1. Significant Other? Trader. Things he didn’t see?
2. Money?
3. Job?
4. Physical Health?
5. Mental Health? Nature of disorder: a. psychological? b. ideational/organic? c. metaphysical?
6. Deep Secret? Trauma? Childhood?
7. Other Significant Other?
Now I cross out 4. Which leaves me wondering what I mean by 5 c). And thinking about 7. Is Mr. Seven her lithium connect?
A SENSE OF AN ENDING
Death scenes are as delicate as orchids. Like death chemistry itself, they seem committed to the business of deterioration and decay. But my death scene has eternal youth. It still has the sash on the door. Do Not Cross. I cross.
The blood on the bedroom wall looks black now, with just the faintest undercoat of rust. At the top of the splatter, near the ceiling, the smallest drops gather like tadpoles, their tails pointing away from the site of the wound. A rectangular section of the wall has been removed by the science team, right in the middle of the base smear, where the bullet hole was. Then the downward swipe from the wedged towel.
I think of Trader, and find that I am contemplating the scene as largely an interior-decoration problem. I want to get out the mop and make a start on it myself. When he returns, will he be able to sleep in this room? How many licks of paint will he want? Surprisingly, I think I am finding a friend in Trader Faulkner. Barely a week after I tried my level best to flake him into the lethal injection, I am finding a friend in Trader Faulkner. I talked with him at the wake at the Rockwells’. It is his key I hold in my hand. He has told me where to look for everything.
Jennifer kept all her personal papers in a locked blue trunk in the living area, and I have a key for that too. But first I quickly cover the apartment from room to room, just to get a feeclass="underline" Post-its on the mirror above the telephone, magnetic Scrabble pieces on the fridge door (saying milk and filters), a bathroom cabinet containing cosmetics and shampoos and a few patented medicines. In the bedroom closet her sweaters are stacked in plastic covers. Her underwear drawer is a galaxy—star-bright...
It used to be said, not so long ago, that every suicide gave Satan special pleasure. I don’t think that’s true—unless it isn’t true either that the Devil is a gentleman. If the Devil has no class at all, then okay, I agree: He gets a bang out of suicide. Because suicide is a mess. As a subject for study, suicide is perhaps uniquely incoherent. And the act itself is without shape and without form. The human project implodes, contorts inward—shameful, infantile, writhing, gesturing. It’s a mess in there.
But I look around now and what I’m seeing is settled order. Tobe and myself are both slobs, and when a pair of slobs shack up together you don’t get slob times two—you get slob squared. You get slob cubed. And this place, to me, feels like a masterpiece of system: Grooved, yet unemphatic, with nothing rigid in it. Homes of the self-slaughtered have a sullen and defeated aspect. The abandoned belongings seem to say: Weren’t we good enough for you? Weren’t we any good? But Jennifer’s apartment looks as though it is expecting its mistress to return—to fly in through the door. And against all expectation I start to be happy.
After weeks with a sour twist in my gut. The building is freestanding and even after a half hour you can feel the sun moving around it and changing the angles of all the shadows.
Trader and Jennifer, they had two bureaus, two work stations, in the living room, not ten feet apart. On his desk there is a sheet of typing paper with stuff like this written on it:
p(x) = a0 + a1x + a2x2 + a3x3 +...
On her desk there is a sheet of typing paper with stuff like this written on it:
x = 30/10-21 m = 3 x 1022 m.
And you think, Hey. He heard her. She heard him. They talked the same language. Isn’t that what we’re all supposed to want? The peer lover, ten feet away: Silence, endeavor, common cause. Isn’t that what we’re all supposed to want? For him a woman in the room. For her a man in the room, ten feet away.
I popped the blue trunk.
It contained nine photo albums and nine ribboned bundles of letters—all of them from Trader. This is their history, illustrated and annotated. And of course ordered. Ordered especially or ordered anyway? With a premeditated suicide there is generally some kind of half-assed attempt “to put things in order”: To attempt completion. To try for completion. But I didn’t get that vibe here, and figured that the Trader “shrine” had been up and running since year one. I hauled it all out and got myself down there on the rug. Starting at the beginning: His first letter, or note, is dated June 1988:
Dear Ms. Rockwelclass="underline" Forgive me, but I couldn’t help noticing you on Court Two this afternoon. What a beautiful all-court game you have—and what a toreador backhand! I wonder if sometime I could prevail upon you to give me a game, or a lesson. I was the dark-haired, bow-legged hacker on Court One.
And so it proceeds (“That was quite a set of tennis!”), with little memos about lectures and lunches. Soon the album is taking up the story: There they are on the court, individually and then together. Then complication. Then complication falling away. Then sex. Then love. Then vacations: Jennifer in a ski suit, Jennifer on the beach. Man, what a bod: At twenty, she looked like a model in an ad for those cereals that taste great but also make you shit right. Bronzed Trader at her side. Then graduation. Then cohabitation. And still the handwritten letters keep coming, the words keep coming, the words a woman wants to hear. No dashed-off faxes from Trader. Faxes, which fade in six months, like contemporary love. No scrawled reminders propped against the toaster, such as I get from Tobe. And used to get from Deniss, from Jon, from Shawn, from Duwain. GET SOME TOILET PAPER FOR CHRIST SAKE. That wouldn’t do for Jennifer. She got a fucking poem every other day.
Complication? Complication fell away, and did not recur. But complication there certainly was. Its theme: Mental instability. Not hers. Not his. Other peoples. And I have to say that I was very, very surprised to see my own name featuring here...
I prepared myself for what they’re now calling a “segue.” But a lot of this stuff I already knew. The dumped boyfriend. The freaked-out flatmate. The trouble begins at the outset, when Trader starts getting serious. There’s this jock, name of Hume, who has to be eased out of the picture. Big Man on Campus can’t take the strain. So what he does is present Jennifer with the spectacle of his collapse. Et cetera. Then the other problem, unconnected to this or to anything else in the outside world: A roommate of Jennifer’s, a girl called Phyllida, wakes up one morning with black smoke coming out of her ears. Suddenly this nerdy little chick is either gaping at the bathroom wall or out there howling at the moon. Jennifer can’t cope with being around her, and bolts, back to the Rockwell home. And who does she find there, stinking up her brother’s bedroom and babbling at the pillows, but Detective Mike Hoolihan. “Jesus Christ,” Trader quotes her as saying, “I’m surrounded.”
Here’s a frustration with a one-way correspondence. The narrative doesn’t “unfold”: What you get is just a jumping status quo. Astonishing developments simply and smugly become How Things Are. Still, Trader spends a lot of ink on Jennifer around now, coaxing her out of the notion that nobody and nothing can be trusted. Sanity, or at least logic, returns. You can finish the stories: