How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti

brains right out of your head.
    I don’t see why you walk down the street so easily, not noticing that you are living half a life—­or how you move up to the counter to order a tuna sandwich like there is nothing ­else in the world—­when there is only one thing in the world to be paying attention to right now, which is that you are not getting your brains fucked out of your skull by Israel, and don’t you think that’s a problem, you stupid, brain-­dead slut?
    I’m just saying—­because I was watching you there and I thought, This stupid fucking know-­nothing slut needs her brains scrambled by the cock of Israel . Her throat has never been bruised down its back by him— is all I was thinking when I saw you ordering your sandwich. Tuna fish , lady? Do you have no dignity? Is your body a limp half-­body? Or is it impossible to have any dignity unless you are getting nightly reamed by Israel?
    If you would like to call your mother, go and do it. The sun is shining, it’s half past noon, the time for tears is now. Please tell her I said hello and that I think her daughter’s a stupid cunt if she thinks she can go around the world with her priss-­ass high in the air like a queen on a throne while not having known the humiliation of being fucked by Israel.
    It is afternoon. It is eve­ning. All the people are going to sleep except Israel, who is a working man—­but sleep has no friendship with him this week—whose sleep is being slaughtered and slit.
    I really must hand it to all the grocers in this town, to all the flower sellers, all the pastry makers, all the people who stand on the floor of the stock exchange with their computers and their ticker tape—­the secretaries, the office lunchers who sit in dreary underground malls and eat their lunches—­their grungy Chinese noodles, their grungy ham and cheese—­who have no joy, who have no fucking, who have nothing but the dreariness of having never been fucked by Israel.
    It’s Sunday now for all you lonely fuckers, but for me it’s always Sunday afternoon. There is nothing but Sundays and three in the afternoons for me now—­and even midnight is as leisurely as a stroll, all the leisure of being battered and bashed by Israel. You poor beautiful lonely suckers whose lives I never wept for until now, whose sorrow I never noticed until now, whose dreariness I never dreamed of till now, till now. Enjoy what you can of a life without the magnificent cock of Israel.
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    Then love, which ­can’t be helped, slips into the death drive. The death drive seeks comfort and knowledge of the future. It wants the final answer and is afraid of life. It is weary of life. It is weary of self-­containment, the continuation of its purpose, the channeling of the energies of the self. It wants to step into the oblivion of someone ­else, and its heart races at annihilation. It renounces and gives up renouncing equally. Cliffs are the friend of the death drive, particularly cliffs into another person. It wants a mutual plummeting into the center, one into the other, like a sixty-­nine. It hopes to drive you off your course like a car plunging into the center of the earth. It strives for love, annihilation, comfort, and death. Now the future is clear! it cries. It wants to drag you down.
    But if you lie still, you may find that you want to lie there in bed beside him not because of the death drive, but for a different reason, which is that you are enjoying looking at his beautiful green-­walled room and being alive—­the sun coming in with the breeze, and the drawings on the wall tacked up with clear tacks and green tacks and yellow and blue, and it is not even so much about the man beside you in the bed, but what a room, what a room!
    Then, when your heart sinks again, it sinks from the death drive like a serpent creeping in—­but from another