April - The Flood 19 страница

Gerard tilted his head and laughed, what seemed to be, at himself. "Beliefs are a funny thing. They change. They get compared to others in an ultimatum situation and then the ones I had before somehow seem smaller than they previously were. I love you and Jasmine. I cannot hurt you two. If making sure I have medical care is one of those things, then, I will get married." He smiled at me to try and ease the burden. It made my breath catch in my throat. I knew that he loved Jasmine, but it was the first time that he said it out loud around me. I knew that you couldn't measure love or really put a quantifier on it, but I still wanted to know. Who was more important? Were we equal?

"Being married doesn't change anything now, Frank," he insisted, noticing my stance on the bed. He sat on his stool and then turned it to face me more. He leaned down on his legs. "Sometimes we do things that we don't always want to do, but they're better. In the end, they're so much better."

I nodded. I knew all of this before. It still didn't let the issue rest completely in my mind, but it made me feel better hearing it come from him. I still held the box tightly in my hand. I wondered when to unleash it.

"Do you remember the art show..." I started slowly.

"I'm having a good day, Frank. You don't need to test me."

"No, I'm not. Well, I guess I am. Do you remember this?" I held up the box, and he smiled.

"My dove...." he said again, while looking at me."I wanted you to know how much you meant to me. It was like a like a marriage, in a way."

"You told me you would never forget me," I said, voice breaking. He tried to break into my dialogue and tell me that he still meant it, that he never would forget me, but I overpowered him. "You knew. You knew all that time, didn't you?"

After a pause, he nodded slowly.

"Why didn't you say anything? Why'd didn't you do anything? We could have helped you!"

Gerard nodded at one my accusations, but pushed them aside. "Then is the same as it is now. Only now you know, and now we're worried all the time. I didn't want that. Sure, I can get medical care now, but I told Jasmine it's only in the worst case scenario. I do not want to hand my life over to other people, especially when I am still capable. Even when I was worried, even when I thought something might be off, I didn't want to tell anyone. There was no point."

I struggled for words. "But... I.... she... maybe I could have... saved you instead of her?"

He got up and sat on the bed with me. He put an arm around me and let me lean on his chest. His admission that he was having a good day was true; and because of it, I let myself have a bad one and I completely let go. He let me, and for a while, we switched positions as he comforted me.

"No, that's not how it is. We can only save ourselves. I was doing all I could then and I'm doing all I can now. It's just there, Frank. Sometimes we need to see it from another perspective." He held me awhile longer, rubbing my arm, but I didn't say anything. I didn't know what to say. I had been thinking and talking too much. I wanted it to be like when he would be the one that carried the conversation, one that got us through the night with his talking of art. I told him I wanted the old Gerard back.

He sighed, and it felt as if I had stabbed him.

"The old Gerard is still me. I get a little off sometimes, but... I'm here. You have to trust me. Please just trust me."

I nodded, feeling bad that I had fractured his image while he was still sitting here with me. Anytime he raised his voice during this conversation, I realized it had been when he felt threatened - not by me, but by himself. He needed to believe that he was still capable of taking care of himself as much as I needed him to hear it. I pulled my body closer to him, then looked at his face and began to touch his hair. I moved my hand down and began to touch his cheeks, his stubble, his lips, and he did the same for me. We replaced our hands with our mouths and kissed softly for awhile.

"Does it hurt?" I asked him, when we broke away.

He shook his head. "It's disorienting and scary if I let it be. It's mostly scary because of the value we put on things, the hold we have over some emotions and memory. But it comes back, sometimes. And more often than not the things that I forget are the little ones. Not the big ones. Not yet."

I told him about the gold theme for the magazine, and how I thought losing your memory was living and digging for gold. How it was horrible and painful and people died in the process, but sometimes, you got something so valuable beyond words out of it. Knowing what I knew then about the process of gold mining from Jasmine's article, the unreliability of beauty did not seem worth it. Gerard agreed as well. "That whole process has so much more pain than I've ever experienced like this. I'm lucid. I can talk. It's a good day today."

"But in the bad ones, does it hurt? Does it feel like digging for gold?"

He considered this. He broke his gaze with mine and then went to the bookshelf. He asked me if I had ever read about Kandinsky, or if we had ever talked about him. I said no, and he began to tell me the story of one of his paintings that he had worked on for days and days. "Kandinsky, now completely frustrated with himself, left the room, went for a walk, and then when he came back a friend had tilted his canvas to its side. That was all he had needed to see. The painting now worked. Sometimes we get too involved with what we think is ours and what we think we can control, and then, we need a shift." Gerard nodded, and then closed the book he was reading from, but still kept it on his lap as he sat down again. "Don't think of it as what I forget, think of it as what I'm still remembering."

I looked above us at the reprint of the handprints we had created together and replaced Kandinsky's blank face in my mind with Gerard's. I felt better. He would never forget that aspect of us. He would never forget me, he had promised me that. He was still remembering things and that was what was important. I walked over to him and gave him a hug, and then left the dove box in his hand.

"Why are you giving it back?" he asked, his voice hitching with worry.

"So you can keep it with you and have a reminder. I know you won't forget me. I don't need to keep it," I explain to him, though it was hard to keep an even voice and not back out of the deal. I kissed his forehead and started to walk out of the room.

"Wait, Frank," he called after me. He dragged his stool closer to the door in a frantic worry but did not get up. "Wait, please. Don't go. Please come back."

I had never heard this type of emotion in his voice before. It concerned me. It worried me. He had been having such a good day, I figured he would be fine by himself for the rest of the night. But the dove box had made his heart leap into his throat, and his desperation took hold of me. I began to realize the way he had been starting and stopping the conversation from before; I thought he had been overcome with emotion, but he had been trying to find words. He was having a good enough day to talk and carry on a conversation, but that didn't mean he was perfect again. He would never be perfect again, if he ever had been. I turned around and went back into the room. I closed the door behind me and wrapped my arms around him.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to scare you," I apologized. He held onto my back, the box still in his hands.

"No, it's okay. I just... get worried fear sometimes," he said. Then realizing his words did not sound the way he wanted them to, cursed, "Fucked."

"It's okay, Gerard, I know what you mean."

I got him to sit in the bed with me, and we kept our clothing on and just held one another. He seemed to enjoy the quietness. He was used to sleeping during the day and his routine had been broken up by Jasmine and getting married. He was happy about that, and glad to be around people, but it made him really clingy when it came time to be by himself again. As if the whole world would suddenly collapse if there weren't other people around to remind him and make the structures he had used for understanding stay up. When he was around others, too, it kept him talking and dong things, making his mind occupied. He confided to me then that when he was alone that it was the worst.

"I would wake up some days and not remember where I was. That was the worst feeling. It was the days where I started off with nothing that were the hardest."

I closed my ears, hearing the pain in his voice. "But it doesn't hurt?" I asked again, to be sure.

"No," he shook his head under my arm. "It doesn't hurt. It hurts seeing everyone else in pain more. That's why I didn't tell anyone, that's why I never talked about it. I can handle myself, or could, at least, then." He sighed and ran his hand through his hair. "It only seems a lot worse than it used to be now because I ask more questions. I would eventually figure it all out on myself before, but it would take longer. I ask you questions now, or ask for help, because I know it makes you feel better. Like you have more control. But it doesn't hurt. I'd tell you if it did. It really doesn't hurt... it's seeing everyone else in pain..."

He began to repeat himself a bit. Not exact replicas of sentences, but the same sentiment expressed without precision. I told him it was okay and shushed him gently. I held his head in my hands and we just breathed together. I could understand what he was saying, and I knew that Jasmine and I had been around him a lot recently. We were probably feeding the illness as much as anyone else. We would always fixate and focus and measure and analyze. We wanted to make sure he wasn't too bad, yet. We didn't let him go into the kitchen just in case. We brought him his food just because. Sure, he was at the place in his capacity where he probably wasn't going to do too much damage. He probably wasn't going to go outside and go for a walk and then get lost. But he could. Those were the parts we were focusing on, as much as we tried to stop. Gerard was content drawing or sleeping most of the day and he knew who he was and what was wrong with him, but we didn't know how much longer we had until that was gone. So we worried, and Gerard saw it in our voices, in our stares, and how we treated one another. He loved us both, and he didn't want us to break apart because we perceived (didn't actually know) that he was doing the same.

I swallowed hard. He did seem a lot worse than he had a month ago. But he insisted it was about the same and I needed to learn to trust that, as hard as it was.

"Do you know much about Kandinsky?" he asked me, and I felt that lump return.

"You just talked about him, I know. The painting and perspective story."

"Right," Gerard said, "but I don't want to talk about that anymore. Do you know he had a book he wrote on just colors alone? What you were saying about gold color remembered me."

"No, I didn't know that. What did he say?"

Gerard began to take me through Kandinsky's repertoire of colors and what each one apparently meant to the famous artist. Red was energetic, kinetic, and represented pure movement, while yellow took that energy, but made it eccentric. Yellow on a page moved toward us, while blue, a concentric movement, seemed to move away from us. The aggression of yellow, when combined with the tranquility of blue produced a calm, immobile green. When a yellow that evoked warmth was mixed with forceful red, the orange that it produced would seem to radiate all over the page and towards the viewer. Colors such as brown became harder and colder than their previous counterparts. "He even theorized about music, too, that each instrument and each sound had a distinct color associated for it. There is a Greek term for this."

"Synaesthesia," I said with a smile. "Jasmine told me about it."

"Yes. That. It makes colors come out of sound. Beautiful," Gerard declared, then went on. He had gone through the colors with only a bit of struggling and I felt okay again. Almost happy. I wrapped my arms around him more and listened intently. It was when he got to the shades beyond the rainbow, black and white and static gray, when his voice changed. "Black is obscurity. Nothingness. I am afraid of black. You said that this thing, this forgetting disease, could be like gold, but I think it's more like the colors that Kandinsky talks about. More like one of his paintings. An abstract, nothing makes perfect. And then maybe the colors fall away and it's just black. I worry about black. I worry that black will replace those things in the sky."

"Birds?" I asked him. I had been following along okay until that last bit. "Birds in the sky? Like doves? You worry about losing freedom?"

Gerard moved his hand, aggravated. He sighed, and said, "Yes, that too, but not meaning thing I said." In his aggravation, his words were getting mixed up. I tried recapture and rearticulate what he had said before, and put it into context. He was speaking of colors, then a lack of color replacing the ones that were already there, the ones that were present in that thing in the sky.

" Oh," I declared. "Rainbow. The colors in the sky, that thing in the sky. Rainbow."

"The rainbow," Gerard said. I could not tell if his happiness in playing along with me was manufactured. Was he struggling more so than usual so he could make me feel more useful by helping him? Was he actually distressed and now I had solved it? He was unreliable now. I could not verify anything anymore because I would get a different response each time. I could do nothing but take his word for it.

"The rainbow," he repeated. "Yes. I worry about losing the rainbow."

I nodded. The same very thought scared me too. Everything was scaring me, the uncertainty, the changes, the unreliability, the gray areas and lack of colors. It seemed that I had nothing solid to grip onto, only his body in my hands. His beautiful body, one that was always so full of color and life - he worried about losing that as much as anyone else. He worried about things as much as I did. He was just as scared as me. He was actually probably more afraid than I was. I woke up and knew who I was and where I was. Even if I didn't like it, I kne w it. I treasured that knowledge and I tried to treasure him. I kissed him on the forehead and then he rose to meet my mouth. We kissed for longer than I had intended, a deep, long passionate kiss. He turned his body over so he was on top of me and straddled my waist. I began to undo his shirt as he stuck his hands underneath mine, but I stopped. I couldn't do it. I got his shirt undone, but I just couldn't go through with the act. I knew it would only end like Jasmine and ours did, in tears and shaking like children. Our sex life had significantly decreased since the news, too. Gerard and I would touch and kiss a lot, and he had said several times that it was touch more than anything that helped to trigger his memory. But sex? No. That would help me remember too, and I didn't want to go down that train of thought in my memories. I could have his photo and hold his paintings in my hands. They would be there if ever one day he wasn't. But bodies broke down and materialized into nothing, into dirt. That was the blackness, the obscurity I was afraid of, and I would not think about. I loved him and I desired him, but I could not keep touching him because I wanted to keep it all together in my mind, whole and complete. If I started now, I would never let him go because I could only lose him.

He saw that I had stopped, and went back to lying down on top of me. He didn't seem disappointed, he seemed happy, actually, that we were just going to press our bodies together instead of reinvigorate our desire. I wrapped my arm around his back, pressing the exposed skin our chests together, feeling the heat between us. Our bodies melted into one another, our colors mixing, and memories blurring. I wanted to give him everything that was in my head. I wanted to give him all the colors so he could remember and not worry about forgetting the rainbow. But it seemed impossible. I was so sad I could barely move.

"Frank," Gerard asked me, his voice timid and quiet. "Please don't put me in a home. That's the one thing that scares me the most." His voice was lucid and clear. There was not a sign of desperation in his voice like before, when I tried to leave the room. This was just a simple fact to him. This was even less complicated than those colors from before.

I nodded. I promised him that I would never do that, and like his promise to me, I would never, ever break it.

Chapter Five

The next morning when I went downstairs to get breakfast for Gerard and myself, I met up with Jasmine. She was still wearing her white dress, but over different pants. I teased her about it, asking if she wanted to keep the wedding party going, and she smiled. It was a relief to see that expression on her face, and when I moved towards her, I kept eye contact. She looked up and met my gaze and we looked at one another unflinchingly. She turned her back on the scrambled tofu she was preparing after turning it low, and leaned her back against the other side of the stove. I moved in front of her, bridging the gap between our bodies. I touched her hair, curling it slightly over her ear, and then I just held her. I put my hands over her stomach, and we kissed for several minutes more before we resumed our days. She went back to her tofu, and informed me that, "Although it would be nice to keep things going, I'm wearing this again because it's the only thing of mine that fits me. Everything else is Hilda's."

Eventually, as I got together toast, I mentioned the promise that I had made to Gerard last night. If I was going to keep him out of a home, Jasmine needed to know too. But she nodded without flinching, and then confessed that was what they had been discussing the night before.

"What else did he tell you?" I asked her, wanting to know if the conversation between us last night had been genuine, or if it was like we were rehearsing lines to one another. It hurt, not being able to grant his promise first. I wanted to be that person again, the one with the ideas, or the one who would at least hear about them before anyone else.

Jasmine looked away and became evasive with the topic of the rest of their conversation. Her body language told me it wasn't important, and to drop the issue. I knew from the way she was scraping off the rest of the tofu from the frying pan with stunted movements, and how she bit her lip, that whatever they were talking about was personal. Jasmine's personal, as opposed to Gerard's issues and the promises that arose out of it. I watched her stomach, her ridiculously large stomach to me now, and I realized that it was Saturday morning. She wasn't going to be going to work, and if I was so concerned about being the first with the ideas, then we really should be having our own extended wedding party. One without all the people from before - that had been too many for Gerard to handle. It would just be the three of us, total and complete, and we would make sure that he never forgot what he feared the most. I nodded to myself, assured of my plan now.

We were going to recreate the rainbow between us all.

I told my idea to Jasmine, with a bit of explanation about Kandinsky, and her eyes lit up. She called up Hilda right away and cancelled their plans together for later that afternoon, and over our toast and tofu scrambled eggs, we began to organize. We grabbed some extra paper, pens, and paintbrushes first, and then realizing we needed a wedding feast, I descended to the kitchen to do some more work. Only an hour or two after our embrace in the kitchen, we were on the same wavelength again. We walked up to Gerard's room carrying plates full of French toast (Le Pain Perdu, I informed her) and our supplies, and then began to get to work.

I had never painted with Gerard and Jasmine before. Apparently the two of them had done some work together, but it was nothing in comparison to the catalogue of art history that Gerard had between us. They had painted flowers on her stomach one morning when they were together, and then painted flowers on canvas together the next. He had drawn her nude like Degas, and she had humored him a little when he wanted her to do some Pollock type designs over her stomach and chest. She was not as big of a fan of abstract as Gerard and I both were. She found that she could never just let a painting be in all of its chaotic mess; she had to find images hidden within or she had to interpret them to mean something in a distinct way. Gerard had teased her mercifully for it, claiming that she, "had to realize that ontology is as much of a story of the self as anything," and though I had no idea what that meant, it had made Jasmine more willing to humor his artistic whims. Then he humored her, and grew to like what they ended up creating. The biggest piece they had done was one of a garden, of course. It was spread out over two canvases that each one had and painted for themselves, so that when complete, they could hang them together outside Jasmine's bedroom door, hers on the left side and his on the other. Their garden together added to the many that surrounded us, like the mural on my wall was, and the one that had been planted outside.

It had been a rainy April, and much of that garden had flood and caused most of the plants to be uprooted. Though Jasmine tried to help out and fix some of it, and other people from our neighbourhood had joined her, it did not help. Only half the garden was blooming, so in the other half's absence, Jasmine and Gerard had been creating their own together. I was surprised at how skilled they had both become, and how fluidly the two of them worked together. What they painted were not Georgia O'Keeffe's type of flowers. Gerard did not want to create something like that, something that people could mistake for vulvas and then never see for its intended beauty. I was not sure what the flowers seemed to symbolize between the two of them, between all of us, and I didn't know how it would be interpreted from the outside world. I was not sure if it had a meaning, or needed one. Gerard just wanted beauty, like he always had, and this was how we made it between us. While Jasmine was prone to realism, and Gerard absurdity, I seemed to balance out the two of them with my appreciation for both. The mural outside my room had the grass finally completed and all the stems that were reaching out towards the handprints, now. It looked gorgeous; it was just chaotic enough for me to appreciate the surrealism of hand-print flowers, of having the garden inside the house, and having a garden all year long. Some nights, when I wasn't with Gerard or Jasmine, I wouldn't sleep in my bed; I would be out in that area with a long blanket and a book. I had done most of my Lolita reading in the garden of our own making, while Jasmine and Gerard had drawn flowers and read poetry and plays to one another in their morning rituals.

"I don't know why the gardens captivate me so much," Gerard stated, after we had explained the plan to him for the day. We were all eating together, some of us more than others, and discussing more than anything the art that we would soon make. "I don't want to say Eden, but I suppose that's what people think. Bibles are known for Gardens. I guess that was why I liked that poem. The name of my show."

" The Flowers of Evil?" I asked.

He nodded. "Yes, that too. It was the non-Eden. I liked that. But that is other people. Other people's meanings." He paused over his food, trying to get the right words, the words that were his, in order to express himself. He was having a remarkably good day and it was wonderful to hear him speak again. "But the flowers are like the rainbow, too, I suppose. Full of life and color. They come after the long winter. It's a relief to see."

With a smile, I looked at Jasmine now and asked why she had insisted on this form of realism. She shrugged and rolled her eyes at her own sentimentality. "People have always tried to tease me that it's because of my name. But you know the story for my name, it's not the reason I like flowers. Notice how not one of what we drew was a jasmine? I did that intentionally. I like the meanings and stories behind the ones we've picked... but then again, those are other people's meanings and stories. I guess, then, I like what's been done with the flowers. How they've been used, and how I want to use them. I like the garden outside because it was not supposed to be there. It was an act of resistance. When I see flowers growing in strange places, through concrete, or something like that, I always smile because it makes me feel as if there is a chance at fighting back."

I noticed Gerard squeeze Jasmine's hand when she had finished, and I nodded. The question was now turned to me, though it felt as if I had nothing much to contribute, especially after them.

"But you do like flowers, Frank," Jasmine told me. "You wanted sunflowers in our garden. And you wanted us to paint a garden in your room."

"I guess so, but I wanted a garden, not just one flower. I wanted everything," I smiled and looked towards Gerard. I had wanted the garden full of hands because they reminded me of him. I wanted them to be around in the winter, so I could remember the winters that were marked by my own hands on his wall, on his body, on our lives. This was the first time that Gerard and I had spent spring together. My birthday was coming up in a few days, too, and I would be twenty-six. He had never seen a birthday of mine, nor I him. He had left me around this time seven years ago. We had never made it past winter, so of course, I had lived my life in winter in my mind and never really thought about the spring. This was the first time I had noticed flowers, aside from that market in Paris, but those even sunflowers then were still marked by his presence. I liked flowers, I noticed flowers, but only because I loved and noticed Gerard.

I tried to explain all of this to Jasmine and to Gerard, carefully watching their responses. Gerard continued to eat Le Pain Perdu and nodded a few times, but it was when I mentioned the market in Paris that his eyes flared with recognition. Jasmine regarded me intently, even when my details about that time began to get on the gregarious side, and I knew it would be okay. Even if Gerard hadn't had that flash in his eyes to let me know that he remembered, I would just get to tell my stories, again and again, to him. I would never have to tire of them at all. There was a sense of liberation in that, I told myself. I needed to seek and find freedom wherever I could, even in the most desperate of situations. Maybe it was when you felt trapped, I thought to myself, that flowers - things that grow in the ground and can't move - suddenly became important. Maybe it was when you realized and still saw life going on around outside without you, that you began to feel a sense of responsibility to go on and do it too.

We got to work after that, our plates now sticky with crumbs and syrup, and we began to get on with our plans. In the kitchen, Jasmine had taped together a bunch of paper in order to arch like a rainbow. We were planning on putting it just above the handprint that Gerard and I had remade, but now in his room, this didn't seem to make sense. Next to the books of fine art and his own creations, our mismatched paper together seemed too hokey and reminiscent of Lucky Charms. Gerard found a large canvas behind his bed that he had been saving and put that down in front of us instead. We had turned it on this side to make it a horizon piece, but Gerard shook his head.

"Not quite, like it's falling from the sky," he explained, using his hands for added emphasis. I could see the gears in his head turning; he was inspired and had a good idea at the tip of his tongue. His eyes darted across the room, between the two of us, and gestured with his hands some more. He tried to convey to us that he saw the rainbow like a lightning bolt; not an arch or a long strip over the horizon. He wanted it to be as if it was stabbing through the earth itself, like a gigantic revelation. The two of us set the canvas up portrait style for him, instead. This way it seemed to go on and on like a tower; it was immense, only a foot or so shorter than Jasmine. Once we had it leaned against the wall properly and most of the supplies he was gesturing for were set up, we backed away. Gerard had a specific vision of how he wanted to do this, and we needed to make it work with him together. Jasmine was to his left, and I was at his right, and we mostly watched with an occasional hand as it all unfolded. Gerard was being good so far, even better than I had anticipated for the day. He was in his element now, confronting what he feared would happen. He knew for sure now that he was not going to forget the rainbow.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14