Descent: A Memoir of Madness

  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.

  * * *

  Drowning naturally elicits hysteria and while going under I thrashed occasionally, hauling myself again toward the surface by, for example, refusing to tear up tickets I’d been given to a Major League Baseball game.

  There is a general agreement among sport cognoscenti that baseball is poetic and cerebral, our only sport sufficiently myth-laden as to deserve a Ken Burns documentary. I suppose so, but in spite of that I remain, to this day, unimpressed by the glacial pace of baseball’s narrative, which David Halberstam, Roger Angell, Roger Kahn, and George F. Will are free to take as the confession of a cretin immune to the tension and nuance of the holy sport. Okay, I don’t get it, but about twice a year I go anyway in order to talk diffusely to the friend or relative seated next to me and to phase in and out of awareness of the contest. The static spectacle on the field, for me, is mere backdrop to conversation. The players in their bizarre, vestigial outfits seem, to my eye—and no matter how close at hand they might be—active at some impenetrable remove, but mostly as inert as chess pieces.

  I say all of this so as to report, in context, on my fear and paralysis that evening. I held up my end of a cheerless dialogue but spent most of my time in a preoccupied effort at aerial reconnaissance, certain that one of the planes overhead, of which there suddenly seemed to be dozens, would dive and crash into the stadium. Worse was the angry patriotism of the crowd, and worse than that was its attentiveness to the game, the indications of happiness around me, the witless sham of “normalcy” or at least the struggle toward some as yet unknowable new American “normalcy.” (But even the old “normalcy” seemed retrospectively depressing, since it didn’t preclude, despite the hubris and optimism of Americans, our participation in the human tragedy.) I scanned the many thousand faces for signs of something like my own imposture but found no inkling and no fellow travelers. What made them immune? Why cheering instead of Xanax? Why were they eating salted peanuts and purchasing pennants and bobblehead dolls? These fans were vacuous and even savage, or such was my depressed, Darwinian hypothesis, in riotous full flower by the third inning. There was also smoke in the stands by the left field foul line, which in the end turned out to be steam from a concession instead of evidence of terrorism. I was tormented by the need to crawl off to bed and by the impossibility of doing so, my torment mercilessly extended by baseball’s slothful process. And once home, I couldn’t say who’d won, or for that matter, name the enemy.

  I next abided an interlude of fishing, directly on the heels of my baseball crucible: one sporting pastime on top of another, diversions traditionally of a male cast, both aimed forlornly at mortality. I’d committed some months prior to this fishing venture, again in the name of sociable discourse, since fishing is for me a bit tediously like baseball—overrated, unfulfilling, and celebrated by its own crowd of priests who elucidate mysteries I don’t discern. I like walking to the river and talking about it, and I like standing by the river and looking at it, but I prefer these activities unburdened by gear, trim, tackle, lore, and especially by the requirement of angling. Nevertheless, it seemed possible to me that while tossing a line out I might find solace, Nevertheless, it seemed possible to me that while tossing a line out I might find solace. Catching fish might make me queasy—hooks, blood, animal flailing—but I still stood to make some psychic gains by wading in redemptive waters.

  But there were no psychic gains. There was only the scourge of being in the world: dry smell of cottonwoods, foam-stained cobbles, the badinage of my younger fishing partners, their enthusiasm and angler’s syntax, the depressing lucidity of river water, the depressing cooler of lager and sandwiches, the gravel bar near which our drift boat lay anchored where I sat in shameless sunlit catatonia before napping morosely across the boat’s beam. My fellow fishers looked heartily mystified; on the other hand, it wasn’t unusual for a “sportsman” of my vintage to inappropriately siesta. I let them believe I was simply tired: an accurate if incomplete brief of my condition. Why ruin things for them with a forthcoming account? I held close my alienation from even this, the date with nature as therapeutic retreat, which only saddened me by contrast with
my past, and because I’d exhausted yet another hope. This world, it seemed, allowed no succor.

  * * *

  The analysis of one’s work from the perspective of psychology isn’t often a fruitful exercise. Most writers recognize the reductive dimension—not to mention the reductio ad absurdum—in criticism that moves from the life to the work, since the life is unknowable, cavernously so, not only to others, but to the writer.

  This granted, it still might signal something that in East of the Mountains, a man chooses bird hunting as his consummate rite, though it seems to him “inadequate, somehow, and misdirected, at odds with the life he had lived.” Terminally ill, he desires, first, the sensual earth, second, the stave of his stoicism, third, what remains of his moral self, and fourth, the consolation of memory. He desires present cogent action, meaningful conduct, and purpose where there is none. He desires that his life might be a story and wills it toward one with compulsive force, shapes it stubbornly toward an epic. Is that romantic or merely depressing? Mightn’t he do better to avert his face and divert his attention toward the pleasant quotidian wherever he can find it? And is the hunting of birds (like fishing and baseball) finally only this sort of hobby? It is, of course, but with the added dimension of profoundly bad karma—since hunting permits no catch-and-release—of a most elemental nature.

  Rousing a last surge of desperate resistance but with no means other than what I knew, I turned to hunting birds—a “sport” I’ve since forsaken. I pondered the moon over Lake Roosevelt and wandered through a farmhouse abandoned in the fifties whose inhabitants had insulated it with pages from the local newspaper. They were gone but their brittle Sears catalog remained, along with broken glass and bird shit. I was also chastened by killing a quail in the bramble beside a cow pasture. Shot at far too close a range, it was soft in hand and stank accusingly of avian intestinal biology. My enervated walking produced few bird sightings but plenty of interludes of Keatsian brooding on the sadness dripping from the trees. The high point of my expedition, though, was rising with intent at my friend’s house in farm country and improving the plumbing in his basement. He’d complained of poor pressure and lukewarm water, and since I had no bedroom drawers to count, I fixated on hydraulics while in the field of sport, walking, armed, behind dogs. I took it as a good sign to be interested in plumbing, but on the road home, on the plateau east of Vantage, a general from the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared via radio that bombs were falling on Afghanistan “as we speak,” and my plumbing restorative announced itself as temporary. Killing as pastoral hadn’t helped me either. As Todd had asked: What’s right about that? I would not be rehabbed by pastimes.

  * * *

  Tuesdays with Todd. His broad-faced earnestness was neither grating nor therapeutic, neither condescending nor worth the check I wrote. The theme was “letting sadness through the door”; the barely concealed subtext was social action as anodyne. My redemption would come through contribution; there was no path other than submitting a think piece to Slate or The New York Times. I was coddled toward “journaling”—Facing Apocalypse in 250 words or less, My Own Private Armageddon in either haiku or iambic pentameter, my choice. “Pen died,” I told Todd, but he persisted in prescribing resurrection through fresh ink, demonstrated the position of the hips in zazen, and hugged with more muscular fervor. He also loaned me a book by a Buddhist nun who had changed her pedestrian American name to something Tibetan, swaddled herself in saffron robes, shaved her hair down to nubs—all in the backwash of a galling divorce—and learned to let sadness through the door. Her pages left me more deeply bereft as they were blighted at every comma by bitterness (but of course I was reading with dark glasses on) and implied I shouldn’t yearn for happiness. There was no point, she seemed to say, to not being miserable. At a loss, I graduated from Xanax to Klonopin—both designed to contain anxiety, so often the dark anteroom to depression’s inner chamber—which put my adrenalized nervous system under more consistent chemical assault. At first I indulged, but then with a nudge from Google my hypochondria embraced drug addiction and I discovered the perverse masochism in viewing all pharmaceutical palliatives as death warrants. A new form of dire struggle—shivering in bed and fending off the urge to take another hit of Klonopin. Once dosed I was at ninety fathoms, but not panicked about the water between me and the surface—still sunk but only struggling feebly, swallowing water but dulled to the reflex against drowning. If anxiety is ultimately a Darwinian advantage, a plus, a goad, a reason for flight—a product of the gene for protective imagining or a superior ability to anticipate Grendel—then Klonopin is counterevolutionary.

  I now widened the circle of confidantes to whom I divulged my condition. In return I was regaled with possible antidotes and proven salutary measures. Physical culture was robustly hailed, as were Jungian dream analysis, Prozac, and snapping out of it. I was urged to read the Kabbalah, like Madonna; to contemplate the value of prayer and scripture; to run three miles before eating in the morning; to perform volunteer tasks with a charitable mien; to defeat my apprehensions regarding Scientology; to judiciously smoke marijuana. I was made to understand by Manhattanites, on the phone, that things were very much worse in Gotham, whose citizens had a right to proprietary angst, present, as they were, at the epicenter, Ground Zero. For them the answer was to move to my house: How could I be going crazy?

  There were also sober disquisitions with siblings on the tenor and psychodrama of our shared childhood. Didn’t I see the serpentine thread that led from those days to depression? The fecund seeds planted in the era of our innocence? Had I missed the obvious ominous bellwethers and signatures of unresolved damage? Had I lived insensate to the pull of the past, willfully ignored its exigencies? Why were we variously counseled and dosed, expensively analyzed, morose? It was because of our parents, the conversation went, hastily married, enraged, regretful; it was because in the storm of their domestic strife we’d been caromed about like bowling pins. Now we siblings had achieved, in adulthood, not only distance but an understandable pain that must finally shudder in the light of day, as it did, in my case, agonizingly. My carefully constructed adult neutrality, the arctic pall I’d cast over our past—it had to melt, eventually, to reveal my many lacerations.

  There is such a thing as filial indulgence and a manner of discourse possible among siblings that’s possible nowhere else. In other words, our dialogue was fraught with complication to the point of a compelling Freudian mootness. My father’s long workday or home repair haplessness, my mother’s many shoes or relentless suntanning—did they indeed explain the grief and gloom punishing the next generation? When in point of fact the next generation had been granted extra decades of childhood as part of its packet of party favors? How fortunate we were, as white middle-class Americans. In any other era (Kafka, for example, was dead at forty) we would probably have expired before jointly observing that the world looked egregiously like ourselves.

  * * *

  Mid-October, a pastoral of leaves, a Robert Frostian chill in the air—time moldering into further desolation—when nothing gold can stay. Leaves, baked squash, the pumpkin patch, the smell of dogs, the smell of apples, the Big and Little Dippers in their spheres—I’d once been susceptible to autumnal things, and their poignancy had occasioned a pedestrian gloom, their pathos had inspired unterrified acceptance, their loveliness had evoked my mortality, yes, but my mortality rife with poetic consolations, as if death were a stroll through New England. Now, though, everything pierced my overloaded brain with an unmitigated extremity, and my thoughts threw me on the thorns of nature, or ran me through with the blade of entropy unsheathed by every floral particular—the dying sword fern, the dying roses, the hoary virulent dying hemlocks with their shallow parasitic roots. This too is depression, a pair of glasses, a way of seeing trees, an amber chamber, a walk through leaves without progress. Or a fever with a nightmare cast, so that even October can’t be sad anymore in the way it had once been happily sad. Or a poem by Frost, who
suffered the deaths of four children—one at birth, one by suicide, one by infection, one by fever—is it any wonder that the bard of New Hampshire poeticized about autumn with such sustained perturbation?

  Such was the season of my discontent, rimed with the effluvium of leaves. I was aware that beyond my bedroom window, dry alder leaves skittered in the wind—I heard them there while anxiously reading on mortification and the underworld, metta and psychotherapy, dukkha and Gnostic cosmology. Tolstoy decided to make his own boots; Voltaire urged me to tend my garden; Goethe parsed, sublimely, weltschmerz; and meanwhile leaves stuffed up the drainpipes and turned to black slough in the gutters. At a loss for further remedial action, and taking sides with Voltaire, I joined a group of volunteers sweeping leaves in a library parking lot. Our consensus was that, post-9/11, this sort of necessary civic action was more redemptive than ever: one thing we could do was sweep leaves together, and to boot for no selfish gain. Didn’t we retain our theater of influence, no matter how tempestuous or out of sorts the planet? But though I was voluble by depression’s standards and agreeable to my rake and to our therapeutic discourse, my eye took note of the moss in the cracks and the intensity of purpose expressed by modest spiders. (What but design of darkness to appall?—/ If design govern in a thing so small.) I acknowledged the clouds and the mildew and mire; I saw where water, erosively, took course. Everything in nature was patently ominous. Even as we worked, more leaves struck the ground, the leaves of maples curled drily, old fists, while the news remained, as always, unsettling—more bombs over Afghan hamlets.