Authors: Shalom Auslander
Hope: A Tragedy
ALSO BY SHALOM AUSLANDER
Foreskin’s Lament
Beware of God: Stories
HOPE:
A TRAGEDY
A NOVEL
Shalom Auslander
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
New York
2012
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Copyright © 2012 by Shalom Auslander
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
Published simultaneously in Canada
ISBN 978-1-101-56128-7
BOOK DESIGN BY NICOLE LAROCHE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Contents
We were liberated from death,
from the fear of death;
but the fear of life started.
—H. Rosensaft,
Yesterday: My Story
Hide in the sky,
hide in the sky,
who wants to come with me
and hide in the sky?
—Serj Tankian
1.
IT’S FUNNY: it isn’t the fire that kills you, it’s the smoke.
There you are, pounding on the windows, climbing higher and higher through your burning home, trying to get away, to get out, hoping that if you can just avoid the flames, perhaps you’ll survive the fire, but all the time you’re suffocating slowly, your lungs filling with smoke. There you are, waiting for the horrors to come from some
there
, from some
other
, from without, and all the while you’re dying, bit by airless bit, from within.
You buy a handgun—for protection, you say—and drop dead that night from a heart attack.
You put locks on your doors. You put bars on your windows. You put gates around your house. The doctor phones: It’s cancer, he says.
Swimming frantically up to the surface to escape from a menacing shark, you get the bends and drown.
You resolve, one sunny New Year’s Day, to get back into shape. This is the year, you insist. A new beginning. A new start. A stronger you, a tougher you. At the health club the following morning, just as you’re beginning your third set of bench presses, your muscles cramp and the barbell collapses onto your neck, crushing your windpipe. You can’t cry out. Your face turns blue. Your arms go limp. There, on a poster on the wall beside you, are the last words you see before your eyes close and darkness envelopes you for eternity:
Feel the Burn.
It’s funny.
2.
SOLOMON KUGEL WAS LYING IN BED, thinking about suffocating to death in a house fire, because he was an optimist. This was according to his trusted guide and adviser, Professor Jove. So desperate was Kugel for things to turn out for the best, proclaimed Professor Jove, that he couldn’t stop worrying about the worst. Hope, said Professor Jove, was Solomon Kugel’s greatest failing.
Kugel was trying to change. It wouldn’t be easy. He hoped that he could.
Kugel stared silently at the ceiling above his bed and listened.
He heard something.
He was certain of it.
Up there.
In the attic.
What is that? he wondered.
A scratching?
A rapping?
A tap-tap-tapping.
The other reason Solomon Kugel was lying in bed, thinking about suffocating to death in a house fire, was that someone was burning down farmhouses, just like the one he and his wife had recently purchased. The arson began soon after the Kugels moved in; three farmhouses had been torched in the six weeks since. The Stockton chief of police vowed he would catch whoever was responsible. Kugel was hopeful that he would, but hadn’t slept since the first farmhouse lit up and burned down.
There it was again.
That sound.
Maybe it was mice.
It was probably mice.
There are a hundred farms around here, jackass. Why would he target you? It’s
farm
country.
You’re frightening yourself.
You’re torturing yourself.
It’s narcissistic.
It’s delusions of grandeur.
It’s optimism.
It’s mice.
Didn’t sound like mice, though.
Kugel thought frequently about death and even more frequently about dying. Was this, too, he wondered, because he was an optimist? Precisely, Professor Jove had declared. Kugel loved life, observed Professor Jove, and so he expected far too much of it; hell-bent on life, he was terrified that someone would cause, by violence or accident, his untimely death. Kugel, in his own defense, pointed out that he didn’t think anyone was actually trying to kill him, he simply thought it well within the realm of possibility that somebody, unbeknownst to him and for reasons yet to be revealed, might be; there is a line, he argued, thin as it may be, between paranoia and pragmatism.
Kugel’s mother, for her part, worried less about death than she did about life. Her own life, sadly, had gone too well, too smoothly; above average in comfort and security, below average in suffering and pain; better than anyone had a right to expect and callously lasting far longer than anyone could rightly demand. Alive, and happy, she cried.
Kugel thought specifically about the experience of dying. He thought about the pain, about the fear. Most of all, he thought about what he would say at the final moment; his
ultima verba
; his last words. They should be wise, he decided, which is not to say morose or obtuse; simply that they should mean something, amount to something. They should reveal, illuminate. He didn’t want to be caught by surprise, speechless, gasping, not knowing at the very last moment what to say.
No, wait, I
oof
.
I haven’t really given it much
splat
.
If I could just
ka-blammo
.
We are all mankind a story, collectively and individually, and Kugel didn’t want his individual story to end in an ellipsis. A period, sure, if you’re lucky. An exclamation mark, okay. A question mark, probably; that seemed the punctuation all stories, collectively and individually, should end with after all.
Not an ellipsis, though.
Anything but an ellipsis.
Don’t end it like this, said Pancho Villa, at a loss for words after being shot nine times in the chest and head. Tell them, he said before dying, I said something.
Kugel kept a small notebook and pen with him at all times for just these thoughts; now and then, when a fitting last sentiment or final set of words occurred to him, he would quickly write them down. Over the years he had filled many such notebooks but had yet to arrive at the precise right notion. The difference between the right word and the wrong word, said Mark Twain, is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
Twain’s last words, to his daughter, were: If we meet . . .
Then he died.
So timing’s important, too.
Kugel hoped, when the time came, that whatever he said would someday be re-said; would be heard and retold, for however many generations remained before The End. He hoped it would be something his beloved son, Jonah, could remember; something the boy could look to in times of trouble long after his father had passed, and find within those few carefully chosen words some light, some guidance, some wisdom (assuming, of course, that Jonah didn’t predecease him, or that they didn’t die together, father and son, in some tragic accident; were that to be the case, Kugel knew exactly what he would say to Jonah as the plane, for example, was plunging toward earth: he would say, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, but at least it’s over. Or something to that effect: Well, son, that was the rough part. The living’s over. After this, kid, it’s all gravy . . . ).
This, ultimately, is what Kugel hoped: that his last words would somehow make all this amount to something, all this . . . this life, this effort, this toil and time and terror. This unintentioned, unrelenting existence. That it wasn’t just a stage, that we weren’t merely players. Kugel could never believe in God, but he could never not believe in him, either; there should be a God, felt Kugel, even if there probably wasn’t.
According to Luke, author of the Gospel of the same name, Jesus, dying on the cross, said this: Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.
Eh.
A little obvious. A little self-congratulatory. A little smug. Where else was your spirit going to go but to God? The moment before you meet your Maker is probably not the best time to be acting like you’re doing Him some big favor by commending Him your soul.
Kugel was approaching forty, and though he hadn’t yet decided for certain what he wanted his last words to be, he had long known for certain what he didn’t want them to be: he didn’t want them to be begging. More than anything, he didn’t want to beg. No pleases. Or nos. Or waits. Or please, nos; or no, waits; or wait, pleases. Or no, no, nos. Or please, please, pleases. Or wait, wait, waits.
Please don’t hurt me, Louis XV’s mistress begged her executioner as he led her to the guillotine.
He hurt her.
Let’s cool it, brothers, said Malcolm X to his assassins.
They shot him sixteen times.
Perhaps they had cooled it, thought Kugel. Perhaps they’d been planning on shooting him twenty times. It behooves the victim, in these matters, to be specific.
Kugel’s dread of begging was due to neither a sense of pride nor a surfeit of courage; he simply hoped that he wouldn’t be in a situation where begging might help. You can’t beg old age. You can’t beg cancer. He could live with those deaths. You can’t beg a car not to hit you, a piano not to fall on your head. You can only beg people. Any situation where begging might be of some assistance had to be one in which your life was in the hands of another human being, a woefully precarious place for your life to be in. Kugel was determined not to die at the hands of another, if only to disprove his mother, who insisted that her last words, and her son’s last words, and her son’s son’s last words, whatever they might be, would be said in a gas chamber.
Or in an oven.
Or at the bottom of a mass grave.
Or at the top of a mass grave.
There it was again. That tapping sound.
Placement in the mass grave mattered, Kugel supposed, only if you were still alive; if they shot you somehow in the leg or arm, and your wounds weren’t fatal. In that case, it would be a far, far better thing to be at the bottom of the mass grave, where the weight of the corpses piled above would crush you to death and end your life quickly, mercifully, rather than dying slowly and painfully at the top of the corpse pile, perhaps even being alive when they buried you.
Tap. Tap-tap-tap.
He was sure of it.
In the attic.
Unless they shot into the corpse pile a second time. Then, of course, top of the corpse pile might be better.
This is what Samuel Beckett’s father said right before he died: What a morning.
A bit of irony, thought Kugel. A smile. The laugh that laughs at that which is unhappy.
Or dropping dead.
He might use that:
What a day.
Looks like rain, suckers.
Kugel wondered what his own father’s last words were, or if he had last words, or if he was dead or if he was alive.
Mistakes were made?
Kugel had a theory. Kugel was certain that whatever last
words
a person chose to utter in his final moments, everyone shared the same final
thought
, and this was it: the bewildered, dumbfounded statement of his own disappointing cause of death.
Shark?
Train? Really? I get hit by a
train?
Malaria? Fuck off.
Malaria?
Regardless of what was
spoken
, this and only this was a human’s last
thought
, the last pure cognition that passed through a human being’s mind, every human being’s mind, before that mind ceased to function evermore. Not
Shema yisroel adonai elohainu adonai echad
. Not Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. Only the ludicrous, laughable cause of its own unfathomable demise.
Cancer?
Tuberculosis?
Benito Mussolini’s last words, as he faced his executioner were these:
Shoot me in the chest!
His last
thought
, though, Kugel was certain, was this:
Shot in the chest?
There it was again—that sound.
A scurrying of sorts. A sliding.
Kugel sat up.
It was something.
There was something up there.
No death, after all, does any life any justice. Our endings are always a letdown, an insult, a surprise, dumber than we thought and less than we’d hoped for.
Crucifixion? thought Jesus. Get out.
Hemlock? thought Socrates.
Wrapped in a Torah scroll and burned alive? thought Rabbi Akiva. You have got to be shitting me.
That sound again.
What did an arsonist sound like, anyway?
Kugel listened.
Beside him, he could hear his Brianna, his Bree, his hero, his love, deep in her wonderful Prozacian slumber. He could hear Jonah, across the hall, bedsprings creaking as he shifted in his own deep sleep. Tylenolian.
It’s a tough place to get some sleep.
Earth, that is.
Of course they didn’t always shoot a second time into the mass graves. That’s life for you: a colossal inescapable corpse pile—and no second shooting.
Kugel crept quietly from the bed and knelt on the floor beside the heating vent at the side of his nightstand. The wooden floor was hard against his knees, but he put his hands on either side of the vent, bent over, and pressed his ear against the cold metal register.
Through the vent, he could hear the tenant moving about in his bedroom downstairs (he’d moved in two weeks before, and Kugel still couldn’t recall his name; it was Isaac, or Ishmael, or Esau—something biblical); he could hear the buzz of applause and laughter coming from the tenant’s TV, which the tenant left on all night long. Below that he could hear Mother, in her bedroom beside the tenant’s, moaning in agony and pain. Mother was alive if she sounded like she was dying; if she sounded like she was peacefully sleeping, then she was probably dead.
And he could definitely hear tapping.
Upstairs.
In the attic.
A ticking?
A tapping.
As if some mouse were gently crapping, crapping on his attic floor.
Like little mouse feet.
Like typing, almost.
Marsupial Proust, he joked. Jules Vermin. Franz Krapper.
It was probably just mice.
Quietly, so as not to wake Bree, Kugel stood, pulled on his robe, took the tall metal flashlight from beside his bed, tiptoed as best he could across the old, creaky floorboards, and stepped out into the coolness of the dark hallway.
Would an arsonist start a fire in the attic?
Don’t they start them outside? Around the foundation?
It’s not an arsonist.
You’re being ridiculous.
He grabbed the rope that hung from the attic door, and pulled it slowly toward him, hoping not to find an arsonist, hoping to find a mouse, hoping, at the very least, to find some mouse droppings; if he found mouse droppings he would know it had been a mouse making the noise, and then perhaps he could at last get some sleep.