Leviathan (19 page)

“You told me you fell because you were too afraid to touch Maria’s leg. Now you change your story and tell me that you fell on
purpose. You can’t have it both ways. It’s got to be one or the other.”

“It’s both. The one thing led to the other, and they can’t be separated. I’m not saying I understand it, I’m just telling you how it was, what I know to be true. I was ready to do away with myself that night. I can still feel it in my gut, and it scares the hell out of me to walk around with that feeling.”

“There’s a part in everyone that wants to die,” I said, “a little caldron of self-destructiveness that’s always boiling under the surface. For some reason, the fires were stoked too high for you that night, and something crazy happened. But just because it happened once, it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen again.”

“Maybe so. But that doesn’t wash away the fact that it happened, and it happened for a reason. If I could be caught by surprise like that, it must mean there’s something fundamentally wrong with me. It must mean that I don’t believe in my life anymore.”

“If you didn’t believe in it, you wouldn’t have started talking again. You must have come to some kind of decision. You must have settled things for yourself by then.”

“Not really. You walked into the room with David, and he came up to my bed and smiled at me. I suddenly found myself saying hello to him. It was as simple as that. He looked so nice. All tanned and healthy from his weeks at camp, a perfect nine-year-old boy. When he walked up to my bed and smiled at me, it never occurred to me not to talk to him.”

“There were tears in your eyes. I thought that meant you had resolved something for yourself, that you were on your way back.”

“It meant that I knew I’d hit bottom. It meant that I understood I had to change my life.”

“Changing your life isn’t the same thing as wanting to end it.”

“I want to end the life I’ve been living up to now. I want everything to change. If I don’t manage to do that, I’m going to be
in deep trouble. My whole life has been a waste, a stupid little joke, a dismal string of petty failures. I’m going to be forty-one years old next week, and if I don’t take hold of things now, I’m going to drown. I’m going to sink like a stone to the bottom of the world.”

“You just need to get back to work. The minute you start writing again, you’ll begin to remember who you are.”

“The idea of writing disgusts me. It doesn’t mean a goddamned thing to me anymore.”

“This isn’t the first time you’ve talked like this.”

“Maybe not. But this time I mean it. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life rolling pieces of blank paper into a typewriter. I want to stand up from my desk and do something. The days of being a shadow are over. I’ve got to step into the real world now and do something.”

“Like what?”

“Who the hell knows?” Sachs said. His words hung in the air for several seconds, and then, without warning, his face broke into a smile. It was the first smile I had seen on him in weeks, and for that one transitory moment, he almost began to look like his old self again. “When I figure it out,” he said, “I’ll write you a letter.”

I left Sachs’s apartment thinking he would pull through the crisis. Not right away, perhaps, but over the long term I found it difficult to imagine that things wouldn’t return to normal for him. He had too much resiliency, I told myself, too much intelligence and stamina to let the accident crush him. It’s possible that I was underestimating the degree to which his confidence had been shaken, but I tend to think not. I saw how tormented he was, I saw the anguish of his doubts and self-recriminations, but in spite of the hateful things he said about himself that afternoon, he had also flashed
me a smile, and I read that fugitive burst of irony as a signal of hope, as proof that Sachs had it in him to make a full recovery.

Weeks passed, however, and then months, and the situation remained exactly what it had been. It’s true that he regained much of his social poise, and as time went on his suffering became less obvious (he no longer brooded in company, he no longer seemed quite so absent), but that was only because he talked less about himself. It wasn’t the same silence as the one in the hospital, but its effect was similar. He talked now, he opened his mouth and used words at the appropriate moments, but he never said anything about what really concerned him, never anything about the accident or its aftermath, and little by little I sensed that he had pushed his suffering underground, burying it in a place where no one could see it. If all else had been equal, this might not have troubled me so much. I could have learned to live with this quieter and more subdued Sachs, but the outward signs were too discouraging, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were symptoms of some larger distress. He turned down assignments from magazines, made no effort to renew his professional contacts, seemed to have lost all interest in ever sitting behind his typewriter again. He had told me as much after he came home from the hospital, but I hadn’t believed him. Now that he was keeping his word, I began to grow frightened. For as long as I had known him, Sachs’s life had revolved around his work, and to see him suddenly without that work made him seem like a man who had no life. He was adrift, floating in a sea of undifferentiated days, and as far as I could tell, it was all one to him whether he made it back to land or not.

Some time between Christmas and the start of the new year, Sachs shaved off his beard and cut his hair down to normal length. It was a drastic change, and it made him look like an altogether different person. He seemed to have shrunk somehow, to have grown
both younger and older at the same time, and a good month went by before I began to get used to it, before I stopped being startled every time he walked into a room. It’s not that I preferred him to look one way or the other, but I regretted the simple fact of change, of any change in and of itself. When I asked him why he had done it, his first response was a noncommittal shrug. Then, after a short pause, realizing that I expected a fuller answer than that, he muttered something about not wanting to take the trouble anymore. He was into low-maintenance, he said, the no-fuss approach to personal hygiene. Besides, he wanted to do his bit for capitalism. By shaving three or four times a week, he would be helping to keep the razor-blade companies in business, which meant that he would be contributing to the good of the American economy, to the health and prosperity of all.

This was pretty lame stuff, but after we talked about it that one time, the subject never came up again. Sachs clearly didn’t want to dwell on it, and I didn’t press him for further explanations. That doesn’t mean it was unimportant to him, however. A man is free to choose how he looks, but in Sachs’s case I felt it was a particularly violent and aggressive act, almost a form of self-mutilation. The left side of his face and scalp had been badly cut from his fall, and the doctors had stitched up several areas around his temple and lower jaw. With a beard and long hair, the scars from these wounds had been hidden from sight. Once the hair was gone, the scars had become visible, the dents and gashes stood out nakedly for everyone to see. Unless I’ve seriously misunderstood him, I think that’s why Sachs changed his appearance. He wanted to display his wounds, to announce to the world that these scars were what defined him now, to be able to look at himself in the mirror every morning and remember what had happened to him. The scars were an amulet against forgetting, a sign that none of it would ever be lost.

One day in mid-February, I went out to lunch with my editor in Manhattan. The restaurant was somewhere in the West Twenties, and after the meal was over I started walking up Eighth Avenue toward Thirty-fourth Street, where I planned to catch a subway back to Brooklyn. Five or six blocks from my destination, I happened to see Sachs on the other side of the street. I can’t say that I’m proud of what I did after that, but it seemed to make sense at the time. I was curious to know what he did on these rambles of his, desperate for some kind of information about how he occupied his days, and so instead of calling out to him I hung back and kept myself hidden. It was a cold afternoon, with a raw gray sky and a threat of snow in the air. For the next couple of hours, I followed Sachs around the streets, shadowing my friend through the canyons of New York. As I write about this now, it sounds a lot worse than it actually was, at least in terms of what I imagined I was doing. I had no intention of spying on him, no wish to penetrate any secrets. I was looking for something hopeful, some glimmer of optimism to assuage my worry. I said to myself: He’s going to surprise me; he’s going to do something or go somewhere that will prove he’s all right. But two hours went by, and nothing happened. Sachs wandered around the streets like a lost soul, roaming haphazardly between Times Square and Greenwich Village at the same slow and contemplative pace, never rushing, never seeming to care where he was. He gave coins to beggars. He stopped to light a fresh cigarette every ten or twelve blocks. He browsed in a bookstore for several minutes, at one point removing one of my books from the shelf and studying it with some attentiveness. He entered a porno shop and looked at magazines of naked women. He paused in front of an electronics-store window. Eventually, he bought a newspaper, walked into a coffeehouse on the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal Streets, and settled down at a table. That was where I left him, just as the waitress came over to
take his order. I found it all so bleak, so depressing, so tragic, that I couldn’t even bring myself to talk to Iris about it when I got home.

Knowing what I know now, I can see how little I really understood. I was drawing conclusions from what amounted to partial evidence, basing my response on a cluster of random, observable facts that told only a small piece of the story. If more information had been available to me, I might have had a different picture of what was going on, which might have made me a bit slower to despair. Among other things, I was completely in the dark about the special role Maria Turner had assumed for Ben. Ever since October, they had been seeing each other on a regular basis, spending every Thursday together from ten in the morning until five in the afternoon. I only learned about this two years after the fact. As they each told me (in separate conversations at least two months apart), there was never any sex involved. Given what I know about Maria’s habits, and given that Sachs’s story tallied with hers, I see no point in doubting what they told me.

As I look back on the situation today, it makes perfect sense that Sachs should have reached out to her. Maria was the embodiment of his catastrophe, the central figure in the drama that had precipitated his fall, and therefore no one could have been as important to him. I have already talked about his determination to hold on to the events of that night. What better method to accomplish this than by staying in touch with Maria? By turning her into a friend, he would be able to keep the symbol of his transformation constantly before his eyes. His wounds would remain open, and every time he saw her he could reenact the same sequence of torments and emotions that had come so close to killing him. He would be able to repeat the experience again and again, and with enough practice and hard work, perhaps he would learn to master it. That was how it must have begun. The challenge wasn’t to seduce Maria or to take her to bed, it was to
expose himself to temptation and see if he had the strength to resist it. Sachs was searching for a cure, for a way to win back his self-respect, and only the most drastic measures would suffice. In order to find out what he was worth, he had to risk everything all over again.

But there was more to it than that. It wasn’t just a symbolic exercise for him, it was a step forward into a real friendship. Sachs had been moved by Maria’s visits to the hospital, and even then, as early as the first weeks of his recovery, I think he understood how deeply the accident had affected her. That was the initial bond between them. They had both lived through something terrible, and neither one of them was inclined to dismiss it as a simple piece of bad luck. More importantly, Maria was aware of the part she had played in what happened. She knew that she had encouraged Sachs on the night of the party, and she was honest enough with herself to admit what she had done, to realize that it would have been morally wrong to look for excuses. In her own way, she was just as troubled by the event as Sachs was, and when he finally called in October to thank her for coming to the hospital so often, she saw it as a chance to make amends, to undo some of the damage she had caused. I’m not just guessing when I say this. Maria held nothing back from me when we talked last year, and the whole story comes straight from her mouth.

“The first time Ben came to my place,” she said, “he asked me a lot of questions about my work. He was probably just being polite. You know how it is: you’re feeling awkward, and you don’t know what to talk about, so you start asking questions. After a while, though, I could see that he was getting interested. I brought out some old projects for him to look at, and his comments struck me as very intelligent, a lot more perceptive than most of the things I hear. What he especially seemed to like was the combination of
documentary and play, the objectification of inner states. He understood that all my pieces were stories, and even if they were true stories, they were also invented. Or even if they were invented, they were also true. So we talked about that for a while, and then we got onto various other things, and by the time he left I was already beginning to cook up one of my weird ideas. The guy was so lost and miserable, I thought maybe it would be a good thing if we started working on a piece together. I didn’t have anything specific in mind at that point—just that the piece would be about him. He called again a few days later, and when I told him what I was thinking, he seemed to catch on right away. That surprised me a little. I didn’t have to argue my case or talk him into it. He just said yes, that sounds like a promising idea, and we went ahead and did it. From then on, we spent every Thursday together. For the next four or five months, we spent every Thursday working on the piece.”