The Guardians Read online

  Case 2: The admission note by the psychiatrist stated, He is somewhat paranoid but says he has side effects from most tranquilizers. On the third day of hospitalization, he was referred to the psychiatrist by nurses because of difficulty getting to sleep. No evidence of aggressiveness or self-injurious behavior was charted that day in the nurses’ notes. The psychiatrist prescribed haloperidol, 5 mg three times a day.

  Nurses’ notes that day stated, He was very anxious about being in the hospital and threatened to kill himself if he gets up the nerve. At 10:45 p.m., notes stated, He has regressed during this shift in all assessment areas. His hygiene is poor. He refused medication initially at 5:00 p.m. and stated that phenothiazines mess me up. He finally took the medication but then stated angrily, Now I’ll really get crazy. He ranted loudly and profanely for thirty minutes. He took his 9:00 p.m. medication and started again, only louder and more threatening. I’ll kill all of you … before I leave here.

  He was found in his room at 6:50 a.m., having hanged himself with a bedsheet.

  Case 3: A man received two 25 mg doses of haloperidol and was allowed to leave the hospital for an outpatient psychiatrist appointment twelve hours after admission.

  One court-appointed evaluator’s report described his developing symptoms of neck rigidity, arms twisting, legs being unsteady, needing to walk, and being confused. Another court-appointed psychiatrist’s report stated the man had feelings that his body was falling apart, that it was like all the bones in his body were broken, and that he was spastic and had had a minor stroke. Repeatedly, he described his skeletal framework being out of kilter, with neck twisted and difficulty walking. A period of loss of control, like jumping off a fence and being in midair was another of his descriptions. He had been unable to sleep and stated he felt a need to get out of the approximately seventh or eighth episode of these symptoms.

  It was then within thirty-six hours that he got a hammer from the basement and walked up behind his mother, striking her repeatedly, leading to her death that day.

  * * *

  When I was twenty-five my parents were exhausted from trying to prevent me from dying, which they’d already done all through my life up to that point. They’d achieved success, full marks. I was still alive.

  I wanted to die and wasn’t allowed to at home, so when I was brought to the locked ward I committed myself willingly because I thought the people there would help me, though I understood the possibility of their helping me only academically. I knew that other people had gone into lockdown and come out somewhat healed, and that either outcome, healing or death, would be preferable to the way I’d been living.

  Suicidal ideation is tricky. When the vision appears, it seems determined, already done. Then the vision subsides, and you see the rest of your possible life stretching out before you untainted.

  If you’d asked me, on the afternoon I voluntarily committed myself, whether anything in my life outweighed the feeling that made me long for death, I would have said no, because nothing did.

  It’s impossible to calculate the number of good days left for a person with the kind of illness that Harris had, so maybe my belief that he would have had many more good days is a false belief.

  * * *

  Mental patients can be wily. While I was on the ward, two people managed to escape in eleven days, both having spied and memorized the lock’s combination. People forget that some of the patients want to get out.

  There are always at least a couple of people at the front desk, and maybe someone who knows jujitsu, just in case. I don’t know for sure.

  When medication is administered, the pills are signed out and logged, then given to the patient and logged again, and while the patient takes the medicine, someone watches the pills go into the patient’s mouth, and then the patient is given water to swallow, and then the patient gapes to show the pills have been swallowed. A finger is swiped under the tongue if the patient has recently been noncompliant, the clinical term for possessing a tendency to spit out pills.

  Think about the person who opened the door for my dead friend. Imagine her closing it behind him.

  I know it was probably a group of people at the ward’s front desk, not one single person on duty when Harris left, but it feels very good to focus my attention on some imaginary wicked, murdering angel.

  * * *

  Dear angel, I feel as if I’ve been robbed, but there was no robbery. Harris didn’t belong to me. He didn’t belong to anyone.

  I’d like to describe this feeling to you, angel, but no matter how close I get to it, the words that come are disappointed (from the French desapointer, to derange), sad (from the Middle English saed, sated, from the Latin satis, enough)—words derived from older words describing conditions of confusion or satiation, and I am neither satiated nor confused. The problem isn’t just that my friend died but that I can’t describe the problem according to first principles. All the words I know have lost their precision to history.

  When I say my friend had a bad death you already know the sanctioned feelings. The knowledge arrives in a package deal, like a casket with gold-plated handles and matching gold tassels on the coverlet, which no observant Jew would ever buy. I imagine there are attempts to sell them to Jews anyway.

  I want to set aside every expectation of how I should feel or act given that my friend had a bad death, and try to explain what has actually happened to me—if, in fact, anything has actually happened to me.

  * * *

  The problem with dying in private is that the rest of us don’t get to watch it happen, and things that happen without us seem less real, not quite finished, maybe even impossible.

  If Harris had died slowly, under a beautiful lace-trimmed coverlet, with stage four something or other, and if a yellow light had been burning somewhere in a far corner of the room as we quietly cried, and if everyone had had a chance to say goodbye or otherwise get to narrate the end of the story, then maybe I could believe that Harris is better off dead and freed from his torments.

  After your friend throws himself in front of a train, you tell the rest of your friends that you love them in case they all throw themselves in front of trains before you have a chance to say it. Maybe you’ve said it to them before, but you do it again, just in case, as if giving them permission to forgo the lace coverlet and to die as Harris actually died—as if to say that with the lace coverlet, it would be easier.

  * * *

  My mind occasionally places me in warm midday, seated across a table from Harris, who is well and calm and maybe a little tanned, as if he has been traveling.

  Since we’re old friends who have been apart so long, it’s always nice to run into each other. My dream is a strange town, and we’re both traveling alone.

  What a wonderful coincidence! How have you been? he asks. I’m sorry I’ve haunted you. I hope it hasn’t been too much trouble.

  Oh, it’s no trouble at all! I say, surprised and touched. It’s just so nice to see you. Really, don’t worry about it …

  * * *

  I often forget I’m a particle in a cosmic process that has nothing to do with human desire or justice. I forget that the world is chaos, that it is incorruptible.

  A week after he died, I wrote, Realize a new level of not caring. What’s going to happen now, Harris dies? What’s to be afraid of now?

  I arrived at an appointment in Manhattan to find the entire long block cordoned. In the middle of the street was a black limousine on its side, a small mangled car far ahead of it, a brown valise, a jacket, a pair of shoes, a bloody piece of something next to the shoes. People lined the sidewalk repeating the litany of what they’d seen. It was already a myth.

  * * *

  I’m not angry at Harris for being dead.

  I’m not angry at Victor. Even now, when I remember his best tattoo, a pill and a pear shaking their fists and scolding a peanut, I smile and see him smile back.

  I’m not angry at my favorite aunt. I love her for eloping with a Ge
ntile and opening a bar with him and living in the city and sending me seventy-five dollars for a coat tree when I moved to that terrible little apartment where the gunshots sounded at night.

  The coats that have hung on it in these nine years! It’s still here in our house in Los Angeles even though we don’t wear coats as we did in New York.

  * * *

  A distant friend writes to me, having heard that Harris is dead. She writes: I just found out about Harris’s passing and wanted to send my condolences. I know he was like family to you.

  I can’t measure my grief and I can’t show anyone what color it is. I can offer testimony that others can reject or accept on faith, but my grief is always just my grief, unobservable by anyone but me, and then imperfectly. And maybe it isn’t even grief anymore; maybe it’s envy of people who aren’t grieving, or shame that my grief is lasting so long when I’m not even part of Harris’s family.

  There are good fathers and bad fathers, good sons and bad sons, good husbands and bad ones, but great friends are all alike. We choose them and keep them. We aren’t bound to them by anything but love.

  It doesn’t sound like much when I say my friend died. He wasn’t my father or my son or my husband. Yet there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother, says an Old Testament proverb.

  * * *

  We never had intercourse, but whether we had intercourse is beside the point, though if asked to identify the point, I wouldn’t be able to.

  I had intercourse with people I didn’t know, or stopped knowing, or knew slightly, or kept knowing and kept having intercourse with, or kept knowing and stopped having intercourse with. I remember almost none of that. I remember intimacies of one kind or another, some in bed, some not.

  I remember less about the embrace than about the sash a man sewed to cover a surgical wound so it wouldn’t terrify us as we embraced. I remember falling out of love with a man at the same rate I fell into love with his infant son. I remember that in winter, on the treadmill at the gym, if the runner on the machine beside me and I decided wordlessly to match our pace for a mile or two, I felt a certain intimacy.

  * * *

  When a world-renowned research doctor is profiled on television, he’s always shown in his lab, dripping liquid from pipettes into test tubes in a large rack. Twenty edited minutes later, he’s shown sitting on a rock by the ocean, or in a field, writing poetry in a notebook, for the world-renowned research doctor is also always a poet.

  I’ve come to call myself a doctor—not a professional doctor, of course—an amateur one. A doctor could type a novel in his spare time as easily as I could trepan a skull in my spare time. The difference is that bad surgery is a felony, whereas bad writing is merely a moral offense.

  To claim oneself a writer when one is not a writer is an insult to writers, but to call oneself crazy when one is not crazy is an insult to crazy people. It belittles what they’ve accomplished.

  * * *

  What is grief for?

  Mechanical explanation: Pain directs my attention to an injury or insult and subsides once the injury or insult is mended or neutralized. The pain of loss subsides if I replace what I lost or adjust permanently to accommodate the loss.

  Evolutionary explanation: Grief is a byproduct of attachment in social animals. The grief of loss teaches me to prevent potential loss of kin.

  Religious explanation: God, the engineer of all that happens, knows best. All life is but a gauntlet ere I live again in heaven.

  Real explanation: Love abides. There is no other solace.

  * * *

  After a beautiful day at the beach with people who never knew Harris, all the way home, I think of opening the front door and going inside and sitting down and typing the words Beautiful day at the beach, and then of recording the events of the day.

  But a card has come in the mail from Harris’s parents that reads, Dearest Sarah … There are so many things that we will never understand about Harris’s life. We do know for sure that you were one of the most important people in it …

  * * *

  In the Vatican Secret Archives, a woman I know examines the effects of light and heat and moisture and time on the bindings of early Italian legal and accounting documents. She is an expert on the structure, fabrication, authentication, and anti-tampering devices of these documents.

  To perform her research she had to apply for admittance to Vatican City, which is guarded by boys in bright harlequin, orange and yellow and blue. They wear swords and hold staves. They stand all day at their gates, letting almost no one in.

  She makes facsimiles of the documents before they decay further. She makes reality safer, but writing is never truly safe. Writing is done in a moment—the moment at which its reality is least mutable—and afterward its reality fades, approaches zero.

  Nothing I perceive is real. Nothing I remember is real. I used to be able to ignore the bright light, the big fire, of that general problem. Some parts of the story are gone, but they have left a heavy imprint, and even now I can detect the shape of what made it, the shape of what used to exist.

  * * *

  Just before I fall asleep I often find myself at an imaginary party taking place in a large house. I find the shape of my grief, leaning against a doorjamb, talking to someone I know. I shudder to recognize it. I cross a threshold or climb some stairs or step down onto a porch. My mind knows not to look directly at my grief. There are many guests at the party, and it is easy to hide.

  * * *

  The first dreams were monstrous dreams, gargantuan narratives of containment and escape, lush landscapes, weird foreign countries. In one scene I saw Harris sitting in front of me, his bare back to me. I knew I mustn’t startle away his ghost. I reached out, not looking, took a hand. It was his hand. I held it, our fingers interlaced. I knew he was dead. I knew it was a dream. I knew I would awaken happy.

  In the last dream Harris was in a hospital, receiving medicine intravenously. He was neither dead nor alive. I begged to enter his room and I was allowed. His body wasn’t human. I took his left hand, but there was no hand, just a long chicken bone stripped of meat. I spoke to him, Aitchie … The thing that was his body stirred and seemed to understand. Very softly, as I let the bone slip through my fingers, I told him goodbye. I was completely present in the dream. I knew in the dream that I could let him go, that it was the end.

  * * *

  I remember the shock of my friend Victor’s death, seven years ago, as a physiological event. I doubled over and called out my denial, no no no no no, like an animal making its one sound.

  Years later one of Victor’s friends said to me, I never got over it. After he died, I got a rash all over my body. I still have it.

  Harris has been dead three years now, but I’m quite well. I can hike in the hills, work in the garden, give a lecture, cook a meal.

  Harris’s mother writes, We were told that the woman who let him out became so distraught after his death that she was unable to work again for several months. I wish I could focus my energy on hating this distraught woman, but no feeling comes.

  I still have something, though, that came with the death and never went away: anticipatory grief, the mourning that takes place before a certain death or loss. A certain death or loss refers to a terminal diagnosis, but of course you know every death is certain. We are matter. We live in matter. Within even the most metaphysical belief system we’re connected to our bodies, which are matter, and which always die.

  After Harris died, I decided to spend some time anticipating all the deaths I couldn’t predict. I pictured my parents dead, my husband, my best friends, my relatives, everyone I knew, one by one. I started grieving good and early, so that when the deaths happened, I’d have a head start.

  I work on each death. I enjoy my methodical practice. By the time the real deaths happen, I’ll already have lived through them. Their assault won’t shake me. Next time, I won’t even need tranquilizers. Next time, I’ll be ready. I’ll be ready f
or every other death.

  If I know you, you’ve died in my imagination. This can’t be right.

  * * *

  I keep rereading my journal from the days and weeks after Harris died as if I’ll find something that wasn’t there the last time I read it.

  On the day Harris died, I gave up the lease on the apartment I’d moved into four years earlier. Four years earlier, I’d had to travel there from another state, and Harris was there in the morning to let the movers in before I arrived.

  I could write a tidy little symbolic study of this coincidence, but now I believe that if I look hard enough at any two things, a relation will emerge. Yet an apartment doesn’t replace another, and this moment doesn’t replace the previous moment. It overwrites it. The tablet is illegible now, so many words written over so many other words.

  * * *

  A year after Harris died I received a letter:

  My cousin drove out to Amboy California along Route 66 and pulled his car onto the tracks moments before a freight train broadsided and killed him.

  He was a talented artist and appreciated your work. He had planned and rehearsed his death including his funeral where I am to read your poem “The Rider” and to comment on it.

  Could you please send me a copy of your poem or direct me to where I can purchase it in Canada.

  Regards,

  V. L.

  Edmonton Canada.

  The first people who heard any part of this book read aloud were a group of students in a Connecticut church. One of them said to me afterward, The date wasn’t lost on me. The next day I realized I’d read from the section about the mundanities of July 23, 2008, on July 23, 2010, which I would have called a coincidence if I hadn’t already borne witness to enough so-called coincidences that I’d stopped trusting my understanding of the word.

  I began to expect them, so when I returned to Brooklyn and visited Harris’s bench in Prospect Park, I sat and waited. An orthodox Jew walked by, payes bobbing, the tassels of his shawl blowing around his waist, but I wasn’t sure that counted. I waited until I saw a man wearing a T-shirt printed with the image of a Mondrian painting like the one Harris copied, and then I walked out of the park. As soon as I reached the sidewalk, it started raining as hard as it did on the day Harris died.