mallorys_camera | Of Shame, Ghosts, and The New Yorker (Reply)

I have some Big Decisions to make this week.

The Biggest of all is whether I should renew my New Yorker subscription.

I mean, I love The New Yorker. And if there were 25 hours in a day, I would cheerfully spend one of them reading The New Yorker cover to cover. Every last word of it.

But there are only 24 hours in a day.

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Else?

I’ve been in serious mope mode all week. The death of cultural icons of approximately my own vintage somehow propels me closer to mortality’s front firing line. Plus I keep seeing JR on that eighth floor balconet in Long Island City. I can’t get the image, the referred anguish, out of my mind.

Not sure why JR’s suicide hit me so hard. I’m wondering whether I would have cared at all if JR hadn’t been so supernaturally good-looking. I’m pretty superficial when all is said and done.

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When I lost The Little Store, I felt this deep, gnawing, irremediable shame. I had been a Very, Very BAAAAAAAAAD person, or I wouldn’t have ended up in this situation.

In vain, I remonstrated with myself that something like 20 million small business owners had lost everything in the riptide of the Great Recession. No, I was different. They had lost everything because the economy had been going too fast, lurched and skidded at the 90 degree turn so they ended up with whiplash; I had lost everything because I was a bad businessperson with an impossible business model, and a singularly repulsive human being to boot.

Shame like that is difficult to deal with, particularly for people – waving hand wildly: Me! Me! – who don’t have very high self-esteem. I have several acquaintances whose circumstances are fucked up to a greater or lesser degree but who just don’t own it, whether from willful refusal to consider the implications of their own actions or because they’re functioning on the high end of the autism spectrum, I’m not entirely sure. These people are constantly expressing vexation and annoyance with various routine aspects of the human experience, and I’m always envious of them. How wonderful it must be to be absolutely convinced that you are always right, that your opinions are synonymous with the judgments God makes in His Star Chamber.

I find myself reconstructing what JR must have been feeling in the hour before he jumped, and it always comes back to shame. He did something, he betrayed someone, he sold someone out. He was in the land of No Forgiveness and Self-Loathing. Probably amplified by drugs, sleeplessness, and mental illness.

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I only lasted a few minutes into Netflix’s much-vaunted Making of a Murderer. Watching it made me physically sick. I watched it long enough, though, to realize I’d heard the story before – Yes! It had been a RadioLab episode two years ago. The victim that Steven Avery was accused of raping – falsely, as it turns out – was interviewed at length about the circumstances of that false identification. What she felt when the DNA evidence proved that this was not the man. Because in her mind, she still saw Avery as the person who had raped her, beat her savagely, and left her for dead.

She apologized to Avery. And to his family.

She described the odd lack of affect on his part when she apologized. And you may think, Well, yes. That’s perfectly natural. Of course. An apology can’t compensate for 18 years wrongfully imprisoned behind bars.

And yeah, that was part of it.

But there was also something else.

Thing is, psychopathology is a state of being. It's not defined by acts per se. And Avery is a psychopath. Lives outside the realm where giving forgiveness or receiving forgiveness mean anything. Psychopaths have no shame. Apologizing to a psychopath is kind of like discussing the Republican Presidential race with Rutger.

Sometimes, I think it would really be nice to be a psychopath.

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Also met up with Allison yesterday for lunch and a trot around the Vanderbilt Estate. She was winded by the end of it, so I thought, Huh. Maybe I’m more athletic than I give myself credit for.

We chattered happily away for four hours. Toward the end, Allison half-laughed and said, “I have a very odd question for you. Do you believe in ghosts?”

“Well,” I said carefully. “I don’t not believe in them.”

Allison’s daughter lives in a haunted house in Maine. The house has always been haunted, but recently the phenomena have increased to the point where Allison’s daughter is having trouble sleeping at night –

I interrupted. “Is there a girl who’s just started going through puberty in the house?”

Allison looked startled. “My granddaughter. How did you know?”

“Adolescent girls amplify that kind of phenomenon,” I said.

In my experience, at least, ghosts are not particularly vengeful. It’s more like they’re riveted to a particular spot until some circuit can be completed. The psychic equivalent to finding the damn car keys, maybe.

“Can you think of anything she could do to get rid of it?” Allison asked.

I couldn’t. Sage? Dream catchers? Thing about ghosts is that they always want something, but they’re poor communicators. If you don’t know what they want, it’s impossible to give it to them. And I’ve seen what I continue to think of as ghosts – although, of course, it’s entirely possible they were hallucinations – but I’ve never communicated with one.

In the popular imagination, ghosts have blurry outlines; they float on a miasma of strange Photoshop-esque special effects. That’s never the way they’ve looked to me. I’ve always seen them as solid-looking individuals. Except that I could see them, and nobody else could.