IT ALWAYS SEEMED TO ME THAT THERE WOULD BE SOME warning—that I would have, at the least, a month to live before I would die. Thinking that, I felt that death could likely never reach me because my everyday life would need to be stopped by this warning—at that moment I would change, be someone else (the person so warned). In a way, then, my everyday self would never die because she would not be the one living the final month. In clinging to the everyday life, therefore, I felt I could avoid death because everyday life, to my mind, is a place to which death never comes.
I was wrong. In fact, the opposite is true. Everyday life is the province of death. It is where all dying takes place—for the extraordinary lands we imagine simply do not exist. There is only the ordinary. It is what we inhabit, and when death comes to find us it is there that he looks.
Looking over this account, I think I have said it badly. I was, it is true, out early in the streets. I was by the factories. The way the trees stand there so impassively—I have always felt a ready calmness that sends me on through the day. But he was there, this man, my terrible opponent, and I came upon him so suddenly.
I wonder, even, could he have come there for the same reason as me? To see the trees? I am so oblivious. Could it be that we two had been in that place together, morning after morning, perhaps for years, until one day I turned on him and killed him? Perhaps it is even likely. Why else would he have come toward me except to speak, to share something—a thought, something. This morning it was especially clear, the thin etch of the trees, and perhaps he felt what I felt in it and wanted to say so, to bridge this pathetic buffer that keeps one mind from feeling the presence of another.
If it is so, it would explain the way his hands outstretched—as if in supplication. When I see it now it seems clear: I killed him for being like me. What kind of suicide is it to kill in the world what you find in yourself?
A PERSON CAN DO WHAT THEY LIKE. THEY MAY STAY where they are. They may walk on some distance, may never return. I did not need to stay with him when he was dead because my killing of him was a non-act. It would not be felt by others whose feelings matter. It would not be felt by anyone I know. It was a non-act. I should not have felt it. It was not necessary to stay because staying would be dwelling on something common. But for me it wasn’t common. Somehow I felt in this wretch a mirror of me. Anyway I did not stay but came straight home. Looking neither right nor left, I returned to the house. I drank a glass of water, and I went up to the room I am now in. I shut the door. This is the last room I will see. No other room is necessary for me. Let all the rest collapse in a breath.
LAST.
I forgot to say—I’m sorry—this last.
Please destroy all my things—all my clothes and my papers, the things people gave me that I kept. Please destroy them. I don’t like thinking of such things staying on.
And when you tell people what happened just say, she had an accident. Talk about the woman you loved and say—oh, she was fine, yes, just fine, but then she had an accident. What happened to her was awful it’s true, but beyond control, anyone could do it, could have it happen—to fall in a hole in the brain and know there is no way out. There isn’t always a way out. Why, it happened to my mother and my aunt, and to her grandfather. It is a likely thing, you can say that, it was always likely, and you were ready for it.
Were you ready for it?
I know that you cannot understand me. But imagine it this way. Imagine I had killed an actual person, someone like you or me. Imagine I had done that, had seen another person in the light of day, and had killed them with no thought for their existence, responsibilities, loves, dreams. In doing that, you could guess I would have betrayed our life. I would have forfeited your affection. You could, seeing that, see that I was no one you knew. For me to be a figure of violence—I know I would stand against everything you believe in—your pacificism, your kindness, love, honor, learning.
What is it to kill a person? Something more than speaking out loud, and something less than being born. Something like knowledge, yet less, a knowledge that leaves you with less. In place of my life I have now only the impression of a graceful body, this man’s body, as graceful as bodies are, this body twisted, wrenched, sprawled, and wrecked. He woke this morning and saw out a window the light of the world and went to it, not knowing he was moving toward me.
I KNOW YOU CAN’T UNDERSTAND IT, BUT LET ME TELL you, I have come to believe that in killing this man I have done violence as it would be to anyone we know. There is no difference. I feel it in my body, am revolted by it. Either it is wrong to think violence is only same against same or it is wrong to feel that they are not the same. I don’t care which it is; I am certain one is true. This is the knowledge of my hands.
So you see, in taking my life I am taking a life that is more general than yours. My life is suddenly general, here at its end. The life I take from myself is the complement of that life drained out on this morning’s path, fled out that man’s ears, eyes, throat.
I am finding my character in fleeing. I arrive then in these last moments and depart again as a stranger to you.
your Margaret
Acknowledgments
Jim Rutman,
Megan Lynch,
Catherine Lacey,
Catherine Ball,
Sasha Beilinson.
About the Author
JESSE BALL was born in New York. He is the author of fifteen books, most recently the novel Census. His works have been published to acclaim in many parts of the world and translated into more than a dozen languages. He is on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has won The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize, and was long-listed for the National Book Award. He was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists, and has been a fellow of the NEA, Creative Capital, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
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Also by Jesse Ball
Census
The Way Through Doors
Samedi the Deafness
The Curfew
The Lesson
Silence Once Begun
A Cure for Suicide
How to Set a Fire and Why
PROSE & VERSE
March Book
The Village on Horseback
Fool Book
COLLABORATION
Vera & Linus
Og svo kom nottin
The Deaths of Henry King
THEORY
Notes on My Dunce Cap
Sleep, Death’s Brother
Copyright
THE DIVERS’ GAME. Copyright © 2019 by Jesse Ball. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover art and design by Sara Wood
Cover artwork based on a photograph © Studio-Annika/iStock/Getty Images
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ball, Jesse, 1978- author.
Title: The divers’ game : a novel / Jesse Ball.
Description: New York : Ecco, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018051083 | ISBN 9780062676108
Classification: LCC PS3602.A596 D58 2019 | DDC 813/.6— dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018051083
* * *
Digital Edition SEPTEMBER 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-267611-5
Version 07312019
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-267610-8
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