June - The Liars 3 страница

"Hi Frank," she said to me and then grabbed at her dad. He laughed and grabbed back at her, lightly tickling her sides, making her giggle and squirm even more before she then ran back inside. It was a quick interlude, but one that made Mikey's face light up and firmly confirmed the choice he had made long ago.

"Thank you for letting me talk," he told me. "It's been awhile."

Inside, Mikey disappeared with the kids and Alexa pulled me into the kitchen. She took out the leftover casserole from her fridge and put it in the microwave to heat up for me. She got me a drink ("herbal tea; we don't want you up all night, now do we?") and told me to sit down and get comfortable. Only after getting the tea poured into my mug and setting down the macaroni casserole in front of me, did she then pounce with the questions. She wanted to know what I was doing and who I was with, and how this little experience was going to end up. She wasn't drilling me or questioning me like Jasmine had before. She could tell that I wasn't drinking again, and she assured me of that fact.

"Though you are nervous," she commented. "You're practically vibrating with conversation and ideas, but you're holding back. It's exhausting, isn't it?"

I nodded, shoveling food into my mouth. I hadn't even really realized how intense my hunger had been when I was working. It was there, a gnawing sensation in the back of my stomach, but I had been so consumed by the knowledge and stifled confusion it had given me, that I tried not to notice.

"All mind and no body, huh?" Alexa said, noticing my frantic eating display. "Do you know who I'm referencing?"

I shook my head and she shrugged her shoulders. I was more receptive talking to her than I had been Mikey, or The Professor, for that matter. Although she was always kind of 'out-there', I seemed to be able to understand her a lot more. If there was a conversation of critics happening that I could embed myself into, I had a feeling Alexa and I would be close. She sat up on her kitchen counter, much like I had seen teenagers do, and continued to talk to me and ask me questions about The Professor. When I had started to call him that out loud, Alexa only smiled. "Be careful with that. You'll make his whole world into knowledge and then you won't be able to see the person, hiding and probably scared, underneath."

Her response baffled me. I saw the person, I was sure of it. He was small and inquisitive, but sensitive. I didn't think he was scared underneath, though. In spite of his frantic movements, he was not always ready (or even that willing) to flee. He had left me in the library all of a sudden, but when I considered the overwhelming flow of words that had first come out of him when we met, that silence was needed. He was giving me time to learn. He was The Professor, as far as I was concerned, and this was the capacity that I had known him in. I was able to piece together other information about him from the way he dressed and how he tucked in his shirt, the Darwin fish on his car, his wedding ring, and other small details like that. But all of these were superficial, Alexa had warned me. She said if people judged her by what she had around the house and what she read, she would fail to excite them and they would get a completely different perception of who she was.

"Who are you, then? How should I be seeing you?" I asked. She jumped off the counter and then smiled.

"Speaking like a true philosopher already," she quipped and rubbed my head. She didn't really answer my question, though, but went on to chastise me a little more. "But seriously, Frank, how would you feel if people called you The Photographer? If Gerard merely became The Artist?"

She didn't give me too much time to dwell in that labyrinth of interpretation, for which I was relieved. She told me she wanted me to see a new painting she was working on, instead. It was in the next room, and she opened the door and waited for me to come inside. I finished up what I had been eating, closing the lid of the Tupperware to save the rest for later. I had been hoping she would ask me to her back room, so I could see the books that she had again and compare them against what I had acquired today. I wanted to know if I could hear conversations going on here too, and if it would be as loud as the room appeared to The Professor. I wondered if the sensation I had felt with her Strength and The Tower paintings had been the beginnings of those same conversations other people could feel, and if they existed through images the way they existed through words and books. I wanted to ask Alexa if she thought so, but as soon as I stepped in the room and saw her canvas, I didn't dare.

It was the Death card in the Tarot deck. The grim reaper, clad in a black robe and nothing but bones, was on a white horse with a black flag. There was a bishop begging before him, along with a child, a young girl, and another man. There was scenery in the background of a hill and a sun, but the image of Death on horseback and of the black words DEATH at the bottom seemed to fill the canvas. Alexa was back to the Tarot cards that I was familiar with. From The Tower to Death, I knew the only one left to go would be something to do with the Devil. I hated these cards. I knew that they didn't predict the future, but I felt the heavy sense of prophecy and enlightenment inside the room. The walls were filled with books, and I had my answer about images: they screamed at me. I tried to maintain eye contact with the piece, but it was too much.

"You wanted me to see this?" I asked her, my attention going back to her. "Why?"

She looked back at me and sighed, as if I should have already known. It was for Gerard, clearly. But really, why? Why was she showing me this? Why did she need to rub it in my face? He was going to die. Okay, I got it. We were all going to die, though; we were all terminal cases, and we had no choice in deterioration. It was not something to be afraid of, and all of the other shit that people said to one another in times of crisis. I understood that, and I didn't even need to read Nietzsche or Jung to get that. But fuck, Gerard was going to die sooner than others. He was already dying now, or at least, the image I had of him was. It was still too sensitive of a wound for Alexa to paint it already. I did not appreciate her art mimicking the real life here, and I began to understand what The Professor had meant about the damaging depictions of reality. It was art, but art for art's sake? No, there was always going to be a little bit of reality that trickled in. There was always going to be that real life engrained within, the philosophy that a work represented. It could not see the whole world, it could not be the whole picture. It was always only going to be a fragment of it. The Professor had said today that there was always another side to the story. I didn't mind that, I was starting to see the beauty in several stories all at once, but this was different. Alexa had picked the death fragment, and it was the shard of the fracture that hurt me the most.

"I think you know why I painted this, Frank, but you're not seeing things the way I am," she began, but I cut her off.

"You're not seeing things the way I am, either. And this is not cool," I was getting heated, angry. I was realizing now how important it was to have the tools of language with which to fight Alexa. I began to try and explain my position from what The Professor had told me about Orientalism and Madame Bovary. It came out completely butchered, but that didn't matter. I was trying to tell her how much she had hurt me without resorting to feeling, without using that gut and visceral response.

But it was that visceral response that she had wanted. That was what she had been working with all this time. She listened to me empathetically and nodded as I went through my chain of arguments, and even told me that she had read both books. She agreed, for the most part, with what those authors had said and with what I was saying, too.

"But Frank, you're forgetting about honesty. I feel this pain too. I feel it so much all I can think about is this death in front of me. There is so much death all around," she explained. She sat down on the bed and tried to work through what she wanted to say. Her hands grasped at nothing in the air, and she combed her hair behind her ear, at a loss of what to do. Her voice cracked. It was the first time that I had seen Alexa moved, and this was another watershed feeling. I had not realized that people other than the three of us in our triangulated relationship felt emotions to the extreme, especially about him. "I read a lot, and I know the conversations that you're talking about. They overwhelm me sometimes, especially when I get to talk to people who share the same ideas or at least know who I'm talking about. Like you." She smiled, lightening the mood. "And these conversations are important and referential and different and influencing. But it's exhausting. You feel exhausted, don't you? I feel it coming out of you."

"Yeah, but, that doesn't matter, it's a feeling," I told her.

"No. Feelings do matter, Frank. Feelings are where you start to figure things out. If you feel exhausted, figure out why it is and what is tiring you out. What is wearing you down, Frank, right now? Is it the way that happiness is represented in those books - do you not agree? Is it Nietzsche's futility of life? Do you not agree? Figure those things out by all means, but please don't ever discount your feelings. I understand that it is not always the best thing to argue with them alone, and trust me, I've lost a lot of fights doing things that way. You need reason, I do not doubt that, but you also need those feelings. You need to find a balance between the two, not exclude one for the other. It's the same fight that way. You need reason when you go out into the world, but when you are alone and not talking and not making up all of these conversations in your mind, you are all you have. Your feelings are all you have." Alexa paused, her attention going back to the painting. "I went away, I went to be alone for a while after I heard the news. I got to that place where there was nothing but myself and this was the feeling I was overwhelmed with. This death, this blackness, and obscurity to life. Not futility, I am not Nietzsche, but obscurity. We do not know, at the end of the day. We cannot say all of this is useless and meaningless because we just don't know. This painting is me not knowing for sure and feeling the despair that comes from it. This was my feeling. This was how I created it. I'm not rubbing your face into his death or cheapening it for art. I'm telling you I feel that pain too."

I sat down on the bed with her, the painting in front of us. I touched her back gently, gaining my composure. We were quiet awhile, then I said, "Gerard thinks that his illness..." I still didn't know how to refer to it, "is something like a blackness, like Kandinsky's black. It's meant to be obscurity."
Alexa nodded, stronger than she had been before. "I know Kandinsky. He has some interesting ideas."

I went to tell her about the rest of the colors and his ways of working with them. When I was done, she told me what she knew about the abstract painter, telling me about his theories of artist as a spiritual reference point. "He said that an artist was a prophet, and he contained this pyramid of himself within himself. His job was to reach the higher plain of reality, located at the top of the pyramid, and to tap into this culture resource. Art was a religious experience to him. Colors were his gods, and he worshiped them."

I thought about this theory on god and then how there was no god at all. It was freeing, that thought, that god did not exist. I wanted it to be that there were only the colors of the rainbow and our own use of them, and I was sure that was all there really was. There was no hand guiding me or us. We were the masters of ourselves, making even the failures somehow beautiful. We couldn't get too convoluted and into ourselves, Alexa warned, so maybe a prophet was too strong of a word. But that freedom in creation, in knowing that there was no god, there was just what you had in front of you and what you could do with it.

"And what you could do together. You can't forget about the things that people are capable of, not just the individual," she commented, becoming very acute with her wording. This was something that she had thought about for a long time. She knew it very well. She turned to me suddenly. "You know, I used to think that you all could change the world."

Her attention and praise made me embarrassed on a deeper level. It wasn't that I didn't believe this to be true; it was that I really did want it to be true, and any reaction would have given me away. She had been telling us this, long before I had even met her. Anytime her name was mentioned, her divination would be the tail end of the remark. Though I knew that everyone in the world had the capacity to change the world, it was nice to think I was special - that we were special, all of us. "The four of you, you know," she went on now. "Vivian, Gerard, Jasmine, and yourself. I used to think that this was a very good combination. You were like the counter side to the four horsemen of the apocalypse and on the eve of all this destruction that was going to happen in the modern world, the four of you would rise up together and save it somehow. You all would fight with this gigantic artistic creation that could be released into the collective unconscious. Then things would be better, somehow."

"You're speaking in past tense," I told her. "Do you not think this way anymore?"

There was more to this feeling of just being special. With this type of praise came the responsibility to live up to it. If everyone on the planet had the power to change the world, well, then I was also really the same as everyone else. That was a comforting feeling, too, just as much as being special. I knew I had power, but the power that she was giving me before was too much to live up to. It crippled me. I just wanted to do something, like Mikey had said. Something - not everything and certainly not nothing.

"Yes, my thoughts on the matter have changed. I no longer see it as the four of you. No four seasons, four elements, or anything like that. But you're not getting off the hook so easily. There is still power, but now I see it as the three of you. As Jasmine, Gerard, and yourself. It always has been the three of you; it just took a little time for it all to flourish and develop, and then for me to see it. But I know, now. There is something special there. I could feel it at the house warming party. You're all...."

"Intense?" I finished for her, laughing a bit. Before when she had mentioned the four of us, I could sort of feel what she was talking about. But now - now I got it. It was the three of us. It always had been. Now that Jasmine and Gerard were together, it felt like nothing could stop us. Ever.

"Yes, intense is a good way to describe it. A lot of intense things happen in threes. It's a highly symbolic and charged number. Father, son, holy ghost, the maiden, mother, crone, and those pyramids. Then there are triptych paintings -"

"And deaths," I said, cutting her off again. We drew out attention back to the canvas in front of us, and the power that I had just received from Alexa now felt as if it was draining out of my body. If the three of us were so powerful when we were together, what happened when it all went away? What happened when Death comes into the picture and takes and takes and takes?

"Yes," she said. She drew in a deep breath and rubbed my back. "And that's why I was painting this. When I was alone with my feelings, this image emerged from me, from the blackest of night and the pit of my sadness. A night like this is sometimes called 'the dark night of the soul.' And well, here is my dark knight."

"What will happen to us?" I asked Alexa and absolutely needing an answer. My questions were boiling over and there were too many insecurities. I had power, then I didn't. And then I hung onto it by a thread.

"Jasmine is having a baby. Does that mean that she is the new third?" I suggested.

Alexa shook her head. "That is not fair. Do not put that burden on the child. She will be what she will be. There will never be a new third. There will never need to be."

"What do you mean?"

Alexa had changed her tone of voice. From the way she was speaking, it almost felt like death wasn't real anymore. As if a finite life didn't really exist, because we would never need a new third. But I thought we had cleared this discussion up a long time ago. "You think it ends in darkness too?"

She drew my attention to the light on the tarot card. I finally focused on the background scenery, and that sun that was just peeking its head up from behind the hill. This was where the light was located: on the new day ahead. This was where you had to look when you were getting close to death. Gaze across the water, into a new city, beyond the hills. You had to look beyond it, beyond yourself. It was the only way to eventually get there, and see that light at the end.

"The card, of course, does not always mean an actual physical death, but the changing of one way of life to another. It could mean a change in personality or a change in lifestyle. In this, when I painted it, I was thinking about Gerard's actual eventual death," she gasped, her emotion overtaking her for that sentence, "But I still believe it's some type of journey."

"Where is he going?" My mind had begun to feel fully active again. When I heard that death may not be actual death, it made me think of other options and alternatives. Heaven was no such recourse, but maybe, something else? Maybe there was that in-between place where he could go and be for a while before he died. Maybe that was where this memory loss had come from and what it was amounting to. Maybe this whole mess we were in was his in-between death before a physical death. Maybe that middle place was where he was going. Where he was nothing... and everything at the same time. It made me choke to think about, him losing all of those aspects of himself. Eventually he would forget who he was, he would forget me and Jasmine, he would forget our love and his life, and then, where would it all go? Who would collect it and enter it into conversation again?

"I think he knows where he's going," Alexa stated.

"But where is that?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "It's different for everyone. When they die, they die. Bodies decompose and then that's that. I don't believe in god, in spite of what it may seem like with all these books around me and some of the things I may say, but I don't believe in him. I think we're all horribly alone in a huge universe. But those stories and those ideas exist for a reason." She paused for a second, trying to grasp at the blackness that language could not reach to. "When you die, your brain still stays active for another seven to ten minutes. Those minute must be elating, if you let them be. We fill ourselves with stories about a god, about many gods, about these cards that will help point us in the right direction through life, so we can really end up playing them all back before us in those minutes before we're really gone-gone. There is that transition phase. That last final chance to see all that we thought was beautiful."

Alexa went on to explain how that may not always be the case for everyone from a biological perspective since if you're killed by something that does affect your brain, like a bullet wound, then it may not have the same affect. Since Gerard's condition was a brain condition, I wondered if it still applied. But we didn't say anything about Gerard, for once. We talked around our feelings, we used reason and logic after the fact, to obscure our utter and bitter remorse for what was happening to a man that we both loved. I could tell from our discussion, and the way she had barely held herself together on the bed, that she loved Gerard. She mourned his presence, and it went far beyond our world-saving capacity. She was working on seeing Gerard the way that I was, too. We were trying to see beyond the myth, and to cherish the person that was disappearing before he was gone completely.

"You said there wouldn't be a new third," I repeated when our silence became too much. I had been so moved by her ideas about what happened after death that I couldn't comment on them. I knew them to be true in a way that I had never felt before. It was so right, I didn't need to argue for or against it, to say I agreed or disapproved. She hadn't needed me to, either."But what did you mean by that? What will happen to us? If Gerard goes where he needs to go and he is okay, what will we do in his wake? What do we all do without him?"

She looked at me and smiled, and said it as if it was the most obvious thing in the world: "You keep his memory alive. You add it to the collective unconscious yourself. You tell stories of stories, until you know what is real again. And Frank - " She added, gripping my arm. "Never, ever forget your feelings. They're more real than you think they are."

When I left Alexa's, shortly after that, I had books with me. I carried in my arms Madame Bovary and Orientalism by Edward Said, but I also had the Bible, The Upanishads, The Torah, and Kandinsky's book on the spiritual prophet. Alexa told me to come back for more anytime I needed them. I could take out as many as I wanted, and keep them as long as I wanted to. "And I'm always here to talk, too, Frank," she added. "Don't forget that either."

Chapter Two

A week later at exactly four-thirty, I knocked on The Professor's office door. I had not brought anything with me, but my empty backpack did not reflect the success or failure of the labor I had undertaken. Over the past week, I had been able to get through a lot of the books Alexa had lent me, plus some more from the library's shelves as well. I had been extremely diligent about visiting the old campus every single day after work, and then on weekend afternoons in order to study in the library and contribute to my other work. I resisted the urge to just try and get the gist of things. It was so tempting and easy to read the introduction on most theory and criticism books and then move on, but I made myself sit through the entirety of Orientalism and many others. Reading was not necessarily linked with understanding, as Alexa told me, and she encouraged me to keep notes or speak out loud in order to really be sure that I processed the information. I could sit and stare at a page and take nothing in. But if I was able to weave this theory and make it become practice instead as I began to apply it to daily life, that was further proof of comprehension. I figured that was what the Professor had wanted me to come to his office to demonstrate, so I had held off taking notes for the time being. Instead I applied the theory in my mind, to the life that I was still trying to find meaning for.

Jasmine and I had been communicating through emails, and I asked if I could begin to spend the mornings with Gerard instead of the afternoons, so I could balance it all. It was completely disorienting waking up extra early so I could have that time with Gerard before Mikey came to get me for work; not to mention then going to work in an office building, and coming to the library where conversations and echoes began to form in my mind, only to continue working. I was no longer a blank slate and that library was no longer quiet. It wasn't a roar, but it was getting there. Even when I was with Gerard in the morning, I began to hear the voices of his own books.

When he and I were together in the morning, we would spend a lot of time looking over books. They helped to ground him and make him feel more at ease. He knew his books, and more so, he knew language and words if they were put in front of him to read. Even if he wasn't reading, and had them close by, it still helped with his moods. His books were familiar to him because most of them had come from his art school days and carried that essence with them. Usually I would greet Gerard in the morning with food, ask him how he was, or sometimes ask the date, then gauge how he was functioning from there. If he was having a good day, he and I talked or were just together in bed for that little bit in the morning. If he was having a bad day, we would look over his old art books from school or his sketch books from years ago. Sometimes he would be incredibly moody and just want to draw or be by himself, and that was fine. We had perfected being by ourselves in the presence of the other person, and even if he wanted to sulk by the window, I would still stay in his room. I'd eat my breakfast quietly, then go to his bookshelf and gaze at the titles, wondering if pictures could talk to me the same way that books now were.

From the conversation that I had had with Alexa, and what I had read on Orientalism, pictures and art, in addition to the already established books and novels, could be equally damaging to the representation of the Other. That was Other with a capital O, I was learning. I had heard Jasmine use this phrase before, but since it had always been out loud and I had only been concerned with the gist, I was ignorant to her syntactic precision. Other with an O meant anyone who was different in anyway, and because of this perceived difference, their representation ended up becoming more mysterious than accurate. Language and pictures were created and then put a space between the Other and myself -the audience - which further exacerbated this uncertainty and accuracy. From what I had been gathering, it seemed like there was never going to be a resolution for this; that there was always going to be this gulf that would never be closed. I was still trying to figure the book out, though, and still in the process of figuring out myself (if I even had a distinct self) a lot of the time, too. In those morning sessions, I would often hold out a book in front of me and wonder how I could be both subject and object, reader and creator, and if there were any way to get closer to the text. I wondered if I could actually get inside the text, and explore those holes that The Professor had told me about. It was more than just criticism, however, that I wanted to embody. I wondered if I could embody art itself, if I could exist as a living work and then therefore not really have to create at all anymore. I remembered when I first saw the Strength painting that Alexa had done, I had felt myself inside of there. I began to wonder if that meant something more and I had participated beyond the realm of the normal audience member or creator. Had I fused the two? When I was holding out these books in front of myself, what exactly did I hold at a distance, and what exactly got inside of me, under my skin?

Some mornings, I would stand in front of Gerard and wonder how much of me was him and how much of him was me. He was an artist, and I was an artist; he was only made a teacher through my obedience as a student. His diatribes and philosophical conversations had only existed because I had been there to listen, and I knew things only because he had been the one to tell me. I knew my worth, and subsequently he knew his own, only because we had loved one another. He was losing his memory and in this process, I was losing myself. It had not happened yet, but I dreaded the day that he would eventually lose those memories that had defined me as a person, those memories that had been created when I was with him. I dreaded him forgetting who I was, because I didn't know if much else could exist after that at all. I began to realize in those early morning hours just how much I had defined myself through his image and interests. The Professor had shown me that; I had depended on him as the sole source of my knowledge, given to me in little neat and compacted lessons. But he had obscured things that were important from the original. He had left out details. He was unreliable. Even before his illness, he was not always telling the truth. He was telling his version of the truth. I would stand before him some mornings, and wonder who he was without me, and who I was without him. And the answers weren't scaring me as much as they used to. I still hadn't begun to form all of my questions or my theories yet; I could not fight in a debate battle, that was for sure, but I was beginning to separate. I was beginning to step back and look at my own life and interpret it. Fracture it. It was freeing, and it was terrifying. I had no idea who I was without him anymore, but that meant I could be anything at all.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14