The Red Parts

by Maggie Nelson

  He sang “Duke of Earl” in a crazy falsetto, and often yelled his personal mantra, I am immortal until proven not! at the top of his lungs.

  He learned, in the year before he died, how to weep. I saw him.

  The End of the Story

  AT THE TRIAL I learn that when detectives arrive at the scene of a homicide, they start far away from the body, and move slowly in toward it, so as not to miss or disturb anything, taking photographs, collecting evidence in sweeping, concentric circles.

  SEVERAL YEARS ago, while working on Jane, I asked my mother if she thought I had grieved my father. I don’t know why I thought this was something she could know. But when I think back on the years after his death and try to locate myself in them, I feel like I’m scanning a photograph in which I’m supposed to appear but don’t. It occurs to me that in watching me grow up, maybe she saw something I couldn’t see.

  Shortly after 9/11, some players from the Yankees came down to the fire station next to the bar where I worked in downtown Manhattan. They had come down to sign baseballs for all the kids whose firefighter fathers had died in the World Trade Center towers. Our station, as we called it, lost eleven men, many of whom drank regularly at the bar. I dropped what I was doing and went outside to watch the Yankees play catch with the boys in the street, the air still rank with the stench of the dead and smoldering steel.

  The boys were euphoric. None was older than ten or eleven. They shrieked, high-fived, ran after balls in the gutter, and donned the autographed Yankee caps the team members had brought for them. It was impossible to forget that each one had just lost his father. The loss was only a few weeks old; they could not yet know how it would shape the rest of their lives. Watching their little bodies, I wondered where grief gets lodged in such small vessels. If I looked at them long enough, maybe I would actually see it.

  The scene was bittersweet, and eventually unbearable. I went back to work.

  Of course you grieved, my mother answered me.

  FOR YEARS growing up I was secretly furious at our mother for not letting Emily and me into our father’s bedroom on the night she found him there, dead. Everyone always said he died in his sleep. But my mother had told us it looked like he’d sat up before falling backwards, so he must have been awake long enough to know that something was going terribly wrong, had just gone terribly wrong, inside his body. Inside his heart. Maybe he woke up with a start, sat up, thinking, Oh my God, what’s happening to me? Maybe he had fumbled on his bedstand for the telephone, thinking, I need help. Or maybe he had fumbled for his glasses, thinking, one last time, What’s happening to me? If I had seen the traces of this fumbling, I would have been able to tell how long he had suffered. Whether there had been any pain. What his last sound was. His last thought. At the bottom of his staircase, behind the closed door to his bedroom, lay a secret I had been unjustly barred from knowing. If I had been allowed access to it, my dream journals would not have been filled for the next twenty years with imperfect resurrections.

  Dad comes back to life, says he had only been in a coma all these years. He explains that after the divorce he got drunk and took a whole mess of anti-depressants and some mystical Mexican drug, that’s why he was in the coma. He says some folks at a rehab hospital took him in and never gave up on him, they watched over his body for years waiting for him to twitch. I feel immensely relieved, although a little guilty for giving up on him, and a little angry that it’s taken him this long to find us again. Then my mother appears and whispers, don’t believe him, nothing he’s saying is true, your real father is dead.

  Dad, again risen from the dead. He is unbearded and soft and there is something sexual about our relationship. I whisper to him, very close to his face—I’m in graduate school now. He says, Are you going to be a doctor or a lawyer? I say No, Dad, I’m going to be a professor. He smiles and nods. We talk about everything that has happened in his absence. I tell him about the 1989 earthquake; he tells me about an earthquake he remembers in Michigan that happened while he was playing tennis. When he says the court filled with rubble I suspect he’s lying. There aren’t earthquakes in Michigan. Maybe this is an imposter. Maybe my real father is truly dead, or elsewhere. Then he says he is still immortal, but he has to go now. He has work to do. I think, Oh yes, heaven-type jobs. Heavenly jobs.

  My mother was damned any which way. Mostly she was damned because she was alive. If we had found her dead body that night, our loyalty might have swung the other way.

  Also, with no other way to explain a massive, fatal heart attack out of the blue at age forty, a story began to circulate like a quiet poison among us that he had died, quite literally, from a broken heart.

  She killed him, I overheard Emily tell friends on our school playground, with a shrug.

  I too believed this story. But gradually, as the years went by, I awoke to its fallacy. Beyond its medical dubiousness, it also elided the fact that my father had been riding a wave of happiness when he died. He had bloomed, as they say. And after a year or two of seemingly joyous promiscuity, at the time of his death he was considering getting married again. To a woman named Jane.

  I had hoped that the years had dissolved this burden for my mother, just as I had hoped that I would eventually stop putting myself in increasingly fucked-up situations in order to make something right that just needed to be left wrong. Then, one afternoon, on a trip home to California during my mother’s second divorce, I overheard a wild fight between her and my soon-to-be-ex-stepfather in which he tried to defend his adulterous behavior by reminding her that they, too, had once committed adultery together. From my perch in the guest room I heard her spit back, You know perfectly well that I paid for that in blood.

  I knew that she was talking about my father, twenty years after the fact. And at that moment I imagined tearing out of the house, running toward the highway, stopping the first car that passed, and begging the driver to take me away, as far away as possible, out of this story.

  My mother is a teacher of fiction. She has read every novel under the sun. She wrote her master’s thesis at San Francisco State on Mrs. Dalloway while pregnant with Emily. To celebrate a poetry publication of mine years ago she sent me a card that read: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”—Joan Didion. At the time I was living in a closet on St. Mark’s Place, and I pinned the card to the crumbling wall to remind me of her support, her thoughtfulness.

  But the more I looked at the card, the more it troubled me. My poems didn’t tell stories. I became a poet in part because I didn’t want to tell stories. As far as I could tell, stories may enable us to live, but they also trap us, bring us spectacular pain. In their scramble to make sense of nonsensical things, they distort, codify, blame, aggrandize, restrict, omit, betray, mythologize, you name it. This has always struck me as cause for lament, not celebration. As soon as a writer starts talking about the “human need for narrative” or the “archaic power of storytelling,” I usually find myself wanting to bolt out of the auditorium. Otherwise my blood creeps up to my face and begins to boil.

  I feel strongly that your family’s story of struggle and hope has great relevance to our audience, the young CBS producer wrote. What story was he talking about?

  The paradigm of faulty family stories for me has always been that of the demise of my great-uncle Don, who died of MS back in Michigan years ago. Visiting him as a small child terrified me: he lay motionless in his bed after a tracheotomy, and greeted us in husky vibrations mysteriously amplified from a dark hole in his throat. Whenever I asked anyone what had happened to Uncle Don to put this hole in his throat and keep him in bed, I always got the same answer: It all started one day when Uncle Don stepped on a piece of glass at the beach. He was never the same after that. It took me years to understand that while this day at the beach might have marked some kind of change in his condition, whatever he stepped on there did not cause his MS. But to this day, the relationship between this piece of sea glass and his eventual neuromuscular meltdow
n is, in family lore, cement.

  During the Middletown winter of murder mind, I was required to teach a course on “narrative theory” at the university. I dismantled the inherited syllabus and made everyone read Beckett, along with an essay about brain damage, then turn in papers focused on the swirling disintegration of storytelling in Endgame. Several students seemed to miss the point—assuming there was one—and turned in papers that argued something along the lines of, If only Hamm and Clov could have told coherent, sturdy stories, they might have found lasting happiness. I was brutal on these papers. Several students complained that I seemed unusually hostile to their ideas.

  “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” I repeated back to them, feeling the whirring of some vague, teacherly sadism, clearly in excess of the situation at hand.

  I make it real by putting it into words, Virginia Woolf wrote. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me.

  How did she end up at the bottom of the River Ouse?

  I know what I want is impossible. If I can make my language flat enough, exact enough, if I can rinse each sentence clean enough, like washing a stone over and over again in river water, if I can find the right perch or crevice from which to record everything, if I can give myself enough white space, maybe I could do it. I could tell you this story while walking out of this story. I could—it all could—just disappear.

  Photo #5:

  Jane’s face, in profile, stained by two tracks of dark red blood running from the bullet wound in her left temple. One river of blood runs straight down the side of her cheek; the other emanates from the same source, but runs in a diagonal line across her cheek toward her mouth.

  Two brick-red tracks of blood starting to coagulate or already coagulated on Jane’s white cheek. That is the picture. That is what there is to see.

  But, as the examiner points out, upon scrutiny, this picture tells a story. They all do. This one suggests that Jane was sitting upright when she died, and that the first shot was to her left temple. Gravity would have sent the blood from the first shot running straight down her face. Then, after losing consciousness, her head would have slumped forward onto her chest, changing the course of the flow of blood. Hence the second track, running toward her mouth.

  No one knows where Jane died. But from this photo one can imagine that she was sitting upright, in the passenger seat of a car, next to a right-handed killer who shot her first in the left temple, then once again in her lower left skull. I guess to make sure she was dead. And then strangled her. I guess to be very sure.

  There are no defense wounds. No signs of a fight. He—Gary, whoever—probably told her not to move. She probably died sitting completely still, the hood of a .22 flat against her left temple, terrified beyond imagining, thinking one simple thought: Please don’t kill me.

  This is one story the picture tells.

  ON APRIL 20, 1970, the poet Paul Celan left his home in Paris, walked to a bridge over the River Seine, and jumped to his death. He left a biography of Hölderlin open on his desk, with the following words underlined: Sometimes this genius goes dark and sinks down into the bitter well of his heart.

  The sentence does not end there. Celan chose not to underline the rest: but mostly his apocalyptic star glitters wondrously.

  A FEW YEARS after I received the card from my mother, I sat down to read Didion’s 1968–78 essay “The White Album.” I knew it opened with the line We tell ourselves stories in order to live. I was surprised to discover that by the end of the first paragraph, the essay has already begun to swerve: Or at least we do for a while. The pages that follow chronicle a breakdown—Didion’s own, and the culture’s. The piece closes: writing has not yet helped me to see what it means.

  I’m sure my mother knew how the essay ended. She chose to give me its beginning.

  In the Victim Room

  IN 1983, the performance artists Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh tied themselves together with an eight-foot rope around their waists, and lived that way, without touching, for a year.

  On the morning of July 22, 2005, I am thinking of Montano and Hsieh while sitting with my family in the “Victim Room” after the jury has gone out to deliberate. A victim’s rights advocate named LeAnn has given us a beeper that is supposed to flash and vibrate as soon as the verdict comes in. Once it flashes and vibrates, we have about three minutes to get into the courtroom. The judge will not wait for us—as a courtesy to the defendant, once the jury has reached its verdict, it is to be delivered as swiftly as possible.

  So here is the performance piece: everyone in my family who has managed to get themselves to Ann Arbor for the verdict—my grandfather, my mother, my uncle and his wife, my mother’s new boyfriend, Emily, and me—must now remain together, huddled around this beeper, not straying any farther than three minutes’ distance from the courtroom, for an indefinite period of time, which Hiller tells us could be anywhere from forty minutes to a week.

  Beyond the trinity of my mother, Emily, and me, we are not an extraordinarily close family. Before this day no one, including myself, has met my mother’s new boyfriend. But now we must all move as one blob, one herd filing into the court coffeeshop together and ordering eight turkey club sandwiches, one herd eating these sandwiches huddled around a table in the Victim Room, which is on the top floor of the courthouse and filled with decks of cards, children’s toys, leather couches, and months-old copies of the New York Times.

  Leiterman’s family is offered no Victim Room. Nor do they have a victim’s rights advocate named LeAnn, nor a beeper. They have to wait for the verdict sitting, crouching, and sleeping right outside the courtroom, either in the corridor or on a dilapidated U-shaped couch by some vending machines.

  I can sense that this performance piece is going to be trying. If it goes on for a week, it might not be sufferable. At first I try to fall asleep on a couch, hoping to shave off some of the initial hours with unconsciousness. When that doesn’t work I make an unsuccessful attempt to dismantle an emergency exit a few doors down that looks like it might lead to the roof, thinking I might be able to steal a quick smoke outside. My mother, Emily, and grandfather play hand after hand of gin rummy. My mother’s new boyfriend bravely leaves the herd for ten minutes to go buy a current New York Times outside in the summer swelter. My uncle sleeps soundly on the couch with the beeper lying against the bare skin of his waist so it will wake him if it trembles.

  Schroeder pops in the room occasionally, as do the team of detectives we’ve come to know as PJ, Denise, Bundshuh, and Ken Rochell. There isn’t enough room for us all, so they have to hover on the little chairs and stools meant for children, their bulky bodies spilling off the brightly colored plastic. They tell us a little more about their investigation, which, unbeknownst to us, has remained active throughout the trial. Apparently Ruelas has been paging PJ and Bundshuh from prison for days, promising them that he has new information. Ruelas has also been calling Leiterman’s attorney with similar promises. The detectives refer to Ruelas as “Satan,” and make little devil ears with their hands when they talk about him. You’ve never seen someone with blacker eyes, PJ says, shaking his head. They say it would be unethical to put him on the stand because he’s a pathological liar. They’re convinced he doesn’t know anything, and just wants a chance to escape.

  The hours drift on. At the top of the fourth my grandfather asks my mother’s new boyfriend what he does for a living. He says, Picture an imaginary object—a cylinder, for example—and now rotate it in space. This explanation does not go far. Next he tries to explain by showing us a card trick. He flips over cards from a deck at random, starting a new pile each time he hits a larger number than the card before. He does this several times, and then explains that the equation that dictates how these piles recur is the same a
s that which determines how fast the lit end of a cigarette will burn.

  Her new boyfriend is a theoretical mathematician. He doesn’t crunch numbers—he has a partner who does that for him. His job is to come up with the right questions. As he talks I get the sense that we are in the presence of great genius, and, perhaps, deeper mysteries of the universe than all unsolved murder cases combined.

  So how does what you do help the world? my uncle’s wife asks cheerily, undoubtedly hoping that the rate at which a cigarette burns might next be tied to the rate at which a tumor metastasizes, or at which the ice caps in the Arctic are currently melting.

  It doesn’t, he says with a smile, and starts to reshuffle the deck.

  At that moment Schroeder’s cell phone rings, and we all hear the voice of Denise on the other end: They’re in.

  Our beeper never beeped.

  BEYOND MURDER MIND, the worst thing I can imagine is walking to your execution. Movies that contain these scenes upset me more than all other kinds of movie violence combined. After Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, which ends with Björk singing and dancing her way to her death on the gallows, I literally could not leave the theater. I thought I might have to be carried out by an usher. This has something to do with my deep-seated opposition to capital punishment, but clearly it goes beyond that. I simply can’t bear the idea of walking toward your death knowing you might not be ready for it. Your bowels letting loose, your legs gone to rubber.

  Perhaps this is another way of saying that I can’t bear the human condition. Life is like getting into a boat that’s just about to sail out to sea and sink, the Buddhists say. And so it is. Tibetan Buddhists talk about death as a moment of “potent opportunity,” but one you have to practice for in order to know what to do with. You have to practice so that even if you were, say, suddenly shot in the head at close range, or even if, say, your heart exploded in your chest in the middle of the night, you’d be instantaneously ready to go, to pass through the bardo. I know that I’m not ready and I’m terrified that I won’t learn in time. How can I learn if I’m not even trying?