Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (21 page)

N
o delirious shamanic revelations or Earth-mother cleansings took place out in the desert, either on my first trip or the dozen or so subsequent ones. Which was fine, seeing as how that wasn't what I was after.

Suleiman's camels plodded. I got sunburned. At night we camped wherever we found ourselves, and I listened to the wind scour the desert while Suleiman cooked single-pot meals over fires made with dead acacia boughs, fires he stoked through the night to discourage the attentions of curious leopards.

I slept easily and without dreams. Sand gritted between my teeth for an hour after I woke, sticking fast even after water and a cup of Suleiman's strong, bitter coffee, which he brewed over the remnants of the previous night's blaze.

Suleiman, like most Bedouins I'd met, had an intense attachment to his family. They were all he talked about—and he rarely stopped talking. In the hail of syllables he explained at some point that this was the way he kept from missing his family too painfully while he was away—talking about them comforted him, especially in the long, black desert nights.

Sometimes he even sang about them, always after sunset, his voice high and sorrowful, drowning out the wind. His singing brought tears to my eyes. It did exactly the opposite of what I'd come out into the desert for: it made me feel. I wanted him to stop, but couldn't bring myself to ask. Then, on the fourth night, a curious thing: I no longer felt myself stirred by his singing. And this was how I came to discover a barometer for gauging whether my insides had gone still again. When Suleiman's singing no longer made me cry, I'd been in the desert long enough.

I told Suleiman the next morning over coffee, and he turned us back in the direction of the sea.

I
will confess, there are moments when even a corpse grows curious about how the lives of those he loved have developed in his wake.

And if I'm being honest, a flicker of vanity persisted in me, and there were times when I found myself wondering idly, over a sink of greasy dishwater, how my friends had eulogized me, and what, if anything, had been written about me and my book.

Because it could be argued that people only really understand and express how they feel about you after you're fertilizer.

And maybe I allowed myself to hope that I was remembered fondly.

And maybe I wished, from time to time, that my first book would be read now by more people, and perhaps in a different light.

And maybe, in ugly little moments I'm almost too ashamed to confess to (and this should give you an idea of the quality of this shame, considering everything that I've confessed already), I hoped there were quiet moments in Emma's day when her thoughts wandered to me unbidden, and she felt the fact and finality of my absence.

I hoped, in other words, that she was in pain. I hoped that she grieved.

This is perhaps the least palatable facet of suicide: the fucking sour grapes.

Again, I'm not exactly swelling with pride when I tell you this, understand.

And when these thoughts came on me I went to Suleiman, and he brought me into the desert, and we wandered for three days, five, however long it took.

T
oward the end of my father's life, he sat in his easy chair in the living room for days on end. He stared at the television without really watching. He stared at the walls, through them. We asked if he wanted the curtains drawn so he could look out the window, and mostly he didn't answer us, but we drew them anyway. Sometimes he would gaze at the snow outside in the yard, and the icy road beyond, and sometimes he wouldn't. He refused to go to bed. It was almost impossible for him to walk to the bedroom and he found it difficult to breathe lying down and was afraid he wouldn't wake up. So he sat in the chair. He smelled bad, because he didn't shower, and also because a sick, dying body gives off a subtle but indescribably bad smell. The smell of creeping terror, maybe, or of futility. So he sat in the chair, exuding that smell, staring at everything.

Then one evening he asked me, completely out of the blue, to take him to see a movie. My relief at his sudden desire to get out in the world nearly overwhelmed me, and I said yes, maybe a bit too eagerly.

We drove in silence, twenty minutes to the Flagship Cinemas in town, and I parked the car in a handicapped spot near the doors and went around to help him out of his seat, took small shuffling steps at his side as he struggled along with his walker.

In the lobby we stood together looking up at the list of films. It was late fall, a wasteland in terms of movie releases, and there wasn't much I had any interest in sacrificing two hours of my life for. But given that, at least in theory, I had a hell of a lot more hours left in reserve than my father, I decided to let him make the call.

He opted, inexplicably, for
The Game Plan
, a goofy-looking Disney comedy starring Dwayne ‘The Rock' Johnson as a football player and gadabout who learns important life lessons when the young daughter he didn't know existed—a girl whose requisite good cheer and pluckiness made me want to strangle a bag full of kittens—comes into his life.

I mentioned, didn't I, that toward the end tumors had begun to grow in my father's brain?

I bought tickets and loitered at the snack counter in the hopes of missing the first ten minutes of the film. My father needed to sit, though, so into the theatre we went.

The inanity can be neither explained nor comprehended. The dialogue singed my synapses. The endless agonizing gags felt akin to sitting through the firebombing of Dresden. And the girl . . . good lord, the girl. She sassed her way through two hours—and since when are Disney comedies two hours long, by the way?—of pure pain, dropping one obvious wisdom-from-the-mouths-of-babes line after another, until I found myself wanting to shave her studiously cute head of hair.

I sat there, marking time. My father munched popcorn beside me, staring impassively at the screen, giving off that stink. It was impossible to know whether he was enjoying this, though I found it impossible to believe that he could be.

I actually began to feel sick to my stomach. My watch indicated that an hour and a half had crawled by, and still the film's easily foreseeable denouement hadn't begun to take shape. Happy as I'd been when my father had asked to go to the movies, I found myself fighting the urge to ask him if we could get out of there. But he was still my father, and one did not ask him to leave—if he wanted to he would decide all on his own, without input or suggestion from me.

A giddy tension mushroomed inside me until I felt on the verge of bursting into hysterical laughter, and not at the movie.

Finally, the credits rolled like a mercy killing. I walked at my father's side, holding his elbow lightly on the slight upslope out of the theatre and preparing myself for the possibility that, half-witted by the cancer in his head, he
had
in fact enjoyed the movie—and that I was going to have to pretend to have enjoyed it, too.

We didn't say a word to one another, all the way through the lobby and out to the car. I eased him into the passenger seat, my tension abating now, thinking that his ever-reliable silence would save me from having to discuss the movie at all.

Quiet in the car, still, until apropos of absolutely nothing, about ten miles down the road, my father, staring through the windshield at the cones of light from the headlamps, said: Well, that was a real piece of shit.

And all the laughter I'd bottled up in the theatre came out at once, until I was crying, until I had to slow down while I tried to gather myself and get my eyesight right again, and even my father, two weeks or so from being dead, cracked a rueful smile.

T
he ascendance of my book from an unfinished navel-gazer of a manuscript to the hottest literary commodity since
Harry Potter
, I would come to learn, began like this:

On the island, my landlord finally showed up with the keys. Chief Morales and his henchmen let themselves into the pink stucco casita and found, among my belongings, the suicide note. Case closed, as far as they were concerned.

The note was the thing that set it all in motion, you see.

Morales catalogued and packaged my things and put them in the mail to my mother—but not before giving the note to a woman who'd asked to read it.

This woman's name was Cecily Calder. Turned out all she had to do was ask, and Morales handed it over without a second thought. Again, crack police work.

Calder did not just read the note and give it back. My disappearance was big enough news in the town where I lived that the local paper had sent Calder to the island to report on it firsthand, and as part of her work on the story she transcribed the note word-for-word into her iPad, though she had both the professional and moral good sense to harbor no intentions of using it for the story.

She was simply struck by the thing—in particular the passages addressed to Emma, which had broken Calder down—and she wanted to preserve it for herself verbatim. Her affinity for the sentiments expressed in the note were such that, while none of it appeared in her own writing, it did heavily influence both the tone and content of the stories she wrote about my death. In addition to three straight news pieces, Calder ended up banging out, on spec, a lengthy Sunday feature praising my book and implying that there are circumstances under which suicide is not to be condemned, but understood, even celebrated.

This last earned her more than a handful of harsh rebukes, from psychiatrists and clergy and parents who'd lost their teenagers to suicide—but it also served as a harbinger of the phenomenon that would end with Leonardo DiCaprio doing a better than serviceable job of channeling my angst in theatres all over America.

Here was the first domino in the chain: after the minimal local dust had settled from Calder's feature, she emailed copies of my suicide note to several close friends, along with the somewhat naïve admonition not to share it with anyone else, given the nature of its origin.

I
n the prologue to his book
The Age of Spiritual Machines
, Ray Kurzweil uses an old episode of
The Twilight Zone
as an analogy for the Singularity.

A gambler has died and gone to heaven. Heaven, for a gambler, is a casino where no matter what game he plays, and no matter how long he plays it, he can never lose. For months he moves from poker to roulette to blackjack and back again; he hits his number every time, and he wins every single hand. At first, the gambler is pleased. He accrues great stacks of chips, and enjoys the attention of the many beautiful women in the casino. After a while, though, he starts to grow weary. He wouldn't, in life, have believed it, but this is monotonous, just winning and winning and winning. In its uniformity, winning has been stripped of its fun, of its very meaning. Over time he becomes desperate. He is buried under chips, drowning in his good luck. He goes to the angel who runs the casino and pleads with him: don't make me stay here, winning and winning and winning, any longer. I wasn't supposed to be in heaven anyway. Not the way I lived my life. I was supposed to go to hell.

And the angel tells him that, indeed, he was supposed to go to hell. Which is why that's precisely where he finds himself.

The point, as concerns the Singularity, is that it's easy to imagine that when perfection is achieved, it will lose its meaning. Without the contrast of imperfection, of strife and suffering and petty daily problems, there will be no upside to the upside. Which is actually true, when you stop to think about it. As Kurzweil says, we are more attached to our problems than to their solutions.

But when the Singularity occurs, Kurzweil argues, our inability to appreciate all the good things in store for us will be transfigured along with everything else. One aspect of perfection, after all, it stands to reason, will be that our need for imperfection will cease. Or, perhaps more precisely: that imperfection itself will cease to have meaning.

S
ometimes when I grew restless and Suleiman was off in the mountains with Welsh tourists, or spending time with his family, I would lie awake in my hut, feeling my insides stir, longing for cheap domestic draft beer and Red Sox broadcasts and low-dose aspirin, and eventually I would rise and push open the door and go down to the edge of the sea.

I wouldn't bother putting on any clothes. If the sky was clear, in the moonlight I could make out the undulating backbone of Saudi Arabia across the black water.

I'd wade in slowly. The shallows stayed warm even in winter, because the reef offshore came up to just a foot or so beneath the surface and held the water in, and each day the sun created a sort of naturally occurring hot tub between the reef and the beach. When the water rose to chest level I'd turn and let my feet leave the sandy floor and float on my back, staring up at the moon, listening to the womb-sounds below.

And while the current was weak, in the right spots it would pick me up and pull me out gradually. I'd let myself drift, lungs filled with air for buoyancy, my arms and legs as slack as if I were quadriplegic. I'd know when I passed over the reef into deeper water, because the temperature dropped precipitously, sending a chill through me and making my muscles want to tense, but I would fight this. The discipline was like a physical manifestation of some Buddhist koan: struggling to stay loose, resisting in order to relax. And if I could resist as the cold numbed my limbs and sent exploratory tendrils into my center, if I could stay slack while my biology screamed its need to shiver, then I would feel my insides grow still again, however temporarily, and then I could breaststroke back to shore and go to my hut and climb underneath the mosquito netting and, cocooned in the damp softness of a single fleece blanket, tremble myself to sleep.

C
oping strategies notwithstanding, there was no way, after a while, to deny that the blankness enveloping me on my arrival in the Sinai had become—like my life—a thing of the past. I abandoned Asif more and more often to disappear into the desert with Suleiman, and stayed disappeared for longer periods of time; so long, in fact, that Suleiman had started to complain about the absence from his family, and to sing ever more plaintively, a fact that made it more difficult for me to not respond to his singing—which of course meant we needed to stay in the desert even longer. And still I found myself in the water at least two or three nights a week, or so I estimated, having long ago stopped keeping track of the passage of time, which was to my mind a construct of use only to the living.