I wonder if, after I’m dead, I’ll be able to visit people the way my mother and sister can. It’s nice to think I could drop in on Hugh and tell him to keep his chin up. I’ve told him a thousand times that after I’m gone he needs to find himself a new boyfriend. I’ve even identified some. The first two, OK, maybe I didn’t put enough thought into them. “Are you kidding?” Hugh said when I pointed out Gilles. “Him?”
“Well, he speaks French,” I said.
“That’s not enough to make me want him, for God’s sake. I mean, he wears aftershave!”
The second was a wrong move as well—way too finicky. “But he is good-looking,” I said.
“What do I want with a good-looking boyfriend?” Hugh asked.
“Right,” I said. “Thanks.”
The latest one, though, a sheep farmer named Duncan—this time I’m really onto something. It’s true that he’s currently living with somebody, but at this point, so is Hugh. “There’s no telling what might happen between now and when I die,” I say. “Maybe Duncan’s boyfriend will hit me with his car while driving drunk. I’ll be killed instantly, he’ll be sent to prison for manslaughter, and wham: the two of you are set.”
I believe I’m being thoughtful, but Hugh doesn’t see it that way. In fact, it infuriates him.
“Don’t you want me to be happy after you die?” I ask.
“No,” he says. “I want you to be alone and miserable. And if you do find someone, I’m going to return from the dead and haunt you.”
This brings us back to ghosts, which, as I said, I don’t believe in. I’m just too practical.
A Number of Reasons I’ve Been Depressed Lately
One. It’s early September 2015 and I’m on the island of Santorini for a literary festival. After the short reading, which takes place outdoors on a patio, the Greek audience asks questions, the first of which is “What do you think of Donald Trump?”
Since announcing his candidacy, the reality-show star has been all over the news. Every outrageous thing he says is repeated and analyzed—like he’s a real politician. I answer that I first became aware of Donald Trump in the late 1980s. That was when Alma, a Lithuanian woman I was working for, bought his book The Art of the Deal and decided that he was wonderful. Shortly afterward, I saw him on Oprah, and ever since then he’s always been in the background, this ridiculous blowhard, part showman and part cartoon character. I see his presidential bid as just another commercial for himself. It wouldn’t surprise me if he were to name the Hamburglar as his running mate. So I say that onstage and then have to explain who the Hamburglar is.
Two. A month before the election, a man picks me up at the Philadelphia airport and takes me to Red Bank, New Jersey, for a show. We get to talking and I learn that his name is Michael. He is white and fifty-five and used to work for Pathmark, a supermarket chain that went bankrupt and closed the last of its branches in 2015. I ask some general questions and learn that grocery stores make the bulk of their money on junk food. “The highest markup, though, is on spices—seventy-six percent!” Michael says, adding that the most frequently stolen items are razor blades, baby formula, and big jugs of laundry detergent, which seem like they’d be pretty hard to shoplift. I mean, those things have gotten huge, like gas cans.
“Nowadays people walk out with the whole cart,” Michael says. “Roll out the door saying, ‘Just try to stop me!’”
It’s rare for a hired driver to overtly discuss politics, and rarer still for him or her to introduce the topic. They will sometimes skirt around it, though. We pass a TRUMP sign on the road, and Michael acknowledges it, saying sourly, “I just feel that for guys like us, white guys our age, if we need any help—housing or food stamps or whatever—it’s the back of the line. You know what I mean?”
Well, isn’t that sort of where the line forms? I think. Michael is in a group I’ve been hearing a lot about lately. White men who, following eight years of a black president, feel forgotten.
How exactly did Obama neglect you? I want to ask but don’t. Instead I change the subject to lines in general. “I didn’t wait more than a few minutes to check in for my flight this morning,” I say cheerfully, not adding that I’m Executive Platinum on American, so never have to wait for anything. When I do have to wait, I’m appalled.
Three. I donate a thousand dollars to the Hillary for President campaign, and within what seems like minutes I get an email from them saying, in effect, “That’s great, but can we have more?” Her organization is by no means unique in this regard. Everyone I donate to acts the same way, and I wind up unsubscribing from their emails and resenting them.
Four. I talk to a longtime friend of the family, who tells me with great authority that Hillary Clinton is a member of the Illuminati and that she and her husband have killed scores of people, including children, whom they also sexually molested.
“You’re kidding, right?” I say.
He’s not, and within minutes words are shooting from his mouth like water from a fire hose. It’s hard to catch them all, but I do grab hold of “You think it’s a coincidence that Prince was murdered on Queen Elizabeth’s birthday?”
“Who said that he was murdered?” I ask.
“Oh please,” this person says. “You honestly believe he died of an ‘accidental drug overdose’?”
The guy speaks to me like I’m an idiot.
“And the queen had him killed…why, exactly?” I ask. “Because his name was Prince?”
I later look at one of the websites this person relies upon for information. On it, an anonymous source close to the royal family—a “palace insider”—reports hearing the queen saying to another Illuminati member at a tea party that before the year ends three more world-famous musicians must die.
None of the websites my friend looks at say anything bad about Donald Trump. Rather, he is hailed as a man of peace. The ones they hate are George Soros, of course, and surprisingly Bill Gates, who has murdered more innocents than even the Clintons, apparently. My friend gets almost feverish when he talks about these people and the way they’re all connected: Queen Elizabeth leads to Jay-Z leads to the Centers for Disease Control leads to the faked Sandy Hook shooting and the way the government staged 9/11.
I want to laugh. Then I want him to laugh and say, “Just kidding!” But he honestly believes all this and is frustrated that I won’t believe it as well. “Wake up!” he says.
Five. An article in the New York Times suggests that Trump should run with the Hamburglar, and I think, Hey, that’s my line.
Six. On election night I am in Portland, Oregon. At the start of the evening I feel confident, but come dinnertime I start to get nervous. I eat alone in the fancy hotel restaurant, watching the waiters and waitresses for clues that I am worrying over nothing. “Any news?” I keep asking, taking it for granted that, like me, they voted for Clinton. They have ironic tattoos and know about wine. Who else could they have been for? I think.
Back in the room I turn on the radio and look at the electoral map online. I go to bed, reach for my iPad. Shut my eyes, reach for my iPad. When the election is called for Trump, I lie there, unable to sleep. In the middle of the night I go to the fitness center and watch the little TV embedded in my elliptical machine. The news had been telling me for months that Clinton was a shoo-in. Now they want me to listen as they soul-search and determine how they got it so wrong. “Fuck you,” I say to the little screen.
An hour later I take a bath and get back into bed. Staring at the ceiling, wide-awake, I suddenly think of Cher and realize that what I’m feeling, she’s feeling as well. So are millions of other people, of course: Hugh, my sisters, all my friends except for the conspiracy theorist. Oddly, it’s this woman I’ve never met or even seen in person who brings me comfort. The next morning I wander the city in a daze, my eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, thinking, I’m not alone. I’ve got
Cher.
Seven. A few days after the election I am in Oakland, California. It’s Sunday
afternoon and I notice a great many people walking toward what looks like a park, some of them carrying signs. “What’s going on?” I ask a young woman. Her hair is purple in some places and green in others.
“Oh,” she says, “everyone’s going to Lake Merritt to hold hands. We’re going to form a human chain around it.” She says this as though it’s going to reverse time and make Donald Trump stop being the president-elect. I cringe, thinking of how this will play on Fox News: “Watch out, everyone, they’re holding hands!”
Eight. I join my family on Emerald Isle for Thanksgiving and have a great screaming fight with my Republican father, who yells at one point, “Donald Trump is not an asshole!” I find this funny but at the same time surprising. Regardless of whether you voted for him, I thought the president-elect’s identity as a despicable human being was something we could all agree on. I mean, he pretty much ran on it.
Later in our argument my father shouts, “He’s the best thing that’s happened to this country in years!” and “It was just locker-room talk.”
“I’m in locker rooms five days a week and have never heard anyone carry on like Trump in that video,” I argue. “And if I did, I wouldn’t think, Wow, that guy ought to be my president. I’d think he was a creep and a loser.” Then I add, repeating something I’d heard from someone else, “Besides, he wasn’t in a locker room; he was at work.”
Since I left the United States in 1998, I’ve cast absentee ballots. Americans overseas vote from the last state they lived in, which for me was New York. Then we got the house on Emerald Isle and I changed my location to North Carolina, where I’m more inclined to feel hopeless. In 1996, in line at the grocery store in lower Manhattan, I’d look at the people in front of me, thinking, Bill Clinton voter, Bill Clinton voter, convicted felon, Bill Clinton voter, foreign tourist, felon, felon, Bill Clinton voter, felon.
At the Emerald Isle supermarket that I stomp off to after the fight with my father, it’s Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, and then the cashier, who also voted for him. Of course, these are just my assumptions. The guy in the T-shirt that pictures a semiautomatic rifle above the message COME AND TAKE IT, the one in fatigues buying two twelve-packs of beer and a tub of rice pudding, didn’t necessarily vote Republican. He could have just stayed home on Election Day and force-fed the women he holds captive in the crawl space beneath his living room.
The morning after our argument, I come downstairs to find my father in the kitchen. “Are you still talking to me?” he asks.
I look at him as if he were single-handedly responsible for the election of Donald Trump, as if he had knowingly cast the tiebreaking vote and all of what is to come is entirely his fault. Then I say, “Yes. Of course I’m still talking to you.”
He turns and plods into the living room. “Horse’s ass.”
Nine. On Christmas morning, at home in England, I climb into the loft space above the bathroom in search of some presents I’d wrapped months earlier. The ladder I’m using is wooden and has only two legs, which slip on my freshly waxed floor. I fall from a height of nine feet and land with a bang on my left side, fracturing eight ribs. As I lie on the floor, stunned and in the greatest pain of my life, it occurs to me that I might die before Trump assumes office, and that maybe that won’t be such a terrible thing. Amy runs out of the guest room then, and Hugh charges up the stairs from the kitchen, both of them asking, “What happened?” and “Are you all right?”
I don’t want to ruin Christmas, so say, “I’m fine. I’m fine.” Fine people, though, don’t need ten minutes to get off the floor.
Hugh phones the NHS—the National Health Service—and after being asked a number of preliminary questions, I’m put through to a nurse named Mary.
“Who are you again?” I ask.
“Mary,” she repeats, not, I notice, Mary Steward or whatever her last name is. Everything in America is based on lawsuits, on establishing a trail. In the United States I’d be told to come in immediately for X-rays, but in England they figure that unless you’re unconscious or leaking great quantities of fluid—blood, pus, etc.—there’s no point in wasting everyone’s time. Mary asks me a number of questions to determine whether I pierced a lung, which apparently I have not. “But it really hurts when I cough,” I tell her.
“Well, David,” she says brightly, “then my advice to you would be not to cough, and to have a lovely Christmas.”
I later learn that what I suffered was called blunt force trauma. It’s remarkably similar to how I felt after the election, as if I’d been slammed against a wall or hit by a car. Both pains persist—show no signs, in fact, of ever going away. The damage is permanent. I will never be the same as I was before the accident/election. A lovely Christmas is out of the question. Every day I lie on the floor and clutch my sides, stunned.
Ten. I hold on to the most unreasonable hope. The electoral college will come to its senses and say, “We can’t let this happen!” It will turn out that Russia tampered with our voting machines. Yet nothing stops the advancing truck. On Inauguration Day I am in Seattle. Late in the afternoon my old friend Lyn sends me a photo of an anti-Trump sticker someone found in Japan. It’s cleverly designed: three peaks that on second glance turn out to be Trump sandwiched between two Klansmen. I want to write back and say Ha, but instead, as a joke, I respond, Dear Lyn, I’m sorry you’re so opposed to change, or too small-minded to move past your narrow assumptions. In the future I’d appreciate your keeping things like this to yourself. —David
A minute later I send a follow-up email that says Just kidding. And it bounces back, as do the next three emails I send. She’s blocked me! I realize. After thirty-eight years of friendship!
I go to bed that night and lie awake, worried that she’s telling everyone I’m a Trump supporter. The news will spread, and by morning I’ll be ruined. “But it was just a joke,” I say to myself in the dark room. “A horrible, horrible joke.”
Why Aren’t You Laughing?
From the outside, our house on the North Carolina coast—the Sea Section—is nothing much to look at. It might have been designed by a ten-year-old with a ruler, that’s how basic it is: walls, roof, windows, deck. It’s easy to imagine the architect putting down his crayon and shouting into the next room, “I’m done. Can I watch TV now?”
Whenever I denigrate the place, Hugh reminds me that it’s the view that counts: the ocean we look out at. I see his point, but it’s not like you have to limit yourself to one or the other. “What about West Sussex?” I say. From the outside our cottage in England resembles something you’d find in a storybook—a home for potbellied trolls, benevolent ones that smoke pipes. Built of stone in the late sixteenth century, it has a pitched roof and little windows with panes the size of playing cards. We lie in bed and consider sheep grazing in the shadow of a verdant down. I especially love being there in winter, so it bothered me when I had to spend most of January and February working in the United States. Hugh came along, and toward the end we found ourselves on Maui, where I had a reading. I’d have been happy just to fly in and fly out, but Hugh likes to swim in the ocean, so we stayed for a week in a place he found online.
“Let me guess,” the box-office manager of the theater I performed at said. “It’s spread out over at least four levels and paneled in dark wood, like something you’d see on a 1970s TV show, right?”
He’d hit it squarely on the nose, especially the dark part. The wood on the interior walls had been rigorously stained and was almost the color of fudge, a stark contrast to the world outside, which was relentlessly, almost oppressively, bright. As for the various levels, any excuse seemed to have been taken to add stairs, even if only two or three. If you lived there full-time, you’d no doubt get the hang of them. As it was, I tripped or fell down at least twice a day. The house reminded me of the condominium units my family used to rent on Emerald Isle when I was in my twenties, though none of those had a crucifix hanging in the kitchen. This one was ten inches tall and supported a slen
der, miserable Christ plated in bronze.
That was the only decoration aside from a number of framed photo collages of the owner and his family taken over the years. They were a good-looking group, one that multiplied as the children grew and had kids of their own. The color in the earlier snapshots had faded, just as it has in pictures of my own family: same haircuts, same flared slacks and shirts with long droopy collars, only now drained of their vibrancy, like lawns in winter. Each generation looked healthy and prosperous, yet I found myself wondering what lurked beneath the surface—for surely there was something. “Which of you is in prison now?” I’d ask, glancing up as I tripped on the stairs to the bedroom.
The house was on the ocean, and the beach that began where the backyard ended was shaded with palms. Most often it was deserted, so except for a few short trips up the coast for supplies, Hugh stayed put during our week on Maui. If he wasn’t on the deck overlooking the water, he was in the water looking back at the deck. He saw whales and sea turtles. He snorkeled. My only accomplishment was to sign my name to five thousand blank sheets of paper sent by my publisher. “Tip-ins,” they’re called. A month or two down the line, they’d be bound into copies of the book I had just about finished. There were still a few more weeks to make changes, but they could be only minor grammatical things. Hugh, who is good at spotting typos and used to do so for his father, a novelist, was reading the manuscript for the first time. Whenever I heard him laugh, I’d ask, “What’s so funny?” Should five or ten minutes pass with no reaction, I’d call out, “Why aren’t you laughing?”