The Collective (2 page)

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.

But the attorney in Cambridge told me that there were no provisions for a literary executor. Joshua’s will mandated that all of his personal possessions should be donated to Goodwill, his book collection to the Cambridge Public Library. His car, a two-year-old Subaru, was to be auctioned, and the payout from his term life insurance and the proceeds from what was left in his portfolio (which wasn’t much, after debts and taxes, and after the driver’s widow filed a wrongful-death suit, which was eventually dismissed due to “contributory negligence” yet racked up court and attorney fees) were to be given to the Asian American Adoptees Fund. He was to be cremated, and the urn buried next to his parents’ plots in Mount Auburn Cemetery. He wanted a plain bronze gravestone, with just his name and the years of his birth and death on it. He forbade any type of funeral or memorial service.

But what about his journals and papers? I wanted to know. What about his last novel? His files and notebooks? His photo albums? Nothing was located inside his cottage, nothing in his office at Wheaton, nothing in his storage space in Somerville. Adding to the mystery was that no note was found. Even though it might have been disappointingly prosaic, as most suicide notes are, a variant of “I’m sorry,” I couldn’t believe that Joshua would not have taken the opportunity to memorialize his last thoughts for posterity. This was a man, after all, who had aspired to join the canon, the pantheon, of American writers, who believed that his every doodle should be preserved for the historical record. Perhaps he had intended to write a note before using the helium, which made what happened on Waterborne Road even more puzzling.

For a brief time, I held on to the insane notion that Joshua had been driven to suicide because someone had been keeping the materials hostage from him, or that everything, including a note, had been stolen from his cottage immediately after the accident, which might not have been an accident at all, but staged to look like one, in a cover-up. Joshua had always been a scrupulous researcher. He once did not eat for four days while writing about a character on a hunger strike. In researching his latest novel, had he uncovered something he shouldn’t have, something dangerous? Perhaps in the netherworld of organized crime in Koreatown or Chinatown? The smuggling of illegal immigrants, sweatshops, money laundering, drugs, the trafficking of sex slaves. Had someone wanted to shut him up, get rid of whatever evidence he had gathered?

I called the detective in charge of the investigation. I was going to suggest looking into Joshua’s cell phone records, his text messages, his bank and credit card statements, his emails and documents on his laptop, his datebook, to find out what he had been doing in the last year, whom he had been talking to and meeting, where he’d traveled. The detective told me there was no need, there was no mystery. Joshua himself had destroyed everything. He had burned all his manuscripts and journals and files in two fifty-five-gallon drums behind his cottage. A neighbor, worried about the smoke, had watched him doing it over the course of several days, using barbecue lighter fluid, a wheelbarrow, and a shovel to turn over the layers and remove ashes. Joshua had also wiped everything off his laptop, all the email messages in his account, all the bookmarks and Internet history prior to the previous week, all the documents, folders, and programs on the computer except for a utility that he had purchased and downloaded to ensure the foolproof, irrevocable deletion of his hard drive.

I was staggered. I refused to believe it. I clung to conspiratorial scenarios. It seemed impossible that Joshua would have voluntarily elected the complete erasure of his life. What must he have been going through? He had made vague references to suicide over the years, comments like, “I don’t know why I keep doing this, I might as well just check out,” but we never took him seriously. He had a histrionic bent. He exaggerated and embellished, he would often call in the middle of the night with a crisis that would turn out to be wholly trivial. He could be a total pain in the ass.

His psychiatrist would not offer any clues when I contacted him, saying doctor-patient privilege extended into death. Exasperated, I told him that he, if anyone, should have been able to see through Joshua’s bluster and melodrama, he should have sensed Joshua was suicidal and pink-papered him into a psych ward. In response, the psychiatrist somberly explicated Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief to me: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. These stages are not necessarily progressive or discrete, he intoned. They’ll occur out of sequence and merge and mingle. He encouraged me to seek out therapy for myself while going through this difficult process.

So I am only left to wonder, and imagine. I imagine Joshua was drinking too much, not eating properly, not sleeping well. I imagine he was waylaid further by a cold and started taking cough medicine and doubling up on his pills. I imagine his work had stalled into impasse, and he anguished in self-doubt and loathing, so he began sleeping in later and later, past noon, time no longer being precious nor perishable, not wanting to face the bright insolvency of his talent, the paltry rations of what had become his life and career, the terrible miscalculations he had made about what would fulfill him, since everything he had done, everything he had worked toward, seemed pointless to him now, utterly meaningless. I imagine he mourned, and he raged, and he despaired that it would never stop, it would never get better, he would never be content, he would always be alone.

What I can’t imagine are his last few seconds. As the car was about to hit him, did he welcome it? Was he relieved, happy, even, or was he terrified, recognizing too late that he had made a horrible mistake? Did he realize at that moment that he did not want to die? Perversely, a part of me wants to believe that. The alternative is too sorrowful to consider.

The fact is, he did not think to call upon us, his friends, least of all me, for help, no doubt convinced we had forsaken him. Maybe his suicide note, had he completed one, would have been in some measure a reprimand, decrying our neglect and implying it had been contributory. But I wonder, if he had reached out to us, if our little group had remained intact, would we have been able to save him, do anything to allay his unceasing, unalterable disconsolation? I don’t know.

We had loved Joshua, but we’d gradually grown tired of him, and of one another. The fact is, if pressed, we would each have to confess that we all saw it coming, and we did nothing to prevent it.

There were occasional emails or, more rarely, phone calls, but we had been drifting apart for quite a while, and actually I hadn’t seen them—any of them, including Joshua—for almost a year. There wasn’t a particular reason for the lapse, a blowout or feud or any intentionality of severance. It was, I reasoned, just the natural way that groups evolve and dissipate.

An intimacy develops among a circle of people, you do everything together, you can’t imagine this tight cadre ever breaking apart, and then, quite mundanely, one friend slips away, and then another. It might be because they’re moving across town or to another part of the country. It might be because they’ve started a new relationship, or are getting married or having a kid or changing jobs. It might be because everyone’s getting older and more preoccupied, busy. And, of course, it might simply be that everyone’s become a little bored with one another, doing the same things over and over, hearing and telling the same stories.

Despite your best efforts and intentions, there’s a limited reservoir to fellowship before you begin to rely solely on the vapors of nostalgia. Eventually, you move on, latch on to another group of friends. Once in a while, though, you remember something, a remark or a gesture, and it takes you back. You think how close all of you were, the laughs and commiserations, the fondness and affection and support. You recall the parties, the trips, the dinners and late, late nights. Even the arguments and small betrayals have a revisionist charm in retrospect. You’re astonished and enlivened by the memories. You wonder why and how it ever stopped. You have the urge to pick up the phone, fire off an email, suggesting reunion, resumption, and you start to act, but then don’t, because it would be awkward talking after such a long lag, and, really, what would be the point? Your lives are different now. Whatever was there before is gone. And it saddens you, it makes you feel old and vanquished—not only over this group that disbanded, but also over all the others before and after it, the friends you had in grade and high school, in college, in your twenties and thirties, your kinship to them (never mind to all your old lovers) ephemeral and, quite possibly, illusory to begin with.

So it was with us, although we had a longer and better run than most. It began with Joshua, Jessica Tsai, and me as freshmen at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1988.

Joshua was from Cambridge, a 1.5—born in South Korea but raised in Massachusetts, not first generation or second, but somewhere in between—and his last name at the time had been Meer, not Yoon. His parents were Jewish professors of history and sociology at Harvard, and they had adopted Joshua late in life, when they were both well into their fifties.

Jessica was second-generation Taiwanese American, her father an optometrist in Saratoga Springs, New York.

I was third-generation Korean American from Mission Viejo, California, the son of an engineer for an aeronautics firm that built navigational equipment for Lockheed, and although I hadn’t gotten accepted into Princeton, as I’d dreamed, I was ecstatic merely to have escaped the banality of Orange County, where I had lived all my life.

Freshmen at Macalester were required to take a first-year course, which often had a residential component, all the students in the class living on the same dorm floor. Even though it wasn’t our first choice, the three of us were thrown together into a course called “The Vietnam War: Apocalyptic Visions and Imperialist Hegemony,” team-taught by professors from the English and humanities departments.

At the initial meeting during orientation, Joshua sidled into the room late and took a seat next to me near the back. It was hot outside, but he was wearing a raggedy gray car coat and Doc Martens. He had a stringy goatee and lank hair that flopped over his eyes, and he reeked of cigarettes. He badly needed a shower. He was of average height and rather thin, but, incongruously, he had a noticeable paunch. Coming from Southern California, land of ab-defined, yogafied, body-obsessed boobletons, where even I—never much of an athlete—had felt compelled to work out and keep trim, this impressed me.

He glanced at the name tag stuck to my shirt. “Eric Cho,” he read. “What do you know, another Korean.” He wasn’t wearing a name tag himself. An act of defiance, apparently. He took a look around at the other kids in the Vietnam War class—overwhelmingly midwestern, upper-middle-class, white-bread—and said to me, “What do you think, bro? We were put in here to provide the Oriental perspective, weren’t we?”

Jessica, who was sitting in the row in front of us, peered around and gave us a brief head-to-toe.

Joshua raised his eyebrows. “You like that?” he nudged me.

I had been staring at her from the start of the session, wondering how I might broach a conversation. She was petite, tiny, really, with long fine hair that curled at the ends. She had a small flat nose without much of a bridge, making her eyes appear slightly crossed and farther apart than they were, and her eyebrows were set unusually high, so her neutral expression seemed to be one of haughty annoyance. Attracted as I was to her, she frightened me a little. She had on a sleeveless Neil Young T-shirt, no bra, nipples poking in the air-conditioning, bell-bottom jeans streaked with paint and smudges, and leather sandals. There was a suede sling purse with fringes on the floor beside her chair. Yet she also had on black toenail polish, and black fingernail polish, a studded wristband, earrings that seemed to be snips of real barbed wire, and a silver chain with a circle-A pendant—the anarchy symbol—her fashion sensibilities crossed between retro-hippie and post-punk. Mainly what I kept staring at was the small of her back, exposed as she leaned forward on her desk, her T-shirt lifting, the waist of her jeans gapping, to reveal a curve of skin that went all the way down to the cleft of her buttocks. She wasn’t wearing underwear.