The Two Kinds of Decay

by Sarah Manguso

  My mother wrote:

  I don’t remember the hospital sessions, but I remember the morning of the ambulance ride when you couldn’t walk and I had to move you around on the desk chair. Never could explain to Nana about your disease. At the time she had the beginnings of Alzheimer’s and would ask daily how you were, then have me explain. Every day, the same.

  Very isolated. Friends and family stayed away, perhaps in fear of catching the disease. Resented this but could understand.

  When you were in the hospital I felt as if I had a little vacation because someone else was taking care of you.

  Was always optimistic about your recovery. Guess that’s my personality. Never was resentful but felt sad for you and often wondered why this had to happen.

  Only had one friend who seemed genuinely interested, who I could talk with and who would visit both of us.

  Now I remember the navy blue jacket my mother wore almost every day she visited me in the hospital.

  I remember how angry I felt when my parents visited me at seven in the evening, when visiting hours were almost over, and when My So-Called Life was on television, so instead of having two things to do in a day, I had to choose one or the other.

  I remember a long time later, seeing Claire Danes in a boutique on the Lower East Side and going in and telling her how much I’d liked watching My So-Called Life.

  I remember that after an IV catheter in my arm got pulled out, I got infusions in my hand instead of my arm so I could keep a better eye on the tubes.

  I remember meeting with my Latin professor and knowing he thought I was dying and not correcting him, and letting him tell me everything that would be on the exam.

  I remember him conjugating a verb and saying masculine and single instead of masculine and singular, and how he blushed.

  I remember my college boyfriend reading Le Monde in the Adams House dining hall and carrying Kierkegaard books in his pockets, and how they stuck out just enough that you could see it was Kierkegaard.

  I remember learning the combination to the lock on the Fellows’ liquor cabinet at the Signet, and feeling as good as I ever had, telling someone else the combination.

  Relevance

  If you could know anything about my disease, what would you want to know? Did it change me?

  I don’t know if it changed me. It happened in spacetime, which is a bad place to conduct a controlled experiment. Spacetime has too many variables already. It’s not even a controlled experiment by itself.

  I don’t know if I changed because of my disease or in spite of it.

  What if I don’t mention the disease for eleven years? Was I thinking about it all that time? What if I talk about it constantly for eleven years? Am I avoiding thinking about something else?

  Did anything important happen to me before the disease happened? After it happened? How important was the disease? More important than getting my driver’s license? Having sex for the first time? Getting put in lockdown? What about when I moved to Iowa? What about when Victor died?

  What about when I crashed my mother’s car?

  I am quite sure I crashed the car so everyone would see I wanted to die. I wanted to die, but I didn’t want to tell anyone. So I took a left turn through a double lane of oncoming traffic, only one lane of which I could see, and I hit a van full of kids.

  Their mother came out laughing—was she laughing? Why have I made her laugh in this memory? She knew I was at fault. I knew I was at fault. And the police knew.

  I think they also knew I wanted to die. I was a frail-looking twenty-five-year-old woman driving an immaculate fifteen-year-old black BMW sedan and I’d just hit a van full of kids, and I knew I looked sedated but I couldn’t help it, and the two officers who came to the scene were very gentle with me. They asked me if I were all right. I wanted to die, but I wasn’t hurt, so I said I was all right.

  I could feel my face lying on top of my skull. I could feel it not moving. I could feel my mouth move when I spoke, if I concentrated.

  One of the officers explained very kindly that I was at fault by definition, as I’d been the one turning into oncoming traffic. It was all right. My mother’s car was wrecked. I’d never been in a wreck before. I wasn’t concentrating on being in a wreck. I was saving the wreck for later.

  Then I went into the library, returned the books I’d brought to return, stopped in the alcove, put a quarter into the pay phone, and told my mother I’d been in an accident.

  Then I drove home in the wrecked car. Did I drive home in the wrecked car? Or was it towed, and did someone pick me up and drive me home? I don’t remember.

  No, I do remember. I remember driving home in the wrecked sedan, but it had grown to the size of a Viking ship, and all other traffic had disappeared, and the roads had disappeared, and there was only me in my broken ship, floating home.

  I wouldn’t have to say a word. My friend Shane had just died. I could just have gone home in my broken ship, the ghost of my dead friend hovering above it, and everyone would know I wanted to die, too.

  And the relevance of my disease would be obvious. Everyone would see that it was the culprit, that it was why I wanted to die.

  I don’t know how to write a novel. I like to ask writers who write novels how they do it. How they write something longer than what can be held in the eye comfortably, at middle distance.

  How can I stop thinking about the disease long enough to write about anything else? How can I stop thinking about everything else long enough that I can write about the disease?

  My friend Isabel says, When you’re writing even a short novel, with at least a couple of subplots, and God only knows how many characters, your brain holds the volume of it beyond the ability of your consciousness.

  Of course.

  Measuring

  A nine-year period began and ended.

  I measure time by the movement of this planet. As any sane person would.

  I tend to forget that my measurement of time is designed to distract me from what’s really happening.

  I tend to forget I’m walking on the surface of a soft mass on fire on the inside, a surface warmed and lit by an explosion taking place ninety-three million miles away. An explosion that started at some point and will end at some point.

  I tend to forget that I rose out of this explosion and—despite my feeling I am unique from it—will someday fall back into it.

  Why nine years?

  Why do I need to read sixty minutes in the morning, and swim twenty laps in the afternoon, and write a thousand words at night, in order to feel that a twenty-four-hour period has been well used?

  What are all these numbers for? What do they measure?

  What do I think I’m clarifying by the act of measuring? What does measuring make clearer?

  At the beginning there’s conception, gestation, the growth of the brain in the womb. There’s the crowning, the first breath, the naming.

  At the end, unless you are vaporized in an explosion, the heart stops and the blood still moves in the veins, then the blood stops and the tissues still live, then the tissues die slowly, and at some point the last neuron in the brain dies. How long this takes depends on too many variables to measure.

  My Jewish grandmother lived to be eighty-five. She thought she’d been born on December 10th, but when we found her birth certificate, it seemed she’d been born at home on the 8th or the 9th. There was snow in Boston, and the 10th was the first day anyone could get out to report the birth.

  I have two letters she wrote to me at summer camp in the 1980s. One is dated Tuesday 6/29, and the other, July 4—Happy Independence Day.

  What times aren’t open to debate? What times are clear?

  Wars end at particular times. They end when the document has been signed. They end at the first moment the document can be described as signed.

  But it isn’t so much that a war ends in a single moment as much as people decide to agree the war has ended in a single moment. And so the measurem
ent becomes unassailable. Not accurate. Just unassailable.

  Nothing happens in a moment. Nothing happens quickly. If you think something’s happened quickly, you’re looking at only a part of it.

  Firing a rifle shot seems to happen quickly, but what about the movement of the trigger finger? What about the decision to fire the rifle? What about all your careful target practice? What about everything in your life that happened before you decide to fire that rifle?

  How can you separate the incidental from what was necessary to your decision to pull the trigger?

  Nothing happens in an instant. Nothing starts happening and nothing finishes happening. History doesn’t begin anywhere. And it doesn’t end.

  Why is it important to me to know the beginning and end of this particular decay I think I’m writing about—which is just part of my own whole decay?

  And couldn’t the decay be called by many other names—for instance, my life?

  The End

  There are two kinds of decay: mine and everyone else’s.

  This is the usual sort of book about illness. Someone gets sick, someone gets well.

  Those who claim to write about something larger and more significant than the self sometimes fail to comprehend the dimensions of a self.

  Most people consider their own suffering a widely applicable model, and I am no exception.

  This is suffering’s lesson: pay attention. The important part might come in a form you do not recognize.

  You might not know to love it.

  But to pay attention is to love everything.

  To see the future as brightness.

  Everything that happens is the last time it happens. We see things only as their own fatal brightness, and there is nothing after that brightness.

  You can’t learn from remembering. You can’t learn from guessing.

  You can learn only from moving forward at the rate you are moved, as brightness, into brightness.

  ALSO BY SARAH MANGUSO

  The Captain Lands in Paradise

  Siste Viator

  Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape

  Sarah Manguso is the author of two books of poetry, Siste Viator and The Captain Lands in Paradise, and the short story collection Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape. In 2007 she was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

  THE TWO KINDS OF DECAY. Copyright © 2008 by Sarah Manguso.

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  Some names and details have been changed.

  First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  Designed by Gretchen Achilles

  eISBN 9781429940986

  First eBook Edition : April 2011

  First Picador Edition: June 2009