PART VIII: WHAT A BEAUTIFUL PLACE TO HATE YOURSELF 2004

My mom is hard to miss, even in the crowd at the airport. Her frizzy hair is pulled back in a low ponytail and catches the light, little frills haloing her face. She’s wearing a T-shirt with an abstract drawing of a woman’s privates that says, BUSH GET OUT OF MY BUSH. My mother: never changing, or changing as imperceptibly as our evergreens.

“Look how long you let your hair get,” she says. My hair is not long at all. “It’s so stringy. I’ll have to cut it while you’re here. Let me look at you.” She does, and I’m afraid she’ll walk right out of the airport and into the street and get run over by a truck. Anything to get away from me.

We haven’t seen each other since before I was diagnosed.

Then she hugs me. And she keeps hugging me, moving slightly to catch her footing or maybe she’s crying. “You’re too handsome,” she says. Wisps of her hair get in my eyes and make them water. “Am I embarrassing you yet?”

Over her head, I scan the crowd for any sign of the Hasidim. One security officer is eyeing me funny, like he’s hypnotized, but he makes no move for his walkie-talkie. Here, with her, for a moment, I’m safe.

“Not yet,” I say. She’s three inches shorter than me and in that moment, looking down at the top of her head, I’m watching a painting of her and she doesn’t know I’m seeing how beautiful she is.

“Is that for me?” she asks about the Christmas-wrapped tube.

“No.”

“Oh, of course. What was I thinking? You come on a surprise visit to see me and the present you bring is for someone else.”

“It’s not for anyone.”

She doesn’t ask me why I’ve come, and so last minute. It’s enough that I’m here. Maybe she’s talked to Jules. Maybe she’s afraid I’ll leave if she presses.

We drive west in quiet in her beat-up van, around the southern end of the Puget Sound then up toward Port Townsend, our little logging vs. hippie town on the Olympic Peninsula.

“How have you been feeling lately?” she asks without looking at me. It’s the closest she’ll get to asking about my brain, which is just as well.

“I guess Jules called you,” I say.

“You disappeared on her, and now you show up here with hardly any warning—”

“Now I’m in trouble for visiting you?”

“No one’s in trouble. But you can’t blame her for worrying.” She glances at me then away. “She made me promise to take you to the hospital in Seattle.”

“But you’re not going to, right? You know how hospitals are. They make a zombie out of you.” These are my mom’s own words. I give her my most winning smile. “I have some things to do, and I want to spend time with you.”

An undercover police car drives slowly by. I shield my face with both hands.

“You’re a cheese ball. You didn’t get that from me.” She sighs dramatically. “We’ll see. I never know what’s going on with you two. All I have is my imagination. It’s not fun to think of all the horrible things that can happen to your children.” She smiles at the road. “But it’s my turn for surprises. I have something for you.”

I’ve never liked her surprises. Insects suicide into the windshield. One swerves around inside the van, looking for a feast. I swat my arms and legs in anticipation of a bite.

But at least it’s not dangerous—the insect or my mom. Of all the people in my life, she poses the least threat. She’s bottomed out the dangerlevel chart, paler than the palest, safest green. How much she annoys me demands its own color-coded system.

“So Jules didn’t tell you any news?” I ask.

“About what?”

“Nothing.” I curl both lips between my teeth and bite—I will not tell her that Jules is in trouble. Or pregnant. There’s no point in worrying her. “You think Dad’s around?”

“Something is different with Jules though,” Mom says. “She used to call at least once a week.”

Just as I’m thinking of my dad, we whiz by the dairy he worked at when I was a kid. He used to pack me lunch-boxfuls of those black cookies they use for ice cream sandwiches, sans ice cream, when he could snatch a few pounds of them from the processing room. When Mom was depressed or too busy with her protests, that’s what I’d get for lunch. But every kid in school wanted to trade, so sometimes I ate two sandwiches if I got a good deal.

The roadside forests whip by unblinking. She says, “You can talk to me about stuff, you know. I’m seeing a therapist. She says you have the tools to talk to me and you choose not to.”

We pass the paper mill where my dad works now, close to town. You can’t see it from the road, but we get a big whiff of it—the wind is just right. The smell fills our part of town, piling up in the air on humid days, blanketing everyone, no matter how thick your windows.

“Smells like home,” I say.

“So talk to me. You’ve been feeling good? Everything’s okay?”

“I’m fine. Jesus.” I cross my arms. She thinks I’m lying.

I’ve been worrying about seeing my old friends, but hadn’t thought my mom would be one of the people who would look at me differently, a specimen. Now she’s searching for some change in my face. Waiting for me to do something psycho. To her dismay, I sit here like any normal person swatting at imaginary bugs. But she doesn’t need to worry—she’s never believed in medication, and now I’m almost off.

We veer onto a gravel street, abandoned toys sprawled across and bikes with tires stolen in years prior, tied to chicken-wire fences.

“It’s not the greatest, but it’s home,” she says, pulling into the driveway of a small yellow shack just as a Volvo drives by. I squat low in my seat so I can’t be seen. But not every car is an undercover police officer working for the Hasids, not here anyway. I’m one step ahead of them.

It’s Mom’s third rental since Jules and I left. I hadn’t thought of that—how will I return to my origin if I can’t go to my childhood home? But calm down, Nicolette is calling out to me through time. She wants to be found! The house is edged with unkempt shrubs, tying its sides in the shadow-sleeves of a straitjacket.

“Don’t you want your surprise?” she says.

I really don’t. We climb out; she struggles with the house keys, drops them twice and laughs. “I guess I’m nervous.” When she finally gets the front door open, I step ahead into a small, barely furnished living/dining room connected to a grimy kitchen. There’s cat hair billowing along the edges of the floor. It reminds me of fake snow used for storefront Christmas decorations. So much fur but no cats in sight.

“How many do you have now?” I ask.

“Only four. Scaredy-cats, all of them. Come on.”

The landline lets out a whiny ring.

“Don’t answer it,” I say.

“Why would I? Someone trying to sell me something. Don’t they know I’m broke?”

“Might be the cops.”

“Very funny.” She throws my messenger bag on the couch—I swear I see a plume of dust rise up around it—and I set the painting tube carefully on top. Then she leads me down the hall to the second door. She takes her time, attempting to be dramatic. “Ta-da,” she sings as she swings it open.

And there is my childhood bedroom. I’ve stepped back in time, just like that. My old desk is against the wall, the top covered with messages I’d carved out to my future self when I was young. I tiptoe to it and run my hand over the rough markings, all the scissor stabs and whirlpools. My old comic books are in their plastic sleeves and special filing case. And I used to have a bin of—there it is, right where I left it—broken electronics. Machine parts I’d taken apart and tried to put back together—a broken telephone, a lamp skeleton. Even my toy cars are crammed in a box with my sister’s shabby dolls, which I always preferred over the cars. The only difference is a poster with a large dove reaching its wings around the world—my mother’s touch.

Like a museum installation, or a crypt, here is my childhood, replicated inch by farcical inch. The room could be one of Nicolette’s installations. It’s something she would do. And this time, that’s not just a whimsy-lovey thought. She had a hand in this.

It must be the portal. This is how I find her.

“Look.” My mom almost hops to the desk chair where she’s draped my old jean jacket. “I found it in a box in storage with the rest of this stuff.” On the back are hand-painted cows standing in a field. Over them, in bubbly cloud-letters, are the words, Not until the cows come home. “You wanted to be a cowboy, remember that?”

Is that the point of original pain? The object ascribed to it? I remember the jacket as the prop for my first act of independence. I remember my sticky elementary school like an extraneous organ. Third grade—my teacher told me to put on my coat for recess and I said, No. It was probably freezing outside but that wasn’t the point. It was the moment when you realize you’re not so powerless to mother or teacher as you previously thought. I will not be put up for adoption or tossed to the side of the road like an unwanted cat if I say no.

“I hated that jacket,” I say, and immediately regret it. Mom looks like she’s about to cry. She’s so sensitive I want to twist her nose for it. Is causing her pain getting me closer to time traveling? It’s how I sometimes acted back then. But, no, I’ve always appreciated her sensitivity.

Is that act of independence when we first begin to know ourselves? Is that first knowing the original pain?

My mother folds the coat with her eyes closed, trying not to cry.

Or do we not know ourselves until later, when defiance runs deeper, when we’re aware we’re happiest when that spell of dependency is severed completely? At sleep-away camp or the second day of high school. Or is it when we dissolve our dependency to something more abstract, like reality? Is it when we learn to lie?

A cat slinks in and rubs against my ankle. Her gray fur has a hundred vortexes swirling in it. But when I reach down to pet her, she runs away.

“Mom.” Say something nice. Why is it so hard to say something nice to her? “Thanks for this.” I gesture around the room. “I like it.”

My mom smiles at me sadly. “You stay here as long as you need, honey. No one’s making you go to the hospital.”

And when did I start unknowing myself?

2 pills left, 112 species of wildflowers in the state of Washington, all fashion trends 2 years behind on the West Coast, 2 hours of indigestion, 4 dying cats, 1 dial-up Internet connection.

As soon as I can get away from my mom after dinner, I lock myself in the bedroom. My bare toes fold over the end of the mattress and my head touches the wall. Some kind of animal is screaming outside my window, being murdered. I wait. And wait. But the portal hasn’t been activated. Why? My stomach curls from Mom’s “famous” tuna noodle casserole. Is that what’s blocking the portal? No, it’s exactly right. My body is replicating a physical state from my childhood, struggling to digest this particular form of horrible: Mom’s cooking.

I could not be nearer to finding my origin. This room, a replica of my childhood, it has to be the portal. It cannot be a coincidence that my mother did this at this moment in time. But it’s locked. Fragments of my past are spread around me—my old jacket and toys, feeling the same old frustrations with my mother. Could they all be part of it? A code of sorts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I was just joking,” Mom says.

“What day is it?”

“Wednesday.”

“No, what date? What year?”

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

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

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

“Mom? How old do I look?”

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

“Mom.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, honey? You like the potatoes?”

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

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

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

She cries into her marionberry pie.

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

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

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

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

“Did you tell him about me being sick?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, like what?” Ralph asks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

he’s so pleased with himself.

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

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

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

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

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

“What is the right word?”

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

“What word then?”

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

“So? What word?”

“I don’t know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” I say.

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

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

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

“Yeah, totally. They did,” I say.

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

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

“You sure it’s okay?” Miles asks.

“Probably illegal,” I say.

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

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

“But what if?” Miles says.

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

“I don’t feel anything,” Ralph says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, they followed me here.”

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

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

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

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

“I know, but what if?”

“Because you fucked her once?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They’d think we’re shitheads,” Ralph says. “Ready?”

Pain works the way empathy works, the same neurons shooting around in my brain now as they did the first time, or when witnessing someone else’s pain. My inner clock is off time. Something shifts. This scene, this moment—it’s another key to open the portal. The pain causes a schism. In the circle, three hands violate and three are victims. One hand and one part of my brain is focusing on causing pain and the other on receiving it and the two parts are having trouble coexisting and I’m not sure which hands are which. When you hurt someone you feel bad, but not as bad as getting hurt, but here all that’s transferred and overlapping because the searing pain I’m receiving on my left hand feels like the pain of causing pain with my right. How much time passes for the aliens watching us? Time slows. Am I controlling time? This is part of the original physical pain and my brain fires the same pink and blue lights as before because I’m physically experiencing the same event, physically going back in time. I am a slow-burning gnarl of tobacco leaf.

Miles flinches first, drops his hand away from mine, which causes his hand to lift off Ralph’s which causes his to lift off mine.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” we yell and laugh. “That fucking hurts!” Miles looks close to tears but instead of crying he punches a wall with his unburnt hand. “You’re such a weirdo,” he says and lunges in to give me a noogie. I slip out of his grip and go to the bathroom. All of this could have happened any year of our lives, but we haven’t time traveled.

I run my hand under cold water and look for burn cream but Ralph doesn’t have anything like that. The mirrored medicine cabinet door is off its hinges and leaning against the wall on the floor like in a shoe store, so I look at my feet. Through the door, I hear Ralph ask, “Shouldn’t I be seeing shit with these pills?” and Miles replies, “It’s an antipsychotic, dumbass.”

When I come back out, Ralph is switching from Pink Floyd to the Doors and Miles is passed out on the futon. I sit next to his feet.

“What year is it?” I ask Ralph.

“The year is twenty-fifty-one and we are all computer simulations.”

I try to laugh. It’s now or never. “Do you remember that girl Nicolette?” I say, all casual. “From school. I think.”

Miles leans up to say, “Yeah, that sucked.”

Miles remembers her. Everyone remembers but me.

“That’s the girl who killed herself?” says Ralph.

“No,” I say.

“What are you talking about?” says Miles. “You’re the one who saw it happen.”

“No I didn’t.” I stand up and look down at him. “That was a different girl.” Did I really cause Nicolette to go back in time and jump by telling her about seeing a girl who jumped? Is that the place she dies? If I caused Nicolette to die—

“Why are you bringing this shit up anyway?” Miles says, closing his eyes again.

Of course they’re wrong. I saw someone jump. But no Nicolette I knew ever threw herself off a cliff. And they never found the body. Just because a father said his daughter had gone missing didn’t mean anything. How could they be sure it was Nicolette?

“You know what I just realized?” Ralph says. “You never asked what we’re up to.”

“What?”

“I mean, you got me thinking. We’ve been talking about you all night, and Helen and some dead girl. I know you’re sick and all, so you should get some attention. But it’s like, don’t you want to know how we are?”

Miles lifts his head up from the couch, eyes closed. “Leave him alone,” he says, then plops back down.

Once, Miles and I tried acid together, at the old army fort, facing the water for hours. He said something really wise—life-changing wise—that we both forgot immediately after. I tried for weeks to get him to repeat it. He took acid again and I was the babysitter that time and had my pen and paper ready. But when we got back to the bluff above the water, all he said was that he knew he’d die here. And since death was the only thing we owned and could control, he said, he was going to have his way with it, was planning a date and time, but he wouldn’t tell me when, and then he pointed straight out in front of him, toward the watery horizon. I had him stay the night with me and he let me hold him until morning.

I place my hand lightly on Miles’s feet. He doesn’t notice.

Ralph goes to the window, almost knocking over a full beer in his path. “Forget it. I didn’t mean anything. I got work in the morning, so.”

“Oh,” I say.

“Don’t worry about it. You gave us your pills, that’s cool of you. Not that it did anything.”

Miles wakes up enough to say, “Cool seeing you, though.”

I pick up some bottles and take them to the kitchen but can’t find the trashcan and don’t want to ask, so I slip out the door with them and throw them into the woods behind the house. I wait to hear the crash of glass, but there’s nothing.

Time is running out. This Thursday could have caused last Thursday. Don’t forget. Four days since we stole the painting. Still haven’t found Nicolette.

Eight thirty-seven in the morning now. My dad was supposed to come at seven. Hours waiting at the dingy window from the couch. Watching the street, watching the linoleum peel up from the floor. I guess I fell asleep at some point but I stayed up most of the night on the Web: the easiest form of time travel. But my mom still has dial-up, so it was slow going. Someone removed the information about the landmine house from Nicolette’s website, which has to be a clue for me, not to mention an easy way to deter the Hasidim from going there.

My mom is outside washing her van. The window looks out on the driveway and I jump at every crush of gravel. An undercover police car rolls by, peering at the house. The cop looks familiar and I duck behind the wall. No sign of my dad’s pickup.

That shape there in the corner, do you see that? Rubbing my eyes doesn’t make it go away. Then a shadow of a man. Dad? I stand up and he goes to the coat rack in the hallway and rifles through pockets like he used to do, looking for his loose-leaf tobacco. He puts on a shadow of a big-brimmed hat like the Hasidim wear. Then he goes behind me to the kitchen where I can’t see him. I hear him peek in the fridge. I hear him crack a beer. I hear him open the oven and stick his head inside. You really shouldn’t do that, Dad. I turn around just in time to see the back door close, the dirty slatted blinds still shaking.

My mom comes in at nine. In the doorway, she stands watching me. “Looks like he’s not coming.” She breathes in deeply. “Sorri, honey.”

“Whatever,” I say.

“I have a message for you, before I forget. From, let me see.” She hunts through a stack of receipts and notes on the kitchen counter. “You left your cell here last night and someone kept calling.”

“You answered my phone? That’s private property.”

“I couldn’t figure out how to turn the ringer off. What was I supposed to do?” she says. “Here it is. A man named Jill. Isn’t that funny? Jill.”

I jump up and stand close, so nothing in her face can get past me. “What did he say? Where is he?”

“He was very nice. We talked for some time. He said it was very important that you meet him tomorrow at 101st Street and Fifth Avenue at six. But doesn’t he know you’re here? He said it was business, or something, a business deal you were in on together. What could be so urgent?”

“What else? What else did he say?”

“I think that’s it. He said not to call that number back, he’d call you soon. And something about your third business partner, let me see. I wrote it down exactly. He talked very fast.”

“What third business partner?”

“Yes, here, he says your third business partner will be there, too, that it all worked out. He sounds older. Who is he? Is he handsome?”

He must mean Claire. There’s no way I’ll let the painting go to her and not Nicolette. Not when I’m so close to figuring it out.

“I can’t believe you kept him on the phone that long,” I say. “What if the police traced the call? What if they’re coming right this second?”

She squints at me for a moment. “I’m sure no one is coming, honey. Maybe it just feels that way.”

“Of course it feels that way when there are people coming.”

“Who is that man? Are you selling drugs for him?” My mom grabs my shoulders and makes me look at her. “Tell me the truth. Right now.”

But how can I tell her the truth? All I can do is show her.

She follows me to the bedroom where I’ve let the painting frivolously lie on the mattress. I gesture to it.

“What is it?” she asks.

But my throat has stopped working.

“Is this why you’re worried about the police?”

I nod.

She stands very close to me. “Did you steal this, West?”

I nod again.

“Why?”

Before I can nod or shake anything she slaps my cheek. It shocks me more than it hurts. Then it hurts. It burns.

“I had to steal it. It was stolen from someone else and I’m giving it back to the rightful owner.”

“I don’t want to hear it. You go back right now and hand it over to the authorities.”

“The authorities are crooks! You’ve broken the law for a good cause. You’re supposed to understand.”

“That’s different. I was young. And I was me. You’ll give it back or I’ll take it to the police here myself.”

This, I decide, is a good moment to grab the painting and storm from the room dramatically, swiping the car keys from the kitchen counter on my way out.

I don’t know where I’m going, driving wherever the van wants to take me. If you’d just tell me who I can trust, Dear Listeners. Why can’t you speak more clearly? It’s as if we’re addressing each other, but in two different conversations. You’re replying to something I’ll say years from now.

Where do I end up but my dad’s old girlfriend’s place and she tells me that he has a new girlfriend and by all means go bug him there, it’s at the end of Jackson Street by the bluff with a great view, you won’t miss his truck.

My dad is hunched over in the side yard, ripping up roots, as I park across the street. Weeding at a house that’s not even his.

I slam the car door. He stands and turns at the sound, squints at me walking toward him.

“West? What are you doing here?” His face is mostly shaded by his sun-bleached ball cap, so he can hide that he’s eyeing me all over for signs of disease. He takes a step back.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“I was real bummed I couldn’t make it this morning. Got caught up here, you know how it is.”

“Yeah.”

He brushes his hands on his pants, leaving swipes of soil, and leans against the siding. “Beth tells me you’re doing all right.” He says my mom’s name like he’s saying another b-word.

“Yeah.”

“Good. And city living? Is that good? You see your sister?”

“Sometimes.” I shield my eyes for something to do, but the sun isn’t in them.

He frowns at me very seriously and says, “You keep the toilet seat down?”

“What?”

“The toilet seat. You have to keep it down in the city. I’ve heard about the rats out there. It’s in the news. Rats coming up from the sewers through the pipes. Not as rare as you think.”

“Sure.”

“You either keep it closed or you don’t. It’s a yes or no question.”

“Yes. I keep it closed.”

“Because sometimes you can be forgetful.”

“I keep it closed, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

His eyes are shadowy—I can’t tell whose eyes they really are. He waits for me to say something more. Now is the time to ask him about Nicolette and the painting. What would he do in my place? I know he wouldn’t take it back to the police.

“I need some help,” I start.

“Nope. Too old to ask for money. I draw the line.” He takes off his ball cap, studies it a second and bends the brim tighter. “You should get back to keep your mom company. You know how she gets lonely. Next time you’re out here we’ll find the time.”

“Sure.” I kick a hedge on the way to the car.

“West, listen.”

I stop and listen.

“You’re not a kid anymore. You have to get your shit together,” he says to my back. I keep walking. “Hey, you hear me?” I can’t believe I thought he’d actually say something nice. “And look out for your sister. She needs you.”

I turn in the middle of the street. That’s the first true thing he’s said. I can’t help saying, “Did you hear the news?”

“What news?”

“Didn’t Jules tell you?” I give him my best fuck-you smile. “She’s pregnant.”

“What?” My dad takes a step toward me, but I walk fast across the street.

When I’m in the van and down the block I say, “Go shove it.”

It’s the best I can do.

My dad was a distraction, a setback—he’s against me. I have to get back on track. And the only place for that is the old fort. The place where Nicolette dies.

The long, narrow path up to the bluff hasn’t changed: a clue in itself. The neglected army fort with its network of tunnels is still a haunt for potheads and skinheads both. On the backside of the hill, where there used to be mortars, are big circles overgrown with weeds and wildflowers. The old gun battery on Artillery Hill, overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

With the painting rolled and tucked under my arm, I pass all the usual landmarks, breadcrumbs Nicolette must have left: used condoms chucked into bushes, tinsel; swastikas spray-painted on cement barrack walls; wasps’ nests; deer. The perfect tableau laid out for me. My cell lights the way through one of the windowless stretches of tunnel. There’s an old Indian canoe, and beyond it, where the tunnel opens into a room, there’s a couch, tattered and threadbare, an empty frame hanging above it, no painting—a living room from hell as a reminder: I’m running out of time. Young stalactites hang from the ceiling.

Back out in the bright fog, the weeds reach from between cement cracks, growing more rampant than I remember, fingers vibrating toward me.

I stop a few hundred yards from the bluff edge. The trees have grown since I was home last, and the view of the water is obscured. Is this the spot? No, ten feet to the left. I stand where Miles and I did acid together.

I creep between the trees, close to the drop-off. The sea goes wild on the rocks below. But I’m focused on the air straight in front of me, where Miles pointed out his death, where Nicolette jumped. The great space between the clouds and the sea—that is the nexus.

When I told Nicolette about the girl jumping from the bluff, she stared at her canvas and started laughing. She put her hand to her mouth and closed her eyes to hold in the laugh. She couldn’t stop. She was a lunatic, laughing to herself like that. She laughed hard enough for tears to spring from the corners of her eyes. “I’m not laughing at you,” she hiccupped, “I promise I’m not.” I sat there, on the edge of my chair, stunned into listening.

I wasn’t hurt by it. And the more I heard the laugh, the more it sounded like a bell signaling some turning point. I thought she might be laughing at some inside joke between her and her art, or from delight at the mere act of painting. The privilege of sitting there at all. But now I see! She was laughing because they never found the body!

It was Nicolette who jumped. But she doesn’t die here! Of course they never found the body. It landed in the future.

But why does everyone else remember her as the girl who jumped, as if it always happened, while all I have is a memory of the back of a girl’s head? What makes me special? Yes, Genius Voices! As soon as Nicolette traveled into my past, easy memories must have been inserted into the others’ minds. Time rippling through and changing their memories. But since I’m the only one who knows Nicolette in the future, the present, my memories couldn’t be changed because that would result in a paradox. Because how could I fall in love with her in the future if I knew her as the dead girl in the past? To suddenly have memories of past Nicolette wandering the halls of school in a daze, dropping her Hawking book that people teased her for reading, or asking the teacher if he was condoning underage sex by assigning Shakespeare.

Jump? Why would I jump, Dear Voices? No, I can’t. That’s way too dangerous. But you are right—why do you always have to be right? Her jumping from the bluff was a scene in an instructional video. A How-To Beginner’s Guide to Time Traveling! When she jumped off the cliff, she was showing me how to propel myself through time.

And what if you’re wrong? What if I jump and the portal doesn’t open and I’m just stuff on the rocks below? Then I’ll never find Nicolette. I can’t risk that.

But she risked everything. She came all the way to my past, to right here, to show me how to time travel, how to find her. Why else would she do that? How can I not trust her?

You’re right, I must jump. The logic is sound. Axiom 2. Or was it Axiom 4?

It’s beginner’s stuff, needing a running start and flying into the abyss, but I can admit to being a beginner. I back up a few feet and get into a lunge, trying to ready my mind—if I do this, I have to do it right. It’s not just jumping. It’s like doing a marathon while reaching nirvana. Nicolette showed me all the tableaux and it must be for this purpose, for this moment. I try to hold all the tableaux in my head: my childhood bedroom, cigarette burns with Ralph and Miles, pie with Mom, the fort and bluff—they’re lost paintings newly recovered, with sections of code written on them. All part of the complex of scenes I must know precisely, in true relation to one another. A pain chain. Don’t forget pulling Jules’s hair.

I wonder what Jules is doing right now. If she’s worried about me, what she’d say about this jumping business. I wonder if she’s safe.

But Jules is why I must do this. To time travel, to sidestep reality and slip through into elsewhen.

I close my eyes and hold tight to the painting. I feel the grass slicing along my ankles as I run, the air whipping the hairs on my face, the edge of the bluff on the ball of one foot and then the other. And then nothing. Nothing. I am in the air. I am the air. I am wildly open. I am heavy. All my organs are in my head. The weirdest part being I have time to think there is a weirdest part, that I am in the air, I am falling through it, this could be forever, I am scared.

I’m standing on the cliff, toes nearly cresting the ridge—again, or still? My face feels raw.

I traveled back in time twenty seconds to when I was first on the edge, about to jump. Or did I never jump at all?

I wonder if the wind would have carried my voice, the day I saw her jump. If I’d called out, if I’d tried to stop her.

The one smart thing my dad said was that I should be protecting Jules.

The trees are spilled paint when Mom and I get out of town and pick up speed. The only car on the road for tens of miles.

The jump only carried me back twenty seconds. It was, like you said, an instructional video—training for a much bigger jump. A bigger risk. But where and when?

A bee is crawling across my window. How did you get in here? You’re supposed to have disappeared, bee, you’re one of the disappeared—for what are you following me around? Don’t buzz at me, I know your pain. But perhaps the bee is on to something.

“I wish you weren’t going back so soon,” my mom says for the one-hundredth time.

“You’re the one who’s making me!”

Which isn’t true—I don’t know where next to go, but the portal isn’t here. I must head east, back towards my future Nicolette.

“You’ll find a way to give that thing back without getting in trouble, right? West?”

I tap the window with my knuckle near the bee. “So, Dad’s seeing someone new? What happened to Kathy?”

“Who knows?”

“I think Dad must be unhappy.”

She cackles like it’s a joke. “You’re right, he must be. But it’s no excuse for the way he acts.”

“But he hasn’t seen me since before.”

“What about me? You think it’s not hard on me?”

Her cell vibrates in the cup holder. It’s him—I can tell from the way her nostrils flare. He’s listening in and doesn’t want us talking about him behind his back. His voice is muffled, squashed between the phone and her ear, he’s speaking from deep inside my pocket. By this point, my dad’s probably saying, “What’s this about Jules being pregnant? I can’t believe she told you and not me.”

My mom gapes at me. “What? Jules is pregnant?”

I take the phone from her hand and hang it up.

“Honey, what?” My mom keeps turning her whole body toward me but tries to keep her eyes on the road. “Jules is what?”

“She’s not pregnant. I was lying. I don’t know why. I was mad.” I watch her face scrunch, thinking about this.

“That’s not very nice, even if your dad is a jerk.” She hits the top of the steering wheel. “You shouldn’t have seen him. I knew it would upset you.”

“It’s fine. We talked about the toilet seat.”

“Not the rats again.”

Along the road the forests are swallowed by farmland. I try to smile at her. She pulls down her windshield visor. “Let’s talk about something more pleasant. Are you seeing anyone? I’m sure there are plenty of fish in the big concrete sea.” Her smile takes forever to spread across her face. I watch the origin of it, each fold of skin and segment of lip stretching almost to breaking, all these movements affecting the next but also the prior, the slow pull of face.

“No,” I say. “I was, but not now.” The bee is a professional eavesdropper. I open my window until it flies out.

“You were? You never told me that.”

“Why would I?”

“Because we tell each other things. Don’t we? What’s her name? What was her name?”

Suddenly every cloud in the sky morphs into Nicolette’s face. If it wasn’t real and therefore scary, it might be romantic. Don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it. “Nicolette,” I say.

Nicolette has taken the place of my hazy reflection in the partly rolled-down passenger window. If I tell my mom about Nicolette would we all vanish? Beside me, Nicolette nods, telling me it’s all right. “I’m trying to find her again,” I say.

“Where is she?”

“Disappeared.”

“You know what your father used to do to win me over in a fight? He’d show up at my door just like we were old friends. I had no choice but to invite him in, and things were right back how they always were. Maybe she’d think that’s romantic.” My mom is bobbing her head like we’re listening to music. “Nicolette. That name sounds familiar.”

The birds are on the wires. Wires stretching out before us—strings on a guitar and the road is the fret board.

The phone starts vibrating again. “It’s him,” she says.

“Don’t answer it.”

“I want to tell him you were kidding. What if he calls Jules?”

“Let him then. Don’t answer. Answer is the key. And keys open or lock.” She squints at the road but doesn’t touch the phone.

I feel strong. Just like I always felt with Nicolette. Like she’s holding my hand again and we’re running across a big freeway, laughing. I don’t know where to go, but she is guiding me.

Instead of speaking to my mom, I try to think to her. I tell her to veer left, and she does. I tell the trees to give us shade, and they do. I tell the wind to whistle a tune from my childhood and it picks up “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” I feel an overwhelming sorrow for the birds on the wires—for all birds. I pity them so much I could cry.

You say, Fly, bird. “That’s funny,” I say.

“What is?”

How the trees listen but aren’t silent.

How the road is a song beneath us.

How there’s a man with a shadow for a face sitting outside my window.

I say this: “What would you say if I ran out of pills? Ran away from home.”

“Did you forget them? Should we turn around?” Her mouth moves even after she finishes speaking, a dubbed-over kung fu movie.

“They’re waiting for me in New York. Waiting happens all the time. We’re always waiting. It’s not hard.” For tomorrow will be new again. That’s good. I can’t wait, really. I will hit my cheek on concrete. Just to feel it. I will rub my cheek on New York bubblegummed cobblestone. I’m there now already, as I’m here in the car. I can feel it right now, thrown out of my seat in an accident, the cement on my face. The sting of those darts of light in stone. The beautiful light inside asphalt: bees. Hundreds of bees. Swarming underground, waiting for their moment.

Causation is reversed. Things yet to happen upset moments in the past. I feel so close to Nicolette. Can you feel her too? She’s near, telling me to follow the sound of her voice. But not too close. To touch her would be to evaporate. To hold onto her would be to hold onto the infinity between moments.

The world is opening its locked doors. Secrets are being revealed.

“What do you do if you miss a pill? What does your doctor say?” My mother is looking at me and the road both. She has two faces, one for each direction. “Stop looking at me like that,” she says.

Here’s the truth: we’re all connected, but not in a straight line. More like constellations, or islands. My thoughts fill the gaps like water; each movement of hers is connected to mine.

The man with the shadow for a face is sitting in my window. Is that you taking over my reflection? Nicolette got evicted. You, shadow face, are telling me to fly.

So I do. I unbuckle my seatbelt and leave myself behind. But, you remind me, I didn’t need to unbuckle because seatbelts don’t hold in essences.

Below me, I’m sitting by my mother in the van. The shadow fills me up. It’s you, filling me up. I see that frail, encumbered body, the top of a head—you have dandruff! My mother keeps glancing at that body sitting next to her, thinking it’s me. That’s not me, that’s just West, that’s just the empty vessel, the frame that holds the work of art. But it’s not necessary anymore. From up here, I hear someone say, What word then? Let’s see the scars. Rats coming up from the sewers. Honey, what’s wrong?

“Should I pull over? Tell me now.”

“I’m fine, Mom. Just drive,” vessel-me says.

“You’re scaring me. You scared me there for a second.”

It’s blinding, the cracks in the universe, the golden thread stretching on the verge of breaking. The blinding light. Underneath the light is shadow. Something is breaking apart.

“Buckle your seatbelt,” she says.

“Just drive,” you say.

You try to tell her. You try to tell her everything. You know about hollering.

You know about being quiet, too. You have to know about hollering to know about being quiet.

You board the plane, bag slung over your shoulder. In first class they glare at you and gnash their teeth, you can see their breath filling the cabin, turning into microscopic bees, making it hard to breathe. An older woman in a fur shawl, which your mother would spray with fake blood if she were here, takes a good look at you then whispers to the woman next to her: That one’s dangerous.

Down the aisle, toward your seat. Someone growls behind you. You aren’t prepared for that and stop short and the man runs right into you and yells, Hey! It echoes off the cabin walls and the overhead bins and returns to you as, Go away!

Seat 23C, aisle on the port side. You stow your bag above the noise along with the painting—the tube now adorned in new birthday wrapping paper from your mom’s—and you wish you could crawl up there, too. You look up and down the aisle for good measure. In the rear of the plane, a wide-brimmed black hat arcs above a seat, the face obscured. Next to him, a cop’s cap. You duck into your seat before they see you. The sun has nearly set.

The little wool flap with the airline logo covers the headrest. Because of the lice and gnats and bees, you try to pull it off, but it won’t give. You try to blow away all possible bees. You try to relax. You try to ignore the voice-pollution that fills up the place: You don’t belong here, get off the plane, jump out while you still can, off the plane.

The row in front of you is an exit row. That’s good. You can be one of the first off in case the sides of the plane rip free—you read about that happening somewhere. The people in the row ahead are too short but you can see their fat arms in the cracks between the seats. The two people in your row to your left are fat also but they are already pretending to sleep. To your right, across the aisle, is not a fat person but a young girl maybe fifteen. Alone. Really and fully alone. You look around but can’t see anyone who might belong to this girl with sky-blue fingernails. Looking at her makes the rest go still—she is safe and good to you. She wears blue wire-framed glasses and is reading The Great Gatsby. The plane pulls back from the gate and starts to taxi. The paint on the girl’s nails is chipped away in mountain shapes from biting, which means that she has eaten that paint, which worries you. You take out your headphones and listen to Charles Mingus in case the voices of the passengers start up again, in case the girl should say you ought to get out of here. You can tell yourself it isn’t real, that you are making it up, but it is equally plausible that the 193 people on this plane are right now unbuckling their just-buckled seat-belts in order to grab you and throw you off or kill you with a travel-size toothbrush. But they’re only pawns; it isn’t their fault they were chosen to off you because of how much you know. Now you’ve pissed off Charles Mingus, he sounds angry, so you switch to Bach’s Goldberg Variations because you feel that is triumphant music and the songs are short like pop songs.

The plane is still taxiing. In front of the girl are two very large Indian women and one skinny man between them. The two women lean over the man and speak so loudly to each other that you can hear a murmur over the music. They gesticulate wildly, their hands flinging the compressed cabin air like water. The woman on the aisle seat keeps turning around as she speaks so her voice rises and falls as she eyeballs the people around her. Her gaze falls on you and you look away. Small TVs descend from the cabin ceiling. A spokeswoman shows you how to breathe. You cannot hear the words but know she is saying, “Have you or any of your belongings been out of your sight? If so, you must report yourself to the proper authorities.” Yes, yes, you want to say, you have been out of your own sight. You slept too much, why did you do that? You must have been drugged, a bomb placed under your eyelids. You are at red-level danger.

Out of the corner of your eye you see the girl put down The Great Gatsby and lean forward in her seat, staring at the screen with her head tilted back. You take off your earphones and look at her smooth, flawless girl-cheek. Then, in one motion, she flicks her head to stare at you and raises her hand to push a button with the tip of a blue fingernail. You follow the finger’s path—the flight attendant call button. Now they are most certainly coming for you. You shouldn’t have been staring at her like that. You are helpless, nowhere to go. You are such an idiot. You gulp at the stale air, cotton-mouthed.

“Water,” you say out loud.

The stewardess has come into profile. She says, curtly, “Sir, you’ll have to wait.” She leans down and the girl whispers something but her mouth is pointing more at the stewardess’s sloped breasts than at her ear. “You’ll have to speak up,” the stewardess says.

“I was told,” says the girl, loud enough for you to hear, but still quiet, “to report anything suspicious to an airline employee.”

The airline employee stands up stick straight. Her voice descends a note. “Yes, go on.”

You close your eyes, waiting for your execution.

“They,” the girl says, and you open your eyes to see her pointing not at you, but directly in front of her, “have been talking about starting a fire on the plane.”

The cabin is an ocean-roar of whispers. You catch the words “slaughter” and “pregnant.”

The Indian woman on the aisle has turned around in one of her curious swivels and has been listening in. “What?” comes the deep growl. “Are you talking about us?”

“I overheard you,” the girl says. “I’m sorry.”

There it is, small and naked, “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry,” you say in the same voice as the girl.

All the players turn to you and stare.

“Did you hear this as well? Sir? Speak up if you did,” the stewardess demands.

“I’m sorry,” you say again, trying to be quieter, but it comes out amplified. You shake your head and hold your earphones up for her to see.

The other woman-in-question sticks her head above the window seat to say, “This is ridiculous.”

The aisle woman says, “She has no clue what she’s talking about. She’s just a little girl. We were talking about how this exit row is actually not ideal if there is a fire in the cabin because only the front exit can be used. We were arguing whether or not we were in the safest part of the plane and my sister said not if we have to help everyone else off first, didn’t you say that.” But the sister only glares.

The stewardess says, “I’m going to have to ask you—”

The man between the sisters takes off his seatbelt and stands calmly in a half-bend under the overhead bins. “You’re aware this is racial profiling,” he says in a mild accent.

“Sir, you must sit down.”

The man straightens his shoulders instead, his head still tilted to fit. “This girl has been watching Fox News far past her bedtime. That is what I’m saying. She has been brainwashed and we are brown. Do you know we’re not even Muslim, little girl? I’m Hindu. And my sister-in-law here is Christian. This is crazy talk.” The man’s voice has raised an octave. “Not that it should matter, but I’m a professor at Rutgers University. In New Jersey. Did you know that when you pushed that button?”

The captain or someone in a different outfit appears. The stewardess whispers to him and the captain-or-someone says to the man, “I’m terribly sorry but this is protocol. When something like this occurs, we must follow protocol. You’ll have to step off the plane. I’m sure it’s just a little miscommunication.”

“We’ll continue this miscommunication in court,” the man says.

They grab their carry-ons and are escorted off. After the three leave, the stewardess helps the girl with the blue nails to get her things. “Is this yours?” she asks, reaching above for a bag with Girl Scout badges and a tube with birthday wrap.

“Not the birthday one,” she says. She looks around tearfully and her eyes finally land on you, sitting with your mouth open, staring. “I’m sorry,” she says to you, and walks down the aisle after the woman. Don’t go, you want to say. You would give her the birthday painting if it would stop her tears.

Over the intercom comes an announcement. “We’re sorry for the delay folks, just a routine safety check and we’ll be on our way. Nothing at all to worry about.” Over the speakers, another announcement, “The man in seat 23C is highly dangerous. We will perform a routine safety check on him, too. Do not attempt to probe him. We must get him off the plane. Off—” You open your mouth very wide.

The engines whir and the whispering bares its teeth. You can hear them all, every word. You can hear Jill talking about following himself on the FBI site, and Mr. Fox about his vacation, and the Indian family and the white girl arguing in an office inside the airport; they stop and stare together out the window when they see the plane leaving them behind. You can hear your mother crying in the car, and your sister crying over the baby in her belly, your father berating himself as he divides daylilies, showering soil around his feet. Some of it catches inside the cuff of his sock. You can hear strangers screech their tires and roll their eyes and yell at their children. Thousands of voices, a tower of them stacked and teetering, calling for help and blaming. It is too much to take in all at once, all those demands like prayers and none directed to a god. It’s surprising so many people get up in the morning.

You are not God. But you lift off the ground. Clear twilight sky for miles, but fat clouds are approaching like bums. The engines and the wind throb in your ears. The air pushing past you is so loud your head is underwater, the drum and rush and echo of being submerged. Your forehead feels clammy, you touch it. You could push your forehead in, clay. You could push in and the skin would give and break and you could push past all the mush and touch your brain, if you want. You leave your fingers on your skull. The buzzing keeps on. No one seems to notice that the wind is rotting away the plane’s steel exterior, and now the sides are gone, stripped off, and you are left sitting in the open night air with your seatbelt still fastened and digging into your stomach, flying over the Rockies.

Alone in the open, the multitude of voices die off until there is only one: an old woman. Her words are nebulous but they are undeniably words. Spider-thread voice. She says: it’s time.

But up ahead is a storm. There is a seam opening in the universe too big to mend itself. It is open because of your failures. This is where things enter and escape, and when they escape they are gone forever, they never existed.

The plane rematerializes around you, and the old woman’s voice is drowned out by the others’. Everyone else is asleep and everyone has the painted, open eyes of chipped, porcelain mannequins. You do not let them know you can hear their thoughts. You put in your earphones and pretend nothing out of the ordinary is happening. Quietly, so no one notices, you wonder: what would it be like to jump?

The clouds are teeth out there in the dark. The man next to you says in his sleep, Jump off the plane. It would be so easy, door’s open. Jump off the plane. You see the man’s mouth moving. Jump before they all die. Jump through the open seam of the universe and erase yourself. Maybe then it will mend. The cabin lights dim and the crystal floor lights guide the way to the exit. And there is a new sound, thunderous. The storm is worsening. You lift your feet to your seat and hug your legs, bury your head behind your knees, glancing over them at the thunder pulsing down the aisle. Jump off the plane, stupid. Jump off the plane or Jules will get hurt. Jump off the plane to reach Nicolette. Jump jump jump jump jump off the plane.

And who are you to argue with logic? This is the jump you’ve been preparing for all your life.

And it isn’t thunder at all. It’s the bees. Out of the crystal aisle lights rise hundreds, thousands of lost bees.

The seconds slow to minutes, to days. There are whole years between moments.

The bees swarm.

Sunrise. The plane hovers over Manhattan. The stewardess hovers over you and says, “Here is your water, sir. Thank you for your patience, you may jump now.”

You try to rise but you’re buckled in. You throw your hands over your belt, finally get it loose. You stand quickly and your shoulder knocks the cup of water onto her skirt. She screams as you shove your way toward the exit.

THE SORRY MANIFESTO¹

BY NICOLETTE BERHARDT
ANNOTATED BY WEST BUTLER

“It is not the fear of madness which will oblige us to leave the flag of imagination furled.”
—Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism

“When you’re an artist, you’re searching for freedom. You never find it ‘cause there ain’t any freedom.”
—Alice Neel²

1. Movements in art today are so numerous they negate each other so that in the end there are no Movements. But there is movement, change, impermanence. In this system of movements as illustrated in this manifesto, we consider ourselves a bridge, of sorts, between desired aesthetic and actual aesthetic, between what we wish our art to fulfill in us, and what it does fulfill. We attempt to reattach what is desired to what is actual. What if we saw them side by side? What would it do to the balance?

2. Once, we slept with a subject’s husband, but only because we could not have her.

3. It is easy to think of the image as timeless. Stilled. No beginning, middle, or end, no linearity, except that which we impose through language. But this is not entirely true. There is no separation between images and words. One cannot look at a painting of a dog on a deck of cards, and not think the word “dog,” or “that is an image of a dog on a deck of cards.”

4. Our father died in the war and his body walks into our dreams every night.

5. Someone once said that in a painting, “you are seeing time happen, not time frozen. Painting contains duration.” It contains time. It contains energy. An image is always changing, as the ocean is always changing, as the mountains. It is unknowable because we try to know it as fixed.

6. We wear strange clothes so people notice us. We leave spots of paint on our pants on purpose, so people will know who we are.

7. A portrait of Stephen Hawking represents Stephen Hawking. But Stephen Hawking himself does not represent a portrait of Stephen Hawking.

8. We are not double-jointed. Can’t whistle. We have never learned a card trick.

9. We just want someone to touch our neck.

10. Breton says, “Our brains are dulled by the incurable mania of wanting to make the unknown known, classifiable. The desire for analysis wins out over the sentiments.” The triumph of analysis over sentiment is, to us, a triumph. But what if nothing is knowable or classifiable, not even the self?

11. We should get peculiar when alone in our studio.

12. We orgasm very easily.

13. We don’t like sex.

14. We must get close to our subject’s devils. When we paint something, it must become real on its own account; it must stand alone as more real than the subject ever was. This energizes us enough to move beyond the image (and in turn provides the viewer with energy); we can free-float, transcend the subject in the world, so it is as if we are creating another dimension, another timeline, in which all of this is happening inside the painting.³ Another us exists in there—perhaps the us we desire to be.

15. There is one hair that grows from our back, invisible, that we pluck once a month or so.

16. We have never read all of Anna Karenina, but if you ask if we have, we will lie.

17. In our first art class, we put a booger on the canvas of the girl next to us when she wasn’t looking.

18. We have only taken one art class.

19. Once, someone loved us enough to hurt themselves.

20. We have the right to paint. We have the right to paint. We have the right to paint.

21. We stole earrings from a department store so our French roommate would think we were dangerous.

22. We have a terrible memory. But we can remember the color of any carpet of any room we’ve ever entered.

23. We have never cut ourselves, but once we told a boy we had.

24. We should have been a dog.

25. Our father, before he left for the war, touched our breast. Just once, softly.

26. Sometimes our very presence in someone’s life can cause a greater absence. We stirred up something dormant. It isn’t our fault. It is our fault. We are such a selfish bitch.

27. When we were eight, we made a friend put her favorite doll in the oven and bake it to prove she loved us more.

28. It is very important that we are who our friends tell their secrets to. We want so badly to be this person that we will let a friend hurt themselves in order for them to have a secret to tell us.

29. We are seduced by the mad ones. We speak in metaphors that become real. We want that magic. (If we steal thoughts, it is only as anyone has ever stolen a thought. We cannot read his mind.) We belittled him by romanticizing him.⁴ What have we done?

30. We did not ask for this. We asked for this.

31. We want someone to see us crying and forgive us. At least we want someone to see us cry.

32. Sometimes we have to leave.⁵

____________

1 This is what Nicolette left when she left me. Instead of a goodbye note or an apology letter or a phone number. This.

2 Her favorite painter. Nicolette would spend long hours hanging around outside Neel’s Spanish Harlem apartment to see if she could spot her sons and make friends with them. Or paint them. They ignored her.

3 I didn’t understand this clue until now. Another time traveling tip.

4 After she left, we talked on the phone once, the only time she picked up before she changed her number, so I made sure to record it:
W: I’m looking at your picture. You’re staring right at me. Can you see me?
N: No, I can’t see you.
W: I feel like a retard.
N: You’re not a retard.
W: Are you eating? Sometimes you forget to do that.
N: I’m fine. Thanks for checking.
W: I feel like a child. Nicolette? You weren’t trying to read my mind, just then? I know you weren’t, but you should tell me.
N: I can’t read your mind. I promise.
W: But we’re connected. You and me. We still are. (Silence.)
N: I ripped up your books.
N: I was leaving them for you.
W: I can feel you. Like my face is really close to a fire. Is that you?
N: I don’t know. I don’t think so.
W: Does that freak you out? I don’t feel like I can tell anyone else that. I feel like I can ask you if you are reading my mind and you might freak out but at least you’ll let me ask.
N: You can ask me. But you have to tell your doctor. West. Do you promise?
W: Are you stealing my thoughts from my head? I’m sorri.
N: No, no. Stop saying sorri.
W: Sorri. If you can read my thoughts, which you can’t, don’t be scared of what you see.
N: I’m not. You can’t scare me.

5 False.