hold my precious clue in my head as I leave the gallery. The cobblestones can lead me straight to the setting of the painting if I can find out more details about them. And wherever the cobblestones are, there must be another clue to finding Nicolette.

In the hallway, a group of Hasidic men huddle together. They are whispering, heads bent low, prayer fringes swaying at their waists as if to music. They’re the same men I saw at the landmine house, but they don’t recognize me. One of them says, “Something and something we are disappearing.” Obviously, they didn’t say the “somethings.” They stop talking as I approach. But stoic me, I smile, friendly and polite as can be so they don’t guess I have any inkling that they’re in on “something” here. “Killer day out there,” I say to them. They nod and wait for me to pass.

I hurry down the stairs away from them and burst out the metal doors into the bright killer day, and who is there but Jill, the elevator man. Placed there to make me forget the cobblestones. I will not forget the cobblestones. There he is with his parenthetical mouth settling into a smile, leaning against the building with his knee bent up and his foot resting on the wall like a flamingo. Him and his old face smoking in the sun.

He sweeps a hand through his thick manly gray hair in a nervous gesture. It makes me want to say the word lightning! Luckily he talks first.

“Smells like shit out here.” And the air suddenly feels like a flooded basement.

“Worse,” I say.

“It’s rich people. Rich people shit smells the worst because of all the exotic things they get to eat. Little do they know,” he waggles a finger, “stomachs don’t accept major credit cards.”

“You remember me?” I ask.

“Sure I remember you. Kid with the painting.”

“Not really with it.”

“How about that article? Did you read it?” Jill frowns. “You didn’t read it.”

I don’t tell him I forgot all about the National Geographic he gave me, but somehow he knows. I say I’d been planning on reading it today, I swear, I’m really interested.

He says, “You should be. Those bees, man. Something weird is going on. Bees disappearing all over the world.”

It is weird, I have to admit, especially since the Hasidim were just talking all about disappearing. But then Jill isn’t talking, just smoking, and I want to keep him here, so I look around for something to talk about and point to the small security camera above the door and tell him how they’re filming me all the time. So they’ll have the specimen someday in the future, to study a life like mine, like Buckminster Fuller created a specimen of himself before they had cameras everywhere.

Jill says, “And what’s a life like yours?”

There’s always the moment when I have to decide if I should tell someone I’m sick or not. It’s usually best to play it safe. There’s danger but I don’t know how much or what color level and it all looks gray-scale, like his hair. “Just a normal life,” I say.

He thinks about this for a moment. “We’re all under surveillance, kiddo. Don’t go thinking you’re special.”

Smart, but false. “You think they’re watching now?”

“Not with that one.” He points to the camera above the door. “I know all the security in this building. Half the cameras are fakes. Floors two, four, and five—fakes. The three cameras on floor eight? All real. They got some honest treasures up there. And one real and one fakeroo on the ninth floor with your painting. It’s all up here.” He taps on his skull with his index finger. “What’s your name, kiddo?” When I don’t answer, he says, “I can keep calling you kiddo if you want.”

“West. West,” I tell him.

“West-West. What are your folks, a flock of geese?”

“Then I’d be named South.”

He likes that. Then he asks what’s the deal with me and my painting.

“Mine?” I say.

“You want it, don’t you?”

“No!” I say in my best abashed voice. “I can’t afford it.”

He leans forward. I can feel the heat coming off him. “You could always steal it.”

I laugh, but he stares at me steadily. Then I have a very good idea. “To tell the truth, the woman who painted it, actually, she told me she wants it back.”

He looks surprised. “Why doesn’t she come and get it?”

“Can’t.”

Jill opens his mouth like he’s going to say something but leaves it swinging there in the hot breeze.

“She doesn’t want people to know it’s hers,” I say. “She took her name off it. They won’t let her just have it now.”

If he knows I’m lying, he doesn’t show it. I can be a very good liar when I want to and I was wondering just the other day why I never pursued a career in acting. (Not that I would ever lie to you, because I promised you the truth. All truths.)

“So, if we all want the painting so bad…” he says.

“You want it?”

Jill grunts. “I don’t know what I want. Who does?” Then he stubs his cigarette out on the wall and grins at me. “You ever stole anything?”

I shield my eyes from the sun-charged windows across the street and tell him how once when I was little, I stole a baseball mitt from a neighbor kid, then gave it to my dad as a present.

“He know it was stolen property?”

“Yeah.”

“He didn’t make you give it back?”

I shake my head. “You ever steal anything?”

He licks his fingers, pinches off the end of his cigarette, then slips it into his shirt pocket.

“What I want to know,” he says to a space past my shoulder, “is who would paint something like that? Why would someone paint a person jumping from a bridge and dying? That would fuck a person up to have that painted of you.” He takes in a clunky, orange-level-threatening breath. “That artist must have been a real bitch.”

That’s when I ram my head into the wall. I say the word lightning to myself. Lightning. Lightning. Light-n-ing. This way I won’t smash his face into the wall.

AXIOM 1: NICOLETTE IS NOT A BITCH.

“Hey. Hey, are you crazi?” Jill grabs my shoulder and spins me to face him. “Are you nuts? What the hell are you doing?”

I can feel the stucco imprint on my forehead but from the look on his face I can tell I’m not bleeding. He lets go of my shoulder and says, “I’m sorri, man. I wasn’t thinking. You knowing her and all.” He sounds careful. I’ve scared him. “Hey, are we cool? I shouldn’t have said that. Are we cool, man? West?”

So he’s gotten hold of both words. He thinks he can just spit them out and everything will be okay. Well he’d better be careful.

But I don’t tell him that. The words won’t come, which is always or usually a sign that they shouldn’t. Nothing yet has fallen out of the sky. Now that these words are back in the language, they are neon arrows pointing to the mission. Pointing to my form above me.

“West,” he says slowly, rolling my name around with his tongue, examining it in there like an expensive piece of sushi. “That’s a real good name. Maybe your folks didn’t want the West to die.” Then he tells me about people in Africa who name their kids after the last names of American presidents. Everyone’s first name is Kennedy, he says. “And once I actually met a kid named Hitler, first name, but that was years ago. Well, I didn’t really meet him, but a friend did. Well, he wasn’t really a friend. More like a traveler.” And he says that now the Italian government is paying Italians to name their babies Benito, not in honor of Mussolini, but because it’s a nice historic name and they don’t want it to disappear. His wrinkles catch the sweat rolling down his face. “What if I’d been named Benito? History is full of dead names.” Bees, names, something disappearing. He scales the building with his eyes, searching for the sky. “I should get back to work.”

But I don’t want him to go just yet. “Have you always been a custodian?” I ask quickly. Then I try to roll my eyes up hard enough that they slap my brain.

“Used to be a lawyer,” he says. “Did some law work, anyway. Then I was sort of an art dealer for a while.” Jill nods towards the door. “But I needed more job security.”

He makes himself bigger, shoulders hunched yet tall, like a bear over his prey, and pushes through the big metal door. But then he looks back over his shoulder like he’s running from someone. I want to ask him: What are you hiding from? I want to tell him: You can stop running now.

The horse cop on the corner of Sullivan keeps squinting at me like I was joking with someone about stealing a painting not forty minutes ago. Up and down the block, old women emerge from narrow doorways where they’ve always lived, and I wonder if they knew Nicolette. Hating them and wanting to grab their ankles and beg them to give me answers. Maybe they saw her around when she painted here decades ago. I need someone to rub my ideas against. I need a Sancho Panza. A Watson. Or maybe I need a Sherlock Holmes and I’m the sidekick. If it weren’t for my meds, I could be both. I am following myself blindly.

At the library, I posted a cropped image of the cobblestones in the painting in a cobblestone forum. And this is where HstryNick04 led me. HstryNick04, facing his own glowing rectangle in New Jersey, or New Zealand, the New Jersey or New Zealand that exists only microseconds away, said that there were only two streets in the city where this kind of Belgium brick had been laid, and one was Sullivan. Somewhere HstryNick04 knows exactly where I am right now.

I stand where there were once Belgian bricks and hold up the image of the painting on my phone to compare. Sketch and write down all the numbers and signs and addresses that are visible from the angle the painting seems to have captured, and other angles just in case. If I can find the street in the painting, then I can find the falling woman, and if I find the falling woman who I feel in my bones is still alive and breathing, then she can lead me to Nicolette.

Have you ever noticed that if you stare at bricks too long, they begin to move? There’s something in the street that I can’t see. I look both ways then get down on my hands and knees in the middle of the road. Pressing my face to the grimy street, how the asphalt shoots off pinpricks of light and the whole city is vibrating against my cheek. Somewhere down here there is a clue.

During our sessions in my apartment, Nicolette painted picture after picture after picture of me. Dirty, grotesque images—empty crab shells and deer decaying on the side of the road. She said all of them were me. A rat in a sewer nibbling at a book. A pile of manure with a white chicken on top, pecking. The apartment was filled with me. Paintings of all the abject corners of my life. She spread my dirty face everywhere.

Of course Jill would think the painting was cruel, since he obviously senses the woman in the painting is alive, too, not just an object of Nicolette’s imagination. How hurt the woman must have been upon seeing her suicide. I would like to revise my first axiom.

AXIOM 1: NICOLETTE IS NOT A BITCH. BUT SOMETIMES SHE DOES THINGS THAT MIGHT SEEM HURTFUL TO THE UNINITIATED.

But over and over again she said she failed to paint me. That was her word—failed—not mine. I told her she never failed at anything, that it was all right. I had to remove the brush from her hand and say, stop, you’ll hurt yourself.

But why did she think she failed? Nicolette could only have thought herself a failure if she was trying to do something beyond the physical paint on canvas, because she certainly didn’t fail at the act of rendering. Perhaps she meant she failed to capture it all. To capture. Some think photographs capture a soul—why not paintings? And she couldn’t paint without a story—stories about my mom, hallucinations, the girl on the bluff. Sometimes stories I’d told her a thousand times already.

PREMISE 3: NICOLETTE LISTENED TO MY STORIES, PAINTED THE EVIL AND DISGUSTING SIDES OF ME, THEN SAID SHE’D FAILED.

She painted hurtful images, but because of Axiom 1, I know she wasn’t trying to hurt me. She was trying to help me. So why would she paint the ugliness she saw to help? Maybe she was trying to paint it away. If she could just paint it, secure it to canvas, if she could transcribe me, maybe she could steal my disease.

CONCLUSION 2 (FROM A1 & P3): WHEN NICOLETTE PAINTS, SHE CAPTURES THE BAD ELEMENTS OF HER SUBJECTS’ LIVES—PAST, PRESENT, OR FUTURE—THUS REMOVING THEM FROM REALITY.

And of course! She painted that woman in order to save her, too! To keep her from jumping. She took away the possibility of suicide, plucked the event right out of her timeline! Like a common pickpocket, no, like a fruit picker—she yanked it like a grapefruit from a tree of possibilities and stuck it into her own timeless handbag of unfortunate events.

But if she does have this power, she could steal any potential event from the life of her subject. She could do unspeakable harm. But she doesn’t! She takes only the bad. Poor, poor Nicolette. What a burden to take on those evils. I have to tell Jill/Benito! The painting wasn’t an act of malice. It was an act of salvation.

But then how did Nicolette time travel to paint the woman in the first place? According to Hawking, you’d need to implode stars to get enough energy to create a wormhole. As we all know:

A2: ENERGY CAN NEITHER BE CREATED NOR DESTROYED.

So, and:

P4: TIME TRAVEL WOULD REQUIRE A MASSIVE AMOUNT OF ENERGY.

By painting that unfortunate event and trapping it in the image, Nicolette must have found a way to harness said event’s potential energy and use it as time-travel currency. Before it burned a hole in that sad but nifty purse of hers.

C3 (FROM C1, C2, A2, & P4): NICOLETTE USES THE ENERGY SHE CAPTURES FROM PAINTING TO TRAVEL THROUGH TIME.

I must find the falling woman, who is now most certainly alive—for the painting is keeping her from jumping. Because if one of those unfortunate events, for instance the suicide, were to actually occur—well, it’s impossible according to the logic, but if it did, it might, mightn’t it, rip a hole in something important.

With my glasses off, it is much easier to press my cheek firmly to the street Nicolette painted in the fifties. But the fifties mean something different to her than they do to the rest of us. They might, mightn’t they, be tomorrow from her perspective!

There is no reason to assume that the way we experience time and space says anything about the way it actually is—the math shows us as much and so does literature. Western stories rely on linearity, but some African storytellers will tell multiple stories simultaneously and one story will trip into another, entwining past and future. They’re on to something true and here’s that truth: there are many more dimensions than we can possibly imagine. Our inability to experience them only goes to show that our experience isn’t sufficient to say anything about anything!

A young couple passes me and points. From where I am, pressed to the ground, the bottom halves of them edge quickly around the corner. I feel terrible for them. They have no idea what a beautiful, magical world they live in.

The saddest part about all of this is that Nicolette will never experience her own end. She’ll never be her own old woman. She pops up here and there, reappearing and disappearing without a trace—which explains her absence this past year, and why her phone stopped working.

It must seem natural to the people around her; she fits into whatever timeline she lands in. She’s probably seen all of history, she might have fended off the Spaniards with the Lenape Indians or been a Viking. But that kind of power must be taxing. I saw the rage she carries firsthand and it was like a jug of sand balanced on her head. But I never realized its vastness, and that in it was all the sand of all the beaches in the world. There’s gold buried in there, sure, but who would want to dig through all that despair to get at it? In that dangerous handbag, she lugs around suicides and murders and loss and sorrow. She must be terribly sad.

A car honks. Three deliberate honks. From my hunched position, I spot a sedan sitting behind me. I hop up on the sidewalk, wave and watch it pass. And there—did you catch the license plate, Watson? A vanity plate that says BEE-OCH with a sassy cartoon bumblebee on its frame. Everything points to Jill.

Here’s a truth: she thought my disease was her fault, that she triggered it. I never told her otherwise.

How much do you know about schizophrenia? Not much, probably. Maybe where you are, there is no word for schizophrenia, it’s just normal. Like asking the universe what it calls the universe. But don’t feel dumb—even the doctors in this dimension don’t know much, especially its origin. Is it hereditary? Unclear. Is it frontal lobal? Don’t know. How do we treat it? No clue! Even though we have neuroimaging now! All these generations of medication are guesswork.

One more stop: Bushwick. A detour to verify my previous conclusions, which could still be false. If Nicolette were just avoiding me, it would be simpler. She wouldn’t be in danger.

The apartment building—the address the jerkwad posted online—is an old tortilla factory, or maybe it was pencils, not meant to be residential. You can smell the asbestos and other things that could kill you, seeping from the mortar. Apartment fourteen—but the buzzer doesn’t work. No choice but to try all the buttons then wish I could wash my hands.

A Hasidic man opens the door. “Can I help you?” he asks.

“No,” I say, about to turn, but I cannot let my fear get the best of me. “Yes. I mean. I’m looking for Nicolette.”

“Hm. Are you a relative?” he asks.

“No.”

“Lucky you,” he says. “She owes me rent. I haven’t seen her since spring.”

“Oh,” I say. All I want to do is leave. “Maybe it got lost in the mail.”

“If you see her,” he says. But he doesn’t say what I’m supposed to do.

It’s all coming from Jill. He’s the one who told me to read about the bees, and all this talk of disappearing names. Since Jill works in the gallery building, it follows that he works for the Hasids, but he’s never mentioned them, and is that a clue in itself? Jill is either my friend or foe and I must find out which to move forward with my plan.

I figure there can’t be many male Jills running around New York City. Back at home, I run a quick search for “Mr. Jill” NYC law, since he said he did some law work. And what do you know—there’s article after article about him breaking the law. Jill Hayes, the anarchist. Jill Hayes, the draft dodger. I follow him from one protest to the next. He’s easy to spot in the Village Voice archives even though he’s since acquired forty years of wrinkles and weird facial hair. He was at nearly every draft-card-burning rally ever and went to jail like six times—which is, for some reason, exciting to me. There’s a great picture of him in handcuffs, looking like he’s about to bite the camera. He probably keeps that clipping with him. Another photo has him holding up an anti-fascist banner with three other boys and a woman under the Washington Square Arch. The woman’s face is blurred in an attempt to escape the picture. There’s also a small article in a local paper from Rochester, Michigan, of all places, about Jill and a cleaning company being accused of robbery in the eighties, the charges dropped. Unless there’s another Mr. Jill Hayes floating around, exactly the same age.

There is so much information. And it’s all mine, only a millimeter or millisecond away. It makes me euphoric. It almost makes me feel like I’m in love. When I get incredulous about information technology, I imagine myself in a period film, and that period is now, and people in the future are watching and I’m voicing my incredulity in dialogue, and they laugh because it will be an inside joke with the audience because yes they do have cell phones that work underground but they aren’t called phones anymore because they’re implanted in their brains.

But then sometimes, there’s so much information I feel nauseated. I can’t differentiate the vital from the trivial. Like the consumer reports I read every day: it’s all there, on the same plane, equalized, and how should I presume? How should I know what to read? Who am I? I am no one. I am only a consumer, a ragdoll sponge of language.

And the National Geographic that Jill gave me? Turns out there’s some mite going around and whole hives are disappearing around the world. That’s the gist of the first couple paragraphs anyway, but it’s hard to concentrate with letters coming unglued from the page.

And in the gallery, the Hasidic man said, “We are disappearing.” Who is “we”? The Hasidim?

My phone chirrups on the table. It’s Jules, as if she’s listening in on my thoughts and is trying to interrupt them. Could she be? But she wouldn’t understand. Jules never knew Nicolette.

“Jules, quick, tell me how big the Hasidic population is.” I hope that Dan isn’t there but I’m afraid to ask in case he’s listening in.

“Hello to you, too.”

“How many people you think?”

“What? I have no idea.”

Calmly, slowly, I say, “Hello. Isn’t there a census number you know or something?”

“No one I know fills out the census. Are you all right?”

“Why?”

“Why are you all right?”

“Why don’t they fill out the census?”

“Because. We’re Jews. Bad things happen when you count us. Think what happened the last time.”

“What happened last time?” Google search: Hasidic population.

“The Holocaust, dummy. The last time we were thoroughly ranked and recorded, who do you think was doing the counting?”

She’s right. There’s no solid number that’s easily searchable. “So?”

“So. Even for a minyan you’re not supposed to count with numbers. You use a ten-character word instead. And you can’t point fingers.”

Quick search for the Holocaust and Mussolini’s name pops up almost as much as Hitler’s. Why did Jill mention Mussolini and Hitler earlier? And now Jules, too. Old Benito did help Hitler try to wipe out the Jewish population. But what does that have to do with Nicolette and the Hasids at the gallery? Wouldn’t it be great if it were some kind of intricate revenge plot? Maybe they want to commission Nicolette to paint Hitler out of history. No, that can’t be it.

“West? Are you there?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you on the computer?”

“No.”

“You are. You’re using your Internet voice. Stop that when you talk to me.”

Maybe the way we use the Internet is an appropriate metaphor for the way we truly move through time—the expansiveness and invisibility. We experience position and time as discrete markers of identity. I am right here and right now. Later, I will be right there and right then. But in space-time, we are four-dimensional creatures. The physics says that I am neither here nor there, neither now nor then; I am a continuous four-dimensional instant, curving through space and time. We think of people and things as having temporal ends—a person dies, they are ended—but that’s misleading. People only end the way a yardstick ends and the way a road ends. They stop in space. We cry.

But is it a tragedy that a yardstick does not extend forever? No! Its utility is derived from its limitation!

“Jules, think carefully. Have you noticed if there’s been fewer people lately? At synagogue and stuff.”

“A couple women stopped coming. Everyone’s moving upstate. What if I moved to Poughkeepsie? Elaine loves it. Not that Dan would ever leave the city.”

“What are you talking about?”

“If you’re so curious, why don’t you come to an event tonight?”

“Services again? Don’t you ever do anything else?”

“I do lots of things.”

“You used to try to make me go salsa dancing. You’re not allowed to dance anymore?”

“Total freedom isn’t always a blessing, West.”

“Yes it is.”

Jules sighs. “Like at a diner, like at Neil’s over on Lex, don’t you have a moment of panic looking through that menu? Page after page, having to read every item to make sure you’re making the best choice. And then you get your usual tuna sandwich and you’re no happier than if you had chosen something from a list of five items. You’re less happy, knowing there are all those other meals you never tried. Or at the supermarket—”

“Okay, I get it.”

“And you have a hundred choices of cornflakes? It’s suffocating. There is such a thing as too much freedom.”

“I get it,” I say, clicking to another website quietly so she can’t tell.

“I make choices within a particular path. We all have our restrictions and disciplines. Mine is faith.”

“What’s mine?” I say.

“I don’t know, West. Your disease?”

There’s a moment of static and I’m not sure if she’s hung up on me or if I should.

“I didn’t mean that,” she says. “If you want to know, the population is growing. Because of the Lubavitch movement.”

I can time travel, too, sort of. I pull up photographs of Mussolini and his mistress hanging from the Petrol station for public viewing. His demise on display.

I wait to feel something about it. I wait and wait.

It’s like the way empathy works, neurologically speaking: when you see a spider crawling up someone else’s arm, you feel as if the spider is crawling up your arm; that feeling is as real as that experience, the same neurons really do fire up. It’s hard for most people to empathize with the abstract—genocide, war. But since I am able to feel other people’s brains as if they’re mine all the time, then maybe I truly can time travel, too. If I just imagine hard enough

I hear someone laughing in the background. “Is someone else there?” I ask quietly.

“No, just Dan. He’s watching some stupid show about tricked-out cars.”

“Dan’s there? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I told him it was killing his brain cells. You would never watch that, would you? You have better taste. I told him that, too.”

“I have to go.”

“But what about dinner? That’s why I called. Tuesday?”

Dan just happens to be within hearing distance of every important conversation. I hang up.

It’s all connected to the Hasidim. And Dan.

The Hasidim know the painting was created in the 1950s because they had it dated like the gallery-sitter said. But they still believe it’s Nicolette’s—they said so at the landmine house. And they know that Nicolette created the landmine house this year. So, and therefore:

P5: THE HASIDIM, WHICH INCLUDES DAN, HAVE ALSO CONCLUDED THAT NICOLETTE CAN TRAVEL THROUGH TIME.

What are they plotting? What could they possibly use this information for?

P6: THE HASIDIC POPULATION IS SECRETLY ON THE DECLINE.

Let’s just say that my sister’s Lubavitch movement is a desperate response to this decline, recruiting less religious Jews as quick as they can. If the Hasidim are disappearing—like the bees, like the names—they would, naturally, want to know how one might stop from disappearing. You can’t hold that against them, because as we all know:

A3: ANYONE ON THE BRINK OF EXTINCTION IS BOUND TO TAKE DRASTIC MEASURES TO PUT A STOP TO SAID EXTINCTION.

They must have decided that if Nicolette can paint a woman’s suicide out of existence, why shouldn’t she, or they, be able to paint their own extinction out, too? If only they could harness that power themselves, they could paint away their own demise and time travel to who knows where! But to harness it, they need Nicolette to teach them, or force her to paint it for them. But the only way to locate Nicolette is through the painting, the last tangible link.

C4 (FROM P5, P6, & a3): the hasidim will stop at nothing to track down nicolette.

I write a letter to Jill that I plan to leave at the first-floor gallery in the building asking him to meet me at a certain location four days from now. I try to sound friendly so I won’t scare him away. Four days to prepare my thoughts. I haven’t told anyone, really, about Nicolette—I haven’t wanted to give her away like that. I don’t know if Jill is working under the Hasidim’s spell or if he’s a free agent, but time is running out, I can feel it. Nicolette is in danger and I must protect her. Without knowing where she is there’s only one thing I can do. I have to tell Jill:

C5: I MUST STEAL THE PAINTING.

Every city has a suicide bridge: Golden Gate Bridge Jacques Cartier Bridge Aurora Bridge Coronado Bridge Sunshine Skyway Bridge Cold Spring Canyon Bridge Nusle Bridge Van Stadens Bridge Humber Bridge Hornsey Lane Bridge Duke Ellington Bridge Villena Bridge Foresthill Bridge Grafton Bridge.

Here I am, five o’clock on Thursday, standing in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge and not a bird in sight. Jill’s tromping up from the East. It looks like he’s carrying Brooklyn Heights on his shoulders. Four days since our last encounter and he hasn’t changed a bit.

I did all my homework, memorized a speech to give him about Nicolette and the painting. I will be the curator of this conversation.

The footpath is full of commuters. Walking and biking, idling. I know where they’re headed. I can feel desperation in their bones, the tremor of doing things they don’t want to do—a general yellow-level danger. Standing above the river, suspended between decision and indecision. Between two visions of themselves. New Yorkers—always more there than here.

I must have gone to work the last few days and done a hell of a job because I’m great at what I do. I must have eaten cups-of-noodles for lunch and fried egg sandwiches for dinner. But it’s more like I’m remembering a movie and imagining a scene that wasn’t really in it. An angled view from above. Where was my mind? Perhaps this is in itself a form of time travel. I must have brushed my teeth and taken a dump; I must have showered once and jerked off twice and rewatched Unforgiven on my computer.

Jill is quiet and forlorn as he approaches. Just nodding and humming on the swaying bridge, which isn’t actually swaying.

He shakes my hand. His is calloused, carrying beans under his skin.

“Lucky we’re here,” he says. “I only got your note when I went by work to get my stuff. Quit a couple days after I saw you.” He smiles between his gray, downy parentheses, but on his forehead is the memory of a frown. “But you got me here. So out with it. What’s this urgent business?”

Each time someone passes us on the bridge, they turn just before they’re out of earshot and look at me over a shoulder. Jill doesn’t see because his back is to them. Their footsteps are as loud as Jill’s voice, and it’s hard to figure out which sounds to pay attention to.

“It’s about the painting,” I say slowly. This is where my speech is to begin. I practiced the lie all week so it feels true. “She says the Hasids, they don’t get her work. Her intention. They don’t deserve it. But they won’t give the painting back. She told me that.”

“Who deserves it then? You?”

“No, not me. No one, maybe. Except maybe the woman in the painting. Whoever she is.”

The lines in his forehead disappear like they’ve been airbrushed away. He laughs out loud. “Whoever? But I know her.”

I close my eyes and listen to the traffic humming below.

“Knew her, anyway.” His words are pinched, like it’s causing him physical discomfort to remember. “I used to live with her. On Sullivan.”

I tie my voice up with ropes so it will not shake. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You never asked.”

This is true. Even with my eyes closed, I can feel him smiling. I throw up my hands. “Well.” Well someone very powerful is moving the pieces around, I want to say. This is divine intervention. This is God or something. This is Nicolette. “Is she alive?”

“Of course she’s alive,” he says defensively. “But real sick. Real sick.”

“You still see her?”

“I keep track.”

“So that’s why you got the job at the gallery?”

“That was just a coincidence. One of those great mysteries in life.” Liar. Eyes shut, I hear him smacking his cigarette pack against his hand. “Like how you know the artist, and I know the subject. Funny, don’t you think? You can open your eyes now.”

I open them. He sounds angry, like he blames me for it. But I wasn’t the one who sent him! The wind blows his silvery hair and lets off sparks. Maybe he doesn’t even know; maybe he’s an agent of the Hasids but his memories were erased. In either case, I act like I don’t know anything fishy is going on. I suck in the smoggy bridge air and ask, “What’s her name?”

He tells me her name like he’s sad to give it to someone else, the way I feel about Nicolette. I hold it in pursed lips, let the name melt beeswaxy around my tongue. Nowhere to go, the name is a trapped bee pinging around inside my head. I watch it struggle in there a while. Claire. Claire Bishop.

I feel I need to give him something in return for her name. “I have to tell you something about the artist,” I say. But I feel so urgent the words come out: “Something I have tell artist.” I have all these wet lumps of clay in my brain that used to be my speech and my fingers are shaking too much to re-mold them. Touching my brain is the weirdest thing.

“See, you are, and I am, we all are snake-like time creatures whose circumference is the shape of our bodies. Like one of those children’s toy tunnels that stretch out and accordion back in. Those weightless nylon ones?” I pull my hands apart as wide as I can to demonstrate. “We think we’re moving in one straight line, because that’s how we think of time, from point of birth until your spatial and temporal endpoint. Then you fall out of the tunnel of yourself, kaput! But if you see it another way, zoom out, my tunnel is draped all over New York, crossing over itself.”

“West,” Jill says. He seems about to stop me but then, “Never mind. Go on.” I know that most people would be getting a little frantic, trying to make eye contact with a passing stranger as if to say, Can you believe this guy? There’s always a hint of fear in their faces, real fear that I’ll flip out on them or hurt them—but that’s absent from Jill’s face. He looks at me like I’m nuts, sure, but he’s not afraid. He sucks on his cigarette then realizes he never lit it.

So, I tell him about Nicolette and time travel. Give him a first-class education on logic and argument while I’m at it.

I tell him how Nicolette understood return. She had me repeat those stories again and again—about the girl on the bluff or my mom’s anarchist jail time or my dad leaving—listening for what she called the “original pain.” We repeat those moments throughout our lives without knowing it. If she could return to it in this piece of art, outside of me, or Claire, maybe she could end the cycle. Turn pain into beauty. Her paintings were acts of salvation, not malice!

I admit to Jill that though I haven’t yet deduced the physics of how Nicolette travels through time, we know that she can. We’ve all had a taste of that power. We just don’t know how to sustain or control it. The power lies in our perception, has a tangible effect on time itself. When we’re bored and time feels like it’s moving so slowly, we’re moving slower through our fourth-dimensional selves. Alas, our linear perception of time is too ingrained and even if we could alter it, most of us would stick to the straight and narrow—it’s easiest, and we’re not the brightest species in the universe. “Can you imagine being with her?” I say in conclusion. “It’s like being with a ghost.”

Jill looks at me like he’s just woken up from a coma and doesn’t know it yet. He didn’t even hear me. I gave away Nicolette for nothing.

I am weak. I am not even human. I am mouse.

“So what you’re saying?” Jill says. “The whole name thing, it’s not a coincidence? There aren’t just two artists that go by Nicolette?”

What would it mean to jump? With my eyes, I follow the wires and the shapes of the wires, touch the nearest one, thick wrapped around each other. Are they hundreds of separate strands braided together, or one wire made to look that way? I grip it with both hands and pull as hard as I can, lean my full weight back—nothing. And yet they sway in the breeze like hair.

“I’m an open-minded sort of guy,” Jill says. “Never been spiritual or any of that, but—you know how that sounds, right? I just want to make sure you know how it sounds to a guy like me. Who’s not into the whole metaphysical thing.”

Don Quixote knew himself even though he was mad. And he slept in his helmet and never left his vigil or his quest. What conviction do people have today that even comes close? If put to the task, we’d all leave our armor unattended. I want to say, yes, I know what it sounds like to all the sad, blind people. The normal people with their normal briefcases and lunch bags. They have no idea who they are. They don’t want to know.

I crane my neck over the railing and watch the cars and feel them reflecting on the underside of my chin like I am water. “I don’t know how you would jump,” I say conversationally.

“What?”

“I’m just saying it would be hard. You’d have to really want it. You’d have to get down to the car level, or heave yourself far enough over the lane below.”

“Real nice, kid.”

“I need the painting.” I turn to face him. “Even if I’m playing right into their hands.”

There is a lull in foot traffic. Suddenly it’s just us.

“It’s too expensive. You said so yourself.” He tries to light up but the wind won’t let him.

“I know.”

He tilts his head back, looking at the nothing-blue sky like something is going to fall out of it any minute now. Avoiding my eyes at all cost. “If we do this,” he says, “you’ve got to be the one. I’ll organize everything, I’ll be there with you, but I can’t—” He throws his hands up as if to say he’s innocent. “I can’t do the actual deed. You got to know your limits. And I’ll be a suspect right off since I quit. I’ll have to be scarce after. But I can help get it to her.”

“To her?”

“To Claire. It’ll be a waiting game till it’s safe. Understand?”

“I thought we were giving it back to the artist.”

“And I thought we determined the person who deserves it is the nice lady in the painting. Am I wrong?”

“No.”

“So that’s the deal. You in or not?”

I look along the cables for cameras or microphones with wires leading somewhere unknown but I am not so stupid as to think they would leave loose wires for me to find. If they’re easy to see, I know they mean nothing. I look Jill right in the eyes and say, “Yes.” I meant to say it tough and low, but it’s more of a breathy, “I guess.”

And I did not feel the need to elaborate what parts of the deal I was saying yes to: no one’s getting the painting but me until it leads the way to Nicolette. Then I can help her. And she’ll see how much I love her.

Jill grins and slaps my back. “Who would’ve thought in a million years? What a pair.”

Of course, he’s lying.

Then Jill asks, low-voiced, “How much cash you got?”

“For what?”

“Occupational expenses. Like any job.”

I tell him I just got paid and could give him that but it wasn’t much. And then he says it will take a grand. He says this very confidently, like he’s done this before.

“Of course, a grand,” I say, and add, “I have to pay rent soon.”

“Takes capital to keep mouths shut. You can’t just snap your fingers and it’s done. Plus storage. And if there’s trouble? I quit my job for this. I’m taking a lot of risks here.”

The word “liar” won’t leave my throat, so I tell him my landlord is usually okay if I’m a little late, and we walk east off the bridge, goodbye for now, bridge.

Thinking of the word “painting,” over and over, painting, painting, painting, stuck in my head like a song, and there’s this group of middle school kids coming toward us down the footpath, four of them, and just as they pass me, one of the kids says the word “painting” just like that. He says, “I took the painting,” or something like that. Most kids don’t walk around talking about paintings or taking paintings, do they? I put that word in his mouth. But at the same time, even though I know what I heard is true, I also know that truth is wrong. Something is wrong with me feeling that. I turn to look at him as he walks away and he looks right back at me and holds my eyes until he’s several feet away and then turns to his friends and starts laughing.

“So.” Jill laughs a little as we walk. “Guess you’re kind of different. What, um?” He fumbles his hands around in front of his mouth like he’s trying to catch a dropped bite of stroganoff, then leaves the question sitting there.

At the ATM, I take out five hundred, the most it will let me withdraw. Eight hundred seventy-six dollars left, which won’t cover rent, even before I give him the next five hundred, but fine, it will be fine. I hand it to him fast and glance around. But Jill doesn’t blink, like it isn’t strange at all for me to be handing him a wad of twenties. We must look like high-flying drug dealers. Sherlock Holmes did a lot of drugs—I wonder who his dealer was.

Only after I’ve given him my livelihood do I get up the nerve to say, “But you quit your job before we made this plan.” He doesn’t seem to hear. Maybe I spoke too quietly.

Jill is my Sherlock.

“Sunday, then. Bring the rest.”

I am his Watson.

“Six o’clock,” I say, and wonder if we should shake on it.

9 pills left, new regimen of 1/2 pill a day starting today, 157.5 lbs., 1 pair smudgy glasses on my nose, no time for lunch, 10,662,359 windows in Manhattan (+/- 50,000 to account for ongoing vandalism, construction, repair), 3 days until Sunday.

Winding my way east in the last of the light. My legs feel weak, like I’ve been walking for years. In the middle of the bridge, I wave to all the walkers and bikers, saying goodbye. One waves back—a nice old lady. She would never jump.

Buckminster Fuller’s story started the day he didn’t die. He was going to throw himself into Lake Michigan after his daughter died of meningitis because he blamed himself—his shabby apartment, his inability to provide for his family—but he had a spiritual moment. Some say he levitated. Same say it was the day he went mad. Others say that day didn’t happen at all.

I want to enter the bridge, and then I do. I become it. Feel the terrible everything people carry from one side to the other. I’ve been here before. The stories press flat on my cement. To my west, the piano keys of the city skyline, changing and decaying, growing up; to my east, the shrunken toughness of Brooklyn, industrial shapes like children’s blocks. Shoes tumble across me, their gum sticks to me, their cigarette butts and spit, I have no words, me looking like I’m hurrying the opposite way beneath them—But I don’t have room inside me for all of their sorrow. I can feel how big it is, this deep-ocean pain, how much space it would take if I let it in, barely leaving room for the guilt I feel for not having room. Barely leaving room for my mind.

I know what they need, New Yorkers on the bridge. Give them a tent lit from within. Give them a bucket of quiet.

Things will be fuzzy, changing my dosage, and that’s okay—worse before better, as they say. When the Zyprexa leaves my system, will I hear you, Idle Voices, banging to escape the trunk of my brain? Will I hear you whimper through your gag? It helps to talk to you, even if you can’t yet talk back. Helps me hold it all in my head. I’ll make a song up about it if I have to, or a mnemonic device. In the spider web of myself, I am searching. I want to seize my true form. I (the imperfect I) am floating just beneath it all the time, reaching up like a child for a lost balloon.

Moon lighting me, the bridge, like an ocean. Which I can hardly believe!—how it finds its way through the maze of buildings all the way to my feet. I can barely hold myself in my own form, I’m so moved and don’t know why, heartsick for moonlight. There is so much moon.

Along the dark moon bridge, I walk toward Manhattan, half expecting to see the Hasids marching at me. Staring, waiting, where bridge meets city.

But they aren’t there. Not even a sign of them. Not a stray hat.