The Futilitarians Read online

  A light rain was dissolving the hairdo I’d paid to have done that afternoon, so I picked the bobby pins out one by one and threw them down into the street between gaudy papier-mâché floats, marching bands, and sips of champagne. I gave myself a whole new look for the evening—a collaboration between the best efforts of my hairdresser and the elements. We were begging beads from masked riders and dancing when a local high school band stopped in front of the mayor’s box, as bands and marching clubs traditionally do, and the mayor in his tuxedo acknowledged the recent death of someone from their community. As they played a solemn tribute, some of the baton twirlers and band members started crying right there on the avenue. These children, too many of whom bear the brunt of the city’s historical ills, stood at attention with their instruments and flags, in their spiffy blue-and-gold sequined leotards, tasseled boots, and transparent rain gear—all post-Katrina donations from a famous Hollywood actress to replace their flood-destroyed old ones. We adults in our tuxes and gowns with our plastic champagne glasses, necks heavy with cheap shiny beads, were tethered with the children to a moment before they resumed their marching and we our partying beneath the antebellum portico. Feeling wretched and shamed by the world, I hid my champagne glass below the viewing stand’s bunting and plywood façade until the band passed. It was one of those moments your soul feels like a fist, clutching disparate strings of experience, time, emotion, whatever, holding them all together and then letting them all go to separate out again.

  Convening an Existential Crisis Reading Group meeting during carnival season also felt odd. Chris had wondered if it was even necessary, since carnival itself can be a salve for the existential hurt. Identity is transcended, normalcy is transcended, and then on Ash Wednesday, back to Ecclesiastes, the gray smudge of the mortal reminder on our foreheads. “All are of dust, and all turn to dust again,” ushering in the always-welcome Lent.

  But we all decided it was even more important to meet, since this month’s gathering would be laden with loss. Dad’s death had left Susan, Brad, and me raw and sad, our friends in the room deferential and tender. Case and Nina had both quit the group after breaking up the night of the first meeting, but since Case had already chosen and sent the reading to us, the discussion was driverless. Was the ECRG endeavor already off-track? His selection, “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” was intense, and there was an itchy energy in the room that kept people reaching across the table to refill their wineglasses.

  Tadeusz Borowski’s 1946 autobiographical short story is pretty much about what the title almost symmetrically implies: man’s capacity for evil, the sham of civilization in the face of that evil. “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” is about a prisoner who volunteers to unload transports into the camp for the reward of the food and clothing left over from the “passengers” after they are trucked to the crematoria or work camp. The action transpires over a hot summer day, narrated in an unnerving present tense.

  The horrors that he and others encounter on the platform, the acts they believe are necessary to survive, I don’t feel the need to recount. It’s heavily charted nightmare territory. As are the terrible things done to children in the story. In his introduction to the collection in which the story appears, Borowski biographer Jan Kott calls the book “one of the cruelest of testimonies to what men did to men, and a pitiless verdict that anything can be done to a human being.”

  It was a long night of talking about our complicity in different systems, the experiment of civilization, the reaches of brutality. The complicity part fed into my lifelong Catholic project of how much guilt to assign myself in any given situation, and I sat on the floor listening, indulging in the ideas, calculating.

  “But the system doesn’t work without your compliance.”

  “We’re talking about the distribution of responsibility.”

  “Crowds can’t be morally trusted.”

  “That part about history being let off its leash…”

  “The debris and tragedy formed an adjusted worldview.”

  “That’s why modern existentialism thrived in the aftermath of World War Two. The fertile ground of questioning. The suffering and the witnessing.”

  My sister Susan, grounded in the material significance of things, offered, “I think Case chose this story because of the shoe connection. The pile of shoes from the prisoners. The narrator needs new shoes from the new arrivals.”

  There was another reading that Case had chosen and then abandoned us to discuss without him that night, a short excerpt from Existential America, by George Cotkin, grainy trenches of darkness down the gutter of the poorly photocopied pages. In this section, “The Era of French Existentialism,” Cotkin defines the canon of existentialism—Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Camus—and identifies some of its major themes, like subjective truth, estrangement, existence and nothingness, existential anguish and nothingness, existence and death.

  No wonder bottles kept opening and getting drained and crowding the table. The void was among us—in the Borowski story, in these French existentialists, in Dad’s death. I found and read aloud a quote from my Concise Dictionary of Existentialism, which had a whole section titled “Nothing.”

  “‘Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being, like a worm’” (Sartre). (See also: Dread; Future; Past and Present; Suicide; Transcendence.)

  A brief debate followed about whether it was the size of that worm coiled in the heart of your being or its voraciousness that mattered more. Mostly folks thought it was your relationship with the worm. Did you ignore it, accept it, nurture it?

  “My worm positively defines me,” Ellen drawled. “In a good way. The world wouldn’t be nearly so interesting without it.”

  As the conversation continued, I followed the admonition to “See also: Suicide,” since Rebecca and Rachel are never far from my thoughts during discussions like these. There was only one entry under that heading, by Karl Jaspers: “One should at least recognize if not comprehend that suicide is a way of positive approach to nothingness.” (See also: War; World.)

  Bullshit, I thought, though I understood where he was coming from, that suicide could be viewed as man’s ultimate assertion of will over the absurdity of existence. Taking nothingness into his own hands. But what about the existential ideal of contingency, about being responsible for others? If our individual actions are connected to all of humanity, then wouldn’t suicide be an act of genocide? Wouldn’t all the damage done to others in the suicide’s wake be enough for existentialists to condemn it? (In fact, it was, and some prominent existentialists did end up denouncing suicide on those grounds.)

  But the twins’ suicides were not elegant philosophical statements. I doubt many are. They were impulsive and confused and messy. Though their deaths were a year and a half apart, they mirrored each other in method (hanging) and toxicity (cocaine and alcohol in their systems). From the outside, the deaths of these two beautiful and outgoing young women from a large, loving family must’ve looked baffling. A little closer in, Rebecca’s troubles were better known. Rachel was in danger by association and sometimes collusion. From the inside, their deaths were the final missteps to end all missteps. And maybe, in their last moments, that’s what they wanted. We could never know. They were so mysterious, so hard to communicate with, since as twins, as the youngest, they primarily communicated with each other. As toddlers, they had developed their own language, dropping sounds that were too hard to pronounce or creating whole other words unintelligible to the rest of us. In a family where education and achievement were default ideals, neither of them had finished high school, though both eventually received GEDs, Rebecca’s under court order after she’d forged one of Dad’s checks at sixteen. We’d marvel at how they even had different accents from the rest of the family, looser somehow, from another part of town, and at how they seemed to know so many diverse networks of people and were always being given free stuff, from appliances to luxury eyeglasses. Like most twins, they also strained
to separate themselves from each other, in appearance and interests, and could become envious and wary of each other. They were enigmas to us, but then again, how hard did I try to reach out to them? I was far away in college when their troubles first began, in middle school. I remember coming home and buying them books for Christmas, but now I’m not sure if that encouragement wasn’t tinged with condescension.

  “There is a forest of bottles on this table,” Chris pointed out. We cleared off the empties, lined them against the wall, and kept talking. We had to keep on with the work of confronting the worm. After all, for the existentialists, nothingness was a call to action, and to attention, not despair. According to them, we were born without meaning and had to create our own “essence.” Some felt it was a task that not everyone measured up to equally. Simone de Beauvoir, in response to Voltaire’s admonition for each of us to “cultivate our garden,” wrote that this was unhelpful advice, that there “are men who try to plow the entire earth, and there are others who would find a flower pot too great.” That’s how I often thought of the twins, stymied or overwhelmed in some way. Forgetting to water their beautiful potted flowers, not giving them the right amount of sun.

  Case assigned us the Cotkin reading to establish a little more of a foundation of existentialism and also show how the movement never really took off in the United States. One American existentialist thinker, Ralph Harper, tried to temper the perceived harshness and nihilism of the movement by formulating a more palatable “dynamic existentialism” that was at heart spiritual and even religious. It was heavily influenced by French theologian Pierre Rousselot, a Jesuit priest who died in battle in England in 1915 when he was only thirty-six. He espoused a “loving intellectualism” that focused on love and caring and awareness. This awareness was composed of “willing (desire, energy), possessing (intellect), and feeling (emotion)—all three.”

  Most people in the room were dismissive of Harper and Rousselot, thought Harper was too soft and that he bastardized the general existential tenets, but I gushed about how hopeful it made me, this definition of awareness, this approach to the task of living. And I appreciated having things broken down like that for me to consider. All three: willing, possessing, feeling. This was a trinity I could get behind, one that I did not have to worship but rather could enact.

  Eager to get back to Borowski and leave “loving intellectualism” behind, Nate asked what everyone thought about the blond girl with the gold watch in the story.

  “Oh, the blonde!” everyone murmured and riffled through the printouts, looking for her. Nate, who spends long days immersed in mute text, likes to read aloud, drawing out emphasis, modulating meaning:

  And suddenly, above the teeming crowd pushing forward like a river driven by an unseen power, a girl appears. She descends lightly from the train, hops up on to the gravel, looks around inquiringly, as if somewhat surprised. Her soft, blonde hair has fallen on her shoulders in a torrent, she throws it back impatiently. With a natural gesture she runs her hands down her blouse, casually straightens her skirt.… Here, standing before me, is a girl, a girl with enchanting blonde hair, with beautiful breasts, wearing a cotton blouse, a girl with a wise, mature look in her eyes. Here she stands, gazing straight into my face, waiting. And over there is the gas chamber: communal death, disgusting and ugly. And over in the other direction is the concentration camp: the shaved head, the heavy Soviet trousers in sweltering heat, the sickening, stale odour of dirty, damp female bodies, the animal hunger, the inhuman labour, and later the same gas chamber, only an even more hideous, more terrible death.…

  Why did she bring it? I think to myself, noticing a lovely gold watch on her delicate wrist.

  She asks the narrator directly what the situation is; the narrator is unable to respond.

  “I know,” she says with a shade of proud contempt in her voice, tossing her head. She walks off resolutely in the direction of the trucks. Someone tries to stop her; she boldly pushes him aside and runs up the steps.

  Out of all of the blunt descriptions of violence and squalor and degradation, Kevin, our existential plumber, said that the blonde radiated “symbol.” But of what? Michael, an exquisite classical-realist illustrator and Edgar Allan Poe scholar, was primed for this question. Michael lived alone in a large two-story house on an oak-sheltered street in the French Quarter, his daily uniform a painterly white linen shirt and khaki pants. Even his mysterious sadness seemed anachronistic to me, a torment from another century, of a different hue and timbre, but always near the surface, as accessible as his sense of humor and gentility.

  “In art,” he said, “truth and beauty and light are often connected. She saw the truth of the situation and her blond hair and gold watch reflected the light, separated her out from all the darkness.” More possibilities ricocheted around the room: culture, youth, virtue, Western civilization, desire, sensuality, courage… Almost everyone else in the story was acting so wretchedly, but she was singled out as brave and dignified; all the more muddying was her Aryan quality, something exalted by the Nazis.

  Christine, a chain-smoking historian and writer, instigator and prodder, had a thick reddish bob and an intense aura of patchouli that would linger exotically in my living room until the next morning. She had always intrigued me, as years before I’d met her when she was working at a crusty, decrepit hardware store on Elysian Fields Avenue, but then one day I saw a really good short story by her in an anthology of local writing. One of those necessary reminders that people everywhere have full and surprising lives, have things to say beyond “Here’s your change.” She said the blonde reminded her of Cordelia, the beautiful daughter in King Lear, who shows unwavering devotion to her aging father even after being disowned for refusing to compete against her sisters in a contest of who could most extravagantly express her love for him. Her truth-speaking voice, “ever soft, gentle, and low,” made her murder by hanging even more devastating. In both stories, virtue and truth are something beautiful and desirable, deeply affecting the characters around them, shining an honorable and attractive light on humanity. But both these young women take their good looks and dignity to an early grave, become part of both stories’ inexorable carnage.

  “Did anyone read Borowski’s bio?” Ellen asked. She was especially intrigued by the part about his relationship with a young girl before his suicide. Ellen was often interested in relationships, even though she herself seemed suspicious of romantic attachment and relished her own social freedom. Whenever we’d see her out at parties, there seemed to always be a rejected suitor somewhere nearby. Maybe, she thought, there was some connection with “the young girl” and the blonde?

  Borowski’s life story is as compelling as anything he ever wrote and has caused some to place him in a category of writers whose biographies not only belong “to the history of literature but are also literature themselves—that is, human destiny epitomized,” noted biographer Kott. In Nazi-occupied Poland, Borowski studied literature at an underground university in the Warsaw Ghetto, risked his life to publish pamphlets and his own poetry, and later worked to the limits of body and soul in the camps. Throughout it all he had one of those epic wartime romances: underground intrigue, Nazi traps, arrests, separation, letters. Assignment to the same camp, Auschwitz, where he caught glimpses of his beloved, her bald head and scabies-ravaged body, as he repaired the roofs in the Frauen-Konzentrationslager. More separation and long months of desperate searching after the end of the war, beseeching letters for her to return to Poland from Sweden. Reunion and their first night of marriage spent in a repatriation camp.

  He was considered the hope of Polish literature in the postwar generation, but ended up working as a journalist for the Communist party, later becoming disillusioned with it, confiding to friends that he had “stepped on the throat of his own song.” In a mysterious bit of biography, actually more like a crevasse, shortly before his death he had “entered into a liaison with a young girl,” wrote Kott. One afternoon, he visited his wife
and three-day-old daughter, their first and only child, in the hospital. Later that evening, at home, he turned on the stove’s gas valves and sealed himself in the kitchen.

  Why do some suicides complete the act just as a new phase of their life is opening up? Why did both of my sisters hang themselves shortly after moving into new domestic situations? Why did Cordelia have to die by hanging and not merely be strangled? What point was Shakespeare trying to make? What point were my sisters trying to make? Why was the proximity between “suicide” and “transcendence” in that “Nothingness” entry bothering me so much? What did Borowski want from that “liaison with a young girl”? Why did the deaths of the blonde, Cordelia, even the twins, suddenly feel sacrificial, youth and beauty crushed by the world’s brutality? But sacrificed to what end? To intensify everyone else’s suffering?

  My questions never entered the conversation, just stayed in my head, where they connected like gears and wore me down with their whirring insistence. I’m usually grateful for how good conversation stirs up my head, in ways that solitary thinking or reading alone cannot. I usually appreciate the unpredictable interaction with different consciousnesses and experiences. But though I tried to be buoyed by the discussion, it could not relieve my feeling of unresolvable dread, especially regarding Borowski’s death. I thought about his poor wife, and how she must’ve felt, having just undergone the animal glory and trauma of childbirth only to be greeted by its opposite, her husband’s death by his own hand. I wondered if she’d had a reaction similar to my sister Kristin’s after Rachel’s death. She immediately stopped breast-feeding her six-month-old. Not of her own choice—the milk just wouldn’t come. It’s always been so sad and fascinating to me, that grief could interfere with your body’s natural cycle like that, could prevent it from creating nourishment. When my sisters died, I was single, with time to focus on my own spectacular pain, to indulge in the outlandish tragedy of losing two sisters to suicide. When my dad died, I grieved with children for the first time, had to be more circumspect, careful not to frighten them with spontaneous crying jags at the dinner table, to include them in the grief but not suffocate them.