“Peace protest,” Dad said doubtfully. “You know I’m deadly allergic to hippies.” But there were no hippies, only a rather inadvertent Burmese Buddhist monk in orange robes whose presence was more than offset by the very intentional cop who had come to monitor the event. Mum’s eyes lit up when she saw a man in uniform. “Oh,” she said. “What fun. A bulletproof vest and a holster. Very satisfactory.” I steered her toward a difficult horse.
Dad clamped his pipe in his mouth, held his hands behind his back, and performed what amounted to a field inspection of the cop’s weaponry, stalking circles around the rig, puffing fragrant clouds of tobacco in his wake. Then, when he had satisfied himself that he had never seen so much firepower in the possession of one man in his life, he removed his pipe and addressed the cop in tones of regretful apology. “Look, I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “We’ve been trying to shut her up for forty years ourselves. Maybe a dart gun would do the job?”
Photographs of Charlie and me from around this time show us seeming-happy: I was fulfilled by my work, and Charlie was doing well in his; we were both rewarded by parenthood. Yet no matter how committed I was to our unit—this beautiful family I had been complicit in creating—I remained unsettled. I felt as if we were living half a lie, or perhaps the greater part of a lie. “There is a sense of discrepancy between what we do and what we are, between appearance and reality, that is the motive force that impels us to seek unity,” Justus George Lawler wrote in an essay entitled “The Two Great Sadnesses.”
But instead of either of us slowing down to address my misgivings, we plowed on, out of habit, out of expediency, out of fear, and out of denial. Once, elbow deep in bubbles at the children’s bath time, I suddenly found myself praying in a kind of panic that nothing would ever change. “It never has to get better than this,” I remember thinking. “We can do this forever. Just like this.” But the mere fact of my thinking it was a kind of acknowledgment that this couldn’t last, neither the equitable moment of our marriage nor the shaky American dream in which it had been conceived.
Because seen in a certain light—the flat, hot light of a summer afternoon, for example—that promising dream has a depressing, thrill-ride quality about it, hurdy-gurdy with brightness, loud and distracting. And however much fun people seem to be having, however endless the music and gaiety seem, soon the ride will be over and then there are the carnies all jittery with meth, and there is the dust and the heat and the desolation. The truth is the American dream had never been an innocent, harmless way to make a living. “It’s incredible,” Dad kept saying when he came to visit. “Who’s paying for all this lot?” Then I saw him make mental calculations. “Well, bloody nearly free petrol helps, doesn’t it?”
I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when Charlie knew that our good, ordinary, sane lives had proved to be risky, expensive, untruthful gambles. It was the summer of 2008: gas prices had just peaked at their highest level in history, and there seemed to be no end to what was beginning to look like a war on Wyoming’s open spaces. Drilling rigs were going up near tributaries of the Colorado River; wildlife roadkill collected off the oil patch was stacked next to Highway 191 and reached the length of a football field and three animals deep. I was up in my office, writing. Charlie came upstairs—which he hardly ever did—and said, “The real estate market has crashed.” A long silence settled into the tiny space.
“Good,” I said at last.
Charlie looked at me, like I had no idea what I had just said. He said, “Things are going to get tough for a long time.”
“Good,” I said again. I thought about the pile of papers next to me: the OSHA reports of dead natural-gas rig workers; the accumulation of evidence of contaminated groundwater near natural-gas wells in the state; the plummeting air quality in sparsely populated mountain communities; the reports of melting glaciers in the Wind River Range; evidence of crashing whitebark pine tree populations; the ways in which this boom was never sustainable, not for the communities that hosted it, nor for the wildlife populations that bore its most immediate and brutal brunt, nor for the state or ourselves and our children. I thought of the wars we were in over power and resources, the ways in which Wyoming children were being recruited straight out of school—into the armed forces and onto the rigs—to feed our appetite for cheap energy. But it was as if morality had been turned on its head by the promise of corporate profits—it was our moral imperative, it seemed, to make money now. It was morally questionable to call for caution, restraint, and breathable air. It was an outrage to ask about tomorrow.
Charlie said, “I’ll have to sell the polo ponies.”
I said, “Well, they should be worth a bit more than our souls were.”
There was a long, silent standoff. Then Charlie said, “I am a decent, good person, Bo.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I pushed away from my desk and folded myself into his arms. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean it.”
In the following months, Charlie showed me columns of figures representing our situation, and even with my limited financial literacy I could see how they marched away from each other impossibly. There didn’t seem to be a way to work our way out of our unwise investments, out of our unreasonable cost of living, out of our belief that the economy could keep on growing and growing. Charlie became ever more silent and worried. I worried too.
Over the next two years, Charlie’s work dried up, and in an effort to keep us afloat, I accepted every magazine assignment I was offered, I took every speaking engagement possible, I wrote proposals and book reviews and taught workshops and said yes, yes, yes. But every check I brought home and delivered to Charlie only seemed to make him more desolate. “It’s not enough,” he said. So I slept less and wrote more. Deadlines touched tails with deadlines.
Then I went to Dallas and gave the talk that finally made me acknowledge that I wasn’t African anymore, not especially. And two weeks later, when I lay in bed coughing and fevered, I believed I could remember the woman who had made me sick, because however hard we work to isolate ourselves from one another and to shore ourselves up against discomfort, we are not immune from one another. There is no way to shut the doors against our contagions, to ward off the effects of our collective stupidity and greed and violence. Those who have an understanding of the mhondoro ceremony were correct when they told me that all beings in a community are connected, that the madness of one is the madness of everyone, that there is no separation of minds and bodies between people. It was true when they said the wickedness and carelessness and avarice of one would bring pestilence on the whole. Your sickness is mine. My sickness is yours.
Our houses were falling, falling, fallen.
What Charlie and I did was not uncommon. We had taken ourselves hostage, plowed ourselves under with debt, and then battled to pay for our freedom. Still, neither of us understood our lives in that way. Even less did we figure out that we were compelled toward one another not just because of some inexplicable passion, but also because we must have recognized in one another wounds of unresolved and repeating tragedy. We had glommed on to one another in happy unconscious relief, as if the inherited and accumulated wounds in each of us had recognized their matches, their balms, and their ends. But neither of us had been able to get beyond ourselves to reach the other, and perhaps we’d never had the will to try.
I have heard it said there are at least two ways of living, at least two levels of awareness. One is the obvious way: the groceries and bank accounts and routines that allow life, as we know it, to churn along in its solid-seeming myth of continuity. The other is the hidden way: the soul-searching and epiphanies and insights that allow soul, or what we suppose of it, to manifest and direct us. To have one without the other is to live dangerously and blindly and violently. But how few of us even know the language of the other way of life; how few of us ever surrender, even briefly, to the sacred terror and beauty of
the other way.
Charlie and I may have initially connected over a sacred terror and beauty, but we had become ensnared in accounts, in transactions and a kind of economic allegiance to one another. It was like we had made a tiny most-favored-nation treaty with one another, but we were separated by a border fence that didn’t allow for breaches of security: I couldn’t break through Charlie’s silence; he could not penetrate my noise. It was a more or less peaceful standoff on which our securities, welfares, and identities depended. But it wasn’t a partnership, it was a power struggle, and like all power struggles it wasn’t sustainable.
FORTUNE TELLER FISH
In the end, at least in this end, the world beyond me and the world that was inside me could no longer exist in the same place and I broke. Or at least the way in which I had been functioning as wife and mother broke. Perhaps that is the definition of madness, but madness, if that is what it was, didn’t happen the way I imagined it would. Witnessing madness, I had always assumed it came with a snapping sound, followed by some kind of definite, momentous impact. If I were to go mad, I assumed I would no longer be familiar to myself. People would pass me in the street and I’d be unknowable to them too. My children would veer from the very scent of me.
I knew this because on the several occasions that Mum went truly mad she stopped behaving in ways that were recognizable as her at all. It was as if her mind had been whisked away and the body we knew of as my mother’s had been left in the possession of some other entity, which did not much care for it. This manifestation of my mother wasn’t vain, or splendid, or capable. It did not bother with any of the usual biological needs: it drank to heroic excess, it refused to bathe or eat or exercise, it lost weight, it lost control of itself, and it went deaf to everyone and everything.
But that is not what happened to me when I went mad. I still felt a connection between my mind and body. And I never stopped caring about ordinary, sane things: I wanted normalcy for my children. I didn’t want us to go broke. I ate right and exercised. And yet at the same time, I felt I was in the process of becoming two people—the person I had been, and the person I was becoming. I couldn’t sleep, I’d lost my appetite, I had two glasses of wine every night and then poured a third even though I knew it was contributing to the sleeplessness and a general feeling of daily malaise. “Oh Al, it’s probably just your midlife crisis,” Vanessa said when I phoned her shortly after returning from Zambia. “Next thing, you’ll grow a mustache and cry all the time.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “I’m far too young for that.”
“All I’m saying is don’t say I didn’t tell you. And whatever you do, don’t get a perm.”
“What are you even talking about?”
Vanessa sighed, as if I had missed the key moment in a movie’s plot. “Don’t you know, people always do something drastic to their hair when they’re having their midlife crisis?”
In the second week in October, Charlie called me from his safari in Zambia. I was in a hotel room in Minnesota. The disconnection between us could not have been more vivid if I had bought myself a one-way seat on a rocket to the moon and he had sunk himself to the bottom of the sea in a submarine. It didn’t feel as if we were breathing the same air, speaking the same language, living in the same world.
“I was almost eaten by a lion last night,” he said.
My hotel room overlooked a parking garage. Beyond that, I could see the metallic thread of an interstate. It was night, but the city threw off a yellow glow like the light in a sick-room. I said, “Oh.”
“Two of them. I was stalked. They followed me into camp.” And then Charlie told me how he had been walking from his tent when his flashlight caught the reflection of the lions’ eyes, or maybe he hadn’t seen the spoor until morning, either way, at some point he noticed he had been followed. And perhaps there was more to the story than that, but none of it seemed to matter then because the fact of Charlie having been stalked by lions changed nothing. He sounded no more alive, or grateful, or excited for having been nearly dead. And his inability to get hurt by animals had long ago ceased to impress me.
What would have impressed me now was Charlie finding work that paid, Charlie asking me how I was, Charlie allowing me a full night’s sleep, Charlie laughing at my jokes, Charlie laughing at all. What would have impressed me was if he’d admitted that we were broken and needed to tear ourselves open and start again, from the ground. I wanted him to say we’d made dreary, intractable mistakes and now we needed to make the sort of mistakes that would jolt us awake and make us unstuck. I closed my eyes. “Look,” I said. “It’s really late here. I have to go to bed.” I could hear Charlie’s disappointment, and I could feel my own. “I’m sorry,” I said. We hung up, then I lay on the hotel bed fully clothed and counted the number of hours and airplane flights before I would be home with the children. “How do people do this?” I wondered.
For the first time in my life, I was conscious of this thought: I believed in what I was doing—in my children, in my work, in my reading—I just no longer believed in the person who was doing it. I had come to the Midwest to speak at an event that promoted literacy for Africa. I had spoken about how literacy saved lives; I had said how it was important to have the vocabulary for what was happening to you. I said that when there is tyranny and war and censorship, our ability to possess—to truly own and occupy—our own words might be all that’s left of us. I said, “In Zimbabwean culture, it is taboo to name the genitals. So when rape is used as a weapon of political intimidation it is doubly silencing. Not only is there the act of violence, but there is also the prohibition against naming what has happened to you. You are not allowed to say ‘vagina,’ ‘penis,’ ‘testicles.’”
I realized it wasn’t the talk people wanted to hear, and although I couldn’t blame them, I kept talking anyway. There is nothing feel-good about rape camps, about women being taken out of their villages by the score and assaulted along with their six-year-old, ten-year-old, thirteen-year-old daughters. But this is why literacy matters, I was saying. Words count. “Hear this,” I said. “Women must be able to read the labels on medicine bottles after they contract HIV from the soldiers who have raped them. And they must be able to read their human rights, and they must be able to speak and write about the atrocities to their bodies and to the bodies of their daughters.” And then I felt alarmed by a low-level cloud of disillusionment from the audience, so I stopped talking and stood in silence while they waited for me to say something uplifting.
Afterward, while I signed books for a trickle of readers, an elderly Zimbabwean man approached me and told me in a low, calm voice, “You are not a good daughter of Africa.” He gestured to the room. “You said those words with my wife present. I am offended. Don’t you know better?” I knew the man, or at least I knew his type. He was polite, educated, urbane, and unused to challenge, and he had some academic post at a small university where his eloquence and his beautiful manners overrode this benign brand of chauvinism.
“Don’t you?” I asked. “When was the last time you were home? Have you not seen?” And suddenly there was a large and growing pool of silence around us, and everyone was embarrassed. The room was too hot—the building’s thermostat apparently had been set for winter in spite of an unseasonably warm fall, and now no one could readjust it. Both the elderly Zimbabwean man and I were sweating. I let my shoulders sink. I said, “You’re right. I am not a good daughter of Africa.”
The truth is, I wasn’t only not a good daughter of Africa, I was not a good daughter of anywhere, nor was I a good wife or a good mother. I was a woman on the brink of free fall, and it was hard to be a good, acceptable woman in any language or in any place when simultaneously contemplating becoming undone. For the first time, I was beginning to see that for a woman to speak her mind in any clear, unassailable, unapologetic way, she must first possess it.
When he came back from not being eaten by
a lion in Zambia, Charlie and I put the house on the market. Then all through the winter and into the early spring of 2011, we acted as if we could still be a couple and as if we could still hold together a family. We acted as if we were more than the home we had built, as if we were the duo that could survive the loss of our house, and as if there was reason for the children to believe that things would always be okay. But each night Charlie and I faced one another as if we were drained adversaries, admonishing one another to get up one more time, to keep fighting.
In April I flew to New York to work further on the frustratingly out-of-reach screenplay with a director who had half a dozen other ideas in the fire. In the end, as much as I wrote draft after draft, the screenplay didn’t happen, but other things did in that intimate, intoxicating city. For one thing, my already chronic insomnia crashed up against the relentless rush of noise outside my window, and meant that I was now utterly without sleep. For another thing, someone who had been until then a friend suddenly seemed to turn sideways and the light shifted on him differently and I fell into him, as if into the rainbow cast by a prism.
As affairs go, it was short but catastrophically intense, more like a physical accident than anything amorous, as if I’d slipped my own moorings completely and was cast adrift in someone else’s shipping lane. “Everyone needs a place,” wrote the poet Richard Siken. “It shouldn’t be inside of someone else.” I left his apartment one morning—a narrow series of three cramped rooms in which I already felt too untidy and too noisy, too much as if I was off course—and went back to the place I had been staying and was suddenly violently sick. Later, dizzy with the implications of the affair and overwhelmed by the ways in which it is possible to betray oneself and the people to whom one is supposed to be undyingly loyal, I took myself to the Guggenheim Museum, hopeful that the tranquility of a muffled public space would soothe me, and allow space and quiet.