“Sex was not the problem,” she repeated, shaking her head. “If he could have been as intimate and loving out of bed as he was in bed, we would never have split up.”
26
The Wind Tunnel
THE FIRST FEW weeks after my return to Oakland, friends came by every day. We’d sit on the purple futon in my living room or congregate around my dining table, the memorial candle burning, and talk about death and transfiguration. Beyond the window, city buses and bottle-filled shopping carts jostled down Fortieth toward Telegraph. I served chips and salsa. A photograph of my brother sat on my writing desk, his ironic gaze banishing the nightmare memory of his mortuary death mask.
Familiarity can be like a dream. The fabric of my own everyday life, viewed through the filter of Jordan’s suicide, took on an iridescent sheen. I felt beatified. Fabulous things happened. Dying plants bloomed back to life in my presence. Fortune cookies blessed me. Strange cats pressed their muzzles to my shins. I found money everywhere: $20 bills, two or three at a time, balled up in careless post-ATM configurations.
Sex was an exception. I gave Carlita’s “therapy” an honest try, suppressing a longing for Nepal during our time together. Our couplings were primal and efficient, keeping a connection alive without bringing us closer. We knew how to have fun together. But when we were apart, my thoughts turned to Grace, with an odd mixture of craving and concern. Half a dozen attempts to phone her had ended in frantic busy signals or scratchy recordings, in Nepali and English, about overloaded lines. It often seemed that Nepal, like James Hilton’s Shangri-la, was a phantasmagoric world. Once you left, you no longer had access.
And my life in Oakland was full. Every day—answering the telephone, standing on line at the post office, shopping for coffee at Piedmont Grocery—I received sacraments of sympathy and concern. Somehow, everyone knew. People touched me, usually on the arm or shoulder, and asked: How are you? Are you all right? How’s your mom?
They were tough questions. For despite the oddly luminous quality of my life, I was not all right. I could not honestly say that I was doing well, or that my mother or sister were doing well. I could not state that we had come to terms with Jordan’s death, or that we ever would.
How are you doing? people asked.
And I answered: It’s like a wind tunnel. The kind used to test experimental rockets and jets. Engineers place a scale model inside a wind tunnel and turn up the fans. For the jet to survive, its shape must divert the winds around its surface. If there is a design problem—any aerodynamic flaw—the model disintegrates.
The strongest blast had hit me when I’d lifted the lid of Jordan’s coffin. My frame had shuddered, trembling with dangerous vibrations, but had not gone to pieces. My mother and sister faced equally powerful gales from different angles, and they, too, had survived. Everyone who experiences a suicide must turn toward the wind in his or her private way.
For some, the strategy is anger: rage at the fool who has thrown away his own life and brought so much suffering to others. For others it is uninhibited grief: days of sobbing, lamentation, the flushing out of pain. I chose the shape of an explorer: investigating, reporting, sublimating my own grief into the excitement that accompanies a journey of discovery. I read Jordan’s journals, perused his letters, spent hours on the telephone with his confidants, professors, and lovers. I roamed through this labyrinth of mysteries with awe and compassion, in search of I knew not what. If this was a quest, it was toward an indefinable goal.
By the end of my third week in California, I realized the goal was not indefinable at all. I had begun to sense its edges.
My desire was to find the True Cause. I wanted to convince myself, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Jordan’s suicide was unavoidable. I wanted to know that there was no other way for events to unfold, that nothing I might have said, and nothing anyone could have done, would have arrested his cancer of the spirit.
IF A TUNNEL is long enough, and dark enough, it might as well be a cave. The first days after Jordan’s death had found me stumbling blindly. But as my investigations progressed, there was gradual illumination. I began to know Jordan as never before. Immersed in his writings, communing with his friends, I found the intimacy that had eluded us as adults. It never felt like a one-way street. We were in constant communication, my brother and I, through channels both subtle and direct.
Others, I learned, had shared this experience. Loved ones die, and after the initial shock, we realize we’ve been given the responsibility—and privilege—of keeping them alive. It’s not a matter of reading their mail, riding their bicycle, or wearing their clothes. It has nothing to do with the stuff they left behind: the structure of objects and friendships, which crumbles like a neglected road in the Amazon rain forest.
It’s about becoming them, in an almost organic way. We absorb the essence of our lost ones, drawing their best attributes into our own lives. If they were kind, we swell with their goodness. If they were pushy, we extract their decisiveness and will. In the case of Jordan, I felt my neck elongating, my eyes becoming more keen. I grew funnier, but more cynical; sharper, but less self-revealing. I felt a strange attraction to Virgil Fox recordings and Berlitz language courses. I picked up rare books, running my fingers along their spines.
My mother and I walked into a bakery in Tarrytown, looking for a fresh Jewish rye. After the clerk had sliced the loaf and slid it into a waxed bag, I stuck my nose in the sack and inhaled deeply. “’Tis the aroma of freshly baled hay,” I declaimed, “with a hint of sweet manure. One needs only a sharp cheese—or a jar of schmaltz.” My mother looked at me in astonishment, as though I’d channeled the deceased. She was right: I was seeing my brother from the inside, looking out.
At other moments—visiting museums, listening to music—I heard his sharp, critical commentary in my ear, heard it as if he were speaking the words himself. One afternoon I dropped into the Strand bookstore, looking for an English version of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. But a ghostly admonition—There is no such thing as a translation—hustled me along.
My brother’s quality of observation, his provocative opinions about art and music, took root within my personality. The vow I had made in Kathmandu, a seeming eternity ago, had been fulfilled. We were brothers at last: on his terms, not mine.
HIS JOURNALS WERE heartbreaking, but the precision of his entries amazed me. He would write a paragraph, rewrite it on the following page, and then write it again, changing a single preposition. But if the writing was lovely, its message was devoid of hope. Jordan had known for years that he was going to kill himself. I found entries penned five, six, seven years ago that might just as well have been written the morning he took his life. There were months on end when Jordan did not believe he could live another day; long summer evenings when he stood on bridges near Cornell University, feeling the wind rise up the gorges and imagining the rush of air against his falling body.
The language of his suffering was theatrical, and unapologetically classical. His journals and letters overflowed with testimonies of unrequited love, phrased in the cloying, overripe language of Victorian tragedy. Even his most despairing entries seemed to have blossomed from the pen of a nineteenth-century dramaturge:If I must die, good; I’ve lived enough for ten men, for a hundred, for a thousand men. When I laughed the sky, the stones and the long grasses laughed with me; no one had ever laughed as I did. When I fell into despair not a thousand generations of men could speak a word to succor me. When I sought for truth I could have moved the planets, and the stars. In all I did I kept to truth and courage.
The words were overblown but, coming from my brother, they rang true. Jordan longed to die, and to die tragically. He had nurtured his pain for years, like an exquisitely twisted bonsai. His death, like Yukio Mishima’s, was ultimately a performance: a self-fulfilled prophecy, crafted for its pathos and impact.
I was fascinated by the accounts of Jordan’s relationships. One of the more unsettling things I learn
ed about my brother was that, despite the earthshaking intensity of his feelings for Lindsay, he had chronicled a nearly identical courtship a few months before, with a woman named Kate. Before Kate had come Jennifer, and Daphne, and Britta.
The evolution of these affairs was remarkably similar. Each began in a flash, followed by overwhelming infatuation and immediate decline. This final stage was an epoch of lamentation and woe, which Jordan painted in the blackest hues. The reason for the breakup was always the same: his “physical problem.”
ONE MORNING IN early April, making a pot of coffee, I wondered what Jordan had been doing just over six years ago, on my thirtieth birthday. I found that journal: a spiral-bound, single-subject notebook. As I leafed through it, I realized I had missed something. When I’d first read it, the journal had seemed to end about halfway through. After a gap of ten pages, though, the writing resumed.
There were only a few entries, undated. The first few were reflections on Cornell and his linguistics courses. But then Jordan returned to his malaise, which was still in its early stages. He wrote of his misery, and of his conviction to see a specialist. But then came something new:I could pretend I had been selected by the gods to suffer, and make a noble story of my woe. But a more candid view suggests that one evening, hidden, fearful for the shame of my act, I did myself injury while abominating myself.
It took a few minutes for the meaning of this confession to sink in. Abomination! Jordan’s use of that word, with its biblical roots, changed everything. In the abstract, it applies to a broad spectrum of nastiness, from bad table manners to two-headed calves. But applied to an act, the implications of sodomy, onanism, and homosexuality are inescapable. Jordan was the most literal writer I had ever known; he would never use a word without a full awareness, and intention, of its meaning. With that realization, the puzzle pieces of my brother’s suicide began moving into place.
I returned to his other journals, looking for the places I’d marked as revealing or intriguing. The word abomination had appeared only once before, so casually that I’d glossed over it. The setting was a dorm party, in the room of an older student. A night of drinking had progressed into what sounded like an orgy, an experimental free-for-all where I myself, Jordan had written, did not shy from the abominations that followed.
When I’d first read the entry, I thought my brother was being funny. It had not occurred to me that the other students might have been men.
The paradox of my brother’s sexual “problem” made sense to me now. The incident he described was not merely an event; it was an event horizon that he had irrevocably crossed. At some point in his high school or college years (or before, although I never had a clue), Jordan must have discovered that he was gay. But he was not, for many reasons, one of those fortunate men or women who absorb this truth, face the challenges of coming out, and emerge into a proud or private ownership of their sexual identity. For my brother, the aberration was intolerable. Despising our father, dependent on our mother, and terrified of the judgment of his friends (and, very possibly, his brother), he smothered his cravings. He regressed into his studies, modeling his public persona after the virile, heroic figures of ancient texts. But his self-proclaimed virtue was a facade: a cardboard cutout, like the model of King Tribhuvan paraded through the streets of Kathmandu.
Was the suppression a conscious process? There was no way to know. But it seemed incredible that someone would put himself through so much suffering. Jordan would weather countless romantic disasters, steel himself for endless sexual disappointments, rather than face his true orientation. He dared not partner openly with men, but pleasured himself covertly. Maybe he had injured himself during one of these autoerotic episodes, but I no longer believed this injury was the cause of his “numbness” around women.
If you would know me, Jordan confided in one entry, look to Thomas Mann. Though his own copies of Mann’s work were in German, I found summaries of the two he mentioned most often. The isolated, superior protagonist of Tonio Kröger, torn between life and art, clearly inspired my brother’s lifestyle. But it is Gustav von Aschenbach, the tragic hero of Death in Venice, who provides the key. In the novel, the renowned author falls in love with Tadzio: a young boy. His infatuation with the youth, which von Aschenbach desperately conceals, costs him his life.
Jordan, like Mann, was no misogynist. He adored women and was adored by them. But they were never more than abstractions, toppling awkwardly from the pedestals he erected. Lindsay and Kate, Daphne and Britta; all were objects of worship, showered with verses and gifts, pined after like unattainable goddesses. But they were not his true partners. Their emotional needs defied his understanding. Jordan’s letters to them, like his suicide note to Lindsay, were eerily similar, blending the archaic prose of John Milton with the longing of Rilke. They read like exercises, essays for a course in romantic love. It was the one subject he could not master.
There was a final entry on the page that followed the confession of his injury. It began with a brief paragraph I’d encountered several times in his later journals: one of those phrases that he kept refining, over and over again, as if by adding or omitting a comma he could make his meaning absolutely precise. Here, at its very first occurrence, it made exquisite sense:Oh you who read these words! Never deny your true nature. For I have done so, and it has destroyed me.
The word deny leaped out at me, just as abomination had. If an abomination is an event, denial is a path: a road away from the heart’s desire. Chokyi Nyima had described desire as a double-edged sword, a force that can overwhelm us or prod us toward liberation. But denial is a barricade that stops everything and halts all forward motion. To deny a crime is to reject the possibility of forgiveness, but to deny yourself is to abandon all hope of acceptance. This was what happened to Jordan. Unable to accept who he was, terrified by his self-discovery, he had pulled that lever. His capacity for arousal, for joy on any level, shut down.
Jordan, who claimed to value honesty above all things, had lived a lie. To explain his passionless encounters with women, my theatrical brother —an expert at mimicking the lame—had invented his own disability. For nearly ten years, the myth of sexual dysfunction had served as his alibi.
Jordan was not a coward. What had stopped him from declaring himself, shamelessly, defiantly? Did he really believe that my mother, my sister, and I would reject him? Every gay person I knew had navigated that bardo: the dread and exhilaration of coming out. Some had been embraced by their families; others had ongoing issues with narrow-minded parents and friends. But they had lived, and sometimes died, on their own terms.
This, I knew, would be the enduring mystery. I’d never know why Jordan couldn’t step into the world, at peace in his own skin. Maybe it was because he despised modern society, with its “faith healers,” careless translations, and jazz. His sensibilities were locked in an era long past, when homosexuality was a public scandal and a personal mark of shame. Or maybe it was just him, the way he was made. It could be that facing his “true nature,” which he saw as profoundly flawed, was beyond his ability. Some people are so good at manipulating what’s on the surface, you never realize how terrified they are of looking below. It’s one thing to imagine the presence of nagas, multiplying in the depths of the earth; it’s another to know you’ve buried them there yourself.
PART III
After
27
Kunda Mainali vs. the Leeches
THE MORNING HE heard about Nagarjun, Kunda Mainali was filling in at the National Desk. The Shaligram had zero redundancy; if a single editor took the day off, his entire department was at loose ends. With events heating up in Nepal’s capital, a lapse in national coverage was impossible. Mainali had been relieved of the Friday Supplement, which he customarily put together on Wednesday, and thrust into Direndra Rana’s high-profile position. “King for a day,” he had smiled to himself.
He was sitting behind Rana’s ancient oak desk—a relic from the British Raj, no doubt, dra
gged over the hills by coolies to Kathmandu—editing a story about yesterday’s bandh. It had been the second general strike in the kingdom in two weeks, and certainly the most violent. The past week, from March 8, had been a nonstop nightmare marked by gang rapes, scenes of hired thugs beating up striking students, and to cap it off, the discovery of six headless corpses in the Sindhuli forest. Nearly eight thousand citizens were now in prison, and at least thirty people had been killed in the escalating violence. None of this seemed to concern King Birendra; he was at his lakeside hideaway in Pokhara, due back tomorrow.
Kunda pored over the copy, despising his sudden responsibility. It was the Shaligram’s official mandate (and, therefore, Rana’s) to sanitize the bandh—or, better still, overlook it altogether. During the past month the world press had lavished unusual attention on Nepal, publishing unflinching reports on the kingdom’s turmoil. His own newspaper, meanwhile, had cast the Jana Andolan as the rabble-rousing of criminal elements, funded and inspired by foreign forces. Ignore it, professed the Shaligram, and it will go away.
This kind of propagandizing was a cinch for Rana, who came from a wealthy family with strong palace ties. But for Mainali, who’d cut his teeth covering the Donald Manes scandal in New York City, it raised bile. He was staring at the copy, staring through it actually, when Meera Khanal came charging in.
“They’ve sold Nagarjun,” the reporter informed him. Her eyes blazed with the delight of a good scandal.
“Sold it? Who?” The question was rhetorical. Nagarjun, the sacred hill that towered over the northwestern rim of the Kathmandu Valley, was the property of the king; it had been part of the wedding dowry presented by Queen Aiswarya’s father in 1973.
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