“Abel, you know what I don’t understand?”
“What?”
“If everything and everybody is perfect, why do you drink?”
A pause and then,“Everything is perfect in itself.”
“Whether you drink or not.”
“Right.”
“But more perfect for you when you drink.” Another pause.
“We don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to.”
“Maybe that’s it.”
“What is?”
“That it’s more perfect.”
“But is it?”
“Louise, I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“What you feel. The truth.”
“I’m not escaping, I don’t feel that. I’m not looking for perfection.”
“Are you looking for anything?”
“Sure.”
“What?”
“Whatever’s there.”
“You mean, whatever you see.”
“Right.”
“I’m just trying to understand.”
“I know.”
“You don’t make it easy.”
“I know.”
“That’s okay. Nobody’s perfect.”
A few days later, Saturday afternoon, I fall asleep on the chesterfield and have a dream about Tim Todd. We’re sitting under a weeping willow. There are things he wants to show me but he’s hesitating, afraid I’ll be dismissive. These things are in a brown paper bag, so they can’t be fish, at least not live ones. In any case I’d prefer not to know. Finally he says,“Well, do you want to take a look?” and there is such wistfulness and despair in his voice that I almost relent.
“Some other time,” I say.
I wake up on the verge of tears. “Tim Todd,” I think, wondering if I cared about him more than I ever realized. No, this is belated guilt, it’s regret over having hurt him. Which is not to say that, under similar circumstances, I wouldn’t hurt him again.
And then something else occurs to me—about why Abel drinks—and I get up and go to the window, uncertain whether I’ve had this thought before. I suspect I have but that I let it go. Probably I was still hoping that the reason lay outside of him, in the form of an awful memory, say, or an abstract philosophy, and that he could repudiate it if he really wanted to.
I guess I’ve used up all of my faith because suddenly it seems obvious that he drinks out of sheer helplessness. If life means doing harm, making decisions, choosing one person over another, then he’s not cut out for it. And doing nothing isn’t the answer; that’s just making a decision by default. Better to be nothing than to do nothing.
Is that how he sees it? He knows how much his death will hurt us, so he must be under the impression that by staying alive he’ll eventually hurt us even more. Maybe we should pretend we’ve stopped caring what he does. Say,“We’ve given up on you, Abel. You don’t matter.” Well, that would gratify him, our falling in line with what he has been telling us for months. How do we get around that? How do we persuade him that he’s entitled to cause pain and, what’s more, that he has a responsibility to bear the pain he causes?
If only I could say, ‘You’re worthy of your own life,” and make him believe me. Too late. Too late. He seems completely enraptured now by the idea of no longer existing. I think he imagines the space he’ll vacate, the actual physical space, and there we’ll be, his parents and I, waving our hands around trying to find him, but at least we won’t come up against any resistance. There won’t be anything to collide with, only air.