Snake Lake

by Jeff Greenwald

  When my prayers were finished, I went into the bathroom, returned with two large towels, and used them to cover the bed and floor.

  It was remarkable, how everything in the room had acquired an air of sanctity, as if I had walked not into my brother’s apartment but into a museum. His jeans and V-neck undershirt draped carelessly across the single chair; the saucepot, wooden spoon, and pasta strainer in the sink; the teacup full of loose change; all seemed eternal, immutable. Jordan’s address book sat on the desk, next to the phone, opened to the letter C. I picked up the receiver and hit “redial.” The phone on the receiving end rang twice, and a woman answered.

  “Good afternoon, Sheriff’s department.”

  I hung up, feeling foolish, and wandered into the bathroom. His toothbrush. I ran my thumb across the bristles. A quart of Listerine waited in the medicine cabinet, along with a bar of Mennen Extra Dry, Barbasol shaving cream, and a flask of Drakkar Noir cologne.

  “It’s a nocturnal scent,” Jordan had explained as I recoiled from him one night in Oakland. We were on our way out, and he reeked. “Meaning, literally, ‘black dragon.’ For ’tis the Latin noun draco—ostensibly the source of this brand-name neologism—which forms the root of dragon, first employed in the thirteenth century. Though one might also admit ‘black serpent,’ or even ‘beast,’ ergo, ‘night beast’ . . .”

  “Jord, we’re going to a Ravel recital, not a vampires’ ball.”

  “Nonetheless: an irresistible draw.”

  “I’m repelled,” I parried.

  “Quite so,” Jordan nodded. “To repel one’s competitors, whilst simultaneously attracting the female of the species, is the aim of male display behavior.”

  I replaced the cologne, returned to the main room, and began looking for my brother’s journals. There were footsteps in the hall, then a knock. It was hesitant, but firm enough to make the door swing slightly open. A tall black woman with beaded cornrows took a step into the room and looked at me incredulously.

  “You’re his brother,” she said. I nodded. She walked directly to me, encircled me in her arms, and laid her head against my chest. Her scalp smelled of musk and tobacco.

  “I’m Monica,” she whispered. “In 605. Next door.” She backed away a few feet, looked into my eyes, and gripped my hands. “Last Friday,” she said, “just before nine in the morning. I was rushing to work. I saw him. He was standing right outside the room, in the hallway, staring at nothing. Just nothing. I looked at him and thought, ‘Monica, this guy is hurting. He needs something. Maybe he just needs a hug, or someone to say something to him.’ But I was already late for work and I didn’t stop. I didn’t stop. Oh, Jesus.” She embraced me again and began weeping. “Oh, God, I’m so sorry. I should have realized. I should have known.”

  I held her tightly. My brother, the report said, had shot himself at eleven. Monica would have been the last person to see him alive.

  “It’s all right,” I whispered. “No one could have known.”

  I was not mouthing words. It had already struck me, and would do so many times again, that nearly everyone I knew—my colleagues, my friends, my lovers—could one day throw themselves from a bridge or swallow an overdose of pills or shoot themselves in a sunny bedroom, and I would receive the news and mutter to myself miserably, I should have seen it coming.

  But there is no question, I understood, of seeing it coming. It is already here. It comes with the territory. Human beings suffer. We have our episodes of abstract dread, profound loneliness, sickness, self-loathing, despair. We all notice how close death is, how casual an invitation it requires. Chokyi Nyima had spoken of the precious human rebirth, and the four auspicious conditions: ideas meant to underscore the momentous value of each human life. But my brother hadn’t studied Buddhism. He had read Thomas Mann and Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche and Albert Camus. The ultimate question, for him, was not about devoting his life to liberation; it was whether to continue the act of living at all. Had he read Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind or The Experience of Insight and bought a meditation cushion, he might have spent his adult years cutting through his preconceptions about life, love, and the mind. Instead he bought a pistol and blew his mind away. The greatest tragedy was not even the act itself, but his ignorance. It was the only solution he had imagined.

  WHEN MONICA DEPARTED I resumed my search for Jordan’s journals. Three of them, spiral notebooks dating from 1980, were in plain sight, on a shelf beside a Greek lexicon. I would read these later. What I wanted right now was the most recent volume. I found it in a blue daypack, hanging from a nail inside the hall closet. Unlike the other journals, this one was bound, with a black plastic cover.

  The pages were covered with my brother’s angular, insectlike scrawl. My heart pounded as I browsed ahead, moving inexorably toward the place where the blue ink would end and the empty pages begin. When I found the spot, my ears were ringing, and a patina of sweat covered my neck.

  The last words my brother wrote had been entered on the seventh of March. The entry consisted of one sentence: I cannot bear even once more to wake to sorrow.

  Closing the book, I stared at the wall above his desk. Suddenly it astonished me, how utterly blank the room was. There were no posters, no photographs, no tchotchkes or souvenirs. There were no vases, plants, or candleholders. Not even a calendar hung on the wall.

  This was entirely out of character. Jordan had loved art, and his other rooms had always been papered with prints: Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci, Gustave Doré. Here, after six months, he still hadn’t gotten around to decorating. Was that it? Or had his appreciation of beauty atrophied to the point where nothing at all could bring him solace? It was then, at that moment, that I understood how completely he had introverted. Somewhere, he had taken a wrong turn into the maze of his intellect and had never found the way back out.

  But here was something new. Sitting on the white laminate bookshelf was a hand-thrown ceramic mug, lapis blue. Behind the mug stood a Valentine’s card, illustrated with a Jim Dine heart. I picked it up and read the brief inscription:To my sweet friend Jordan

  who has won a place in my heart

  Love,

  Lindsay

  I replaced the card and moved to the desk, where my brother’s address book still lay open. There were five names under the letter C. The most recent addition was Lindsay Cohen.

  I lifted the receiver and dialed.

  25

  Lindsay

  THEY’D MET AT the campus racquetball club: the intense graduate student, lean and muscular, and the Amazonian architect sweating through her Lycra top. She wondered if the thick hair under her arms bothered him, but on their first date he put her mind at ease: “I like earthy women,” he’d told her. “Women unafraid to carry lambs under their arms.”

  She was two years older than Jordan. Her three-story house, set behind an iron gate in a rough but up-and-coming section of Philly, had cost her $1 when she bought it as part of the neighborhood regentrification program. Now, ten years and $45,000 in renovations later, it was hers free and clear.

  We climbed the carpeted stairway to a large dining room. The table was set; between the stoneware plates sat a large brown bag.

  “I ordered Chinese. They make it with no MSG. And we can have herbal tea. Is that okay?”

  “Perfect. Thanks.” I wandered through a broad passage into the adjacent living room. Lindsay had good taste, and was well traveled. Russian lacquerware decorated a low Chinese table; it wasn’t the kind you bought at boutiques. A row of ancient, dirt-caked clay oil lamps, evidently excavated by either herself or someone she knew, were displayed on wire mounts atop a low bookshelf. Framed Henri Matisse posters from the Musée d’Orsay hung above the sofa.

  “This is a beautiful place. You’ve got some lovely things. Have you been to Russia?” I spied the piano. “My God . . . that Steinway . . .”

  “I know. It belonged to my grandmother. Isn’t it amazing? She gave me my first lessons when I was el
even. But it needs to be tuned. Do you play?”

  “No. I wish I did.” I returned to the dining room and stood, resting my hands on the back of a chair. Lindsay had migrated into the kitchen. Her voice emerged, twangy with echo.

  “I’ve got . . . let’s see: peppermint, chamomile, Cranberry Cove, Almond Sunset, Orange Spice . . . Constant Comment . . .” The refrigerator door opened. “Juice, Diet Coke . . . unless you’d prefer a Calistoga. Or a beer. I think I . . . well, there are two. You can have a Budweiser or an Amstel.”

  “Amstel, please. I’m sorry, I should have brought wine. I wasn’t thinking.”

  She returned to the dining room with a Diet Coke and my beer and a handful of serving spoons. “Never mind,” she said. “This is the first day I’ve been able to think for a week.”

  We hadn’t shaken hands, or touched; nothing. “Lindsay . . .”

  She put what she was holding down on the table and came up to me with unexpected urgency. The instant we embraced, she released a flood of tears.

  “Christ. I was hoping this wouldn’t happen. Shit.” She let go. “I’m sick of having swollen eyes.”

  “Does it help to cry?”

  “It did at first. Now it’s, like, sneaky and uncontrollable. I’ll be waiting at the bank, or drawing at my desk, and all of a sudden I’ll think about Jordan, and bam, I’m gone. What about you?” I said nothing. She pushed back and looked at me—we stood eye to eye—and laughed a little. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m being selfish. Just hold me for a minute. Okay?”

  WHEN LINDSAY HAD first opened her front door I’d experienced a moment of perceptual vertigo. For a split second the motive for my brother’s infatuation seemed absurdly clear. Lindsay looked exactly like him. Their resemblance was so striking that I knew she must resemble me, as well. What would it be like to make love with a woman who could be your fraternal twin, or conversely, to embrace a man who so nearly mirrored your own features?

  She was tall, maybe even five foot ten, with the kind of lavish, curly hair universally coveted by women who don’t have it. In better times, I imagined, she had an easy laugh; her face had the right lines. It was a sweet face, bright and intense, clearly accustomed to expressing the full range of emotions. In this respect she would be the polar opposite of Jordan, whose entire emotional range could be represented by a small array of Noh masks.

  “We were magnetically attracted,” Lindsay said quietly, filling a mu shu pancake with vegetables and plum sauce. “I thought he was the handsomest man I’d ever met. He was absolutely the smartest. I mean, I’m no dummy, but half the time the things he was saying went . . .” She sliced her hand through the air above her head. “And that was when I could get him to speak English!”

  We told stories and laughed, mostly, falling back again and again upon our disbelief. She shared his letters with me, even the most personal ones. I was astonished by the vulnerability of his writing. It was a side of my brother I’d never seen.

  But resonating within his prose, one could hear a steady chord of theatrical melodrama, as if even his love letters were part of a scripted exchange, borrowed from some doomed classical romance. He had flown his soul like a kite, spinning out string until it got so high and wild that he’d lost control.

  I trickled soy across the skin of an egg roll. “Lindsay . . . How did you find out?” Her whole body seemed to contract. “You don’t have to tell me.”

  “No. No, it’s okay. Give me a second.” Throughout the evening her tears had fallen and stopped, her face clouding and brightening and darkening again like a monsoon sky. Lindsay got up, went into the bathroom, and came back with a Vicks inhaler. She drew the vapors deep into her nostrils.

  “It was last Saturday night. The ninth. I’d been at a party for one of the women in my office; she’s leaving to open her own office in Maine. It was a great party, our boss had hired a band, and we’d all chipped in and bought her a paraglider. We were drinking a lot, and at about three in the morning I called a cab. By the time I got home the place was spinning. All I wanted was to get into bed and collapse. But the light on my answering machine was blinking. Which was weird, because I’d left for the party pretty late—about ten.

  “So I turned it on, and the message said, Lindsay Cohen, this is Detective Moorehouse from the Philadelphia Police Department. We have a suicide note addressed to you from a Jordan Greenwald. And that was how I found out.”

  The blood drained from my cheeks. “That’s . . . it’s horrible.”

  “You can’t imagine.”

  I picked at my chicken and broccoli and managed to ask, after a minute, if Lindsay would show me Jordan’s note. She nodded. It was a copy, she said apologetically. The police had kept the original.

  March 8, 1990

  My Dearest Lindsay,

  I want you to know, first of all, that you bear no responsibility for my death. Since my mishap ten years ago, the thought of suicide has been with me constantly—a grim companion, to be sure, and one who, after a time, left his traces upon the lineaments of my face and in the inflection of my voice. Through the awful length of days, I summoned strength from the hope of recovery and from that only. Last month, however, I learned that any change beyond my present condition is most unlikely. It was then that I bought a pistol.

  All these years I attempted to conceal my spiritual decline from others; but never, not by pages read or miles run or hours spent in picture galleries, could I conceal it from myself. I know that you, too, perceived in me a certain want of spirit. Its cause, though you may not believe it, resides in the flesh. Knowledge of this insuperable obstacle, particularly as it keeps me apart from you, has made my life at last intolerable.

  The German poet Friedrich Hölderlin ends one of his poems with the line, Einmal lebt’ich, wie Götter, und mehr bedarf’s nicht: “I lived once like the gods, and ask no more.” When you and I lay together, Lindsay, I, too, knew that blessèd life. It is to you, then beloved, that I owe the greatest happiness I have known on this earth—the greatest happiness, I think, that anyone could know. I do not believe in a life after death; but if there is one, be certain, my darling, that I shall watch over you from that other world.

  Sweetie, please remember, you bear absolutely no responsibility for my act and I have not for a second held you responsible. It results rather from long, long unhappiness. In a letter to a friend I wrote that my chief dread was that you entrust yourself to me and I fail to make you happy. You foresaw that when we parted; I foresee it too, not only in your case, but in the case of any woman. I am altogether too unhappy to continue; I long for an end to consciousness.

  I am writing these lines in what I believe to be my last minutes (or hour). How pleasant it is to think of you, darling! From the day we met I have thought of you without cease. And again I have the opportunity to tell you that I love you.

  My dear, dear friend, I bid you farewell. I do not know what to write except that, in this difficult hour, I am glad to reflect that I did not conceal my love, and that my attentions brought you pleasure a while.

  Love,

  J.

  I finished the letter and set it on the table, humbled. The kata and prayer flags I’d left on Jordan’s corpse and around his room were trinkets. Lindsay’s love was the single gift, I knew, that might truly redeem my brother’s spirit and save him from the lowest rebirths.

  “When was the last time you spoke with him?”

  “Thursday night. He called me about going on a bike ride Sunday. I told him I didn’t know if it was a good idea. We’d stopped seeing each other about a week before, and I was feeling conflicted. It was so tempting just to see him, to hold him.” Her voice broke. “But I knew it wasn’t right. I knew if I saw him again I’d lose whatever ground I’d gained. I mean, look, I’m thirty-five. And I was really sure he was it. When we first met. I thought he really might be the one. Your brother was really such a wonderful man, but he just . . .”

  We sat in silence. I became aware of the hour: t
he Metroliner back to Manhattan left at 10:30 p.m. But there was something I wanted to know, a piece of information I needed before I could leave the house.

  “Lindsay, can I ask you a personal question?”

  She nodded, but said nothing.

  “For a long time—for years—my brother complained of a sexual problem. It was the root of his despair. The only time I heard him talk about killing himself, it was related to that issue. Supposedly there was a moment, when—during sex, almost ten years ago—he felt what he described to me as a sharp pain in his penis. That was the ‘mishap’ he wrote about in his note.” I was tempted to stop there, but realized I still hadn’t asked the question. “I understand that it must have been terribly frustrating, even humiliating, for you as well. But what I need to know is, how bad was it? I mean, do you think he was beyond help?”

  Lindsay looked at me directly, neither blinking nor wavering, while I spoke. When I finished she pulled her hair away from her face with both hands and threw it back over her shoulders. Then she placed her hands on her knees.

  “Can I be equally frank with you?”

  I nodded, flushed.

  “Sex was not a problem,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Jordan was wonderful in bed. He was a wonderful lover. He had no sexual problems at all.”

  I couldn’t speak. The room quivered and spun, as if she had hit me over the head with a frying pan.

  “It was out of bed that our problems arose. Jordan just couldn’t relax. He couldn’t let go. He had this mask of formality that he put on, always, the minute he got up in the morning.

  “I used to shake him”—her voice seemed to arrive from a great distance—“and beg him to loosen up. But it wasn’t something he could shake off. He had spent too long building that persona, that wall. And he couldn’t let it down, not even for me. So I asked him to see a therapist. I gave him $1,000 to cover the first few months, the trial run. But he only went once.