Ghosts At the Window

     I was at the window again, that cruel window, the open one, staring down and down all the way to the ground below.

     How many times had I stood there before, waiting for something to happen?  For sanity to return, for courage to well up, for a sign from the universe one way or another.  But there was always nothing.  Just me leaning out like a brute, but never too far, never beyond a civilized point.

Lingering there over the wonderfully terrible appeal of the end too soon.

     Then something always pulled me back.     The fear of falling I think.  Or the ghastly image of myself smattered on the concrete, one leg twisted behind the other.  That creeping pool at the ear.  No, something else.  In the end, it was always the tearing away my love would have to endure due to my own selfish contempt.  That was what stopped me.  I was tangled in my own tragedy to be sure, but I could always see a way out through her love.

     But this time it was different.

     I was pulled back all right but it was as though a ghostly hand had yanked me.  Not gently either, but firmly, the way one would pull back a bad dog.  When I turned around, the sensation made sudden sense.  It was Hym Yuda standing before me.  I had only ever seen him sitting and was surprised that he was shorter than me, sturdier, more solid in some way in spite of his spectral nature.

     Hym Yuda had a stern look in the one photo I had of him.  And it was no doubt on that photo that I based his entire persona.  After all, he lived and died generations before me; I had no idea who he really was or even if he really was.  So my concoction fit the image I had of a man for whom the silliness of suicide was no doubt a puzzling annoyance.

     “Vassinyertin?” he said, or something like that.

     I never knew in all the time that I saw him whether he was speaking English with a Yiddish accent, or Yiddish in a way that I could magically somehow understand.  No matter, I knew that he was asking me what I was up to.

     “I’m trying to get myself to…”

     But I could not finish that sentence.  In the opera within my own mind, this aria had profound meaning; deep deep deep weight and heft.  But in words, in ordinary language, it sounded like a bad jingle in a cheap radio ad.

     “That’s what I thought,” he said.  “Putz!  Putzela, it’s a dumb idea.”

     “What would you know about it?”

     “Plenty.  Andere essen yenem, szi esst sich.”

     “What is that?  Some kind of prayer?”

     “No.  It’s a saying.  It means, some eat at others, she eats at herself.  They said that about my mother.  You’re like her in some ways.”

     “What ways?”

     “She was never good enough for herself and took it out on everyone else.”

     “Forget the parables.  I’m at the end of something here.”

     “Narishkeit!  Nonsense.  What is with this me me me.  You don’t push on for yourself.  You do it for your family.”

     “It’s different now.  Not the same as living in a village.  With low windows.”

     “You love your wife?”

     “I do.  Very much.  But…

     “Your sisters?  Your friends?  Those who love you?”

     “Yes but sometimes I feel that I can't...”

     “Good.  And what about the rest of us?”

     “Rest of who?”

     “Us,” he said firmly.

     He was pointing behind him, towards the bedroom wall.  There was nothing on that wall but I soon began to see it not as blank but empty.  I mean, more like a canvas than a vacancy, something yet to be filled.  And very slowly, like a thought forming, that wall became filled with ghosts.  They were vague at first, ghostly.  But then slowly they began to form themselves into all those photos on the family album.  All those lives that led down to me here now.  That uncle throwing dice in the alleyway in Brooklyn; that cousin singing in the sun down in Florida; the boy whose name I never knew riding that donkey into town back in Vilna.  Slowly I could feel the weight of evolution, the pressure of descent.  As though it would insult their struggles to indulge in my own.

     I know that this was what Hym Yuda had in mind because after a long pause he said to me:  “Egypt, Babylon, Rome, Russia, Germany.  Through it all we survived.  No,…through it all we rose up.  We fought, tooth and nail, every step of the way.  And all for what?  For you to jump out a window on a bad day and end your own little tiny misery?  What is that in light of what the world is?”

     “Yes, but sometimes…”

     “Sometimes, nothing.  All times, everything.  Oyb men vil fargesn di tsores, farvandlen arum.”

     “Huh?”

     “If you want to forget your troubles, turn around.”

     “What the fuck is that supposed to mean.”

     “You’re a smart boy when you’re not being a selfish putz, figure it out.”

     The window, which was still open, still looked to me like a gateway and the decision like some kind of solution.  It still did then, and many times after that.  But always I closed the window because they would not let me linger there, the ghosts.

     From that point on, I could always see them, dim and dusty, living out their lives in the past with no idea about me or my sufferings. And somehow that changed things.

     I did not decide not to kill myself then.  Or anytime after that.  I simply kept turning around.