In a magician’s vanishing act, a man wearing a black cape locks another man in an upright black box. The magician waves his wand and intones a series of words and makes the confined man disappear. Then he intones some more words and waves his wand again and the guy comes back. It should be noted that he participates of his own volition. With death, a form of magic we’re forced to undergo, we don’t return, though our corpse is still here, a locked and empty black box. I can’t decide if this makes death a more successful or less successful act.
Some people think you shouldn’t loan books out, because you’ll never get them back.
That’s what happened with me and Heidi. She used to live next door to us, in the back unit of the fourplex.
She was already living there when Tim and I moved in to our place in Venice, shortly after that incident involving my kitchen ceiling, in the late summer (or was it the early fall?) of 1998.
The moving process was exhausting; the previous owner had stripped our new house of everything, even the light fixtures, leaving only the wires.
My knowledge of Heidi is limited to the following. She was German and had retained an accent. She was an accountant. She liked to garden. She was . . . in her fifties? Heidi wore glasses, with thin silver frames. She had gray curly hair and a sharp face that might have been pretty when she was young.
She . . . the more I try to represent her, to present her likeness, the more I try to portray anyone, especially the people who’ve gone, the more they slip out of my grasp.
But I feel a need to keep talking; otherwise I’ll just plunge into silence. And then what will we do?
Our relations with Heidi were neighborly, cordial, but distant—you don’t want to get too friendly with your neighbors. All tangled up in their business.
Heidi made more of an effort; she gave us produce from her garden, basil and tomatoes and zucchinis. When she heard us in the backyard, she would say hi and talk to us through the slats of the fence. I could hear her but couldn’t see her, or just barely. Hang on, she’d say, and then she would climb up on her ladder, bearing her vegetables. I can still see her on that ladder, wearing a big sun hat, her sweet, sharp face peering over.
Heidi did accounting the old-fashioned way, in hard-backed ledgers, entering the transactions by hand. She showed me one of her ledgers once. I don’t know why. I must have asked to see it. She had this exceptionally neat handwriting, perfectly formed letters and numbers that were so small I’m surprised anyone could make sense of her bookkeeping.
I told her that I did accounting for a while, in high school, and at first I was pretty good at it, but soon I began to lose track of the basic principles. I would get the credit and debit columns confused, the distinction between those categories, which posed a fundamental problem to my ongoing success in the subject.
And the process began to disturb me. Somehow it seemed too . . . symbolic, of the relationship between life and death. From God’s vantage point, we’re all numbers, it’s nothing personal, he’s just balancing the books: what we thought was an asset becomes a liability; everyone’s name ends up in the debit column eventually. Though doesn’t debit have a positive value in double-entry bookkeeping?
Heidi nodded and laughed; I could not tell if she understood or thought I was insane.
Years went by. So many things must have happened in that time, but they’re all lost or I’ve put them somewhere else for safekeeping.
I can say this. For a while with me and Tim it was touch and go. He didn’t trust what I got up to while he was traveling. He began to tire of my impulses.
I’m glad he stuck around. I’m the kind of person who needs someone to quietly insinuate himself between me and the world, someone who’ll shield me from death or life or a sinister combination of both.
One afternoon Tim and I were on the street; we had been out walking, talking things over, and Heidi was washing her car. She had a bucket of dirty, soapy water. I have no recollection of the model or color of her car but the bucket was blue, the shade old ladies dye their hair. Tim asked Heidi how her day was going, and she paused for a moment.
“Okay,” she said, soft rag in hand, but her voice sounded a little funny, like something was going on and she wasn’t sure if she should share it with us. For some reason known only to her, she decided to say more.
“I have to go into the hospital for a procedure tomorrow, to have my ovaries removed,” she said.
Everything blurs here, but I’m sure we expressed our sympathy and asked her about her condition and wished her well.
“We’ll see,” she said, and went back to washing the car.
Heidi was gone for a while. Then one night, say, six weeks later, I was opening our front gate when I saw Heidi. She was wearing denim shorts and a gray camisole edged with lace. Her hair was longer. Hair can grow considerably in six weeks. She was with a young woman who turned out to be her daughter. There was no family resemblance.
“How are you?” I asked. “We’ve been thinking about you.” This was not entirely true. In fact, I had forgotten all about her.
“Oh, better,” Heidi said. “I’m just out of hospital. Though I developed a blood clot in my leg; that’s why I was in so long. Complications from the surgery. They almost had to remove it. My leg, I mean. I almost died.”
Heidi didn’t look like someone who had approached death, someone whose innards had been thoroughly scooped out. She was smiling and a bit giddy; this may have been due to the drugs still circulating in her system. Dressed so casually, she looked like she had just returned from vacation.
“We’re glad to have you back,” I said. I meant that.
The smell of the night-blooming jasmine was intense, and Heidi breathed it in, practically swooned. Or maybe that was me? I wanted to question her further, but she seemed in a rush to get inside.
When people have cancer, regardless of the form, there is often a similar story, a foreseeable sequence of events.
Heidi went on chemo.
She lost her hair and her appetite. She got real skinny.
Sometimes when I was in the backyard, I would hear Heidi retching.
She and her body followed the story faithfully, word for word.
Whenever I saw Heidi I would ask how she was doing, but at some point I stopped asking; I did not want to intrude.
She continued to give us vegetables. I can still see her, standing on the ladder, in the sunlight, handing me some zucchinis and tomatoes, praising their reds and greens. The skin on her neck and arms had become gray and flaky, another side effect of the chemo, like the gray dust from an eraser left on a page.
Once, we ran into her at the theater, a night of mediocre performance art at some small airless black box in Hollywood. Heidi was foregoing wigs and her head was bald, covered in a light moon-like layer of silver stubble. She was dressed in black and looked very chic; cancer had invested her with a certain glamour. A friend we were with asked Heidi if she was a performance artist.
“No, I’m an accountant,” she said.
At the time of Heidi’s illness, there was a property boom in Venice—is there a link between the descent in her body and the rise in real estate values? This remains unclear, but the fourplex was sold and Heidi was kicked out. As required by law, she was given a relocation sum of six thousand dollars. She found an apartment in West LA.
“It’s not as nice,” she said. “Let’s stay in touch.”
“Of course” I said. Of course I didn’t.
Before Heidi moved out, before she died of cancer of the ovaries, I loaned her a book by a German writer. I thought Heidi might like it; there was the German connection, and the main character in the novel, who was essentially the author, had a love of gardening. The story took place in the days after the Chernobyl disaster, when there was that crack in the nuclear reactor, and everyone in Europe thought it was poisoning the air and the soil. The woman in the book was unperturbed; she kept gardening, daily, compulsively.
“Have you started reading it? What do you think?” I asked Heidi one day through the slats of the fence.
“Yes, but I haven’t got very far. It’s quite difficult,” she said.
As Heidi was packing up, I thought about asking for the book. I knew I wouldn’t see her again. But I couldn’t bring myself to do this. You don’t ask a dying woman who is being evicted to return a book. You just don’t do that.
Heidi left a box on the verge: kitchen items mostly, some bowls, cups, measuring utensils, frying pans. I rifled through them, to see if there was anything of use.
The only item I kept was at the bottom of the box: one of her ledgers. It wasn’t even blank, as if she had begun keeping the books for a business and then given up. Who would want a half-filled ledger?
I guess I would. In its pages divided into two columns of fine blue lines are the financial accounts I don’t understand of a business I have no stake in: meaningless calculations, transactions, numbers.
The new owner of the fourplex tore the fence down. It was rotting and termite-ridden, and besides, the property lines were incorrect, so a new fence had to be rebuilt, reducing the width of our yard by four inches. I was not happy about this. For a few days, while it was under construction, I had an unobstructed view of Heidi’s old place, the gnarled remains and roots of her garden.
I spoke too soon about not seeing Heidi again. She had promised to drop in sometime when she was in the neighborhood, and although she never did, perhaps sensing we wouldn’t welcome such an unexpected visit, I dreamt of her, like I dream of everyone who’s dead.
Heidi came to the door, vegetables in hand. She looked better: she had more flesh on her bones, more color in her cheeks. But I wouldn’t let her in, even in a dream.
“I’m busy,” I said.
“That’s okay,” she said, though she sounded hurt.
I would not accept her vegetables. They were covered in dirt; they could be poisoned. Heidi was offended.
“You’re as skinny as a lead pencil,” she told me, turning to leave. “You should eat before you disappear completely.”
Dreams aside, I like to think that the dead are our neighbors. Sometimes when I’m in the backyard, I try to concentrate to see if I can perceive . . . not Heidi’s image but her ghost peering at me over the fence, offering me something.
Or I shut my eyes and listen, to see if I can hear her speaking, or trying to. If ghosts exist, I imagine their relationship to language is tenuous, even more tenuous than mine. Ghosts must retch up language; all their words must come out garbled.
Could be I’m not looking or listening hard enough, but I don’t see or hear anything.
And if I’m being totally honest with you, if such a thing is possible, I don’t feel any sadness over Heidi, not really, not in my heart where I should feel it, but I’m filled with regret about that novel I loaned her, the book Heidi borrowed from me.
What do you think happened to it?
Most likely, when she died, when Heidi was forced to move yet again—death is a form of relocation, stripping us of everything—her daughter cleaned up her apartment and sorted out her things. She would have kept some items that belonged to her mother, articles of personal value, keepsakes, but surely not that book. She probably put her mom’s books in a box and took them to the local library, donated them to the free books section.
Either someone picked up that book and it’s in their possession, or it’s still out there.
From time to time, I get an overwhelming desire to go looking for that book. Wherever it is.
I can’t remember the name of the book or the author, but it doesn’t matter, because I only want the copy Heidi read, the one she held in her sunspotted hands.
You see, I’ve formed this idea that Heidi read it as she was dying and scribbled notes in the margins, an account of what she was undergoing. I write notes in every book I read, don’t you?
Perhaps she didn’t write much, not a story, just annotations on her own death: random, disconnected thoughts. That would be more than enough.
This notion of mine has no foundation whatsoever. But I don’t care. I’m convinced that in the book, which Heidi is unable to return to me, written in her accountant’s hand, is the partial story of the infinite particulars of her own disappearance.