12. Jonny Bishop
Chapter twelve
Jonny Bishop
The rest of the apartment has gone full bohemian maximalist since I left.
Aunt Shelley has painted every wall a different color, accumulated end tables like they’re going out of style, and hung tapestries from places I’m fairly sure she’s never been.
But the room I had for those last months of school is exactly the way I left it—bare walls, an empty desk, the same view of Flint Street.
I told myself at the time that I didn’t put anything up because I wasn’t staying. It’s taken me ten years and seventeen hours packed in economy to notice I’ve done the same thing in four countries.
I’m still stiff from the flight. The woman next to me, a matron from Chandigarh going to visit her son in Pittsburgh, complimented my Hindi, asked me point-blank why I wasn’t married, and then spent four hours trying to sell me on the charms of her two unmarried daughters.
I didn’t have the heart to explain why that wasn’t going to work out.
By the time I’d landed in Richmond, the tiny catnaps I’d managed along the way had convinced my brain that I was completely fine.
I’m not fine. I’ve slept maybe forty minutes since Newark, and every time I go under I’m back on Denning Court.
Flint Street is empty at this hour, the pavement glistening under the streetlamps.
Around the corner, the Bean Stop is closed, the campus sleeping.
It’s too quiet. India is many things, but it is never quiet.
Even in the depths of the night, there’s traffic, dogs, someone’s radio three streets away.
I look at the building across the street and see that there’s a light in a window on the fifth floor.
Somebody else having a sleepless night. I wonder what’s keeping them up—a deadline, a breakup, a baby?
I put my hands on the sill and look up at that distant yellow square and feel, unexpectedly, less alone.
I’m only here because Aunt Shelley needed me, although she’d rather chew glass than admit it.
A lump. One lump, she said. And not even a very big one.
And they had it right out. And there was absolutely no need for me to interrupt my plans.
She said all of that in tones of great annoyance when I called her from the airport in New Delhi to say I was on my way, and repeated it at least twice between luggage claim in Richmond and this apartment.
But you can’t open a phone call with “I’m all right” and not expect the person on the other end to hear everything that follows through a filter of panic.
So I gave her a face-saving excuse: my visa renewal was dragging on, and the same guy at Fairhaven University who’s been pestering me for five years to do a guest lecture on digital entrepreneurship had just emailed again, and the timing worked out.
All of which is true, but it isn’t the reason I’m here.
My aunt got to be annoyed instead of grateful, which is a Bishop family specialty, and I get to be here where I can keep an eye on her and see for myself that she really is as well as she claims.
If I’m honest with myself, part of me wanted to come back.
Three weeks. That’s the deal I made with myself somewhere over the Atlantic. The lecture and Aunt Shelley’s follow-up scan are the big priorities. Everything after that is negotiable. And then I fly home.
Or I would be flying home. Except my visa renewal has been sitting in an office in Delhi since March.
It should have taken six weeks. Everybody I know got theirs in six weeks.
Mine got referred up for clearance, because somebody in a records department finally noticed that the man who makes the videos and the man on the passport do not have the same name.
So I can go anywhere on earth I like. I just can’t go home.
I go to my desk and fire up the laptop. If I can’t sleep, I can at least work. I pull up the rough cut of my latest episode and adjust the saturation until my skin goes pink, then dial it back and press play.
“Today, I’m back in one of my favorite cities, Panjim!” I watch myself for at least the twentieth time. “This is Jonny on the Spot. Here we go.”
I pause the video and drop a cross-fade into the opening montage. I really need to swap out the clip with the snake handler—it’s gone stale.
My phone buzzes. It’s the group chat in Goa, half a day ahead of me and wanting to know whether I’m alive.
I type back that I landed and that my aunt is fine. She is also furious about being fine in a way that requires assistance. Then I put the phone face down.
I can’t sit still. There’s no yoga mat, but the hardwood is clean. I work through a sun salutation and a routine that at least loosens the muscles that have set into the shape of an airplane seat. Then I pull on a hoodie, slip out of the apartment, and let myself out into the night.
It’s been raining. The sidewalks are still wet and the streetlights are doubled in them. In Goa the monsoon comes down like it’s got somewhere to be. This is polite rain, and it stopped before I got outside.
I take a right and walk toward Chancellor Street.
The campus is beautiful at night—they light the buildings well, and the old brick glows.
When I first moved here, I used to wander these streets at two in the morning when I couldn’t sleep.
I learned every path, every shortcut, every bench worth sitting on.
The campus hasn’t changed much. They’ve made Ridge Road pedestrian-only and replaced the asphalt with brick. That looks nice.
I stop outside the Bean Stop and peer through the window.
The chairs are piled on the tables, the way I used to stack them at closing.
I can almost see myself behind the bar—not mopping floors but standing in the courtyard with the string lights, the last time I saw Lance, the October wind in my hair and the taste of him still on my lips.
I told him the next day I was leaving. I didn’t say where.
He asked me not to go. I said I had to. That was the last real conversation we had.
I wonder sometimes if Lance and I could have worked out. If the timing had been different. If we’d had more space, more years to grow up. If the fire hadn’t scorched the ground between us before anything had a chance to take root.
I’m getting maudlin. It’s way too late now. He’s in the Marines somewhere, living a life I can’t imagine. I’ve been wishing him happiness for years, and the ache of it has softened into something I can carry.
There’s a notice taped inside the window, and I’m three steps past it before my body stops walking.
It’s us. Me and Lance. The Excelsior photo—the one that went everywhere, the one that outed us to the world.
Both of us covered in smoke and grime. You can see the tear tracks on my face.
We’re looking off to the side, and I remember now what we were looking at: the woman who had just found out her sister was alive.
That picture followed me across the globe.
It’s the first image if you do a search for Parker Bishop, and it’s on the first page of images if you just search the word Fairhaven.
I go back and lean in to read what it’s actually for. “Fairhaven Wildfires: Ten Year Memorial Commemoration.”
I lean back from the window.
Parker Bishop. I haven’t been him in a long time.
It’s the truth. I can tell people that in three languages.
And it holds up right until I catch sight of his face on a ten-year-old photo taped inside a window on Chancellor Street—seventeen years old, still coughing, scared out of his mind—and I have to stand on a wet sidewalk and look at him and admit that I never got him out.
I just gave him a different name.
I look down at my own forearm without meaning to.
There’s a green bracelet I’ve been wearing for about eight or nine years, and tattoos: a phoenix and vines running up past the elbow.
None of that is there by accident—under the ink, if you know to look, the skin doesn’t lie flat.
Nine years and a lot of money to make one part of me unreadable.
There’s a date at the bottom of the flier. I do the sums before I can stop myself, and the answer is that I’ll still be here. Of course I will. I’ll be here for the memorial, my birthday, Thanksgiving, and I’ll probably be here when they put the Christmas lights up on Chancellor Street.
I decide, standing there with my hood up, that I’m not going. I’m not walking into a room so this town can look at me and see him. Lecture, scan, flight.
And underneath that, so quiet I can nearly pretend I didn’t hear it: I would like, one time, to be in this place without being afraid of it.
I walk home slowly, hands in my hoodie pockets, taking in the quiet streets.
A campus map they’ve put up near the Grier building lists what’s coming up—drama auditions, a concert, and at the bottom, the conference: “Digital Entrepreneurship for the New Age.” They could have asked me about that title.
It’s not punchy. My name isn’t on the notice, but that’s fine.
Jonny Bishop has no origin story, no hometown, no dirty laundry.
He’s as much a creation of my viewers’ imagination as he is a man in his own right.
Back in the apartment I settle at the desk and skim my emails.
Three hundred unread. Patreon notifications, scammers, a man in Ohio who has now explained twice what he’d like to do to my mouth.
Eight years ago there were eleven subscribers and most of them were my aunt on different devices.
These days it pays for my life, which in Goa goes further than you’d think.
I respond to a few loyal fans asking about travel to India—a quick personal reply is a good way to keep people on the Patreon. God, I’m such a shill.
Before I turn the light off I open the fridge, because Aunt Shelley’s fridge is a crime scene. Half a jar of mayonnaise, a box of wine, and something in foil I’m not opening. She’s three weeks out of surgery and she’s been living on toast.
I’ll cook for her tomorrow. Not because she’d ask—she’d sooner starve than ask—but because it’s the one thing I know how to do that feels special.
I go and stand in her doorway, because she isn’t asleep either. She has the Kindle propped on her knees, her reading glasses down her nose, and a row of orange pill bottles on the nightstand.
“Why aren’t you sleeping?” she says.
“I could ask you the same question.”
“It’s these goddamned pills.” She waves a hand at the nightstand without looking up. “What do you want?”
“The survivors’ group. The Phoenix Society. Do you know where they meet?”
That gets the Kindle put down.
“The Baptist church hall on Palmer. Sunday afternoons, I think.” She takes the glasses off. “Why?”
“They’ve got my face on a poster.”
“You were on the front page of the paper, honey. Everybody’s got your face.”
“That was ten years ago. I was seventeen.” It comes out harder than I meant it to. “I’m not going to the memorial. And I would rather not be taped up in a window on Chancellor Street looking terrified so they can use my face for PR.”
Aunt Shelley looks at me for a long moment.
“Then go and tell them so,” she says. “Politely.”
“I’m always polite.”
“You’re always something.” She puts the glasses back on and taps her Kindle.
“Go to bed. I’ve just got to the good part.
He’s finally told her he’s been in love with her since the beginning, and she’s winding up to say something stupid, and if this woman throws it away after four hundred pages, I will riot. ”
I go back to my room and snap a photo of the dark, quiet street and send it to the group chat. Then I draw the curtains so the morning light won’t hit me like a searchlight in a few hours, brush my teeth, lie down, and close my eyes.
When sleep finally comes, I dream, once again, of fire.