Every You, Every Me (3 page)

I started walking home. The normal route.

I was trying to connect the words in my head when I saw it. Nailed to a telephone pole. Another envelope.

Not taped there. Not tacked up. Nailed. At my eye level. Precisely.

I wondered how long it had been there. I wondered why nobody else had seen it. I wondered if I’d passed by it on my way to school, missing it because I didn’t look back.

But most of all I wondered what was inside.

For some reason, I was expecting an answer to the question I’d left behind:
Who are you?
I wanted the photographer to leave me a self-portrait.

Instead I got more trees. This time with a wall, curving into an arch at its top.

3D

3E

I figured I had to go back into the woods, directly from this spot.
I wouldn’t find you there. I knew I wouldn’t find you there.
It couldn’t be a coincidence that the photographer had chosen this pole.
Coincidence. Things coinciding.
The tree line was to my right. I’d never ventured this way before
had I?
but I imagined it would all be the same when I got inside. And by
imagined
I mean I really did imagine it—I sent a mental search party walking there even before I’d moved a step, picturing it like it existed. Then, from that single section of wall, that single set of stones, I built an entire castle. I imagined a fortress waiting in the middle of the forest—not with a sleeping beauty inside, but haunted by a sleeping beauty’s ghost. The body would have decayed to dust, showing that all beauty is temporary, except perhaps in stories. My mind was getting away from reality again, and I reluctantly drew it back in.
There is no getting away from reality. Well, only one way.
I knew there were no castles in this small patch of suburban thicket. You, Jack, and I would have found them by now. We would have known.

We had been kids here once.

“Ariel!” I called out now like I’d called out then. When you’d been hiding. When I’d seeked.

Remember?

You never answered. Not with words. Sometimes you’d simply look over from wherever you were, and that small movement would help me find you. Other times you’d wait. And if it grew dark and I hadn’t found you, I knew to go to your backyard steps. If you weren’t already waiting for me there, I waited for you. You always returned. Until you and Jack started up. For a time, I still waited for you, even though I knew you were somewhere together, maybe inside. Then I stopped waiting.

It was too dim now. I was unfamiliar with this nonpath. I walked through the woods, lost, making my own wrongheaded trail. Then I got to a spot. Not the spot I was looking for, but another spot—a spot I remembered. You and I had been here, on this kind of a day, with the clouds venturing too close to the ground, too deep into my thoughts. We came into the woods because nobody else did.
When you weren’t with Jack, you were mine again.
Last year. It must have been late last year. We’d escaped into the trees to hold hands and talk. This wasn’t unusual for us to do,
I loved it so much
and I wouldn’t have remembered this time as different from any of the others if it hadn’t been for what you’d said.

I don’t want to remember this. But I have no more control over my memories than I do over the past.

“If I ever ask you to get me a gun,” you said, “could you?”

At first I’d thought it was a joke. I asked you what kind of gun.

Remember?

“The shooting kind,” you answered. “A real gun.”

That’s when I knew it wasn’t a game or a joke. It was a test.
A trap.

“What are you talking about?” I said.

And you repeated, “If I ever ask you to get me a gun, could you?”

“A gun?”

“Yes, a gun.”

Nobody in my house owned a gun. Nobody in my life.

I told you this.

“But would you go out and find one for me? If I told you I really needed one.”

I’d wanted to say
You’re crazy,
but already those were dangerous words.

You were facing me, but your expression was all zeros. Your hand was resting on the bark of a tree, and that’s what my eye fixed on. I wondered why we call a tree’s skin
bark
instead of just
skin.
I wondered if it was because ours is so weak in comparison.

“Evan,” you said, bringing me back.

“I couldn’t get you a gun,” I told you.

“But if you could, would you?”

“Why are you asking me this?”

I thought I could contain it. I thought I could prevent it.

You moved your hand from the tree. Walked over to me and nestled in. I thought that was it. I thought we were moving on.

But then you said it, in a matter-of-fact voice.

“If I ever ask you to get me a gun, don’t. Whatever I say, don’t.” Looking right into my eyes. “Listen to me, Evan. If I ever ask for that, go get help. If I ever ask for that, you’re going to have to save me.”

Plus/minus

Positive/negative

1/0

I can/I can’t

I will/I won’t

You are/you aren’t

I said/I thought

I said “I will”/I thought
I can’t

I thought
I can
/I said “You won’t”

There’s no way to release yourself from a memory. It ends when it wants to end, whether it’s in a flash or long after you’ve begged it to stop. What was the next line? What did I say to you then? I probably changed the subject, and the new subject wasn’t worth remembering. So I was back in the present, back in the woods, photograph in hand. I heard cars in the distance. I let myself be hit by branches. I did not walk aimlessly—I had an aim—but I walked mindlessly. I heard the tops of the trees being shaken by wind. I looked for walls. I stopped calling your name.

It was unfair, I thought—the photograph had made the leaves white. I was looking for things that weren’t as they were.

Then I realized I could be walking on top of what I was looking for.

And I thought,
Of course.

3F

There was a place where the woods dropped. There was a path. And a bridge. A small bridge. A small stone bridge.

I ran as if someone was waiting for me. As if I was late.

“Listen to me, Evan. If I ever ask for that, go get help. If I ever ask for that, you’re going to have to save me.”

I tried I tried I tried I

It was about ten minutes farther in. This strange stone bridge, patching the gap between two cliffs. A memento of some earlier settlers, who might have had uses for the forest that were obscure to us now.

It was your mind. What could I do?

Focus,
I thought.
Focus.

I skidded down the dirt edge of one of the cliffs. I felt like I was bruising myself, but I didn’t mind. I saw the arch but couldn’t see if anything was in it. Anyone.
I wanted you to be waiting with your camera. I wanted to be blinded by a flash, hear a laugh behind it.

Nothing stirred as I approached. The bridge had been out of use so long that the trees and the shrubs had begun to grow underneath it.
Abandoned.
I stepped through the undergrowth and looked through to the other side.

“Hello?” I called.

I had gotten so used to being alone, but never entirely used to it.
Never used to it enough to stop wanting the alternative.

I jabbed my shoulder against the wall, made another bruise. The stones curved right over my head. They were cold, colder than the air.

I started to find patterns in the way the stones were stacked, and that’s when I saw it. Shoved into the bridge like a message that had been left for the rocks.

The next envelope.

As I reached up, I flashed into a fit of frequencies—all of them playing at once.
Your voice, saying you would never forgive me.
The first envelope sitting on the ground, my hand reaching down for it. My mother telling me not to touch things as we walked through a museum. Or maybe it was someone’s house. The curve of the stone next to the crack. And the crack itself—the shape of it, how it grabbed hold of the envelope. Hunger and sounds and my shirt pulling up as I reached, exposing the skin.
The bark.
I thought about the castle this was supposed to be, and wasn’t.
Your prison.
Jack’s cigarette. The fire that receded to the tip of his mouth and the smoke that expanded into the air. Two infinities: the one that stretches to the beginning but never touches—when you halve and halve and halve and halve, infinitely—and then the one that spreads out into the endless, endless future, the endless, endless distance. The set of infinities that is itself infinite.
How do we go on? When so much happens to us, how do we go on?
I took the envelope in my hand. I was already picturing myself opening it. I was already ahead of myself. But I had to stop that image—I had to stop that prediction—because I had no idea what was going to be inside.

Like every fool before me, I reached.

4

4A

It was your mind. The way you were wired. That was the only thing all the theories had in common. You were manic. You were depressive. You were schizophrenic. You were on drugs. You were on the wrong medication. You needed medication. You heard voices. You’d lost the will to speak. Anxiety. Disorder. Nobody knew for sure, at least nobody who was saying anything. After you left, all that remained were guesses. I would go over everything. Every detail. Every panic. Every sigh. But they never added up to anything but you. I only saw the person. I couldn’t see the wiring. I couldn’t fix the wiring.

I tried I tried
I

4B

At first I needed daylight to see it—or any light—because it was too dark to make out anything in the tunnel. I needed the articulation of light—or at least I thought that would be enough. But then when I was outside again, the image still wasn’t clear to me. We were still in the woods, yes. And there was a figure. But who? What? It could be Bigfoot staring at me.

I needed magnification. Because if I kept on staring, the photograph would become the stories I made for it, and I’d have no way to get back to the truth.

“You’re not making this up,” your mother said. “Are you?”

I
ran
went home and attacked the drawers. I needed a magnifying glass. I had no idea why we would have one, but it seemed like the kind of thing every house would have. Hammer, egg timer, magnifying glass. I was opening drawers I hadn’t opened in years. In my top desk drawer I found stamps that were now devalued, ink pads that had dried up, a rubber zoo of pencil-top erasers shaped like cartoon characters. It was like my childhood had fallen overboard from my life and had washed up here, in secret. But no magnifying glass.

But I still have your sunglasses. You left them at my house. I guess that means they’re mine now. I’d give them back if I could. I keep them on my desk. I can’t bring myself to put them away. They don’t look good on me. I remembered one time I tried and you laughed and said that there wasn’t a pair of sunglasses in the world that didn’t make me in some way look like a douche. You said I had honest eyes, and that I shouldn’t try to hide them.

I checked the kitchen drawer that held all of the things that didn’t belong in any of the other kitchen drawers—the pot holders, the scissors, the glue stick. Nothing. I checked my dad’s desk drawer, with its language of paper clips and binder clips. Nothing. I checked in my mother’s desk drawer—just old business cards and notes and a few photographs of me from when I was younger, much younger, extremely young.
Was I always like this?

And then my mind started getting so angry at itself.
I know I suck. I know I’m stupid. Stop telling me. I know.
Because the answer had been here all along.

I loaded up our computer. Turned on the scanner. Placed the photo on top of the glass operating table. Pressed a few buttons. Turned away from the light.