June - The Liars 8 страница

"I think I'm going to go," I began to tell them. I stirred in my seat and began to gather up some of my utensils and tried to thank them for the meal. The two of them had gone back to a friendly debate over wine. I knew from my own drinking adventures that this was expensive wine. Wine that reminded me of Gerard and the night we had had together when we put ourselves together; a night that could still go on if I left right now.

"But Frank, you've hardly told us about yourself," Melinda informed me. "I want to know more about you. Ken tells me that you have a baby on the way?"

I nodded, but I didn't want to talk. I didn't want to tell them my life's details anymore. But I finally heard the minutia of his name, and got it to stick. Ken and Melinda, with their son who was named Keenan. This was their life, their laughable and untouchable life that had been blocked off by knowledge and dead authors, and in spite of all my hard work, I no longer understood. I was still in a cave, after all.

"And he used to do photography," he mentioned. His use of past tense rattled me.

"I still do it. I'm thinking of going back to it, when I'm not at work," I told him, hinting that I would no longer be around. I needed him to know that I was going to leave. This was my last act of fighting back - using my passion. If I was in the cave he said I was, then I knew how I needed to get out. I needed to talk to the people I cared about, take more photographs, and use my art. It was the only way.

The Professor seemed to understand what I was hinting at and he nodded as he clucked his tongue. "Very well. I thought we had been doing some good work, but the heart wants what it wants," he said the last part sardonically, making me shift again in my seat. "But before you go, let me tell you another sort of allegory, or cautionary tale, if you will. I know I've been saying a lot recently, but bear with me."

I nodded, as if I had a choice, and listened closely as he began to tell me about Chris McCandless. "He was a boy about your age. Decided that everyone around him were the liars and not living up to what they believed that life could be. He criticized everyone around him, but he should have criticised himself. He went to Alaska; this was his one truth. He wanted to life off the land, and he thought he could best achieve his goal by embodying Jack London and going on that quest. He went there against the wishes of everyone else around him. While there, his own error got himself killed. An oversight in his book caused him to eat poisonous plants and his miscalculation of a route cost him a way out. He died in the middle of wilderness, trying to uphold the ideas that he believed to be true. Happiness, beauty, love, freedom; these are good things, do not get me wrong, Frank. But he took himself and these things too seriously, he ignored those he loved and loved him back, and he could not laugh at himself. He died reaching for these things, Frank, and they were never real. Don't get too blinded by your own version of truth, because it hardly every corresponds with reality."

I nodded, only half listening and comprehending. His story had struck me, but I refused to pay attention to it at that very moment. I was too vulnerable, and I knew I needed to find the best way out of here.

I told The Professor that I would consider his musing, and that I had a good night. "But I have a baby to prepare for, and friends to see," I told him, and he nodded, finally conceding defeat. It was certainly a rare emotion for him to possess. He got up to shake my hand, but it felt cold now. Melinda shook my hand as well, but even that was cold. Kiddo was already in bed, so I headed out the door without saying goodbye to him. In the morning, I suspected, he would be just as relieved as I was that I was gone for good.

I was left with a bad taste in my mouth, but I knew it was for the better, even in spite of his cryptic tale. I looked back at the house before I got into the car, and I remembered the walls and walls of books. That had been the only section of their house I had liked, and the only place I had liked where he had taken me. The books I felt as if I could devour like they were their own dishes and delicacy. I was aware of the power that narratives had, and I could analyze that, surely, without splitting them all apart. I had not completely destroyed the beauty in life, the beauty in art, and moreover, the love story that I knew I had with Gerard. That was still precious and real to me. I thought of The Professor's books again, and how he had used them. It was not a way to connect with people. It was a way to keep them outside of himself; he had built himself this wall of dead authors who screamed their dead conversations at him. He thought this made him smart, knowing all that had come before him, but Gerard knew that, too. And he was more alive, misquoting Duchamp or Magritte or Proust. The dead authors made The Professor die to me; they made him form in a timeless vacuum, like a statue that was too modest to be sketched. While I heard the wild moan of ecstasy from the pages of novels and the vibrant yelling of excitement and freedom, he heard something else, and he kept it inside, he hid it deep within the pages, embedded citations, and behind their covers. He had built his own cover, and he was impenetrable. I could not get inside of him, though I now knew his name, and I would never even bother to try. I could not get inside of Melinda, The Prosecutor, either; only her eyes. And Kiddo, he was restless, he had something there, but he hid it away like a precious diamond. It would eventually come out, but I wasn't going to be around for it. I wanted to devour book after book after book to fill the void I was met with now, walking away from what I thought was going to be good. But I had loved people too deeply not to know how much he had failed.

I walked away from the house, and I imagined I was heading out of a cave, and I ran to my car, turned on the headlights, and drove home towards the sun that I knew was there, that would always be there, because it was never-ending.

When I got home, Jasmine was in the baby's room. She had moved some of the cut-ups and her and Hilda's zine collection in there and she was going through them. Her large piece of collage work that contained cut-ups of every edition of her magazine was hung up on the wall. It was a mess of words and newsprint to me, not coherent whatsoever, though I would sometimes catch glimpses of odd headlines ("shameless / botched lives") and unique sentences ("degrading art to be removed"). She was standing back from her work, hands on her hips and back, regarding it. She shook her head and moved forward, ready to take it down and put it someplace else, when she noticed I had come upstairs. She seemed surprised to see me and asked why I was back so soon.

"He wasn't what I thought he was," I told her. I was well aware of the fact that Jasmine had been a little envious of my expeditions recently, and I did not want to disappoint her as much as I was that very moment. She scrunched up her nose a bit, but didn't say much else.

With a sigh, I walked into the room to take a better look at the other contents. Hilda had been giving us stuff like crazy that she was finding online for free or through friends at workshops, and half of our room was already furnished. Though we did not plan on using a crib a lot of the time, we had a bed for when she got older already (that Jasmine had piled with more cut-ups that were not yet complete) and a dresser for her clothing. It looked like we were expecting a seven year old, and not that Jasmine was only six months pregnant.

"I've been pregnant for half a year," she bellowed when she realized how long it had been. "How much longer? My god."

She had moved to sitting on the bed, complaining that her back had been hurting her. She apologized for not greeting me at the doorway because she still didn't know how to balance her own body and weight. I came and sat down next to her, instead, and she leaned over from her brightly colored pile and gave me a quick kiss.

"I'm sorry he wasn't what you had hoped. What was he like then, out of curiosity?" she questioned now that she was off her feet. She had been surprised by my sudden distaste for The Professor, whose name was now Ken, I reminded myself. I had once talked so highly of him, but it had all worn off. Jasmine was used to liking her professors, at least, her women's studies one. They treated people like people, I figured, and not like experiments or people still trapped by their own ignorance. I told her what had been said to me that night and she looked appalled.

"People are so fucked up. You're not a puppet. You're not there to pad his ego," she had turned her attention away from her zines and was focused solely on me. We sat on the bed cross-legged, our hands touching in the middle. It felt good to hold her again, even if her stomach provided this large hill we had to sometimes reach over.

"They also thought that because I was a vegetarian that meant I ate fish," I said, knowing that Jasmine would get a kick out of that. She looked at me carefully at first, then shrugged her shoulders.

"People forget or they don't know. It happens." She reached out and pulled my neck towards her, and kissed me on the mouth quickly. "I'm glad that you know, though. This is what makes this possible." She referred to his stomach, and I agreed.

She went back to her zines, and I began to look around the room at the items we had for our daughter. I looked at the large space on the wall, and wondered if Gerard would paint a mural here for us like he had for Mikey and Alexa. I wondered if he would have the strength to do that then, and if he did, what Biblical tale he would paint. Would it be another great creation myth, but free of satire? I sighed, realizing yet again how disappointed I had been with the dinner that night. Although I tried to focus on Jasmine, and got her to tell me more about collages, her plans for the magazine, and what she was working on right then, my mind wandered. The story The Professor had told about Chris McCandless still stuck with me. It resonated in a way I had not explored yet, and I recalled The Professor's words about his death: useless, pointless. I knew enough now to realize that he had been telling me these two stories, one completely ancient and set in Athens, and this modern day one set in America, on purpose. He wanted me to connect the dots between them both, and while that was easy enough to see the intent, it still didn't seem like the same context. Gerard had explained Socrates to me in a much different way. Chris and Socrates had both died instead of giving up what they believed in -- but Socrates' had been a willful death. Chris had been a mistake, a horrible accident. The Professor made it sound like a suicide, as if he had made those mistakes on purpose; or worse than that, if Chris was stupid enough to make them in the first place, then he therefore deserved to die. These small nuances in storytelling were getting to me and confusing me. I wanted someone else to help. I asked Jasmine if she had ever heard of Chris before and her eyes went wide.

"So sad what happened to him," she said.

"So it was a horrible accident, right?"

She nodded, and then when I explained why I was asking and what The Professor had said about him, her eyes widened even more. "A cautionary tale? What on earth. No, Frank. No. If that professor knew anything about Chris' actual life, he wouldn't be saying that. He fucked up, sure, but he did not die because he was ignorant. He wanted to go to Alaska, but he was planning on coming back. Even while he was there, he was beginning to realize how wrong he was and how much he needed to come home again. People always focus on the fact that he went to Alaska and it was so important he killed himself for it. They turn him into a martyr for the arts. He was not a martyr. You can't be a martyr if you realize you made a mistake. Not in going away, but in thinking that you would be happy once you got there, and be able to keep it forever. Happiness means nothing without another person, and he said that. He wrote that down. No one can deny he learned, even if he did die in the process. He wanted to come home again."

I nodded, trying to follow along. "Why do you think he wanted to come home again?"

"Why does anyone? There are better things there. It was the same for Thoreau as well. He came out of the woods. He didn't live his life there. He needed to go and I would never discount that for him or for Chris. But he needed to come back, too. He needed to live his life. It was just a horrible accident that got in the way for Chris. Not a warning sign or cautionary tale. Don't listen to that."

"What do you think he would have done if he came back? I mean, what do you do when you have that final goal already achieved? What do you do with your life then, if you spent so much of it working towards something as great as that to begin with?"

Jasmine stopped for a moment and took awhile to think. She finally just said, "I guess you're happy for some time. And then you find something else. I don't know, it just...."

"Goes on?" I suggested, thinking of our flower discussion. She smiled, remembering it too.

"Yeah, I suppose," she leaned down and kissed me again, and I pulled her in to make it last longer. It had been a while since she and I were alone, without Hilda's guffawing presence, as well. I missed these people - these real people, not dead authors - in my life. I needed them more than ever. But when I pulled away from the kiss, and Jasmine went back to her zines again, that feeling occurred. That loneliness, that despair, that want for a project. Was that what I was searching for, all of this time? That finale piece that made me satisfied to go on just living my life? What was my Alaska? What did I need to go into the woods to do, only to come out again and tell everyone else about it? I needed to do it, to go and do something, whatever it was, that was for sure. But death and tragedy were not elements that made the story a good one. Even Ken had gotten that right, only he had fucked up the underlying meaning, the truth that was really lurking behind the words that were used to express them. Chris needed Alaska, like Thoreau, and just as much as Gerard needed Paris. Gerard became the icon of that pursuit to me right then, because he had gone for his dream. He had left, but he also came back. He came back for me. He came back for us.

There was always a reason you left, and there was always going to be a reason you came back. You always came back, I knew it. You always returned to where you were loved, because that was how you understood it was real. You had to leave to fully understand what life was about. To be taken out of context, only to be ushered back in again. You needed to be separated from yourself, to realize you were in love, and how powerful the two of you had been.

I longed for that escape for myself. I had gone to Paris with Gerard, but that was his dream, and even in my coming to him, that was still his dream. Where did I want to go, and was there even a place I could go? With my life already bustling around me, I wondered if I had missed my exit, or if was still waiting for me someplace soon.

As if hearing his name in my thoughts, Gerard came downstairs and then knocked on our door. He walked inside the room, and though he seemed a little disoriented being up at this hour, he had followed the voices. He knew these voices and wanted to be with them. Jasmine and I welcomed him, but we also worried about him. Because he often slept so much during the day, he had sometimes taken to wandering in the middle of the night. In a brief fit of desperation that morning, we had considered getting locks for the bedroom doors, but quickly discarded that idea before Mikey picked me up for work. It would hurt us all too much to lock him up, and I didn't let myself think to the point in the future where it could become real. Gerard was looking around Paloma's bedroom, at the cut-ups, and new furniture, as if this was the first time he had seen it all. He was drawn over to the large wall space, and touched it careful.

"I'm going to paint this," he told us. I had no idea if he was being serious or just stating things that were familiar. It didn't matter.

"You should," Jasmine told him. "What do you want to paint?"

"Flowers. I've been painting them recently. They remind me of something. Of someone," he said. He traced his fingers along the long white wall, ending up where Paloma's bed started and where the two of us where sitting. He leaned on the frame, but he did not sit down. He was touching his chin and considering things, gazing at the large blank canvas. Jasmine began to get up and I went over to her, giving her a hand. We whispered a bit about him in each other's ears to see if we should do something. We decided he was fine for now. A bit out there, but generally okay. Jasmine clung onto my arm as we stared at his back.

"I know you're talking about me," he said. "I'm okay. Don't worry."

Jasmine jumped a bit, as if she had been caught. We stopped our murmuring, and eventually, both turned our gazes away from him. Jasmine went to collect the stray bits of paper from her collage work, and then realized she had buried an envelope under the pile. "Oh, Frank. Some mail came for you today."

She handed me the small package and I furrowed my brows. My pay stubs came to my mailbox at work and Jasmine knew to throw junk mail away, since she was usually at the mailbox before I was. When I saw that it was from my father, my hands began to shake as I started to open it. Letters were usually serious business, especially when I knew he had access to a phone and there were usually plenty of people here to answer it.

I opened it up to find a check, along with a small handwritten note. My dad wasn't one for words, either, but while my mother made up for her silences with visits to the art museums, my father made up for it with materialism. "Frank. This is the money that I've saved from not drinking. I would add to it every week that I didn't buy anything. It's not much, but it's something. I wanted to show you what can be done and what matters. I also wanted to give your daughter something. From your dad - and your mom too. Thanks."

His note was awkward as he tried to be authoritarian, but caring, on paper and it made me smile. But when I saw the amount on the check, I lost it. I wanted to cry, and I felt it coming out in small tears down my cheeks. I didn't sob, though. When I found myself taking a breath, it came out in a laugh. I was beyond being too proud to take money from my parents. This was a fucking blessing and the fact that I was holding it in my hands did not seem real. I showed Jasmine and she began to sob and then laugh, too. She had been so stressed with the situation at the magazine, the state of her car, and the strange payment plans we had for our mortgage. She and Hilda had been going to Food Not Bombs more, and I knew it wasn't just because it was a good political event. Jasmine was scared. She was eating more because she was hungry, but she didn't want to pay more for groceries. This check, though it wasn't much, was so much more than I thought was possible right then. It was the act of giving, more than anything else, that floored me. I wanted to call my father, but it was getting pretty late. Jasmine and I hugged one another, instead, and then Gerard called over to us.

"Hey, what's going on? I see good faces."

I smiled and took a few quaking breathes. "Yes, very good faces, Gerard."

"Why?"

"Because... my dad sent a note. Do you remember my dad?" I asked. Gerard took a deep breath, maybe remembering when my father beat him up or maybe not remembering the dinner where he had been yelled at, but there was something. He was there, he felt it, and he nodded. He moved away from the wall, and walked towards Jasmine and myself. He grabbed her hand first, and then touched her stomach. He looked at me and smiled, and I told him not to worry.

"My father said he was sorry. He gave us money," I added. "We're okay."

Gerard nodded again, and then wrapped his other arm around me. We all stood huddled together for quite some time, before Gerard broke us up again. His mood suddenly changed, but this time, it was good. He grabbed my arm, and pulled me closer to himself, pulled me into a dance with him. We started to dance without music and in disjointed movements, but I went with it. I tried to heed the invisible sounds in the room, and make something beautiful out of it. I tried to let him teach me, to pull me further out of the cave that I was still sitting in.

"This is a celebration, right?" he asked when we got going. I told him it was, and Jasmine agreed. We were all celebrating then, and soon the world itself dropped away and peeled back into the night time. The world that Jasmine had been cutting up was completely dismembered, and within the trauma culture, we made up our cohesion. "Careful," I whispered into Gerard ear, and it made him dance with me more, pulling me closer to him. Soon, even the room itself had disappeared and I just saw him before me. There was no sense that he knew what he was doing when he was dancing, other than that he was doing it with me. We had done this once before, seven long years ago. He was showing me he remembered. He was showing me that he loved me. And Jasmine too, for he moved over to her next and the two of them danced a small foxtrot across the room. It was so simple and so beautiful. I watched them dance from the edge of our daughter's bed, and I wished that the night would never end.

Chapter Five

Even though we technically didn't need to go to Food Not Bombs anymore, Jasmine and I went the next time they had their community feast. Before then, I had been working through some more of my own meditations, with Jasmine (and sometimes Hilda) joining me as I sat at our kitchen table with a fan rotating around us and a blank page in front of me. We were learning that when we wanted to know things for ourselves, we needed to find alternative ways of accessing information. The library could only take us so far, since people manipulated libraries. Even if I had wanted to read books about photography criticism in my undergrad, the school was only going to purchase so many and only by specific people. This type of omission was only the beginning, and I knew that it extended much farther than photography. The Professor's quip about philosophy as studying "dead white men" started to become concretized in my mind as I searched for the faces behind the authors who were remembered and those who were forgotten (but not quite lost).

Lydia's birthing center and the alternative library held a wealth of resources where inside most town or university funded libraries simply didn't exist. In some kitchens where Food Not Bombs did their cooking, they held cookbooks and alternate resources that also didn't exist outside of this protective sphere. Hilda and Jasmine had been ravaging them and taking what pamphlets they could for weeks, which Jasmine began to share with me before she cut them up. I went through what was left of her zines and relied on Hilda and Jasmine to summarize any parts that I had missed orally until it comprehended. Most of this was about feminism and sexuality, but there were a few on Marxism; this flagged in my memory, and I immediately went to right away and tried to absorb. After Jasmine got her ultrasound one evening, we didn't go home right away, but hung out in the huge comfy chairs in the alternative library, and talked casually to the woman with thick-rimmed glasses. We checked some books out and brought them home, and added them to our ever-growing pile. This became a small project we brainstormed on together, even when Hilda was present, it was Jasmine and myself relaying ideas back and forth. In between getting the room ready for our daughter and making sure Gerard was okay, we spent our idle time trying not to think about our worries. The money that my dad had given us was not a lot, but it was a small fortune to us and meant that for the meantime, we could rest easy.

His check and small note made me feel more secure about the future, too. My parents, while they were not rich like The Professor and The Prosecutor, they did have money. They were both thrifty, mostly because they had lived through poverty before I was born (and I suspected a little while he had his minor drinking problem). They knew what it was like to be constantly stressed about the number in the bank, being in overdraft, and paying heavy interest rates and they never wanted to go back to it. His gesture of giving us money was caring; though I did hate the fact that he only extended this curiosity when a baby was involved, and that he had not mentioned Gerard in his note. But those were incidental details, I knew they were. I began to realize that my father had his own language like my mother, only he spoke without anger when he approved, and showed money for kinship. On principle, I should have turned it down because he was still not quite behaving the way that I expected a father to behave, but I knew that was not helping anyone. We needed this money. I wasn't going to be like Socrates and condemn us to death (perhaps that was a little extreme) just because my father had omitted one sentence about Gerard. With the check, my father was saying that he wanted me to be in his life, and I took his money to accept his offer. I cashed it the next day and we got Jasmine some proper food (she had been eating nothing but peanut butter sandwiches far too much), and then we paid some bills. I sent him a letter for thanks, and the deal was done. We felt better knowing he was there, and I felt better knowing that in the future, if things got bad again, he could possibly be there for more. He was not retiring anytime soon, and even when he did, he would still work. I knew that we were going to have a lot of support for this baby, and it wasn't just going to be my parents stepping in.

Hilda had gotten us most of the furniture and smaller items, Mikey and Alexa donated the rest of whatever supplies Jonah had now grown out of, and Vivian contributed as well since Cassandra was adamant about never having kids. We had a lot of stuff and we had a lot of people. We were slowly building up our family - I had just never figured that my parents would be a part of it. I didn't want to turn them away, even though I knew I was not obligated. I was not biologically determined to accept them as Paloma's grandparents. But I wanted to, now. Even before the check, I knew I had wanted to repair that relationship. I may have thought I was turning to them out of anger when I was drunk that one night, but why else did anyone go home again? It wasn't to fight or to prove worth, it was to be coddled. It always was. In spite of the inferiority I felt realizing that point as I poured over alternative parenting books in the library, I knew it was true. I had wanted their help and any anger I felt that night had been directed at myself. My father saw through the guise I was putting up, and he had done what I needed him to do. He was still shaky around the issues of Gerard, but I understood. He understood. All of this made it okay for them to be Paloma's grandparents, and in my letter thanking him, I asked them both what they wanted to be called. "I'm partial to grandma and grandpa, but do what you guys want," I informed them.

Jasmine had called her step-brother and apparently he had told their mother. But she had not visited them. They had sent cards and well wishes, but were, for the most part, absent. They lived in another state now since her step-father had gotten a job and she was okay with this. She didn't want her family around. They brought up too many memories, she said. They talked about the past too much. Her mother had sent a card that congratulated her for being pregnant, but then warned her about me and about the species of men who only wanted to hurt. I thought she had been over-exaggerating when Jasmine told me, but shook her head.

"See?" Jasmine showed me and I was taken aback. The hand writing was so soft and delicate, even as it said horrible things, seemingly out of thin air. "My mom can't get it right that not all men are like my father. I mean, she married Steve for a reason and clearly they're happy. She just needs to calm down."

Jasmine shrugged and put the card away and that was the last we talked of it. We went on with our information hunting instead and focused our mental energy there, not deciphering cryptic signals sent by parents. She wasn't too sure what they were going to want to call themselves to our child, and I didn't press much to ask if she wanted them there. She said she wanted Jason, her step-brother, as an uncle and he had seemed into the idea.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14