I said to myself: I’ll just go have a quick look-see, I’ll just stand in the middle of the house and look around, still as a statue, a quick little look is all I will take. The more I thought about it, the more invested I became in finding out what happened to my adoptive brother, because whatever happened to him was surely very odd. I believed that. When a human being takes his or her own life, the circumstances are always very odd and serious and they must be looked into. It must be done with the rigor of a proper metaphysical investigation. Perhaps to investigate his death would revitalize my own life, and if I could communicate my eventual findings to them, it would strengthen and support the lives of my adoptive parents as well. I began to feel rational and purposeful. It’s unnatural to not want to be alive anymore, I said to myself. Life itself is the instinct for growth, for survival, for an accumulation of forces…1 That’s what Nietzsche said, philosopher of life!
I kept propping myself up in front of the boxes and saying more and more things to no one. I will look thoroughly around the house, I said, an investigation virtuoso, leaving no room unturned, because a thorough and professional investigation of the house is precisely what the situation calls for. I pictured it in my mind: I walk up to the door of my childhood home, a door painted black with a brass kick plate, and ring the doorbell. My adoptive parents open the door and greet me warmly with a plate of cookies and skim milk or day-old muffins and lukewarm tea. I saw us setting aside our various issues and presenting to the world a unified front, I saw us braiding our grief into a rope, a strong and shiny rope we would take out and show people who asked us what it was like to lose someone to suicide.
I would have to examine every fiber of his bedroom with a magnifying glass. It was simple, I could see. Of course I would have to begin there. When he was living, my adoptive brother lived off and on with our adoptive parents for most of his twenty-nine years on the planet. In fact, he spent more than three-quarters of his life in his childhood bedroom, if you included sleeping. There was information there in the house, in the bedroom and in the closet. The closet would contain the most information, I said to no one, that disgusting closet that accumulated piles and piles of clothes, books, broken vases, empty picture frames, batteries, suitcases, pieces of garbage, broken computers, little jars with baby teeth. The insides of my nose started to burn because even though I was approximately nine hundred miles away from my adoptive brother’s closet in suburban Milwaukee, situated as I was upright with my hands on the boxes in my shared studio apartment in Manhattan, somehow the smell of the closet in Milwaukee wafted up through my nostrils and got stuck inside my nasal cavities and caused the passages to burn. I recognized that burning, that sulfurous stench as the singular property of the closet: its dead-animal odor. Because a small animal settled in between the walls and died in there, behind the closet. Because it took my adoptive mother an entire summer to figure out what the smell was and to call pest-control services. They had a terrible time removing it, they were only able to remove pieces of the dead animal with the aid of a small and specialized scraping device from China. The other dead-animal parts had already been absorbed into the rotting wood and there they remained, they were there causing that sulfurous stench long after I moved out of the house, and long after I left Milwaukee to begin my life in New York City.
It made me laugh a little, the idea of going about my business, my metaphysical investigations, in the middle of this familial nightmare. Helen Moran, are you mad? I should have asked myself. Helen Moran, I should have cried out, are you an insane monster? The truth is, I would only have laughed or coughed into my hands or averted my eyes because I could not think of anything else to do, not a single thing. The idea of the investigation had already taken root inside my brain. A little self-knowledge can be a very productive thing, I said to no one. I am a very productive person, I said as I opened the windows of my shared studio apartment. I shouted things to the passersby on the crummy sidewalks below. I can be a very helpful person! I screamed. A woman pushing a double-wide stroller looked up at me with concern. At your service, bitches! I shouted. I saluted the pigeons and the rats. I said to no one, What you are doing, Helen, is not only very ethical, it is what is required.
2
At the time of his death I was a thirty-two-year-old woman, single, childless, irregularly menstruating, college-educated, and partially employed. If I looked in the mirror, I saw something upright and plain. Or perhaps hunched over and plain, it depended. Long, long ago I made peace with my plainness. I made peace with piano lessons that went nowhere because I had no natural talent or aptitude for music. I made peace with the coarse black hair that grows out of my head and hangs down stiffly to my shoulders. One day I even made peace with my uterus. Living in New York City for five years, I had discovered the easiest way to distinguish oneself was to have a conscience or a sense of morality, since most people in Manhattan were extraordinary thieves of various standing, some of them multi-billionaires. Over time, I became a genius at being ethical, I discovered that it was my true calling. I made little to no money as a part-time after-school supervisor of troubled young people, with the side work of ordering paper products for the toilets. After my first week, the troubled people gave me a nickname.
Hey, Sister Reliability, what’s up? Bum me a cigarette. Suck my dick. They never stopped smoking or saying disgusting things to me, those troubled young people living and dying in Manhattan, sewer of the earth! I was living and dying right next to them all the while attempting to maintain an ethical stance as their supervisor, although some days I will admit it was difficult to tell who was supervising whom.