Private Citizens

by Tulathimutte, Tony

  “Only reason you’re saying that is because you ain’t gone yet.”

  “You didn’t either.”

  Eugene took this levelly. “I been everywhere. All over the bright blue fucking Earth and above it too. You think there’s any kind of asshole I don’t know? Talkin’ about freedom here. Work a job, you got a boss. Run a business, you got customers. That’s your life if you go to college, only worse, ’cause then you get a giant stick up your ass about being smart. Smart don’t make you less stupid, though. You’re never gonna get the money or respect you think you deserve. You get it by keeping your ass under your elbows and making your own way.”

  “I’m making my own way? We only do what you want.”

  They eased to the shoulder, crossing the corrugated rumble strip that made the car moan deepeningly as it slowed. A car at rest felt so low to the ground. The breakdown lane fizzed in the noon with bottle glass and high-reflectance asphalt. “Okay, scooter. Where you wanna go? Outer space? Pick somewhere.” Cars of different colors whipped past, too fast to have shapes. “I could’ve given you up easy, shit. Easy. I raised you up for your own good, not mine. Put my kid in some gagglefuck group home? Not me, man.” Eugene spat his cigarette out the window. “But hell if I’ll keep you from fucking yourself up. I’m not your boss. Suit your damn self.”

  A problem with decisions between past and future was you made them in the present. Henrik said he wanted to go. Eugene kept to his word, so long as Henrik agreed not to expect any cash or list him as a parent on his application. “Understand you’re handling your own shit now. Ain’t no making your way back to me.”

  It was strange. Henrik had fought to leave, but now with his frictionless release, he felt tricked into disowning himself. Henrik wanted to smash his dad’s face. But that would mean showing he felt something, and he’d rather keep things equal and deny Eugene what he’d been denied, his real thoughts.

  Six months later in New Haven, Eugene had dropped Henrik off at his destination with his single bag, ignoring the clapping, hooting freshman orientation volunteers in blue shirts, and left the curb to join the stalled line of roof-racked minivans and moving trucks filing off campus, with a sunburned arm hanging from the window, slapping the side of the dirt-whitened door.

  AT YALE, PROMISE became indistinguishable from purpose. Henrik maxed out his credit cap and audited multivariate calc, cognitive psych, evolutionary bio, chem and intro O-chem, mechanics, optics. Whenever he doubted the utility of learning the behavior of light around massive bodies, he reminded himself it was keeping him alive. Every morning he was up at seven A.M. without an alarm, ate a waxy dining hall apple on the walk to class, took in a lecture, lunch off a tray, lecture, lecture, problem sets in the library, a take-out dinner in his room while watching a loaned movie, and then the last two hours in the computer cluster at Jonathan Edwards, copying MP3s from the dorm network and browsing Craigslist free ads—students just threw stuff away. He had no friends, though on weekends he played Texas Hold’em with the funny unambitious stoners on his dorm floor and turned in by midnight, reading or doing problem sets in a bed that he’d double-lofted because he didn’t like having space between him and the ceiling.

  It was comfortable. Rooms were comfortable, and so were dining halls, and the treed quads he crossed in the still winter into heated lecture halls among hundreds of students facing the same way. Parties were the only discomforts. How did one party? Why didn’t anyone do the Macarena? At orientation he sweatily lurked by snack bowls with an escape-ready smile. He was intrigued to witness the binge drinking of powerful, talented, rich legacies, but conversation was an enigma, and when approached by chipper RAs or strident networkers, his strategy was to regurgitate his admissions essay. Your life sounds so interesting, they’d say, then excuse themselves to the bathroom and never return. At one function he briefly interacted with a rescuer of the shy, a redhead with large smiling eyes and a loose black T-shirt (IT’S NOT GONNA SUCK ITSELF YOU KNOW) who asked him if he was the scavenger guy. She invited him back to his dorm room, where he set a land speed record for virginity loss, and disappointed her again when he told her he didn’t have any weed. This happened two more times before she stopped replying to his emails.

  Better than nothing, he thought. He would’ve happily done fifty more years of college and left a well-informed corpse. But you didn’t escape initial conditions. The life pendulum swung wider and wider from the pivot of its past. The summer before his sophomore year, Henrik became a textbook case, though the textbooks were divided on calling it agitated depression, dysphoric mania, mixed episode, or mixed state. A state contradicting itself, where high met low, or as Linda put it later, where unstoppable farce met immovable abject.

  Mania did a job on memory. Mostly he recalled being angry at facts. Needing to explain back at them. Breaking a finger punching a newspaper dispenser. His roommate yelling for him to turn his fucking light off at three A.M. Instead of sleeping, Henrik would scare people away from the computer cluster with questions about where they were from, what they believed in, and would they stand up for it, like would they go to war and die? In lectures with his legs V6-ing under his desk, he filled his composition notebooks, ignoring the calc professor’s horseshit while taking unpunctuated notes on theory-of-everything from the charismatic counterlecturer in his head. He wrote arguments for and against life; he began to think the slowest and most painful form of suicide was living, running the whole decathlon of suffering, no breathers or bottled water. Fear of dying was irrational. Death was utilitarian. Decrease in net resource consumption and planetary suffering. Increase in net comedy. There was no afterlife but there was a right-before-death, and medical research said it was loopy and nice, all white lights and gentle voices. With booze it wasn’t even scary. Some people with terrible lives didn’t kill themselves, but that didn’t mean they shouldn’t. Most people weren’t alive and didn’t mind. You couldn’t regret it.

  In October, a week after his roommate had moved out, three days since he’d last slept, two days after his RA had visited to ask if everything was cool, Henrik scheduled an appointment with a distracted doctor at Student Health. After he denied having suicidal thoughts (taking twenty minutes to distinguish thinking about suicide from considering committing suicide) she sent him away with a script for Depakote and Topamax and told him to call if he experienced problems. He lay in his lofted bed at four P.M. after taking his first dose, feeling like his brain was rotating a foot above his head. Henrik dented the ceiling with a kick, climbed down from his bed to get the liter of Smirnoff from his desk, and without a thought he drank it, swallowed all his pills, climbed back up, and took a serious nap.

  By sheer ineptitude he survived: Depakote only damaged the liver. He awoke in a snarl of puked sheets with an ordeal in his skull, registering his confusion at the wall clock, which read noon—had he slept for negative-four hours? Did negative sleep give you unrest? He shuffled to his RA’s room; in ten minutes he was being carried out by two EMTs to Yale–New Haven Hospital, on a stretcher.

  As far as Yale was concerned, with suicide it was the thought that counted. From the hospital he was shuttled to the Mental Hygiene wing at the Department of University Health. Its waiting room was a no-occupancy purgatory for the screaming and openly resisting, and after an hour’s wait the DUH nurse led him through the DUH facilities to consult the DUH officer. At the officer’s request, he handed over his notebooks, answered questions about his behavior and medication. The information went to the review board, who saw his record of missed classes, TAs’ and RAs’ reports, and testimony from his ex-roommate, and ordered ten days of spaced-out hospitalization and valproic acid monitoring, after which they offered either involuntary or voluntary medical leave from school. In hindsight, choosing the latter eased his transfer to Stanford later on, though it didn’t feel like much of a choice; it was not take-it-or-leave-it. He both took it and left.

  III. All Mass Shares Identity

  If Henrik had
had a quieter place and more time to consider his peril, he might have. The warehouse where Lucretia lived was loud and active, and being there was like touring a foreign country where he had neither language nor currency. Discovering that Cory lived there too, not only in San Francisco but in the same building, seemed at first a miraculous consummation of fate, though since his dinner with her he’d sensed delta waves of malice wafting off her, her looking harried and on-task even when walking to the bathroom in her underwear.

  He kept to Lucretia. On that first day, with his stuff still in her car, Lucretia toured him around Iniquity, let him feed the chickens in the backyard, introduced him to housemates. The air in her bedroom was heavy with incense, covering strong base notes of fungus and bouillon. He could reach the ceilingless tops of her pressboard partition walls on flat feet. Above her futon was a poster of arms cradling a lotus captioned YOU ARE WELCOME, and a cross-stitch that read LIFE IS A GIFT. Lucretia insisted he take the futon, nested with voluptuous down pillows and purple watered-silk sheets. She’d sleep on her yoga mat. Rent? No worries; he was a guest for now.

  Henrik was anxious about what Lucretia was expecting from this bargain; if she was pulling a long con, the joke was on her, because he had nothing. But she appeared to thrive on exactly that: nothing. She scavenged and grew her own food, was uninsured, and didn’t mind Henrik’s silence because she was always talking. She was unconditional, projecting into everyone she met her sense of basic goodness and connection. Her generosity made Henrik want to cry, but for months now the Depakote and Topamax had been making him feel like his feelings were happening to someone else.

  As Henrik pretended to sleep that night, Lucretia entered in the dark, undressing audibly. “I love guests,” she said, sliding under the sheets next to Henrik. She fell asleep instantly, bunched up against him as if asking to be petted. Was she ever lonely?

  After a sleepless sexless night, Henrik asked Lucretia over muesli where the nearest pharmacy was. She made her worst face and asked why. He said he needed prescriptions filled—at this, she became a flurry of snorts and book recommendations, declaring that Western medical institutions profited by aggravating illness; Big Pharma was a cartel, doctors were pushers, patients were junkies. She asked to see what he was taking, and when she laid eyes on his briefcase-size pill case, she looked like he’d just told her he was born without a heart. She made him lie down, and sent up gasps researching his prescriptions on her naturopathic reference sites. He wasn’t disordered, she assured him; society was. Manic conservatives, depressive liberals. Mood-swinging markets and a demented climate. Rich against poor, white against unwhite. Henrik was just American.

  Under Lucretia’s advisement, he tapered off Depakote, figuring it’d run out anyway. Reluctantly she let him keep his asthma inhaler, but he white-knuckled the rest. His first weeks brought on fever and dizziness. His head felt crammed with a dull hot compost that he couldn’t expel. At night he writhed in bed, pondering his status: no longer a scientist but a layperson, surrounded by the infrasonic hum of dread that he would reject his life like a donor kidney.

  Launching her campaign of dietary reeducation, Lucretia recited blog posts about flavonoids and c-kit, noetics and nootropics, New Scientist articles linking the spike in nut allergies, bipolar, and celiac to antibiotics. She plied him with congee, barley tea, and apple cider vinegar, and shooed off noisy roommates. “Keep putting those good foods in you,” she said. When he swallowed, he couldn’t feel anything going down, it just vanished; but it had to come out eventually, and after being bedbound for six weeks, with light hurting his stomach and his breath turning fruity, he was pissing in his water jar, and even then Roopa uncomplainingly collected his jars and replaced them with new cloudy tinctures.

  By March, his phone service was cut and his university fees went unpaid; the official transactions affirming his existence expired. He realized he was dead. His suicide had just taken a few years to kick in. It was why he couldn’t move, think, say, or sense; why his body felt like a random collation of limbs and holes in space. He was a corpse and Roopa was just a nice girl patronizing him by pretending he was alive, making sure his body didn’t stink too bad. It was good, death forgave. If life was a gift, it was the sort (hastily wrapped, price tag attached) that only proved the giver didn’t know or care about you at all.

  But in early April his death proved temporary. He slithered to the bathroom, grunting at Cory as she raced from her bedroom out the front door. He crunched at a stale ear of sourdough and drank a glass of water, noting how fresh it tasted. It might’ve been only a contrast to Lucretia’s syrupy tonics, but he couldn’t stop drinking it, and drained the glass at one tilt. He realized that he hadn’t felt dizzy, shaky, or nauseated all morning. When he changed his clothes he found that he’d gone down a size, like he’d lost a whole suit of skin in her sheets. Lucretia encouraged him to keep resting, but was glad his sadhana was opening.

  Was he better? The thought made him smile and sweat. So his problems were psychosomatic after all. He could live without meds if he regulated his lifestyle, could be unemployed if he grew his food. Even if her cures were placebos, wasn’t placebo the best medicine? It was like some paralyzing electromagnet on his brain had been removed, like the internal gyroscope that kept him suspended in death had finally toppled, like the meniscus of anxieties he’d had had burst, spilling his enthusiasm forth.

  He needed to go outside. Pulling sneakers onto his bare feet, he shuffled out of the warehouse. The air felt mentholated. Millions of data points rushed bright and sweet across his skin. Through the vapor of his breath, he saw the sideways morning light crowning the upper thirds of the buildings across the street. Buildings taller than any person alive! A dimpled brown stream crept toward him from a Latino shopkeeper hosing down the sidewalk. Blackflies droning around trash cans, windshield glass kibbled in the gutter. It was all great.

  On jellylegs he walked south. He’d forgotten his jacket but didn’t feel cold. He strode down Mission and up Valencia in two hours that went by like a pop song. Everything felt solvable with just the right application of force. He laughed and stepped into a puddle in the gutter as the white balloons and empire waists of a quinceañera mobbed the sidewalk. Every stranger seemed so interesting that he wanted to follow them all day; it was stupid how you couldn’t just do that.

  Henrik’s shirt hung with sweat. He needed to buy Lucretia a gift. At a bodega ATM he emptied the forty dollars from his bank account and bought two watermelons whose greenness and bounty excited him. Watching the bodega cashiers wet their fingertips on a sliced cucumber to count cash faster, his eyes watered and something soul-like rose up in him. These strangers stocked all these huge watermelons just for him. He went out until he passed a man sleeping in the alcove of an apartment entrance. He left a watermelon at the man’s side so it’d be the first thing he saw when he woke up. Another victory for society.

  That night, when Lucretia came back, he surprised her with the other watermelon and a long to-do list. They biked out to pizza at Pauline’s, dessert at Tartine, karaoke at Encore, cocktails at KoKo and Martuni’s, up and down the Seward Street slides, roaring back to the warehouse with Lucretia riding his shoulders. After a hot shower he entered Lucretia’s room, where she’d changed into a black camisole and green panties and had her hair up in a thing. The partition walls teetered when Henrik closed the door behind him. “You dress different than when we met. Lucretia.” For the past several months they’d dwelt in the intimacy of personal pronouns. “Okay if I call you that?”

  Lucretia turned. “Yeah, let’s go with that. She’s just a character, but I like her.” She pulled Henrik in by his chin. “Maybe I’ll make you guess my real name.”

  “What’s the prize?”

  She removed her thing and gemstones fell from her unfurled hair. She smiled with her face upturned and squinted to look posh-sexy. “Something you’ll like.”

  “Hillary Clinton. Mike Tyson.”

  “One more gu
ess.”

  “Roopa,” Henrik said.

  “What about my last name?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Lucky for you, you don’t have to.”

  OFF HIS MEDS, certain valves and vessels were reopening, introducing a fresh directness of the senses. Liberated from the restrictions of a paid hour, sex with Lucretia became so greatly achievable that Henrik no longer wondered what she saw in him. He felt like a man. The sex and room-sharing made them a de facto couple. And couples got married.

  While Lucretia was at a textile-making class in Oakland, he wanted to make her a surprise. She liked citrus. There were crates of limes and oranges around that she never finished. He squeezed dozens of them until his hands reddened with the acid and pitchers of juice lay on the countertops. Juice or margaritas later. More fruit in less time. He bought some rum and drank half. She’d also like it if he folded her laundry, though what was dirty was unclear, and when he opened her drawer he found a dull gray pistol lying in a nest of dark camisoles. Oh right, she’d mentioned that. He picked it up, practiced some quick draws, then moved the gun to the bottom compartment of her wardrobe under a shoebox. He was overdue for a haircut, but he’d barely finished trimming the sides when he remembered there was fruit to squeeze. Already the juice pitchers were swarmed by an electron cloud of fruit flies. He stood trembling over the sink to wipe the stickiness off, aware of the supercollisions in his head, the cardiac megathrusts. An oxygenated optimism was telling him that he was better than he’d ever been, but a chronically outvoted minority voice of reason was telling him that his lack of symptoms was a symptom. That sleep was not a disease he should’ve cured. That wellness was the illness.

  Well, maybe he wasn’t cured, but so what, this was better because: Cured of what? Nobody who knew what was going on with war and the economy, much less determinism, could be happy about it, but at least you could understand. Just because he was on his own didn’t mean he couldn’t be a scientist, a higher-order Poincaré or Mendel or Ramanujan intuition maker who worked backward from the answer. Brute-force research wasn’t worth the effort—the scientific method was always catching up to the eureka. Inspiration was more fruitful, like squeezing fruit.