Intro to Book II of the 'Life of Socrates': ... {RAISING FLORA}
I
The thought consumed me. Every morning I would open the Post in the hope that someone had committed the act. Not some sick schadenfreude, but to know that someone out there, the victim in this case, was worthy of my empathy for their cause. There were not many reasons I had not yet done the deed myself. (I had tried once, sort of. It was a spur of the moment thing.) But they existed and they were substantial: friendship, the need to nurse a mother’s cloyingly pathological love, the impulse to see what the inheritance will be (an inappropriate, mean impulse which I trusted I had sufficiently suppressed).
Of friendship, I thought I would never find it again. I’d had friends; lots, in fact. But in the end, they amounted to my experience with both first and second cousins. You are with them as a child but they grow up and away from you and they were nice to you back then, but now you’re invisible. This is how friends are. Friendship in youth is ephemeral, friendship among adults was simply impossible. There had been recent attempts by old ‘friends’ to reach me; two, in fact. But the shame of embarrassment was an impassable obstacle. I couldn’t even face myself with pride (the only thing I could face with pride was the act). So how could I possibly receive an old friend? Yet in all that, something new arrived: a brother in the desert of loneliness. So mellow, so agreeable. I pondered what the news of the act would be like to my new best friend. Perhaps in reality it wouldn’t affect him, but in my vision, I saw it being carcinogenic to my friend’s own wellness. How could I cause more loneliness in the world! And I loved him.
Of my parents’ love, it was oxygen; not only to me but to my parents. So how could I cut their oxygen supply! I saw my Mother cry every night. An impenetrable spell of pain that is impossible to imagine. This was a reason. To list the reasons on the other side, well, that would be impossible. And this is why the choice subsumed me. In this realm they were not reasons any more. They were the prognoses; the grim realities of the situation.
I would not get a cat. I had made up my mind. It’s not that I couldn’t afford one. But where would I be in a year? A month? Sooner if I needed the emergency exit. And how could I do it to the cat. But I had made up my mind. I would not be getting a pet. No, the cat will not be a lifesaver. But it wasn’t just the cat. It was everything. Material objects such as musical instruments, clothes, books, technology and the like; immaterial things too like knowledge and friends. I kept very little about the house in preparation for my own coming absence. My disease was all that existed now. And I didn’t know the name of the disease. ‘Bipolar I with psychotic features,’ wouldn’t do. ‘Schizoaffective disorder’, didn’t fit, provenly so. ‘Substance use disorder’? Not this time around, I’m riding with well-oiled breaks.
There was this ideation in the past. It came and it went; never as strong as a few months ago. And the difference was that now I had a methodology. Living in the apartment was fortuitous, (there was a metallic heating pipe running the length of the ceiling). It would not fail, I knew that. But how long would it take? How painful? I was most frightened of pain. After all, wasn’t the act an escape from this? It was pain that I must avoid at all costs. Sometimes there were still good moods; things to look forward to. But I trimmed those as much as possible. Every season something would roll around that I would not be able to avoid—to be absent for. I rolled my eyes when it was time for those events to roll around.
Then there was the pressure to get a job. This came from the benefactors, which, at least, ‘is how it should be’, I thought. This is how I came up with the original plan: the last season of my temp job was midwinter. Perfect! The act would express my profound dislike for the cold. How fucking poignant. Then, I would have the apartment cleaned, already cleared out in preparation for the great coming absence. Then there was the nagging. ‘What of a note? Should I leave one? Yes, a note. But what will it say? No!’ I thought, ‘the writer in me has died’. But did I owe one? ‘Addressed to my parents, maybe; what in god’s name would it say?’ So, I wrote the simplest most cursory note I could, but just out of empathy. Then the chance came, it was late winter, the temp job was over. It was late in the evening; the television set was on. The house was set, the note was in place. I felt the pressure around my neck, and stepped to the edge of the chair. But suddenly—and just in time—I discovered I had changed my mind. I woke up the next morning and went about my business, as if I had any. I was a living apparition.
I began the process of applying for jobs. There, then, in the dead of winter. I promised myself, if I get a respectable job there would be no executing of the deed. If I failed, it meant the act. Well, I tried. I struggled. I stumbled and fell. But why couldn’t I? I now had what I didn’t want. What I knew I had to do without: a choice. A choice meant time. Time meant light. Light meant hope. This wouldn’t do. In the months leading up to the attempt—when I started but could not go through with it—all was like a photo negative. However, that night a candle was lit in my mind; (in the darkroom). The flame was so small, so delicate. I tried and tried to blow the thing out, but it kept on reigniting itself. There was suddenly some color.
II
I bought a small plant. I wasn’t sure what it was called. The people I bought it from told me, but the plant’s name escaped my mind. Some people tried to help me identify it, but their tries were inconsistent and hence I deemed them incorrect. I carried it that day to my appointment with the psychiatrist. When I brought it home, I placed it in the windowsill where I kept my meds. Next day, I moved it to a sunnier window where I kept three books Mother gifted me. Mother warned me not to give it too much sun. In the first week, some of the leaves, which were green with red in the center, turned yellow. They snapped off at a mere tap. I never removed them from the soil, in the pot, where they fell dead. And I could not help but enjoy seeing them decompose, lacking more and more moisture, with time, until they are golden and withered; wise and dead in the damp soil. Then I thought, ‘I’d love to hear them crunching under my feet, like in autumn’. These were small enough; they’d turn to dust in my fingers if I was really feeling immature. But I resisted. Mother did warn me, but I don’t think it was the sun that killed them. The first time I watered it, Mother presaged me that I’d ‘kill it’ because it was ‘too recently watered’. Well, I did not know how long it had been. In the end, it lived.
The plant became a fixture that I got used to. Sometimes a leaf or two would get sick. One time, the whole plant was flopping down, looking terrible. I got worried. Then I poured two cups of water on the soil and placed it in a metal strainer in the sink. This was a trick I invented. Mother’s advice: ‘Don’t let the water puddle under the plant, the roots will soak through.’ I got a sense of life from the plant when I watered it. This is because I heard the nonsound of the organism sucking up the water. A sipping, slurping: ‘thrppp thrppp’. Another time I accidentally poured hot water on the soil. This was a concern. ‘Can the heat of the water burn its nerves? Does it have nerves? Am I obtuse for wondering about this?’ In those days, I worried.
In those black months, when all was like a photo negative, I was sure I had made up my mind. I was the act and the act was me. The only thing stopping me was simple procrastination. That and courage. I have to admit. Courage was not a virtue I boasted. Virtue was not something I boasted. So, if anybody told me at this point that I lacked courage, I wouldn’t care.
I was too sick to shower. I went for months and months. When I saw Abba, he told me my fingernails look dirty. Mother complained of my foot odor. This continued even after my obsession with the act had subsided. It felt like sheer indolence, I knew it was depression. I fasted. I went from three, to two, to one, to no meals per day. I let the apartment go, too; dust, cobwebs. I didn’t clean the floors, but a couple of times a year. Then, I began showering more frequently. I felt a lot better. But I still didn’t know how to clean the apartment. This was a habit I picked up living in the apartment on Union Street in Crown Heights, Brooklyn in 2016 through 2017.
IV
There were three of us and two bedrooms in a narrow basement flat. The landlord, whom I never met, lived in Israel. He was equitable enough to repair the broken washer and dryer. No air conditioning. When I first moved in, on a return to Crown Heights, coming from Arizona where Mother had been nursing me from a nervous breakdown, there were two roommates in two rooms. It was $250 for a bed; $500 for a whole room. There were two old, used mattresses in each windowless room. When I showed up, I claimed my room (Abba paid the $500 per month). These two Jewish men moved together into the further room down the hall, on two foreign mattresses, side-by-side. The one who changed rooms was a young Hasidic man who must have been in his mid-20s. He was tiny and his hair and beard were bright orange. His name escapes me. The other was named Eyal, and he was a very large man, always dressed in drab tones. He must have been in his mid to late-40s; he was Israeli (I knew he had to be Polish!) and obviously unemployed, though he didn’t admit it. Divorced for some years, Eyal had an American-born son whom he barely ever saw. He drove an old white van, and would stalk parking spots close to the apartment. He would do this by sitting in his van, not moving for long hours. In the winter, Eyal heated the apartment by igniting the stoves and oven on full blast. No one ever told him it was wrong. I didn’t have the nerve. The religious kid departed after a matter of weeks with me in the apartment. This was after Eyal leveled his first complaint against me: that I ‘smell’. That he could ‘smell’ me ‘through the wall’. I asked the little Jew whether he smelled anything and he said, ‘no.’ Then he moved out.
When it was just Eyal and I, we never spoke until we had an argument. He complained about something asinine, and I in anger told him he was ‘an alien who’ couldn’t ‘speak English.’ He laughed and said he spoke ‘better English than’ me. I laughed. Then I slammed my door so hard, it got stuck and I somehow had to force it back open. I had to leave the apartment for something the next day, and when I returned I discovered my laptop was broken. (There were no locks on the doors. I tried once to replace the doorknob in my room with one that had a lock. I bought it at the local hardware store. I couldn’t put it right, was too frustrated once I took everything apart, and eventually just gave up.) He had been in my room. I felt so small. There was nothing I could do about it. I would not confront him. I would not report it to the landlord in Israel. The worst part of my experience in the flat on Union Street was the two floods with water about one foot deep. It left mold over everything, even things that didn’t get touched by the water like my clothes, grew mold. It zapped everything plugged in: the laptop on its last legs, which I just eventually threw in the trash.
It was a drizzly, overcast Sunday afternoon and I was home alone. I walked to the old yeshiva, where I knew how to access the roof. I climbed the stairs of the dormitory, avoiding people at all costs. I never made it outside. There was no fence on the roof, in violation of biblical code. I decided that the drop was not high enough and anyway it landed in soft grass. So, I headed home, back to the apartment, where along the way I found a long green wire at a street-side construction site. It had been left behind unintentionally. It was the weekend, so the men weren’t working. I stuffed it in my bag. When I reached the flat there was still nobody home. The apartment had no windows, but three doors to the outside. One of these doors led to a very small patch of grass, fenced in against the old urban backdrop. There were three wooden steps leading to the kitchen of one of the upstairs apartments (the ghastly condition of our basement apartment was not representative of the apartments in the rest of the house). On the edge of one of these wooden steps, I tied one end of the green wire; and the other end around my neck. I jumped up and tried to bend my knees in midair for sufficient suspension, but the wire came loose from the wooden edge of the steps and I gave up.
V
I went into the psychiatric ward of Interfaith Medical Center on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, New York, around the time I first met Charles, the new roommate. I went in by ambulance, seated beside the stretcher and in metal handcuffs. Charles had recently graduated from Columbia with an Engineering degree. He couldn’t find an engineering job, so he drove for Uber. He worked long hours. Modest amount of rabbinical literature in his room, he never missed a prayer. Charles didn’t have a beard because his family was Litvish not Hasidic. The morning I was arrested I had smoked a cigarette in the hallway of the dormitory of my old yeshiva, smashed the window of the study hall with a book (took me two, three tries), pushed an old man on a walker (more like: lightly tapped), crying out some nonsense inside the synagogue to the effect of: ‘You’re the Jewish doctors, you help him!’ And to no effect. I don’t know what I meant by it, but it was supposed to come off as anti-Semitic. And—and this is what got me caught—went out into the street screaming obscenities on the top of my lungs into the brisk, early morning air—in front of the cops. Like me, Charles paid full price at the flat, meaning he paid $500 and got his own room. This left Eyal hanging on with his $250 a month, – if he even paid that – sleeping on the floor in the main room where the stair landing is. That is to say, the landlord in Israel let him stay. Eyal slept all day. When I would come home, I would walk down the stairs in the middle of the afternoon and all lights would be out and he would say, ‘Shuuush’. Remember, there were no windows, so even during the day, with the lights out, the apartment was pitch-black. He slept on the floor all day and did not work. Twice he packed a bag and disappeared for a week at a time. One time, from the station of my bedroom, where the door was closed as always, I could have sworn I heard him weeping to himself, like a child, in the next room. Sleeping all day really started in the month of October, when the weather shifted. This was hibernation. He was like a bear.
I don’t know what the worst part of being a patient at the Interfaith Medical Center psych ward in Crown Heights, Brooklyn is. There were the clothes: surgical blue paper cloths with very short, wide sleeves and a hole for your head. The food: inedible sandwiches with one slice of cheese on two frozen slices of white bread. The showers: closets without room to strip. The staff: treated you like you were a criminal; called you by your last name: ‘Krane! Meds!’ The library: the only adult books were a paperback fragment of Bonfire of the Vanities, a play by Tom Stoppard and another old, beat paperback Proust with chunks torn out. A West Indian woman loaned me her New Testament. I pored over the blue, soft cover volume, voraciously consuming the words. When things were hot, she took it away and said, ‘Enough’. I was wheel-chaired into the ward, slept the first night. Next day I met with the doctor. I was having delusions; I decided to be open with him. I told the doctor, who was accompanied by students with clipboards, ‘The Khazars are building an empire in the Middle East.’ They came to me in bed with a needle, but I successfully resisted. I had been injected with something in the emergency room, probably Thorazine. This came as a result of my lack of cooperation in the psychiatric emergency room, which had couches and a television and oddly resembled a waiting room. I got up from my chair, even though it was comfortable, went outside the room into the hall and lay down on the hospital floor. I curled up in a fetal position, into a ball, I acted silly. The guards saw me right away. To receive the mandatory injection that came as a result of my testing, I had to be held down in a private room, it was a struggle. I had no visitors this time to witness that this hospital was not humane, but I forced myself to get well again. The reason for my 15-day stay: I had gone off my medication.
VII
There had to come a day when I would eventually move. Dwelling in the basement flat with roommates was self-punishment. I did not believe I deserve anything better. There was the beef with Eyal; the floods, the roaches and the mold. There were the bad memories, the reek of failure. Mother spent months trying to convince me to ‘find a better place.’ Finally, one day when I had just returned from a Thanksgiving trip to Arizona, I threw down the gauntlet and jumped into the apartment search. One application of mine was denied for a studio in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn (accessible only by the old, slow, local R train and the majority of the population were religious Muslims). That realtor turned out to be an asshole and did not follow up about other possibilities. In any event, I did not want to leave Crown Heights. Not because I was living the Hasidic lifestyle at this point, but because my friends were there. The Brooklyn Public Library was there. I was accustomed to life in the neighborhood. Same pharmacy, same bank, same—and this is important—cannabis connection.
Months passed as I searched the Internet for a place to live, within the budget Mother had set. I considered moving to Manhattan, but it was way over the budget. Then, one day I was at the home of my AA sponsor (for I was living a lie), whose wife had recently gotten her real estate license.
‘What can you spend?’ she asked, seated on their sofa with a laptop before her.
‘$1,200,’ I said.
‘That’s a good number,’ she responded.
Next week, she called me up about a studio on the outskirts of Crown Heights. It was more than $1,200; it was more than $1,500 but less than $1,600. It had multiple windows and a bathtub. I took it. Abba once said, ‘This place has got to be like the Taj Mahal compared to the hovel you were living in.’ He was right. My life got a little easier; a lot more comfortable. Both Mom and Abba flew into New York to help me move in: Abba from Florida and Mother from Arizona. The apartment was not actually located in Crown Heights, but in East Flatbush; a new zip code, same subway station. We went shopping for supplies. Everything a single man would need for a studio apartment.
IX
The Coleus, as in Coleus amboinicus, of the family Lamiaceae, is no longer an existing genus. The newfangled, formal name for the plant is Plectranthus scutellarioides. But, still most people simply call it a Coleus. I started communicating with the plants in my new apartment. I don’t mean I talked to them—not usually—or that they had mouths and were talking to me. It was more of a silent communication. Sometimes, I observed how the plants communicated with one another. Yes, they interacted. For instance, when I would take one plant away from the ledge for the purpose of watering it, I, like a parent, could feel the pain the separation had inflicted on both the plant I was carrying and the plant I was temporarily leaving behind, awaiting its turn to be watered in the sink. When they were sitting side-by-side, they had power. They united. (I learned they can even transfer diseases to one another.) When they were apart, they were closer to death. I sensed their joy and their sadness; the plants (some of them), like a pet or a child, loved me. I felt their vibrations. My large Coleus grew to about 20 inches. The first plant had lost a lot of leaves, though there were baby leaves beginning to sprout, so I had no real way to measure it. It looked healthy after many months, just slightly stripped. I knew they would live years if I continued to take care of them. This troubled me, for what about my plan? The act!
Mom and Abba were very generous as I moved into the third apartment in Crown Heights (actually East Flatbush), in February of 2018. This was the most expensive apartment yet. I guess they didn’t have a reason, in those days, to demonstrate more tough love. I was taking my medication, going to therapy (first, once every two weeks, then, once per week), to a psychiatrist once a month and as far as they knew, I was going to meetings and was sober. I even had a temp job. The only things I didn’t get that would normally go in an apartment, I insisted I didn’t want: microwave, toaster, coffee maker, et al. Abba even gave me a ‘house warming’ gift in the form of a check for $1000! I was walking into an interesting experience. Now more comfortable, yet moving closer and closer to the act, I retreated within myself. I stopped going out. Mother begged and begged to let her buy me a guitar. I refused for a year and a half. Then, around the time I started bringing home the plants, finally I submitted—but I knew it wouldn’t be as fun anymore. Those damn plants made me forget about the act. Refusing a guitar was because there was only the act. Now I had a guitar and vegetative life in the apartment, and I didn’t want the plants to die because of me. And I knew that nobody would have taken care of them were I to have executed the deed.
I had a television set for the first time in many years. It stayed on at all hours. Turning it ‘on’ was the first thing I did entering the apartment and turning it ‘off’ was the last thing I did, exiting. It wasn’t on because I was watching it. It was on because I needed to hear voices, so I wouldn’t feel so lonely. It served its purpose well. But while I had a TV, for the first two years in that third apartment in Brooklyn, I didn’t have a computer. The desktop unit I bought in Israel—built in the store just for me—I trashed in the old studio apartment off-campus in Israel, in a moment of severe mania, along with a perfectly good, $800, semi-hollow body, electric guitar, which I had had set-up by a private luthier on the Upper West Side, back in Manhattan. My next computer was a $1000 Apple laptop. I spilled coffee on the keys, while finishing my thesis. Then, I spilled more coffee on the replacement, external keyboard. Then, I bought a cheap one. It worked. I got lucky. But this one was stolen from inside the synagogue at 770 Eastern Parkway. (You’d think, given the Ten Commandments, and all, that religious Jews wouldn’t steal. I found that the more religious they are, the more they steal; especially from such a famous and ‘holy’ synagogue. Perhaps, young rabbis that they are, they find legal loopholes. I can’t imagine it, though.) The refurbished laptop Mother bought me while convalescing from homelessness in Arizona, Eyal broke; then, the floods. I had become gun-shy about owning a computer. And so I did all my Internet activity and writing on a Samsung Galaxy cellular phone Mother bought me in Arizona, and ergo the number had an Arizona area code.