Gandhi smiled. “I know, I know. But I’ve always thought that a life should have meaning, otherwise it’s as if you didn’t even exist. It’s like trying to make a mark with a pen that has no ink in it, or drawing a brush across the canvas and nothing shows because you didn’t load the brush with paint. The gesture means nothing. It was pretense. It wasn’t even practice.
“For a while I wanted to be a musician. Guitar, then clarinet. I practiced hours every day, and the music finally got to be pleasant enough, but there was nothing special in the way I played, and I realized I didn’t love it that much anyway, and you have to love it to be good at it. So I tried out for sports, and I was a pretty good runner, and I exercised myself to exhaustion, and I was pretty good, but never the best. And I kept waiting for that euphoria some runners get, at least I could have that, but it never came for me, or I didn’t recognize it when it came.
“I used to get so angry. I trembled, Daniel, I actually trembled. I tried to express that anger in some way, to let it go, but I failed in that endeavor as well.
“I learned computer programming, and some companies hired me, and I was competent enough, but never inspired. I implemented, but I didn’t create. Believe me, I worked with creative programmers, and there’s a difference. Maybe it should have been enough. At least it provided me with a good living, and it paid for various avocations, some creative writing instruction, dance lessons, art classes, woodworking tools. But nothing quite stuck. Once or twice I accidentally cut myself on a wood chisel or a scraper. I discovered that it was vaguely, strangely soothing. I found new ways to accidentally cut myself after that. It was quite embarrassing, I was always afraid I might be found out, but after a time, I have to admit, it was deeply satisfying. I’d have these wounds on my hands, my arms. People must have thought I was really absorbed by my craft, or maybe they thought I was simply clumsy. And when the wounds started to heal, then I’d interfere with that healing. I couldn’t control the world, but I could control that. At least to a point. Ultimately, if I had decided to stop scarring my body, I don’t think I could have.
“I would have weeks I’d be so depressed I couldn’t get out of bed, or if I forced myself out of bed I’d spend my time sitting, staring at nothing. It was as if I were inside a dark closet that no one else could see, and sometimes the weight of it, well, my shoulders would become so painful, as if I were carrying some huge piece of furniture I could never put down, because if I put it down it would ruin everything.
“I knew I didn’t belong in the world, but I didn’t exactly know what I should do about it. Sometimes I would sit in my window, my feet dangling outside, four floors up, terrifying myself, wondering if I could just let myself slip out.
“I say that now, and it sounds illogical. But logic has nothing to do with you when you are in that dark world. Everything becomes a matter of belief and, I don’t know, a kind of dark, a so very dark, faith.”
“You sound like you were an interesting person—with all that background, I’m sure you could have talked knowledgably in a number of areas. You must have had friends, and women must have—I don’t want to be too nosy, but if there are people who love you, then to my mind, you’re definitely a success.”
Gandhi smiled at this, but there was something in his eyes that made Daniel feel so sad he thought he might weep. “You’re a very kind man,” Gandhi said, “and I’m sure you were loved, and you’ve told us you had a wife and child, so I know that must be true.” Daniel nodded, but did not want this line of conversation to continue. “But the key thing about love, I believe, is that you have to recognize that it’s happening. You have to recognize that someone is loving you, otherwise it’s no good to you. You miss it, so it might as well not be there. I’d like to think now that someone might have loved me, and that I just didn’t recognize it. That would at least be something. But since I didn’t see it then, I’ll never know.
“I never knew love, Daniel. Wouldn’t that have been something if I had? But I couldn’t quite make it happen.”
Daniel let his eyes wander. Off in the distance there appeared to be more fires than before, a line of them, it must have been miles long. He wondered if the entire city, what was left of it, was going to burn. He wondered if their building, even surrounded with its dead zone, would survive it.
“I did keep trying. I don’t think I really gave up until a year or so ago. Obviously, I wasn’t going to achieve my goals, and I wasn’t going to be satisfied with anything less. I could not let myself remain colorless, anonymous, never to have left a mark on the world. I had to do something. I needed to be thought about, to be remembered. And no, I didn’t do what some of the men in our scenarios have done. I didn’t carry guns into a school and murder children, or try to assassinate some important person or other. I could never have done something like that.
“I did decide to commit an act of violence, but against the sole person responsible for all the disappointments, for all the negative things that had happened to me during my life. Myself. I decided to commit suicide.
“But even after coming to that decision I was at least somewhat hopeful, I suppose. What if no one knew what happened to me? What if I disappeared? I’d be a mystery, a mystery for a lot of people. Nothing nags at the human mind more than a mystery, am I correct? They wouldn’t be able to help themselves, thinking about me. Maybe for years.
“And if they found the body a certain way, well it would make the news, would it not? People would be curious. I’d give people something to talk about. You know, like when they found Richard III’s body under that parking lot in central England?”
“Or maybe you wouldn’t be found at all?”
“Oh, I thought about that. But if I were inside a concrete building like this, I figured it would last two or three hundred years. But practically speaking, they would probably tear it down after forty, don’t you think? Technology progresses faster and faster, and even buildings become obsolete, the heating and plumbing systems, the features, the expectation of new innovations. It becomes cheaper to tear them down than to retrofit them.
“I’d been watching them building a large municipal government complex downtown. They’d build these forms with a framework of rebar inside them. Then starting early in the morning they’d fill them with concrete.
“I’m extraordinarily skinny. And small in stature. A small human being. I always have been. I realize it doesn’t make me the most attractive person. In fact I sometimes wonder if knowing that has contributed to my lack of success. But I wassmall enough to slip naked through the spaces between the bars one night in one particular form. Barely, even with my body well-oiled, and I bloodied myself pretty thoroughly in the process, as well as breaking a rib or two. It was a rather deep form, but I made it almost to the bottom. At least deep enough that I was pretty sure they wouldn’t notice me all the way down there when they poured the concrete. They might, and they might pull out my body and I wouldn’t be buried inside the building as I’d planned, and then discovered a century or so later when they finally tore it all down, but I was quite willing to take the risk.
“But all that exertion and I didn’t break the cyanide capsule in my mouth, until then. I was very pleased to have obtained such a poison. A splendid detail. Very international spy and all that. But I slipped and twisted my arm, popping my shoulder out of its socket. I inadvertently bit down on the capsule. I was in so much pain, you see. Not just physically, but I was cursing the world and everything in it, how existence itself had betrayed me.” He stopped and once again smiled at Daniel with that dreamy, almost unworldly smile.