The Futilitarians

  As Soren unspooled a long, animated story about recent, rather dramatic trouble with his teenage daughter, a kind of coda to the meal, and Dad listened, amused and sucking on a toothpick he’d gotten from the maître d’ stand, I was conscious of time finally dislodging itself from the Rib Room, that stasis chamber for so many years. Forced into motion by the roiling generational activity of a big family, the waxing and waning of experience. Fresh young crises rising to the surface while the older, hoarier ones take root below. My brother’s voice eclipsing my father’s across table 5. The hand tapping the base of my wineglass becoming my mother’s. All obvious, but our human place in time had suddenly taken on the material weight of inevitability.

  After almost three hours of lunch, Dad was fading. Done with his kids for the day, he needed to retrieve his car from the valet and retreat to his leather recliner in Algiers. Call the doctor about refilling his pain meds. My brother picked up the check. My father let him.

  Months later, listening to the tape, I realized just how unsatisfying that lunch had been. I was such a bad interviewer, lulled by the Rib Room back into my role as daughter, sister, diner, eating and casual conversing overtaking interrogation. I wasn’t even brave enough to try out my big theory about the deaths of Rebecca and Rachel being catalysts for my father wanting to take on pro bono death-penalty work. I just couldn’t pursue that line with him. Bringing up the twins was always a risk—you never knew how he’d respond. Which is why I never did and always just complied with his edict about not writing about their deaths. Just thinking about asking revived that nervous little-girl fear I still felt around him, even so close to his death. Fear of reprisal, fear of losing favor, fear of hurting him even more deeply than he already was. It never seemed worth it.

  Contrary to Dad’s enduring pessimism about Ronald’s case, about six months after he died, Mom received a letter from one of his colleagues. Due to Dad’s “tireless work,” Ronald was being released from Death Row. To me, this seemed both a huge and cramped victory, Ronald’s life widening out from a solitary eight-by-ten-foot cell, twenty-three hours a day, under the threat of lethal injection, to living with his guilt until his natural death in the general population of Angola. But for Ronald it was transformative. The letter went on to describe how not only was his life spared, but almost immediately he entered a training program to mentor younger offenders with the hopes of helping them avoid the mistakes he had made. Within the year, he would become a certified tutor, prepping other inmates for the GED, and begin working toward his longtime dream of becoming a minister, something unreachable to him on Death Row. He was accepted into the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary eighteen months after applying, a feat that takes most inmates years to achieve.

  After Mom shared that letter, I started a correspondence with Ronald. As he was now in the general population, he could use a highly restrictive email system called JPay. In his first message, he apologized for taking so much of Dad’s time near the end of his life, time that could’ve been spent with his family. Then he acknowledged that his crimes were against humanity, not just individuals and their families, and that he took full responsibility. As soon as he met Dad, he felt great relief. Finally, a good attorney and a man of compassion and conviction. He wrote that he’d come to regard Dad as his best friend.

  Then one day, completely unsolicited, I received a message from Ronald. As usual, it was typed in all caps because it allowed him to write more quickly in the short amount of time given him at the JPay kiosk. Thus, his messages appeared on my screen with the urgency of a telegram, an important dispatch rushed to me over great distances. He wrote that Dad once told him that his own daughters had died with the same mixture of cocaine and alcohol in their systems that Ronald had in his when he’d committed his crimes. Dad knew the obliterating dangers of that combination. Maybe one more casualty could be prevented. I read it several times. My God, I’d been right.

  I asked Mom and my brothers, who’d talked with Dad at length about the case, if he’d ever mentioned that connection between the twins’ suicide and his dogged, decade-long defense of Ronald. No. Never. Was it too painful to talk to his own family about it? Just another wall he’d erected to make it possible for him to keep moving forward? Or was it for the same reason I could never ask him about the connection—fear?

  Another telegram from Ronald, from the universe: when Dad arrived for what would be their final visit, they were both surprised to be escorted to a regular visitation room reserved for “contact visits,” not a glass-partitioned booth. Ronald said that neither of them had requested a contact visit, which is rarely granted and usually reserved for family. Bureaucracy and procedures are so tight on Death Row that Ronald figured it was an act of God. The two men were able to hug for the first and last time instead of waving through a glass wall or shaking hands in open court.

  Ronald had been surprised to see how much Dad had aged since they’d last seen each other.

  As close as they were, Dad never told Ronald he was sick for those last years. That he was closer to dying than Ronald. Ronald was incredulous, devastated, to learn of his death shortly after the visit. Now it seemed even clearer to me why Dad made that trip to Angola before he died. Ronald knew him and his motivations like no one else did. It was a last chance to be known, not fully and deeply or even accurately, but in a way that was important for him. As best friend to a man condemned to death, as an attorney trying to save someone’s life, as a lapsed Catholic still dedicated to defending God’s word, as a father trying to account for the loss of his two youngest daughters. As a man who was not sick and not defined by his illness. And maybe Dad understood himself best in the intimacy of the visitation booth on Death Row, where life is distilled down to questions of law and survival, of sin and atonement, more chances to make things right, especially for those who need it most, the guilty.

  Toward the very end of his struggle with death, Ivan Ilyich, like my dad, also finds meaning and connection in a man far outside of his own social circumstances. He feels his family, friends, and doctors have all but abandoned him, and he becomes peevish and difficult. His only comfort is in Gerasim, a healthy young peasant servant “with a light, vigorous step, exuding a pleasant smell of tar from his heavy boots and of fresh winter air… wearing a clean hemp apron and a clean cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his strong arms.” The only thing that provides him relief from the pain is to rest his legs on Gerasim’s young shoulders, which he does for hours at a time, sometimes all through the night. Gerasim has a natural acceptance of the circumstances of life. He “was the only one who did not lie; everything he did showed that he alone understood what was happening, saw no need to conceal it, and simply pitied his feeble, wasted master. Once, as Ivan Ilyich was sending him away, he came right out and said: ‘We all have to die someday, so why shouldn’t I help you?’”

  Though that night it was an otherwise-fractious ECRG meeting, with lots of smoking breaks and awkward exchanges—Tom imploring a disgusted Ellen to embrace the beauty of her middle age, Nate’s young friend interrogating us individually about the ECRG’s intentions—everyone rallied around Gerasim. Tristan spoke from a prone position on the floor. He’d hurt his back years before, falling two long floors down a service elevator shaft while helping move an armoire, someone having left the gate open. He once told me that as he stepped backwards into the darkness, he experienced an utterly lucid Wile E. Coyote recognition of the emptiness below him. “Gerasim is the character closest to nature, to the earth. Even the way he smells. So he’s the one with the most natural relationship to death.” I sometimes worry about Tristan. Living in his half-renovated Creole cottage on the edge of a gentrifying neighborhood, so sensitive to the world and alert to the needs of others; if it’s not his back, it seems something else is always ailing him.

  Even though Nate harped on the imbalance of power in the servant-master relationship, he admitted that Gerasim transcends his role as servant and deals with Ivan Ilyi
ch as a fellow man.

  “Just like Epicurus said, ‘When it comes to death we human beings all live in an unwalled city,’” I noted from the floor next to Tristan, pleased to use one of my favorite quotes. “All equally vulnerable in our mortality. But Gerasim takes it one step further, suggests action. Since we’re all defenseless against death, why not help each other out?”

  “Exactly.” Kevin stolidly anchored his end of the couch while the young men monopolized the rest of it with their agitation. “And it’s through experiencing Gerasim’s directness and generosity that Ilyich fears that maybe he got life all wrong, and that now there’s no time to rectify his wrong, wasted life.”

  Ellen, as usual, corralled us back to the text by pointing a thin finger at her iPad, suggested we look at the ending.

  When Ivan Ilyich’s wife comes into the room “to congratulate him on taking the sacrament” of confession, “her clothes, her figure, the expression of her face, the sound of her voice—all these said to him: ‘Not the real thing. Everything you lived by and still live by is a lie, a deception that blinds you from the reality of life and death.’”

  At this point, Ivan Ilyich begins to scream for three days. “‘Oh! Oh! No!’ he screamed in varying tones. He had begun by shouting: ‘I don’t want it! I don’t!’ and went on uttering screams with that ‘O’ sound.” While his screaming is truly terrifying and torments everyone in the house, I’ve always been impressed by Ivan Ilyich’s last-ditch marathon of defiance. He’s right, of course, there’s so much to scream about. Sometimes I feel like screaming now, to clear out the lungs and the soul, do an end run around any terrible deathbed realizations. Maybe making some noise now will help later?

  But, in the end, at the last moment, Ivan Ilyich does seem to break through to the truth when he asks himself for the final time, “But what is the real thing?” At that moment, in his flailing, his hand lands on his crying son’s head, and his son takes it and kisses it. Then he sees the pure grief on his wife’s face, her unwiped tears. Having been so fixated on his own suffering, he hasn’t made this very easy on them either, and finally he sees their suffering clearly, wants to make amends. There’s still time. He wants to say “Forgive” but, enfeebled, mistakenly says “Forget.” No matter. “And suddenly it became clear to him that what had been oppressing him and would not leave him suddenly was vanishing all at once—from two sides, ten sides, all sides. He felt sorry for them, had to do something to keep from hurting them.” And that something, that one real thing that he can do for them in life, is to die. The light comes, the relief comes. “‘Death is over,’ he said to himself. ‘There is no more death.’”

  After leaving Kristin and the bar that night, I walked past the hospital’s emergency-room entrance ramp to my car and I realized that Dad was probably going to die in the same building where Otto had been born. I still marveled at how moved the staff had seemed when he arrived. Birth was their job. They saw it every day. But just before midnight, as our wet, wriggling son emerged, their eyes softened above their surgical masks and the whole colossal mess of the city outside dissolved for a moment.

  Several blocks down, on the same oak-lined street as the hospital, I drove past the white crumbling stucco walls of Lafayette Cemetery No. 1. If you look hard enough from the street, you can see the peaked roof of the twins’ tomb. Sometimes I pass the cemetery and think about them with tenderness, other times with a cold calcification, almost bitterness. They took themselves out of the game, which became more interesting and richer than they could’ve imagined, and now are stuck behind the wall. But that night I was thinking about Dad and how much more time he had with us out here before he joined the twins in there.

  Passing one of our famous walled cities of the dead within our walled city of the living that night, I was feeling the full effect of my citizenship in the unwalled city. The cemetery reminded me that the archaic bureaucracy of death that some families deal with in New Orleans was about to be set in motion. We’d have to find the yellowed, 150-year-old deed to the tomb, kept in the same Ziploc sandwich bag my grandmother kept it in, handwritten in beautiful nineteenth-century script, signed by my great-great-grandfather, present it to the city authorities (crazy that these relics still serve us), deal with the obituary, funeral home, cremation, and the near-criminal fees that accompany death in America. Cataloging the death chores and the dread and mystery of what lay on the other side of them propelled me through the dark city. Driving home, I stayed close to the river and the old neighborhoods and narrow streets, the tall buildings of the Central Business District rising up, sloping back down to the human scale of the downtown Creole neighborhoods, the intersections, the avenues, the red lights and the green lights, all our obstacles and permissions, and I wondered where all these other cars could be heading.

  NOVEMBER

  Nineveh

  A poem focuses and quiets the room like no other reading, creates a white space of concentration around the talk as it does around the words on the page. The poems Sara chose for November called for small investigations of large questions; you could isolate a line or group of lines and use them as a drawstring to gather everyone in. People seemed grateful for the careful packaging, the surprising gifts of these poems. The atmosphere that night was low-key but engaged, in a pleasant, contained way.

  This was in contrast to October’s Tolstoyan provocation, and all the generational and gender fissures it had aggravated. That night there had also been grumblings that the readings for the year had been too homogeneous; after all, white European men don’t own the struggle. Though on the shelves, in anthologies, philosophy departments, and conversational references, they certainly monopolize it. The night of the Tolstoy discussion, Sara was also being unusually assertive and announced that she wanted to choose some poetry for November’s meeting. Though I was expecting her to present a full-on cadre of women poets, she mixed it up, male and female, made them equals.

  Each poem Sara chose held a quotidian Moment of Awareness, as experienced with one’s self or other people. The poems seemed like attempts to pin the self down in the universe or, as in the lines from Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room,” which we read that night, “to stop / the sensation of falling off / the round, turning world / into cold, blue-black space.” Poetry’s combination of precision and mystery makes it the perfect genre for this task. It asks for a kind of thoughtful deference, and we indulged it.

  We immediately pointed out that the poems Sara chose were all explicitly situated in different seasons, another way to locate ourselves in time, albeit transiently. Seasons afford concrete context but also can be obviously metaphorical, pointing out how life is experienced in stages and cycles. A reminder that the world is turning, orbiting, and time is passing in a more or less orderly, inexorable way, unless you live in a seasonally muddled and at times unpredictable place like subtropical south Louisiana. When I lived in Massachusetts during college, I marveled at the true seasonal distinctions, the predictability of them. Leaves blaze and fall, then the snow, then spring bursting through it with delicate little crocuses, and then real scorching summers. And it was interesting how people were communally affected and bound by the shifts in weather, how moods changed along with the seasonal gear hauled out of basements and attics.

  For years, both early fall and early spring, the most pleasant and anticipated weather of the year in New Orleans, were tainted for me. Rebecca died in September and Rachel in March, and as soon as the temperature changed, I could feel the grief approach through the air, feel it on my skin, before I actually remembered their death dates. During that period, I remember thinking that those girls had managed to ruin both seasons for me. But time overtook that cycle, too, dulled the fine-tuned physicality of grieving to a less painful, more general remembrance. Now in spring, my body recalls being heavily pregnant with my younger son, can still conjure twinges of that amazing restless fear and apprehension mixed with the clean, vibrating blue of April. I imagine one day that sensa
tion will also fade into mere recollection, but at least spring has been reclaimed for me within that ongoing dialogue in nature, like the line from Theodore Roethke’s poem “Unfold! Unfold!”: “What the grave says, / The nest denies.” The nest gets the last word.

  Though the nest is built into us all, maybe it doesn’t get the last word for everyone. In the first poem we discussed, Stephen Dobyns’s “Somewhere It Still Moves,” spring in Sarajevo is connected to a conditional sort of hope. His Moment of Awareness occurs during a literary conference, a fun dinner in a centuries-old restaurant (“whitewashed walls, great black beams on the ceiling”) that makes the speaker and his fellow American diners feel that they are in “the midst of history.” Soon, however, the poem telescopes away from the conviviality of the table, the pantomiming waiter trying to make himself understood to his American customers, the lively clatter of the restaurant, to the city’s war-ravaged near future, a time when Dobyns will see newspaper photographs confirming that “the restaurant, the entire block has been / transformed to rubble, so many rocks at a crossroads.” During the dinner, Dobyns writes, “The waiter laughed with us.” Now, seeing the photos of devastation, the speaker laments of the waiter: “He is probably dead now. / Killed by a sniper as he crossed a street or stood / by a window.” Across time and space, the poem blasts us apart with war, reconnects us with love, but ultimately, remembering that night, the speaker lands on the impulse to destroy inherent in our species:

  On one particular evening

  the waiter brought his tray with a paper bag on a plate

  and we laughed. A fragment of that sound is still traveling

  so far out into the dark, an arrow perhaps glittering

  in the flicker of distant stars. Somewhere it still moves.

  I must believe that. Otherwise, nothing else in the world