by Rob Roberge
• Number of people lowered into lifeboats, by minimum estimates: 107 crew, 43 men, and 704 women and children. Total: 854
• Actual number of people lowered into lifeboats: 139 crew, 119 men, and 393 women and children. Total: 651
Seventy percent more men and forty-five percent fewer women made it to safety than the most conservative eyewitnesses had testified. And twenty-five percent fewer people were on the boats—only 651 survivors actually boarded lifeboats. Very few of the eyewitness testimonies were much like any of the others in a wide range of small details and some enormous details, such as the fact that witnesses were conflicted on whether or not the 882-foot ship broke entirely in half prior to sinking.
No one came to the inquiry to lie. No one intentionally avoided telling the truth. But if the initial fact is the true event, that initial truth then becomes like a sophisticated virus that adapts to each host, so that it is never quite identical to the original virus, nor to its manifestations in any other host.
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DECEMBER 25, 2009: Singer/songwriter Vic Chesnutt—a quadriplegic dating from a car accident while driving drunk at the age of eighteen—dies of an overdose of muscle relaxants at the age of forty-five. It is ruled a suicide. Prior to his death, in an interview with Fresh Air host Terry Gross, Chesnutt claims to have “attempted suicide three or four times…It didn’t take.” He says he guesses he was, those times, too chicken to go through with it.
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2009: The doctors tell you you’ve had at least seven major concussions over the course of your life. Three or four when you were a basketball player in high school before drugs and a knee torn in three places brought what was left of your athletic career to a close.
A few more came in car accidents, one so bad it fractured your neck—a hairline, but apparently dangerous and close enough to the spinal cord that you are lucky you can walk or move your arms. You came, a doctor tells you years later—when you have insurance and get MRIs and the full workup for your years of blinding, debilitating migraines—incredibly close to being a quadriplegic when you were twenty-three.
“When did you break your neck?” the doctor says.
“I don’t think I did.”
He points to the fracture and taps it with the end of his pen. You hear his pen make a ticking sound on the X-ray and the glass behind it. “Another centimeter and you’d be answering me by blinking your eyes once for yes and two for no.”
“So, does that explain my headaches?” you say.
The doctor tells you it explains some of the headaches and he sits you down and tells you about post-concussion syndrome and a possible condition known as CTE. A condition they cannot diagnose until they perform an autopsy, so whether or not you have it is a guess. He tells you about your possible risk for early dementia and the loss of the control of your frontal lobe and the loss of your memory. “To be clear,” he tells you, “there’s no guarantee you’ll have dementia. It’s just that your odds are a good deal higher than the average person.”
You are a writer. Hell, you are a human being. You are your memories. Take away a person’s memories and they may as well be brain-dead. This scares you more than anything. To slowly disappear in front of your wife’s and your friends’ eyes. To have come this far to be able to love and enjoy life and truly be worthy of other people’s love after so many years of trying to destroy yourself. To know that someone else is more important than you and that she would have to watch this—watch what makes you what and who you are slip away by degrees like the tide going out.
You will become someone who is Not You. You will forget when you met your wife. You will forget the look in her eyes and her smile where one eye closes more than the other, that beautiful asymmetry. You will forget the terror you felt seeing her fear when she went into emergency surgery and you thought it was the beginning of the end and you decided, calmly, that you would kill yourself if she died.
You will lose every bad and every beautiful moment of your life and you will cease to exist.
You will, you promise yourself—before you lose everything you remember—before you forget how much you love the people you love, kill yourself, which wouldn’t be a suicide because you would never be yourself again anyway. This would just be dying on your own terms.
The worst part will not be the total loss at the end. It will be the start—when you still know who you are, and you know what, and who, you are losing.
Sometimes you aren’t thinking about it and then it hits you. You make lists, you write down everything you can remember. You try not to think about the fact that all of these could be nothing other than stories you might read someday as if they happened to a stranger, because you might be that stranger someday. Your memories are already foggy and scrambled at times. And then, they may not even be there anymore.
This, you worry about. Always.
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JULY 28, 1841: The body of “Beautiful Cigar Girl” Mary Rogers is found in the Hudson River. The murder remains unsolved and becomes a national news story, inspiring Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” a year later.
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SOMETIME IN THE ’80s: The last thing you remember, you are drinking at Father’s Five—a bar on Mass Ave in Boston, and you put Jason and the Scorchers’ astounding cover of Dylan’s “Absolutely Sweet Marie” on the jukebox. Then you wake up in an apartment in Montreal—a city where you know exactly no one, including the guy whose apartment you are in, and he looks at you the way you might look at a unfamiliar sweater that someone left on your floor after a party.
You take a beer from his fridge and drink it in the stairwell on your way down to the street. A normal person might freak out. You might have freaked out only a year or two ago. Instead, you are only pissed off that you don’t have enough money to get drunk right then and that you have to hitchhike back to Boston. Even your friends or girlfriends, tolerant as they are—more saints than you can count on both hands, actually—are not going to come pick you up hundreds of miles away. Some things are too much to ask, after all.
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1985: You have a dorm room with your own bed but you end up sleeping with Melissa every night for a few months. Sleeping with—but not having sex. Melissa is a lesbian. But she’s single. You start as a friend who helps her with her guitar. You’re a better guitar player than she is, but she is a much better songwriter and singer.
At night, the two of you drink and play guitar. She’s a Beatles fanatic. You teach her all the early singles. You teach her the dual lead harmony parts on “And Your Bird Can Sing.”
With the lights out, you drink and smoke cigarettes and hold each other while the rain patters on the roof of your dorm. You are young—you know nothing—and you wonder sometimes if the power of pure love (because you’re pretty sure that’s what you’re feeling) could make Melissa love you the way you love her. In the years to come, you’ll sleep with people and next to people, but you will never again this often fall asleep holding on to someone and waking up still holding them the next morning.
You know the smell of her hair. The pace of her breathing. The way her right hand tremors for no known reason while she’s deep in sleep. She lets you kiss her eyelids, but not her lips.
“We don’t want to get confused here,” she says. Too late, you think but don’t say.
You play in a band called Junkyard—Junkyard sounds like every member in the band fell in love with the same Johnny Thunders record, which is pretty much the case. Even your originals sound like covers. Melissa plays in a band of four women who all dress in black and have on pale makeup. They call themselves the Bell Jars. Their originals sound great and even their covers sound original. They are the real deal. Junkyard is not.
The Bell Jars have a show coming up at the Rat—a major Boston club in Kenmore Square. Melissa is worried about her guitar skills.
“You should play guitar for us,” she says.
You’ve thought of this. Her band is better than
yours, but you could make their songs better with your guitar. You figure, without saying so, that the fact that the band is all women could be an issue. “I wish I could,” you say.
“Seriously,” Melissa says. “Some small labels and some A&R clowns are supposed to be at the Rat and I want us to sound our best.” She smiles. “You play the main guitar parts and I can front the band and focus on my singing.”
You feel enormously flattered.
“You’d have to dress in drag, though,” she says.
You’re drunk. Not seeing any potential repercussions. Plus, it’s for Melissa. You shrug, say, “What the hell.”
“You’d play a set with us in drag?”
“Why not?”
The band goes for the idea. The night of the show, Melissa shaves what little facial hair you have. She sits on your lap while she does your lips and eyes and cheeks. She tells you what a pretty girl you are. You feel yourself blush. She gives you a wig of hers, black with severely cut bangs like the rest of the Bell Jars.
For your outfit, she picks a short black dress with black stockings and a black girdle with garters for the stockings. Your cock starts to get hard when she’s dressing you but if she notices it, she doesn’t say anything. You’re five foot eight and a hundred and thirty pounds. You remember thinking you were fat.
You’ve played a few practices with the band—dressed like yourself, thankfully—and the sound is good. They probably are one of the best bands in town, but you seem to make them even better. That night at the Rat, the show smokes. You feel weird, playing in heels, feeling the slip of the stockings in the shoes, the pull of the garters on the stockings, but it all seems to be going well and you have to admit, it’s kind of sexy being all dressed up onstage next to Melissa, with whom you may or may not be madly in love.
After the show, you break down your gear and you have to piss. You pause for a moment between the women’s and the men’s room, and you choose the men’s room. You piss at a urinal—difficult around your girdle-style garter belt, but you make it. As you start to walk out of the men’s room a huge skinhead punk looks down on you and says, “Faggot!” He punches you to the floor. The bathroom tiles are cold. You have passed out on these tiles before. The floor is covered with water and soap and piss and dirt and blood. You leave the wig there. You get up slowly, your nose bleeding.
That night, at Melissa’s apartment, you are still dressed up while she gently puts ice on your broken nose. She buys more liquor than you would have needed on a normal night, but you are in pain. Your nose is broken. This is the fifth time—you know what a broken nose feels like and you have learned to fix them yourself in front of a mirror, which is what you do that night in her bathroom, your mascara raccooning around your eyes like Alice Cooper. After you straighten your nose, you nearly pass out. You start to wobble and you take off your heels. You can’t breathe through the nose—it’s too swollen to snort the blow that would numb the pain, but Melissa gives you her last three Percodans and she puts the ice on your nose and kisses your forehead several times, saying “My poor, poor, pretty baby” over and over.
There is talk, among the band, of having you join the Bell Jars. But then there’s a review of the show in one of the city’s most important underground zines:
Boston’s The Bell Jars are the real thing, thanks mostly to frontwoman Melissa B’s incredible charisma and vocals and her songs that bring to mind if Joni Mitchell rocked like Paul Westerberg. She’s one-of-a-kind in a city of carbon-copy bands, and because of her, The Bell Jars may be Boston’s NEXT BIG THING.
On the down side, it doesn’t help this band that their best-looking chick is the dude who plays guitar in Junkyard.
This last line doesn’t exactly smooth your way into the band. Melissa still wants you, but the rest of the band vetoes her. Talk of you joining the Bell Jars ends.
One night, holding hands in bed, listening to the rain outside and the Beatles on the stereo, you say, “I love you.”
She snuggles closer to you. You have slept together almost every night for the last three months. There is a trust. A comfort you have never known. “I love you, too,” she says.
“No,” you say. “I mean I love you. Like in love.”
Rain. Music quietly under the rain. You hear her take a couple of deep breaths. “You know who I am,” she says. “What I am.”
“I’m sorry,” you say.
“Don’t be sorry,” she says. You are holding her but now she’s turned away. “I love you more than I’ve loved anyone else. Can’t that be enough?”
And you could say, no, that’s not enough, because that’s what you’re feeling. But you feel like you’ve already stepped over some line. You lean your head into her shoulder blade. “That’s enough,” you say.
Not long after that, the Bell Jars break up and Melissa decides to take off for Los Angeles. She asks you if you want to come, but you’re scared. You’d only know one person in LA, and that person would, you’re sure, be a star in a year or so. You’re afraid of moving to a city you’ve never seen. A big city where you might be alone. And she doesn’t love you—at least not the way you love her. So, you stay.
One of the last things you do before she goes is teach her the guitar part on the Beatles’ “Her Majesty.”
Around six months later—this is before the Internet, before cell phones and e-mail—someone says to you, “Did you hear what happened to Melissa?”
You haven’t. You expect to learn she signed a major label deal.
And he tells you that she was raped and murdered in an alley after playing a show in LA, not long after moving there. You find out six months after it happened. You don’t know any of the details and never will. Who did it. Where it happened. What exactly happened. You can’t believe she’s been gone six months and you had no idea.
There is no funeral you can go to. This will bother you forever.
You still can’t hear the Beatles for too long without thinking of her. You have to leave the room whenever “Her Majesty” comes on.
You live your life in music. People ask you all the time: Beatles or Stones? Who would you rather listen to? You tell them, Stones—no contest—but you never really tell them why.
2012: You think the story about waking up in Montreal might be a lie that you told for so long that you now believe it’s a fact. You know you blacked out and woke up miles away from where you were—probably not even the same state—that much you’re positive about. You remember waking up on some guy’s floor and taking the beer and leaving. You know that happened somewhere. But there are so many jumbled fragments and you don’t trust yourself. There’s a natural human desire to make sense out of any series of events. That doesn’t mean, of course, that they do make sense.
But Canada seems like a stretch. Definitely one of those Vermont/New Hampshire–shaped states once. And you think it happened at least twice in different places. But for years, you were very fucked up. And for years, you also lied to people. Memories blur. Nabokov said that memory is a revision. Maybe you revised a lot of this wrong. You are honestly not sure.
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2012–2013: You feel your brain getting worse. They told you this would happen with age. Your cycling is becoming more rapid than it’s ever been. Although you’ve mentioned being “bipolar” to various people in your life, you have rarely given any details of your specific condition, instead relying on popular conceptions (and misconceptions) of the disorder, which do not usually include psychosis or the kind of frequency with which you swing between poles. There are two major types of bipolar. Along with the mixed, nonspecified, cyclothymic (lower-grade) type, there’s the most severe form, with the worst prognosis and highest risk of suicide: rapid cycling. The subcategory of rapid-rapid, or ultradian, cycling is the most unusual. This is what you have. While many with bipolar experience short bursts of ultradian cycling, you simply live there.
Technically, to be diagnosed with rapid-cycling bipolar, you need to have four manic epi
sodes within a calendar year. But four episodes a year doesn’t seem very rapid to you at all. In the year leading up to the release of your fourth novel you are firing off a few a month. Before they take you off the antidepressants that can complicate rapid cycling, you start having massive swings, sometimes within days or, on a few occasions, hours. You can feel amazing and in tune with the universe at noon but have absolutely no idea how you’ll feel at six o’clock. You may want to kill yourself by then. You may desperately want to get loaded or drunk. You may still feel like your brain can process information ten times faster than normal, as though your fingers on a computer or a guitar cannot keep up with everything clicking into place in your brain. All you know is that, for you, even doubling the baseline minimum for standard rapid cycling would constitute what would be, at least recently, one of the least eventful years of your life.
But you are lucky in some ways. In a peak manic state, most people are paralyzed with the dilemma of choice—too many things racing around their mind but not slowing enough to be caught. But you can spend twenty-four hours mixing in a recording studio and feel like there are sparks coming out of your fingers you’re so alive. You have written for seventy-two hours. Your focus, you find out, is rare for someone with your condition. Many people don’t really function.
Still, while there are genetic components to becoming an addict, you—and everyone who has ever been in recovery—understand that there is still an element of choice involved. You can choose not to drink. You can choose not to take pills. You can work the steps and somehow make your way through life with more tools than you used to have to deal with shit. But increasingly—more than you have had to face since before you got clean—you are realizing the overwhelming truth that you can’t choose not to be crazy. You take some of the strongest brain stabilizers available, but nothing’s going to make it go away. In your case, even what it means to “control” it bears no resemblance to actual mood stability. People say that addicts are, at heart, control freaks. Using addicts know how they’re going to feel in five minutes. Mental illness, on the other hand, is the ultimate loss of control.