Don Lee - The Collective

Why couldn’t Joshua have waited and killed himself in the privacy of his cottage, instead of imperiling innocent bystanders? Although I learned later that the driver had not been so innocent. His blood alcohol level had been.092, above the legal limit. Skid marks showed he was weaving on Waterborne on the preceding straightaway, and he was driving an estimated fifty-one miles per hour in a thirty-five zone. Just hours before, he had ordered three glasses of Malbec with his pork Milanese at a Concord restaurant, and perhaps had drunk more after he’d left with his lover — a sales associate — and gone to a motel with her.

No matter. Instead of flattering obituaries and tributes for Joshua, there were articles tinged with rebuke. Instead of being celebrated as an Asian American novelist of minor yet significant renown, Joshua Yoon was being remembered as a murderer.

There’s an established protocol to this, writers committing suicide. It has to be done with some dignity, honor, perhaps even panache, in order to establish the proper legacy. Gas would have been acceptable. Plath used gas, as did John Kennedy Toole. Hemingway and Brautigan shot themselves. Hart Crane jumped off a ship, Primo Levi down a stairwell. Woolf drowned. Mishima chose the most gruesome method, seppuku, Malcolm Lowry the most commonplace, pills, which — combined with his chronic alcohol abuse — had led, the coroner concluded, to his “death by misadventure.”

Yet suicide is an act of solipsism, or narcissism — I’ve never seen much of a distinction. The suicidal are incapable of thinking about whom they might affect, whom they might harm. They have vacated all rational considerations. They’re only thinking of themselves, and the exigency of the situation, which is to make it all stop.

Why had Joshua wanted to die? In the days afterward, everyone (except my wife, who knew better) kept asking me that question. My answer, only half in jest, was usually: He was a writer.

Yes, he was depressed — obviously. But this was not something new or atypical for him. Aristotle called it melancholia, the predisposition artists have for depression, prone as they are to being morose and antisocial and self-flagellating and megalomaniacal. Indeed, without that inclination, no one would probably become an artist in the first place.

Still, everyone wanted a reason , something concrete and understandable, like a degenerative disease or excruciating heartbreak, and I suppose I hoped for one, too. But no, Joshua wasn’t sick, and he wasn’t in love. He didn’t have a psychotic breakdown, he wasn’t bipolar and hearing birds speaking in Greek, nor was he facing sudden destitution. He had had money at one time, but frittered away almost all of it. Nonetheless, he was getting by. Although he rarely received any royalties for the three books he’d published, he had a part-time position as a writer-in-residence at Wheaton College that provided him with a modest income and health benefits. He wasn’t a gambler or a sex addict or a (nonprescription) drug user, he wasn’t a pervert, he wasn’t having an affair with a student, he wasn’t being extorted by pimps or dealers or loan sharks (unless you want to count credit card companies). No one was threatening or blackmailing him, there were no scandals in the offing, he wasn’t about to be disgraced or lose his job or reputation.

So he had no reason to do it, and yet he had every reason. He had never married, never had children, never even lived with anyone. He had chosen to steer clear of any distractions or obligations that might interfere with his writing. He was willing, nay, eager , he said, to make whatever forfeitures were necessary in the pursuit of his art. This was what you had to do if you wanted to be a real writer, he said, if you wanted to strive for greatness, for perfection. You had to be dedicated. You had to sacrifice.

That was why he had moved out to Sudbury nine months before, to that dank, isolated little cottage in which he had lived as an ascetic. The place came with a few basic furnishings, and Joshua kept it spartan, bringing only his files, laptop and printer, clothes, flat-screen TV, and extensive book collection. I visited him there once. Wood paneling and appliances circa 1950s roadside motel, thumbtacked sheets in lieu of curtains. Instead of getting shelves, Joshua had stacked his books against the walls, and then screwed hooks into the floors and wood panels and connected them with a series of bungee cords to keep the stacks from toppling. In the kitchen, he had boxes and boxes of Sapporo Ichiban ramen, purchased from the Japanese market in the Porter Square Exchange. It was, essentially, what he had been eating every meal for weeks. He was like that, obsessive with his habits, eating the same thing or listening to the same album over and over, until he finally got sick of it and switched to something else. He made the ramen with — I’m sorry to report — packaged bologna that he sliced into thin strips, cabbage, and the yolk of an egg.

He would get up early, make coffee, write, eat ramen, write, go for a run, shower, write, drink a beer, eat ramen, write, watch TV (the Red Sox) or a DVD (mindless action thrillers, his taste in movies surprisingly lowbrow), then get into bed with a book. He did this pretty much every day, save for occasional treks out for fast food or take-out meals, and visits to his psychiatrist. His schedule had varied only twice a week during the spring semester when he had had to drive to Wheaton to teach a fiction-writing workshop. He didn’t go into town, didn’t go away for vacations or holidays — only trips to New York for research. His parents were dead, and he had no relatives to speak of. He didn’t have a girlfriend, and he no longer saw any of us, his old friends, albeit our little group had by then fragmented and dispersed of its own accord. That was the extent of it, his life. To me, it was a rather lonely and — I don’t want to say this, but I will — pathetic existence.

In point of fact, Joshua didn’t seem particularly happy about it, either. After he’d gotten a fair amount of attention for his first novel, each successive book had met a poorer reception, and he felt he had become irrelevant as an author. It bothered him that he wasn’t famous, that his books weren’t selling more, that he wasn’t winning the big prizes and grants, that he wasn’t better reviewed, that he wasn’t more influential, that he wasn’t among the anointed . He was, in other words, a typical writer. However, he had talked excitedly about his current project, saying the new novel might be his magnum opus, his breakout book. Supposedly it was about residents of Koreatown and Chinatown in Manhattan after 9/11, and supposedly he was almost finished with it. I don’t know if this was true or not. No one had ever seen a single word of it.

How well do we really know anyone? We only know what people are willing to reveal. It’s not that people change. People don’t change. They merely hide things from you, and lie. Was Joshua lying about his new novel? Had he been working diligently on it in that cottage in Sudbury, amassing pages, as he claimed, or had he been blocked, unable to produce anything, and prevaricating? It could be that he was writing some, but fitfully, and he knew it wasn’t working, the language flat and uninspiring, the story line increasingly ludicrous. Perhaps he sat at his desk all day, unable to squeak out more than a few sentences after hours of effort, and could no longer envision what should come next. Perhaps what he feared most was happening — his imagination had abandoned him, the well had gone dry.

We will never know. This is what shocked me the most. It might have been foolish of me, but I had expected Joshua to appoint me as his literary executor. I thought he might have left instructions asking me to edit or finish his last novel, or, at the very least, cull through his papers and archives to donate to a library, so they might later be examined by biographers and academics. I knew he had kept everything — his journals, each manuscript draft and outline, the index cards and notebooks in which he sketched out ideas, research materials and maps, calendars, annotations in the books he read, his correspondence with editors and his agent and other writers, grant applications, sample book covers, even all the rejection slips he had received from magazines for story submissions.