I stared, paralyzed by revulsion. I couldn’t touch him. There was no question of lifting his head, or putting anything around his neck. My kata hung limply in my hands. At last I draped it across his breast, tucking the silk fringes under the lapels of the jacket.
This was what was left of him. My strange brother, solitary navigator of the dense worlds: those neutron-stars of philosophy, ancient languages, linguistics. My brilliant, irreplaceable brother, insane prankster, pitiless critic, divine comic, desperate clown. Here lay hammer and anvil, calculator and goose quill, athlete, Athenian, ass. My brother, Imitator of Sheep. My impossible little brother.
He was really dead. He would be dead for the rest of my life. My wife, if I married, would never know him. Our children would never meet him. We would never trek in Nepal together, never picnic at Point Reyes, never again send each other birthday cards. There was no one else alive who had shared my childhood so closely, or who knew me more intimately. I realized, for the first time, how utterly alone I was.
In a moment I would close the coffin and say farewell to Jordan forever. But first I reached out and touched, tentatively, his cheek. It was cold and firm, like neoprene. And then I kissed my fingertips. I kissed them as if I had touched something holy, although I knew beyond any doubt that what lay before me was nothing but an empty husk. I closed the lid.
My mother was in the mortuary office, sitting stiffly in a wooden chair while a clerk totaled the bill. She turned to look at me as I walked in. I shook my head.
“I wanted to say good-bye to him,” I told her. “But he had already left.”
WHEN THE FUNERAL ended, my sister and I caught the Metro-North to Grand Central. We hopped on the Lexington line and emerged at Seventy-seventh Street, gasping at the city’s fin-de-siècle beauty. It was the first time either of us had encountered strangers, or been around crowds, for days. I found it vivifying. It was a joy to be back among the living, ascending onto Manhattan’s spring streets. We turned uptown and continued the final half mile on foot.
The Met is always crowded, often chaotically so. Debra didn’t know the place, and stumbled into stunned agoraphobia as we entered the echoic enormity of the Great Hall. I took her hand and led her along, beelining toward the galleries Jordan had loved the most.
The bookish sobriety of the place seemed to forbid speech. We wandered reverently among the Cycladic harpists, beheld the marble warriors and Greek sphinx, and peered into dimly lit showcases loaded with ancient necklaces. Finally we reached Gallery 25: the bright and spacious atrium housing the Temple of Dendur. Debra walked directly toward a low wall containing a still, rectangular pool. She sat down and pulled off her boots.
“My feet are killing me.”
I sat beside her and looked at her feet, comical in wasp-yellow stockings. At twenty-seven she was quite beautiful, with a radiant smile and thick auburn hair that glinted copper in the sunlight. She had a sharp sense of humor and could grasp the most oblique concepts instantly. But in other ways she was surprisingly unsophisticated, lacking the self-confidence of my other friends her age. Unlike Jordan or myself, she had spent her adolescence adrift, bereft of a sense of direction.
It wasn’t surprising. Most of my sister’s life had been spent in a spiritual and intellectual vacuum. As the youngest of three, she’d been left to contend with our parents’ discontent, long after Jordan and I had made our escapes. Her search for approval and acceptance took all the wrong turns, landing her in a witches’ brew of drugs and alcohol. The self-destructive cycle had carried into her twenties, when she’d bottomed out in a crazy marriage that lasted three weeks.
But all that had changed. Over the past five years, she’d pulled herself together. Debra had found a steady job, started therapy, and was dating her grade school sweetheart. She’d even discussed turning her supernatural rapport with animals into a pet-grooming business. It seemed far-fetched, but I’d heard crazier things. The point was, she had her dreams; she could imagine her future.
I pulled some change out of my pocket and handed her a quarter.
“What. Am I supposed to make a wish?”
“It’s an option. Jordan and I did, the last time we were here.”
“I can’t picture that.” She seemed completely astonished. “When? What did he wish?”
“It was five years ago. I don’t know what he wished for. I asked him; he gave me a very earnest look and answered in ancient Greek.”
“He’s incredible.” Debra leaned forward and pinched yellow nylon off the soles of her feet. “I know it’s sick, but I can’t believe he’s dead. I can’t accept it. It’s like a dream. I feel like I’m dreaming. Even being here, sitting here with you. It’s like nothing is real. Do you know what I’m talking about? Am I going crazy, or what?” Tears fell onto the cement floor between her heels. She looked at the coin in her palm, twisted around, and flung it into the shallow pool. It gulped and sank. I followed suit.
“What did you wish?”
“What did you wish?”
“Are we supposed to tell?”
“You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
Debra took a breath. “I wished that this doesn’t kill Mom,” she said. We were silent for a moment, then she turned to me.
“So? What did you wish?”
“I wished that someday, somehow, I can write about him. He deserves to be written about.”
“He does,” she said. “I can’t imagine how you would do it, but he definitely does.”
The atrium was spacious, but cold. Debra put her boots back on, and we left the ruins of Dendur, walking through the Egyptian galleries. As we entered the room containing finds from Dynasty 21, I stopped in my tracks, drawn magnetically to a dimly lit mummy. Staring at the desiccated shape threw a switch in my brain. The full impact of the recent days struck me like a blow, and I groped for my sister’s hand.
“Jeff? Are you okay?”
She shook my arm. “Do you want to get out of here?” Debra’s palm was sweating; she, too, was spooked. “Come with me,” she said. “I feel better when we walk.”
I followed her into one of the adjacent galleries. Two long papyri, excerpts from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, filled one entire case. In the other were ornate coffins, the paint as fresh and colorful as if it had been applied by David Hockney. One of the wall cases held canopic jars, scarabs, amulets, and some fragments of what must have once been larger bas-reliefs. It was here that we stopped. Debra pointed to a small sandstone carving. It portrayed a small bird and a single hieroglyph. I read the card:QUAIL CHICK PLAQUE PTOLEMAIC PERIOD (332-30 B.C.)
“Do you recognize that bird?”
“It looks familiar . . .”
“That’s what Jord gave Mom and Dad once for Hanukkah,” she said. “That very thing. They must sell reproductions in the museum gift shop. It’s weird”—I felt the familiar force of my sister’s telepathy at work—“but he had this thing for birds. Did you ever notice? He was, like, infatuated with birds. I thought that was kind of cool, because he actually reminded me of a bird. The way some people look like animals. Do you know what I mean?”
We left the gallery, making our way toward the exit. “I was thinking about that just this morning,” I said. “While you and Mom were in the bank. I had the strongest feeling that if he comes back, he’ll be a bird. It would make perfect sense.”
“Do you believe in that? In reincarnation?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think so. It makes sense to me that things should work that way; that consciousness is never wasted, and never disappears. But I also believe in karma: that your situation completely depends on the positive and negative actions you’ve performed. Not only in this lifetime, but in your previous lifetimes as well. So while I hope Jord comes back again, I have a feeling that committing suicide really screws up your karma.”
“Why? I mean, what if someone’s really sick, or in constant pain?”
“I don’t know what the policy is on that. The point is that
getting a human life, being reborn as a human being, is incredibly rare. One book I read said you should imagine a single lifebuoy, floating on the surface of the ocean. In all the ocean, there’s one turtle. What do you think the chances are that the turtle, coming up for air, will pop through that ring?”
“What do I think? Zero.”
“Well, not quite. But incredibly small. That’s how likely it is that, of all the possible rebirths, you end up as a human being. It’s an amazing opportunity—because only as a human can you meditate, study, and behave in ways that change your karma. Killing yourself doesn’t change anything. All you’ve done is wasted your human rebirth. Who can say when, or if, you’ll get another one?”
“I disagree.” My sister unhesitatingly took on the Buddha. “I don’t accept that Jord’s life was wasted. In any way. Period. Sorry.”
We left the Met, walking through Central Park. Debra’s boots clonked on the walkway. There were jugglers, joggers, and women pushing strollers. A volleyball sailed wild, bouncing by our feet. A Chinese man sold Good Humor bars to a pair of skaters, their legs splayed for balance. Pigeons clouded the path. The air was pure Manhattan ambrosia, perfumed with sweat and ambition, a lick of exhaust and the Hudson, mowed grass and muck, cotton candy, the exotic scat of the zoo.
We strolled in silence, welded together by grief and solitude. Sometimes Debra would shake her head, and at those moments I knew exactly what she was thinking, because I was thinking it, too. Our nagging question, the tormenting, overarching Why? pervaded the day like mist; but beneath its vapor hung the even more inscrutable How? How did you ever find a way to forsake this sweet, sweet planet, Jordan? How did you bring yourself to shut off the trees, grass, ducks, bicycles, and squirrels?
How could you close your eyes forever to the clouds sailing above the skyscrapers, to the hot pretzels laced with sweet mustard, to any or all of the infinite rest of it? And could anything, any sweet final memory of this world you barely knew, any hope or scheme or itch of curiosity, any seductive wink or lustful embrace, Baroque fugue or cello concerto, telephone call or sudden visitor, have kept your finger off that trigger?
We crossed Central Park South near the Plaza, jaywalking between hansom cabs, to meet Fifth Avenue. I was looking in the window of Saks, captivated by a line of handbags studded with huge fake gems, when Debra called to me. She was standing by a newsstand on the corner.
“What’s up?”
“Look!” she said, pointing to the cover of a newspaper. “There’s something about Nepal.”
I dropped a few coins into the rack and opened the Times. There was little new in the story, just an update on the stalemate between Nepal and India. But it was a reminder that my other home still existed, so far in time and space from this one.
A strange thought gripped me. Jordan and I had both left our worlds. I wondered if, like a determined ghost, I’d be permitted to return to mine.
24
An Apartment in Philadelphia
THERE WAS A coffee shop next to my brother’s apartment building. I sat at a red Formica table, drinking jasmine tea. On the walls of the café hung framed photographs of Hollywood starlets: Jayne Mansfield, Lana Turner, Marilyn Monroe. Refilling my cup from a tiny Pyrex pitcher, I wondered if these vampish images, which Jordan was forced to confront every time he stopped in for a bagel, were sources of torment to him.
My mother and sister were on the nearby campus. They would join me in an hour and a half. What I had to do between now and then was finish my tea, go next door, introduce myself to the building manager, and gain entrance to my brother’s apartment. No one had been in the room since his suicide, with the exception of a police detective and the medics who had removed his body seven days ago. It was my responsibility to do whatever was necessary to ensure that my mother and sister could enter the studio without fear of what they might see.
The air was cold. Every time I had a birthday, for the rest of my life, I’d remember this anniversary. But my brother’s timing had been an act of compassion, not cruelty. He had phoned our mother three days before his death, asking when I’d be back from Nepal. “In a day or two,” she’d replied. It had finally dawned on me: He’d waited. It was not his choice that I’d flown home on my birthday.
The lobby of the apartment building was cavernous and dim, the floor polished-granite inlay, the overhead lamps opaque with a half century of moth wings. One entire wall was filled with old brass post boxes, their perforated doors tarnished green. Rococo trim scampered around the ceiling. I liked the place immediately. Some distance away, two Louis Quinze armchairs flanked a circular marble table with a reading lamp rising, stalk-like, from its center. A middle-aged woman sat in one of the chairs, leafing through People. She folded the magazine and placed it on the table as I approached.
“Mrs. Walsh? I’m Jeff Greenwald.”
She took my offered hand in hers. They were thin, but warm. “I’m so, so sorry.” She had a triangular face, with large black eyes and small lips. “I’m so terribly sorry.”
“Thank you.” I had learned, at last, that there was no better reply.
“He lived on the fifth floor.” Her voice reverberated slightly. “We can take the lift.”
I followed her into the elevator. The door closed in front of us. We emerged into a slightly musty hallway. An anemic rubber tree sat on a table with fiddlehead legs. Maroon carpeting covered the floor. Mrs. Walsh led me down a short hallway and into a little alcove. Three doors faced the space; she paused in front of room 603. The keys were in her hand, but she didn’t unlock the door.
“You know that no one’s been in there since . . .”
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
“It hasn’t been cleaned up.”
“I understand.” I reached out to touch her elbow, but she took my hand.
“If you like, I’ll go in first,” she said. “Or I can wait out here. Or of course if you prefer, I can just unlock the door and leave you by yourself.”
“You’re very sweet.” I released her hand. “I’d like you to unlock the door, and let me go in when I feel I’m ready.”
“Of course.” She slid the key into the deadbolt. “If you need anything, I’ll be down in the lobby.” She turned her wrist. There was a definitive snap, which resonated in the foyer. Then she removed the key and left me alone.
I placed my hand on the doorknob. Adrenaline pounded in my temples. It was almost comical, to be so frightened. So frightened by a room. As frightened by this closed door, in fact, as I had been by Jordan’s closed coffin.
I tried to objectify my fear by envisioning Asian traditions. In Nepal I’d have watched Jordan’s body burn to ash, heard his skull pop. In Tibet his body would have been carried to a hilltop, hacked to pieces, and fed to birds of prey. Now he was in the ground; there was only this room, this apartment in Philadelphia. The room where he had shot himself. What was the worst thing I could imagine? Bits of brain on the floor? An eyeball in a corner? All of this was just stuff. Empty stuff. It had belonged to my brother, but wasn’t a part of him anymore.
Yet the truth was that, Buddhism or bravado notwithstanding, such a sight might be too much for me to handle. I recalled the anxiety attack I’d suffered during Lhosar. Though I hadn’t known it at the time, it now seemed obvious that my reaction to that corpse, exposed on the Boudhnath kora, had been a premonition. I’d always been squeamish. If there was anything gruesome in the apartment, it could set me off—and this time, Chokyi Nyima would not be here to save me.
This was a risk. Even so, I had no regrets about turning down Mrs. Walsh’s offer to remain. My visit to the spot where my brother had ended his life was a pilgrimage, but it was also a labor: a reconnaissance of the naga’s den. Like the descent into Shantipur, it had to be performed alone.
I faced the door. It stared back blankly, its stenciled numbers an unknown area code. Was there a keyhole? I wondered absurdly. Somewhere I might peek in, first?
A distant memory surfaced: the one
and only camping trip I’d ever taken with Jordan, fifteen years ago. We had stood side by side, naked, at the edge of an alpine lake, anticipating the icy rush that a momentary surrender to gravity would shoot into our veins. Too wimpy to plunge, I dipped my toe in the water. Not Jordan; he snorted at me in exasperation, then dove headlong into the lake. His lean body knifed through the water, emerging sleek and blue on the far side.
“It’s like bathwater!” he cried out, arms wrapped around his shaking torso. “It’s like a fucking Turkish bath in here!”
I turned the doorknob and stepped inside the room.
THE FIRST THING I noticed was the blood. The mattress caked with blood, so dark it looked like chocolate; the streaks of blood thrown recklessly across the wall; the broad puddle of dried blood, the deep brain blood of my brother, cracking on the lath floor. A crumpled white sock lay next to his ruined pillow. I closed the door behind me.
The room was surprisingly bright and pleasant, nothing like the mortuary’s pall of mourning. I recognized my brother’s smell, mingled with stale milk and laundry. A single, large window faced an open courtyard and, beyond, an unremarkable cityscape. The window opened easily, and a breath of spring air rushed in. It occurred to me that the weather had been very different a week ago: cold, windy, maybe even raining. The change of seasons was so dramatic, so vivacious on the East Coast. After sixteen years in California, it was the only thing I missed.
In Kathmandu, I’d bought a sheaf of 1,008 small paper prayer flags. They were intended as a gift for an artist friend. Now I took a handful of them from my jacket pocket and scattered them over the bloodstained bedding. The victims of violent death, Tibetans believe, sometimes loiter at the site of their demise, seeking solace or direction. If Jordan’s spirit returned here, it would find useful tools: prayers of wisdom and compassion, potential passwords for the difficult journey ahead. Nothing I could do or say would bring my brother back to life, but it seemed possible that I could expedite his Bardo experience. It was better than nothing.
Snake Lake Page 23
