Descent (2 page)

At Ducornet’s house in Denver, we loitered over tea for forty minutes, but these were minutes I couldn’t abide despite the idyllic feel of the place, its natural light, stillness, and silence, opulent bohemian and third-world appointments, and comfortable sofas and chairs. Quitsland, too, was restless, tapping her toes while I fidgeted and paced, and like me fending off the suggestion that we linger at this oasis. Instead we grimly plowed north through Denver—a city that, like a ghost dancer’s nightmare, seems bent on filling the spare high plains—and discovered the dynamic of our car journey altered; a pair of sober pragmatists, we adjusted to the loss of our poet and muse by making everything around us shipshape and imposing automotive order. I drove, and Quitsland rode with a map on her lap, responsibly alert and awake to road dangers. Yet I took no solace from our steadfast approach and was aware of the futility of most forms of solace. I’m used to tracts of sagebrush wastes and appalling reaches of desert steppe, but I wasn’t prepared for this part of Wyoming. In fact, at this juncture in the development of my disease, Wyoming was sufficient to cause me pain, and the evidence there of erosion by wind, and of the path of water across lost eras—time’s intransigence and perdurable length—seemed acute to my fractured sensibility. So did the sky at dusk over sagelands, where the melodramatic phrase “in the gloaming” made sense—albeit differently from the sense it made on English moors and in Irish peat bogs, where nightfall seems hued by European sorrows. In Wyoming, eternity is longer.

We made Evansville, near Casper, well into the night and took rooms at a Comfort Inn. Quitsland sought to cheer me in a booth at Applebee’s by pointing out that at nearby tables citizens went on with their lives. This was one of those chain restaurants with a massive, colorful, laminated menu, festive Saturday night steak-and-shrimp diners, many mounted televisions tuned to sports stations, and large, no-nonsense desserts. Equipped with this context, I ate something, exhorting myself under the rubric “You have to,” then retreated to my cubicle at the Comfort Inn, which, compared to Applebee’s, was tranquil enough—despite trucks on the interstate and late-hour revelers—to allow me to observe, with deepening dismay, the uneroded presence of my alertness aid, Vivarin, still fizzing frantically in my nervous system. All night my mind watched itself struggle to sleep, with digressions down the halls of doom and into the labyrinth of unfettered fear. This is the end, I kept telling myself: anyone sleeping contentedly tonight is a fiddling,
postmillennial Nero.

At dawn I found Quitsland looking relatively hale and handed her the keys to the Taurus. I was pop-eyed and thrumming and within the hour had overdosed on scenery. The Big Horn Mountains reared up in the west and we passed where Custer and his cohorts were slaughtered (this time I felt the pain of the scalped) on what became the Crow Reservation. Here I read map names that once gave me pleasure—towns called Quietus, Recluse, and Node—but came up empty of delight in their presence. At a crowded diner in Livingston we shared a table with a young ranch family bent on post-church pancakes. Livingston should have felt safe but it didn’t, and on this troubled Sunday after 9/11 the streets were empty in the quintessential manner of small towns in the West—broad, breezy, and desolate. Everyone not at the diner, I speculated, must be sweatily reinforcing the underground survival shelters widely believed to be ubiquitous in Montana, the state Ted Kaczynski chose to dwell in.

But once more to the interstate. Neither Quitsland nor I confessed to nostalgia for lost youth as we listened to Janis Joplin’s
Greatest Hits
—middle-aged baby boomers on an improvised road trip, crossing the continental divide near Butte with “Me and Bobby McGee” as our anthem—but for my part I felt nostalgia for last week, when the world was younger and Bin Laden less infamous. That night, in Spokane, I drank a Guinness for dinner in the hope that this Dubliner’s soporific would lend me poetry and dreams. But no such luck of the Irish. At the Days Inn, I suffered not only insomnia but a fermenting headache and—a banal addiction, like picking at a scab—more CNN.

In the morning the passing country was steadily more familiar as the place I think of, expansively, as home, and I began to nurse expectation. We traversed the Cascades into western Washington and crossed the floating bridge to Seattle. Fully incapable of riposte or barbed words—hardly capable of words at all—I engaged in hapless and losing debate with a Budget Car Rental clerk, who insisted that $793.76 was a normal fee for four days in a Taurus. The driver in front of me had been mildly litigious but his rant had a post-9/11 inappropriateness that gave Budget the upper hand; the driver in front of him had played his aces, the patriotism and national crisis cards, also to no good outcome. Meanwhile, most of the customers queued up looked weary, rumpled, speechless, and defeated, many suggesting in their deportment or carriage the self-effacing and impractical patience I recognize as a trait of my city. Here was a Seattle mise-en-scène—mildly lackluster and full of imposed deference—the kind visitors can find exasperating.

The skyscrapers still stood, but no planes rode the skies, and on the downtown streets I felt the weight of my aloneness—still breathing but otherwise not among the living. I was home but couldn’t really go there anymore, and it was the last straw to find home no salve, because I’d pinned my hopes on the futile notion that being there might miraculously redeem me, that I might be resurrected by geography. Instead I sunk deeper into trepidation regarding, specifically, the remainder of my life and the prospects for regaining equilibrium. I was cowed and beginning to feel, dimly, that I knew things I didn’t want to know.

A bland and sullen downtown pall. Anyone not despondent, I believed, was wearing blinders. The rightness of unhappiness was obvious and clear. The only
reasonable response to the world was an overwhelming and excruciating sadness; everything else was willful delusion. And now I couldn’t gaze on innocent humanity, and wanted to hide my face. I wanted to curl in on myself. The pageant around me appeared like a charade in which the players were ignorant of their artifice, and of the pathos they elicited in their audience of one. There was nothing to do but shrivel and surrender, because the sham and tragedy of everything was, moment by moment, and at every turn, hideously too much to bear.

*       *       *

Home meant being differently mired and newly incoherent. Though I divulged my condition to my wife at our doorstep, there was no deliverance in this confession, and my strained description of disequilibrium succeeded mostly in frustrating me, as if words were a rudiment devised for the purpose of obscuring intended meanings. (“I was much further out than you thought / And not waving but drowning,” wrote Stevie Smith, in an apt summation of the problem.) Meanwhile, my wife was not disabled and my children—ages eight and up—were making plans for recreations. A September stillness sat on our house, punctuated by rushes of autumn wind, and the young whips in the orchard appeared anemic. The pond was low, and deer had chewed inroads against our garden. The many and various pastoral concerns that had comprised for some time my afternoon palette now seemed false, hackneyed, and onerous. And on my desk a fat pile of mail tilted, it too exhausting in appearance. For my work as a writer I had no brainpower, but for hysteria there were boundless synapses, however frayed, available for firing, and I spent them at the altar of the World Wide Web—between long bouts with CNN—feverishly indulging my host of paranoias: looking for hideaway banks in Australia, criteria for Canadian citizenship, Tasmanian real estate, conscientious objector exegesis (I had two sons of draftable age—never mind that there was currently no draft), water purification treatises, anthrax esoterica, analyses of Russian nuclear security, and excerpts from the Al Qaeda terrorism handbook that might yield clues to my future. Complicated, labyrinthine spelunking, but the Web is the paranoid hysteric’s supreme enabler, and its deep interstices and eerie connectivity extend the reach of the psychotic temper, lend insanity the power of corroboration, and provide strange provenance for every obsession and confirmation for every delusion. Clicking and scrolling, I elbowed outward, until truth was shaped by my consciousness (it was a little like playing with a Ouija board). I had merely to start a search engine to make of my sick mind the universe.

I now suspected that my packet of symptoms went by some clinical name. There’s a bank of drawers in one wall of our bedroom and I had taken up counting them repetitively to confirm their existence in sets of twos, a practice that never yielded satisfaction, one counting always leading to the next and producing fresh uncertainties. The lumber in the ceiling needed counting too, but shiplap in expanse can seem like op art and this girded my deep insecurity regarding the number of boards overhead; mightn’t
some have blurred together? They wanted recounting with a sharper eye, but still I couldn’t be sure. I counted and the rhythm of counting was robotic, or like a child reciting times tables—a silent voice mysteriously impelled but not crowding out my doomsday thoughts; it insisted on itself in parallel.

The air felt viscous, and it was difficult to act. My sloth was so great as to make dressing ponderous. Gravity lay heavy on me; nevertheless I was urgent, always, to wrestle with my condition. Compelled to it by a dire panic, I called my doctor and told his receptionist that I needed to see him as soon as possible regarding a troubling stomach pain, a deception that seemed to me entirely necessary as a means of avoiding humiliation.

My doctor is competent, sturdy, gracious, and has a trace of Kentucky in his delivery and manner. He had tapped on my bare chest at intervals past and taken the measure, apologetically, of my prostate, but despite these intimacies he seemed now appalled to hear that I’d succumbed to madness. I made a number of bereft confessions regarding the depths to which I’d sunk and described myself as “behind glass.” My doctor, meanwhile, sat stoically on a wheeled stool in his perpetually pill-less woolen sweater-vest and registered my symptoms with an air of tragedy and with a disconcerting haplessness, as if my condition were Ebola or a brain tumor. He sighed more than once, his shoulders caved in, and his hands stayed folded against his khakis. The modulated certainty evaporated from his voice as he fumbled in an effort to prescribe something soothing and urged me in the direction of psychiatry.

Next door I endured embarrassment again when my kindly pharmacist of many years handed me a bottle of Xanax pills and quietly said, “I’m so sorry.” I prevaricated in the face of this drugstore affront, claiming the prescription was for use judiciously on future airplane journeys. I also yearned for an anonymity my neighborly world couldn’t afford. Knowing nearly everybody in my neck of the woods, which had heretofore seemed for the most part pleasant, now seemed like an unnavigable morass and demanded of me convoluted perjuries. Yet try as I might to wear my old face, my eyes were telltale windows into darkness, and everybody seemed to look right through them, and sadly, to see how I’d declined.

At home my pretense took punishing forms—an excruciating pose of normalcy over dinner, or staring down, for the benefit of my children, the bleak news emanating from the television. The Xanax made me mildly sleepy but otherwise provided no ameliorative boon, and surreptitiously I called my brother—a psychiatrist—to discuss the remedy my doctor had meted out, this call made with the bathroom door locked and the door to the shower stall closed, me inside.

My brother asked diagnostic questions, cautioned me regarding the addictive quality of the entire class of benzodiazepines, applauded as appropriate and widely standard my doctor’s choice, and dosage, of Xanax, then reminded me that a stock explanation for certain kinds of creative output—for example, the writing of stories and novels—was a latent mental illness. In fact, the writing
is
the illness, the illness expressed as words instead of illness, with the punishing symptoms waiting for the stories and novels to finally wane over an inner horizon and descend out of the way. Something like that; I didn’t
quite follow. In my agitation I couldn’t comprehend. I probably misrepresent my brother, but I don’t misrepresent my confusion about things, there in the shower stall.

Hemingway, London, Woolf, Borowski, Shelley, Plath, et cetera—writers go mad (and kill themselves). The relationship (“inspired madness”) is widely embraced, a reading discussion group or classroom commonplace, sometimes conceived as a riddle or code—a poem deciphered as a portrait of madness—this is what some students take away from lit courses and biographies of Anne Sexton. On the other hand, there’s also science in corroboration of this, with numerous studies establishing a link between creativity and serious depression. One says that artists are eight to ten times more likely than others to suffer from a major depressive disorder; a second stops at seven; a third, undertaken at Brown University, that 50 percent of those in the creative arts get depressed.

But I find I doubt all of this, or at least deeply quibble with this use of “major.” Can it really be that half of all writers meet in this particular grim library? A place that is not just the blues exponentially but something altogether different? (The word “depression,” Styron wrote, prevents, “by its very insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control.” If he’s right, then adding the word “serious” to it merely makes things graver in the wrong realm.) I imagine these studies conducted by people who don’t know the questions to ask, and therefore—missing the point completely—extrapolate from their own brand of melancholy. Otherwise, every other literary memoir, from among those credible and discernibly forthcoming, must fill me with empathetic horror. They don’t.

*       *       *

I began to spend my time doing nothing, but the nothing can’t be described as boring; it was instead a white space relentless, of silent grappling and ordeal. As static and listless as depression might look, it is inwardly and essentially a dramatic condition, like being battered aloft on a storm or cast into an abyss. The sensation of being unmoored, I can attest, isn’t lacking in interest, but taking everything into account I would prefer the most stupefying normalcy.