by John Welter
“And what is your job?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Oh. Do you work for the government?”
“Which government?”
“The United States government.”
“Yes. That one.”
“Well, I certainly don’t have to know anything about your profession, unless it’s related to why you came to see me. Your secrets are yours.”
“That’s why I came to see you. Some of my secrets shouldn’t be mine.”
“Oh? And what does that mean?”
“It means I need to share them with somebody, but there isn’t anybody. I don’t think I have a very interesting psychiatric problem for you. I don’t hallucinate. And why should I? Reality’s strange enough. At least hallucinations go away. Reality won’t. But I don’t mean I want reality to go away. I just wish it would work better.”
“Which part of reality doesn’t work well for you?”
“The part where I wake up every day and I know the only person I can share my life with is me. I mean, I like myself. I think I’m a pretty nice man. Usually. But I’ve come to hope that I deserve more than just me.”
“Are you suffering from loneliness?”
“I’m not benefitting from it. I told you it wasn’t a very interesting problem.”
“All suffering is important. You don’t have to pass some qualifying round to talk with me. Loneliness can be one of the most debilitating, agonizing conditions a person can face. You don’t have to apologize for not having the right kind of pain, as if there’s a superior sort of pain; there isn’t. But earlier on the phone, you said you thought you might have had a nervous breakdown?”
“Yes. For about a minute.”
“A minute?”
“That was long enough for me. Do you think it’s possible to have a nervous breakdown in 60 seconds?”
“Well, I’ve never heard of one that short, but I’m sure it’s possible. There aren’t time limits on nervous breakdowns.”
“If I’m the first person to have a nervous breakdown in 60 seconds, could I get a ribbon or an award?”
“I don’t think anyone gives awards for suffering.”
“I’d at least like a ribbon. A red one.”
“Before we honor you …”
“Or a green one.”
“… for your rapid suffering, it would be helpful if you told me what happened to you during what you describe as your nervous breakdown.”
And so I told her about the overpowering sense of unreality, my sense of alienation from everything immediately around me, and the general feeling—almost like a sudden and horrifying realization—that everything I’d been doing in my life was shallow, pointless, and wrong, and that I urgently, desperately needed someone in my life, and there was no one, how it was like I was having almost a mystical insight in which all of the dulling layers of ordinary existence and ambition and sensibility—my public self—briefly vanished, and the only truth I saw was that I needed to love someone, and there was no one, as if the universe finally told me an awful truth: All you have is you.
Dr. Boulan silently listened to all that and stared at me with somber concentration. She said that what I described, including the overall sense of uncontrollable panic, at least resembled a nervous breakdown, but whether or not it could be called a nervous breakdown didn’t matter, because I obviously had something. And it didn’t matter which name you called it. It mattered that I survived it and was trying to live my life well.
She didn’t say what color ribbon I’d get. She assured me that I seemed perfectly sane, although I said “perfectly” was obviously an exaggeration. She said, “Yes, but the only people you’ll ever meet who might enjoy undisturbed sanity are babies, because they haven’t had to face anything yet.” She recommended that she and I talk at least a few more times if I was serious about examining why my emotions could become so concentrated and explosive in me, and if I wanted to deal with my loneliness. She said people liked to trivialize and dismiss loneliness, as if it were nothing more serious than feeling sorry for yourself, which often it wasn’t. But she said that being alone, or being too alone, was unquestionably one of the most unnatural and damaging conditions in human experience. Meanwhile, as I was busy being unnatural and damaged, she said I ought to think about doing some kind of community or volunteer work, at least for the time being. Since I didn’t seem to have a woman in my life, I could meet other people and help them, which maybe wasn’t the sexual love I was hoping for, but it could be a way to find and give love.
THE ONLY kind of volunteer work I really wanted to do was volunteer to have Natelle lie on top of me, which undoubtedly would have to wait, and which I hoped wouldn’t be a community project anyway. But probably it was a good idea to go out into the community and work with someone who might genuinely need my help, since it could distract me from my morose self-interest and maybe make me a little more human. Dr. Boulan had suggested I try the Literacy Council, and I went there for four training sessions to learn how to teach adults to read and write well enough to at least fill out applications for the wretched jobs they applied for. These people were the working class, or the underclass, or the great huddled masses of immigrants who hadn’t even been assigned a class from which they’d like to escape. The literacy classes were held in a church basement. The student I was assigned to was Mria, whose name I thought was supposed to be spelled M-a-r-i-a, but she spelled it “Mria,” as if for all of her life the first “a” had been missing from her name and no one had told her. I thought that possibly her mother or her father, both of whom I assumed were illiterate, sat down years ago with great affection to show their little girl how to misspell her name. So I decided that now wasn’t a good time to injure what little pride she had left by telling her a letter was missing from her name.
Before our first lesson, before I could show Mria the alphabet and help her practice writing the letters, Mria told me exactly what she wanted out of the class.
“I need to learn how to write a suicide note,” she said.
Disbelief and anxiety rushed through me, as if no one could have really said such a thing. I said, “What?”
Mria stared at me with a patient and almost peaceful expression on her young face and said, “I need to learn how to write a suicide note. Can you show me that?”
I looked across the room for one of the supervisors, but they weren’t there. I didn’t know what to do. She didn’t look desperate or crazed. She just looked like a pretty Hispanic woman in her early twenties who was politely waiting for me to speak. I said, “I’m supposed to teach you how to write so you can have a better life. I’m not sure suicide is a better life.”
“No, no no no no noooo,” Mria said quickly, shaking her head and smiling in an embarrassed way. “I don’t want to kill myself. I only want to write a suicide note. Just a note.”
“Killing yourself and suicide are pretty much the same thing, and I don’t think I’m supposed to get involved in that. Maybe you should see a psychiatrist. They’re in the Yellow Pages. But then, you can’t read the Yellow Pages. I could show you.”
“You don’t understand,” Mria said in an exasperated tone. “I’m not going to kill myself. That would be crazy. I only want you to help me write a suicide note to Diego, so he’ll love me.”
“Who’s Diego?”
“He’s my lover.”
“If he’s your lover, doesn’t he already love you? And why would a suicide note make him love you?”
“Diego’s seeing another woman, and if I threaten to kill myself, he’ll know how much I love him and maybe he’ll come back to me,” Mria said in a sad and honest tone, and I was astonished that someone I didn’t even know was telling me her most painful truths. And then I thought of something.
“Can Diego read?”
Mria looked puzzled and uncertain. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never seen him read anything.”
“Well then, how could he read your suicide note?”
Mria put her hands over her eyes and moaned, and I felt sorry for her.
“Maybe Diego could come here and take classes,” she said in a hopeful voice.
“So he could read your suicide note? I think he’d want a different reason than that. Anyway, I don’t think suicide is the basis for a good love affair.”
“I want to learn how to write anyway,” Mria said defiantly.
“Okay. Good. We’ll start with the alphabet.”
“And will you write me a suicide note to take home with me tonight?”
She was so innocently morbid and grotesque that I started sniggering. I was supposed to be helping someone toward self-esteem and self-reliance, and this woman just wanted a goddamn suicide note for her illiterate boyfriend. The world wasn’t meant to make sense. I said, “Mria, if I wrote you a suicide note, how would you know what it said? You can’t read.”
“Well, it’s not for me. It’s for Diego,” she said.
“He can’t read, either.”
“But you could tell me what it says and I’ll memorize it and tell Diego what it says.”
“Well if you’re going to tell him, there’s no reason for a note.”
“Then you won’t help me? I only need a simple note that says ‘Diego, you pig, you bastard, I love you. And because I’ve given you my heart and you don’t want it, tonight I will take my own life.’ But I won’t kill myself. I just want Diego to miss me.”
That was the only thing Mria and I had in common. We wanted someone to miss us. And there wasn’t anyone to do that. So I felt kind of close to her then, because we shared the same sadness. And even though I regarded her as pathetic and ludicrous, I decided I’d at least write her stupid note for her, the way you give a child a worthless gift that the child nonetheless finds invaluable.
On lined notebook paper, with Mria solemnly watching me, I began writing: “Dear Diego, you pig, you bastard, I love you.”
19
The president, the dominant force and instrument through which the nation sought to realize its noblest ambitions, was shown on the television news eating a grilled Spam sandwich at a district attorney’s barbecue in Provo, Utah. He ate Vienna sausages at a firefighter’s picnic in Little Rock, ate Beanie-Weanie casserole at a church supper in Peru, Indiana; and ate fried pig intestines at a military show at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. If it came from a dead animal and was held in low culinary esteem, the president made sure he was seen eating it.
The obvious explanation was that the president wanted to be seen as a regular guy, a peer of the common Americans who, by habit or economic coercion, routinely ate second-rate food that even they didn’t like very much. The public had reacted with so much derision and contempt over the firing of Abbas that the president conspicuously sought to counter it and ingratiate himself once again.
But there was another and more fascinating truth to this. I had manipulated the president. Oh, he manipulated me first, by reacting with petty scorn over the elegantly disguised Spam he and the prime minister ate. I had been transformed by him into the bodyguard for a drunken pianist with diplomatic immunity. But while the president manipulated me quite directly and crudely, my manipulation of him was more insidious, and therefore more pleasing. And this was my power: the president was putting unpalatable things in his mouth.
Abbas had the glorious part. All he did was lose his job because of his own willful recklessness. Because of my plot to humiliate the president, Abbas had already been a guest on two national news shows and three national talk shows, for which he was paid thousands of dollars to light into the president. Losing his job had actually been quite profitable, and I was jealous. All I got was free beer for guarding Aramilo from the unknown political assailants who, in my opinion, wanted to kill him for playing Cole Porter songs, since that was almost all he did.
Abbas had been elevated into a kind of chivalric national hero for demonstrating that the president “really wasn’t going to tolerate being treated like an American,” which was the phrase he memorized for every talk show and newspaper interview. You really had to appreciate the logic. I did, since it was mine.
The president responded by gallantly eating every vile food he could find on his various trips across America. People became less interested in what the president’s position was on unemployment and global chaos than in what his position was on corn dogs. The presidential diet became a national obsession, and hundreds, if not thousands, of people mailed bizarre recipes to the White House, inviting or daring the president to try them. Natelle made photocopies of some of the stranger recipes, such as the one for artificial tofu made from beef, which was supposed to be for vegetarians who liked meat.
One of the recipes was called “Threatened Species Gumbo.” It was sent in by a man from Port Sulphur, Louisiana, who said that the main ingredient was “some animal that the Wildlife Commission doesn’t want you to eat.” There was no way to know which recipes were genuine and which were purely ludicrous inventions meant to taunt the president, but the recipes included Gila Monster Omelette, Pan-Fried Salamander, Sweet and Sour Skunk, Blackened Sea Cow, and Venison de la Rue, which Natelle and I decided meant a deer found dead on the side of the road. Natelle said we could compile some of the recipes into an American cookbook. If we did, I wanted to call it “Cooking Without A Conscience.”
My own role in all of this remained secret, but I was alluded to in a Washington Post story about the Spam incident in which an anonymous White House official said that “a Secret Service agent was reassigned as a result of the president’s unhappy meal.” I think this made me famous in the same way that the Unknown Soldier was, except I wasn’t given a tomb.
Every day I read the paper and watched the television news to see if Abbas would screw up and mention me, which he didn’t, and to see what else the president would put in his mouth that day in some obscure neighborhood where offended and mistrustful Americans waited to see if the president would insult them by not eating their food. Finally it happened, at a goat roast near Tulsa, that a woman offered the president a plate of breaded and fried pig testicles. I thought the president should have smiled graciously and said, “Actually I prefer my testicles without breading,” but he didn’t think of that. And, for a while, as I watched the brief report on television, I felt sorry for the president. There’s something wrong with a country whose citizens think sex education shouldn’t be taught in public schools because it’s indecent, but who think it’s fine to eat pig genitals.
Gardenaul was standing next to the president and said, “I’m sorry, ma’am, but the president can’t eat anything that hasn’t been tested by the Secret Service,” as if Widdiker and Yamato were going to eat balls. You could see them standing next to the president and shaking their heads. It looked like Yamato was going to pull out his machine gun and kill the woman. And who could criticize him?
“She was holding a plate of testicles in a threatening manner. Naturally I shot her.”
I missed being on the road.
MRIA DROPPED out of the literacy program right after I wrote the suicide note for her, and I nervously studied the newspaper and watched the television news to see if she’d either killed herself or been murdered by Diego. I worried that maybe she really had intended to kill herself, or that she or someone else read the suicide note aloud to Diego, who, after hearing himself described as a beloved pig and bastard, went into a rage and killed her. If any of that happened, it never showed up in the paper or on TV, which was good, although what it meant was that Mria was still illiterate and I hadn’t made even the tiniest fragment of the world better.
My next student was a 46-year-old schizophrenic alcoholic street person named Dark, who said he wanted to write children’s books about a dead pigeon he owned. To be conversational, I said, “You have a dead pigeon?”
“Me too,” Dark said, and I could smell acrid wine on his breath. “I’d like to write children’s books about a dead pigeon that has a fear of heights, so it won’t fly.”
/> “There’s already a book about that,” I said, hoping this would dissuade Dark from talking about it anymore, and suddenly I decided the best thing I could do was make sure he never learned how to write. So, already, my first student had dropped out of class, and my second student was threatening to write grotesque children’s stories that I wasn’t going to help him write. I wondered if Christ ever felt this way when he went out into the world to help people, if he just wished they’d go away and suffer somewhere else. I asked my supervisor if I could at least have one student who was sober and who didn’t want to write about the lives of dead animals, and my supervisor, a woman named Grace, smiled at me and said, “You’ve already driven away two students.”
“So you’re pleased with my speed? Thank you,” I said.
She got me a new student who was sober and who seemed at least moderately sane, a 31-year-old maid named Keesta who said she wanted to learn how to read so she could read stories to her six children, two of whom were already teenagers and didn’t want anyone reading stories to them. But finally I had someone I could work with, someone whose simple and backward life I could help a little bit by showing her the alphabet, which to me was just ordinary, trifling—second nature—but to her was the same complex wonder that a four-year-old encounters. Keesta, who at least knew how to spell her own name and the names of her children, stared with confusion and uncertainty at the printed alphabet I showed her.
“Where all these letters come from?” she said, as if she’d never seen all the letters in a row before.
“The store,” I said. “Not really. I think they’re Arabic, or maybe Greek, mixed in with some other Indo-European crud that we don’t have to talk about. It’s not that many letters. You can learn them pretty easy. I’ll show you.”
She kept staring at the letters and said, “Air-bik? Isn’t that foreign? I need to learn Eeen-glish.”
“Well, this is English. We got some of our letters from ancient cultures thousands of years ago, but then we changed it into our own language. You don’t have to learn all that. You just have to learn these letters.”