August - An Archive 5 страница

I nodded, understanding what he meant. I tried to imagine Mikey as that type of father, sneaking around nights and on weekends in order to see this young girl in her twenties. He stopped working late and continued to see Alexa, and before they knew it, she was pregnant. "We should have used protection. We deliberately didn't a few times. We knew what we were doing even if we never explicitly talked about it until we had to. We were acting unconsciously, like Alexa said. We wanted to be together, like this, as a family, though she felt bad breaking up a marriage and I was still in denial that I was breaking mine up. I really had been for years, even before her. I had never been happy. This pregnancy, instead of filling me with dread, filled me with hope. I couldn't keep things a secret anymore, and I told Susan what had been going on."

It wasn't a good break up, and Mikey took full responsibility for that. He was good about everything, and he still sent money for his children, even though they were well in their twenties now. He had visited them a lot when they were younger, but it had taken a long time for them to come around to him. They felt betrayed, and Mikey said that they had every right to feel that way, and he would have felt the same. "I was cheating. I had become those men that I had always hated, and I accepted the animosity towards my actions. But I understood things on a different level, now, having been on that side of the argument. I knew that they really were angry at me for all the years that I had spent working and not seeing them, being horrifically unhappy and taking it out on them, and not because I had slept with someone who wasn't their mom. I hated what I had done, but I look at this now, and I can't regret a single thing. I couldn't keep this a secret, and really, this isn't one. I tell people and most know."

Mikey's body language looked tired, a bit defeated. His story was a lot for him, because of the mistakes he felt that he made, and the conflicting emotions with what it got him in the end. He kept telling me that he was not proud for cheating, but that he almost needed to do it. I knew his story, even before he told it, because it took on the same shape as all the other deadbeat dad tales I had heard all throughout my youth. I knew those stories first hand from Jasmine, and I had seen my own parents' marriage. Mikey had left behind something bad, but he had created something new. He had followed what he knew to be right, though it didn't look that way to a lot of people. From the outside, his story looked the same as anything else, but now that I was in the center of it, I was well aware of how different and wonderful it really was.

"My kids are okay now, though. They came for Christmas this year, and they like their half siblings. It's hard, talking about that time period, but we're okay now." He nodded his head, satisfied.

"Don't regret it, Mikey," I told him. I was about to go into a big speech about how regret was a useless emotion, and this was the one thing that I learned from Gerard, but Mikey only smiled. He beat me there.

"I know. I don't. Things look different to different people, and this is the one memory that I have that takes real shape, because it's over. I know regret is useless for it, and I guess that's another tribute for Gerard as well."

I nodded, and added: "And following your heart?"

Mikey smiled, and looked out at his kids. Alexa slid the door open that we were standing in front of, and then stuck her head outside. It jarred us a bit, and she realized we were talking and was about to go away and back inside when Mikey stopped her. He grabbed her shoulder gently and pulled her face towards his own, and they kissed briefly. Alexa let out a small laugh, and then disappeared inside again. "I'm ready for you when you are," she called out to me, and I looked back to Mikey.

"Yeah, I'd say you're right about that," he told me, answering my question from before. "Sometimes you wake up and realize you're in a bad situation, and it comes on suddenly. You need to get out. It took me a while, but I know there's no shame in getting out, now, especially when it gives you this. Fuck what others think." He smiled, and it caught me off guard. I was used to him being serious, and not really swearing. It was endearing, and delighting. He was done his story now, and his ending complete. I let him go back to his kids, and he greeted Isaac with a throw of a ball. Isaac had been the child that brought him and Alexa together; the first child that shifted a life already in process. I watched them awhile longer, wondering how I could convey all these stories, and do them the same justice.

Inside the small room where all Alexa's books lined the shelves, she began to set up for her turn. She pulled out her deck of tarot cards and pulled a small table, hidden under the bed, to put between us. I was sitting on the bed and she was where her easel usually was. It was collapsed and leaning against the wall and a chair from the kitchen was in the room so she could sit comfortably across from me. There was no canvas around anywhere. She had probably sold the Death card piece and was waiting for inspiration to hit her for her next work. I had no idea why she had brought out the deck, however, and I was even more surprised when she lit incense and placed the smoldering stick in a holder on one of the bookshelves. The sweet smelling smoke began to fill the room and she arranged two candles on either side before she sat down again. I asked her if it was time for me to flick on the recorder, hoping that her set up was done. She got a cloth to put over the small table we were using, dark purple and velvet, before she nodded her head yes. She smiled, and dove right into what she wanted to talk about, before I could give any instructions.

"I want to tell you about the major arcana," she began and when I shifted in my seat, she held up a hand to signal my stop. "I know, you want something about Gerard. You want to pick my brain and see what's under this index card in my mind labeled Gerard. But I want to tell you about how I remember him. How is very different than what I remember about him, but trust me, Frank. This is how I do it. No, I'm not going to contact him from beyond the grave or predict our futures together or anything like that. I don't believe in that, either. But I do believe in what I can see, and I see him in these cards. I want to show you the major arcana." She split the deck in two, one half being much thinner than the other. She had already separated the major from minor, and using this smaller pile, split them again and began to spread them out in front of us. The cards right ways up facing me, she laid every single one down from zero to twenty two. When she had completed, she raised her eyes to me again. "I told you before about lightness and darkness and how this is seen in the cards. Gerard was around for that conversation. He told us that the end is nothing but darkness, and while I could offer no definitive answer about the end because I have not gone there yet, I could offer my opinion on the beginning, and I say that the beginning is darkness, too. It is in the middle where there is light, and it is your responsibility to find that light. There is a light in each of these cards, and I want you to find it in each one. Zero is The Fool, as we all are fools when we first begin to learn. Let's start there, let's start anew."

She drew her hand down slowly to where she had first begun setting up the deck. Although I was taken aback by the entire display and was still wondering if I would be able to get what I needed from this interview, I was captivated by Alexa. Her voice took on a quality that I had never heard before; this must have been how she talked to her clients. I hoped they paid her well, because she commanded a different type of authority and wisdom that I had never felt before. When I found the card labeled THE FOOL at the bottom with the number zero etched up top, I tried to follow her instructions and find the source of light in the beginning. Most of the card was drawn in light colors and I didn't have to search too far to see the sun in the backdrop. The rest of the card, under the sun, displayed a youth at the edge of the cliff, who was dressed in vibrant colors and holding a rucksack over one shoulder, along with a dog by his side. Alexa nodded with my deduction of the sun, but also offered that since the dog was bright white and protecting the youth before he fell off the cliff, that he could be the source of light, too. But suns were common symbols, and they embodied the progress that we would need in order to continue our journey.

"This card is the place of birth," she informed me, her use of parallel words uncanny. "Carl Jung believes that each of these cards in the major arcana is representative of the life cycle and stage that we all must go through in order to reach the end and become our full selves. The end in this case is not the Death card, but The World instead." She skipped ahead with her hands, and motioned to the card that was closest to me at the bottom of the array. THE WORLD was written in large black letters, the number twenty-two at its apex, and in its center it contained the elements that were needed to make a world. There was a person in the center, a laurel leaf around them, and four other symbols in the corner of the card. There were three animals in the corners, lion, snake, and a bull, along with the face of a human man. The backdrop of the card was blue, but I saw no distinct sun and no distinct form of light here. Alexa smiled, knowing what I was search for, and provided me with the answer. "This card is enlightenment, total and complete transcendence, so that you can see the world as its whole and how it functions. You see each individual element and you look down on it all, not with condescension, but with understanding. In this card, the light is everywhere and your entire world lights up. Or you are the light yourself, and you look down on all that gives you joy in the world."

She smiled and then we went back towards the middle, and she instructed me to find the light in each one of them. "You do not necessarily need to do this in order, though, since in our lives it is rare we have order. All we know is the beginning and the end and sometimes we never reach all the stages in between. But we are always The Fool when we are born, seemingly by accident and chance, and then we know the end when we die and we become The World. We are everywhere, then, we are dirt and air." She nodded and then leaned back in her chair, letting me take the reins of this now and go through on my own. With a sigh, I began, knowing how convincing Alexa could be. I did not want myth for the archive and I had been adamant about that. I knew I needed to let people form their own stories, but I was getting a bit aggravated, especially since I was being pulled into it and doing most of the work.

I started to find the light in the easiest cards, the ones I had seen before. The Strength card had always been welcoming to me, so much that the lion seemed like something I could pet if I just reached out far enough. The infinity symbol above the maiden's head was the light, that was simple, and I went on. The Tower and Death still haunted me, and I quickly found where they contained light and then began to zoom through the rest. I found Justice in her golden scales and sighed as I still hung onto distant memories of The Prosecutor. It was feeling as if all of these cards were relating to things that didn't even have to do with Gerard, but with others, and was about to complain when I found The Hermit card. I stopped in my tracks then, and gazed up at Alexa.

"When Gerard was in Paris, he called himself a hermit. He lived alone for so long, he began to feel like one, and the townspeople around him used to call him l'etranger. At least, until I showed up," I told her, letting my own story and image of him bleed through. Alexa merely nodded with a smug smile on her face. It was in that subtle tip of her head where I began to understand that she had known exactly what she was doing with these cards and forcing me to find the light. I was finding Gerard in each of them, just the way she said that she found him. She was getting me to understand her way of seeing things, by using my own memories and my own distinct vision. The light in The Hermit card was contained in his lantern, right in front of him. Alexa went on, telling me that six-pointed star and the way he held it out in front of him was symbolic for the quest for truth. I told her about the candles in Paris and the cave allegory, which she already knew, but I told her my distinct version of it. I told her about comme le soliel interminable and she could only smile as she sighed. "See, Frank? It's the light that is always there. You must always find that light. It exists right now, not after, and it is never-ending, exactly like he told you."

I wanted to thank her, but I could barely form words. The smoke in the room, while sweet and pleasant, began to overtake my lungs and I coughed. She touched my shoulder gently, and then we went back to the cards. We focused on the cards between us, and I went through the deck, believing in her more and more, and finding Gerard in each little piece. The card The Sun contained sunflowers, so many of them, all at once, spread over the card as if it would burst up from the source. While she told me about man's ascent to greatness that the flowers represented, I told her about the market in Paris. For The Lovers card, it was hard to miss the sunlight in the background that overwhelmed the card, but the two figures below, reaching out to one another but not quite reaching, reminded me of Magritte and the sheet that separated The Lovers. I thought of Gerard's rendition of Magritte's works, and I told Alexa more about the man that we were realizing the two of us knew so well. I knew Gerard's body, his mind, and his behaviour, while Alexa knew the deep emotions felt behind the surface of his art. She knew more about that than I thought possible.

"These images and icons, evocative symbols, and distinct patterns, they don't just come up in our life stages, they are an important part of human consciousness. Because of this, they permeate everywhere. Did you know that every single culture has their version of the creation story? They may not be named Adam or Eve, but they function in the same manner. We had no contact with these parts of the world, we spoke different languages, but our brains still processed the information in the same way. We told each other the same stories. This is why these symbols are so important, even more so than language. These are the foundations of our thinking and sometimes it's good, but sometimes it does lead us down a negative path." She moved her hand to The Devil, a card I had been deliberately avoiding, and was not going to get out of that easily. I looked down at the people chained to where The Devil held them captive, but the more I looked, the more I began to realize that their chains were easy to be released from. I asked Alexa about it and she confirmed. They were there because they wanted to be chained there. It was an idea that was the light in this card, and idea that could permeate someone's mind and infiltrate them so strongly that even when they were able to leave, they told themselves they could not. Gerard was still embedded in even the scariest card in the deck. I thought of his The Flowers of Hell exhibit, and the monster that he became in some people's eyes because of an idea wrongly interpreted. I shuddered, and we moved swiftly on.

"There is a book by Joseph Campbell that talks about the hero with one thousand faces. He is the person who makes this journey from The Fool to The World, and then comes back and to tell everyone about it. This journey is everywhere in society. From Buddha to Jesus to Star Wars, we see a hero with no face and we give him a face. To me, Gerard has always been that face. He has been that myth that lies deep within the undercurrent of our daily lives, and the ones which we try to bend our own lives towards."

I nodded, understanding that all the stories that I had been told as I grew up were all really the same but told with different symbols. It didn't lose the magic of the tale, but it did make me stop and think about the implications now, especially for Gerard. I was giving Alexa far more credit than I had in the past, and I believed that these cards could represent the things that had happened to me without actually knowing me because of this underlying structure, but I still had a wall up. I did not want to turn Gerard into a myth. It was never his mission to become a myth, and even though it could easily be read like that in the cards, I didn't want to place him there. No matter how beautiful that story would end up being, I didn't think I could tell it honestly. The sunflowers from The Sun stared up at me as I explained all of this to Alexa. "He was a man, but he had his face. He was - is - Gerard. I want to keep him that way, as long as I can."

Alexa nodded, and then extended her hand to touch my shoulder. "I know, Frank. I know you see things differently than I do, but please keep in mind that this is how I see him. This is really how I see everyone, including myself. For your project, you want to avoid the lies that myth can sometimes perpetuate and therefore want nothing of it. But for me, everything is myth and nothing is a lie. Sure, I'm not as extravagant with myself as with Gerard's interpretation, and maybe I should focus more on my interactions with him, though there were so few. I made up my stories in between, I guess, and from afar."

"What interactions can you remember having?" I asked her. We had both backed away from the cards, and she took a long time to think.

"Even then, all of our conversations were always about myth and great stories, even if they were told from his own artistic perspective. The first painting he did for us was Noah, and the first painting I saw of his was a reinterpretation of something that was already within painting canon. All these pictures, these paintings, these texts, they are all related. I cannot ignore them. I understand that you want facts, but these are facts to me. This is how I see my life: everything in full color. I like to think that he saw things the same way, and felt things as deeply." She paused for a second. "You know, he talked a lot. You were aware of that, I'm sure, and probably could barely get a word in edgeways since you're very quiet. Even though he talked a lot, I knew that he was keeping things from me, from us, and maybe even himself. He had something else going on underneath his skin and I believe that he brought it forward through painting. Whatever it was."

"The madness," I said, just barely above a whisper. Whether or not Alexa knew that the Greek translation of dementia was madness, I did not know. But she nodded, understanding something very strongly.

"The madness to him was just his subconscious. It was only his demons that everyone suffers from. He was brave enough to face his demons in paint and give them an end that way. Me, I see them regularly through the cards. I always think in cards. I am never alone," she stated with finality, and with a smile. "Myth is never ending, like light, and the thousand faces always get replaced. I know that I said before that I believe it begins and ends in darkness, but sometimes I wonder, at least for him, if it began and ended in light."

I thought about that for a moment. The interview had gone in completely different direction than I thought it would. I saw no distinct story between Alexa and Gerard, and given the time period and how they had known one another, maybe there was no story to tell. Maybe it was all side glances and sceptical glares between the two of them. Or maybe they had shared this deep connection, over a small touch, and instantly understood their interiors without talking. She knew of the madness that he suffered from, both in and outside of the creative diseases that could be fatal. I could see that she knew how intense it was to live a life filled with art and all of these symbols that spoke with one another, and I trusted her because of it. I thought of her question on his life in light, and explained to her about Kandinsky's rainbow and the blackness of obscurity that Gerard feared. She nodded sympathetically, but she still insisted on her original deduction.

"Yes, but what is light, or at least, white light? It is all the colors at once. If that's not madness, I don't know what is. Having everything all at once, and never knowing what way to go. No wonder he was drunk half the time." She sighed. "In spite of death, I don't think he will ever be done."

I paused, really thinking through her statement. My doubts from before came back, and I was again no longer sure if I was doing the right action with this archive. I had been making things complicated, and now I was making them end. Just because his physical body ended, did that mean the story of Gerard needed to end alongside it? What was I making an archive for? I turned to Alexa, and asked her over the cards. "Am I being unfair? Making it end right now?"

"No," she responded right away. "You need an ending, and so does he. So do all of us. But that does not mean that you stop believing, that it all goes away, and we never remember him again. You're making an archive, right? That was the specific word you used?"

"Yes," I told her. "An archive."

"Well, there you go. An archive is a place to keep things, not a place to end them. You can come back whenever you want, and change and add things, or simply marvel at the collection. But end it? No. You don't end the archive, even if they take away your space. Because you've added it once, it will always be on reserve. Eventually the interviews you do will end, you will stop adding, and you will think that you are done. But nothing is ever done, if these cards and the stories I have told you have anything to prove, it is that fact."

She began to collect her cards, from beginning to end, her eyesight down and firmly concentrated. The incense holder had burned out the stick, and the smoke was filtering out through the room. Taking this as the end of our session, I shut off the tape recorder.

"You should let me do your cards one time," she told me. "But for the time being, here. Take these. I hope they help you in whatever you need." She dropped the deck in my hands, and I felt the weight balance on my palm. I thanked her, but I knew that would never be enough.

Mikey gave me a ride home, and when I got there, Cassandra was already ready. Her mother was with Noelle in the car and the two had apparently begun to hit it off. "They like the same pulp fiction writer that I can't stand. So now they're like BFFs. I can't stand it. My mom is going to be buying us wedding dresses soon." She heaved an aggravated sigh, and then pulled up a chair to the kitchen table where she was. Jasmine was upstairs with Gerard, and we had the room to ourselves. I was about to probe a bit more about what type of wedding dress Cassandra envisioned herself in, just to break the mood a bit, but she cut to the chase.

"So let's get this over with," she insisted, and even when I offered to make us both some tea, she shook her head defiantly. "I know what I want to say and why would I wait any longer? This isn't a stroll down memory lane for me, and I don't think it is for you, either."

I had no idea if that was a subtle stab at just how tired I looked, and I didn't care. She did have a point, and though I felt as if I had already been through enough that day, I pulled out the tape recorder and began so we could finish as soon as possible.

"Gerard is an asshole," Cassandra announced, and my eyes went wide. "I know we all love him and all that mushy stuff because we're family and it's oh so nice. Please note that in spite of myself I am including myself here, because I am the sister after all, but we also need to be honest with ourselves about this. Since no one else will be, I'm taking on that duty. Gerard Wyatt was an asshole. He left for seven years. This needs to be better known, along with how it ruined my mother for the first part of that. But it also helped make her who she is now because she had to refocus her time and energy, so even though I want to be mad at him, I can't be. I could only stay mad at him for a week when he first came back. Then I began to remember why I liked him being my uncle before."

My eyes went wide again when she called Gerard her uncle, and she fought back now, realizing her slip-up into the past. "But I would like to re-inform everyone that he is my younger brother now. He lost the uncle privilege when he left and I grew up without him. So, hah. And Frank, who is the archivist right now, is my other younger brother, and he is older than Gerard. Just for everyone listening or reading or whatever ends up happening to this tape, this is how it should be documented. I remember these things and I will come back and find you, Frank, as much as I like you, if you forget about this and decide to not put it in."

I smiled and suppressed a small chuckle that was emerging. Cassandra seemed insulted, so I showed her my pad of paper as I began to write on it. I wrote her name down and her position as older sister, then underlined, and for good measured, circled it. The ticks of the pencil and the crinkling of paper were caught in the tape, along with Cassandra satisfied nod, and the rest of her addition. "Okay, I have now confirmed that Frank is doing a good job. He is an honest guy. He's really the best guy to do this." She smiled, but the nostalgia was fleeting. I was amazed and how much I was enjoying Cassandra's story and her way of telling it. The way that she was addressing me and acknowledging my role made me feel visible again, and like I was finally involved with the story on a more visceral and organic level. I had felt like I was jumping in too much before, but now Cassandra was pulling me there and directly asking me to participate. She identified me as what I was in this context - the archivist - and she made everyone's positions well known before she went on. Alexa's discussion had tried to pull me in, too, but we had been talking though symbols and metaphors, while Cassandra was very much grounded in the real and present moment. She had to be in order to take this on. This was an emotional project, and for Cassandra, who had stayed so closely guarded most of her life, it was hard to begin opening up and to do it completely by herself.

"So, where shall I start? I had to think about this a lot, and then I realized I was rationalizing things too much in my head. Frank likes emotion, I kept saying, and so, though I hate him for making me feel my feelings, here it goes...." She took a deep breath, and then finally stopped talking to the tape recorder in front of us, and started to talk to me. When meeting my eyes became too much for her, I offered her my hand and she pushed that away, too. She looked down into her lap, talking to herself more than anything, and began to usher herself through her memories.

"Okay, so I was the playing piano one night. I always play piano, but I'm talking about when Gerard was staying with us when you and Jasmine were at that commune and being hippies. I remember being really upset at first that he was even there. He was making my mom completely stressed out again and she didn't need that. She was running so many summer projects at the university, along with coping with him, and I couldn't stand it. Noelle's mom freaked out that month too, and not to mention that we still have no idea what's going on with our school, Gerard just seemed like yet another list of burdens, which was unfortunate. I had just started to like him again, and now he was making my mother crazy again. I know it's not his fault, but I was angry and upset. I ignored him. I felt bad about it, but my mom was taking care of him pretty much 24/7 so I didn't feel too bad. Noelle started to come over to hide out from her mom and to help out with small chores and whatnot, so she distracted me too. I was always busy, so it really wasn't exactly willful ignoring. I was either with Noelle, cleaning, or playing piano..." She paused for a second and twisted her face around. She excused herself to get a glass of water, clearly stalling. I let her do what she needed to do, keeping the recorder going as she ran her glass and took a few minutes to drink it. She leaned against the counter and folded her arms across her chest. It was just then that I realized she was wearing red; not bright red, but a burgundy sort of color. Her top struck me, as if it didn't belong, but was still familiar. I wondered if she had gotten new clothing, finally coming out of her muted color phase.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14