My brother’s pain dispelled all those illusions in a moment. In him, I saw myself, and I realized I was wrong. It was all wrong. My childhood had been miserable. My upbringing had been twisted and hostile. My view of myself was delusional. My view of reality was completely unreal. This wasn’t life. This wasn’t ordinary life at all. Something was wrong inside me. Something was terribly wrong.
I recovered the screwdriver. I slowly climbed out from under the desk. I tossed the tool down on the desktop, my hand still shaking. I looked at my wife.
“It’s not just my brother,” I said. “It’s me too. I need help.”
CHAPTER 11
FIVE EPIPHANIES
I have lived two lives. That was the ending of the first: that screwdriver falling. Within days, I had made an appointment with a psychiatrist in Manhattan. What followed was a miracle of recovery, a swift, dramatic, and absolute transformation from one way of being to another. I sometimes like to joke that I’ve seen many men go mad, but I’m the only person I’ve ever met who has gone sane. It’s not really a joke, though. Sigmund Freud is often quoted describing the psycho-therapeutic process as a journey from “hysterical misery to ordinary unhappiness.” My journey was different: it was a passage from suicidal despair to a fullness of vitality and joy I had not even thought to imagine.
While now I look back on this period and see Christ within it everywhere, at the time, on the surface, he was apparent only in hints and whispers. This was—or seemed—an entirely secular conversion. But it was this conversion that made my ultimate conversion to Christianity possible, and maybe inevitable, because it freed me to trust my own perceptions and reasoning. As long as I was in mental disarray, as long as my actions were self-destructive, as long as my outlook was deluded, any faith I thought to have, any idea of God I formed, seemed to me by definition unreliable, the comforting illusion of a mind in pain. As long as religion might even appear to serve me as an emotional crutch, I dismissed it as a form of weakness. It was only when I felt certain that my inner life was healthy and my understanding was sound that I could begin to accept what experience and logic had been leading me to believe. For others, I know it was Christ who led them to joy. For me, it was joy that led me to Christ.
These crossroad years, these five years of therapy, were emotionally dramatic. They were full of sudden and consequential insights, unexpected thunderclaps of comprehension that permanently changed the way I thought and lived. There were so many of them, I’m almost afraid to set them down here all together. I’m afraid I’ll come across as even loopier than I was, some sort of flighty mystic leaping from inspiration to inspiration like a celestial ballet dancer leaping from cloud to cloud. It wasn’t like that, though. I was just a writer making his way, a little slowed by personal damage, a little late to the game. But a writer, to find his voice, must first find himself. I found myself in an electric season of growth and transition, and the discovery was marked by this rapid series of revelations.
I’m going to make a catalogue of those epiphanies here, because they were not only the souvenirs of my journey to sanity, they were the prized relics I carried with me into a better time. I referred back to them continually in the years that followed. I studied them carefully. They became the basis for the way I thought and for the things I thought. Ultimately, I came to believe they were not so much a series of revelations as fragments of a single revelation, spread out along the five-year path. In effect, I would spend the next decade learning to put those fragments together in their proper arrangement. Only then did I see the meaning of the greater epiphany complete.
A year or two after I entered therapy, I found myself sitting alone at my desk in the late hours of a spring night. I was trying to decide whether or not to end my life. It was the last time I would ever think of killing myself, but it was the worst time; the darkest. I had never considered the idea quite so seriously before.
My wife and I had moved back to Manhattan. We had a baby daughter, Faith. I had a low-level job at a movie studio: not much money, but a steady paycheck with benefits and a flexible schedule that left me plenty of time to write. Ellen and I were both taking freelance work, too, so we were getting by. We had a pleasant one-bedroom apartment in midtown. The neighborhood was good and the rent was low. But it was a small place for a family of three. We had to wall off a dining alcove as a nursery. And our bedroom had to serve double duty as my office, which frequently discommoded my ever-patient and supportive wife.
I was locked away in the office-bedroom that miserable midnight. I was sitting at the same desk I’d been building when I dropped the screwdriver a year and a half before. I had gone in there to work, as I usually did in the evenings, but my work was over now. The baby was in her crib and Ellen was asleep on the living room sofa. I had poured myself a drink—I kept a bottle in the desk drawer like the private eyes did in my favorite novels. I had turned off every light except a desk lamp. I had the radio on, tuned to a baseball game, the volume low. I was just sitting there in the dark, staring into the shadows, smoking cigarette after cigarette, taking an occasional sip of scotch.
I felt a brutal weight of sorrow in me—sorrow and self-pity, a toxic blend. I was a burden to my family, I thought. I thought: My wife and daughter would be better off without me. I don’t know now how serious I was. Serious enough. I was reviewing the various methods by which I might end it all. Walking off the roof of the building seemed the easiest way. I was pretty sure I had the courage for it. I was even beginning to make plans for when I might do it.
One sentence kept repeating itself in my mind, one refrain: I don’t know how to live. I don’t know how to live . . .
Most suicidal people don’t do the deed when their mood is lowest. They’re too depressed. They don’t have the energy to act so decisively. It’s when they start to feel better—that’s when the real danger arises. And I had been feeling better this last year or so, much better off and on. But the therapy that was helping me was painful too. I could only afford to see my psychiatrist once a week, but the process was on my mind every day, every hour, and the obsessive self-exploration was exposing parts of my past and my psyche I would have much rather left hidden away. Plus I still had no real idea of how to get along in the world, how to achieve the things I wanted, the career I wanted, the good life I wanted for my wife and child. I could not find a way to use my particular talents as a writer to convey the vision I wanted to convey. My writing career, such as it had ever been, had ground to a complete halt. I hadn’t had a serious publication in almost five years.
Then, earlier that day, there’d been a bitter little incident; just a small thing, but cruelly calibrated to unbalance me. I was walking across town, downhearted, lost in my own melancholy reverie, when I glanced up and spotted the famous editor who had published my first novel. He was on the same sidewalk as I was, coming right toward me. Jarred out of my meditations, I wasn’t quick enough to realize that he had already seen me and was trying to walk past with his eyes averted, trying to avoid a meeting. Reflexively, I called out hello. He stopped, but only for a second. He was brusque and dismissive, even disdainful. Stone-faced, he said a word or two, then quickly walked on. Like every other editor on the planet, he wanted nothing to do with me. It was a little thing, as I say. But I was already fragile with depression and it broke my heart.
So I came home at the end of the day. I dutifully finished my work. I sat there at my desk with my cigarettes and my scotch, my ballgame and my shadows and my sorrow. I sank into the depths of my anguish and I despaired.
What I didn’t know, what I couldn’t see, was that it was almost over: this difficult time; I was almost through it. I was already past the most painful phase of my therapy. I would soon experience a series of remarkable breakthroughs. My depression would lift for good, and the past would begin to lose its insidious grip on me. At that black, black moment, I was inches away, just inches away, from finding a light of true peace and gladness within myself.
Within weeks, the first hint of a change in my professional fortunes would make its way to me too. I would win a small poetry prize—a hundred dollars and publication—for a long poem I had distilled, ironically enough, from the transfiguration scene in my disastrous Jesus novel. Again, not a big deal, but a legitimate sign that I was finally starting to find my voice, finally starting to figure out how to say what I wanted to say in a way people could understand. Very soon after that, I would read a novel that would complete that process, changing the trajectory of my work and restoring me to my original purposes. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins is a Victorian thriller so brilliant that some scholars suspect it was heavily rewritten by Collins’s good friend and publisher Charles Dickens. Two-thirds of the way through reading the book, I would literally sit up in bed with the shock of understanding. I would suddenly see, like looking through a clock to the clockwork, the mechanics of how the thrilling stories I loved to write could convey whatever vision of the world I had. The moment would mark the beginning of my career; it would be the making of it.
It was all right there, a good life, a joyful life, the life I hungered for, so close to me, a footstep in time, as I sat there at my desk and considered suicide, thinking the same words over and over again: I don’t know how to live.
The baseball game on the radio was a Mets game. I’d been a Yankees fan all my life, but the Yanks were in the doldrums this year and the Mets had assembled an exciting roster of players. I’d become fascinated by them. I identified with them, especially with the two veterans who led the team. They were a mismatched pair. Their contrary personalities seemed to represent something of importance to me. One, Keith Hernandez, the first baseman, was a dark, brooding, cigarette-smoking man-on-the-town type, a student of Civil War history, and a Gold Glove student of the game. Away from the stadium, he was involved in a divorce and a drug scandal. But I loved the thinking man’s way he had reinvented the defensive work of the infield. When I began to experiment with my first crime novels after reading The Woman in White, I would use the name Keith as part of my pseudonym.
The other player, the catcher Gary Carter, was Hernandez’s opposite, a sunny, upbeat, gung-ho future Hall-of-Famer who never stopped grinning and liked to refer to himself as “the Kid.” Carter was a clean-living Christian, and a loud-mouth about it. During postgame interviews, he would frequently thank the Lord Jesus for a victory or a home run. He once said that he could see the interviewer’s smile curdle whenever he did it. I could see it, too, and, in all honesty, I always sympathized with the interviewer. I considered Carter’s exuberant faith a character flaw. It embarrassed me. To paraphrase the cynical hero of one of my own novels: Whenever I heard someone say Jesus as if he really meant it, it made my skin crawl, as if they’d said squid or intestine instead. The rest of the Mets, a talented assembly of scoundrels and troublemakers, openly hated the Kid for his relentlessly clean-cut cheer. But I liked the guy. His all-out play inspired me.
Now, as I sat at my desk in a cloud of smoke and self-pitying sadness, the announcer on the radio described Carter stepping up to bat. It was a crucial moment in a close game. There were men on base in scoring position. Carter smacked a grounder to the outfield. A notoriously slow runner because of his bad knees, he took off down the line as fast as he could. Somehow he managed to beat the throw to first. The single scored the winning runs. It was an exciting moment, but I was barely listening. I hardly cared. I just went on thinking: I don’t know how to live. I don’t know how to live.
When the game was over, the on-field reporter corralled Carter for a postvictory interview. The reporter asked how the catcher was able to run so fast when his knees were so badly damaged from years of squatting behind home plate. If, in that moment, Carter had done his Jesus routine, if he had praised Christ or sung hallelujah, I don’t think his comments would have reached me at all. I think I would have grimaced and shuddered at his happy-talk piety. Then I would have shrugged it off and gone on toying with the notion of self-murder.
But tonight, for some reason—for some reason—Carter decided to leave the religious stuff out of it. Instead, he answered very simply. He said, “Sometimes you just have to play in pain.”
The words jarred me instantly out of my depressive reverie. I remember blinking in the shadows as if waking up. I remember slowly turning my gaze from the empty darkness to the radio. I remember repeating the sentence silently to myself. It seemed to me for all the world as if Carter had heard my thoughts as I sat there. It seemed to me he had heard me thinking, I don’t know how to live, and had responded over the airwaves with the only honest answer there is.
Sometimes you just have to play in pain.
I nodded in the darkness, my eyes growing damp. I thought: Yes. That’s right. That’s it exactly. And I can do that too. I can play in pain. If I have to. I know I can. That’s something I actually know how to do.
I put out my cigarette. I got out of my chair. I turned off the radio. I left the bedroom. I never considered suicide again.
From the very first day I started it, therapy had changed the rules of life for me. Up until then, I considered some of my most self-destructive and disturbing habits of mind to be inborn aspects of my nature. If I was unhappy, I thought it was just the way things were, the world being what it was, and me being who I was. Like a lot of artists, too, I assumed my suffering and whatever talent I had were inseparable. I was afraid that if I lost one, I would also sacrifice the other.
But as soon as my therapy began, I realized, no, none of this was true. My misery was not me and it was not the world and it was not connected to my talent, such as it was. It was just a wound I had sustained in the course of living, a wound that could be healed. It was a broken piece of the psychic machinery, and it could be fixed.
I’ve often wondered what that initial meeting was like for the psychiatrist because for me now it seems poignantly comical. Frantic with hypochondria, pale with depression, edgy with anger, I all but stumbled into his office that day. It was a cramped, windowless room on the ground floor of an ornate apartment building on Manhattan’s west side. I dropped into the armchair and he sat in a high-backed swivel chair a few feet away from me. There was a Freudian couch against the wall to my right, a desk to my left, and hardly any space for anything else.
The psychiatrist was a slumped, sad-eyed Jewish man about ten or fifteen years older than me. He had a thin, quiet voice and spoke deliberately as if to make sure every word he chose was just the right one. He had a dry sense of humor, too, and I could tell right away he was smart, which mattered to me very much at the time. How could I expect a mere mortal to heal me if he couldn’t comprehend my towering genius?
He asked how he could help me. In answer, I began talking and talking and talking some more. Over the next forty-five minutes or so, I believe I told him every single untoward, sad, and twisted thing I knew about myself. Bizarre sexual fantasies, homicidal hostilities, deviant desires, and antisocial behaviors, all of it. I had been thinking it over for years, you see. Probing my troubles, investigating their psychic causes. I knew the theories of Freud well, and I knew myself pretty well. Now everything I knew and thought I knew came pouring out of me in a torrent of words. I told all my darkest secrets in that first session with so much brio and abandon that the psychiatrist finally shifted in his seat and shook his head in puzzlement and said in his deliberate way, “Why are you telling me this?”
To which I replied, startled, “I thought you might need to know!”
When the fifty-minute hour ended, I left the little room. I left the ornate apartment building. Made my way back to work on the east side. I walked across Central Park. It was clean and green in the early autumn sunlight. I felt relieved to have that first session over with. I even felt slightly hopeful about the future. Other than that, though, I felt no different than I had before. I had told this doctor things on first meeting him—many things—that I had never told anyone ever. You would have thought making such a complete c
onfession would have had some profound emotional effect on me. It didn’t seem to. The world and I seemed about the same as ever. I shrugged to myself and continued on my way.
The next day at home—we still lived in the Westchester cottage then—I had to make a phone call to arrange an appointment. The phone was on a shelf off the narrow stairway that connected the ground-floor kitchen with the living room on the second floor. I sat on the stairs as I made my call. I remember I got into some minor squabble with a nasty receptionist and ended up slamming the handset down into its cradle with frustration.
Then, without any warning, I buried my face in my hands and began to weep.
I had not cried for years and years and I had not sobbed like this since childhood. My chest throbbed painfully with the force of the convulsions. My whole body shook and it went on and on. I understood. It was a delayed reaction to my first therapy session. I had shoveled three decades of muck out of my consciousness. Now my body was washing the vessel clean. I relaxed and let the process run its course.
The effect of the catharsis was remarkable. When it was over, it seemed as if every symptom of mental sickness had vanished from me for good and all. The anger, the depression, the hypochondria—as if by magic, they were all gone. For days and days afterward, I felt a radiance of light and life rising inside me, a kind of inner dawn. I felt at once still and hilarious, and I knew this was my True and Original Self reborn. My interior cosmos wheeled in harmony with the stars, and the little birds of happiness sang tweet, tweet, tweet . . . and yes, all right, I knew it was temporary. I didn’t think I’d been cured of my lifelong mental affliction in one fifty-minute session. I knew all the old agonies would soon come clamoring back to their home in my brain.
Still, while it lasted, it was a glorious sensation. More than that. I believed that these few days of high peace gave me a momentary glimpse of something true. This, I thought, was who I really was, not that other miserable man I had been living with all these years. This inner harmony was the goal toward which I would be working in my therapy. And it was real. It existed. I was experiencing it right now, like a vision of things to come. There was a long trek of self-understanding ahead of me, I knew. But for those few days, I was allowed to visit the promised land on the other side.