Concomitantly he understood something which could yet prove to be valuable. He understood how unhappy he was — understood, that is, that it was no mood. He did not discount other people’s unhappiness. There were those who lost limbs, whose health failed, who couldn’t make it at today’s prices, those whose loved ones died, who would never get what they wanted and who wanted it more for exactly that reason, those whose reputations were stripped away, those who had done great crimes and knew they’d slipped up, that even now the net was tightening. There were those whose expectations, so nearly realized, were disappointed by technicalities, those who were habituated to subtle poisons, those who were condemned. Even now, he supposed, there were children lost in the forest, and there were those whose plane was going down in the mountains and those whose bodies were being humiliated by sadists. People were drowning who had simply meant to go for a sail in the lake. There were cars overturning, burning, their drivers still alive but trapped by steering wheels and stove-in doors. He didn’t discount other people’s unhappiness. More power to them. All he knew was that he was as unhappy as any of them, as unhappy as anyone who had ever lived in the world. And this was a fact, as true of himself as his right-handedness.
Something else was true. For the first time in his life this man, this in-his-best-moments hypochondriac who feared illness and saw mortality in the headache and the common cold, who prized experience and blessed whatever of geography he had seen for its mystery and disparateness, who honored the accomplishments of others and waited in suspense for their new inventions and next books, who melted at all kindnesses to himself as involuntarily as he grew stiff-necked at slurs — this same fellow sat on his mourner’s bench (even now taking a certain — yes — pleasure at the juxtaposition) and quite seriously, and for the first time in his life, considered suicide. At last a quick and even violent death was preferable to what he now understood he had always, if often unwittingly, endured. He had been left out. Jesus, it was the complaint of a kid in a schoolyard, a thing fat boys confessed to their pillows. Only that. Wallflowered by life. Left out. Not through conspiracy, as little through fault, luck of the draw in an unlucky world. Left out. Many are called but few are chosen. And some, like himself, weren’t even called. Left out. How do you goddamnit like that?
In the books he’d read and films he’d seen the characters found a parade and joined it. They bought loud clothes and a bunch of balloons. And the triumph of pure trying was satisfying, even thrilling, as all existential assertions are thrilling, as all little motions are — the cripple’s faltering step and the mute’s first word, garbled, ripped from a torn cone of throat and lovelier than an aria. Energy admirable at long range, other people’s wills and small defiances a beautiful metaphor. How he’d wept when men climbed the moon, the more impressive for its pointlessness. How impressed he’d been at apothecary measures of all strangers’ bravery, little guys’ puny resistances, Denmark’s treatment of its Jews, his father’s sideburns — all that judo of the spirit. But what did any of that come to? A life of stumble, of maimed conversation, effort a lousy substitute for results — and in the end just another compromise. Why should he settle; why should he make deals with his needs? Why should certain men live? There was nothing for it but to cut throats and slice wrists. To be or not to be, you schmuck. Why couldn’t he do it, then? Fear? A little, but nah. Scruples? The notion that as a suicide he would end up with even less than all those compromised cripples and mitigated heroes with their qualified lives? No, no. Why then? Because by now he had lived too long with a sense of justice, with the conviction that if you pay and pay eventually they must give you something for your money, that otherwise they would be shut down. Christ, he thought, his blood still in his veins, his brains and liver and other organs where they were supposed to be, his internals stashed away in the drawers and cupboards of his belly like things in a well-ordered household, I am religious, I am a religious man. I believe in God.
About a month after coming to Chicago he received the shipment from Missoula. When the Railway Express man came to his door, Preminger, forgetting it was he who was responsible, was very excited. Packages, boxes and cartons addressed in an unfamiliar hand still had the power to give him hope. When he saw that they contained only his own things — his books and typewriter, his small, cheap assortment of dishes, cutlery and glasses, his everyday clothes (he’d brought with him all his grand stuff, dressing for his father’s death as for a cruise) — he was disappointed and didn’t even bother to unpack it all. What had he expected? Toys? Rich gifts from mysterious admirers? There wasn’t even a letter to give him the gossip about the few people he knew in Montana, and he guessed that the sender, a graduate student who lived in the same rooming house and with whom he’d gotten drunk once or twice and gone to a few movies, must have been pretty pissed off for all the trouble he’d caused him. He had known it was an imposition and had made his request with a greater urgency than he’d felt, pleading his altered life, hinting that windfall kept him in Chicago, not so much to boast as to get his acquaintance off the dime. “Oh, and listen,” he’d said on the telephone, “don’t bother about the liquor.” (A half-bottle of Scotch, a fifth of Beefeaters still in its cellophane truss.) And told the student to keep his Activities book. (A not inconsiderable gift — about a hundred dollars’ worth of tickets for plays, concerts and football games.) But the booze and tickets had been sent as well, a sign from the West — that new life or no, he was a pain in the ass. He moved the stuff onto the bed in the second bedroom where, along with the deflated basketball and the odd game or photograph that had survived his father’s compulsive redecorating, they already seemed further vestigial artifacts of a prior life.
It was a year that the summer had its teeth in the city, the weather like a tricky currency. One watched it like the stock market. Highs in the hundreds were not uncommon. The sky was white and cloudless. There was a drought. The leaves on the trees were a golden green and rattled like gourds in the softest wind. Preminger, who’d lived in the West, sometimes looked alertly behind him when he heard this sound in the street, as if expecting snakes in the trees. People moved outside on their balconies, not because it was cooler there but to be closer to the phenomenon. It was odd to see them suspended there, on the sides of the buildings, like balloonists in baskets or a hundred teams of window washers.
One day, the first since the occasion of his public drowning, when people were sunning themselves in the chaise longues and deck chairs, Preminger went down to the pool and discovered that it was being drained. The lifeguard explained that it was always closed after Labor Day. As he stood there, the phone rang; the lifeguard excused himself, listened for a few moments and nodded. When he hung up he clapped his hands for their attention.
“That was the office,” he told them. “It seems that because of the heat a lot of the residents have been complaining about shutting down the pool. I’ve been instructed to fill her up again. They’re going to close down the other two but will keep this one open until the weather breaks.” Several people applauded. The lifeguard gestured that he had more to tell them. “Only,” he said over their enthusiasm, “only there won’t be an official Red Cross lifeguard after today, and the management says that, like always, swimming will be at your own risk, only more so. I’m supposed to fill the pool and turn my chemicals over to the Activities Committee who’ll police the pool and provide its own lifeguards.” A cheer went up, and Preminger, who’d never before been in on an eleventh-hour stay of execution, joined in.