Imagine Me Gone

by Adam Haslett

Soon I had fumbled into a question about what kinds of things he designed, falling right into the script of the Internet date I had wanted to avoid, that face-off across a table stripped of all context and fellow feeling, and supported by nothing more than the mutual assumption of loneliness, a social form that had always struck me as rigged to fail. It didn’t matter to me what he designed so long as he would go home with me after dinner.

He asked if I’d like to share an appetizer, and what wine I preferred. He was tangled up in politeness, which by default I matched and parried, moving on to social autopilot. I wanted the evening to start over. I wanted to whisper something suggestive in his ear as soon as he arrived, preserving the mystery by ushering us back through the curtain again into the vaguer, richer world of romance. None of this disastrous self-reporting, this checklist discovery of “things in common.”

It occurred to me that he might be less neurotic than I was. That he might know himself decently well. Which made me think that if we were going to fuck for the first time tonight, I should do the fucking, so things didn’t get too out of balance.

I hadn’t wanted to interrupt the clean white lines or clutter the open space. Which had left it sterile. One of the thousands of adult dorm rooms in Manhattan, where credentialed children performed their idea of adult lives.

I almost always role-played it, acting the stud giving it to the boy, or playing the shameless boy myself. But Seth wasn’t playing. He didn’t mutter anything in my ear, he didn’t harden into self-regard. He kept his eyes open, his dick firm inside me, but the rest of his body almost lax, as if we were cuddling. 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 kept waiting for him to disappoint me, by not calling or texting, or by calling or texting too much, but he didn’t. Which left me trying to disqualify him on other grounds: his apartment was too gayly neat; there weren’t enough books in it; he wasn’t a political junkie; his voice got queeny with his friends; he watched sitcoms, liked animated movies, owned a cat named Penelope. But I actually found the tidiness of his apartment reassuring, and he did in fact read the news, if not all the polls. And when he bantered with his friends he seemed to be having fun.

I decided the way we’d met would catch up with us. One of us would get bored on the Internet and decide to hook up with someone else, just for fun, and there would follow an awkward coffee date and that dwindling exchange of e-mails I’d anticipated the first night at the restaurant. It would have been a kind of relief. To get back to normal. But the months went by and it kept not happening.

I was afraid my loneliness was a leprosy, a disfigurement, which, if he ever saw it, would repulse him.

I could even tell Michael that I was in love. He would listen to such a declaration with thirst, at least when he stopped talking about his own predicament long enough to hear it. But that Seth loved me back? That if anything he was the more affectionate? Of course Michael would never be less than polite about it. He’d say he was glad, and yet I would be cutting him off, leaving him more isolated than he already was. And what for, if I could just soft-pedal it, allowing him the sense that nothing had really changed?

I’d fantasized about having in-laws. A comfortable, accepting couple who would be delighted their son had found a clean-cut professional, and who wanted to welcome him into their family. Their comfortable, intact family. Seth’s older sister, Valerie, and her husband, Rick, lived with their infant son just a couple of streets away from Seth’s parents. Rick worked at the construction firm Seth’s father ran. They were all, apparently, keen to meet me.

stanchions.

I asked about his visit home. He’d spent the morning playing video games, and the afternoon at the mall. When we’d first started dating, each new discovery—that I didn’t need to make weekend plans to fill empty evenings, that I had someone to talk to at the end of the day—had come as a revelation. The discoveries were different now. I could sense his mood in a phrase or two. I knew when he was worried about me, and felt guilty for it. These were their own kind of marvels, strangely reassuring as proof that Seth and I were, in fact, involved. Just hearing him describe his day with his family untensed me.

Seeing an opening, he started in on his perennial subject: slavery and trauma. I could never tell if he actually thought he was discoursing on all this to me for the first time, in which case the drugs had given him mild dementia, or if—and this seemed more likely—it didn’t matter a great deal whom he was describing it to, he just needed to narrate it, over and over. Earlier that summer the magazine

It hadn’t occurred to me that living on my own would be different from living with Ben and Christine.

I had never suspected that hearing the muffled edge of their conversations through closed doors and the toilet flushing upstairs had done so much to assure me that other people existed. In the new apartment the cinder-block walls cut off all sound of the neighbors.

By our third meeting it was clear I had more in common with him than I did with my fellow grad students. For one thing, we were both fifteen (at the level of the psychic), we listened to inordinate quantities of dance music, and as far as I could tell, we were both attracted to his English teacher.

Sound systems are what turn cars into escape vehicles, even if you’ve got nowhere to go.

When you live most days alone in a room with a tiger kept from pouncing on you by nothing more than your constant stare, being poured a cup of Pepsi can feel almost Christlike in its mercy.

What do you fear when you fear everything? Time passing and not passing. Death and life. I could say my lungs never filled with enough air, no matter how many puffs of my inhaler I took. Or that my thoughts moved too quickly to complete, severed by a perpetual vigilance. But even to say this would abet the lie that terror can be described, when anyone who’s ever known it knows that it has no components but is instead everywhere inside you all the time, until you can recognize yourself only by the tensions that string one minute to the next. And yet I keep lying, by describing, because how else can I avoid this second, and the one after it? This being the condition itself: the relentless need to escape a moment that never ends.

But as a major CNS depressant, liquor has its advantages. It struck my reptile brain square on its diamond head. 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 wondered how any of them—Celia or Alec or my mother—managed to live anywhere but on the lip of his grave, eyes pinned open, trying to look away. How were they not cold to the touch of anyone but those, like my father, like Bethany, who ended who you were by making you over again in their image?

No, no, I said, I just thought I’d drop by. Maybe it was true after all that I would never be with anyone romantically. That my anguish, which for a time had specialized in love, had once more become indivisible from the rest of life.

I should go, I thought. But the idea of getting up and leaving the house was terrifying. If I stayed here, in his company, I might knuckle through. They would cook dinner, I could eat with them. The overhead light, the grated cheese. It could be ordinary. My eyes started to twitch, as if I were caught in a waking dream. At the ER, they would think I was just a drug seeker.

None of the children, Michael least of all, would have wanted to hear that it happened to be almost forty-one years since I had taken the bus to Lambeth to visit their father in another north-facing hospital room. What do the dates matter? I could hear them asking, and I would have had no answer to satisfy them. They think it’s simple of me, to keep track of time this way. I don’t ascribe anything deep to it, I don’t say it means anything in particular, other than that I’m sure I spend too much time thinking about the past. But it is a way to remain connected. Like visiting each of them if they move, so I can picture exactly where they are, which I do every night as I’m going to sleep, the images bridging the distance. Dates do the same. If I measure off the months and years, it is to link me to them, and back to them when they were children, and earlier still to when John and I were together before we were married, when everything was just beginning.

He stares at me as if I’m casting him adrift in a storm. But what in God’s name am I supposed to do? Drive him through the night? Or have sirens and lights in front of the house at four in the morning?

I got a different kind of release than I did from sprinting, and Paul came home more relaxed than he ever did from the gym. And more likely, I noticed, to have sex. Which was good for more than just our love life. It calmed the worry, which I’d never quite rid myself of, that there was something lacking between us. A missing ease born of an insufficient trust. It didn’t press on me the way it used to. But it was there still—the thought that we might not always be together. And that if it was going to end, I would be the one to end it. I knew it wasn’t that simple, and that this idea served its own function, to regulate an older, more basic fear of mine that one day Paul, like my father, would simply vanish. Sex banished those abstractions.

I held a bit of myself back. Knowing well enough that he was at the lowest point in his life. But that was part of it. The extremity of his situation. Where did it end? What level of need couldn’t he surpass? However much his fate had weighed on me in the past, I’d never stopped to imagine that it wasn’t my responsibility. I encouraged my own patients to see the limits of their obligation to members of their own families, but not myself.

The portrait in front of me had a different aspect from the rest: a man in his early fifties, simply dressed in a russet coat with a plain black collar and brown neckerchief. His wavy black hair hung down to his shoulders, with no wig or jeweled clasp to hold it in place. There were no tapestries or upholstered furniture in the background, just a featureless gray-brown, which focused all the viewer’s attention on the face itself. It seemed to be by a different artist altogether. Not because of its darker palette and lack of finery, and not because it possessed any greater degree of realism. It was something more ineffable. I had the sense that this person had been alive. Not merely historically, like the other personages here, but alive in the way of experience. He’d been present to things which had marked him, and which were registered in the image. Despondency, I might have said, given the dark cast of the eyes and the unsmiling lips, but that didn’t suffice. It hadn’t been that simple. Haunted, I thought, but that wasn’t right either. Occupied was more like it, inhabited by a thought not his own, a force not of his choosing, something he had endured over the course of years. When I stood for a closer look, I saw the label SELF-PORTRAIT. The light in the picture fell on his wide forehead and across his nose, casting the right side of his face in partial shadow. His eyebrows were just fractionally lifted, not in surprise but in a kind of openness. As if the tension of ant...

There had been an episode. This is why Michael had called. And now the charge of anxiety it had sparked was completing the family circuit.

the hardest part for either of us was the lack of Internet. I hadn’t been away from it that long in years. Nor had Michael. The absence of distraction left us irritable and bored. But that had been part of my idea for coming here, to disenthrall him from that constant, goading semi-stimulation which only fed his anxiety. To help bring him back to some kind of present.

“Dr. Bennet said he thinks I’d qualify for disability. He said he doesn’t support it for most of his patients, but that he would for me—that my condition is that severe.” “That’s what you want? To make it permanent like that? To get a subsidy for it? If you wanted that, why come this far? If it’s all insulin for the diabetic, why even agree to come up here?” “You told me I had to.” “No. I offered. And you agreed.” “You don’t want Mom to sell the house. You think she should stop supporting me.” “That’s true,” I said. “But do you really think I don’t want to help you? You always say talking about the anxiety takes the edge off,

I knew this drug was different. To come off it too quickly could be dangerous. It would take time. But we didn’t have months to work with, which meant we just had to do the best that we could.

“You shouldn’t worry anymore,” he said. “Any of you.”

“Because you’re off it now. All of it. This is the trailing stuff. You’ve done it.” He rested his forearms on the table and leaned forward, lowering his head. “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. Dad, for instance. I never blamed him. I never did. He reached his limit.”

To have ever been impatient with Michael’s suffering seemed suddenly callous. All the effort I had expended pretending our lives weren’t much different, so that he wouldn’t have to feel lonelier than he already did—it hadn’t been for him, but for me. Because I had wanted so fiercely not to pity my brother. Not to pity him as I did now.

“The miracle of an analogy,” he said, using the napkin now to pat the sweat from his forehead. “That’s what Proust calls it. On those rare occasions when the miracle of an analogy had made me escape from the present. That’s the only real life, the only thing that makes you know you’re alive—the backward ache. That’s what music is. The trouble—for me—is that at some stage I realized those miracles, those aches, they have a history. They’re not private. The music’s always about what someone’s lost. That’s what you hear, when it’s good: the worlds people lost, the ones they want back. And once you hear it that way, you can’t avoid it—that it’s somehow about justice.”

“You want me to have a life like yours,” he said. “Like yours or Celia’s. Someone to be domestic with, a profession, so that I’ll be taken care of. Mom wants it too—for me. But that’s what I mean about sentimentality, how cruel it can be. Because how can I ever not want those things when you all want them for me? And yet it’s never going to happen. I don’t mean that in a self-pitying way, even if I do pity myself sometimes. I just mean that isn’t my life. People don’t want to be loved the way I love them. They get suffocated. It isn’t their fault. But it isn’t mine, either.”

“I told you,” he said, in a voice I didn’t recognize, low and determined. “I have to sleep now.” The countless times he’d said this before, I’d heard it as a complaint. To be sympathized with, yes, but not so much as to alter my plan. But this sounded different. There was no more pleading. Instead, he was doing what he never did—asserting himself.

What he had said to me a moment ago was true. I hadn’t been listening to him, not for years. I’d wanted him to be better for so long that I had stopped hearing him tell me he was sick. For the first time I saw him now as a man, not a member of a family. A separate person, who had been trying as hard as he could for most of his life simply to get by.

I have no memory of how long I held him. Or of how long afterward I remained in the chair opposite, beholding his body, the brow furrowed, the eyes resting like stones in their sockets. Long enough to observe a square of sun creep down the wall, across a map of the bay, and onto his glowing form, before it slid onto the rug and vanished. I had never understood before the invisibility of a human. How what we take to be a person is in fact a spirit we can never see. Not until I sat in that room, with the dead vehicle that had carried my brother through his life, and for which I had always mistaken him. I knew that as soon as I stood up, I would have to act. I would have to go into the world and seek help. But as long as I remained in the chair, in the silence, none of that could begin.

It was as I walked home alone through the warm darkness of that summer night, in the nearly perfect quiet of our neighborhood, that I vowed never to let that happen again. Never to put myself in a position to be left by a man. It was one of those youthful promises you make to yourself and keep long after you stop recognizing what you are doing, or how it is distorting your life.

An old impatience returned, the kind I had experienced when I started as a therapist: the urge to search for the moments in their past that contained the key to liberating them in the present. That’s what I used to do, press for more and more family history, excusing it to myself as interest and attention, when really it was a distraction from the suffering in front of me, a desire to find the passage of experience that would explain their pain away. What good plot didn’t offer that? A meaning sufficient to account for the events. But as time went on, I realized that my clients’ lives weren’t works of art. They told themselves stories all the time, but the stories trailed off, got forgotten, and then repeated—distractions themselves, oftentimes, from the feelings they were somewhere taught would damn them or wreck them.

Because if all I did was scour what a person said to me each week for clues, I wouldn’t do her much good. I had to give up my own need to cure if I was going to stand any chance of shepherding her toward acceptance of who she already was.

He’d sounded so desperate on the phone from Maine. And yet I hadn’t said what I should have to Alec—that it had gone too far, too quickly, and that he had to stop it.

“Bourbon’s fine,” I said. He palmed ice into the tumblers and poured three generous drinks. “Cheers,” he said, looking me in the eye for the first time, just for an instant, and offering a small nod of the head, as if allowing me still further into the circle of his acknowledgment. Rick did the same when I glanced at him, and the three of us clinked glasses. It was a simple, male gesture, this little close-lipped dip of the chin, the eyes meeting ever so briefly. I’d given and received the nod a thousand times. It was what remained, I suppose, of tipping your hat. But I’d always experienced it as more than that. As a forswearing of an implicit threat of violence. A sign, between men, of disarmament. “Cheers,” I replied, aware of the closeness of their bodies to mine—Seth’s father’s big frame, Rick’s barrel chest and thick legs. These two men I had only just met were granting me an unspoken acceptance, giving me that minimal respect of belonging with them. But only in the narrowest sense. I’d earned the right in their eyes to be treated as a man. As a participant in the basic competition among all men. Just noticing this, not letting it pass as an ordinary fact of meeting strangers, unclenched something in me. A fist in my gut. A bracing against attack. I tried listening to their talk about suppliers and the housing market but I couldn’t focus on their words. I saw their lips and eyes move, their weight shift, and as I watched them I understood clearly and for the first tim...

After great pain, a formal feeling comes— Those quotes Michael carried with him everywhere on sheaves of paper in his messenger bag turned out to be declamations, mostly, about the lasting evils of slavery. But there were others, too, on music and art, and life more generally. A few of which have stuck with me since I read through them last winter, in the months after he died. They were like notes to us that he had written but never delivered. Or delivered by speaking them only after I had stopped listening. The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs— That is how it was for a time: abstract. Moving through tasks at a great remove. Meeting with Veronica, the real estate agent. Tidying the house for the prospective buyers she brought around to view it. The hardest, of course, was going through Michael’s things. Discovering from the pile of correspondence with his creditors, and his handwritten lists of the status of each loan and the amount outstanding, how he had tried right up to the end to manage his debts. It took Alec less than a day to dispense with them all, except the one that I had cosigned. It required nothing more than a death certificate. And then there were his records, in the gray milk crates along his walls, in boxes in the study and Alec’s old room, all around the edges of the basement, too—thousands of them. I have no room for them here in the new place, but we weren’t about to throw them away, so they sit in storage until we find them a home, where hopefully th...

I found myself telling Paul how I wanted Dr. Gregory and Dr. Bennet and Dr. Greenman, and the people who’d invented all those drugs, imprisoned for what they had done. I hadn’t said it like that to anyone before. Even to myself. And he took it in stride, saying that he understood.

For so long I worried Alec would never find anyone, given the difficulties of that world, and how tightly wound he is.

He is so committed to his guilt. He needs Michael’s death to be his fault. It’s what keeps his brother alive for him—that connection. As though, as long as he still has a confession to make, Michael will be forced one day to return in order to hear it. Without that prospect, there is only an ending. This is the thing I have discovered: Michael’s being gone doesn’t mean we stop trying to save him. The strain is less but it doesn’t vanish. It becomes part of our bewilderment, a kind of activity without motive, which provides its own strange continuity.

I find characters to all be so insightful. How would the effect be different if a character had very little emotional intelligence ?

In their one feint to tradition, Paul is kept from my bedroom while Celia puts on her dress and arranges her hair. I do what I can to help, buttoning her up from the back, fixing the clasp of her necklace, things I haven’t done for her since she was a child.