When we landed, the ticket man came running over with a bucket I thought was for Henry, but instead he flipped the safety bar back, pulled us out, and dumped a bucketful of sudsy water into the belly of our ship. “You fool,” he yelled at Henry, who was unsteady on his feet, searching his pockets for more ride tickets, wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his sweatshirt. “Go back where you belong. Go home.”
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.