Every You, Every Me

Page 3

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.

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.

Every You, Every Me

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

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.

The scanner translated the photo into pixels. Then it translated the pixels into zeros and ones. Then it translated the zeros and ones into pixels again, which in turn were assembled into an image on the screen.

I clicked zoom.

And again.

200 percent.

Every You, Every Me

And again.

Every You, Every Me

And again. And again. I kept clicking until the photograph was demolished, until it was no more than a mosaic of gray tiles, adding up to nothing. Nothing. Because wasn’t that how I felt that day? If you zoom close—if you really get close to someone, if you really get close to yourself—then you lose the other person, you lose yourself entirely. You get so close you can’t see anything anymore. Your mind becomes all these abstract fragments. English becomes math.

Every You, Every Me

I zoomed until all that was left was squares. Sixteen. Then six. Then four.

The computer stopped me at four.

Every You, Every Me

These four squares told me the truth. I no longer recognized what part of the photo they came from. They could be leaves. They could be part of my hair. My skin. The antique camera in my hand. The dirt. All I knew was which day they came from. Unmistakably.

Somebody else had been there that day.

Somebody had seen us.

I knew I should have called Jack, should have told him … but I didn’t. Not yet. I was afraid of him thinking that I was crazy, too. I wasn’t sure what he’d do if he saw me drowning. I wasn’t sure he’d save me unless he was also saving himself. what he’d say.

I walked past your house later that night. My mind was still full of pixels, so I tried to pixelate everything I was seeing. Turn the lamps into white squares, the road into gray. Your house, though, defied this. I know it’s not your house now but it’s still your house. It insisted on being noticed on its own terms. You did this to me, it said. Not in a voice I wasn’t hearing voices (yet) but in the way it sat there in the night. There was something missing from it, and I was the cause, I was the one who knew. There were lights on, but I couldn’t tell if that meant anyone was home. You told me how your parents always left lights on when they went away, set on timers to mimic bedtime. I loved it when we reset them, even when your parents were around. Under our control, the lights in the house would go on for three minutes—from 3:01 a.m. to 3:04 a.m.—shining through the neighborhood, casting shadows. Your parents were always asleep. They never knew. They always slept well, until Jack and I woke them up.

I liked your parents. I always thought that when the story was told, they would see me as the hero. But instead I became the bearer of their sorrows. “You’re not making this up, are you?” I showed up, gave them the burden, and left. I missed the burden now. Even if I couldn’t have handled it, I wished the heroic thing would have been to keep you it for myself.

It could not have been your parents in the woods that day. Neither of them could have taken the photograph. Nobody who really knew you could have. They would have tried to stop it. They would have intervened.

They would not have stood and watched and taken pictures.

Do they sleep? I want to know … am I the only one who doesn’t sleep?

I knew you were at the center of it.

This should not have surprised me, since you had always been at the center of things. Nobody would have put you anywhere else. Especially me.

Even now, you refused to be pixelated, forgotten, silenced, erased. Not that I wanted to erase you. The opposite. I wanted the opposite.

Ours wasn’t the kind of friendship where I knew the exact day it started. I only knew the exact day it became essential.

I have always been aware of how I break.

I know what kind of situations will break me.

I know what kind of people will do it.

I know how much it will hurt.

That day in sixth grade, remember? I broke because the humiliations and doubts and anger gained critical mass. I failed a history test because I’d forgotten about it; I had been studying hard all year, and with one bad grade I undid it all. Then I had to run an extra two laps in gym because I was too “lazy” slow, and I didn’t think I was going to make it, and I was going to have to stop or die of a lung attack before I finished. The other kids loved that. And then, at lunch, I tried to sit with Tara Jenkins and she told me there was no room, even though there was. The weight of it was too much. I felt myself breaking as I went outside to recess. I found a quiet piece of pavement and started rubbing my hand over it. Catching the gravel in my skin until I was bleeding, until my palm was open and raw.

Then you found me. Later, you’d tell me that you’d seen what Tara had done and had followed me out to see if I was okay. I was never sure if that was true. I thought it was possible you happened to see what I was doing and were morbidly intrigued. You came over to me and didn’t tell me I was gross and didn’t ask me what I was doing. Instead you said, “Stop that.” And I did.

I said I hated life. You said you hated life. We decided to hate it together.

We didn’t know anything.

Without you I wouldn’t have been able to contain the hate. I would have used it against myself. You’re the one who helped me control it. My mind spun out to other things.

But it always came back to you.

They said you weren’t coming back.

I didn’t believe them.

I wanted to hear it from you.

Back to the present.

I found you in my locker the next morning.

Not you.

A photograph.

But for a moment, it felt like finding a body.

It felt like finding

what you I needed

to be

found.

Every You, Every Me

Not slipped into the locker through one of the airholes or through the crack in the bottom. No: taped up, white envelope. The photographer had broken into my locker and left it there for me.