Some long scams nurture weak egos, then take them down. Others, the kind I was subjected to, worked off greed, and, with variations, all used the long con that is performed by big-concept grifters.
For example, I received a business letter. An actual letter. It provided a company name and London telephone number, but no address.
Dear Ezekiel Stark,
I am Martin Toynbee, the managing partner of Toynbee & Toynbee, my subject David Stark died in testate, his wife and children with him in the tsunami of 2003. He has left $6,860,000, and I decided to contact you on the personal conviction of trust and confidence to assist in distribution of the money left behind by my late subject. My proposition to you is to seek your consent and cooperation to present you as a relative/next-of-kin and beneficiary of my late subject. This will be executed under a legitimate arrangement that will protect you from any breach of law. If this business proposition offends your moral values, do accept my apology. I hereby use this opportunity, asking you to exercise Utmost indulgence to keep this matter/proposal private.
I received another request a month later, from a different “solicitor,” both in 2010, both from London. Of course, I thought back to my time in London, when I was like a dead man walking, and thought back to the people I hung with, and wondered, but then I decided it was worse: it was a random attack.
The second letter had no letterhead, no company name. In its “proposal,” my putative dead relative, should I like to claim him, had lived in China.
That wasn’t the end.
I received a handwritten letter from a London address, about someone searching for me, a relation of mine, the letter said, but who was no longer of this world. That intrigued me. I kept myself from answering it, for a while, anyway.
“No longer of this world.” Someone did have my number. Would I go for it? It might be true.
The stuff got progressively more hardcore. This was addressed to me:
I am working in a detective agency. My name is not important now. I want to warn you that I’m going to watch you and monitor your telephone line. Do you want to know who paid for shadowing you? Expect my next letter. Probably, you don’t believe me. But I think that the attached record of your telephone conversation will assure you that everything is real. The record is in archive.
The password is 123qwe
We have a tape of your conversation
•important for your life
•Your phone is monitored
•attention
•You’re being watched
•important
•We monitor your privacy
•I’m monitoring you
•important information
•We’re watching you
•Danger
This seemed like a practical joke, a silly scam in the age of scams. But added to the other letters, this accumulation, man, might be important evidence, or evidence of a societal shift, or even evidence of no evidence. I mean, it might be nothing, or it might be something. It’s got my name on it, literally, and, personally, this IT or NOTHING came for me and added to the significance of the unaccountable variety.
“Your phone is monitored.” Right, that crossed line, weird phone call, I’d heard clicks. But why me. Still, why not me. I mean, why anything is anything or anyone, and there’s an entire novel range and variety of cruelty. People will do anything for a stupid high. People do the same old with new toys dressed up in new rags, OK, and work the same routines. Artists are people who hope not to do what everyone else is doing, and usually end up doing it. That first human-like character, that eternal question mark, the one who made the first mark, who first scratched on a wall: What was its origin in the early human brain, that impulse? Mark-making, painters call it. Evidence of life in front of a canvas. Photography, not that way, only about other-ing, marking that others are there, or a place, I am here, looking at it, or you, and I’m not you. I can’t be you, see, I’m holding a camera.
Make a mark, or be one.
I held on to the communication. You never know. White House intern Monica Lewinsky kept the blue dress with President Clinton’s sperm stain on it. You never know when you’ll need backup.
I was being bamboozled, targeted, and, one day, I quit spying for the USPS. Bad juju. I kind of believed they’d try to keep me on, and coax me to stay, but my handler ho-hummed, and yeah-yeahed, after I explained I needed to stop—for health reasons—which he didn’t even question. Pissed me off, my insignificance obvious.
As compensation, they sent me a USPS T-shirt, and thanked me for my service to the government. Wear it, and blow my cover. Half-kidding.
No one knew about my gig, and never would, even though I received a Certificate of Appreciation, with a government seal, for being a “valuable federal agent,” no revealing even that honor. Kidding. Plus, the USPS sent me first class and airmail stamps, two one-hour telephone cards, which can come in handy if your phone crashes, and a plastic letter opener with a motto just above its razor-edged blade: helping the usps get better every day. The letter opener enticed the opening of letters, but mine are mostly bills or charity requests, and don’t contain secrets. Getting a letter in an envelope, especially handwritten, not asking for $$, is a souvenir of antiquity, a fragment of a Greek vase in your mailbox.
My image of being a secret agent made me feel a bigger me, but more, the image I composed for me from this secrecy, this actual, bona fide ridiculousness, made me feel better. I know it’s really idiotic.
What do you want? I know I want things, something, not material things, but I have been living around materialists, who accumulate, and they seek status, and don’t know it. It can rub off, it can begin to affect you, you need to get away. I did. Hide away in a cave, with wifi. Haha.
I live a private life. But what is private.
look in a rearview mirror, the end is closer than it appears
O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible.
—Camus, quoting Pindar, in The Myth of Sisyphus
The world turns, returns, damaged, renewed, and, say, art is what some people do before death, its own thing. Life happens unconsciously, then imperceptibly, incrementally, consciously, it begins to add up, seems to be something, something of your own, and then there are circumstances producing consequences, and they show up, subtly, or blow up in sudden, horrifying ways: Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Your mother is murdered. Your husband has left you.
Few recognize what’s happening, as it occurs. Except visionaries.
It’s a new day that dawns long after it’s new. To feel surprise is surprising to me. The unexpected can’t be expected, but it’s coming.
My memory is a little messed up. I phoned home because that’s what I do. I have always kept in touch with Mother, even when I cracked up in London, I let her know I was alive—I think the German painter called her also—she championed me in her unique way. The last time I called her, or the time before last, Little Sister answered.
I’m Tilda, Zeke. Don’t call me Little Sister.
OK, I said. Hi, Tilda.
She’d been reading Virginia Woolf’s diaries. Mother had all of them. Tilda quoted: “Madness is the least of my sensations.”
Madness was a family thing. Nothing unusual.
That’s cool, I think I said. What are your most sensations?
I was kidding around, not expecting anything.
She said, You guys just see patterns. My feelings are mine. Secret.
I go something like, Very funny, you know I keep your secrets.
She changed the subject or handed the phone to Mother. I can’t remember exactly.
Two weeks passed, I think, anyway, sometime later, Mother phoned. “Little Sister took her life.”
I flew to Boston, rented a car, drove home, a familiar now unfamiliar ride, and all of us were gathered there. Bro Hart, his CIA wife. Clarissa. Family friends. Mother said she was glad Father wasn’t alive. This was the second
time I heard Mother cry.
Mother found her in her bedroom with the many windows.
I often speculated about the maternal line, suicide, and mental illness, it was abstract.
Little Sister was a mystery, from when she was small, but she was our mystery, we were used to her, nothing about her seemed strange, to us. She was just quiet.
I returned to that “Way to Heaven” letter. Maybe Little Sister had been telling me, warning me: she was going to leave this world for the next. Maybe she was doing what artist Ray Johnson did. For a year, he sent odd, cautionary, and oblique postcards to friends, but he was a “correspondence artist.” His death cards may have been stranger, but they fit a pattern. Even anathemas align when evidence shows a pattern.
She said I saw patterns. She didn’t like that. Why?
Not saying I don’t sometimes cut along the dotted line. I liked big scissors cutting fabric pinned to a translucent pattern, following blue lines. I liked our butcher’s cutting meat, neatly. I suppose that makes me a horrible person.
The other’s suicide causes an eruption of DULL HUGE EMPTINESS, a pneumatic drill of dumb thoughts: Unbelievable. Unacceptable. Unanswerable. Futile, rhetorical. When did she decide. Why. How could we have not seen it. Mother aged overnight, totally. I thought she could die of heartbreak.
me: I talk too much, like Little Sister said. You let me talk. You encourage the worst in me. I’m kidding.
analyst: I don’t think so.
me: Don’t think I talk too much?
analyst: Don’t think you’re kidding.
Sick weeks passed, months, time, time again, until I watched myself in a dream, writing on a piece of paper, I didn’t know what I wrote down. I stopped and looked. is/was is/was is/was is/was is/was is/was is/was is/was is/was is/was … Mother was nearby, and I shouted, “Mother, life is a verb. First, Is; then, Was.” You’re here; then you’re not, that’s the deal. Life is the in-between, that’s it.
The dream felt so cold.
Little Sister’s dead. I shake my head, forget, lose it, then IT would rise against my wish to return to the past before it. I relived her life through mine, going through the photo albums. I didn’t look through her things, I didn’t allow myself, not yet. Mother kept her room as it was. Life stopped in that room. I was afraid to see it. That’s true.
Her life ended, mine looped backward. “Madness is the least of my sensations.” I felt mad once, after Maggie, a buzz, a scrambling in the brain, mind-implosions, not able to control thoughts crashing into each other, a terrible sound inside I couldn’t stop, not any of it.
Friends called her suicide a tragedy. In my demented academic brain, I’m thinking, Not in the classical sense. Where’s the hubris and fall? The inevitability? In her mother’s genes? Me too, I’ve got them.
Tragic accident, a grave mistake, she lost her way, went off the track. Little Sister left a letter—a suicide note, they’re called—for Mother, and she wrote it was better this way, she blamed no one. She even thanked her. I can’t believe it, no blame, good to the end, but her end was bad, and no good comes from bad. Someone said that.
I repeat, repeat, a death is repetitive in its effects, though it happens differently, it’s always the same, and those who are left behind tell the same stories until memory fails. No one gets out alive.
A leap into the abyss, people say almost as an obligation, especially if the suicide is a jumper. The abyss.
death customs
People don’t live death or experience the oncoming of death, in the same way, with the same intensity; if we did, we couldn’t go on, right. We don’t feel the same about everyone who dies, even someone we were tight with years before, he dies, you’ve been out of touch, and hear about the death, and usually it’s a “That’s sad,” a memory or two, and you’re out of there. Otherwise, we’d be continually wailing and mourning. Life would be all mourning, all the time. An idealist might say: war would come to an end. Anyway, imagine: you FEEL more for the anonymous. You’d FEEL the same for others you feel for those you love. “Those you love” makes me sick. Your life becomes greater than your little plot (pun intended).
I’d believed: Little Sister was contained. What she contained destroyed her. I never thought she was unreasonable. I try to be conscious of her, but she’s gone. Still, my activity is consciousness, compared with Little Sister’s; that is, it’s how I am different, but it doesn’t matter. Her death should make my life different. I should become accountable for something. That’s what I told myself. Those words became a drive, I was engulfed, inevitably, though, by me being who I was, anyway. I couldn’t mean anything different, not after a while.
Many very early societies believed, and there must be some that still do, that death is unnatural, that dying was not in the original order of things. Just like in the Western tradition, people wrote myths about the beginning, genesis, when we lived in a garden, in a bounty of life without death, and then fucked it up. People were meant, in some cultures, to shed their skin like a snake, and stay young and alive, and, if they didn’t shed it, they would die. Death began for one culture when a woman didn’t shed hers. This could relate to facial surgeries and procedures. In many ancient, early societies, they believed in the renewal of life through the renewal of skin. This society does, though supposedly we realize facelifts and derma-peels don’t prolong life. But that’s just reason, which is nada.
I shaved my head, as a sign of mourning. But I looked like any balding or completely bald guy. I thought of marking my face, like the Sioux, but that seemed too obscure or post-punk. I wanted to display for the public, I’M MOURNING, I’M IN GRIEF. Couldn’t use an obscure language, another society’s codes would be misunderstood, what with tattoos prevalent. I settled on a black armband. I suppose I don’t have to explain how that got misread.
Intellectuals and academics read for assurance: of the worthiness of reading, for one thing, and thinking, ideas, life of the mind (see Coen brothers’ Barton Fink). I reread Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” Civilization and Its Discontents, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.” The death drive: an unconscious wish for stillness, entropy. Consciously, suicide to end anguish. I read about a suicidal person’s moment of decision, when, people who are living say, she makes her decision, feels calm, relieved, even happy. People who really want to die find a way. I watched The Big Lebowski again and again and again. I reread Madness and Civilization.
Mother told me about a psychoanalyst who hated Freud, and he seduced his patients. When he was found out, he killed himself. Clarissa’s friend took her own life because she was in debt, and shamed by it.
I read that suicide is homicide, the other way around.
I totally see that. Because depression is anger turned inward, my analyst said. So suicide is homicide turned inward, homicide is suicide turned outward. In the past, if you were mad, you were put away and the family shut down to the public. No one cares now. I mean, some people don’t want other people to know there’s a breakdown, or suicide in the family. But it’s ordinary. Secrecy is becoming an antique constraint. Victims and survivors often do tell-alls.
Dishonor, defeat, failure: people expect to be exculpated, or they don’t care, and public appearances satisfy the public’s gaping maw.
From the burning Twin Towers, men and women jumped out of windows to escape death by fire, to another kind of death, but did any have hope for survival, to be caught, somehow? That God might intervene.
There are survivors of everything, each survival is different. Surviving what, and surviving for what, that’s something else. When does the survival gene get switched off? A trauma can do that.
The ordinary is as much an accident as the extraordinary.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
—Rumi
This poem
was painted, in block letters, on a wall at the hospice unit where Mother volunteered.
Hospice people put it this way: when people start leaving this world, they’re “actively dying.”
Mother says if I spent time caring for a person who’s facing death, it might help me. Get out of this, feel differently, become a different person. She’s serious. I’m thinking, hospitals breed disease.
She’s been volunteering, for perspective, she told me.
I didn’t want to know.
She bore Father’s death well, that’s what Clarissa kept saying then, she’s bearing up, doing as well as can be expected, etc., palliative phrases, bromides.
Like a new project, Mother became very interesting to me. Who she was, if I could find out. Also, in analysis, she played a huge role. Of course, right.
I depend on or need a project, I include myself. I am one. Mother became one. The existence of Mother and Clarissa, the gen before me, had kept me from being the next to die. While they are alive, I wouldn’t die. Mother would die sooner. An accident. Cancer. The natural order of things. But then Little Sister took her life, and the order of things wasn’t natural.
It wasn’t too long after Maggie split, and I split apart, that Mother wanted dying strangers to surround her. That’s how I saw it. Their eyes recede, she told me, they stare at you, out of little death-pockets, and to comfort them, she sings to them, does what she can. They die, one after the other.
Mother wrapped herself in loss and soldiered on. She wouldn’t kill herself, but further immersed herself in death, as if she’d meet her baby and only daughter on that plane, if she stayed on it. I think she blamed herself, but never said it.
Mother needs to feel useful, part of that Puritan thing. Keep busy, do good works. I guess I favor her. Death’s part of life, she tells me, patiently. Hell, yes, I think. She tells me Buddhists believe you die twice. Your death, first, and then the second one comes after everyone who knew you dies. Then, it’s as if you never existed.
You never existed.
Mother tells me it’s her calling, Little Sister is calling her.
Men and Apparitions Page 23
