hand-cast; paper hard copy, a true dissident organ.
Around there, the pivot point came. A sudden change in lighting, perspective, tempo; a moment in time. He was in his attic reading his broadside, the first (and only) paper edition of I Have Shared a Document with You . He had fifty copies, printed on an artist friend’s ancient letterpress machine.
But then he glanced out the window and the sky looked bad, like menacing bad; a moving front, gray and striated, coming in hard over the West Hills. A darkness grew in Leo’s chest; a voice—the only floridly psychotic thing that had ever happened to Leo—said, That’s right. Kill yourself. Before you lose the nerve .
It made sense, was the strange part. Leo could handle being a depressive. Possibly he had chosen it, in one way or another. And he would find a way to handle it for the rest of his life. But if he was a real nutter, he should find a way to kill himself; that was the deal he’d made with himself.
He climbed out onto his roof, a steeply pitched and many-angled place, and gorilla-walked to its apex, then stood tall like a weather vane. Yeah, that weather system was aimed at him. It was roiling and zombific and loaded with tons of very bad news about his future. He swayed forward a bit, imagined the tumble and empty air.
No, not enough empty air. He’d come out alive, with tib-fib fractures and a head injury; he’d be forever the unsuccessful suicide, the chickened-out.
So he scuttled back into his attic and lay on the floor. He was chicken; he didn’t want to die.
That’s the good news, he told himself. And he remembered his mother telling him that he was not excused from the table. (He was a terrible eater.) Now he heard her voice. Not in the psychotic way, but in the keen-recall way, from heaven or space or the compost or whatever. You are not excused, she said. She was tough; she had probably faced those flames bravely when they had come for her.
But if he was to live, how was he going to live with this?
He saw that the dissident broadsheet and the blog and all the stupid little fascinations were distractions; they were deeply beside the point. In back of all the wild imaginings, he had been taking shallow breaths and keeping one eye on the door.
In the newspaper—the real one—Leo read about outbound Africans who hid in the wheel wells of jumbo jets. He read about the ones who fell frozen onto Queens, their bid for freedom having far overshot the mark. But maybe some made it through; maybe they bounced off the awning of a Dunkin’ Donuts and found new lives as plasterers or lawn-mower men or newsagents, scarfed and hatted and peering at you from behind racks of gum. Panting and wading and grasping, the driven of the earth move across it in unflagging defense of their right to keep living. So what of people like Leo, adrift on privilege and spangled with choice, who let life’s flame gutter on its wick?
In the weeks that followed, his thoughts became as dark and jangled as wire hangers at the back of the closet. Oh, how the monsters had come in to stomp around his head. The morning was bearable, the afternoon insufferable, and the evening a damp relief.
He bought his pot from a sketchy character who made you come to him. To his house over by the freeway, its windows blacked out, the fish tanks unclean.
Leo nailed a sheet over his front window. He stopped answering the phone and then the door. The world outside was full of antagonists. He stayed tethered to his bong.
The sisters had timed the intervention well. A week earlier, he might have stood his ground. In the event, he did try. He tried It’s None of Your Business, which they rejected out of hand. He tried I Might Still Be Able to See Myself Out of This, which did not convince them. It was clear that they weren’t going to leave until he agreed to something inpatient. Rosemary mentioned some very illustrious places back east. He actually thought about it.
But he didn’t want
Around there, the pivot point came. A sudden change in lighting, perspective, tempo; a moment in time. He was in his attic reading his broadside, the first (and only) paper edition of I Have Shared a Document with You . He had fifty copies, printed on an artist friend’s ancient letterpress machine.
But then he glanced out the window and the sky looked bad, like menacing bad; a moving front, gray and striated, coming in hard over the West Hills. A darkness grew in Leo’s chest; a voice—the only floridly psychotic thing that had ever happened to Leo—said, That’s right. Kill yourself. Before you lose the nerve .
It made sense, was the strange part. Leo could handle being a depressive. Possibly he had chosen it, in one way or another. And he would find a way to handle it for the rest of his life. But if he was a real nutter, he should find a way to kill himself; that was the deal he’d made with himself.
He climbed out onto his roof, a steeply pitched and many-angled place, and gorilla-walked to its apex, then stood tall like a weather vane. Yeah, that weather system was aimed at him. It was roiling and zombific and loaded with tons of very bad news about his future. He swayed forward a bit, imagined the tumble and empty air.
No, not enough empty air. He’d come out alive, with tib-fib fractures and a head injury; he’d be forever the unsuccessful suicide, the chickened-out.
So he scuttled back into his attic and lay on the floor. He was chicken; he didn’t want to die.
That’s the good news, he told himself. And he remembered his mother telling him that he was not excused from the table. (He was a terrible eater.) Now he heard her voice. Not in the psychotic way, but in the keen-recall way, from heaven or space or the compost or whatever. You are not excused, she said. She was tough; she had probably faced those flames bravely when they had come for her.
But if he was to live, how was he going to live with this?
He saw that the dissident broadsheet and the blog and all the stupid little fascinations were distractions; they were deeply beside the point. In back of all the wild imaginings, he had been taking shallow breaths and keeping one eye on the door.
In the newspaper—the real one—Leo read about outbound Africans who hid in the wheel wells of jumbo jets. He read about the ones who fell frozen onto Queens, their bid for freedom having far overshot the mark. But maybe some made it through; maybe they bounced off the awning of a Dunkin’ Donuts and found new lives as plasterers or lawn-mower men or newsagents, scarfed and hatted and peering at you from behind racks of gum. Panting and wading and grasping, the driven of the earth move across it in unflagging defense of their right to keep living. So what of people like Leo, adrift on privilege and spangled with choice, who let life’s flame gutter on its wick?
In the weeks that followed, his thoughts became as dark and jangled as wire hangers at the back of the closet. Oh, how the monsters had come in to stomp around his head. The morning was bearable, the afternoon insufferable, and the evening a damp relief.
He bought his pot from a sketchy character who made you come to him. To his house over by the freeway, its windows blacked out, the fish tanks unclean.
Leo nailed a sheet over his front window. He stopped answering the phone and then the door. The world outside was full of antagonists. He stayed tethered to his bong.
The sisters had timed the intervention well. A week earlier, he might have stood his ground. In the event, he did try. He tried It’s None of Your Business, which they rejected out of hand. He tried I Might Still Be Able to See Myself Out of This, which did not convince them. It was clear that they weren’t going to leave until he agreed to something inpatient. Rosemary mentioned some very illustrious places back east. He actually thought about it.
But he didn’t want
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