I’ve always wanted to do good things for other people, but I never did them for myself.
A couple weeks ago I acquired the gun. I thought I could do it with pills, but that was selfish. I will take my gun with me, I will drive to the hospital and sit in my car right outside the emergency room door. I will call the police and 911. I will leave detailed instructions about what my body and organs are to be used for. I will shoot myself carefully in the head, but not so my skull blows up. If I do it correctly, I will not feel anything. The car can be sold to help cover the costs of my funeral.
My organs and skin and eyes and tissues are to be donated to those who are about to die, every person that is last on any organ donation list, all of my physical material is to go to them.
This is my way of doing something right in the world.
I hope you understand what I have decided.
I’ve wanted to die since I was eighteen. I kept myself alive for as long as I could. This is the moral answer to that feeling.
When I was little I used to go swimming and I thought I could die by holding my breath. Every time I almost did it, I got scared.
When I was little I lied a lot. Helen and I played confession and I fell in love with lying. Our mom washed our mouths with soap, and after a while, I started to like the taste of it. Or maybe I’m tricking myself. I guess I got used to it.
I’m not scared anymore. You can’t do it and be scared.
Personally, I think my life was beautiful. No one else would think it’s beautiful, but it was enough for me.
You have to believe in what you’re doing.
I hope you understand what I have done.
It’s possible I have lied about a lot of things, but everything I have said here is entirely true.
I hope you understand.
40
When my adoptive brother died, he didn’t leave anything for me, not even a letter addressed directly to me, just a document for anyone to read, and addressed to whom? No one in particular. What he left was for the people in need, the people who needed actual help, troubled people with failed organs and missing eyes and ears and tissues, I want to give it all away.
The morning of the funeral, I kept rereading his document, and I was astonished that my adoptive brother thought I might be bipolar or schizophrenic. I kept reading that part about myself, over and over, I ran my finger across the computer screen, and I touched the word schizophrenic. The oil from my finger caused the word to shimmer psychedelically. I kept searching for the parts where he wrote my name, Helen. I touched my name and made it shimmer. It was so reassuring to read Helen this or Helen that. I exist. In someone else’s world, I exist. I wanted to run around in a park or on a hilltop and shout to people, I was in his life! I played a major role, fuckers!
I would have to show it to my adoptive parents, or perhaps they had already read it, there was no way to know, but at the funeral I would ask them. At the funeral, I told myself, would be the appropriate place to ask. One step forward. Two back. One back. Two forward. A few minutes after reading his document for the tenth time, I was proved wrong when I said he didn’t leave me anything. He left behind my pamphlet, and when I opened one of the brand-new closet’s drawers, there was something in shrink-wrap. I picked it up and examined it. Bitches Brew by Miles Davis in vinyl form. I knew he had left it for me, and me alone. Tears came to my eyes. At six in the morning, I heard doors open and close, people padding into the bathroom. I heard people talking. I heard someone get sick in the bathroom.
I checked my email and read a message from my supervisor, he said he wanted to talk to me on the phone and he would call later today, that hopefully I would be around. Perhaps more importantly there was an email from Professor Kim. She wrote to say how sorry she was for my loss, but she had never met my adoptive brother. She had three assistants, one for research and the others for teaching, and they were all female. She didn’t have any auditors this semester, and she had never heard his name before. She closed by asking if there was anything else she could do.
For a long time, I looked out the window at the depressing tree. I had moved the plant and desk fan to the floor. The few things he had left behind, I arranged simply, perhaps my greatest talent. Then I began to sob again. The hysterical sobbing person returned and when I looked in his closet mirror, I didn’t recognize myself. An ugly vein the size of a child’s thumb burst in the middle of my forehead, so it looked like there was a wrinkled worm underneath my skin. As I stared at myself in his closet mirror, I remembered two stories I heard my adoptive mother tell Chad Lambo in the living room the first real day of my investigation. At the time I couldn’t process them, but now they made sense, and the stories animated the person everyone thought he was and wasn’t, the stories brought him back to life. I liked stories like that, stories that would make me feel as if I understood something about him. When I think of them, I thought, I see a ghost and the traces left all over a person’s life.