The Guardians Read online

  All signs are misleading.

  —Yiddish proverb

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Begin Reading

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Sarah Manguso

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright

  The Thursday edition of the Riverdale Press carried a story that began An unidentified white man was struck and instantly killed by a Metro-North train last night as it pulled into the Riverdale station on West 254th Street.

  The train’s engineer told the police that the man was alone and that he jumped. The police officers pulled the body from the track and found no identification. The train’s 425 passengers were transferred to another train and delayed about twenty minutes.

  * * *

  If I were a journalist I’d have spoken to everyone and written everything down right away. I’d have gone to the hospital and met all the people who were on the psychiatric ward at the moment Harris walked out the door, and then this book would be a more accurate rendering of the truth.

  If I were to write responsibly, with adequate research to confirm certain facts, I’d have to ask people about the last time they saw or spoke with or heard from my friend Harris. I’m afraid to ask his parents those questions. I’m afraid to talk with his last lover. I’m afraid to meet his doctors and the man who drove the train.

  For three years I’ve studied klezmer orchestration, the physics of rainstorms, maps of Eastern Europe. I thought I could trade my life for this useless, vigorous research. Since I was afraid to know so many answers, I didn’t ask any questions, and now it’s been three years. Now no one could possibly be able to remember the mundanities of July 23, 2008.

  I could have waited until the end of my life to try to understand what happened on that day, saved it for last so I could know its whole effect, but instead I waited what seems an arbitrary, meaningless length of time.

  I tried so hard not to notice Harris’s death, I barely remember it. Time eroded the memory of it even as it gathered the dust of what’s happened since. But I need to try to remember it now so I might keep it from haunting me.

  * * *

  We know the lost time begins just after noon because that’s what the desk nurse said, and we know it ends at 10:48 because that’s when the train pulled into the station. Sometime during that minute, maybe the engineer engaged the air brake. Maybe he blew the whistle. And before or after the engineer did those things, the train’s snub nose, or maybe its whole underside, just above the rails, made contact with my friend’s still living body.

  I want to say that ten hours are missing from Harris’s life, but that isn’t right. They were in his life. They just weren’t in anyone else’s.

  Though I wish I could, I can’t say Harris lay down on the train track and felt relief. I can’t imagine anything but torment, a blinding light, then nothing.

  What I carry now—it brightens sometimes, without warning—is not his pain. This pain is mine, and unlike my friend, I don’t try to hide it. I let it get all over everything. I yell in my studio. I cry on the subway. I tell everyone I know that my friend threw himself under a train.

  * * *

  Some people believe that only the selfish accept suicide as a possibility, but I don’t believe suicide is available to everyone. It was available to me for a moment, and then a door shut between me and it. The door has stayed shut.

  Some people think I should be angry at Harris, but I’m not angry. I believe in the possibility of unendurable suffering.

  A man whose lover died slowly wants this book to be about love.

  A man whose brother died quickly wants this book to be about rage. I couldn’t save my brother, he says. It never goes away, he says.

  * * *

  Sometimes I wish someone else had died instead—someone who blocks the open subway doors, for example, or someone who leaves piles of peanut shells on a train car. The fantasy comes to me in a flash—I can bring him back to life!

  The woman who changed her baby’s diaper and left the filth on an orange plastic subway seat—I’d have traded her for Harris. And I’d have traded the man who unwrapped a candy, placed it in his mouth, dropped the wrapper on the platform in front of his feet, chewed, unwrapped another candy, placed it in his mouth, dropped the wrapper on the platform in front of his feet, chewed.

  * * *

  Harris played music, wrote software, wrote music, learned to drive, went to college, went to bed with girls, moved to New York, moved to California, went to graduate school, moved back to New York, went to more graduate school. His three psychotic breaks occupied almost no part of his actual life.

  During the first episode, he hired a lawyer, convinced his colleagues were conspiring against him. He called his sister, not knowing where he was, thinking he might have been slipped something. She told him to lie down and rest. He called himself an ambulance, sent it away, drove himself to a gas station, parked the car, got out, slept behind a trash bin. A talking dog appeared and told him to enter a house. The door was unlocked. The people inside called the police, and Harris was arrested and brought to the hospital. After thirty-six hours of telephone calls his mother found him.

  I don’t know what breed of dog it was. I don’t know what color the house was. I don’t know how the doorknob felt in my friend’s hand.

  After the first episode, sometimes he’d stop speaking before the end of a sentence.

  * * *

  During the second episode, a year after the first, he disappeared from a roof party, and for a horrible moment it was believed he had jumped. Someone went to his house and knocked on the door for a long time before Harris finally opened it, his fist clenched and ready to strike. Days passed. He broke a date to see a play. A cousin came to Brooklyn late at night to fetch him. Knowing he was on the way to the hospital in the morning, Harris ran away from his cousin’s house, and the police committed him.

  During the third episode, a year after the second, he left his girlfriend. He took a cab to the hospital with an aunt. He went willingly. He knew what was happening.

  He was nauseated. He might have been dehydrated. He wasn’t sedated.

  Then there are ten hours unaccounted for.

  He liked whitefish. He liked drinking Manhattans.

  He timed his jump in front of the train, and that’s the story.

  * * *

  During college, five of us squatted at someone’s father’s house in Cambridge all summer. The father would have disapproved, so when the cleaners came each week to dust and to water the plants, we packed our things and moved them into the closets and stayed out of the house until nighttime. I lived in the daughter’s room and replaced her stuffed animals on the bed each week according to a diagram I’d drawn.

  I worked at a publishing house, writing summaries of accounting textbooks. The office was freezing, so I took a brown sweater from my friend’s father’s closet and hung it in my cubicle and put it on every day. I don’t remember cleaning it.

  Sometimes I went out for drinks with the other interns, who anticipated becoming full-time employees of the firm after graduation. They bought office clothes—blazers, shells, hose—with their earnings or with some other money.

  Of my four housemates, Harris was the only one with a job. The others watched television, drank watermelon coladas, and sunbathed on the roof. One of them often said in a heavy German accent, We are not watching the television; we are reading it.

  I don’t remember shaking Harris’s hand for the first time, and we didn’t learn how to talk to each other for a few more years, but I remember our workers’ kinship.

  * * *

  When college was over, we all
moved to New York. Harris’s mother cosigned a lease for a loft apartment in Manhattan, on Chambers Street, and for the next decade, a lot of people we knew lived there for a week or a month or a few years.

  The third-floor loft, a photographer’s former studio, was fourteen hundred square feet and had a small bathroom with a door, a tiled area with a refrigerator and a stove, and a smaller area in the opposite corner, about four by six feet, raised eight inches with some plywood.

  I bought some cheap red velvet and hand-sewed a curtain to surround those twenty-four square feet and mounted a bar on the two open edges. I hung my clothing on wire hangers begged from the dry cleaner around the corner, borrowed a narrow futon and a plastic crate from Harris, and lived there for two and a half months.

  My ten-foot-high window looked south onto the World Trade Center. It was so close I didn’t need to think about it. When I woke up, it was there, filling the window with its mirrors.

  My roommates paid more rent than I did and lived in office cubicles separated by drywall. It was more than a year before anyone figured out how to put up a ceiling. As we fell asleep at night, we spoke to each other in the dark like brothers and sisters. Sometimes someone played music in his cubicle so we all could hear it.

  After a while we instituted a rule against that, trying to force the illusion of privacy.

  Eventually everyone just called the place Chambers Street. We all knew it was No. 119. Keys were given away and lost. Things fell into the floorboard holes. Drugs got stolen. Tenants came and went and their artifacts accumulated—a framed drawing, a piggy bank, a bong. Someone brought home a puppy. Someone put on a nitrous oxide puppet show. Someone dropped the air-conditioning unit out the back window and through a grocery storefront. Someone published a novel about the place. Someone tried to hang himself in the bathroom.

  Every New Year’s Eve was like the last moment of your life—if you stayed late enough, within a few hours you’d see everyone you’d ever met, minus a few relatives.

  Wire-reinforced windows opened onto the fire escape at the front of the building. I sang in a choir and practiced my parts out there, in the cacophony of traffic. I never felt anyone watching me or listening to me as I sang Mendelssohn into the air, three floors up.

  After he built his ceiling and bought the orchestral score of a Webern opera, Harris invited me into his room. It wasn’t a cubicle anymore. I muddled my way through the soprano line of some song, and he looked at me as if it had been the best thing he’d ever heard.

  * * *

  Harris met the train with his body, offered it his body.

  The train drove into his body. It drove against his body.

  It sent him from his body.

  The conductor went down onto the track and touched the body and lifted and carried the body.

  There was no need for a doctor.

  The body was removed from the track and rested for two days without its name.

  * * *

  Engineers who have driven suicide trains, who have looked into the eyes of the people they were forced to kill, aren’t required to disembark to remove the remains from the track. Removing the remains is the conductor’s job.

  My lab partner from ninth-grade biology, now an emergency doctor, writes:

  I’m not sure that anyone can tell exactly what happens to a body upon impact with a train. It happens very fast, and it’s hard for me to imagine that the person has any awareness of pain because the trauma will likely be so massive and so instant with the amount of force a fast-moving train carries. I don’t think any more specific data exists than that it is essentially a massive and rapid crush injury to all organs, bones, etc.

  In photographs of bodies hit by cars and crushed by bus tires, train wheels, and tanks, I can see that all the red and yellow interior parts of the body have been pressed out of the skin. The hard skull is detached. The clothes are shredded. The soft inner parts of the body cover a surprisingly large area on the ground.

  If I worked in a morgue, I wouldn’t expose the entire extruded mess. I’d show the identifier a small part of it, whatever still resembled the outside of a body, or what the identifier might remember of the outside of it, if I could.

  I think I remember hearing that Harris’s parents identified the body, but then I think the teeth must have been collected, and maybe no one had to look at what was left of Harris’s body after it was crushed into its constituent parts.

  Thus untethered, the body no longer possessed situation in the world, and there was nothing more to say about it.

  * * *

  Harris never listened to music on the subway, he told me, because he liked to hear the sounds of the city: the high sound of metal on metal, the low sound of cars moving forward, the tinny leakage of other people’s music from tiny speakers, speech in improbable languages, the breath and movement of bodies, and the live music sung and played by the anonymous performers of the New York City underground.

  When the first few bars of a piece of music stayed in my head for months, in my misery I sang them to Harris—and he immediately said, Oh, that’s the fugue to the Bach G minor violin sonata.

  * * *

  Hours into a blind date I looked at my watch, knowing I’d never see the man again but feeling wrecked by the number of first dates I’d had in the past month, and thought, Why not bring him to the concert? The redheaded man photographed well but in person had the yellow skin of a vagrant because he’d smoked for thirty years. Thirty years! I’d been accepting dates with older men because I wanted to be taken seriously.

  It felt so good to know that Harris’s family was there at the concert, waiting for me in case I needed them.

  The redheaded man and I went to a concert where Harris was playing fiddle with one of his innumerable bands, and I sat with Harris’s mother and introduced the man I’d never see again and basked in the warm light of the underground club.

  * * *

  Those blind dates brought me such pleasure—not the pleasure of meeting people, but the pleasure of my pretense that I was trying.

  I went out with an actor who sat in a famous person’s restaurant and snarled that he hated the famous person, hoping to summon him to the table so they might be photographed together.

  I went out with a theater set-builder who had a black belt in something. He grabbed my wrists just before the check came.

  I went out with a disc jockey who dragged a leg. Someone had recently approached him in a parking lot at dusk, asked him, Is that neurological? and then mugged him.

  * * *

  As we pulled into the driveway on the first night of Passover, having taken a car all the way from the city to his parents’ house on Long Island, Harris said, Be careful—my grandmother will think I got married. We smiled.

  We spent all our money on drinks and taxicabs. We knew that others our age had enslaved themselves to mortgages and pregnant wives. Family was a balm for the unimaginative, a consolation for the unremarkable, just another thing to feel superior to.

  As if Harris didn’t know any better than to eat a cracker before offering one to his girl, his grandmother pointed to the olive spread and said to him, Make a nice one for Sarah. What we didn’t know, of course, was that the grandmother understood. She just pretended not to. She had seen it all before.

  When I was older I understood that I’d been invited into the family and that I’d been too frightened to accept the invitation.

  * * *

  On a summer afternoon Harris suggested that he and I go outside for a moment, away from the music and the crowd.

  He brought me outside. The sun burned. We stood by the side of a building and I talked about something until Harris knew he wouldn’t be able to talk about what he’d brought me outside to talk about. We went back inside.

  * * *

  I really wish I could show you my penis, he said, as if it were a painting or a country. God, I just wish I could show it to you.

  It was said to be a majestic organ, the greates
t that many had seen.

  We still lived with three other guys in that raw loft space, and at home I turned my gender most of the way off so that when the guys evaluated women, I could listen and even participate a little, and not just fall to pieces at the irrelevance of my femininity. I listened to the dick jokes and cruel anecdotes and judgments and didn’t feel a thing. Not for years.

  A few women had confirmed among themselves the supremacy of Harris’s penis. Eventually we all accepted it into our reality along with another roommate’s hairline, another’s whining. Harris was the one with the ear for music, the folding bike, and the penis.

  Aside from a couple of intoxicated kisses, Harris and I never attempted to touch each other, so his penis was always safe from the responsibility of its power. We could talk about it as if it were an amazing restaurant in another town.

  For years, we returned, yearningly, to the subject of the transcendent penis. Each time we discussed it, we observed our feelings—would it be possible that I could be shown the beautiful thing? Could either of us recover from it? And if we couldn’t recover, would it be worth it, just to have beheld it for a moment?

  If we’d ever been to bed, we could never have talked about his penis as we did.

  Now it is among the great mysteries.

  * * *

  I lived in Manhattan for six months and then moved to Brooklyn, near the East River, and awoke after the planes had already hit the buildings. There was no television. The transmitter was in Manhattan in a pile on the ground.

  As I got dressed and packed my camera, Harris rang up.

  A giant white bank of plume spread east, from Lower Manhattan, across the otherwise blue sky.

  We walked to the river. On the other side of it, one building stood where there had been two, and I took two pictures of the fire at the top of it.

  People waited quietly along Kent Avenue. Car radios played every couple of blocks, and Harris and I stood in the street, waiting and listening and watching the tower burn.

  We didn’t stare at the tower as if it were television. We looked at it, looked away, talked a little. People were jumping out of it like angels.