Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (27 page)

A
nd God, the lawsuits. To this day, you know, people imagine I'm ridiculously wealthy. It's not as though I don't continue to make money, of course. But the lawyers turned me upside down, and I'm still hanging there by my ankles. Some of the lawsuits had to do with the book itself, readers who claimed mental anguish and the like as a result of my still being alive. The majority, though, were wrongful death cases brought against me by the families of suicides. All these coalesced into two class-action suits, and both require that I pay in perpetuity and allow for new plaintiffs to be added after the fact.

We're talking millions.

Not that I care about the money. What I cared about was sitting in the Moynihan courthouse in Manhattan and listening to statements from the loved ones of people who had killed themselves.

The judge granted an audience to any and all who wanted to speak. It took over two months.

It would have been fascinating, if not for the heartache that filled the courtroom each morning promptly at nine. Fascinating for the emotional range with which people presented their grief. One could spend years studying sociology, or psychology, and not come away with the insight into human behavior that I earned in that courtroom. It turned out, for example, that parents of suicides, of all those who came and spoke about those they'd lost, were most demonstrably upset while on the stand. Parsed further, mothers cried more often and more wrenchingly for lost sons, and fathers for daughters.

On the other hand, the spouses of suicides tended to be dry-eyed, their chief emotion fury rather than sadness. This was the demographic that fixed me directly with their gazes most often, and held those gazes longest. They sat on the stand with a brittle stillness, as if fossilized by grief. They rested their hands in their laps and never moved them, not even to emphasize their words or wipe away the few tears that did come.

And then there were the children of the departed.

During recesses I vomited into the hoary new porcelain of the Moynihan courthouse toilets. At night I shut down my synapses with whiskey. Over those two months I woke more often on the sofa of my hotel room, or on the floor, than in bed.

O
ne afternoon in the courtroom I glanced over my shoulder toward the gallery and swore that I saw Emma. The barest glimpse—she disappeared when the man in front of her, who'd been leaning forward to fiddle with something on the floor between his legs, sat back up.

I stood and turned to see if it were actually her, but the judge, who took no pains throughout the trial to hide her disdain for me, bade me take my seat again.

Shortly thereafter she called a recess for the day, and I pushed my way through people as the multitude in the gallery rose and filed out. I walked all the way to the top of the courthouse steps, scanning faces, but if it had been Emma in the back row, she was long gone.

Soon I would see Emma in the courtroom without doubt or question, as a witness for the plaintiff. But of course I had no way of knowing that, at the moment.

T
he day my father died we all knew that the time had arrived. We didn't really understand how we knew, and we didn't discuss it. No one said, Today's the day. It was intuitive. He'd been very sick for weeks, but that morning there was a lethal hush in the bedroom he shared with my mother, a quality as unmistakable as it was impossible to define. We knew.

The telephone rang and rang, and all day the house teemed with the arrivals and departures of relatives and friends, people who milled around the kitchen and smoked in the yard, crushing cigarette butts against the icy walkway with the heels of winter boots. The coffeemaker gurgled nonstop. As the day dragged on the entryway became splattered with mud and slush, and dirty mugs piled up beside the sink. All these visitors were conspicuous in their lack of anything to do but displace air and wait, while those of us who'd spent months ushering my father to his death tended to the last few things.

There wasn't much for us to do either, really. My final interaction with my father consisted of me leaning over him with my thighs pressed against the side of the mattress, prodding him with a hand on his shoulder, trying to get him to focus on me, then asking if he wanted a drink of water. He scrunched his face up, trying to understand from within the haze his sickness had trapped him in, and when understanding blessed him—such modest revelation, to grok the sort of inquiry any dog can grasp and respond to:
do you want some water?
—he nodded gratefully, his mouth slack and making loud ragged noises. A few other people had accompanied me into the bedroom, wanting a chance to say good-bye to him while he could still realize they were there. Two uncles, an aunt by marriage, and a friend who had served with my father in Vietnam. They watched with quiet, awkward reverence as I lowered a glass to my father and aimed a bendy-straw at the collapsed strip mine of his mouth. He wrapped his lips around the straw gingerly, and the effort of drawing water left him exhausted.

Months later I ran into one of my uncles at a hardware store. I was measuring out a length of heavy-gauge steel chain, but I don't remember now what I needed it for. We said hi, chatted for a few minutes. I asked after his wife, who had recently had heart surgery. He invited me to the lake sometime, to seek out smallmouths and pickerel. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, he said how proud and impressed he was at how well I had taken care of my father. The tenderness with which I'd asked my father if he needed a drink of water and then given it to him, my uncle said, was a quiet sort of heroism that he'd found really moving.

And it was nice, hearing that, though I had the sense that my simple, inconsequential act seemed impressive to my uncle only because he was one of the many people there who had nothing to do but sip coffee and smoke cigarettes and watch my father thrash his covers and expire. If I'd wanted to, I could have told my uncle about a hundred times during my father's illness when whatever courage I possessed had abandoned me, and I'd turned away from him and toward whatever petty distraction was closest at hand: a television, a bottle, a woman.

Instead, I told my uncle that yes, I would like to get together and take his boat out on the lake one evening and catch some fish. But we never did.

T
he lawyer who represented me in the class-action suit has said repeatedly that I could, if I wanted, have the whole thing tossed out with a minimum of effort and near certainty of success.

Here's the thing: the reason the judge hated me wasn't because of what she heard in testimony from the hundreds of plaintiffs who accepted her offer to sit on the stand. It was because she shared many of their sentiments, having once been a fan of Emma's book. The judge counted herself among the betrayed, the hoodwinked.

All this became public knowledge after an anonymous source with intimate ties to the judge talked to the
New York Post
for an article written in the wake of the judgment against me.

The anonymous source, incidentally, was anonymous only insofar as everyone agreed to pretend they didn't know it was the judge's estranged husband.

Somewhat less incidentally, the anonymous source provided the
Post
with audiotape of the judge saying, over the ambient clink of crystal and fine flatware at the Four Seasons, that she wished mine were a capital case so she could ‘fry [me] like a Hebrew National' and ‘write the ending as it should be.'

Needless to say, she should have recused herself.

My attorney called at three o'clock on the morning the article went to press—he'd read it online before actual newsprint hit the streets—and the sound I heard on the other end when I answered the phone can only be described as panting.

I'll file the paperwork this morning! he said. That unbelievable bitch! That frigid little cooze! By the close of business today you'll be off the hook!

I listened to him champ at the bit for several minutes, then told him that I had no interest in being off the hook.

He was, of course, flabbergasted. Are you out of your mind? he asked. He paused, rendered momentarily mute by his incredulity. Then he spit out: This is millions of dollars!

I've got enough left over for your fee, I said. Don't I?

I
t's possible—maybe even likely—that the Singularity is nothing more or less than the afterlife we've been promised for so long.

I mean, it would be difficult not to notice the theological implications of everything I've told you so far.

But beyond that, look at the basics of what Judeo-Christian mythology says about the afterlife: I was told, as an altar boy, that my finite mind could not comprehend the joys of eternity. I was told that corporeal existence is the gauntlet through which we pass on our way to heavenly enlightenment. I was told that my dying body will be transformed into a body that shall never die. I was told, finally, that in heaven no one suffers or grieves. That there will be no pain, and no end, that this dulcet perfection will go on forever and ever.

The principal difference between Scripture and the Singularity, as far as I can see, is that admission to the eternal life of the Singularity will not be conditional upon one's faith in it.

W
hat my lawyer was by profession and probably temperament incapable of understanding is that, as I told you, I didn't care about the money. They could have it. It was theirs to begin with, after all—they'd paid for the books and filled my coffers, and really all I did was return that money to them in a perfect circle of commerce and atonement.

Here's the thing: I didn't have to be in that courtroom at all. These were civil suits. I could have sat out the duration under a mango tree, earning 5 percent in a country without an extradition treaty. But I wanted to be there. I wanted to hear what these people had to say to me, and I wanted to do whatever they felt necessary in terms of penance, and I wanted them to be as satisfied as they could be, and then I wanted to fade from their minds and hearts, like a raw image on film, burning blank in the sunlight.

The right to be forgotten.

What I did not want was to go through all that for a second time. Which is exactly what would have happened if we'd had the case thrown out—it would have been reloaded with a different judge, and I'd have had to sit and take in all that pain, all that ire, all over again.

A
fter Emma testified for the plaintiffs, I asked my lawyer if she had approached him about testifying for us.

This was outside the courthouse, during a short recess immediately following Emma's testimony. She'd left without saying anything to me. A cigarette smoldered between my fingers, but I was still too stunned to actually smoke it. The cigarette would eventually burn down to the filter, stinging my knuckles, and I would toss it away without having taken a single drag. For lack of anything better to do, my lawyer had bummed a cigarette from me. He didn't smoke his, either, not because he was stunned at Emma's appearance and testimony, but because he didn't actually smoke.

When I asked if Emma had approached him about testifying, he looked at me, then looked at the cigarette held in his right hand, then back at me. Yeah, he said. He gave the cigarette an unpracticed, awkward flick, nearly snapping it in half. She did. Before the trial started.

And why didn't you say yes?

He looked at the cigarette again, as if trying to figure out what he was supposed to do with it. Jesus, I don't know, he said, shrugging. We were fucked anyway. I figured there was no point in getting you all worked up.

I
f I imagined the judge hated me, though, if I imagined the families of the departed wanted my blood, nothing, but nothing, could have prepared me for the wrath of the plaintiff's lead attorney.

Professional, well-compensated hatred often being more withering than the personal variety, in my experience.

My lawyer thought I was insane for agreeing to take the stand in the first place. But it was just another whistle-stop on my world tour of contrition, as far as I was concerned.

Determined though I was to speak, I still trembled while ascending the stand. Being called up there—the new courtroom's warm lighting, tasteful oil paintings, and plush area rugs aside—was like walking into a meat locker.

Before me stood the plaintiffs' attorney, her arms folded over her chest as I settled in. She held her face turned slightly away from me, toward the jury. She managed to appear both furious and grief-stricken at once, her mouth a tense red line turned down at the corners, her eyes refusing to acknowledge my presence.

I have to say, the attorney began, still not looking at me, it is difficult for me to talk to you because I feel really duped. But more important, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers. I think it's such a gift to have millions of people read your work, and that bothers me greatly. So now, as I stand here today I don't know what is true and I don't know what isn't. So first of all, I wanted to start with the question that everyone wants answered: why did you tell us that you were dead when here you are, very much alive?

Well, not that this excuses anything, but I did actually try to kill myself, I said.

And you failed. Curt, accusatory.

No sense in denying it, I said.

And then your book was published and sold three million copies. And counting.

I didn't know it would even be published, I said. I certainly didn't
mean
for it to be published.

Please just answer the question.

I paused a moment, unsure, then said, Yes, over three million copies. According to my last royalty statement.

My lawyer, who had by now abandoned all hope, scribbled on his notepad, then held it up so I could read:
IXNAY ON THE OYALTIESRAY.

Counselor, the judge warned, glaring at him.

Let's assume, the attorney continued, that we believe you when you say you never intended for the book to be published. Nevertheless, the book
was
published, and published to great success. A success due in no small part to the lie of your suicide. Would you agree that this is the case?

Well, sure, obviously, I said. The book would most likely have been ignored, if not for the fact that everyone believed I was dead.

My lawyer tore compulsively at the corner of his notepad, making bits of yellow legal–ruled confetti.

So you
wanted
people to think the suicide note, and by extension the book, were true. So that people would buy the book.

I wanted people to think the suicide note was true. That I don't deny. But the book was, and remains, a work of fiction. A novel.

The attorney straightened her blazer. So you expect us to believe, after all the things you've said and written that we know now were lies, that you meant for this . . .
novel
to be read as fiction. As not true.

Well I don't mean to quibble, I said, but a novel is, by definition, not factual.

Your honor? the attorney said.

Witness will answer the question, intoned the judge.

Okay, I said. That's correct. But the thing is, from the perspective of a novelist there is a brand of lying that feels more honest than the actual facts of an event. Lying as a way to move closer to the truth, or to illuminate how something actually feels in a way the mere facts cannot. It's all sort of abstract and difficult to defend, but, uh, no less valid for that, I don't think.

I was dying up there, and I knew it. I had expected to die up there. I'd even wanted to die up there. Nonetheless, sweat started to run in rivulets down the small of my back.

Did I mention that I was drunk? Sad but true. My testimony started at eleven in the morning, and I went out there absolutely soused on whiskey. I'd tried to clear up my eyes with several doses of Visine, in addition to giving myself borderline frostbite on both cheeks with a baggie of ice intended to reduce the alcoholic protrusions of my face. Despite this, I still looked like I'd just crawled out of a Dumpster, and what was more I could sense precisely how bad I looked, which did nothing to alleviate my burgeoning anxiety.

But also, I continued, once again I have to make the point that the book was and is a
novel
. I'm happy to admit that I'm as guilty of casual duplicity and lies of various size as anyone else who's spent a few years on Earth, but I never meant for this story to be interpreted as what people generally think of as the truth. It's a fictional representation of very real experiences and emotions that I had. That's all.

A ‘fictional representation'? the attorney asked, eyes narrowed. That sounds evasive to me. That sounds like exactly the sort of vague language someone would use when they've been caught in a lie.

I don't deny lying, I said. I haven't all along.

The attorney sighed and shook her head. She strode slowly back behind the plaintiff's table. Fine, she said. You don't deny lying. Fine. Then let me ask you this:
why
did you lie?

I looked at her. Why did I lie?

Yes. This is your opportunity to come clean. So please, tell us why you lied.

I hesitated. Is this a trick question?

No, it isn't. It's an honest question, and I'm expecting an honest response.

Well . . . I mean, I lied because that's what I'm paid to do. I realize this isn't the answer you're necessarily looking for. But I don't know what the answer is that you're looking for, and in lieu of that answer this is the only one I have.

The attorney repeated my words slowly. You lied . . . because that's what you're
paid to do
?

As a novelist, I added, trying to be helpful.

Then the attorney completely lost her cool. She leaned forward and jabbed one finger at me, using her other hand to brace herself against the plaintiff's table. I think you're missing the point here, she said. I think you're missing the point entirely. Because people don't care about the difference between a novel and a memoir. What people care about is being led to believe in something, and then finding out that what they believed in is a goddamn lie.

I'd recoiled without realizing it, but nevertheless did not drop my defense entirely. ‘Novel' and ‘lie' could probably be considered synonymous, I said.

Details! the attorney said. Semantics! We believed you, and you lied to us. That is what matters, here.

I paused for a moment. Took a deep breath, thinking about how I wanted this to go. I could remain meek and contrite and most likely get out of there alive. But on the other hand, what did I really have left to lose? Not even my dignity, that tattered artifact. So fuck it, I thought.

If I hadn't been drunk, I almost certainly would have stuck with meek and contrite.

Okay, I said. Let's say for sake of argument that I did write the book as a memoir. That I meant for everyone to interpret it as a factual record of events. That was how you took it, yes?

The attorney looked to the gallery, a sea of multihued ovals nodding in unison. She turned back to me, nodding herself.

And when you believed the story to be true—and understand that I'm not conceding for a minute the definition of ‘true,' that's a different discussion altogether, but for the sake of expedience I'm trying to get us all on the same page—so when you believed the story to be true, it meant a great deal to you. You found it heartfelt and moving and above all
honest.
It would be fair to say, even, that it changed your life.

Nodding again, more vigorously now.

So what I'm wondering is, why should the story suddenly mean any less to you just because it isn't factual? It's a ridiculous distinction to begin with. Consider the popular cliché ‘there are two sides to every story.' Perception is singular and faulty and unreliable. I will remember today's events differently than you will. We could both write down our impressions of this hearing, and it's more than likely that our accounts will differ. Does this mean that either of us is lying? Of course not. But if neither of us is lying, then neither of us is telling the truth, either. We're incapable of it. We are not reportage machines. We're perception machines.

I paused, thought for a minute. Also, I continued, we're not even getting into the stickier issues of whether or not what we define as ‘reality' actually exists. A lot of debate about that, you know.

The multihued ovals stared at me, suspicious, unconvinced, and I decided to try another tack.

Or maybe, I said, maybe think about the stories we loved, the stories that got inside us and tumbled around and melded with our DNA when we were kids. All fiction. All lies, by your own definition. Can you imagine a four-year-old stomping out on story time when he discovers that the Wild Things are made up? How silly would it be for a second-grader to march into Barnes and Noble and demand his money back on finding that it indeed may be Cloudy, but there is not, and never will be, a Chance of Meatballs?

We all exist in fantasy worlds, even as adults, I said. How many of you whiled away the drive here daydreaming about something or another? Singing along with a song on the radio and imagining yourself onstage? How many of you close your eyes when making love to blot out the sight of your spouse, conjuring in his stead the image of the checkout boy at the grocery store, or the beau of your newly divorced best friend, or your coworker's wife?

The multihued ovals exchanged glances, and even the attorney's veneer slipped ever so slightly, revealing a glimpse of something human and vulnerable and found out.

These things are counterfeit, I continued, complete and utter make-believe, and yet you find them satisfying—perhaps, in some instances, more satisfying than your real lives. So why, then, have you turned on me for providing one more deeply satisfying lie?

The attorney stood stock-still behind the table.

I'm not mad at you, I said. I don't even think you're wrong. I just don't quite understand it. The story I wrote—the story you fell in love with, the story you believed—is true. It had to be, because otherwise there is no way that it could have moved you so. I felt, and continue to feel, all that I wrote. Facts notwithstanding.