The Epicure's Lament (41 page)

She'll miss me a little, I suppose, at least at first.

I'm sorry I'll never hear her play again. That, and I'm sorry I'll never smoke another cigarette, cook another meal, eat another meal, fuck another woman. Those are the things I'll miss the most. I'll never go out on the iceboat with Carla. I'll never go back to Gotham City and find it all as it was before, in that shining era of high spirits.

I won't miss this wrecked body with its pain.

All right, there's nothing more to write and nothing more to do. It's time for the Last Cigarette, the one Zeno smoked over and over all his life, but mine really is.

For the last time, I just touched a match to a cigarette. When I've smoked it, I'll end all this. Meanwhile, instead of rhapsodizing tediously about the grand obsession of my life, I'll write out Montaigne's hermit-tower words as a final prayer of sorts—secular last rites:

The ‘plague of man is the opinion of knowledge.
I establish nothing. I do not understand. I halt. I examine.
Breath fills a goatskin as opinion fills a hollow head.
Not more this than that—why this and not that? Have you
seen a man that believes himself wise? Hope that he is a fool.
Man, a vase of clay.
I am human, let nothing human be foreign to me.
What inanity is everything!

Let nothing human be foreign to me. What inanity is everything! And out I go.

FOURTH NOTEBOOK

February 24, 2002—Here I am in the afterlife. It's a place with large windows; outside, a lot of bare trees and a late-winter sky that's usually bleak and lowering; inside, institutional furniture, an efficient staff, and inedible food. The walls are pale beige. The air has a fine, rich, unpleasant moistness and reeks of others’ psyches turned inside out, the past exhumed, the stench of rotten pain. I've lost a foot. I no longer smoke, at least not for now. No smoking was allowed in the medical hospital, naturally, and I was there for a while, having my foot amputated, recovering from my addiction to hillbilly heroin…. No smoking is allowed here either. It seems I quit cold turkey, involuntarily.

I'm not in pain any more, except for the occasional phantom twitch in the place where my missing foot used to be. They've got me on some sort of meds—antidepressants, I guess
they're called—I try not to dwell on the insidious changes they're wreaking in my brain.

Also, it turns out, I'm not dead. The night I tried to kill myself, I've since learned from Dennis himself, my brother went rooting through the hallways and stairwells like a truffle pig until he whiffed the unmistakable black, glossy odor of my imminent end. He “raced” up to my room, where he “unhesitatingly” saved me by dragging me downstairs by the armpits, flinging me into the back seat of the Dart, then racing along small twisty back roads to the hospital “at top speed.” He was drunk that night; this could easily have killed us both, but unfortunately it didn't. He “hauled” me into the emergency room, where, as my stomach was pumped and I was hooked up to tubes and monitors and an IV and it was determined that I would live, albeit possibly as a brain-damaged vegetable, he “refused to leave my bedside.”

I came out of my coma in the middle of the cold empty white week between Christmas and New Year's to find myself blinking up at the glare of lights, the hovering faces of a nurse and my brother, a white ceiling.

Immediately I was aware of the trouble so many people had gone to, to bring me back to this life I didn't want…. It put me in a sheepish, dazed funk that hasn't abated yet and shows no sign of doing so.

According to Dennis, I'd “practically begged him” to “save” me. I had sent out “distress signals” all fall, left my notebooks “lying around” for Sonia to find; he “had a feeling” on Christmas night, he said, that I would “pull something like that.” He said a lot of other things as well, but at first I couldn't listen to them, because I wanted to throttle him for dragging me back from wherever I was headed.

Maybe writing again is a bad idea. Once again, my hand is rusty with the pen….

When I had recuperated enough to leave the medical hospital, out of his “grave concern” for me, my brother committed me to the ivy-covered college-campus–like grounds of Jernigan Memorial Psychiatric Hospital, where I have spent the past weeks cooling my one remaining heel in individual therapy, group therapy, physical therapy, and art therapy. These are all dubious and unpleasant pastimes, but it's the last of them that galls me most. Art therapy… I shudder to think that anyone might be observing me in there. My old self, maybe, watching through the windows, as Reborn Hugo makes a watercolor depiction of the inside of his head, because if I ever hope to get out of here I've got to convince them I'm “cured.” Which is to say, no longer suicidal.

It also turns out that I do know what happened after I “killed myself.” Bun is still alive. Why, I don't know. Shlomo isn't living in the gatehouse. Why, I don't know either. Stephanie hasn't left Bun: another mystery. Bellatrix was told only that I got sick and am in the hospital. She and Sonia have gone back to their place in New York. Apparently, commuting to and from Bellatrix's violin lessons in the city became too much of a haul without me at Waverley to provide the necessary reason for staying there. Also, I'm sure the Waverley ghosts were making them nervous.

Vero, to my further mystification, has come on the past three Saturday afternoons in a row from Brooklyn to visit me. Possibly because she'd come all this way and here we were so we might as well talk instead of sitting in silence for the minimum duration of a visit, we found that we had some things to say to each other. We sat on the sun porch, she in her silly Edwardian outfit, I in my customary garb (thanks to Dennis, who brought me my own clothes at my insistence). We passed a not entirely unpleasant afternoon discussing Montaigne and Villon, then other writers and books, then what we think about
this and that. On the whole, Vero has more opinions than I have. Since she is a professor, some of these are unnecessarily abstract and analytical, but when I point this out, she laughs at both of us. She threatened to visit me again if I stay here long enough, so we can exchange more opinions. I agreed that she could come if she wanted, and I meant it.

It makes no sense. But there it is. I have no idea why, but I am beginning to tolerate her.

Dennis isn't sure any more whether or not he wants a divorce from Marie, although she's told him there's no way she wants to reconcile after he had an affair with her best friend. I'd bet my foot she takes him back within a month.

This is the only thing I've learned since I “came back” that makes any sense at all to me. It seems I understand very little of anything. It might be the drugs they've got me on. My mind has been foggy and hazy for a while; I'm writing here again only because I hope it might provide some clarity and focus.

February 25—Shortly after I returned to consciousness, I read aloud to Dennis the entirety of Montaigne's “Isle of Cea” from my hospital bed, a lengthy essay that extols the beauty and virtue of suicide. Having brought the book at my request, he listened without complaint or interjection. However, the following passage, at the very beginning, evoked a defensive sigh from him which caused a long interruption, possibly because I read it in an extra-loud and very clear voice, emphasizing almost every word, so he would be sure to get the idea:

“Death can be found everywhere. It is a great favor from God that no man can wrest death from you, though he can take your life; a thousand open roads lead to it.”

When he sighed, I stopped and fixed him with a look.

“A great favor from God,” I repeated in a steely tone. “You denied me that. How could you do that to me?”

“How could you do that to me?” he asked back in a wet-eyed tone of his own.

“I did nothing to you,” I said. “I did it to myself.”

“Didn't you imagine it would have an effect on me?” he asked. “You're the only brother I have.”

“Why is it so important to have a brother?”

“You're my link to the past. You're part of me.”

“I've never been anything but a thumbtack-sticking irritant to you. I would think you'd be nothing but relieved and grateful to be rid of me. But even if you secretly were, it's all too typical of you to drag me against my will back from the edge of where I wanted to go and tell yourself you did the right thing. You tried to get me sent to military school once too. I got away that time—well, I was younger and more agile then.”

“That time,” he agreed, “you got away and we couldn't find you. This time, I did what I should have done then. I brought you back.”

“Dennis,” I said wearily, “you have no idea about anything.”

“I would say the same to you,” he said with a glint of anger.

There ensued a silence during which, because I had nothing else to do, I searched what was left of my soul. Was I relieved, at all, to be alive? Was I grateful, at all, to Dennis?

In fact, no, I wasn't. I see no great advantage in being alive. I meant to die. My carefully laid plan was tampered with. Here I am with my eyes once more open, my brain still ticking. What is the use? Life is arguably not preferable to death. And no one should try to prevent another person from quitting the game. It's not cricket, as they used to say.

However, Dennis thought otherwise, and his will prevailed over mine, if only because at the time he was conscious and I was not, and therefore he was able to enforce it on me without my being able to fight back.

“Dennis,” I said then.

He gave a start. He had been woolgathering too. What his own comb held I'll never know; there are still a few things in this world to be glad about.

“Tell me something,” I said. “Why exactly is Stephanie still with Bun Fox and not with you, as advertised?”

Dennis winced; I had struck a nerve. “This is the pathological, destructive pattern of their marriage. She hates him, then she loves him, then she hates him again. I can't keep up, and I certainly had no idea how truly and irrevocably she was committed to him when I embarked on my ill-advised affair with her.”

“Do they ever have sex?” I asked.

“Hugo!” he said.

“I doubt they ever do,” I said. “Did you know that Bun is a child molester?”

“What?” He stared at me.

“You heard me.”

“Who told you that?”

“Stephanie told me she found kiddie porn under his side of the bed. He was Marie's client because he wanted to stop being a pedophile; she ‘helped’ him ‘get over it,’ but I don't buy it. He's apparently trying hard not to molest anyone, but he'll cave; it's only a matter of time.”

“Stephanie was making that up,” said Dennis, laughing a little in shock and disbelief. “She was having you on. There's no way in the world that could be true. Bun? No way.”

“I saw frustrated desire in his eyes when I thwarted his plan to pick up Bellatrix from school and fondle her in the woods somewhere. Don't leave him alone with your daughters. Guard them with your life.”

“Bun is my friend,” he sputtered. “And you're…”

“Nuts?” I proffered helpfully. “And Bun is your friend, is he? The friend whose wife you fucked.”

“That was a mistake.”

And so forth, predictably.

He still doesn't believe me, but I've planted the seed.

I finished reading the essay, and he listened, and that was all in the way of recrimination and discussion the two of us will have.

February 26—Instead of relinquishing the parallel burdens of consciousness and corporeality, as I had intended, I am now required to sit in a circle with the other nut jobs every morning after breakfast and subject myself to a tormenting proximity to the pain and suffering of others; as for my own, I'm not much for earnest sharing.

Then I'm required to dip my paintbrush into paint and smear it meaningfully around the paper.

Then it's time I go to see Lance, the thick-necked homo of a physical therapist, to learn how to walk again. This is in its way as humiliating and unpleasant as all my other therapies. I'm currently engaged in an awkward and mutually hostile getting-to-know-you dance with the prosthetic foot they've made me, “they” being unseen and unknown craftsmen far away.

Then comes another sort of dance, my daily verbal gavotte with the formidable, intelligent, sixty-year-old Dr. Emma Jameson, who has trotted around many a dance floor in her day. Seemingly without any idea of what I'm up to, she will lazily and playfully spar with me for a while; then, without warning, she snaps to attention like a lioness I mistakenly thought was asleep in the sun on the quiet savanna and pounces: “Why do you suppose you made that joke, Hugo?”

Apparently I make deflecting “humorous” remarks because I'm afraid of intimacy.

Well, chuh, I want to say.

“Afraid” isn't really the right word, but the subject of my
emotions makes me want to put my head down and go to sleep; I'd prefer to stick to the facts here in this notebook, since apparently I'm not allowed to in my various therapies.