Roof Garden
We sat on the roof in wicker chairs and sipped from ice blue glasses against an ice blue sky. The wind turned the heat away, flowing through the palm tree fronds that lined the roof, their thin gracious shadows splaying across the floor and disappearing off over the edge. The city fifty storeys beneath shone pinkly in the evening sun, a glowing haze in the distance preparing itself for night.
“I think it’s going to be a lot like life,” my friend George said, sipping from his glass, watching the sun diffracting through the glass façades that rose above and around us. “A whole lot of noise and worry, but not so bad really, longer than you expected but shorter than you hoped, and then you die.”
I looked at him and he looked at me and shrugged and we watched the sun again. “This is a good thing,” he said.
The wind stirred the silence for a moment, then my voice. “You’ve always said you didn’t want to die old and withered with all the joy sucked out of you. Better to go out young, and bright, and happy – right?”
He frowned. “Yes and no,” he said. “I think I was wrong. I think we think of joy as a finite commodity that dwindles linearly, that you start out with the greatest possible supply of joy as a kid, and then gradually it fades over time as you age, through a sort of joy attrition, through bartering for a job and a pension, school, car, such things … I am no longer convinced there is a joy-to-age graph with a negative slope. I think joy is a supply that can be regenerated, grown, cultivated even, and grows out more when given, like a plant, a living thing. The more you give the more you get. Maybe it’s the desire to share joy that dwindles, not the joy itself, so you give less out to the world, and you get less back, so you think the joy is the problem, when the problem is your refusal to share it.”
He’d always had that strange way of making me think, even in college, when he seemed to think in ways he wasn’t supposed to, and came across not as wise or as pretentious but as studious, interested, very much alive and fascinated by it. “So it’s like a painting, or a story,” I said, trying to keep up.
We lit cigarettes, drawing smoke, watching the wind catch it as we exhaled and curl it through the air and out into the city. “How so?” he said.
“They grow from being seen, or read. They don’t start out with the most meaning, the most truth; they accrue truth as people understand them, like or dislike them, appreciate or forget them. A painting carries the meaning of every pair of eyes that has ever looked at it. That’s what matters – not the color or shape but the thoughts they have evoked.”
George smiled. “This reminds me of dorm nights, drunk nights. Get wasted and talk about life.”
I smiled too. We raised our glasses, clinked them together, drank the rest. There were a lot of memories there, underneath the surface, and the idea that there would soon be no new memories felt ugly and empty.
“Do you think we simply are our brains, the chemicals and neurons and such, they’re all we are? Or is there some essential nonphysical part of us that exists independent of the brain, of the body?” he asked.
“I think I would like it very much if we were more than our brain, but the honest answer, the one I believe in my head but not in my heart, is that we are nothing more than our brains, yes,” I said. “The soul is electricity pumping through fleshy gray matter.”
“So,” he said, smiling, “I don’t have brain cancer, I have soul cancer. If the cancer is a part of my brain, is it a part of me? Is it me? Am I killing myself?”
I didn’t want to talk about it. But it was his cancer, not mine. He could talk about it if he wanted to. He was the one who was going to die; it would be selfish, I thought, to feel sorry for myself. I dipped the glass in ice, poured more clear liquor into it, poured him another too.
“The idea that you can believe something in your heart, but not in your head, that’s interesting,” he went on. “That suggests that for some reason our brain – our self, I should say – wants us, encourages us even, to believe in contradictions. In the relevancy of irrelevant organs.”
“The brain, being aware of itself, knows it should not be too aware of itself,” I murmured, half-smiling. “Or else it may suddenly realize, ‘ , I’m squishy, and the only thing protecting me from the bright pointy world is several centimeters of bone.’ Better to convince itself it exists elsewhere too, or it might start asking itself tough questions. A sneaky bastard, the brain.”
“A smart bastard. Protecting itself from itself,” he said, smiling too. We fell silent, looking out over the city, over the glass and people and cars, the bustle, the lights that were beginning to turn on, windows flashing into illumination, the electrons beginning to be excited by countless electrical currents in countless glass tubes in countless storefronts and homes and offices and galleries and theaters and clubs. Darkness was falling, and in response life stood up on its tiptoes, puffed out its chest and refused to be silent.
“I really think this is a good thing,” he said again. “I’m excited, man. I really am. That’s why I asked you to come here.” He met my gaze. “I’m getting on a plane tomorrow morning. I’m going everywhere I can, seeing everything I can. This is a blessing, a message, to go out and live my life, in a way I never would have otherwise, at least not until I got much older. I want to learn as much as I can. Mean as much as I can. Will you look after the place while I’m gone?”
“Of course I will, George,” I said. “You don’t even have to ask.”
He smiled. “There’s liquor in the cabinet, and I’ll leave you a credit card—”
“Please, George, I can take care of myself.”
“No, I insist. Order anything you want. Have parties here. Live it up. I know you’ve always, always wanted a penthouse and a view,” he said. “Consider this yours.” I thanked him, and we sat quietly for a few more minutes, drinking.
“I’m so lucky,” he said.
* * *
I got a postcard a few days later, in the mailbox in his apartment. I had never actually gotten a real, physical postcard before, in my entire life; it felt like a relic, something that still existed entirely because people wanted it to, not because it was useful. There was a picture on it of a beautiful South American rainforest with snow-capped mountains looming gracefully in the background, teeming with life and brightness.
On the back he had written, “Step one,” and underneath that, “Happiness is the intersection between having all that you need and giving all that you have.”
That night I had a party in his roof garden, and I invited everyone I knew whose company I even mildly enjoyed, and I invited all our old college friends who had lost touch or kept touch or oscillated between the two. A lot of people came, mostly because of it being on a roof with a breathtaking downtown view, and palm trees that swayed in the breeze, and an open bar. I felt the need to have people around me, to be surrounded by laughter and noise and conversation, to feel whole and complete. I preferred not to think.
It was a mild, adult sort of party, where everyone got comfortably but not raucously drunk, partly because at some point between twenty and thirty you become hyper-aware that you are at some point between twenty and thirty, but mostly because having parties in very nice places where you don’t live leaves you afraid to break very nice things that you don’t own.
As the party wound slowly down, I went off and sat down in one of the chairs on the balcony, and looked out over the sea of flowing lights. Even up there, you could hear car horns and sirens; it was easy to imagine snatches of conversations, lover’s quarrels, pretentious reviews of pretentious movies.
“How could anyone ever be sad, with a view like this?” my friend Lily said, sitting down in the wicker chair where George had been sitting a few days before, when he told me. “I would kill to come home to this view every night. I’d never have to leave my house.”
“It’s been great, living here while George is away,” I said. “You know, he didn’t even really need anyone to look after it. He just knew how much I would love it.”
“Just like George,” she said, smiling. “I had the biggest crush on him in junior year, you know. Remember that time we all came here for the Fourth of July, and went out on the boat in the Hudson to watch the fireworks? He told me he was going to move here after he graduated. I asked him to take me with him. You know what he said?”
“What?”
“He said, ‘I don’t make promises I can’t keep, and you don’t need anyone to take you with them. You’re bright enough, smart enough, driven enough, to take yourself.’ And he was right. Then we made out,” she blushed, laughing. “Oh, I haven’t seen him in a while. When does he get back?”
“I don’t really know,” I said, and I wasn’t lying, though I wasn’t really telling the truth. He had asked me not to tell anyone about it. The man had brain cancer, and worried about how everyone else would feel. “It’s kind of an indefinite thing.”
She made a little ‘o’ with her mouth and looked out into the lights again.
“How are you and – what’s his name? Alex, right?” I asked.
“Oh, we broke up a few weeks ago,” she said.
“I’m sorry.” Everyone apologizes for things they can’t possibly control. It would have been more honest for me to say ‘I empathize’, or, ‘I’m not really sure what to say, but I’m here if you want to talk about it’. ‘I’m sorry’ is practically teeming with these less ambiguous meanings, when it comes from a friend to a friend. ‘I’m here,’ it says. ‘You don’t have to be alone unless you want to be, in which case, okay’.
“It’s alright. I’m actually happier now. I think we were better off as friends, you know. There was no real passion there. Hadn’t been for a long time. We had just devolved into a kind of cycle of codependence. It’s really pretty amiable between us.” She looked at me, smiling again. “Do you think, um … is George … well, is he single, still?”
I lit a cigarette to occupy myself. “You should ask him when he gets back. I always thought you two were great together,” I said, hollow.
* * *
“I’m in Peru, man. I touched down in Lima two days ago – such a beautiful city, and the people, the girls, my god. But the real reason I came, I went out into the jungle with a guide, into the Amazon rainforest. It’s like a different world, a darker, archaic, secret world where things haven’t changed all that much in a thousand years, and people know exactly who they are and where they came from and where they’re going. It’s not simpler, it’s just more complicated in different ways, and less complicated in other ways. There is more time to think. And I came here, what I came here for, man … we’d always talked about it, and I finally did it, I drank ayahuasca. It’s like my eyes have been opened. The veil was torn away and I saw things, not as they seem to be, or ought to be, but as they are…
“I threw up and then I closed my eyes and my soul was torn out of my body and thrown out into the Universe, I touched the stars, I felt the tug of the black holes pulling me towards them, I felt energy and light you can’t even imagine, surrounding me, bathing me, spreading through my pores and shining through me. I saw every galaxy that ever was or ever will be, and they all moved and danced together in a neverending harmony, a harmony that doesn’t care about you or me, that’s why bad things happen, Alan, even to good people. I understood the great balance that holds this universe together, that ripples down from galaxies to solar systems to planets to people to molecules to atoms to galaxies again…
“We measure evil and injustice in quantifiable terms, in murders per capita, in infant mortality rate, in starvation statistics, we throw up our hands and say ‘how could such evil exist in any good universe’? We think the scales seem horribly tilted in evil’s favor, we think life is a gift we would rather not have been given. But we are missing the other half of the scale, the counterweight, because it is not quantifiable, it can’t be put into an Excel spreadsheet and filtered down into news headlines, it can’t be explained in numbers and formulas. I’m talking about love, Alan. You will never see ‘Mother loves her four children selflessly’ as a headline. You will never see ‘Old man is perfectly content to sit in the sun and listen to birds sing’. The sum total of all the bad that has ever existed could never hope to outweigh all the love in the universe, in our galaxy and in other galaxies, and the bad tempers the good, gives it meaning. For every twenty-five-year-old man who gets brain cancer, a child draws its first breath, Alan.
“Gravity, electromagnetism, space, time, energy, mass, entropy, they all exist to give us capacity, opportunity, do with it what you will. And the universe wants us to know how we fit into its biggest secret. You think I’m crazy but the tumor isn’t big enough to press down on any nerves yet. This is real. This is what I believe.”
This went on for some time on the phone between Lima and New York, and some of what he was trying to tell me was lost, understood only to him, but most of it wasn’t.
* * *
I got a package from Greece. Inside the package was a large clock, about as tall as my whole chest and wider around. The numbers on the clock face had each been replaced with a word. Twelve o’clock was Hope; Love, Joy, Peace, Inspiration, Truth, Beauty, Compassion, Generosity, Patience, Justice and Happiness followed. I hung it on the wall in his apartment and then I always knew what time it ought to be.
There was also an envelope with another postcard, of the Parthenon and ancient Athens, and $5,000 in cash. On the back it said, “You know those homeless people we pass on 32nd St every day?”
* * *
People who have been to more than a few funerals said George’s had more tears than many, though less than some. I did not cry during the service, or the eulogies, or at his strangely doctored-up looking pale smooth waxy bloated face, or as the casket was lowered into the ground and dirt piled on top of it and over it until the hole was filled. It wasn’t that I was afraid to cry; such fears fall away in the face of cold, immovable reality. Fear seems banal. It was just that he was still alive, to me. He was still off traveling somewhere. Nepal, Qatar, France, Brazil, New Zealand. There would be another post card, another strange gift and a cheerful note and ‘Oh, by the way, who’s that guy you buried on Sunday? That’s not me.’
You think you know what to expect – that seeing other people go through pain somehow prepares you for it, vicariously; that pain and loss in music, movies or books gives you a template to follow for how it will really feel in your own life. It doesn’t. In reality it’s both better and worse than you expect.
When I got back to his apartment to empty out my things and move home, the mailbox was empty except for some delivery menus, and it finally all fell in on me and I sat down and saline solution flowed hotly down my face and my own voice sounded choked and alien and my breath was ragged and the large clock on the wall was the wrong time, and always had been.
I promise you this, and the worst promises are also the most reliable: some day, you will die, and so will everyone you have loved or ever will love or ever could have loved, if you had the chance. This is an indisputable reality. It is as tangible as gravity and just as inescapable.
It is a testament to human resilience that we are able to think of anything but this, at any time. It must mean something that, from the moment we emerge from the womb, we don’t say ‘no thanks’ and crawl right the back in. Instead we claw and fight and grow our way into life, and some are happy with it, some are unhappy, most are both, a few are neither; but everyone has the sneaking suspicion that something they’re doing matters, somehow, and that is either the most convenient lie or the purest truth, and I’m not sure it matters which.
I stood up and went out on the roof with the wicker chairs and the palm trees and the spectacular view. The sun was shining, and would continue to do so for a very long time.