All My Letters Were Written by Ghosts
“What’s that sound? Is that a cat or a baby?”
“That’s a baby. Yeah, so I had a baby, in May. Wild, yeah? I have a cat too, but she’s not as loud?”
“How was the birth?”
“It was…uncomplicated. I was lucky. Given my age (laughs). But it was still miserable (laughs weakly). But I won’t be doing it again, so.”
“How’s the baby? Do you like the baby?”
(Pensive pause) “I do, a lot more than I thought I would. I like being with him. It’s just, I dunno, it’s super hard, especially that first little while postpartum, but it’s getting better.”
“Good. (pauses) I’ll trade you. I’ll take the baby, and you can have mine. I (inaudible) have (angrily) fucking glioblastoma. (inhalation on other end, uncomfortable pause) I’m, look, I’m sorry. I (halting, inaudible) don’t mean it.”
(long pause) “It’s ok.”
I was singing another round of the problematic Indian song to my son in the back of the car, I was scrubbing stained pajamas. I was taking part in an exercise class with a bunch of women on mats and breathing deeply with my lungs, my intricately lobed, working lungs, while the instructor exhorted us to “HARTU ARNASA, BOTA, OSO ONDO, HARTU, OSO ONDO PRIMERAN” I was walking down the street without my glasses and everything was blurry, I was talking to myself but really to you while walking uphill, I was pulling out clumps of hair and all that time you were dead, you had stopped, you were not. I was pulling laundry out of the washer I was burning the grilled cheese I was thinking about the latest awful stuff in the news and you were dead, I couldn’t talk to you about it now. I was wasting time on social media and remembering when I tried to explain Facebook to you I realized I had the endorsement of a dead person on my LinkedIn, an inbox full of smarmy notes from people now gone.
I am wondering if they’ve laid you to rest yet I am looking for an obituary on Google I am wondering if they will wash and bury you or something else, I wonder what kinds of inappropriate jokes your father is making since 2 of his 4 children have died before him I am thinking how your wife uprooted her life changed careers to move cross country twice for you and now what is she going to do I won’t ask, obviously, not now anyway, but I should say something. I wonder if your body is in the hospital morgue or if it is already in the ground, they can’t have used any of your organs, seeing as how things went in the end. I wonder if your hair is still growing where you are, if it’s coming back after you shaved it for chemo.
Once when I was 20 you saved my life, you and Justin. Ok so the nurse at the hospital said my life probably wasn’t really really truly in danger, but the sharp wasp sting was pretty dangerous, seriously dangerous enough to give me epinephrine and injected antihistamines and liquid peppermint allergy drugs, to be laid out with hideous hives and swollen everywhere for two weeks. Life is fragile, you told me, when I thanked you, and I cringed, like I did at a lot of things you said because they were embarrassing but you weren’t wrong, that’s the thing about clichés, they’re not wrong. Then Justin ghosted us before anyone called it that and I should tell him, I think he should know.
I read your Rate My Professor reviews just now. A lot of those kids seemed to think you were a hardass. I don’t know what they expected from someone with your pedigree, with the years you put in at the most elite institutions in the world where your family’s wealth allowed you to focus on your studies. It is almost Thanksgiving so I am thinking of the time I drove to L.A. so I could have Thanksgiving with your friends who knew our five-minute history. One of them said something suggestive and I kicked him in the ass, actually physically in the pants. He’s now one of the world’s leading mass spectroscopists, or is it spectrometrists. I knitted you a gorgeous blanket after I dumped you and spent a lot of money shipping it to California because that is what I did in my 20s.
My email is full of messages from the dead, my letter box is overflowing with cards from writers no longer living. When Daniel Pearl was beheaded those acts weren’t so routinely in the news and I remarked that it was very sad. You told me that all of life was sad as if I was kind of dumb for thinking being beheaded on a video to your pregnant wife could be relatively sadder than other things. You told me I wasn’t special when my advisor was denied tenure and I had to leave my PhD program, you said I should do a PhD anyway, somewhere else. I hope that if you’re still hanging around somehow you don’t think I’m being especially stupid to think it sad when you died of sepsis at 45 after being made blind and immobile by a brain tumor after being pushed around in a wheelchair by your friend the director of clinical trials who was going to get you into one until it was too late. I hope you’ll lay down some high expectations somehow, in my dreams or something, about my unfinished novels, I think we can lay the PhD thing to rest at this point.
I keep a running list on Amazon of gifts I am thinking of giving people later on, obviously I don’t buy from them but you must admit it’s a handy place to keep a list and there are things on there for you. Cookbooks and novels I won’t send you now. I like giving presents probably a third of my bookshelf is books from you, pretty happening stuff I wouldn’t know about otherwise. I have been reading the New Yorker for 22 years because of you I am a big reader of blogs and then you told me about Gawker. Even after I had long stopped sending you links I still think you would like this article. I would ask something maudlin like if they have internet magazines in the afterlife but you were pretty avowedly not a believer in that sort of thing, and I didn’t say your memory should be a blessing to your parents, I didn’t think it would wear well. Your mother has become slightly more dominatable by your stepping out, she said it was incomprehensible and that also makes me sad, I hope you don’t think less of me for that.
The last time I saw you was when you came to visit I never met anyone who had made it to idk 35 or so without ever hanging their laundry up to dry, not even on the backs of chairs or something, and I didn’t know what to say when you were worried about hanging your wet underpants on the balcony since everyone does and no one cares. Didn’t you ever just lack the quarters or whatever? When you were diagnosed with gout everyone said you were the perfect gout patient they wouldn’t have expected less. You ate with Jonathan Gold and he lived longer than you did, you know, 12 years, and his cancer snuck up on him faster, which might be better, I think. I never would have had Armenian food or that incredible Oaxacan mole if you hadn’t taken me. Probably someone should tell the lady at Europane about you, you kept her solvent for years. We’ll always have the blasted wasteland of Bakersfield where there was a combination tandoori/pizza restaurant, which makes sense if you think about it, and I told you what to get at the Basque place and when the lady at the family-style table talked about how she’d lived other places but knew she was coming back home to Kern County it was all we could do not to ask Why, Though. You hated our little college town just like Nabokov and you took me to the botanical gardens in Miami, in Los Angeles, there was always something to see and something to eat. You used little c ‘catholic’ wrong on the train once and I didn’t correct you in front of your parents and I could see them appreciating that.
I wish you were there in Texas still, believing things that aren’t true, I wish you were still around. My father had an infection like that, an infection so violent at the end my mother wouldn’t talk about it other than to take the painkiller clause out of her advance directive, so after that I thought that if he could do all that I could give birth. Your infection was probably equally violent but I prefer to believe you slipped out quietly without knowing, without moaning out from under all the painkillers like my mother-in-law did. I prefer to think your wife didn’t know it was coming, there wasn’t that fearful rattle at the end, the goodbye was entirely Irish and completely unlike you. I hope you didn’t know what was happening I hope the drugs were good. Today I will tell you about the thing I read and tomorrow I will tell you about the thing I saw and I will always tell you the things, isn’t that crazy, how could Werner Herzog outlast you, I can’t believe it.
