(note: this is a humbled study of Amy Hempel's In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried)
Your friend is dying and all you have are stories.
Stories with no endings.
It is June 26th, the day Clifford Brown died, fifty years ago. This bothers your friend, your black-and-blue, emaciated, emotionally writhing friend. Your friend who has succumbed to the sweet smell of the end, who has lost his fear of the hospital’s chemical odor, its funhouse smile. But not today, he says over and over again. Your friend believes if he dies on the day Clifford Brown dies, no one will remember him.
You do not tell your friend that barely anyone remembers Clifford Brown, much less the day he died.
Instead, you tell him the stories. The stories seem to lift his spirits. Or comfort him. Or distract him. Deconstruction, at a time like this, is deplorable.
You tell him the story of the man and woman who meet in a mental hospital. Adequately though not thoroughly treated for their depression, the man and woman leave the hospital and get married. Their bouts with depression return as their attempts to obtain happiness founder. They decide to actively seek sadness and find that obtaining sadness, as they suspected, is a lot easier than attaining happiness. However, the question remains: do they become happy? Does their aspiration for sadness turn into an inverted form of masochism?
Your friend claps for this. His wrists look translucent.
You tell him the story of the materialistic girl with the fear of snakes. Oh brother, your friend says, I can see what’s coming from a mile away. You tread lightly. While she’s at the grocery store, the girl’s ex-lover hides a bunch of baby snakes in the girl’s apartment. When she returns, the ex-lover is standing outside, smiling. He tells her what he has just done. The girl shrieks. Now does this girl, with this devastating fear of snakes and snake paraphernalia, inch into her home and live out her days with the fear of encountering one of the snakes? Or does this girl, who is uncontrollably materialistic, leave her home and all her possessions?
Terrible, your friend says, plain terrible. All she has to do is get someone, someone she trusts, someone who doesn’t go jack-crazy upon the sight of a snake to sift through the apartment and clear out all the snake pictures. Your friend coughs or laughs.
Okay, you say, exasperated. You tell him the story of the small, reticent girl whose uncertain sense of self-value causes her to fake her suicide, to see how her family and friends react. Of course, they’re devastated, crestfallen, torn into fleshy shreds of emotion. Satisfied, the girl anonymously invites her family and friends to the same place, where she reveals herself. How does everyone react?
There is silence and the morning sun glows thickly against the windows. You wish you could smoke a cigarette up here on the 30th floor, let the smoke pour endlessly from your mouth, your plumy pirouette so close to the clouds. Does he want you to go on?
So basically, her family and friends—
Woah, whoa, your friend says, what do you think you’re doing? You know the rules. No endings. Absolutely no endings.
You slept through the entire flight from New Jersey to Los Angeles. This was one week ago. While you were sleeping, you dreamed that you were stuck in a beautiful glass bottle. Thin, tall, with a sky blue hue. You felt small and helpless and vulnerable. With enough force, you could have broken the bottle with your bare fists, but you refused to do this. The bottle was too beautiful.
Your friend has been at this hospital in downtown Los Angeles for a year. You are both 17. You are both six foot and wiry and pale-skinned. You both have perfect teeth and bad postures. You both were burgeoning young golf talents until your friend came down with this illness. You quit golf. You told everyone you couldn’t bear the thought of playing knowing your friend would never play again, but now you’re not so sure what this means.
When your mother asks you if you miss golf, you say no way. But you cross your fingers. This means nothing, the crossing of the fingers. Unless, of course, crossing your fingers comes with the same dangerous permanence of crossing your eyes.
The hospital smells like cold rubber. Every night you fill the large hotel bathtub with hot water. You slink into the tub with intentions of getting rid of the cold, rubber stench, but, invariably, you end up sinking into the water and holding your breath for as long as possible, wondering if it’s really true, if you really can’t drown yourself.
Your friend tells you what he likes best about life: sexually blithe women, words that are at least two syllables longer than their simpler synonyms, drawing the horizon line on a landscape sketch, difficult art, and pop music that sounds like pop music but doesn’t feel like pop music.
Difficult art is a shitty way to describe it, your friend says. Hold on. What I mean by difficult art is art that is a genuine expression of the self. Being that we can never know anyone else, if their creations are genuine expressions of their self, then of course it will be difficult, even momentarily inaccessible. But don’t you see? If everyone did this, all the proverbial cards would be out on the table. We’d be one step closer to understanding, one step closer to ultimate empathy, one step closer to a more peaceful existence.
You don’t dare tell your friend that this will never happen.
You tell him you enjoy, from time to time, a sexually blithe woman. Your friend laughs. Of course, you say, in your most charming voice, when I say enjoy I mean get ignored by. Around your friend, your lack of prowess with the ladies feels like more of an asset than a liability. You try to miss him and feel nothing. You hope this is because he’s right here, in front of you.
Outside the room, you hear a lot of yelling. Feet stampede, like a piece of clicking plastic, down the hallway. You hear screaming. Women and men and children. An EKG squeals. Your friend picks wax out of his ears. You hear screaming. As you watch him, your stomach begins to spin like a drill. You feel nothing for these screams.
You’ve been at your friend’s side for the past seven days. The doctors and nurses know you well. They don’t know your real name but they have a name for you. They call you Fly Paper. They say you look like a blank piece of fly paper. Every day, things are thrown at you. Things that are lachrymose, things that are weary, things conceived out of haste, things foul-colored, swirling, menacing to the naked eye.
At the end of the first day, they looked at you and wiped their brows. God bless him, they said in unison, solemnly. That boy is going to fall over if any more things are thrown at him. Look at how it all sticks to him. Yet look at his face, stolid, unaffected, without a worry. Winsome, even.
And then the next morning came. Blank. Fresh. Clean like a brand new black marble bathroom. Like a porcelain vase that falls from a table, hits the floor, and bounces like a rubber ball. You are a mystery to them, Fly Paper. Where do all those things go every night? Where do your worries and your fears go, where does your sadness retreat to?
The doctor walks in the room and gives five up high to your friend. He checks your friend’s chart and then examines your friend closely. Thin protrusions from the blanket delineate your friend’s body. You almost lunge at the doctor when he taps your friend’s knee. Easy there, Doc.
The doctor asks how long you’ve known each other.
Since we were five, your friend replies cheerily.
The doctor takes a step back like this is way too much for him to handle. What’s your secret? he asks you.
You say nothing. You can’t think of anything.
So, Doc, when am I going to get the boot from this swanky club?
You want the truth?
Your friend nods.
In five seconds. The doctor looks at his watch. Starting now. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. He snaps his fingers. What the hell? Still here? Well, I guess you can’t trust my estimates.
Your friend clears his throat and changes the subject. Hey, Doc, you know why I’m lucky to be dying? The doctor checks the EKG machine. Your friend’s bald head looks clay-like. Because very soon, your friend says adopting his most grandiose voice, I’ll know the meaning of life. Yes, that’s right, I said it. Now think about it. Whatever comes next directly affects how we would perceive this life. Don’t you see? Don’t you see? I know you’re jealous, your friend points at the doctor, and I know you’re jealous, your friend points at you. I just hope I remember this life.
You think of a film you recently saw, which begins with a lifelong pathological liar on his deathbed, at 95 years of age, telling his family that he loves them with all his heart and that he is sorry for all the lies he has foisted upon them over the years. When he dies, the family doesn’t know whether to believe him or not. Each individual grapples with this in a different way. Some of the things they do are tremendous. The pathological liar’s eldest son starts buying cheap cars and crashing them into trees. When the cops finally catch him in the act, he tells them there’s something so vile about these intransigent creatures, the trees that is.
Your friend met Thom Yorke the day before you arrived. Make a wish. The first day you were with your friend, he told you this and you felt envy, envy that was sore and loud. This was the most emotion you’ve felt the whole time.
This was more than just an encounter with Radiohead’s front man, otherwise you might not have felt as strongly about it. Yorke told your friend something secret. There is a music video for one of Radiohead’s songs where a man lies on the sidewalk, unmoving, almost catatonic. When someone approaches the supine man and asks why the man is just lying there, the man snaps at him and refuses to reveal his reasoning. Finally, at the end, overwhelmed by the group of people who have gathered around him, the man tells them why he lies there. Only, the viewer is unable to make out what he says. The band swore lifelong secrecy.
But now your friend knows.
When he told you this, you recalled the time when the video came out. Together you studied this video, you watched it in slow motion, hired lip readers, talked with linguistics professors, pestered the band with an unremitting enfilade of nagging inquiries. You were obsessed. This was your Kennedy assassination.
But now your friend knows.
Originally, you were supposed to visit your friend for a few days and explore Los Angeles during the rest of the time. But now, here you are, on the seventh day of your trip, sitting by your friend’s side for the seventh day straight, emotionless, hoping your friend will take pity on you and divulge this secret, hoping this secret will deliver catharsis, hoping this catharsis will let you know that you’re human after all.
You leave tomorrow. You really don’t leave tomorrow. You leave next week. But you tell your friend that you’re leaving tomorrow. The thought lingers, and then turns from purple to blue to white to nothing. It disappears as if it never existed.
You know that nurse, Marla, your friend whispers. He tries to adjust his crotch and while doing so, tries to hide his pain from the movement.
The one who gives you sponge baths? you ask, grinning. He reciprocates your grin.
Yeah, her. I think she likes me. I mean, I know my situation. I know I’m going to die soon and I’m sure she knows that I’m going to die soon. I don’t know. It’s just these little things, the way she applies pressure during the sponge baths now, as opposed to the pressure she applied when I first got here. The look she gives me when she’s doing all this drives me mad! At first, she avoided eye contact at all costs. Now, we hold conversations, while she’s doing it, we have friggin’ staring contests for God’s sake!
You both laugh heartily, and your friend doesn’t stop until you stop. You notice that his mouth looks misshapen, deracinated.
You hear the wheels of a gurney screeching down the hallway. In a flash, you see a pulpy, bloody body atop it and you hear sharp orders being delivered. A few drops of blood fall onto the floor. You step outside and observe the blood. It’s just blood. Three purplish reddish spots. They look so lonely, so abandoned. You feel like you’re watching someone starve to death. You wish upon them as if they were lucky stars and then wipe them away with your t-shirt.
During your freshman year of high school, your friend’s seven-year-old brother died. He simply went to sleep one night and the next morning he didn’t wake up. The doctors diagnosed it as a rare lung disorder. You remember the wake, how your friend’s mother and father sat on opposite sides of the room, how your friend, then healthy, had his chest pushed out, trying to provide a strong presence. He was the only one who gave a eulogy.
His parents separated for a year, but came back together after he was diagnosed with his illness. You’ve seen them once since you’ve been here, the first night you were here. At a local bar, his father, sensing you were uneasy about the imminent death of your friend, explained:
When our son died, a lot of people questioned our decision to separate. Especially, because we had another son. People, my family, my wife’s family found the decision to be selfish. As if subconsciously, we were trying to upstage our son’s death. To tell you the truth, few people talked to us and I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t a difficult period for both me and the missus. Nonetheless, we stayed along the path that we had laid out for ourselves. We mourned in our own way, alone, with few outside distractions. And you know what? I can’t imagine myself being here, as emotionally strong, in light of everything, as I am now, if it wasn’t for me deciding to mourn in my own way.
He told you, we’re all different creatures and to deny ourselves of these differences, to deny ourselves of what we really are, would be tragic, would be deadly.
You didn’t ask him what he was going to do when your friend, his only remaining son dies, though you waited around for awhile longer, drinking nothing but water, eating nothing but peanuts, hoping that he’d tell you anyway.
So what happens with the girl who faked her suicide? your friend asks you.
What about the rules? you reply.
Oh, to hell with the rules.
I don’t know.
What do you mean, you don’t know?
I don’t know.
Stop saying that. I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. Why are you doing this?
Don’t make me do it.
You’re being selfish. Don’t you see what condition I’m in?
We’d all like to know things, you say. I mean, I’d like to know what Thom Yorke said. You know how I feel about that and you haven’t said one goddamn word about it since the first day!
As soon as you say this, your friend’s face drops. A gelid pallor blooms on his expression, matching the rest of his body. He doesn’t say anything, his face looks wrinkled in sadness, no, in disappointment, and the color of his eyes redden, he slams his fists against the bed, like a child burning alive, but truth be told, you don’t regret saying this.
I’m not going to tell you, you say.
With his eyes pale red and bruised, he sends you out of the room. You get up and leave without looking back.
You sit in the stairwell, frightened. You fear any kind of reflective surface.
Your friend used to tell you stories. Stories with endings. He would tell you this one particularly peculiar and semi-poignant story about a man with a great imagination. As men with great imaginations tend to do, the man spent most of his days imagining a better a future, nothing too ridiculous, everything within the charcoal-lined demarcations of reality. But soon, as men with great imaginations who try to anticipate reality tend to do, he started over thinking everything and fell into a thick, tar-like sadness because nothing he imagined ever came true.
Imagine that, your friend would say, slapping his knee. He told you this story several times, usually when you were both high, usually when he was happy. You never told him anything like, I’ve already heard this story, or, why are you telling me this again. You just listened.
But soon the man with the great imagination realized that he could beat the system. If he imagined something different than what he truly wanted, there would be a greater chance of what he truly wanted coming true. So the man imagined the worst things and for awhile, a lot of good things happened to him. Not exactly what he truly desired, but good things nonetheless.
Happily ever after, you would say.
Not quite, your friend would say.
It turns out, the man descended into an encumbering sea of melancholy, as a poet may describe it, drowning. Imagining these terrible things weighed on him until he collapsed, mentally and emotionally. It turns out the imagination isn’t meant to be manipulated like that, it serves other purposes too. Unable to rid himself of contemplations of the imagination, he, one day, imagined that he would live forever.
At this point in the story, your friend would get up and stare at you intermittently, silently, wiggling his eyebrows cleverly. It wasn’t until you would cry out, what happened, what happened, sometimes thinking that maybe your friend had a different ending each time that your friend would tell you this:
The first few days after he imagined that he would live forever, he thought he could die at any moment. When this didn’t come, he forgot all about this. A year later, he woke up in the middle of the night and wondered why, for no apparent reason, he was so happy.
The nurse taps you on the shoulder. She tells you that your friend wants to speak with you. She doesn’t look you in the eyes.
When you enter the room, your friend somberly holds out his arms, not saying a word. You embrace. He tells you a dream he had where he was with a group of strangers in the desert, but the dream, for you, seems to stop there because all his words that follow are incoherent. The only thing you can discern from his maelstrom of words is: everyone around me is eating sand and enjoying it and I am dying of thirst. He laughs at this and you laugh at this and your laughter coalesces and creates a warm orange glow that suffuses the room. But then your friend begins to cry. You tell him you’re sorry, though in your head, you know that you don’t regret asking him to reveal what Thom Yorke told him. Your friend shakes his head. It’s not that. Rivulets of tears roll down his face. It’s not that. Today is the day Clifford Brown died, your friend cries. He was only 25. He could have been the greatest jazz trumpeter ever.
And you feel this. It’s small, deep down in you, and it rolls around your fleshy interior like a marble teetering on the edge of a table. It’s so visceral, so striking. You try to muster a tear but the marble rolls off the edge and disappears. You’re back where you started.
You don’t miss your friend. You hope it’s because he’s sitting right here.
Your friend had a girlfriend. She was a nice girl and what the masses would call, very beautiful. And smart too. Not bookish smart and not street smart, but philosophical smart. And under the auspices of her own personal philosophy, she declared that relationships were deleterious to love, that love needed to be on its own, capricious, free. She cheated on him. Those are your words. Your friend would tell you that they had an open relationship. It was better this way. Whenever they were together, they were both brilliantly in love, radiant, they glowed a clean purple, with serpentine hairs of wine-color red floating in and out. But when they were apart, your friend was a mess, though he would stick his chest out and repeat, sometimes like some goddamn robot, that it was better this way.
When your friend was diagnosed with his illness, his girlfriend left him.
You both sit in silence for an hour, close to each other, sniffing at each other’s breaths. The Latino nurse comes in. Visiting hours are over. You look out the window and see the purple dusk in full bloom.
You take a deep breath and hug your friend so hard and for so long that he has to push you away in pain. As you walk out the door, he says wait. Don’t you want to know want Thom Yorke told me?
You tell him no. As you leave the room, you look back a dozen times, hoping he’ll tell you anyway.
Your friend dies that evening. You draw a diagram of how you feel and carry it around with you. At the hotel bar, you meet a girl. She asks you what it all means, pointing to your diagram and you tell her it’s an explanation on how your feelings are harvested and what you do with them once they ripen. She keeps telling you this tragic and geometric, lost but so rigidly shaped. Like an art critic, she describes it as “Mondrian meets tragedy.”
You sleep with her. She doesn’t try to understand you. She says things like, I don’t fall in love until I fall in love. She kisses with her eyes open, studying you.
That night you dream that you’re standing in front of the gates of a dam. Other people accompany you. Some of these people are the people that you love, your family and friends, and some of these people are strangers, beautiful strangers. When the walls of the dam begin to rumble, you take a panoramic picture of everyone, and then you all hold each other and wait for the water to come. And it comes. Crashing and pounding and tumbling through the gates, the water comes down on you, your family, your friends, and the beautiful strangers. They say when you die, you don’t feel anything. But everything calms down, you look around. Everyone is gone. You are completely dry.
You wake up feeling wet and heavy with sweat. The girl is gone, but it’s okay.
After breakfast, you return to your room. You lie on the ledge by the window, curled up and tense. Don’t move until you want to move. Think about the small, reticent girl, who faked her suicide. Think about how you were going to finish it for your friend:
It turns out, her family and friends are disgusted with her. What an abject being! Amidst their baroque screams, reprobation rendered ornately, a message is discerned for her: you don’t understand how this made them feel. You think tragedy is a game, they say, a system to be solved, something pragmatic and rigid. When they cry, it’s as if they’re trying to hurt her with their tears. Feel it. If you knew what this felt like you wouldn’t do anything. Feel it.
If you knew what this felt like you wouldn’t do anything. She wouldn’t. Soon their crying deteriorates into a wet stutter. A sniffle. The coda, cold, empty and rhythmic.
Naturally nonplussed, the girl lingers. Too scared to leave, too scared to be left. The people wait. The speed of their silence strobes front and back, left and right at a spectral pace. What’s said next is not so important. It’s not even discernable. Or relevant. It’s what it sounds like that matters: Like the color blue trying to make itself into a sound.