August - An Archive 7 страница

"And then Gerard really came into the picture after that. We had always heard her talk about him, but he seemed so surreal. She talked about him within the same statement as people like Michelangelo, but then she would compare him to Milton's Satan and other more negative pieces. We had no idea what image of him we were supposed to form. We really met him when you guys moved, the first time," Dean came back in and took over the narrative. We made pretty intense eye contact as he spoke of this time, because he and I had also shared a few personal moments then. "I can remember the two of us in the stairwell so distinctly even now. Gerard was sitting on the steps because he had gotten too tired, and we were all going past him. Callie had just run ahead to get more boxes, but I was lagging behind. As I passed him, we made eye contact and nodded, but he asked if I was chasing Beatrice. I was completely caught off guard, and he said, 'It's not quite the seven layers of hell, but that shouldn't stop you from chasing after her.' It was the most bizarre statement anyone had ever said to me. I don't even know if I said anything back to him about it. I just kind of went along with things and got you guys moved in. But it bugged me, you know? I had all this other stuff I needed to deal with before I could even consider his statement, but it would creep into my mind at random times. I ended up doing a Dante's Inferno painting just to see if I could get it out of me."

He turned to Callie now, and she smiled. "I saw it, and I thought it was an okay piece of art, but I couldn't stop staring at it. It made me think of the thrift store I used to work at. We used to get freaky art like that all the time, only Dean's piece was actually good."

"You worked at Savers?" I cut in, my own memories coming back to me. I was suddenly back to December, wandering the aisles of forgotten garments, trying to find Jasmine in the crowd, finding Vivian and Gerard, and the job interview I missed. All of the things that slipped by me so quickly, suddenly coming back into focus. I told her that Vivian had taken me - all of us, really - there after I had gotten back from Paris so we could all get new clothing and could play dress-up. It seemed so contrite to say something like this to how well-dressed the two graduate students were before me, but I didn't care. I looked down at what I was wearing, and tugged on the shirt I had on underneath the button up one. "See? I got this there. It was the first round of dress up."

Callie nodded and smiled. "Totally like a dress-up, though I think more people saved fun outings like that for Halloween. I worked in the Housewares department and my god, that was a treasure hunt. Working here was when I had first started getting serious about art. They had some of the most horrendous and then the most beautiful donations. There were a lot of prints and duplicates by the classic painters, but then there was some original art that was well done, too. I would always write down the people's names in the corner if I could make them out and see if I could find them later on, if they were famous or not. That was really when I started to pay attention on a more local level, and how I found out about the university where Vivian taught. Dean's painting reminded me of the ones that I used to shift through daily, and we went out to coffee after that. He told me the story of Dante and Beatrice, although I already knew most of it, and I told him about working in the back of Savers and feeling as if I was trying to find Beatrice - or just beautiful things.

"What people donate is incredible. I've seen full military uniforms with badges and metals. I've seen original pieces of art, antique pictures, and even an old gramophone. It felt like a time warp going back there sometimes or like my childhood had vomited in the room and I could not escape legos if my life depended on it. But then, then you get the "underworld materials" as Dean called it. These things used to be a part of something larger and have a distinct humanity to them, but are now dropped off like lost souls. Think family photo albums, diplomas, love letters - oh I once found this chest that needed a key to open it. It took me all day, but I eventually got to the end of the cart I was unloading and I opened up the box with the key I found in the corner. It was filled with letters and they were the most beautiful things I had ever read. I smuggled them out of the back room, because I could not let them be destroyed."

"Destroyed?" I asked.

"Most things at Savers, when it's not used or bought, is gone. Something like the letters wouldn't even be sent to the floor because they wouldn't turn a profit. I could not lose them."

Dean nodded. He had been just as taken with Callie's story as I was, and now he sat back and drank his coffee. He made eye contact with me, and said, "I'm glad you're doing this. Making this archive is a really good idea."

"Why?" I wondered. Though Gerard had been a part of their story, and had made them find one another amongst all the things that could have gotten in the way, he did not seem to be a present force in their lives. At least, nothing like with the first set of people I had interviewed. He was there, but as a shadow, a footnote.

"Because if you didn't, then this would all end up in the trash, just like those letters would have," he stated honestly. "Not every Savers has a Callie in Housewares who is willing to preserve. Not everything that is that beautiful is ever seen again, and that's such a shame. So I'm glad that at least somewhere, this will exist. Like Callie's letters. She still has them in her closest, and she wasn't kidding, they are quite beautiful."

I wanted to tell them about collective memory, about how even if those letters were thrown out, they would still be around in people's minds. The love would get picked up again and those people who wrote them still had that feeling within them, but Callie and Dean were exchanging lovey-dovey looks with one another, and I was getting tired. The materiality of their story, along with the things they held in front of them, made me envious. I wanted to feel things with my hands again and to know what I was doing was right. I needed to start building soon, I realized. I was becoming exhausted running through hell.

The three of us departed shortly after that. We had finished our coffees and I had turned off the tape recorder. They began to tell me more about their relationship, how the two of them had gone to Savers and looked at old art, and it was a nice story. They tried to do interesting things together and talked about travelling a lot. They both wanted to see Egypt and Turkey, and then maybe smaller places like Bhutan. Travelling and being exposed to good art was something that was definitely in their future, but until then they spent a lot of time watching documentaries and working on their projects. They expressed an interest to know what Gerard, Jasmine, and I usually did. I told them a little about The Bear, the show for the archive, and the protest songs, since it was the last form of art that had been passed between the three of us.

"How does a relationship like that even work?" Callie had asked and my face fell. Her comment wasn't meant to be mean and maybe I overreacted a bit. She was interested in us since we were outside the norm of monogamy, and she wanted to be nice about it. But we were not a curiosity. We were not some sideshow that was going to get taunted at, or sympathetic looks. How was I even supposed to explain my existence to people who meant well? I couldn't yell at them for being mean to my face, and yet, what they were asking me was completely wrong. They didn't hurt me, and I knew that Callie and Dean's attitude was only formed through lack of exposure to the type of love Jasmine, Gerard, and I manifested. It wasn't their fault, but I didn't know how to answer.

I managed to sputter out a, "It just works," and then corrected myself to, "Or at least, it worked." Callie and Dean both became saddened by my use of past tense, and the underlying reason for the archive, Gerard's decline, was hinted at too strongly. We called it a night after that, knowing we all had a lot of plans that we needed to adhere to. They walked hand in hand away from me, and I sat in Jasmine's car awhile and collected myself. I began to think about another counter argument to Vivian's request of display: even to well wishers, with good intentions, a display could only be taken so far. I would have rather had my collection in an archive, singular and alone, still there as a blemish in history for people to remember, for people to seek out on their own. But I absolutely didn't want to brandish it so people could ask me strange questions about how it worked. It just did work, and if you didn't see that from the evidence I was going to supply, then there was nothing else I could do.

This was the problem with a display. People were always going to come in and trample on it. Even with an archive, I knew the same would happen. It would only be quieter, more passive aggressive. If wanted to be free of something, and do Gerard justice, I needed to bite the bullet. I needed to do the archive and have a show to display it - at least for some time. I didn't want to get too wrapped up in the art of confession, and let my display turn into an overexposure. I just needed to get it out, and then I needed to back away. I could only deal with the questions for so long and there was nothing forcing me to answer them.

I realized in the car that as much as I was making this for Gerard, I was also doing it for myself. It was not that I needed to tell people about him, but that I knew him. I needed to proclaim that I was a part of him just as much as all of these people. I didn't want to say I was more important, though. I had just heard tales of gender identity, drama, robbery, baseball, and the entire series of life stages, light and darkness, and treasure hunts through hell. I did not think I could compete with that, or if I would be able to muster the energy for this by the time September rolled around. When I got home I called up Vivian and told her I was going to do the display.

"Thank you, Frank," she said. There were no admissions of 'I knew you would,' and no rubbing it in my face. "I will start to set that up for you and you should start thinking of how you want it all designed."

I swallowed, but barely anything went down. This was the first time I had really gotten into a project this deep, with this many voices, and this many parts. I didn't know how on earth I was going to arrange and end up completing it. I didn't think I would have the time. I was used to working alone, and then only getting other people to intervene during the ending stages when the set-up happened. Now all of it hinged on others. I felt the strings I was holding slowly loosen and I imagined utter failure. I didn't even have a title yet.

"The Gerard Project," Vivian suggested, and I immediately recoiled.

"No, absolutely not."

"But this is about him? So why not?"

I sighed. I was beginning to doubt that you could ever represent one person and one person utterly. Mikey had said so himself. We all had connections, we all had our lives. We were never alone. This was about Gerard, but I could never represent Gerard alone. I was already overflowing.

"I just want an archive, Vivian. Just an archive."

"All right. We can call it The Archive."

"No," I cut her off again. " An archive. I don't want there to be anything special or distinct about it. This is just him and everyone else. Just an archive."

She sighed, too, more upset that I was making this hard to market rather than the intention of my work. "I approve, even if this will make my life hard in the end. An Archive it is. You have until September. Use it wisely, my dear."

"What if it's not done by then?" I asked. I thought of Alexa's words about the idea of endings, the constructed nature of them, and debated having this archive just end mid-sentence so that I didn't have to feel this immense amount of pressure.

"It will be, and if not -"

"Yeah, I know. We can add to it later, that's what an archive is, really," I parroted.

"Yes, and Frank, remember that he's not dead, either." She paused. "Endings happen when they happen. Sometimes it's in the middle of the work, before you ever expected it to be done. Did he ever tell you about the story of Kandinsky and the painting?"

"Yeah," I said, my voice heavy. Kandinsky bore a brutal weight now, in darkness and light.

"Exactly. I tell it to my students. Sometimes you're done and you don't even know it. Go for a walk, go outside, be around some awesome people, love someone," she emphasized the last point. We were both quiet for some time, and her words from before echoed in my mind. He's not dead, either, Frank. I nodded to myself, and told Vivian thank you, and to have a good night.

"You too," she said, and then hung up the phone. I sat in the kitchen, alone for the first time in what felt like ages. I took out my bag and pulled out the pad of paper. I had written nothing down when I saw Callie and Dean other than her asinine question. I had written it down, hopefully to take some of its power away, but it had not worked. Seeing it stare back at me made me rip off the first sheet of paper and put it into the trash. I sat down at the kitchen table with my pencil, and began to write. I had no idea what I was doing at first - I thought I was just venting my frustration - but I soon found that they were taking the form of letters. The first one was to Callie and I tried to explain to her in the simplest of terms just how my love life worked was something that was not up for public scrutiny. I thought of what Hilda said, about how labels meant nothing when you enter a private space like another person's body. I knew that words melted away then, and that they had always been empty containers. What was real was the body I had in front of me, whether it was Gerard or Jasmine or both at the same time. I didn't need to explain how that relationship worked, I began to grow heated in my letter writing, because if she had half the love I had ever experienced, she would understand how something as simple as love worked. It only got complex when you made it complex. When you just loved one another, it did not need explanation...

I moved on from there, writing my next letter to Dean and thanking him for the peripheral bonding we had about masculinity. I wished I had known more men like him, instead of like Travis and Sam. I wondered how I would have turned out, but then again, no matter how much easier my life may have been with Dean as my friend in high school, I wouldn't have traded what I was given instead for the world. To Hilda, I addressed her with perplexing emotions as I went back and forth from elation to utter confusion and annoyance with her actions, her thoughts on sex, and how she had been there for Jasmine. I appreciated our conversation on the phone, and it had restored my faith in her, but I lamented that it had taken far too long for us to get there. Next were Mikey and Alexa, as a unit. I told them I admired their strength, their monogamy, and their dedication to one another. I told them that parts of me wanted their life because it was so simple, or at least, it appeared so from the outside. I wanted Jonah to be my own son, so I could raise him and be there for him the way my dad wasn't exactly there for me. I wrote a letter to my dad and told him that just because he didn't address Gerard in letters didn't mean that he didn't exist. Just because Gerard was sick, didn't mean that I was sick with this forgetting disease, because I was still here, remembering everything and refusing to let it go. I told my mother to stop screaming her silences, and to just use fucking words. I wrote a letter to The Bear community, and I didn't say much. Just a simple wish you were here, because things were so much easier then. It hadn't been just easier for myself, I knew that Jasmine's anxiety had crept back into her system and it was almost like we hadn't left at all. Her hair and new clothing, maybe, stood as the only frames of reference that something had indeed changed. I told The Bear community as a whole that they were whole, and then I stopped writing. I was getting myself into this huge vortex of spinning stories and lives that I had forgotten myself. I needed to remember who I was, who was in my own archive, and write them all down quickly before I forgot. I wrote to Vivian for pedantic ironies, Cassandra for her filthy mouth, and Noelle for being too damn quiet that I never really got to know her. I wanted to know her. I wanted to know and love everyone and though some of my letters were so violent and bitter because I was just so fucking tired, I wanted everyone to know that they meant the world to me. These letters would never be sent to the person they were addressed to. But they needed to be written, they needed to be let go.

When I finally got to Jasmine and Gerard in my writing, I stopped. I needed to be angry at them. I knew I had to get all my frustrations and laments about mistakes I had made, we were making now, and all the things that we all forgot. I had forgiven myself and everyone around me at The Bear, but had I forgotten? No, I had been too afraid to forget. I kept this like a weight around my neck and I was tired of feeling like I was dying anytime I moved. I hated myself for writing these horrible things to the people that I loved, and I told them I loved them in the letters. I told them I would never forget that they were as bitter and stupid and selfish as I was, and I would never forget all the wonderful things they had done to overcome those failings.

I was still writing furiously when I heard Jasmine move upstairs. She must have finished putting Gerard into bed, and was now coming down to see me. I had been on her letter then. I had been yelling at her, but not for the reasons I knew she thought. I finished up what I was saying quickly, and then I stuffed hers along with the others into my bag with the tape recorder and my other supplies. I closed the straps and waited awkwardly for her to come down and see me.

She smiled when she came in, holding a mug. She was wearing one of Hilda's old pairs of pants, and my collared shirt over her large belly. Since most of my clothing was loose on her, it fit around her ample stomach perfectly. She had started to wear tank tops and t-shirts underneath, and then just did the buttons up until they stopped fitting across the center and let the rest hang down. Her hair was slicked back from having just had a shower, and she wore no shoes or socks. She hated all of her clothing now, all of the stuff that didn't fit, and all of her shoes were in the same situation. She had been living out of that garbage bag Hilda had donated and my closet for the longest time. Cassandra, and then Noelle, had come by to pick through her old attire and then Alexa had come for some 'new' outfits, too. She took the bulk of it, wanting to make sure that Rachel had some choices, but there was still a lot there. And as we had both discussed previously, she was probably never going to wear it again.

"Hey," I called out to her. She was putting her dishes in the sink and running some water over them. I touched the small of her back as I approached from behind. I began to tell her about what Callie had told me about working at Savers. I recounted the story of the lost letters, the art, and then reminded her about us playing dress-up. I spoke about the "underworld materials" as Dean called them, and Jasmine seemed to like this part.

"I guess there's the part of Savers that acts like a confessional, and we can dump old burdens, too," I suggested. I waited for a minute, but Jasmine didn't respond. "Do you want to go to Savers with me? I have some things to take over, and I figured I could look around too."

Jasmine was paying attention again. "For Paloma?"

I sighed, and understood. "Yeah, sure. Do you have anything else to take?"

She finished up the dishes and nodded. Within moments, we were both hauling down the rest of her closet, getting in the car, and going. We were fast on our toes; we had to be for Gerard's sake, and for Jasmine's as well. Before we dropped off the large bag of the last of the clothing that made up Jasmine, I asked if she still had the cardigan I had gotten for her here in December.

"You know, the one with flowers all over the back? Horribly tacky?"

She smiled and nodded, assuring me that it was at work. "I needed it there to remind me of you."

I nodded, and grabbed her hand for a moment, before we stepped inside the automatic doors of the store and I had to let her go. She moved between the aisles so fast that I didn't know where she had gone. I took this as a sign to start my discarding of burdens, and I began to look through the store, not for a place to save the items that could be lost, but put the things that I needed to lose. I moved through the aisles marked Housewares and found a rack that held office supplies on long hooks. I spotted one bag that contained a bunch of stationary supplies, and reached up to pull it down, and tore it open. I made sure no one was looking, and though I felt bad about defacing something like this, it was the point. Jasmine had told me about ad-busting and culture jamming years ago, and though this wasn't quite like that, it was my form of personal and public confession. It was my way of placing myself into the world and forgetting about it. If I was going to be on display, something needed to stay hidden and faceless. This archive of a store wasn't the best place, but these weren't the best feelings. I shoved all of my letters in envelopes and I walked around the store sliding them under toys, in jacket pockets, inside of books, behind toilet tanks, and in couch cushions. I unconsciously looked for furniture that reminded me of Gerard: an orange couch, a jacket like the dove one, a paint set. I also found myself looking for things that used to be a part of Jasmine's archive: a purple dress, the combat boots, romance novel, and clips that used to go into long, long hair. I thought of all of these things, pictures, images, words, and symbols and how we kept certain things closer to ourselves than others as a way to keep ourselves propped up inside a certain story we needed to tell. I was dismantling everything around me that night, not just the characters but the structures those stories took. I slid my verbal confessions and jammed them into stories that had been forgotten and vaguely wondered how and if they would get picked up again. When someone found my teary confession about how much I love a man who was disappearing, would this person keep it? Could finding an anonymous letter out of the blue change your life? I knew stranger things had happened, because they had happened to me.

I held only two letters in my hand after fifteen minutes of wandering and hiding. I folded the two together, and placed them under a rack. I walked away from it, and I didn't look back. I walked through books, where Jasmine and I had come the first time I was back in New Jersey, and saw another copy of Dante's Divine Comedy. I left it on the shelf, because I wasn't looking for Beatrice anymore. I walked through Housewares, where Callie had worked, and I stared faced to face with a pipe I had missed my first time around. Ceci n'est pas un pipe. This is not a pipe, I thought to myself. No, it really wasn't anymore. I wandered more aisles, now, just to wander.

I found Jasmine in the store, eventually. She was not looking at baby's toys for Paloma, but completely submerged in men's shirts.

Chapter Four

I spent a lot of time transcribing. The writing that I had been doing for the letters made me feel more in control of the project, even if I ended up abandoning them all. I had signed each letter with my name, both first and last, and it occurred to me that if Vivian ever found out, she would have probably considered it the best publicity stunt ever. If someone found a letter, they could possibly be intrigued enough to find the source of the name, and since we were going to be promoting the show through flyers around Savers and the downtown core, it was very possible they could come across it. They may even come to the show, and then add their own testament to the archive. It was like responding to a modern day version of a message in a bottle. I replayed my actions, and although I knew they could be interpreted as a stunt, I knew that wasn't what I had intended. It was never how things really looked on the surface. There was always a story behind the most basic actions, a different interpretation available for those who wanted to access it. I knew that more than ever now.

I was trying to be as honest as I could with this. When I was typing up the interviews, it was hard to convey the sounds in the background, the small nuances of breathing and prolonged silences. I wanted to type the actions that I remembered happening at the same time, but I didn't know how much of my own memory was faulty. It wasn't just people with dementia that got facts wrong, I told myself. Alexa had given me a lecture on the complexities of memories one of the times I went over to see her for dinner during the week I was transcribing. She told me about eye-witness accounts that regularly got the perpetrator wrong, even if there was no outward bias motivating them towards error. Our emotions were usually the pieces that fueled the strongest forms of memory, but emotions often lied. There was no such account as things as they were when memory was concerned.

"But, there was a time when we simply had to memorize everything and our minds were probably at their sharpest. Before the printing press, before books as we know them, there was nothing but oral history. People would memorize chunks of poetry, the bible, and small fairy tales and tell them to one another as a way to keep them alive and going. This was how information was transmitted, and, although memory can be flawed, what these people managed to convey was incredible. You ever notice how we always try to locate ourselves when we speak of memory? We uses phrases like, 'I've lost my place' and 'where was I?' when talking. People used to imagine big rooms where there memory was located and they would try to fill them with objects that would make them recall the next part of the story. If they lost their place, they meant inside their memory palace. They had wandered too far off into one corner and needed to find something with substantial enough meaning inside their minds to pull them back again. It's not just with this disease that he has where people get lost," she had told me in one of her long lectures over Indian food.

I wanted to ask if she thought he would be able to find his way out of the place he had wandered into, but I didn't dare. I was beginning to really see that Alexa did read "everything" and seemed to have a reference base for most theories about a variety of topics. I didn't want to know if the answer was negative. I knew that if I tried to start committing more about his disease to my own memory room, I would lose sight of my project at hand. But I wrote down all of Alexa's speech on memory, word for word in my notebook, as I could recall it after the fact.

I did the work for the archive with as much speed as I could while still preserving the delicacy of the stories I had been told. I lived through each one of them again, but it was different for me. I had all the pieces together, and though I was going to do my best to tape it and keep it together, it was not enough. I couldn't transcribe the motions people were using and the sounds in the background were only the beginning of all the senses that had been engaged. I thought of the meal with Alexa and Mikey, the breeze of their house, and then of the smell of coffee with Callie and Dean. There was the way that Cassandra's tears felt on my face, and the strong emotion in Jasmine's voice though she spoke very quietly. I typed it up and did what I could, but I kept the tapes around. I knew I would soon need them again.

After the last word had been transcribed, and the tapes and papers sat neatly on my desk at home, a few days passed without much work at all. In fact, I had begun to move on entirely. I filled out an application form for Human Resources during my lunch break at work. Although Mikey had warned me with a few cautionary tales, when I asked him to be a reference and write a letter, he was supportive. "I hope you find what you need," was all he said as he slid the letter on my desk the next day. There was still one more I needed to get, and though Vivian had always been my back-up plan before, this time she was busy with the show. Gerard had also been spending some nights with her, eating up any more free time she would have had to get together a reference for me. Gerard had begun requesting Vivian and writing her name down to see. We were shocked and surprised, but obeyed the request. He wouldn't be able to do too much more moving, lest he became perpetually lost, but when he arrived at Vivian's, he was mobile. He didn't use the wheelchair as he walked through her front door, just leaned on one of us for support. Vivian had a cane in her house somewhere from when her mother had needed it, and Gerard seemed much fonder of this aid to his mobility. It was more of an accessory than anything else, Vivian had explained. She welcomed her old friend into her house with a large smile and Cassandra had been dealing with Gerard's presence, too. The act of collecting their memories seemed to help them remember that things were good at one point and could be again; it also helped to dissipate any anger they may have felt and the guilt that resulted from that.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14