Descent (3 page)

My depressed routine had no starting place or morning and I seemed to exist in an endless nowhere like a character from
Waiting for Godot
. Strangely at first, but then with a cold logic, everything but me faded far into the background. A bulwark of dense and watery glass, of shifting convexities and veering concavities, stood between me and the world. People were distant, as if among the living while I’d joined the dead; whatever they said, or did, was at a remove. From my post in bed—a slug, shriveled—I now and again registered my wife in the room, pulling back a curtain or opening a closet, but feeling regarding her presence was dulled, about which I felt only vaguely guilty, awash as I was in self-obsession. Appalled, she treated me as the invalid I was, and persevered.

On I went. In daylight anthrax traveled through the mail and the magazines wondered which death-dealing pathogen was most easily introduced into drinking water; at night I lay shivering in bed beside my wife—cold no matter how warm the night and curled tight with my head beneath a pillow—in a state of pathological torment. The content of my thought, while various, was predictable: I moved from insoluble existential dilemmas—death, evil, suffering, God—to intensely detailed scenarios for action such as moving to New Zealand, burying cash, doubling my capacity for propane storage, and devising alchemies to make pond water potable. Night was by some minuscule degree preferable to day, since in the dark hours I was released from the necessity to sustain my facade of only slightly more than normal 9/11 consternation. Xanax made me feel like I’d taken a roundhouse punch, but didn’t provide a technical knockout, so I alternated in bed between drugged misery and bouts of lucid, tremulous anxiety. At night the brevity of life was tangible; so was the eventual suffering of dying. I lay there mentally experiencing my annihilation and felt crushingly aware that, in cosmic terms, this event was just around the corner. Eternity seemed long, the crypt terrifying, getting there even worse. I was also convinced that the whole business was a riddle and that with sufficiently sustained and terrified cerebration, and with an extraordinary quantity of inner strife, I could, with life’s wretchedness, make peace. Yet I knew simultaneously that this wasn’t so, even as my mind, of its own accord, continued the violent exercise.

Finally, in a panic, I dragged myself to a bookstore, where I found myself conspicuously vulnerable to the spirituality section, particularly to the shelves merging right with philosophy, left with psychology and alternative medicine, and down with mysticism and the Gnostic occult—I stood in front of them in the recognition that depression is a consumer mode, too (thoughts in this vein, so prelapsarian, embracing the world outside my spell, were like Morse code messages from my old self). I also discovered here the Brown study’s mad half, because in every other book these scribblers acknowledged the hell that had forced me to them. Here were my comrades, redeemed or rehabilitated, from suffering ascended to the heights of clear vision and quality hardback publication, and since I’d lost all power of literary discernment, I perused a lot of them with greedy intensity, mustering none of my former cynicism for the inward journey and mind work.

I also took aim at some legitimate heavies, spending myself against William James (whose depression was famously the bona fide version), Kierkegaard (ditto), Marcus Aurelius, Saint Augustine, and Jung. But reading while depressed is not really reading, and I cycled as I turned these hallowed pages between hope for an epiphanic enlightenment and dread that there was nothing to be taken from them beyond confirmation of my current metaphysic. And confirmed I was. Aurelius’s stoicism seemed thinly transparent, Augustine’s redemption was a self-imposed ruse, Jung’s mysticism was a house of cards—in short, the deep thinkers were right to be unconsoled, the bitterness of pessimists was the only true vision, the highest truth was dark. Tolstoy, nearing fifty, reached an impasse I recognized:

I questioned painfully and protractedly, and with no idle curiosity.… I sought like a man who is lost and seeks to save himself—and I found nothing. I became convinced, moreover, that all those who before me had sought for an answer in the sciences have also found nothing. And not only this, but that they have recognized that the very thing that was leading me to despair—the meaningless absurdity of life—is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man.

But my biggest mistake, by far, was Ernest Becker, whose
The Denial of Death
should only be read by those well-dosed with Wellbutrin or otherwise immune from the psychic torture in its pages. Becker’s scholarly and exhaustive contention is that the depressed penetrate to a rational mortal fear, while the rest of us—my undepressed self included—devise elaborate and neurotic identities to drown out death’s deafening scream. Heroism in particular is undressed in this fashion—we each construct our myth as a shield, our ego as an atmosphere, argues Becker, lest mortality descend entirely on us, and not just in our spare bad moments, to drive us away from sanity.

Could I ever go back to my pre-Becker days? I’d read him twenty-five years before and passed the interim immoderately happy, but these were facts I dispensed with conveniently; depressed, I read Becker and emerged deeply panicked and possessed of a truth best framed as a question: Why isn’t
everyone
depressed?

Spurred to it by madness, I’d eaten from the tree of knowledge, and now there was no return from exile.

*       *       *

It was a relief to me daily when my family left the house. This is an especially bleak state of affairs—preferring to endure one’s suffering in solitude, and finding the presence of those one loves unbearably difficult and demanding. It’s a loneliness not exactly volitional, but neither is it unwelcomed or contested; on the contrary, the depressed person feels in utter aloneness a strange and appropriate consolation. My preference was to squeeze my head beneath my pillow; despite this, and in the name of my children, I struggled against my inclination to disappear completely. Mounting what felt like a colossal effort, and marshaling some shadow of my former energies, I made a dutiful appearance each morning to feed the dogs and light the fire, take a nodding interest in everyone’s itinerary, and generally enact the unremarkable persona of a man about his a.m. affairs. Granted, I was mostly unshaven, ill-dressed, and poorly kept, but none of that was unexpected of me—a buzzer going off, a red flag or clue—and for my children, I hoped, it was just their father. I think that for the most part I distracted or fooled them—post 9/11 it was reasonable to be glum, and so I had that contextual advantage—but doing so was such a strenuous farce that when all had left in pursuit of their business I fell, each
day, into bed again. In contrast to my road insomnia, I now slept long with drugged conviction, as this was the only means at hand to negate an otherwise grueling insanity that in waking life was unremitting. I had only one thing to look forward to, and that was the forgetfulness of sleep.

I took as second best hiding in bed with the sheets drawn across my head and the door to the bedroom shut. If that sounds pathetic, it was.

My wife sought to coerce me outward and I complied like a helpless and obedient child—and with no objectivity for what might be redemptive—but these forays abroad were uniformly disastrous. Out and about in the world at large, tagging along behind the grocery cart, I saw fellow shoppers from my watery distance while acutely aware of their Beckerian defenses and the transparency of all their enjoyments. Why would anyone pick out a cheese with any interest in the matter? In the grandstands at a high school football field, on a Friday night bitten with autumn chill, I could hardly care which team was which; my awareness stayed fixated on the fans around me and their meaningless enthusiasm for the contest. This was what stood between them and death—third down, three yards to go—and the thought of that seemed so tragic as to inspire in me retreat. In fact, the mere existence of human beings was enough to induce morbidity in me, so it was preferable not to see them at all.

There was also the matter of canceling engagements, a duty that left me guilt-ridden. I had to tell the Key West Literary Seminar that I wouldn’t be coming to participate in panels on the subject of American literary landscapes. The show was going on, according to an organizer: the airports were empty and therefore convenient, and not a single registrant or invited writer had canceled citing recent events. (Again I’m put in mind of the Brown study. Here was a seminar presenting twenty or more writers: Shouldn’t at least half be going off the deep end?) I imagined attendees in wall-to-wall sun, accoutred in things floral and swilling margaritas, sipping champagne at the Audubon House, trading witticisms on deep verandas or skiffing the flats after permit and tarpon—sociable meals of stone crab and beer—while out here I cowered under my blankets, counting the drawers in the bedroom wall at three in the afternoon.

The morning came when I was conscious of the fact that I had a Remington in close proximity that might put a cap on this nightmare. (My most recent novel,
East of the Mountains
, was about a man who had decided that faced with mortality there was no better choice other than his shotgun.) The notion was abstract but not transitory in my thoughts, impossible but also revelatory, and when I heard from afar this siren call of suicide—a song I wouldn’t admit to my wife—I felt a cold and potent upwelling, a seafloor current, of terror. This is the depressive’s surpassing, final logic—that there is nothing to live for, that life is unendurable, and that death is preferable. After all, everything that once brought happiness, everybody you’ve ever loved, now just occasions
pathos. I saw my children and imagined their deaths; my desk I pictured rotting in a corner in some decade hence; my work shredded or lost in a gloomy archive; my wife reduced by time to bones and then to dust and nothingness; everyone I know turned nameless and forgotten; the Earth combusted; the universe cold; my aged self dying tempestuously for days; then death as a long stint of nothing. It makes sense to me now, in the face of all this, to eat a peach and savor it, but depressed it made sense to skip the peach and go straight to annihilation.

The scraping of the grim reaper’s scythe at such hot-breathed and intimate quarters had a momentary clarifying effect: I saw the need for intervention and engaged the services of a mental health counselor who advertised himself as specializing in depression. On the phone I was aware of my verbal impotence, of my inability to depict for him how I’d reached the end of my fraying rope; otherwise this counselor, “Todd,” would have dropped every duty immediately, I was sure, in favor of contending with my pressingly mortal case. Didn’t he hear, in my ranting, febrile voice, that I couldn’t endure the 120 hours he needed for other matters? No. I tried insistently to parse for him the lived, felt quality of “unendurable,” rendering it always with fresh inflection and with deeper shades of desperation, but he remained professionally impervious to this, a man who has talked to many sick people, who is always talking to many sick people, who isn’t surprised by this sort of call that is simply part of the fabric of his work life—we made an appointment for Friday morning.

In the meantime I stayed as etherized as possible. The hysteria emitting from CNN was a cacophonous chorus of ad-laced doom—anthrax, dirty bombs, smallpox, light aircraft—a panoply of biblical plagues. I absorbed a documentary on suicide bombers that convinced me these people would blow up our Thriftway—they were young and full of religious fervor, and their mothers passionately approved of them—and so, with shame, I let my wife get the groceries solo. There was a second documentary on nerve gas that pressed me not to breathe anymore, lest the atmosphere contain, invisibly, the seeds of a painful death. Mail was dangerous, even advertising flyers; worse were packages and boxes. The television, the mail, the newspaper, the radio—none could be trusted, nor air, nor water; our food might be shot through with E. coli or botulism; the propane company might quit delivering; we were all going to die of winter cold, or starve to death, or succumb to a virus introduced by terrorists; we were all on the cusp of apocalypse. The planet was a maelstrom, or a mirror casting back a portrait of my chaos; it was about to implode in a violent cataclysm that would end the human era.

But I was harbored by my sheets as long as I gathered them around me with last-gasp conviction. I did nothing but I did it with enormous tension and with my mind chattering away frenetically, as if to stave off, with a wall of thought, an imminent final calamity. In a Xanax haze, I counted shiplap or nurtured my embryonic hypochondria. Weight loss and torpor seemed to me now the early symptoms of an inexorable unraveling; maybe the brittle feel of my hair and the psoriatic scaling at my knees were harbingers of a mortally weakened lymph system. Maybe my shallow breathing meant something; maybe the colon cancer that had killed my grandmother at about my age was announcing itself right now as madness before proceeding to ravage
the rest of me. It seemed that way, and I sensed the tumor metastasizing below my rib cage. Shuffling about geriatrically in slippers during brief expeditions away from my bed, I felt exhausted and terrified. I sagged. My pant waists grew loose. My voice, always a reedy instrument, relatively diaphanous in hue, grew wisp-like, timid, and aspirate. And all libidinous impulse died in me; nothing in my soul or hypothalamus spurred me on toward procreation: I was anathema to life.

My Friday morning was disappointing. Todd was reminiscent of my self-help books—worthy thoughts presented with compassion (I had “let the world in,” and that was good), but where was the miracle of therapy? Why didn’t I feel soaringly better? The couch, the pillows, the blankets, the artwork, the retreat alcove and the water view, the freshly made tea and the heat turned high, my shoelessness and banshee demeanor, me describing the immolation of happiness, Todd asking, “What’s right about that?” before teaching me to sit cross-legged and meditate. We hugged at the end of my allotted fifty minutes and I wrestled my shoes back on, unlaced. Outside were trucks at a construction site. I felt sure one was loaded with anthrax.