The Futilitarians by Anne Gisleson

Author:Anne Gisleson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2017-08-27T04:00:00+00:00

It is often by a trivial, even an accidental decision that we direct our activities into a certain channel.… Usually, we know nothing of the ultimate orientation or of the outlet toward which we travel, and the stream sweeps us to a formula of life from which there is no returning. Every decision is like a murder, and our march forward is over the stillborn bodies of all our possible selves that will never be.

When I first read those lines, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud, because they were so brutal and so true. As you get older all the bodies of your stillborn selves may pile up around you but every decision is also its own act of creation. That’s one of the miracles of the self—that we keep creating ourselves amid the personal carnage.

The day before Dad’s funeral, I sat in the kitchen in a hollow state of suspension, everyday life just bouncing dully off me, as I read the newspaper article about his life, an unreal exercise in language processing. When we were kids, he had warned us against believing everything we read in the paper, that there was no such thing as an objectively true story, that facts and circumstances ranged out far beyond the neat columns and the discreet authority of the byline. But reading his obituary engendered a different kind of disbelief. So did looking at the great picture of him, an unselfconscious side view sneakily snapped at a Christmas party, as he hated having his picture taken, smiling in his outdated glasses, the sweep of brown hair he compulsively combed and his big “lugan” nose whose forensic powers he warned us about every Saturday night before we went out. (“Lugan,” a term he embraced, was a midwestern pejorative for anything Lithuanian, like his Kaunas-born maternal grandparents.) The biographical details, highlights of some of the more prominent cases he tried, even ones he would’ve considered disappointments, padded here and there with a little bullshit from our luncheon. The newspaper listed the children who survived him but not those who didn’t, a sad erasure for the twins, especially since I suspect they were the last ones on his mind as he slipped away from us.

But it was the story to the left of my dad’s, running exactly parallel on the page a mere centimeter from his, that kept distracting me as I read. INJURIES CITED IN DEATH AT OLD HOTEL. A decomposing body had been found at the bottom of an elevator shaft in an abandoned Howard Johnson out in the Katrina-ravaged but recovering New Orleans East. The coroner’s office said that the individual had been dead about four to seven days before someone found him and that he’d died from internal bleeding from pelvic fractures. They had released a description to help ID him. “The man is white, between 20 and 30 years old, 5 feet 7 inches, 148 pounds, and has light brown hair, a full beard and a mustache.… The man also has a twisted right incisor in the right side of his mouth.

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