Hello? I said, because I thought she might have hung up.
I’m sorry, she said quickly, I’m here. I’m so sorry.
Then she was silent again.
Do you have his records or not? I said.
We do. I just looked. Although the last time he came here was two years ago. You can have them if you want.
There was the silence again, a vast desertlike silence. What would his records from two years ago tell me? Nothing, I shuddered, except that he always had perfect teeth. Then the receptionist must have handed the phone to a new person, because a different voice came on, a lower, more masculine voice with a pleasant cadence.
Ms. Moran, it said, if you’re at your parents’ home, and you want to get a cleaning, we can squeeze you in this week. Just let us know. We’d be happy to squeeze you in.
22
Of course I didn’t want to be squeezed in, I hated to be squeezed, physically or metaphorically, it didn’t matter. I stopped caring about my teeth around the time I stopped caring about my skin. I’m sure I had a mouth full of calcium decay. A lot of people have it, I thought, and some have it even worse.
I pictured the dentist’s office: a small building that looked like a halfway house, cramped sweaty rooms with hot plates, bachelors in undershirts sitting on beds covered with moss. I would walk or have someone drive me there, and the next thing I knew, I would have his records in my hands. But of what importance was it? What would dental records from two years ago tell me about his suicide?
My stomach rumbled; I went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. What was I doing in such a large and extravagantly empty house? I found a red apple at the bottom of the crisper drawer. Its skin was waxy and shining; it looked like an apple from a fairy tale. All humans have an inflated sense of ego, I thought, except the ones who commit suicide, in fact, they have the exact opposite problem, no ego at all. I took a bite of the apple, then another. I was chewing the apple thoughtfully when I bit into something soft with a very fine granular texture. I spat it out into my hand: pieces of a black worm. Of course the apples in my adoptive parents’ refrigerator would be mealy and filled up with worms, I thought as I entered the study, it made perfect sense for this disgusting house. I considered calling the cleaning woman, but I knew better, I knew that extra cleanings were not calculated in my adoptive parents’ monthly budget, already thrown off balance because of the funeral costs, etc. I threw away the rest of the apple into the trash can next to the desk. I noticed it was filled to the brim with wet balled-up tissues.
There was information in my memory, I was certain, I knew there had to be clues buried there, signs and clues pointing toward his death, and it was uncomfortably close to the moment in which I found myself, the moment of sitting alone at my adoptive father’s desk in his wood-paneled study, the post-suicide phase. It was easier to fantasize about other things, any kind of thing whatsoever, anything to distance myself from the last time I saw him, I could even think about an octopus wearing a hat, I thought, and I could think about a person wearing an octopus as a hat. I opened my traveler kit and stared at its oblong and bumpy shape. It looked like a tan pill, water-bloated.
It was too easy to picture him, it would’ve been easier if I hadn’t seen him at all, it would’ve been easier to have only very old memories of him, not new and fresh ones. It was too easy to picture his light blue polo shirt, his damp forehead and his thin dark hair, his slightly thick wrists and fingers, the pore-less skin of his nose and cheeks. Now it seems every memory I have of him, new and old, must be seen, scrutinized, and apprehended through a critical lens, the lens of his suicide.
I had already performed the hard and necessary work of understanding him, mostly through his letters and emails, etc. He had already told me everything he wanted me to know. My adoptive brother was a reserved person. He never left the country, he didn’t play sports, he talked to my adoptive parents and to people like Thomas, he watched movies and professional sports on his computer, he kept a desk fan running in his bedroom for background noise. He liked quiet things and the fan must have soothed him and it must have soothed him to watch one of the hundreds of movies he first purchased on DVD, then pirated off the internet, I thought as I sat in my adoptive father’s study, and yet all the soothing in the world couldn’t keep him from killing himself. Did he put a bullet down his throat or into his temple? Did his skull shatter? Was there blood and pieces of brain? Did he hang himself? Did his neck snap? Twenty-nine years old and gone! You should subject your body to physical stress, I once wrote to my adoptive brother in a letter, or your body will decay. Some amount of stress can be good for you. For him, the stress of being alive was enough. Being alive was a contest of endurance for him: how long could he keep himself alive on this planet? I should have told him about The Waterfall Coping Strategy, I thought with regret.
I never looked at him and said, Adoptive brother, what is your existence like on this planet? He never told me anything about himself, and that was certainly part of his plan. In hindsight, I am sure he was covering up a grand scheme, the grand scheme of his suicide. He would have been a great architect, I despaired, or a writer. If he had stayed alive, he would’ve written long and complicated books that traveled far into the future and past, I was certain. I leaned back in the chair. Doubtless he was a great inventor and fabricator. He was a highly skilled embroiderer.
23
He did not form physical relationships, he did not dream of women or men, he did not care to reproduce children, he did not care to go to museums, he did not care for flowers, he did not care to listen to music, especially not music, anything but music. He told me he was not an active listener, that he never cared for music, it never interested him, and after I forced him to listen to Bitches Brew by Miles Davis 1970, in my shared studio apartment, after listening to the entire thing, and then listening to it again, he changed his mind.
Eye-opening, he said.
Perhaps that was the one helpful thing I did for him that stayed that way. There were no negative repercussions. I asked him if he was interested in seeing live jazz somewhere, even though I had no idea where that would be.
There’s so much to see and do in New York City, he said. I spent two weeks debating whether or not to come. I couldn’t decide if I should stay in New York City or travel even farther out into the world, a world I have difficulty imagining. It’s a pastime of mine to pretend most of the world doesn’t exist, and I’m fine not going anywhere.
Planning the trip to New York was a trial. Going through with it was a potential disaster. He told me he waited for the situation to feel perfectly right, that for two weeks he sat at his desk in his childhood bedroom and deliberated over all the possible outcomes for a trip to New York City and beyond. He studied flight maps and schedules, he did research on commercial airplanes and airports, JFK or LaGuardia. He thought he was so smart and prepared. It took him two weeks exactly to come to a feeling of certainty and as soon as he arrived at his decision and booked his one-way ticket to New York City and beyond, he began to feel unsure he had made the correct decision and therefore spent five hours on the phone with various airline customer-service agents going over the possibility of canceling the flights and getting a refund on his credit card.
We are both very indecisive people, he told me. We never learned how to decide anything. Make a list of pros and cons, make a list of possible outcomes, that’s what I learned how to do. It’s easier to stay at home and yet here I am.
And are you planning on staying with me?
Of course.
He was sitting up on my bed and I sat on the floor.
Where else would I stay?
My shared studio apartment was simply one curtain-divided room with a galley kitchen and no closets and no bathroom and a series of small windows that must have looked like the saddest portholes of a ship going nowhere; my apartment building had more in common with the most run-down boardinghouses of depressing German novels from the 1920s, like
a tenement slum, the bathroom was across the hall, every time you went to the bathroom, you had to take a tiny key to get in, sometimes it would take hours to locate the tiny key, and the entire building was unlike any place a normal person would choose to live in the year 2013.
I like your apartment, he said, it suits you.
The one thing I was proud of was my display of found objects on the wire shelf near my bed, things I’ve found on the street, or stolen, nothing worth more than ten dollars. There were three animal figurines carved out of macadamia nuts, a faded drawing of Marcel Duchamp printed off my roommate Julie’s printer, one Swiss Army knife, a glass finch, an old-fashioned amber-colored pharmacy bottle with a skull and bones, a broken record player with assorted broken acetate records, a packet of Genmaicha tea, a skeleton key, a can of pepper spray, tampons, overnight-sized pads, a worn-down biography of William H. Prescott, an SH-50 microphone with no cord, a Japanese NOH mask, one gold Zippo lighter, a giant, heavy fork. It stopped raining, and the sun shone in a friendly way through my apartment window. Directly across from the window there was another building, a shabby concrete affair. So next to the window I had taped a painting of pink flowers. The title might have been SUNLIGHT STREAMING THROUGH PINK FLOWERS, and it reminded me of nature, that it existed, because there were times I forgot. I noticed my adoptive brother staring at it.
It’s a French Impressionist. I forget which one.
Our mom has that exact picture in her closet.
I don’t think so. I’ve never seen it.
Yes, she does. Next time you’re home, go into her closet. It’s above the jewelry box.
I thought he was imagining things, and I suggested we take a walk. Despite our differences, we were both lifelong walkers. We both rejected Catholicism and its pedophile priests and lesbian nuns and took up walking as our religion. Our adoptive parents never walked unless they had to, they drove their station wagons and SUVs to and fro, out of the garage and into another garage, never coming close to nature, avoiding nature at all costs, whereas my adoptive brother and I both from a young age gravitated naturally toward walking everywhere in nature whenever possible, except the forest behind the neighbor’s house, the forest that had been forbidden to both of us, the forest of abuse and child molestation and kidnapping, therefore that forest was off limits when we were young for our walking purposes, only later would we be able to walk in the child-molestation forest, and by then we no longer cared to walk there, we each had our own routes of where we liked to walk, he in Milwaukee and I in New York, each of us fixed in habit, each of us unable to take a radical step and alter our ways, until—
I suggested we go to Prospect Park in Brooklyn to sit and walk only because it was more peaceful than Central Park. And now, as I sat in my adoptive father’s study, it occurred to me: why didn’t I take him to Central Park? Why Prospect Park and not Central? It didn’t make sense; I should have taken him to Central Park, I said to no one. Why decrepit and rundown Prospect Park and not Central Park? Tears came to my eyes and I kept saying things to no one as I began to slowly weep.
If you knew someone was going to die a few months later, you would take him to Central Park, not Prospect. It tormented me, the thought that I would never be able to show him glorious Central Park, Central Park in early autumn, Central Park with a scarf and hot chocolate, Central Park with the pigeon people, the golden-hued leaf-draped Central Park of film and TV! That afternoon in July we proceeded down the seven flights of stairs and into the beautiful New York City streets filled with garbage and all kinds of miserable and neurotic people. Sister Reliability! some voices called out, and I thought I saw a few people I recognized as my troubled youth, their faces were distorted with laughter and amusement. I waved back warmly. My adoptive brother and I walked past numerous bodegas and stores that sold wigs and wigs only, we went into a Duane Reade so he could buy cough drops, we descended two flights below ground level into the subway, Dante’s inferno. He rushed in through the turnstile behind me. He was a small person and pressed himself easily into my back. Was that the last time he touched me? I wondered. Was that the last time he touched anyone? I believed to this day that my adoptive brother never had sex. He was not a sexual person and neither was I. Sometimes I wondered if our lives would have been easier for us if we had both been adopted into an Amish family.
When we got off the train, we walked four city blocks to the park. We came upon a small zoo within the park. He paid for my ticket. Near the zoo entrance a fake-looking cave housed a fat, densely furred cat with short, flat ears and an unhappy, evil expression on its face. We sat down on the iron bench and some men walked by pushing carts selling popsicles and hot dogs. No one looked at us because we were short, miserable Koreans. The zoo was mostly empty. Not even public schoolchildren came to this zoo, it was that depressing. At least it was a bright day. Neither of us pursued the idea of going deeper into the zoo.
I told them I had to go to Wyoming for some job training, he said, but I’m here with you. Can you believe they believed me? I told them I would live at an extended-stay hotel, training with a group of federal investigators. Can you imagine me actually doing something like that? They don’t really understand anything about who I am.
That’s right, I said sympathetically, they’ve never understood either of us.
I’ve come to peace with it. Don’t say anything to them.
You have nothing to worry about. I never like to talk to them and it’s not like I’m going to start talking to them any time soon.
The truth is, he said, I’ve started working with a Korean professor at Marquette, Dr. Kim.
Oh?
I tried to act interested, but any time he mentioned Korea, I started to think about other things, particularly a rich person’s heavy fork I found in a dumpster in Tribeca a few days ago, a fork that must have weighed ten pounds, with tines that began the width of a finger and tapered into a tiny pencil point, a fork that I thought would be fun to show Steve.
I’ve been working on it for a few months, he said.
Working on what? I said.
Korean history, he said. I don’t go to Marquette, but she told me I could audit her classes. And since I started auditing, I’m helping her out with her research.
That’s nice, I said.
I’m at the library all the time, he said, it’s a very nice place.
That makes sense, I said. Are you happy with everything?
No, he said, I’m never happy.
He told me the happiest time for him was a period after he graduated high school. He lied to our adoptive parents, he said he had found a job in Madison registering gun licenses. He didn’t qualify for any apartments, he had no credit or work history, so he ended up sharing a room in a halfway house. The manager took pity on him. It’s funny he lived in a halfway house, because he never drank or did drugs. The manager thought he might be a good influence on his clients. The young man who shared the room with him was a recovering heroin addict.
It was the happiest time in my life, he said, I just went to movies all day, and for money I took surveys online. I didn’t have to think about anything.
And no one knew about this? I said.
I had nothing there, he said, and it didn’t matter. It was a place you could have nothing and exist. But now I’m working on Korean history, so things are interesting again.
Very nice, I said. I’m glad interesting things are happening.
He laughed a little and then his slight laughing turned into coughing. Like me, it seemed he had a persistent cough throughout the day. He coughed so much it was difficult to understand him at times, because unlike most people, he would try to talk through his cough. As his coughing abated, he asked me who my favorite person was. At the time, I wondered if that was his awkward attempt to find out if I was in a relationship, or dating.
There was a fifteen-year-old girl who I thought had a bright future, full of possibilities. Her name was Isa F., she had brown clear eyes, dark hair always
covered up with a black hoodie, and she was a bit of a smart-ass. She sounded like a chain smoker. I was informed her mother was dead, her father absent, an aunt raised her, and that she herself was on her way to becoming an alcoholic. My first day on the job, I noticed her right away, she appeared to know what was actually going on, and what needed to happen, more than the other troubled people. It looked like she was telling other kids to shut up, and even my coworkers appeared to listen to her.
My name is Helen Moran, I said to her.
She looked me up and down. Fuck off, she said.
She reminded me of myself when I was her age, so she was my favorite.
24
I might have been troubled slightly by his lie about training with federal investigators, but then I remembered I dismissed it just as quickly. Whatever he tells them is none of my business, I had thought. He always lied to them; I could trace his pattern of lying behavior back to when he was ten years old when we played CONFESSION. It never occurred to me to intervene. I could be described as many things, but I was not an intervener, especially not when it came to my adoptive brother and his life, and perhaps the truth was I was afraid of intervening, because to intervene would mean to communicate with and confront my adoptive parents, people I hadn’t looked at in the face for years, perhaps because I was afraid of their faces and always had been. It was easier for me to turn the other way when it came to his lies, and at the time it was much more comfortable for me. I always exploited people and situations for my own comfort.
I was finished with my weeping. Perhaps if I had taken him to Central Park instead of Prospect Park we would have had an in-depth conversation about what was going on in his life, his struggles and worries, his hopes and dreams, but because I took him to Prospect Park, we sat in silence most of the afternoon at the zoo until the sky darkened and it was time to leave.
Sorry to Disrupt the Peace Page 10