by Jesse Ball
He’s snuffling around there at the edge, maybe trying to climb out, maybe just being busy hoping it will stop.
But she says to him, your dad’s a big man, everyone knows him. But you’re not your father’s son, you’re nobody if you can’t find your way through the divers’ game. And suddenly it does look a lot like he’s crying—I don’t know, it’s hard to tell in the water, but he tells her to screw herself. He takes a deep breath and he goes down again, and we’re waiting and waiting for him to pop back up. One of the girls is counting out loud. Other girls join her. You hear their voices, like, happy and also just full of spite. They’re counting and counting. Finally they just stop. Somehow they all want to stop counting at the same time, except one, and you hear her voice counting on, and then even she can’t take it, she stops, and it’s really quiet. Just the sound of water, maybe some machines in the distance.
No one thought he’d go through with it. Maybe he made it. It occurs to us. So half of us, we run across the grass to the other pond, and we’re looking there to see will he come up. But he isn’t there. We’re looking real close. Where is he? He isn’t in the one pond; he isn’t in the other. Somehow no one wants to go in the water.
And then we get the feeling, all of us at once, that we better be far away. If you don’t know what that’s like, if you haven’t been in a situation, I can’t say, but your skin gets tight on your face, tight and cold, and all of a sudden you can think really clear. You can see how things are going, where they’re going, and then everything is fast like sped-up film. No one looks at each other. No one talks. We all just walk away. It’s like rushing, like hard wind rushing at you, and there aren’t any thoughts in your head, just your legs running under you.
Then you’re back in the street by your house and you want to pretend things are the same. You and everyone else, you all just make things the same, you want to try and say what you can say to have them be . . . to have them be that way, the way they were, the same. If there was something for anyone to know back where we were, well, no one knew it. No one looked, no one dove down and found it out, so it is hard to say anything even happened. Ollie could have slipped out of the water anywhere along the edge of the pond and just walked away. He could just be playing a trick on us. It would be like him, don’t you think? You know him. You know how he is. It’s the kind of thing he would do.
Letter
How many years did you spend writing your death letter?
It is eight in the morning. The sun rose and now stands over the house. I am sitting in the workroom—your workroom—a place I have always hated. I don’t know how to tell you what it is—the place I’ve come to. I am trying. There is a joke you used to love to say—when we first met—you would say, If you ever plan to leave, write me a letter. Don’t tell me in person. I’m too weak to hear such things. Well, now I am writing you a letter. I hope you will remember the joke and smile, though it might take years.
I’m sitting at this desk, and everything is inert. The chair is inert. The walls are inert. I’m helpless. I don’t even know what I mean to say or how to begin. Alan, I was walking by the Gasklos buildings. I had left you here asleep at the house, and I went walking. It was early and still mostly dark. I went the way I always go, past all the shuttered shops, and then away by the dividing wall, then down to the Gasklos buildings. There’s that corner there, where one of the buildings reaches out to the path, and you can’t see what’s ahead. I always think, I wonder what’s on the other side, and then you get to the corner, and there’s nothing there. There’s never anything there. Alan, I didn’t expect it. All my expecting led me in that moment to not be expecting anything, despite feeling expectation. I had grown used to my expectation, and then I came to the corner, and there was someone there. That part of my walk is solitary. At that hour there’s never anyone, not on the walk, not in the street. He loomed out of nowhere. I don’t know what he meant by it. He seemed large to me. He saw me, he spoke to me, he came toward where I was. It was only a few feet. I froze completely. If I was holding anything, I dropped it. He was speaking, but I didn’t understand him. The light there is poor, and it seemed like something I had heard of. I had the feeling I was in the midst of something I’d been warned about. This is how it begins, they say, describing the very scene I was in, and it ends with you wretched and raped. I looked at him as he came and I saw his face clearly, totally, I’ve never seen a face like that, not yours not mine. That seemed a proof of something, of some destruction to come; why else would it be so easy to see him, to see his face in this detail—like he was claiming me, and that claim was that I would never, could never forget him. It felt like falling through a floor.
THE BELL JUST RANG—SOMEONE AT THE DOOR. IT wouldn’t be you. I feel that in this moment I am so completely alone—alone from others and from myself—that for once I can feel close to you. For years we move toward each other and away. Sometimes I love you, sometimes not, sometimes I know you, sometimes not. Sometimes I love the one I know, sometimes I love the one I don’t know. There have been times I wished you gone. That’s what it is to live with someone. This moment I feel so close to you. That’s why I can cry to myself and find this joke so funny: that I should write you this way. I think of the moment you find it. You’ll enter the room, you’ll see me there—not waiting, not not-waiting, not doing anything, lacking what I’ve always been, but missing nothing. Isn’t that the confusion of death? The body is there, and it seems to the eye—nothing is wrong with it. Why should it not be inhabited by the one I love? It is not inhabited by the one you love. She has left it. Not to go anywhere—for all she was was that, that wretched pile of cells. She has given up what animation was hers, her life. Alan, I am so sorry. For you and for all your hopes. This small person I am has ruined them.
I THINK OF HOW I COULD HAVE RISEN THIS MORNING and gone a different way. Of course—that path, that way is the way I always go. But there have been times when I went a different way—and if I had, then in this moment when you sit reading my letter, my body beside you, your face contorted in some impossible cry or laugh, then in that moment I would be there with you talking. We would be talking in the garden, or standing in the hall, saying anything, nothing, anything. I feel even had I failed to turn the light switch on my first attempt. Had I, upon waking, groped a moment with the light switch, it would all be different. Standing in the pale light, dressing a quarter second late, I would be a saved woman. That gap would have stood complete, and complete it would have been my savior. But, Alan, I found the light switch on my first try. I dressed as quickly as I could. I rushed off to my appointment not knowing I had an appointment—still I went toward it like a woman driven.
I AM NOT YOUR DARLING—NO ONE IS ANYONE’S DARLING really. We wear buckets on our heads and scream ceaselessly like lunatics—this is an accurate picture of life’s maraud. But darling, I was standing on the path and instead of me standing there what stood there was some semblance of me that contained all the training I have ever been given. All that was horrible that was given to me was present in me then, and there was no room left for anyone I know or anyone you know, anyone you might have seen in me. That man stood over me in the near darkness and I quailed, and in quailing I leapt into a person I am not. I remembered all the training I had been given. And what I did was nothing I know, though I know it now.
Do you remember those classes? Have I told you how I hated them? I was just a girl. I practiced and practiced with the practice-gas, we all did. It was a game. Every day in school to practice. You’d stand in the painted circle and someone would try to get to you, and before they did you’d put on your mask, pull out the canister, and pop the lid. My school kept ratings, lists, rankings, who could do it well, who needed improvement. I was a failure. The others could always get to me; I never pulled the lid in time. Don’t you see, the teacher would say, they will take your mask and they will rip you into bits. This canister is your life. Don’t you see? I didn’t see. My parents were called to t
he school. Your daughter cannot protect herself. She must have extra training, or she will be in danger whenever she leaves the house.
I was dragged home in shame. My privileges were taken away. I was sent to a special program at great expense. There we took pains to learn every motion of that murderous routine. I hated it and I hated it and I learned to do it well. Who would have thought, said my instructor, that you’re the same little reject who came here ten days ago.
I HAVE BEEN GIVEN MY WHOLE LIFE, AS YOU KNOW, TO thoughts of death—not always my own death—but to death thoughts. Somehow I have pictured myself in my final moments by a river, or holding a cup of tea, holding a cup of tea and sitting in a body so wrinkled and changed that no one I know would know me. That was how I pictured it. I felt it lay there, in those details. But right now I am sick all through my body and I want no tea. I made no tea. I am writing this letter on the desk you use for your pointless—you would describe them that way—writings. They are all of a piece, this writing, that writing, all writing: pointless. Yet we do it. Even in this I am a coward. I want to say something. I sit to write it. I fail to say it. I fail to say it. I fail to say it. I fail to say it.
I’ll say it now. He was coming toward me on the path, and I found that I had put my gas mask on. I found I had in my hand the canister. I felt a swelling as painful as delight run through me, and I opened the canister, I tore off the lid. It was like a film. He tried to backpedal, but the gas moves through the air so rapidly, it reached him in a second and he was off his feet. Then I, recoiling, stopped. I went toward him. His falling down made me feel at once that he was a person—I went toward him and he was crawling out of the gas, clawing at the ground, trying to get away, making the most awful sounds you’ve ever heard. My sympathy twisted then. What if I had done the wrong thing. Had I done the wrong thing? I took his feet in both my hands and pulled him back into the gas—not because I wanted him dead but because I did not want to be confronted by him for having done to him what I did. Rather that he was dead than that. I pulled him back in, and he resisted like a child. I don’t know if I was crying. I held his feet and watched him thrash. This was a grown man trembling like a laundry line, calling and calling with something like a voice. Was I crying? I don’t think I was crying. I am not crying now.
WHAT I HAVE TO TELL YOU IS THAT THERE IS SOMETHING surprising I have found and what it is is this—what I have done to this man I absorbed completely. I did not run away. I did not go for help. I did not frame it comfortably in my head. I absorbed it wordlessly—absorbed all of him into me. I stood there on the path and felt what he was, what I was, what had happened, and I grew into something different than I had been. There is a permanent sickness in my stomach. It is a revulsion and it is a disgust, and it is a disgust at who I am and have been—who you are—who we are together—who everyone together becomes in this day and age out on the pavement. Perhaps there are arrangements—other arrangements of men and women that I could be a part of—but my own action showing me to be so perfect a part of this horrific society in fact demonstrates to me the exact nature of this society. In this I have my total knowledge, and I want no part of it. We are maintained by a violence so complete, it is like air. And because of that, I would rather die than anything, rather die than be alive. I’m sorry.
THERE IS A FEELING THAT WE ARE THINGS IN COMMON not alone. That I am myself in terms of you, and you you in terms of others. Together we make a world and go on in this sea of days and months. In this picture no one is their own—everyone is everyone else’s; our bodies are the possession of our society. We might own things but never ourselves. Yet I think there is a different duty.
I see it differently—let me say, we never live but by taking resources that might have gone to another. We are hungry; our greed knows no bounds, and in the course of a life we consume what we must to proceed. We think that fair. Well, I believe, this being true, that a person who does not like life, who does not enjoy life, who enjoys, likes it no longer, has a duty to stop at once this feeding that takes resources from another’s mouth. There can be no argument in favor of continuing a life devoid of caring, most especially not when it precludes the possibility of other delighted lives that might have been.
So you see I have thought about this. I sit here thinking about this. I am sick all through my body. I know you think it wrong to take one’s life. I know most especially you will think it wrong of me to take my life and in doing so to ruin or alter what you can expect from yours. But my dear—this thing that happened, in happening it ruined me. It ruined anything I might give you. I am better gone and better gone sooner.
YOU TOLD ME A STORY WHEN WE FIRST MET AND YOU would walk with me to the university. You said that the girl you knew before you knew me—who you lay with and who went around on your arm—you said she was struck by a train. She was drunk. People were drinking, friends of yours, and she with them, and they drank enough that they thought it funny to stand on the train rails by a tunnel. But in their confusion they expected the train from one direction—it came from the other. Most of your friends jumped away, all of them, I think, except her. She did not jump away. You told me this. She was crushed completely and with her the first version of yourself that you had presented to the world. You told me this, told me her name, showed me her picture. I felt how you loved her, and also how you loved who you had been then—someone you could no longer reach. You said you experienced a cavity when thinking of her. So completely had she been killed that you could not remember the sound of her voice. To me it was remarkable. I loved you—and wanted all of you. I felt somehow I could be for you both myself and this girl, never mind that I knew nothing about her. I drew her in my head and grew to be her in part, and I did it for you. Sometimes when we were together and I would speak unexpectedly, act unexpectedly, and you reacted with shock, that was her in me, her voice in my mouth, her hand on my shoulder.
Why do I say this now? Well, I wonder—if she in her death made a gap the size of her life and you could see nothing but the gap, not her but the lack of her, I wonder, will my death make for you a widest gap, an incommensurable space, so that the effort of your life hereafter is just to live, to live on beside it? And will you feel when I die that it is not just me but also this girl, that I die, and that she dies for a second time, this person I tried to be for you, this attempt of mine in all the weakness of my heart to bring to you a self you thought you’d lost?
THIS DISGUST IN MY STOMACH IS A KIND OF PICTURE, and in it I feel myself compelled to wonder—what this man was going to do. Where was he going and why? Who was he going to see? Who is there that loved him? Even now they are learning that he is dead. That news is traveling on an intricate map—the measure of which is the exact dimension of his life. The lack of his life in that way fills his life—and those who know him cannot know why.
OR PERHAPS THEY DO KNOW WHY. MY REVULSION AT this place of our lives—this society of which we are a part—seems not to immediately admit an obvious truth: the people who are ground to bits by our horrific thoughtlessness, selfishness, greed, though they may not know in each case why it has happened, they do not need to know. These things have happened so often that it becomes clear: a man like this did not die because of what he did but because of what he was. We are the ones who have the privilege of having things happen to us because of what we do. Not everyone is so lucky.
LET ME DESCRIBE FOR YOU WHAT I SEE WHEN I CLOSE my eyes. There is grass and a stretch of dirt. The dirt lies flat the way ground is supposed to. Something about it harms me. Its flatness is like a voice saying, look on, look on. Beside it there is the corner of a building. There are arms too, and legs. Arms, legs, a torso, shoulders, a face, hands, a face, and these are at the center of my vision. What else could I be looking at, wherever I might go? The face is bent, pulled in and out as though suddenly starved and gorged, and it gapes at me. The eyes are bulbs. This is the body of a man, this is a man about fifty, it is his body, and I look at his eyes, I kneel over him,
and my skirt is touching him, I am touching him, I kneel and look at his eyes, but I can no longer tell their color. The gas does that. His shirt is coarse and blotched. I touch it as I crouch on him. I have never touched such clothing before, never crouched over someone in a street. Touching him shames me, for I am shamed by it, and I see now I should not be but am, which is my shame. I see there on the ground what he was carrying. A small valise. It has fallen open and I see what’s there. A notebook, an apple, reading glasses repaired with a rubber band. All this I saw when I crouched there, and I see it now, and it shames me.
NOW I AM LOOKING AT A PICTURE ON YOUR DESK. IT IS a cottage on a hill. You said once to me the name of the person who lived there, some minister. You said he retired and fled the city at the height of his fame. He was a pointless person like all the other pointless people. But he did escape. I look at this picture and feel, I too am finding my nature in this flight.
HAVING SEEN THE BODY OF THIS MAN WRENCH ITSELF into garbage, I know what it is that awaits me on the floor of our house. I sit here writing, and as I sit you move toward me through space. I sit, I write, you come to the door of our house. I set down the pen, I take up the canister. You unlock the door, you enter our house. I open the canister, I breathe in and am caught up entirely. I cough, breathe, cough, breathe deeper, and, racked by coughing, fall. At the bottom of the stairs you hear a crash. You climb the stairs. Some filament of colored gas emerges from beneath the door, and this is my banner. This is what you first see. These are the tidings you have of me, and in them is everything you need to know, this whole letter in that sight. Meanwhile in the room I am curling desperately, wanting to beat my head against a curb to get the gas out. At the last worst moment it is done and the room is empty but for you wearing a gas mask and standing in the doorway. What is it you stand over? Something that was me just a moment before. It is a piece of theater we will have, this final tableau. I am so cold. I feel cold. I write cold. Can you hear it? I am so sorry. Alan, I am sorry. I wish I were not doing this to you.