Imagine Me Gone

by Adam Haslett

The beast is a projector too, every day throwing up before me pictures of what I’m incapable of.

It struck me then, for the first time, how unethical anxiety is, how it voids the reality of other people by conscripting them as palliatives for your own fear.

We’d become friends, of the sort men often are, in that we daily confirmed each other’s existence but pretty much left it at that.

Paul stood with his back to me at the sink, doing the dishes. When next we squabbled, he might bring this up, his having cooked and cleaned. He was banking domestic credit.

“I’m a researcher and I edit news summaries,” Alec says. “And my boss is a woman.” “Right,” Michael says. “But is she a radical feminist?” “She’s a features editor. She’s not radical about anything.”

“What are you going to do?” “I don’t know.” “You don’t know? Are you saying you might have a child?” “Well, I’m not going to have a deer.

In an effort to get her to elaborate, Gus referred to Dad as her “life partner.” Man, was that a mistake. The phrase grated violently on the brain of the unit, causing instant suspicion that the training officer might be a New Age–language infectee, thus unable to survive Mom’s judgment and impotent to assist us.

It should have turned me off—neither of us being in charge—but the lack of a story set me afloat, leaving me light-headed and close to joy.

I sat upright in a hard-backed chair for five minutes trying to breathe intentionally, as it said to do in the pamphlet she’d given me on self-soothing. For some reason, when I finished I was still thirty-six, single, and about to die.

Booze—the ancient dimmer of fear and sorrow. The granny of all psychoactive meds, a blunt old hag toddling down out of the mountains with a demented smile and a club. World? she sneers. What world? And swings her cudgel at your skull.

I wish they would simply write. Then I could organize all the papers and take stock of them. I do hate not wanting to pick up my own phone when it rings.

“There’s a limit, Alec. You don’t want to think about it, but there’s an ethical limit to what anyone should have to endure. You can’t just negate that with sentimentality. With the idea of some indomitable spirit. That’s a fairy tale. It’s what people say about other people, to avoid the wretchedness. It’s just cruelty by other means. Requiring a person to stay alive. For you.

I’d kept believing in the one catharsis. As Alec did, and my mother, in her own manner, and even Michael, who never stopped trying to want what we wanted for him. How could he? We’re not individuals. We’re haunted by the living as well as the dead.

“If those congressmen sell themselves any faster,” Seth’s father said, “they’ll be shipping their own jobs to China.”