Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the short story of the week. This is from a collection called ‘Exemplary Lives’—based, very loosely, off various people I’ve come across; the idea being just trying to explore how people get through their lives as well as they do.
Best,
Sam
WEIRDO WATCH
From ‘Exemplary Lives’
Steven was one of these legendarily sad guys. He wasn’t really a friend, just somebody who was in the same social circle, somebody other people liked to talk about. I remembered him from college, scrawny, stooped-over, in loose jeans and a windbreaker like he was a middle schooler or a pensioner, a long weathered face like an old hawk. He was well-liked, considered to be very intelligent, a gloomy court jester in the mold of Feste or Eyeore, although he walked so slowly that a pack of friends would leave him behind as they went off to class or the dining hall. I remember seeing this a few times, the friends apologizingly taking off, Steven waving no hard feelings, and then him trudging along, striking up a short conversation with everybody else who caught up with him and then kept on going, like in some sort of morose relay race. “Won’t Steven be a great old man?” somebody said once, clapping him on the shoulder.
“That takes a lot of practice,” Steven croaked out, in what everybody thought was a terrific delivery.
Steven moved to New York after school, just like everybody else, and he tried to make a living freelance writing. I was a very active google stalker at this stage, and I’d feel these surges of envy every time I saw the byline of somebody I knew, probably clicked through newspapers and magazines, to be honest, just waiting to run into some familiar name. And I’d come across Steven fairly often, writing about a wide range of topics, electronic music for Pitchfork and things that were dry and policyish for Jacobin and The New Criterion. He was very earnest, that seemed to be his style, and it didn’t really matter if he was writing about Thomas Sowell or Goldfrapp, the approach was the same, there was a lot of parsing of individual phrases, a wonky, good-hearted desire to get to the bottom of things—to me, it felt a little too nakedly like what he would have learned in a critical theory seminar in college.
I was making up my mind to accept Steven as a kind of settled figure, someone who had made it in a sense, who would consistently be there, but whom I didn’t have to be particularly jealous of. And then he disappeared, there were long pauses between bylines, and I sort of figured, as much as I thought about it, that he’d bitten the bullet and gone to grad school, maybe even caved so far as to do the LSATs or a post-bacc.
When we were nearing 30, I got a call from a friend telling me that Steven had attempted suicide. It was a strange thing to hear in a phone call, it was a friend I hadn’t heard from in a while, and at first it seemed like a kind of extreme gossip, this was the sort of thing that always stayed very private, that you heard about only if you were really close with a friends’ circle, but in this case it had become a kind of public event, there was an online charity contribution that the friend pointed me towards, no obligation, just a kind of pick-me-up gesture towards Steven, and then a group of people were taking turns sitting with him and they wanted to see if I would join them. Nobody knew what to do with a situation like this—institutionalization seemed to have gone out of fashion, the natural thing would have been to go to his family, but, apparently, they depressed him, they were social sciences professors out in some wintry college town, he was more willing to launch himself into the beyond than he was to break the lease on his cute Brooklyn apartment.
His suicide attempt had, as far as people could tell, not been very concerted. He’d slit his wrists, then tried to bleed himself out in a bath like in some Roman history book he’d read in school. The consensus was that it was more of a gesture at suicide than a genuine attempt; if it had been, he would have gotten serious about pills, hurled himself off a structure. Somebody was designated to make sure he went to his weekly therapy appointment—that was the heavy lifting in the rescue Steven operation. Other than that, the idea was for him to not go more than a night or two without somebody spending the evening at his place. He had just gone through a difficult breakup—he’d had a girlfriend, Mary, off and on since college, she was cute and wore enormous glasses like she was auditioning for the role of an attractive nerd, and she was well-liked, largely because she’d taken Steven on as her charge, as if he were some neighborhood stray, but they’d broken up apparently for the final time and she’d said some very incisive things that were held to be the direct cause of the wrist-slitting—and, even for a born solitary like him, the loneliness was too difficult to take.
I didn’t mind this chore at all. It was a time of life when, even though my friends’ group was perfectly conscientious, wanted to be socially valuable in some way, we weren’t the sort of people who would volunteer at a soup kitchen or replant trees—it just wasn’t what was expected of us—and there was something very pleasant about taking the subway in a different direction from work once a week, spending time in Steven’s brick-exposed, book-lined apartment.
There was no great obligation to take care of Steven or even chit-chat. He knew that he had become a charity case, was resigned to it like a repeat offender taking his place in study hall, he came downstairs, opened the front door for his caretaker, usually turned his head, didn’t pass any kind of a greeting while he tried to catch the inside door before it closed behind him. He had work that he brought home with him and he would spend most of the evening on his laptop, working or reading magazines. We’d order Thai food for dinner and he was like a polite child entertaining a sitter, putting the laptop away while we ate, sometimes flipping through the TV for something we would both like.
It was pleasant, a bit boring. He seemed lonely, unbelievably so, but not despondent. The only hint that anything was really wrong was his self-deprecation, which was constant, the furious head-shake if he realized that he had screwed something up on the Seamless order, the hollow tone he had talking to the computer as he finished a work assignment – he had taken a position as a staff writer with a trade magazine—saying, “And why couldn’t I have finished that four hours ago?” It took me a while to notice it—I guess self-deprecation, a wry deadpan was standard-issue for everybody in my circle—but once I did it seemed to underpin everything in his speech. And I was like some kind of resident-in-training, learning to ignore the stream of self-criticism—probably this was a protocol that all caretakers had adopted—but at a certain point it was hard to think about anything else and I said, as delicately as I could manage, “Do you think that has anything to do with what happened—your running yourself down all the time?”
He seemed completely prepared for the question, perfectly unperturbed by it. “I know it’s a bad habit," he said, “and I know it’s not nice for somebody else to hear, it’s just that if that’s what my thoughts are and if I try to say what I think, then if I didn’t say that I probably wouldn’t say anything at all. And besides,” he said, after we’d taken a pause to eat our food, “my extremely expensive therapist thinks I need to express myself more—and it would be nice to think she was right, it would be nice to think I wasn’t bankrupting myself for her for nothing.”
This was very deadpan, a reminder of what had made him, after a fashion, popular in college. He could be counted on for a certain matter-of-fact cynicism, to tell you that some loudmouth in seminar was ‘just winging it,’ that some abstruse critical theorist, whom everybody was struggling with, was ‘turgid for the sake of being turgid.’ Once he’d explained himself, we seemed to move to a different type of conversation, I was no longer tiptoeing around him like he was a terminal patient, or trying to avoid certain trigger words, I felt like I could ask him about his breakup, for instance, and Steven would blow on his food and say, not like he was articulating anything for anybody else, like he was just opening up the channel of his thoughts, “I mean, she was not nice, she wanted a lot of things out of the world, so we’d end up having a lot of fights over subscriptions—that’s sort of a metaphor, but there really were a lot of subscriptions fights—just a constant self-improvement, and when she realized that I was skinny and kind of stodgy and never really going to be any different, that was – that was as difficult for me to take in as it was for her. But—” And there was another pause, he chewed slowly on a new batch of noodles, there was a final-round competition on the reality show we had on in the background, a sword-making show on the History Channel, and we watched as the brash underdog pulled off an upset and then he resumed his thought exactly where it was—“but I didn’t think it was a bad thing that she wanted as much as she did, nobody—nobody dreams like her, and that was, that was a very addictive thing, until it turned out that I was just some kind of an obstacle for her in her getting all the very many things she wanted.”
He was a hard person to talk to, especially now that he had given up on his career ambitions, seemed to just be whiling away time with the trade magazine. In a group, he had been enjoyable, so reliably, relentlessly downbeat, and his opinions, as he wrote them out or as he aired them in occasional monologues, were interesting and complex, he really was invested in a wide variety of topics, was really anxious to get to some sort of truth in all of them, but in conversation it felt as if he were flickering in and out of consciousness. I’d try to reply to something he said. “You don’t think that was good for you, what she was doing, you don’t think that opened you up?” and he’d grunt and talk about something else and then a week later when I was back he’d finally answer the question, “No, I don’t think she was good for me,” he said, “I think she gave me an idea of what I was supposed to be and when I couldn’t make that work it was like everything else in my identity sort of became unstuck, it felt—it’s hard to describe this, but I have a very clear visual of it—it’s like paint coming unpeeled, like I thought my life had lined up in this ideal way, go to college so that in college I could meet Mary so that I could be confident and do all the things that I loved, and then when she pointed out that I wasn’t as funny as I could be or as smart, that I was a bit conventional or slow on the uptake, it was like the wheels would start turning, maybe I should have gone straight into a normal job right out of school instead of being over-ambitious, maybe I should have taken a year off instead of starting college, been more mature when I started, maybe I should have gone to a different college where I would have met somebody different—just an infinite regression, that’s very difficult to explain to anyone else but is very um excruciating for me.”
We had gotten to a strange place. We had gotten past the night-shift feel of the early visits, now he shared things about himself, talked pretty freely if in his own rhythm. On the other hand, we seemed to have gotten to the same place as where we had been at the end of college, the sense that, with no hard feelings towards one another, we really weren’t destined to be friends. I found him to be a bit introverted and self-absorbed—after some time, he talked openly enough about himself, but I don’t think he asked a single personal question in all the time I visited him—a weirdo, basically. And if he was interested in some of the same things that I was, and took them very seriously, I found it somehow difficult to talk to him about books or politics—his voice would trail off in the middle of a point, he tended not to voice his own opinions, his bold column-writing phase seemed to be behind him, he would announce that a topic was ‘irreducibly complex’ or would point me towards a writer I hadn’t heard of. I decided to beg off the assignment. The group was breaking up in any case. It had been fine to spend a day a week with him when I’d first been asked, but now I was getting busier, had started seeing somebody new. It felt very macabre to babysit an adult, especially one who seemed to be doing fine—he had his job, he had started submitting freelance pitches again on his esoteric topics, he didn’t seem, to speak in clinical terms, to be any danger to himself.
I went once more, intending for this to be the last time. He’d finally gotten his buzzer fixed, propped the apartment door open so that I could let myself in. He was on the couch, hunched over his computer, electronic music blasting. I recognized Daft Punk, Trentemøller, and then there was a lot of other stuff that was just a wall of sound. Oh great, I thought, Justin the ringleader of the group has told him that I don’t want to come anymore, and now he’s sulking, an adult man sulking. I did my work and he did his and at some point he went to our saved orders and pressed the submit button and when dinner came he docilely put his laptop aside, although still with the music playing.
“I’m sorry I’m being like this,” he said in his flat way. “It can’t be much fun to be around someone like this. I just had a pitch turned down for Jacobin—something I thought was pretty good, about economics, and that’s somebody I used to write for all the time.”
He blew on his noodles. It was hard to think of how to comfort him. Mercifully, the music had shifted, it seemed to have gone onto a different playlist, something North African, it felt like desert, like great wide-open skies.
“Something like that happens,” he said, “and you just can’t think of how far to regress, like where exactly was the mistake, something I wrote badly in some other article I did for them, something I screwed up in the relationship, something just not right with me, with the way I think, something that formed wrong in my brain. It’s not very productive to think in this way.”
I agreed that it wasn’t.
“Valueless, that’s what I have to grapple with,” he said. “Everything that went into my education—completely valueless.” The head-shaking was back, more intense than I’d seen it before, it wasn’t exactly angry, just weary, like he was a dancer in the song we were listening to doing some kind of ritualized shake, like he was trying to pull himself out of a bad dream. “29 years old, not a thing to show for it, and I come back home and I put music on my computer—an amazing song, a song like this—and I start to tear up and the hair stands on the back of my neck and everything in me just comes to life and I think – I think I must be valuable in some way if I can feel like that, and it’s just hard to believe, you know what I mean, that I can feel something as strongly as that, that it’s possible to feel something as strong as that, be plugged into life like that, and, in the same moment, to feel, for the greater truth to be, that you’re a complete fucking failure—”
Wow. Beautifully written, sad. We all probably know a person like Steven. Thank you for sharing, and I am left wanting to read/know more!