by David Adjmi
Then she hung up the phone.
I wanted to visit Vivian’s grave but I didn’t know where she’d been buried. I kept calling her parents but they stopped answering their phone. Soon after, they had it disconnected. Their official story was that Vivian died in a car accident, that she’d totaled the BMW. But Gladys told me she heard Vivian took heroin with her DJ boyfriend and overdosed—which was why her parents didn’t invite people to the funeral. I remembered the dark circles under Vivian’s eyes when I ran into her that day on the Westlands Lawn. I remembered how thin she looked—how at the time I saw all that as a kind of European glamour, a character she invented who was perfect and deracinated. Now I wondered if Vivian’s sophistication wasn’t just a mask for something dark and unresolved inside her. Maybe, like Cathy, she was driven in some infernal, terrible way to wreck her own life, even as she strove to make it better.
I didn’t know how to grieve Vivian’s death—which wasn’t a death, it was more a disappearance. I felt numb, but maybe that was a good thing. What was the point of getting lost in a huge welter of unmanageable feelings when there were things I could manage? What were feelings, after all, but stupid versions of thoughts?
I began to read with savage, almost murderous intensity, like I was chewing and clawing at the books with my mind. I couldn’t sit in the pillow room anymore; all the sensuous pleasure interfered with my new spartan regimen. I found an uncomfortable desk and chair near the periodicals section and sat there for hours on end.
For one of my classes that spring, we read Crime and Punishment. The main character of the novel, Raskolnikov, comes up with a scheme to murder and rob a pawnbroker. He believes the murder will benefit the world, that he can use the money to do great things for humanity. Raskolnikov thinks this murder will be the test of his will—like Nietzsche’s Superman—that this act of cruelty will be proof of his ultimate greatness.
Early in the book Raskolnikov has a dream. In it he is a small child. He is on his way with his father to visit the graveyard where his baby brother and grandmother are buried. As they cross the town square, drunken townspeople outside a tavern are hectoring a horse’s owner to murder his old and useless horse. The townspeople are laughing wildly, urging the owner of the horse to “whip her in the eyes” and “beat her to death.” Several seize whips to beat the horse, joining its owner who is battering it in the face with a crowbar. Raskolnikov, upon witnessing all this, becomes hysterical. He rushes through the crowd to the horse, then “put his arms round her bleeding dead head and kissed it, kissed the eyes and kissed the lips.” His father pulls him up, and carries his son back home. But Raskolnikov is overwhelmed by grief:
“Father, why did they . . . kill . . . the poor horse!” he sobbed, but his voice broke and the words came in shrieks from his panting chest.
“They are drunk. . . . They are brutal . . . it’s not our business!” said his father. He put his arms round his father but he felt choked, choked.
I saw the scene vividly, as though it were playing out before me. I heard the lashings of the whip, the whinnying screams of the dying horse, its twisting flank and bloodshot eyes. Most harrowing, though, was the image of the boy choking and sobbing in the arms of his emotionally vacant father—who’s as numb as the men in the tavern. The boy is shocked by the brutality of the men, he needs warmth or comfort, but the father’s lame response, “It’s not our business,” only makes things worse. The boy’s voice breaks, cracks, rendering him incapable of speech. He is, literally, choked.
Confronted with this spiritual deadness, Raskolnikov wraps his arms around the void where his father should be, just as he wrapped his arms around the dead horse. I understood that terror and desperation: the horror of being left to fend for oneself in a world so brutal it reduces one to choked sobs. I knew what it was like to feel so full of love, and have that love choked out of you because there was no outlet for it in the world.
Raskolnikov’s dream bore a remarkable similarity to the circumstances around Nietzsche’s breakdown—I’d read about it in one of the biographies.
Nietzsche, crossing a piazza in Italy, saw a man viciously beating his horse—and he too rushed to the horse and threw his arms around it in a protective embrace. After that he became catatonic and was placed in a clinic in Basel and never recovered.
I thought this was kind of weird. What was Nietzsche’s breakdown doing in Crime and Punishment? Did Dostoevsky base his book on Nietzsche?
I did a search in the library and learned that actually, no, the reverse was true: Nietzsche’s breakdown came long after Dostoevsky finished Crime and Punishment; in fact, Nietzsche was known to have been influenced by Dostoevsky—he’d read and admired this very book. So what was going on here? Was Nietzsche just waiting to find some man beating his horse in a public square so he could play out the scene? And why? Was he just drawn to the book the way Cathy was drawn to Sylvia Plath and Marguerite Duras?
I’d known about Nietzsche’s breakdown, but I thought it was part of some brilliance or spiritual genius embedded in his philosophy, that he was a bright, burning asteroid streaking through black skies before flaring into burnout. But, there in the library, I started to see the breakdown as something else. I decided Nietzsche had become obsessed with the story from Dostoevsky, that this story of a small, helpless child choking at the human condition resonated intensely with who Nietzsche really was—not some ideal mythic supernatural being, but who he was inside: the fixed unchanging part of him, the wounded, broken child whose father died when he was four, abandoning him to a heartless world. Raskolnikov’s dream touched some Freudian wound in him, some unhealed scar he tried covering over with intemperate writing and exclamation points and stories about jumping into frozen lakes naked—some mythology he wanted to make his own but couldn’t, no matter how vehement and violent he made the writing, just as I couldn’t make myself into him.
The Superman was bullshit.
The Superman was a fantasy. The fantasy couldn’t just be made into reality by exertion of will. We couldn’t simply choose who we wanted to be. If that were true, Nietzsche would have married Lou Salomé; she wouldn’t have rejected him and broken his heart. He would have had a nice little life lecturing at universities—which he couldn’t, because no university would hire him. He couldn’t even sell three hundred copies of Beyond Good and Evil, which was what he needed to recoup the publication fees, because he was forced to publish it himself with his last dollars, because it had been rejected by everyone! He did not live the life of a Superman: it was a sad, horrible life—just like mine, and Cathy’s, and Vivian’s, and Richie’s, and everyone I knew. You couldn’t change your past. You could make yourself into a character, sure, but hiding inside you, lodged deep—like a molar, or the ringed interior of some ancient redwood—was the damaged, sick part of you that could never be healed. And that sickness, that horror from your past, would dominate you, trail you forever like some atavistic latch, because that was destiny. That was life.
That was reality.
And there in the library, I felt something break inside me. It was like that moment near the end of Persona where the filmstrip snaps and burns: the very material of my life disintegrated. I felt like I’d been pushed out of a building—my stomach dropped, my body started to buckle and shake. The world seemed to come to a grinding halt. Colors began to parch and dissolve. I could barely breathe, barely stand or make my way to the car.
I drove to the pharmacy where I purchased about twenty boxes of sleeping pills. I must’ve seemed suicidal—with my tremoring hands and my dozens of sleeping pills that I charged to my father’s Discover card—but the man at the register didn’t seem to find any of this notable. His indifference slightly annoyed me, but I didn’t want a scene, I just wanted to die. When I returned to the car it was dark out. The tremoring subsided. I’d been so worn out from all my psychic torment. Now I felt a strange peace wash over me, a serene preamble to death. The darkness was a sumptuous deep black; I felt cradl
ed and held by it like it was a huge dark womb. On my drive home the darkness erased all the details, and all I could see were lines and angles and disembodied glimmers.
Goodbye world, goodbye life.
I returned to my apartment and locked the door to my room. I sat at my desk. One by one, I popped the blue oval pills from their aluminum casing. I piled them up on my desk in compulsive fervor. They were sloped to an apex like a mountain, like the mountain in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the one people in that movie kept compulsively painting and drawing. There was something ecclesiastic, even beautiful, in the vertical arrangement of the pills. I didn’t want to disturb their fragile composition, but I knew I had to die. As I prepared to scoop a few into my mouth, though, I felt drawn to some force, some holiness in the pastel blue pyramid. I didn’t want to feel the holiness, I didn’t believe in holy things, but none of that mattered. I couldn’t move. I felt pulled back as if by ropes. A strange thought entered my mind: that life was beautiful and sacred. The thought sickened me, because I knew life was a nightmare, but the feeling it evoked showed me I was wrong. It was just a feeling, yes, but the feeling was somehow more real than any thought I previously held—about anything. The feeling etched itself into my entire being with the precision of a laser. And that was it.
In the vague attempt to end my life I was connected back to some part of myself I thought was gone, a part that linked me to something eternal and unknowable, that hearkened back to my childhood, when I believed in spirits and angels and even God.
I took an incomplete for the semester and a brief leave of absence from school. I was exhausted. I felt sore all over, like I’d been in an accident. I rented dumb movies. I baked brownies from a recipe that was supposedly Katharine Hepburn’s.
One night, my brother Stevie drove to see me. I was surprised by his visit. We hadn’t spoken in a few years. He said, “I’ve been where you are. I’ve been to the bottom. I lost everything, but I got up and kept fighting, and you can do that, too.” There was nothing revelatory in what he said, but it struck me as a revelation. It was so rare for anyone in my family to open up to me. It was an act of pure love.
I bought a ticket one afternoon at the TKTS booth for a play called Six Degrees of Separation—there were posters for it everywhere: a black man and some austere-looking white woman drawn in pastels. I liked the look of it. I hadn’t been to the theatre for at least a decade, and I missed it. I wanted to restore some lost part of my life that once gave me pleasure.
The play was about the impossibility of ever being anyone but yourself, and also the pain of never fully becoming yourself. Paul is a gay man who trains himself to speak and act a certain way so he can function inside the hermetic envelope of bourgeois privilege. He stabs himself, lies about having been mugged, then passes himself off as the son of Sidney Poitier to Flan and Ouisa Kittredge—a wealthy art dealer couple who live in a glamorous penthouse on Central Park West.
Paul is a con artist, but he doesn’t want Flan and Ouisa’s money. He wants beauty and art. He wants love and eternal friendship. He wants a tribe, something he can belong to, a cleft in the rock of the world to hide in.
Like Blanche, Paul’s story ends badly. The suggestion in the play is that he hangs himself with a pink shirt Ouisa and Flan gave him to replace the one he bloodied stabbing himself. “He wanted to be us,” Ouisa says. “He stabbed himself to get into our lives.” I was choking on my tears during her monologue. I saw myself in Paul. I saw my own story play out right on that stage—and I didn’t know I even had a story. I thought that, like Paul, I only existed in my attempts to become someone else.
All around me people were wiping away tears. Somehow the story belonged to everyone in that audience. We were knit together by the fiction of this play, which harbored something more real about life than the lives we might return to when the lights went up. In the darkness, we weren’t burdened with those lives. In the darkness, everything solid became amorphous, and we were one organism. We belonged to one another: to life and all the beauty and tragedy and pain that went with it.
When the play ended, I sat in my seat for a while, wiping my eyes as people stepped over me to exit the theatre. I didn’t know if my heartbreak was about the play or Vivian or Cathy or my own life—probably all of it. When the theatre emptied, an usher tapped me on the shoulder. I collected the sobbing mess of my self like a rumpled heap of laundry and walked to Broadway. I didn’t feel like going home just yet, I needed to shake off the dream of the play, so I arbitrarily chose a direction and started walking.
I walked past skyscrapers and midtown plazas of dimpled pink marble, past men in navy-blue suits wolfing down stacked plates of halal meats. As I walked, I felt I wasn’t just shaking off the play, but some dead part of my life, like I was molting. Eventually I ended up in Times Square. I hadn’t been there in years, but now I felt a deep pang of nostalgia. I walked down Shubert Alley, past some memorabilia shop where Howie and I had one of our crazy laughing fits. I walked past marquees of theatres that advertised plays I’d never heard about, but now I wanted to see all of them. Some fuse inside me was relit.
As I watched Six Degrees of Separation, my life story unfolded in a sort of dream. The dream was dreamt up by a playwright named John Guare, whom I had never met and who didn’t know me—but he understood me, he knew me. The play was his message in a bottle, a transmission between remote shores.
Late in the play, Paul appears to Ouisa in a dream and delivers a message. He tells her the imagination shows you “the exit from your nightmare,” and a way to “transform your nightmare into dreams.” The theatre could do that, too, I thought. The theatre could transform nightmares into dreams—and that felt to me like a kind of power. It was a power I desperately lacked, and suddenly craved more than anything in the world.
It was getting late, I didn’t want to miss my train back to Westchester, but before I left for Grand Central Station I took one last look around me. It was twilight, one of those nights where everything is lit up with color. Strips of pink light were reflected on the sides of buildings—which became living murals all of a sudden. The city became a giant reflective mirror, like the reflectors my sister used when she gave herself those terrible sunburns. The vertical glass walls became screens that revealed my entire history, as if a kind of ancient scrollwork. I thought of the trips my mother and I took to The City when I was a little boy, how I would stare at my own reflection in tinted surfaces and see nothing reflected back. How I felt like nothing back then. How I lived with the constant terror my life would never amount to anything, that I would never belong to anything.
The deepening twilight turned the city for a moment a shade of burnt orange. The buildings were bathed in orange light intersected by darkening shadows, black and orange, like plastic jack-o’-lanterns. Every so often, light from digital displays hit in startling flashes. I looked around me, looked up at the floating signs and black barriers. I stood for a moment in the jangle of voices and noise, and I felt a sense of enormous calm wash over me. It was where I belonged.
Book III
At Sea
L’Hommelette
MY FATHER STILL held a torch for my mother, he never really got over her, but he was very fond of his new girlfriend, Cookie. She was the first and only person he dated in the twenty years since he and my mother separated. They were introduced by his younger sister the summer I graduated from college. Unlike my mother, who was diabolically infatuated with the things he could buy her, Cookie was simple, humble. She taught my father about macrobiotic diets and eating healthy. She taught him about hijiki and green shakes. My father ditched his tan suits and started wearing sporty tracksuits and baseball hats. He started going to Turnberry, where Cookie had a condo from her first marriage. A tiny quorum of Syrians had houses there; they were chummy, smoked good cigars, went fishing and gambling. Dad had everything he wanted: the girl, the house in Florida, beatific exchanges with rabbis, soul-nourishing exegeses of Talmudic paradoxes. F
or the first time in a very long time he was happy.
Then, late one night, he called me, hammered on Prune Juice. He was slurring and speaking in teary incoherent circles. “She don’t want me no moah,” he said, again and again.
“Did you and Cookie get into a fight?”
“Who needs her!”
“Dad, you sound really drunk.”
“She don’t want me no moah.”
“Did she break up with you? Or—”
“Good riddance!” I heard him sniffling on the other end. Then, after a long silence, he mumbled, “I’m blue, Dave . . . I’m very blue.”
I’d never seen my father in this lovelorn condition before. Though he was liquored up beyond comprehension, I was able to make out the basic facts of their estrangement. Cookie felt Dad was too stubborn and controlling: he wanted to dictate what restaurants they went to, and how religious she should be, and what she could and could not wear. And while Cookie was constitutionally averse to, and even terrified of, conflict, she felt she had to stand up for herself. She’d already dealt with a controlling husband in her first marriage; she was tired of having to sacrifice autonomy for companionship.
I could only imagine how difficult it was to be in a relationship with my father, because God knows he was controlling and monomaniacal, but I felt sorry for him. He was lonely and in his sixties. He’d been single for so many years, and finally found someone to love, and though my father’s idea of love was bluntly transactional, and I was sure their love was attenuated—the love of people who groped blindly at the world, striving vainly for some vague ideal of happiness that would always elude them because they lacked a basic self-concept—I still wanted him to have something. I suggested he apologize. “Let her apologize to me!” he thundered back. I gently explained that he was a little bit controlling, an allegation that horrified him: “How am I controlling?” he remonstrated. “If she don’t want me that’s her problem. Who needs her! I’m through with women!” His romantic notions were trapped in the amber of 1940s Hollywood comedies: grumpy, loitering bachelors and their inveterate vows to swear off women who snared and collected men like toys.
