The Futilitarians Read online

  I knew he was being irrational in demanding I not write about it, but having two daughters kill themselves is irrational. I remember having no adequate response except to flush warmly, reach for my wine, and look out the window in mute acceptance, suddenly oppressed by the padded booth and black marbled walls. Feeling stuck and wanting to get the hell out of there. Luckily, it was the end of lunch, when things materialize in accordance with the regular rhythm of the meal. The de rigueur Drambuie in snifters would have arrived, throwing quivering amber shadows on the table, and soon after, the check would come and go without Dad even looking at it, a wordless understanding with his waiter. We would go our separate ways into the afternoon. I knew which bars in the French Quarter Dad frequented and would steer clear, go to my own bars in my own neighborhood.

  Soon after Dad died, I ran into an ex-boyfriend, a long mistake whom it took me several confusing years to extricate myself from, who told me how he’d overheard a couple of men in a golf clubhouse reminiscing about the legendary Rib Room days and their post-lunch benders. One of the men said that he was often tasked with keeping track of Gisleson, because he had a tendency to just disappear.

  MARCH

  The Belly of the Whale

  On the morning commute to Otto’s school, we’d sometimes pass a bar, a twenty-four-hour joint with its door propped open to the daylight. Often the threshold framed a patron on a stool, usually an older guy, maybe smoking, who had either been there all night or was starting very early. Behind him, redly glowing light fixtures on the low ceiling, the jittery screens of video poker machines, that sweet, dread touch of Christmas lights strung above the bottles. Unused cash registers with neat squares of rags covering the buttons. George Jones on the jukebox back by the pool table.

  Sometimes we would get stuck in traffic in front of that bar and watch one of the patrons gazing outside. I’d wave and one of the guys would wave back. Once Otto asked why I did that, wave, and I said, “I’m just saying hi.” Then thought to myself, Saluting the Tragic Plane on the way to kindergarten drop-off.

  Because of our March ECRG reading, an excerpt from Arthur Koestler’s 1964 opus, The Act of Creation, I had become attuned to life’s Tragic and Trivial Planes. In The Act of Creation, which explores the nature and purpose of creativity in life, novelist/journalist/anti–death penalty activist/suicide Koestler outlined what he believed are the two essential planes of existence: the Trivial and the Tragic. The Trivial Plane is where most of us spend a great deal of our lives, doing the work of survival and civilization: repetitive labor, commuting, running errands, and general life maintenance. In the Trivial Plane we are held down by “the grip of convention,” and the possibility of self-transcendence diminishes. We experience the Tragic Plane when we fully connect to metaphysical forces like love, despair, and death, but if we spend too much time in “the belly of the whale,” which tends to “disrupt all logical operations,” we become lost.

  The Koestler reading was chosen by Tristan, born on a barge on an Amsterdam canal, a former bookseller and editor and now a carpenter. He’d been one of the first to arrive at the warehouse when our nonprofit held a drawing marathon in the half-deserted, art-starved city after Katrina, along with the National Guard. A stranger to us, he stayed most of the twenty-four hours, even helped clean up the huge mess the following morning. He’s been a steady partner in projects and a generous friend ever since. That evening he described how about twenty years before he’d taken a nine-month job in Antarctica, painting the walls of the McMurdo Station, an American research center. The average temperature was always below zero and there were only about a hundred people there, the paint crew cloaked in white suits, against the white walls, atop the white continent. He said that the sensory and emotional isolation was intense but that he learned to recognize fellow workers by their gestures and gait, an industrious band of ghosts whose moods he could sense by the way they held a paintbrush or traversed the camp. When he finally went on leave to Christchurch, New Zealand, he was so overwhelmed by the intensity of daily life—the colors, the sounds, the expressions on people’s faces—that he felt like a newborn baby, experiencing everything for the first time, wandering the town near tears.

  Koestler posited that both the Tragic and Trivial Planes are necessary to live a fully engaged life, and that each plane can only be truly grasped through contact with the other. The seam, or tightrope, between them is where human creativity, whether personal, artistic, or scientific, exists. While the Tragic Plane feeds our minds and souls, the Trivial Plane provides the necessary “social and intellectual stability” needed to create and function.

  There’s something to be said for putting a name to a condition, a certain comfort in common recognition. After reading the Koestler piece, I started evaluating my days in terms of the Tragic and Trivial, how much time I spent on either plane. I could’ve charted it out like an EKG reading. In the morning, on Trivial lockdown getting everyone fed, ready, and where they need to go; late morning, if I’m writing, I check in with the Tragic; early afternoon, at work teaching, the planes are interlocked; afternoon safely back on the Trivial with pickup, homework, dinner. Though often, around five o’clock, it’s like someone walks up and hangs an anvil around my neck, which maybe explains the universal cocktail hour. Then everyone shuffles sleepily toward nighttime oblivion. With enough luck and self-medication, no night terrors at three in the morning. But there are always places in life where these dichotomies fall apart. For me, it’s caring for my children and husband, when affection breaks through the chores, times when making dinner and folding laundry also feel like love.

  At March’s ECRG, we talked about how difficult it can be to negotiate the planes, like when you’re, say, shopping at Target, but deep in some anxiety or despair, and you run into an acquaintance who asks how you’re doing and you can only smile and lie, white-knuckling the edge of the Trivial Plane. We talked about how some people we know seem to firmly inhabit one or the other, about people we’d lost outright to the Tragic Plane, dragging others down with them for a while. I wondered if Rebecca and Rachel knew, on some subconscious level, that their suicides awarded the rest of us siblings lifetime memberships to the Tragic Plane, wondered if spite figured at all in the blackness of those last moments of preparation and descent. Most likely not, but they always seemed so united in their aggrievement. We thought they were spoiled, our tired parents too lax with discipline, with curfews, with money, after already raising six children. The twins thought that as the youngest they were getting the scraps of a big, noisy, energetic family.

  Koestler wrote that whole communities can be relocated to the gusty Tragic Plane through catastrophes like war and natural disaster. We agreed and talked about how after Katrina, it was extraordinary to live in a city where people were so blasted open and vulnerable, charged with frustration and purpose. For the first year, it was a town without small talk, everyone eager to connect with each other, share their sad, crazy tales. So much work and worry; people seemed exhausted all of the time. In addition to all the authentic human interaction, hope, and generosity, this Tragic Plane was also distinguished by the exodus of friends, the premature loss of many of our elderly, vultures of all stripes, suicide, and divorce.

  But, Koestler continued, these communities “soon succeed in banalizing even tragedy itself and carry on business as usual among the shambles.” Also true. Just two months after 80 percent of the city had flooded, and was still mostly empty, my older sister, Kristin, insisted on celebrating her husband’s birthday with a big dinner at a nice French Quarter restaurant, one of the few that had reopened by October. Restaurants, five-star to one-star, had limited menus and were serving everything on paper, plastic, or Styrofoam because the water system was still wrecked, and everyone was understaffed. Kristin couldn’t abide that, despised drinking wine out of plastic, so she brought her own case of wineglasses to the restaurant for us to drink from, then took them home and washed them herself.

  That night
Brad and I were sitting next to a man I’d known for years who had lost his father, house, and job during Katrina. He had a look that had become familiar during that time, a loose, tired quality acquired from your life being mangled and imperfectly reassembled, wife and children suddenly shoehorned into a small apartment in a part of town you’d never liked but that hadn’t flooded, and working a job you’d never wanted but that paid. In the tawny glow of the grand dining room of the Bourbon House, our plastic cutlery might’ve squeaked against the Styrofoam plates, just like it did against the containers we lined up for at the Red Cross trucks when we first came back to the destroyed city, but we were toasting my brother-in-law and the strength of our troubled region with my sister’s wineglasses, clutching the delicate stems.

  Spending so much time on the Tragic Plane alters your relationship to the world. Obsessions and patterns emerge that were not available to you before. My first extended visit there was when Rebecca died, in 1998. We buried her in the half-crumbling Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 in an aboveground tomb that had been given to my great-grandfather to pay off a debt. The tomb at Lafayette No. 1 was merely a piece of real estate like any other, and thus contained a whole other family of strangers. My grandparents and five previous generations on my mother’s side are buried in a tomb in a Creole section of St. Louis No. 2 on Esplanade Avenue, on the same street where my grandmother was born. My grandfather had been interred there about six months before Rebecca died, and according to certain Latin burial practices in New Orleans, you’re supposed to wait a year and a day before reopening the brick-and-mortar seal on the vault. So my mother asked her mother, alive at the time, if the auxiliary Lafayette No. 1 tomb could be used for Rebecca.

  It hadn’t been opened for well over a hundred years. Walking the crushed oyster-shell lanes toward the interment, we passed a few tombs engraved DIED OF YELLOW FEVER. When we arrived at what was about to become our family tomb, our grief was momentarily pushed aside by curiosity about the freshest vision of history we’d probably ever see. As my older brother held the urn with Rebecca’s ashes, we peered inside and marveled. The shadows of the tomb, which had been sealed up since 1884, still held the same crypt-cooled air of that year and two small, sealed iron sarcophagi that Mom mused distractedly could’ve been yellow-fever victims, since the date was about right and that was often a method of burial for the more affluent victims of the disease.

  Over the next several months, the thought of Rebecca being interred with nineteenth-century yellow-fever victims nagged me, embellished my grief in a way I didn’t understand. The metaphorical connection was not neat: yellow fever was an impersonal affliction while suicide was intensely personal. One had been more or less eradicated and the other probably never would be—timelessly, universally, connected to our condition. But both were associated with helplessness, a giving over to an invading force. And both were contingent on the communal, and thus could have devastating effects on the community.

  One afternoon, still mired in grief, I remembered an old book about yellow fever I’d acquired at that cursed estate sale where I’d found A Concise Dictionary of Existentialism and searched for it around my apartment. At the time of Rebecca’s death, I was renting a cheap, grand place on Felicity Street, in the Lower Garden District, one of those mansions divided up into apartments during the city’s late-twentieth-century decline, with double parlors, tall ceilings and windows, tiny, squalid bathroom and kitchen, and a man I should have left long before. I finally found the cinder-block-sized book in a closet, hosting silverfish in a musty cardboard box. As I sat on the floor and carefully opened it, the book shed vestiges of leather spine. It was actually the 1882 Annual Report of the Louisiana Board of Health, including brittle foldout charts, graphs, and maps detailing various public health issues, and also the latest medical research, statistics, speculation, correspondence, and quarantine efforts relating to diseases like smallpox and yellow fever. Apparently, sixty babies died from teething that year, while Mardi Gras travel from the North and West brought in smallpox, as did the booming cotton trade. The report blamed “the coloreds’” reluctance to get vaccinated for various diseases’ persistence in the city, but who could blame them for not trusting white men with needles? The thousands of ships that came through the port were described as disease-breeding vessels importing microscopic threats from all over the globe.

  The book and I soon moved from the floor by the closet to the airy front parlor, and settled onto the couch I’d bought with the live-in boyfriend and which I would leave behind a couple of years later, with most everything else, when I finally came to my senses. The annual report was from around the same time our Lafayette No. 1 tomb had last been used, and I focused on information regarding yellow fever in New Orleans. An extensive article by Dr. Joseph Jones, who spent twenty-seven years of his life studying the disease, began, “A pestilential fever of continuous and specific type, originally developed in tropical and insular America; confined to definite geographic limits and dependent in its origin and spread upon definite degrees of temperature and capable of transportation and propagation in ships and towns and cities.” Dr. Jones cataloged its symptoms thus:

  intense pain in the head and back, injected eyes, rapid circulation, elevated temperatures… depression of the nervous and muscular forces, and of the general and capillary circulation, jaundice, urinary suppression, passive hemorrhages from the stomach and bowels, nares, tongue, gums, uterus, vagina, gall bladder and anus, and in extreme cases from the eyes, ears and skin; black vomit; convulsions, delirium and coma.

  Lurid, hand-colored, full-page drawings depicted a young man in a collared nightshirt tucked under a lovely green blanket in various stages of yellow fever. First: flushed forehead and cheeks under dark, delicate curls and gray, stupefied, bloodshot eyes. Several pages later, the final stage: eyes yellow, brow deeply furrowed as if in distracted concentration, black vomit splotching all over his pillow, dressing gown, and sheets. The shadows on the pillow, cloudlike in the first drawing, are now more jagged and urgent. The angle of the shadows suggests a bedside lantern, one that must’ve lit the artist’s sketchpad as he tried to get the capillaries, the curls, and the spring-green blanket’s arabesques just right.

  Dr. Jones wrote, “We have, in New Orleans, great variations in the severity and duration of the febrile stage.” So true, I thought, slipping back into the metaphorical. At the same age Rebecca was when she died, I’d been caught up in my own aimless febrile stage. I lived in an old Creole house from the 1830s on Orleans Street in the French Quarter where leprous plaster fell in clumps from the ceiling, cracks spidered and split, ivy worked its way subcutaneously into the rooms. During that time I suffered a sort of fever, the kind that made you stay up all night and spend late mornings in a pained, lethargic struggle for your senses. A dislocation of days, a disorientation of hours. I worked as a cocktail waitress and later at the front desk of a hotel down the street. I usually had a bottle of Dewar’s on my dresser, and every night was another opportunity for a hundred bad decisions. But eventually, incrementally, through luck and inchoate forward movement, I broke through all that, applied to grad school, started teaching (though I was still making bad romantic decisions). Why couldn’t Rebecca have broken through her stretch of dark confusion? What resources did she not possess? So many unsuccessful suicides are grateful for that second chance that it’s become part of conventional suicide-prevention wisdom: if vulnerable people can just make it through those dark moments, they’ll be okay on the other side. But roughly one in a thousand of us can’t or don’t.

  Why did I conflate yellow fever with Rebecca’s suicide? If her fellow tenants in the tomb were indeed yellow-fever victims, why was I so preoccupied with the symptoms and grisly circumstances of their deaths? The images, the suffering? Was it an attempt to ground her death in something both historical and visceral, rescue her from the void? Metaphor can be good for attempted void rescuing. The satisfaction of connection, the sharpening of feeling. Even th
ough I was having a hard time reading books during that first period of intense grief, out of my inner chaos literary patterns of arrangement were still forming, almost helplessly.

  A similar thing would happen in the aftermath of Rachel’s death, when I was once again thrust onto the Tragic Plane. At a springtime lunch at an outdoor café with my mother, both of us still very much in that raw, pained state, I saw within a cascade of jasmine vine a young tendril that had curved back up on itself and twisted into a perfect noose. I was so distracted by the noose I could barely participate in conversation. Even nature was conspiring to make sure the chosen method of both girls’ deaths would always be present to me, always exist somewhere in the world. For a time after that lunch I began to see nooses and potential nooses everywhere, in oriental carpets, in belts, in necklaces, in cursive letters, electrical wires, a knot of twine in the junk drawer.

  While the noose was a rather focused motif, the yellow-fever metaphor/preoccupation had been compounded by the appearance of bouquets of yellow roses at Rebecca’s tomb every now and then for about a year after her death. It was presumably her ex, M., the large, blond, doughy, abusive strip-club owner. I had suspected he’d been abusing her, and it was confirmed one night at a party after she died, when an acquaintance began a conversation with condolences, but then suddenly revealed that he and his wife had briefly lived next door to Rebecca and M. and had often heard the unmistakable sound of my sister being beaten. Slaps, thuds, cries, etc. I turned stony inside and asked why he never called the cops or told anyone. He said he was afraid of M. and his two massive Rottweilers. I don’t remember how the conversation ended, though I do remember leaving the party immediately, weighed down with disgust and sadness. Though M. had not been invited to the funeral and it would’ve been hard to find the right tomb in the labyrinthine cemetery, I assumed he was the one leaving the flowers because of a discovery my sisters and I made when we broke into his house a few days after Rebecca was interred.