Death Kit

by Susan Sontag

  “Go on,” said Hester. “Why are you stopping? Don’t stop now.”

  “I guess I don’t want to go on.” Diddy sighing bitterly. “It’s all too ugly.”

  “Please,” says Hester sarcastically. “Don’t stop now.”

  “All right, I won’t.” New energy. Diddy sits up again in bed, throws the covers down to his knees. “Now, why don’t you be honest, damn you? Tell what you really feel about your mother. About being blind. About me.”

  “You know, Dalton, you could have asked me all that any time you wanted.”

  “Sure, sure. I know,” he says bitterly. “And I’ve been free all along to ask you how many men you’ve fucked, too. And if you’ve slept with anyone since we met.…” Hurried on, because he didn’t really want these questions answered. At least, not first. “I could ask you a lot of things. And for answers, you could serve up that gnomic crap I’ve fallen for. That you have your so-called truth and I have mine.… You’re hardly the most confiding or approachable of women, Miss Nayburn. Though I imagine that your unshakable esteem for yourself and your cult of honesty tell you that you are.”

  “I’ll answer any questions you ask, Dalton.” A dare.

  “All right.” Which question? There are so many. Like throbbing boils in Diddy’s flesh. Might as well start at the beginning. “Tell me how you feel about your mother.”

  “I hate her.”

  “Since when?”

  “From the time I understood what she’d done.”

  Diddy, poised on the verge of a scathing long-winded reply, suddenly took a deep breath. Well, go on. “Is that all?” he says, tauntingly. “Not a big tablespoon of saintly love, forgiveness, and compassion along with it?”

  “Dalton, I swear to you that I loathe my mother. Loathing and disgust are all I feel toward her.”

  Not what Diddy expected to hear. “All right, I’ll believe you for the time being. Now tell me how you feel about being blind.”

  “Oh, God! What do you think?” Hester cries. “Idiot!” By light from the window, Diddy can see her face twisting with the effort to hold back tears.

  “Hester! Hester, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m saying. Let’s stop.” Reaches out to touch her. She pulls away sharply.

  “I don’t want to stop,” Hester said shrilly. “You want honesty, you stupid fool. You’re going to have it. Don’t flinch. I’m doing most of the work. And if I can take it, you can.”

  Diddy streaked with pain by her words. “You’re damned right I can take it. And I’ll ask you again. You can call me idiot, fool, or anything you damn please, but it’s true, I don’t know how you feel about being blind. I mean, you don’t seem to hate and feel bitterness when you have the reasons I’ve always understood make anyone hate and feel bitter. You do something else. You back away. You dissolve. It’s as if you don’t exist any more. Then you fade in, come back, very serene. But it doesn’t seem to have much to do with the other person at all. And each time there’s a little less generosity in you, as if that were being used up gradually by whatever you do to yourself inside. I used to love you for that serenity. But now I think there’s mostly vanity in it. And all this I connect, though I can’t prove it, with your blindness. So much so that I think you almost like being blind.”

  “Maybe that’s how you’d be,” says Hester coldly, “if you were blind. Speak for yourself.”

  “Hester, tell me straight out what you feel. About being blind.”

  “I hate being blind so much that most of my waking hours I wish I were dead.”

  Move quickly. “And about me?” Diddy delivers the words so fast he hardly had time to envisage the blunt, agonizing blow he was inviting.

  “It’s so complicated.… At times, I love you deeply. I hate you sometimes; maybe most of the time. And then I pity you, and I’d like to help you. But whenever I think of what it would mean to help you, I become frightened. You have a powerful desire to destroy yourself. I’m afraid that if I really held out my hand to you, you’d pull me under, too.”

  Diddy shocked. But quite unwilling altogether to let what had been an exposure of Hester turn upon him (now). “Okay, you’ve leveled with me. I’m grateful. But let’s not change the subject. We were talking about you, Hester. What about your destructive needs?”

  The girl didn’t answer for a moment. A sigh? Then she sat down in the wicker rocking chair near the window. “My destructive needs?… Believe me, Dalton, I don’t want to evade your question. It’s just that it’s hard to answer, since I’m not sure I’ve even begun to express those needs. But I’m not trying to suggest they don’t exist, or that they’re only puny desires that are largely dormant. I don’t know what their size is. The only thing I’m fairly certain of is their direction.… It would be to destroy someone else, rather than myself.”

  “Logged any victims yet?” Diddy says bitterly. The energy for quarreling beginning to fade. Hester had returned to the bed (now); if only to sit on it. The heat and moist odors flowing off her body had begun to suffuse Diddy’s mind, blurring his thoughts, interposing a dense vapor between his ability to reason and the crystalline word-blocks stacked in his mouth and ready to be fired off. “Who have you done in so far?”

  “You … maybe.”

  “Me?” Diddy’s voice becoming hoarse. “Don’t flatter yourself, baby. I’m perfectly capable of destroying myself without your subtle assistance. All by myself.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “Are you being sarcastic now?” Diddy says scornfully.

  “No. I’m thinking. Wondering whether what you said is really true.… Listen, Dalton, however much you hate me right now, or think I hate you, you must believe that I don’t want you to go under. And whatever you’re bent on doing, I don’t want to be the means of destroying you. And maybe I’m not. And couldn’t be. Maybe you’re doing it all by yourself, as you just said. God, how I’d like to believe I’m not part of it!… But I can’t. What I think is that you do want to be destroyed, but aren’t strong enough to do it. You do need me to help you. And I don’t want to—at least I think I don’t.…”

  “Hester—”

  “Yes, maybe I do. I’m not a saint. And you’re tempting me, Dalton, it’s the most depraved kind of seduction. I don’t want to destroy you. But deep down I feel that’s just what you’re begging me to do.”

  Could Hester be right? Suddenly, for a brief flash of light, Diddy the Deceived saw the truth illuminated. Saw the vast extent of the dark, fatal labyrinth in which he was toiling. Perceived how alone in it he was. Either there was no one to lead him out, or Diddy’s false Ariadne had dropped the thread.

  But maybe matters aren’t that hopeless. Maybe their pain could be explained in terms less absolute. A psychological explanation, if you will. Diddy, not really alive, had a life. An unfortunate example for a person like Hester, someone younger and essentially innocent. She (now) was beginning to see the monsters, half brute and half human, that Diddy saw. Perhaps being blind, without literal vision of her own, makes her even more susceptible to his black visions. His commitment to suffering was infecting Hester. Her own precious ration of vitality, preserved through such excruciating trials, leaking away. Once Hester, really alive, was her life. Didn’t merely have a life. Sharing Diddy’s provisional existence was adulterating her vitality. The longer she lived with him, the more fully she partook of his suffering and morbidity.

  Hence, her tirade tonight.

  “I’m going to think long and hard about what you’ve said,” Diddy murmured. “I think it’s all wrong, absolutely crazy. I know what the trouble is.”

  “Do you?”

  No, to tell the truth, Diddy doesn’t. And Diddy the Truth-teller says so. “Okay, maybe there is something right in what you’re saying, too.”

  Diddy extremely sad. Not angry any more. Sad that Hester should fear him. As if he were someone risen from the dead, to be honored at a distance for his extraordinary feat; not loved at close range. But her instinct ma
y be sound. If indeed he is a posthumous creature whose very touch was withering.

  A final flaring-up of resistance to Hester’s verdict, even as she is visibly softening toward him. “But goddamn it,” Diddy cried, “you can’t be right all the time!”

  “Why not?” said Hester.

  “Why not?” Diddy repeated incredulously.

  “What do you think, Dalton? That being right is something democratic? A guarantee that you can be right half the time and I can be right the other half? Darling, it isn’t like that—except when it is. And with us, it isn’t.”

  Diddy turning restlessly in the bed, not knowing what to answer.

  “You were about to tell me something,” Hester continued. “You were saying you thought I was at least partly right in what I said. What’s right?”

  “Maybe … that I am a kind of Lazarus. I feel like one. Especially since I tried … to kill myself.”

  “And what’s wrong in what I said?” Hester was unbuttoning her blouse.

  Diddy grimaces; reaches out to put his hand on her breast. “What’s wrong, at least what I pray will turn out to be wrong, is that living with Lazarus is dangerous for you.”

  “But you know, Dalton,” she said, slipping under the covers, “I was saying just as strongly that I’m dangerous for you. If you’re Lazarus, maybe I’m Medusa with the snaky hair turning you to stone.”

  Diddy had forgotten about the stone. Wait, think a moment. But his body feels as different from a stone (now) as a swallow is from a hammer. Should he trust what his body exuberantly urges? Or should he heed the garish premonitions that swell inside his mind? No choice. The choice is already made. Diddy clasped the girl in his arms. “Take the damn skirt off,” he murmurs. “Why have you worn your skirt into bed?”

  “Have we stopped quarreling?” she asks.

  “Hell, I don’t know. I can’t think any more. My mind’s a blank.” Diddy waited for Hester to say something. But at least she was pulling off the rest of her clothing and throwing it on the floor. “You don’t want to fight any more, do you?”

  “No. I’m worn out.”

  “But you must promise me that tomorrow we’ll talk about Paul.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s important to me. Even more important now. This whole nightmare tonight started, remember, because I said I didn’t trust Paul. And you took that to mean something about me, not about my brother. Now, all the more, I insist that you meet him and see for yourself what he’s like.”

  Diddy confident he would be vindicated, at least on this particular issue. If, to Hester’s ears, he sounded spiteful and unloving, she could have no inkling of Paul’s shallowness, his flair for exploiting those who loved him, his vanity, his self-deceptions. But she should be able to guess how much, once, Diddy had loved Paul.

  “You must meet him this time,” Diddy repeated. “Then you can judge for yourself.” That seems a good idea. But perhaps not. Why is Diddy so confident Hester will see through Paul? See the whole Paul. She might see just part of what Diddy sees. The graceful Paul who can, when he chooses, make anyone smile; can make it easier for anyone to like himself a little more. Maybe she’ll find him attractive. More attractive than Diddy. “Tomorrow…”

  “Dalton, please don’t talk about tomorrow. Where are you? I want you closer to me.”

  “He said he’d call us tomorrow. I don’t know for how long he’s in town this time, but I want to know if you’ll meet him.”

  Hester thrust her body against Diddy’s in the way that always arouses him. The shuddering, almost painful knotting of his groin, the hard flowering of his sex. Hester has slipped farther down under the covers; is taking his sex in her mouth. Diddy groans, throws back the blanket, presses on the back of her head with his hand. She’s devouring him, taking him inside her, pulling him toward her. Dragging him away from thinking, from memory, from words, from Paul. Let all that go, then. It doesn’t matter. No, it does. But can wait until tomorrow.

  But Paul never phoned the next day, though Diddy and Hester didn’t go out. Nor on any of the days following.

  * * *

  In the first days after their quarrel, Diddy and Hester seemed to move about more quietly, for the most part in silence. Both in a state of shock, as Diddy thought. Reluctant for any kind of contact other than the sexual one. But gradually the rhythm of their days became less haunted, took on renewed vigor. Although still extremely quiet. Passing days on end indoors. Since the daily walk was abandoned, seldom leave the apartment.

  Whether this was originally Hester’s desire or Diddy’s—he isn’t sure—both wish it (now). Diddy doesn’t even have the one morning and two evening strolls with Xan any more, having turned the dog over to the ASPCA. Far from subsiding, as Diddy had expected, Hester’s antipathy to the animal worsened. Xan began to react. Shrank under the couch when Hester entered the living room; became servile and overagitated when Diddy fed or combed him or got out the leash for their walks. If Diddy thought he might have been able to resurrect the old Xan, lively and spirited, he would never have given his pet up. But he didn’t. Accepted the dog’s transformation as irrevocable. He didn’t like Xan any more.

  Though he’s not aware of actively missing the creature on whom he’d lavished so much balked affection for the last two years, possibly some vacuum (now) does exist in Diddy’s heart. Of which he’s unaware. Some yearning for the kind of loving dialogue possible only with an animal; at least only with someone who doesn’t speak. And this may be the reason—if a reason is needed—why he was thinking all last weekend of something he’d once written. In his sophomore year in college, Diddy had started a novel, and worked on it fairly diligently for a year. Called The Story of the Wolf-Boy. And written in the first person, for Diddy couldn’t imagine the story being narrated by anyone except the hero himself. He never dared show his effort to anyone, teacher or friend. Sure that he’d then realize he had no talent for writing. And since abandoning it, when he became serious about his pre-med courses, never again attempted any fiction. But he must have valued it. While never rereading a single page, he’d kept the manuscript all these years. Both the first draft, written into three loose-leaf notebooks with a Parker pen, his mother’s gift when he graduated from high school; and the second draft, which he’d typed. (Now) he’d like to read his “novel” aloud to Hester and to himself.

  Knows exactly where it is. In that heavy cardboard box, the one never opened, on the shelf in the front hall closet. In which are stored, among other things:

  report cards from grammar school;

  four high-school yearbooks and twenty-five issues of the weekly school paper from his senior year when he was Managing Editor;

  his diplomas;

  long manila envelopes stuffed with photographs of himself and Paul as children;

  the crude slingshot he’d made when he was eight;

  his “Catholic” diaries, from the age of twelve to fifteen;

  his letters in track and basketball;

  an album pasted full of clippings from newspapers and magazines about Paul, concert programs, and other miscellaneous souvenirs of his brother’s career, up to 1960 only;

  the watercolor portrait of Pasteur he did when he was ten;

  some Stevenson campaign buttons;

  a bulky package tied up with string that holds all the letters, as many as three a day, the notes, and the telegrams Joan and he exchanged during the first two months after they’d met.

  Takes down the box. But it’s not there. Neither the written nor the typed version. How is that possible? Look again! Diddy sure there’s no way in which it could have been gotten lost or been thrown out without his knowledge. Diddy the Methodical rummages in other likely places. Eventually, going through all the closets, drawers, and boxes in the apartment. The manuscript nowhere to be found.

  One other thing is missing from the cardboard box. The gold medal Paul got when he won the Chopin Prize at the age of eighteen. “You keep it for me, Diddy,”
Paul had said negligently, when he came back from Warsaw. Putting it on Diddy’s dinner plate, grinning. Diddy could never decide whether it meant Paul was more fond of him than he’d supposed or cared less than he supposed about the unexpected victory and becoming famous overnight. On the balance, Paul’s surprising present felt more like a hex than a fraternal blessing. Thinking that Paul might ask for it back one day, Diddy had never had the nerve to chuck it into the trash bin. But when, after dumping the contents of the cardboard box on the hall floor to make sure his manuscript wasn’t there, he noticed, almost in passing, that the medal in its handsome leather and velvet case was also gone, he felt a distinct relief.

  But the disappearance of The Story of the Wolf-Boy was something else.

  Diddy trying not to be too depressed by the inexplicable loss of his manuscript. Reminding himself it wasn’t anything more than adolescent junk. Couldn’t have been really good. So, not a true loss. But painful anyway. He had so looked forward to reading it to Hester. To bestow a part of him never shared with anyone, something he’d kept secret from even Joan. And he’d gotten an intimation that the story might in some way have eased the barely perceptible ache he suffers from giving up Xan. Nothing as strong as solace. Still, the themes connect.

  Hester has come from the living room; is standing near him. “What are you doing, Dalton? Are you looking for something?”

  Oh, just sorting out some old junk. Getting rid of things.

  About the best that Diddy can do is to resurrect, in a recurrent dream, a parody or fragment of the bizarre story set down in his lost manuscript. This, just about the only dream he has (now), arrives as a welcome change from the dreams—unrememberable nightmares, rather—plaguing him for the last month. Dreams that had laid Diddy low; awakening most mornings with the sensation that a huge flat stone is lying on his chest. But from this dream and its variants, Diddy often awakens pleasantly, feeling lighter, somewhat purged.