Imagine Me Gone

by Adam Haslett

  3. She nonetheless reported out her sense of our situation: (1) unit cohesion, and affect of individual soldiers (me), still questionable years after resignation of the co-commander. Elephant still in the room. Ghost still in the basement; (2) retraining required to improve overall performance. Alec generally concurred. Mom said something about having nothing against talking. In an effort to get her to elaborate, Gus referred to Dad as her “life partner.” Man, was that a mistake. The phrase grated violently on the brain of the unit, causing instant suspicion that the training officer might be a New Age–language infectee, thus unable to survive Mom’s judgment and impotent to assist us. Gus asked what was so funny. It’s nothing, Mom said, it’s just that I would never refer to John that way.

  4. Mom ordered by Gus to Reeducation Camp Worcester to meet disciplinary standards for therapeutic self-description. Junior members of the unit did not object. Countermanding the instruction, however, Mom ordered a cruise-missile strike from the USS Passive Disdain, a destroyer under her command presently operating in the waters off Cape Cod. Camp Worcester reported leveled.

  5. Adult acne became general. Scattered reports of giardia, stress fractures, and hair loss.

  6. During initial interrogation, Alec informed Gus that he was gay. Celia responded by observing that we were here to discuss things we didn’t already know. Resulting friendly fire caused minor damage to decor and fenestration. Mom seen wincing at loss of family privacy. Gus asked if Alec had anything he wanted to say to the family as a whole on this subject. The PFC reported that, yes, in fact, he had kept much of his struggle to himself, in tacit deference to the hierarchy in which Dad’s resignation still ranked above all other battle wounds.

  7. Records indicated that the little wheezer had come out to Subcomandante Celia first, somewhere back during the Opium War of his middle adolescence. According to later reporting, he had suggested to her he would end up a closet case in light of his ambition to join the Senate (may he be forgiven). Second up was his reveal to Mom (a conversation about which the less imagined the better). Only after he had gone to college did he bring it up with me. I was driving us to the cineplex one summer evening in the Cutlass. He asked if I had met anyone at BC, and if Caleigh was my girlfriend. This came as a surprise, given that he and I never talked about such things, his being his larval, stripling self—boy pretender to the empty throne—and my being generally ashamed. He was single, he said, knuckling bravely through the awkwardness of talking with me about it. And it turned out, he said, looking away from me and out his window, that he was attracted to men. We had just passed the house of one of his high school friends, a precocious fan of Stüssy gear, pretty in a Duran Duran sort of way, whom I remembered him being particularly fond of, and I was saddened at the thought of the little fidget-buster being lonely. I told him that I approved of homosexuality as a counter-hegemonic subject position. That it constituted one of the key sites of resistance to patriarchy, and should be understood as a revolutionary stance. In retrospect, I could have used a more personal touch. He might have wanted something more from me, given the absence of the father function.

  8. Moving on, Gus noted that I had yet to describe my own sense of the unit’s mission. Searching for cover, I found none. The night before, after Commodore Celia had granted me leave to discuss Bethany in our session, I had stayed in my old room listening to her favorite Aphex Twin tracks, and trying to read a little Althusser. After repeated tries, Caleigh finally answered the phone at her parents’ house, where she’d gone for Christmas. To my disappointment, her instructions were to heed Celia’s advice: own up already to the hollowness of the salvific fantasy of romance, to its childishness. And take to heart what Celia kept implying: that my lamentation was misplaced, that the loss of Bethany was a stand-in for the older grief, a loss I was bound to repeat until I let its real object surface. This, of course, was a Freudianism straight out of basic training, and a principle I readily accepted. The problem being that basic training had so little to do with actual combat. My intellectual grasp of my situation never seemed to hold much. Life kept slipping through it. And in life, I needed Bethany. Because she could let me love her now, in the present. And even if doctrine held that this love wouldn’t give me back everything I’d lost, what if it did? After Caleigh tired of my resistance, and we said good night, I took my meds and fell into a dream-soaked slumber. I found myself at an auction. A stage, or block, had been erected at the back of a Christian Dior boutique in old Charleston. There, up on the platform, naked and glistening in the spotlight, was Bethany. Some bidders snapped photographs. Others stepped close to appraise the tone of her muscles. White women in beautifully cut dresses made disparaging remarks about the condition of her hair. Meanwhile, on the wall behind her, between two glass display cases of couture gowns, blood ran from the palms of a High Gothic Jesus, skeletal and pale. No one seemed to notice him. I tried taking suits from the rack to cover Bethany, to shelter her from the eyes of the crowd, but the saleswoman told me I had to purchase the merchandise before using it. At which point a hole opened in my chest, and I vomited into the hole, the hot liquid circulating back up through my heart and neck into my head. Bethany crumpled to her knees by the footlights, bowed and silent. All I could do was stand there, failing to save her.

  9. Deciding it might be best to skip my dream sequence, I told Gus I concurred with Celia. Airing the effects of the past was long overdue. As Marx tells us, the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare upon the brains of the living. I was all for the discussion of transgenerational haunting. It was just hard to focus at the moment owing to a woman in Ohio I needed to visit.

  10. Executing an ingratiation maneuver with a bit of quick jocularity, training officer deployed the phrase girlfriend trouble. Tower of Babel. No interpreters in sight. I could sooner have crafted an origami hare from the gold wafer of his melted wedding band than communicate how completely he had misapprehended me. Girlfriend trouble? Those pesky ladies it’s so hard to keep from bitching at you? Training officer’s feminism missing and presumed dead.

  11. After thanking us for sharing, Gus briefed us on the rules of engagement: This was not a free-fire zone, we were to limit collateral damage, and leave no one behind. That understood, what, he wanted to know, were present conditions? Mom reported that she was just glad to have us all home. And that she wished I didn’t have to take so many pills. So that was helpful. Also, she had noticed that Gus had graduated from Bowdoin, and wondered if he had studied with Maureen Durant-Draper, the archaeologist, who had been a classmate of hers at Smith. She’s done a lot of work on Constantinople, Mom said, I don’t know if you ever came across her? Junior ranks of the unit slumped, defeated, in their chairs. As you can see, Mom said to Gus, my children are fond of being exasperated. Gus turned to the grunts to ask what bothered us about the mother ship’s inquiry. I’m supposed to be more serious, Mom said, answering for us. But we’re not here to talk about me, she went on, it’s what they have to say that’s important.

  12. Seeing the operation going sideways, Celia redirected us to the core mission. Conversation ensued regarding the long half-life of Dad. I had no objection to this other than my virtually blank memory of him as a person. That Mom should remember her husband made sense. But why Celia and even Alec the Younger should have such vivid recall of him while I, who knew him longest, have trouble even picturing his face I couldn’t rightly say. The three of them proceeded to be moved by painful memories. Listening to them was mesmerizing. They cried like they had that afternoon I returned from England to Walcott with Peter Lorian, after Dad died, and I had watched them leaning against each other on the couch in the living room, their grief seemingly intensified at the sight of me. Hearing their collective weeping again in Gus’s office, I thought that in the force of their feelings there might be a way back for me. Into the time before I fled the house, before I left them there, blind to the coming evil that I alone had seen. A chance to somehow repent for my cowardice
by joining them now. And yet as mesmerizing as their emotion was, it reached me like the sound of a record played low in another room, a world of meaning beckoning me to a closed door.

  13. If I had just woken up earlier that morning, Alec was saying to Gus, I could have spoken to Dad, and maybe he wouldn’t have left. Dear, Mom said, you can’t think like that. And then without warning, Alec was speaking about me, saying how much he worried about my life, how he wished things could be easier for me, and Celia was silently agreeing with him, rocking her whole body back and forth, biting her lower lip, trying not to cry again. Mom put her hand on my knee. It’s hard for Michael, she explained to Gus. And it’s hard for us to know what to do. Gus looked across the coffee table at me. They seem very concerned about you, he said. How does that feel?

  14. There is a point in all wars of attrition when the combatants begin to suspect that their purpose is not at all what they believed it to be, that in fact the war is its own organism, of which they are merely the cells, and that its sole drive is to go on forever. Depending on the hour, the insight either maddens or clarifies, sending you into despair, or clearing your vision by releasing you from the bonds of hope.

  15. Time had fled. Our session was ending. In his concluding remarks, Gus appeared genuinely excited at the complexity of the unit’s issues. He said there was a lot to work with, and that his office stood ready to complete the retraining if we were willing and able. Afterwards, we went to a Japanese restaurant. Mom asked us what sashimi was. I drank pilsners. The order to stand down was never given. Later, under cover of darkness, we commenced our retreat.

  III

  Alec

  There were no shades on his windows. Lying on his bed I could see across the street to the roofs of the buildings opposite, to the water towers and stovepipes silhouetted against clouds backlit by the moon, a picture of some old New York, a movie-set picture, as if we’d met the old-fashioned way, in a bar, and were a couple of kids who’d wound up here on a drunken lark.

  His bed was pressed into the corner, against the windowsill, leaving just enough room for the closet door to open. Above the Ikea dresser, postcards of minimalist paintings and geometric tiles were thumbtacked to the wall. He had gone into the only other room of the apartment to get his computer. It was already two in the morning. An hour earlier and I might have salvaged the following day, but it was close to shot now. Seth was his name.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, when he climbed back onto the bed with his laptop.

  “I want to play you a song,” he said.

  A song? How credulous, I thought, at this stage. We’d kissed and helped each other come in the usual imitation of porn—a warming exercise of sorts, trying to clear away the awkwardness of anonymity to see if there might be conversation. We’d been lying in bed awhile now, chatting, which surprised me—that neither of us had balked yet.

  His pics had deceived less than most. He’d said he was twenty-eight and he looked about that. For his face shot, he’d employed the standard attitudinal glare, meant to signal languid indifference, a mix of attempted intimidation and reassurance that hooking up would involve no entanglements because he didn’t need anything more than that, being otherwise self-contained and perhaps already boyfriended. It was the safest way to go about all of this, conceding nothing of your desire beyond the moment at hand. The jacked-up brain state of skimming pics and profiles and the eventual orgasm—with someone else, or alone if you bagged out and got off to a video clip instead—were narcotic enough to skip you over the grinding moments of outright deception, the encounters cut short at the front door.

  “It’s a Vanessa Smythe song,” he said, scrolling through a playlist.

  Sidelong, in the light of the screen, his face was gentler than the image that had got me to click on him. His eyes and mouth had an indefinite quality, a pliancy, which had distracted me as we were getting off. He wasn’t, in fact, intimidating. And for a moment I’d hated him for it, for being softer than his ad. Though at the same time it made me curious. His fine black hair needed a cut. He was unshaven, but not, it seemed, for fashion’s sake. There was something particular about him, a lack of the usual guardedness. Already I’d stayed longer than I’d intended, and still felt no urge to leave.

  “Do you know her stuff?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. My music had always come from Michael. I’d never developed my own habit of finding new things to listen to. If he didn’t share or mention something, it passed me by. For a long time that had meant being effortlessly ahead of the curve as he sent me tapes, then CDs, then audio files of what he was listening to, but he’d done less of that since the whole Bethany episode, which was already five years ago now, and my collection had grown dated.

  “Take a listen,” Seth said.

  The opening notes of a jazz standard filled the little room. A live recording of a piano ambling in a minor key, accompanied by a horn, summoning the ease of some velvet banquette in a ’40s nightclub. Then came a woman’s low, tentative voice, singing the occasional line slipped in between the motions of the players, as if hesitant to interrupt. I wasn’t a big jazz fan, but the tune was pleasantly melancholic. I was trying to let go of how late it was, to give up on tomorrow, and the music helped. A slow beat entered the mix, a snare, then a bass, and eventually a few strings, creating a swirling sound. It was the reworking of a standard, not a classic rendition. When the piano expanded its range the singer seemed to take it as permission to let in more feeling, in the last words of a line, swinging a note, holding it an instant longer than the line before.

  Seth had put aside his computer and was lying next to me again. The song went on like this for a while, balancing between restraint and release. I’d expected either a trashy pop hit shared in irony or some aficionado’s serious band, but this was neither. The longer it went on, the more I thought Michael would like it. He didn’t care who made a thing if it had that particular ache to it. And this did. Whatever safe, old-world reference it had begun with was slipping away now. The opening shyness of the singer had been a feint. Her voice had power, and she knew it.

  You’re not anywhere else, she seemed to be saying. You’re here now, with me, in this room.

  As we lay there together listening, Seth, like a nervous kid on a first date, reached over and took my hand in his. It was so unexpected, and so tender, it caused me to shudder. A few minutes ago we’d had our dicks in each other’s mouths. We’d kissed and tongued. But all that had been routine. This was different, and riskier. It hinted at intimacy. He was actually touching me. And I was letting him do it.

  The muscles of my neck let go, and my head sank deeper into the pillow.

  Holding hands listening to a favorite song? As if we hadn’t met two hours ago? As if we hadn’t both got off like this with strangers who knew how many times before? Did he think he was a magician, that he could just wish the anonymity away?

  Whatever the singer was doing now it wasn’t cool anymore. Her voice had opened wide, edging toward the point of failure, making it clear she wasn’t faking it, that the trouble in the song was her own, that she was in some kind of real danger, which no producer’s smoothing edits could save her from. Not that she was crazy. She wasn’t letting her audience off the hook that easily, by offering the safety of distance that would open up if she were just to make a spectacle of herself. She was staying close, continuing to bear the weight of herself.

  Without thinking, I interlaced my fingers more tightly with Seth’s. As though I had traveled back into some younger, more trusting self. When he squeezed my hand, I fell into pure nostalgia. The keen memory of a thing I’d never had. A nostalgia for a moment just like this. As if back when I was a teenager and I’d wanted it so achingly bad, I had met a boy and we had fallen in love, and been together in private ecstasy. And as if, at last, I could mourn the loss of that imagined happiness.

  The voice was in full flight now, skipping up and out of any world that could possibly last, into sheer
bliss, giving me the ridiculous hope that Seth and I could be together. That he could give me back what I’d lost. Lying beside him, I prayed for it.

  When I left the next morning, he gave me his number and e-mail and I gave him mine. I walked onto the street I had seen only in the darkness of the night before. Trash cans were lined up at the sidewalk and the cars were double-parked, the pavement wet from an early-winter snow. Men in suit pants and ski jackets with laptop bags over their shoulders and women in tailored suits and knee-length winter coats made their way in silence to the train. Like a college freshman who’d just had sex for the first time, I studied their faces to see if I could detect which of them had come from the warmth of a drowsy morning fuck, who among them were the elect, as Michael called them, and who had slept and eaten by themselves, their mornings spent in the little disciplines of solitude. An absurd perch for me to assume on the basis of one night, as if I were elect now, a giant presumption, but as I joined the sidewalk traffic, trailing with it down toward the subway, that was the difference: the spell of the night before seemed for once strong enough to countervail the evidence of the world unchanged.