Imagine Me Gone

by Adam Haslett

Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. —Jean Genet

If this is an emergency, and you have gone on holiday by accident with your younger brother, in the hope that you might finally tear your eyes away from the scenes you have been fixedly contemplating your entire life, but find instead that a storm blowing in from paradise has become caught in your wings, so that all you can see is the wreckage of the past piling up before you, one single catastrophe, with no future, then please hang up, and contact my answering service.

I knew him naively, then. He wasn’t raised to be understood in the way people think of relationships now. He grew up in the old world of character as manners and form, emotion having nothing to do with it, marriage being one of the forms. Which isn’t to say he doesn’t love me. He’s just British about it. I think when he met me he realized he might be able to escape some of that, in private at least. In his eyes, I had that American openness he admires,

If you think of memory not just as looking back but as being aware of time and how it passes and what the passage of it feels like, then there is something about being in motion that does cause it. Through some sleight of mind, physical forward motion makes time seem visible. Which causes me to think that maybe the unnatural speed of cars and jets actually creates nostalgia. Because the simplest way to block out the strangeness of time passing before your eyes is to fix it in place, to edit it down to monuments or potted plants. Like, I suppose, my rides on those nearly empty trains back from Surrey in the early evenings, already dark in winter, passengers across the car visible in reflection on the glass—a fixed memory I carry now as a stand-in for the more particular instances of wanting badly to see John, to be done with the courtship so we could live together and see each other every night as a matter of course.

Often during that month I didn’t know which was worse, his dark mood or the shame and frustration it caused him.

there was something about those walks in the park, perhaps precisely because he didn’t talk a blue streak as he usually did, that added a kind of gravity to being in love with him. I’d always wondered before if the mystery that made the beginning of romance enthralling necessarily had to vanish, or if with the right person it just lasted on. I couldn’t have imagined the answer would come in this form, so tied up with trepidation and anger at him for disappearing, in a sense, leaving me with this remnant of himself, but there it was, a mystery deeper than I had guessed at. All his animation and verve could vanish like the weather and stay lost, but then somehow, after six weeks or so, return with such self-forgetting that he didn’t see anything strange about how blithely he led me by the arm into a car showroom to look at MGs, and then took me out to lunch and a bottle of wine, as if nothing had ever happened.

once we’re on the island and the three of them are spending most of the day playing on the rocks, or in the boat with their father, or traipsing up and down from the porch to the tide pools and back with their crabs in tin saucepans, the salt water and sun will wear down the edges of their nervous energy, and now and then I’ll get to be with myself long enough that when they come back, or I spy them going about their business, I will actually see them for a moment. Which ordinarily I don’t.

With children, everything’s already happening and then over with. It happens while you’re trying to keep up and gone by the time you arrive at a view of things.

He won’t talk about it of his own accord. He imagines that if he can contain it inside himself its resolution will be contained as well. That everything will work out—his upbringing distilled into a superstition.

salvific.

Somewhere in there he was hearing what would lead him to the Moog synthesizer and the revolution in the sound of modern life, to a music that mirrors to an almost frightening degree the frictionless surface of commercial culture, but reminds us that it’s still human beings who are condemned to live in it, caught in the undertow of its melancholy.

There is no getting better. There is love I cannot bear, which has kept me from drifting entirely loose. There are the medicines I can take that flood my mind without discrimination, slowing the monster, moving the struggle underwater, where I then must live in the murk. But there is no killing the beast. Since I was a young man, it has hunted me. And it will hunt me until I am dead. The older I become, the closer it gets.

The grass is intensely green, the scrub-apple trees by the road past blooming, on into their pure summer verdancy, along with the rhododendron and the lilac, their flowers gone, their leaves fat with sun. The air smells of the fecund soil—the flesh covering the skull of the planet, the muck from which the plants rise, busy in the mindless life of heat.

I’ve lived vicariously at times off that birthright of the American upper-middle class—their competitive optimism. It’s what I loved about working in this country. What are your plans? How’s the project? How’s business?

Being the youngest, that is part of it. He understood the rules from the point of view of someone who got to break them. They were provisional, and with wile, they could be set aside.

His straight brown hair falls at a slant across his brow. I could reach over the table now and touch the top of his downturned head. The beast is a projector too, every day throwing up before me pictures of what I’m incapable of.

It’s no use resisting this heat. My shirt is soaked, the sweat has seeped into my shoes. But I mind it less. There’s nothing of my person to protect anymore. The simplicity of this is a great relief. An empty stomach and throbbing temples are no more personal than a bank of thriving weeds, or the mirage of asphalt melting in the distance along the bridge. Such distinctions are made of tension, and the tension is melting. Why fight? The inanimate world has such unimpeachable wisdom: no thought.

Her anger spreads in too many directions, and I am the root of it. She has lost me already. But she refuses to know this, and the refusal drives her mad. It galls her that I gave us so many years and so much life together unmenaced, and then simply no longer could. Before, she had a choice. To break it off or go forward. Now she has none, any more than the children do. I don’t even provide money enough for food and clothing. They’re put on credit cards.

She takes a towel from her knapsack and wipes her forehead. It’s no surprise that boys are attracted to her. There’s a precision to her good looks, a fierceness even. That, and the way she carries herself, with a confidence bordering on aloofness. Which I suppose she got from me. An earlier me. And what do I do now? I steal her confidence back, day by day, cheating her of steadiness and care. Of the three of them, she sees me most clearly, which makes it harder for her because she isn’t protected by distraction.

Being beside her, close enough to sense the heat flowing from her body, I’m momentarily astonished at her existence—this child of mine. How narrowly we all avoid having never been. Yet even if the knife of chance did happen to cut her into being, I have the passing terror that it isn’t so simple, that in these ultimate matters time is collapsed into a single moment in which you are forever in danger of having the knife tilt the other way, as though, if I am not careful between here and the parking lot, I might go astray and she will be canceled, stolen back by not-being, like a thief grabbing her through an open window.

There’s a reason I try to be away from here as often as I can. The worst of the fog may have lifted, letting me see again, but it’s in the most familiar objects that the beast still nestles, exuding itself from the caned rocking chair in the corner, the one that Margaret and I bought together in Southampton, and from the fluted-glass lamps on the sideboard that her parents gave us as a wedding gift. It pulses in the watercolor of the old octagonal house that hangs above the sideboard, over Margaret’s shoulder, as she passes Celia the bulgur salad and Alec the plate of bread, and it slinks onto the table between us, its head invisible as always but its body breathing, everyone straining to behave as if there were only four us here, eating supper together on a summer evening.

Einstürzende Neubauten a

I don’t know what most people mean when they use the word love. If they haven’t contorted their lives around a hope sharp enough to bleed them empty, then I think they’re just kidding. A hope that undoes what tiny pride you have, and makes you thankful for the undoing, so long as it promises another hour with the person who is now the world. Maybe people mean attractiveness, or affection, or pleasantness, or security. Like the nonbelievers in church who enjoy the hymns or go for the sense of community, but avert their eyes from the cross. I feel sorry for them. They are dead before their time.

Frankie Knuckles, Marshall Jefferson, Jesse Saunders—Roland drum-machine royalty.

Giorgio Moroder and the German industrialists,

One of the troubles with reading Proust while living at home with your mother because you’re too depressed to be in college is that the experience simultaneously aggrandizes and hollows out your fondest hopes for love, leaving you both more expectant and already defeated than most people are into.

I can throw in for free whatever pathology you choose to make of a romantic and sexual attraction to black women by a white man who studies slavery and its legacy in the U.S. But you will come up with nothing that I haven’t thought or worried to death already. Which is one of the reasons I fill these forms out in such detail. The only relief comes in describing it.

hagiographies.

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. For a moment there, I was able to step outside that, to hear what she wanted to be.

New York apartments either reminded you that you lived in one of the most crowded places on earth or allowed you to forget it.

I loved men. Obviously. But it wasn’t just sex. To know for certain, as I did right now, that a man was paying attention to me, to me and no one else—what more was there to want than that? To matter, and know that you mattered.

I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me that couples who’d known John and me together didn’t call as often after he died, but it did. I thought it was owing to the manner of his death at first, the awkwardness of the subject, but really they were just more comfortable with other married pairs.

As Michael saw it, capitalism had been cruel to our father, giving him no quarter when he was down, the weight of no money and too much responsibility dragging him under. Which didn’t mean he hadn’t been sick, but that there had been no margin for being sick.

I transcribed it. Do you want to hear it?” “No, I don’t.” “Why not?” Beneath his guilelessness, knowingly or not, lay the accusation that if I didn’t listen I too would be abandoning him. This was the disavowal: he could remain innocent of his rage as long as he found a way, however indirect, to channel it through us.

“I can’t help it, I have no choice.” I could have argued the impossibility of the fantasy, but then out would come the Proust quotes and the diatribes against passionless domesticity. Love was an affliction or nothing at all. In which case, Paul and I were nothing. I had given up years ago on being able to share with Michael what I myself went through day to day trying to be with another person, to ease my flinching against Paul’s expressions of love, convinced that what they promised would never last, would vanish without warning and cut me back down to the truth of loneliness.

fustian

Which meant we monitored each other’s responsibility for the family, watchful for any sign of defection, as though we were on a desert island together, each surreptitiously building an escape raft that the other occasionally burned. My cardinal sin was having boyfriends to begin with, because God forbid another family unit arose to threaten the hegemony of the dying colony. His was being younger, and so having required my taking care of him when there was no one else to do it, putting him in the hole, in terms of time served. Now, belatedly, he’d set himself up as the family actuary. It was his attempt to engage at the lowest emotional cost.

Michael had been living with Ben, and then Ben and Christine together, for years by now, in an arrangement that had morphed from a stopgap measure in the wake of his breakup with Caleigh into the most constant aspect of his adult life, all, needless to say, without any planning or discussion. Jobs, doctors, romantic crises had come and gone, but throughout he’d remained in that little front bedroom facing Shawmut Avenue on the edge of the South End.

He gave me a blow job in the parking lot at 128. We exchanged, like, three words.” “That’s gross.” “Oh my God,” he said. “You are so homophobic.” “Oh, please. He could have murdered you.” “And that makes it gross?” “It’s just a little extreme,” I said. “Like maybe you’re acting out.” “I thought you worked with Bay Area homeless kids. How is this extreme?” “You don’t prostitute yourself to pay your rent.” “That may change,” he said. “Whatever. My point is, is this really what you want to be engaging in? Wouldn’t you rather have a boyfriend?” He gaped at me, incredulous. In my exhaustion I had walked right into it—the blithe demonstration of my heterosexual privilege in suggesting such a thing was so readily had, when I knew well enough that it wasn’t. But here he was, attractive and articulate and employed, and I didn’t get why he couldn’t find someone else like that in all of New York City. It was half the reason he’d

“Well, I’m not going to have a deer. You say child like it’s a disease. You sound like Michael.” “Okay, let’s just say, that would be a game changer. Procreation?” Seeing his reaction, I felt almost giddy, as if all of a sudden my escape vessel was complete, and I’d made it out onto the open water, free at last. What better veto of filial duty than an infant?

Officially, Alec and I were no longer competitive. To be explicit about it would seem petty. But it still squirreled its way into moments like this, when the battle became primal again, and we struggled, pulling each other together because that’s what we’d always done to get through, and pushing each other away to convince ourselves over and over that we were more than just functions of a loss.

stripling

I told him that I approved of homosexuality as a counter-hegemonic subject position. That it constituted one of the key sites of resistance to patriarchy, and should be understood as a revolutionary stance. In retrospect, I could have used a more personal touch. He might have wanted something more from me, given the absence of the father function.

own up already to the hollowness of the salvific fantasy of romance, to its childishness.

Deciding it might be best to skip my dream sequence, I told Gus I concurred with Celia. Airing the effects of the past was long overdue. As Marx tells us, the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare upon the brains of the living. I was all for the discussion of transgenerational haunting. It was just hard to focus at the moment owing to a woman in Ohio I needed to visit.

10. Executing an ingratiation maneuver with a bit of quick jocularity, training officer deployed the phrase girlfriend trouble. Tower of Babel. No interpreters in sight. I could sooner have crafted an origami hare from the gold wafer of his melted wedding band than communicate how completely he had misapprehended me. Girlfriend trouble? Those pesky ladies it’s so hard to keep from bitching at you? Training officer’s feminism missing and presumed dead.

The jacked-up brain state of skimming pics and profiles and the eventual orgasm—with someone else, or alone if you bagged out and got off to a video clip instead—were narcotic enough to skip you over the grinding moments of outright deception, the encounters cut short at the front door.

As we lay there together listening, Seth, like a nervous kid on a first date, reached over and took my hand in his. It was so unexpected, and so tender, it caused me to shudder. A few minutes ago we’d had our dicks in each other’s mouths. We’d kissed and tongued. But all that had been routine. This was different, and riskier. It hinted at intimacy. He was actually touching me. And I was letting him do it.

Like a college freshman who’d just had sex for the first time, I studied their faces to see if I could detect which of them had come from the warmth of a drowsy morning fuck, who among them were the elect, as Michael called them, and who had slept and eaten by themselves, their mornings spent in the little disciplines of solitude. An absurd perch for me to assume on the basis of one night, as if I were elect now, a giant presumption, but as I joined the sidewalk traffic, trailing with it down toward the subway, that was the difference: the spell of the night before seemed for once strong enough to countervail the evidence of the world unchanged.

I had nothing to read on the subway and I didn’t want to listen to music that would displace the echo of the song Seth had played me. I looked at my fellow passengers instead, taking in their shorn, wary affect, the aspiration to undisturbed nonpresence guarded by newspapers, gaming devices, books, and headsets. They avoided my open gaze as they would a beggar or lunatic. Normally, I would be full of tiny aversions, or avarice for other people’s lives. The absence of all that disoriented me. That I could stand there swaying with the motion of the train, badly late to work, in a state of such democratic calm, almost affectionate toward my fellow riders—how sappy! But even my cynicism didn’t last more than another stop. The heedless goodwill stayed with me all the way home.