—>Building on Fire

I didn’t sleep well last night, and I didn’t realize until this morning why that might have been. I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning, watching Fringe and reading Wikipedia articles about serial killers and suicides — morbid, I know, but it’s what I do sometimes — and it wasn’t until I saw the first few fingers of the sun nudging into the sky that I realized what day it was: it’s the third anniversary of the Bad Day, the day my foster brother killed himself and his daughter in a fit of drunken madness that capped a several-months descent into insanity that we who loved him had watched, helpless to do anything about it. For that reason I can remember everything I was doing on this day three years ago. It was the worst day of my life.

I’m not going to subject you to those scenes, though they haunt me. In part it’s because I’ve written about them before and don’t wish to bore my loyal reader — but in truth, with the passage of time, it’s because I’ve come to believe that there is such a thing as a private experience, an experience that can be lived without having been told afterwards, over and over, in language artful and halting. I’m not embarrassed, and I’m not trying to avoid reliving the pain — I relive the pain no matter what I say. I’m just not going to write about it now.

I’m thinking about the risks involved in being human. It seems to me you’re born prepared to be open and whole, and as time goes on life kicks you around and you come to be closed and broken. If you’re lucky, the bruises and dents don’t really accumulate until you’re old enough to handle them, until your parents have herded you carefully through the fragile stages of your childhood and released you onto your own recognizance, trusting you’re strong enough now to take it. If you’re unlucky, like Jesse was, life begins to kick you when you’re small, and continues to kick and to kick until you’re shattered. It’s a risky business, this. If there were other options — not death, but something less permanent and also safer than being alive — I might take one. I think, in fact, it could be argued that I’ve tried very hard to do that through substance abuse, over the years. Being a drunken loner with a novelist’s eye for detail and no compunction about receiving sexual gratification without emotional commitment is, in fact, very much like being not-quite-alive, the riskless version of humanity writ large.

I was a drunk before Jesse killed himself, but the apocalypse in which he disintegrated is illustrative of the risks involved in being human that I have long been trying to avoid. When you consent to love someone, you expose yourself to enormous opportunities to be hurt: they may be unreciporicative, or they made be the sort person incapable of friendship, or they may love you back for a long time and then abandon you, they may take advantage of your affection for their own gain, they may persuade you to do things you shouldn’t do. Or they may commit suicide, suddenly, just when you thought they were getting better, and leave behind a scarred landscape of confused and broken people who can do nothing but compulsively, destructively mourn. They may kill someone else you love, because they have gone insane.

A few months ago, someone asked me, “You you ever wish you never met Jesse?” And I gave the honest answer: every fucking day of the last three years I have wished, at one point or another, that I had never exposed myself to the risk of caring about him. His final act doesn’t nullify the many pleasant hours he and I spent together, the nights he listened to my secrets and told me his in turn, but even three years after the fact I can’t help but feel, right now, that the pain has outweighed the pleasure, the bad outweighs the good. The scale tips only one way, in the end. Do I know which way it is yet?

But at the same time, every time you opt to love someone, to let them in, it is entirely possible that many years from now this kind of thing may happen. Not even Jesse knew he was bipolar when he and I became friends, twenty-two years ago. Life kicks you around, and it’s your responsibility to kick back, or you end up living the anesthetized half-life I’ve been living for a long time, and I have to tell you — whether or not having been friends with Jesse for most of our lives was worth it, never taking the risk of caring about someone is far worse. It’s the difficult calculus of armor and wounds. I’m no good at it. I’m not sure anybody is, really.

*

On the anniversary of her death, I’m going to tell you a story about Maribella, who would be almost eight by now, and probably ten feet tall. Maribella was a willowy mophead who had her father’s leanness and grace but really looked much like her mother — sometimes it’s hard for me to spend time with Maribella’s mother, because an expression will cross her face that’s so familiar I’m sent cascading down into a pit of despair. She was the girliest girl who ever girled, a devotee of all things pink and purple, anything to do with a princess or a unicorn, and everything to do with getting dressed up in dresses and heels and makeup she didn’t know how to apply. She was bright and funny, and devious in a way that — and I mean this fondly — I think she must have got from her father.

One day when she was probably three, I found myself babysitting her. I had expected to be completely up to this task, the task of entertaining and safeguarding a three-year-old, as I had been three years old once and felt sure I remembered what it was like. But she mastered me quickly, and soon understand that she could easily manipulate me because I found her funny and cute. The first thing she did was steal my glasses off my face, which I thought was quite amusing until she dashed off up the stairs with them in her sticky little hand. By the time I understood what was happening, she had disappeared into her bedroom. When I came huffing and puffing in after her, I found her standing at the foot of the bed, her empty hands clasped primly at her waist, a thin smile just preparing to burst into a laugh.

“What did you do with them?”

And that provoked the laugh. She threw back her head and laughed, a garrulous, fried-out laughter, the laughter of a cartoon villain, and I realized that I was going to have to find some other way of getting my glasses back than just demanding them. I tried searching, but the room was overflowing with stuffed animals and clothes and — you may have spotted this already — I couldn’t really see. Finally, after several fruitless minutes pawing through drawers and under furniture, Bells laughing behind me the whole time, I realized that I was going to have to bribe her. Or rather, give in to her blackmail. Ever since that day I’ve wondered if that was premeditated or not, and which would be the more impressive — artful planning, or spontaneous criminal genius?

I was made to play with a procession of little felt dolls that I couldn’t really see, and then to play “store” — a game in which I offered to buy Bells’ toys for escalating prices and she declined until such a point as I was offering her real money — and then to give her several “plane rides”, which involved lying on my back, putting my feet in the air, and letting her lie prone on my feet as I pushed her up off the ground. Finally, I heard the car doors slam out in the driveway and knew her parents were home, and stood up.

“Okay, kiddo, for real. I need my glasses so I can go talk to your dad.”

She flung herself against the door, arms spread across it, and looked at me with all the seriousness her round little face could muster.

“You can never leave,” she said, and I believe she meant it.

And though I scooped her up right then and carried her downstairs to meet with her parents’ scolding, she was more right than she could possibly have known. Years later, now that she’s dead, I find myself back in that room with Maribella often, playing dolls and giving her airplanes, and forever my image of her will be the little girl in the purple sundress, her strawberry blonde curls wild from several consecutive minutes dangling in the air, telling me I’m never allowed to leave her room. And I never really will.

*

This entry is called “—>Building on Fire”, not because the actual lyrics of that song are particularly relevant to Jesse & Maribella’s lives and deaths, but because of how I sometimes feel about all the love that I poured on the two of them. On this date in 2014, that love transformed into a building on fire, and the fire still burns. It consumed Maribella’s mother, it consumed me, it consumed Maribella’s half-sister, it consumed what remains of Jesse’s biological family, and it consumed the way in which we all related to each other. I, personally, have done bad things, hurt people I care about, because of how consumed I was by the fire Jesse lit that day. Let me tell you: this is not a story with a happy ending. There isn’t any uplift here. I’m not going to give you a heaping bowl of redemption. Suicide and murder fill the lives of those who survive with grief, shame, suspicion, paranoia.

The calculus of armor and wounds. It may in fact be unsolvable.