THIALH

When I was 17, I planned to write a novel that would somehow ply and individualize The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Not the Carson McCullers book, which I’d maybe read with no effect in junior high school, but the lesser-known filmed version. It starred Alan Arkin and was probably released in the later 1960s, but I’ve decided not to fact-check what I’m writing since the movie’s less the architecture of my thoughts than their brunt. In any case, the movie must have bombed, since, by the time I’d finally gained the chops to maybe write my version, no one I knew had even heard of it.

I was in my middle-20s then, and the movie’s details were erased, or largely so, like preliminary pencil marks or powers of suggestion whose only purpose was to float a revelation I’d experienced while watching it. I rarely cry, even when alone, but I did, and with an unusual lack of self-control, blubbering right there amongst the movie’s other, less absorbed customers. I continued to cry off and on for days afterward because, as best I can remember, Alan Arkin’s character seemed to me a kind of distillation of what was deeply wrong with me.

In my reckless memory, there was something physically screwed up with Arkin’s character, whose “name” I can’t remember anymore, and who I’ve decided might as well have had my name, which is Dennis. Maybe Dennis was blind or deaf. Those are my guesses. But he was very kind and generous, or else he had become innately kind and generous, hoping an unbridled selflessness that made his drawbacks seem beside the point would draw people close to someone as generally useless as himself.

Dennis didn’t get out much due to this impairment I’m imagining. But people in his neighborhood would ring his bell whenever they felt sad or problematic. He would listen attentively, so I guess he wasn’t deaf, and he would say kind, supportive, wise sounding things in response, which seemed to help them. He wasn’t a happy person, even so, but helping people made him feel like he was more than some disabled guy who needed others’ prompts to even live and who evinced no value to the world apart from making able people count their lucky stars.

Sometimes these visitors would pause their fretting long enough ask how Dennis was, and he would tell them he was fine as briefly as he could because he knew they didn’t really care, or that they wanted to be quickly reassured he was okay enough to always be cemented where they could rely on him, so, in a way, their show of interest was a secret way of making sure he wasn’t doing all that well, because they actually wished the worst for him, or wished the worst that wouldn’t kill him.

Despite his reassurances, he was very lonely, to tell the truth, meaning when he was alone, which was most of the time. After someone he’d just helped had closed the door behind them, he would stay planted in the chair or on the bed where he’d been listening, feeling emptied out and disappointed and . . . not unloved exactly, because he figured people loved his kindness, or, rather, relied on his kindness, which isn’t quite love.

No one imagined what he did when they weren’t with him—for instance, that he’d sit or lie around for hours trying to believe that someone he’d helped might love him and not just need his immoderate attention, not caring from where it came or who’d provided it. Everyone assumed, superficially but logically, that someone so selfless wasn’t interested in being loved. Actually, the idea of love never even came up when they thought about him. They just thought, “He’s so nice.”

One of these confessors was a woman, younger than Dennis. She was beautiful, or he thought so, so I guess he wasn’t blind. She also seemed to need his kindness more than the others. She visited a lot. When she would ask how he was doing, the questions seemed sincere, although he knew that the intensity of his attraction to her beauty might have made the questions seem sincere when they were simply more polite or guilt-inspired.

He fell in love with her. It was so stupid. He was agonized and embarrassed by this love since he knew he was unworthy, but he tried to let himself believe she visited so often because she cared or even loved him or, at the very least, had missed him. He knew this theory made no sense, and that their closeness was a technicality, and that she’d never fall in love with someone whose body sucked, but he wanted her to love him so badly, and he understood that love, at least in theories proffered by the church, etc., was supposed to be extremely flexible.

Sometimes he thought, She wouldn’t let me be so kind and giving and devoted if she didn’t love me. He thought, She has to know I wouldn’t be so giving and devoted to her unless I was in love. He thought, She wouldn’t let me be so obviously in love with her unless she was in love with me in some way. He thought, If she didn’t love me, she would tell me to stop doing all these things for her because the fact that she gives nothing but her presence in return would make her feel uncomfortable.

He loved her so incredibly much. When she needed something, no matter how peripherally or trivial, he would spend days on the phone or negotiating streets and local stores with great difficulty, trying to find someone to help him give her what she needed. When she needed money, he lied to her and said he had a lot of money and went deeply into debt so he could give her everything that anyone could ever give another person.

He began to almost think her gratitude was love because, by then, he’d made himself virtually nothing but a source of generosity that just happened to look unpleasant like him. He knew the only way to let her know he loved her was to give and give, ideally greater things than anybody else could give her, and he accepted that the only way he could be loved by her was through being thanked, ideally more warmly than she thanked anybody else.

Something got fucked up later in the movie. I don’t remember what it was. Maybe she came by one day and said that something he’d helped her with had made it possible for her to move away somewhere where she’d be happier. That sounds right. In any case, he realized she’d only ever wanted him to help her, period, and now that she was happy, she didn’t need him anymore, and that she’d never actually loved him. She’d only loved how much he loved her, if even that. Or she’d only loved that love’s results. Or not even loved. Felt lucky.

Dennis recognized that, given what he had to work with, he had, through her inveigling, become the best human being his materials could ever possibly allow to be fashioned from him, the most valuable, the least pointless, and that, even in that utmost state, even after having given her what she or anyone most wanted in the world, happiness, and after devoting everything he had materially and otherwise to her and trashing his emotions to accomplish that, he wasn’t loved.

He didn’t think, Maybe if I write a novel that would tell her how I feel in a more exalted form, and if it’s great enough . . . He wasn’t a writer. He hadn’t written novels that people liked and whose talent in that one regard formed his only premium in the world. He couldn’t think, If I devote this last, most valuable thing about myself to her, and if I tear apart the rules that hold the novel back and write the most amazing ever, it will be such a brazen act of love that she’ll have to love me. Unlike me, he had no foolish hopes about himself and art’s value and love.

After a few minutes of debate, Dennis killed himself. I can’t remember how. Maybe Dennis shot himself in the head, but I would think that. If I didn’t remember exactly how it happened, that’s obviously what I would guess. There was some kind of funeral. The people he had helped showed up, including the woman. They seemed sad, but not so sad that you thought his death would make much of a difference in their lives. He’d been really nice, and that was nice, but he was disabled, so the suicide made sense.

I’ve tried to write my version of this depressing novel several times. Or I would have thought of trying to. Sometimes I couldn’t find a form magnificent enough to actualize it. Always I knew or felt that to work as hard and painfully as I would need to do to write this self-excoriating thing, I would have to be like Dennis in the movie and write it as a sacrificial gift to someone whom I loved so much that I would do this hardest thing I could ever do as an act of love for him.

For most of his life, Dennis believed the person he had loved the most and would always love above all others was George Miles, a friend for whom he wrote a cycle of five novels in the roughly 1990s. They met when George was 12 and he was 15. George was the strangest, sweetest, and most beautiful boy Dennis had ever seen on earth, and, to his complete amazement, George loved him instantaneously and fiercely. Or he exhibited every sign Dennis recognized from books and daydreams as love.

But when George turned 14, the passion and excitement Dennis roused from him was diagnosed and named by doctors not as love but a form of mania. George was, they said, severely bipolar, and it’s true that something scary had begun to warp his love for Dennis. It either came in outbursts, days-long fits of almost violent affection and flirtation, or was cut off by indifferent stares that showed no sign for sometimes weeks.

Still, they thought it was love. They called it that. They fought through every frenzied day and numbing day to prove that theirs was just a heavily embattled love. George’s family and friends and doctors and psychiatrists did everything they could to make him understand that Dennis was a trigger, a drug, an idée fixe. Sometimes they’d convince him that excising Dennis was the key and he would look the other way at school until the loneliness felt even worse.

Dennis’s friends back then tried everything to make him understand he was obsessed with saving George, and that he couldn’t. That the imagination, meaning love, was too loosey-goosey to compete with science or biology, the smartest said. But Dennis stuck, and, years later, not so very long before George shot himself, they finally drew their heaviest weaponry against his illness and started fucking, and they fucked and fucked until George’s last and worst depression took over.

Last year, Dennis thought he was equipped to write his Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, of course for George. He sat down at his laptop and, for seven months, wrote down everything he remembered from their friendship, beginning with the night they’d met until the day in 1997 when he found out George had killed himself ten years before without his knowing. Dennis recounted everything they’d done and said as honestly and artlessly as he could write, hoping that his pain and lack of stylishness would read as hugely more than them.

Even though the effort made him cry more violently and constantly than he’d ever done, and even though it made him think irrationally, throw his head back and yell at nonexistent George, not unlike how the actor in that Rimbaud biopic yells so stupidly at God while scrawling Rimbaud’s poems, what he wrote was just cathartic crap, and when he read it over afterward, all he discovered was that everyone but George and him were right about them.

Maybe George loved how fiercely Dennis thought he was amazing and not just too fucked up. When he became officially bipolar, and Dennis started fighting to unearth the gist of that amazing little kid he’d met, George wanted to believe that kid was trapped somewhere inside him, and he fought too, and he called the struggle love because Dennis did. But if George didn’t love Dennis, and there’s no evidence he did, then I guess I never loved him. I loved something else that this is torn from.