I Wished Read online

  He’s slopping out his tumult while trying to detect if any other fumbling chatters are upset because of him, and he may have isolated one. There’s just the trace of intake in the guy’s harangue—dents or dings or maybe even wounds as codependent as those calling and responding bleats that saxophonists traded in the jazz records his father played incessantly.

  If all the chatters, George included, were just segments in a kind of typist choir, each performing a distinctive tonal fraction of some abrasive score, then . . . That’s too difficult to imagine being true, so . . . maybe if their heated ramblings are just linguistic shreds dispensing outward from some disco ball–like application embedded in the website, which could possibly be true, then . . .

  If the garbage in their voices could be scraped away, maybe they’re intelligent or draw less stupid pictures or are prettier or something great that some vindictive, lesser mortals have so teased or criticized into seclusion that they’re only true when fighting one another for attention with a font’s cache of modifiers as their weaponry.

  Maybe when they’re not online, they shadow colleges’ or high schools’ walls. Maybe they’re goths or emos who have gussied up life’s hellishness into a daily Halloween. Maybe their trendiness solved people’s meanness into an issue of conflicting tastes in fashion, which hurts less but makes it extremely difficult for them to make close friends.

  Maybe they write poetry about their feelings and read that to one another while imagining their listeners are attachés or scouts from lyrically impaired but otherwise amazing bands. Maybe no one actually listens, they just wait their turn to read, and vice versa, so they don’t know why they feel comfortable yet miserably alone when they’re together.

  Maybe they grew bold enough one day to post their poems on websites set aside for gloomy, unsophisticated artists and admirers of incompetent, cathartic art. Maybe they grew confident enough to stop pretending their scribbles were poetry instead of suicidal scrawls they might have chickened out and torn in shreds were not the Internet a wildly more rewarding trash can.

  Maybe someone loved them once or twice, or said they did, which they no more believed than actors buy the love of fans that only know them when their feelings are impersonations. So, love got lost, and now that they’re so doomed, or wish they were, they know that mutual addiction will have to do, and they’re trying to addict someone right now.

  At some point, George’s chat-mate hints it might be safe to switch on their respective webcams and illuminate their separate cockpits, and George, gambling that the correlations in their ranting back and forth will make his chat-mate’s face a witching mirror image, types okay amongst a burst of words about his less than magical appearance.

  George is startled that his chat-mate is a little boy, maybe 12 years old at most. He’s sitting in a brightly daylit room with posters of some athlete on the walls, and he looks strangely tickled that George is old enough to be his father and lives far enough away from him that, judging by a wall clock in the background, it’s the middle of the night there.

  “My English . . . you already know it is very bad,” the boy says in some thick and somber accent. He leans into his desktop to study George, who sees some bruises on his face.

  “I thought you were faking it like I was,” George says.

  “No,” the boy says. “I try to write very hard.”

  “So . . . why are you fucked up?” George asks.

  “Because my father killed my mother,” the boy says. He leans back and looks away and starts to cry. “And . . . now he’s raping me sometimes.”

  “I wish I could do something to help,” George says. “But it looks like you live very far away.”

  The boy gives George a careful glance. “Why are you sad?” he asks.

  “Because . . . God, so many reasons,” George says. “I’ve been bipolar all my life, and now it’s gotten even worse, and they’re saying I’m psychotic.”

  “I want to kill myself,” the boy says.

  “You shouldn’t,” George says. He mumbles “shit” under his breath and tenses up and moves his cursor to the spot where he can shut the application with a tap. “You’ll hurt someone. Hurting other people is the only reason I don’t do it.”

  “No, just me,” the boy says. “No one cares. I—”

  “Look,” George says, “if you’d told me this when we were chatting, I might have thought, Whatever, I don’t know this guy, maybe he’s lying, but . . . you’re a little kid, and . . . I can’t let you hurt me.”

  “I won’t hurt you,” the boy says. He grabs his face and sobs and starts to shout things in some other language, and it’s so frightening that George could make some little kid he barely even knows feel this horrible.

  George’s high school friend is still his best although they haven’t talked in years and live half a world apart. George had planned to move away from home but never did or barely even. He thinks he’d live in France if there had been a genius medication. He’s a 30-year-old failed musician with severe bipolar illness holding a loaded gun and listening to Nick Drake late at night.

  Everyone who loves Drake thinks they share what made his early records sound so sad, then grow so bleak, but George extremely does. Maybe if he had unleashed his pain artistically he would feel different, but for now it’s like Drake’s lyrics are his thoughts after being edited and scored by someone just like him but more important.

  Nick Drake’s songs are like a pack of dolphins signaling his solitude incoherently to George and other introverted messes. It’s a very tight relationship between suicidal artists and their suicidal listeners that has been curing or killing guys like Drake and George forever. When everyone you know is either very far away from you or hides, you find someone dead to love.

  George is holding the gun like it’s a phone and wishing his old friend would somehow call him. His friend wrote him letters for a while, but George would never write him back, not even when he moved and got a new address, and now he’s moved so many times the letters couldn’t be forwarded to him if they were magic, and George’s phone is just a gun.

  According to some article, Nick Drake grew so sad he had to move in with his parents. Every day he left their home and walked to an abandoned house, then sat down on the floor where local junkies gathered daily to shootup, then die or not. He wouldn’t do their drugs or talk to anyone, and none of them knew why he came or stayed or who he was or ever acted like they cared.

  Maybe he admired their love of almost dying. Maybe he was studying the painless things they said when they were almost dead. Maybe they spoke for him just like his music does for George. Maybe they enjoyed the company or pitied him and thought, “At least we have this drug, and imagine if we didn’t.” Then he would leave, and they would say, “That guy is weird,” no matter what they felt.

  Years later, a journalist learned where Nick Drake died and somehow met one of those junkies, who recognized Drake’s photo. He said Drake came and went for months. They’d only let him stay because one of the junkie girls thought he was handsome. The last time, just before he left, he’d started crying, and, when they heard and looked, he said, “You guys know me. Tell me what is wrong with me.”

  When George’s best friend was 15, they met. George fell in love so fast his parents thought it was a gay thing. It wasn’t, even though George wanted it to be, but he was 12. For him, it felt like being a magician’s trick. He snuck around and lied about his whereabouts so they could be alone and talk. His other friends thought that was odd, but no one understood why George did anything.

  Even as a kid, George stayed upset too lengthily and acted too revved up by friends and things he liked, but he was cute, which made the fluctuating mostly fun for everyone until he worsened. By 14, he would either not shut up or stared at friends like they were walls, and almost everyone he knew decided they’d had crushes on him that they’d now outgrown.

/>   By 15, George would stay in bed for weeks. His best friend sat with him sometimes, and it was rough, but at least they were alone like George had wanted. Even his parents, who’d tried to exile George’s friend, said, “Be our guest.” Up until his late teens, George would sometimes find a drug or some belief or girlfriend, and he would tell his friend, I need to love myself or God or her or anyone but you.

  He found an almost genius medication at 18, but its side effects made him so horny that love turned into an offshoot from his crotch. His problems grew as simple as the gap between his body and his friend’s. They started fucking, which made their love deducible at last and look completely normal from the outside. But then the pill stopped working, tearing George in half again.

  One day his best friend said, “If I haven’t worked for you by now, I think I won’t.” He decided he was free to move across the world and be an artist. George tried to be an artist but was too fucked up to give his pain a surface. He found a girlfriend who got sick of his insanity. When she dumped him, he threatened her and was arrested. He agreed to move in with his parents to avoid a trial. The phone rings.

  “Why did you love me?” George asks whoever’s calling him.

  “Because you love me so much,” says the voice.

  “But I don’t,” George says. “If I did I wouldn’t do what I’m about to.”

  “I swear to God you do,” says the voice.

  “What about when I was manic?” George asks.

  “I pretended you were giving me a standing ovation,” says the voice.

  “And when I was catatonic?” George asks.

  “I would look at you and fantasize,” says the voice.

  “I’m sorry that I never . . .” George starts to say into the phone, or, rather, to the phone since no one’s there, and not actually to a phone since what he’s holding to his head is just the gun. He never finishes the sentence, because he isn’t sorry.

  “What’s that music in the background?” asks the voice. “It’s beautiful.”

  “If you love me, you’ll hang up now,” George says. He thinks the caller would hang up then. He makes that happen even though it hurts. He knows it’s real because he hears the click.

  THIALH

  When I was 17, I planned to write a novel that would somehow ply and individualize The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Not the Carson McCullers book, which I’d maybe read with no effect in junior high school, but the lesser-known filmed version. It starred Alan Arkin and was probably released in the later 1960s, but I’ve decided not to fact-check what I’m writing since the movie’s less the architecture of my thoughts than their brunt. In any case, the movie must have bombed, since, by the time I’d finally gained the chops to maybe write my version, no one I knew had even heard of it.

  I was in my middle-20s then, and the movie’s details were erased, or largely so, like preliminary pencil marks or powers of suggestion whose only purpose was to float a revelation I’d experienced while watching it. I rarely cry, even when alone, but I did, and with an unusual lack of self-control, blubbering right there amongst the movie’s other, less absorbed customers. I continued to cry off and on for days afterward because, as best I can remember, Alan Arkin’s character seemed to me a kind of distillation of what was deeply wrong with me.

  In my reckless memory, there was something physically screwed up with Arkin’s character, whose “name” I can’t remember anymore, and who I’ve decided might as well have had my name, which is Dennis. Maybe Dennis was blind or deaf. Those are my guesses. But he was very kind and generous, or else he had become innately kind and generous, hoping an unbridled selflessness that made his drawbacks seem beside the point would draw people close to someone as generally useless as himself.

  Dennis didn’t get out much due to this impairment I’m imagining. But people in his neighborhood would ring his bell whenever they felt sad or problematic. He would listen attentively, so I guess he wasn’t deaf, and he would say kind, supportive, wise sounding things in response, which seemed to help them. He wasn’t a happy person, even so, but helping people made him feel like he was more than some disabled guy who needed others’ prompts to even live and who evinced no value to the world apart from making able people count their lucky stars.

  Sometimes these visitors would pause their fretting long enough ask how Dennis was, and he would tell them he was fine as briefly as he could because he knew they didn’t really care, or that they wanted to be quickly reassured he was okay enough to always be cemented where they could rely on him, so, in a way, their show of interest was a secret way of making sure he wasn’t doing all that well, because they actually wished the worst for him, or wished the worst that wouldn’t kill him.

  Despite his reassurances, he was very lonely, to tell the truth, meaning when he was alone, which was most of the time. After someone he’d just helped had closed the door behind them, he would stay planted in the chair or on the bed where he’d been listening, feeling emptied out and disappointed and . . . not unloved exactly, because he figured people loved his kindness, or, rather, relied on his kindness, which isn’t quite love.

  No one imagined what he did when they weren’t with him—for instance, that he’d sit or lie around for hours trying to believe that someone he’d helped might love him and not just need his immoderate attention, not caring from where it came or who’d provided it. Everyone assumed, superficially but logically, that someone so selfless wasn’t interested in being loved. Actually, the idea of love never even came up when they thought about him. They just thought, “He’s so nice.”

  One of these confessors was a woman, younger than Dennis. She was beautiful, or he thought so, so I guess he wasn’t blind. She also seemed to need his kindness more than the others. She visited a lot. When she would ask how he was doing, the questions seemed sincere, although he knew that the intensity of his attraction to her beauty might have made the questions seem sincere when they were simply more polite or guilt-inspired.

  He fell in love with her. It was so stupid. He was agonized and embarrassed by this love since he knew he was unworthy, but he tried to let himself believe she visited so often because she cared or even loved him or, at the very least, had missed him. He knew this theory made no sense, and that their closeness was a technicality, and that she’d never fall in love with someone whose body sucked, but he wanted her to love him so badly, and he understood that love, at least in theories proffered by the church, etc., was supposed to be extremely flexible.

  Sometimes he thought, She wouldn’t let me be so kind and giving and devoted if she didn’t love me. He thought, She has to know I wouldn’t be so giving and devoted to her unless I was in love. He thought, She wouldn’t let me be so obviously in love with her unless she was in love with me in some way. He thought, If she didn’t love me, she would tell me to stop doing all these things for her because the fact that she gives nothing but her presence in return would make her feel uncomfortable.

  He loved her so incredibly much. When she needed something, no matter how peripherally or trivial, he would spend days on the phone or negotiating streets and local stores with great difficulty, trying to find someone to help him give her what she needed. When she needed money, he lied to her and said he had a lot of money and went deeply into debt so he could give her everything that anyone could ever give another person.

  He began to almost think her gratitude was love because, by then, he’d made himself virtually nothing but a source of generosity that just happened to look unpleasant like him. He knew the only way to let her know he loved her was to give and give, ideally greater things than anybody else could give her, and he accepted that the only way he could be loved by her was through being thanked, ideally more warmly than she thanked anybody else.

  Something got fucked up later in the movie. I don’t remember what it was. Maybe she came by one day and said that something he’d helped her with had made
it possible for her to move away somewhere where she’d be happier. That sounds right. In any case, he realized she’d only ever wanted him to help her, period, and now that she was happy, she didn’t need him anymore, and that she’d never actually loved him. She’d only loved how much he loved her, if even that. Or she’d only loved that love’s results. Or not even loved. Felt lucky.

  Dennis recognized that, given what he had to work with, he had, through her inveigling, become the best human being his materials could ever possibly allow to be fashioned from him, the most valuable, the least pointless, and that, even in that utmost state, even after having given her what she or anyone most wanted in the world, happiness, and after devoting everything he had materially and otherwise to her and trashing his emotions to accomplish that, he wasn’t loved.

  He didn’t think, Maybe if I write a novel that would tell her how I feel in a more exalted form, and if it’s great enough . . . He wasn’t a writer. He hadn’t written novels that people liked and whose talent in that one regard formed his only premium in the world. He couldn’t think, If I devote this last, most valuable thing about myself to her, and if I tear apart the rules that hold the novel back and write the most amazing ever, it will be such a brazen act of love that she’ll have to love me. Unlike me, he had no foolish hopes about himself and art’s value and love.

  After a few minutes of debate, Dennis killed himself. I can’t remember how. Maybe Dennis shot himself in the head, but I would think that. If I didn’t remember exactly how it happened, that’s obviously what I would guess. There was some kind of funeral. The people he had helped showed up, including the woman. They seemed sad, but not so sad that you thought his death would make much of a difference in their lives. He’d been really nice, and that was nice, but he was disabled, so the suicide made sense.

  I’ve tried to write my version of this depressing novel several times. Or I would have thought of trying to. Sometimes I couldn’t find a form magnificent enough to actualize it. Always I knew or felt that to work as hard and painfully as I would need to do to write this self-excoriating thing, I would have to be like Dennis in the movie and write it as a sacrificial gift to someone whom I loved so much that I would do this hardest thing I could ever do as an act of love for him.