June - The Liars 21 страница

"Or three or four or five," Jasmine added, in jest, but then listened closely to me. I knew that I would never be whole, especially now, knowing all that I knew, and having these things happen to me. I thought of what Mikey told me in the car about his own abuse. My life wasn't abuse, but life certainly felt as if it had assaulted me for no good reason with some circumstances. I did not want to take his experiences as my own, but I knew how he felt. I knew that all of these things just happen to you, and you walk away from them in a fugue and you have no idea why you were alive anymore. The thought of losing Gerard, of losing everything, made me wonder why the fuck I was alive anymore.

"I want.... I mean I think, you know, when we go back whenever that is - you can stay as long as you want - that I'm going to ask Mikey if I can be a part of the human resources department," I responded, then felt instantly idiotic. Really? That was my big answer? Human resources? What an ambition switch, famous art photographer to human resource representative in a major investment banking company. Oh that was just wonderful. I kicked a stone and felt my face blush. I expected Jasmine to laugh at me, but she patiently waited. She knew there was more to me. There always was. I had a world going on behind my head and she merely waited for me to allow her access.

I looked back up at the stars and took another breath. "If I had known what I know now years ago, I don't think I would have ever started drinking. I don't think I would have ever wanted to die. I always thought that I had failed, that I had fucked up, but it wasn't all me. Daniel showed me..." I went off on a big of a tangent, and explained to Jasmine the conversation that I had had with him, the one where I had been an idiot and said a racist remark. Then how he had showed me where things were fucked up in society, and how the people here were screwed over and how, knowing what they knew about themselves and about the world, made the decision to leave and evolve.

"I don't think I could leave the outside world. I need to go back. I need to see him. I dream of staying here..." I said, my mind wandering a little. Both of ours did, and we kept our gaze on the stars, on Orion and the three stars in his belt. "But I know it's only a temporary solution. I still need to have that big moment, you know? This was your Alaska. I want mine."

"You think human resources is it?" she questioned. There was no judgement in her voice. She was just curious and wanted to piece together this new image of myself, as much as I wanted to.

I shook my head and kicked the ground again. "I don't know. But it's something. It's the way that I can keep freedom in my life somehow, if I make sure that other people know they're free too. I want people to know that it's not their fault if they don't feel free, but that there are things they can do to change it. "

She nodded, and I could tell she was standing by me, even when she timidly asked. "But what about art?"

I had been so afraid of this and of having to make this excuse. Yes, of course, art was there. Yes, art provided freedom. I would have died without art and without Gerard before I found this knowledge. Sometimes I cursed myself for going as far as I did with my reading, with the books and the people I talked to, but I knew I had to. Once I started, I couldn't look back. It was the same with Gerard. Once we started, we couldn't look back. Though I knew our ending together would eventually have an epilogue, it wasn't an epic tale. It wasn't immortal and never ending. It wasn't a myth. We were both horribly mortal and we would need to leave one another again. I just didn't know it would be this soon and this way. I had been denying that fact, once faced with it, and there was nothing else I could do but find the ways in which to free myself again, this time without him. And then remain there for others in order to show them the way out of the cave.

After some time, I began to answer Jasmine's question. "Art is there. It's always there. It's the escape. But I can't get up every goddamn day and be expected to deliver all the time. I can't be expected to do that. I can do it, for sure, but I want to live my life. I don't want to spend my life indoors anymore, by myself. I want to talk to people and I want to help people. I want to help people like he did with me, and like everyone else I've known up until this point has helped me."

I took a breath, getting emotional. I wanted to say more, but I didn't know if it could pass my lips. I could think it, but I regretted admitting the truth about Gerard out loud. The truth was that as much as I loved Gerard and thanked him eternally for what he had done for me, and as much as I knew that he built this wonderful life around himself, I also knew that he was a drunk a lot of the time. He suffered from the same affliction of needing to create all the damn time and then feeling that wall of failure when he didn't commit or complete. He had calmed down significantly ever since Paris and coming back with me this year, possibly because he understood what was happening, but it didn't matter why. As much as he was this amazing person, he was also an asshole who left people without thinking about it. I thought about Vivian the last time I had seen her and how distraught she was. Her image of Gerard was different than my own because she knew him before I did, and could fill in all the holes that I had no clue existed. When we tried to place our pictures of him next to one another, they didn't always match. He didn't always match. This didn't matter for my story and what I knew had happened with me, but it did change things on a bigger level. This was no longer a story about him and myself. More people were involved now, more than just Jasmine and Vivian, but everyone he had ever come in contact with. Given this much information, he could no longer be perfect. He was all of these things, some bad, but I loved him anyway. I didn't have to like him anymore because that was pointless. I could love him in spite of his flaws. I realized that for the first time being at The Bear. I realized it was okay to hate him a little bit for leaving me, for making me wait for such a long fucking time. I could hate him and still love him and want to be with him. I could still change my image of him, and be with other people, and still have him around. I learned that here. When I left him, when I finally, for the first time in my life since he came into it, left and did something else, it meant I could let him go. It didn't mean I forgot him. It just meant I could live.

"Seven years is a long time," Jasmine said, being able to understand my silences and pauses. I cracked then, the pieces I had held together showing through a bit.

"It's not long enough," I told her. "Not long enough at all."

I had started to cry, just barely, and Jasmine came over and tilted her head on my arm with hers around my waist. I knew that she had also been grieving Gerard while we were here. We would not mention the moments where we'd walk in on one another in the middle of sobbing. Her hormones were making her emotional to begin with and sometimes it was enough to just start talking about the baby for her tears to slide down her face. We had grieved a lot together, but for the first time now, we talked about his death in matter of fact terms. We looked at the stars, not at one another, as we did this.

"We should get a physicist for his funeral, when it happens," she mentioned quietly.

"Why a physicist?"

"Because we're all made of star stuff at the end. It was another one of those things that Gwen told me. She said we're all made of the same things as one another and as the trees and the earth and the stars. So if he left, he wouldn't really be gone, according to the laws of physics. I think I'm getting this right, but it's hard, you know? She made it sound a lot more beautiful than that."

I nodded, taking the knowledge in. We talked about how he would want to be cremated and Jasmine confirmed this fact. Apparently he had been saying "fire and dirt" at one point, and it only occurred to her now that he had meant cremation. He was planning his own death, too, I realized. He understood his reality, as much as he struggled to convey it. We would understand it. We would have to.

I thought of what Alexa told me, about the constellations and the stars. Jasmine was repeating more facts that Gwen had told her about the nature of the universe. It seemed to calm her down, knowing the bigger picture behind all of us. I listened carefully and encouraged her to go on, but my mind wandered. I knew from Alexa's books that astrology was a pseudo-science, and she knew it too. "Doesn't stop me from liking it. It's never what it says it is. It's always a metaphor for something else," she would remind me. It was what people did back then before they had the capacity to understand astronomy and physics, she had also reminded me. It was one of those many stories that people told themselves. Alexa knew we were all made of star stuff too, but that I was Taurus star stuff and Alexa was Scorpio star stuff, Gerard was Leo star stuff, and Jasmine was Cancer star stuff. Rather, Orion star stuff. As she explained to me the nature of physics that she could recall, her hand placed on her stomach like it was her own weapon against the world, she was Orion. She was a hunter for a different thing, but she was hunting. She was always trying to keep going, and to stay alive, keep feeding, and bringing up new life.

"What happens when a star burns out?" I asked.

"I have no idea. I would have to ask Gwen."

"I wonder what happens if a star burns out inside a constellation. Do they still form the same picture?"

Jasmine looked at me, considering the question and realizing the implications. She went back to the stars and answered a simple, "Yes, I believe they stay the same."

She grabbed my hand, and I nodded. "Me too."

Chapter Six

When Vivian called us a few days later, I thought we had lost track of time completely. Although we had electricity from solar panels and people did have clocks and watches, it all seemed pointless when we didn't have set times for work. The heat wave eventually broke and we were all back to work, but since the busy season was ending, and there was another influx of people going in and out, labor was not as demanding as it had been. The only permanent fixture that governed our day was sleeping and eating, and that was how I had gotten used to measuring things. When Tonya came down to where Korey and I were digging and told me that Vivian was on the phone, Gerard didn't even cross my mind. Even as she stated seriously that this was an emergency and Vivian seemed worked up, I still thought we were really late and she was having a hard time containing her aggravation. On the walk over I began to count up all the dinners we had eaten to see if there were more than thirty. I lost track; too much of our food was the same and too many dinners bled together. I pressed the receiver to my ear and waited for the lecture to ensue. When it was quiet on the other end, I began to feel my heart pound in my chest.

"I'm sorry, Vivian, are you there? Is it August? I promise we're coming back in the next car ride."

She breathed a sigh. She sounded wearier than she had been when I last visited her, and I began to grow scared. "No, it's not August. It's close, but not quite. You have plenty of time."

"Viv, what's wrong?" I said slowly, my voice giving away how worried I had become. She had stopped talking, and I knew now that this was about Gerard. He sprung into my mind like a jack in the box I didn't realize I was turning.

She sighed again, and then went onto the matter at hand. "It's Gerard."

"I know, I got that much. But what's happened?"

"He had had a stroke about a week ago. He's probably been having them for months, actually. This really isn't a recent thing. Strokes are probably what caused all this. I only noticed because he wouldn't get up or look at me, even after I asked him to. I thought he was just being temperamental, but then he started to throw up..."

I had tuned her out. She gave me the details, but I refused to listen to them. All I needed to know what that he was sick again, and sicker now than before. He had had two strokes so far that Vivian had caught and taken him in for, but he was okay. He only had partial numbness and his loss of words from before was worse. Sometimes he didn't talk, and it was his left side that was partially paralyzed, so writing things down was out. He could master some dexterity, but it tired him. "He's okay," she assured me. "Not going to die anytime soon and the doctor's given him medication this time around."

There was something her voice was not telling me. "What about him?"

She started to cry. "What about him? I love him. I love him so much, so I'm taking care of him. But I don't want to watch this anymore, Frank. I can't do this for much longer."

I nodded, gripping the phone hard. Jasmine and I had been talking about coming home. The next car ride was soon, but we knew that we could just get Paul to drive us at anytime at all and he would do it. He always wanted more cheese from the fancy shop just outside of town and this was Gerard we were talking about. This was a priority more so than any medical emergency for Jasmine. But I hesitated. I didn't want to go back, I didn't want to see him the way Vivian had described. In my mind, he was still young. In my mind, everything was okay.

He had already had one stroke, though, and Vivian had not called us. This was clearly not a pressing matter health-wise, at least for Gerard. He was okay, apparently. Sleeping a lot, still eating without help, and though he resented it, he took his medication. He knew who she was and where he was, and though she had written down on the whiteboard by his bed that he had had a stroke, after the second day he erased. When she asked him about it, he had said why the fuck would he want to remember that. Nothing good came from remembering something like that. He hated his hands some days because they were still slightly immobile, but he had been working with them the most and had regained a lot more than he had been expected to. He was still there, kicking around. But he was sick, so fucking sick, and there was no hiding from it anymore.

"He nearly fell down the stairs the second time. Cassandra had to grab his arm. He hurt his knee, but thank god it wasn't his hip or he didn't go flying," she confided. Vivian kept talking, kept telling me these things that she had probably been keeping inside for the past few weeks, but she never asked me to come back. She begged and pleaded it within her words, though. Eventually, the guilt became too much.

"Okay, we'll come back, Vivian. I'm sorry we were gone this long. You should have called us sooner," I told her, my tone flat. We had talked about coming back, I told myself. That night with the stars, we knew we were done and that it was only a matter of time. Only we had been so full of hope for the future, then. We thought we were coming back to children and myself being a father, and so much more. Just not to this.

To my surprise, Vivian gasped and her voice seemed to jump through the other end of the phone. "No. No, Frank. Don't come back."

"What? I thought you told me not to leave."

"That was before this. Stay longer there, stay as long as you need to. Come back when you're ready."

I was confused and extremely angry. She knew I couldn't enjoy my time here now, knowing the state that Gerard was in. This was deliberate on her part, a manipulation so she could feel in control. "Why bother to call us, then? What the fuck do you want, Vivian?"

"I want him back! Isn't that obvious? I want my friend back. I want him to look at me and know who the fuck I am beyond this shit that's surrounding us everywhere. I want him to talk to me like we used to. I want him to laugh at me again, to tease me, to fucking love me."

"But what do you want from me? Why did you call me unless you need me to come back?" My voice was rising, and I looked around to see if Tonya or Paul were here. They had left the office space empty to give me privacy. I saw file folders opened on the desk in front of me and some notes Paul had been taking about economic rebuilding. They were probably going to get Jasmine, who had been working with Kristin to get all the recipes she was missing all morning. A ball formed in the bit of my stomach, realizing that I would have to be the one to tell her what was going on and that we had to leave. Even though Vivian kept telling me to stay, and to not come back until I was ready and how she just needed to vent, I wasn't to going to hear it. I couldn't stay here anymore. It was no longer safe.

"Don't drink Frank," she said suddenly, throwing me off guard. I had been going through my own mental inventory to see what else I needed to do before I had to leave. I knew we could probably get out of here by the end of the day, but Paul would need plenty of warning so he could stay someplace overnight. My thoughts of couch surfing were interrupted by Vivian's plea and her change in tone of voice. She was no longer mad at herself for hating Gerard in this condition, she was mad at me.

"What?"

"Don't drink Frank. If you come back, you can't drink. You just can't. You know that, right?"

Her tone was now accusative and while my anger towards the entire situation had made me feel big and abrasive from before, I now felt small and minuscule. The muscles and confidence I had gained here really meant nothing under the weight of Vivian's harsh critique. The guilt I felt in April when I had let myself go came back, but I was determined to push it away. I had not had the urge to drink in such a long time. It was so freeing here, being the woods and letting it all go. But real life had meandered its way in. There was no way I could drink at The Bear. It was just not allowed. Daniel in particular was vehemently sober and shared many of the same views that Lydia had on alcohol. We had discussion after discussion about it, talking obscurely and not referencing any specific point in either of our lives. This was the first time it had been pinned on me. Really pinned on me. My father had even been talking about his own problem with me obscurely. He had told me I had a problem, but he never dared tell me exactly what to do about it. Vivian was telling me now, as if it was a challenge. I could not drink. If I did, I would literally face her wrath again, only I knew that she would actually hit me.

It was a topic that I was surprised she even knew about. The drinking had been done mostly outside of her house with Jasmine, Marc, and Gerard being the only people who grasped its magnitude, and Gerard wasn't grasping anything anymore. Jasmine must have told Vivian and I began to feel angry for no reason at her. It was her right to vent about me, because it affected her too. My stumbling home drunk ate away at her just as much as it did me. Only she had gotten help for it and the force of that help was now breathing down my neck over the phone.

"You can't do that again, Frank. You just can't," she repeated when I had not said anything. I gripped the phone hard again, wondering what the fuck I was supposed to do then. I asked her, angrily, what on earth she expected from me.

"Even Gerard drank!" I said, as if this point had some weight to it.

"So you're going to follow in his footsteps after all? Hurt people the way he is? Only he can't help it right now. You can."

"How Viv? I got away and I thought I was okay. I knew I had to come back but I didn't know to this. "

"It was going to happen anyway, Frank. You need to deal with it."

I let out an exasperated sigh. I thought of the conversation that Jasmine and I had only nights before. How was going to human resources, remembering that I was free, going to help me now? How was this going to solve anything? Gerard was on medication now. He was fumbling to pick up pens and stayed sitting down or in bed most of the time now. I didn't need human resources, I needed a drink in order to deal, and if I couldn't have that, what was next?

Vivian grew quiet on the other end, then probed. "Why did you start drinking, Frank?"

"What?"

"Imagine it. Remember when we imagined what if you had a baby and what if you didn't? Imagine your life with drinking. Why are you doing it, and why would you do it again when you came back?"

It was so simple. I knew the answer, but the visualization and then saying it out loud tore me in two. "Because he's leaving me and I never said he could."

"No one ever says anything, Frank. We never give permission for people to leave because we never would and no one would get anything done. That one last goodbye bullshit you see in the movies? It's not real," Vivian stressed this. I knew she had lost her mother a few years ago, and this was what held her mind in place with this view. "Sometimes people just leave, without warning, and you deal with the last thing that you said to them, no matter how awful it was. No matter how boring it was. You just deal."

"It's that dealing part I'm having a hard time with," I confessed. Vivian was getting more sympathetic. Having let out her rage at her situation instead of keeping it inside, she began to reach out instead of push people away. She had also broken me down to a point where I knew nothing beyond my own fear.

"I know, it's so hard, Frank. You don't think you can do anything else. But you've got to figure out how to deal with losing him, but you can't drink him away. You can't. It's not going to do anything."

"What will?" I asked, begging her for answers. The room was quiet. I couldn't even hear everyone outside working anymore. I imagined them all, pressed up against the office door, listening in on what I had to say. I felt as if the world was watching, as if this tiny little story in the immense diversity of people really mattered as much as it did to me. I knew that they were all off with their own lives, doing their own things. If anyone was going to be pressed up against the door it would be Jasmine or Daniel, because I had let them get that close to me. But even they had their own lives. We were attached, but I couldn't force people to pay attention. It did not mean I had to shut up or give up, it meant I needed to do things differently. I still wondered where Jasmine was, and if she was okay.

Vivian did not have an answer for me. "You'll figure it out. You'll deal. You're smart, Frank. You'll find a way."

We tapered off into conversations about when I would come home, who would take care of Gerard, if it was safe to move him back to his room in our house, and how we could make him comfortable. She explained to me the procedures and repercussions of strokes again, and I made sure to listen. I heard about how often he needed to take his medication and how it was supposed to help. He was doing all he could to stay mobile, so that wasn't going to be an issue for now, though Vivian did have a wheelchair if we needed one. I tried to make notes as Vivian gave me all I needed to know, but it was hard. After scrawling down a few key points, I made sure Vivian was getting support she needed and she was. Cassandra and Noelle did a lot of the cooking and cleaning now that Vivian's main responsibility was Gerard. Mikeyand Alexa had dropped by after the first stroke and often brought food and conversed with him. Jonah came once, and Gerard responded well to him. He was still doing art, she told me. Just not as much as before, and of a different kind.

"But he knows who you are. I mention you and Jasmine every day and he knows who Paloma is, too," she assured me. I bit my lip, not wanting to know how much of this was really true, and how much she was over-exaggerating to make me feel better.

I promised her that we would be on the next van in, and that I would tell Jasmine and that we would be okay. We were about to say goodbye, when she added: "Oh and Frank?"

"Yeah?"

"Don't drink."

I was about to nod and tell her okay, but the line was already dead.

Jasmine took the news as best as I could have hoped. She was sad and upset, and we both spent most of that night crying over our circumstances and feeling sorry for ourselves. "Will he be able to hold Paloma?" she asked me, and we both sobbed our answers. We didn't know. We just didn't know how bad things were, and if they were going to get better now or not. Vivian had said that the only part of his recovery he seemed to be dedicated to was practising his mobility and dexterity, so it was possible. Gerard was actually seeing the doctor more regularly now that he was under coverage, and Vivian was pragmatic about those types of things. Jasmine felt ashamed, as if she should have been doing that all along. We both lamented and grieved our mistakes, the errors that we had committed in this whole process. We were both trying to hold onto him for too long. We thought we were making the right decision, the decision that he would have wanted us to make, but it had not been what he really needed. He wanted things to be beautiful, and we had given him that with Kandinsky colors and our small conversations about art in the mornings. We had loved him and his worldview too much, so much that we could not see that he was deteriorating faster than he should have been. Maybe he had had a stroke with one of us and we didn't even know. We would write it off as something else, as a blackness that we could not explain.

But it could be explained! It was that we just didn't want the answers. I knew from talking to Gwen more before I received that phone call, that almost everything in the universe could be explained and that it did not take away its beauty. We had needed to come here, I realized, not only to get ourselves help and to do what we needed to do, but to finally have Gerard get the help he needed too. It was the help that he still resented receiving, but that he needed. He did not like waiting in rooms and hearing bad music only to have someone explain how his blood had clotted inside of his brain and this is why he was feeling paralysis, but he needed that. Vivian loved Gerard in a selfish way, I thought at first, trying to keep him perfect and alive longer so he could spend time with her. But I realized that we all loved selfishly, including Jasmine and myself, who thought we were merely fulfilling his wishes. We were too concerned with keeping him as close to the artist we had both fallen in love with that we missed all the signs, and now, we selfishly worried that we had caused irrefutable damage.

"No," I told Jasmine, straight and simple. No. None of that was our fault. None of it happened because of us.

"But we're all linked," she reminded me, and she caught me off guard. "We should have taken care of him."

I wanted to sob then, not finding a way out of this logic, but I still couldn't do it. I still refused to view this incident as completely our burden, because I knew it would lead to carrying the world around again. It was not our fault. We were linked in that we all affected on another's lives, but we did not cause the hurt or pain from something like this. We couldn't have. We needed to recognize the power that we had, the power over one another, but we had still made the right decision. Gerard wanted to remain himself as much as we wanted him to as well.

"You can't take the entire world on your back," Daniel would remind the two of us, and helped me to find the words that I lacked when faced with Jasmine and my grief combined. "In spite of the power we have, we're nothing more than ants. Don't ever forget that, as well as the fact that one ant can clog a machine."

It seemed odd, mixing the metaphors and splitting back between two extreme trains of thought, but it helped us. We needed to believe we had enough strength to keep going on, but also not enough that we were responsible for all the bad that would happen. We were not responsible for all the good, either, and it was a fine balance to maintain. We just needed to be grateful that we had had what we had, and try to move forward. Though it was hard, especially when Daniel was there for me more than he ever had been before, and I could do nothing but sob in the bed with him.

We left The Bear three days after Vivian's first phone call. She would call us daily to give updates, and also to make sure we were still going. She also called to vent about her situation, I knew, but I never reminded her of that. At the end of every phone call, she would tell me not to drink. It was positive reinforcement, and she was trying to be supportive, but it almost made it worse. I felt like I needed to decide right then and there the activity that I was going to pursue or else all would be ruined. I tried to keep Daniel's thoughts on the world and ants in my mind. I repeated it to myself often as I worked, and it began to make more sense. As four of us banded together to build a large crate the day before I left, I realized that this entire project only had as much power as the four of us, together, put into it. The world could only be changed through large scale action; it was the power that I had witnessed before at Food Not Bombs and the power I became aware of with the waves of feminism. If one of us backed out of this project, and ducked away as we lifted the huge weight of lumber, it would all come crashing down. One ant could cog the machine and make it no longer able to run again. The example I worked through was benign, but this analogy was all-encompassing. It could be good or bad, because large apparatuses were either good or bad. But they were all the same in the end.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14