August - An Archive 8 страница

Instead of asking Vivian for that letter, I found my resource in a surprising person: Hilda. I had never worked for her, but I knew she would do it. She enjoyed anything to fuck around with the system, and when I told her my proposed plan of getting inside their system and working on trying to change things from the inside, she celebrated me. I knew she thought I was more revolutionary than I really was, but I let her have her heyday. If it made her write a better letter, I was fine with it. I didn't know the intricate details about my plans to be a wrench in the machine, and just how that would work beyond metaphors, but I knew I would figure it out. I was realizing that I needed to enter that world that Alexa had shown me on her card and to become a more public figure, not just another fly on the wall in my cubicle. I heard too many problematic statements said over my ears and far too many people did not understand what they were doing to one another with only words. Words did not mean anything, but that was only within a private space. I could not speak with Jasmine and be understood because we used the language of our bodies. But with the person around the corner from me, all we had were words, and so we needed to be on the same page with what was okay, and what was not. I could not get Daniel out of my mind some days, and I knew that if I was ever going to survive in this world, that I needed to change things.

Hilda promised to send off my letter by the end of the week. Whenever hers came, I would send my form off and wait. As I sat at my desk, my mind would wander back to the lure of the old life that Jasmine and I had had at The Bear, not only represented through Daniel's words in my mind. I would often drive on the same highway that had taken us there after work, after Mikey had dropped me off, and then Jasmine came home, and wonder what the fuck was next. I couldn't go back to The Bear and I began to realize I was not done interviewing people. I turned my car around, and headed to the last person who was inside of our web, and the last place where I needed to begin, the alternative birthing center. A class was just finishing up, and I waited as they all flooded out, before I stepped inside and asked Lydia to speak with her.

"Hi," I said, suddenly feeling inadequate. She was wearing a dark blue jacket, with white shirt underneath. She was still wearing flowers in her hair, though the season was almost over. This one a blue hydrangea.

"Hello, Frank. It's been a while. Jasmine told me about your trip the last visit with us." She smiled, motioning to a chair. I moved over and asked her if Jasmine had also informed her of the project I was doing.

She shook her head. "Jasmine's been keeping me busy with other news. The baby is on her way. Are you ready?"

"I uhhh...." She threw me off guard. I had been used to people asking me what the project was about or at least already being informed and interested. Not only did Lydia not know, she didn't seem to care. "I think I'm ready, but I haven't though too far ahead, yet. I'm really consumed right now."

She nodded, a slight bit of disapproval displayed in her pursed lips. "Babies are big deals."

"I know. But I'm preparing for a death, right now, too. You had told me that death was like birth. You also told me about the collective memory of a culture -" She cut me off.

"I also told you about having babies, and taking care of one another. And what are you doing? You're out again. Jasmine has been telling me that you are out a lot of weeknights now. She needs you home."

"I'm working, though," I said, feeling a bit wounded. I had not expected so much resistance from her. She was not yelling at me, but her words cut like fire across my body. "Look, I'm helping to prepare for the baby as well, and I'm trying to take care of Gerard, too. The project I'm working on is about him. I'm trying to collect all the memories he lost, and keep them together so none of us have to lose them again. I'm trying to recreate him -"

"No, you're not. The first part of the project you told me, this is okay. We all do this with one another. But the second part of your project is dangerous, Frank. Be careful who you try to recreate. Be careful who you think you're becoming. You are not a puppet master. You are not God." Her eyes flared a bit, and she repeated to me what I was doing in her own words. "You're trying to fill in the blanks and to collect what was lost. This is good. But leave him alone. This isn't about him anymore."

I shifted in my seat uncomfortably. "What do you mean? This project is about his memories."

"But what about your story? Your memories involving him? They must mean something. You've been interviewing people for your own selfish desires. You're coming to me right now expecting to find a revelation about yourself. I do not appreciate being used for such things, and I'm appalled that you would even come. You are a better man than that."

"I'm sorry," I apologized. I considered a million excuses, a million reasons, and then I realized it was not my place to use them. "I'm really sorry."

"You don't need to apologize. You need to understand that we're all in pain right now, too. Jasmine as well. Don't use those people who are feeling pain like yourself and think that this is not about you. Our relationships are always about one another and you can never be self-less. You can never give without expecting something. You always have an agenda. I see right through yours."

I nodded. I had been avoiding myself this entire time. I knew that, the way that Jasmine knew herself underneath her skin, and was still trying to hide from it. Or was she, anymore? Lydia mentioned that Jasmine had missed me in the evenings. I had been avoiding her, not knowing what I was supposed to do next with this piece of herself that I had, but maybe she was ready to tell me. Maybe she had been ready to talk and I was not there for her. We both had to face all of the parts we had been avoiding at some point or another. We both needed to make our peace, and move on with our fucking lives. We were going to have a baby soon, I reiterated. There were so many other things to think about.

"Too much has been changing. People change so much," I attempted to explain to Lydia, and she corrected me within minutes.

"People don't change. That is one of the beauties and miseries of life. We will always be the people we are, but our surroundings, our behaviours, and our actions, they can change. They should change, especially if we want to survive," she smiled. For a moment I wished I had my tape recorder playing. She sounded like Gerard then, his words and wisdom, coming out of her mouth. I wanted to fuse the two of them together, to hold onto her a little bit longer so I could, through association, hold onto him. I got up to hug her, to say 'Thank you,' but she held me back with the palm of her hand. She knew my agenda, and that I wanted her because she reminded me of him. That I wanted to be in this place now because it reminded me of Jasmine, and the Jasmine that I thought I knew. But she was still there, that person, was still there. People didn't change. I would always love them both, so deeply and so intricately, Jasmine and Gerard. While she was sorting out herself, I was sorting out mine. This had always been my project, so blatantly and evidently. This was always about me - and he was all of me, or at least, had been for such a long time.

So what did I want to say about him, about us, what did I want to do? I had so many places to start at, so many holes to jump into and fill in the blanks. It seemed impossible to summarize all that he was, and all that I had tried to make him to be. I shuffled my feet, back and forth, feeling the weight of it all.

"Go home, Frank," Lydia told me. She pointed her long arm towards the door. "Let him go."

I got into Jasmine's car and I spent a lot of that night driving. I went to the old apartment first, where I could see a light on where we used to live. It hit me so hard in the chest that I had to drive away before parking. I couldn't fathom someone else touching our sink, our walls, and repainting the handprint. I didn't like this change, I didn't like the way that things were moving, and I knew it was impossible to stop. I used to take photographs! I told myself in desperation. I had a dark room. I didn't know where my camera was, and I didn't know why I had not thought to bring it with me tonight. Why was I carrying around a tape recorder instead of a roll of film? Why was I bothering with interviews and with archives? This was Jasmine's passion, not mine. I needed to take photos and do art and cover myself in paint and lock myself up in that apartment and deny that everything outside was real.

I drove the car until I got to the block before our townhouse complex. I knew Jasmine would be up, and she'd be with Gerard. The thought of coming home to them made me so happy. But my foot stayed on the gas, and I drove past them, and then parked around the back of the place, in a different subdivision, and waited. I sat in the car and knew I could not step inside the house until I was done with this project, once and for all. I had one last person to interview, according to Lydia, and that was myself.

I got the recorder out, and I held it in front of me. I turned it on, sighed into it, and turned it off. I let my mind wander, and I looked outside and saw a rabbit run quickly across a nearby lawn. I thought of all the books I had read recently, all the authors and artists that had influenced my life. I was mix-matched, a mess, and fractured beyond recognition. No one could be whole, no one could be cohesive, but that was all I had ever wanted, and the only reason I was still doing the project. It was the only way I could think of fighting back against the forces that denied me anything that I thought was mine. With another sigh, I turned back on the recorder, and I began slowly, thinking aloud.

"Lydia said a long time ago that we were all like animals, just trying to survive and love one another, and Jasmine used to tell me things like this, too, even before she went vegan. Gerard called me his dove, and I used to think that was how I would remember him. I do remember him, and doves, but there is so much more than that. There was sacré bleu, the handprints, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, Picasso, and all of art itself. How can I say that the whole canon of painted art, every last fucking stroke, will remind me of him? Can he be a whole subject like that? Is that a fair representation? Ugh, I don't know, I just don't fucking know. Let me start over. Okay." I took a breath, and then tried a different room in that memory palace so I could walk down its deep hallways.

"When I was with Gerard, I knew where I needed to be in my life. But when I was at the Bear community, I would get up every day and run. It was the first time I felt independent, the first time I had a goddamn good reason to get out of the bed in the morning, without another person urging me." I took a breath, and let the confession slip, "I am thinking of running now. I want to run with more than my legs and more than just that morning jog. Everything is changing, and I somehow think this is my only stability, my only way to freedom. But in spite of all this change that is happening all around me, Lydia has assured me that people don't change. This is a part of life, in its beauties and complexities. People don't change, but things do and things absolutely must. They can change a lot." I thought of Jasmine, I thought of Gerard, and I thought of myself here, with no camera. "But I am still the same. Jasmine, whatever I call her, is still the same. Gerard is still the same, even he gets lost inside his own mind and I can never find him again. He is still the same, even if he dies.

"I know all of these things," I spoke into the recorder, "but I still want to run. The permanence of this life is what scares me. This is all I have. Even Alexa, who talks about the new age and ghosts and spirits, still knows that we only have what we have right now. Gerard - what I remember about him the most - is that this life was it, too. This was freedom for us. You can't live with regrets, because that wastes your time. Shame and guilt - you can feel them, but you can't let them rule you. Waste of time, waste of time..." I said into the tape recorder, trying to mimic the way he would tell me. As I waved my hands like he would, well aware that this was another bit that was lost from audio perspective, it occurred to me. The answer:

" Tout ce qui n'est pas donné est perdu. All that is not given is lost. That is what I remember the most about him and that is what he is to me. All that is not given is lost. I don't think I can give anymore than this." I bit my lip, knowing full well that I was taking as much as I was giving. I was carrying that weight, but no one had asked me to carry it. I took a deep breath, and talked again. "I don't think that I can take anymore giving, and that's why I want to run. It's the permanence and the price of that gift that weighs on me. But I know I'm taking too, and I know I'm running because people want to take the same things from me. People want to tell me their stories, their burdens, as much as they want me to tell mine and that is what's overwhelming. That is why I want to run. Even this small story of the suicide note and this French phrase is something that is shared now, something that was not only given to me. It means so much to me, the world, but it is not only mine and I know that that it never was. I need to learn to give as well as to be taken from, because I know I'll be in such a worse off place than if I don't do this. If I don't finish what I came here to do."I nodded to myself, strength and resolve growing. "I have to. I know I don't have to do anything in life, that I am completely free because I say I am, but I have to do this. It is the only way that it won't all be lost, all of this giving and taking, this memory and forgetting. It may be lost, we may never find our way out again, but I know that it won't ever be wasted. Never."

I took a breath, and then asked myself my own repeating interview question. "What will you remember most about Gerard? Well, I don't know yet. Right now, I can't see. I'm still in the middle of the masterpiece and there are too many voices shouting at me, too many people demanding, and one of them is me. But I cannot run away from life, even if I think that the road means freedom, because all that I have inside of me, all of these voices, this emotion, this love - it will all be wasted if I don't use it. I have so much to use it on, so much, Gerard taught me that life was worth living, even if he said it implicitly. He will always be there for that, even though I know how to do it on my own now. I will always remember him first, before anyone else. He was the first."

I started to cry then. I left the tape recorder on. I sobbed and sobbed into my hands, my fingers scraping against the glove compartment, the dashboard, my feet hitting the steering wheel as I tried to stop but couldn't. I wanted to grab onto someone, but no one was there. I had left them all behind at the house, and I realized how pointless this all was. No, no, I told myself inside my head, it was never pointless. I let out a guttural moan, realizing an archive was now done. I had put it into the recorder, and I would type it out and it would be done. He was cataloged, archived. I had done what I thought to be the hardest act, express my feelings on him, but who was around to see it? I would type it up, sure, but that didn't matter because he was not dead, yet. He was still alive and I was here alone.

In my frustration, I leaned down and shut off the fucking recorder. I gasped it in my hands and bawled my fist around it. Then, in the slightest impulse of anger, I smashed it against the glove compartment. The little pieces of plastic flew in a million different directions as I collapsed my head in defeat on the steering wheel. Oh well, I thought. Add that to the list of things I need to repay someone for. I had smashed my own voice in the archive and I was relieved. I was saddened and overwhelmed, because that meant I was so close to being done, to letting it go.... but I was telling the wrong people. I was misinterpreting his quotation. If all that was not given was lost, talking alone into a tape recorder in the back lot of an apartment complex was not going to change anything. I had no audience, no reader, and none of it meant anything until I could bear to be with the people who I loved. He was still fucking alive, and I needed to tell him all of this to his face. Regardless of whether he could comprehend this or not, or if it was too hard for me to speak. Life was hard, but you just fucking did it.

Lydia's words were finally making sense. He was still alive, Jasmine was still pregnant, and there were so many things at my house that I needed more than any confession right now. I jabbed my key in the ignition, fixed myself as best as I could in the mirror, and kicked out the pieces of the tape recorder onto the earth. I would buy Jasmine a new one, I told myself. I stepped on the gas, and it didn't feel like I could get home fast enough.

I stood in the front hallway for the longest time. The closet was next to me, slightly askew, and shoes were lined up neatly on a mat. I could tell Jasmine had gotten some new ones to fit her new foot size and it was strange seeing a pair, almost exactly like mine, right next to me. Her feet were only two sizes smaller than mine now, and she was also getting taller. Her bones had been lengthening, and if it weren't for the giant child she was carrying around all day, she would be able to stand up straighter and possibly look me in the eye. She was gazing towards me from the kitchen when I got home, but I stayed in the hallway a little longer. I let my bag ease off my shoulder, then touched my neck and back. I felt the stress and tension of compiling a project that seemed so larger than life slice off of me. I had smashed my own confession, but I had no right to smash the others that were given to me and I knew that. They were all in the bag I carried, and instead of destroying them, I opened the closet and tossed them into the back. For now. I had better things to attend to.

When I turned to regard Jasmine in the kitchen, she was sitting there with a mug of tea. She was tracing her fingers around the outside edges of it, and I knew this meant she was worried. Had she been doing this every night, waiting for me to come home and notice? I backtracked from the stairs, knowing that Gerard would be sleeping anyway. I had felt this dreaded sense of emergency to see him, to apologize, but it was probably better for his own comfort if I didn't barge into his room after he had been put to sleep. He was going to be up early, like he always was, and I would see him then.

"Hi," I said, going into the kitchen. I plugged in the kettle for myself, and asked Jasmine if she wanted more. She shook her head, and we exchanged a few pleasantries.

"He's been asking for you," she told me, referring to Gerard. I nodded somberly and then sat down with her at the table. I pulled the chair so I could face her; our legs weren't under the table, but our knees were touching. She was wearing a pair of Hilda's old jeans, and my plaid shirt. I leaned closer, and realized it wasn't one of mine. It was one of the items she had bought earlier during our trip to Savers. I smiled, and touched the collar. Definitely not mine, it was far too fluffy and thick. The August heat dissipated at night, and though she wore the shirts undone halfway, it was still pretty hot. She didn't seem to notice the temperature, and she seemed sad when I told her that she looked good.

"How is the project coming?" she asked me instead.

Then it was my turn to look sad. The kettle began to make noises that it was warming up. I held Jasmine's hands in my own, and I told her that I had broken the recorder. "I will get you a new one, I swear," I promised her, but she just shook her head. We realized it was Vivian's, but didn't correct one another. I had wanted to apologize, and I tried to do it for that, and she let me. It was an old thing, anyway, she had responded. Technology had pretty much made them obsolete now. It wasn't a big deal. But we were quiet. I felt as if we were slowly coming out of the fog we had been in, but I kept pulling myself back inside of it. "I'm starting to have doubts," I confessed. "How did you do the archive?"

"The author's? It's much different than this. I was just looking at her work and correspondences. It wasn't like what you're doing. It wasn't so...."

"Intense?" I suggested, and she nodded. "But it's normal to have doubts about something like this."

"Why?"

"It's huge. And it involves a major life choice, to a certain degree. Everyone has doubts about things like that. It would be unhealthy if you didn't." She breathed in and out slowly, not making eye contact. She took a sip of her tea. "I had doubts with this, too, you know. But that doesn't meant I want her any less." Jasmine rubbed her stomach, and I did as well. We both held our hands in the same position, one right after the other like a trail, and waited for her to shift around. Jasmine finally made eye contact with me when we both felt it, and we smiled at one another. I leaned down and kissed her, and let my head rest on her shoulder.

"I don't think I'm cut out to do things this way, though. I still don't know."

"Do the means justify the ends?" she asked. "Anytime I start to freak out about being pregnant, I realize what's after being pregnant. Anytime I flip out over giving birth, I always think of after. Anytime I think of...." She trailed off, then without finishing moved on. "I just try to place it in context, you know? I think of my life with or without certain elements, and then I begin to realize who I am and what I want."

"Like Vivian said," I elaborated. Jasmine just nodded. We were so close, I realized. So close to both of us releasing what had been bothering us - and then the kettle went, so I got up and made my tea. Jasmine stayed where she was, rubbing her stomach almost compulsively.

"Are you afraid?" I asked her. I kept my back to her, and I was glad, because she didn't see my face fall when she answered. "Of birth?"

"Sure," I agreed.

"It's going to hurt," she stated, then stopped.

I heard a distant echo in my mind, and I latched onto those words: "You need just enough pain to know it's real..."

"But what if your whole life has been pain?" she asked me, and it was clear we were no long talking about Paloma. I turned around and faced her now, holding my tea as I leaned on the counter. There was pressure in her voice, a need and a want for an answer from me. I could quote Gerard all night, but could I really give her what she needed in that moment? I sighed, and then said: "I guess you know the right decision, then, if your whole life has been pain and has lead you to where you are now."

I looked at her with a small grimace, hoping I had said the right thing. She swallowed hard, and looked at her tea for what felt like the longest moment. The room was quiet, and we were gradually moving out of the storm.

"Frank?" she said. I was still at the counter.

"Yes?"

"I need you to call me Hunter now."

I closed my eyes, realizing that we had finally done it. The first change of many was happening and we were finally acknowledging it. As the archive fell apart in my mind and scattered away into all of these small anecdotes and lost memories, so did the image I had kept of Jasmine as well. I sat back at the table with Hunter, my tea pushed off to the corner, steam still rising from its surface. I held his hand, and when he tried to make jokes about the name totally being ironic since he was vegan, I told him that I remembered.

"Orion. The hunter constellation, you showed me it at The Bear. I remember, don't worry."

His smile broke. He had been crying as he was telling me, the sudden emotions he had been keeping underneath for years, the pain I had no idea he was in suddenly coming up to the surface, even as he was trying to make the joke. He said a lot of things, but they were all running together and blurring as tears brimmed in his eyes. I knew he was scared, and he was just trying to rationalize this choice to me, because he thought I wouldn't understand. Or maybe there was that small spec of doubt that was still holding him back, but he needed to go forwards anyway and hope for the best. Maybe I didn't quite get this decision entirely just yet and I would have to ask him a million questions, but I understood him, as a person. I had loved him since we were seventeen. I couldn't just stop now.

"It's okay, you don't need to explain anything," I told him as he began to sob into my shirt. "People don't change - things change, but people don't. I always knew, remember? You told me that. I still know now, and you're still you."

He nodded into my shirt. We both knew it was more complex and just that simple and that this would involve a lot of time and energy on both of our parts, but everything was still so new for us. It was a new type of discovery and a new part of our lives. We were going to have a baby, too, on top of this, and I had no idea how to even comprehend anything. The archive was done, I realized. Hunter's old name was there, and I didn't know if he wanted me to change it. If he wanted me to avoid it, throw it away for him, or just forget it happened. We were out of the vortex now and could make those decisions.

"No, no," he told me. "That was what made it easier. That was how I fully understood."

I nodded, and we stayed in the kitchen, holding one another. I began to cry, overwhelmed by the knowledge that I had helped in some way with this. It was the first time since starting the damn archive where I didn't doubt its existence. If talking aloud had helped those involved, and it wasn't an exercise in exploitation or futility, then I was relieved. If anything, it had given me Hunter. I held him in my arms and was so grateful he was around.

"Ai, ai," I whispered in Hunter's ear, grieving this decision for the last time.

"Ai, ai," he whispered back.

Chapter Five

Gerard was still sleeping when I went into his room in the morning. I knocked quietly before I pushed his door open, and noticing his placid face in bed, I decided not to wake him. I tiptoed around, sitting on his stool by the shelf, and waited for the sun to give us more light. It was early; before the sun had even come up, which was a real feat in August. I had barely slept the night before, catching maybe two hours at my desk in my bedroom before I decided to see Gerard. Though I knew I would be utterly exhausted at work, as soon as Hunter had fallen asleep and his breathing changed, I got up and began to work on the archive again. Not in the same context, of course. Nothing would ever be the exact same since I first started it, but that was all right. That was the point of the archive. It was never to remember things as they were, but to help them change into what they needed to be. We were not at that stage yet, and I knew that I needed to finish it and give us all a resolution from the stories we carried around that no longer made sense.

The archive had always been for us. For every single person I interviewed, it was our way to discover about ourselves and to put the pieces of our family together again. Our family was joined, not through blood, but these strange little connections to one another. While people recognized blood relations and legal documents, the rest of our mess did not make sense. And even the legal documents did not suffice now. Within a day, pieces of paper meant nothing. How was anyone supposed to comprehend that Hunter (with his old name on that license) was not married to Gerard Wyatt, but that they were only a smaller part of a whole? How was anyone supposed to infer that it was the three of us, and always would be? Our relationships and our lives could not be summarized on a form, and now that Hunter was who he was, I could not believe I could even fathom other people trying to understand our family from the outside. But I wasn't trying to make them understand, I had realized. I couldn't. I knew it as soon as the words had escaped Callie's mouth that it would take too long to explain all of this to everyone and it would drain me in the process. I was already so exhausted from all the collecting and dealing with my own life when I was inside of it. I realized that I was always going to be in the middle of the storm and in the middle of the greatest masterpiece alive; to be out of it, meant I was out of the family and I never, ever wanted that. We were all in this, together, and we may have not been able to fully comprehend our sheer magnitude, but that didn't matter. We pieced things together the best that we could, and we kept them all for ourselves in the end. My audience for this archive was not the outside world, because I did not want to use those words that I needed to when I was there. I didn't want to make the personal political, because the personal was sacred to me. But I did want to make the personal into art, and I believed that I was doing that with the archive. My audience for that had been us all along.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14