June - The Liars 12 страница

I found that Gerard kept returning to three artists over and over again. He wanted to see Pablo Picasso's blue period and then tell me about the French symbolist poets who were also inspired around this time. He wanted to talk to me about hunger and the squalor of the city, about the prostitutes that Picasso painted and how he made blue beautiful. There were moments when he would talk about the color blue that I thought I saw some stirring recognition I the back of his mind. He would talk about a "blue renewal" and how Picasso believed that he was washing the city and giving it another chance when he painted it all in blue. Blue was like water, and one could be bathed inside of it, and come through the other end a new person. The virgin Mary was blue, and this was where that phrase came from. It was a French curse, an ironic twist on the renewal and sacred capacity of it. Sometimes he would let those French words past his lips, and then he would look at me and smile. He'd kiss me and kiss me, and I would feel as it I was being showered upon by blue paint again, as if I was renewed once again. But a lot of the time, after we talked about blue, we went onto Picasso and his cubist period, and then his other work. If he had not gotten the blue, when we got to Picasso doves, he seemed to remember.

"Have I told you that Picasso painted doves?" he would ask, and I'd say no. I would always say no, because then the quiet old man in front of me would become a young man again, and tell me about his own dove. It was one that he kept in his apartment to remind himself about freedom, because he needed it there. He would sometimes tell me more about freedom, and I listened to every single world as if it was the first time. It was always my first time with him, his arms around me, like I was seventeen.

We would go onto Vincent Van Gogh next, and he'd look at the sunflowers and try to think back, try to remember. He told me about Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, and the relationship that they denied having together, but Gerard was convinced it had happened. He would squeeze my hand tightly, and sometimes I would read from the book of Van Gogh's letters that Gerard kept on his shelf. We found the letter where he was addressing his brother Theo about the sunflower paintings he had just begun, and about how happy they made him. Gerard told me that flowers had this type of hold over people, that they were persistent, and that he had bought flowers to amuse himself while in Paris.

"With me?" I asked, hoping he would remember. He usually did, but then he also confessed that he had done this many nights before I got there. "Mostly to remember Van Gogh. I wanted to be happy, too. I wasn't there. No good feelings."

I nodded, and held him closer when he told me more about the darker times in Paris, the times he had glossed over before. I gathered, from the many tales he divulged, that he was sick while in Paris. He knew things were changing then, that his mind was slowing down. "But it was only madness, like the kind Van Gogh had, I thought. So I used flowers to make it better."

"Did it work?" I asked him, and he had smiled. "I'm here," was his simple response, and it was all that I had needed. Flowers had gotten him through the Parisian desolation, long enough to come back, long enough to give those flowers to me.

"Do you know what Van Gogh's last words were?" Gerard asked me suddenly. My heart beat in my chest menacingly, my hands trembled, and I let my morbid curiosity ask, "What?"

"The sadness that never ends," Gerard quoted. He sat there for a bit and touched his chin, thinking through sometimes. "Liar."

"Liar?" I asked, and Gerard nodded vehemently.

"Liar," he repeated. "The sadness does end. I know it does. Even in madness, it ends. Nothing is never ending."

I nodded, then, biting my lip pressed a bit more. "What about the sun?"

He smiled, the expression taking over his entire face. We both looked up, and then moved ourselves to the bed. We stared at the handprint and the French words underneath it. "Comme le soliel interminable," he said out loud, and then smiled again. I wanted to ask him where he had learned that from, but I thought it better not to know.

"You're right," I conceded to him. "As much as I love Van Gogh, he is a liar."

Gerard took my hand, and pressed it to his mouth. We sat up in bed, and brought the books over to us, continuing our lessons like this.

"Just like Frida," he had commented. "Living our lives lying down, but up dreaming."

Frida Kahlo was the third artist we returned to, and the one we probably spent the most time on. She had been the most refreshing out of all we had seen. I noticed how the artist we repeated also repeated themes in Gerard's life. Picasso had been there for his art, for his passion, and for his love. His works reminded and comforted Gerard of his own life and his own love. Van Gogh helped him to work through the isolation that he had felt when he lived in Paris, and helped him to express the elation of being reunited. Van Gogh also helped him to escape from madness into real life, into finding meaning and a purpose. Van Gogh's constant letter writing was comforting, documenting his passion and his life. Gerard documented everything during that time in Paris, too, and though none of his journals made it back to New Jersey, I remembered what they looked like. I had liked watching the ink bloom on pages, marking a life lived so richly and full of color - but absolutely and utterly alone.

But Frida, she held a different place in his life. She held the two of us together in a way that we had never thought possible. Her work was full of nightmares and savage imagery, but she never liked to dwell in tragedy. Frida had detested wallowing in misery and madness; she would have probably cut Van Gogh's ear off herself, hearing him complain the way he had. She lived the last half of her life, in a cast, in bed and this was the fact that Gerard seemed to remember about her the most. We must have looked at the photo of her painting her cast in bed more than we looked at her actual paintings, though we spent a great deal of time looking at those, too. Especially the ones that depicted her pain, The Two Fridas and Henry Ford Hospital. The violence that her body suffered was rendered so visible and so evident in these works. But she had hung around, even in spite of pain and immobility. Though there were speculations that her death was a suicide, it had been a good life. A life not lived in vain and a life she had cultivated outside of art. She had been married to Diego Rivera, had affairs with many people, including Georgia O'Keeffe and Leon Trotsky, and she would have had children if her body would have let her. The art was an escape from pain, like Gerard found himself turning to it now. He never wanted to forget the rainbow, so he painted it. Frida had lived a long time in spite of her ailing body and I knew that Gerard kept coming back to her work, to the photographs of herself painting her full body cast, and to some little quotations, because they made him feel okay. They made him feel better going towards what he was going to.

When he was more lucid, I asked him. "Where do you think you are going?" It had been a question that had plagued me since seeing Alexa, and we had discussed death frankly. Gerard was feeling better this night and we had spent nearly the entire time with Frida, so I figured he'd be up to this. He knew that Van Gogh was a liar, so I wondered what he thought was truth.

He told me he didn't know where he was going, but that he was reading Frida and what she said made sense to him. "When she died, in her journal she wrote, 'I hope the exit is joyful and I hope never to return.' I think the same thing sometimes. Even before all of this. I worry about darkness, but I will be okay."

I had interpreted before that he mentioned darkness or black to mean existing without memories, and I nodded and touched his arm. When he became scrambled some nights, I had to learn to interpret his new lexicon. I told him that this part scared me too. "But do you also hope never to return?"

He nodded. "I don't need to. I have this."

He touched my face, and though I knew he wanted to elucidate more, this was it for now. This was all I needed, too, and I began to fill in the blanks by myself, on my own. He remembered our life together that night, but he was losing it around the edges. Sometimes from the way he was speaking, I could tell he had reverted back to his art school days, and Jasmine conferred that this had happened with her, too. I would hear her crying some nights, realizing that she had lost him before I lost him. He was always good about remembering me. He rarely called me by another name. Sometimes he wouldn't name me at all, and then I was suspicious, but it was okay. It didn't matter. Even if he looked confused, he was never angry at us and in spite of what I sometimes feared, was never aggressive.

"Tell me about Paris," he said to me shortly after. I wasn't sure if he needed his memory jogged that night, or if he was tired of talking and wanted his own version of a bedtime story. I didn't care, either way, and I began to go through our entire affair.

"You made me wait for seven years, you jerk," I teased him. I told him about the poster I had seen advertising the trip, Rappelez-vous ce que c'était que d'être libre?, and how it had been that which finally let me come. I relayed our meeting at the cafe after some long, long letters and waiting periods. I told him he never cleaned off the damn table before he started to write so that light shone through the page, like a window, like a prism. I told him about the good food, but that he lost weight because he rarely ate regular meals. I told him about the great sex we had when I finally got there, and how he got up really early in the morning to go for walks. I told him about sunflowers and market places. I told him everything, and that night it felt as if I had lived my whole life there again. I hugged him so strongly when I said that I was done, that we had gotten on the plane and we’ve come home.

"There was a rainbow when we landed in New Jersey," I said, then shaking my head. "I still don't know how rainbows happen in New Jersey in the winter time, but I don't care. I know what I saw."

"And then what?" he asked, but I couldn't tell him. The story was still going on, so I could barely sort through it myself. I had no idea what to say to him, so I just held him and he held me back. He seemed to remember things more when he touched them, and I encouraged him to put his hands all over me. I wanted to place him in every last crevice of my body, I wanted him to crawl inside of me, I wanted to carry him in my heart. But he merely felt the surface, as if the answers were written on me, as if he was O'Keeffe and would continue to make art through his hands if his eyesight failed him. He touched me, again and again, and eventually said it was all right. He was going to be okay.

"I just have the forgetting disease. That's all," he said, and made it sound like nothing, when fuck, it was taking everything.

The last night that we had together, the real last night, because in the morning Daniel and the van were coming by to pick us up and take us away for a month, I prayed that he was lucid. I needed him to understand that we were leaving and he would not see me for a while. We had held off telling him that we were going until the absolute last minute. We didn't want to upset him, and we also did not want to upset ourselves. Jasmine had had her time with him in the morning, but it was falling on me, being the last to see him, to tell him what was happening.

When I walked into his room and saw that he was painting, I took it as a good sign. It was still the portrait piece of Jasmine from before, displaying her from the waist up, sitting on the bed. I thought he was still painting it, but as I got closer, I noticed he was really just looking at it. He kept the piece by his bed, along with our handprints, the dove box, and a list of the date and what was going on with him, to help himself out.

I sat down on the bed and asked him how he was doing. He nodded, but did not remove his vision from where it rested. Sitting in front of the painting and being mute could be good or bad signs. She was pregnant in it; maybe he was trying to sort out his affiliation there. I had no gauge for lucidity. Just a horrible, horrible feeling inside of my chest.

In the quiet that surrounded us, I felt my life cave in. I began to cry; I couldn't help it. I had been keeping it together for so long and I had not resorted to drinking. I wanted it, but even when The Professor had wine I kept my distance from it. I wanted to take a break, but I also wanted to ease this guilt and burden I felt because of this. I had been so worried all day that tomorrow morning on the ride into the community that I would just burst into tears and nothing would make sense anymore and I would feel as if I was making a big mistake. I was crying now instead, not because I was making a mistake, but because I hated how relieved I was for leaving. It was horrible wondering if he remembered me, if he still loved me. Could you forget something about love? Could you forget that sensation that it did to your body, the way it crept inside of you and got into your thoughts and never left? He had been a part of me for so long. Not even metaphorically conjuring Plato - I had been inside of him and him inside of me. We were having a baby together. It took too much energy to wonder if he had forgotten how to love me. I had placated myself too much with his thoughts of Picasso. He remembered Picasso and blue and doves, therefore, he remembered me. He loved me. But I couldn't take it anymore. I cried on his bed and I didn't care if I upset him as well.

He came and sat down next to me. He apologized, and I wanted to push his hands away and tell him he did not even know what he apologized for.

"Frank, it's okay, I know, I'm sorry, I have Alzheimer's," he said. But he could have been reading it off the whiteboard we kept in his room with that information on it. He told me the date, but that didn't matter. He could have been reading it again. I turned away from him on the bed, only to realize now that I was ashamed. My face was red and flushed, and my throat felt like it was closing up. He was touching my back so caringly, and I felt like a horrible person. I could not meet his eyes. I spat out that Jasmine and I were leaving in the morning.

"For a long time?" he asked.

I nodded. "About a month or so."

"I'm staying here?" he asked. I turned over in the bed now. I was lying down, my head on his pillow, and he was sitting on the edge, looking down at me. He held my hand and rubbed his thumb in circles, but he didn't say anything else. His face did the speaking for him. His lips were thin, as if he was trying to hold something back.

When I told him that Vivian was also coming in the morning, he seemed to take the news better. Vivian was familiar to him, and when I mentioned her house, he seemed to know what I meant. He knew the Vivian now, with a house and a daughter, not the Vivian who lived in a dorm room. I had heard bits and pieces of their story come out of his mouth, but none of it made sense. Anytime he lost something, he said that it was robbed like Vivian, and that I should call her and let her know. I had wanted to bring it up when I saw her, but there was no time for that.

"Are you going to be okay?" I asked Gerard. I had calmed down a lot more, now that the burden of telling him about my absence was gone. He seemed okay, maybe a little sad, but he understood what was going on. I was sure of that. There was nothing written on the whiteboard to help him, now, and he was still here, still talking to me and touching me.

"Can we lie down?" he asked.

"Of course," I told him right away. I shifted more into his bed, right to the wall, to give him as much room as he needed. But as soon as he got under the covers, he asked me what I was doing over there, and pulled me over to him.

"If I have to let you go now, my dove, at least give me this much," he said quietly. I let him pull me, and I let him take all that he needed. When we began to kiss, and I moved myself to his neck, then ear, I whispered, "Take everything." He held me closer, and I told myself he knew, because he began to take what he needed.

He held me that night, for most of the night, not speaking. He seemed to want to explore every inch of my body, instead. We left our clothing on, for the most part, and he just lifted his fingers underneath and all around. We kissed a lot, too. We had been reading days earlier about Magritte's The Lovers and Mother And Child by Klimt, and he had liked the way the people were touching one another. It had been vulnerable to him, and he wanted to do that. He knew what sex was like, and sex was almost easy. But it was that intimacy and vulnerability, that was hard. That was everything. One critic we had spent time reading about had said that the soul was contained in a single kiss, and, having shared that, couples were now bonded forever. This had been why Magritte had a sheet over The Lovers, as if to protect them from that sudden damnation of fate. I thought that had been a much too simplistic reading when I first discovered it, but the way that Gerard was kissing me then, it felt quite right. It felt like he was breathing me in, remembering me, and I was doing the same for him. We had both wanted to forget, but we needed to take a piece of the other with us when we did go, wherever we ended up getting to.

I wondered how much could be lost in a month, and how much could be gained. It seemed like our lives were cascading all around us and that everything was changing. I looked down at our bodies, together, and I wondered how much would be recalled when we put them together again. We had already put our bodies together, like that great Plato story. We didn't need to do it again - especially now that the kiss was passing between us like old stories and paintings. How much would stay the same in that month away? How would this all look when I came back? I could not believe I was leaving him, for the first time in my life, I was ushering him away. I knew how much I needed to. He had left me to be free, and I needed to leave him to do the same. It was the only way to know that all of this had been real.

"You better not forget me," I told him. I grabbed his face gently and pull him on top of me. We lay together like that awhile, him nuzzling me with his nose before he responded.

"I will never forget you, my dove," he said. He buried his face in my neck and I began to cry again. I could easily attribute his expression to something that he had read. I had given him that dove box back, with the little scroll inside that said those very words. He could have just been parroting those words, knowing that he was saying something right because it was written down. He was unreliable, after all.

But the way he held our bodies together, and then, the way he pushed our hands together like a five pointed star, barely touching, I knew he wasn't a liar. He was Gerard, and I loved him. He would not forget me, ever, because he said he wouldn't. And I had to trust him. It was the only way.

In the morning, I watched the sunrise from his window and it felt like Paris again. With one final kiss, and one final promise, it was my turn to go.

July - Safe

Go down, Moses
Way down in Egypt's Land
Tell old Pharaoh
Let my people go.
Jubilee Singers

Chapter One

The Bear community was located six hours southwest of where we currently lived. It was still in New Jersey, but located around areas and through counties I had never heard of before. It made me feel inferior, as if I didn't know enough about where I came from. I could name the fifty states because they had drilled it into us so strongly in school, but once it came down to the inside workings of the roads and cities of each, I was lost. Other than Paris, my hometown with my parents where I currently lived, and a few trips I had taken when I was younger to Florida, the world was pretty much empty to me. The driving began on familiar highways, gradually getting off at more exits, and then driving through the typical cottage area that rich people (maybe even The Professor and The Prosecutor, I thought to myself) had their summers and second homes. But soon after, we even left those behind. We had barely been driving two hours when all that I could name and recite dropped off my own personal map, and we began on the real trek. There were still cabins and houses on the road as we drove to it, but they became less and less prevalent, and began to get traded for more thickly populated woods and granite walls of stone. We still had four hours to go, although Daniel had said that was a generous estimate. Maybe three and a half, especially if Paul, the driver, was getting antsy about going back to work again.

Jasmine and I had been the last stop on the roster, since we were on the outskirts of town. We were placed in the back of the van with the rest of our own cargo, and everyone else's backpacks and duffle bags in behind. We seemed to have packed the most - but we sort of had to. Jasmine had all these instructions from Lydia in case something went wrong, and although she wanted to escape work, Jasmine brought some assignments to do and pieces to investigate. My packing had consisted of a backpack full of Alexa's books and some I had purchased myself, along with one filled with the bare minimum like my toothbrush and a few sets of underwear. As much as this was a retreat into nature and we both wanted to embrace the wild, this excursion was solely for Jasmine. This was her purpose and she would be filling every minute of her time with her own expectations. I had brought more books than boxers because I knew I would need something a bit more substantial than daydreams to keep my time occupied. Yet, I didn't want to take my camera. I could not explain the absence of the urge into words yet, but when Jasmine asked if I had brought it and I said no, she nodded as if she understood. I found my gaze dropped from the windows of the van as we drove, especially when I began to recognize nothing at all, and went down to my hands instead. Jasmine looked at her small palms too, and I wondered if we were both questioning what we were meant to do. She was ecstatic, though, even if she was questioning a lot at that moment. This place and this time period would actually allow her - allow us both - to get to the bottom of something we had both been avoiding. We bumped along a gravel road at one point and I knocked myself out of my stare, and attended to the bags from the back that had been jostled forward. The others in the van with us had far fewer items and really were embracing that living off the land quality that The Bear promised. I even heard one of the girls near the front seat mention Chris McCandless and how he had stated that all one needed in life should fit into a single backpack, so that had been all she had brought.

That had been Nicole, one of the two women who were in the seats in front of us, the other being named Catherine. They were young; just out of their fourth year of college and going on a "life altering" - "no, life-finding, life embracing" trip of which their parents did not approve. Both had tanned skin and dark long hair, which Nicole had braided in by her sides. They wore skin-tight pants and what Jasmine hoped to be vegan doc martins, along with oversized t-shirts and sweaters. They appeared to be twin entities to me, and as we drove, I could only tell Catherine apart by her slightly more nasally tone of voice and less idiotic banter. They were the loudest in the car and spoke pretty much the entire trip, but they were not really reflective of the others that inhabited the van, or that we were going to meet at The Bear in a matter of hours. The driver was named Paul and he had lived at The Bear nearly as long as Daniel. He had no bags, but his map, papers, and other driving gear was still littered all over the back of the vehicle. There was another guy in the passenger seat who I didn't catch the name of, but would occasionally entertain Paul with his rants about the economy and the imminent collapse that was going to happen. I initially thought the guy in the front seat's name was Michael Ruppert because it was said so much, but that turned out to be a journalist they both liked. Jasmine had perked up at this point, and they had promised to get her the old copies of his news letter From The Wilderness for her to read.

"It's going to happen soon," Paul warned sternly, making eye contact with us through his mirror in the back. "I know I sound like a conspiracy nut, but Ruppert has been predicting this for years. It will happen. And really, we're in the best place for something like that. We grow our own food, have our own electricity, and know how to take care of things without depending on corporations. We will survive."

"You know corporations are considered people, by the law?" the guy in the front seat asked. While I had no idea that this was true, and most of the van of newbies did not (except for Jasmine, of course), it was quite clear that Paul and Daniel were well aware.

"Why do you think this place exists?" Paul countered. His voice was large and booming, and he spoke with a slow deliberate timing, but it did not make him menacing, in spite of what he talked about. "Corporations can be people on paper, but they still cannot be tried for murder or jailed. If they could, none of that would exist."

"And now we're back to happy hour again," Daniel quipped, raising his arms in the air comically. He was not doing this to undercut Paul, I noticed. It wasn't that he didn't believe in what the driver was saying, though I could tell that Nicole and Catherine wanted to see things that way. They went onto bantering back and forth about the aesthetics of the 1960s hippie lifestyle, while Daniel and Paul both lowered their eyes and met each other's stares. Daniel only stopped the dialogue because he knew how real this all was, and didn't want to get everyone too afraid yet.

"Not to worry," he smiled and my stomach did a flip. "Where we're headed is safe."

Jasmine and he exchanged a few more words, possibly about the newsletters, and the discussion was dropped for the time being. Daniel was the last person in the van, usually perched in the back with us, but he moved around the vehicle a lot, talking and exchanging pleasantries with people. He put on his seatbelt and sat still in a seat only when he absolutely had to. The roads we were driving on before we left the city were calm and had no lights, so it was safe to do so. He was the undesignated leader, only being able to be compared with Paul, who usually headed up most of these driving missions. Paul was silent, though, aside from his rants on the economy and the way the laws treated people. Daniel was the talker, about anything and everything, he seemed to know and have an opinion on. He was the one who usually got people talking, too, and engaged with one another. He had a hold over strangers that could unite even the most superficial of differences. He got me talking to Nicole at one point, only because he had noticed a small tick of my face when she had mentioned McCandless. Daniel had started a discussion around that, and eventually, I realized that although Nicole was a bit of an idiot, this stemmed from her being naive. I knew that place, and I had to be kind to her, and Daniel inferred this without explicit reference to either of us. Daniel and Paul worked well together; while Daniel organized the people, Paul took on the brunt of the driving missions and dealt with the business side of things. He had a PhD in economics, surprisingly. He didn't look that old, maybe thirty two, and I was surprised how he had gotten so far, only to come right back away from the civilization that had given him a higher education. At least he was using it for good, he told me. He knew how "the system" worked, and wanted to protect the community and help it to flourish.

There was a business side to The Bear that I didn't really consider before. It seemed so contrary to what we had been discussing before about the evils of big business. Daniel explained it to us all as we drove in, knowing that Paul's summary would go over most of our heads. He also needed to let us know why on earth we were visiting corporations before leaving them behind and getting on the highway. Since their car ran on vegetable oil, they had to get their supply from restaurants and other business before we really even left the city. Although they didn't have anything with them in the back now because of our bags, they would often stop around the city and provided people with fertilizer that had been made at the community.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14