A Pattern in Particles of Gas

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We had known each other about six months when Billy first met my mom. Their meeting was another first that came about unplanned. We planned very little back then, when we were first falling in love. We would wake in the mornings to the unformed possibilities of a day. Time stretched around us, looser. When I look back, I realize that it was a rare stretch of months in which I never made to do lists.

That day, it was late fall. We woke in my bed, late morning. We knew by then that I liked my showers hotter than Billy did. I liked to nearly scald my skin red. We showered. Billy yelped in the heat. It was a Sunday. I was relatively sure we would spend the day together but there was always a chance that Billy would leave to paint instead.

I understood from the beginning that Billy would evaluate our relationship, at least in part, by how it affected his painting, that if I was good for his painting he would consider me good for him. Because of this, I often found myself caught between wanting him to wake up inspired, ready to leave for his studio, and wanting him to stay and spend his day with me. Really what I wanted was for us to leave for his studio together. I had this image of us there in my head. In it, I wore boxer briefs and one of Billy’s oversized button downs. My dark hair was pinned up, pieces fell from its clip and framed my face. I wore glasses I didn’t actually own, these thick square frames, and the sun in the room made my skin look dewy. I drank my morning espresso while beside me, sunlit too, Billy mixed colors. I nursed this image of us regularly. I liked to imagine it was where we were heading, that I’d grow into the elegant girl I watched lay in the sun, surrounded by paint fumes, reading her book.

I never questioned Billy when he left to paint. Because we made no plans, there was nothing to cancel and his leaving was never an explicit rejection of me. On the days he left, I’d lay in my bed and touch myself to the idea of us. I realized I could exponentiate the effects of our sex by playing flashes of it in my head. The images I came to were not overtly sexual, his palm pressing my cheek, his hand cupping my shoulder, but there was a specificity to them that I found erotic. I was fascinated by how well my mind could conjure these images of our body parts. It was not just a hand I saw, but his hand, and this made me feel that even having left, he was close.

That Sunday, we stepped out of the shower, our skin pink from the heat. What should we do today? Billy asked me. I unclenched with relief that he was not leaving. The Met? I proposed. Earlier in the week I’d picked up mushroom chocolates at a bodega near my apartment and as I spoke I pulled them out of my underwear drawer, passing the colorfully packaged psychedelics his way.

Billy took the chocolate bar, turned it over in his palms, then flashed me a grin. There was an exhibit I’d researched an advance, something about Monet in Venice. I like the impressionists, I said to Billy. I had always found their form of beauty encouragingly accessible. I also liked doing drugs with Billy, I found they loosened us and made conversation flow to places it otherwise wouldn’t. We had done party drugs together, molly and ketamine, but hadn’t yet done shrooms. It was an experience I wanted to collect with him and I realized, as I began to dress, that this too was an image I’d pre-crafted in my head. Us walking side by side in the quiet of a museum, our shoes tapping a rhythm into the marble floors. In my head, the museum was mostly empty, and my arm was looped into Billy’s. My hair was down and tucked behind my ears. As Billy spoke about the impressionists, he liked them too, despite himself it seemed, I dressed to match the version of myself in my daydream. I didn’t have everything she had but I got close with loose low-rise jeans and a sheer long sleeve.

We took our mushrooms on the subway uptown. The chocolate only partly hid the earthy taste and smell. We did the New York Times Crossword on Billy’s phone. Billy kissed the top of my head when I guessed Blowfish to the prompt Hootie and the. The whole ride there I tucked and re-tucked my hair behind my ears.

There was a long line to enter The Met. We joined the queue on the stairs. Waiting, we remarked on the fact that the most beautiful buildings in the city were reserved for museums and churches. Art and religion are things you can believe in, Billy said, and I liked that he said this, and I liked that I knew what he meant and agreed. We got to the front of the line minutes later, and walked in.

Inside, the archways were gilded and stunning. I felt myself wonder if my shrooms were hitting, a telltale sign that they were just starting to. I looked at Billy, do you feel anything yet? He was staring up at the archways too, and from the look on his face I could tell that he did. We began to walk, not to the Monet exhibit, but aimlessly towards the nearest gallery. I had the distinct sensation that I could select my focus for the day. That I could choose to zoom out or zoom in. I explained the sensation to Billy, I feel like I could look at the whole building or look at a single brush stroke and that if I looked for long enough they’d eventually look like the same thing. He kissed the top of my head again. Yes, he said, I think you’re right. Today we get to choose our altitude. He looped his arm in mine. It was him who initiated the action, that part I remember explicitly.

The first gallery we entered was the one with the guns. Flags I didn’t recognize hung in even intervals from the walls and in the center of the white space was a full suit of armor atop a metallic horse. Lining the walls of the room were cases and cases of swords and guns. Let’s pick one, I said to Billy, and see what we can do with it. I looked at him as I said this. I almost could not believe how beautiful his face was. His eyes refracted the silver of the armor. They were deep silver pools and I wanted to swim in them. I was overcome by how much I wanted him, by how unfettered my want could be. He scanned the room while I watched him. I knew that there was an imbalance between us, he wanted to look at the art, I wanted to look at him, or to look at us, from above, paired together, living out what had previously been a daydream. I knew that if I could pick an altitude, always, it would be that one. One high up, watching his arm loop in mine, my hair tucked behind my ear, the whale bone handle of the gun Billy was pointing to, saying this one, what can we make this one be.

Do you think it’s killed anyone? I asked him.

He looked surprised by the question. I’ve never thought about these weapons being used.

They must have been though, right? I wondered. They’re only art because they’re old. Back then they were a utility.

There was a small label on the case storing the gun that Billy had chosen, indicating it was from the late 17th century Ottoman Empire. Its bone shaft was ordained with pearl, sapphire, and garnet stones. I don’t know, Billy responded, where is the line between art and utility? Someone sat and made this, he continued, gesturing to the gun, someone sat and used their hands and whatever tools they had in late 17th century Turkey and decided which stones to use and where to place them and there look, he pointed to the place on the shaft of the gun where it narrowed and then widened, forming what felt like a neck, they decided to narrow and widen that part of this gun, someone did that, he looked at me, doesn’t that make it art? What is art if not caring enough to make something, caring enough to decide how it should be?

As he spoke, we had both gotten closer to the case with the gun in it. I narrowed my eyes to a single jewel on the narrowest part of the neck. It was a sapphire, radiant cut, glistening in the light of the room. I liked the definition of art that Billy had proposed, how it emphasized the role of care, the intention of the artist. I liked to picture Billy’s paintings, which I still, at that point, had not seen, as beginning with an act of such tenderness. By that definition, the gun was always art, I said to him, I agree. He looked pleased with himself, and the earnestness of that look made me smile. See that sapphire, I said to Billy. He nodded. Now what can we make that Sapphire be?

We spent over two hours at that gun case. Fractal patterns began to rise off the glass. I turned to Billy and watched them rise off his eyes too. I stored the image of his eyes like that for later, for a different Sunday, when he’d leave to paint and I’d be left to touch myself in my bed. We decided the gun probably had killed someone and that we weren’t overly concerned with the morals of something that had killed being considered art. We agreed, easily, that like art and religion, death was something you could believe in, that it deserved a space in beautiful buildings too. We wondered who had died at the hands of this beautiful gun and wrote the stories of their endings, where’d they’d been shot, where and how long they’d bled. Billy wondered again, who had done the making of the gun. He wondered about their process, if they had sketched the gun out first, how they had selected and sourced their materials, how they’d fastened the jewels to the bone. We wrote a whole story for that single sapphire too, I’d never wondered before where the sapphires for a 17th century Turkish gun might have come from, there was so much I’d never wondered about before, and everything was worthy of wonder, I realized, standing in that room before that gun case. I felt acutely aware, in that moment, of the fact that wonder is something we choose. We wondered about gem traders and Billy spoke about the Silk Road and I loved the sound of the word silk in his mouth. A new image rose in my head as we wondered over that sapphire. In it, we were much older, we were in Billy’s studio again, it was evening, the sun was pale pink over the city, I was drinking a glass of red wine. My hair was clipped back and streaked with gray. On my left hand, which was aged and spotted from the sun, sat a sapphire wedding band.

We left the gun case arm in arm. We were so at ease together that day, the images in my head felt like they were stacking up, more premonition than imagination. Billy asked if I wanted to see the Monet exhibit. I didn’t care what we did. Let’s see what we can make over there, he whispered, and my whole body flushed warm as I felt myself rubbing off on him.

As we walked, we passed the entrance to the costume institute. My mom has a piece in there, I said to Billy. It was true and I surprised myself by realizing I hadn’t mentioned this to him before. I had spoken to Billy about my mom, who had raised me on her own and still lived in the apartment I grew up in, but only briefly. He was so reticent to discuss his own family that we had, until that point, generally left the topic of family untouched.

My mom has been a therapist for as long as I can remember, I said to Billy, but before she had me, she was an artwear designer. She made these outlandish, extravagant, one of one pieces, wildly beaded and threaded and woven by hand. I actually haven’t seen the one they have here, I told Billy, it’s not on display, but it’s in their collection. She always used to tell me she wished she hadn’t sold it, that she wished we could have hung it in our apartment instead.

No way, It’s here? I nodded. She must have been talented, Billy said to me, why did she stop?

I didn’t really know why she’d stopped. She was my mom, and embarrassed as I am to say it now, I’d always viewed her life through the context of my own. She’d had me in her late thirties, an unplanned pregnancy with a one night stand when she was still making art in the East Village. Growing up it was just the two of us. We were close, I always would have described us as close, but I realize now that our closeness, which I so cherished, was limited. I knew her as my mom, which was different than knowing her as a person, as knowing what she’d wanted, what she’d lost, what she’d had to give.

Billy was quiet as we walked to the Monet exhibit. It had gotten much later in the day and despite the lack of windows you could feel that the sky outside had darkened. We stopped before the entrance to the exhibit to read the writing printed on the gallery wall. The exhibit, the wall said, contained a series of paintings that Monet had done near the end of his life while on a three month trip. He’d traveled to Venice with his second wife, Alice. The wall contained little detail about Alice beyond her relationship to Monet, though it did state, and I remember this clearly, that she “loved wrestling matches and was a devout catholic.” It was such an odd pairing of descriptors, wrestling and Catholicism, that I stopped, startled, before continuing to read. The wall went on to explain that during their three month trip, Monet had made thirty seven paintings, which were the makings of the exhibit that followed. They couple had left with plans to return the following year so that Monet could finish his work inspired by the city. This was 1911. Alice died that winter. Grief stricken, the wall finished, Monet completed the series at home.

I finished reading. My hands felt cold. I tucked them into the space between Billy’s forearm and torso. I was unsettled by the gallery wall, by that word, wrestling, there was a violence to it, a violence to preserving so little of someone. It felt somehow more cruel to hint at Alice’s humanity, the specificity of her interests and desires, wrestling, than to offer nothing, or to offer only her Catholicism, which was a broadly accepted identity marker and would not have elicited the image that took form in mind then, one of Alice in a long dress coat and a hat adorned with feathers, cheering for two young men as they wrestled on an outdoor stage somewhere in France. There was something about the image, which was Monet-esq in form, brush stroked and grainy, that I found heartbreaking, though I could not put my finger on why. I felt that this image and the word that had evoked it, wrestling, was somehow more violent than the gun we had admired and agreed had probably killed. My reaction was strange and disproportionate. Alice had, in many ways, what I wanted. She had married the painter. She had died a muse. I wondered what Alice had done with her days while Monet was making thirty seven paintings in Venice, if she had enjoyed the city, if she ever touched herself to the idea of his hands. I shivered. Billy must have sensed my discomfort, the rigidity of my arm in his, because he turned to me as he finished reading, moments after I had, and with his silver eyes still swimming said, well that story is already written, let’s go.

We turned around with the buoyancy of a cancelled plan. The high of realizing how much is in your power to simply not do. We’d gone to The Met to see a Monet exhibit and had seen a single gun instead. I felt we had gotten away with something, that we had a secret now, that we could bend the city to our will. The day was more special for being more absurd, more special for being exactly what I had imagined in my head while also being nothing like that at all.

Outside, the steps to the Met were coated in darkness. My mom lives just across the park, I said to Billy. We were coming down from our drugs, in that mushy afterglow part where all I wanted was to lay on soft fabric and be rubbed. The subway sounded wholly unappealing. We could go over, if you want, I said. I didn’t want to spook him, I was generally cautious about suggestions that implied a seriousness between us, but I was high still and our day had been so good.

I knew our families were different by how surprised Billy was by my suggestion that we stop by my mom’s unprompted. He seemed taken aback, not by the notion of meeting my mom, but by the idea that I would see her so casually and with so little forethought. Jewish mothers are literally always happy to see their kids, I told him. He laughed. I wasn’t joking. Seriously, I told him, opening my phone, watch this.

Mom, I said when she picked up, Billy and I are at The Met and were wondering if we could stop by the apartment. I watched Billy clock that my mom knew him by name. He could hear her voice, her lilt of a Long Island accent as she spoke to me over the phone. Of course, honey, come over. I’m roasting a chicken. I knew she would be. She’d roasted a chicken every Sunday evening since I was three.

Billy and I had dinner with my mom that night. We were both lightly shrooming, which I told her when we walked in. Billy was further shocked that I had chosen to share this with her. When she barely reacted, only asking if we needed water and how our trip had been, I saw him digest what this meant about our dynamic, and again, how different it was from his. The roasted chicken, which my mom made by coating the raw bird in salt and pepper, then letting it sit on a plate in the fridge, was moist and tasted like childhood. I ate the skin first, which was something I’d done as a kid.

Conversation at dinner was easy. My mom was a thoughtful, nonjudgemental person. She asked good questions that did not feel evaluative. Billy and I told her about our gun. We told her about the sense we’d had, of choosing our own altitude for the day. How we felt we could decide what to focus on and that just by deciding, we could make it the most interesting thing. She smiled as we said this, knowingly so. I assumed this was because she had done a fair share of drugs in museums when she was young and recognized the sensation, but as we finished speaking, she explained the knowing look in a different way. She told us that she had a client who was a neuroscientist and was currently researching the nature of consciousness. In a recent session, he had brought up the idea that our society’s notion of what can be conscious is incorrectly limited. He had outlined for my mom a thought experiment, which she then put forward to Billy and me. Let’s say a new species from the core of the earth made its way to the surface, she started, this new species would have to be unfathomably dense to have existed in the core of the earth, so on the surface, everything, including humans, would look to them like particles of gas. She paused to confirm we were following and we nodded, assuring her we were. Ok, she continued, then let’s say one new member of the species was a scientist and that this scientist was studying the particles of gas on the surface of the earth. Let’s say he started to notice fleeting patterns in the particles, and those fleeting patterns were what we know to be humans. Then let’s say this scientist tried to claim to other members of his species that these fleeting patterns were conscious. She paused again here, before building to the story’s conclusion. Of course not, the other members of this new species would say, those are just particles of gas. My mom finished the thought experiment with a look of near wild excitement on her face and as I looked over at Billy I saw that he shared it. It’s all altitude, my mom concluded, our understanding of the world is defined entirely by where and how we look. Then she recomposed her face, though this client is suffering from delusions of grandeur, so we should take that all with a grain of salt.

It makes sense to me though, Billy responded, that same wild look still in his eye. We are constrained by nothing more than our own perspective. He took a bite of his chicken. I think about that a lot in my painting, he said, and I knew then that he liked my mom, that he had taken to her quickly. Billy didn’t speak about his painting lightly, he spoke about his need for time and space, but rarely about why he painted and what he felt when he did. Painting feels like a way to discover new perspectives, he said, he was chewing as he said this, or maybe not discover them, but become aware of them, does that make sense? He didn’t pause for an answer. It feels like when I’m painting there is something driving me that I don’t understand, like my best painting happens when I’m not trying to control it but follow it. Like I’m making all these decisions, what colors to use and where to place them, but when I’m really painting, when I’m really in it, I don’t even know where the decisions are coming from, they just come. It’s the craziest feeling, he said, I’m not really describing it, he shook his head, ok, he said, turning to me, like that gun today, someone had to decide where to put all those gems, right? They had to decide where and how to narrow that neck, but were they really deciding, or were they discovering? Is it possible that we only ever discover beauty? He shook his head again, then continued, I don’t know, but it does make me think about how much we don’t understand, how narrow our perspective really is. He took a breath. I’d rarely seen him speak this long, uninterrupted. It’s cool though, your client’s idea, he said, turning to my mom, by that logic any pattern in particles of gas could be conscious, a hurricane could be conscious, a rainbow could be conscious, a painting, or any art really, could be conscious. And it feels that way sometimes, doesn’t it? Like the art has its own perspective, its own way of being in the world. He finished, swallowed, then looked not at me but at my mom. Why’d you stop, he asked her.

My mom’s face was soft. She seemed unsurprised by the question She looked at Billy in a way that emphasized the years between them. I stopped because I could, she said simply. My art had always felt like an imperative, to make things, to make beautiful things, to discover beauty, she nodded to Billy, had always felt like the only thing there was to do. My desire to make things was relentless and constant and nearly debilitating. I was obsessed with that feeling, the one you’re describing, the feeling of being taken by the unknown, I chased it with the fervor of the religious, but the thing about that feeling is you can’t chase it, not successfully at least, you can’t control it, it doesn’t work that way, you can’t have it because you want it, it comes because it wants you. I was gripping too tightly, she said, I was yearning too hard, and it was taking something from me, all that desire, it was taking too much of my will. I don’t know, she said, pausing, one day I realized I could choose to stop, that all that yearning was optional, that I could choose to simply live instead. Billy’s face fell. I thought of us turning away from the Monet exhibit without entering it, the high of that agency, and I thought, in that moment, that turning away was often when consciousness felt most acute. Don’t look so sad, my mom said to Billy, I also stopped because I had a daughter. She turned to me, I stopped because I’d already discovered the most beautiful thing.

That scene, the three of us, my mom, Billy, me, around the dining room table in my mom’s upper west side apartment, eating a roasted chicken on a Sunday eve, became one that existed across realities. That first Sunday marked a shift in mine and Billy’s relationship, and the beginning of a relationship that existed because of our relationship, the one between my mom and him. My mom drew out a side of Billy that was curious and tender. Around her he asked more questions, he seemed younger, eager to be mothered and told he was sweet. I loved this version of him and I loved my mom for being a part of what I could offer to Billy, for being a part of what it meant for him to be with me. Even as it became a scene we lived out regularly, us three having dinner together, it remained too, an image in my head. We sat at a table with half-drunk glasses of wine, orange tulips, mismatched linen napkins. My hair was shiny, my wrists were slender, my mom and Billy were laughing, the chicken was perfectly salty, my tongue coated with the salt on its skin. Beside us, the window was open, outside, the light patter of rain.

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