The Guardians

by Sarah Manguso

  The mourning over, the grandmother held my hand and said, We must move past this. We must. Her words sounded banal to my ear, but in that I am interested in how people live to be ninety-one, I noted them. It’s possible they are very important.

  * * *

  The night after Harris’s unveiling, I turned on the television.

  The protagonist sits at his writing desk in the eighteenth century, hears a knock at the door, opens it to find a man with dirt in his hair and blood on his face. There has been a terrible impact between something and his body, and when I saw this beaten man I thought it was Harris.

  My dead friend was on television, made up to look beaten. I screamed and turned off the television. I couldn’t bear even the suggestion that he might have lived through the impact with the train. In fact, I couldn’t bear to think that he ever had been alive, that he ever wasn’t dead. As far as my mind was concerned, at all possible points in time, my friend was a dead man.

  * * *

  I still see Harris everywhere.

  I know it isn’t him, but when I see someone who resembles him I stare, take in as much information as possible, knowing that in a moment he’ll stop being Harris, that he’ll turn back into someone else.

  When I find a substitute Harris I always think of my friend’s cat, Roy, who loved playing with the laser pointer. My friend would hand me the device and say He knows it’s fake but he loves it anyway, and I’d send the pink laser-dot over the rug, the floor, the vertical front of the sofa, and Roy would slap away at it, trying to pin it with his soft orange paw.

  * * *

  Don’t tell me about the rich variety of mourning customs throughout the world from the beginning of civilizations to now—I don’t want to know about customs. I don’t care to know how others act out the playlet of their ruination.

  I want to know about my particular grief, which is unknowable, just like everyone else’s.

  * * *

  I knew a woman who spent years mourning a dead friend. She threw away all her clothes and dressed all in black, then threw away her black clothes and dressed all in white. She took elaborate detours so she wouldn’t ever walk past a restaurant where she’d eaten with her friend. She stopped eating certain foods, went to church every Sunday and prayed secret prayers but never took communion, dedicated hours and days to her grief. From my vantage point it resembled a child’s game, an idle person’s dream of purpose and utility.

  The feeling of love isn’t for the beloved. It’s for the lover. When people tell me they feel breathless with love, I don’t care. Their breathlessness is for them. Only their behavior toward the beloved counts. Only behavior shows love, is love.

  That’s why I’m ashamed of my grief.

  During the first year, my job was to comfort Harris’s family and friends, to comfort and care for myself so I could help the others. Shiva is a social responsibility. But my grieving past shiva isn’t for the parents, who must relearn to care for each other instead of their dead son, and my grief isn’t for Harris. My grief is for myself.

  * * *

  Sometimes I try to believe that while I was away for a year, Harris gradually faded away, achieved greater understanding, passed on to the life triumphant, and that I missed the yearlong process—that his gait slowed and the flesh on his face thinned, that he started sleeping more, turned up the morphine drip, and so on.

  Death has been presented to me so many times, in movies and photographs and writing and life, always the same—the gradual fading of a person in a bed, swathed in white, a slow, clean, elegant fade.

  None of those things happened to Harris. He had an experience unknowable to anyone but him, an episode, and then was well again, and then had another episode, and then was well again, and then had another one, during which something happened and he died.

  Those who have had one seizure are from then on cared for as if always on the verge of another seizure. If I were capable of anything beyond contemplation and record, I’d devise a maintenance protocol for those diagnosed with episodic psychotic illness. I’d devise a simple instruction that everyone in the world would learn—Stop, drop, and roll! Thrust the fist under the rib cage! Pinch the nose and blow into the mouth!—and from that point on, those vulnerable to future psychotic breaks would be safer.

  Then again, the protocol for those suffering florid psychosis, as Harris was at the time of his third hospitalization, is to lock them in and guard them.

  My friend didn’t die of some secret tumor. He died because someone opened the door of a building. I imagine telling him that.

  He would have said Oh, Sarah.

  * * *

  When my husband and I moved to Los Angeles from New York, I unpacked everything right away. I don’t like traveling. I like staying home. I love unpacking most of all.

  Wedged between the tape and the cardboard of one of my boxes was a man’s wedding band, silver, engraved. I’d never seen it. It had to belong to one of the men who’d moved the boxes into or out of a truck, so I wrote a letter to the moving company with a photograph of the ring, assuming that one of the men had been looking for it.

  No one wrote back. I called. I found the name of the foreman who had packed everything. I left him a message. No one called back, no one wrote back. I keep the ring buried in a bowl of seashells so I don’t have to look at it. I’m quite sure my husband has forgotten about it.

  I’m in denial not that I’ve moved to Los Angeles, but that I’ve left New York. Somehow my mind has convinced me that I’ll just be living in both places now, with all my friends and everything the same, but with a few additional things, like palm trees, freeways, and sun.

  I’m in denial not that Harris is dead, but that he isn’t alive.

  * * *

  The worth of a single man’s life in New York State is a few hundred thousand dollars.

  Harris’s sister told me she’d refuse to be involved in any legal proceedings, if there ever were any.

  Harris’s parents gave me permission to write this book and dedicated a bench to him in Prospect Park. After a plaque was attached to the bench, and the first group of Harris’s friends went to visit it, one of them told me it was twenty feet away from where it was supposed to be.

  Five people picked it up and carried it back to the appropriate tree.

  In Memory of

  Harris J. Wulfson

  1974–2008

  Composer, musician, and friend

  who loved this park

  It was like carrying a coffin, he said.

  * * *

  In the bath, completely alone, I talk to Harris. I put him at ease, ask him with perfect calm, Are you feeling a little crazy?

  I imagine sitting with him at the laundry on the Sunday night before his aunt brought him to the hospital for the last time. On Sunday night, the clothes tumble in the big machine. Harris sighs and—can you see the light of the small dim bulb?—hangs his head lower. I put my hand on his hand. Do you want to go to the hospital with me now? He isn’t paranoid here, isn’t violent or confused. He trusts me.

  I try to spend time with our living friends, hoping it will make me miss him less.

  * * *

  Either Harris’s mind or his will threw him in front of a train. I believe it was his sick mind, having temporarily overpowered his will, that coordinated his ejectment from the present into the past.

  Forward onto the track, backward into the past! Think of that tidy arithmetic. It seems like a discovery, but I haven’t discovered anything, once again, other than my own cleverness.

  * * *

  Harris’s sister writes,

  I know only a very little bit about the day Harris left the hospital. I tried to get him on the phone once I knew he’d gone in. But they had a ward phone that rings and rings and rings until one of the patients decides to answer it, and maybe if you’re lucky, they’ll be able to find the person you’re looking for. Nobody ever answered that damned phone. And I had no number for the nurses’ stat
ion. I just kept calling until I found out he’d left.

  As far as I know, he’d removed his hospital bracelet and was wearing normal clothing. Even though he didn’t have his cell phone or keys or anything except, it would seem, a few dollars in his pocket, he talked his way out.

  I also remember that day was one of the worst rainy days of thunderstorms we had that year. Harris wandered in the rain for about ten hours before he ended up at Riverdale Station. I believe he walked there even though he had money for the train. He wasn’t found with a MetroCard (that I recall). And Riverdale isn’t on the subway lines.

  I can only imagine what he was thinking for ten hours. If he’d set out with the intention to kill himself, he had a very long time and many possible ways to have done it. But he ran in front of a train on an outdoor platform at night in a horrible thunderstorm. Who knows what tricks his mind was playing.

  This is why I believe a dybbuk killed Harris.

  * * *

  In Jewish folklore, dybbuks are malicious possessing spirits, the dislocated souls of the dead. They are said to have escaped from Hell, or to have been turned away from Hell for serious transgressions such as suicide, for which the soul is denied entry.

  Loosely translated from the Hebrew, dybbuk means attachment. A soul unable to fulfill its function during its lifetime is given another opportunity to do so in dybbuk form. It supposedly leaves the host body once it has accomplished its goal.

  Harris had spent time in Eastern Europe, traveling alone, meeting musicians. It doesn’t seem impossible that he might have met a dybbuk during his travels.

  The supernaturally affected musician is a familiar trope—the Italian composer and virtuoso Niccolò Paganini, for example, wrote music so difficult that in the nineteenth century it was commonly thought that he’d entered into a pact with the Devil, and in Vienna one listener declared he’d seen the Devil helping him.

  Harris was a prodigy—accordion, fiddle, mandolin. Whatever he picked up he could play. It doesn’t seem impossible that he might have attracted a dybbuk by his playing, and that a dybbuk who wanted to play as well as Harris might have attached to him in order to fulfill his wish. Or the dybbuk might simply have been the soul of a sinner who wished to escape the punishment of wandering the earth, and who is just trying to die, over and over.

  * * *

  I almost didn’t make it. I thought this made me rare, lucky, special. How close I came! I think about the years I was sick, the weeks in intensive care, the day I almost poisoned myself—almost, almost, almost.

  The memories of a few dangerous moments are smooth stones in my hand. They always feel the same.

  Every time I’ve ever gone anywhere, I could have died. But there I was, in a car, in a plane, cheating death. Everyone alive on earth is here, cheating death at every minute. We’re all the same.

  Harris’s father was one of the doctors who came from the suburbs to the city on the day of the attack and the days following, waiting at a hospital to treat the thousands of wounded. Hundreds of doctors waited in the wards. Everyone gave blood then, too. It felt so good to help the dead people who weren’t coming.

  * * *

  I remember the smell of Harris’s sour breath when we met on the subway platform of the L train at Bedford Avenue each morning. We took the train to Union Square, then I went uptown and he went downtown, to our respective jobs.

  On the subway platform of the F train at Sixth Avenue on a hot day, I remarked that the station had smelled of piss consistently since 1999. Harris smiled and said, In fact it’s smelled like that since 1998, and I know that because that’s the year I started pissing here.

  For years afterward, we imitated the German store owner who’d wanted to sell him an antique mandolin: Give it a severe thought.

  We made fun of high-concept art projects. He had a bit about an ancient bowl. I make facsimiles of musical instruments for lost civilizations that never existed. This bowl is used to serve rice, but when it’s empty, it’s used to summon people to funerals …

  In ten years I never heard him say anything unkind about a woman.

  When our frame of reference began to grow beyond what we’d learned in our expensive colleges, Harris said, smiling, not needing to explain the irony, Eventually I stopped keeping track of how stupid I was getting.

  One year he sent Christmas cards with line drawings of Santa Claus and text beneath. He is coming … The time of Moshiach is upon us!

  * * *

  One of my students says, In Scripture, people could go straight to Jesus, but with prayer, you need to be persistent. She has laryngitis but smiles all through the week, so sure she is of her savior. She believes in a guiding force outside herself.

  My life looks ridiculous next to hers. No one takes care of me. No one watches me when I sleep, but my student believes in something other than herself that doesn’t want her to suffer. She believes in no excuse not to love everyone in imitation of the external thing she calls the Christ.

  Under those circumstances, how does grief feel?

  * * *

  When I ask my husband for a certain notarized form for the seventh time in seven days and he says his briefcase is in another room and that he’ll fetch it when he’s done reading some inconsequential squib on the tiny screen of his cell phone, and when I get up and search the other room for the briefcase only to find it hung on the back of the chair he’s sitting on, for just a moment I think my life wouldn’t have been swallowed by disappointment if I’d married someone else—that if I’d married Harris, I would always be happy and he would have lived.

  * * *

  When my psychiatrist asked, I know you don’t take it every day, so how should I write your prescription? I answered, Just write “Please give Sarah all the tranquilizers she wants” and sign it.

  * * *

  At some point I believed I might find some solace in talking to a psychic. I needed to know whether Harris was trying to talk to me and if I should prepare myself to listen.

  I told my husband, who knows me all the way to the bottom of my life, or so I thought. Even now he’s known me only half the time that Harris did.

  When I told my husband I wanted to talk with a psychic, he accused me of having become soft and stupid, weak and sick. It gives me a headache to remember how young he seemed at that moment, and how old I felt.

  Sobbing, I said, I want to talk to Harris. The sadder I felt, the angrier he seemed.

  * * *

  After he’d been dead a year, Harris’s score to his setting of my poem “Hell” arrived in my mailbox. His friends from music school had found it while collecting his work and sent it to me, without explanation, assuming I’d been waiting for it. I hadn’t known it existed, but of course I’d been waiting for it as much as I’d been waiting for any sign that Harris still wanted to talk to me, since he didn’t leave a note.

  * * *

  When I asked my mother what she was thinking when she got married she said she was thinking, Well, I’ll be able to get out of this, too. This year she and my father celebrated their sapphire anniversary.

  It takes my breath away to consider that my husband may one day have known me for eleven years, not ten, and therefore longer than Harris did.

  * * *

  Suffering from nausea one day in Iowa in 1999, I took a dose of prochlorperazine, a go-to clinical antiemetic. It’s an antipsychotic, too, as high-potency as haloperidol, which for decades was the gold standard. As it turns out, dopamine antagonism helps both the nauseated and the insane.

  After a few minutes I felt slightly better and went to the lunch counter at the pharmacy around the corner. I’d taken prochlorperazine many times before, without any trouble, but that day, after I sat and tried to drink a Green River and eat a ninety-cent cheese sandwich, while sitting on the stool I felt an overwhelming need to move all the muscles of my body at once, continuously, in order to combat the sensation of my entire body waking up from being asleep.

  I mean asleep in
the way that a foot is said to fall asleep from pressure on a nerve pathway and on arteries that bring blood to local nerve cells. As the pressure is released and the nerve impulses readjust and the foot starts to wake up, the pins-and-needles sensation begins. Until the nerve resynchronizes with the central nervous system, the pins and needles give way to a steady burning sensation, the brain’s safety strategy for a malfunctioning limb, and you have to shake your foot to put out the fire. The instinct is irresistible.

  Imagine that feeling, but in your entire body.

  With akathisia, you feel as if your foot has fallen asleep and has begun to wake up, but is stalled at that burning phase, that strange and painful neural overstimulation. Now imagine that instead of your foot being asleep, it’s your whole body being scratched to death from the inside by a dybbuk. Others witness your torment but can’t perceive the cause of it.

  Clinicians write that akathisia contributes to impulsive acts of violence and suicide. According to case reports, if you have this feeling for long enough, you might jump out a window or hang yourself or stab a friend to death or murder your mother with a hammer.

  * * *

  Here are the records of three cases published in American medical journals in 1985.

  Case 1: A man with chronic schizophrenia, who developed command hallucinations, received two 5 mg intramuscular injections of haloperidol over a thirty-minute period and, because of other activity in the emergency room, was left alone in a room to relax.

  Within an hour he became acutely agitated and felt that he would jump out of his skin. He tried pacing around the room, then eloped from the emergency ward and ran home in the hope that talking with his roommates would calm the unbearable inner restlessness.

  When this did not yield any relief, he went up to his third-floor apartment and leaped out of the window, breaking his leg and arm. After he was taken back to the hospital by ambulance, the symptoms of akathisia were recognized and he received an intravenous injection of diphenhydramine, which soon relieved his distress. The patient stated that he did not intend to die but would have done anything to escape the intolerable feelings induced by haloperidol. He has since steadfastly attributed his suicide attempt to the unbearable restlessness.