Descent (7 page)

It’s widely acknowledged that for those prone to melancholy, holidays are deeply insufferable. The call to merriment and convivial enjoyment is heard by the depressed with unadulterated dread: an especially enervating farce will be required, the effort involved is bound to hurt, and there is no avoiding the obligations implied—all at a time when what one prefers is a hole in which to collapse. How have you been? What’s new with you? My wife took the measure of my mental health, more than once, telling me in furtive asides that my performance of mirth was admirably convincing. I contained myself through all of this, occasionally retreating into the bathroom in order to let my face fall apart.

We left for the Harbormaster. Our banquet room, smartly prepped for the feast, lay hard by the Wreckroom Lounge. The Harbormaster has many nautical appointments and is meant to evoke the interior of a yacht, not an especially gilded yacht but a yacht nonetheless. Yet a light softened by landward conifers penetrated our private windows, and none of us could see the sea. Settled, we began with a round of festive tippling, and soon my wife’s parents grew fuzzily nostalgic, and spoke of the past with a poignant yearning but in a way that chilled me with its intimations of mortality. They feted us earnestly, declaimed their thankfulness, and publicly displayed their eternal affections; then in variously awkward tones we each avowed our love for one another, my own declaration hoarsely whispered and marked by dullness and brevity. I loved everybody, but couldn’t say it. In my mind, the only thing was to get home to bed. The others went on painting depths of feeling, some with a clearly tipsy effusiveness. Their surfeit of emotion, while potentially cloying, struck me in my bereft condition as a shout against the dying cosmos: do as you will, it seemed to say, but briefly we anyway embraced each another. And isn’t that, couldn’t it be, the point?

I didn’t know, and repaired to a lonely hall’s end for a respite before finding my way—reluctantly—to the buffet line. Here other families were making the best, too, of not being at Grandma’s house for the holiday—or at any house, for that matter—at the Harbormaster instead. But what did I know? I wasn’t positioned to judge the happiness of others. And I was sure I appeared conspicuously withdrawn. In an overly compensatory effort not to ruin things, I was easy and jocular with well-dressed strangers as they skewered cornichons and addressed purple onions with a difficult set of tongs. The considerable bounty spread before us seemed excessive even in the context of Thanksgiving. The platters of meats and starches overflowed. I casually ladled gravy in the service of my performance and waxed unbridled over cranberry sauce. I loaded my plate, a prop.

At table, the burden of my emptiness grew in proportion to the enthusiasms of my in-laws for dinner, for the ambience of our banquet room, and most of all, for each other. As they warmed to the task of feasting together, gorging themselves in the prescribed manner and celebrating with food their familial bond, I found I couldn’t lift my fork. My in-laws are mostly gastronomes and, to some extent, gluttons, and this made dinner even more fraught with crisis, as a wan appetite is inevitably noted among aggressive diners such as these. And how to explain my lack of zest? How not to eat and, at the same time, not insult? I moved my food about, nibbled some, wandered off to the buffet line “for more,” and accidentally lost my plate.

With our meal behind us we took a family constitutional, wandering into the nearby marina to admire my father-in-law’s sailboat. Trudging the docks in the cold at dusk, I noted the fervor of my wife’s older brother for seafaring trim, for spars, lanyards, masts, rudders, sailcloth, anchors, jibs. My wife’s older brother is robust and cheerful or, to put it another way, round and jolly. He has survived Hodgkin’s disease (chemo, radiation, shingles, swelling, long and painful hospital stays) and triple-bypass surgery,
buoying to the surface after both mortal crises with his natively happy disposition intact, dispelling any notion of his untimely demise with reignited enthusiasms. Is that merely “chemical”? An activity of serotonin in his head that’s not in mine? I had, in October, divulged matters to him, and he had responded by sharing the avowals and aphorisms he lives by. (“I promise myself to be so strong that nothing can disturb my peace of mind … to look at the sunny side of everything and make my optimism come true … to be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear, and too happy to permit the presence of trouble.”) This hadn’t worked for me. I couldn’t force depression into remission by uttering belief statements to my mirror each morning. In fact, the very notion of so doing, the idea of consciously nurtured optimism in the face of reality, seemed to me a sham. But the bottom line was that here, on Thanksgiving, my brother-in-law, having faced death twice, was walking the docks with a ruddy visage, smelling the salt air, wearing his years well—in the bosom of family, in the aftermath of turkey and pie—while I, with all my rabid thoughts, could hardly drag myself along the docks.

It’s possible to live too fully in one’s head, which is partly what turned Tolstoy to boot making and the scything of crops, though certainly there is an element of madness in his geriatric vagrancy, in his wandering away from his ample estate under cover of night at age eighty-two—his last-ditch effort to free himself from torment—a sojourn that ended with his death, instead, in the Astapovo railway station.

*       *       *

I had no intimation that the Prozac was working and called Dr. K——to tell him so, more than once and at inappropriate hours—sporadically goaded by a sense of crisis—and left messages hued with desperation. K——, in return, counseled fortitude and patience: like telling someone strangled by a noose to hang in there until the rope snaps. My reading regressed further toward a tantalizing vapidity: manuals penned by survivors of madness who fancied themselves made wise by suffering—self-appointed healers and teachers with strategies for transforming pain into bliss—but I wasn’t convinced by any of them, and felt they were either deluding themselves or intentionally deluding me. Yet I had no filter. A likely title came into my atmosphere and I read it with the utmost hope, as if, on the next page … but it was never so. Here was a chapter on ascetic denial, maybe therein lay a salve for my wounds; here was another called “The Fortress of Anger,” “Dreamless Sleep,” “Refining the Gold,” “Letting the Blessings Flow.”

It was the season of lights now, December in America, the electricity freed up by silenced air conditioners rededicated to neon Santas and tiny, winking bulbs. Three weeks to the darkest day on the calendar, and this year’s celebrations palled over by terror and its insidious underling, economic fiasco. People weren’t buying or frequenting the malls; Osama had us by our wallets. Still, along the streets near my home, neighbors defiantly strung up lights and arranged their kitschy yard displays, and the shop windows all were suitably decorated, as if nothing significant had changed. On the other hand, the
newspapers were full of panicked advertisements taking up full folios, and the televised commercials for financial services, digital gadgets, and airline travel were shrewdly somber but hopeful. Christmas was pitched as resurrection 106 days after Armageddon; it was time to buy again, as in days of yore; but were we led all this way for Birth or Death? as Eliot asked regarding the Nativity, that birth which is offered as the reason for the season? In point of fact, as the Druids knew, the reason is darkness, its piercing acknowledgment—a fervently desperate cry against darkness in the midst of an annual fear.

I strung up my own small lights, in late afternoon, with nobody home, my mood toward dusk appallingly gray, the wind up and roiling the treetops—clashes of limbs against the sky, a dark density of clouds. Frilly cascades, discounted at the hardware store, made in Taiwan by underpaid workers: I draped their handiwork from our stuccoed house in the great northwestern woods. Here I was in Salish country, hanging lights assembled in Kangshan from the portico of my faux-French home and seeing myself as a point on the globe, exceedingly small and far too complicated, while two billion people elsewhere suffered in the name of my holiday aesthetic. And did Bin Laden hate me for this, too? For my extravagant use of electricity?

Christmas morning and the stockings unhung, the gifts contemplated,
The Nutcracker Suite
and the Londonderry Boys Choir, almond cookies and sparkling cider, the dogs with their annual holiday biscuits, the new calendars and the NBA on television, the needles from the tree in the nap of the rug, the presents in mounds, the crimped foil from chocolates, also me with my morose X-ray vision—the brevity of life, its irrevocable meaninglessness—finally my well-deserved “Christmas nap,” wondering if I would ever indeed take an interest in my new home brewer’s five-gallon carboy or read
The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing
or tipple from my 40-ounce bottle of Sheaf stout. A gray day. Darkness came early. My in-laws assembled for an evening repast and I gathered up my sham of health and went down the stairs to greet them. We have a video recording from this Christmas Day and in it I see myself stilted and halting, bent at the waist and shuffling down a hall, threadbare and gauntly disinterested in smoked salmon served on tiny crackers with cream cheese, all of this visible beneath a tenuous performance of, if not mirth and gaiety, then peace. As the householder nursing his snifter of brandy, I light the cheery Yule log fire, straighten my sweater-vest, turn toward the flames, and decide, once again—off camera—not to weep.

I was aghast that evening to hear Judy Garland’s rendition of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” a wish once sent across wartime miles to whoever it was who might not return, whose chances of returning were in the hands of fate.
Have yourself a merry little Christmas, / Make the Yuletide gay, / Next year all our troubles will be miles away
. Punctured by this, I retreated to the shower stall and sent tears feebly down the drain.

*       *       *

A woman once told me that, for a time after her husband died, her grief was as constant as breathing. Then one day, while pushing a shopping cart, she realized she was thinking about yogurt. With time, thoughts in this vein became contiguous. With more time thoughts in this vein became sustained. Eventually they won a kind of majority. Her grieving had ended while she wasn’t watching (although, she added, grief never ends). And so it was with my depression. One day in December I changed a furnace filter with modest interest in the process. The day after that I drove to Gorst for the repair of a faulty seat belt. On the thirty-first I went walking with a friend—grasslands, cattails, asparagus fields, ice-bound sloughs, frost-rimed fencerows—with a familiar engrossment in the changing of winter light. I was home, that night, in time to bang pots and pans at the year’s turn: “E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.” It wasn’t at all like that—this eve was cloudy, the stars hidden by high racing clouds—but I found myself looking skyward anyway, into the night’s maw, and I noticed I was thinking of January’s appointments without a shudder, even with anticipation. Who knows why, but the edge had come off, and being me felt endurable again. My crucible had crested, not suddenly but less gradually than how it had come, and I felt the way a newborn fawn looks in an elementary school documentary. Born, but on shaky, insecure legs. Vulnerable, but in this world for now, with its leaf buds and packs of wolves.

Was it pharmacology, and if so, is that a bad thing? Or do I credit time for my healing? Or my Jungian? My reading? My seclusion? My wife’s love? Maybe I finally exhausted my tears, or my dreams at last found sufficient purchase, or maybe the news just began to sound better, the world less precarious, not headed for disaster. Or was it talk in the end, the acknowledgments I made? The surfacing of so many festering pains? My children’s voices down the hall, their footfalls? Finally some combination thereof, or these many things as permutations of each other—as alternative vocabularies?

However it was, by January I was winnowed, and soon dispensed with pills and analysis (the pills I was weaned from gradually), and took up my unfinished novel again,
Our Lady of the Forest
, about a girl who sees the Virgin Mary, a man who wants a miracle, a priest who suffers spiritual anxiety, and a woman in thrall to cynicism. It seems to me now that the sum of those figures mirrors the shape of my psyche before depression, and that the territory of the novel forms a map of my psyche in the throes of gathering disarray. The work as code for the inner life, and as fodder for my own biographical speculations. Depression, in this conceit, might be
grand mal
writer’s block. Rather than permitting its disintegration at the hands of assorted unburied truths risen into light as narrative, the ego incites a tempest in the brain, leaving the novelist to wander in a whiteout with his half-finished manuscript awry in his arms, where the wind might blow it away.

I don’t find this facile. It seems true—or true for me—that writing fiction is partly psychoanalysis, a self-induced and largely unconscious version. This may be why stories threaten readers with the prospect of everything from the merest dart wound to a serious breach in the superstructure. To put it another way, a good story addresses the psyche directly, while the gatekeeper ego, aware of this trespass—of a message sent so daringly past its gate, a compelling dream insinuating inward—can only quaver through a story’s
reading and hope its ploys remains unilluminated. Against a story of penetrating virtuosity—
The Metamorphosis
, or Lear on the heath—this gatekeeper can only futilely despair, and comes away both revealed and provoked, and even, at times, shattered.

In lesser fiction—fiction as entertainment, narcissism, product, moral tract, or fad—there is also some element of the unconscious finding utterance, chiefly because it has the opportunity, but in these cases its clarity and force are diluted by an ill-conceived motive, and so it must yield control of the story to the transparently self-serving ego, to that ostensible self with its own small agenda in art as well as in life.