Euclid Avenue, Berkeley, in the morning. Students study the ground before them, walking silently, considering the tasks demanded of them today, tomorrow, next week. The dawn light, muted by that familiar nebula of haze that shrouds the bay, pours itself over the scene, the street, sidewalk, and shop windows painted by its pink luster. I hear commuters’ engines slowly pass before me, behind, on my left, their irritated growls betraying the failed hunt for streetside parking close to campus. As if on cue, the smell of donuts belches from a roofpipe as I pass the shop of that old Asian baker, the one who makes the strong coffee that I often fetch before my mid-afternoon classes.
But this scene is all background and white noise. As I walk, nothing is real to me except for my projects. The term papers, the deadlines, the thesis ideas, these all swim back and forth like schools of fish in my mind, my consciousness fixed on them. These account for my brisk stride, my hurried glances at the clock tower. It is as if the swirling motions in the scene around me are sustained by these projects, or rather, that my projects have thrown me into this scene without my consent. They are the energy of my movement: My tasks and concerns are the libido of my world.
I notice a vagrant beneath a bush on my right. His eyes turn toward me. They are blue, sagging upon a contorted jaw, its mechanism rotating a set of bare gums. His gaze captures me as if by a spell and my gait is halted. As I look back at him, I begin to see not a face, but things. His face disappears, as it were, and strange objects appear in its place. There is a sunburned brow, a piece of noodle clinging to shaggy hair, stubble. Beneath the bush around him I begin to see filth and unmoving chunks, lumps, debris. A crumpled bit of paper, a half-dried puddle of mucous, a lard stain.
Then, as if startling myself in a mirror while alone in a room, I begin to notice my own body. With the vagrant’s face, I too have disappeared. Instead of me, there is only this lumpy mass of objects, disparately organized, heavy, soft in parts and hard in others. It wants at first to be in motion, but the energy putting it in motion begins to subside and it sits unmoving. Then the feet appear, two wraiths suddenly appearing to collect me. Everything grows cold: a book in my hands, the breeze seeping into my shirt. I smell the donuts again and I smell shit in the bush at the same time.
And I begin to lose my grip on things familiar. My concerns are fading from the front of my mind like visitors departing without saying goodbye. My mind is following a strange scent into a place it has never visited before: the background of my world.
A raspy voice is calling me into the bush. The old man with his wizened hands and filth. He is saying something and now, as if entranced by his voice, I am wholly occupied by him. I want to touch his face.
And a strange kind of terror begins to take hold of me. The same terror attending a descent into paralysis. Every option for acting—an infinite number—is suddenly available to me. Every way I look with my minds eye, I see nothing except objects overlaid with options. This paralyzes me. I cannot decide which option to choose because I see no means of preferring one over another. Yet I feel that I must choose, so I turn round and round in my mind, possibilities swimming before my eyes. But, as if I am viewing them from a high speed carnival ride, they become a blur.
In this condition, I feel that I may sit here all morning, all day, all night. I could remain tomorrow, the next day, and the day after until, like this man, I begin to resemble a bag of garbage. Having become this, all of my projects will disappear completely and cease to exist. Indeed, to this point they have merely resided on the edge of existence, not having any being except in my own mind. Having existed only in my mind and cast out by my mind, they will be extinct.
I consider that my sitting will not draw the slightest attention from the students walking on Euclid because it would make me part of their white noise. They would not see me. I would be a venue for their projects. No, rather, I have always been such, but did not know it because I was using them in the same way (using them through neglect). I have fallen into another world or, perhaps, I have clambered out of the world into which I had, in the beginning, already fallen.
My existence is becoming suspect. Something—the vagrant?—has punctured my world and deflated it, and now I cannot take hold of it anymore. I only see things attached to other things, and everything without any attitude or relation to me. Pieces of gum, black and round, spotting the pavement. Dried leaves clustered in cobwebs beneath the hedge. My own hands, as if I had never seen them before.
And I wonder what is beneath the skin of that hand I find before my face. This wondering reinforces an option for acting and this—acting—slows the dizzy spin. I reach into my bag for another object, a pen, cheap, stolen from the library. I plunge it into the palm of my left hand and the pain emerges as if it, too, were an object, a thing outside of me. I perceive it in the same way I perceive the pen. I do not perceive it as pain. The as-ness of the world is fading. There are only frightened nerves. The oozing begins and I fall backward into the bush, twisting the pen deeper and harder, aiming between the bones. I ponder the surfaces of these sensations as I might those of a stone, absent-mindedly.
Blood is running down my arm. I feel it chilling and notice the strange color that appears when it contacts my pale blue shirt. The pen has plunged so deeply now that I can see a dancing peak on top of my hand as the tip of pen tries to pierce its surface. But I lose my interest and toss the pen into the street as if it had become empty.
The blood reaches the sidewalk. Shoeprints form and fade in twos and threes as students, unnoticing, step through it. It will dry soon, I think, and silently watch.
The vagrant turns his gaze to me, his yellowed eyes gaping. And suddenly, as if taken by a fit, he flies upon me, his long, twisted fingers about my neck, clutching. I hesitate for a moment, noticing the sensations: his greasy, trembling hands, his bony legs bent backward. Vapors of vodka and tobacco. Teeth like little shards jutting from gray gums.
My left hand scrambles across the pavement and I find the pen near the gutter as my vision begins to dim. I realize now that the vagrant is squeezing harder, asphyxiating me.
Fight. Finding my strength, I roll over, trading places with my assailant, pinning him to the sidewalk. His eyes are shut hard now and his mouth is bent downward at the sides, clownish. In our tumble, his head hits the pavement; he is grunting and coughing, remembering his weakness. I release my grip and the pen falls to the ground again.
Others have noticed us now. They have seen the blood and the conflict and some have stopped. They are murmuring with disguised voices. I look up at them, panting and vicious. “I am this stuff,” I say, displaying my wound. One of them grimaces and walks off. Another of them—a young woman—waves her arms at someone across the street.
“He killed the old man!” She shouts. She has an Asian accent. I don’t immediately understand why she is shouting. I cannot find meaning in anything except fighting, but that is done now.
Others approach and form a small crowd. Their faces fill me with terror. I try to explain: “There is no point in doing this. I can sit under the bush. I can just be here like him. I am just this.” I raise my hand to them, proving my case, but to no effect.
I stagger to my feet and stand over the vagrant. The crowd moves back, forming a semi-circle around us. I gently nudge the man’s head with my shoe, then again and again, harder so that I’m kicking. There is no response. I point at the man, “I don’t know who he is. I don’t know where to go.” These words seem to be addressed to myself, but I only hear the sounds in my head that do not speak to me.
Down the block, I see a police car round the corner.
Flight. I find a gap in the crowd, dart forward and run, thwarting someone’s attempt to block me. The crowd is pointing and shouting at me but their voices merging with the noise of the traffic.
I run between two buildings, behind a row of bushes beside a hotel, through a sea of cars in a parking lot. I have the disturbing sensation of the perfect freedom of going nowhere and anywhere, of moving without acting and without destination. The self I had forged among others is dead and gone. I am a vagrant; an animal with no identity. I have committed suicide, perfectly and purely.
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