This wasn’t the first time I’d made this vow. I knew Umma was the same woman she had been when I was young, the one who’d risen every morning at five to make Korean breakfast before leaving for the hospital so that no one had to eat dry toast; stitched our Halloween costumes by hand because the ones at the store were flammable; lain in bed with us when we were sick and sung the best songs, made up the best stories. But I hadn’t lived with that mother since I was eighteen. Now I was just a voice on the line, a rainstorm whirring in the distance, and the help she offered was different when she was far away. It was less practical, more tough love, and in the last few years, the story of our relationship was of these phone conversations after which I would mentally abandon her as she had abandoned me. In a matter of days, I’d call and say I was sorry, even when I wasn’t. But this time, I promised myself, I will not call her, because I won’t be here. I had done everything she wanted. And it still wasn’t enough. The cycle of abandonment was over.
While I mopped the bathroom floor, I tried to cry but no tears leaked out. What water there was, was on the floor or in the flood outside. Should I call Nate? There was a pain inside me—would he be able to carry some of it?
Nate was back at Princeton. The previous summer, his father went into remission and his mother passed away. Since October, he’d been coming up most weekends to help me with groceries and laundry. All he ever wanted was to be at school studying science, and it was human duties that took him away. Neither my law school friends nor the grad students would help me. It was already hard for me to ask, but then I watched as they recoiled, saying, “Sorry, too busy to get sick.” Everything Nate gave me—and had given his family the year before—could be calculated. Every Friday on the Amtrak, quickly depleting his savings in $200 increments, Nate came.
Because I pulled away from Umma, I turned to Nate, as if he were my mother. Hadn’t Nate and I been meant for a life of ideas only, his of the early universe, mine of human thought? But instead of a beautiful, pure life of ideas, there was the reality of Nate caring for me as he had his parents. I thought, I will call him. I will issue an ultimatum in a non-ultimatum-y way. I thought: If he doesn’t come tonight, then I am going to take the rest of these pills. If he doesn’t come tonight, then nothing can alleviate this pain. If p, then q. It was simple, really.
When he answered the office phone, our exchange was perfunctory. He was busy, he was in lab, he was supposed to come on Friday, after all—in two days! But, as a compromise, he would try to come tomorrow. I wondered whether his office mates overheard my neediness, and I hated myself for being weak. “It’s night right now,” Nate reasoned with me in his beautiful, chary voice, but he would try to come tomorrow. “Tomorrow,” I echoed. And we signed off, forgetting to say “I love you.”
Leaning against the bathroom door, I closed my eyes and summoned Nate’s deep-set ones, blue and wide and halcyon like a Montanan summer sky. His inner life was a mystery to me. Mine was horrific, a war scene in which every soldier behind enemy lines wore my face. Under Nate’s beautiful, smooth mask of a face, what? “I’m a simple man. I don’t know much, just a handful of things,” I heard him say then, taking the form of a sage resting on a tree stump, whittling a branch and in possession of all knowledge. Actually, Nate was complicated. I just didn’t know in what ways. What did I think about his promise of “tomorrow”? I wanted him to read my mind and had expected, in this first real love of my life, for love to mean omniscience. It didn’t occur to me to ask for what I needed, which was for him to appear so I didn’t have to die.
Suddenly, I threw down my mop, disgusted with this meandering train of thoughts. All I did these days was chew over myself and my life—how self-absorbed and revolting! Socrates said an unexamined life wasn’t worth living, but I couldn’t agree; it was possible to scrutinize to the point of ineffectualness. I wanted the endless pondering and pain to end, and pain—we all knew—was existence. I bolted up, grabbed the container of Ambien, and went into the kitchen.
At the table, I emptied the pills. They formed quite the mound. Seeing the mound, I choked up. Again, I considered the people closest to me. I was always begging Umma to see past the externalities to my essential nature, but she kept denying who I was, and the ultimate pain was that it was she herself who had made me—I was her golem. As for Nate, the few black balls of chaos in his otherwise monkish existence I’d scribbled there myself. His own mother had died when all she wanted was to live. That was the way with living things, I marveled, they fought so they could live. But I had long ceased thinking life was an objective good. I did not want to fight anymore.
I laid my head down next to the pills and tried to sob, tried to emit some true emotion from my depleted body, but there was nothing left from me to wring. I slammed my fist weakly down on the table. A pill rolled and fell to the floor. I crawled into bed.
Listening to the rain outside, I reflected on the many years I’d spent fighting and struggling against myself. Somehow I knew the fatigue threaded back to the first chapter of my life, the one written mostly by my parents. I could blame and resent them, but in the end, was I not complicit? What was the word that described it all best—“resilience” or “cowardice”? In the corner of my eye, I saw the Virgin Mary statue holding out her arms but nothing was in them, her foot on the snake’s head, crushing the evil of the world. I wished I could stand unloved—by my family, by society—and not be destroyed, but I’d never been able to locate that possibility. Even here in grad school, while the other students disputed, every word was another brick laid high on the wall between their search and mine. Theirs was an intellectual journey in which they began whole and would end enriched, but mine commenced from an enfeebled state and the process was somehow primitive because it was fundamentally existential, nearly religious—the search for why I had done what I had done in my life. What was I looking for? Something I wasn’t sure existed that would render everything with meaning. I had attempted so many things in order to belong to myself—searching for a home at Princeton, then leaving it, trying to find a simple life in Korea, answering my parents’ sacrifices by embracing law school and now graduate school (the compromise!)—and this constant unsuccessful push to authenticate my true self had left me exhausted.
Was I afraid? Yes, I was afraid. When I was gone, the pain of the world would incrementally dip for a moment, with the loss of me. Nate would be better off and could find someone more suitable. The hundreds of instances I’d wished for death came roiling back, fatiguing in their sameness—my senior year in high school, more times than I could count in college—and always, I had saved myself with the help of others who had been able to locate in my life some worth when I could not. Now I was alone and had to do that calculation myself. I was where I’d once dreamed I’d belonged, and nothing fundamentally had changed.
I couldn’t wait until tomorrow, so I put the phone down and laid the Virgin Mary beside me on my pillow. Because I lived alone and had nothing of any value, no extensive preparations had to be made. I threw back all the pills with a sip of water, and with the world carrying on outside, I closed my eyes.
3.
MANY EONS LATER, I WOKE up alone in a room.
The place was spare like a dorm, with a twin bed and a wooden dresser. I wore a hospital shift and had slept without a blanket. No wonder I had been so cold. Slowly, I recalled the emergency room the night before. This wasn’t a dream then, and I was in a new place.
Hearing movement outside, I poked my head out the door.
“Where am I?” I asked a nurse carrying a tray of waters. Zombies in pajamas shuffled past.
“The STU,” the nurse replied, not stopping. “The Short Term Unit.” It took me a second to register what she said because she pronounced “the STU” like “the Stew.” In the hallway, which stunk a little like old stew, a sign read, “McLean Hospital, Belmont, Massachusetts.”
Belmont—a monied enclave west of Cambridge where Harvard professors lived. Not an IV or blinking machine in sight. A nurses’ station was encased in glass, and below it, the leather couch I’d shivered on earlier in the night. A nurse dispensed medication in paper cups. One by one, the zombies threw back their pills, cracked opened their mouths, lifted their tongues at the nurse.
I had seen enough movies, read enough books, and I knew enough to be afraid.
I was sitting in the breakfast room, morosely staring into my cereal, when I was called to see the doctor.
“When can I leave?” I demanded.
“This is a psychiatric hospital, not a prison,” she said. “You can leave when you are ready, but it’s likely you are not.” She paused. “You do realize you tried to kill yourself last night.” I flinched.
She said she was going to prescribe an antidepressant called Wellbutrin XL. “We’ll double it after we see how well you tolerate it. I’m also going to prescribe Seroquel. Its sedative quality will help you sleep.”
More drugs. Because I hadn’t been able to fix myself.
When I saw Nate that morning in the Stew, I thought, There, I’ve gone and done it; he’ll have those circles under his eyes forever.
On a couch near my room, I held on to him, crying for as long as I could, but really the dry, choking sobs came from my throat, not my soul. Inside, I had crossed over, onto the plane of death: I was dead, yet this body continued to announce I was alive. Some of the buildings at Peabody Terrace were high. Couldn’t I have considered flinging myself off one of those? Say you shoot yourself, or slit your wrists, but you botched it? Then people will know because you’ve got a hole in your chest or bandages up to your elbows. When you take pills but you live, all the scars are inside.
Under my hands I felt Nate’s shoulders, the shoulders I’d fallen in love with. I read the swell of his triceps and scapula, the angel’s wing below the shoulder, and under my fingers I wanted this rock to shake, but he would not.
“Why don’t you stay at my place instead of Jamie’s?” I asked once I pulled away.
“He doesn’t mind. I’ll go over to your place this afternoon and make sure everything is okay.”
“Sorry you have to take care of me.” Sorry you have to take care of everyone.
“Don’t worry about me. I want you to worry about yourself.”
“What am I going to tell the people at school? Spring break’s almost over. I wish I could just say I broke my leg.”
Nate looked down at his hands. They were strong, masculine hands, which welded circuits, coded software, and climbed mountains. He had small, precise handwriting and did his work in pen, as if he had no need for an eraser because he never made mistakes. I had imagined scientists and mathematicians were like artists, preferring pencils, but maybe artists didn’t mind mistakes. “What happened last night was worse than breaking your leg,” he said quietly. “I spent the whole night looking for you. I didn’t know where they took you after the emergency room.”
I asked how he knew what had happened.
“I called your phone when the paramedics were there,” he said.
Nate fished my phone out of his coat pocket. I checked the dialed calls. University Health Services, 2:01 a.m. I had called the line in my stupor. “I took some pills and I’m awake now. She said I’d be asleep. The doctor said to take care of the sleep,” I remembered telling the operator.
Visiting hours were over, and Nate promised he’d be back soon. “Do you want me to bring you anything?”
“Maybe some decent food. The scrambled eggs are runny here.”
I never had to eat the food in the Stew because Nate brought me every meal. Despite consuming a lot of Tex-Mex covered in sour cream and cheese, I shed weight. Wellbutrin was an upper and gave me the shakes. Sometimes, in the middle of group therapy or while mindlessly peering into the television in the common area, I woke up inside a multisecond mental glitch as though I had been rebooted after freezing. I was afraid to call this what it seemed to be—a seizure—and did not mention it to the aides or therapists, who did not appear to notice. I just knew I felt alert for the first time in months—the seizures the price for energy—and I considered myself nearly fixed.
