2022
Emerging from the john with her coat draped over her arm and carrying her overnight bag, Sharon tossed a gift-wrapped box onto the living room couch where I was reclining and half-asleep.
“I would have given you this tonight,” she said. “Happy fucking birthday, Steve. You’ve traveled around the sun thirty-five times now and you still haven’t seen the fucking light. Enjoy the rest of the fucking weekend.”
And then, slamming the apartment door behind her with a force that knocked a picture from the wall, she was gone.
For minutes afterwards I stayed put on the couch, processing what was clearly her permanent departure. Yes, it disturbed me that her decampment had come on the afternoon of this particular birthday. And I did experience an uneasiness about the void her absence from my life would leave. (Although we’d maintained separate Greenwich Village residences, she’d been my steady girlfriend for nearly six months and slept at my bigger place a lot.) But these concerns were quickly dissolved in a wash of relief; a relief succeeded by apathy.
Not to say that I’d stopped liking Sharon. I still had an affection for her. The issue was that I couldn’t really love her. And her persistent demands, especially in the last weeks, to move in, to marry, to have a baby, had become oppressive. (She was just months younger than me and the alarm on that biological clock had been sounding long before our hookup.) Of course, the strain I’d been made to feel in this period wasn’t all about Sharon specifically. It was rooted in the fact that the depth of emotion required to respond to such entreaties had always been off my spectrum. I was more than capable of lust. But love, certainly of the kind she wanted, was something alien to me.
Indeed, what transpired with Sharon had merely perpetuated a lifelong pattern. In one way or another, it had happened in all of my “serious” relationships with women.
What I’m referring to would invariably begin in the early stages of routine intimacy. And it didn’t take much to trigger it. I’d hear the sounds they made in the bathroom, or notice a simple mole or dimpled hollow on a breast, and instantly suffer a spasm of revulsion that was accompanied by a heart jolt of fear — it was as though I’d caught a glimpse of the grave itself. If the intensity of that reflex passed quickly there was an insidious aftereffect. An emotional distancing would be left in its wake, a distancing that was beyond me to bridge. Try as I might, I couldn’t shake my perception of women’s bodies for what they were, an atrocious and ephemeral concoction of pipes, wiring and nasty liquids that nature had fiendishly devised and then camouflaged by, at best, a pretty face or figure. Any ardor I may initially have felt would fade, and sex would become obligatory and mechanical. In the aftermath of the ensuing split-up, that could take place anywhere from weeks to months later, I would feel only a listlessness in the company of any new women I met. My torpor would last until my libido necessarily reawakened — it represented, after all, a biological imperative. Then, not counting one-nighters that were over too fast for me to find cause to recoil, I would once again enter a familiar scenario.
Sharon had attributed my resistance to her wishes to what she called “commitment phobia” and I should acknowledge that I’d given her mixed signals, which undoubtedly shaped her reading of me. But if I’d led her on a little it had nothing to do with an ambivalence about marriage or monogamy per se. It was because I was experiencing a conflict of a very different kind. I was approaching my middle years with no significant couplings to show for it, and given that she was comely, personable and intelligent, and that I would soon age past the quality options she signified, I thought I ought to want her. As a result, I couldn’t bring myself to thoroughly discourage her aspirations. Despite her constant complaints about the noise that extended into the early morning hours from the nightclub across the street and just four floors below — I barely noticed it myself — she’d remained adamant about taking occupancy (with getting hitched and becoming a mother to quickly follow). And I had intimated that, when I turned thirty-five, I might be ready. If, all along, I knew that my readiness wasn’t likely, I did hope that something would rescue me from my condition. But when the time came nothing had changed.
“So, are you prepared to take the next steps?” She’d asked me in bed that morning, snuggling behind me.
“Shit,” I grunted. “I’m not.”
My mother told me once that when I was born the obstetrician had remarked that I was “high-strung.” Since no further details were recalled by her, I can only assume that I evacuated the womb trembling with terror. When I think of this, I’m reminded of another ghastly aspect of women’s bodies. This one involves nature’s design of the female anatomy and it makes perfect sense of my trepidation. A freshman at Pratt would know better than to locate the portal to the world in such close proximity to the anus. This ungodly configuration made the moment of one’s birth comparable to exiting a subway station in pre-gentrified Jersey City.
I’m not trying to be funny. As it occurred to me later, the doctor’s comment had predicted a handicap to which I’d been sentenced — a handicap which would impede me not only in my relationships with women but in every imaginable emotional category. I mean if my innocence as an infant hadn’t shielded me from too much clarity, as an adult, the crucial repression and denial mechanisms that mute too keen an awareness of the uglier realities of existence — and belonging, it appeared, to most everyone else — would be glaringly missing.
I’m talking about the illusions and mental manipulations other people were able to employ in order to live with some measure of interior peace in response to nature’s unacceptable reality. Religion, say, and the immortality it promised. (My parents were atheists.) Or an immersion in social or political causes to concentrate the mind. (I had no passions; never even voted.) And to be sure, there’s romantic love which, from what I’ve observed, is a method used to transform the body from a source of apprehension into something quite the opposite — a vessel of transcendent and seemingly eternal pleasure. (The brutal return to a simple perishable body is probably the fundamental reason the termination of a romantic attachment is so shattering for so many people.)
So, while one of the consequences of missing insulation was my inability to deeply connect with the women in my life, equally debilitating was my hyperconsciousness of my own physical composition and fate (a self-perception which I suppose the women simply mirrored). The sinister underside of nature being in all ways evident to me, I lived with a dread that would fluctuate from high to low, but which was constantly there. The horror of death’s inevitability and agony that I knew their beauty disguised and distracted us from, a bright spring day or magnificent sunset were not, for example, phenomena to rejoice in, but ominous and disquieting. (If you want to know what nature is, watch those shows on the animal channels for a demonstration. See how it doesn’t give an antelope’s ass about the destruction of life, but just makes more.)
My mental state was, however, a secret that I never revealed, not to anyone. More than a little self-conscious about it, and my socializing being minimal anyway (I had friends but none with whom I was very tight), I was loath to discuss it. And inasmuch as I was functional, decent looking, educated and with a well-paying, if humdrum job, no one I came into contact with would suspect that something might be wrong. To my knowledge, the most negative thing ever expressed about me was that I tended to be “sullen.”
“Sullen.” I could summon no argument against that description. Veiled as my inner wretchedness may have been by a determination to appear as together as possible, I was still, and much too often, solemn and visibly ill at ease.
As I’ve noted, I hoped that something would happen to deliver me from my situation. Well one evening, and out of nowhere, something did happen; something at once trivial and seismic, and that I could not have foreseen.
A bitterly cold midwinter month of dragging myself through the rounds of my days had passed since Sharon took off and I was walking to the laundry room in my building’s basement when I felt a hard crunch under my foot. Looking down I saw that I’d stepped on a large water bug and that its crushed remains were oozing from under my shoe. In the same instant I also saw a second bug right next to my shoe. Apparently in reaction to the event, it had jumped some six inches straight up and, upon landing, scurried away. I felt no disgust or remorse over what I’d done. But I wasn’t indifferent either. No, what I felt was something like a thrill that made me want to repeat the experience. Compelled to chase after the companion bug, I cornered it behind a trash can where I dug my heel into it and watched it break apart, its lifeless tentacles still gently waving. With this action I felt a full-blown thrill akin to the rush from a line or two of cocaine or speed. But this one was joined by a revelation that had the impact of an epiphany.
I could end my consuming difficulty with nature by becoming one with its monstrousness!
Before I was back upstairs, I knew what I had to do and, given the size of my difficulty, what the commensurate scale of it needed to be.
How I acquired the weapon — an AR-15 with a 16-inch barrel and iron sights, or the half-dozen 30-round magazines that came with it — is nobody’s business. I will report that I found it, in its design and craftsmanship, to be a stunningly beautiful instrument and that, immediately in its thrall, when I first held it in my arms — it weighed maybe six or seven pounds — it seemed to pulsate as if it was possessed of a beating heart. Was I, at that moment, projecting the excitement of my own wildly beating heart onto it? Listening raptly to the previous owner’s detailed instructions about how to use it (I had no experience with firearms), I was feverish with anticipation and ready to implement my plan just a week or so later.
I’d chosen a Saturday for the deed. And that afternoon I repeatedly paced the breadth of the apartment, pausing only to glance out the window at the shuttered night club below. When darkness fell at last, and wearing a thick parka with the loaded gun clutched against my chest and extra clips in a backpack, I climbed the two flights of stairs to the roof. Once there, I slid the long dead bolt rod and opened the creaking metal door to a blast of icy air, which made me wish I’d thought to bring gloves. Maybe twenty patrons, all of them young, were queued now in front of the club when I got to the roof’s ledge overlooking the street some thirty yards from the door. Pulling the parka’s hood tighter around my head and laying the gun at my feet, I crouched and wedged myself between a skylight and a fireplace chimney and, peering down, watched them. I could hear some in the group laughing. They were anticipating a good time.
I didn’t wait to start. The ready and easy marks I’d correctly envisioned clearly illuminated by street lamps and the club’s neon sign and decorative lights, I picked up the rifle and began firing right away, moving my aim from the back of the line to the front. Having, as I said, no prior knowledge of guns, the crackles and pops of the reports were much louder than I’d thought they’d be. And the force of the recoil against my armpit was stronger than I’d expected. It would doubtless leave a bruise, but I felt no pain. The thing was I couldn’t really feel my body. I wasn’t even cold. From the moment I’d started shooting I was liberated from my body and, by extension, from all the grief that it generated for me. I wasn’t scared anymore. On the contrary, I was ecstatically happy. In the process of killing, you kill your own death, at least your anxiety about it. Feeling far greater than anything I’d ever felt on coke or amphetamines, I realized what being truly “high” meant. It meant to be outside of and above the body that will ultimately destroy you. I’d mimicked nature — given it what it obviously relished — and I’d been rewarded by euphoria. The vivid red blood that was erupting like a fountain of mini geysers all along the line was glorious to behold. I heard muffled cries, but no screaming. It was happening too quickly for that. One guy, who I’d hit in the torso, looked in my direction with a questioning expression before falling. Even with the wind up the smell of sulfur was thick in the air. Shell casings were scattered all around me. And in short order sirens began to wail.
I think I got most of them.
Since I had no presence on social media and had given no hint of my intentions to anyone, I knew there’d be puzzlement about my purpose. Had I been in the grip of some twisted ideology? Did I have a grudge against the club? People would look for a rationale that, however demented they’d deem it, was comprehensible and comfortable. What could my motive have been? Well, I’ll tell you. Self-defense. I was defending myself against my crippling terror of death. But no, they won’t get this. This explanation will willfully mystify them because to understand it would oblige them to examine the devices they use to protect and sustain themselves and would, in turn, undermine those devices.
It was at this point that, separated from my body and with the prospect of my own death no longer frightening me, I thought to turn the gun on myself. If death or permanent incarceration were all that was left for me — and not knowing how long my exaltation would last (which might have made a life in prison tolerable if it continued) — I wanted to take advantage of a moment in which my demise would be all but painless.
That was when I heard a grating sound at the rooftop door. The SWAT team had shown up. They’d knocked out the stairwell bulbs, but there was still sufficient light from the windows of the surrounding and taller buildings to see the door, which I’d left slightly ajar, slowly opening wider. They were cautiously pushing against it with their weapons. Then they egressed, dropping to their stomachs on the tarred roof floor and crawling military-style along it.
Looking at these men, I found myself feeling emotions that surprised me. I was caring about them. Caring deeply. Had the ecstasy my act induced enabled me to tap a previously inaccessible dimension of myself? And coming now from an extraordinary disposition, I was thinking that, although they were helmeted and heavily armored, it took courage to do what they were doing; unlike me they had normal lives to lose. Following that thought came an adjunct thought — for them to claim a kill would fittingly confirm and reward the heroism they wanted to own. Immediately after that, however, I flashed on a quite different explanation for their being here, an explanation that came in the form of a question. Did they pick this job for the chance to get a taste of what I’d arrived at? But why they’d chosen to be here didn’t matter now. Now either of those reasons was enough to move me. Out of admiration for their valor, if valor was what it was, or empathy, if a private misery was what it was, came a swelling of generosity and a better idea than my first one.
Standing fully upright and facing them, I emptied a clip in their direction, careful to aim above them. There followed a crackling fusillade of hail-like metal, the impact of which lifted my feet and hurled me backwards and, in its deafening volume, so all-consuming of my senses as to further reduce my capacity to know any pain to a slight burning in my chest. With that, as the blood spilled from my ripped heart into the cavities of my body, I entered a sweet oblivion.
In addition to authoring multiple collections of short fiction along with commentary on a variety of subjects (see his About page), Robert Levin is also a prominent jazz critic.
Called by Nat Hentoff “a writer from whom I always learn something,” Robert Levin is a jazz critic whose work focuses on free jazz. Writing since the 1950s, he has contributed to Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, All About Jazz and DownBeat. He’s the coauthor of two books on free jazz and has penned more than 100 liner notes for major labels like Blue Note. They include albums by John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. His criticism and memoirs reflect long-standing, first-hand engagement with the musicians and movement he documents.
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