Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

Aleksandr waved at the crowd. The crowd cheered itself hoarse.

And then I waved back without meaning to. What I mean is, I didn’t know I was going to wave before it happened. My arm went without my permission.

It was not dramatic. It felt the way it feels when your eyelid twitches uncontrollably, except with more heft. It took energy, after all, to heave the bone and muscle and meat of an adult human arm; it took aggression to harness the normal mechanics — the tremendous, delicate, intricate art of movement — and appropriate them for some other, darker purpose. And for a moment there was a smile on my face, for a moment I was amused by its strangeness. And then a spine of ice grew up into my heart, and lay down roots, and I was afraid.

Because there it was. That was it.

But as soon as I was sure, I wasn’t. I’d looked for this so hard, for so many years, that it was possible I was hallucinating it. Around me, the scene — the shouters, the marchers, the discreet domestic intelligence officers, Aleksandr — bled into a smear. The roar dulled into ambient noise, like the sound of the blood in your head or the unnoticed electric vibrato of the universe. I watched my hand. I stared at it. I dared it to move. It was still.

Maybe not, I thought. Maybe, really, not.

I dropped the posters I was holding. I threw my hat off, idiotically. I ran through the streets, and the Neva spun below me, and I dodged old women who swore at me — and suddenly, my short, unimpressive life came back to me in snatches of motion, as though I’d spent the whole time running: there I was running across the Charles River on nights after my diagnosis; then running through the snow with my silly friends in high school; then running after my father through the rust-colored leaves of some unremembered fall. I flew across the city, and I felt that if I was moving this quickly, this competently, then I must have been wrong about the tremor. I sprinted, and I swore, and I felt that if I’d been right — if I had in fact seen and felt it — then I had undoubtedly managed to leave it behind, back in the square, in a seething mass of people who would certainly trample it to death.

I banged into the hostel, and I ran up to my room, and I lay down on my bed. The sloppy thudding of my heart in my chest was some sort of reassurance. I stared at the ceiling, and I stared at the wall, and I stared at the seven geometric stain-continents that lived on my floor. I thought about Africa — the real Africa, not the one on my floor — and I thought of how I’d have liked to go there to see the pyramids, to see the Sphinx, to see the things that do not belong to me but that I’ve always (secretly, impiously) thought belong to everyone. I thought frantically that maybe I would still go one day; maybe my life would continue in its current vein (nomadic, improbable, interesting) until the day when I sat down to write my memoirs. The fact that I’d been sentenced to death long ago would be dismissed with a laugh as another unlikely youthful event. Maybe, maybe. My heart was starting to slow down, the blood making ever calmer eddies in my head.

Then it happened again. My hand gave a twitch — small, modest, but completely involuntary. I watched in revulsion as it moved against my will; watching it was like watching the posthumous twitching of a headless chicken. It was my hand, and yet it was clearly not: it had disowned me, it seemed, it had mutinied against me. It had come to kill me in the tower.

I threw my fist against the wall and let the pulp of my hand compress against the pain of my hand, which folded into the pain everywhere else.

Out the window, a little boy was spinning a pinwheel, and I remembered the scene from the T window on the day of my diagnosis: how there was a dullness to the colors, a new tedium to the scene, but at the same time a new singularity — it was as though a gray film had been lacquered over a painting that you were told was the most beautiful in the world, and it really was a pity you couldn’t see it properly.

For years — for years — I’d thought seriously about what would be the way to go, when I’d go. My current option, I’d always known, was no option. Not at home, where my incremental passing would have been chronicled and mourned — not least of all by me. Not here, anonymous and alone, in a country that would relegate me to a state-run, piss-soaked institution, to babble and die alone in my own head.

So I’d thought about it. I’d thought about the clean certainty of gunshot; I’d shuddered at the notion of the choked, panicked minutes of a hanging. There was drowning, but drowning is no option if you know what drowned bodies wind up looking like. I’d been drawn to the half-assed feminine forms — pills or some such. That was the kind of suicide attempt that leaves you time for an Abraham-and-Isaac type of intervention, in case the gods could be persuaded that they had punished you enough, that your suffering was sufficient, that you believed. But then there was this: as soon as the decision seemed imminent, I tried to figure out how it was not. Immediately, I began a terrible barter. My whole life had been hinging on the pretext that the decision was already made: as soon as I saw anything — anything — that was it. I would have to act. Although there would be a grace period of good cognition between the initial symptom and the commencement of mental unraveling — and the grace period wasn’t negligible, either: my father’s mind was functional, more or less, for several years after his first symptoms appeared — I would never be able to count on it. There was too much chance for my will to be corroded by weakness of mind, too much likelihood that I would cower behind my oncoming oblivion and turn away from the only obvious escape.

I understood this progression in an academic sense. I’d studied the science and read the articles; I’d internalized the grammar and the vocabulary of the illness. And I’d known it, too, in a nonacademic way. I’d seen my father’s arms whir like windmills, I’d seen the terror and the fury in his eyes, I’d seen the way he choked on water and words.

But there are things you know objectively to be true and things you feel subjectively to be true; the things you understand somewhere in your head and the things you understand viscerally, intuitively, behind your heart. You can know that space might be unending, and you can understand that time is contingent, and you can write out the size of an atom in scientific notation. But when you try to access any kind of experience of this, you fail. You have reached the limit of your own comprehension, and you sit uncomfortably with the reality that there are truths that lie quite beyond your ability to fully believe them to be such.

There were some days in bed then. I don’t know how I spent them.

I do know how I spent them. In the window: a wedge of white, enfeebled light. On the floor: shadows, stalking their way across the room from morning until night. I came to think of the shadows and the light as caught in a kind of battle, a game of strategy. But the shadows always won, and it became tiresome to watch.

I think the manager started bringing me bread and tea after the first few days. And once I think Viktor was in the lobby — probably at Aleksandr’s bidding — inquiring after my health.

It wasn’t a physical fever, but it was like that: my head floating several feet above my body, my absorbed fascination with the cracks in the ceiling and the aging patches of dirt on the floor. There was the way that dreams impinged on reality, until I stopped keeping track of what was what.

And every once in a while — not often but with increasing regularity — a spasm in my arm, in my leg. My fingers fluttering against the sheets. My legs kicking, kicking, savagely, at nothing.