Remembrance of Things I Forgot: A Novel Page 4

  I was startled to see my Galapagos drawing hanging on a wall and walked over to admire it. I’d been able to purchase the drawing after Sylvia generously sold it to me for half price, letting me pay her in installments. Next to the drawing was a small painting titled Tenochtitlan, Mexico, 1521, that had a red dot posted next to its catalog number. It was a map of the Aztec capital on the day Cortez and his troops burned the city to the ground. Billowing smoke and flames were painted in minute detail, and somehow the delicacy of the small artwork movingly evoked the destruction of an entire civilization.

  I heard someone walking behind me, and from over my shoulder came a familiar and yet alien voice. “Isn’t it amazing how he captures that moment in history?” Junior waited for me to respond to his comment about Gary’s drawing, but when his eyes met mine, an upwelling of tenderness overwhelmed me and I became flustered.

  “I, uh, love that his work reminds us that all maps tell a story,” I finally managed to say.

  “I love that too!” Junior gushed, then his face reddened as if he was ashamed of his own enthusiasm. It was easy to see that his heart was as unwrinkled as his face. “Did you know he’s visited all the places he draws?”

  “No,” I lied, amused by Junior’s sincerity.

  “I think that’s one of the things that gives his maps such an intimate quality,” he explained. “He makes the world look handcrafted.”

  Sylvia had encouraged me to try my hand at selling artworks, and I’d always been nervous about doing it. Junior seemed slightly hyper, and I thought a joke might allow him to relax.

  “Maybe God’s name is written somewhere at the South Pole?” I suggested. “Like a potter signing a bowl.”

  “With his ego?” Junior said. “I’m sure his signature would be the size of Brazil. In fact, it might be Brazil.”

  “God does have an artistic temperament. He’s become a bitter recluse since he thinks his work hasn’t been properly appreciated.”

  “His best work’s behind him,” Junior declared. “He’s been living off his reputation for years.”

  Junior smiled as his eyes butterflied around my arms and chest. It took me a second to figure out I was being cruised by myself, which was the most unsettling compliment I’d ever received. My smile widened slightly, wordlessly signaling that I appreciated the compliment while also reassuring him that I thought he was attractive as well.

  This was getting weird, but I was relieved that Junior liked me. (Of course if he disliked me, what could I do? My only recourse would be to stop talking to myself.) I wanted to stand there all day chatting with him about art, but I needed to talk to him privately. I still had no idea what I was going to say. I needed to prove to Junior that I was him from the future and to tell him about our sister’s death. And it had to be done quickly and persuasively. I couldn’t disclose what I had to reveal here at his job. I had no idea how he’d react, which struck me as strange. Making any one of those statements would brand me as nuts, but telling him both at once would make even Dee-Anne Arbus say, “You’re too fucking weird for me.” On Junior’s desk was an exhibition catalogue for the Van Gogh show at the Met, and I used it to stall for time.

  “Did you see the Van Gogh exhibition?” I asked.

  I felt dishonest leading him on with questions whose answers I already knew; it made me feel like God talking to Abraham or Job.

  He grinned. All of my life people had told me that I had a great smile, but this was the first time I could verify it. “Oh, yes. We had tickets for my best friend Michael’s birthday on January 22nd.”

  Michael Adams was my best friend then and would still be my best friend twenty years later.

  “It turned out to be the perfect day to go. There was a snowstorm— everyone here kept calling it a blizzard—that shut down the city. But I grew up in Buffalo and Michael’s from Olean, and western New York boys don’t think six inches of snow is a reason to stay home. When we got to the Met, the galleries were empty. We had the whole exhibit to ourselves! I was especially moved by his last paintings: the seventy he did in seventy days before he shot himself; they’re one of the greatest achievements of any artist.”

  I stopped smiling and felt distraught that someday Junior would bitterly understand the horror of seeing someone you love die from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. I’d always regarded Van Gogh’s suicide as a sad fact of art history without fully grasping that it was also a family tragedy. People make jokes about Vincent cutting off his ear—I probably had myself—but his brother, Theo, must have been devastated by Vincent’s increasingly self-destructive behavior. I suddenly felt a kinship with Theo’s plight.

  Junior seemed to have read my mind. “His brother, Theo, died six months later. He had syphilis but he was never able to come to terms with his grief.”

  “Come to terms with his grief,” I said with unexpected sharpness. “That phrase makes it sound as if there will be some sort of negotiation about the depth of your sorrow. There isn’t. Every death is an unconditional surrender.”

  Junior appeared to be understandably disturbed by my outburst and became subdued. We moved to another of Gary’s intricately beautiful drawings; it was an overhead view of the East Village, centered on St. Marks Place, where he lived, reminding me again that Gary would be dead in ten years.

  “So much for the ability of art to console us,” I said. “For Theo, even owning every Van Gogh painting and drawing was inadequate compensation for the loss of his brother.”

  Junior listened attentively as we came to the next picture in the gallery, a map of Venice.

  “Art makes life better, but it doesn’t necessarily make it enjoyable,” he said. “Cezanne’s apples aren’t much help when you’re hungry.”

  “Or Andy Warhol’s soup cans for that matter.”

  We walked over to the last map, an overhead view of the cities of Niagara Falls and the lower Niagara River. Finely drawn plumes of spray obscured the cataracts.

  “I recognize that view,” I said emphatically. Niagara Falls was the setting for many of the most memorable moments of my childhood.

  “Me too,” Junior said. “My grandparents had an apartment right there.” He pointed to a spot overlooking Goat Island and the American Falls. “And my cousins lived right there,” he added, pointing to a spot on the gorge in Lewiston on the lower river.

  Junior’s mouth quivered as if he were on the verge of laughing.

  “My sister . . .” He began but immediately stopped himself. He appeared to regret mentioning Carol, and I wondered why.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Well, it sounds really negative but I think it’s funny.”

  “Tell me.”

  “My sister says, ‘Niagara Falls has the most beautiful view of the two ugliest cities in North America: Niagara Falls, Ontario, and Niagara Falls, New York.’”

  I chuckled because that sounded like something Carol would have said. Unfortunately, that’s true, I thought, thinking of the hideous gambling casinos that would be built on both sides of the border in the next twenty years.

  Junior frowned. “That’s not a very good sales pitch.” He nodded toward the painting.

  “I don’t know. The painting is beautiful; it’s the cities that are ugly.”

  Hearing him talk about Carol revealed how much he loved her. There’s a subtle change in register in someone’s voice when they speak about someone they love, when for an instant vocal cords are plucked like harp strings.

  It was a gratifying to see that I was someone whom I’d like to know. My recollection of myself as a young man had focused almost entirely on my callowness, errors of judgment, fiascos, and romantic ineptitude. Our mistakes would be easier to accept if we’d actually been complete idiots; you can’t really blame someone who’s wrong about everything. But I actually possessed several virtues: I was curious and intelligent, and steadfast to the people I loved. (Taylor was another story—he deserted me by becoming a Republican.) I decided that I could entrust Junior
with preventing Carol’s suicide. If I unexpectedly returned to my present, he would watch out for her. I needed someone I could rely on, someone I could trust, and, like most people, deep down, I believed I could only depend on myself.

  We walked back to the reception desk, but our attention remained more focused on each other than the art. Junior introduced himself, and when I couldn’t choose a name, I just blurted out “John” also. I looked for a flicker of recognition but he took it in stride: there were a lot of Johns in the world. He asked, “What do you do?”

  I was unprepared for his question and considered lying. I was afraid that everything I revealed to him about his future would somehow lead to Armageddon. Then I blew off the future again and admitted, “I’m a comic book dealer.” If he asked to see my inventory or shop, I’d claim I dealt privately with high-end comic book collectors. All twenty of them.

  “Really?” he said, sounding pleased. “I deal a little part time and I’ve thought about that as something to fall back on. But I want to write and draw comic books.”

  It wouldn’t be until two years later that I’d give up trying to become a comic book artist and settle for becoming a full-time comic book dealer. It had been a difficult decision, and while I’d convinced myself it was the right one, hearing Junior’s virgin ambition revived a series of long-submerged regrets.

  Junior noticed the rapid change in my demeanor. “Are you all right?”

  I pushed my face into a grin. “Oh, yeah,” I replied. “Are you working on something?”

  “Uh, yeah,” he said. “I’m working on a new character, Dark Cloud.”

  I’d spent several years working on Dark Cloud, the mentally ill, severely depressed, sexually confused, and totally hot superhero, but after Marvel and DC rejected him so did I.

  Junior stopped talking and his twinkling eyes indicated he was eager for me to ask about his character.

  “What’s his story?”

  “Starting when he was a teenager, Dark Cloud began to be troubled by feelings of melancholy. Whenever he saved someone’s life, he’d find himself wondering whether they wouldn’t just be better off dead. He finally sought the help of a therapist. It turned out Dark Cloud suffered from debilitating survivor’s guilt after his father had sent him to Earth in a rocket ship when their home world was destroyed.”

  “A depressed, mentally ill superhero?” I asked. “One of his superpowers should be that he can actually suck all of the oxygen out of a room.” It seemed unfair to use this line, since I wouldn’t think of it for another year.

  “That’s great,” said Junior. “Can I use that?”

  “Sure,” I said. “What are his other powers?”

  “Every morning he uses his X-ray vision to see whether he’s developing a brain tumor.”

  Junior became wide-eyed as we traded premises for the character.

  “He’s invulnerable but easily hurt,” he said.

  “His mood swings are faster than a speeding bullet!”

  “His sidekick is his mother.”

  “He’s his own archenemy!”

  “He’s confessed to his shrink that sometimes he thinks about leaping off tall buildings in a single bound.”

  Junior’s comment about suicide jolted me and I stopped smiling.

  “Can you imagine?” he asked. “He’d have suicidal thoughts, but then feel even more miserable because he can’t cut his wrists or overdose on pills no matter how many he swallows.”

  I cranked out another polite smile but didn’t find his jokes about suicide amusing. I saw Junior in fifteen years, with less hair and more muscles, sobbing uncontrollably as he stood outside the hospital, talking to our mother on his cell phone. Junior would go through a long, painful emotional and spiritual convalescence after Carol’s death, but at some point his “healing” would be understanding that there are experiences in life for which there is no recovery, events that disprove Nietzsche’s oft-repeated bullshit that “Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger.” No, some things just make us sadder. And Junior would have to live with that. I had second thoughts about burdening him with this knowledge fifteen years before he would have to deal with it. Then I reasoned that if I told him about Carol’s suicide now, maybe he’d never have to deal with that specific tragedy. There would be other deaths, but they would never be as devastating as Carol’s had been.

  “I have to be careful,” he said. “Dark Cloud could easily just become a dumb joke. It could actually be darkly ironic, possibly even moving, if it’s done right.”

  I hadn’t thought about Dark Cloud for years, but still regarded it as a great idea.

  “I’d read that,” I said.

  Junior’s grin made me wonder about the last time I was as happy as him.

  “I can see the first issue: twenty-two pages without any dialogue,” he said. “And in every panel Dark Cloud, in costume, sits slumped in a chair, staring at a television in a darkened room. Until on the last page, he gets up and leaves, then returns with a bag of potato chips and sits down again. It could be sensational.”

  I laughed. “I guess. If you like to read comic books as performance art.”

  “That’s the idea! Then everyone will be waiting to see what happens in the second issue.”

  “You might want to bring it down from ‘Everyone.’”

  He conceded the audience for Dark Cloud might be a tad less inclusive than “Everyone.”

  “I’m actually thinking of taking a drawing course at Pratt,” Junior revealed.

  I took several drawing courses but never became convinced my abilities were good enough for the evolving hyperrealistic style of comic books. I was more Snoopy than Dark Knight. I didn’t imagine that in twenty years many successful graphic novels would be drawn in varied styles ranging from detailed photorealism to blocky cartoon. It rattled me when critical and commercial success fell upon graphic novels whose drawing style I could have done—maybe even better.

  “Save your money. Most successful illustrators start drawing in high school. You can’t start in your twenties.”

  “Hmmm, you have a superhero’s body,” Junior said, “but you sound like Dark Cloud’s archenemy, Mr. Negativity.”

  His flirting was a mixture of coy and heavy-handed. We really needed to discuss that and Carol. No wonder I wasn’t getting laid then. I wanted to tell him: You have so many opportunities to please guys with your mouth and the first and most effective way is to shut up.

  “I’m not negative.” I sounded especially defensive because Taylor often accused me of the same thing.

  Then it occurred to me I could use Junior’s interest in me to get him alone. I was randy all the time in my twenties—and if a man I was attracted to reciprocated my interest, then I would drop my pants and everything else. Now, I didn’t want to hook up with Junior. I couldn’t have sex with myself—it seemed gross. But I did need to talk to him privately.

  “What time do you get off ?” I asked in a low voice.

  Junior’s eyes widened.

  “I work till five thirty,” he said. “Sylvia’s letting me leave early because I have class at six.”

  I couldn’t remember taking a class back then. My puzzled expression prompted an explanation.

  “I’m learning Pascal.”

  I vaguely recalled taking a stupid computer programming class at the New School.

  “Skip it. Trust me, it won’t make a big difference in the long run.”

  “I only have four more classes.”

  “Some day Pascal will be as obsolete as Etruscan. The average person will never need to know how to program a computer. Study typing. That will always be useful.”

  I’d never learned to type properly, and half of my business was conducted online. If I could type with more than two fingers, my workweek would be shortened considerably.

  Junior’s face puckered. “How do you know?”

  I was tempted to yell, “Because I’m you and I’ve already lived through all of your misdirected ene
rgy, useless tangents, and dead ends.” Instead, I said, “History’s repeating itself. Everyone’s telling us now that we need to learn computer programming. But it could be like telling a man in 1890 that he needs to learn how to run a power plant because in the twentieth century everyone will need to know how to make electricity.”

  Junior’s face became rigid, and I couldn’t tell if he was on the verge of becoming angry or bored.

  “Well, I’ll take my chances.”

  It spoke volumes that I knew Junior better than any person on Earth and I still didn’t trust that I could be completely honest with him. I felt myself becoming angry—I didn’t realize how stubborn I could be—and then Sylvia came out of her office.

  “John, I need to speak to you,” she said, glancing forcefully at us, before returning to her lair.

  “I’ve got to go,” Junior said.

  “Meet me after class?” I asked.

  He thought for a second before grabbing a notepad and pen from his desk.

  “Give me your address.”

  I wrote it down and he smiled broadly. “I’ll see you around nine,” he said.

  As I left the gallery, I recalled that I’d had a lot of bad dates in my life, but Junior faced the most disappointing letdown of them all. The guy he was interested in was himself.

  3

  WALKING BACK to the Finney Room, I felt increasingly anxious and wondered whether I should have told Junior about Carol’s death already. What if something happened to me before nine o’clock? Opening the door, I hoped to find Taylor seated at the computer, playing online Scrabble, killing time while he waited for me to show up. To my disappointment, he wasn’t there.

  I turned on the computer and opened a file named “Telephone directories.” After a few clicks, I found Carol’s address and telephone number in Crescent City, California. I wasn’t even sure if the candlestick telephone would work. After all, who was paying the bill? But Taylor would have thought of that and taken care of it. I picked up the receiver and heard a dial tone.