Sheila Heti - How Should a Person Be?

HOW SHOULD A PERSON BE?

Sheila Heti

Copyright 2012 Sheila Heti

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This edition published in 2012 by
House of Anansi Press Inc.
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Heti, Sheila, 1976How should a person be? / Sheila Heti.

eISBN 978-0-88784-279-5

1. Heti, Sheila, 1976 Fiction. 2. Williamson, Margaux Fiction. I. Title.
PS8565.E853H68 2012 C813.6 C2012-902878-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010924089

Cover design and illustration: Rebecca Seltzer

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishingprogram the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and theGovernment of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

ALSO BY SHEILA HETI

The Middle Stories

Ticknor

FOR CHILDREN

We Need a Horse

WITH MISHA GLOUBERMAN

The Chairs Are Where the People Go

for Margaux

PROLOGUE

H ow should a person be?

For years and years I asked it of everyone I met. I was always watching to see what they were going to do in any situation, so I could do it too. I was always listening to their answers, so if I liked them, I could make them my answers too. I noticed the way people dressed, the way they treated their loversin everyone, there was something to envy. You can admire anyone for being themselves. Its hard not to, when everyones so good at it. But when you think of them all together like that, how can you choose? How can you say, Id rather be responsible like Misha than irresponsible like Margaux ? Responsibility looks so good on Misha, and irresponsibility looks so good on Margaux. How could I know which would look best on me?

I admired all the great personalities down through time, like Andy Warhol and Oscar Wilde. They seemed to be so perfectly themselves in every way. I didnt think, Those are great souls , but I did think, Those are some great personalities for our age . Charles Darwin, Albert Einsteinthey did things, but they were things.

I know that personality is just an invention of the news media. I know that character exists from the outside alone. I know that inside the body theres just temperature. So how do you build your soul? At a certain point, I know, you have to forget about your soul and just do the work youre required to do. To go on and on about your soul is to miss the whole point of life. I could say that with more certainty if I knew the whole point of life. To worry too much about Oscar Wilde and Andy Warhol is just a lot of vanity.

How should a person be? I sometimes wonder about it, and I cant help answering like this: a celebrity. But for all that I love celebrities, I would never move somewhere that celebrities actually exist. My hope is to live a simple life, in a simple place, where theres only one example of everything.

By a simple life , I mean a life of undying fame that I dont have to participate in. I dont want anything to change, except to be as famous as one can be, but without that changing anything. Everyone would know in their hearts that I am the most famous person alivebut not talk about it too much. And for no one to be too interested in taking my picture, for theyd all carry around in their heads an image of me that was unchanging, startling, and magnetic. No one has to know what I think, for I dont really think anything at all, and no one has to know the details of my life, for there are no good details to know. It is the quality of fame one is after here, without any of its qualities.

In an hour Margauxs going to come over and were going to have our usual conversation. Before I was twenty-five, I never had any friends, but the friends I have now interest me nonstop. Margaux complements me in interesting ways. She paints my picture, and I record what she is saying. We do whatever we can to make the other one feel famous.

In this way, I should be satisfied with being famous to three or four of my friends. And yet its an illusion. They like me for who I am, and I would rather be liked for who I appear to be, and for who I appear to be, to be who I am.

We are all specks of dirt, all on this earth at the same time. I look at all the people who are alive today and think, These are my contemporaries. These are my fucking contemporaries! We live in an age of some really great blow-job artists. Every era has its art form. The nineteenth century, I know, was tops for the novel.

I just do what I can not to gag too much. I know boyfriends get really excited when they can touch the soft flesh at the back of your throat. At these times, I just try to breathe through my nose and not throw up on their cock. I did vomit a little the other day, but I kept right on sucking. Soon, the vomit was gone, and then my boyfriend pulled me up to kiss me.

Aside from blow jobs, though, Im through with being the perfect girlfriend, just through with it. Then if hes sore with me, let him dump my ass. That will just give me more time to be a genius.

One good thing about being a woman is we havent too many examples yet of what a genius looks like. It could be me. There is no ideal model for how my mind should be. For the men, its pretty clear. Thats the reason you see them trying to talk themselves up all the time. I laugh when they wont say what they mean so the academies will study them forever. Im thinking of you, Mark Z., and you, Christian B. You just keep peddling your phony-baloney genius crap, while Im up giving blow jobs in heaven.

My ancestors took what they had, which was nothing, and left their routines as slaves in Egypt to follow Moses into the desert in search of the promised land. For forty years they wandered through sand. At nights they rested where they could, against the dunes that had been built up by the winds. Waking the next morning, they took the flour from their sacks and moistened it with their spit and beat together a smooth dough, then set off, stooped, across the sand, the dough spread across their backs. It mingled with the salt of their sweat and hardened in the sun, and this is what they had for lunch. Some people spread the dough flat, and that dough became matzo. Others rolled tubes and fastened the ends, and those people ate bagels.

For so many years I have written soul like this: sould . I make no other consistent typo. A girl I met in France once said, Cheer up! Maybe it doesnt actually mean youve sold your soul I was staring unhappily into my beer but rather that you never had a soul to sell .

We were having Indian food. The man next to us was an Englishman, and he brightened up. He said, Its so nice to hear English being spoken here! I havent heard any English in weeks . We tried not to smile, for smiling only encourages men to bore you and waste your time.