Sheila Heti is the author of seven books, including the novel “How Should a Person Be?”
Sunday, May 17, 2015
Monday, May 11, 2015
"When I died...""My Life Is A Joke"Death Story by Sheila Heti
The New Yorker, May 11 2015, FICTION: (Scroll down to story please.)
Fiction MAY 11, 2015 ISSUE
My Life Is a Joke
BY SHEILA HETI
When I died, there was no one around to see it. I died all alone. It’s fine. Some people think it’s a great tragedy to die all alone, with no one around to see it. My high-school boyfriend wanted to marry me, because he thought the most important thing to have in life was a witness. To marry your high-school girlfriend, and have her with you all through life—that is a lot of witnessing. Everything important would be witnessed by one woman. I didn’t like his idea of what a wife was for—someone to just hang around and watch your life unfold. But I understand him better now. It is no small thing to have someone who loves you see your life, and discuss it with you every night.
Instead of marrying him, I married no one. We broke up. I lived alone. I had no children. I was the only witness to my life, while he found a woman to marry, then had a child using fertility. Her family of origin is large and lives near them—same with his family of origin. I visited them one time, and at his birthday dinner there were thirty relatives and close friends, including their only child. We were at the home of his wife’s parents, in the small coastal town where they were building their lives. He got exactly what he wanted. He has thirty reliable witnesses. Even if half of them die or move away or come to hate him, he still has fifteen. When he dies, he will be surrounded by a loving family, who will remember when he still had hair. Who will remember every night that he came home stinking drunk and yelling. Who will remember his every failure, and love him in spite of it all. When all his witnesses die, his life will be over. When his son is dead, and his son’s wife is dead, and the children of his son are also dead, the life of my first boyfriend will be through.
When I drew my last breath, no one saw me. The car that hit me drove quickly away, and a driver stopped to carry me out of the center of the road. I was already dead when he carried me, so I can say I died alone.
Now, you can probably tell that I’m lying. If I really am O.K. with the fact that no one I loved witnessed my death, why did I come all the way back here from the dead? Why did I put on the flesh of my body, and the clothes I wore my last day on earth? Why did I resume the voice I spoke with when I was living, and return to the weight I was at the time of my death? I even washed the dirt out of my eyes and my hair, settled my teeth in the places in my mouth where they were before they got knocked out. Why did I bother doing that? It was a lot of work. I could have stayed in the ground for eternity. I could have stayed there, disintegrating, if I felt that my life was resolved. If there had not been a twinge of anxiety in me that something still needed to be said, I would still be in the ground.
Here is the thing: I was a joke, and my life was a joke. The last man I loved—not my high-school boyfriend—told me this during our final fight. I was thirty-four at the time. During the fight, as I was trying to explain my version of things, he shouted, “You are a joke, and your life is a joke!”
The night before, we loved each other still. We went to bed at the same time, and, as he read a popular crime novel on his phone, I fell asleep on my pillow, gently touching his arm. A few days later, I died. It has taken me since that time—four years—to understand the full significance of what he said: that I was a joke and my life was a joke. At the moment he said it, I didn’t know how to reply. I was so hurt, I just began bawling. This only proved to him that he was correct. I stared at him with an open mouth. Of course, I was used to his cruelties by then, but still it hurt.
When I received your invitation to come speak here tonight—Didn’t you know I had died? You did not—when I received your invitation, at first I thought, No, I cannot come. The truth is I had no reason to. But then a few months later I wrote you a note: I’ll come if you’ll pay to dig me up. If you’ll pay to fly my corpse across North America, from where I am buried, and wheel me to the mike stand, then yes, I’ll come. As I flew, I worked so hard to keep in my dead brain what I wanted to say—it was the whole reason I’d said yes. I had something important to declare. What was it? Have I said it already? Thoughts slip from a dead brain so quickly. I can’t remember if I said it.
Lying there under the ground, salt and soil and sweat and worms and seedlings and saplings and the bones of dried birds collecting in my mouth, and my blood caked dry, and my toes curled up, and my brain filled with hair and the feathers of birds, and the little white balls of whatever it is that sometimes specks the soil—those little Styrofoam balls—and the shit of dogs, and the piss of skunks, and the seedlings and the saplings and the acorns and the raisins; it is so amazing I could think down there, in that total, wet darkness. You never know, lying in the ground, what your niggling thought will be. You can take only one thought with you to the grave, and invariably it is a thought that bugs you, something that must be thought all the way through to the end before you find your peace. The thought I took was of a man I loved saying, “You are a joke, and your life is a joke.” It cleaved to my head and my muscles and my bones, until I was nothing but those words. When my life collapsed inward—which is what death is, life collapsing deep into itself—that phrase remained outside the collapsing; it became a thing separate from me. And, because it was separate from me, I could take it with me—it was the only thing I had.
Could I have a glass of water, please? Where is my water? I am parched and I am dead. Tomorrow I will be on an airplane home, down there with all the luggage, peace in my bones, having declared what I came here to declare—what I realized when I was underground. Then I will be dead for the rest of eternity, never having to brush myself off.
The man who said I was a joke and my life was a joke—he may not have been there in my final moments, witnessing my final breath, but what I realized was: he foretold my death. He could only have foretold it by seeing me to my core—by having been my soul’s witness. When he said those awful words, he witnessed me into the future, a future he knew I would meet. During our fight, I tried to convince him that he was wrong. “I’m not a joke!” I cried. “You’re the joke! You’re the joke!”
When a person slips on a banana peel and dies, then her life is a joke. Slipping on a banana peel is not how I died. When a person walks into a bar with a rabbi, a priest, and a nun, and that is how she dies, then her life is a joke. That is not how I died. When a person is a chicken who crosses the road to get to the other side, and that is how she dies, then her life is a joke. Well, that is how I died—as a chicken crossing the road to get to the other side.
When I crossed the road that day, it was to the other side I was heading—that was how much despair I felt, our fight still in my mind. Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side. A suicide. The other side is death. Everyone knows that, right?
I scurried out in front of that rusty old car, and smashed myself into the metal, my teeth pushed back into my throat by the fender, my chest completely run over.
I didn’t come here to depress you. I came here to tell you a joke. Or, rather, to show you a joke. Me! And to brag that I was witnessed. That first boyfriend of mine—he doesn’t live far from here. Perhaps he is in the audience, listening? Having a beer? I hope he’s here! My life and death were witnessed, I tell you! Witnessed and foretold! You did not fare any better than me. It seems both of us won, in the end.
What a chicken I was. I couldn’t bear any aspect of living. Especially that old custom: that you have to live a better life than everyone else.
What is the other side like, you may be wondering. Since I’m here, I might as well tell you: it’s a ridiculous place where everyone is always laughing. It’s like something I experienced once, on a transcontinental flight. This woman beside me laughed at every dumb joke in whatever show she was watching, literally every joke the show made. Then she watched another show, then another one. Her laughter filled our row of seats. She didn’t stop laughing from takeoff to landing. How a person’s laughter can make you hate her! Don’t the laughers of the world know this? Do they think it makes them lovable? Who likes to hear someone laughing to herself, headphones on, while staring at a screen? Probably the same people who like to listen to strangers fuck behind a hotel wall.
Over there on the other side, it’s like that all the time—the dogs laugh, the trees laugh, everyone laughs—whether there’s anything funny or not. I practiced this speech on the other side, before an audience of sixteen people, and it took four hours, from beginning to end, as I waited after saying each sentence for the laughter to subside. Here on earth it is different, of course. The quiet of the living is one of the great reliefs. Is death the same for everyone, or is this laughing world a death made just for me? How can I know for sure?
Does anything I’m saying make any sense? I’m self-conscious about my speaking. Does my voice sound all right? When you are dead, it’s difficult to carry a thought. My head feels stuffed with cotton batting; my eyes feel stuffed with cotton balls; my ears feel plugged up with cotton. It is hard to think, to string meaning to meaning. I did not come here to tell you I love you. Is that what you think I am saying? I only loved two men ever. One of them wanted to marry me, and the other thought my life was a joke. My first boyfriend found himself a witness, and I have come to declare that I found one, too. I won, you see? I won! I won the best thing a person can win—to be seen! I declare it here today. It’s the only reason I crawled into my flesh to stand here before you—a joke on this stage. His words no longer hurt me. They make me feel so proud.
Why did the chicken cross the road? That’s me. I am the chicken. And I got to the other side. He knew this would happen when he spoke those words. How beautiful to be seen. ♦
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