Men and Apparitions

by Lynne Tillman

  We both live with ghosts.

  If I let myself, if I let go of time or of the present tense in which I live, tensely, ha, I see Little Sister with Clover. Clover welcomes her into the truth of life after death. Corny, oh man, yes, they’re inhabiting the spirit world, a special unembodied place, because they were suicides. Not Hell, where Dante would have put them, I wouldn’t. Their hell was life, after a while, hell for Clover. I suppose Little Sister too. But I can barely let myself imagine hers. I knew her, alive. I never knew Clover as a living person.

  Little Sister had a goth period, serious goth, black lipstick, blackened eyes, the look fit with her silences. Ironically funny now.

  I contemplated a memorial for Little Sister, but I’d be walking Henry Adams’s path, his memorial work for Clover. I found that a big problem.

  Ultimately, or penultimately, I became curious about actual dying. Mother hooked me up with some hospice people.

  The hospice nurse wasn’t morbid like a funeral director:

  You can take someone who’s got cancer from top to bottom, but then as soon as they’re kind of dying from their cancer, you can still stick a tube down their throat and kind of put them on a ventilator and try to resuscitate them. The question is, just because you have the tools at your disposal, is it reasonable to apply them? And that’s the only reason why a hospice referral is ever considered, sort of—what’s the word I’m looking for? That’s the only reason why we have to sort of think about this at all, is because there’s always something you can do, and when is it smarter to actually shift the goals of care away from life prolongation and toward maximizing quality? Because most people, if you just talk to them kind of in the abstract, or even concretely, if you had a choice between living a shorter period of time with better quality of life versus a longer period of time in a life sustained by this and that treatment, and this and that hospitalization, most people will choose quality over quantity. But not everybody.

  Death’s door, in a hospice unit, isn’t a metaphor, since once you walk through that door, or are wheeled in, though you might be kept going longer, usually you are.

  At death’s door, what would I want to know.

  A nurse practitioner, who leads her hospice unit, talked to me about pain, psychic and physical, about who wants to die in pain, and why, and the misunderstandings about pain itself and the methods used to relieve it. Options play out differently for patients, the people around them, and professionals. Some patients view pain as a test of their personal strength. The beginning of the end of it: childbirth. Pregnant women bite the bullet to feel the pain, you know, natural childbirth. This authenticity shit has no limits.

  Pass me the morphine. Please.

  People can die quietly, with atropine, if their families let them. Atropine dries up their saliva, and then there’s no death rattling, no discomfort for the dying.

  There’s psychic pain and physical pain.

  The nurse told me: there’s a huge fear of addiction, dying people are afraid of getting addicted, or their families are, for them. Your mom, an addict? Addiction is a question of brain chemistry, and the brain chemistry of addiction and the brain chemistry of pain relief are completely different things.

  It’s nuts, I say to Mother, later on, and she nods, calmly. Zeke, she says, why do you think people will be any smarter about dying than they are about living? But think about this, will you, just one hundred years ago, all medical care was basically palliative. Back in the day, there wasn’t really anything anyone could do for anyone.

  The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process, the process namely of its verifying itself, its verification. Its validity is the process of its validation.

  —William James

  Things fell apart for me in several ways, and I won’t count them, trust me.

  Family photos in physical albums, gone, zip. No hidden treasures, only files on desktops, apps, and everything is deletable. Could be good, deleting all. Could be a positive change that so much possibility—possible possibility—makes hanging on to the past less important. Because a photograph proves nothing, it’s incoherent, uninformative, inconsistent, undependable, though it is more than nothing, or “proof” of nothing. If a “document,” it confirms movement toward the undecidable and inconclusive. As a form, you could say, actually, I’m saying, a photograph recognizes its own INCOHERENCE. In two centuries, the medium has evolved from claiming to be evidence, to representing a circumstance in life, to “being” no reality and only a perception or a condition from a subjective POV, to extinction of its humanist and enlightenment past. With digitization, possibilities multiply for what humanity can imagine itself as, which it might one day be or fulfill.

  A photograph infers, doesn’t confer.

  Humans split the atom, but can’t split themselves from their images.

  “I love the activity of sound … sound that doesn’t mean anything.” —Cage

  Pictures don’t have to mean anything. Life doesn’t have to. Deal with it. Face values. Time’s an abstraction, but reality makes it mean.

  Ezekiel Stark, former image investigator.

  moving forward backward

  I want never to forget forgetfulness, and then maybe I’ll remember.

  Mother is a spiritual atheist and I’m pretty sympathetic. She’s even more committed to her ancestors, because Little Sister’s with them, and feels closer to Little Sister, which comforts her.

  Mother and I—“Mother and I” is a new construction—have become closer. Maybe I am different from any Zeke I’ve ever been, or maybe she didn’t care to keep a maternal distance. Who was left, anyway. Me, Clarissa, Bro Hart.

  She hardly ever talked about Father, hardly ever mentioned him, no telling of any little stories. That became weirder to me. She didn’t remarry, so I assumed she still felt married to him, loved him, somehow. I asked her one night, when she was visiting my place, she visited me more, Little Sister gone, a bonus that made me feel guilty, actually, because it made me happy. I was a middle child, displaced by both ends.

  I took Mother out to a great restaurant. I asked her: Did you love Father? No. I asked why she married him in the first place, why she stayed with him. She said something about the heart being a mystery, some shit like that. She changed the subject, somehow. I let her. I was sort of stunned, anyway. Then, she told me more, over time, things I didn’t want to know, but that made sense in a way that I couldn’t stand.

  I knew she had lived in Frankfurt, Germany, for a year, when she went to study abroad, and she wanted to learn German, to read German philosophy, and she didn’t want to go to Paris, which to her seemed like a cliché. She wanted to find herself. She’d always been a good girl. JFK’s assassination shook her hard, but she didn’t become a hippie.

  The Vietnam War was building up, exploding. I didn’t know that she had met an American guy, an enlistee. He felt it was his duty, he had dropped out of college. There they were in Frankfurt, fell in love, she was madly in love with him. They were together for six months, but he was going to Nam. He wasn’t there long when he was killed. She never could love anyone again, after him, she couldn’t.

  OK, I didn’t love my father, but Mother’s not loving him seemed dishonest, hypocritical, unworthy. Right, I was being moralistic. She’d promised herself to him, so she thought I should understand that, given my feelings about Maggie, and my weird thing for Clover (as she put it, indelicately).

  There’s a nun-like thing about Mother.

  She returned to the States, finished college, met Father during college, he was finishing law school, married him, because she wanted a family, children, and to work and get on with life. She never left that dead soldier. John. That was his name, she told me. His best friend, Rick, went to Nam with him, but Rick came back in 1968, headed straight to Amsterdam, to hang out and smoke hash, the way everyone did. Rick became a hippie
ex-soldier, and some people hated him because he’d gone to Nam, some were OK, he was in a lot of pain, and no one understood. Rick moved on to heroin. He couldn’t get enough, became homeless, then finally he couldn’t get high. No one could put up with him anymore. He hanged himself in a park there.

  Mother thought it could have happened to Johnny, if he’d made it out alive. She might never have gotten him back, anyway. She assured me my father never knew.

  Mother said they had a good sex life. She said something like he was affectionate. She admitted maybe he knew somewhere, deep inside, but because of his drinking, it didn’t matter. “He was married to his Dewar’s. But I tried to be a good wife.”

  I’m not angry and I am.

  Mother’s “trying to be a good wife” killed me, that the concept of goodness and a level of deception merged with self-abnegation. Her loneliness from pretense, and my father’s not being loved, even though he was a shit, seriously depressed me. I don’t know, it brought me back to whether Maggie ever loved me. All unhappiness is local. Even if Maggie did love me once, even if she returned and apologized, apologies come too late, brought by a misguided mail carrier. The letter’s too late to count. No one enjoys reparations.

  me: Sex and love aren’t the same, she said.

  analyst: You’ve said that.

  me: OK. My mother shouldn’t.

  Listening to me talk was awful; I felt like an idiot, the gifted child failure. Feelings can be stupid. I was Mother’s “adult child,” which is what it’s called these days, so I have to make the transition. People really believe they can move out of what they were and felt. Move it all, transition from grief to normal life, from one body to another, and most trivial, it’s said: transition from one job to another.

  In hospice, it is the big T, and, after T, NADA.

  There’s volunteering, believing you’re a good person; there’s volunteering, knowing you’re not. I’m in the second group. My conscience is transient, or relative, I hold a thought, an opposing thought, weigh them, and, even in a context it’s hard to know what’s right, ethically. I used to think Mother was more ethical than I could ever be.

  People think they care; often, it’s selfish, so that they can like themselves, or because they want to be cared for; religious maniacs care about what they care about, and go to hell if you don’t. How do we talk to ourselves about our lack of caring? Blah blah, and we walk on by a slumped body on the sidewalk. Have to do it. Survival of the fittest. Otherwise, we won’t get to our therapy appointment. OK, all too human and inhuman.

  Caring gets produced by a system that makes caring what it is. Caring could have another form, shape. Trying to imagine another kind of caring …

  No one wants to face death, though, except Mother and hospice people. They want to, all the time.

  Mother hooked me up with the hospice’s spiritual care counselor, Ralph. Our meeting was totally serious, humorless, so I couldn’t be my usual self. Kidding. I wanted to know what was expected of a spiritual care counselor. I had absolutely no faith in any of that, so I was curious, maybe morbidly curious. Not kidding.

  Mother wanted me to know Ralph, and I think I know why. He was much more grave than the nurse practitioner.

  “A counselor is neutral in terms of different religions. Near death, there’s the medical side, social side, the other dimension is the suffering of the patient, which is not amenable to their treatments. It’s not precisely psychological, it’s more transcendent than that. A person’s relationships, with family, themselves, and with the transcendent, with God.”

  I didn’t rebut God. Why bother when there is no God.

  “The counselor helps the dying person to discern what suffering derives from their relationships. Because the dying have got more important things to do than die or think about their dying. How do you live what’s left of your life to meet your needs and to meet your expectations?”

  I said, But most people are afraid of dying. I am.

  Ralph nodded with compassionate understanding, and I nearly lost it.

  “Most people who are WELL are afraid of dying. There’s an old saying, I think it’s Plato, who had put it that young men fear death; old men fear dying. People near death tend to be much more focused on what happens before death and the process of dying than on what comes afterward. Somebody’s dying of terminal cancer, say. The profession won’t be surprised if they die within six months, sort of a negative definition. A near horizon for most people.”

  Near horizon, not vanishing point. Western Civ had reasons for its development. The unachievable became desirable: a vanishing point encourages viewers to seek what’s always out of sight and beyond reach. It encourages ambition, and came about with the Renaissance, when artists got out of the religious business. A near horizon—a concept for a photographic effect.

  Ralph told me that dying people often don’t want their families to see them die.

  “There was a young man under fifty, dying of cancer. He and his family were from Brazil, and we were finally able to find them. They came, and all gathered around his bed, for several hours. They left to make the final arrangements. He died before they got back. He waited until they were there, so he could say goodbye, or they could say goodbye. People are trying to make peace with themselves.”

  Mother wanted me to make peace with myself. Little Sister didn’t give us a warning, though maybe she did, and none of us picked up on it. I need to be more forensic in my approach.

  Doctors keep people alive, I say to Ralph, when they can’t cure them, when they won’t recover, but why can’t they just die without pain. Just put them out of their pain.

  “For doctors, death is the enemy, it’s a failure. So, they’re hostile to it. Hospice workers believe death is a normal part of human existence. But we suffer in different ways. Absolutely the key denial of a healthy society, a society of people who medically are healthy, is to deny death and deny suffering. We think suffering has no right to exist. But it has.”

  I stopped recording Ralph then, and sat in an empty lounge or waiting room, I was there a long time, after Ralph walked away, wondering about “suffering having rights.” A promise to a dead person is weird, Mother’s to Johnny, mine to Clover, OK, I get that. But it’s how things operate. Present behavior is based on the wishes of the dead, or what we imagine they want. Nothing concrete, but something like an inborn version of legacy, a reason to continue, that incorporation. I owed Little Sister, I’d never given her anything, and I never promised anything. But we, or maybe I, had never allowed her a right to her suffering, to own it. Whatever that is, I mean, I can’t exactly put a face to it, that right. We have a right to happiness, why not to suffering. The eleventh right.

  Maybe the family tried too hard to erase Little Sister’s pain, anguish, difference. Maybe if we dismissed it, she could. And that way we could alleviate our own suffering. I wish I could speak to her about it.

  They cramp our style, rain on our parade. Don’t want to bother too much with unhappy people. They don’t want to help themselves, right. There are professionals to deal with them, oh yeah, and, if you volunteer, what’s your problem, right, you must not have enough going on in your own glorious existence. Etc.

  After Little Sister died, maybe six months later, Aunt Clarissa wrote me a letter, and I opened it with a kind of crazy pleasure, using my second USPS letter opener—thanks! your daily reports keep us on the cutting edge. They sent it on the first anniversary of my retiring from domestic spy work, another gift. Ain’t life grand.

  I didn’t actually want to read her letter, she’d always been so weird to me.

  Dear Ezekiel,

  I hope you know which wars are worth fighting. All your ancestors got you to this point and I thank them (gratitude). Allow your soul to heal (as you know every illness has an image). Examine the burdens you carry and try to get rid of what is unnecessary.

  Your mother needs you. Yours, Clarissa

  That was it. Her missive was at least a
communication. Or at most. I wondered if she was telling me my life wasn’t a total mistake, because that’s how I wanted it to read. Or that it was, and now it was the time for me to get in line. Get with the family program. I wondered if it was her kind of apology.

  I thought to send her some of my flawed, capsule narratives:

  Ezekiel Stark, a skeptic in his field, was promising. He studied small groups or areas of cultural concern—family photographs, the basis of images, men. His dissertation pubbed by a university press, his gig in acadoomia was upped to associate professor. He walked the halls of academe, walked the line, talked the talk, and went by the book. He was a good enough colleague, if sometimes too aggressive when he thought he was right. He always seemed preoccupied. Sometimes he partied. Sometimes he was a hermit. He did his version of field work. He wrote papers, articles, books, he made a splash, and then he floated.

  Or, Ezekiel Stark married young and loved his wife passionately, and she left him for his best friend (typical, right?) and he went mad. He fell under a spell, one way to put it, and broke down like an old car. He took a break, then carried on, unhappily, but functioning, as they say. When his baby sister took her life, this was the “peripeteia” he’d only read about, a sudden turn of events, the unexpected is never expected—her suicide. He thought: was it meaningful, could he make her life mean something, was it a wake-up call (more triteness). Nothing worked. So he took another longer leave.

  Or, Stark entered psychoanalysis long ago, but he occasionally opts out, and escapes self-reflection. He might say he is now dedicating his time to the god who heals, Asklepios. Also, he continues to investigate what can’t be known, because the irrational is more powerful than the rational. Stark believes: It was her unconscious that took Little Sister, so it wasn’t intended. He’s more interested in the unknown realm of unreason than the world of reason.

  Clarissa would like that, though more and more, as she ages, she doesn’t recognize the boundaries between those realms.

  In Little Sister’s bedroom, Tilda’s bedroom, in her walk-in closet Mother found some artwork, unsigned. Photographs of the family, of herself, some friends, male, female, other, and also pictures of words. Words singled out, cut from magazines, reshot and blown up. Words she liked or didn’t. Used or didn’t.