Things You Should Know

PLEASE REMAIN CALM

I wish I were dead. I have tried to keep it a secret, but it leaks out: “I wish I were dead,” I blurted to the woman who is now my wife, the first morning we woke up together, the sheets still hot, stinking of sex.

“Should I take it personally?” she asked, covering herself.

“No,” I said and began to cry.

“It’s not so easy to die,” she says. And she should know, she’s a woman whose milieu is disaster — a specialist in emergency medicine. All day she is at work, putting the pieces back together and then she comes home to me. She tells me about the man run over by a train, how they carried in each of his legs in separate canvas bags. She tells me about the little boy doused in oil and deep-fried.

“Hi honey, I’m home,” she says.

I hold my breath.

“I know you’re here, your briefcase is in the front hall. Where are you?”

I wait to answer.

“Honey?”

I am sitting at the kitchen table.

“Today’s the day,” I tell her.

“What’s different today?” she asks.

“Nothing. Nothing is different about today — that’s the point. I feel the same today as I did yesterday and the day before. It’s insufferable. Today,” I repeat.

“Not today,” she says.

“Now’s the time,” I say.

“Not the time.”

“The moment has come.”

“The moment has passed.”

Every day I wish I didn’t have to live a minute more, I wish I were someplace else, someplace new, someplace that never existed before. Death is a place without history, it’s not like people have been there and then come back to tell you what a great time they had, that they highly recommend it, the food is wonderful and there’s an incredible hotel right on the water.

“You think death is like Bali,” my wife says.

We have been married for almost two years; she doesn’t believe me anymore. It is as if I’ve cried wolf, screamed wolf, been a wolf, too many times.

“Did you stop at the store?”

I nod. I am in charge of the perishables, the things that must be consumed immediately. Every day on my way home I shop. Before I was married I would buy only one of each thing, a bottle of beer, a can of soup, a single roll of toilet paper — that sounds fine on a Monday when you think there will be no Tuesday, but what about late on Friday night when the corner store is closed?

My wife buys in bulk, she is forever stocking up, she is prepared in perpetuity.

“Did you remember milk?”

“I bought a quart.”

“Not a half gallon?”

“You’re lucky it’s not a pint.”

We are vigilant people, equally determined. The ongoing potential for things to go wrong is our bond — a fascination with crisis, with control. She likes to prevent, to repair, and I to wallow, to roll obsessively in the possibilities like some perverted pig. Our closets are packed with emergency supplies: freeze-dried food, a back-up generator, his and hers cans of Mace.

She opens a beer and flips through a catalog for emergency management specialists. This is how she relaxes—“What about gas masks? What if something happens, what if there’s an event?”

I open a beer, take a breath. “I can’t stand it anymore.”

“You’re stronger than you think.”

I have spent nights laid low near the exhaust pipe of a car, have slept with a plastic bag over my head and silver duct tape around my neck. I have rifled through the kitchen drawers at three A.M. thinking I will have at myself with a carving knife. Once fresh from the shower, I divided myself in half, a clean incision from sternum to pubis. In the bathroom mirror, I watched what was leaking out of me, escaping me, with peculiar pleasure, not unlike the perverse pleasantry of taking a good shit. I arrived at the office dotted with the seeping red of my efforts. “Looks like you got a little on you,” my secretary said, donating her seltzer to blot the spot. “You’re always having these shaving accidents. Maybe you’re cutting it too close.”

All of the above is only a warm-up, a temporizing measure, a palliative remedy, I want something more, the big bang. If I had a gun I would use it, again and again, a million times a day I would shoot myself.

“What do you want to do about dinner?”

“Nothing. I never want to eat again.”

“Not even steak?” my wife asks. “I was thinking I’d make us a nice thick steak. Yesterday you said, ‘How come we never have steak anymore?’ I took one out of the deep freeze this morning.”

“Don’t try to talk me out of it.”

“Fine, but I’m having steak. Let me know if you change your mind.”

There is a coldness to her, a chill I find terrifying, an absence of emotion that puts a space between us, a permanent and unbridgeable gap — I am entirely emotion, she is entirely reason.

I will not change my mind. This isn’t something new, something that started late in life. I’ve been this way since I was a child. It is the most awful addiction — the opposite of being a vampire and living off the blood of others, “eripmav”—sucked backward through life, the life cycle run in reverse, beginning in death and ending in…

Short of blowing my brains out, there is no way I can demonstrate the intensity, the extremity of my feeling. Click. Boom. Splat. The pain is searing, excruciating; the roots of my brain are hot with it.

“You can’t imagine the pain I’m in.”

“Take some Tylenol.”

“Do you want me to make a salad?”

I have been married before, did I mention that? It ended badly — I ran into my ex-wife last week on the street and the color drained from both our faces; we’re still weak from memory. “Are you all right?” I asked.

“I’m better,” she said. “Much better. Alone.” She quickly walked away.

There is an enormous amount of tension in being with someone who is dying every day. It’s a perpetual hospice; the grief is too extreme. That’s my specialty, pushing the limits, constantly testing people. No one can pass — that is the point. In the end, they crack, they leave, and I blame them.

I’m chopping lettuce.

“Caesar,” my wife says, and I look up. She hands me a tin of anchovies. “Use the romaine.”

“How was work?” There is relief in other people’s tragedies.

“Interesting,” she says, pulling the meat out of the broiler. She slices open the steak, blood runs out.

“How does that look?”

“Perfect.” I smile, grating the Parmesan.

“A guy came in this afternoon, high on something. He’d tried to take his face off, literally — took a knife and peeled it.”

“How did you put him back together?”

“A thousand stitches and surgical glue. Another man lost his right hand. Fortunately, he’s a lefty.”

We sit at the kitchen table talking about severed limbs, thin threads of ligaments, the delicate weave of nerves — reattachment, the hope of regaining full function. Miracles.

“I love you,” she says, leaning over, kissing my forehead.

“How can you say that?”

“Because I do?”

“You don’t love me enough.”

“Nothing is enough,” she says. And it is true, excruciatingly true.

I want to tell her I am having an affair, I want to make her leave, I want to prove that she doesn’t love me enough. I want to have it over with.

“I’m having an affair,” I tell her.

“No, you’re not.”

“Yes, I am. I’m fucking Sally Baumgarten.”

She laughs. “And I’m giving blowjobs to Tom.”

“My friend Tom?”

“You bet.”

She could be, she very well could be. I pour Cascade into the dishwasher and push the button — Heavy Soil.

“I’m leaving,” I tell her.

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know.”

“When will you be back?”

“Never. I’m not coming back.”

“Then you’re not leaving,” she says.

“I hate you.”

I married her before I loved her. For our honeymoon, we went to California. She was thinking Disneyland, Carmel, Big Sur, a driving trip up the coast — fun. I was hoping for an earthquake, brush fire, mudslide — disaster.

In the hotel room in Los Angeles I panicked. A wall of glass, a broad expanse of windows looking out over the city — it was a surprisingly clear night. The lights in the hills twinkled, beckoned. Without warning, I ran toward the glass, hurling myself forward.

She took me down, tackling me. She sat on top, pinning me, her one hundred nineteen pounds on my one fifty-six — she’s stronger than you think.

“If you do that again I won’t forgive you.”

The intimacy, the unbearable intimacy is what’s most mortifying — when they know the habits of your bowels, your cheapnesses, your horribleness, when they know things about you that no one should know, things you don’t even know about yourself.

She knows these things and doesn’t say it’s too much, too weird, too fucked up. “It’s my training,” she says. “My shift doesn’t end just because something bad happens.”

It is about love. It is about getting enough, having enough, drowning in it, and now it is too late. I am permanently malnourished — there isn’t enough love in the world.

There is a danger in this, in writing this, in saying this. I am putting myself on the line. If I am found floating, face down, there will be theories, lingering questions. Did he mean it? Was it an accident — is there any such thing as an accident, is fate that forgiving? Was this letter a warning, a true story? Everything is suspect. (Unless otherwise instructed — if something happens, give me the benefit of the doubt.)

“What would it be like if you gave it up?” she asked.

I am incredulous.

“If you abandoned the idea? Aren’t you bored by it all after all these years; why not just give it up?”

“Wanting to be dead is as natural to me as breathing.”

What would I be without it? I don’t know that I could handle it. Like being sprung from a lifetime jail, like Jack Henry Abbot, I might wheel around and stab someone with a dinner knife.

And what if I truly gave it up, if I said, yes it is a beautiful day, yes I am incredibly lucky — one of the luckiest men in the world. What if I admitted it, you are my best friend, my favorite fuck, my cure. What if I say I love you and she says it’s over. What if that’s part of the game, the dance? I will have missed my moment, I will be shit out of luck — stuck here forever.

“Why do you put up with it?”

“Because this is not you,” she says. “It’s part of you, but it’s not you. Are you still going to kill yourself?”

“Yes,” I say. Yes I am, to prove I am independent, to prove I still can. “I hate you,” I tell her. “I hate you so much.”

“I know,” she says.

My wife is not without complications of her own. She keeps a baseball bat under her side of the bed. I discovered it by accident — one day it rolled out from under. Louisville Slugger. I rolled it back into place and have never let on that I know it’s there. Sometimes she wakes up in the middle of the night, sits straight up, and screams, “Who’s there? Who is in the waiting room?” She stops for a second and starts again, annoyed. “I don’t have all day. Next. Bring the next one in.” There are nights I watch her sleep, her face a naive dissolve, tension erased, her delicate blond lashes, her lips, soft like a child’s, and I want to punch her. I want to bash her face in. I wonder what she would do then.

“A thought is only a thought,” she says when I wake her.

And then she tells me her dreams. “I was a man and I was having sex with another man and you were there, you were wearing a white skirt, and then someone came in but he didn’t have any arms and I kept wondering how did he open the door?”

“Let’s go back to sleep for a little while.”

I am getting closer. The situation is untenable, something has to happen. I have lived this way for a long time, there is a cumulative effect, a worsening. I am embarrassed that I have let it go on for so long.

I know how I will do it. I will hang myself. Right here at home. I have known it since we bought the house. When the real estate agent went on and on about the location, the yard, the school district, I was thinking about the interior — the exposed rafters, the beams. The dead man’s walk to the top of the stairs.

We are cleaning up. I wipe the table with a sponge.

“What’s in the bag,” she says, pointing to something on the counter.

“Rope.” I stopped on the way home. I ran the errand.

“Let’s go to the movies,” she says, tying up the trash. She hands me the bag. “Take it outside,” she says, sending me into the night.

The yard is flooded with light, extra lights, like searchlights, lights so bright that when raccoons cross to get to the trash, they hold their paws up over their eyes, shielding them.

I feel her watching me from the kitchen window.

We go to see The Armageddon Complex, a disaster film with a tidal wave, a tornado, a fire, a global-warming theme. Among the special effects are that the temperature in the theater changes from 55 to 90 degrees during the film—You freeze, you cook, you wish you’d planned ahead.

The popcorn is oversalted. Before the tidal wave hits, I am panting with thirst. “Water,” I whisper, climbing over her into the aisle.

She pulls me back into my seat. “Don’t go.”

At key moments, she covers her eyes and waits until I squeeze her free hand to give her the all clear.

We are in the car on the way home. She is driving. The night is black. We move through the depths of darkness — the thin yellow line, the pathway home, unfolds before us. There is the hum of the engine, the steadiness of her foot on the gas.

“We have to talk,” I tell her.

“We talk constantly. We never stop talking.”

“There’s something I need to…” I say, not finishing the thought.

A deer crosses the road. My wife swerves. The car goes up a hill, trees fly by, the car goes down, we are rolling, we are hanging upside-down, suspended, and then boom, we are upright again, the air bag smashes me in the face, punches me in the nose. The steering wheel explodes into her chest. We are down in a ditch with balloons pressed into our faces, suffocating.

“Are you hurt?” she asks.

“I’m fine,” I say. “Are you all right?”

“Did we hit it?”

“No, I think it got away.”

The doors unlock.

“I’m sorry,” she says, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t see it coming.”

The air bags are slowly deflating — losing pressure.

“I want to live,” I tell her. “I just don’t know how.”