The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend

By Sarah Manguso

The Guardians opens with a story from the July 24, 2008, edition of the Riverdale Press that begins, "An unidentified white man was struck and instantly killed by a Metro-North train last night as it pulled into the station on West 254th Street." Sarah Manguso writes: "The train's engineer told the police that the man was alone and that he jumped. The police officers pulled the body from the track and found no identification. The train's 425 passengers were transferred to another train and delayed about twenty minutes."
The Guardians is an elegy for Manguso's friend Harris, two years after he escaped from a psychiatric hospital and jumped under that train. The narrative contemplates with unrelenting clarity their crowded postcollege apartment, Manguso's fellowship year in Rome, Harris's death and the year that followed—the year of mourning and the year of Manguso's marriage. As Harris is revealed both to the reader and to the narrator, the book becomes a monument to their intimacy and inability to express their love to each other properly, and to the reverberating effects of Harris's presence in and absence from Manguso's life. There is grief in the book but also humor, as Manguso marvels at the unexpected details that constitute a friendship. The Guardians explores the insufficiency of explanation and the necessity of the imagination in making sense of anything.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Feb 28, 2012
• ISBN: 9781429950220

Sarah Manguso

Sarah Manguso is the author of 300 Arguments, Ongoingness, The Guardians, The Two Kinds of Decay, Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, Siste Viator, and The Captain Lands in Paradise. Her work has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize, and her books have been translated into Chinese, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Her poems have won a Pushcart Prize and appeared in four editions of the Best American Poetry series, and her essays have appeared in in Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, and the Paris Review. She has taught graduate and undergraduate writing at institutions including Columbia, NYU, Princeton, Scripps College, and the University of Iowa. She lives in Los Angeles.

Book preview

The Thursday edition of the Riverdale Press carried a story that began An unidentified white man was struck and instantly killed by a Metro-North train last night as it pulled into the Riverdale station on West 254th Street.

The train’s engineer told the police that the man was alone and that he jumped. The police officers pulled the body from the track and found no identification. The train’s 425 passengers were transferred to another train and delayed about twenty minutes.

*   *   *

If I were a journalist I’d have spoken to everyone and written everything down right away. I’d have gone to the hospital and met all the people who were on the psychiatric ward at the moment Harris walked out the door, and then this book would be a more accurate rendering of the truth.

If I were to write responsibly, with adequate research to confirm certain facts, I’d have to ask people about the last time they saw or spoke with or heard from my friend Harris. I’m afraid to ask his parents those questions. I’m afraid to talk with his last lover. I’m afraid to meet his doctors and the man who drove the train.

For three years I’ve studied klezmer orchestration, the physics of rainstorms, maps of Eastern Europe. I thought I could trade my life for this useless, vigorous research. Since I was afraid to know so many answers, I didn’t ask any questions, and now it’s been three years. Now no one could possibly be able to remember the mundanities of July 23, 2008.

I could have waited until the end of my life to try to understand what happened on that day, saved it for last so I could know its whole effect, but instead I waited what seems an arbitrary, meaningless length of time.

I tried so hard not to notice Harris’s death, I barely remember it. Time eroded the memory of it even as it gathered the dust of what’s happened since. But I need to try to remember it now so I might keep it from haunting me.

*   *   *

We know the lost time begins just after noon because that’s what the desk nurse said, and we know it ends at 10:48 because that’s when the train pulled into the station. Sometime during that minute, maybe the engineer engaged the air brake. Maybe he blew the whistle. And before or after the engineer did those things, the train’s snub nose, or maybe its whole underside, just above the rails, made contact with my friend’s still living body.

I want to say that ten hours are missing from Harris’s life, but that isn’t right. They were in his life. They just weren’t in anyone else’s.

Though I wish I could, I can’t say Harris lay down on the train track and felt relief. I can’t imagine anything but torment, a blinding light, then nothing.

What I carry now—it brightens sometimes, without warning—is not his pain. This pain is mine, and unlike my friend, I don’t try to hide it. I let it get all over everything. I yell in my studio. I cry on the subway. I tell everyone I know that my friend threw himself under a train.

*   *   *

Some people believe that only the selfish accept suicide as a possibility, but I don’t believe suicide is available to everyone. It was available to me for a moment, and then a door shut between me and it. The door has stayed shut.

Some people think I should be angry at Harris, but I’m not angry. I believe in the possibility of unendurable suffering.

A man whose lover died slowly wants this book to be about love.

A man whose brother died quickly wants this book to be about rage. I couldn’t save my brother, he says. It never goes away, he says.

*   *   *

Sometimes I wish someone else had died instead—someone who blocks the open subway doors, for example, or someone who leaves piles of peanut shells on a train car. The fantasy comes to me in a flash—I can bring him back to life!

The woman who changed her baby’s diaper and left the filth on an orange plastic subway seat—I’d have traded her for Harris. And I’d have traded the man who unwrapped a candy, placed it in his mouth, dropped the wrapper on the platform in front of his feet, chewed, unwrapped another candy, placed it in his mouth, dropped the wrapper on the platform in front of his feet, chewed.

*   *   *

Harris played music, wrote software, wrote music, learned to drive, went to college, went to bed with girls, moved to New York, moved to California, went to graduate school, moved back to New York, went to more graduate school. His three psychotic breaks occupied almost no part of his actual life.

During the first episode, he hired a lawyer, convinced his colleagues were conspiring against him. He called his sister, not knowing where he was, thinking he might have been slipped something. She told him to lie down and rest. He called himself an ambulance, sent it away, drove himself to a gas station, parked the car, got out, slept behind a trash bin. A talking dog appeared and told him to enter a house. The door was unlocked. The people inside called the police, and Harris was arrested and brought to the hospital. After thirty-six hours of telephone calls his mother found him.

I don’t know what breed of dog it was. I don’t know what color the house was. I don’t know how the doorknob felt in my friend’s hand.

After the first episode, sometimes he’d stop speaking before the end of a sentence.

*   *   *

During the second episode, a year after the first, he disappeared from a roof party, and for a horrible moment it was believed he had jumped. Someone went to his house and knocked on the door for a long time before Harris finally opened it, his fist clenched and ready to strike. Days passed. He broke a date to see a play. A cousin came to Brooklyn late at night to fetch him. Knowing he was on the way to the hospital in the morning, Harris ran away from his cousin’s house, and the police committed him.

During the third episode, a year after the second, he left his girlfriend. He took a cab to the hospital with an aunt. He went willingly. He knew what was happening.

He was nauseated. He might have been dehydrated. He wasn’t sedated.

Then there are ten hours unaccounted

Reviews for The Guardians

[akeela_8 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Guardians by Sarah Manguso is a strange tribute to Maguso’s friend, Harris, who committed suicide by stepping in-front of a moving train. The book is egocentric and Manguso shares some alarmingly personal thoughts about her friend, with allusions to a romantic relationship that might-have-been. She writes: “…I think my life wouldn't have been swallowed by disappointment if I’d married someone else – that if I’d married Harris, I would always be happy and he would have lived.”She goes on at length about how Harris’ death has traumatized and incapacitated her for years. What is most surprising is that Manguso is married, though some of her assertions showed a worrying disregard for her hapless husband. I don’t what the point of the book was. Not a book I would recommend.

[kidzdoc_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This was a mercifully short elegy to a dear friend of the author, who checked himself out of a mental hospital in NYC and committed suicide by stepping in front of a Metro North train in Riverdale roughly 10 hours later. I enjoyed Manguso's earlier book The Two Kinds of Decay, a memoir about her own illness, but this short book came across as little more than a self absorbed form of written diarrhea by a spoiled rich girl about the effect that Harris's death had on her, which I found to be macabre and more than a little disturbing. Some thoughts should not be shared with others, and some books should not be published, which is the case for The Guardians. I'll give it a generous 2 stars, and at a cost of £14.99 it is overpriced by at least 10 fold IMO.