I burped, some vomit rose up in my throat, and I employed the Swiss mountain stream technique to swallow it down. Then I told him about the time my adoptive brother visited me in New York, about the status of my investigation, and I went over the six reasons people commit suicide.
He looked at me with a strange and intense emotion, it seemed like he wanted to shake me, or to kiss me. I swerved my head away, in case. He pretended he didn’t notice anything, and told me that the article I cited missed a reason, the reason he believed my adoptive brother killed himself: a philosophical reason, but I didn’t get to hear his explanation; I had to pull myself away from him, so I would be able to throw up alone, comfortably and quietly.
37
When I was a freshman in high school, everyone called me spinster from a book, because of how ugly I was, and the state of my generic, off-brand clothing and shoes. At that time I had not discovered clothes from the dumpster. I wore beige caftans from Kmart in the summer, and during the school year, a beige shirt and pants uniform. From far away, it probably looked like I was nude. If I walked past a boy in the hallway, he shrieked and made screeching sounds. IT’S THE SPINSTER FROM A BOOK! Then he would stick his finger in his mouth. The truth was, I didn’t mind the quaint and old-fashioned insult; I thought spinsters were interesting because of the books I read, Jane Austen and George Eliot. Of course, even in their novels, the spinsters were married off eventually. Perhaps the book that left the greatest impression on me from that time was Kafka’s diaries, I admired his entries of despair and complaint, I tried to absorb them as a way to perceive and understand the world because I too had despair and complaints. And I’ll never forget how he ended them: You too have weapons.8 END.
Who, exactly, has weapons? Did he mean me? My adoptive brother?
At the age of sixteen, I was obsessed with a person I didn’t know, and I used this obsession to get out of the house and see the world outside of suburban Milwaukee. I followed Fiona Apple around on tour across the country one summer by myself, I bought bus and plane tickets, after saving up every paycheck from a seasonal mall job at the incense store. Instead of staying at motels, I tried to befriend innocent-looking people at the shows and hint that I needed a place to spend the night, it worked mostly with young unattractive men who were alone, young men with canes, etc. The other nights I spent in hostels or even in 24-hour diners, I went to as many shows as possible, I would arrive early, and perch myself by the backstage door, usually with a pathetic stuffed animal, and I can only imagine the intense pity she must have felt for me as she came upon me standing by myself with a stuffed animal, waiting by the door like some poor orphan out of Dickens, it probably ruined her day. One time I gave her a notebook with poetry, not my poetry, of course, but poetry by Sylvia Plath, I tore out my favorite poems and glued them into the notebook, I myself didn’t write poetry, I had no interest in writing anything, I thought poetry was boring but cool, and she asked me why I liked Sylvia Plath, she seemed genuinely interested to know why, and I told her I liked the poem about shoes that rhymed, and Fiona Apple sort of smiled, she told me to read Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, then her tour manager pulled her away from me, wait, she’s trying to tell me something, no wait, but she was easy to pull away because she was small, meanwhile the security guards were assholes, and they made fun of me, some of them called me chink, but I didn’t care, my heart lifted when she came out onstage to perform, because she waved the stuffed animal around and put it on top of her piano, where it remained until the end of the show, and when she left the stage, she took it with her. What did she do with all of them? I wondered. She probably has a room in her house filled with stuffed animals from starving once-orphans like myself, I thought, or maybe she donated them to a children’s hospital or a preschool in need.
As I remember that time and how colorless everything was, everything except Fiona Apple, I realize it’s possible I was as miserable as my adoptive brother, and I understood how this misery and depression would lead to suicide. Until I returned home, I forgot that for a brief moment, I myself considered suicide, I thought about cutting my wrists with plastic razors when I was in high school, and I considered it again before I escaped Milwaukee. My adoptive mother was correct, I was very dramatic. But I didn’t kill myself for some reason or another. Inside me was a force that wanted to stay alive.
38
Like most normal people, my life force ebbed and flowed, ebbed and flowed. At times I felt euphoric for no reason, perhaps a troubled person gave me a high five and told me I was cool, and then, an hour later, I started to feel depressed, like nothing was worth it, everything I did was a waste. I was currently on the tile floor of the upstairs bathroom, a bathroom connected to my adoptive brother’s bedroom in a house full of relatives and neighbors, where I was resting after an hour spent violently throwing up and retching and then forcing myself to gag by sticking a finger down my throat in a desperate attempt to end the spell of nausea that had seized my body.