Adam Haslett - Imagine Me Gone

We sat for a minute or two as he finished what he’d poured.

“Do you know?” he said. “I haven’t had sex in six years. Six years ago — and that was just twice, with Bethany. Before that it was two years. Twice in eight years. I started writing pornography. Back in Michigan. Just for myself. So at least there would be something besides the Internet.”

I didn’t need to know this, I didn’t want to know it. But I had said that I would listen, and so I did.

“It helped, actually,” he said. “Making it personal like that. It was surprisingly effective. Just the writing of it.”

“That makes sense. I guess.”

“The good thing about some of the drugs — they amputated my libido. Which made it easier. It was a blessing, it really was.”

“You said there was a song in your head, what song?”

“‘Temptation,’ New Order. Just one line on a loop: Up, down, turn around, please don’t let me hit the ground / Tonight I think I’ll walk alone, I’ll find my soul as I go home . Their lyrics were never great. But that melody played on the bass line…”

“It’s not going to keep going like this,” I said. “It can’t go on like this forever.”

“You keep saying that.”

“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.”

“You’re hearing music, Michael. It’s going to pass. I can put on other music. We should have been doing that, we should have been listening to more music together.”

“It’s not that,” he said. “I understand now why they deny people sleep to torture them. That’s what it is — torture.”

“You’ve had a drink. It’ll take the edge off. You should lie down and close your eyes. The exhaustion’s going to catch up with you.”

He seemed to be laboring for each breath, his lungs trying to stretch the skin tightened over his chest. Again using both hands to steady the bottle, he filled the glass three-quarters full.

“That’s not a good idea,” I said.

He gazed at the plastic juice glass with its checkered print. “I shouldn’t have gone back to England,” he said. “I should never have left you all there in that house. Not that I could have stopped him. But I could have warned you. I could have been there.”

“You wanted to be with your friends,” I said. “You were in the middle of school. We got it, Celia and me, we understood.”

“I couldn’t stand being there. I had to leave. But that’s the thing, that’s the thing — I still dread it. It’s already happened, but I still dread that it’s about to happen — soon, right now…I haven’t been a good brother,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He reached across the table and took hold of my upper arm, squeezing it tight, as he used to when I was little.

“Yes you have,” I said.

I had never seen Michael cry. Not even when we were children. The muscles of his face unlocked. His whole jaw seemed to loosen, his mouth came open, his lips shook. In his glistening eyes there was a brightness. He looked new again. New and terribly sad. And I cried with him.

“I didn’t know what to say when I came back that summer,” he said. “You were all so upset. But I didn’t feel anything. Nothing. I was blank. I kept trying, I knew I was supposed to feel something, and to help you, but I couldn’t. And it was so hot. You remember? It was stifling. For weeks. And I just stayed in my room playing records because I didn’t know what else to do.”

“You were wearing wool,” I said, and laughed. “You had on those gray wool pants and a blazer when you came in. You looked so different. Like a grown-up.”

“I despise that house in summer.”

“Celia and I — we were there together when Dad was sick. We saw everything, and I guess we — her, mostly — we made up some way of talking about it. But you were gone. I thought you’d been talking with Dad on the phone, that somehow you knew him better. I didn’t know what to say, either. It wasn’t your fault.”

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.

It occurred to me that I could kiss him. I could take him in my arms. He hadn’t been touched like that in so long. I could help him. Not with the love he wanted, but with the love that was here. What harm could there be in that?

I handed him a paper napkin and he blew his nose. He took another sip of his drink. I just smiled. It didn’t matter now that he’d begun to cry. He was finally opening, and letting go.

“Do you remember being up here in the summer?” I said. “Playing on the rocks, out on the island?”

“I think I read Death in Venice, ” he said. “Which Mom approved of for some reason. The poet of all those who labor on the brink of exhaustion .”

“Those phrases of yours — the ones you read aloud — that’s why I started writing. I probably never told you that. It was because of you reading me those lines.”

He sat up in his chair, confused by what I’d said, straining to understand it.

“You were so excited by the sentences, they were so satisfying to you. It was like listening to someone preach, the way you read them. I didn’t know what most of them meant, I just heard your rhythm. And I wanted to be part of it.”

“Really?”

“I tried to sound like that, whatever it was. To write something you might want to read aloud like that. It’s not what I do anymore, obviously. But yeah, at the beginning.”

“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.”

He emptied his glass a second time and placed it on the table.

“It’s like water,” he said. “I don’t feel a thing.”

“I never wanted to say this to you, it seemed too harsh,” I said. “But whenever you started talking about all that reparations stuff, I kept thinking, The only reparations getting paid are from Mom to you. Like you were demanding she give you another childhood. For her to take care of you that much. Because you were angry about the way things went for you. And it just didn’t seem fair. To her. And it still doesn’t.”

The freshness of his sadness had begun to recede, his expression becoming more distant. I couldn’t tell if he was considering my words, or if he simply hadn’t taken them in.

“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.”