Excerpt from the unpublished novel Dzhokhar Tsarnaev I Love You.
After a few years of silence, R began to receive death threats again from Kaveesha, the Berkeley ultraleftist child of Tamil Tigers. He sent her memes of Mayo jars to remind her she was white. This is just sad, R said. If he were getting to some real deep cruel shit, I would be into it. (She was an extreme emotional masochist).
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Then he started sending her love poems by Faiz Ahmad Faiz. He didn’t stop sending her death threats. She asked me to write a response to his ludicrous, dangerous, manic emails. I told her my days of ghostwriting for her were over. (No more eulogies, elegies, birthday wishes, love letters, etc. You’ll have to write your own suicide note, I told her. We all have to write our own suicide notes, at the end of the day.)
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I looked it up. Kaveesha is a Hindu name meaning “king of all poets.” I think, on an etymological level, that’s why R fell in love with him. She fell in love with him when he was still just a kid, the same age as Rimbaud when he wrote A Season in Hell. Kaveesha’s whole life had been a season in hell, it seemed to me. Kaveesha, the king of all poets: the poet of rage, criminality, death, femicide, insanity, etc. In general, R fell in love with disturbed, angelic boys and older maternal women with hearts of gold.
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I’m ready for death, R said. We were having dinner at a Korean restaurant on Telegraph, alone on the back patio on a cold October night. A heat lamp kept us warm and made me feel vaguely feverish. I knew she was telling the truth. In the face of her determined romantic pathology, which was also her irony (“the everlasting irony of women” -Hegel), I felt constantly inferior. Even as a kid I was tormented by the sense that I was trapped in my drives, my Capricorn imperviousness to fate, contingency, catastrophe, etc. I had no sense of humor, no sexuality, no ability to improvise, I felt. And later when I had all these qualities in abundance I didn’t know where they came from, as if I was cut off from their murky source, their diabolical source. For awhile I identified with evil, with madness, as an antidote to the emotional autism of my childhood. But even then I was attached to life. I was hypochondriacal and feared death most at my most delirious, when I took a million risks that should have killed me.
Every night I lie awake, she said, looking out the window, at the moon in its various phases, thinking that at any moment now a sniper bullet from Kaveesha will shatter my skull. That’s fucked up, I said. “No, it’s not.” She knew enough about violent death to know it was as natural as any other death and in some ways more logical. “It’s fucked up what he’s doing. No woman should live in fear of male violence, of the male compulsion to exact an illusory revenge. You know that but you exempt yourself from your own universe, as usual, because you think you’re God, or nothing. Or both.” “It hurts him. That’s what I don’t like about it. He should be focusing on something more important than me. I’m not worth it.” “It’s terrifying to think that he could kill you, kill us.” “It’s not terrifying. Why do you think it’s terrifying?” “Because it’s absurd. That kind of violent death is tragicomic and absurd. It’s meaningless and yet it would spill out carcinogenically into space and time.” “No, it would just be another drop in the ocean, on the one hand, and yet it could shake things up, maybe.” “I have no intention of dying in the cheap Dostoevskian mania of a mentally ill kid, a failed revolutionary, a failed poet, whatever.” Why not?, she asked, as if to say, Why do you think you’re so special? During our entire relationship, especially as it succumbed to an infinite bitterness, she would cut me down like that in grotesque ways. Not in the normal way you cut down a partner’s ego. She would cut down my entire claim on selfhood, on survival. But it wasn’t personal or malicious. It was her rage and her nihilism and her irony shining through her strange opacity, the dark lake of her estrangement. It was something erupting from deep inside her, a place she’d only visited in nightmares and in fugue states. It was a trait she shared with her mother, whose untreated bipolar disorder and decades of insomnia had made her capable of completely arbitrary behavior, bouts of cruelty and lability, threats of violence, suicidal jokiness, unstable thought, grandeur, incoherent attacks, etc. But it was too surreal to take seriously, too funny usually, in her mother’s case. Anyway it quickly petered out into exhaustion, into glassy-eyed emptiness. But she was old. R was getting old, too, I thought, too early. I could see it in her. If Kaveesha wants to kill us that badly, she said, he has the right to. I could tell she was getting drunk. She’d get drunk off a single beer these days. We weren’t fighting. In fact the entire night was suffused with tenderness and a kind of cathartic closeness, like we were finally getting close to stripping away all the barriers between us, like we were free to really finally talk, after a decade of being blindly chained together, of drowning together in need and delusion. I laughed. You’re crazy, I said. You sound like some 19th-century Russian character, like one of Dostoevsky’s idiotic romantic nihilists. You sound like an idiot and there’s no way to really talk to an idiot, as Dostoevsky knew. Only God can help you, at this point. “If Kaveesha kills us, if he takes out two privileged white bourgeois leftists in a jealous passion, it could be a revolutionary act. If you killed me, on the other hand, it would be lame.” “You can’t truly base your politics on that kind of novelistic egoism, novelistic fatalism. Or maybe you do. I can’t tell. I don’t know what grounds your politics anymore. But I’m realizing now you were never grounded. There was always something suicidal about you. Maybe that’s what drew you to me. You fell in love with me because you thought I was exciting and a genius and strong enough to contain all contradictions, to make you secure and loved in your death drive. I was a safe haven for suicide. A thrilling solace and recognition, at long last. Because my dick was always hard and my mind was always racing, was always far beyond anything that could be called reality. I was an older alcoholic living in a rundown house in Somerville, a kind of alpha version of the dude from Cat Person, but no less predatory. A man who’s twenty-six years old and living with no future, who’s an artist, a real artist, and a real addict too, is infinitely attractive. I’m sure I’ll never have that sexual charisma again, not that I want it. Just like you’ll never fall in love with an older man again (or, come to think of it, just as I’ll never be a man again (“I was so much older then/I’m younger than that now”). I talked to you on our first night about moving to Latin America and you believed I would leave at any moment. But truly I never could have left if we hadn’t left together. I didn’t have the courage. Or I had all the courage in the world but I needed a woman to feel alive. A skinny anorexic unstable depressed chaotic Harvard blonde with big tits from a haunted, prestigious family. Someone to get fucked up with and to talk shit about everyone else in the world with. I don’t think I was alive before I met you. I didn’t know my own power, though you taught me that. You taught me a lot of things. That’s why our breakup drove me to the edge. And why I had to die inside, where death really lives, become nothing, shit, the abyss, whatever. But now I’m on the other side and I don’t want to die, not yet. I don’t want you to die either.” “…I don’t want to die,” she said, somberly. I could tell she meant it. “And anyway, if Kaveesha killed me, my mom would go on a killing spree.” “I feel that your mom might go on a killing spree one day anyway. Walk into the Hastings city hall or some shit or kill some Republican politicians or maybe some ICE attorneys. I’m scared of her, and of you. I’m scared of the pain inside you both, that intrauterine pain and rage that nourishes you.” We started to talk about incest, about the curse that incest inflicts on children, its inchoate transmission, its slipperiness, its unverifiability, its multiplicity, its ambiguity. Incest is like the demented chronotope of the human species on earth, I said. If you feel that your dad molested you, she said, wouldn’t that make it true? And then wouldn’t you pity him, instead of choke on an undefined hatred and avoidance? It would free me, I said. And I could forgive him. It’s possible we should all act towards our parents with the radical forgiveness one would give towards a father who raped you. I have dreams where my dad rapes me almost every night, she said. Her dad, unlike mine, was gentle, un-narcissistic, almost asexual or pre-sexual, or so it seemed. The conversation moved to friends of ours who had to postpone their wedding in Mexico City because the guy had published an essay about his fucked-up Chicano gangster family, in which he aired certain secrets and crimes, among them incest, murder, drug trafficking, drug abuse, paranoia, dereliction, ruthless exploitation of the community, etc. (he also, naturally, portrayed their immense charm, that’s part of the MFA identity racket, the underclass as inflictor of trauma and bearer of picaresque vitality). So they’re postponing it because the family won’t attend?, I asked. “No. It’s not just that they won’t attend. It’s because they’ve been told that if the wedding goes ahead that his cousins will shoot it up.” “So they will attend”. “Yeah, they’ll go to the wedding for sure.” We were laughing now. We were our old selves now, for a moment. It’s the price you pay for snitching for your MFA, R said, for capitalizing on culture-of-poverty cliches. I don’t know, I said. I liked the piece. I think he has the right to tell his story. No one owes loyalty to any class. Not even the lumpen class, not even the class of predators. I was struck by the thought that maybe my politics were going soft.
That night I lay awake thinking about the similarities between writers and killers, or artists and killers, thinking about the Black Dahlia killer and the porousness of the imagination. The conatus of survival is the conatus of sex is the conatus of ecstasy is the conatus of our darkest secrets. Evil is a secret, whispered from ear to ear. A game of telephone and an initiation. Writers either jerk off to crimes or they commit crimes. And sometimes both.
That night when we got on our bikes and hugged to say goodbye I said I love you for the first time in years and she muttered it back, or I think she did.