The Regrets Read online

  At COFFEE I often saw Jesse, a former NYU classmate, typing out his Ph.D. dissertation. In the time-honored manner of coffee shop strangers, he once asked me to watch his laptop while he went to poop; he showed zero sign of recognizing me, though we’d had many swinging-dick arguments over Foucault during college, and had once been goaded by our mutual friends into an arm-wrestling match at a dive bar (I’d won two out of three).

  Another night, I saw my friend Todd stumbling out of the faux-gritty bar with his arm slung proprietarily around Apple, the ex-girlfriend of the drummer in his band, the band I’d occasionally subbed in on keyboards when their usual keyboardist got a better offer. Apple had often hung around after our shows and had tried several times, unsubtly, to sleep with me. Ironically, I was the only band member who’d never been attracted to her; I went for a certain type, and she was the opposite (loud, blond, openly wounded).

  Had my death destabilized things so much? Had her shock at what had happened propelled her into Todd’s welcoming, eczema-scabbed arms? I stopped on the street and watched them walk by. They didn’t even notice me.

  They’d probably already found a new substitute keyboardist too. A substitute for the substitute.

  I’d never felt so fungible. Something swelled within me, a kind of panicked sadness that I didn’t know how to expel, and I found myself following, walking briskly until I caught up as they paused at the corner to wait for the light. I leaned over and got Todd’s attention. “Excuse me,” I said. “Do you have a light?”

  “Sorry, man,” he said. “I just quit.” He gave me a distracted, apologetic smile, then turned back to Apple. The light changed and they crossed the street, arms latched firmly around each other’s waists.

  Et tu, Todd? What kind of person quits smoking when his friend dies? Wasn’t he supposed to still be immobile, perforated by grief? He looked so possessive and content, gazing into Apple’s round upturned face. It was as if he had a whole new orchard of pleasures stretched out before him, nurtured by my decomposing body. “You’re welcome, asshole,” I whispered after him.

  I knew this wasn’t fair. But I realized now how alone I was.

  Did it even make sense to use the word “I” anymore? I was like the photographic negative of a person, an absence given form, a loose ache of consciousness attached to a cheap facsimile of a body; I could blend in anywhere only because I belonged nowhere.

  * * *

  You may experience intense resentment of people around you. You may envy the way they are unquestioningly lodged in their bodies. They may appear anesthetized, half awake. Resist all urges to “wake people up.” Shocking them will not have the effect you imagine it might. Plus, you will incur regrets.

  Soon I shared, with Saint Margaret and co., the familiar, jokey banter of strangers woven together by routine. S. M. herself turned out to be something of a genius. One of those first days, I’d complimented her on the intricate, perfect steamed-milk leaf she’d created atop my espresso’s tiny surface. “Is this actually as hard as it looks?” I’d asked. “Did you have to, like, go to barista school to learn it?”

  She shrugged. “Took me a day or two to get it right.”

  “Do you always do the leaf? Or do you get creative sometimes?”

  “Oh, I am creative.” She winked. “You think that’s a leaf?”

  I knew the game we were playing here. I’d played it often with girls like her, cool girls who shoehorned you into a sexual dynamic to prove they could control it. I squinted down into the espresso cup. “Oh,” I said. “Oh. I see it now. I’m blushing.”

  “No you’re not.” She smiled. “But just wait. I’m very, very good at this.”

  After that, every day she made me custom espresso art that brilliantly walked the line between smut and cliché. Was it a snowflake or a snooch? A tree or cock and balls? A yin-yang or a titty fuck? Every day I loudly, vocally admired her artwork; I offered erudite, prurient exegeses. Sometimes the other baristas gathered round to see.

  Yet I never learned a single fact about their lives. They never asked my name, or shared their own. If they thought it was odd that I showed up every morning at seven and stayed for an hour or two, mostly just staring off into space, they never let on. If all my theatrical interactions with Saint Margaret should somehow have made me more visible to her or to the rest of them—well, they didn’t.

  Most people don’t notice most other people. Most people don’t notice much of anything. Their lives fit them too snugly; noticing requires space. I suppose I’d always known this in an intellectual way, but now that I lacked a life of my own to envelop and absorb me—now that my life consisted mostly of strenuous attempts to impersonate a person—this seemed like the staggering central fact about humans.

  At times, there was a fun side to my new anonymity: I spent a few nights in bars, talking to strangers, making up baroque lies, briefly enjoying the chance to be whoever I wanted—Suave Emergency Doctor Wes Bennett, Shell-shocked War Reporter Jeremy Flank, Libidinous Sculptor Ricardo Pierce.

  But the game was too easy. Other people were so embarrassingly credulous. “So you’re, like, a hero,” one girl actually said, laying a fluttery manicured hand on my thigh, after I’d told her about my stint with Doctors Without Borders in Afghanistan, the time I’d tenderly pulled shrapnel from a young girl’s land mine wound, looking into her dark quivering eyes and singing a low lullaby to calm her, while her mother—who’d just been gang-raped by warlords—huddled in the corner, weeping and cursing George Bush.

  The girl’s name was Ashley or Ashton or something. She looked as though she’d grown up riding ponies. Her hair was the color of genetically modified corn. “I don’t like the word ‘hero,’” I said, placing my hand over hers. “You know who the real hero was? That girl was the hero. Even now, every day she hobbles to school on her crude prosthetic leg, determined to learn to read—”

  “Don’t they, like, punish them for that?”

  “You have no idea. If the Taliban overheard her so much as sing her ABCs, they’d cut out her clit with a scimitar.”

  She covered her mouth in horror. “They do that?”

  I closed my eyes, as against an onslaught of unwelcome images, then took a sip of my beer. “You have no idea,” I said, “what they will do.”

  Ashley/Ashton was quivering by now, looking at me with wet wide eyes, her body tense with reverence. I could see her nipples pushing up against the thin fabric of her shirt. I almost wanted to follow through—my contempt for her had reached a near-erotic intensity; I could almost feel the ghost of the imaginary mutilated Afghan girl hovering at my ear, whispering, Do it, hate-fuck this girl with her intact pussy and her dumb hungry gaze, fill her up with the blunt savage cock of death—

  And that’s when I knew it was probably time to go home.

  I couldn’t help but (self-reproachfully) feel that this new quality in myself was just an intensification of a quality I’d always had—this desperation sublimated into something Therese referred to as “male plague.” I’d struggled against my own male plague: in my guilty reading of bell hooks and Judith Butler and all the queer theorists Therese foisted upon me, the way you might foist vegetable shakes upon someone with a junk food addiction; in my therapy sessions with Myrna. Knowing what I knew now, though, I couldn’t help but (self-pityingly) blame the Office. I couldn’t help but wonder who I might have been if April 8, 1996, had gone the way it was supposed to have gone. I’d tried to explain it to Myrna, harder than I’d tried with the rest of my shrinks, those kind stern men and women who’d adjust my doses minutely, then adjust them right back, like an anxious writer inserting and removing a comma.

  Oh, Myrna. Myrna, I miss you—with your slate-colored sweaters and your Susan Sontag gray streak and your lesbian partner and your two large, hardy dogs. That was all I knew about you—that was all the photographs in your office disclosed—but I could imagine the rest, the West Village apartment and the expensive olive oil and the handmade soaps in the bathroo
m and the earnest discussions, over late-night red wine, about whether or not to purchase a dilapidated country home or adopt a biracial child. Myrna, I’m making fun of you but I loved you. You refused to be charmed by me. When I teased you, you didn’t tease back—you just looked at me sadly, as if you could see right through me, but couldn’t quite name the thing that you saw.

  * * *

  Do not try to figure things out. Do not try to avenge anything, or to “set things right.” We suggest that you simply try to enjoy this gift of time. Did you have a “bucket list”? Now is the time to knock those items off, for good! You won’t get another chance.

  Also: if you attempt to curtail this period through any form of auto-antagonism (read: suicide), you will incur regrets. Besides, it won’t work.

  I tried, I really did. I went to Coney Island one day and rode the Cyclone until I threw up. I walked all over Brooklyn and Queens, hovering in previously unknown-to-me ethnic enclaves for hours on end, sampling varieties of fried dough I hadn’t known existed, getting into long conversations with rough-faced Ukrainian bartenders, playing chess with leather-jacketed con men in the park. I roamed the streets, sitting on random stoops, talking to whoever was around. I communed with a wider variety of people, with a wider variety of problems, than I ever had in my first life, my real life, because, well—I had nothing else to do.

  In my first life, I had always remained snugly in the grip of my own relatively minor problems. Each night I went to bed thinking about tomorrow’s office meeting, or the woman with whom I’d just been studying for the math test (this was my and Therese’s euphemism for sex, our original unnecessary alibi to her parents), or the way that the latest adjustment to my antidepressants felt a little bit off. In the moments when I had encountered alien forms of suffering, I hadn’t wanted to get closer—probably from some misguided fear of contagion. Now what was there to be afraid of? How could my own situation be any worse? I was dead.

  But my communion with New York’s lost souls showed me nothing new; it just deepened my awareness of the essential fuckedness of everything. I told one sad man or woman after another, in bars or on stoops or at bus stops, about how I’d killed my best friend—yes, killed her. I wasn’t sure what had happened, but I was certain it had been my fault, an error deeply embedded in the flaws of my character: my self-absorption, my self-pity, my distractibility, my refusal to take life seriously.

  When I spouted this monologue, my listeners just nodded, with unsettling looks of familiarity. Each of them had suffered through something just as terrible, or worse—though none of them had died doing it. In any case, none could offer redemption. They were all just sad and fucked, and trying to make the best of their fucked situations, and not doing a very good job. Knowing this didn’t make me wiser or deeper or more Jesus-like. It just made me want to crumple into a ball. I wanted everything to go away, all of it.

  So I started retreating again: drawing into myself, spending more time sitting at COFFEE, or reading on my narrow twin bed, trying to ward off the past and the present. Like a prisoner, I counted the days, marking them on a hand-drawn calendar on my bedroom wall—each day bringing me closer, I assumed, to that letter from the Office that would instruct me on how to return. I enjoyed the clichéd quality of this gesture, its narrative over-inscription, its thorough depletion.

  I would have traded this sorry Lazarus half-life in a second for the chance to tell Therese what I’d never told her, to apologize and explain. Wouldn’t she have believed my story anyway? Why had I doubted her? Hadn’t her love been big enough to make room for some bright awkward angel? Or I would have welcomed pure oblivion, the nonexistence of this body that had caused me nothing but trouble. Again, more strongly than ever, I wanted to die.

  And I could, I would—eventually. I had been back on Earth for almost six weeks, half the allotted time. In the meantime, I’d have to keep moving in my flickering half-assed way through the streets Therese and I had once walked.

  There was nothing of her in any of these doorways, under any of these streetlamps. I didn’t find her drinking in any of these bars or wandering any of these parks or sidewalks. Each time I saw a curly-haired, full-voiced woman, I lost her all over again. Each time I heard that crunch of bone, saw the bent limbs, heard that strangled cry that was the last noise her body would ever release—that body I had loved in my own sloppy yet ardent way, now reduced to street-dirtied carrion.

  There’s no way to assimilate a memory like that, no way to connect it to your current or past experience. At least, I thought, in this version of my life, nothing I do really matters. At least I won’t be able to fuck anything up any further.

  Was I ever wrong.

  * * *

  Should you be tempted to begin any new relationships in this re-manifestation, please remember that—contrary to appearances—you are, in fact, dead. Your death is a terminal condition; while it is technically incommunicable, certain symptoms of it may be transferred to others. Sexual contact with another person in this state is, perhaps, the most efficient way to incur regrets.

  To be alive even partially, I suppose, is to be betrayed again and again by your body—by its recklessness, its commitment to pleasure.

  The body doesn’t care what you’ve done, or what you deserve. It doesn’t listen to warnings. Your body doesn’t know you’ve just crashed and totaled everything that ever mattered to you, or that it, itself, is mostly dead. All it knows is that it has some life in it. That life, no matter how raw and fragile and doomed, will do what life does: reach out toward other life.

  I first noticed the girl one August morning, at the coffee shop. She had dark hair and glasses and bright-red lipstick and alarmingly perfect posture. Unlike the regulars, who slouched over their laptops or sprawled proprietarily across the threadbare couches, this woman sat up charm school straight, looking lost in private thought, delivering tiny bites of cupcake into her small red mouth.

  She seemed different from the other patrons, these bland sedated zoo animals: alert and uncomfortable, like a squirrel, or some other kind of nervous prey. Did she, too, intuit that everything surrounding her was treacherously provisional? Even when she got up—pushing her chair back beneath the table as if to correct the temporary displacement her presence had caused, placing her dish on the counter with deliberate precision—there was a tense, fraught quality to the way she doled out her attention. I wondered, with a wave of arousal, how this attention might bestow itself upon another person. For example, myself.

  That day, I followed her out of the coffee shop at a discreet distance, and watched her walk to the bus stop, arrange herself on its low glassed-in bench. I hovered there on the sidewalk, unable to approach any further.

  As I lay in bed that night, I pictured various parts of the girl, one by one. First, I thought only of her red lips. Then her pale slender throat. Then her cute butt. I couldn’t manage the whole girl. I could just barely hold myself together against the feeling that I was about to come loose and undone. Already I was so overstimulated by everything all the time that just living made my entire body feel like a throbbing erect cock; the prospect of actual sex was terrifying and unthinkable. The slightest swoon of genuine lust sent my molecules racing, as if I was about to heat up into a liquid or gas.

  I could hear Therese’s admonishing voice in my head, the voice she’d always used when I confessed some new erotic obsession. And how is this one different? she’d ask, one eyebrow raised. How are you going to avoid drive-by heartbreak this time?

  I’d mutter some bullshit about living in the moment, embracing uncertainty, being honest about my own limitations, and eventually she’d stop teasing, grow frustrated: Thomas, I love you, but when are you going to grow up? You never move toward anything, only away. You just grab the nearest warm body and run for the exits.

  She was right—at least, she’d always been right in the past. And yet, and yet: what if this—the girl—was just what I needed?

  Not a relationship, of
course—I had no interest in dragging another person into the rickety haunted house of this half-life, in deliberately breaking the Office’s rules. But just a little harmless crush, from afar? Just a little fantasy, a spike of pleasure to sustain me through the emptiest, most memory-haunted hours of my day—a reason, besides my appointed duties, to get myself out of bed each morning?

  The next day she didn’t come to COFFEE, but I took a chance on the idea that she might be at the bus stop again, around the same time. I had to catch my own bus there at some point anyway, to go mail my daily report; there was no harm in showing up a couple of hours earlier than usual. I told myself I wouldn’t linger; I’d board my bus when it came, whether the girl was there or not.

  I hoped only to sit next to her for a few minutes—that I might just be able to hold myself together against my awareness of her body next to mine, its contours and privacy and scent. This possibility alone seemed like reason enough for existing. It was its own argument against death.