“He looked dead just now,” Gould says, after the elevator door closes, and a man says, “Couldn’t be. I saw his heart going, pump-pump, pump-pump; he’ll pull through and will be back here in a week as if nothing happened,” and Gould says, “I hope so, but he looked dead to me, I swear: his body limp, head just hanging. I bet that’s why they took him out of here. There just wasn’t any sense working on him any longer,” and someone else says, “If he was dead they would have kept him here to write up a report because there wouldn’t have been any hurry to get him out. They must have thought they could do better on him in the ambulance to the hospital and of course even better than that in the hospital and that they got enough of the arsenic out of him now to get him to start surviving again. Believe me, though I didn’t get a look at him the last few minutes, no hospital’s about to waste the time and cost of one of its emergency units on a dead man,” and Gould says, “As I told this fellow, I certainly hope you’re right. “Where can you buy that stuff anyway? You’d think it’d be outlawed, it’s so lethal.” “Chemistry labs,” someone says, “and he was going for his Ph.D. in the area, wasn’t he?” and someone says, “By area do you mean Columbia?” and the woman says, “Columbia, I knew he was a student there, in chemistry.” “I thought it was history or political science,” Gould says, “since that’s all he seemed to talk about, politics and spheres of influence and such. And he knew everything about the subjects no matter what the era.” “And I thought ladykilling,” a man says, “because Jesus, if there ever was a guy in this building who scored well with the ladies, he was it. In fact, he had so many of them and at all hours that it’d be difficult to think he had time for anything else.” “So taking that into consideration,” another man says, “and his good looks, which is part of it, and the impressive way he spoke, and his intelligence and obvious charm, you have to think, Who had more to live for than Ronald?” and a woman says, “Roland. And always the last one to leave the elevator, always there to help you with your packages or say a nice word: things like that. A lovely person, an absolutely lovely person, with no sign of the slightest sadness or distress. That’s why it’s such a shock, what they say he did, and why I’d have to think he swallowed it accidentally.” “No, I’m sorry,” Gould says, “and really, shouldn’t we all pitch in, or at least the ones who live on this floor, and clean up the mess he and the hospital people left? Anyway, Roland happened to bang on my door for help when he was in the worst throes of it and told me he took the arsenic because he at first wanted to die but that he now didn’t want to, maybe because he found how painful it was or just getting so close to death he realized his mistake.” “He probably didn’t think it’d be that slow, either,” a woman says. “But you have to admit that if he was a chemistry doctoral student—” “He was,” a man says. “I know his dissertation adviser, and Roland and I talked about her.” “Then he knew what he was getting into and how long it’d take, and at the time, as this man here stated, he must have meant it but then had a sudden about-face. Now I guess all we can do is pray for his poor soul, for I’m sure he took enough to kill several men.”
A tenant on this floor tells the police that Roland’s door is still apartment and everything,” a policeman tells her, “and we’re about to attend to it, thanks. Just tell us if you know if he has any animals in there,” and she says, “No, I remember he once said he thought it unkind and a nuisance keeping pets.” A few police officers go into Roland’s apartment with the super and find the arsenic with the container capped, the super later tells some people, the empty can of soda he took it with, the glass he mixed the solution in, with a note pasted to it saying something like Don’t drink from this! It might contain poisonous residue! Throw out but break first, if I can’t because I’m suddenly incapacitated by the drink and a suicide note. It’s addressed to Apt 7J, a man whose name I once knew but I apologetically say I can’t recall now: his next-door neighbor and someone he vaguely said boo to, the man tells Gould a week later while they’re waiting for the elevator on the seventh floor. “He might have seemed friendly to others, from everything people here are saying of him since he died, but he acted to me like I cooked the worst-smelling fish in the cheapest corn oil every day and never dumped my garbage, cleaned my room, or took a bath.” The note, which the police held for a few days before giving him—“Let’s say that was stretching a bit their constitutional privilege of holding evidence,” the man tells Gould, “but since he meant relatively little to me and I was dumbfounded he chose me out of anyone to write the note to, I let it slide and didn’t make a legal case out of it, as I could have and conceivably got compensatory damages from the city and made it a test case against these kinds of questionable practices of the cops”—said he wants to die by his own hand because of a number of convincing articles and books he’s read the last year on how life’s not worth living in spite of the many little exciting if not fleetingly thrilling short-term things that can happen to adults. “You have to assume he meant orgasms, both of the masturbatory and copulative sort,” the neighbor says, “and good hash, a few brief poems and paintings over the centuries, several smashing sunsets and maybe a sunrise or two, and seeing the aurora borealis the first time.” Also because of a love he had for a certain woman who’ll go nameless because she’s blameless—“You wonder, at a time like that when he’s writing his death scrawl, and from such a bright and I suppose well-read guy, why he’d resort to such trite rhyming,” the neighbor says—but who didn’t return his love for her one iota, or perhaps, for half an afternoon at the most, just a trifle more than an iota—“You can imagine what happened during those few glorious hours,” the neighbor says, “since I’m sure he’s underestimating the iotaness of them.” The neighbor must have seen him with her once or twice, Roland wrote, but he tells Gould, “I saw him with, in my two months here, over a dozen different girls—I’m in and out of here ten times a day, so I miss practically nothing in this building—and of a wide variety of races, colors, shades, nationalities, and languages. And all lookers, and once three in a single day, so why’d he think, unless he described her for me, I could distinguish this one from the others because of maybe a particular glitter in his eye or bigger bulge in his pants that day?” Also because he’s going nowhere fast: he can’t stand historical research, writing bibliographies and papers, or other scholars and academics; the last thing he wants to spend two years on is a dull derivative dissertation, and the last thing he wants to become, he’s found, is a teacher or father, besides knowing he’ll never be even half fulfilled in any profession or capacity or with any woman over a long time or in any city or climate in the world. Life has been relatively to deeply depressing for most of his life, especially when he was a boy, so it seems the most sensible thing is just to end it. Could the neighbor personally tell his grandmother how much Roland appreciated her for bringing him up (here he gave her Bronx phone number, which turned out to be a disconnected one, the neighbor says, and with no listing of such a name in any of the city phone directories), when his parents died—both from cancer and just months apart, which had to influence his dark outlook and attraction to literature holding such a view—and how sorry he is for the sadness his death will cause her. He didn’t have the courage to write her directly and thought it best that what he would have said to her come secondhand in abbreviated form from a stranger. Please be patient with her; if she wants the neighbor to come to her apartment for tea to talk about it, please do, though he only has to go once. He also wishes he had a lot of dough to leave her so she could live comfortably in her last ailing years, but he dies, as she well knows and the bank-and checkbooks on his dresser will confirm, just about penniless. The young woman he loved, if anyone does discover her name, is not to be blamed one bit for his suicide, as he said, and the writers of those articles and books he read, some of which the neighbor will find in Roland’s bookcases and by his bedside (a few should go back to the library), are only to be commended—the ones still alive (most died natura
l deaths twenty to a few hundred years ago)—for having told the truth about what life is: endless tasks, meaningless efforts, illusions, repetitions, titillations, the occasional high, and tons of horseshit, this letter and statement about what life is included. “When I first read the last part,” the neighbor says, “I thought, Well, we’ve all heard that before and never thought much of it, but in the final line he sort of covers himself.” Gould says, “I’m surprised at that last part too, if you’re being accurate in your paraphrase of it, since I always thought of him as one of the deepest and most knowledgeable and clear-thinking guys I’ve known, and I’m not saying that now just because he’s dead.”
Roland started City College two years after Gould but they graduated together. He got out in three years while two of Gould’s five years were in night school, though they were around the same age, as Gould finished high school at sixteen. He was a tall handsome guy, lanky or wiry—you never saw him with his shirt off or in any garment that sort of stuck to his chest—sought after by lots of college girls, it seemed, praised and encouraged by his teachers to go on to graduate school but thought of by most guys Gould knew at City as a smart aleck, stuffed shirt, and pretentious bastard. He paraded his intelligence, was intolerant of anyone’s point of view if it differed with his, was bitingly witty and sarcastic, had no time for small talk, joking around, or even smiling, won every intellectual argument because he was such a good speaker, knew his subject so well, and never got emotional when he spoke, and also something about the attentive way he listened and focused on you without ever interrupting no matter how long you rambled on, and maybe the longer the better, for you to lose what you were thinking; cold-shouldered just about every male student unless he stopped you to ask your opinion about a particular topic that had been engaging or perplexing him lately, as he put it, waited till you were done or fed you some questions or lines to keep you stumbling and then decimated everything you said in the order you said it, often enumerating your points. He hadn’t changed much in any way a few years later when Gould moved into the apartment building. Jesus, not on the same floor too, he thought, since there were few people he liked less and no one he had felt more threatened by every time they had met. (Later he thought, What if I had lived next door to him? I doubt he would have written me the suicide note. But he would have knocked on my door sooner and I might have been able to save him by doing the same things I did. Then would he have moved back? How would he have reacted to me after that?) Usually Roland ignored Gould’s automatic greeting and smile, when they passed each other on the street or in a store or at the mailboxes downstairs, or would just grunt a morose, “Yeah, hi,” if they were waiting at the elevator, and then remain silent during the ride, lost in what seemed like a profound thought—eyes closed and head raised or head face down and hand covering his eyes—or reading a book he was obviously deep into and didn’t want to be taken from. Though occasionally Roland would ask a question in the elevator or the lobby—start it off with something like, “I was mulling over something and considered you the perfect person to discuss it with, if you have a minute”—about a subject (politics, religion, history, philosophy, literature, metaphysics) Gould knew nothing or little about, and if he knew more than that or even a lot and allowed himself to talk about it—usually he’d say, the five or six times this happened, “Really, I’d like to discuss it but I just can’t think straight now” or “I’m honestly in a rush”—Roland would still always end up ridiculing him, or not “ridiculing” so much as challenging Gould to prove what he said wasn’t shallow or softheaded, sentimental, commonplace, uninformed, “pilfered from a recent Times editorial,” just plain wrong, backing the challenge with quotes and facts and aphorisms and lines of poetry and Latin and French maxims, making Gould wonder about his own intelligence compared to Roland’s (not about himself personally compared to him, since he knew he was a nicer and more likable and maybe even more compassionate guy and would never treat someone’s opinions like that or inveigle anyone into a discussion simply to show off his mental prowess and range or to humiliate or discomfit that person), and how it’s unlikely he’ll ever think profoundly and speak that articulately and succinctly and formulate his thoughts so methodically or even be able to justify and defend well his simpler notions and arguments, and that as far as the so-called life of the mind’s concerned he’ll never be more than a half-baked intellectual with minimal perceptiveness, limited erudition, and few original ideas. All this was especially disturbing, since there was nothing he wanted more and worked harder at than to be a deep thinker.
What also annoyed him about Roland was that if he saw you with a pretty woman—riding up the elevator with her, for instance—he’d shoot her a look that said, Listen, drop that jerk and step out with me. In other words, Give me a signal you’re interested, and I’ll take it from there. So: a come-on—and once one of the women Gould was seeing and liked did drop him, saying it’s impossible for things to ever really work out between them since she knows she can never feel strongly toward him, and about a month later he saw her walking out of a neighborhood movie theater with Roland, his arm around her, her face close to his and looking as if she was going to close her eyes for a kiss. He didn’t want to interrupt her, wrong time to, but said, “Hello, Beca,” and she said, “Oh, Gould, hi, did you just see this picture too?” and took Roland’s arm off her waist. “I know you two live in the same building and I think you’re even on the same floor, but this is New York so I feel it necessary to ask, do you know Roland Meese?” and he said, “Do I know him? No, only since college,” and Roland said, “That’s right, we were in the same graduating class, or yours was the one before mine. How are you doing? Like a cigarette?” and Gould said no and Roland lit one and looked away, admiring the sky or something in it while he blew smoke straight up. “Well, nice to see you both,” Gould said, and walked ahead of them, not knowing how they first got together or when, but it was obvious she was stuck on Roland, though he couldn’t tell by Roland’s expression or anything how he felt about her. One day if he ever sees her again he’ll tell her, if she doesn’t know already, since they lasted only a few weeks or so together—once, when he saw Roland getting off the elevator, this popped out, “How’s Rebecca?” and Roland said, “Beca Kahn? Beats me; haven’t seen her for months. I didn’t know you knew her”—what happened to him: “Killed himself, I’m not kidding; arsenic, though soon after he took it he wanted to live, banged on my door for help; it was so strange: mine, which just shows how desperate he was, since the only thing I was good for before to him was dating girls, which means bringing them into the building, that he later went out with. But what a sight: his mouth foaming, gums and nostrils and tongue coated black. And a hellish stench coming out whenever he tried to speak and then suddenly no stench to my sensory apparatus when from about twenty feet away people on the floor were complaining about it,” and then say, “By the way, how did you two ever first get together? I’d just like to know. What’d he do, secretly get your number when my back was turned or you were leaving the building without me, or did you, without his even asking, slip it to him?” No, he won’t. Couldn’t hurt someone intentionally like that. He’d just say, “Did you hear about Roland?” and if she said no, he’d say, “Sorry I have to be the one to tell you. He committed suicide: poison, what a pity, guy so young and bright.”
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