It looked like Thomas was crying, but I wasn’t sure, so I kept talking.
A few minutes before you arrived, I was in a state of panic, I was unorganized, and you were about to arrive. Everyone always arrives at the worst possible moment. You were on the doorstep about to ring the doorbell when I looked something up on the internet, I said to Thomas. I went to a mental-wellness website, which I trust as a source, and it states there are six common reasons people commit suicide: 1) they’re pathological 2) they’re depressed 3) they didn’t understand what they were doing 4) they’re irrational 5) they have a medical reason 6) they lost control. We must rule out that he was pathological or irrational, and as far as I know he never lost control. He composed his suicide, I said, more than he composed his own life. He was obsessed with planning and preparations, and he left nothing to chance.
Because of what I knew of him and his planning obsession, I said, he absolutely confounded me, his only adoptive sister, when he showed up unexpectedly and out of the blue at my shared studio apartment in Manhattan one day at the end of July. It was the second thing he did that truly astonished me. And at the time, it made me so angry, because what did he think I had to offer him?
17
Three months ago I was in New York City, and chaotic things in my life, like my living situation, began to stabilize. It had been years since I had seen him. We stayed in touch through email, text, etc., but I never went back to Milwaukee, I didn’t go home for the holidays, I stopped doing Thanksgiving when I was in my early twenties, Christmas was the next to go. It took me five years to stabilize in New York City. When you move there, people tell you it will take two years, but it took me five. I started my current job over half a year ago. And it’s shit. One morning a few months ago, my supervisor blew his whistle and gathered us, supervisors of the troubled young people, in the most disgusting room of the facility, a room filled with piles of flies and mosquitoes and mold-flecked mugs and one grimy window. Everyone was standing in an oval, a great force of pleated khakis and polos. I was looking at my phone discreetly when I heard my supervisor say something about assembling a team to oversee an internal investigation, and as I looked up with great interest, my coworker Michele told me to go make coffee.
My coworker Michele from the first day of training showed me no respect, she treated me as if I were the least important member of the team, the one who isn’t a right fit, the one who always scrubs out the toilets the incorrect way, a way they’ve never been scrubbed and never should be scrubbed; I was a blight on humanity, and somehow she must have inferred that my blight-on-humanity self was once a barista for minimum wage and cash tips at a punk café when I was in college with nothing better to do, because out of the twenty people standing in the oval, she singled me out.
I left the filthy room and went into the employee kitchen. It had been a long time since I had been a barista; fortunately, I remembered exactly how to brew a carafe of French Roast. As the coffee dripped down into the carafe I wondered what exactly had triggered an internal investigation in the first place, I imagined someone violating all of the employee handbook’s precepts, all of the rules and procedures we went over in great detail during a two-week unpaid professional development session, and I was certain I myself would never be under investigation, because my infractions were so minor, for example sometimes I took too many bathroom breaks so I could check my phone in peace, or occasionally when I cleaned the bathrooms I shoved the stack of paper towels up through the slit in the dispenser instead of getting the key and opening the loading door and inserting the stack properly. When I returned to the filthy room with two carafes of French roast, I noticed everyone had dispersed, the meeting was over, and someone had thoughtfully opened the window to air out the odor of too many humans in one room. I left the carafes and returned to my desk deeply embarrassed I had been left out of the meeting. No one bothered to update me, no one sought out my presence or decided to tell me what was discussed. No one even thanked me for making coffee.
Look at what’s in front of you, I said to calm myself, that’s what matters.
Above my work desk I had pinned several photos of my favorite troubled young people: most of them were gone, some of them went on to community college or for-profit technical schools, some of them went into menial labor and customer service but sometimes all of my troubled young people’s faces blurred into one gigantic face of sadness and despair, so I asked the ones I liked for photos, even though I hated photography, simply to be able to remember their individual names and faces, otherwise I would forget. As I sat in silence and reflection, my period began unexpectedly, and bled through my khaki work-pants. I stood up. A giant splotch of dark brown had formed. Michele pointed out the splotch, infuriating me, and she offered to wipe it with a moist towelette. I told her no, and she went ahead and wiped it anyway. After her senseless violation, I could feel the splotch had doubled in size. Michele and the towelette had brought it back to life, and the towelette’s scented moisture had soaked through the khakis to my underwear so that I was shivering at my desk, which was situated directly under an air-conditioning vent.
I kept forcing my anger down below my passive surface. The night before, I went to a party with my roommate Julie in Bush-wick, that shitbox of a neighborhood, where a drunk man tried to hold me down and kiss me at three in the morning. I was left with no choice but to bite down on his tongue as brutally as possible. I drew blood, and I felt a piece of his tongue come off into my mouth, a small flap the texture of a gumdrop that I spit out.