There was information in my memory, I was certain, I knew there had to be clues buried there, signs and clues pointing toward his death, and it was uncomfortably close to the moment in which I found myself, the moment of sitting alone at my adoptive father’s desk in his wood-paneled study, the post-suicide phase. It was easier to fantasize about other things, any kind of thing whatsoever, anything to distance myself from the last time I saw him, I could even think about an octopus wearing a hat, I thought, and I could think about a person wearing an octopus as a hat. I opened my traveler kit and stared at its oblong and bumpy shape. It looked like a tan pill, water-bloated.
It was too easy to picture him, it would’ve been easier if I hadn’t seen him at all, it would’ve been easier to have only very old memories of him, not new and fresh ones. It was too easy to picture his light blue polo shirt, his damp forehead and his thin dark hair, his slightly thick wrists and fingers, the pore-less skin of his nose and cheeks. Now it seems every memory I have of him, new and old, must be seen, scrutinized, and apprehended through a critical lens, the lens of his suicide.
I had already performed the hard and necessary work of understanding him, mostly through his letters and emails, etc. He had already told me everything he wanted me to know. My adoptive brother was a reserved person. He never left the country, he didn’t play sports, he talked to my adoptive parents and to people like Thomas, he watched movies and professional sports on his computer, he kept a desk fan running in his bedroom for background noise. He liked quiet things and the fan must have soothed him and it must have soothed him to watch one of the hundreds of movies he first purchased on DVD, then pirated off the internet, I thought as I sat in my adoptive father’s study, and yet all the soothing in the world couldn’t keep him from killing himself. Did he put a bullet down his throat or into his temple? Did his skull shatter? Was there blood and pieces of brain? Did he hang himself? Did his neck snap? Twenty-nine years old and gone! You should subject your body to physical stress, I once wrote to my adoptive brother in a letter, or your body will decay. Some amount of stress can be good for you. For him, the stress of being alive was enough. Being alive was a contest of endurance for him: how long could he keep himself alive on this planet? I should have told him about The Waterfall Coping Strategy, I thought with regret.
I never looked at him and said, Adoptive brother, what is your existence like on this planet? He never told me anything about himself, and that was certainly part of his plan. In hindsight, I am sure he was covering up a grand scheme, the grand scheme of his suicide. He would have been a great architect, I despaired, or a writer. If he had stayed alive, he would’ve written long and complicated books that traveled far into the future and past, I was certain. I leaned back in the chair. Doubtless he was a great inventor and fabricator. He was a highly skilled embroiderer.
23
He did not form physical relationships, he did not dream of women or men, he did not care to reproduce children, he did not care to go to museums, he did not care for flowers, he did not care to listen to music, especially not music, anything but music. He told me he was not an active listener, that he never cared for music, it never interested him, and after I forced him to listen to Bitches Brew by Miles Davis 1970, in my shared studio apartment, after listening to the entire thing, and then listening to it again, he changed his mind.
Eye-opening, he said.
Perhaps that was the one helpful thing I did for him that stayed that way. There were no negative repercussions. I asked him if he was interested in seeing live jazz somewhere, even though I had no idea where that would be.
There’s so much to see and do in New York City, he said. I spent two weeks debating whether or not to come. I couldn’t decide if I should stay in New York City or travel even farther out into the world, a world I have difficulty imagining. It’s a pastime of mine to pretend most of the world doesn’t exist, and I’m fine not going anywhere.
Planning the trip to New York was a trial. Going through with it was a potential disaster. He told me he waited for the situation to feel perfectly right, that for two weeks he sat at his desk in his childhood bedroom and deliberated over all the possible outcomes for a trip to New York City and beyond. He studied flight maps and schedules, he did research on commercial airplanes and airports, JFK or LaGuardia. He thought he was so smart and prepared. It took him two weeks exactly to come to a feeling of certainty and as soon as he arrived at his decision and booked his one-way ticket to New York City and beyond, he began to feel unsure he had made the correct decision and therefore spent five hours on the phone with various airline customer-service agents going over the possibility of canceling the flights and getting a refund on his credit card.
We are both very indecisive people, he told me. We never learned how to decide anything. Make a list of pros and cons, make a list of possible outcomes, that’s what I learned how to do. It’s easier to stay at home and yet here I am.
And are you planning on staying with me?
Of course.
He was sitting up on my bed and I sat on the floor.
Where else would I stay?
My shared studio apartment was simply one curtain-divided room with a galley kitchen and no closets and no bathroom and a series of small windows that must have looked like the saddest portholes of a ship going nowhere; my apartment building had more in common with the most rundown boardinghouses of depressing German novels from the 1920s, like a tenement slum, the bathroom was across the hall, every time you went to the bathroom, you had to take a tiny key to get in, sometimes it would take hours to locate the tiny key, and the entire building was unlike any place a normal person would choose to live in the year 2013.