The Mets

I was about to swallow the entire bottle of pills when my doctor texted, “Hey.”

This intrusion naturally led me to pause my activity.

Shortly thereafter, my phone displayed the words Doctor Hurlovst is typing. Since my doctor is seventy-four, I figured this might take a while. I stood up, closed the bedroom window, and returned the bottle of pills to the nightstand. Eventually he wrote, “Have a free ticket to the Mets game next Wednesday. Want to join?”

My doctor is a friend, although this epithet may be too strong. My doctor doesn’t really have friends. During my checkups he likes to say, “Todd, I don’t really have friends,” usually after I’ve adopted the prone position but before he’s removed two gloves from a box labeled Aurelia Delight Blue Vinyl PF Gloves. The relative position of our bodies give his words a menacing quality. Thankfully, he also hangs photographs from 1980s Albania in his office, which I find quite soothing.

Two weeks ago, my doctor reiterated his sense of isolation during my biannual check-up. He said, “I lack companions and companionship, Todd.”

I stared at a Tirana playground from 1982 in silence.

Finally I said, “I’m going to kill myself.”

He said, “In some ways, the pictures are my companions.”

I said, “Sleeping pills.”

He said, “But of course that’s ridiculous. An art object cannot be your friend.”

I thought about the bottle of sleeping pills on my nightstand, which I’d placed beside a novel by Thomas Bernhard and a novel by Louis-Ferdinand Céline. These authors do lend credence to my doctor’s view.

I said, “How long until a dead body smells?”

He said, “The younger curators don’t like the photographs that I most admire. Tastes have changed.”

I’m particularly curious about the smell emitted by my decomposing body because I would like to maximally inconvenience my neighbor in 11D, and the miasma of death is generally held to be quite inconveniencing. Unfortunately, it took quite a while to calibrate my postmortem waft in the direction of my neighbor’s windows. I had only just finished when my doctor texted.

In response to my doctor’s text messages I write, “Hi. I accept. Thank you for the invitation.” Three reasons underpin my decision to join him at the Mets game and postpone my demise: One, my doctor has box seats just behind the third base line. Two, the Mets are in the middle of a tight divisional race. Three, I’m experiencing lingering uncertainty over my calibration of the cross-breeze.

In some ways, the Mets are my doctor’s friends. However, many of the team’s players will be traded away or sign contracts with different teams after the season ends. I guess in that respect they’re not really friends, since friends usually don’t leave without saying goodbye. It’s also the case that friends tend to share interests, and I have never heard a Met express curiosity about Albanian photographers working between 1985 and 1990. My doctor says Albanian photography reached its zenith in the five years after Enver Hoxha’s death.

The Mets are currently on a road trip in Cincinnati. They return to Queens on Monday, and I’ll attend the game on Wednesday. This means that I will need to pay my co-op’s monthly maintenance fee since Wednesday is September 2, and payment is due on the first of the month. I think it’s important to be a good community member, but these payments have become unpleasant to me ever since I became embroiled in a dispute with the building superintendent. Two months ago, the co-op unveiled a full-scale mockup of its new elevator cabs. The board asked the Otis company, which will manufacture the cabs, to display its new CS3A Push Button Elevator Panel prototype in the building’s lobby for residential input. After interacting with the prototype in a very tactile manner over a number of days, I attended an information session featuring the building manager, the superintendent, and the co-op board. During the Q&A session, I said, “The buttons lack buoyancy.”

The entire co-op board remained silent in the way that people remain silent when they have heard a compelling point.

I said, “This building has children, and in some sense we all have an inner child, and children like buoyancy. It brings joy to their ascent or descent, depending.”

The superintendent said, “Closeness here is existence in the greatest distance from the other—the distance that allows nothing to dissolve—but rather presents the thou in the transparent but incomprehensible revelation of the just there.”

I said, “This language is really very surprising given the context.”

My super is a devotee of Martin Heidegger. As part of his compensation package, the building gives him—my super, not Martin Heidegger, who died of natural causes—a free apartment on the ground floor. In every room of this free apartment, the building super has mounted pictures of Martin Heidegger. I’m in no position to judge the quality of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, but I can tell you for certain that Martin Heidegger was not a very attractive man. In addition, there are very few pictures of young Martin Heidegger in the apartment, which has further aesthetic consequences.

While I was speaking about buoyancy and the superintendent was quoting Heidegger, the co-op board remained silent. After the pregnancy of this silence became too much to bear, I said, “I’m going to open the elevator shaft door on the eleventh floor and jump.”

The co-op board said nothing.

The super said, “The Mets are playing well this year.”

I said, “It’s not only the buttons. The buttons are one factor among many. There are other considerations as well.”

I felt it was important to stipulate that the button’s lack of buoyancy was not the primary reason for my decision. People latch onto all sorts of things in a very retrospective manner after you jump down an elevator shaft. It’s important to avoid misunderstandings. While communicating my intentions to the co-op board, I took pleasure in the fact that my neighbor in 11D—who cares nothing for our building’s communal spaces and thus did not attend the information session—would be unable to use the elevator for an unspecified amount of time while they removed my body.

There are many reasons why I disdain my neighbor in 11D. For a long time, I had a dog, and then the dog killed himself. My neighbor in 11D was the ultimate cause of my dog’s suicide, although the superintendent was the proximate cause. This is how it happened: The building superintendent strenuously enforced the co-op board’s rule stipulating that pets must travel in the service elevator instead of the regular elevator. Each floor has two elevators but only one set of elevator buttons, making it impossible to specifically call the service elevator. This means that half the time the regular elevator arrives, and you have to send it down to the basement and then press the elevator button again for the service elevator. I think this had a profound effect on my dog’s mental well-being given the natural stresses associated with having to relieve oneself. One morning, my neighbor in 11D commandeered the service elevator for fifty minutes in order to move an oven out of his apartment. Later that day, my dog stood in front of a Tesla Cybertruck that my superintendent was parallel parking. It was a slow process.

To add insult to injury, the following morning my neighbor again took possession of the service elevator to move an industrial oven into his apartment. As he stood outside his door supervising three movers and a dolly, I walked into the hallway and said, “I’m going to stick my head in that oven.”

My neighbor said, “The problem with industrial ovens is that they take forever to preheat.”

I said, “Why do you have an industrial oven? Are you a baker? Do you run an artisanal pizza shop from your apartment?”

He said, “Appearances are deceiving.” From this I gathered that my neighbor also fancies himself a phenomenologist.

I said, “I’m going to pry open the elevator shaft door and stand between the dolly and the open door and then pull the dolly with the oven on it toward myself so that I fall down the shaft and the oven crushes me.”

He said, “Did you see Francisco Lindor’s game winning double last night?”

I returned to my apartment and wrote on X, “I am likely to take my own life in the near to medium term.” Fourteen people liked my tweet and three people, including my neighbor in 11D, retweeted it. One person responded, “70 Free Spins No Deposit, Get Your Bonus & Win Real Money. One Of Our Many Great Offers, Check Them All Out!”

In response I wrote, “I am interested in your orthography choices.” They did not reply. In the aftermath of this silence, I tried to jump down the elevator shaft. I encountered two problems: First, I struggled to open the elevator door, which features a safety lock preventing its being opened unless an elevator cab is present. Second, I realized that I had to plan my dog’s cremation.

My ex-wife, who also drives a Tesla, joined me at the cremation a few days later. In our divorce, I got the dog, the apartment, the alimony, and most of the ethics. She kept her acupuncturist, Anastasios, with whom she now lives.

As we stood beside the A15-10 Bespoke Pet Cremator in the back of the funeral home, my ex-wife took a series of work calls.

I said, “I’m going to eat rat poison.”

My ex-wife pointed at her phone and whispered, “I’m speaking with four Japanese banks. The Tokyo Metro is seeking to raise 348.6 billion yen through an IPO.” I felt it was obvious that the four Japanese banks would hear her whispering and that it would have made more sense to put the phone on mute and speak at a normal volume. I also felt that public utilities should not undertake IPOs, but I admit this was a secondary consideration.

My ex-wife works for Citadel, a hedge fund run by Ken Griffin. When I pointed out that Ken Griffin has donated more money to candidates who refused to certify the 2020 election than any other human being alive, she asked me what I knew about atriums.

I said, “This question is really very surprising given the context.”

She said, “You’re mistaken.” She then proceeded to tell me that I should visit the atriums, halls, buildings, museums, graduate schools, admissions offices, and other architectural sites named for Kenneth C. Griffin on account of Kenneth C. Griffin’s philanthropy. She then pointed out that these spaces occasionally drop the “C” and sometimes drop the “Kenneth,” so I should be careful not overlook spaces named Griffin Hall or Griffin Hospital Wing when organizing my itinerary. “This act of modesty makes it difficult to know the true extent of his philanthropic giving,” she said.

After the funeral worker handed me an urn with my dog inside, I said to my ex-wife, “Once I ingest rat poison, you will no longer have to pay me alimony.”

My ex-wife said something in Japanese to the banks. 

The cremation took place one week ago. Since then, the Mets have won six games in a row. They’re currently only two games behind the Philadelphia Phillies in the National League East. The Mets are a trying team—they both appear to try, and they try their fans. On Wednesday, they will play the Baltimore Orioles at Citi Field in Queens. This raises an interesting thought, which is that if I had to drown myself in one harbor, it would be Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. They’ve done a nice job cleaning the water and reintroducing oysters into Chesapeake Bay.

In addition to scheduling my maintenance fee payment, I now have to complete the reading that I assigned my students for Monday’s class. We’re currently studying The Scarlet Letter. Last week, Hester Prynne refused to name her lover and had a conversation from prison with her returned husband, Chillingworth. This scene underscores the differences between fiction and nonfiction. For example, my ex-wife was quite forthcoming on the subject of her acupuncturist, Anastasios. As we sat on the 2 train between Clark Street and Wall Street, she further informed me that she had never been diagnosed with sciatica. I considered jumping in front of the next train, but my wife would naturally have assumed that I killed myself as a result of her infidelity. If you jump in front of a train moments after your wife has informed you that she has lied about a series of medical diagnoses, she will latch onto all the wrong things in a very retrospective manner. As a secondary consideration, I believe in supporting public transit and extended delays lower the public support these systems rely on.

Over the last twenty-eight years, a significant part of my job has been trying to help young people latch onto the right things. For instance, I tried to explain that Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter functions as a metaphor in class last week.

After I made this point, Tim raised his hand and asked, “So it’s not real?”

I said, “The letter is both real in the sense that it exists in the book’s fictional universe, and it is a metaphor.” 

Marcus said, “If it’s a metaphor, how come other characters can see it?”

I said, “Let’s try another example. In Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Josef K’s trial is both real and also a metaphor.”

Sally then raised her hand and reminded me that The Trial was no longer on the syllabus because parents had objected to a book that featured a banker being killed. Sally tends to make helpful and clarifying points. On TikTok, she offers book reviews to her twenty-four thousand followers. She has given six out of ten stars to The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, and the abridged Moby-Dick. In the final analysis, my students will likely view my suicide in metaphorical terms. Perhaps this is for the best.

If things go as planned, the Mets pitcher on Wednesday will be Sean Manaea. He can be streaky, but he’s having a strong season. During his last outing, his box score read: 7IP, 6H, 1R, 1ER, 0BB, 5K. A box score functions as a memorial to a set of historical events. It’s quite beautiful in this way. The Mets’ ability to find creative ways to lose baseball games remains a hallmark of their organization. Within this ridiculous endeavor featuring rich men and artificial rules, the Yankees usually win and the Mets usually disappoint. There is something human about this.

Next to the pills and the novel by Bernhard and the novel by Céline, there is a bedside clock. It reads 1:09 p.m. This afternoon’s game started four minutes ago.