The Friend

by Sigrid Nunez

  Next time?

  That was the deal. The therapist would give me what I wanted, and in return I’d come back.

  At least for a couple more sessions, he says.

  • • •

  Sitting in the therapist’s office, Apollo at my side, I can’t help smiling. It’s like we’re in couples therapy.

  Except that we get along.

  One time, a woman passing us in the street shot me this: Better a dog for a husband than a husband who’s a dog, I always say.

  Always?

  When I was in my twenties, out walking Beau, I sometimes got lewd comments from men. That dog your old man? You sleep with that dog? You fuck that dog, lady? I bet you let him eat you.

  I find it unsettling when another woman in the street calls Apollo sexy and tells me she’s jealous. You’re a lucky, lucky woman, she says.

  • • •

  When the certificate arrives, I waft it under Apollo’s nose before sticking it under a magnet on the refrigerator door.

  You do realize, says Wife One, that you’re committing fraud. Even if it is for a good cause.

  I am aware of the righteous anger of those in genuine need of animal support toward the growing number of people passing off ordinary—and in some cases exotic—pets as service animals. I’ve heard about the skunk in the college dorm, the iguana in the restaurant, the pig on the airplane. I promise that I will not take Apollo anywhere he would not normally be allowed. After making a copy of the certificate to send to the building management agent, I will leave it and the badge from the National Service Animal Registry at home.

  As for the therapist, he had no reservations about putting in writing that I was suffering from depression and anxiety aggravated by bereavement, that the dog was providing essential emotional support the loss of which was likely to cause harm to my mental health and might even be life threatening.

  Wife One thinks it’s funny: Because the truth is, in this case it’s the animal who can’t deal, and you’re his emotional support human.

  • • •

  Now I am forced to talk. If nothing else, to explain why I don’t want to talk. Still true: I don’t want to talk about you, or to hear others talk about you.

  I want to quote Wittgenstein on the unspeakable and the necessity for silence. Even if quoting philosophers out of context was something you told us not to do. Philosophical statements aren’t old sayings, you said.

  A pause here to wonder at Wittgenstein, three of whose four brothers killed themselves, and who often thought about killing himself too. Who, like Kafka, is said to have received the news of his terminal illness with relief, but whose words at the actual hour of death bring to mind George Bailey: Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life!

  Do I talk to Apollo, the shrink asks. Well, yes. To encourage bonding, it is recommended that people talk to their dogs. Which seems to come naturally (though my guess is people are now doing it less and less, thanks to our attention-devouring devices).

  I once heard a stranger in agitated conversation with her pug: And I suppose it’s all my fault again, isn’t it? At which, I swear, the dog rolled its eyes.

  Yes, I talk to Apollo. But not about you. That’s the thing: I don’t have to tell him. (Dogs are the best mourners in the world, as everyone knows. Joy Williams.)

  And just because there are other people who’ve lost someone to suicide doesn’t mean that what I’m feeling is something that can be shared. I did once sit through a radio program on the subject of suicide loss. Listeners were invited to call in and comment. All the usual word-stones were cast: sinful, spiteful, cowardly, vengeful, irresponsible. Sick. No one doubted that the suicide had been in the wrong. A right to commit suicide simply did not exist. Monsters of selfishness and self-pity, suicides were. Such ingratitude for the precious gift of life. And although they might hate themselves, it was not themselves suicides wished to destroy so much as the family and friends they left behind.

  None of this was helpful.

  But neither were the dozen or so books on suicide that I read this past year. I did learn some interesting things. For example, that certain ancient sages held that voluntary death, though generally to be condemned, could be morally acceptable, even honorable, as an escape from unbearable pain, melancholy, or disgrace—or even just plain old boredom. That later thinkers have suggested that, despite Christianity’s absolute prohibition against committing suicide (though nowhere in the entire Bible is there any explicit condemnation of it), Christ himself could be said to have done just that. That in Western countries the volume of suicide notes reached a peak during the eighteenth century, when they were usually intended to appear, alongside other public announcements, in the newspapers.

  And this kicker: Writing in the first person is a known sign of suicide risk.

  What was helpful: words of a woman I knew years ago, when we happened to be working at the same magazine. Out of the blue, when they were young and newly wed, her husband had made her a widow. One day we were planning our future, she said, the next day he was gone. At first I thought I owed it to him to do everything possible to try to understand. But I came to believe this was wrong. He had chosen silence. His death was a mystery. In the end I decided I should leave him his silence. His mystery.

  • • •

  I talk about my feeling of living with one foot in madness, the distortions of reality, the fog that descends at certain moments, unsettling as amnesia. (What am I doing in this classroom? Why, in this mirror, does my face look so weird? I wrote that? What could I have meant?)

  I talk about how, no matter how much I sleep, I’m exhausted. About the number of times I bump into something, or drop something, or trip over my own feet. Stepping off the curb into the path of a car that would have struck me if someone standing by hadn’t jerked me back. The days when I don’t eat, the days when I eat nothing but junk. Absurd fears: What if there’s a gas leak and the building blows up? Losing or misplacing stuff. Forgetting to do my taxes.

  These are all symptoms of bereavement, the therapist tells me unnecessarily. Doctor Obvious.

  But you know, Apollo, I say after my fourth or fifth session, I think I really am beginning to feel a little better.

  • • •

  Another thing about Wittgenstein. According to the physicist Freeman Dyson, who attended Wittgenstein’s lectures at Cambridge in 1946, if a woman dared to appear in the lecture room he would remain silent until she got the message and left.

  I get stupider and stupider every day, Dyson once overheard the philosopher mutter repeatedly under his breath.

  About women, at any rate.

  Tempted to put too much faith in the great male mind, remember this: It looked at cats and declared them gods. It looked at women and asked, Are they human? And, once that hard nut had been cracked: But do they have souls?

  • • •

  It’s not that I can’t say how I feel. It’s very simple. I miss you. I miss you every day. I miss you very much.

  • • •

  Another pause, this time to wonder what Wittgenstein meant by “a wonderful life”?

  And to feel for his sister Gretl: three brothers and a husband who suicided.

  • • •

  I tell the therapist about those uncanny moments, after I first heard the news, when I believed there’d been a mistake. You were gone but not dead. More like you were just missing. Like you’d decided to play some horrid juvenile trick on us. You were missing, not dead. Meaning you could come back. You could come back, and if you could come back, of course you would. Akin to that brief period years ago when I believed it was just stress or fatigue or some odd phase I was going through, and once whatever the trouble was had passed my looks would come back.

  Later I found myself often recalling a scene, the final scene, from the movie Houdini. I’m talking about the old fifties
version, with Tony Curtis, which I saw on TV when I was a teen. He who had become world famous for his spectacular escapes dies while attempting to break out of the water tank in which he’s been submerged upside down with his feet locked in stocks. The Chinese Water Torture Cell trick he’d pulled off before, but this time, unknown to spectators, he is weak and in pain from a ruptured appendix.

  Dying, the master magician promises his wife: If there’s any way, I’ll come back.

  Which gave me goose bumps then and still has the power to move me.

  Even if I know that the real Houdini died in a hospital bed, and that his last words were I’m tired of fighting.

  • • •

  I drag up another memory. This time I’m much younger: a child. Birthday party at the house of a friend, a large slate-gray Victorian, to me a creepy castle. Hide-and-seek. I am It. I finish counting and uncover my eyes. It is late afternoon, it is winter, and all the lights have been turned off for the game. Filled just minutes ago with bright boisterous life, the house is now a tomb.

  I was told that the first ones to leave their hiding places to investigate found me sprawled facedown on the carpet.

  Too much excitement, too much ice cream and cake: the grown-ups got it wrong, the way grown-ups will get children’s troubles wrong. And I, frightened to the core, and not having the words, didn’t even try to enlighten them. But I never forgot. The tired phrase deathly still can bring it all back in a flash.

  The year before, my grandfather had vanished. Followed shortly by our elementary school principal. Nothing that was said to explain these vanishing acts was very convincing. But that there was something nasty involved, some unspeakable thing about which lips must stay sealed—this was clear.

  The horror sank in. They weren’t hiding, the other kids; they were gone. Vanished into that same darkness, never to return. Only I—It—remained. Alone alone alone. The room swam before my eyes. I threw up before I fainted.

  • • •

  Remembering just now that Gretl Wittgenstein’s father-in-law also took his own life.

  • • •

  Do I dream about you?

  Dutifully I describe it: Wading through deep snow, struggling to catch up with someone far ahead, a figure in a dark coat, like a triangular tear in the vast white blanket. I call your name. You spin around, start semaphoring with your arms. But I don’t understand. Are you telling me to hurry up, or warning me to stop and turn back? Agony of uncertainty. End of dream. Or, I say (for some absurd reason apologetically), at least that’s all I remember.

  I talk about the times I see you. Each time my heart turns over. But why should it be that almost always the person I mistake for you is someone who looks like you not at the age when you died but at some other stage of your life. Once, on campus, I nearly shout for joy at the sight of someone who looks like you when you and I first met.

  • • •

  I confess to sudden rages. Walking in Midtown, rush hour’s peak, people streaming in both directions, I find myself seething, ready to kill. Who are all these fucking people, and how is it fair, how is it even possible that all of them, these perfectly ordinary people, should be alive, when you—

  The therapist interrupts to point out that you made a choice.

  It’s true that I keep forgetting this. Because very often it seems to me that it’s not what happened, that it wasn’t a choice at all, no act of free will, but rather some freak accident that befell you.

  Which, I suppose, is not inaccurate, self-homicide being unquestionably against the natural order of things.

  Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life and thou no breath at all? weeps King Lear. Thou being his daughter Cordelia.

  At times I can barely contain my anger at students. How can you be an English major and not know that you don’t put a period after a question mark? Why do even graduate students not know the difference between a novel and a memoir, and why do they keep referring to full-length books as “pieces”?

  I want to hit the student whose excuse for not doing that week’s assigned reading of fifty pages is that she had jury duty.

  I delete without answering the questionnaire from someone who is considering taking my class. (Number one: Are you overconcerned with things like punctuation and grammar?)

  • • •

  All that anger, says the therapist. Yet none directed at you. No anger, no blame. Is this because I think suicide can be justifiable?

  Plato thought so. Seneca thought so.

  But what do I think? Why do I think you did it?

  Because you were trapped upside down in a tankful of water.

  Because you were weak and in pain.

  Because you were tired of fighting.

  • • •

  Once, I spend most of the hour not saying anything. Each time I start to speak I break down. After a few tries, I give up and sit there sobbing until it’s time to go.

  I wanted to talk about the time you and I met up in Berlin. I’d been living there that year, on a fellowship. You were passing through: the German translation of your latest book had just been published. So we had a long weekend together.

  You wanted to visit the grave site of the writer Heinrich von Kleist, the very place where, in 1811, at the age of thirty-four, he shot himself. I knew the story. How Kleist, who suffered all his life from despair, had for a long time wanted to die. But not alone. The idea of a suicide pact had always turned him on. His dream lover: a woman whose heart’s desire would be to die with him.

  Henriette Vogel was not the first woman he approached, but it was she who, diagnosed with terminal cancer at the age of thirty-one, rapturously accepted his proposal of a romantic murder-suicide.

  After shooting her in the left breast, Kleist shot himself in the mouth. The man’s job.

  Both appear to have expected the experience to be an orgasmic one.

  A witness reported having seen them the night before, relaxed and dining in merry spirits. And although the two were Christians, they appear also to have expected that death would transport them to a better world, an eternity of bliss among angels—no fears of the eternal torture said to await equally the violent against others and the violent against themselves.

  Vogel, who was married, asked in a last letter to her husband not to be separated from Kleist in death. They were buried where they fell, a shady green slope on the lake known as the Kleiner Wannsee.

  Like many burial grounds, this one was peaceful. I would return to it often by myself. (The site has since been renovated, but I’ve never been back.) Almost always I found a fresh flower resting on Kleist’s tombstone, even in winter. I had loved his work ever since reading it for the first time in college, and it pleased me to be at his resting place. To think of the Brothers Grimm walking there. Rilke on the very spot, writing verses in his notebook.

  Crossing the Wannsee bridge that day, we saw two swans mating. Not the graceful sight one might have thought—the female looked in serious danger of being drowned. In any case, it was hard to imagine their comical flapping efforts succeeding.

  But not long after, on a walkway under the bridge, I found their nest, surprisingly close to shore. Here, too, I would often return. Usually, I’d find one—the female, I assumed—either curled sleeping or sitting on the nest, while the other floated nearby. Sometimes I watched them working together, enlarging the nest with twigs and rushes until it resembled a giant Mexican hat.

  It is common knowledge that swans mate for life. A less well-known fact is that they sometimes cheat. I myself discovered that one of this pair—the male, I assumed—habitually visited another swan, in a different part of the lake.

  Though I never saw any eggs in the nest, I was hoping in due time to see some cygnets. But then one day the nest was gone. I have no idea what happened to it. The swans began building a new nest, but before long it too v
anished.

  The swans in Wannsee often appeared toward the end of the day, their feathers taking on the changing colors of the sunset. Rose-tinted swans, swans as pink as flamingos, as blue as violets, swans the deep purple of twilight, night swans. Birds out of a dream, a reminder of the beauty of the world. Of heaven.

  He must have been a monster, we agreed. Using his poetic powers to talk a meek, incurably sick woman into letting herself be shot.

  But what about her? She was dying anyway. Suicide by proxy, while hastening her death, almost certainly spared her much suffering. But enabling another person to commit murder and self-murder—in this case someone who, though in despair, was still young, and who might have lived and continued to create literature of genius for many more years—how justify that?

  If Kleist had never found a death buddy—if, like others before her, this woman had refused his mad request—who knows what might have happened? Or not happened. In fact, the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that Madame Vogel has a lot to answer for. What kind of love was this? Did it not even occur to her to try and save him?

  • • •

  Now wondering why I wrote “Of heaven” when I don’t believe such a place exists.

  • • •

  For those who don’t want to go it alone, the internet is a godsend. Perfect strangers, sometimes living far apart, find each other online and arrange a date. A man from Norway flies to New Zealand where he and another man jump from a cliff. A man and a woman book separate rooms at a lakeside resort and are later found handcuffed and drowned together. In Japan, where the trend for group suicide is especially strong, carloads of corpses keep turning up. But the favorite suicide site in Japan remains the famous Aokigahara Forest, at the foot of Mount Fuji, where neither trail signs saying things like You are not alone and Think of your parents nor phones connected to hotlines have succeeded in ousting it from its place as one of the top suicide destinations in the world. Vying with the Golden Gate Bridge, number one spot in the US.

  • • •

  Berlin. I remember you were in excellent spirits. In one of those flukes of publishing (which, according to you, was now mostly flukes), your book, which had sold poorly back home, was a bestseller in Europe. So you were given the royal treatment on that tour. You were delighted to be in Germany, known for its serious readers (as you kept saying), and particularly in Berlin, one of your favorite cities, like Paris an ideal walking city, rich in the tradition of flânerie.