Before You Go

by Tommy Butler

  Whether due to his increasing disquiet, or his coterie of clients barely out of college, Dean’s butchered aphorisms have become simple and crude. “The early bird gets laid,” he likes to say. Or, “If you can’t stand the heat, take off your sweater and show me your boobs.” I no longer force a smile at my brother’s feeble attempts at comedy. They feel sad to me, almost desperate, as if Dean is beginning to notice that I’m no longer even pretending to be amused.

  Do I blame Dean for Esther’s death? Rationally, no. He couldn’t have known that by making me late for lunch, he would indirectly cause her to be in the exact wrong place at the exact wrong time. He didn’t even know it was Esther that I was meeting, and still doesn’t, because I never told him. Nor do I ever plan to. I couldn’t bear some flippant comment about Esther, assuming Dean remembered her at all, which isn’t likely. I look at him now, at his perpetually widened eyes and the beads of sweat on his upper lip. He seems to me like some fearful animal, focused on his immediate surroundings and maybe a moment or two into the future, but not more. I don’t think Dean lingers in the past, let alone the sliver of it that included Esther.

  He wraps up his flyby. If he said anything of note, I’ve already forgotten it. But then I wasn’t really listening. He gives me one last look, tapping the side of his nose as if he’s sharing a secret. “Remember, dork,” he says, “if life slaps you, turn the other butt cheek.”

  8:00 p.m. I meet Bannor for our walk. Despite how long my work days have become, I have yet to miss a walk with Bannor. It is uncanny, really, how Bannor’s voice mails never fail to prescribe a time and place that fits my schedule, as if he had access to my calendar and designed our walks to accommodate it. It would almost make you wonder, if you had the energy for wondering.

  This evening’s venue is Wall Street. I arrive a few minutes early and wait outside the New York Stock Exchange, staring dumbly at its marble columns until my vision blurs and they twist into misshapen dollar signs. I blink and turn away. The summer evening is warm and still light, and the street itself—closed to automobiles—is filled with tourists. They are a colorful, casual, camera-toting assembly, in stark contrast to the gray-suited bankers who occasionally get spit out from the mouths of the stone buildings, like pale corpses from a mausoleum. Pale corpses on cell phones.

  If they regard each other at all, these tourists and these bankers, they do so summarily. The tourists snap pictures of the bankers along with everything else, as if these expressionless gray creatures were exhibits at a zoo—reptiles, maybe—released from their enclosures for the tourists’ entertainment. The bankers slither through the crowd, their eyes hostile if not predatory at the sight of so many sheep. Animals all, then. Though at least each group has its class in the kingdom. Scaled in my gray suit yet gawking like a tourist, I have no place in either, lost somewhere in the gap between the two.

  Bannor arrives. He greets me, as ever, with a silent nod that I’ve always tried to take as a smile but that I now admit is just that—a silent nod. It has been almost seven years since Bannor and I first met in group. He must be in his late fifties by now, yet time sits lightly on him. A bit more silver in his beard, perhaps. The lines in his forehead slightly more pronounced. He seems no older than when we first met, and certainly no closer to his own death. The only antiquated things about Bannor are his tweed suit and the exactness of the crease in his homburg hat. A century ago the tourists might have mistaken him for a banker, but not today. In this modern age, he is an eccentric, and a—well, I don’t know what Bannor is, or does. He never talks about himself. If not discussing the future, or perhaps some small detail along our walk—the call of a particular bird, for example—Bannor is routinely speechless.

  Normally I find the silence pleasant, even peaceful. But today it feels like just another form of closing off, of isolation masquerading as companionship, ultimately no different from Dean’s inane clichés, or the repetitious blather of my coworkers, or the predictably rote wedding ceremonies of Jennifer’s colleagues—all just different forms of distraction from something genuine, something authentic. Bannor may as well be my father at the breakfast table, with a bulwark of newspaper raised to his eyes to ward off conversation until he can make a break for the door. It suddenly occurs to me that I don’t know him at all.

  “How are you, Bannor?”

  He raises an eyebrow. “Fine.”

  “Are you?” Normally I wouldn’t press him, but “fine” is not an answer—or it would be, if everyone didn’t automatically say it without meaning it, without even thinking about it, as if we’ve all agreed that we don’t really want to know how anyone else is doing, or whether they are okay. I mean, what if they’re not? What then? “Are you really fine, Bannor?” I continue. “How are things with you? What’s going on with you?”

  Bannor clasps his hands behind his back and keeps walking. We pass Federal Hall, with its thick marble pillars and imposing bronze statue of George Washington out in front. Bannor glances up at the former president with a hint of appeal in his eyes.

  “In the future—”

  “I didn’t ask about the future,” I say, pushing further. Something inside me is teetering, grasping for something to hold on to. “I asked about you. How are you? What do you do for a living? What are the other special occasions you wear your suit for? What is it that you lost? When, exactly, do you think you’re going to kill yourself? And where? And how? Just give me one thing, Bannor. One real thing. For god’s sake, I don’t even know your first name.”

  Bannor removes his hat and rubs at the silver sheen of his closely cropped hair. His pace slows to a shuffle, almost stopping altogether, then picks up again as he begins to speak. “My wedding,” he says. “I wore this suit at my wedding.” He sets his hat back on his head. “In the past,” he adds.

  “I didn’t know you were married.”

  “For a time,” he says. “She left.”

  “I’m sorry, Bannor.” My body crumples with shame, shrinking, wanting nothing more than to melt down to the pavement and escape into Wall Street’s ample gutters. I shut my mouth, determined to leave Bannor alone, but he continues.

  “Fire and water is what we were. By the end, there was so much smoke, we couldn’t even see each other.” He pauses, calculating. “That was ten years ago,” he says. “Our daughter was five.”

  “You had a daughter?”

  “Have,” says Bannor. “I have a daughter, but I don’t see her. Not now, at least. She thinks I’m crazy.”

  “Because of . . . your travels?”

  Bannor nods. “My first trip was about six months after they left. I made the mistake of telling my daughter about it. I thought it could be our little secret, but she told her friends at school, where I worked. I lost my job soon after that. Not her fault, of course. She didn’t know any better. Really, you’d think I would have seen the whole thing coming, given that I was traveling to the future, but it didn’t work that way. That’s what you’d call irony.”

  “What did you do at the school?”

  “I was a teacher,” he says. “History. Not anymore, though. I lived my whole life in Harlem—now I bag groceries in Alphabet City, and spend Sunday mornings clearing my neighbors’ needles and shell casings off the front stoop.” He shakes his head. “You’d think I would have seen it coming.”

  We’ve nearly reached the eastern end of the street, where a small patch of sky opens up over the East River. The bankers and tourists are mostly behind us. Bannor stops and turns to look back to where we started. At the far western end, just visible through the narrow lane between the muscular towers of commerce, the delicate steeple of Trinity Church points to the heavens.

  “I’m sorry, Bannor,” I say again.

  “Albert,” he says. “My first name—it’s Albert. Though, if you don’t mind, I prefer to use my last. It’s the one thing we still share, my daughter and I.”

  9:15 p.m. I skip the gym. Again.

  9:30 p.m. I meet Sasha on her fire esca
pe. Judging by the number of used matches and cigarette butts on the sidewalk, she’s been here awhile. I settle in beside her to look out over the water and the lights of Brooklyn. I keep silent, still stinging with guilt over making Bannor talk about his past, and not wanting to do any more damage.

  Besides, Sasha’s already heard everything I had to say. About Esther’s death, I mean. Given that Sasha was the only person I ever spoke to about it, she had to hear it more than once, until even I could see that this fire escape was no confessional, and that any catharsis my tirade may have originally provided had since decayed into masochism. Sasha listened patiently throughout. Now that I’ve slumped into silence, she bears that, too, at times mirroring my muteness, at times filling the space with words of her own.

  Tonight she speaks casually of South Dakota. She’s recently back from visiting her parents, in the same house she grew up in. It’s a relatively recent development, these trips back home. During most of her years in New York, Sasha almost never went home, not even for the holidays. Especially not for the holidays, she would say. Last summer, though, she finally got on a plane, but not before laying down two rules for herself. First, she’d only stay for five days at a time. Everyone in their proper dose, she says. Even parents. Second, she’d only visit during summer. So she can listen to the crickets.

  She doesn’t do much when she’s there, but I like hearing about it anyway—catching up on local gossip with her mom, watching television with her dad, even taking walks through the woods near her house.

  “I found something that made me think of you,” she says. “I thought maybe you’d like to have it.”

  She reaches into the shadows at her side and retrieves a round bundle of cloth that I hadn’t noticed until now. She hands it to me. No bigger than a golf ball, it sits lightly in my palm. I unwrap the cloth, and my throat clenches when I see the hard black object within, its dull sheen barely visible in the city’s evening glow.

  “It’s a piece of coal,” I say.

  “Coal?” says Sasha in mock surprise. “That’s bona fide anthracite. I have it on good authority.”

  I don’t know if I want to argue with her or thank her, but it doesn’t matter because I can’t possibly speak anyway, consumed with the effort of repressing the sobs that well up in my chest, clamoring to get out.

  “Elliot.” Sasha’s voice grows gentle, and I know what’s coming. “It’s not your fault,” she says. She’s told me this before. More than once. Yet somehow she knows that she’s not done saying it, because somehow she knows that I still don’t believe it’s true.

  11:08 p.m. I don’t have sex with my girlfriend. After three years, our sex life is no longer inspired choreography, but a different kind of performance art, where the same show is performed for the same audience again and again. I’m not sure if this is a problem or if it’s normal, but we don’t talk about it, so we’re not likely to find out. Instead, we dutifully make sure we get naked together every few weeks, each of us no doubt suspecting that regular sex is on some “healthy relationship” checklist somewhere. On with the show.

  But not tonight. I am in bed with the television on when Jennifer comes home and crawls in next to me, burrowing into the covers on her side.

  “What are you watching?” she asks, her voice a disembodied murmur from within her cocoon.

  What am I watching? A tearjerker of an old movie that never fails to get to me, never fails to leave me with this vague, fleeting memory of something lost and beautiful.

  Jennifer risks a glimpse. “Oh my god, are you crying?” she asks, suppressing a chuckle.

  Am I crying? No, I don’t think so. My vision is a bit glassy, maybe, but my cheeks are dry enough. That’s not crying, is it? And why would I be crying, anyway? What do I have to cry about?

  “Elliot,” says Jennifer. “It’s just a movie. If it makes you sad, don’t watch it.”

  She hunkers deeper under the covers and is instantly asleep, her words hanging in the empty air like the pronouncement of a generation. If it makes you sad, don’t do it. If it’s not real, don’t believe in it. And so on. They mean well, these people. They do mean well, don’t they? You can’t argue with the soundness of this advice, can you?

  According to physicists, everything in the universe exists only to the extent that it relates to something else. This is not metaphor, this is science. Even the most elementary particle, they say, is in essence a set of relationships reaching out to other things. If an electron, then, is separated from the protons and neutrons and other electrons of the atom in which it resides, and is not observed or otherwise acted upon by any outside force, then that electron, as a matter of scientific fact, is not merely isolated or independent. That electron, quite literally, doesn’t exist. There is no electron.

  A tear finally does run down my cheek. I’m not entirely sure why. I have no defensible reason, scientific or otherwise, to feel this way, or to be so tired—of these people, of this day, of this life. Yet, as Sasha once said, “Reason’s got nothing to do with it.” To the extent I’m actually here at all, I just don’t want to be anymore. I shut off the television. The movie isn’t quite over, but I know how it ends.

  After

  Elliot

  (2000)

  There are a number of ways to kill yourself. One way or another, they’re all bad.

  Many are too painful or difficult to even consider. If you are neither a Buddhist monk nor a Japanese samurai, then you probably can’t achieve—or even describe—the strength of mind required to immolate yourself or carve open your own abdomen with a sword. Less exotic methods aren’t much better. It’s nearly impossible to break your own neck by hanging yourself, which means you’d have to dangle there—by your throat—until you suffocate. And if you’ve ever pressed the edge of a razor blade to your inner wrist, just to see how it felt, you know that some innate sense of self-preservation immediately kicks in to stifle any thought of breaking the skin, let alone cutting deeply enough—twice—to bleed to death. Suicide is hard. Even if you conclude that the end justifies the means, the means themselves may terrify you to the point where you can’t invoke them.

  Most methods also allow far too much time to abort the process before completion. It can take seven minutes to suffocate by hanging—undoubtedly the kind of excruciating ordeal you’ll want to get out of once you’re in it. Or, if you pull a very old car into the garage and close the door, you’ll have maybe twenty minutes before you black out, during which you’ll somehow need to refrain from simply turning off the engine. As to slitting your wrists, if you manage to cut deeply enough, you may still have to watch yourself bleed for over an hour—more than enough time for your survival instinct to take over, whether you want it to or not.

  Even if you find the resolve to begin, and the conviction to follow through, the means themselves are liable to let you down. Many methods are frighteningly unreliable. Only six percent of people who slit their wrists actually die as a result. Of those who intentionally overdose, the success rate is six percent for nonprescription drugs and twelve percent for prescription. Failing grades, by any measure. And the consequences of failure can be nothing short of horrific—more so, arguably, than the consequence of success. A drug overdose can devastate internal organs. An aborted hanging will almost certainly result in brain damage. The long-term effects of carbon monoxide poisoning can include memory defects, parkinsonism, dementia, psychosis, paralysis, and blindness.

  And then there’s one more scenario. The one in which you do everything correctly, nothing goes wrong, and you successfully reach the point when it’s too late to abort. A fait accompli but for the waiting. You take the pills, or jump from the bridge, or step off the chair with a rope around your neck. Even then, there’s often time—whether minutes or seconds—to contemplate what you’ve done, to reconsider that which can no longer be reconsidered. Time for an emphatic, resounding voice to rise up from the deepest, most primal corner of your reptilian brain and rage against your desire t
o be gone, flooding what’s left of the vessel of your spirit with guilt and shame and doubt, declaring in no uncertain terms that you’ve made a terrible, irrevocable mistake. It is a voice you don’t ever want to hear.

  All of which leaves me with one option.

  “A gun,” says Bannor, echoing my words back to me, apparently unsure whether or not he’s heard them correctly. “You want to steal a gun.”

  “Yes,” I say. It’s not easy to surprise Bannor, though I take no pride in having done so. “From your neighbors. The ones who leave shell casings on your stoop.”

  We are walking through the Ravine, in a fragment of Central Park called the North Woods—a bite-size homage to the island of wilderness since displaced by New York City. Even this tribute is manufactured—streams and waterfalls made by human hands, boulders strategically placed, trees carefully planted to create the disorderly illusion of natural order. Granted, in some spots, away from the main avenues, the North Woods achieve a certain stillness. In moments, you can almost believe you’re deep among the trees of Connecticut, looking for words in a book that no longer exists.

  “An unusual request,” says Bannor.

  I know he’s baiting me, but I don’t plan on discussing my intent. Telling someone your goal seems a way of trying to prevent it from being reached. A cry for help, or something, which is fine if that’s what you’re looking for. I wasn’t going to talk to anyone about it at all, but I need Bannor’s help to make it happen, and I trust him not to judge or argue. I decide that I won’t offer up my reason for wanting the gun. If Bannor asks me directly whether I plan on killing myself, I’ll be honest with him. He doesn’t.