June - The Liars 15 страница

As I set up the candles and Jasmine laid down, my mind began to wander. "I feel like I'm in Paris again," I confided. She asked me why, and I explained to her how Gerard never had heat or power half the time, so we were always warming ourselves over candles and trying to see one another through the flame or in the dark.

"You've never told me that before," she said. She sighed all of a suddenly, and then turned on her side. I came over to the bed and touched her back gingerly. Her mind was racing; I could practically hear the gears move, it was so quiet in the silo. Her breath caught in her throat a few times, and she kept going faster each time her heart beat. It was so dark, so quiet, and though I could hear bugs and crickets chirping, I felt absolutely alone in the world again.

"Do you think we made the right decision, Frank?" Jasmine asked suddenly. I thought she meant about coming here, and being so completely alone and isolated. We had always been alone and isolated before, I figured, not having anyone who really understood what we were doing with our lives. Now that we were surrounded by nothing and alienated from the world, we had people who understood us. It seemed like a fair, but unfortunate trade-off. I didn't see where the wrongness factored into the decision, and then I realized that while I had forgotten Gerard, she still hadn't yet. And I supposed that I hadn't either, because I began to feel my chest tighten and my heart beat faster and faster, in sync with hers.

"What else could we have done?" I asked back. "We wanted to come, so we came. We did what we needed to do."

"I know. But we could have brought him with us?" she probed, but didn't seem so sure of her suggestion.

"You know that that wouldn't have worked. We would have been in the same situation as we had been in before. Only we would have been trapped even more." I had entertained the idea of bringing Gerard to The Bear on the ride in here, but quickly threw it out. It was a completely unsafe environment for him. It was too unfamiliar, and if he got into those woods? It would be horrible. He wouldn't have been able to draw as much here, though the view would have been inspiring. He would not have been able to work. This was something that we both had to do, but it was imperative that it be without him. I tried to explain this to Jasmine as clearly as I possibly could, and even I was surprised at how little emotion crept into me.

"I know, but then that makes me feel like I shouldn't have come at all. Like you shouldn't have, either. We should be there to take care of him," she pleaded. She was trying to convince herself, I realized. She felt bad because she didn't feel bad. I laid down on the bed with her, our faces aligned and I kissed her. I tried to touch her to keep her calm, rubbing my hands up and down her arms. I noticed she was clutching her stomach, and so, I went down lower. I pulled up her shirt slightly and kissed her protruding middle. She was going to have an outie belly button instead of an innie soon, I thought, and then laughed at Hilda's bad joke from before. Hilda felt like ages ago, I realized, and part of me wondered if Jasmine was mourning her loss at the same time.

"We needed to come here," I repeated. "We needed to... forget."

"That's what I'm afraid of," she confessed. "What if I forget my old life? What if I forget the real world?"

"Jasmine, this is the real world. This is quite possibly the most real the world has ever been." I thought of the woods, the dirt, the shit. This was all life was, really, wasn't it? There was fire in front of us. There was darkness all around and the sound of animals and insects and the night-time sky.

"You know what I mean, Frank. What if we just don't come back? What happens then?"

"We've only been here one night. Not even. It's easy to feel that way now," I told her, now trying to convince myself. Forgetting was too powerful of a tool, I realized. What if we absolutely forgot everything, not like Gerard per se because that I knew could not be romanticised, no matter what. But what if we forgot about the tainted parts of our lives? What if we forgot about the real world and its shitty fucked up violence and the way it treated people, and we just lived here? What if we forgot everything else but what was in front of us, and then made the rest up? Was that so bad?

"I know, I know," Jasmine told me. Her voice was calming down significantly, but she was still uneasy. "I'm just not used to feeling this happy. This free. I understand what you meant before about freedom, Frank."

"What?" I had no idea what part of freedom she was talking to, because even that idea had been fragmented in my mind.

"When Gerard left you, and he went to Paris. You used to tell me that was the free-est moment in your life. And I get it now. This is it for me, this, right here." She touched the bed with her hand, and then moved it towards my face and held me by my chin. I held her closer to me, and moved so I could see her face again. She was getting overwhelmed, but it was good. She went on. "I could live here forever, but at the same time, I could go home tomorrow because now I've felt that moment. I have it. It's good. I can keep it forever, now. I almost don't want to ruin it, so part of me does want to go home tomorrow."

"But if we left now, under the premises of guilt, we would never forgive ourselves," I tried to convince her and myself. I kept thinking of my moment in the woods. It was not exactly freeing, but I knew there was something there that I had not accessed yet. Part of me worried about accessing whatever I needed for it might replace that freeing moment with Gerard in my mind. I worried about that type of forgetting the most.

"But if we stay, and something bad happens, will we be able to forgive ourselves then?" she asked, frustrated. "It's a lose-lose situation, Frank. We're never going to find the right answer that doesn't leave us ashamed or guilty. I fucking hate it."

"I do too," I said, wrapping my arms around her and hugging her tightly. We hugged, rubbing our hands on one another's bodies, trying to find the solution. We were not leaving. Though we had doubts, and I knew that Jasmine was probably trying to cook up some scheme about her water breaking so we could get Paul to drive us, I knew that as soon as we fell asleep that night, it would all be gone. The worry was partly from being thrown into something so new. As soon as that newness was gone, and we had gone to sleep... so would the anxiety. Jasmine and I both had lived with anxiety over Gerard for so long now that it didn't feel right to let it go, especially when he was still alive.

He was alive! I told myself. Don't forget him, how could you forget him? Go and be with him, all the time. Help him. Save him! These thoughts came at me like a knife, like a lightning bolt. This had been my constant barrage of thoughts for two months. It had been gone in the forest, when I had managed to separate it from myself. Now I knew how overwhelming its presence had been when it came back to me again on the bed with Jasmine. These had been her thoughts, too, and I knew how exhausted we both were. I wanted to forget him; I wanted to live my life, if only for a fucking month, if only just right here and for this night; but Jasmine was right. We were fucked either way if we forgot or if we remembered.

"We need to forgive ourselves," I finally came out with. I had been staring at my bag full of Alexa's books that were propped up in the corner. I saw the worn canvas fabric and stared at it hard, as if I could expunge knowledge through my own vision. If we were going to survive the month of July, and then, the rest of our lives back in New Jersey, we couldn't be worried about the consequences of forgetting. We had to be prepared for them, and I believed we were. The consequences left us entirely overwhelmed and full of that anxiety we wanted to forget.

I thought back to something that Gerard had told me in Paris. It had been that first night when we were reunited, and I had been trying to get answers out of him about his life there, his life without me. I remembered him quickly, so I could use him to forget again. He had told me to let go. All the failures that happened in life never had to mean anything if you didn't want them to. I could let go of all the disappointment I had felt when he left me behind, and I had needed to do that, in order to fall in love with him again in that cafe. I tried to explain the whole Paris scene to Jasmine, but too much had happened. It was too difficult to speak of the man we both loved and to use his own arguments as justification for forgetting his very existence.

"What's going to happen to him is going to happen whether we are there or not. He is with Vivian and he knows her. He will be okay. But us? We're here and we need to be okay with that too. Just let it go. Forgive."

The words made me feel as if I was play-acting a priest, and that the silo's walls were now a confessional booth as we held one another tightly and confessed our sins. It felt like I was hinging upon something so biblical because those words had always contained such heavy connotations in our society, but no, that reality was impossible here. There was no religion here and there was no way it could get inside. This was just so fucking simple. We needed to forgive ourselves for whatever happened. We needed to let go and just live here. We needed to deal with what we had been hiding from before and completely running from. I had my issues, and I knew that Jasmine had her own, too.

She gasped for a second, then tried to speak. "I forgive you, Frank. I forgive myself, too. For all of this, whatever it may end up being. I wanted you to know that."

I held her closely, and in the back of my mind I wondered what the fuck I had done. I had been so good recently, but that didn't matter. If Jasmine and I were married now, we needed to realize that we were also separate. We could not take out all of our frustrations and anxieties on one another. We could not be that all-encompassing thing for the other person. We just had to love one another. We were bonded, if only for the rest of this month, until our kid was grown, or for the rest of our lives. The only way this was going to work was if we forgave one another in addition to ourselves for fucking up. If we were never going to be whole, then we were never going to be the everything that the other person wanted us to be.

"I forgive you too, Jasmine," I told her. All the times were I had felt bitter or angry or just plain confused at why she was doing certain things passed before my mind. And then I let them go. They would always happen. Jasmine and I were too different to understand one another completely. But we loved each other so much, and I never wanted to leave. I never wanted to let her go. So I had to forgive her, and she had to forgive me.

Even though we did not say it, and though he was not there, we forgave Gerard as well. We forgave him for all he couldn't be to us anymore, and all that we had wished he could have been. He was full of failure and fucked-up broken pieces just like the rest of us. He was only a man. He was a man we both loved with all our hearts, but he was fallible. I forgave him for that, and I didn't think I had ever loved him more than in that moment.

After our admissions to one another, we separated for a bit and began to get ready for bed. I used the toilet for the first time, and okay, it wasn't too bad. I would get used to it. Jasmine had already been using it for most of the afternoon. "Pregnancy bladder," she told me with a smile. She couldn't even fathom fear for it, or she would really be screwed. I told Jasmine I was going to grab some of my books and go up to bed and read, but she asked me to stay. Though my mind had been quieted from before with our small ritual, I did not want to be alone that night. I would have enough of that as the weeks went by. That was what the woods were for, Paul had confided in me. Right then, however, all I wanted was Jasmine.

She was beautiful. I knew I thought this a lot of the time, but in the candlelight and wearing her white bedtime shirt (one of my old ones; it fit over her stomach and she liked the idea of dressing in drag while she was seven moths showing, like Hilda), she looked unreal. She was sitting on the bed, wearing a pair of my old boxer shorts as well. I walked over to her, wearing pretty much the same thing, and we laughed for a bit at how we were twins. The moonlight came in through the small windows that we had and it caught her smile. I touched her face and began to lean down to kiss her, only to have her grab my hips and pull me closer. We laid down on the bed together, and then began to explore with our hands places where it felt we hadn't been in such a long time.

I lifted up her shirt and eased the fabric over her belly, kissing it like I had before. Jasmine was beginning to revel in being pregnant, and I wanted to show her that her body was just as gorgeous as I remembered it being. It always had been, and always would. I could see her skin stretching to meet the demands of the added girth and I traced my fingers along those marks. She seemed skeptical towards that exploration at first, but she warmed up to it. She took off the rest of her shirt and exposed her breasts, and I shed my shirt too. She told me to be careful with her breasts because they were still sometimes sore and she wasn't used to them yet. I grabbed them gently in my hands and felt their weight as I kissed her neck. With both our chests now bare, we pressed ourselves together before she ran her hands down the front of me. She touched my nipples and then went to slip off my boxers. We both disrobed entirely, and I lay on my side to face her. She was on the pillow and already looked tired. We had been going slowly, mostly acting as if we were discovering all of this for the first time, and were not engaged in a heated manner. I was hard and she reached down to touch me, but it was lethargic. We wanted touching, not fucking. I moved my hand on the outside of her vulva and asked her what she wanted me to do.

"I don't know," she said, still thinking and tossing around ideas in her head. We had not had very much sex recently. We had used the book that Mikey had given us, but that was a week fascination and then we got back to our busy lives. She had been spending more time with Hilda because she was leaving, and because their bodies were both still anomalies to themselves. She felt more comfortable exploring that terrain so that she would then know what she wanted for herself. I had always been so curious about Hilda and Jasmine, and now that the relationship seemed to be over, I found my thoughts wandering there.

"Do you miss her?" I asked, and Jasmine took a moment to realize who I meant.

"Yeah, I do. She was a good friend. We had a lot of fun together," she said, and then kept thinking. "But I'm glad it's done."

"Why? You two seemed really intense." I thought back to the fisting comment, and I began to wonder if maybe, just maybe, we should be trying that. Was that how I could retain a place next to Hilda? The thought didn't get very far; I should have known it was fruitless effort.

"We were intense, but sometimes it was too much. I mostly wanted to be naked with someone. I wanted to touch her and have her touch me. It was nice, completely different. I loved - love? - her. But, she's irresponsible. Sporadic. She had her baby and then she just left. I knew that was going to happen, and she warned me. I don't mind people leaving, but I like it when they come back. I depend on it." She laughed. "But then again, look at us. We just got up and left. So I get Hilda, in a way. I would just never want to be more than what we were."

I nodded. I had no one really to compare what Hilda was with Jasmine for myself. All the people that I had sex with regularly (but not all the people I had ever had sex with) I loved deeply and wanted to be with forever. Gerard had been different, though, to say the least. I didn't want to think about how our relationships between our bodies had changed. It was one of the topics that hurt me too much. The last time we had had sex, I had tried to put us back together like the great Plato myth. I was realizing more now about how that myth had no place. That perfect unity did not exist. Gerard put ourselves back together, but it wasn't solid and sealed after that. It was tenuous, strained, and could fall apart. I felt my body stretch away from his on the car ride all the way here, our line of connection and of pleasure being pulled taut. It would soon snap, it was holding on by a thread. I would always love him, but that feeling of not being with him, a part of him, the feeling that Jasmine had with Hilda, that would end soon.

"I mean, if she comes back to town we will probably hang out. Possibly have sex. But it won't ever be the same as before. It's over, and I'm glad," she said. She looked at me, then, and kissed my forehead. We didn't mention our relationship at all. It was still going on, swirling around us, and changing. I had no idea what we were to one another, but that was okay. We were husband and wife to everyone else, I supposed, but to one another, we were still figuring it out.

I began to realize that you could only talk about relationships in hindsight and only using past tense. You could only tell their story when they were done. I opened my mouth to speak about Gerard, but then I closed it. It was not time, though in my mind, the verbs had already switched. I grew somber for a second, and Jasmine laid her head down on my chest.

"I like this, Frank," she finally told me. I placed my hands on her back, her bare back, and we slept like this. On top of the covers, on top of the world we had found ourselves in. Inside the middle of The Bear, our hearts murmured forming a new line of connection.

Chapter Two

The mornings became my favorite part of the community. Because we didn't have electricity yet, and there were no standard measures of time, Jasmine and I kept our drapes drawn back and let the sun wake us up in the morning. I was awake first, hearing the birds chirp outside our window, and then touched her smooth belly beside me to gradually rouse her. We had both slept naked and we took to doing this a lot. After exploring one another in the morning, taking as long as we liked for we didn't have to go anywhere, we began to put on our clothing again. But it was different clothing than before; what we wore wasn't casual or professional, because those lines of division didn't happen anymore. Jasmine wore Hilda's clothing that she had left here or my plaid shirts because it fit over her belly and I wore t-shirts and jeans. These were our work clothing and they were as professional and practical as anything out there. I thought of what Vivian had tried to teach Gerard and I when we returned from Paris: The Art of Dress Up. To a certain degree, Jasmine was still playing this game because none of what she wore anymore was hers, but the dress up ceased to exist if you didn't have an audience. In our small silo, it was just the two of us and even going to work on The Bear, there was no need for that performance. We were not dressing up for anyone anymore.

Before work, Jasmine returned to a habit she used in university to keep her essay writing skills sharp, and went to go and write for the first hour or so of the morning. "Just stuff," she told me. "I don't really even know what it is. I feel like I have all these voices in my head sometimes and I need to get them out. This is how I make sense of myself before the day takes me away."

I nodded and understood. Though I was not writing, I awoke in the mornings with a purpose now. My first thoughts were of The Bear, and how I needed to explore more of the woods. The birds that woke me that first morning, though I didn't make it in time to the window to see what they were, I was convinced were doves. I wanted to follow them into that forest, and see if I could see their conversations as easily as I could with books and paintings. Jasmine and I eventually fell into a routine, even after we got electricity and we no longer needed to fully depend on the sun to wake us up. We kept our shades drawn, and if one of us got up before the other, we would wake them and then separate for our morning rituals. I would go for a walk into the woods and she would write. It helped us make sense of ourselves outside of one another, and the work that we did with the community.

I started off walking, and the first few times that I went out, I didn't even get that far. I went to the same log that I had sat on the first day and tried to repeat what I had done before. I tried to re-enact the forgetting of myself, and of Gerard, and lose the dynamic. Lose the history. I wanted to be here and see if I could erase myself. This wasn't a bad self-esteem issue. I actually felt good for the first time in a long time, at least, since I had found out Gerard was sick. Wanting to disappear was as much abstract as anything else. I didn't want to be my mind anymore, or remember all of the pieces of myself that words contained. If I was going to be a liar, then I wanted to see what it felt like to be telling the truth. I wanted to forget what was usually first to go in Alzheimer's patients; maybe a part of me could understand Gerard more, or maybe I could forget him entirely since he himself was a figment. I wanted to forget the self that was created, but focus on things as they were instead. That manifested as the woods to me, and as soon as I let go of the constructed self, the real parts of me began to show through.

I felt better about myself and my abilities than ever before. The work that they gave us was hard and exhausting. I ended up having to help with the solar panels that first day, in spite of having no idea what I was doing. In my confusion, I cut open a section of my arm. There were no stitches required, but I was sent to Kristen for the rest of the day and was on office duty with Jasmine. It was nice to be with her that one time, because we were far apart in most things we did. It was during that afternoon, however, where I realized I had fucked up because I had let myself become too involved. I was too worried about my own ability helping with the panel, than actually helping. Because I was too worried about others perceptions, I let myself down. There was no self, I thought, and from there on I concentrated all of my effort into my tasks at hand.

I was cleaning, lifting, putting, fixing, all damn day. My jobs changed all the time, and I was exhausted my first day after the accident. I had hauled grain from one place to another, and then helped dig an area for more compost. It felt like an aerobic activity and my muscles swelled with lactic acid. But it felt good, and I began to see the pain that I was in as something my body had, but not me. I still got up early every morning to go for my walks. I even started to run when the log and the path beyond it became too little, and I wanted to explore more but lacked the time. Even after running in the morning, working all day, I began to wear up a resistance and I had never felt so secure in my own body before. I was amazed at my muscles beginning to form beyond what they were. The extra fat that I had around my middle was changing and hardening. I slept better than I had in years, and I felt good when I greeted the sun, or the rain, each day. It didn't matter what the weather was in the morning, I would go out and explore.

Jasmine was walking a lot too. When she wasn't on office duty, she would be errand runner and deliver things from house to house, silo to silo, and carry small items if she could. She began to delight in her own body as well. Our nights spent together were more exploring rituals. As she gained girth in her stomach and breasts and let her hair grow, I gained muscle and let my hair grow long alongside her. I hadn't had a hair cut in ages, it felt, and her fingers seemed to grasp more and more at the base of my neck. Our jobs on the community were tiring and sometimes arduous, but we had our individual lives in the morning, and then we put ourselves back together again with our fingers and hands. I began to understand what Paul was meaning about being whole, but not quite. I knew better now than to think I was completely whole, ever. Especially knowing all I knew and I knew that knowledge was eventual. It was a curse, but it was what made us what we were. And I believed, in spite of what most people were telling me, that you could know all that you knew, and still be free. And still be happy, and take pleasure in life as it was.

I came to these heady, and maybe somewhat unrealistic, realizations about life when I was in the woods in the morning. I'd watch the sky shift and change colors, and I'd think back on all that had happened. Sometimes, especially when I was running, I would try not to think at all. I would use the concentration I had developed while working and see if I could erase more of myself and more of the world around me. I would focus on my breath, on the sound my feet made when they hit the path, and the way the woods spoke to one another. I kept trying to see if nature had a dialogue. I listened closely, sitting perfectly still on my log, and waited to be enlightened. It never happened like it did in books. I had to slowly piece together each realization in hindsight.

At the end of each of my run, there would be a farm. This was how I knew the land was done and that it was no longer the community. The woods seemed to go on forever, but most of the paths were all man-made and the further I got away from The Bear the more evenly spaced the trees became, the more man had interfered and intervened. The farm was bordered by a chain link fence in order to distinguish itself as private property inside the woods, which was yet another way I knew I had to stop running and turn around. Each time I reached the end, though, I would stop. I would look at the cows, if they were outside. The land we were on contained many hills, and the farm house and family home sat atop another roll in the earth. The animals they had (I saw horses one morning) and their small crops were below them. The grass was cleared away and not over run like it was in the woods or even around The Bear. Though the community grew a lot of its own food, the land was not as trimmed away as it appeared here. I knew the cows had some hand in that, but it was also manipulated by the farmer. There was a wooden fence a few feet from the chain link fence, dividing off the ground in order to keep both people away and animals inside.

Each time I stopped, I wanted the cows to look at me, and most of them did the first time I showed up. I knew that this was a farm and not a factory farm, and there was a big difference. But the cows still seemed skittish. They were brown cows, not the black and white kind that most children played with in their farm toys. I wondered if these cows knew the fate of their lives, in the end. There had been so much theory I was exposed to about the rights of animals and about their consciousness if they had one. It wasn't even just current opinions, like the pamphlets from Food Not Bombs. Thoreau had a passage on vegetarianism in his book, and even Descartes, one of the dead white men that The Professor had studied, talked about the lives of animals and whether or not they were sentient beings. Descartes had said that they were merely machines and could not feel pain, and while I could reject that on my intuition alone, I wanted to know and to see what the answer really was for myself. The cows looked at me as I stopped from my run and I pleaded with them with my stare. I wanted to transmit to them that I did not hurt them. I wanted to somehow convey that I never would eat them, ever again.

But in the back of my mind I knew I was drinking their milk. I had felt Jasmine's breasts in my hands just that morning and I knew they would be full of milk soon, too. I knew that our daughter would drink that, like I was drinking from a cow. The whole notion baffled me. I had not drunk milk in a while, but I still had that part of myself that saw it as feasible. Just because it wasn't around me and I didn't eat it, didn't make me vegan, and I knew that. I had not had animal products in ages. Even when Paul offered me some of his cheese, I had said no. I had not called myself a vegan, but I was still very unsure of what I wanted to believe. I realized as I ran to those cows each morning that I had been expecting an answer from them. Each time I stopped and paused there, I had been expecting some great revelation like I had been reading in Emerson and Thoreau. I had asked Jasmine, several times, what that moment was for her. She had told me a long time ago, but out in these woods where I forgot things, it seemed too far.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14