Kirthi and I start dating. That’s what I call it. She calls it letting me walk her to the bus stop. She lets me buy her lunch. She tells me I should stop. She still never smiles at me.
I’m a heartbreak specialist, she says.
When I see her in the hallway, I walk up behind her and slip my arm around her waist.
She has not let me in yet. She won’t let me in.
Why won’t you let me in, I ask her?
You don’t want in, she says. You want around. You want near. You don’t want in.
There are two hundred forty seven ways to have your heartbroken, she says, and I have felt them all.
I am in a hospice.
I have been here before. A regular client.
I am holding a pen.
I have just written something on a notepad in front of me.
My husband is gone.
He died years ago.
Today is the tenth anniversary of his death.
I have Alzheimer’s, I think.
A memory of my husband surfaces, like a white-hot August afternoon, resurfacing in the cool water of November.
I tear off the sheet on the notepad.
I read it to myself.
It is a suicide note.
I raise a glass to my mouth, swallow a pill. Catch a glance of my note to the world.
The failsafe kicks on, just in time. The system overrides. I close the ticket.
It’s her father.
That’s what Sunil tells me, one day over a beer.
Kirthi hasn’t been to work for the past two days.
Sunil is in Tech Support. He has seen all of the glitches. He knows what can go wrong in the mechanics of feeling transfers. He has seen some ugliness. He is fond of saying that there is no upper bound on weirdness.
Her father is still mortgaged, Sunil explains. Locked in. A p-zombie, he says. Sold his life.
“This is going to end badly, man,” he says. “You have to trust me on this. Kirthi is damaged. And she knows it.”
Sunil means well, but what he doesn’t know is that I am fine with damaged. I want damage. I’ve looked down the road I’m on and I see what’s coming. A lot of nothing. No great loves lost. And yet, I feel like I lost something. Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? How about this: I lost without the love. I’ve lost things I’ve never even had. A whole life. Just like my father, I get to have my cake and eat it, too. Except that it’s a great big crap cake.
Still, as the weeks go on, I am starting to think Sunil is right.
“Kirthi won’t let me in,” I tell him. “She tells me to get away from her, to run.”
“She is doing you a favor, man. Take her advice.”
I ask her about her father.
She doesn’t talk to me for a week.
And then, on Friday night, after we walk for an hour in silence, before going into her apartment, she turns to me and says, how awful it is to look at him in that state.
We draw closer for a moment.
Why won’t you just love me, I ask her.
She says it’s not possible to make someone feel something.
Even yourself, she says.
Even if you want to feel it.
I tell her about the life I had my eye on.
It’s gone, she says.
I’ll find another one just like it, I tell her. Standard happiness package. Decent possibility. The chance of a kid. It wouldn’t be enough for us, not quite, but we could share it, take turns living the life. One works while the other one lives, maybe I work the weekdays and she gives me a break on weekends.
She looks at me. For a few long seconds, she seems to be thinking about it, living the whole life out in her head.
She doesn’t say anything. She touches the side of my head.
It’s a start.
When Deep was happy, before it got bad and then worse and then even worse, he was always talking about how he knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy. Stuff like that. He talked like that, he really did. He loved telling stories. About a week before he cracked up, he told me a story while we were in the coffee room about a guy at Managed Life Solutions, a physical suffering shop across town, who somehow made arrangements with a prominent banker who wanted to kill his wife. The banker was going to do it, he’d made up his mind, but he didn’t want the guilt. Plus, he thought it might help with his alibi if he didn’t have any memory.
Bullshit, I said. That would never work.
No, really, he says. He tells me all about it, how they met, how they arranged it all while talking in public, at work in fact, but they talked in code, etc.
Could never happen, I say. There are twenty reasons why that wouldn’t work.
Why not, he said.
It’s just too much, I said.
Too much what? There is no upper bound on cruelty, he said.
The next Monday, I came to work, and they were pulling Deep out the door, two paramedics, each one with an arm under Deep’s arms, and two security guards trailing behind. I wanted to say something, anything, to make them stop. I knew I would never see him again. But I froze. As they dragged him past me, I tried to make eye contact, but I looked in there, and no one was left. He had gone somewhere else. He was saying, okay, so. Okay, so.
And then the next day, there it was, in the newspaper. The whole story about the banker. Exactly how Deepak told it to me. There were rumors that he was the one the banker hired; he was living with murderous guilt. Other people gossiped that he had done death of a child.
I don’t think it was either. I don’t think it was any one thing that did it. Deep just knew. He knew what was out there. There is no upper bound on sadness. There is no lower bound on decency. Deep saw it, he understood it, what was out there, and he let it seep in, and once it was in, it got all the way in, and it will never come out.
I open tickets. I do the work. I save up money.
Weeks go by. Kirthi opens up. (Just a little.)
She still refuses to look me in the eyes when we are kissing.
That’s weird, she says. No one does that.
How am I supposed to know that? I have not kissed many people, but I don’t want her to know it. I have seen in American movies that people close their eyes, but I have also seen that sometimes one person or the other will sneak open an eye and take a peek at the other one. I think it makes sense. Otherwise, how would you know what the other person is feeling? That seems to me to be the only way to be sure, the only way to understand, through the look on their face, what they are feeling, to be able to feel what they feel for you. So we kiss, she with her eyes closed, me looking at her, trying to imagine what she is feeling. I hope she is feeling something.
I am at a funeral.
I am having a bypass.
I am in drug rehabilitation.
I am in withdrawal.
She takes me to see her father.
He has the look. I remember this look. This is how my father looked.
He is living someone else’s life. He is a projection screen, a vessel, a unit of capacity for pain, like an external hard drive, a peripheral device for someone’s convenience, a place to store frustration and guilt and unhappiness.
We stand there in silence.
We go back to work.
I am at a funeral.
I am at a root canal.
The thing it is uncomfortable to talk about is: we could do it. We could get him out.
Finally, she can’t take it.
He has only four years left on his mortgage, Kirthi tells me.
The thing is, the way the market works, sellers like us never get full value on our time. It’s like a pawnshop. You hock your pocketwatch to put dinner on the table, you might get fifty bucks. Go to get it after payday and you’ll have to pay four times that to get it back.
Same principle here. I love Kirthi, I do. But I don’t know if I could give sixteen years of my life to get her father out. I could do it if I knew she loved me, but I don’t know it yet. I want to be a better man than this, I want to be more selfless. My life isn’t so great as it is, but I just don’t know if I could do it.