The Guardians

by Sarah Manguso

  It doesn’t matter if he thought of me, wanted to call me, missed me, felt angry at me, loved me, but it’s impossible not to invite oneself into the black box of a forsaken mind.

  It must be very beautiful to be finished. When the train rushes into the station, to let the wind blow into your face. Suppose your whole life surges back to you. I try to believe that Harris summoned all the beauty of his life.

  I’m comforted when I remember that energy that appears missing has just gone somewhere else, has been surrendered to the system of the world.

  * * *

  I thought I would write ravishingly about the last ten hours of Harris’s life. I’d make it into a story—a man walks out of a building and eats a whitefish sandwich and gets a little fish oil on his hands and rubs it into the skin, conditioning it, seasoning it, remembering that what we clean from ourselves is not always unwelcome.

  His hands redolent of fish, he walks outside without an umbrella—at this moment I am reminded of my landlord who said to me, after his liver transplant, on a rainy day, with perfect hatred, I have never carried an umbrella in my life. The rain falls on him hard.

  Harris looks at the old buildings and knows they will outlast him. He looks at the clothes and the fruits displayed under awnings and behind vitrines and knows they will outlast him like the sky, the sun, the material of the clouds.

  His hair is thin on top and his scalp is very white. His expensive eyeglasses are dirty. He taps rhythms on his hips and thighs as he walks, whistling and humming a little, grinding syncopations with his tea-stained teeth.

  He walks west into the park, finds a ledge that will protect something the size and shape of his body. The rain falls lighter now, and he is cold from sitting still. He extricates his body from what it has crouched under, and he walks east again to the avenue, or west across the park, and at some point, down to the subterranean train that takes him across the body of water dividing Manhattan from Queens, and he sits whistling and is ejected from the train.

  He sits on a bench at the track for three hours after the sun sets. The lights keep him from feeling completely alone, for he can see the forms of the others on the platform and in the station.

  He is still whistling a little, the music in his head unabating, both punishment and balm. Trains come and go on the far track and the near track.

  He stands as if ready to deliver something.

  The sound of the train approaches, the light of its light in the wet dark, maybe a veil of mist now between him and it. He walks across the platform to the yellow edge. Maybe he thinks about the way his body looks, how it would look to someone looking at it. Maybe he is looking at it.

  During the next moment he’s alive, and during the moment after that he isn’t alive yet still exists, just not anymore as himself but as a body thrown in front of a train, which raises the questions of responsibility and blame.

  Did Harris throw someone’s body under a train?

  If I could I would blame him, but I can identify Harris only with the body, not with the one who threw the body.

  * * *

  Late for some concert, when we arrived on a crowded subway platform, Harris said, A platform filled with people—that’s what I like to see.

  Since then, whenever I find a crowded platform, I remember what he said and feel glad. Soon the train will come! Despite everything, I’m always happy on a crowded platform.

  I wish I could pretend the last minute of Harris’s life wasn’t ruined by fear. Isn’t the mind supposed to degrade memory into more manageable forms, to contaminate it with false memories we’d prefer to the real ones?

  This is what I’m trying to remember instead: A train comes, and my friend is on it. He waves to me. I grin from the platform. People look at us and wonder if they should remember it. And that train takes him away forever.

  * * *

  At the memorial three months after Harris’s funeral, his last lover was beautiful and calm, and all through it I thought it was easy for her because she’d known him only a few months, less than a year.

  She kept her distance, and I understood. She had been the last one to go to bed with Harris. At least she had that. Maybe she didn’t want that last intimacy threatened by someone who had known her lover ten times longer than she had. I didn’t want my own intimacy threatened by hers.

  How can intimacy be threatened? It isn’t a finite substance like gold or coal, a friend chides. But of course it is, and I missed the whole last year of it, and now there isn’t any of it left.

  * * *

  I picked up some earth in the shovel and let it fall onto the casket. I’m glad I remember the sound of it.

  A Catholic asked me about the raging and the yelling and the weeping at Harris’s funeral, having never seen it before. It’s because for Jews, death is real, I told her, understanding it myself for the first time, the reason I prefer Jewish funerals to Catholic ones, where we’re told that heaven waits for us happily, with all its lights on.

  * * *

  One week after the funeral, Harris’s sister cleaned out his apartment. Harris’s two oldest friends went along. His parents didn’t. They said I should go to help sort Harris’s things, to take whatever I wanted to remember him by—furniture, books, whatever was there, but I couldn’t, wouldn’t, go.

  I didn’t want anything to remember Harris by and I didn’t want to see his hair on the bathroom floor or smell the breath trapped in his bedclothes or see what books he had read or what food he had left in the refrigerator. I didn’t want to know any of that. I had just returned from a year away, and I hadn’t seen Harris yet, and I wanted to hold on to that word, yet.

  I’d helped Harris move into that place a couple of years before. I’d told him not to take his grandmother’s enormous oak wardrobe, that the closet and a dresser would suffice, but he wouldn’t listen. The thing looked like a coffin.

  Harris’s two oldest friends dragged trash onto the street and lifted the wardrobe into a truck and took Harris’s bookends and his tea mugs and his salt and pepper shakers.

  There was one thing I wouldn’t have minded having—a literary journal I’d signed and given to Harris because it contained a poem I’d written for him, about him. One of the lines is Winnie, I am writing this on behalf of my friend Harris. He loves you and wants you to love him. Harris’s sister told me she wanted me to have it, but when I asked her about it months later, she said she’d decided to keep it, and I realized I didn’t need it.

  * * *

  One of the men who helped clear out Harris’s apartment—a better, braver friend—told me someone had broken into the place weeks earlier, while Harris was still alive.

  The place wasn’t dirty, but …

  Dark gray inky fingerprints dotted the white laminate surface of a credenza. Harris hadn’t cleaned up the mess from the forensic work. The police had tried to find the remnants of a story no one was there to see, and the artifact of their attempt to find the story outlasted the story.

  It felt exhilarating. We were a team. We were on a mission.

  There were musical instruments—accordions, violins, and mandolins, including the solid-body one Harris had made. There were screws, bolts, nails, rolls of paper towels.

  All those paper towels—he wasn’t planning on being dead.

  There were three vacuum cleaners.

  I took one of them. Now it’s the Harris J. Wulfson Memorial Vacuum Cleaner.

  Was the bed made?

  I think his bed was made.

  He was the first person I ever knew who read the paper in bed on a laptop.

  We kept bringing things out to the street, and people kept taking them. We went to his office and asked to speak with someone in Human Resources, and when we told the man Harris was dead, he burst into tears.

  * * *

  Three months after Harris’s funeral, I didn’t go to the memorial concert his other friends had prepared because I wasn’t going to continue without Harris. Everyone else could mourn, o
bedient, but I would not participate.

  I’m raising the tiny irrational child of Harris’s death. It hides, then appears and demands all my attention and all my power. I limit its range: When I teach, I will not think of it; when I run, I will not think of it; when I am with others, I will not think of it. But then it surprises me and I have to go home and be with it, tend to it.

  I take good care of the little infant death. It’s learning to behave.

  I don’t think I can live without Harris, I tell it.

  You’d be surprised by what you can live without, it tells me.

  * * *

  At some point I stopped believing that Harris died when the train touched his body and started believing that he died when he walked through the door of the unlocked ward, as if his life ended on the far side of the threshold, as if the ten last hours of his life didn’t happen, but they did.

  He walked or ran or sat or stood or ate or spoke or touched something or someone. He walked or ran or rode in a car or a train from Manhattan to the Bronx for ten hours during which someone might have found him and saved him by putting him back on the other side of the door but didn’t.

  In ten hours you can work a full shift, eat lunch, and drive home. In ten hours Jupiter and Saturn rotate approximately once. New York to Pittsburgh takes ten hours by bus. Los Angeles to London takes ten hours by plane.

  The ten missing hours would make a good story if I liked making up stories, but I don’t. I try not to make anything up, and I fail every time.

  * * *

  For the first year I thought I’d wait until I’d really adjusted to the loss, maybe wait ten years. Now it’s been less than two years and I wish I’d started writing ten years ago. Preparing, writing down all the things Harris and I ever said to each other.

  While composing my eulogy, I could remember only a few things, among them the lines from a movie that we’d recite to each other after one of us had a bad experience in love. One of us would ask, What makes you so happy? And then the other would say the woman’s line, Well, I’m very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say, and then the other would say the man’s line, And I’m exactly the same way.

  When I recited the lines during my eulogy, everyone laughed.

  * * *

  Statistics show that suicides increase until people reach their mid-forties, after which they subside until people reach their mid-eighties. Maybe the idea of middle age is what makes people kill themselves. If I’m only halfway there, a forty-two-year-old thinks—

  If this is it, an eighty-four-year-old thinks—

  When a poet ends her life, ghouls send lines of the dead woman’s poems back and forth all day. Everyone wants to find the most prescient, the most declaratory statement that she would always have done it, that we would never have been able to prevent it. Or maybe we want to find a clue we should have noticed, since it was right there in her poems, all along, that we should have known to save her, that she had wanted us to.

  I remember taking the train out of the city with her, eating lunch with her, listening to her and perceiving her frizzy cloud of hair as an extension of the tightly wound spring of her mind. We visited a roomful of graduate students and read from our books, answered a few questions, then went home separately. I haven’t thought about her in seven years, but all day I go online to find the lines people have extracted from her books. All day long I read her poems.

  In one of them, she wrote: How many mourners can fill a hall? / Room for them all.

  * * *

  I read the obituaries every day to learn what sorts of lives are available to us, to see an entire life compressed into a few column inches, to fit the whole story in my eye at once.

  I say I’m interested in life, but really I want to play a little game with Death. I want to lie down next to him and smell his infected breath.

  After he pins me with his rotten arms and burst knees, gray bone showing at the joint, I want to wake up alone with bruised eyes, his hair in my teeth. And then I want to whisper a little story about him inside the safest locked room in the world.

  * * *

  In the church of Saint Mary in Rome’s Piazza del Popolo hang two paintings by Caravaggio. The one depicting the conversion of Saint Paul was finished in 1601, the year Shakespeare finished Hamlet.

  It seems a remarkable coincidence until I consider all the other things from 1601 that are gone, all the people who walked on the stones of the piazza before me—I feel them surging through it, four hundred years in a moment—absolutely gone. All the pretty girls and boys who left behind nothing but flesh, the flesh of their flesh, which is gone but for the flesh of its flesh, and so on.

  * * *

  My journal from the day I met my husband reads, Beat the tall man at pool.

  The next day reads, He laughs loudly at the things I say and swears when he loses at pool—twice more today.

  The next day reads, I like people who possess either deep mastery or deep empathy, but not as much as I like those who possess both.

  Three weeks later, not knowing anything about it, an ex-lover proposed to me in a letter, and I realized I was already married.

  * * *

  Like everyone from Hawaii, where ghosts are integral, my husband knows people who have seen them, and he knows that the ghosts are preceded on their path by ghost dogs, and that if one sees the dogs or senses their approach, one is to look away, as the ghosts are not to be regarded by the living.

  Harris stayed near me for about two months after I was married. I didn’t see him, but he was there. By then he had been dead almost a year. Then one day he was gone.

  He was gone, but in Texas, during a business trip, my husband woke in the night to find a ghost—a man in a broad-brimmed hat standing in the corner of the room. Though I am dubious of ghosts who are said to appear in human form, I considered that it might have been Harris, gone to Texas to watch my husband for me, to keep him safe and to remind him to be faithful.

  I consulted the photographic archive assembled by his friends but found no photograph of Harris in a broad-brimmed hat. I did, however, find a photograph of me placing a white-frosted cake before him on the night of his twentieth birthday. He exhales carefully onto the candles. I don’t remember it—it may as well have happened to someone else.

  * * *

  At first I thought a death was a thing in itself, a discrete item in the world, a piece of time and space.

  When I asked an elite runner why he started going long distances, he said, It was part of a larger pattern.

  At first I thought a marriage was a thing in itself, a discrete item in the world.

  My husband and I invited six friends to our courthouse ceremony. When it was over, he and I went to the beach for a week. At the seaside cabin we tried to do nothing but be married, but by the third day we both mourned that we’d had to leave our work aside per the honeymoon convention.

  On our fourth day at the cabin we declared the week a working honeymoon and for the rest of the day I wrote sentences and he made drawings, together but silent, against the background of the sea. The cabin was so remote that deer walked by, their hooves crunching the sea pebbles. Rabbits and moles emerged from the bramble.

  At night my husband and I ate fresh fish and walked on the sand and told each other what we’d made that day.

  * * *

  Three weeks after the vows we had a party at a little restaurant near our apartment. People came from out of town. After it was over, I put on flat shoes and walked home with my husband.

  Weeks or months after the party, having failed to find a suitable answer to my question among the living, I asked Harris if I should change my name. He had been dead a year. He answered, Not right away.

  * * *

  My poem for Harris is a persuasive address to a woman he loved. It’s a poem about what young people care about—falling in love, getting the girl, starting something.

  When people aren’t young anymore, they car
e about other things, sustaining love, and whether, a long time from now, things will be the same or different, and whether the beloved will be the same or different, or maybe when people begin to care more about those things than about starting something, that tendency is what makes them stop being young.

  Marriage helped me forget my potential, helped me learn to attend to the present moment. During our first year together, after every quarrel, my husband and I examined and speculated on the relationships of people we knew, describing lovingly to each other their myriad flaws. Now we’re almost able to see our own.

  * * *

  Exactly one year after Harris’s funeral, on the elevated track the wrong train screamed murderously by and didn’t stop. I waited at the outer track for the local, wanting to sob, my husband beside me. The train to the unveiling was five minutes, fifteen minutes, twenty-five minutes late.

  I felt myself standing very straight and still, in my one black suit, relying on my posture to keep me calm. Then I remembered I was on my way to Harris’s unveiling, and I sobbed downstairs to the street and hailed a cab, and my husband and I rode it to Long Island and gave eighty dollars to the driver when we got out at the Jewish cemetery where my friend’s body had disintegrated for a year.

  What I find most interesting is that the train did stop, of course, at the appointed time, but I so faithfully believed what was written on the misprinted schedule, I didn’t see it stop, didn’t for a moment believe I could possibly be in the wrong place.

  * * *

  We went back to the spot in the earth just above where Harris’s body is buried. The granite headstone stood with a white linen sash covering part of his name.

  There isn’t just one unveiling. Every moment is the unveiling of the preceding moment. We might as well take the veils for granted, ignore them as we ignore air, dust, the passage of time.

  The granite headstone stood under bright sun. We stood in a ring around it. The grandmother sat in a folding chair. She was ninety-one that year.

  The rabbi spoke, sighed, used the full range of his voice. We knew Harris was dead. We’d known it all year. Then the rabbi removed the sash and made it real for us, and we thanked him. I dutifully cried.