August - An Archive 1 страница

“I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start again.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Chapter One

During her graduate degree, Jasmine worked as a research assistant. Her main job was to take all of the correspondences from a recent author and categorize them, go over her old manuscripts and footnote the changes, and also update her bibliographic profile. She was making an archive, she had explained to me, and it felt as if she was creating this person again out of stacks and stacks of paper. There was some art, too, and that was to be listed with numbers and letters and go in as appendixes and glosses. There were so many intricate details about the form the narrative could take as an archive, and though it was representing someone's life, it was cut-up in a lot of places. It was a more academic and fancier way of doing a collage, really. You were making the person again, from scratch, from the things that they had left behind and made themselves. This had been the first time when Jasmine really began to feel like a hunter. Before then, she had been reading about other people doing academic work, acting as a professor's shadow, and arguing with theory through words and footnotes. But an archive was more concrete than words on a page, and as she hunted through the piles that this woman had left before, she began to feel in control of what she was doing.

"They cut my funding, though, about halfway through. Then they made me go through the ethics board so at that point I didn't even know if I could use the material I was finding. They ended up deeming it too 'sensitive' and it's like - of course it's sensitive. That's why it's here. That was why she left it behind for us to find," she explained to me.

The author was dying of cancer, and part of Jasmine's job had been to go to her house and dig through her old desk and try to find any unpublished manuscripts. Jasmine had been doing her thesis work on a feminist publishing house and the crux of her research ended up being on two shoddy and water-stained manuscripts that she had found at the bottom of the author's closest. She was supposed to see how a book was produced from the author's legacy alone, as if conjured from thin air, and then sold to the mass market based on a familiar name. From that point, she was also interested in seeing how a narrative was produced through the name behind the words. This was her summer project. Using Barthes and Foucault, she wanted to see if an author was dead before they began writing or if they were kept perpetually alive through the inclusion and manufacturing of certain "secrets" or events into their life through the implementation of an archive. Could the story behind a story thus produce eternal life? Could an author that was dying and no longer writing, suddenly still produce new material? Could material be not the end result, but the mere genesis of something more? These were big questions that came forward once submerged knee-deep in paper and broken typewriters, feeding tubes and home-care nurses, and chemo therapy by proxy, but Jasmine lived for the big questions. She needed this project to keep her sane over the summer months when, as Callie and Dean could testify, the structure of school wore away and the professional student was suddenly at odds with themselves. Dealing with the ethics board over this, although tiring and maddening, was also a huge relief. Jasmine could beg for the catch that she had waited and watched for all afternoon. Hunting, like research and writing, she told me, was very solitary work. She never condoned the process of hunting, but on the very base level, she understood it. This project was her only ethical solution and it made her feel so utterly powerful, even when people were trying to take it away. It meant that it had been hers at one point and that the work she was doing was enlightening and in some way dangerous. Although this entire ordeal was supposed to be a summer pursuit that her publishing house had given her, it ended up taking her well into the next year when she was supposed to be writing her thesis. She almost changed her topic entirely and wanted to focus on the author's life and her archive, but it didn't feel quite right.

"Outside of the ethics board, the reality of the situation was too overwhelming. The woman was dying, though she had done everything in her power to cover it up. She had the most amazing wigs and the best attitude I had seen. But not many people walk away from cancer once it gets to lymph nodes. I knew that she would have been okay with me doing the archive, since she saw me so often, and her husband and I were exchanging daily email at one point near the end of the summer, but the publishing house didn't care. They wanted legacy in the form of money, which I ended up giving them with those manuscripts. The archive was incidental to them. They acted interested when I had first told them my idea, but as soon as the losses did not equal gains in time and money, they cut back the funding entirely. I managed to keep working under my supervisor's grant, but it was not the same after. I knew this wouldn't be done for me or anyone else. The archive was done to remember her, to organize her for coherency later on. My professor used to always say 'you can't tell a masterpiece when you're standing in the middle of it. You need to back away or spread it out.' And so, since she was dying and we knew she would be finishing no more masterpieces, we needed to spread out what was left."

Archives, though they usually held paper and historical facts, were taken to a different level with Jasmine. In one of her first courses for her graduate program, she had read about archiving feelings. "How exactly do you modify and archive something that is not tangible, but can clearly be felt and distinctly remembered? What about things that leave no trace, but you know happened? How do you make something that holds them?" she had mused all throughout her first year studying. The question seemed to follow and haunt her all summer and well into the next year. Jasmine was focusing solely on her English degree then, and she had been missing the feminist influence in her life. She wanted her project to embody the personal and the political, and to her archiving feelings was the distinct vision achieved. It was a female author she was working with, too, which helped her to break out of the mould that had been etched by dead white men. Jasmine was trying to take the archive and make it more real by embedding markers of feelings inside of it. She put small letters from the writer to her husband in the archive; these letters would often describe the writer's progress in a novel, maybe mention a title, but then diverge off and would speak explicitly about the love the two of them had for one another. The markers of the relationship the author had with her husband were plentiful. They were devoted, but as Jasmine began to sort through, she noticed gaps in certain time periods. It was only after her score in the closet of the water-stained manuscripts when she found what had been missing. The author, while working as a professor part time and as a writer-in-residence, had an affair with a younger student. Furthermore, she had also had a long and passionate relationship with another professor; a female one that was still alive and reputable. It was at this point where the ethics board came in, and in the end, Jasmine lost the case. The feelings that those two side narratives represented were lost. It didn't matter that now those two new manuscripts contained characters that were based off the younger student and the female professor. Since permission was not given, that footnote was never going to happen, and those sections of the archive blacked out from public scrutiny. It was at this point where Jasmine turned her energy away from this for her thesis. She still completed the archive, but it was only every other weekend and sometimes only once a month. She was devoted, too, and did the best she could with both this side research project and her own thesis and tying them together. The clues were there if people wanted to look and Jasmine could only hope for other readers who were as astute with observation, and patient like hunters, as she was.

"It was sad when I left and I took the books from her shelf for the last time. I had grown so used to seeing her office in such a state of disarray it was a shock to me to leave it clean. When we said goodbye it was different than it had been before. She had heard about me finding the manuscripts and was pleased with what I had done at the publishers, but she also knew about the other gaps in her life I had found. They were never in the archive and her husband never found out, but she knew. She had been getting a round of chemo so I hadn't seen her in a while, but she looked at me differently. It wasn't out of hate or disgust because I now knew that she had been in love with one of her students and a prof, but because she was relieved. Someone else knew. Before I left, she insisted that I take a book with me. It was Woolf's The Waves, though I had insisted that I had read it before, she told me strictly that I hadn't. It ended up being filled with notes that her student had written to her. There were passages that he had underlined in her literature class, and then at the end, there was a final note used as a bookmark that he had written to her about how wonderful she was and how much in love he really was. It was all so surreal," Jasmine reflected to me, showing me the book. I heard about this during one of the winters we were together, nearly a year after she completed it. Jasmine always had to let things sit awhile before she could really reflect upon them. "I felt like I was now a part of the archive. I know my name is on it as an assistant or whatever and that my thesis is bound and hiding in a shelf in a library somewhere, but that's not what I meant. I felt like I was inside the archive now. I held a piece to it, but since I got to meet the author and she gave me something that was hers, it didn't seem to matter that we had lost the ethics board approval. It didn't matter that the archive, although already pretty cut up, was missing these two huge pieces. We had still created her again, and it's sometimes glaringly obvious what is not said as much as what is."

The archive was still at the school and Jasmine said she visited it almost every month until she graduated. The manuscripts that she had found were also published and now a part of the university library, but she didn't see them that often. She already knew those stories, as well as the distinct shadows hiding behind at the bottom of a closest, thought to be forgotten.

I thought about these little bits of conversations and this entire weaving narrative of Jasmine's story behind a story in the car on the way back home. I fell silent and began to concoct just how I would be able to pull off trying to make an archive for Gerard as well. I knew he was never going to paint another masterpiece. Even if he was in good health and could keep his bearings long enough to do one, it would not have the same quality as those he did before. This did not mean he wasn't creating and what he was producing wasn't good, it was merely different. The amount of coherence needed in order to produce a masterpiece was not there, but was still talking to people when he could, drawing, and basically existing. Surviving was an art, he had told me, insistent upon this fact. I needed to let him just exist now, as Gerard, the way that I had wanted to exist as Frank. I could not expect anything from him anymore, but I could remember him. I needed to remember him and what he had done. The insight Jasmine's professor had provided hit me with astounding clarity: I could never understand what was happening to us because we were still very much inside of it. Us surviving and existing in our lives was the masterpiece, and until it was all done I needed to start grabbing and shelving and figuring out where things went. I needed to paste Gerard back together again the way I had worked on piecing myself back together again in the woods. Gerard had no woods he could go to, and maybe soon no more words with which to form a narrative. But he had us. He would always have us.

I told Jasmine my idea quietly in the car. We were coming up on familiar territory now. I knew we were on the interstate road home, just before the turnpikes. The sudden familiarity after being so lost in my thoughts caught me off guard, and I knew I needed to capture what I had been thinking about before we got home. I did not want to announce my plan just yet because it was still so brand new. Daniel had gone up towards the front and was talking with Tonya and Paul anyway. After the second half of the drive, when I began to formulate the idea and went through my own collective memory to piece together the theories that fit and those that did not, they began to fade in my mind. They were just there now, part of a former life that we were slowly fading away from; Jasmine and I were in another place, another time. We had moved back into the eye of the storm, and now we were trying to find shelter when it all started up again.

"Do you remember the archive that you did?" I asked her, and she nodded. She told me she had gone to see it before she left for The Bear.

"The author is dead now. She hung on for a lot longer than anyone thought was possible," Jasmine said, not upset at all. "I knew she was dying," she kept explaining, wanting to account for her lack of emotion. "It was not a surprise to now see the birth and the death dates under her name. I had already grieved her, in the process of creating the archive to begin with."

As soon as those words flew out of her mouth, she looked at me. She knew exactly what I wanted to do and she almost started to sob in the van. I put my arm around her and my hand on her stomach with her. I wanted to do this, no question. Even if no one wanted to see this, even if I had no one interested in looking at the interior, I needed to do this for myself. This was as much about remembering Gerard and making sure his gifts were understood as much as it was about the people in his life. All archives were. Although they claimed to be about one person, they were really a web and a mess of people. Sometimes too many to count and remain coherent. It had been the author's husband that had approached the university and demanded that they do this. They had taught her books, she had done guest lectures and lived as a writer-in-residence, so why didn't she deserve an archive in this institution?

"All people deserve an archive," Jasmine had told me then. "But it's only some people they deem worthy of them. She won that battle, and this is where my job came in."

She had been bitter when she said this, but in a way, even then, I still thought we all had archives. Only some of them were funded by a university and got a large audience, but we had our own libraries of our lives. That's what photo albums were and almost everyone had one; they were my reference point when Jasmine was telling me all about her work in archives. I knew what she meant, because I had been keeping my own this entire time: my portfolio. It not only helped me to get work when I did, but it collected certain time periods of my life. I had no distinct blue period to the outside world like Picasso did, but I had my own private blue period: the shirt that Gerard had stained, the photos from that time period, and the final note he gave me. This was where our letters went, and now how emails were classified. Archives were larger and more interactive versions of family trees. You could find your name someplace and then see who came off of it, who interacted with you the most, and then who they interacted with. All of this formed a web, and the archive was just taking the paper and material artifices from that and making something with it. It made it a narrative, through picking and choosing, helped life to make sense in some familiar form. It would be too overwhelming to document everything that happened to us, although some of us tried. We must pick and choose. Jasmine's job as an archivist had been to do the picking and choosing (although not all of it was appreciated) and I knew that I had to start doing the same. I could no longer allow Gerard permanent residence inside of me as I carefully tried to remember absolutely everything about us. I could no longer carry him around, day after day. I needed to drop him. To drop him and then to organize him all over again, so I could see who I was losing - and then see who I was keeping. I wanted to make him into a paper giant, into an art giant with words and materials that he had left behind.

"Where are you going to start? How are you going to begin all of this?" she whispered to me in the van. It was a large question - and a much needed one. Gerard had lived through over half a century and created a lot during that time. I knew that no matter how hard I worked, I would never get it all.

"I'm going to start with the people," I told her, still formulating my ideas. "I need to talk to the people in is life first, those who were the subjects of his art. I want to start there, not with the masterpiece itself."

"Because you need to spread out," Jasmine said, remembering.

Although Gerard had never married until Jasmine (and even then it was a marriage of circumstance and pure need), had never had kids, had never really gotten that famous until the very end of his life, and was now slowly forgetting everything, I was convinced that I could render him whole. Through other people and their interactions with him, I knew that he was there - all of him - and if I talked to just the right amount, I could find him and arrange those pieces from memories. If I wanted to do an archive my own way, then I needed to start with the people's lives that he walked into, and fill in the blanks from there.

"I want to start with you," I told Jasmine. She nodded into my shoulder, but did not say a word. We were almost home.

He was in a wheelchair when we got back. We had Paul drop us off at Vivian's place so we could pick up Gerard and then have a small meal before we went back to our house. She had been taking care of him for weeks now and had gotten used to him living there, in spite of all of her complaints. She had become attached to him again like she had in art school, only now she was the one taking care of him. She didn't want to confuse him by moving him over to our place first and waiting for us there. If he responded to us well, then it would probably be okay to move him, and not the other way around, she insisted on the phone.

Paul drove very quietly, as always, and no one said anything when we pulled up and he and Vivian were outside in the dry August sun. I knew they thought they were being polite by not addressing the fact that there was this frail man before them, but it angered me. They could clearly see him, they knew how important he was, and yet, he seemed to disappear into the backdrop as we said our quick goodbyes. No one asked to be introduced and no one did any introducing. The only person that got outside the van was Daniel, and he only gave us both a quick hug before he hopped back in. This was why I was making an archive, I told myself. So these silences would scream louder than anything.

At first, my intent behind this project had been to capture Gerard as he had been before the illness, before the strokes, before the weight loss, muteness, and personality changes. I looked at him now and wondered if that was a good idea, if it was truly being honest. I didn't have to worry about an ethical board, so I didn't have to worry about censorship, except through myself. Would I be brave and ethical enough to render this picture whole? How much of his illness equated with the vision of Gerard? How much of it changed the perception of his life? Now I was the one asking big questions, and I swallowed hard as we walked up the driveway.

A plaid blanket was tucked in around Gerard's skinny legs, which were pointed to the side. His limbs all seemed so long and lanky in the piece of equipment, and when he moved his arm to cradle his face in his palm after waving, it looked grotesque. He seemed to flow out of the wheelchair, and the blanket was acting like a dam. His coloring was off; Vivian told me he had been eating, but his appetite was poor because he had become so used to being up and about, walking or off doing something, and now he was confined. He got no sensations of hunger, so he didn't see the use in eating. His hands were white, so white against his black clothing, and his gray hair made his face seem paler than usual. He had lost weight, and that was saying a lot. He had already lost some in the preceding months, and had just started to gain weight when Jasmine and I decided to eat all our meals with him. I kicked myself for leaving, for letting him waste away, but I knew that Vivian had done a good job. If he had wanted the food, he would have eaten it. I tried not to focus on the hollows of his cheeks, and instead just looked at him. I tried to spread him out instead of seeing him as a masterpiece already complete. I looked at the blanket, and realized that we had had sex on it several different times when Vivian was not home. I wondered if she knew that, and it made me smile. Maybe he had chosen it as the one he wanted to use to keep warm, perhaps reaching from some far distant memory that he could not place. The wheelchair that he was in was probably one that Vivian had gotten for her mother years ago, and it was now coming back into use. It was one that Cassandra had probably played on when she was younger, too. I began to make up these stories about the surrounding objects and then sometimes categorize facts about all the pieces that made up Gerard right now. The shoes he wore were caked with mud; he must have tried to go for a walk at some point, in the garden, looking for irises or sunflowers. This was easy, I told myself. I could totally do this. Up until then, archiving feelings had been this vague notion, one that sounded good in theory, but when I saw Gerard before me, and those feelings overwhelmed me, it seemed nearly impossible to catch them all and pin them all down. But separating and spreading out was helping a little, at least until I got closer to Gerard and I realized he was wearing the dove jacket.

That jacket, that fucking jacket, I said in my head. This was the key to the narrative: the black faded fabric, the dove emblem, the paint stains, and the empty sleeves where more of his body should be. The dove that brought us together and that we both had worn as names. The Dove Man, he had been just a dove like me, then. When I looked at the jacket's back, the handprints were still there, and again, I felt as if I was being brought to my knees. Comme le soleil interminable. The black door and the yellow handprint. It was too much, all too much. Only minutes into my endeavour and I already felt as if I was being brought to my knees. How could I even begin to undertake this project?

Vivian grabbed my shoulder. She saw me looking at the jacket, and whispered in my head. "He won't take it off. I think it reminds him of you."

I nodded, because I had no other words. I swallowed hard and Vivian began to rub my back. I felt another hand touch me and I figured that Jasmine had come around from the side. But I was wrong; she was still at the car with Tonya, who was helping her take her things inside and unload the car. The hand clasping me was Gerard's. He held me at my wrist, as if he wanted to pull me down to tell me something. The closer I got to his face the more I could see the partial paralysis in his left side that Vivian had told me about on the phone. His lips wanted to move, and he formed a small smile, but that was it. He didn't speak and he didn't need to speak; that jacket said it all. I held onto him for some time before we all went indoors. I was beginning to think, more and more, that I could actually do this.

Since it was still only early afternoon, Vivian had insisted we stay for the day. August was a nice month, one of her favorites because she was finally done school and teaching until September. Callie and Dean were off romanticizing, apparently, and though they had thesis defences come September, Vivian knew they'd be pushed back because they were too into one another. Vivian told us more about her plans to start gardening, the knitting that she had been doing (she had made stuff for the baby, and all the items were in the color green, so it wasn't too gender specific and Jasmine's eyes lit up), and talked about Cassandra and Noelle, who were growing far more serious. Noelle practically lived there, now that her mother realized what she and Cassandra had been doing under her nose since December. While her mother knew that Noelle liked women, Noelle also liked men, and her mother had lived in denial about one part of her daughter and focused on the other. Denial had been a powerful force, at least until the two of them were caught in the shower when her mother came home early from work one afternoon. Though the committee meetings to save their high school had ended with the school year, since there was still no decision out yet on whether or not anyone would save LYNS, the two teenagers had used it as a covert excuse. Denial, again, became a powerful force. The two of them moved their party to Vivian's place where she didn't care if her daughter had sex. She was almost sixteen, come late September, and it was her life so far as that went. There would be no unexpected pregnancies ("there's been enough this year!") and Vivian was just glad to have her daughter back in the house again.

Vivian was not the person that I had left that one night, nor the person I had spoken with on the phone. Maybe it was the weather; the heat waves had finally stopped, and like she said, she was done with school and could now go outside and not worry as much. She still had marking and some bureaucratic paperwork issues, but it did not weigh her down. She complained about school, not Gerard, and I listened closely to her as she talked. She seemed delighted by Gerard's presence and still talked to him as if he could respond in his old form. She was treating him as if there was nothing wrong with him at all, as if everyone needed to be fed from the table, and as if everyone needed to be pushed around. I admired her so much that afternoon. She was beautiful, pragmatic, and strong. I could see the fissures around her eyes if we did bring up the topic, but she was staying optimistic. Jasmine and I hung out mutely at the end of the table, vaguely talking about our experiences at The Bear, but the six hour journey back had been enough distance. We were focused on our new idea, but also watching Vivian astutely, to try and understand what our next role in Gerard's care was going to be.

"I'm going to miss having you here, Gerard, but I think these people love you a lot and want you to come home with them," Vivian had reminded him before we sat down to eat. She would sometimes grow quiet and dim as she fed him, but she was so much more whole than the last time I saw her. She was never going to be whole again, but then again, I didn't think any one of us ever would be, if we were before.

Had I missed these cracks before? I wondered to myself, feeling guilt that I had tried to displace for so long. Had I just not wanted to see them? Now that I did, they were all I saw, like the Where's Waldo? book, staring back at me menacingly. But cracks and holes did not mean it was incomplete. They did not mean that I had to abandon everything that I was doing. Archiving was about holes, was about jagged edges and so was collage work. So much of art happened between paintings and what was going on in the blank spaces. So none of us were whole anymore, I concluded. What did it matter? We all sat around the table and ate rice pasta salad with chickpeas and green beans, and talked about our lives together. Vivian updated us on hers and Cassandra's (who was at a piano lesson), and then we told her about ours. Jasmine talked about the article that she was going to write about solar electricity and how the baby was doing. When Vivian glanced over to me, I told her I would explain my story later and that I wanted to talk to her this afternoon.

"But first, I need to see Jasmine," I informed her, finishing up my meal. "Do you have a tape recorder?"

Jasmine and I set ourselves up in the basement so we could have privacy. The space still had the feeling of Gerard and I living there, though all of Vivian's furniture was back in its space before. I could still see where we had spilled coffee one morning, and how it still stained the rug. I still felt his hands on me, phantom hands, as I walked by where our bed was and I could still feel the creative surge of energy as I walked past the art room. I opened that door again before we started, wondering if we could do our interview in there, but it was filled with Cassandra's old baby clothing and appliances. Instead we set up where our bed used to be, myself in the corner and Jasmine pulling up a spare chair in the middle of the room. I grabbed a small coffee table and placed it between us.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14