Every You, Every Me
Page 2I remembered the photo in my pocket and took out the envelope.
“This yours?” I asked.
“What is it?”
“I found it. There’s a picture inside.”
Jack shook his head, exhaled some smoke. It matched the color of the sky, but I could still tell when it disappeared.
“Not mine,” he said. “Where’d you find it?”
“Near the woods.”
“What’s in it?”
“I told you, a picture.”
Jack took one last drag, then dropped the cigarette and stepped on it. He reached out his hand and I passed the envelope over to him. As he opened it, I could feel the smoke on his fingers painting itself onto the envelope. Taint. The cigarette on the ground was still burning.
“Hey, that’s a good photo of you,” he said. “Who took it?”
“I don’t know. That’s the point. I don’t know.” Then I told him the whole story about finding the first photograph, and how whoever took it must have taken one of me while I was finding the first one.
“Fascinating,” Jack said, but it was clear from the sound of his voice that the fascination wouldn’t last much longer than the cigarette had.
“So it wasn’t you?” I asked.
“No,” he said, still looking at the photo.
“Maybe it was Ariel?”
Say her name.
Now Jack looked up, a little bit tired of me.
“Ev, you know it couldn’t have been Ariel.”
He said your name.
“What if she’s back?”
Jack returned the photo and lit another cigarette, this time not asking me if it was okay.
“Ev, she’s not back.”
“But what if …”
“It’s not her.”
“So some random stranger took my picture yesterday and left it for me this morning?”
“It wasn’t yesterday.”
“What?”
“You weren’t wearing that yesterday. And there wasn’t that much sun yesterday. This is from another day.”
I tried. I really tried to think of when someone might have taken my picture. Not posed. Not premeditated. Spontaneous.
But no.
You were the only exception.
“Freaky,” Jack said. Then he looked away from me, at the other people who were on the patio with us. Seeing us as two friends talking. Our morning routine. Everything routine. They’d appeared without me noticing. My brain took them off mute. I heard their voices without making out the words.
Freaky. That was Jack’s conclusion. And I knew it was pointless to talk to him about anything after he’d come to a conclusion.
Still, I had to ask.
“Have you heard from her?”
He shook his head.
“It’s a good photo,” he said. Then we went inside and split off into our own trajectories.
There were so many voices, so many people around me. I stood there on the side of the hallway and watched everyone pass—some traveling together, some meeting up, most entirely unaware of anything besides where they were going, each particle knowing its own destination without ever knowing the exact path. Is this what you meant when you said you were splitting? Every step, even the smallest movement, marking a different line. I started plotting out the variations of my own route—not just the ways I could go, but all the people I might step a little bit aside for, or slow down for, or speed up to see. I was starting to get lost in my own infinities, so I refocused on the faces, on the people I knew and the people I recognized and the people who seemed familiar and the people who were strangers even though we had this school in common. There were two thousand of us in this building, and one of them, I thought, was responsible for the photograph in my pocket. One of the two thousand was responsible for the envelopes and the mystery and my thoughts at that exact moment. One of them had done it.
Unless it was the girl who wasn’t here.
2C
I’m lying, aren’t I?
I never wanted you to take my picture. You did, but I never really wanted it.
We were at the pool. It had to be summer. I didn’t want to take my shirt off. I never took my shirt off. But you said I was being ridiculous. That was your word. Ridiculous. Mostly friendly, but a little teasing. You asked me what I was ashamed of. Had I carved Molly Hughes’s name on my chest? Were there unicorn tattoos I hadn’t told you about? Was I wearing a man girdle? I wasn’t really laughing, but I wasn’t not laughing. You tugged at my shirt. I said fine and took it off. Felt the sun. Felt so pale. And you took out your camera. Said you had to capture this for posterity.
I felt like I was your accomplishment, when what I really wanted was to be your friend.
“You see,” you said, “you have nothing to hide.”
I didn’t want you to see me with my shirt off. It was weird.
I never saw the picture. You might have deleted it.
I mean, I doubt you still have it.
Did the accomplishment mean anything in the end?
3
I went back to the spot after school, but there wasn’t any new photo there. Same thing the next morning. Even though I knew two points didn’t make a pattern, I was still disappointed to find nothing there. It couldn’t just end. Not now.
3A
You are leaving me messages, but I haven’t gotten the message yet.
3B
When I ran back between second and third periods, the envelope was gone.
But there wasn’t anything left in its place.
3C
I checked during lunch. I checked after school.
The spot was empty. Empty but not void. Void is when there is absolutely nothing there and the nothing is natural, a complete vacuum. But empty—with empty, you are aware of what’s supposed to be there. Empty means something is missing.
Once again, a grayness was settling in. My mood. The light around me was changing its properties. I tried to catch it dimming, but it was imperceptible.
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
Every You, Every Me
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.”
“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.