by Mark Merlis
SEVENTEEN
Willis,” I say over the phone. “The SLS people can’t find the binder with the 1973 journal.”
“1973? Um … that would be the last one, right?”
“That’s right. I’ve read the others.”
“Oh, you have?” I suppose he is thinking: if she’s read the others, why the hell would she be looking for more? “I remember, there isn’t a binder for ‘73. Actually, there weren’t binders for the others, I did that. They were just in folders in his cabinet.”
“Ah.” That’s why Jonathan couldn’t find them in the end, if that’s what he was looking for. They were just folders among folders, all with unreadable labels.
“And ‘73 wasn’t even a folder of its own. Just one entry stuck by accident in a file with other stuff. A correspondence file, 1958 or ‘59, I think. And I … I didn’t make a new folder for some reason, just stuck it back in where I’d found it.”
“So, if I got those letter files …”
“Yeah, it must be there. I’m practically sure it was ‘59.”
“Okay, thanks.”
Willis says, “Whatever happened with this guy you were dealing with? Marks, was it?”
“Philip Marks. I let him get started. He did start actually, a few weeks ago, looked at the 1964 journal.”
“Ouch.” Willis laughs. “I remember, that’s the one I’m a clown
I had forgotten: Willis is the only other person who has read about himself in Jonathan’s journals. We are a little club. “You come off better than I did.”
“I don’t know, Martha. I mean, I know he wrote some spiteful things. But—it’s not just me, everyone who knew him understood this—he would have been desolate without you.”
“Funny he couldn’t find the room to write about that.”
“Maybe he only wrote about things he wasn’t sure of.” This reassurance seems glib to me. “Anyway, you’re letting Marks go ahead with the biography?”
“I still don’t know. Probably not, I guess.”
“So you’re just reading for yourself now.”
“Should I?” There is a long pause. “Willis, you left it hidden. Should I? I’m asking, I’ll do what you say.”
“You’ve read everything else.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re okay?”
“No.” I find myself chuckling a little. Willis gets it, not as slow as Jonathan said, and chuckles with me.
“He wrote it for you,” Willis says. “I don’t know what the rest of the journals were for, but it seems to me he wrote those last few pages for you to read.”
“Then I should.”
“I … I can’t take the responsibility, Martha. I mean I never could, I guess that’s why I gave up so long ago. It’s between the two of you. You have to decide if there’s anything more you need to hear from him.”
Jonathan’s last entry is in the 1958 correspondence folder, not ‘59. A few pages in longhand on ruled paper. At the top—in a hand other than Jonathan’s, Willis’s I assume—is written, Undated entry, April or May [?] 1973.
Then it begins, the writing shaky but recognizably Jonathan’s, in the schoolboy script that was the least anarchic thing about him:
Can’t find journals. If I found them, can’t read, can’t know whether to save or destroy them. So they will stay here. Martha says she can still read my handwriting. I must try to say the last thing.
The day the officer came Martha and I sat on the stairs till he went away. I ran down and followed him. Caught him halfway down the block. Colonel, I went. Major, he corrected. Then, Mr. Ascher? I nodded. Sir, I don’t want to talk out here. I mean—
I offered him a cigarette. He was nonplused, took it. Major, he couldn’t have been thirty-five. Hair cut very close, golden corona as if his head were eclipsing the sun. He bent to accept the light, then stood straight. Brought his hand to his lips for another puff as sharply as if saluting. We were a step from Faherty’s. Let me get you a beer or something, Major.
His eyes narrowed. Was I crazy? In shock? He shrugged: not protocol, but no easy way to get back on the script, why not a drink?
I was crazy, in shock. Also watching myself clinically. No, awestruck or horrified. That in that moment some part of me that wasn’t numb could think about making him.
Two or three bourbons. Suddenly the major was sloppy drunk. No stage between ramrod straight and jelly. He was babbling about this guy Charlie. Best guy I ever knew, he said, over and over. Me and Charlie, we was in this clearing. I mean, this close, no more than—The major looked around, pointed behind me. No more than here to that pinball machine. That close.
I turned to look at the pinball machine. The animal part of me that wasn’t numb noticed the pinball player. I see him now. T-shirt disclosing the vee of muscle above his butt as he bent over the machine.
That close, the major said. Looking each other in the eye. I raised my piece and Charlie didn’t even flinch. Just looked at me, minutes it felt like, till I pulled the trigger.
I whirled around and faced the major. He was staring at his drink, nodding. Best frickin guy I ever knew.
Oh. Charlie was the Vietcong, that’s what he meant. What an asshole, I thought. What an ungodly mix of vicious and maudlin. Though maybe he was saying how it really was, maybe he knew things I didn’t know. Things you only knew if you stood across from someone in a clearing and raised your piece.
Bullshit. That’s how they keep their hold. Making the rest of us think they’ve seen something holy.
I offered him another cigarette. Just to break the rhythmic keening, best frickin guy best frickin guy. He took it, uncrossed his eyes long enough to light it.
I wondered maybe—whatever had happened to Mickey, wasn’t the major supposed to tell me? I wondered if Mickey thought whoever killed him was a wonderful frickin guy.
The major looked over at me, puzzled. Who’s this guy? Then slouched back, took a drag of the cigarette, nodded sagely at me. I turned to look for the pinball boy, but he was gone. No one left at the bar but a bag lady and a tiny trim Negro in a frayed suit. It was the major or nothing. I heard myself thinking that and was again thrown into that eerie otherness. Marveling that one part of me could be adding up my chances for a quick lay while the rest of me slid into darkness.
The major was still nodding when I turned back toward him. Then he stopped, closed his eyes. I’m sorry about your boy, he said.
I was tempted to look blank and say, My boy? What about him? For the major had never actually done his job, made his solemn announcement. As if the angel Gabriel had come to give Mary the big news and got sidetracked into some anecdote about the last celestial choir practice. But he looked sorry. I put my hand over his, soothing.
He opened his eyes. I mean, it’d almost be better if he’d died in action or something.
Uh-huh, I said. I could hardly see him, my own voice seemed to me to be coming from far away. I prompted. If he’d died in action instead of…
I dunno. I can see how guys get down, you know? I could never. I mean, I guess I kinda roll with the punches. But I can see how you, how you might just not know any other way out.
He looked at me. So grave, so moronic. Inside me the abyss, loss within loss. At the same time all but choking with indignation. This brutal affectless vacuum trying to console me.
So you’re telling me he—what, he killed himself?
Alarmed, he wasn’t supposed to tell me anything. No, shit, no. It was heroin.
I started shaking, held myself still. He babbled. We got this problem, lots of guys doing it now. Don’t worry, it ain’t gonna say heroin in the record. It looks bad for the CO.
I didn’t know what that meant then, heroin. Since then I’ve read up on heroin overdose. While I could still read. Spasms, shallow breathing, heart slowing and stopping. I didn’t know then, it was just a word. The only heroin symptom I knew about was shrunken dick.
The major waited for me to say something. I didn’t. Soon he
was just staring in my direction, not at me. Slumped a little, no idea who I was or where we were.
I said, You look kind of done in. Probably ought to get you a room at the Albion. The Albion, little dive hotel on 14th Street where I used to take tricks sometimes. Somehow got him the three blocks to the hotel, upstairs to the room.
I fucked him the way I want to fuck America. So hard he bit the pillow to muffle his own screams. Like the condemned man in Kafka’s Penal Colony, biting down on the felt gag. As the terrible machinery of death engraves in the flesh of his back the name of the commandment he has broken.
I punished the major for the commandment I broke, broke in my heart. God’s command to Abraham as he stood with the knife raised above Isaac. I read it over so many times, while I could read. Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him. Lay not thine hand upon the lad.
So I find that I am ending this journal almost as I began. With Kafka. They say when he read his stories to friends, grim terrible stories, he laughed uproariously. Until tears came to his eyes.
When Kafka was dying he told his executor to destroy every word he’d ever written. The guy ignored him.
The phone is ringing again. I heard it yesterday, about this time, but didn’t get up from the daybed. Where there is no trace of Mickey, not even the memory of his shape in the mattress.
The first day or so after I staggered home from the library, I thought only: you bastard, you have made Mickey die a second time, you’ve taken him from me one final time. Then I tried to think, not about Jonathan—I swore, never more about Jonathan—I tried to think instead about Mickey. Tried to make myself focus on him, as an obligation or devotion. And I would find, half an hour later, that I had torn that week’s New Yorker into a million little shreds or that I had, so neatly and systematically, pried off every single layer of a Bermuda onion. That’s what I did in lieu of meditation, took things apart.
For what was there, really, to think about? Whatever misery had led Mickey to his end, what torment or shame or just tedium was finally unendurable—no matter what I imagined, I was left only with that feeling in my breast, at once burning and hollow: the sensation I had when he cut himself or had the measles or when he came home crying because some rough boys teased him. I know, my baby, I know. And I cannot help you.
Until at last, this morning on the daybed, I closed my eyes and made myself just … look at him. Mickey, my scared baby thousands of miles from home, no one to hold him, trying to blot it all out. Mickey, confused, sweating, dirty, short of breath, his muscles jerking, Mickey gasping, jerking, Mickey fading away. If I cannot love that boy I never loved him at all. Mickey at rest. I have him back finally, Jonathan gave him back. And told me what to do.
I know the phone calls are from Philip Marks. Almost Christmas, the fall term over, a few weeks’ break when he could be working. And you will, Philip. I won’t get up now, but I will answer next time. I will let you see everything, everything but a few sheets of paper misfiled in the 1958 correspondence folder. I stuffed them in my purse the other day. Nobody will miss them, they were for me only.
The real Mickey, beautiful fading Mickey, is mine, mine only now. Philip—if he even mentions Mickey, I must try to see that he mentions Mickey—will write about a brave boy who died a hero. His name scratched, MICHAEL A ASCHER, with the other names, on that wedge-shaped scar on the Mall where Jonathan’s dreams are buried. And mine.
And our country’s.
I must remember to make up the daybed for Philip Marks.