Fury (21 page)

Yes, Buddhists generally value patience, warn against the faults of anger, and discourage retaliation, but they also warn against being a human doormat. A person has to establish boundaries and practice a little self-defense, he says. The word “no” has to be in her vocabulary. She can't placate, abide violence, or absorb everybody's blame, because in the end that would make her a broken warrior and “a broken warrior is of no good to anyone.”

“Have you heard the story of Sadhu and the Snake?” I tell Hunter I haven't. “In India,
sadhu
s are wandering monks who travel from village to village teaching, chanting, praying, and helping people burn off bad karma. According to legend, one of these
sadhu
s visited a village where a huge snake was terrorizing people. So the
sadhu
sat the snake down and taught him about
ahimsa
, or nonviolence, and the snake seemed to take the message onboard. A year passed. The
sadhu
visited the village again and, sure enough, he ran into the snake. Only this time, the snake was bruised and skinny. He had stopped terrorizing the village, but in an effort to be nonviolent and openhearted, he had allowed the village children to taunt and throw rocks at him. He was so injured that he could hardly hunt and so scared that he couldn't leave his hiding place. The
sadhu
shook his head in disappointment, and the snake said, ‘What? You told me not to bite.' And the
sadhu
said, ‘Yeah, but I never told you not to hiss.'”

I listen as Hunter goes to his bookshelf and opens to a passage in Gandhi. “‘[Nonviolence] does not mean meek submission to the will of the evildoer,' ” he quotes, “ ‘but it means the putting of one's whole soul against the will of the tyrant. Working under this law of our being, it is possible for a single individual to defy the whole might of an unjust empire, to save his honor, his religion, his soul and lay the foundation for that empire's fall or its regeneration.' ”

Unlike Sheila, Hunter doesn't think a person can process all her rage in one weekend. “Thich Nhat Hanh compares anger to a crying baby,” he tells me. “Whenever we feel it we need to pick it up, embrace it, speak quietly to it, and try to figure out what's making it anxious.”

“That's from his book
Anger
, right? I've read that. The only trouble is, I think my ‘anger baby' died of SIDS. Forget crying. I can't even hear its
breath.
”

I give a hot, dry laugh, but Hunter stays quiet. There's another long silence, this one loaded and portentous. “Empathy's my gift too,” he finally says. “I've always been very sensitive to other people's emotions. I absorb them. They affect me. I can't seem to help it. The whole time we've been talking, I've been getting this really sad vibration from you. Like, it's making me feel really depressed.”

The old me realizes this statement is ripe for mockery, but Hunter has seen me somehow in the course of one phone call, and I feel my eyes mist over. “I didn't think I felt sad when I called you.” I crush the cigarette I've been smoking into a leaf-shaped soy sauce dish. “But, now that you've said that, I feel like I could cry.”

“I know. I feel like
I
want to cry.”

“Shit,” I say, feeling my breath catch like a bone in my throat. “Maybe I am. Sad, I mean.” Amazement briefly illuminates my misery. A
stranger
is more in tune with my emotions than I am.

“Stop trying to get angry,” Hunter says. “All of that will come later. For now, I think you need to go cry for however long it lasts. If you can, clear the afternoon for it.”

Alice has suggested the same concept. She calls my humiliated, depressive mood my “gremlin,” after the mythical creatures responsible for sabotaging aircraft and causing inexplicable accidents during flights.

Alice is always encouraging me to devote fifteen minutes a day to “sitting with” said creature—this so the emotions won't subvert the rest of my day.

But for as much as she wants me to “feel” my gremlin's disappointments and “write down” all the panty-waisted scrawl the varmint has to say, I prefer to tell the gremlin to shut its yap. Or even better yet, I tell it what I had always been told as a child: chin up, shoulders back, put on a smile, don't let on that you're upset, think about how your behavior reflects on
me
.

My method doesn't work. By neglecting the beast, I pretty much ensure that he'll distract me. Where concentration is concerned, he adds static to my radio. Saner people, like family therapist Karyl McBride, have put it this way: “The grief process begins with a decision: to let your feelings be there.” I can't yet relate to my “gremlin” or understand where he comes from. But I know I can acknowledge his pinched, reptilian face. It's small progress, but unlike my occasional stabs at
tonglen
, I don't turn away from the loneliness that arises, to the shame that I can touch and smell and hear and taste. A tendril of indignation pushes itself up beneath grief's surface, carrying with it
those
emotions, my feelings, hale and tingling.

After I hang up with Hunter, I cry until my cheeks are fevered, my eyes are slits and my nose is raw. Then I go to my medicine cabinet, looking for Natrum Muriaticum, for grief, only to find its little brown bottle dry.

I can't understand anything I am feeling, and, at the same time, I can't talk myself out of this state. I feel exhausted and lost, almost as though I am walking a long blank highway. I have no idea what revelation I'm walking toward. I am too far gone to turn back. What's worse, I'm losing the incentive to keep trekking. I can't bear to think or talk about emotions anymore. Talking doesn't change the landscape. I ache to call it quits and absorb whatever ruin comes my way. Only my book keeps me going.

With Alyssa's help I call her mentor, a woman named Stowe, to beg her for more Nat-Mur. She wants to know how much of the other remedies I have left.

I am also out of Lycopodium (for fear). I have at least four more doses of Lachesis (for envy). And, although I have two spoonfuls of Staphysagria (the anger remedy) left, I'm avoiding it due to the bad reaction it gave me.

This last statement piques Stowe's interest. “Tell me more about these negative reactions.”

I mention the vomiting, the headache that felt more like a brain injury. I ask her if she thinks the reaction was healing aggravation.

“For sure,” Stowe says in a slow, blissed-out voice that wears on my nerves, even though, in recent months, I've been warming to alternative medicine like hers. “Don't be discouraged. That's an auspicious sign! Your body is clearing out and airing old toxins! The headaches are probably temporary. I'm gonna send you more Staph and encourage you to keep taking it.”

Stowe also urges me to take more Lachesis, the remedy for jealousy. She says I'll know when I need it because I might develop a tickle in my throat or feel an urge to get what she very clinically calls “all gossipy.”

From what I've read in my homeopathy books, Lachesis is the poisonous venom of the bushmaster snake (albeit in a highly diluted form).

“Most women take all the other remedies before they take Lach,” Stowe tells me. “We don't like to admit when we feel jealous, vengeful, kind of bitchy. My husband always reminds me to take Lach, usually right around my period. We'll be bickering, and he'll say, ‘I think you need to take your Lach.' And I'll tell him, ‘Fuck you.' Then, a few days later, I'll cave in and take it.”

I picture Stowe as a tall, handsome woman, bohemian and rich thin, with streaked red hair tumbling down the back of her caftan.

She asks if I have any other concerns that she can help me with. Eventually, I confide that I'd like to stop smoking again.

“A few cigarettes are fine,” Stowe says in her wistful, Hollywood voice. “But they'll make you sick if you don't know who you really are.”

I'm not entirely sure I do know. Stowe agrees to include some detoxifying droplets in the box of remedies she will soon mail me.

For the next two weeks, I follow Stowe's advice religiously.

On Monday morning, I swallow a spoonful of Staph. I stay inside most of the day, nursing a cigarette between my yellowing fingers. I try to write and find myself just as numb and confused as I was when I tried to “meditate” on my throat.

On Tuesday, I take Lach. On homeopathy Web sites, I read that a person who needs Lach is like “a highly strung bow, taut with sexual energy.” “A sexually frustrated Lachesis woman” is liable to be “touchy and highly emotional,” one site said. Evidently, she'll need an outlet for all that stamina (art, career, spirituality, or sex) so that it won't backfire against her.

Something in this passage reminds me of a word I came across in the huge stacks of semantics books back at my parents' house.

The word I am thinking of is
liget
, a concept that has terrific importance to people of the Ilongot tribe of the Philippines. According to linguists,
liget
refers to anger, but also to energy and passion. The word is ascribed to forces of nature like chili pepper, liquor, wind, rain, fire, even a man's seed. Although
liget
is often born of envy, it is not always destructive. On the contrary, it frequently implies vitality and fierceness. Psychological anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo wrote that
liget
represents a will to compete and a desire to triumph; it is “realized in activity and purpose, in a willingness to stay awake all night and travel far when hunting, in a readiness to climb tall trees or harvest in hot sunlight, in an aura of competence and vitality.”

Depending on how
liget
is channeled, it can “generate both chaos and concentration, distress and industry, a loss of sense and reason, and an experience of clarification and release.” There was no exact English translation for
liget
. Yet the Ilongots say there would be no human life without it.

I stick to my homeopathy routine out of curiosity. I do it out of desperation, and because I have a masochistic desire to play the part of the guinea pig. But, computer that I am, I still put much more stock in therapy. It's far easier for me to believe that horrible experiences become entrenched in our psyches than imbedded in the tissue of our body as dark “energy.”

Once a week, I find myself back in Alice's office with its canned, deodorized air, and on the black leather sofa that droops in the center as though it too were about to collapse into tears.

I can tell the saintly woman is frustrated with me. In an effort to arouse the anger beneath my avoidance strategies, Alice has taken to treating me roughly. But no matter how she prods me, I won't lash out, challenge her perspective, or raise my voice above a polite murmur.

Alice begins to engage me in role-playing exercises. When she plays my mother—hoping I will tell her how much it bothers me when she gossips about my sister to me and about me to her—I spend a quarter of our session describing how doing so would make my mother feel as abandoned as she did when my grandmother made her move out at nineteen. When she tries to play my father, I insist my dad is too fragile to hear my criticisms until he finds steady work. When she suggests I coddle my family and repress what I really want to say, I cry with self-loathing. When she calls my “sweetness” inauthentic, I absorb the criticism and resolve to be meaner.

One day she claps her hands together and cuts off my string of excuses. “Koren!” she yelps. “There is no ‘right' or ‘wrong' time to open up and reveal the real you to people! Get real. Be authentic. If you wait until a ‘better time' to tell them what's bothering you, you'll be waiting forever!”

“Give it time,” Alice used to tell me at the start of our sessions. “You grew up in a family where you learned very early that anger was dangerous. You learned it would compromise your parents' love for you. That it would upset the balance of your family and interfere with everyone's ability to cope. I'm trying to prove to you that you can have a safe and positive experience with anger. It just takes time. Hopefully, through the process of transference, you'll be able to start by getting ticked off at me.”