by John Gould
For a while I was thinking Vietnam — I’d detected a bit of an American accent, something southern. Jake, Monty, and my guy (why didn’t I get his name?) had served as tunnel rats in Cu Chi or someplace, Jake and Monty blown up by a booby trap while my guy was around the corner taking a leak. But then it occurred to me, that doesn’t even work if he’s fifty, the dates are wrong. So I switched to a hunting accident. In my mind the three of them putter across a lake in Jake’s flat-bottomed boat. The deer are over yonder. Somebody gets silly, the boat gets rocking and flips. Two guys go down — they’re more heavily laden with gear, perhaps — and my guy’s left bobbing there alone. A big buck stops and sniffs the air, melts back into the woods.
I told Andrea about it once, about how I almost died on my way to her that day (I kept it to myself at the time, as I was keeping a lot of things), about the man I met, and the story I dreamt up to explain his despair. What she got fixated on, for some reason, was his theory about the afterlife.
“Why not?” she said. “Why couldn’t you be both miserable and dead?”
“Or joyous,” I said. “Why couldn’t you be both joyous and dead?” She was pregnant with Sky at the time, and I was pressing her to have cheery thoughts. I believed it might make a difference, predispose Sky to a happy life. Me trying to manipulate her, was how Andrea interpreted it, as she was interpreting more and more of my behaviour at the time. “You can’t control me,” she’d say.
And of course she was right. What I can control, I realize, is nothing. I don’t know why this lifts my spirits, but it does.
Ex
Dear Sam,
I’m not the person to write this letter, I know that. Go ahead and curse me out, okay? Get it over with. Then read on.
First off, a bit of news. I’ve left Larry again. For good this time. Does that make things better for you, or even worse? Any chance you two might be friends again? Not best friends, but then I’m not convinced you ever were. That was for effect, wasn’t it? “She left me for my friend” is okay, but “She left me for my best friend” has so much more oomph. It’s an art form with you, fashioning the dreary into the dramatic.
Anyhow, I thought you’d want to know. Larry says Lynne says your novel is about a novelist and a filmmaker, about you and me. I’m not sure how far you’re going, chronologically, but it’s a different outcome, I would think, if the unfaithful one also ends up alone. A different arc. Maybe you’ll want to leave the me-character remarried, though. Benightedly content in her bourgeois enslavement, the bitch.
You know I think of myself that way too, right? You know I hate myself as much as you do?
Larry says Lynne says you’re only a little way into the novel, but that it’s going to be really good. “Scary good” is how she describes it. She’s generally more tactful than that with Larry (it must have been tricky at times, representing the two of you, especially when you were both schtupping her), so she’s obviously knocked out. For which, congratulations.
But you’ve got to stop. This is not a book you should write.
Again, I’m the wrong person to make the argument. There’s clearly self-interest involved. Do I want to read your version of me? Do I want others to read it? I don’t.
But my self-interest goes beyond that, and it dovetails with yours. What’s good for me is, this one time, good for you too. Larry says Lynne says the novel’s going to be in three parts, structured around your three attempts to kill yourself after I left. Brain. Breath. Blood. It’s smart, but it’s also suicidal. If you spend too much time with this stuff, if you go back inside it, how will you ever get out again?
You hate it when I obsess about the holocaust (or at least you used to, it’s not likely you care one way or the other anymore), but it’s my personal history, sort of, and I can’t see deleting it from my life, or from my work, or from my way of thinking about things. Anyhow, I want to talk about survivors. What they tend to do is survive, right? Not just survive but (look at Bubby) thrive. They get married, they have kids. They build things, they contribute to things. They live, and their lives are a great big Bronx cheer to death and its sidekicks. What they don’t do is kill themselves. What they don’t do is capitulate.
But then look at Primo Levi. Look at Paul Celan. Look at Bruno Bettelheim. I don’t have to go on, do I? Okay, then look at Jean Amery, Jerzy Kosinski, Tadeusz Borowski, Piotr Rawicz … All holocaust writers who killed themselves, of course. The parallel is preposterous, maybe even repugnant, but do you see my point? It wasn’t the holocaust part that killed them, it was the writing part. They were just like the other survivors, except they kept trying to articulate what had happened. They re-entered the trauma in order to reveal it to us.
You’ll go back. You’ll write a good book. It may be helpful to others, but it won’t help you. When you say, “They were soused and savaging each other daily” (that line is yours, if you like), it won’t make it any less true. When you say, “She came at him with a paring knife,” it won’t mean I didn’t do it, it’ll mean I’m doing it again. Just let it stop.
I got the green light on the Primo Levi project, by the way, the one I talked about way back when. The idea that his death wasn’t a suicide at all but just an accident? You said suicide was an accident too. You said everything’s an accident. We didn’t fight about it, imagine!
Rach
Customer Review
The Sinking Lifeboat: How Death Could Save Us [Hardcover] R.L. Clark (Author)
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Worth losing sleep over
By G. Bailey (Vancouver, Canada) — See all my reviews
If you want to freak yourself out sometime, like I just did, have a look at the world population clock. There are going on eight billion people right now, all thinking thoughts and going to the bathroom and so on, eight billion, and that goes up by another eighty million per year. That’s like adding another Iran every year, though of course not everybody being born is a Muslim. Not that I have anything against Muslims, except the batty ones but that goes for everybody. Anyhow, there are four people born every second and only two die, and that’s what this book is about: death, which we need more of. Nobody seems to have heard of this book, which isn’t surprising because nobody wants to think about it, but poverty and starvation and ruining the environment are going to keep getting worse unless we do. Think about dying, that is, and actually die.
One unique thing about this book is that he talks about not just human rights but also animal rights. We’re basically infesting the planet, which you can’t deny. But what we do deny is death. We live in denial, says R.L. Clark, which is why we impose ourselves on the world, trying to make ourselves big with power and possessions and fancy ideas (like this one, guilty!), and also why we insist on surviving no matter what. Only if we accept death can we make life possible for all living creatures, even the ones that bother us.
Maybe the best thing about this book is that the author doesn’t tell you he’s dying until the last chapter. He has something called “fatal familial insomnia” which is basically that you can’t sleep, and you lose your mind and fall apart. Maybe that’s why he can talk about all this, not just because he’s dying but because he can’t sleep. Actually he can sleep for now, the disease hasn’t hit him yet, but it will, and that must make it hard to sleep. The only thing is, there’s no cure for his disease. If there was a cure, would he really not take it? Are we supposed to believe he’d stay awake when he could be sleeping instead of dead, though in some ways what’s the difference?
Plus there’s a big thing he’s missing and that’s, sorry guys, but feminism. If women had control of their bodies they wouldn’t choose to be pregnant all the time. I’ve read that one in five pregnancies in the world isn’t wanted by the woman, or it might even be two in five. Full disclosure: my wife is pregnant right now, with our second, both of which we agreed on. But if women all over the world had power, so they only had the children they wanted, you’d cut down
most of the overpopulation, or a lot of it anyway. Then just a bit more death and we’d be okay.
Also, it’s rich people who have to start kicking the bucket (though euphemisms are part of the problem according to R.L. Clark). We can’t count on the people who’re dying in Africa and places like that because they don’t eat much, and have puny little carbon footprints. It’s people like you and me who have to snuff it, and I hope we do for the sake of Liam, and either Ryder or Rebecca, though not till they’re older.
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Report Abuse
Extras
This story, their story, will be even better when they’re old. They’ll tell it to friends, and to strangers. They’ll tell it to their kids so often there’ll be talk of dementia. They’ll tell it to one another, tossing in fresh details to enhance each new rendition.
“I had a scar over this eye,” Jacques will say. “Running all the way down to my chin.” He’ll inscribe the swoop of it with the tip of a finger.
“And a flap of flesh just here,” Oriana will say, pressing a palm to his temple, which by then will be grey.
“Your left eye dangled halfway down your cheek,” he’ll say, “and there were streaks of blood on your cheerleader’s skirt. They were random, but not random.”
“Right.”
They’d both auditioned, but on different days, so they didn’t see one another until they were no longer themselves. They were both skinny, and pretty good at moaning and shambling and tipping over when somebody impaled them or shot them in the head, so they made it into group A, the group that would be closest to the camera. That meant hours in the makeup artist’s chair. By the time they met they were dramatically altered.
“How did we recognize one another?” they’ll marvel. “How did we know, under all the guck?”
They each had their own reason for responding to the ad. Oriana happened to be working on an article for a pop culture magazine, her very first sale. Her topic was cosmetic surgery, specifically the botched surgery of a young movie star. Oriana came at it through the undead. “Our most fundamental terror,” she wrote, “is that we might turn out to be objects. We aren’t afraid of being transformed into zombies, we’re afraid we are zombies. Zombies with good manners, our guts neatly sausaged inside our skins.” After many years, she’ll still recall the thrill these sentences gave her as they composed themselves on the page. “A zombie longs to eat us, the same way a rock longs to roll down a hill. What if our desires, too, are just impersonal laws being worked out on our bodies?” Then she segued to the surgery. “A surgically altered face is disturbing in the same way a zombie is disturbing. The starlet wants to transcend her limited physicality, but in fact she affirms it for herself, and for us. We watch her turn into a thing.” The piece needed one more dimension, an element of vulnerability or risk on the author’s part. Signing on as an extra in a zombie series? Perfect.
Whereas Jacques just liked to be scared. How could that be? How could a bad thing be a good thing? Maybe he’d figure it out on set.
For the first day’s scene they were assigned — after hours of sitting around, shyly grinning at one another through their gore — to a mob of zombies hunting a pregnant woman. It was a happy episode — the pregnant woman decapitated them all with a broadsword she’d fashioned from a length of rusty gutter. The only person they overtook and ate was a sleaze-ball who’d tried to sacrifice everybody to save himself.
“You were so good,” Jacques will recall. “You really tucked into that jerk!”
“You too,” Oriana will say. “I completely bought everything you did. Remember that moan you had going?”
“And how you kept slinging your eye out of the way while you chowed down?” Jacques will mime this maneuver, a fashion model’s hair flip.
“We were gruesome.”
“We were gruesome.”
She’ll pause a moment, get wistful. “That was the first time we touched. Remember?”
“Of course. We jostled each other as we tried to get at the good bits.”
“You had his brains all to yourself. But then —”
“I let you in,” he’ll say.
“You let me in.”
And so on. They’ll just keep summoning details like this, conjuring up the moment of their meeting. They’ll do this more and more often over the years, and never tire of it. Without the need to say so, they’ll share the view that starting out undead made them immortal, that death had touched them and let them go. Nothing will ever rob them of this belief.
Squirrel
My journal prompt from Ms. Lopez who is our sub until Mr. Kisch finishes his breakdown is What do you believe in? I don’t know is too short since this has to be 250 words. I’m writing on my spiral notepad with Mum’s phone as a flashlight in the passenger seat. The dashboard bobblehead of Albert Einstein who was a bad student Mum says to make me feel better and didn’t wear socks is nodding. My sister is asleep in the back seat, we take turns. Mum is trying to sleep in the driver’s seat because she has to get up early to go behind the bakery for buns. We’re supposed to use details so this is a 1998 Ford Escape which was my aunt’s. Ford means to cross something and escape obviously means escape. I’m not supposed to touch dead animals, no one is, which is why I can’t tell Mum although I suppose she might read this. For details the squirrel was grey and soft and cold like the pavement. When I picked him up he stayed the same with his hands up to his face. Squirrel is a strange word when you stop and think about it. I held him for a while and then chucked him into the bushes at the edge of the church parking lot where we park every other night. The church doesn’t look like a church, just a building that goes up a bit over the door. I tried to find him again in the bushes but couldn’t. I thought maybe he was alive and ran away but that doesn’t make sense. Mum is snoring now which is good because she’s asleep and also I sleep better when she snores which also doesn’t make sense. Since I picked up the squirrel I see light in people’s heads. Maybe I always did and didn’t notice. Now I get hot and people’s heads turn colours like purple for Ms. Lopez. The light mostly stays in her head but sometimes comes out a bit. My sister Tree just said either puzzle or nuzzle in her sleep, or some other word that rhymes with them. The light in my sister’s head is red but the light in my mother’s head is almost more like green or sometimes blue. In the mirror after we shower at the Y the light in my head is no color, there’s something wrong with me but no one else can see it. What does believing something mean? I believe the squirrel ran away or do I only hope so? That’s enough words probably but my fingers are too cold outside my sleeping bag to count them. To be safe another detail is Ms. Lopez thinks I’m the class clown but I only am since she said so. I like that people like my squirrel noises but I also like Ms. Lopez. If this isn’t enough words sorry.
Angel, Still Ugly
People can’t seem to agree on which of Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings was his last. Most poetic would be Wheatfield with Crows, since it was in a wheat field that he subsequently shot himself in the chest, but it could just as easily have been Daubigny’s Garden or Tree Roots and Trunks or even Thatched Sandstone Cottages in Chaponval.
In the case of Paul Klee it was most likely Still Life (which is poetic too, or ironic or something), a painting that contains a kettle and a moon and also a sheet of paper on which is sketched another of his late works, Angel, Still Ugly, by which he seems to have meant an angel who hasn’t yet risen all the way from carnality to spirituality. If I were an artist, and if I believed there to be a difference between carnality and spirituality, and if that title weren’t taken, I might grab it.
Today is the second anniversary of my son’s death. Some days I say “my son’s suicide,” some days I don’t. My wife, before she left me last year, told me it was time to stop laying blame. She said the same thing again when she came back earlier this month. It’s odd, because I’m not aware of having blamed anybody. When exactly did we stop comprehending one another?
&
nbsp; Van Gogh and Klee both had a tough time. With Van Gogh it was simple despair, if that’s the right word to describe somebody who eats his paint. In Klee’s case it was physical pain, a type of sclerosis that attacked his whole body, including his skin, so that his face hardened into a mask of itself. One of these artists killed himself, the other did not. “The longing for death,” Klee wrote in his diary, “not as destruction, but as striving toward perfection.” He kept producing, a thousand works in his final year, until the illness caused the brush to fall from his hand.
So there’s a choice. You can stop or you can keep going. My son seems to have made one choice, I seem to have made the other. I’m tempted to think he was in the right, but perhaps I’m in the right too. Knowing I can kill myself, perhaps I don’t need to? In this sense my son saved me, made my suicide unnecessary by showing me it was possible, if that’s actually what he did. I’d rather it had been the other way around, I’d give anything to switch destinies with him, but this desire of mine appears to have no bearing on anything whatsoever.
My wife comes to bed tonight, a slash of magenta across her forehead. I shut out the light and we lie side by side in the mottled darkness.
“Any luck?” I ask. She’s back in her studio for the first time since our son’s death. I have the impression the ideas aren’t flowing.
“Not sure,” she says.
Like me, our son was not artistic. What he had the knack for was making things work. He took things apart and put them together again.
“There’s a new theory,” I say. “About Van Gogh. That he didn’t actually kill himself.”
“Oh?”
“That it was a schoolboy who shot him. By mistake.”
My wife is silent.