I keep looking at it. It seems darker, now, the top duller. Is that a film of dust over the surface?
I stand up, knocking my chair backward, and run to the bedroom, grab a quilt from my bed, run back in, and throw it over her drafting table, draping it completely from view. Then I take it and drag it to the far wall. It could be anything now. A drum kit. A rocking chair. Fuck all.
I sit back down and stare at the board. My heart starts to pound, faster and faster. My vision narrows to a slim, dark tunnel. The table and blank sheet blur, the fuzz fades to TV snow, flurrying and buzzing, becoming indistinct. Bells chime louder, louder. The steady hum of the emergency broadcast system. I cover my head with my hands.
I push my drafting table to the far wall, too. I let it pile up with bills, newspapers, not quite able to bring myself to cover it with a blanket.
When I can’t stand to be in the studio anymore, I rent an apartment in Park Slope on a quiet street with dogs and old people. I write the studio off as a workspace on that year’s tax returns, in spite of the fact that I have nothing to work on. Work is on hiatus. Indefinitely.
Donnie sends me to a doctor. He prescribes Zoloft and Xanax. I gain back the weight I lost from the stroke, turning round and soft again. I sleep. Real, deep, gauzy sleep, nearly comatose. Stroke sleep. Sleep begetting sleep. I can’t get enough. When I’m not sleeping, I crave sleep. Most days, it is enough to get up, change sweatpants, and transfer myself to the couch, where I turn on the TV and nap it all off.
It is strange and ultimately insulting how, when someone you love dies, just expires without warning, time does not stop. For weeks after the funeral, everything is in limbo. Obligations disappear, routines crumble. It is enough to shuffle along the edge of one’s life. When the call back to normality comes, I ignore it.
I don’t answer the phone. I don’t check email. I avoid going online at all until, one night, I make the mistake of Googling my name and am greeted with a shitstorm. Mel is being talked about, we are being discussed, in public and in private. Articles have been written, comment sections have become sinkholes of gossip, hearsay. There’s the NPR interview gone to hell, the photos, the off-reels. I never knew just how many pictures there were of Mel licking people’s faces, or using random objects to pantomime a wang, or, in our early years, flashing the shocker. That one half of the partnership is dead, of an overdose, overdose overdose, has doubled, tripled our search engine tally.
Mel is being made over large and transparent in legend, even while her smell still hangs in the studio, her cigarette butts still crushed in sundry coffee cups around the Cintiq, a pair of crumpled green Asics by the door. In death, she is changing. Disappearing.
—
I get a stack of mail from Donnie’s office. A lot of sympathy cards I toss out. One from Florida in a soft pink envelope, a nice papyrus job. I know who has sent it before it’s open. It is indeed a Lisa Greaph production. Her cursive is soft and gray and swooped. I’ve never seen the name Sharon written so beautifully. It almost makes me glad it is mine.
Dear Sharon,
I read about Melody and was so sorry to hear this sad news. I know in my heart the love of Christ will find you and lift you up. “We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight. Yes, we are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.” II Corinthians 5:6–8.
—
There is a Mel that now exists only in my head. A faux Mel, a hazy stand-in Mel, a Mel more cartoony than the actual cartoons we made of her. This Mel in my head listens, pats me on the back, never pukes, never gets into fights. I forget the bad breath and sour moods, the drunkenness, the stupid dancing. It is idealized Mel, cheap, ill-made. And that cuts most of all. In my heart of hearts, I know how much she would have hated that.
The line between being fucked up and being straight enough to leave the house is becoming harder and harder to figure. I get my groceries delivered. Mail from the studio is forwarded. I don’t even like to go out on the stoop. Each slant of sunlight is a visual warning against my new habits, my perpetual nighttime mind—the weed I now buy at the pound level from Fart’s roommate, the Xanax I’ve started taking every day, sparingly at first, then ramping it, sensing a nearby boundary, getting just close enough to reach that zenith of fuzz, the mind’s cable-cut snow. I want to wade through my apartment in a pool of yellow light. Decide I kind of know, now, what Mel was chasing after.