Where will you sleep? she asked him. Are you going somewhere?
He had a large duffel bag slung over the shoulder and a small suitcase on wheels.
I’m headed to a casino in Jersey, he said, you’ll keep an eye on my daughter, right?
All of this trouble for a clean, bedbug-free bed, she said to him.
In summary, she took a bag of drugs from work and exchanged it for a clean bed. To put it plainly, she had no right to exchange the powder for the clean bed, as the powder was not technically hers, a powder that turned out to be heroin, a missing powder that caused chaos in the upper management of her nonprofit organization, and a missing bag that brought out the police and a detective.
Unfortunately the man from Crown Heights never came back. The young woman stayed in the apartment with the man’s daughter for two weeks, until it was arranged for the daughter to live with a relative in California, and when the woman returned to her own apartment, the bedbugs were gone. In a way, it might be said, they all won.
The moral of the story is do whatever you have to do, but first do no harm!
New York City, a city so rich it funds poetry, also has the financial resources necessary to help people get back on their feet, but I want to suggest A NEW WAY, a radical approach without the intrusion of nonprofit organizations, the government, and people, who, though well-meaning, have never walked a day in your shoes.
Less than a year ago, I slammed my compass down and ethical shards flew everywhere. Those shards, when they were whole, did nothing for me! They were better as shards! I swept them up in a dustpan and threw them away. During times of desperation, one’s moral compass can shift, in fact, it can be radical to alter one’s ethical position. Ethical positions should never be laid in concrete, sometimes it’s necessary to shift one’s moral compass, and sometimes it’s necessary to destroy it.
28
I made hundreds of copies of my pamphlet after I convinced a coworker to show me how to print them on our facility’s laser printer. I left them on subway trains, I gave them to people on the street who looked upset, I dropped them off at Marxist bookstores and vegan cafés. One day I helped an elderly Jehovah’s Witness down the steps of the A train station, and even though I was running late for work, I gave him one of my pamphlets; if one person could be helped by my pamphlet it would all be worth it.
I was so proud of it, I sent a copy to my adoptive brother, I took great care addressing the envelope, I signed my name extravagantly in green pen. After I sent it to him, he went out of contact for a month. When he came back into communication he never said anything about my pamphlet. I thought he would appreciate me sharing it, I assumed he would consider it a thoughtful gesture, as he enjoyed reading. I never forgot that he liked to read nonfiction thoroughly and in one sitting, and when we were young our adoptive parents thought we both read too much and that we needed to go out into the world more often to interact with the living. When he was in ninth grade his favorite book was about trees, Drawings of Trees in the Midwest, it’s possible he liked reading about trees because they spent their entire lives in continuous peace. He took Drawings of Trees in the Midwest everywhere he went, even to high school where hateful and disgusting kids made him a pariah for carrying around a book about trees. Eventually the book’s binding came apart and he threw the entire thing away. I was surprised at his lack of respect for an object that once gave him so much joy; he told me it didn’t matter, he didn’t need the book anymore, he had memorized the contents and he could see the trees precisely etched and shaded in his mind any time he wanted to, and I didn’t understand it, that he would want the trees inside his brain like that, why would he fixate on trees, it didn’t make sense. I myself had no particular interest in trees.
29
One day our adoptive father picked us up from school. I was a senior so it was very embarrassing to see him waving at us from the car. I buried my face into my backpack. When I climbed into the car, I ducked down. My adoptive brother sat like a normal person in the backseat, and instead of going in the direction of our house, my adoptive father drove us through a small and complicated neighborhood, there were stop signs every block, and then we came upon an industrial space, then past the industrial space and into what appeared to be a new town. The car stopped. There were small stone and brick buildings situated on a well-manicured hillside lawn like an extremely wealthy person’s estate. In the center of the spread was a lake with swans. Someone was feeding them and someone else trimmed the hedges. I thought he was going to drop us off and let us start our lives over in a strange town with a new family, but instead he got out of the car, pulled my adoptive brother out, then dragged him to a small stone building where I saw a door open, and only my adoptive brother went in. Somehow I was spared the experience. I only knew it was a therapist because my adoptive brother told me. He told me that he told the therapist he wanted to be a therapist. Each week was an opportunity for a new lie. The therapist called my adoptive father and told him he couldn’t work with a person like that; it was too frustrating.
Think about what therapists have to listen to all day, said my adoptive brother. At least I was saying something interesting.
30
Everything in my memory was significant in relation to his suicide; it was like staring at a wall for hours when you’re on drugs, the wall becomes packed with meaning and menace. I stepped outside to mail my rent check. It was a relief to take a break, and I shut the front door with a kick to the brass plate. At the end of the driveway my adoptive parents had installed a whimsical mailbox in the shape of a fat cow, its legs and udders dangled down, forever humiliating my adoptive brother and me. As I shut the mailbox, a police car pulled up. The engine shut off and two policemen got out, I turned away quickly, the car doors slammed shut, and I heard boot heels clicking toward me.
Excuse us, ma’am, do you live here?
I looked at them hesitantly; they looked depressed and impulsive, I wanted to ask them if they ever considered suicide. Because there were two of them, I was very nervous.
I used to live here, I said. Why?
We’re just checking in on things, they said. How long have you been here, and how long are you staying?
A couple days. I’m here to offer my support.
That’s nice.
I realized one of the police officers was a blonde woman with short hair like a man’s, and masculine features, but it didn’t make me feel better. She looked meaner than the man.
Are you related to the people that live here? said the woman.
I’m the adoptive sister-daughter.
Are your parents home? We’d like to have a word.
You’re welcome to come in, I said, but my adoptive mother isn’t feeling well.
So you’ll be at the funeral, the female said.
I hope to be.
Give her this, said the man.
It was a small white envelope, to Mary and Paul.
I watched the car drive away. I was in another one of my philosophical moods. Ultimately we must take matters into our own hands and decide our own fate, which is what I was beginning to believe my adoptive brother did when he killed himself.
31
There was a park that no one liked near my adoptive parents’ house. I liked to go there when I was in high school, because I was always in trouble, and alone, and crying. I hadn’t yet come into my Sister Reliability role, I wasn’t of service to anyone, not even to myself; I was just another troubled female.
The park was almost always empty. There was a man-made lake with no ripples, some benches scattered around the lake, a tiny wood bridge, a few small man-made hills to run up and down, a grove of elms and oaks. No one went to that park; children hated that park. Perhaps old men who lacked imaginations liked that park. Everyone else thought it was boring, and it was. It was possibly the worst park in the history of parks. I walked from my adoptive parents’ house to that terrible park, and it matched up perfectly with what I pictured, with
what I remembered from skipping out of high school to escape to the park, to go and sit underneath a nonnative tree, to smoke a cigarette and smell the fresh-cut grass and geese shit. When I was in high school, they didn’t have the funding for the program to remove and exterminate geese. The geese lived their lives, and then some brainless person, I’d guess a male, made the decision to collect and exterminate them, because they covered everything in their shit.
My daughter is going to slip and fall, someone said.
She deserves to fall on the shit, I thought, if she can’t pay attention to what she’s doing. Mankind will go extinct soon. I became interested in that idea. No one was there to stop me, or to say Helen, you are thinking very negative thoughts, humans are not that bad, for example…
The third day of my investigation I sat on a bench in front of the lake devoid of geese. I smoked a cigarette and another. I was smoking meditatively when I saw Thomas jogging around, Thomas stretching his legs, Thomas tying his shoes, Thomas putting in his earbuds, Thomas doing jumping jacks, Thomas in a purple polo shirt and black athletic shorts.
Thomas! I called out to him. Thomas!
He ignored me and kept running.
Young lady, said an old man sitting on a bench directly across from me, did you know this park was built on top of an old Indian burial mound?
I was surprised a man even noticed me, I was usually invisible. And most people never registered that I even had a sex, they saw me as a small and shabby adult, someone to be pushed out of the way. I got up from the bench, ignoring the old man, and ran after Thomas. I was very out of shape and by the time I reached him I was gasping and out of breath.
Thomas, I said. I touched his arm.
What more do you want from me? he said as he began to slow his pace. Haven’t I told you enough?
Something has been bothering me, I said.
So what’s new about that.
I need to know something. Did he ever say anything to you about working with a Korean professor?
He didn’t go to college, how could he work with a professor?
He told me he audited the class.
Thomas shook his head and picked up his pace.
Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror? he said. You constantly have a crazy look on your face. I bet you didn’t know that. Well, it’s true. I have to go, good luck!
Will I see you at the funeral? I called out, even though I had no idea what time the funeral was.
He kept running farther away. I watched him exit the park, then he made a turn and disappeared past a bus making its own turn. Sweating and exhausted, I threw myself down on a different bench underneath a weeping willow. After I gathered myself, I took out my phone and performed a quick search. There was a Professor Kim who taught at the Marquette law school, with a specialty in criminal law theory and race. My hands trembled as I typed out an email to her. To put it plainly, I informed her of my adoptive brother’s suicide. I closed the email by asking her when we might meet for lunch, my treat. The word suicide itself no longer had much meaning; its meaning had been sucked out and now it was simply a husk of a word that I used in relation to my adoptive brother. Utilizing the word suicide in a conversation instead of the phrase died unexpectedly emphasized the violence against the self; it cut through the bullshit and brainlessness of talking to strangers about my adoptive brother’s death. I pressed send.
Then I paused a moment and responded truthfully to my supervisor’s message. I typed that I did not keep good records, but I did remember one day taking my troubled young people to Central Park to play basketball. We borrowed a basketball from someone at the park, and it’s possible we lost it. I apologized. Then I apologized for possibly damaging the paper-towel dispensers. I considered calling my supervisor to see how everyone was doing, but I decided it wasn’t wise to draw attention to the fact that I was missing work, especially considering I was under an internal investigation. The problem with an investigation is people will continue to investigate until they have found something, anything, and only then, when they have found something, will they close the investigation. And what would the investigators uncover about me? I wondered. Would they find out that every day was an internal struggle to not destroy the lives of my troubled young people? Would they discover that when I went into my place of employment, unlike all of my coworkers who took the elevator up to the facility, I, as far as I knew, was the only one who walked up ten flights of stairs in order to inhale sharply the aroma of the rubber-encased steps because the smell transported me more lucidly than a dream back to the first grade of Catholic school and how I hid from the nuns in a very similar if not the exact same rubber-encased stairwell simply because I could spend minutes, hours inhaling the delicious fragrant rubber smell? I was very curious about what they would find out about me, in fact one might say I was perversely curious.
32
As I left the park, I noticed a crowd of people had formed around the bus where Thomas had exited and turned. The bus was still there. An ambulance pulled up and a police car. Then another. The bus driver was talking to the police. People stood around nervously and looked down at something. I saw their mouths open, and their fingers pointing. It appeared the bus had hit a pedestrian.
Instead of investigating the scene, I focused on the status of my own investigation. In order to investigate something, you need to talk to people and you need to get them to say things, helpful things, confessions, etc. I left the park and went in the opposite direction of the bus and the ambulance. I turned onto a busy street, and I walked in the shoulder, right next to cars driving at 50 miles per hour, when some people honked at me and rolled down their windows and screamed at me to get a car. Instead of going home, I headed toward a café.
No one liked to tell me anything, I despaired. Thomas no longer wanted to talk to me. The Moons had nothing to say. Why didn’t people like to tell me things? I needed more witnesses and more components. I needed to put his life into an arrangement that made sense. When I arrived at the café, I was dehydrated and exhausted from yelling back at people. It bewildered me, all the people inside the café, sitting and sipping quietly, everyone with a life doing things. The café could move two feet to the left, and everyone would continue their sipping. I ordered a skinny half-caff latte, then took my drink and sat down at a table near the bathroom and began to collect my thoughts. A tall thin woman walked by and then walked back.
Helen? she said. Helen Moran?
Me?
Don’t you remember me? She smiled. It’s Elena.
I looked at the woman. She seemed familiar, she reminded me of someone from the artistic group, and I shuddered.
I’m not sure who I am to you, I said.
You look exactly the same, she said. I walked by and I said to myself, that’s Helen Moran, there she is, after all these years, she’s sitting right there in a chair, looking around at things.
Thank you for noticing, I said.
You left Milwaukee, right?
I moved to New York.
It’s been a long time since we saw each other, she said. I’m sorry we lost contact.
I never come back here, I said. Not even for holidays.
I’m sorry, she said. Milwaukee has missed you.
I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else, I said.
Oh, that’s not possible, she said. You were unforgettable back then! I’ll never forget that performance in the nude with you, Peggy, and Teresa. Or what about that night of absurdist theater? You were in a cardboard boat while two brothers played instruments behind you. You took pictures with a Polaroid camera, then you carelessly threw the pictures into the audience and hit someone in the eye, the picture tore a man’s cornea.
I never sat in a cardboard boat, I said. I never tore a man’s cornea.
Yes, you did, said Elena. Back then you were an emerging artist and you made assemblages out of boxes, a hundred boxes from a dumpster stacked on top of one another, then someone started that silly rumo
r, well, I know it’s not good to stir up things from the past…
No, I said. Sometimes it’s necessary.
She patted my arm.
I won’t bother you, of course, but tell me quickly what you’re doing back here.
My adoptive brother died, I said, I’ve come to find out what happened.
Oh dear, she said. Was he ill?
Elena, that is the exact question I asked myself when I heard the news! I said to Uncle Geoff, Was he ill, no one told me he was ill! He wasn’t ill, he killed himself, and I’m trying to understand why. There are six possible reasons a person will commit suicide, would you like to know what they are?
I explained to her the six reasons. I told her there were of course more possibilities, including ones I couldn’t even begin to imagine. Suicide is everywhere, I went on, impossible to escape from. It must be an attractive solution to the irrational, the depressed, and the pathological.
What do you mean it’s everywhere? said Elena.
A few months ago a story circulated around my workplace about a coworker’s roommate, a young woman from China who had difficulty speaking English. When she got home one day, she did all of these mundane things, she unpacked the grocery bag, she took out the trash and recycling. She swept the floors. She left the mung beans, a package of glass-thread noodles, and one sweet potato on the counter. Then she went into the bathroom she shared with my coworker. She tied a noose and stepped off the toilet. She hung herself only a few steps away from my coworker’s bedroom. Of course she didn’t do a very good job, the noose came apart, and she fell down onto the tile, and on the way down, she slammed her head against the toilet. My coworker discovered her on the floor, the noose still partially around her neck, and took her to the hospital. Everyone, according to my coworker, shunned her after she survived her attempt, including my coworker. Who knows why everyone shunned her, except when someone attempts suicide and fails, we feel nothing but ashamed and embarrassed for them.
Sorry to Disrupt the Peace Page 12