Snake Lake

by Jeff Greenwald

  Having thus entertained my hosts, I was ready for fresh information about the Western world.

  “Same old same old,” Mark confessed, sucking mousse off a candle. “Good old status quo.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Paula said. “I started night school. Teaching English as a Foreign Language. It’s a two-year program at S.F. State. And guess what? We’re reading from the Ramayana. Didn’t you say your brother is studying Sanskrit?”

  “Sanskrit, Arabic, you name it. All at the same time. It’s unbelievable. I don’t know how he does it. I learn a few words of Nepali and lose all the French I ever knew.”

  “Open your presents,” Gina demanded.

  “Already?”

  “She has to go to bed soon,” Paula explained.

  There were three gifts on the table. The first, from Mark, was an out-of-print folio of black-and-white photographs: the Himalaya, as they’d appeared in the 1930s. Paula had wrapped a bottle of port in a rice paper print of the goddess Saraswati. Carlita had already given me my “official” present, a set of champagne glasses, before the meal. This second present had to be something unusual. I shook the box; it rattled. “Don’t shake it too hard!” she warned.

  Inside was a folk art sculpture of a snake, made of wired-up bottle caps from Mexican beers. “This is fantastic,” I said. “Did you make it?”

  She shook her head. “I bought it from a local artist. I don’t know if you realize it, but every letter you wrote me had some mention of snakes.”

  “My neighborhood was called Nag Pokhari: Snake Lake.”

  Mark picked up the serpentine assemblage, which would have been about two feet long uncoiled, and bent it into a striking pose. “This is great.” He set it on the table and shook it from side to side; the caps rattled convincingly.

  “It’s a rattlesnake,” Gina declared, blasé. “We saw one in Golden Gate Park.”

  “Really?” Paula grinned. “We saw it at the aquarium, honey.”

  “It’s in the park, Mom!”

  “You’ve got me there.”

  I found four small crystal glasses in the pantry and uncorked the port. “Mark?”

  “Certainly.” A telephone rang, its muted chime coming up through the floorboards.

  Carlita rolled her eyes. “That’s mine. Sorry.” She left the table and ran down the back steps. I poured out the port. Less than a minute later Carlita returned, looking concerned.

  I handed her a filled glass. “Do you have to leave?”

  “It’s for you. Your mother. She sounds strange.”

  “My mother? Why’s she calling me at your place?” I looked at the wall. “It’s almost ten in New York.”

  She shook her head. “Wait for me,” I said. I set down my own glass and hopped down the wooden stairs.

  Carlita’s bedroom was at the front of the flat, facing the street. A streetlamp glowed just out of sight, defining the facing buildings with sharp shadows. I sat on the bed and picked up the receiver.

  “Hi, Mom. This is a surprise.”

  “Jeff?” Her voice sounded choked.

  “Mom, what’s wrong?”

  “It’s Jordan,” she said. The words seemed to cost her enormous effort. My heart leaped into my throat.

  “Jesus, what’s wrong?”

  Silence radiated from the receiver, a black vibration that surrounded my head like a cloud of wasps.

  She whispered, “The worst thing you can imagine.”

  “For God’s sake, Mom, just tell me what happened.”

  “He shot himself.”

  “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.” But I held on. She hadn’t said it yet, not really. It could have been an accident. Fucking around with a gun. Posturing, posing, playing on the edge. The thing discharged. Some kind of grazing wound. In the foot, maybe, or, worst case, the torso. Internal bleeding, intensive care. Tomorrow, first thing tomorrow morning, I could be on a plane. I could already see the tubes coming out of Jord’s nose, feel the thick, flat hospital bed against my knee, hear the respirator. He’d missed his heart. I’d stand beside the bed and hold his hand. Tomorrow I could be in New York. Crazy fucker. But he’d pull through. He’d be okay. My crazy little brother.

  “Oh, God,” I begged. “Is he all right?”

  “Jeff?” My mother’s voice was an incredulous whimper, and I squeezed my eyes shut. “He’s dead.”

  22

  Emptiness

  NONE OF IT existed.

  Not the brief apparition of the Sierra Nevada, whose bleached peaks gnawed the sky. Not the lapis eye of Lake Tahoe, or the impossibly straight highways drawing their nails across the Nevada sands. The Rocky Mountains did not exist. There were no fields in the whole expanse of Nebraska, vast even from the sky.

  It seemed that clouds exploded from horizon to horizon, like popcorn strewn across an infinite glass tabletop, throwing animated shadows against millions of acres of farmland, but I knew better. No cities interrupted the monotony of the landscape, and no one lived in them. The empty blue swimming pools and red clay quarries and schoolyards full of yellow buses formed an illusory rainbow.

  The paradox presented by my own apparition in the midst of so much emptiness was a puzzle of no interest. What did interest me, and served as my personal vine—dangling above an unthinkable abyss—was the Buddhist doctrine, so urgently stated by Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, that nothing and no one was “real.” Not the world, and not myself. The vivid physical presence I had known as “my brother” was a serendipitous accumulation of atoms: parcels of pure energy, temporarily bound together by barely understood forces. These atoms themselves were separated by vast tracts of space; you could drive a truck between them.

  Who, then, was I grieving for? Jordan had never existed.

  Yet it seemed that he had.

  I REMEMBERED OUR last encounter. It was in San Francisco, late July. Jordan had jettisoned himself from my Oakland flat and taken a room in an unremarkable Victorian on Twenty-fifth Avenue. We had reconciled, to a degree, and met for lunch at a Greek restaurant on Clement Street. He had expressed reservations about moving back to the East Coast. I tried to convince him to stay in San Francisco, but he was committed to completing his graduate degree in linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania.

  “Well, if it doesn’t work out, you can always come back here.” We were alone in the car. I was driving him home. A tall black man pulled a convoy of bottle-filled shopping carts along the broad avenue, singing a pop song at the top of his lungs. Jordan studied him as we passed by.

  “There’s money to be made by the man with enterprise,” Jordan remarked. “This is why I find it so difficult to abide the common street-beggar, a member of which species assailed me as I made my exit, last night, from the Balboa Theater. The fellow requested ‘spare change.’ To which I replied, in commiseration, that it was spare indeed.”

  I pulled up next to the curb in front of my brother’s house.

  “Need any help packing?”

  “No. Save a few cartons of texts, I’ve accumulated remarkably little in the way of material comforts. A futon, a lamp, some dried cheese, a rasher of bacon, and goblet of cold, clear water. These, and a Spartan toilet kit, suffice.”

  “Don’t forget your running shoes,” I added.

  “Right . . . and a scrap of cloth to cover the loins.”

  I chuckled at this self-parody, which seemed to define more and more his default behavior. He opened the passenger door and regarded me evenly. I looked at him in turn. People usually guessed that we were brothers, although our resemblance had declined with age.

  “I wish we’d spent more time together. It was an incredibly busy summer, with my new book and all.”

  He nodded peremptorily, permitting the alibi.

  “Come back after you graduate,” I said. “I really think the atmosphere here is healthier than the East Coast’s, psychologically and physically. And you already know a lot of people. I needn’t tell you that my friends are your friends.”

  J
ordan bowed his head in acknowledgment and extended his hand. I grasped it. He looked at me for a long time before releasing his grip. “Farewell,” he said, swinging his legs out of the car. When he closed the door, I quickly rolled down the window.

  “Take care of yourself!” I shouted. “Call me if you need anything.”

  “Yes.” He hesitated. “Thank you for everything.”

  I watched him turn his back and climb the short flight of steps to his front door. It opened and closed. I would never see him again.

  I LEANED MY head against the airplane window and wept. There was nothing for it: no secret of self-control, no imagined Buddhist cure. My brother had killed himself. And the most awful thing was that it was still so fresh. Three days ago he was alive. I could have called him on the telephone. I could have spoken to him, heard his voice. He would have spilled out his plans, and I would have stopped him. Of this I was certain. I would have done anything, gone anywhere, to prevent my brother from taking his life.

  I wished that my heart could fly out into the atmosphere, wished that my horror and grief could burst out of me in a single wild tide and be expressed, complete, done with. But there was no such end in sight. And I understood, from my limited knowledge of such things, that the shock and pain I now felt were the first frost of a coming winter, the length and darkness of which could not be measured.

  The enormity of my dispensation struck me full force, and I was surprised by how much satisfaction it brought. There is simply nothing more tragic, I realized, than death. Every play, every book, every film that relies on tragedy relies on death. Only the victims and circumstances change.

  There are the huge deaths, the vast genocides that sweep through nations. There is the unspeakable horror of watching everyone you know and love die, and the guilty longing to follow them into the grave. There are the deaths of children, but all deaths are the deaths of children. There are the poignant deaths of misaligned lovers; the senseless deaths of colliding cars and plunging buses; the maniac street-corner deaths; the righteous deaths; the swift, dreamlike deaths on plummeting airplanes; the long deaths and short deaths; the heroic deaths and holy deaths. There are useful deaths and useless deaths, the “friendly fire” and sanitized collateral death that we read about in the newspapers. The good guys kill the bad guys, the bad guys kill the good guys, and each side writes its own tragic libretto.

  I recalled a cold and moonless night in 1984: the night after my father’s funeral. My cousin Susie and I drove aimlessly through the Long Island suburbs. When we reached the north shore, my bladder began to throb.

  “There’s no place to take a leak,” I observed in a panic.

  Susie pulled to the curb in front of a posh estate that looked like a set from The Great Gatsby. She leaned over and pushed my door open. “Your father just died,” she said. “You can piss wherever you want.”

  The memory made me laugh sharply, startling the already uneasy passenger beside me. No need to explain. My condition raised me, for the moment, above social convention.

  But there would be liabilities as well. Facing my mother at the airport, for example. And I would be expected to say something at the funeral. Afterward we would sit shiva at my mother’s house in Ossining, propped on little stools, receiving an endless stream of guests who meant well but couldn’t possibly know what to say. What could they say? I didn’t know what to say to my own mother.

  After the formal grieving period, there would follow an era of sad logistics. Calling Jordan’s friends, closing his bank account, sorting through his possessions. Most of the latter, I imagined, would be found in his apartment in Philadelphia. I remembered that he kept private journals; it was imperative I find them before my mother did. My motives included, irrationally, a desire to conceal my brother’s sexual dysfunction—but there was more. The fact that Jordan despised our father was no secret to me. I could only imagine what his personal writings might say.

  He could really be a bastard. And now he had shot himself. He’d put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. I wondered if he thought even once about our mother, our sister, or me. The sheer frustration of not being able to slap him across the face made me dizzy. It simply wasn’t possible that I couldn’t ask him these questions, that I couldn’t grab him by his arm and say, Why, you fucking melodramatic asshole? Why’d you give up, you spineless coward? Why didn’t you call me, you selfish prick? What good is it going to do you now, moron? How dare you do this to yourself. How dare you do this to me.

  The clouds above, the earth below. Snow still dusted Ohio, untouched on the flat roofs of shopping malls. We flew above the worn knobs of Appalachia. Freeways ran like fuses through the powder. Now there were cities amid the fields, tracts of evergreens, parklands with meadows of dormant wildflowers. Soon the entire hemisphere would erupt into spring. My brother was dead, but the world looked the same from the air.

  23

  Egyptian Wing

  ON THE MORNING of March 15, a sparrow landed on a squat bush outside of the Chase Manhattan Bank in Ossining, New York.

  My mother and sister were with the bank manager, terminating my brother’s accounts. I waited in the parking lot and leaned back, etherized, against the side of my mother’s Camry. The sun was glorious, its full electromagnetic spectrum beating against the receptors in my skin. Light filtered through my eyelids, displaying a boundless persimmon sea.

  When I looked again, the bird was still there. It cocked its head and watched me, studying my features. We watched each other. Then came the rush of recognition, and I caught my breath: Is that you? Jord? Could that be you?

  We had buried my brother the day before, and I was already wondering where he might turn up next. There’s a wonderful sense of democracy in the idea of reincarnation. When someone you love has died, the whole world becomes a stage for their potential reappearance. I had recognized Jordan in a dozen potential forms: the raccoon raiding the trash cans outside my bedroom window, the dragonfly hesitating over the small lake on my mother’s property, the sleeping baby draped over a mother’s shoulder in the Ossining Bakery.

  But none of these scenarios could be accurate. It took longer than a week, supposedly, to be reborn. It required some forty-nine days for the soul to complete its journey through the Bardo and migrate into another form. This period, right now, was the crucial time: the period of passage. My brother was not perched on a shrub in Ossining-on-Hudson. His soul would be navigating that terrifying realm of flashing lights and deafening explosions, beginning its journey from the ineffable place we call death to the ineffable place we call life.

  I’d learned all this, but couldn’t help myself. I saw him everywhere.

  MY BROTHER’S MEMORIAL had been held in a Long Island mortuary, an hour’s drive from Ossining. It was a small event. We’d arrived early, at my insistence. There was something I needed to do.

  Folded in the pocket over my heart was a silk kata scarf blessed by the Dalai Lama. I’d received it some years ago, when His Holiness had visited San Francisco. Now I would place it around Jordan’s neck, and pray that its potent blessing would ease his journey through the Bardo.

  But as I entered the empty assembly room and saw the closed coffin, displayed in perfect solitude before rows of empty padded chairs, I collapsed against the door frame. My sister stood beside me, trembling so much she could barely speak.

  “Are you going to open it?”

  “I have to. I must.”

  “I can’t look.” Her face was white as aspirin. She left me, moving to a seat near the middle of the chapel.

  The shiny box. My brother was inside of it. All I wanted to do was lift the lid, place the kata around his neck, and kiss him good-bye.

  But there was a problem. Jordan had shot himself in the head. Through the back of the head, actually, with a hollow-point bullet that had blown his face off. There was now apparently something in its place, though I didn’t know what. I knew only that the mortuary had billed my mother hundreds of dollars
for “cosmetic restoration” fees.

  I’ve seen my share of horror movies and have felt my heart race with terror as crypts or coffins or spaceship doors creaked open to reveal gelatinous blobs, psychotic killers, or the blank eyes of the undead. I’ve waltzed with death myself, losing my footing on Himalayan precipices or careening out of control on icy New England roads. Three years earlier, during a night dive in the Solomon Islands, an underwater current nearly dragged me away. I’ve been thrown from motorcycles, cornered by forest fires, and trapped amid a school of hammerhead sharks. But at that moment, standing beside Jordan’s closed coffin, it seemed I had never known fear before. My heart pounded in my chest, and my legs were clay. My entire body seemed gripped by a stupefying narcolepsy. All I wanted was to lie down and sleep. My dead brother’s face was three feet from my own, but I dared not look. I dared not open that box.

  I held the coffin lid by the edge with the fingers of both hands, steadying myself, sensing its weight. Debra sat behind me in the pews. I took a deep breath, and lifted.

  Inside lay an unfamiliar dummy with a waxen, painted face. Jordan’s cadaver was dressed in a natty suit and tie, its chest artificially inflated. His eyes were too far apart. His nose, my brother’s proud Medici beak, had been flattened. The lips, so adept at smirking, described a piously straight line. His eloquent hands, their nails neatly trimmed, lay beside him. A rolled-up towel propped his neck.

  The face bore no look of suffering, or any expression of peace. It was utterly lifeless, and completely anonymous. The embalmers had tried to restore him, but the feat was beyond their skills. Better, I thought, to have left the wound. This caricature was more awful, in its dishonesty, than no face at all.