PART VI: I WILL FIND YOU, FALLING WOMAN 2004

I’m on the roof of the gallery and they’re coming for me.

The din of the protest has faded away. The sun is nearly down now, hidden in a nook between two buildings, disguising itself like another window with another sun glinting off it. There’s a good breeze coming off the Hudson and I’m alone, waiting. I’m good at waiting.

Jill and the painting are gone. There’s a chance I’ll never see them again—but I don’t believe that thought. That’s a liar thought.

Footsteps sound in the stairwell. They’ll be here any minute. I can hear their numbers, the way they move in packs. The Hasidim. They’re finally here to take me like they took my sister. I wait for their canes against my back.

5.5 pills remaining, 4,313 surveillance cameras in the subway system (only 2,156 actually work), 250,000 war protestors reported, 500,000 actually gathered.

But you missed what happened. Sometimes you leave and I don’t know where you go. Let’s jump back in time half an hour. You’ll have to imagine your own whirling time-travel sounds.

When I found Jill—when I find Jill—he’s a flamingo in the alleyway off Twenty-Third, his usual stance, one leg bent up on the wall, smoking his cigarette—but the opposite of bright pink. In the shadow of the dumpster, he blends into the air and the building. There’s a big industrial garbage bag at his feet, like when I first met him. I guess I expected to see a whole entourage of paid-off thieves. I’m disappointed it’s only him. With his leather-gloved hands, he throws me a pair of cheap black knit gloves meant for kids and a salmon-colored ski mask.

“It’s salmon-colored,” I say.

“Is it salmon? I’d call it pink.” He shrugs. “Hard to find black. It’s summer.” I gesture with my eyes at his mask, which just so happens to be black. “Had mine a few seasons.”

“What if they catch me because of the color?”

He says there’s only one real camera on floor nine, where we’re heading, black and white—which he tells me I should have known from heist movies. He digs through the garbage bag and pulls out two Styrofoam bowls. “Put these on your shoulders. Under your shirt.”

I look at him as in, um…? He rolls his eyes like I should’ve known this, too. “On the off chance we’re actually recorded—which won’t happen because I know which cameras are fakes and which aren’t, and I’ve studied their directional and oscillational abilities—they won’t be able to recognize your body type. Get it?” He pushes them into my hands. “Trust me.”

I slip on the bowls and the gloves, which stretch just enough to fit over my hands, and am about to put on the pink mask, but Jill shakes his head and tells me to wait until we’re in the front door, that we don’t want to look suspicious to passersby.

“Did you bring the cash?” he asks.

I dig the five hundred bucks out of my front pocket and hand it over.

He shoves the money in an empty Marlboro pack. “Thanks,” he mumbles. He seems embarrassed. Then he pinches off the cherry of his cigarette, sticks it in his front pocket, and stands up straight. I take a breath so deep it hurt. He might have gotten me a girl’s mask, but at least he looks ready.

He nods. I nod back. The bricks are yellowing their faces in the early evening sun. Sure, there are words in me, like “What am I doing?” and “This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done I’ll rot in jail and get raped by big hairy men,” but cottony fear suffocates them out, my lunch ticking in my stomach like a bomb. I want to ask for water. We edge out of the alley, and Jill looks up and down the street, like in the movies. Then he unlocks the big metal door and we’re in, just like that, as if we’re doing nothing wrong.

It’s surprisingly loud in the quiet of the closed-up building. We slip on our masks and I hear the sound of a washing machine coming from somewhere else, or maybe the sound of a very gravelly female voice humming a Bulgarian song? There are the words out of control and dumbass lameboy tapping out of the walls.

Jill wraps himself around the stairwell like he’s a blanket of snow-melt, silent, dripping. He’s obviously had practice with this—there’s a secret strength in him. I bumble up after. There are our staccato footsteps arguing with the static of the building, an old snore and hum. There is the battle in the walls—rats and other long-toothed animals. A city centipede crawling faster than me up the stairs. It slips into a crack where I can’t follow.

“So you’ve done this before?” I ask, out of breath by the tenth step.

“Shh.”

“So you’ve done this before?” I whisper.

“No. Sort of. I’ve done this before, yes, all right. Never galleries. Only homes.”

“You’re an art thief?”

“I prefer to think of myself as part of the growing field of art valuation. Fell into it in my twenties.”

His voice is being broadcast by the metal handrail I’m holding. I’m afraid my voice would do the same so I keep my answer brief. “Hm.”

“Yeah, so, what’s your day job?”

“I predict ideas.”

“Quiet down.”

Quietly, I tell him I work for a predictive marketing firm.

“Fancy,” he grunts.

“I make spreadsheets,” I say. “Were you at the protest today?”

“What’s another face in the crowd?”

“What about Vietnam? I read how you helped those people.”

“How do you know about that?”

“Simple Google search,” I tell the old geezer. “You were in the Village Voice like five times, and once in the New York Times.”

“Twice in the Times, I think. I thought twice.”

Between flights three through nine, Jill whispers to me the story of the painting. He says it lingered on the black market for a long time, then it was sold in auction since it was never reported as a theft. Bought by a woman is all he knows. Then there was a twenty-year gap when no one knew where it was, until one day the painting ended up here, apparently donated. They probably had it in a storeroom for years. Then he tells me about his own heists.

“I follow all my own cases online,” he says. “Good to keep tabs on that sort of thing. The Interpol website’s pretty comprehensive. The FBI’s okay. I mean, not all the jobs I’ve done get flagged. But it means something if a painting you grabbed gets posted under Recent Thefts, right up there with The Scream. Which, have you been reading about this? Stolen in broad daylight. Just like us, hey. It means something, to be monitored. Means I’ve touched something important.”

“So how did our painting get on the black market in the first place?”

Jill is suddenly out of breath and says he guesses it was stolen from Claire Bishop’s home. He tells me how sometimes there’s a buyer before you do a job, and you don’t want to mess with those guys. And if it makes the five o’clock news, they usually report the value and hence your percentage of the market sale and how can you turn your back on those dollar signs? But he says our job here won’t make the nightly news, what with the GOP in town. And the authorities try their best to not let these things go public and show how easy it is to rip off fifty-thousand-dollar works of art.

We reach the ninth floor, me drinking my own linty sweat from my upper lip. Jill unlocks the gallery door and says he’ll keep a lookout and I nod solemnly because that was the deal—he wasn’t going to do the actual deed.

Inside the gallery, everything is ringed in salmon-colored fuzz—the hardwood floor, the walls, the desk-sans-gallery-sitter. There’s a siren in the distance. A clock that I never noticed before ticks so loudly my bones vibrate. The sounds of trying to be quiet. My own muscles berating me. It’s fine, I tell my muscles, I’m about to finally have something real to offer Nicolette. I’m helping her, taking it away from the Hasidim.

And there it is, waiting for me. The falling woman’s hair glows; I can almost feel it on my own scalp. Her arm drooping over the frame, glistening like she is sweating too. The whole thing shines out, its essence reaching for me, bright as lightning as I lift it from the wall.

Time falls around me. The gallery walls crumble brick by brick. Through the bouquets of mortar and dust, I see the ancient meadows of the city. They hover above the sidewalks, the traffic cones, running down to the estuary and the sea. I see the layered shinbones of our ancestors, and feel the soil between my toes, the wild marshes of the Manhattan. Beyond that is the liquid future, shimmering and proud. The high clouds. The satellites. All shot through with light.

Briefly, I crawl into the painting: the cobblestone street, the Brooklyn Bridge, the body of a woman falling. Every brushstroke an apology.

I am the little masked thief in the corner of the image, nearly invisible, walking down the painted street. I tap my foot on a cobblestone, smudge it.

This feels right, it doesn’t matter if it’s stealing. Me and the painting: forever.

The snap of a nail hitting the floor. A streak of lightning in my peripheral vision: the sound of the alarm. In the shape of a lightning bolt the gallery wall splits open. All of us, for a brief and infinite second, are sucked into the seam of the world. Slipped through the crack, disappeared like we never existed. And I don’t know who I am and no one will know us because there is no one to do the remembering but no one will forget us either, since there is nothing to be forgotten. The world is quiet because it is gone. In the end there is just me and the painting.

Jill’s beside me, he grabs the painting. We run up, up. I swear he’s grinning. My cell phone flies out of my pocket and knocks against the wall when I trip over a step. I snatch it up.

We burst up to the open tar roof. “They’re coming,” he says. “What took you so long?”

“They’re coming,” I say.

He digs out a box cutter and cuts the canvas from the frame, smooth and precise, like he’s done it a hundred times. He’s done before I can react and by then what’s the point of punching him in the nose. He hands me the wood frame. “Break it up,” he says. I smash and pry and stomp the frame against the roof until it’s in pieces while he rolls the canvas neatly. He whips out the garbage bag. It puffs up with wind and he stuffs the painting into the bag with the frame like so much waste. “Give me your mask.” Without looking at me, he flutters his hand about for it. “And the bowls.” I remove the damp bowls and the mask and he throws them in the garbage bag, too. We lean against the roof ledge, the bag between us. “You tripped an alarm in the gallery. A motion detector or something. It’ll be fine. We got a couple minutes. It’s almost over.” He looks a little pale and his eyes flick every which way. “You’re red as a rose, kiddo. Are you ready for this? You’re the diversion. They got nothing on you. You slipped in because you saw the door was open. You might be stupid, but you’re no criminal.” Then he adds, “To them you might be stupid, I mean. Not to me.”

It will be fine. Why wouldn’t it be fine? I paddle my collar open and closed, trying to cool off. “What if they question the gallery-sitter and he recognizes me?”

He says to stop freaking out, and even if they do question the guy, visiting a painting’s not a crime. “Too late for doubts.” Jill peeks inside his Marlboro pack at the money. “But our crime is not victimless. You got to understand the outcome of your decisions. These old widows crying to a newscaster over some heirloom portrait of a duke—it hurts me to see that. And you know me, I don’t give a rat’s ass about rich bastards who can go out and buy another blasted portrait of a duke. But I tell you we are hurting someone, no way around it, even if it’s just that gallery-sitting jerkoff.”

Then I turn to him fast and grip the garbage bag, stretching the plastic. “But you planned this. You knew I was coming. You planned all of this. Didn’t you?”

He’s quiet a moment. “I didn’t plan it to happen like this. Maybe I got the job here because of the painting. I shouldn’t have lied about that. I thought about stealing it, but I couldn’t. For personal reasons. Then you came along. I knew you’d do it. But we’re on the same side. Okay? We’re a team. You’re all right.”

He waits for me to say something, but I can’t.

“Anyway. You saw me through my last lift. This was it.”

He turns his ear to the street. The siren grows louder, then stagnant for a moment, stuck in city traffic. Why does the police siren get dibs on that word, when the original siren was the sweet sound of fatal desire? But the Doppler effect sometimes sounds like longing.

Then we see a police car pull up near the building, the slamming of doors.

“That’s our cue,” Jill says.

I let go of the bag.

“You remember what I said? You can handle it from here. They’ll try to bullshit you and say you’re trespassing, but you’ll get around that. Play it cool.”

“I didn’t like the gallery-sitter anyway,” I say.

“That’s the spirit.” He backs away to the fire escape on the adjacent ledge.

“Jill. Watch out for the Hasids.”

“Why? They can’t fire me. I already quit.”

“Just watch out for them.”

For the first time, Jill seems scared. “All you got to do is nothing. Don’t try to find me. I’ll find you. Okay?” He nods at me, and as if with gratitude says, “Take off your gloves.”

And I watch him disappear over the far side of the building, garbage bag full of beauty slung over his shoulder.

3 pills dropped, accidentally, from roof, lost sight of after 6.5 feet; 2.5 pills remaining; 2 helicopters, 1 police blimp over my head.

———

“Okay!” I yell at no one, then pull my gloves off and throw them into the alley below. They flutter down like two black birds. One lands in an old crate. I lose sight of the other.

Straddling the ledge, half of me is on the brink of falling, the other half is not. I could fall, if I wanted, just tip the scale a microscopic amount. But I know I will go another way.

The men are coming up the stairs. I try to stay calm, like you. Maybe there’s still enough time to get away.

The blast of the roof door banging open and shut. At least a hundred pairs of feet readying their attack. The Hasidim, on me in hordes.

Every time I think of doing something but don’t, there is an echo. A hologram of myself that did do that thing or make that decision, and that self disperses into the ether, winking away into some other dimension. That’s what I’m hoping happened this time, that this me will disperse. But no, the me who did not break the law and steal a painting is hanging out in the ether, relaxing on my ether-stoop, maybe with some Chinese dumplings, safe and out of trouble. Everything’s fine over there. Maybe over there, I’m a famous underground hacker, and maybe I’m not sick. Or maybe I never met Nicolette or maybe my sister dies giving birth.

There are only two of them in blue uniforms, not much older than me.

“Hey, buddy,” one says. The other stretches his rubbery neck to see behind me, looking for the painting. “This building’s closed. How’d you get up here?”

“The door was open, so I just—”

“The door was open, huh? See anyone else when you came in?”

They’re close enough to push me off the ledge. “Anyone else? No.”

“You realize you’re trespassing. We’ll have to take you in.”

“No, I didn’t realize. The door—”

“The door was open. Got it.” The first one has me turn around and pats me down. It makes me feel like I am, in fact, hiding something under my shirt.

He says, “I don’t suppose you know anything about a stolen—”

“Stolen?”

“A stolen painting.”

I shake my head no. And the second one says, “We could charge you for trespassing and hold you ’til you remember.”

“Okay,” I say.

The first one stays with me, lighting a cigarette while his partner looks around the roof. Out across the city, bouquets of smoke escape from buildings. And here on the roof, bouquets of smoke escape his mouth—but this guy can’t see the beauty in it.

“How’s the sunset, lover boy?”

“Average,” I say.

They lean over the edge, peering into the alleys, talking on their radio to someone scanning the area. One of them bends over and picks up a nail from the tar roof. I try to think if I touched the nails on the wood frame. Jill’s voice is coming from the radio telling me to run, but that can’t be right. Then one of the men slaps me on the shoulder and laughs. “Come on, lover boy. Look, he looks ready to cry. Why the long face?” He throws his cigarette and leaves it on the roof. The three of us walk down the stairs together, since Jill isn’t here to operate the elevator. The second cop hums Buddy Holly and by the time they put me into the back of the police car, he’s hummed it through, Peggy Sue, three times. One of them says, “Nothing on him, we’re bringing him in.” From the back, I can see the web of their skin through the dividing grate, the heat radiating off of them at the sad end of the sizzling day.

They take my fingerprints and eye my emergency card with numbers for my doctor and Jules, but they don’t call. When they question me, I say the door was open, maybe left that way by the thief. You have my true remorse. I’ve never done anything of the sort before and I never will again, Officer, it was such a nice sunset, and I have a thing for sunsets over the Hudson.

They can’t hold me for anything, and they’re mobbed anyway. All these kids from the protest in booking, yelling “pigs” at the cops. Can’t even bear to fine me. You got lucky, the pigs tell me. They roll their eyes at me and say, tell us if you go out of town.

Halfway out the double doors, I hear the Buddy Holly cop say behind me, “Found a set of fingerprints, boss.”

Another dagger of a day. Some people call it Monday.

All I can do at my desk is look at police beats. You know Jill’s been fingering the painting. Probably he’s groping it like it’s her naked body. Could he be licking it? He might be licking it. There’s nothing online about if he’s been picked up or not. The only thing I found was a message in a Disappearing Bees forum that said I should “keep my ears open for any change.”

“Hey, Westeroo.” Orange-Socks Dave is calling to me from the front door to our offices. “Some weirdo left a package for you.”

I trip over a chair leg on my sprint over to him and nearly ram Orange-Socks Dave in the gut with my head. “Where is he?”

“Left already.” He holds out a cardboard tube. “Guess he didn’t want to see your pretty face.”

I shove past him into the hallway—no sign of Jill. I open the door to the stairwell.

“Hey, where you going?” Dave says. “You won’t catch him. Don’t you have to work?”

I stomp back over to Orange-Socks Dave and snatch the tube from his hand and that’s when I catch a glimpse of his feet. I ask slowly, “Why’d you change your socks?”

“They raised the terrorist threat level. You didn’t see?”

Walking backwards, not taking my eyes off Red-Socks Dave, I go back to my desk. He’s seen Jill’s face. All it would take is a little bribe and the Hasids would pull him too.

With more care than I’ve ever used with anything ever, I open the plastic top of the tube. There’s the canvas. I close it tight again.

Mr. Fox has closed himself in his office, blinds slightly parted like many lips. Did he see me get the package? What’s he doing in there? His office is sort of not really on the way to the lounge, so, with the tube, I creep along the wall with the pretense of getting a Vitamin Water. As I pass his door, I hear my own voice. The voice is on speakerphone. “It’s too much,” I hear myself saying. Then I hear another voice, “I guess you’re kind of different.” And I hear, “They don’t deserve it.” Snippets of my conversation with Jill on the bridge. There must have been a microphone after all and I’m not surprised I didn’t find it because I am inadequate.

And then a new voice I don’t recognize. “He’s falling behind. He hurt someone.”

The door flies open and there’s Mr. Fox in his pleated pants, mandarin orange can in hand. I hide the tube behind my back.

“West. Good. I’m off. Taking my wife to the Bahamas tomorrow.” His mouth is full of canned oranges. “Promotional thing. Put some color on this gut. You won’t recognize me Monday.”

But Mr. Fox hates beaches. I remember him saying so. He’s lying so I won’t think he’s gone in pursuit of Nicolette.

“One day there won’t be computers, Mr. Fox.” It’s the first thing that comes to mind. I have to throw him off. “Zero, zilch-o. No chips in brains, no consoles hidden under the earth’s crust.”

“And why’s that? Let me have it,” Mr. Fox says.

“It’ll all happen after a century-long cold war tech race during which we’ll be forced to consolidate then rid ourselves of technologies to prevent intellectual leakage. I’d like to be around to see that. Companies like this will be long gone.”

“Yes. Well. Me going on vacation doesn’t mean you are. You’re still on thin ice.” He heads to the lounge.

How did he get those tapes? It’s nonsense, thinking that Mr. Fox could know anything about the painting—except that it makes perfect sense. Mr. Fox knows the Hasids well, he and my brother-in-law being old playfellows, which is how I got the job to begin with. And Mr. Fox’s superiors? Well, I’ve never met them. Fishy, isn’t it?

Shaking and sans Vitamin Water, I turn around, walk straight past my desk and out the front door and down the stairs. It’s only three o’clock and who does it matter to? Not me.

I should have been fired long ago. So why haven’t they? Because they’re waiting for something. Waiting on me to do something. Now that they no longer have the painting to help them find Nicolette, they’re after me. I’m supposed to make a great discovery—I’ve always felt that—but about what? About the painting, and Nicolette, and maybe the bees and the missing words and maybe the Hasidim and maybe Mussolini? The data patterns have been coming more easily now, too easily, as if I’m creating them as I see them, projecting patterns from my movie-reel forehead. Have I been plotting out the physics of Nicolette’s power for them? Is that the reason I’ve been kept around? My deduction itself is leading them straight to her. All my searches and charts of Nicolette, all the activity I’ve snuck into the boring workday: it was all for them and I didn’t see it. Idiot! Lameboy! And Mr. Fox, that two-timer, has access to all my files.

But here it stops. No more digital footprints. Or fingerprints. From now on it’s the old-fashioned notepad. I will shed technology like I warned Mr. Fox about.

This is bigger than the next consumer trend. Forging the future as well as the past, that’s what I’m doing. The bosses upstairs would have a field day with that data.

Outside, the sun blasts. For a moment I can’t see anything but the gray-green memory-shapes of buildings in my eyes, superimposed over the real buildings. And when that clears away I see, so clearly, ten floors up and huddled around a long table in an ill-lit room, maybe wearing little green visors over their wide-brimmed black hats: the Hasidim. They’ve been the bosses all along. I see that now. My bosses.

———

2 pills left, none ingested for 22 hours; 1,000 police cameras in dragnet over 5-mile Iraq War protest; 972 hours of surveillance footage; 1 Republican National Convention.

At home on my laptop, the sun pastes my reflection squarely on Nicolette’s website in front of me. But reflection-me in the screen keeps grimacing at the me sitting outside it. The me in the screen is moving his lips like he’s trying to talk, but there isn’t any sound. I’m trying to tell me something. But the me outside isn’t grimacing or talking back—which is wrong, a reflection doing what it wants.

The tube is on my lap, never more than two inches from my body. Now I pull the painting all the way out and unroll it. A sticky note flutters to the floor:

KEEP SAFE UNTIL WE CAN GET IT TO HER.

That’s all he says. Not how to reach him, or where to meet, or what the hell to do if my boss is working for the Hasidim and knows everything and we’re all doomed!

I spread the painting on the wood floor then lie down next it. At least now I can try to get it straight to Nicolette without Jill tagging along and making me feel bad for lying to him about giving it to Claire.

I feel hungry in different parts of me. My arms are hungry. My hands flop on my chest like dropped food. My legs ache to kick out like my skin isn’t big enough for me anymore. I want to punch the wall. I’m not angry, it’s only that my bones are anxious. My friend Miles back home, he used to punch walls. There were holes all over his mom’s house from when he got drunk. His dad was an alcoholic who left him and his mom when he was little. I remember he punched two holes in his closet doors that he said were his dad’s eyes watching him.

My phone vibrates in my pocket and would you look who it is, it’s Miles. Lying here, thinking of punching a wall in honor of him, and then he calls. It isn’t fair. I shouldn’t be able to affect the universe this way.

I try to push the talk button, but my thumb has other plans, punching a bunch of numbers, and I’m afraid I’ve hung up on him, then it vibrates again to tell me I have a voicemail. Miles says he saw my mom in the grocery store today and that it’d be cool to talk to me. I can’t tell from his voice how much she’s told him, if he knows I’m sick or not, if she put him up to calling me. Of course she failed to comply with my one teeny request for secrecy. For all I know the whole town is on speakerphone every time I talk to her.

Do you hear that buzzing? I’m not expecting anyone and I wish I had a butler. The door buzzes again. I get up and press my face to the window, which is forever stuck, and try to get a view of who’s downstairs.

Tachi’s remote-controlled car runs into one of the policeman’s heels on my stoop. The cop turns around, shields his eyes searching for the driver. But Tachi’s somewhere unlocatable, probably controlling it from his window across the street, laughing out loud to no one.

The same two cops from the roof of the gallery.

Now they’re buzzing all the other tenants but no one in my building would ever open up for the police. The next apartment over buzzes, I hear it through the walls, but the cops are still stuck outside. A dead bee on the sill twitches with each buzz, close to my face.

Dan answers the door.

“I know you want to get rid of me, but I need to stay here for a couple days. Then I’ll be out of your hair for good, capisce?”

Into the lion’s den. The last place they’ll look for me.

Jules comes out of the bedroom in her nightgown, tying a scarf around her head, a question on her face.

“We have a house guest,” Dan says to her.

“What’s wrong?” She drops the scarf to her side and she’s nearly bald and I look away.

“Finish with your scarf,” I say.

“West, what happened?”

“Nothing happened. They’re fumigating is all. The neighbors have bedbugs.”

Dan straightens up. “You better not bring them here.”

“What is that?” Jules points to the tube with the painting, which I wrapped up in Christmas paper, the only kind I had in my apartment.

“I don’t have bedbugs. The neighbors do,” I say. “It’s preventative. Just a couple days.”

They look at each other and pretend to communicate with their eyes but I know they’re speaking different languages.

Jules and Dan have already eaten but they sit at the kitchen table and watch me scarf down some bland veggie pasta. “Why didn’t you join us at the protest?” Jules says.

“You went?”

“Don’t look so surprised,” Dan says. “Jews are born protestors.”

“It’s in our nature to take issue with an indifferent leader,” Jules says. “We get mad at God if He’s unjust. Even though maybe He’s always unjust. Maybe humans are more moral than God. But he set the standard, and we have to let him know if He’s not living up to it.”

“Easier to let Bush know,” Dan says.

“But what good did it do?” I say.

“We’ll see,” Dan says. “But even if it looks like nothing, it’s not. Protesting is survival.”

I pour hot sauce over my pasta and take too big of a bite.

“Slow down,” Jules says to me. “You’ll choke.”

“Don’t tell him how to eat, he’s a grown animal.” Dan winks at me.

It’s true I feel hungrier than I’ve ever been and I can’t slow down. I am hungry! I could eat my own arm, I could eat the moon. This pasta will do nothing for me.

“We could watch a movie,” Jules says.

“We could watch the game,” Dan says.

“It’s my night to choose,” Jules says.

“Let’s let West choose. Why are you so quiet, West? You should take a cue from Jules and speak up more. Jews know how to talk. It’s why we’re so smart, isn’t it?” he sort of asks Jules. “It’s how we learn. You can’t form ideas with only you in your head.”

Is he insinuating he knows something about my mind? I want to tell him that it’s just as hard when it’s not just you in your head.

“Do you have any meat?” I ask.

“Yes!” Dan says, as if he’s won an argument.

And then I realize what I’ve been throwing down my gullet. His food, in his kitchen. Would Dan hurt me? How can I take the chance? I spit out the bite I just took into my napkin.

“What’s the matter?” Jules asks. “It’s good.”

I think I’m going to be sick.

“I’m not hungry anymore.”

After cleaning the dishes, I’m about to close my eyes on the couch when Jules comes out of the bedroom cradling a big book. She sits on the arm. Dan’s out of focus, reading the sports section at the table, eavesdropping.

She speaks quietly, looking at the coffee table. “I called your doctor. We think—Dan and I think—that you should go back to the hospital. Before things get worse.”

I sit up. “How’d you know I wasn’t sleeping? You might have woken me up just now.”

“And, West? Dan and I, we’re taking a…” She looks at Dan, who is no longer pretending to read. “A vacation.”

“Where are you going?”

She drums her fingers on her knees, stalling. “Well, nowhere. What I mean is, we need some time. From everything. We’re under a lot of stress. Dan thinks maybe—”

“We think,” Dan says.

“We think that you, your illness, might be causing me too much stress. And right now I don’t feel good and need to try resting. West. For me. Do you understand?”

“Because of the baby?” I ask. Jules just stares at me.

What if the baby ends up like me? That’s what they’re thinking.

“You told him?” Dan asks.

“No,” Jules says, still staring. “He just knows.” She looks at me the way she does. “Tomorrow—hospital. I’ll go with you. It’ll be better this time, shorter. To get you back on track.”

This is all Dan’s doing. He wants me out of the picture. I shake my head. “Tomorrow’s no good. Big project at work.”

“Is there?” Dan says, coming toward the couch.

“Why do you care?” I ask.

“West, please.” Jules touches her stomach lightly, looking down like she’s calling it West. “I’m sorri I upset you. But you can’t act like this. You’re lying to me again.”

“You’re the real liar,” I say, “keeping your big secret.”

“Do you hear yourself? You sound like a child. You sound like yourself. That’s how he always used to talk to me,” she says to Dan.

She’s right—but how can I help that my old child-self possesses me like a ghost?

“How did you know I was pregnant?” Jules asks. “You better not have told Mom yet.”

“I’m glad he knows,” Dan says. He grabs a blanket off an armchair and drapes it over Jules’s shoulders and says, “Now he and I can celebrate with some wine, and you can watch.” He throws me a grin, to throw me off. His teeth are too big.

Jules shoos Dan away, but her shoulders relax. “I want to show West something.” She opens the book she’s brought, pointing at a glossy group photo with both of us tucked in the middle. It’s a high school yearbook. “Key club, or whatever, remember? Mom made us join.”

“You look dumb,” I say and try to smile.

“You look dumb,” she says.

“Why do you have this out?”

“One of my old classmates just died. We weren’t really friends, but—”

The book on my lap, I flip to my class photos—it’s from my senior year and Jules’s freshman. All the kids look like jerks in their photos, even Miles and Ralph. Nicolette’s picture is the only one that doesn’t make her look jerky, she just looks like her—Nicolette.

Nicolette.

“What’s she doing in my yearbook?” There, right in the B’s, on the same page as me, is Nicolette’s face in a half smile, not quite prepared for the release of the shutter.

“Oh, that was so sad,” Jules says, looking over my shoulder at the picture. Dan’s looking too, and I try to shield her face from him.

“How did she get in there?” I ask again. Slowly so they understand.

“I thought she was gone by then, too, actually. They must have used an old photo.”

“You know her?” I ask. My words feel like they are coming from a memory. Not here and now.

“How could I forget? West saw the most horrible thing. Did I ever tell you about that, Dan? The girl on the cliff?”

Dan’s looking hard at Nicolette’s face. I slam the book shut.

“Huh.” Dan straightens himself up, suddenly uneasy. “Enough reminiscing. You’re supposed to go to bed early,” he says to Jules. “Did you take your medicine?”

Jules groans. “No. Of course I forgot to pick it up.”

“Something’s wrong.” I try to tamp down my smile. Something is beautifully wrong. How did she get into my yearbook? My past? Is that where she’s been hiding all this time?

“Nothing’s wrong,” Jules says. “Just some pain.”

“I’ll run down to the pharmacy,” Dan says.

“No, I will. I can do that.” I stand quickly and give them my politest smile. “Least I can do, showing up uninvited.” Nicolette found her way into my past. But why would Jules remember her while I don’t? Some sort of time-traveling ethos? I can’t even begin to think about all the implications while I’m trapped in here.

“Thanks?” Jules says, a little surprised. “I’m going to take it that this new attitude also means you’re okay with the hospital tomorrow?”

“If it will make you happy.” Obviously, there’s no time for hospitals.

“I’ll call the pharmacy and tell them you’re allowed to pick it up.”

Dan glares at me and Jules smiles. I grab the painting and open the door.

“You can leave that,” Jules says. “West? Leave it.”

“It’s a present, you’ll peek,” I say, ducking into the hallway before they can stop me.

Down in the lobby, there’s a camera pivoting toward me like a duck’s head, filming me as I slip out the front doors and cross the street. If I could piece together the footage of my personal surveillance, from all the storefronts and ATMs and museums I’ve ever walked by, I could make a film of my true self.

I couldn’t think in there, with their threats of hospitals and Dan’s razor smiles, but out here, on the night street, Nicolette is everywhere.

Nicolette is in my past. Do you see how brilliant it is? But why? All I can think is she’s trying to send me a message. What better way to contact me than traveling back and inserting herself in my timeline, my very own high school? Artfully, through a story I told her, about the girl on the cliff. That must be where she’s been since she disappeared last year: fourteen years in the past, dropping breadcrumbs for me to find throughout time. But she wouldn’t have jumped. Would she? It must be another clue.

The tube swings at my side as I walk west. Maybe Nicolette is trying to tell me something about the painting—how to get it to her, where to go in order to do so.

But something is off with Jules and it cannot be a coincidence it’s happening now. Is it about her baby? Could they be after it? I have to find a way to once and for all convince Jules she’s keeping dangerous company. But I can’t protect anyone from inside a psych ward.

I shield my face as I pass the pharmacy with Jules’s medicine. There’s a homeless man wearing a plastic halo from a bachelorette party.

The homeless man is right about one thing—Jules is an angel. She’s too good. She can’t see what’s going on in her very own home. The nerve to go through my sister to get to me!

There’s a red no-walk sign and I can’t go any further, the universe slowing me down.

The Jews know suffering—they know it in their blood and in their bones. Every generation, Jews have been forced to deny their identity, or sleep on ashes. Jews were considered the mad ones—they chose ashes over un-knowing themselves; that’s the story, over and over again—except for our great-grandmother. My heritage is pretending to be sane with the rest of society. And Jules, the martyr, believes that’s an offense she must repent for. Anyone stuck between two worlds like her is bound to be impressionable. Dan’s been feeding on that guilt.

P7: DAN ABDUCTED JULES INTO HASIDISM BY PLAYING ON THE VERY COMPASSION AND GUILT THAT LETS HER LOVE ME.

But I don’t care if it would save a whole people from vanishing. I don’t even care if Jules would choose to sacrifice herself to keep them from disappearing. I can’t lose Jules. And Dan knows that! He thinks I would do anything for her, even give up Nicolette. But he’s wrong—I’ll save them both from the cliff edge, and Dan doesn’t know that.

C6 (FROM C5, A3, & P7): JULES IS A PAWN; SHE IS BEING HELD AS RANSOM TO PERSUADE ME TO HELP THE HASIDIM USE NICOLETTE TO STOP THEIR DISAPPEARING.

Dan nearly found out where Nicolette is hiding, looking at the yearbook. If I don’t get Jules out, she’ll get hurt, and the baby, too. People will drop like anchors.

I won’t let that happen. I loop counter-clockwise back around the block, past the homeless man with the halo, past the pharmacy, back to Jules’s building.

And there they are. The same two cops, on cue, materialize on the opposite corner of First Avenue, walking straight toward her apartment.

Kennedy airport is a carnival of pissed-off people. Not a minute has passed in my mind and here I am, at a counter facing a woman with a double chin and mean eyes, booking the next red-eye west with my nearly maxed-out credit line.

This is the only way. And Jules knows it, too. It was like she was handing me a clue on a silver platter and I almost missed it. The yearbook was obvious, but did you catch that bit about me being my child-self? On a silver platter over a bed of lettuce with some gefilte fish. I’m supposed to start thinking like a time traveler.

The past: it’s the only place to escape the Hasidim and their agents, A.K.A. “the cops.” They know where I am, always, in the present, and I can’t fight them from here. Jules will be disappointed in me for not getting her medicine. She’ll never know I’m saving her life, and they might take advantage of her with me gone. But if this works, I’ll stop it before it even began.

And that is where I’ll find Nicolette. In my past, I’ll give her the painting, and she’ll remember how good I am. She’ll know me again.

But Watson, what of the physics? You’re thinking that only a pro time traveler can move through time and space, that a newbie like me would be lucky to travel a millisecond in the same geophysical position. But maybe, you’re thinking, just maybe, if I find the right nexus point in my past, I can stay in the same place but emerge at Nicolette’s exact time coordinates.

That’s what I’m thinking, too.

In order to paint and therefore time travel, Nicolette had to get at that point of original pain. She had to return to the origin—the nexus—of her subject.

Which is why I’m going to my place of origin—that moment when my true self diverged from my imperfect self. That’s the portal, and it just so happens to be in the dragon’s lair. Straight into the arms of a woman who has herself run from the law. She’ll help me hide the painting, she’ll understand. To get there, I must travel three hours into the past, EST to PST. There, the physics will become clear.

You, dedicated listeners, will never leave me. If you are in the trunk of my brain, it is by your own volition. Even when I’m an embarrassment, even when I break the law or run away into the past, you are with me every step of the way.

The airline clerk taps her screen and clucks at me. “Well? There’s a middle seat.”

I smile and say to the mountain-faced woman, “I’m going home.”