Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

There was a pause the length and temperature of the Cold War.

“Yes,” she said at last in English. “What do you want?” She sounded like she thought I was selling something, which was a reasonable conclusion. I’ve found that most people are selling something, even if they don’t always know what.

“This may sound odd,” I said. “But my father was a correspondent of Aleksandr Bezetov. Do you remember him?” I tried to keep my voice gentle and supplicating, a posture I’m not particularly good at adopting. I waited. There was another glacial silence, and I worried that I’d offended her. She was probably old, probably forgetful, and who knew what her relationship to Bezetov had been, and here I was asking her to grope for Gorbachev-era memories. I started to imagine kind ways to disentangle myself from the conversation — confusion about inverted numbers, swapped identities. But through the haze of my discomfort, which was expanding rapidly, filling up the silence, came her voice again, stronger this time, more certain.

“Aleksandr Bezetov,” she said, and I could hear her thawing out. Her voice had changed to clinking glass; behind it, I could hear the glinting echoes of laughter. “Yes. I believe I remember a thing or two about him. That dumb kid.”

I’d never thought of the esteemed Aleksandr Bezetov as a kid, and I tried to think of the kind of woman who would. She’d have to be old, for one thing — older than I was ever going to be, anyway.

“You worked for him?” I said.

“Not exactly.”

“But you knew him?”

Another pause. This one was fuller somehow — rife with silent memories that seemed to register in the crackles of the telephone wire.

“Yes.”

I hung up the phone.

When you get ready to die, you look back over a lifetime and try to unravel its enduring questions. You retroactively assign meaning to chaos, you make coincidence into portent. You scan your past for moments that might have been road signs, and then you try to see which way they were pointing. It’s an unrelenting striving for tenuous links, a dazed hunting for patterns that may or may not exist. You are a child looking for a lost thing in the sand, racing against the tide and the approaching darkness, trying desperately to remember where you might have buried it.

When I scanned my life, I found an alarming lack of loose ends. Bezetov, in a way, felt like a loose end.

So I thought about Russia: cold and vast, criminal and corrupt and possessed of an impossible language, hostile to foreigners and women traveling alone. Then I thought about trying to sort through what few mysteries remained to me.

I double-checked my savings account: large from a lifetime of modest pay but too responsible living. I double-checked my age: one year, four months until average age of onset. I double-checked Elizabeta Nazarovna’s name and address.

It was logistically easy — almost too easy. I wasn’t trying to disappear. I was just trying to wrap up. But the accumulated attachments and obligations of an entire abbreviated lifetime took, in the end, under a week to resolve. I found myself wishing to leave behind a somewhat messier life. I half hoped that something would come up — an unknown bastard child, or a court case, or a professional emergency — that would require my attention, that would grab at me with insistent hands and pull me back to Boston and my life. But nothing did. I’d lived a life of relative simplicity and organization. I’d lived a life with an eye to leaving it. And here I was, leaving it, just as tidily as a traveler who doesn’t bother to unpack at the hotel room because she knows the time there is limited.

I withdrew my stocks and my savings. I submitted my final grades for my final cast of students, and then I submitted my resignation. I left three months’ rent for my landlord. I spent some time on the Internet. I spent some time counting the number of whims indulged in a lifetime (none, discernibly, in my case). And then I spent some time saying goodbye — which, like everything, is easier if you’ve got a head start.

I told everybody — mother, doctor, college friends, co-workers — that I was going on a trip. It was going to be meandering, I said, and spontaneous and luxurious and self-indulgent and, most important, very long. I said that I wanted to see the world while I still could; I said that I wanted to have an adventure on my own while I could still do anything on my own. My co-workers were supportive. My mother, I am sure, was relieved. People who’d never spoken of my diagnosis, people who’d never asked about my father, were thrilled to have a concrete and explicable and ultimately positive way to obliquely reference it. They talked about what an important decision it was. They talked about what a self-actualizing trip it would be. If they secretly thought I’d chosen an odd locale for my final vacation, they had the courtesy not to mention it.

I gave Jonathan the same line, more or less, though he understood me well enough to know that it probably was not true, that I was probably never coming back. He was disbelieving, of course, grief-stricken, angry, all that. He thought I was bluffing; he thought I was losing it. He wanted me to go to counseling.

I wasn’t bluffing, although I probably wasn’t at the most mentally stable moment of my entire life. But I wanted to say — and finally did during one of those last awful nights that I will spend the rest of my life trying not to remember — look: I am not the one who’s delusional. I am not the one with a distorted vision of reality.

Ultimately, what could he do? I am an adult woman and a United States citizen; financially independent; capable of affording an expedited visa. He couldn’t stop me, the way nobody can really stop anyone from leaving them, in the end.

A few days before I left, I went to play my last game with Lars. It was May, and the air was silky. It didn’t feel like a day to play chess, but I wanted someone to talk to. This, however, was not to be. Lars raised his eyebrows at me and said nothing. “Hello, old man,” I said when I sat down. “How’ve you been?” He shrugged and gestured beatifically to the chessboard.

“What?” I squinted. “Is something wrong with you?” Lars looked the same as usual — dishwater-gray hair, a sunburned nose, the personal presentation of a person who sleeps habitually under bridges — but his eyes shone with higher than usual spirits. He handed me a card.

In response to my recent detention by the FASCIST CAMBRIDGE POLICE, for disturbing the peace by singing, I have taken a vow of silence. Please support me in my endeavors to combat the FASCIST PIGS’ attempts to abolish LIFE, ART, and FREEDOM in our hometown.

“You got arrested? For singing?” Lars’s eyes flickered, and he pointed to the word “detention” in the note. “Detained? For singing ?”

He nodded solemnly.

“Okay,” I said. “I guess that’s about right.”

Then we sat quietly and began to play our usual game. My heart wasn’t in it, so he went easy on me, I realize — I came closer to beating him that day than I probably ever had. But I did not win. And now, I suppose, I never will.

“You are almost no fun at all without language,” I said halfway through the game. Lars stuck out his tongue, I guess to convey that he was at least a little bit fun without language.

“It’s too bad that you don’t want to talk,” I said. “Because I have news.”

He turned his face to the side and narrowed his eyes. Lars loves to gossip, and I knew it would bother him to have to abstain from gossiping, even in the service of his noble political objectives. He grabbed a pen and flipped his petition over. What? he wrote.