The Collective: A Novel

by Don Lee

  I called the detective in charge of the investigation. I was going to suggest looking into Joshua’s cell phone records, his text messages, his bank and credit card statements, his emails and documents on his laptop, his datebook, to find out what he had been doing in the last year, whom he had been talking to and meeting, where he’d traveled. The detective told me there was no need, there was no mystery. Joshua himself had destroyed everything. He had burned all his manuscripts and journals and files in two fifty-five-gallon drums behind his cottage. A neighbor, worried about the smoke, had watched him doing it over the course of several days, using barbecue lighter fluid, a wheelbarrow, and a shovel to turn over the layers and remove ashes. Joshua had also wiped everything off his laptop, all the email messages in his account, all the bookmarks and Internet history prior to the previous week, all the documents, folders, and programs on the computer except for a utility that he had purchased and downloaded to ensure the foolproof, irrevocable deletion of his hard drive.

  I was staggered. I refused to believe it. I clung to conspiratorial scenarios. It seemed impossible that Joshua would have voluntarily elected the complete erasure of his life. What must he have been going through? He had made vague references to suicide over the years, comments like, “I don’t know why I keep doing this, I might as well just check out,” but we never took him seriously. He had a histrionic bent. He exaggerated and embellished, he would often call in the middle of the night with a crisis that would turn out to be wholly trivial. He could be a total pain in the ass.

  His psychiatrist would not offer any clues when I contacted him, saying doctor-patient privilege extended into death. Exasperated, I told him that he, if anyone, should have been able to see through Joshua’s bluster and melodrama, he should have sensed Joshua was suicidal and pink-papered him into a psych ward. In response, the psychiatrist somberly explicated Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief to me: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. These stages are not necessarily progressive or discrete, he intoned. They’ll occur out of sequence and merge and mingle. He encouraged me to seek out therapy for myself while going through this difficult process.

  So I am only left to wonder, and imagine. I imagine Joshua was drinking too much, not eating properly, not sleeping well. I imagine he was waylaid further by a cold and started taking cough medicine and doubling up on his pills. I imagine his work had stalled into impasse, and he anguished in self-doubt and loathing, so he began sleeping in later and later, past noon, time no longer being precious nor perishable, not wanting to face the bright insolvency of his talent, the paltry rations of what had become his life and career, the terrible miscalculations he had made about what would fulfill him, since everything he had done, everything he had worked toward, seemed pointless to him now, utterly meaningless. I imagine he mourned, and he raged, and he despaired that it would never stop, it would never get better, he would never be content, he would always be alone.

  What I can’t imagine are his last few seconds. As the car was about to hit him, did he welcome it? Was he relieved, happy, even, or was he terrified, recognizing too late that he had made a horrible mistake? Did he realize at that moment that he did not want to die? Perversely, a part of me wants to believe that. The alternative is too sorrowful to consider.

  The fact is, he did not think to call upon us, his friends, least of all me, for help, no doubt convinced we had forsaken him. Maybe his suicide note, had he completed one, would have been in some measure a reprimand, decrying our neglect and implying it had been contributory. But I wonder, if he had reached out to us, if our little group had remained intact, would we have been able to save him, do anything to allay his unceasing, unalterable disconsolation? I don’t know.

  We had loved Joshua, but we’d gradually grown tired of him, and of one another. The fact is, if pressed, we would each have to confess that we all saw it coming, and we did nothing to prevent it.

  3

  There were occasional emails or, more rarely, phone calls, but we had been drifting apart for quite a while, and actually I hadn’t seen them—any of them, including Joshua—for almost a year. There wasn’t a particular reason for the lapse, a blowout or feud or any intentionality of severance. It was, I reasoned, just the natural way that groups evolve and dissipate.

  An intimacy develops among a circle of people, you do everything together, you can’t imagine this tight cadre ever breaking apart, and then, quite mundanely, one friend slips away, and then another. It might be because they’re moving across town or to another part of the country. It might be because they’ve started a new relationship, or are getting married or having a kid or changing jobs. It might be because everyone’s getting older and more preoccupied, busy. And, of course, it might simply be that everyone’s become a little bored with one another, doing the same things over and over, hearing and telling the same stories.

  Despite your best efforts and intentions, there’s a limited reservoir to fellowship before you begin to rely solely on the vapors of nostalgia. Eventually, you move on, latch on to another group of friends. Once in a while, though, you remember something, a remark or a gesture, and it takes you back. You think how close all of you were, the laughs and commiserations, the fondness and affection and support. You recall the parties, the trips, the dinners and late, late nights. Even the arguments and small betrayals have a revisionist charm in retrospect. You’re astonished and enlivened by the memories. You wonder why and how it ever stopped. You have the urge to pick up the phone, fire off an email, suggesting reunion, resumption, and you start to act, but then don’t, because it would be awkward talking after such a long lag, and, really, what would be the point? Your lives are different now. Whatever was there before is gone. And it saddens you, it makes you feel old and vanquished—not only over this group that disbanded, but also over all the others before and after it, the friends you had in grade and high school, in college, in your twenties and thirties, your kinship to them (never mind to all your old lovers) ephemeral and, quite possibly, illusory to begin with.

  So it was with us, although we had a longer and better run than most. It began with Joshua, Jessica Tsai, and me as freshmen at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1988.

  Joshua was from Cambridge, a 1.5—born in South Korea but raised in Massachusetts, not first generation or second, but somewhere in between—and his last name at the time had been Meer, not Yoon. His parents were Jewish professors of history and sociology at Harvard, and they had adopted Joshua late in life, when they were both well into their fifties.

  Jessica was second-generation Taiwanese American, her father an optometrist in Saratoga Springs, New York.

  I was third-generation Korean American from Mission Viejo, California, the son of an engineer for an aeronautics firm that built navigational equipment for Lockheed, and although I hadn’t gotten accepted into Princeton, as I’d dreamed, I was ecstatic merely to have escaped the banality of Orange County, where I had lived all my life.

  Freshmen at Macalester were required to take a first-year course, which often had a residential component, all the students in the class living on the same dorm floor. Even though it wasn’t our first choice, the three of us were thrown together into a course called “The Vietnam War: Apocalyptic Visions and Imperialist Hegemony,” team-taught by professors from the English and humanities departments.

  At the initial meeting during orientation, Joshua sidled into the room late and took a seat next to me near the back. It was hot outside, but he was wearing a raggedy gray car coat and Doc Martens. He had a stringy goatee and lank hair that flopped over his eyes, and he reeked of cigarettes. He badly needed a shower. He was of average height and rather thin, but, incongruously, he had a noticeable paunch. Coming from Southern California, land of ab-defined, yogafied, body-obsessed boobletons, where even I—never much of an athlete—had felt compelled to work out and keep trim, this impressed me.

  He glanced at the name tag stuck to my shirt. “Eric Cho,” he re
ad. “What do you know, another Korean.” He wasn’t wearing a name tag himself. An act of defiance, apparently. He took a look around at the other kids in the Vietnam War class—overwhelmingly midwestern, upper-middle-class, white-bread—and said to me, “What do you think, bro? We were put in here to provide the Oriental perspective, weren’t we?”

  Jessica, who was sitting in the row in front of us, peered around and gave us a brief head-to-toe.

  Joshua raised his eyebrows. “You like that?” he nudged me.

  I had been staring at her from the start of the session, wondering how I might broach a conversation. She was petite, tiny, really, with long fine hair that curled at the ends. She had a small flat nose without much of a bridge, making her eyes appear slightly crossed and farther apart than they were, and her eyebrows were set unusually high, so her neutral expression seemed to be one of haughty annoyance. Attracted as I was to her, she frightened me a little. She had on a sleeveless Neil Young T-shirt, no bra, nipples poking in the air-conditioning, bell-bottom jeans streaked with paint and smudges, and leather sandals. There was a suede sling purse with fringes on the floor beside her chair. Yet she also had on black toenail polish, and black fingernail polish, a studded wristband, earrings that seemed to be snips of real barbed wire, and a silver chain with a circle-A pendant—the anarchy symbol—her fashion sensibilities crossed between retro-hippie and post-punk. Mainly what I kept staring at was the small of her back, exposed as she leaned forward on her desk, her T-shirt lifting, the waist of her jeans gapping, to reveal a curve of skin that went all the way down to the cleft of her buttocks. She wasn’t wearing underwear.

  “Or,” Joshua said more loudly, “you strictly vanilla? As in boarding-school shiksas, frosty Mayflower mungie cakes, pinkaloid pooty, Ritz cracker chirp-chirp Marshas. Or maybe you prefer the local corn-fed variety, the gopher winkle Triscuits and chalky Betty Crockers and Miracle Whip doozers and tapioca hayseed cream pies.”

  By now, everyone in the room had swiveled around and was looking at us.

  “I’m sorry,” Joshua said, quite pleased with himself, “was I speaking out of turn?” Then, as a postscript, he told me, “Not that I have anything against white girls, understand. After all, as Kierkegaard once said, pussy is pussy.”

  Jessica raised her hand. “Is it too late to transfer to another class?” she asked the professors.

  “Ditto for me,” I said.

  “Damn,” Joshua said. “Once again, betrayed by Asian nation.”

  We were assigned single rooms on the fourth floor of Dupre Hall. Macalester—or Mac, as everyone abbreviated it—was considered a premier liberal arts college, small and selective, with fewer than two thousand students. The campus was pretty and well maintained, and the school itself was rich, its coffers bursting with donations from the founders of Reader’s Digest. Yet Dupre Hall, designated for freshmen and sophomores, was an ugly brick bunker with vertical slit windows, and it was generally acknowledged as the worst dormitory on campus. Dupre—alternately referred to as Duprojects, Duprived, and Duprison—was the only hurricane-proof building on campus, in an area that was not known to have hurricanes. Supposedly the building plans, intended for a coastal location, had been available at a discount. The single rooms in Dupre indeed felt like a prison, so narrow that the beds had to be lofted on stilts, with the desks and dressers directly underneath. There was a rumor that Macalester had to pay a fine to the state every year because the rooms violated a human-rights code, not meeting the minimum legal size for juvenile detention cells.

  Joshua was on one end of the fourth floor, the smokers’ end, and Jessica and I were on the other. I was curious why we’d been given singles, unusual for freshmen, and not doubles or even triples.

  “You’re complaining? You wanted a roommate?” Jessica asked.

  “I wouldn’t have minded.” I had a sister, Rebecca, who was four years older, and no other siblings. She had left for college when I was entering the ninth grade, and consequently I’d gone through high school feeling like an only child. I would have welcomed the company of a roommate.

  “It’s going to be claustrophobic enough around here,” Jessica told me.

  She was right. The orientation schedule was chock-full of activities that weekend, everything emphasizing community: lots of meetings and group sessions and pep talks, tours, picnics, resource fairs, advising appointments, dances, and talent shows. Parents had been invited to participate in the festivities. Naturally, all three of us had asked our parents not to come, but Joshua’s were the only ones who complied. While Jessica and I grudgingly escorted our parents around the campus, Joshua sat in the quad, leaning against a tree and listening to his Walkman CD while he smoked and read a novel or scribbled in a notebook.

  We were encouraged to sign up for as many student organizations as possible, and there was a dizzying number to choose from. We could join the newspaper, the student government, clubs for minorities, civic engagement, and international relations. We could join clubs with political or religious affiliations, clubs for artists and musicians, for feminists and queers, for bicycling and other athletic pursuits.

  There were sports teams at Mac, even a football team, but they weren’t entities of much importance. There were no athletic scholarships, so not surprisingly the teams were perennial losers. No one ever wanted to be identified as a jock, a pejorative term on campus. Pointedly, there was no Greek system, no fraternities or sororities, the school much too progressive for any of that nonsense.

  The only things I was truly interested in were the literary magazine and Ultimate Frisbee, the latter because all summer, knowing Frisbee was popular at Mac, I had been practicing, able now to throw sidearm with two fingers and overhand with a wrist flip. I had wanted to be good, competent, at something upon arrival. I ended up, however, joining two other organizations—Amnesty International and Habitat for Humanity—because I saw Jessica Tsai going to their tables and signing up. Joshua, of course, abstained entirely.

  “I’m not a joiner, man,” he told me in the dining hall. “This group-participation shit is driving me crazy. I mean, what happened to developing the individual, to encouraging subversion and independence? I thought that’s what this place was all about. Instead, it’s, you know, just the old bourgeois concept of togetherness—i.e., conformity—under the guise of PC liberalism. It’s fucking oppressive, man. It’s downright totalitarian.”

  “It’s not that bad,” I said. Truthfully, I appreciated the intimacy of Macalester. In high school, and in Southern California in general, I had felt lost, merely another Asian American kid among the multitudes.

  “Let me ask you something,” Joshua said. “Who do you read? Who are your favorite writers?”

  At one of the orientation meetings, we had been forced to reveal our career aspirations, and it turned out that all three of us wanted to be artists—Jessica a painter, Joshua and I novelists, the latter a coincidence that immediately distressed me.

  I set down my fork. “I don’t know,” I said. “Cheever? Updike, maybe. Chekhov. Fitzgerald.”

  “Jesus, how’d you get to be such a fucking Twinkie? Chekhov’s okay, but the rest of those guys are just WASP apologists.”

  “What about you? Who do you read?”

  “Pynchon, Nabokov, Kundera, Joyce. DeLillo, Rushdie, Hawkes. Calvino, Dostoyevsky, Barth. Coetzee. Bernhard.”

  “I like all of those,” I said, although I hadn’t read many of them, much less heard of some.

  “Wait a minute,” Joshua said. “Did you come here because Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul? Is that it? It is, isn’t it?”

  I felt myself warming. I had already visited the house on Laurel Avenue where F. Scott Fitzgerald had been born and the ones on Summit Avenue where he had lived.

  “I knew it,” Joshua said. “You’re a romantic. God, I’m going to have to look after you, Eric, make a special project of you the next four years, because if you take that shit out into the world, that kind of fucking idealism, you’
ll get slaughtered. You’ll get creamed. It’ll be the death of you.”

  4

  I kept hearing a church bell ring. I’d be in my dorm room or the library and hear the bell, and I’d look at my watch, thinking it must be the top of the hour or a quarterly increment thereof. But the clanging appeared random, occurring anytime, most often at night or in the wee hours of the weekend.

  “What the hell is that?” I asked Joshua one evening. We were sitting in the fourth-floor study lounge of Old Main, both reading Michael Herr’s Dispatches for the Vietnam War class.

  “Oh, you don’t know?” he said with a smirk.

  “Know what?”

  He dog-eared the page he was on and led me to the window. “Look across to Weyerhaeuser.”

  It was dark, but I could see a few lights outside Weyerhaeuser Hall, across the quad, where a couple was gamboling on the sidewalk, skipping and giggling and kissing.

  “Ever notice the bell there?” Joshua asked.

  I had, now that he mentioned it. Next to Weyerhaeuser Hall, there was a small gazebo with an old church bell hanging inside of it.

  “It’s a tradition here,” Joshua said. “You lose your virginity on campus, you ring the bell.”

  “All these people were virgins?” I asked. This did not seem like a school of erstwhile prudes. Then again, there were a lot of dorky students at Mac, teenagers who in high school had likely been unpopular and excluded from the active coital roster.

  “No, no. It’s when you lose your on-campus virginity,” Joshua said, “your first sexual liaison here, not necessarily the first time you’ve ever glazed the donut.”

  “Oh.”

  “You’re not a virgin, are you?”