by Ryan Ruby
“Because I was hoping you’d come with me.” He said it without hesitation, almost casually, as if he were inviting me to the pub for the evening, rather than to nothingness for all eternity.
With an abrupt twist of my neck, my eyes met his. A whisper evaporated from my stunned, open mouth: “Why me?”
Zach grabbed my shoulders and looked me straight in the eyes. “I didn’t consider anyone else but you. From the beginning, the very beginning, I had a feeling about you, a feeling that’s proven to be correct.”
“And what was that?”
“That you were lonely—and not just lonely: alone, deeply alone.” I tried to look away, to hide my shame at the truth of his words, but he shook me so I would not break his gaze. “If I was able to see this it was because I felt the same way about myself. You laugh? You think that because I was always surrounded by people, talking to them and going out drinking with them, that I was any less alone than you were, sitting by yourself at Hall or at The Bear? No, the only difference between us is that, unlike you, I knew why I was lonely. And also why you were lonely. You want to know the reason? It’s because we’re special, Owen. That’s why. Being special means being singular and being singular means being lonely, even if, like me, you have to surround yourself with meaningless chatter in order to drown out the voice in your head that reminds you how alone you really are. But the amazing thing is that we found each other. That’s the rarest thing in the world, don’t you think, two singularities finding each other like that? I wasn’t wrong about you. You were the only one capable of understanding me, understanding me like one brother understands another. To understand someone, to truly understand them, requires more than intelligence, which you demonstrated right away, it also requires empathy, the willingness to understand. That is what is so rare. And to have that, to have empathy, you must have had the same experiences as I did. To understand the question that most people are too stupid or too afraid to even pose, you must have had certain experiences that would enable you to understand the need for that question to be asked, why it needs to be wrestled with, why there is nothing more important than finding the answer. And that question is—”
“Why is life worth living.”
He let go of my shoulders, now that he believed I was capable of standing on my own two feet.
“Exactly. If you can ask that question, if you are even capable of posing it at all, it must be because all of the traditional answers—service to God or falling in love or having children or achieving peace on earth or even experiencing as much physical pleasure as possible—fail to satisfy you. They must fail to alleviate the suspicion, the miserable suspicion that all those answers come at the cost of submission—submission to a religion or a political ideology or even the natural order. And that a person who answers like that, who submits themselves like that, has already given away their freedom. For people who submit, death is nothing more than a redundancy, because their lives are not worth living. How to be free and alive at the same time? I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not possible. And between freedom and life, I choose freedom. And I want to share my choice with the only other free person I’ve ever met. Share my freest act with him—with you. Because only another free person would be able to understand what I’m talking about.”
As he spoke, a rush went through my body. The objects in the room, which his earlier words had emptied of significance, were now resurrected, one by one. They overflowed with the purpose he had stripped from them only minutes before. Everything now seemed radiant and clear. Everything stood in its proper place, where it had to be, a mathematical proof made out of objects rather than necessary truths. All that had to happen was that two people understood each other as perfectly as we did. Zach and I were the deduction. The Q.E.D. Later, I’d go through my habitual pattern of indecision and self-doubt, second-guessing his motivations and mine, but at that moment I was prepared to do anything he asked of me.
“So, Owen, what I want to know is: are you in?”
I’ll never forget the look on his face when I gave him my answer. The change in his expression was nearly imperceptible, but I couldn’t help but detect a glimmer of triumph emanating from the corners of his lips and from the deepest recesses of his dark eyes. He looked as though he expected me to respond as I had and at the same time couldn’t believe his good fortune that I had done so. Everything was going according to plan; he wouldn’t compromise his end goal by gloating over a merely intermediary success.
He told me how, on the day he and Tori got into their row, he’d entered the pub, where he reread the passage he had just quoted me. Afterwards, he took a long walk up the river to Port Meadow, where he’d stumbled on the ruins of Godstow Abbey. That old nunnery, he said, was the perfect backdrop for the scene he’d envisioned. The scene that, in a week’s time, we were going to enact.
“Let’s begin then, shall we?”
“Begin what?” I asked.
“We’re going to compose our note.” Yes. Of course. There would be a note. What would a suicide be without a note, a philosophical flourish before curtain’s close, and no need to absent felicity for a while in the telling of our tale.
The typewriter, whose taupe hatchback case Zach proceeded to place on the table, was nicked from the flat in Berlin. It materialised in our pile of luggage the day we returned to England. If I kept silent about its unexpected presence there, I suppose it’s because, by then, I had learnt better than to remark on such things. When he returned to his flat, the typewriter’s rightful owner probably wouldn’t notice it had gone missing from the miscellany he stored in his pantry. Even had he done so, I doubt he would have missed it much. But these were rationalisations, my rationalisations. Zach simply came, saw, purloined.
He opened the case. It was a beautiful machine. A portable Rheinmetall-Borsig KsT from the 30s. The company logo in gold on the glossy black metal. Four rows of circular white keys in QWERTZ layout, with keys for all the umlauted vowels, and one for the Reichsmark sign. Zach loaded a piece of paper, turned the knob, and released the carriage. A bell sounded.
“Same idea as Berlin,” he said. “When we’ve finished our draft, I’ll type up two copies, one for you and one for me. Everything will be the same, except the names, obviously, and the spelling. Now, have a seat.” I ran my thumbs over my knuckles, cracking them one after the other. “What do you think for the salutation?” he asked. “‘My Dear Owen comma,’ or just ‘Owen comma,’ or maybe ‘O dash’?”
“‘O dash,’” I ventured. “‘My Dear Owen’ sounds treacly to me. Even if you were to cut out the ‘My’ it would still be a bit casual for the subject, wouldn’t it? Just ‘Owen’ on the other hand is too businesslike. The way a father would open a letter to his son scolding him for his overspending. You’re not going to fancy signing it ‘Zachary,’ after all, are you?”
“Right,” he agreed. “Let’s go with the first initial.” I watched the ribbon rise and fall three times as I typed a black oval and two short dashes on the white paper. “The first line… should announce the purpose.” He paused to have a think on how this should read. “‘By the time you read this I’ll be dead,’” he suggested.
“Good. But not exactly true, is it?”
Zach returned my knowing grin. “No, I guess not. Not literally at least. But that doesn’t really bother me. It’s not the literal truth we’re after here.” I typed the sentence and waited for him to continue. “I think the next few lines should be about why we’ve chosen each other to be the recipients of these letters.”
“Go on,” I said, my fingers at the ready. I watched them climb up and down the alphabet like a spider on its web as I typed the words he dictated to me:
By the time you read this I’ll be dead. I write to you because by my death I would like something to be understood. Of all the people I have ever met, you are the most likely to be sympathetic to my reasons and thus best able to explain them to those, blinded by love or prejudice, who will not grasp what it i
s I have done. I apologise for what will no doubt be a burdensome task, but I am not asking for your—or anyone else’s—forgiveness. The first thing that must be understood is that I am going to do nothing that calls for forgiveness. And anyway, by the time you read this, there will be no one left to forgive.
I read the sentences back to him. He read along with me over my shoulder, circling a word here or there with his pen. I could smell the champagne on his breath. He capped the pen and placed it behind his ear. “Paragraph break.” I flung the carriage with animation: time to switch places. As I stood up from his chair I couldn’t suppress a recollection of the thin parting through the black hair on the crown of Nadya’s head, her mouth bobbing between Zach’s unbuckled belt and mine. “What we need now is a statement about our motives,” he said. “Think you can do that?”
I touched my fingertips to my forehead to help me conjure the words.
“It is important… to make perfectly clear that…”
I began to pace. With the lit cigarette in my mouth, I must have looked like a miniature locomotive speeding back and forth on a very short track. I spoke quickly as well, enjoying the way my words found their echo in the clacking of the typewriter and encouraged by the exclamations of approval that surged from Zach whenever he heard one of his own thoughts return to him with a majesty alienated only by the timbre of my voice and the small inexactitudes of my paraphrase.
“To make it perfectly clear that my death has not been motivated… by any pain dash… physical comma emotional comma or psychological dash… that I have undergone in this life comma or at least comma as these things are conventionally understood full stop.”
“‘Conventionally’! Great! Keep going.”
“Relative to the sufferings I know to be the lot of the vast majority of humanity comma I have lived a life of privilege comma comfort comma and contentment full stop. I have every reason to believe my life would have continued roughly in this way in the future full stop.”
“Hold on a sec!” Zach shouted as he rushed to keep up with me. “… roughly… this… way… in… the… future. Okay. Got it.”
“Nor has anything I’ve ever experienced comma no setback or frustration of my desires comma been strong enough to… damage? This contentment? I’m not sure if that’s the best way to put it.”
“Why don’t we try something stronger. Like poison: to poison this contentment.”
“All right… to poison this contentment full stop.” My cigarette was now a cylinder of grey ash. I found it a resting place in the crowded ashtray and lit another. “I feel it necessary to state this clearly because it is of the utmost importance to me that my final action is not regarded as a self-interested or cowardly comma—”
“Good!”
“—some sort of inability to face the particular sufferings of my life full stop. Rather it is the opposite comma a disinterested action—”
“Good!”
“—one that goes directly against my self-interest comma a sacrifice of myself in the name of something higher than myself full stop paragraph break.”
The bell sounded and the carriage moved. Zach said, “It’s brilliant, Owen!”
“Read it back! Read it back!”
The note was to continue for three more paragraphs. Two more relays between sitting and standing. Between talking and typing. At each break, there was a noticeable increase of speed in our lips and fingers. Our speech became more fluid, our prose more florid, as each paragraph wildly dared the next to do more, to say more. When I typed the final “Zed,” ripped the paper from the platen, and began reading the final paragraph back to him, I was short of breath. I reached for the packet of cigarettes on the desk next to the typewriter. There was only one left. I lit it and smoked slowly with my eyes closed as I listened to him type the second letter. My copy. The one that would be found in his pidge after our deaths. When he finished, he brought it to me and handed me his pen, tapping the empty space between the valediction and my first initial, where I signed my name.
READING THE WORLD.—When medieval theologians compared nature to a book, it is likely they had scientific treatises in mind. While that may be a suitable metaphor for the prose of minerals, vegetables, and animals, when the chapter that introduces humanity is finally written, it becomes clear that we are dealing with an altogether different genre. Human patterns bend into segments—storylines, dramatic arcs—that can be plotted on a plane whose axes are Time and Desire. As these segments are recorded and passed on by the billions, events, limited in number, begin to repeat themselves, and the plane crystallises with allusions. The difference between being in the world and reading the world breaks down and woe to the man who does not recognise which story he is living in!
The taxi leaves us next to a small triangular park consisting of a few trees, a wedge of grass, a few benches, a clock imprisoned in an irregularly shaped iron polygon, and a large statue of Dante Alighieri. The neon sign of the Hotel Empire shines red light onto the shoulders of the bronze Florentine, imbuing him with a suitably underworldly aura. We cross the road and enter the opera house just as the ushers begin to circulate through the lobby, tapping handheld xylophones with mallets to inform those who have just arrived or who are still loitering there, finishing their conversations or their drinks, that it’s time for everyone to find their seats.
Vera swiftly leads me up the red-carpeted stairs to the mezzanine, where we overtake scores of elderly men and women who proceed slowly on canes, on Zimmer frames, on the elbows of their tottering spouses or their obliging grandchildren. Aside from these last, and from a few girls with round Slavic faces wearing lurid pastel dresses and skyscraper heels, Vera and I look to be the youngest members of the audience.
Holding me by the hand and moving with urgency, she blazes by the outstretched programmes offered to us at the door. We step over court shoes and loafers, whispering apologies to those who are momentarily forced, some with considerable difficulty, to stand as we pass. We find our seats—dead centre, five rows back—just as the starburst chandeliers ascend to the gold-scalloped ceiling. The house lights dim. I quickly crane my head, first over my right, then over my left shoulder: for four floors not a single empty seat is visible. The stage lights reflect off pairs of opera glasses and catch the crystal pieces of those miniature chandeliers that hang from the earlobes of every third or fourth member of the audience.
The conductor takes his place in the pit and lifts his baton to ready the orchestra. When he brings it down again, it’s as if he’s maliciously swiped a hornet’s nest. The cellos vibrate like angry wings, a sound I do not so much hear as feel in my spine, whose vertebrae unlock just in time for the bows of the double basses to saw back and forth against my exposed nerves. The monumental curtain opens on a flood of fog and mist, blown downstage by a gale whipped up by the violins. The floodlights pulsate blue and white, suggesting flashes of lightning, whose jagged bolts descend to the stage floor in the notes played by the brasses and fade into the thunderous roll of kettledrums.
A figure appears in the mist. Dressed like a medieval woodsman in a loose-fitting tunic, with leather gauntlets and soft boots laced up to the knee, he staggers forward, battered by the storm. He falls. Then rights himself with great effort, clutching his side, a wounded man using his last reserves of strength to flee some as yet invisible terror. As he struggles to make his way downstage, the floor begins to rise, revealing on its underside the joints and rafters of a wooden ceiling. From an opening in the stage, the gnarled and blasted trunk of a once-proud oak extends through the L-shaped hole in the ceiling. The woodsman climbs through the hole, collapsing at the base of the tree. Extending one exhausted arm after the other, he drags himself toward the embers of a fire that gives off a glow the same colour as the words that appear, translated into English, on the black rectangular screen embedded into the back of the seat in front of me. Whoever’s hearth this may be, he sings, here must I rest. The orchestra goes silent so we may hear the first lines
of the soprano, who is dressed in mourning. Awakened by the sound of the stranger’s voice, she has courageously entered to investigate.
Halfway up the tree trunk, something, something metallic, glints in the light of the fire. I slide my glasses to my nose, trying to see what it might be. Though I have by now grown accustomed to watching foreign films with subtitles, I find the need to change my sightline disorienting and uncomfortable. By the time I realise the metal object is a sword that someone has plunged into the tree, I have missed the soprano’s next lines. I touch a button to the left of the screen and the red text of the libretto disappears. Better, I think, just to watch and listen. Better not to bother about the words for now, but simply allow the gestures and the voices, the costumes and the instruments to tell me what I need to know of the plot.
An hour or so later, I am startled from the daydream into which I’d fallen by the abrasive sound of rapturous applause. On stage, the curtain is slowly closing on the woman and the woodsman, who are embracing, he between her spread thighs, she pulling his face to her breasts with white fingers visible through the weave of his long, unkempt hair. Her neck is thrown back in ecstasy, her own hair spilled on the stage like a puddle of strawberry blonde blood. Lying beside them is the naked blade of the sword that, in the course of the act, he must have drawn from its oaken sheath.
I put my hands together, since that’s what everyone else is doing. Everyone but Vera, that is. Vera’s left hand is tugging at her necklace, the forefinger of her right curves into her mouth. She is biting her knuckle. Her eyes are red and wet. My lips part to ask if she’s all right, but already she is standing, her back turned to me, halfway to the aisle.