How Should a Person Be?

by Sheila Heti

  “Right.”

  “Then, on our last night there, we forgot to close the bathroom door—­we ­were so drunk—­and in the morning you woke up and it was beside your leg, and without even thinking, you smashed it under your hand.”

  “I remember,” I said, uneasy.

  “Well, that’s like you buying the same dress as me. I’m doing a lot, what with letting you tape me, but—­boundaries, Sheila. Barriers. We need them. They let you love someone. Otherwise you might kill them.”

  • chapter 2 •

  THEY WANDER THE CITY ON DRUGS

  The world is made up of poets and retards, and everyone’s a poet, and everyone’s a retard. I made a slip of the tongue the other day, and instead of saying I wanted an audience, said I wanted a Godience.

  A man ran into a bar and began smashing all the beer mugs, throwing them to the floor. The bartender tried to stop him, and so did all the people drinking in the bar, but he was too violent. There was too much rage within him, and it overpowered all the others, who ­were fearful and afraid. At last, in his exhaustion, the man fell into a chair.

  The man said, Stop. He got up and, stumbling, said to himself in a mumbling undertone, Stop stop stop. The people stood tense around him in a circle. He paused where he was, wavered a bit, then looked up at the dark, wooden, low-­hanging ceiling. If he had reached up, he could have touched it. The police had already been called. Would they arrive too soon, before he had a chance to speak? He lifted his head. I want to make an announcement, he said. I have an announcement to make. The man who loves God loves liberty. And as for the rest . . . license is what they love.

  Milton! That’s who he had been reading that morning, or the morning before, or before he went on his bender. Now the policemen came to the door, and he was handed into their arms. In the corner, a blond-­haired girl was crying, she had been so afraid. She was being comforted by a man. A policeman spoke. “Does anyone ­here know Milton? Has anyone ­here read Milton?”

  Ryan said, “I read an introduction to one of his books. I only read the introductions. That’s where all the information is, and that is where it all happens.”

  I was feeling nauseous. The ­whole commotion had made me practically sick, and this was a place reputed to refill the beer steins in the back with what was left behind in the pitchers and the glasses.

  Ryan and I had enrolled in a clown class together. I was really excited about it. Since all the best artists know where the funny is, I thought if I went to clown school, I might know it too.

  There ­were three former clowns leading the class because enrollment was so high. They had to hire two extra teachers so we would all get some individual attention. Ryan sat before me with his face painted white—­I had painted it—­and I was making his lips red. The other students ­were already way ahead of us. They had already moved on to the second person, so that half of them had their faces complete, while the others ­were being powdered. I hadn’t even started on Ryan’s cheeks, and both of us ­were growing concerned. I saw him ner­vous­ly pulling at the paper towel I had tucked into the white collar of his T-shirt.

  “I remember being told in kindergarten not to talk too much,” I told him. “My teacher called me a chatterbox.”

  “Wow,” Ryan said. “I don’t have any traumatic stories like that.”

  I was saying how life is like a bar brawl and there is a cowboy shooting at your feet. It was me, Ryan, and a red-­haired girl from class. We ­were walking through the dirty snow—­snow gone bad from three months of pissing dogs and cars. In that moment, I felt as though I had made a mistake in comprehending everything. What would our punishment—­for conceiving of things wrong—be? Life is not like dancing while a cowboy shoots at your feet!

  “Guys!” I said. “Life is not like dancing in a bar brawl while a cowboy shoots at your feet!”

  Then I woke the next morning, thankful I ­wasn’t high. I will give up pot because it makes me paranoid. But I will stay close to God because he makes me paranoid.

  Margaux and I broke from our feelings of austerity with drugs. A good night of drinking and smoking, or a night of doing coke, and the next day, far from being hungover, our brains felt stilled and refreshed. It was like our insides had been set back to 00:00:00.

  Margaux made the best paintings of her career the morning after we had been drinking for eight hours straight. She woke at nine and got up, and without thinking or hesitation went straight into her studio and began making paintings. I woke and cleaned the entire apartment, washed all the walls by hand. We didn’t feel the need to call each other that day, and normally Margaux and I talked minimum once, for reassurance.

  Soon it came to be that several times a week we would meet at Lot 16, just for a beer; then, not wanting to stop, we’d call someone for some coke; then it would be every night we wanted to relax like that after having worked all day—­and the next day we’d wake and work better than if we hadn’t got fucked up the night before. All that time we ­were calmly getting shitfaced, calmly waking at 00:00:00, and not calling each other until night fell, when we would ask like it was the first time ever if the other wanted to take a break. Yes. In the daytime, austerity. In the nighttime, oblivion. Daytime, nighttime. Daytime, nighttime. It went on and on like that, like throwing a ball from one hand to the other.

  •••

  At one point Ryan tried to talk to us. “No one wants to be friends with you two, and when they see you, they avoid you. Sheila, you never come to clown class anymore.”

  “Who gives a fuck about clown class,” I said, giving a kick to the sidewalk with my foot.

  We ­were following our instincts, same as we had always done.

  I wanted to take a big pipe and swing it against someone’s throat. I wanted to see their body buckle back and red shoot from their throat like a burst water main. Psychoanalytic drugs.

  Though it was cold, we’d pace through the city at night. Now in one direction, now another. Always changing direction. Should we go down this alley? Fine. Do you want to go up this alley? Yes, let’s do it. But we just came down this alley. That’s okay, we’ll go up it again. We went up it and down it, up it and down. If we keep walking through this alley, we’ll tread a rut into it. That’s okay, I prefer pacing to getting somewhere. Up it and down, up and down. Then in the mornings Margaux would paint, and I would wash the walls.

  It was getting colder. We told ourselves that these ­were the happiest days of our lives. Never had I had a routine. Never had Margaux had a system that worked so well. In the mornings there was frost on the windows. I went to the salon. There was beauty everywhere.

  •••

  The lecture portion of class was held in a university classroom with coliseum-­style seating. Everyone sat in the dark in their boots, having trekked in the snow with them, so that by the end of the lecture we all had puddles of slush beneath our feet. Pulling on our heavy coats at the end of class, we tried not to trail the hems of our sleeves in the little puddle of snow and muck. I sat with my coat on and could hardly see the page, the lights ­were dimmed so low. Before us on the screen was projected a slide of a man on a mountaintop by Caspar David Friedrich. The professor’s voice was amplified with her mike. “In the nineteenth century—”

  The nineteenth century, I thought, snickering.

  “—artists ­were compelled by the idea of the sublime, which was the most elevated expression of the harmony between nature and man. By contemplating nature, a figure like this one on the mountaintop would be inspired with reverence for the majesty of what God created—­both humbled by it and also elevated by it because he, as a witness and an observer, had a privileged relation to all of creation—­both of it and standing outside it to contemplate it. It was through contemplating nature that one would gain this experience of the sublime, so you tend to find in pictures from this time—”

  Slide changed.


  “—this theme repeated: the untamed and overwhelming power and beauty of nature, and the witness to it, somewhere in the painting, a stand-­in for the viewer and the paint­er. Without a witness to the scene—”

  Right! Right! It is not a picture of the sublime! Suddenly I understood our walks, mine and Margaux’s, through the alleys, up them and down them on our drugs.

  “There is no sublime in it,” Margaux told me.

  Now she was getting more interested in painting in the nights as well, and when I would call to see if she wanted to take a break from painting and go with me to drink, she would say no. She even told me, the one night she did come out, that she only had an hour. When I tried to explain what I had learned in class about the sublime, she didn’t think it had anything to do with us or why we liked our drugs.

  “We like our drugs for the opposite feeling,” she said, “for the feeling of nullity. Not for the awesome power of the universe.”

  “No! No! We ingest it. We swallow it, we put it inside us—­the awesome power of the universe. ­We’re not looking at a mountain range because there are no mountain ranges in the city.”

  “That ­doesn’t mean ­we’re trying to put the mountain range inside us—­so that we can feel the power of witnessing a mountain range, as in a Caspar David Friedrich painting.”

  “That’s exactly what it is,” I said, looking her in the face.

  Margaux shook her head. I nodded mine.

  “I can see it,” I said. She shook her head.

  We could see no trees and we could see no mountains from where we lived. When we looked out the window we saw cars, we saw people, we saw traffic lights and buildings just like ours. Sometimes the past came to greet us, and there ­were two policemen sitting atop their ­horses, walking down the side street I was living on, and I woke to the sounds of the ­horses in the road. I raised myself in bed and looked out the window. When a car came by, the policemen pulled on the ­horses’ reins and the ­horses stopped, and the policemen and the ­horses waited patiently for the car to go by, one ­horse shaking its tail in the road.

  I liked lying there in the dead of night, watching the snow swirl beneath the streetlights. It looked to me like the harmony between nature and man, that we should build such streetlights and nature deliver such blustery snow.

  I didn’t envy the teenage girls in their tight jeans with the curve of their round asses showing beneath their puffy jackets. They walked through the snow with their girlfriends who dressed alike, their hair hanging below their shoulders, shopping bags in hand. I regarded them like deer or any natural phenomena—­not designed specifically to please me, but pleasing all the same.

  In the dead of night I would lie awake, gazing at the ceiling, and, thinking I heard the sound of ­horses, I would turn my body to look out the window, but I only saw the ­horses that once and never again.

  I remembered the man who came into the bar, crashing the glasses against the floor. Liberty is freedom, and license is freedom at the expense of God. Man can do nothing directly to achieve his own freedom. What he can do is to indicate his willingness to be set free by knocking down his idols, so allow the Word of God to circulate freely in human society. I wanted to discuss this with Ryan some more, but when I went to his place and knocked on his door, he was not there. I decided to go to the Communist’s Daughter and sit at the small bar. My gut suggested that the man who was breaking bottles was the hero. I sensed something immovable in the center of him—­maybe not admirable, but strong and stable and straight.

  I knew as I walked that the planet was spinning at a very high speed, but that this did not prevent everything from staying in its place, and everything from seeming solid and straight. If the earth did not spin on its axis, this would not be the case. I might have been wrong, but as I had nobody to discuss it with, I was not contradicted in my thinking. When I arrived at the bar, I was pleased but not surprised to see Ryan sitting there. It was the place he most liked to drink at, and he was doing it again. He moved aside, and I sat down next to him. I asked him how important he thought it was for the earth to spin on its axis, and he said, “I don’t really know.”

  The bartender, who was wiping down a spill, overheard this and remarked, “Of all of my customers, the two of you seem to know the least about science.”

  “Are other people always talking about science?” I asked.

  “Often,” he said and, hooking the rag back over the hook, he said it again. “Often.”

  I wanted so much to make a retort that would redeem us both, but I could think of nothing before he was off filling up a half pint of beer for someone ­else—­another customer, who knew more about science than Ryan or I did.

  “It ­doesn’t matter,” I said, turning to Ryan, but his face was clouded over.

  He said, “If you think his opinion is going to shake me from my axis, you’re wrong! My axis is solid and stable and straight, and I have always spun around it—always—not around his opinion or yours!”

  Night fell, but then, there are always holes to fall into.

  I don’t want 00:00:00 anymore. It is banal. Yet in the pitch-­perfect moments of life, I say to myself that I have followed my rules wisely, and that the surge of sublimity that flows within me is the gods’ reward.

  Now when I wake in the mornings, I look out the window in the hopes that a policeman on a ­horse will pass by. When it ­doesn’t happen, I untangle myself from the sheets and get up and go to the mirror to start my day. I produce a haughty, superior expression to intimidate myself into thinking I’m cool, cooler than I am. I make my eyes as world-­weary as possible, like a fashion model’s, then I think, You’re a charlatan. You love everything you ­were ever given.

  I want more than to appear sufficiently cool in my own eyes—­though this would be admitting that all my vanity and primping has been a waste. Every glance into the mirror and the expressions I’ve contrived to intimidate myself—­fatuous. It is perhaps better to continue along the path toward beauty I have started on, and to hope that, if I am rigorous enough in following this path, it will lead me somewhere great. Then, if I do succeed in turning myself into an idol, it will not have been for nothing.

  I am not thinking of the one who said that in order to gain life, you have to lose it. If I lose it, I will be like the earth spinning off its axis into infinity, and who knows, without being something I can gaze at and admire, if I will ever find my way back.

  But I can only imagine what would happen to all the stuff of the earth if the earth was to spin off its axis. I think trees would crash into cars, but I don’t know enough science to say.

  • chapter 3 •

  ANTHONY AND URI

  The next several weeks I worked double shifts at the salon, to distract myself from the nothing that made up my days. One afternoon, Sholem came in to have his hair washed. He said he was still feeling dirty from making his ugly painting, and he wanted to wash away that feeling. It often happened that people came to the salon for that very reason—­more than anyone would guess. Seating him at a basin, I put a towel around his neck and guided his head back into the bowl, then turned on the water and adjusted the temperature on my hand. Uri had recently started me on shampooing. I put the spray near the crown of his head, and as the water flowed down, I asked, “Is it too hot? Too cold?”

  “Just right.”

  When it came time for the conditioner, I gave him a head massage, the way I had been taught, but he was tense, his shoulders straining toward his neck, and his neck was very rigid. Then he blurted out, “Oh, why did Margaux make us do this?”

  SHEILA

  Do what? The Ugly Painting Competition?

  SHOLEM

  Yes, the Ugly Painting Competition! I’ve been thinking about it a lot, you know, because I still ­can’t understand why she’d want me to have these bad feelings, and the only thing I can come up with i
s that she must be going through a painting crisis. She wants to make the worst possible paintings out of some mistrust of painting.

  SHEILA

  A painting crisis! But she never stops painting! She’s painting all the time.

  SHOLEM

  But she hasn’t begun her ugly painting yet, has she? And why not? When you ask her, she just shrugs it off. But it’s been months! I saw her at an opening last night, and she just kept saying that paintings don’t matter. I find it really depressing, and it makes no sense. It’s so frustrating!

  SHEILA

  But she’s always spoken like that.

  SHOLEM

  But don’t you think it’s strange? And the strangest thing about her crisis is that it’s late.

  SHEILA

  It’s what? Late?

  SHOLEM

  Late! Most paint­ers go through their crisis in art school, because that’s where you’re surrounded by all these people telling you that, you know, painting is dead. So I ­can’t understand why she’s going through this crisis now, when everyone loves her work, when the critics do, and when she has a dealer who’s a consummate believer in painting. Why now? And I think it’s because Margaux ­doesn’t trust painting. She ­doesn’t trust it to be a powerful communicator, so she has to make the worst painting possible. Then, if there’s still some beauty or value at the end, it will restore her faith in painting.

  I led Sholem to an empty station and swiveled the chair around. He sat, and I turned him to face the mirror. I took the comb from my apron and dipped it in the Barbicide, so he could see for himself—­whether he was consciously worried or not—­that it was free of germs, and I flung off the excess liquid and drew it through his hair, looking down at his head. Ruby came up and put her hand on my arm.