New Moon (60 page)

No wonder my friendships were thin and empty. No wonder I felt obscure and forlorn that day at the lake.

All the time telling myself, no! retreat!—I hitched back to Laura Scales.

“I can’t keep doing this, Rich! You’ve got to solve this yourself. You’re not some special case. We’re each of us alone with our own ghosts.”

We went out again. “Just a short walk this time,” she made me promise. She loped beside, withholding comment, in warm sun then shadow. I wanted to be regular like her, to stand up and live the damn life.

Yet ordinary existence seemed like play-acting, and I couldn’t fake it or carry its weight. Nothing except the fact of us interested me, its symptomatic relief. Everything else was a life sentence. I thought, “I’m destroying this, this one possible thing I have.”

“I’m weak,” she said. “Don’t you see that? I can hardly save myself, let alone you. The world is not ugly; the world is good and beautiful.”

I trudged silently as the sky proved her right, showing its last sienna-mauve hues before twilight. Why couldn’t I be there too? The beauty of ordinary things had once been good enough, the flow of mundane events. I had been kept on track, as I looked forward to each next pleasure, challenge, novelty, even impasse, it didn’t matter. Regular stuff, like every other gal and guy, every creature of field and sky too. In fact the gods had treated me well. Why couldn’t I give up this fixation, let go of the string and float with the other balloons? Whose faith was I keeping, whose meaning pretending to impose on meaninglessness?

A cat bounded across the path and stared up. Lindy smiled and extended a palm in its direction. Everything was so studied, so flat.

We reached her house. “End of the line, kiddo.”

How did anyone live?

For lack of any better option I kept going to classes, almost losing hold of Geology because I didn’t have patience to sit through a lab
with rocks across the floor imitating a landscape for our autopsy. I wrote my response as a Beckett-like script, with the monadnocks and mountains and rivers announcing their roles aloud. It was a wonder I found breathing room to pull it off. But I got Professor Foose’s bemused C.

Abnormal Psych was my single solace, for I could pore over the textbook for symptoms that applied to me, and many of them did. I mostly feared being like Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, a specter passing through a nihility. I wanted to be a solid, diagnostic episode in nature like an oxbow lake or continental drift, an explicable fault line that Dr. Friend could cite from his years of work with me—any voucher to stop my open-ended free-fall. Even the deepest fire-spewing volcano had a cause, a thermodynamic vector and libidinal charge behind it; it could be charted and tracked. Cameron and Rychlak made that clear:

“… into all available channels!”
No kidding, guys!

The more the underlying anxiety increases, the greater the somatic discharge, and vice versa, until terror becomes inevitable. The attack merely relieves a contemporary build-up of cathexis and tension; then innate, self-perpetuating anxiety reasserts itself and begins recruiting toward the next attack. At least as good as a rupture in the crust of a planetary object!

But what were those infantile urges, temptations, and conflicts? How could I get a grip on them, defuse their charge, turn their torque, their flow of lava the other way? How could I apply seismic leverage to something so impalpable and fugitive?

The answer
was
the question: the outbreak of terror is how the unconscious gets the attention of the ego. Something even more unbearable is being converted to “mere” panic and given passage in its camouflage—something obviously bottomless and brutal because panics are horrific in themselves.

Was it that, without terror, there would be nothing at all, I would drift in empty space forever, no jetties or signs? William Faulkner conceded as much in
The Wild Palms:
“Between grief and nothing I will take grief.”

Perhaps that’s why Jon fought ghosts in the night. Better them than nothing.

The next time a wave of panic came I went straight to Heath’s house. I was about to see him anyway—he was scooting down his front stairs en route to our class. I tried to explain my state, but I had no words for it. In frustration I clenched my fists, ran fingers through my hair down over my face, grabbed my arms. I dug my nails into them as deep as I could. He stopped and gave me a mystified look, a gaze both of wonder and admiration. Then he began walking again. “What affect!” he finally declared without breaking stride. His observation cast a mirror, and I saw myself absurdly, a figure in a textbook.

“There’s a battle inside you,” he continued, “an enemy you can’t face. It has no identity, no symbolic form, no reconcilability or
contingency. Everything in this so-called world must look to you like some sort pale imitation of the world inside you. Obviously no one understands; they just cite textbooks like me. Only
you
know. And that leaves you so alone. It is an existential state more than a pathology. You are teaching me something about death instinct. You are fleeing death by pursuing from it. And you are pretending to know what you are frightened of because that at least suggests there
is
a world, there is a solution.”

“I deserve an A in this course for living it.”

Both of us laughed, as I accompanied him to class.

That night I dreamed of an immense wind. It blew across darkness, carrying images, image fragments, scraps of paper down avenues of the City. Fierce, unformed animals—wolves and cats and curs—tore off the dream shroud, led me through its scar into a hollow, a gentler void. UFOs patrolled an outer sky of too many planets and moons.

This counted. This was an actual place.

They never spotted me as I ran through high grass and hid in vines. The wind was frantic, bracing, euphoric. Everything that needed to be changed it ripped apart, swallowed into its momentum without distraction or regard. It was as elating a spectacle as I had ever witnessed, and it was core. It cleared the stage and re-set me.

In the morning I felt both better and worse. I was woozy and hung over but, paradoxically, not as afraid. I went to geology without fully appreciating the shift. I finished the day’s lab by working through half my lunch hour. Then I realized: I had a spark, I was normal again!

I ran back to Phi Psi in glee. It was over! I knew that implicitly, even as I knew when it began with currants in cereal. There was no explanation; it was just gone. In its place was something like the dream wind, carrying the most beautiful images across a spring morning—shards of a yet-unwritten ode. The world was magnificent, the clover and dandelions so exquisite they broke my heart. The sky was scrumptious, a sheer miracle.

The shadow of doom had been replaced by an ebullience so
fathomless and vast, with so much rhythm and design, it was absurd. Was this ever a stunning day—such azure infinity, so many blossoms of primary colors, such delightfully goofy insects and birds, each of them stately and wondrous to exist at all! I didn’t have enough outright kudos for them, but I found a patch in the Glen and took those lines that came:

Four sheets of paper later I came to a crescendo:

The phrases and beat translated themselves from nature as lucidly as if they were stanzas of Virgil. Nothing eluded me, nothing fooled me; subjunctives and strings of participles were right at hand, in the breezes, fragrances, and luminosities of spring. All I needed was to decode the mumblings of a slightly unfamiliar dialect into words. Correlatives arose wherever I looked: a back-up first baseman from the old Yankees (Don Bollweg transformed into granite-gneiss pinstripes), daisies across fields of childhood, the haunted land beside a cobblestone road,
“a tiny dead bug / drifting across a marsh moon / into the black / forever,” “the fleeting blackbirds from maple pies (four and twenty in four and twenty speckled swarms),” “the Spaldeen rabbit bouncing home.”
The stream through the Glen uttered the oldest proverb of my life:

By mid-afternoon I had entered the realm of the planet Jupiter:

After twenty pages I dropped my pen into the grass and calmly took in the summer that had arrived in my absence. I was starving. I felt as if I hadn’t eaten for days. I ran to the snack bar and ordered two cheeseburgers, a plate of fries, and a maple-walnut frappe. I sat there consuming them in bliss, each sip like the first time I ever experienced a tree’s creamy caramel sap.

Years later I arrived at a cover story for my panic: I had been coasting impetuously, thinking to get by on the status quo, to ride my new identity into happiness. But I had to
earn
my freedom from
my mother’s whammy. The Greeks knew this: once Medusa hexes you it is no mean feat to break her stare. She doesn’t yield to mere persuasion—she won’t grant passage without exacting a toll equal to the gift

At some point in childhood I had walled off a paranoid terror that was unsustainable, probably unsurvivable, cocooning it inside my life, below its discharge threshold and spike potential. Cocooning isn’t a usual strategy. People with traumas tend to eke them out, averaging their waves into duller, more dissociated states. But I wanted to be sane, and not just sane, I wanted to
feel
what was happening. Not only did it interest me, seemingly from the get-go, but it led to those magical, elusive layers of epiphany and gloom—the heart of meaning. And each state was too real and salient just to discard or antidote.

As long as the venom was bundled and insulated, I could coexist with it. It didn’t supplant my normal existence or get deflected by the usual Freudian aberrations, inhibition or denial, into dysfunctional maladies.

After sixth grade, I panicked only fleetingly, and they were brief supernatural visitations, modes I could diffuse or turn into binges and pranks. Otherwise I became a moody, erratic boy, comforted by my own soap opera.

Lindy ended all that in a flash. She drove me out of the solipsistic trance I wrapped around my teenage years. She intuited the truth too, that nothing real had been at stake before. She wasn’t “pretty.” She wasn’t a “girl.” She was far more stringent and irreconcilable than that.

The price of being found by her, of getting the so-called “true romance” I had wanted more than anything, was having to wake up. There was no free ride there either. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t stay in my bubble—I would have willingly accepted
that
deal—it was that the act of being touched by another person was radical and ineluctable. Lisa’s charm notwithstanding, David had it right.

Without warning, I changed personae overnight. I lost the capacity to bury myself soporifically in box scores, Corn Kix, and other artless totems. I couldn’t be a child anymore and I couldn’t
tell myself
I couldn’t be a child, for I wasn’t ready to be anything else. I had resisted becoming a man, not for the usual reasons, I believe, but because I didn’t want to rouse the dungeon-keepers or give them reason to suspect hubris on my part. I didn’t want them
even to know I existed.
That was the carapace of the cocoon.

Now I needed a shot of whatever was in that chrysalis, however ghastly, to claim my spirit, to grow a male backbone, to meet my plucky, no-nonsense girlfriend with some degree of style and grit.

The spring-of-’64 panic came when I was nineteen and a half. I made a hairline crack in the cocoon, and through it the entirety of my life got recapitulated in delayed terror. I could not be conscious of what was happening because there was no conscious form of it. It was beyond mediation: too complicated for ordinary intention, too elliptical for analysis, hieroglyphic and paradoxical beyond ideation. It couldn’t blandish by words or insights; it had to assert itself by pure exigency. To be conscious was to be token and strategic, was not to do it at all.