How Should a Person Be?

by Sheila Heti

  There is no way we can be forgiven except to say: We did not even know how to talk to our own mothers. We ­were left with our friends, as lost as we ­were. We ­were left with ourselves, as lost as our friends—­sheep with no shepherd, sheared of what­ever once kept us warm. We ­couldn’t even really believe that the sheep that came before us ­were warmed by their own wool. It all seemed so improbable and far away.

  Now we are at the point where all the cards have been laid and the story they chart can be read. We are worse off than we ­were at the beginning—­but this could have been predicted from our starting point. In the beginning, the gods gave us liberty; in the end, we discovered cheating. Instead of developing the capacities within, we took two roads: the delusion and oblivion of drugs—­which didn’t start off as cheating, but as access to the sublime; and treating ourselves as objects to be admired—­the attempt to make the self into an object of need and desire by tending to the image of our selves. We have found that, in our freedom, we have wanted to be like coke to the coke addict, food to the starving person, and the middle of the night to thieves.

  Yet the three ways the art impulse can manifest itself are: as an object, like a painting; as a gesture; and as a reproduction, such as a book. When we try to turn ourselves into a beautiful object, it is because we mistakenly consider ourselves to be an object, when a human being is really the other two: a gesture, and a reproduction of the human type. One only has to travel on a subway during rush hour and pull into a station and see all the people waiting to get on and off to be struck by how many of us there actually are in the world. One is a reproduction of the human type—­one sleeps like other humans, eats like other humans, loves like other humans, and is born and dies like all other humans. We are gestures, but we less resemble an original painting than one unit of a hundred thousand copies of a book being sold.

  Now the gestures we chose are revealed as cheating. Instead of being, one appears to be. And the cheater breaks her own heart.

  Yet the sex started off so incredibly sublime! The dinners, the nights, the paintings, my beauty, his beauty, hers, theirs. At first, the drugs gave us a feeling for the sublime in nature and ourselves. When we took them, we expanded into a thousand pieces. Then it seemed like cheating when we already ­were in a thousand pieces, and the sex and drugs didn’t expand us into a hundred thousand more or put us back together again.

  But in those early days on earth, nobody could have made a complaint against us.

  • chapter 10 •

  WHAT IS DESTINY?

  I continue to write soul as sould. It is my only consistent typo. My unease about it goes so deep that I try never to speak about it to anyone. Every time I write that word, I quickly erase the d and try not to think about it anymore. It’s like when you hit a bird on an empty street at night—­you just fix your eyes straight ahead and keep driving. No one saw you; it’s between you and the bird. There’s nothing to be done about it now—­it happened.

  Like sould. It happened. Nothing to be done about it now. Move on. Life is so short, and of all the questions I ask myself in this life, none should involve this typographical error, or whether in fact I have sold my soul, or had no soul to begin with to sell. I shouldn’t dwell on it. Who gives a fuck in this fucked-­up world. There are problems so vast and so deep ­that a young woman sitting alone in her room should slit her throat and die sooner than bother about the state of her soul, when so many great artists before her spent de­cades recalibrating a single blank canvas in their studio, fifteen, sixteen hours a day, as their marriages crumbled into the soil.

  I know better than to let my life crumble around me just because somewhere inside me I am without a soul. For I sold it. And I don’t remember to whom. Or why. Or when.

  When I strip away my dreams, what I imagine to be my potential, all the things I ­haven’t said, what I imagine I feel for other people in the absence of my expressing it, all the rules I’ve made for myself that I don’t follow—­I see that I’ve done as little as anyone ­else in this world to deserve the grand moniker I. In fact, apart from being the only person living in this apartment, I’m not sure what distinguishes me.

  There are people whose learning is so great, they seem to inhabit a different realm of species-­hood entirely. Somehow, they appear untroubled by the nullness. They are filled up with history and legends and beautiful poetry and all the gestures of all the great people down through time. When they talk, they are carried on a sea of their own belonging. It is like they ­were born to be fathers to us all. I should like one day to impale them all on a long stick. But I know I won’t. It will never be one of the gestures by which I am known, so I might as well forget about it. Thinking about it does little to help me inhabit the realm of living.

  •••

  Yet there is one character in history who is reassuring me these days: Moses. I hadn’t realized until last week that in his youth he killed a man, an Egyptian, and buried him under some sand. The next day he saw two men fighting. When he tried to stop them, they said to Moses, “What? And if we don’t—­are you going to kill us too?” He became afraid. He thought, Everyone knows what I have done.

  Then he fled town.

  And he is king of the Jews—my king. If that is what my king is like, what can I expect for myself? If the king of my people had to be told by God to take off his shoes for he was standing on holy ground when God addressed him for the first time, I should not worry that I—­who have never been addressed by God—­am all the time standing on holy ground with running shoes on. I used to worry that I ­wasn’t enough like Jesus, but yesterday I remembered who was my king: a man who, when God told him to lead the people out of Egypt, said, “But I’m not a good talker! ­Couldn’t you ask my brother instead?” So it should not be so hard to come at this life with a little bit of honesty. I don’t need to be great like the leader of the Christian people. I can be a bumbling murderous coward like the king of the Jews.

  • chapter 11 •

  THE BUS STATION

  At the bus station, sitting on an orange, molded-­plastic chair, I looked through a huge book called Important Artists—­the only book I packed for my journey. I had borrowed it from Sholem a few months before. Now that I had no hope of finding my soul by staying where I was, I wanted to take a different route to the one thing that would justify the ugliness inside me: I would become Important.

  I sat there with the book on my knees, moving carefully through the pages with a pink highlighting pen and a yellow one, like a beautiful, anxious, pregnant young mother studying for her medical school exams. I blew away a bit of sand that was stuck in the spine of the book.

  Reading through the biographies and taking notes, I learned that the artists originated in a hundred and eleven cities, but by the Important phase of their careers, they populated thirty-­nine. Twenty-­three of those cities had only one artist in them, and the remaining sixteen held the rest. Twenty-­seven percent of the artists had left their country of birth. Not a single American-­born artist had moved outside of America.

  Of the sixteen cities where more than one Important Artist lived, six held only two artists who ­were Im­portant: Buenos Aires, Rio, Vancouver, Leipzig, Tokyo, Cologne. I eliminated those six, for the odds ­were too small of becoming Important there, and I was left with only nine cities, where three or more Important Artists lived:

  Glasgow4

  Düsseldorf5

  Mexico City6

  Paris7

  Amsterdam8

  Los Angeles9

  London15

  Berlin19

  New York30

  In the future, would the list say:

  Toronto3 ?

  But I ­couldn’t think like that now! I ­wasn’t living in a future time—­but the present time.

  I paused for a moment before making my decision, cradling those only-­one-­Important-­Artis
t cities in my heart, as if before putting them to their death: Antwerp, Vienna, Warsaw, Barcelona, San Fernando, Douarnenez, Helsinki, Port of Spain, Zu­rich, Havana, Frankfurt, Milan, Cairo, Tarnów, Las Palmas, Hermosa Beach, Seoul, Altadena, Matsudo City, Ho Chi Minh City, Santo Bello Jesus, Rheydt.

  The answer was obvious: New York. It had been certain before I began. I could be there in twelve hours, for cheap, on the bus. There, the odds of meeting someone Important, and thus becoming Important myself, ­were best. I went to the counter. The lady told me that a bus would be leaving in exactly two hours. I handed her my credit card and signed a promise to pay eighty-­nine dollars, and I put the ticket in my pocket.

  I called Ryan and told him he could take over my apartment, since his was smaller than mine. Then I ner­vous­ly called Israel and told him I was going to New York. When he asked me why, I said I was going there to finish my play. It was not true, but I hoped he would be really impressed. There was a pause on the other end.

  Then he said, “I hope you write until your fucking fingers break.”

  •••

  Heading out of the station for a smoke, in pain, I passed two teenage girls who ­were standing with their bags before a deli, gazing up at its illuminated menu.

  “What is American cheese anyway?” I heard one of them say.

  Her friend replied, “I think it means it has a chemical in it.”

  • chapter 12 •

  SHEILA WANDERS IN NEW YORK

  I called Jen, who once put me up in France, and asked if I might stay with her my first few nights in New York while I looked for an apartment of my own. She had returned to America and, in her friendly way, agreed to help me. I was looking forward to seeing her and imagined us growing closer and becoming true friends.

  On the bus ­ride down, I stared out the window and recalled the happy days we had spent together in Paris. We had gone to the Musée d’Orsay. I remembered standing at the far end of one of the galleries, looking for fifteen minutes at a tiny painting of a single stalk of asparagus. It was the most moving thing I had ever seen, painted so tenderly and with such a loose hand that it hardly seemed like it had been any work at all. When I finally looked over to see who had painted it, I discovered it was Manet, one of my favorite paint­ers. I wondered at this; was there something in his hand or his soul—­or elsewhere—­that was essentially him, so much so that it compelled me every time, and made me love everything that was his, without even knowing it was?

  When Jen and I left the building, I told her about my experience with the painting. Then she told me about her favorite painting: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel. As we walked through the fine, slightly damp Paris air, she explained why she liked it. “From my own point of view, when I am struggling, I always imagine I am struggling with a dev­il. But when I saw that painting I realized—­no, it’s an angel. Now I always try to remember, when I am struggling, that I am struggling with an angel.

  “So you see, I’m really leery of these self-­improvement seminars where you try to make yourself better and better. We probably need to suffer in order to . . . well, in order to break the spells.”

  I arrived at her apartment on the Lower East Side at ten the next morning, sweaty from the all-­night bus ­ride and feeling the grime all over my flesh. It was a sunny day, and I carried my heavy suitcase though the subways and up into the street. I collected the keys at a deli near where she lived. Then I went into her apartment and lay down on her couch, which was made over with white sheets. There was a note on the pillow from Jen. She said she would see me after work. We had agreed that we would go out later that night to see a lecture by an important young graphic novelist.

  I lay there for a while with my eyes wide open. The apartment was large and fancy, all done over in rich browns and reds. It belonged to her wealthy boyfriend. She was alone half the time—­he often traveled. He was in the tech industry, and she once told me that he had Asperger’s syndrome. Then she reassured me that Silicon Valley boys aren’t so bad to sleep with because they’ve read all the manuals.

  That eve­ning, we talked for a bit as Jen ate from the fridge while I watched. I began to grow anxious. Time was passing, and it started to seem like we’d never leave the apartment. I wanted to be among the Important people! I was worried that we ­were running late. I didn’t want to spend my ­whole time in New York in someone’s apartment. I put on my jacket, hoping Jen would get the hint, but instead she showed me a present that her boyfriend had given her: a stuffed, plush parrot that was perched on the edge of the glass-­topped dining table. She went and began twisting a rubber cracker back and forth in its beak. “Eat, eat!” she said. Finally I went and stood in the hallway. She followed me there, but after picking up her purse, she glanced over her shoulder at the parrot. She seemed anxious and regretful. “I think it’s still hungry,” she said, and she hurried back to feed the plastic cracker into its mouth some more. I stood there leaning against the doorjamb, watching, exasperated. We remained in her apartment like that for the rest of the night.

  I guess those ­were my early days in New York. But it’s everyone’s story, I know.

  • chapter 13 •

  DESTINY REARS ITS UGLY HEAD

  The next day, I wandered around the city, looking up at the buildings to see if I could find a place to rent. Earlier that morning, I had written an email to the theater, telling the producer to pull the play. She emailed within minutes and told me she was disappointed. I didn’t care. As I walked the streets, I thought only about Israel.

  There, in the sunlight, all of him went through me: how one afternoon, early, when he was still moved by me, he had pulled out from his closet a canvas he had made with just my name painted on it in a sea of purple, like a vagina opening, and after nakedly holding it before me for a moment, shyly returned it to his closet. Even I, with all the feelings I had for him, knew it was no good. He was a genius, but not a genius at painting. He was a genius at fucking. If he painted as well as he fucked, he would have had the ­whole world hanging him on their walls just to watch his cock and hips.

  He had skin the color of tomatoes and eyes the color of mustard and ears the color of rabbit stew and feet the color of grass. And the smells from him ­were tomato and mustard and rabbit and grass. The words he spoke sounded like snakes in the grass. And when he smiled it was like mustard on the smile of a wound. When he touched me, my cells bred like rabbits: more blood, more flesh. All of my self came alive to breed to meet him doubly, triply; my body multiplied to satisfy him.

  My eyes grew hot and welled up with hot tears as I considered our sex, for the first time, from his point of view. He would have gone home with the smell of my juices on his cock, and in the hairs around his cock, and he might have even put his hand there to find my smells and inhale them in the privacy of his own home, in his bed, and might have been intoxicated by it.

  I had hardly told Margaux a word about him, for she was made impatient by conversations about relationships or men. Yet I had gone over to her apartment one afternoon, very early in my time with him, having not heard from him in forty-­three hours, and paced around her kitchen like a wild animal until she decided to calm me down. She set me up in the other room, in front of her TV, and made me watch a movie while she painted in the next room. It was a French film, about love and bondage and sex. Well, I just emerged two hours later, into her studio, saying, near tears, “Love is a battle between the sexes in which the man always wins because that’s more erotic for everyone!”

  Not even turning, she said, “I should have shown you a different movie.”

  The next night I went with Jen to a party and there I met a beautiful girl named Anjali. She was thin-­limbed and her dark hair was cut below her shoulders, and it was very clean and shiny. Her father was from France and her mother was from India, and she had lived in both places but was now living in New York. I liked her instantly, just the way that sometimes
happens. There she was, with her bright, enthusiastic eyes, and we stood in the corner excitedly talking, and soon we ­were talking about love.

  ANJALI

  So I had decided I ­couldn’t get into a relationship right then because it ­wouldn’t be good for me—­I needed to build myself up—­enjoy my own company without sacrificing myself for someone ­else. I just wanted to have fun and be frivolous and air-­headed and light, and just enjoy life and drink and go out and what­ever, fuck. So I met this Italian guy at a party in Paris and we got on fine; at seven ­o’clock in the morning, we left—­four people—­a Pakistani, a Greek girl, he and I, and the party was really close to my ­house so I asked them if they wanted to come up and sleep at my place, because we ­were all tired.

  SHEILA

  Yeah?

  ANJALI

  Well, the Greek girl and the Pakistani guy decided to go home, but the Italian guy decided to come and sleep at my apartment. So he came up and we went to the balcony to have a cigarette, and he was feeling cold so we came back inside. We ­were sitting on the sofa next to each other, and he suddenly said, Actually, I think I’m going to go home. I was like, Okay. And he said, But give me your phone number and everything ­else. I gave him my phone number, really not thinking he was going to call or anything, and the next day he sent me a text message saying, Listen, if you need any help doing little works in your ­house and stuff like that, give me a ring and I’ll come and help you.

  SHEILA

  (embarassed) Oh, that’s nice!

  ANJALI

  I wrote him back and said, I don’t need any material help, but if you want to go and have a coffee, sure.

  Both laugh.