My story ends something like this: on Saturday the 14th of January, 2023—about half-hour after having lunch at the Lake Oswego Burgerville—I backed my car out the driveway onto the streets of Portland, Oregon, intending to find out how many pedestrians I could run over before the police intervened, preferably with lethal force.
You can find it in the papers if you’d like. They don’t like writing it like the way I just did—they use terms like ‘homicidal maniac,’ or ‘terrorist,’ sometimes, if the perpetrator is the kind of person who they think has the potential to scare people. I don’t really mind either, personally. It’s all the same to me. A lot of them try to be diplomatic: both the New York Times and the Washington Post removed me from the equation altogether, preferring ‘Breaking News: Attempted Street Attack in Portland.’ Later they called me the ‘Burnside Street Attacker.’ I thought that was pretty funny, but then I’ve always been a fan of the more dramatic, tabloid headlines. I think my favorite was the Sun. They regularly have a bit of a zinger before the caption: mine was Street Criminal. Couldn’t have bungled it better if they’d tried.
Obviously you’d like to know how it happened, how it came to be that a promising young boy like me—a real Harvard man, if you want to put it like that—how I ended up on the streets of Oregon barreling over pedestrians with a kind of gleeful fervor on my face, at least according to what the police cams saw. It’s really not that interesting. You can fill in the details—there was the dead wife, real perfect and beautiful, all that, who killed herself in a psychiatric care facility in the March of 2022. 3rd March, in fact. God, was she beautiful, but that doesn’t stop it from being all cliché. It’s all pretty obvious. You can make it up if you want. And then there was the whole thing about my tenure application getting rejected, that was another big one—the review board was unhappy with my progress and gave me an extension on account of the dead wife but no official leave, which meant that I had to keep going to work to get my paycheck cause grad school hadn’t left me with any savings. Most of it’s just drudgery like this, but I’m boring you by getting into it. Dead dog, stepped in a puddle that morning on the way to visit my mom’s grave, all that.
But you can find the backstory in the papers. What you really want to know is what was going on in my head at the time, what exactly was possessing me. Whether I was angry or whether I was feeling nothing at all, as if I was looking at myself from somewhere way up there and just following the dots moving around on the Portland street grid—of which I was a bigger square that had decided to completely abandon the rules altogether by swerving and sidelining in all these zig-zag ways that violate the spirit of the game. In fact I’m pretty sure you’re thinking I don’t sound all that angry right now, and you’re right—I’m not. Truth be told, it bothers me as well. Those guys at the review board were pretty cruel to me, after all, and I didn’t deserve having my wife taken from me. Nobody deserves something like that. If you have to know, her name was Hope, which is pretty ironic. She was something like Chinese-Dutch-French-American all at the same time, being born in Queens to already mixed parents, but even as she spoke in her New Yorker modulations she really looked Chinese more than anything. I like thinking about her because it grounds me. Otherwise I’m always up in the air with these fancy ideas. In fact I’d bet any amount of money that she’d be pleasantly surprised to find out that I went so haywire after her death: one of the things that used to trouble her so much was this idea that I was never really in love with her, more so just playing at the idea of love and fulfilling my ‘expected role’ not out of actual loyalty to her but rather out of a loyalty to the underlying role of ‘husband,’ and before that ‘boyfriend,’ whatever, so something like me actually running over some shoppers on Burnside would I think prove to be enough of a shock so as to keep it settled once and for all that I was filled with profound grief at the unjust nature of her death and the fact that she had been both taken from the world far too early and also taken from me, specifically, that was important, that I was actually filled with such profound grief and not simply playing at the role of being the troubled maladjusted widower out of obligation to myself, the role, and the narrative structure of the universe. That was her big fear, and her knowing that I did this would provide her some catharsis. The big unfunny joke is that, as I said, I wasn’t angry, so even if she’d found out and this fact had saved her it would’ve been based on a lie. What I was actually feeling was a concoction of emotions that have been experienced by so few people that we’ve never actually come up with a word for it, hence this whole narrative exercise, but it wasn’t anger.
So let’s get into that. In fact it was in Burgerville that I’d made up my mind to die. I promised no more backstory, but this part really needs it: as I said, I’d planned to visit my mom’s grave in the morning to talk to her. I’d actually never done that before—talk to a grave, I mean—because it seemed so stupid and ill-advised; it’s not like she could hear me, you know. I was one of those kind of people who really fundamentally wanted to believe in the idea of an afterlife but could never get themselves to actually do it in any real sense, and so I was always filled with this desire to talk to my mom at her grave but once I got there I felt foolish and ended up simply thinking about her and laying down flowers, that sort of thing, sometimes wishing she was there and crying while remembering all the things that she used to tell me. They were always these offhand recollections, too, like she’d ask me to fetch her something from the kitchen, or me just going and putting my arm around her and kissing her while she had put her glasses on and was sitting on that big armchair of hers reading those Czech books she used to like—Kundera was one of her favorites, she thought he was very erotic, and that was one of the things that Hope and I really bonded over: her mother had liked Kundera as well and thought he was similarly erotic. The really big one I’d have to say was this one time I’d asked my mom about her favorite childhood memories and all these tears had swollen up in her eyes not because they were so emotionally devastating but because she couldn’t even remember them all that well, she’d somehow just forgotten what her childhood was like. It was also a different era—she’d grown up under Communism, and I actually asked her if the world was gray and brown with this sepia undertone, and indeed when I constructed my own reimaginings of her childhood memories in my head they were always sepia-tinged in the same manner. Her true answer to that question was that it wasn’t actually gray and brown like in an old picture but it still was legitimately grayer. The memory itself I think was one of a time she had gotten into an argument with her father because he hadn’t given her enough money to buy something from the store—she couldn’t even remember what—and she’d gotten so annoyed at that that she’d torn the little money she did get, which was a few Koruna, into shreds, after which she’d gotten roundly scolded and been sent off to sleep without food. That and this other one in which she’d torn open a dictionary. This memory always made me cry, I don’t know why. Even as she was telling it I would start sniffing, although it wasn’t a sad memory or anything—it was just one of her memories, one of the few she actually did remember very well. She had been a rowdy girl, very tomboyish, and even the mother she’d grown up to be was very independent and hardheaded even as she was soft and warm and couldn’t stop worrying for a single instant. Those were the kinds of things I used to think about sitting next to her grave. One of the most significant thoughts was about that memory of hers and whether she herself imagined it in that sepia-toned way, because I somehow wanted the memory exactly like she had it, exactly in that same way—I wanted her to be able to imprint both the visual memory and the sound and the feel and how it was to be perceived in that full context of collapsing 1980s Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union in general, all of that somehow handed to me verbatim, but of course she couldn’t do that, so her tears would have to do. I always like to think that my mother and I were very similar in the fundamentals but I suppose that you’d have to really dig into what fundamentals are—certainly this memory could be a fundamental. But even so, that’s besides the point. The point is that this time I was going to talk to her and ask her for advice. I didn’t on any level actually expect an apparition or something, for her to put her hand on my shoulder or anything like that, but I did expect some kind of revelation. Who knows if I’d actually have done it this time? It’s not as if this was the first time that I’d gone to the cemetery with my mind made up to talk to her. But the crucial difference was that, like always, it had rained in Portland the previous day and the streets were all wet, and in my frenzy to reach her quickly before my conviction to actually have a conversation with her evaporated I had failed to pay attention to where I was walking and stepped off the sidewalk into a deep crack between the sidewalk and the street which was filled with a deceptively high level of water. My foot just sunk right in. It seeped into all of my New Balance sneakers, and it was annoying enough that I cursed and felt that there was no way I could make it to the grave now while also being annoyed that my conviction to talk to her had probably faded away already and I wouldn’t be able to do it this time, either. The Burgerville was nearby—I’d parked right around the corner—and feeling a bit hungry and foolish I just decided to go there, instead, thinking that at least while I ate the shoe would dry off.
So turns out that this was my first time in a Burgerville, and I didn’t know what to order—you’d think that as Portlanders Hope and I would’ve at least had a bite at PDX one way or another, but despite being big cheeseburger people we weren’t Portland natives and I’d only formally taught at Reed for about five years of which two were actually just spent in Boston since the pandemic had shut everything down and we didn’t feel any need to hop on over to Oregon just yet when we could continue enjoying the Cambridge lifestyle (sorry, that’s an inside joke between Hope and I—we really hated living in Boston). If you live in Portland and aren’t dirt poor, which we somehow weren’t, you don’t go to a chain but a food truck, usually, or one of those weird bar/restaurants they have in town. There was this one that we went to that had the softest chicken tenders we’d ever had, God. Really the way they were breaded were something else—that was the time we were talking about movies and Hope told me that she’d been a big fan of Michael Haneke as a teenager. We’d been married for three years at that point; I’d just hit thirty. It just blew my mind that somehow I didn’t know this fact about her, and I was trying to make some or the other joke about how I’d ended up marrying a woman who had, at fourteen, decided that The Piano Teacher was completely representative of her internal state, but I think what I was actually trying to get at was that one of the things I’d come to appreciate about our marriage was that she couldn’t surprise me anymore. This sounds bad, but to me this was the greatest gift that I could’ve had—that she was both physically and emotionally so familiar to me that any such development would only ever just be a natural addition to my mental model of her; almost like an unveiling rather than a completely bamboozling fact that made me see her in a slightly different light altogether—I mean to be clear it wasn’t a negative light or anything, if anything this made her even richer to me—and that we really were basically inseparable parts of each other. I wanted to know her so completely and thoroughly that there wouldn’t be anything left apart from my love for her. All that while eating those tenders—and the fries were pretty great, too. I was actually recalling this in the Burgerville. Not in such meticulous detail, but there was a little flash of it, not even visual, but just the sensory intimation of that incident; if she’d been around I probably would’ve verbalized it as ‘haha, remember that time we went to that tenders place, sweetie? what was that called?’ but she obviously wasn’t, instead she was dead, so I just had the memory and nothing else. Of course, memories of Hope are pretty tainted, now, so they don’t just bring back the memory and the in-moment feelings associated with them but also the intermingled sadness at the fact that she’s not there anymore—but I’m getting sentimental. The store clerk was this older woman. This always makes me sad, because there’s no reason a woman over thirty should ever be working in a burger store, how horrible. She had frizzy hair and was actually a little bit mean, but I reasoned away that of course she wasn’t a mean old lady but rather someone who had been turned mean by the same cruelties that had led her to working in this store in the first place—and could she really be blamed for that? What I ordered was a quarter-pound bacon cheeseburger with a side of fries and some diet coke. It was, on the whole, okay. I sat at a diner table and looked out the window all alone, which I used to do a lot in those days. Truth be told, one of the reasons I was so convinced that this time I’d talk to my mother aloud is because I actually hadn’t really talked to anyone at all for a couple weeks at this point. I’d opened my mouth occasionally to say things to waiters and the like, so I wasn’t all blank, but I don’t think I’d had a conversation all the way since New Years’ Eve, which I’d spent at this bar I used to be a regular at. I remember talking to some old guys then. One of them taught me Go, which I thought was very different from chess. In fact I had been playing Go quite a bit those past few days, all online, obviously—I don’t know anyone who plays Go in Portland, though now that I think about it there must be some kind of club. You can never tell with these Portland clubs, though; a lot of them are just implicit singles meetups, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with something like that. This was some of the stuff I was thinking on that diner chair looking out the window—it seemed a very prominent part of my life, and it struck me as a very lonely thing to do, really. It was also very cold out, though it wasn’t snowing—in Portland it only really snows around very late January, close to February. Instead it was just cloudy and dull.
It was at this time that I had the epiphany.
Now I’m going to go ahead a little bit, because I think what it made me feel is probably easier to describe than the thing itself—these are complicated forces we’re dealing with; they can’t be quantified in terms of words so easily. Actually, by the time I had gotten into my car I had only decided to end my life, not that I was going to do it then—and in fact it did not even seem anything particularly new, because I had vowed to end my life several times before. For what it’s worth, Hope had been doing it since she was a young girl, and it took her twenty-eight years to actually go through with it. It was only in retrospect that I can conclude the precise details that actually made this time different. Previously I had always set dates, and things like that—I’d kill myself on the 16th, for instance, leading to all of this logistical planning. It’s so stupid that I don’t even want to think about it, but I’ll push through. Like I would think ‘oh no that’s my father’s birthday, I can’t die on my father’s birthday, obviously,’ even though my father had died when I was sixteen. All these vague excuses for not pushing through. Hope told me that one of the things she would do when she was a little girl was a ‘one step further’ exercise. Her preferred manner of death was being hit by a car, so she would do this thing where she would step closer and closer to the highway each day, building up courage so that she would eventually make it fully onto the lane, but this daily ritual would somehow or the other always be put off by life and so she never ended up making it. I mean, I’m not complaining, but she did tell me this one time in a car ride along the Pacific Coast Highway, no less: she had put up her bare feet on the dashboard and she was wearing these heart-shaped sunglasses and this beautiful, flowing white top and bell-bottom jeans—when I say she looked angelic believe me, she looked actually angelic, no sepia-tinge; in fact that is one of the most colorful memories I have of her and in general, her sitting on my right and the ocean blue on my left, telling me about how when she was a kid she used to do this ritual. She said it so matter-of-factly, too, as if it were just something one did. I remember actually asking her how she could be so matter-of-fact about such things, and I think that hurt her, somehow; she looked out the window for a while, thinking, no doubt, about whether I actually loved her or not and whether that moment of exclamation on my part had been a betrayal and that I no longer loved her anymore because she had shared that part of her with me—unfortunately the circumstances of our situation made it impossible for me to hold her, she was always better when she was in my arms; I suppose you cannot believe that someone does not love you when they are brushing their lips against yours, holding your waist, now clutching it. But in that moment I couldn’t do that, and perhaps it was that moment in particular which led to her later leveling all these accusations of cheating against me. She seemed to believe that everyone were robots and she was the only real human being in this world, and I guess we weren’t really good at giving her reasons to believe otherwise; my reply had been fairly tactless, I was so surprised at the confession. I should’ve stopped the car or something. Coming back to Jan 14th, I didn’t have any of these tendencies. There was no bargaining, no negotiation. I also didn’t prove Hope right by behaving ‘robotically’: my actions had intention, they weren’t just occurring mechanically. Like, at some point I actually made a genuine decision to mow down those people, I wasn’t dissociating or anything, as I said.
I will say, one of the things that I definitely do remember is a lot of consideration about mechanics. I gave you this vivid video game-esque image of looking down upon the Portland Street Grid, but the reason that’s coming to my head in the first place is because that’s just how I think about maps and the like. In fact I partly lied—I was genuinely thinking about the whole accident from that top-down perspective as I did it, but it’s not because I was outside of myself, but because, as I said, I’m always thinking that while navigating. I was quite aware of the Satellite perspective of the attack. I am similarly aware about wondering whether it was worth running a red light, considering that I’m going to die at the end of this, anyway—I actually didn’t, and the reason is that I was also simultaneously aware of the perspective of a later police investigation, and I wanted them to think that I was pretty polite in the sense I went about it. In fact it would have been more prudent to have run the red light since it fit the ‘unhappy widower’ narrative—ultimately I was doing the whole thing for Hope—but, I mean, that was all hypotheticals, anyway, Hope was dead. Similar bit about lane crossings. I’d have to speed up on the rightmost lane, since that’s the one next to the sidewalk. Having never run someone over before, I didn’t know what would happen, and what speeds to go, and so on. I decided 60 ought to do it, but I didn’t actually anticipate the fact that the people would slam onto my windshield, cracking it—I hit only seventeen people in the end, not the hundreds I had going on in my head. And this also only happened because I swerved straight into a crowd; evidently if I had tried to pick them off one-by-one I would have gotten three or four at most, the visibility would’ve become so horrible. Of them six died, and four suffered pretty bad injuries. The other seven had broken bones or big bruises. The car itself was a second-hand Toyota Sequoia with a very high hood and a strong grill, which enabled getting that far in the first place; a RAV4 certainly wouldn’t have barreled through seventeen people, and a Corolla would’ve hit maybe four at best. The Sequoia was what Hope called ‘our baby.’
Don’t worry, I know I’m being pretty detached about this—it’s a consequence of the epiphany. These were all the logistics going through my head.
But the really interesting part, of course, is how I transitioned from ‘I’m going to die’ to ‘I’m going to run over a bunch of people.’ The causes here are circumflex. Remember how Hope wanted to be run over by a car? This factoid was pretty important, but it’s pretty subtle how it ends up manifesting in terms of someone else being hit by a car. This is teleologically easier to handle: at some point an accident must be involved, and hence it happened. Or it wouldn’t, and I wouldn’t die. These things were intricately tied in this manner.
None of this serves well to explain, nevertheless.
Let’s get back to the psych ward—sorry, to the Burgerville. All these are the thoughts of a man looking out the window who’s come to the inevitable conclusion of suicide. What’s he thinking? He must be profoundly lonely, because he’s looking out the window of a Burgerville. All alone. Nobody around him. His wife’s dead, his mother’s dead, his father’s dead, his dog’s dead—Buster, no less, echoing the cliché; he, too, was run over by a car—you can see the pattern. Things are bleak. But life isn’t actually all that bad, per se—he’s got a job he likes, he’s got some friends. Yeah he hasn’t been hanging out with them recently, but they’re there, they call. They’ve got names like Trevor, J.P., even Wu-Tang Dan, and there’s even Céline and her boyfriend. Fuck, there’s also Luca and Xiao, if you’re counting that way—he’s an ex-Harvard classicist, after all, and sooner or later he will make tenure, if only at Reed. He’s sad a lot, but that’s understandable. His wife went nuts in a psych ward. She slit her wrists with a piece of glass. Smashed the window, all that—the kind of unspeakable pain he was never in. In fact the pain he’s in is almost Proustian, in nature—he just can’t live with these memories, because every time anything happens he thinks of the existential weight he’s carrying of all these people on his shoulders, keeping them alive, all by himself, and then all of a sudden his life begins to look like something else entirely. Remember: he’s only got one of it. And the question is whether it’s worth it. He’s done all the basics: grew up, got a job, got a wife. Hey! He even fell in love! How many of them get to see that? Sure, he’s not got kids, but that’s got nothing to do with lack of trying, and it also seems so excruciatingly far away now that it’s really the last thing on his mind—I mean, what’s he gonna do with half a job and no wife but a kid? Instead all he can see is his future extending onward, about forty more years he’s got, at worst, and they all don’t seem that bad. Crying on the weeknights. Making meaning out of his work. Reading the Metamorphosis yet again—he’s been getting into Xenophon pretty seriously, recently, as well, and the bar’s always there on Friday evenings. Saturday there’s shopping. He could get another dog. It’s not even close to over.
But then he thinks of the psych ward, and she’s there, staring blankly at a wall while thinking of this guy, Michael Brodský, this guy she met at a bar a few months before she got herself put in this place for being a hysterical, suicidal young woman who tried to run over a bunch of people down on a street in Portland but only ever managed to slam herself into a pole, swerving and missing just before she hits this young father with a baby strapped onto his chest—somehow the baby didn’t make her do it.
And he thought that the baby was the important part! That’s what I remember thinking, more than anything, that I wanted to mow down a baby. Because the epiphany, or so I can call it, ultimately had a lot more to do with Hope than it had to do with me. So let’s split it back into two now: first is the deciding to die, which had been done a long time ago: maybe since she was a kid, really. That wasn’t a decision so much as a symptom. It was just always there. Sure, it wasn’t always active, but it was always there, in some way or another, and in that Burgerville it just became clearer than ever. I mean, the puddle really settled it: here were the elements, preventing me, preventing her, whatever, from even the basic common decency of going and talking to your dead fucking mom. That makes it a lot more potent.
Sorry about getting all worked up. As I said: there’s this guy, looking out the window of a Burgerville. Let’s stay there for a while. That’s me. And I’m thinking all those thoughts but am also acutely aware of all those thoughts, aware of the fact that yes, horrible tragedies happened, and things are going pretty badly. But it’s been almost a year since Hope died and the sorrow is fading. It’s not that I don’t love her anymore, it’s that she’s just not there. All I’ve got are just memories of her, and they’re becoming sepia-tinged, like those memories of my mother that always make me cry. And in some ways this is good, because now I can’t remember that time we were in the car that well, anymore—what stays with me isn’t what she did or what she thought but just how she looked so ethereal and beautiful and otherworldly, my beautiful wife, my wife—I want you to know that, that she was my wife, in the end, that yes, I was the one who loved her. And that’s fading. I’m finding it harder to even remember what that love was like. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still there, but it was so cruelly snatched away from me that when it’s fading all I’ve got are these tidbits, really, these remembrances. What am I going to do with those? And at the same time my life’s seemingly improving, even though I haven’t been talking to anyone; the fact is that I could. But it’s all in this weird, unappealing soup of events that just looks like the days stretching after each other ad infinitum. ‘So it goes.’ That’s what I’m thinking. None of this means anything without her. It’s just days, really. Things to occupy my time with. And sitting there in that Burgerville I realize that I’ve lost this existential conviction that allows things to actually occur in a manner that they cause any psychological or even physiological changes in me. I mean, it’s not bad, exactly—kind of like those burger and fries, in that they’re just okay. Palatable. Edible. Not too bad, just fine. This isn’t a digressive emptiness, it’s more so that as my memories have become sepia-tinged, my world itself hasn’t—it’s still got color, but it’s, as my mother said, legitimately grayer. And I think the crucial point is—and it’s one of the things that we don’t have words for—it’s that I already know what the rest of my time on this earth is going to be like because it’s going to be exactly like my time right now, except I’ll have even less of Hope, and my mother, and Buster. They’re just going to fade away. Each semester I’ll have some new kids to which I’m going to present my bit about Ovid and Virgil, and we’re going to read those and I’m thinking maybe the kids could do Hesoid this term, who knows? Maybe they’ll enjoy it. And so on.
And that’s one aspect of the baseline state of death. The second one is that what I told you at the very beginning: guy has wife, wife dies, guy doesn’t get tenure, so on—this is a story. It’s a narrative. It’s building towards something, and I’m thinking that somehow or the other I have found myself in a narrative situation. These aren’t just abstract ideas: they happened to me. My dog literally got ran over by a truck. I stepped in a fucking puddle, man, while I was trying to go to meet my mom. I just wanted to talk to her, for once. I wanted to think about her and cry. And, if you think about it—if you really think about it, just for a second—who am I to resist the whims of the narrative form, of this story? This is not a hypothetical. It must happen because everything’s been leading up to it. And let’s say I don’t kill myself, then—well, it’s just going to happen again, because the relevant, underlying facts are true—she’s dead, dog’s dead, no job. His name was Buster, he was a Golden Retriever, and we got him because Hope couldn’t have a kid. She cried so much about that. She got a dog for herself. I mean, she lived alone in this beat-up Portland studio, but she got a dog, anyway, even though she traveled so much. She stopped traveling for him. He was four months old when we got him, was about a year and a half when he died. He wasn’t any good at playing fetch, but you should’ve seen him at the dog park. That’s all sepia now, too, even with the green grass in the memory; they’d changed the lights at the dog park recently—changed the halogens to LEDs, which were a lot brighter and they gave the grass this vivid neon glow, and while I can recall it and I can visualize it cleanly the consistency has turned into that odd sort of sepia that comes from the warmth of the memory being painfully nostalgic, as if it it belongs to a world outside our own. Maybe that’s what mom was thinking, all those years ago, when she thought back to the time she ripped those banknotes. She had a dog herself, back in the day; she was called Vera, and she was a German Shepherd. But I’m getting lost again—the point is that there’s a clean narrative arc that goes from guy whose wife dies to guy whose life no longer has any color in it and it ends, right there, in that final, untimely act—to be buried right next to the others.
And even there, that’s not the only one! That’s the big joke (and this one is pretty funny): they let you choose whether you want to be the dignified widower who ‘gets over’ the wife and instead spends his days relaying the quote-unquote power of ancient Greek Literature to dissatisfied, bi-curious Oregonians, or whether you want to be the guy who loved his wife so much that he slammed into a crowd with a vehicle. They don’t even make the decision for you. And the ‘epiphany’ this mental juxtaposition of both the love and seeming desires of Hope combined with an absolute understanding that these potential narratives—which are really all that there are—are rendered absolutely zilch by the fact that you can pick and choose at your convenience which one you’d like to follow to fruition and hence there is no reason for any one to have really any kind of invalidity at all over another. Bada-bing bada-bang, once you start looking at it that way, the Burnside Street Attack really wasn’t a tragedy in any sense of the word—it wasn’t tragic that all these people were run over, nor was it tragic that the guy had been pushed to such extremes by the fact that his wife had died. Once you start looking at it that way all that’s left is that the Burnside Street Attack was simply an event that occurred, just like any other. Not dissimilar from stepping into a puddle outside a Burgerville or that one time Hope got bit by a tsetse fly during a volunteering stint in the Congo and got sleeping sickness. And if each of those narrative threads are equally valid, might as well pick the one that’d make Hope happy.
I hope you’re getting it. If you want to know I didn’t think of these things in the way that you’re probably going about it now: in fact it was one of those thoughts that don’t actually have a visual component outside just a mental ‘refreshing’ of the world like how when you’ve got a new television the old one suddenly seems so quaint and it seems weird that you were able to look at it, no problem. I had that happen real-time inside the Burgerville. I did even think of the television comparison.
Once you’re there the rest starts clicking together. I don’t have to tell you about how nothing has any meaning anymore. At a profound level you don’t care if you live or die: you’re a bit like the absurd man, finding things somewhat baffling and strange. Everything starts to look so weird. A bit like a weed high, but at a more base level. You get in the car, turn the screw. Might as well do it know—it’s all the same, really. But the one thing that’s really strange—and this is the kicker—is that the people around you don’t seem to get it. They’re walking around as if things mean something. I see this kid skateboarding: what’s going on? Why’s he doing that? Doesn’t he know that it’s all meaningless? There’s no God, there’s no nothing. C’est bizarre!
Now listen closely: now that I’m thinking narratively, I must build to a climax, of sorts, a climax that is all but perfect in retrospect. Hope wanted to be killed by a car, and therefore me being in a car must be the killer. Doesn’t that make sense? It’s all so clean, so straightforward. I could kill one person, maybe two, maybe three, who knows? It was all for her, somehow, and it was such a fitting aberration! I remember when I met her. It was a few months before she got put in the psych ward. She was a real genius, the type of people you don’t meet much these days, the type who can deconstruct, distill everything you’re saying into interpretations so far beyond what you can imagine—she went to Harvard, of course, easily one of the best classicists of the year, maybe of her generation. Then there was that Robert guy, back in ’18. Put her into the ward the first time, had to get ECT until she got fixed. A bit of a precocious girl. She was doing better when she met me, but she had all these doubts, all these things that didn’t make any sense; wanted to know I loved her, every day, every night. Kept asking for it, like it was some kind of job that I had to report on. Her mother had died a short time ago, and she wasn’t taking to it all that well, and a month after I met her the dog got ran over, too. I don’t know why these things just kept happening to her—guess some people are just born unlucky.
Anyway, I’m in the car, looking at some people walking by the side, thinking it’s for Hope. She would’ve wanted it. What I want you to understand at this point is that I’m actually not the monster you think I am—I know you think I’m crazy, I know you think I’m just spinning bullshit. For example, I actually know that killing people, running them over—that’s a bad thing. I’ve read all the arguments. I’ve even internalized the guilt. This isn’t something I’m going around doing for funsies. It’s a carefully calculated philosophical and existential position I’ve arrived at which just involves me inhabiting the narrative, playing it out till the end, carrying out the grand whims of the universe—and, of course, I’m unfortunately the one chosen to do them. So I start thinking about the kind of person I’m going to run over. Of course it’s a man, one who looks like Michael—that same dark hair, the chiseled collarbones, the twisted smile, his grey eyes, his long arms, the depth of his gaze, the way he’s looking straight through you. It has to be Michael. I look around, trying to pick someone like him off the street. My world has already turned grey. I feel it approaching, faster and faster. And I catch a glimpse of a man like that right next to Powell’s, wearing what looks like a backpack, staring out into the street; he’s even got a beanie hat on—Michael so loved those—and he’s got a scruffy beard, but it will have to do. And then I see the baby. I’d thought it was a backpack; strapped onto his chest, it’s a little baby boy with fuzzy hair and the same grey eyes as his father, and all of a sudden I feel the tears come up again. Because for a second I had a thought that could really damn me forever—that if there was really no meaning, no greater moral character to this world and all actions were indeed as arbitrary as I stipulated them to be then perhaps the great rebellion could be striking into the innocent. I felt, somehow, as if I were doing a favor to him because the world I lived in had been so devoid of meaning and beauty that it had driven me to this point. I could not even fathom for a second that there were others who did not find life so bleak and oppressive. That the baby could very well grow up to be a man who was known and loved and who carried out his actions with a quiet dignity instead of my hysterical vehemence. And I felt, in that moment, that if the world was truly meaningless then my action of ending that life was equally comical and valid, but when I saw it something changed. I swerved. I wasn’t even doing 60—I was too weak for that. It was around 35, and I swept headfirst into a pole, and later when the police found me bleeding from the head having suffered a concussion I think it took them only a few minutes to realize that this was a girl in such a profound state of pain that they could have me legally declared insane on the spot.
And this is the truth I’m giving you and I also gave myself because it is just so cliché and unworthy of my elevated intelligence that to the papers the only reason I tried to run those people over was not because of the aesthetic pretensions of a narratively well-lived life but because ultimately from an outsider perspective I did not prove to be any different from that stereotypical image of the dumb BPD girl slitting her wrists because her boyfriend left her—Michael, who abandoned me because I he said that I was proving to be insane, accusing him of cheating, building long scenarios of self-justification in which I inhabited the monologue I ascribed to him; even within my radical acceptance of the fact that I was just another cliché I really despised being that particular one. Because I wasn’t that girl. I wasn’t just mopping around, feeling things. I had completely internalized the fact that no one was ever going to love me, that I was broken, that underneath the whole thing about me being prodigiously doomed out of love was the raw pain… and then my mother died that March and it all came crashing down until I was left with nothing. And, truth be told, I still don’t think he ever loved me. I knew when we were in that car and he just said nothing but sat there in bewilderment at my confession—he said he wanted to understand me but evidently he’d never paid even a whit of attention because if you can’t predict that I’d been doing something like that do you know me, like, at all? I knew when we were out there in Portland eating chicken tenders of all things and he said that I was unhealthy for watching those movies when I was that young and that they’d fucked me up. That’s what he said—that they’d fucked me up. How could he say he loved me after that? And that worst part is that somehow I still loved him. I felt so bad, so fucking bad, I was crying all the time, every time I looked out my window at an untainted world I wanted to puke at the fact that I couldn’t be one of those people, one of those lovely, shiny people who walked around with this newfound glow around themselves because someone actually cared for them, for one, because they could call home and someone would pick up and ask them what their day was like and really mean it, you know—sure Michael would call me in the evenings but he’d just go through the motions, even if we talked for hours he had obviously taken out the time to play at this whole ‘cool boyfriend’ thing, as if he ever had any real feelings for me. I could picture every single one of those ‘love you!’s being delivered with that scrunched-up face followed by a ‘tsk-tsk’ after he’d cut the phone call and instead returned back to whatever stupid task he had at hand. Now that I’m in the psych ward I can sit and think all day, and these lemming whitecoats are going around thinking that I have the same interiority as those morons over at 4C who think that they have bugs under their skin or that the CIA sends covert mind-control transmissions via radio waves, because the psychiatric bar for what comprises a delusion is surprisingly low—believe me, I’ve run all manner of experiments on this particular stereotype and the conclusion is that some form of staring into the distance and a short, thoughtful pause before giving a genuine-sounding answer is enough to inspire beaming recommendations with respect to recovery; really you can even do something as low as replace ‘God’ in any statement said with religious fervor with ‘the universe’ and you’ll see those totalitarian lab coats pull out their clicky pens and start scribbling away at their notepad. I’ll be out in a bit, but till then I’m sitting here thinking about Michael, who didn’t love me. They’ll never know what’s going on in my head. How could they?
Meanwhile I was so tied up into the facade of being the perfect girlfriend in that I would be the ‘cool’ girlfriend, the one who didn’t care, but I didn’t want to play this facade of being loved conditionally, I just wanted some skinny cheery guy with a boyish demeanor to really hold me close and tell me that he loved me and he actually saw something in me that wasn’t just a broken shell of one logical contradiction after another, building into an ontological trap, but actually just a naive girl who was so intimately tied into her Chinese-Dutch-French-American upbringing that she really believed that there was something to these things, you know, that holding hands in a park meant something, or that kissing with tongue wasn’t just something that you could do, or that love for people could not be turned off—because when I loved I really loved, you know, I really did. If only Michael loved me. He was just one name among many—just another one of a long line of disappointing men who only saw a smart young girl to fulfill whatever domestic fantasy they had this time. And I laid out all these criteria that would accompany the man I wanted but ultimately the only one I really, really needed was one who loved me and who wouldn’t leave. He would love me even knowing that every time I closed my eyes all I imagined was the peaceful bliss of a shotgun explosively annihilating my brain stem. And I couldn’t bear that pain. I wanted to fucking die. I also wanted to puke, to rip my hair out, to cry, to never leave my bed, to set everything on fire, to slam a baseball bat into the wall again and again and again, but more than anything, I wanted to die, because I was a nice girl, first and foremost, the ultimate cruelty, I was not posing at being nice, I really was, despite everything, a nice girl who just wanted to do the right things, who didn’t want to burden other people with these despicable, pathetic thoughts I was having and it ate me inside, you know, why I was so compelled to be this nice girl; maybe it was just the core working-class tenet of my being, just being a nice girl and try as I might I could not erase it and turned it, like millions and millions of nice girls before me, inside, into hysterical, fanatic self-hatred; and finally the day came when I stared down Burnside Street and couldn’t feel a single thing and toppling over into my doom seemed less of a narrative climax and more an act as involuntary as digestion. All I wanted was for someone to kiss me. And I would kiss him back, every day, every night, every evening, I would never stop because I loved him as much as I hated myself, and maybe through that union I would come to find in myself something worth saving.