August - An Archive 4 страница

"We didn't," I said, conflicting and creating even more than one voice within myself. "We didn't, I don't - I just can't believe we did."

But we still held one another, crying, feeling like criminals in our own bed, in our own sins. The guilt between us spanned a river, and inside of it, we were both drowning. The only thing I could do to make it better for Jasmine was to whisper in her ear, the way Gerard always had. "I love you, Hyacinth," I told her and then gripped her close to my body. Her new hair was sharp underneath my chin, and while she fell asleep, I stayed awake. I knew the only thing that would make me feel better, and I was not even close to being done.

Chapter Two

I called up Mikey the next day, and arranged to meet him and Alexa for dinner that night. I stayed home during the day, unpacking and cleaning, while Jasmine headed back to work. It was the weekend and I knew I would be back at work on Monday and needed to get myself together and more of this project underway before I became too distracted. Jasmine, on the other hand, was eager to get out the door. Meredith had sent us the copy of the magazine that had come out while we were away and Jasmine had been poring over it all morning before she left. She had never really seen a magazine that Meredith had done as editor, except for the few sample issues that she was shown during her interview. She sat at the table, her brow furrowed, before she decided that she had to go in. Though no one would be there, Jasmine needed reclaim her position at her desk (hoping that, at least, hadn't been changed too much) and to fix the damage that had apparently been done. The perceived damage was really not much at all. The issue was called Liberty and had one too many articles about politics (without the personal) inside. Jasmine had always like the quasi-artistic bent to the magazine, embodied in their gender-bending logo of a feminine mouth with a mustache, and she was reluctant to let go of that vision just yet. She still had August, she told herself, and maybe a little of September, too. She began to expand on some of the ideas she had thought over while she was at The Bear, and I encouraged her. I knew that she needed to work, like I needed to organize and get the archive underway. Jasmine thanked me for the support and kissed me before she went, also informing me that she needed to see Lydia afterwards, and that she would be going alone. I swallowed hard, knowing that tone in her voice, and watched her speak it with her newly cropped hair. I wondered what would transpire from both of her meetings today, but didn't vocalize my concern. I had been calling her Hyacinth, on and off, and though she had responded well to it, she told me to stop as I said goodbye to her for the day.

"Just for now. I need to get some things in order, and then we'll talk, okay?" She smiled, and I agreed. I would have to let her go and do what she needed to do, and in her absence, while I waited to do my own project, I got our life back together again. I cooked meals for all of us for the week, unpacked and washed what had not been taken care of the night before, and managed to understand Gerard's medication and how to get him to take it.

Vivian had been strict with me to not hide it in his food or trick him, as if he was a dog, but to just give it to him. He was going to complain, but he liked complaining. Even before this entire illness, Gerard had always liked complaining about whatever he could, teasing and critiquing, but it was only so he felt he had some control over situations where he didn't. He knew what was best for him and he knew that the people around him wanted the best for him. At least for now, while he knew who we were, it would be wrong to deprive him of the choice to take medication. Vivian had warned me it once took her all afternoon to persuade him, but she didn't expect that to happen again. "If he knows who you are, Frank, there is not a lot he won't do," she had told me with sadness in her voice. I thought of nothing but that remark as I gingerly stepped into Gerard's room and asked him how he was that day. I brought food, new art supplies, some music, and his medication, and we ended up spending the afternoon together. Not because he wouldn't take his pill; not at all, that went down easily though he groaned at the sight of it. It was me who was stubborn and didn't want to leave. Though he wasn't much for talking, he was active and animated, and I put on the tape of protest songs that Jasmine had given me before we left for The Bear. I had wanted to tell him more about my time there, but it didn't seem fair. Instead I sat with him, read nearby him, and helped him get some art supplies he couldn't reach with the one side of his body that was still slightly numb. He kept flexing his hands, to try and get dexterity back, and I held whatever one was idle as he did this. I stayed in his room, even when he fell asleep and the music shut itself off, just looking around. I didn't think about the archive consciously as I did any of this, but I knew in my mind I was trying to recreate his room here and memorize every surface. Everything in here had its origin someplace else, and his room collected and brought them all together again. Everything, I said to myself, but that rainbow canvas.

When Mikey knocked on our door, I was surprised the time had gone so fast. There were no clocks and calendars and schedules to keep now, I realized. I was not living inside the wilderness of the community anymore, where time seemed to stretch on. I got up quickly and left the room, my work there now done. I grabbed my tape recorder and my notebook off my floor before answering the door. While I greeted Mikey and stepped outside, Cassandra came in to fill my place. She passed me in a blur and I yelled out at her that I needed to talk with her soon.

"Yeah, yeah, my mom explained. Noelle is coming over later so we can do that. But for now, I'll stay with him," she informed me. She looked down for a brief moment, and sadness crossed her face. "I think the whole idea is ridiculous, to be honest, though. You're just poking at old wounds and making it melodramatic."

I nodded and shrugged. "Sometimes that's the only way to heal."

She scoffed. "Whatever. I'll still think of something and then bill you for whatever therapy I need afterwards."

She smiled through her bitter remark, however, making me take it with a grain of salt. I had missed her around, acting as my sister. My older sister, I reminded myself. I wasn't interviewing her later as Gerard's niece or adoptive daughter. She was his older sister, too. I told her that I would remember to have that as an integral part of the archive, and she seemed to warm up to the idea. We left on good terms, and I admired her maturity to deal with Gerard. She had had no choice when she was living with her mom and even when she had taken care of him then, she had mostly done it for her mom. Now, she was here of her own free will, and in spite of her resistance and anger towards Gerard and his actions a lot of the time, she was caring for him a great deal. I knew that Jasmine was going to be home within a few hours and that would make things easier, but that still didn't stop me from admiring Cassandra the more time I spent getting to know her. I wondered if one day, when she was a famous musician, if anyone would try and hunt me down for an interview to put in another archive to commemorate her. I wondered if we would still be drawn together if the one person connecting us left.

Inside the car with Mikey, I explained to him briefly about what I was doing, only to get barely into a sentence when he told me that Vivian had called. "I know all about it," he assured me. I couldn't read if he was excited or not about it, but he assured me that Alexa was. "She has something prepared already, visual aids and all, and she will show you it after dinner. But until then, let's just stay away from the heavy stuff."

I nodded, and we got back to work topics. I would need to come in on Monday and be briefed on what I had missed while I was gone. Although they had gotten someone to take over the bulk of my work, since I was apparently proficient, they wanted me to be aware of what I had lost in time and revenue (their revenue on paper) so that, in the case of promotion, I would not be missing any pieces of their system. The sound of promotion made me feel this strange sense of pride well up. Though I found no source of genuine passion in my job, the idea of climbing higher was appealing, especially with the thoughts I had entertained at The Bear about going into Human Resources. I wanted to ask Mikey about my plan, and whether or not that was a good idea for me. I didn't want to bring it up, though, because part of me still felt like a failure for it. It wasn't art, it wasn't even photography, but I still hoped that I could make it my own in a way, and that, with the advent of this new archive that was mine and mine alone to keep and attend to, I would not feel so resigned if I took a position elsewhere. Since Mikey had mentioned promotion, I tried to see if I could ask all of these questions that went to the topic of HR in a roundabout way. He didn't seem to catch onto what I was doing, and merely told me that he didn't know too much, but that the department was run poorly. He had worked there, very briefly, when he was first climbing up the floors of operation.

"It feels, a lot of the time, like it's a museum," he informed me.

"What do you mean?"

"It's like they are collecting relics and displaying them to show how cultured they are," Mikey raised his eyebrows as he pulled at a stop sign. "They treat the people like things, and they try to collect as many different things as they can so they can feel diverse. They don't change the policy or the language, but they brandish diversity as if having it somehow made the truth self-evident. It doesn't make sense."

I nodded, and Daniel's remarks echoing through my mind. He was so keenly aware of the subtle differences, sometimes merely expressed in the nuances of language, of the complexity between surface and depth understanding. I began to wonder if my idea of infiltrating would be worth it. Could I really change the whole system from inside? Did it really matter if I did? It was all too much to consider right then. I knew what I wanted to do with the future, and I knew that people were important, but I was still stuck in the middle of the masterpiece of survival. I was still too focused on the people that were around me right now to look beyond them at abstract versions of humanity in museums just yet.

Mikey pulled in the driveway, and like clockwork, Elizabeth ran outside to greet him. All the kids had been playing outside, and now that their dad was home, their focus had switched. Alexa came popped out from inside the house as well and walked down the pathway to meet me by my side of the car door, while Mikey attempted to stand and walk with Elizabeth on one leg and David on the other, while the other three kids following behind. Isaac was holding Jonah, who was flailing in his little onesie at the sight of more people.

"Welcome, Frank," Alexa said with a grin. "I hear you're vegan, now, too."

I nodded, and was surprised to find that Alexa not only knew about the sudden private change I had made within the middle of The Bear, but had also made the entire meal that night vegan, and had done so without any trouble. "You'll have to tell me what changed, Frank, although maybe not this visit. There are other things to attend to."

Then, amidst all the screaming and yelling and flailing and running, we all somehow managed to get inside the house together.

The dinner was curried chickpeas with biryani rice, and the spices in the food helped to combat the heat of the house. August was not nearly as wicked as July, but Mikey and Alexa did not have air conditioning, and with the oven on all day, the house felt like a sauna at first. Alexa had gone around and opened all of the windows and the large screen door to usher out the heat. It was helping a little, though a few times big gusts of wind would be carried in around us, and take us all by surprise. Some papers would flutter and drawings fell from the fridge, but I managed to clutch my notebook to my chest and not let it get away from me.

The children were well aware of Gerard's condition and had heard about my project. They asked so many curious questions and I cursed that I did not have the tape recorder with me at that very moment. They remembered Gerard through his work, through the art that he had made with them, and the art that he had left on their walls. He was the man who "drew really good pictures" and "sometimes smelt like gross cigarettes, but he always went outside so mom wouldn’t get mad at him." They remembered Gerard in simple terms, through simple word choices, and just by his name. Some of the younger kids called him "dad's brother" because uncle was too hard to say for some of them, and Gerard even harder than that. Sometimes he was shortened to just his initial B, and sometimes, for kids like Jonah, he was merely a distinct arm flail of recognition. Alexa was positive about this point, that Jonah's movements and gurgles were a type of language, and he only did some of them when around Gerard. I had to take her word for it, especially when she started to cite child psychology and Skinner's theories on behaviourism to make her argument even more persuasive. She stood by as Jonah's translator, and insisted that he was well aware of Gerard and loved him as much as the other children did.

Some of the older kids cited the time that Gerard and I had both come over, and he had been trying to draw their father and trying to draw them as well. Rachel mentioned that he kept getting her name wrong, but that she understood why now, and that it was okay. "Please tell him it really was okay," she insisted, and all I could do was nod. Jonah was quiet and bounced in his high chair, and I wondered if he would remember any of this conversation later on and be able to tell me about it without the aid of Alexa's translations. Would he remember Gerard holding him, that night at the party? Would he remember his handprint being formed on our wall? Alexa went on, after her small rant on Skinner and Piaget, telling me about when children's memory begins to form and they grasp concepts of the outside world.

"It is very rare for us to remember anything before age two. That's when our memory receptors begin to retain the information that we're given, and also, if you think about it, it's when our routine changes the most. We begin to walk, toilet train, and form language. Language is one of the key components of memory, which is why you're interviewing, I take it."

I nodded, but probed at her other comment. "Jonah's not two, yet. How will he remember Gerard?"

"I said it was rare, not impossible," Alexa smiled. She began to steer the conversation away from dwelling too much, and began to try and prove her theory by asking Mikey what his first memory was, sharing her own, and then asking me. I had nothing to offer right then, and eventually the kids' voices were stronger than hers and drowned out the adults reminiscing. These weren't really the same memories for them, yet. This was still so very present.

I was so surprised that Elizabeth and David had things to say about Gerard, considering they had only really met him this year since he had not been present for their birth. But he stuck with people; he always had that ability and even when he wasn't around in body, there was always his Noah's Ark mural on the wall to reinforce his presence. Alexa and Mikey did not have too many family photos up on their wall, and even less of people outside the family itself. Alexa had told me that maybe that could change soon, now that they know a famous photographer, but there was no pressure on me. I wanted to give them more photos of Gerard to have around, and had considered asking them if they were interested as a way to help the kids remember. But a lot of them did even without that aid, and I supposed it made sense. When you're young, only meeting someone for a few months is a good chunk of your life. They loved him as if he had never abandoned them in their youth, and then never tried to contact them. They loved him because he drew really well and would sometimes give them pictures. That was all it needed. Even for Jonah, I knew there was still hope. He had already known Gerard for a large portion of his life, and it was at the very best time, just when those memory receptors were budding with new stimulus and information. He would remember, I was convinced, by the end of the meal. By the time everyone had finished, I realized the entire dinner conversation had been about Gerard and the complexities of memory, children's capacity, and times that had passed.

It had been a rewarding discussion, but I wondered if I was making this too complicated, too convoluted. Had my brief stint in academia turned me on myself, and made me perceive Gerard in ways that he didn't need to be perceived? He was just a man that drew pictures, good pictures, and what was wrong with that? For the first time since the project was conceived in my head, I began to have doubts. The children remembered him so simply. It was the adults that were butting in who were making things complicated. I noted that Mikey was the exception there. He had stayed quiet for most of dinner, and focused on making sure Elizabeth ate what was in front of her instead of hiding it in her dress.

After dinner was done and the kids had been ushered away, Alexa said she needed a moment to prepare before she was interviewed. She went to the kitchen and did some dishes, and then disappeared off into the little side room where all her books and paintings were. I was left with Mikey, and he had given no inclination of what he wanted to say, or what he wanted to contribute.

"Do you mind if we step outside?" Mikey asked after finishing the dishes where Alexa had left off. I grabbed my tape recorder from my bag and asked if he minded if I taped what he said about Gerard. He looked at the little black device with some hesitation, and then he consented.

"I don't really know what to say, though, because I feel like it's already been said," he told me. We were standing in the porch area of his backyard, under some shade. There were deck chairs around, but he didn't sit down, so neither did I. His kids were playing in the yard in front of him, everyone organizing themselves their own ways. The heat had dissipated tremendously and it was a relief to step outside just as the sun was beginning to decline in the sky. Rachel had Jonah now, and seemed quite content to play with him by herself. David and Elizabeth were running, as usual, to get the ball that Isaac was hitting with a bat.

I thought about the conversation that Mikey and I had had before in his car, about how he dealt with life, and the advice that Gerard had given him. Was that how he wanted to remember his brother? On the tape, though we did not speak for quite some time, the sound of kids' laughter and running was captured.

"This is what I feel like Gerard should have seen, or at least, seen more of," Mikey said, referring to his backyard noises and his children playing. "I love my brother, but our relationship was hard at first. When I was a baby, he was a kid. When I was a kid, he was nearly a teenager. We have six years between us, and that doesn't seem like much now, but it was then." He paused. "But before he was an artist, and before anything had ever really happened to us, before our father realized that he was gay and that I was going to be having a hard time, we used to play. It seems like such a long time ago because it was and it didn't happen that often. Gerard never liked sports and neither did I, really, but we did play baseball. Only a few times." Mikey nodded. "Before he met you and left for Paris, he played with Isaac once. I remember it because it was so contradictory, because now he was that artist and all of those things happened to us to make us change. We weren't kids anymore, but he was playing with my son, who was a kid. It was something that Gerard didn't like to do, even with me, but he did it anyway. That is what I remember about him." Mikey looked over at me. "Is that enough?"

I nodded strongly, that was plenty. Just because Jasmine and Vivian had gone on and on about him, and given me a narrative that I could follow and possibly develop into something more, did not mean that Mikey had to as well. All during that dinner, I kept hearing snippets of the kids' impressions of him, and those small words formed by tiny mouths seemed to mean so much more than a five hundred page story that I could tell. I wanted to just tell people about Jonah's flail of his arms when someone said Gerard, because maybe in some recess of his mind he had already formed his first memory of Gerard holding him at the party. These small moments, these simple moments, they always mattered so much more. Mikey and I both focused on his kids playing, and Isaac struggling to hit the ball. Did he play because it reminded him of Gerard? He had not mentioned it when we were at the dinner table. Maybe he played it for some unknown reason, something unremembered but was still there, hidden. He knew he liked it, and he did not understand why. The lack of understanding, the void between the pieces, the myth that was formed out of that, was it better than facts?

"Am I making this too complicated?" I asked Mikey. I was so overwhelmed that I didn't even realize I left the tape recorder on at this part.

Mikey shrugged. "Our lives are complicated. We all form connections to certain people, certain events. Sometimes we need to tell a story out of them. Sometimes those moments just fly by."

"What about you?" I asked him, wanting to know more of what he was not telling me, and realizing I had no goddamn right to it, even if I was archiving this. It was archiving, not dissecting. I had to find it on the ground, not dig it up, in order to put it away again.

Mikey took a breath, and shared what he was comfortable with: "I think about those moments that you're collecting daily. I see them in front of me. And I am never alone because of it."

I nodded, and I shut off the recorder. I was about to thank him and go inside to meet Alexa, when he told me to wait. "I didn't want to tell you this for your archive, but maybe I should. Or at least, I should probably just tell you," he began. He looked at his kids, and then back to me. I held the recorder in my hand, but I didn't turn it on. "You know that Alexa is my second wife?"

My eyes widened a bit as I shook my head. When I thought about it more, however, and considered the facts, his admission made more sense. Their oldest kid was twelve, and that would make Mikey roughly thirty-eight when he was born. Alexa had always looked younger than him, but I never pried because it wasn't my business, and I knew all about large age differences and the relationships that formed around them. She was ten years younger, he explained, and he had left his first wife for her.

"We were having an affair, actually," Mikey said. "It's not something I'm particularly proud of, but it happened. My life is better for that affair."

He was grave about the matter as he spoke, realizing he was deliberately harsh on himself. He did not advocate affairs, and even now with this piece of information, I would have never considered him being involved in one. He was serious as he informed me about the details of his former life, and though he was still strict with himself, I could see the visceral emotion being expressed through his words. He found affairs deplorable and despicable, because that was not what marriage was about. He emphasized that he was speaking about the men he used to work with, and how he would chastise them internally for leading their wives on. He knew what type of relationship that Gerard and I had had, and what type of relationships that Gerard participated in. They were never monogamous, but, he noted, they were no t affairs. Full disclosure was key and what Gerard was doing was not the same as what these men he worked with were doing. Affairs were secretive, and especially within marriage, they just should not happen.

"Those are not the rules," Mikey told me. "If you don't like the rules, don't play the game."

But then he met Alexa at a work office party and the rules began to become more malleable. Things changed, very quickly. She had been hired as a fortune teller for the office's Halloween party, and she had singled him out at first. "I hated it," he told me. "I hated most of those office parties because they were just terrible and boring, but I went to every single one of them because I did not want to be home. Alexa made that one interesting, though, even if didn't like her telling my astrological sign to the whole room." He laughed a bit, remembering how insistent she had been. He was a Virgo, and the sign for that was the Virgin, and she had teased that they were very compatible together. They had talked most of the night after she had finished her fortune-telling duties, and though he had taken her card, he didn't think he would ever use it. He confided in me then that he had become a bit of a workaholic at that point in his life. It was very easy to do in his line of work, and he still knew guys who didn't leave the office until midnight and came back only after getting some rest and black coffee on their way from their apartment. In his line of work, he could get very rich, very fast if he played his cards right, but he admitted that it was not the money that kept him wired to his office. He had two kids at home, William and Andrew, who were both nearly ten and a wife that aggravated him.

"We got married when we were young. She was pregnant. We didn't think we had a choice," Mikey went on, and I began to remember these details from the story that Gerard had told me years ago.

"Didn't you use to play guitar?" I asked.

Mikey smiled and corrected. "No, bass, actually. But yes, I used to play, and Gerard was great with encouraging me. But as soon as Susan and I got married, it just seemed to not be in my priorities anymore." He sighed and I felt my own dream's precarious balance in the sway. "I wanted to be the perfect musician, and well, if I couldn't be that, then I was going to be the perfect husband. Alexa actually told me that perfection was usually the downfall of most Virgos that night, but I'm getting ahead of the story. All my time and energy went into being that perfect husband to Susan and then perfect father to William, and then when Andrew came along, him too. But after a few years, things were distinctly different. She wasn't putting in the same amount of energy that I was, and I began to get bitter because it didn't seem like it was fair. None of it seemed fair." When Mikey realized that he didn't want to be the perfect husband anymore, but that he couldn't leave because he loved his kids, he began to put his energy into becoming the best business person. "That was how I got so successful so fast. I just didn't go home. I would spend time with my kids on the weekend, but it was exhausting. I could not connect with them on the same level they wanted to connect with me because I wasn't happy and I knew they suffered because of it."

I was in awe, listening to Mikey's story. I couldn't fathom him not being a good father, because that was all that I had seen him as. In the middle of his story, Rachel threw a ball towards us, and he stopped, went and got it, and gave it back to her. He gave Isaac some encouraging words, waved to Jonah, and then eventually got back to his story. His kids came first, even midsentence, and I knew that if Elizabeth and David had crashed and hurt themselves in the middle of running around, he would stop this story entirely and it could be years again before I heard it. It was difficult to see any other side to Mikey.

"Alexa changed everything," he informed me. "She was barely twenty-seven when we met. I thought she had been flirting with me because of the gig, so I had tried to not read too much into her affection, but I still found myself thinking of her more than usual. I ended up calling her a week later, and she chastised me for missing her birthday. So I took her out. I still didn't think that anything would happen between us. I was in denial about the whole thing, even when something finally did happen. And then we just started. I didn't know how to stop it, and I realized I didn't want to stop it. She made me so happy. She was completely unlike anyone I had ever met before, and though I didn't get the tarot card and astrological routine, the way she spoke about it pulled me in."

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14