Leaving the Sea: Stories (13 page)

—People are pursuing different strategies during the hardship, and yours would seem among the most severe. How long have you advocated the cave?

—
Advocate
is the wrong word. If I occupy a life raft out on the ocean, and people are drowning, I don’t “advocate” the raft to them. I enjoy the raft and my relative security. If the people in the water choose to survive, they will swim to me and petition the raft, and of course I’ll give fair consideration to their request, weighing the relevant factors. In such a case, advocacy of the raft is hardly necessary, and the same is true for what you call the cave.

—So you don’t need to promote what people cannot live without?

—Right. But even if I hold a deep conviction about survival, particularly during the hardship, our species is too complex for me to assume that everyone wants or needs to survive. There will be people, to follow this life raft example, who must stay in the water and perish, for reasons peculiar to them, and it’s not my business to probe their motives. Oceans require people to drown in them. That’s not only a line from a popular song. To me it’s beautiful that our survival strategies are wonderfully diverse and not all of us can succeed.

—In other words, you feel that people who do not agree with you about the cave have a death wish?

—My feeling about other people and their wishes is not important. What I think doesn’t interest me, just as survival is not a theoretical project, at least as I practice it. When you outlast everyone addicted to unprotected space—Americans, as we call them—you don’t much care to hear the ravings of the newly dead. Every species is defined by death and every creature has a role to play, even if some of those roles appear negating or doomed, or beguilingly marginal. If I was assigned a death role, if I was meant to die tonight, for example, which I’d be prepared to do if such an event could lift the shadow, you might still hear me disputing the reigning survival narratives, perhaps even arguing that death is the most radical form of survival. It is a necessary imperfection of the species that we each believe we are in the right.

—So the cave is a survival narrative?

—It’s not a cave any more than a house is a cave.

—It’s underground.

—A relative distinction, and a sloppy one. Caves have entrances, in any case, so your terminology is moot. Let’s try to think outside of our disease. It’s enormously difficult to penetrate a true underground space, and I’m hardly an absolutist when it comes to subterranean levels.

—Explain.

—Most of what you call the underground was once cold, blue space that is now simply clotted with matter. It’s the old adage we learned in grade school: solids attract, space is a punishment. Are there ideal clottages of matter that feature high survival ratios? Perhaps, but it’s not so simple. I look for below-grade cavities that are aperture free, but I’m not interested in fixating on pure coordinates because I don’t believe in compassing. These foolish tools are just treasure maps to one hell or another. Areas of high solidity, which often occur at extremely low altitudes, are simply safer. The sea-levelers have lost access to light and power and laid themselves bare to every sort of attack, yet still we have to listen to their sentimental justifications and old-fashioned cries for the good pastures and prairies which are graveyards now. I don’t believe in some absolute mineral intelligence, but you’d have to be a moron not to notice what is surviving and to wonder very seriously how to model it.

—To the outsider, this looks like you’re burying yourself alive.

—I would agree with the word
alive
here. I put a premium on life, even while others wring their hands and object to the “idea” of the low home, or other safe zones, all the while groping in cold darkness with no food, at an altitude—where our buildings used to be—with a remarkably grim survival rate. Drs. Moskin and Ruefle have repeatedly refuted the idea of an absolute sea level. Why are we even having this conversation? We key your dangerous coordinates into a GPS and find ourselves headlong over a cliff. What good will it do me to grab on to you if we’re both falling to our deaths?

—But we’re not falling.

—Said the remarkably uninformed man. The whole idea of a boundary between the earth and the air is problematic. It is one of those intellectual wrong turns that has marked us with a terrible shadow. The scar around our necks is where sea level used to be.

—What scar?

—It’s an expression. Altitude itself has been fanatically idealized since early mythology. We’ve been banning the wrong books. The beauty of flight, the freedom of space, the supposed poetry of birds: glories or cautions? To me it’s strikingly obvious that we should seek to be supported by matter on all sides, a suit of earth, as Frehlan put it, whether in person-sized cavities or elsewhere. Altitude, even as a concept, has failed. Evolution teaches in the negative, but we are terrible students of the future.

—Is it the Anchorites you side with?

—Who said that if you want to watch someone die, befriend an Anchorite? There’s a narcissism to people who flee to the mountains, and I’m not just singling out my father. The flight of the Anchorites is self-centered and historically minded—in the worst way—and to me they are like characters auditioning for a novel. Pick me, pick me! They are begging to be noticed and they cry when wounded. The preening quality of their isolation has no appeal to me. They have a fondness for exposure, and we might as well watch them decay before our eyes. But my opinion on this is merely personal. I care about results. In terms of efficacy, which is what matters, Anchorites die. Six of them will die during this conversation.

—Is that your final measurement for people, whether or not they die?

—That measurement predates me, and it will outlast me, too. I’d be curious to learn of a more revealing criterion.

—You’ve given up many things in pursuit of the cave: your family, your home, your job.

—I’ll have those things again. They might not take the same shape or form, it might not be the same family, home, or job, but those things will return to me even stronger because of my survival work.

—But do you miss your actual family?

—I feel relief. Relief and gratitude. Gratitude because I can experience strong feelings for those people. How many of us really have that intense flood of emotion, like being drugged? Feelings are a gift, and I am lucky. In some sense, my feelings toward my wife and children are more intense when the moment is not complicated by their presence, and there is no accounting for the magnification that happens when we are swaddled by earth, fully enclosed, necessarily free of people.

—As a father and husband, are you responsible for the survival strategies, flawed as they may be in your view, of your wife and children? Is there an obligation here?

—I am not here to talk about particular people I may have known. There’s no need to cripple our thinking with specificity. But I presented an airtight survival case to those individuals, and my views on this are well documented. Families necessitate energetic concealments of the obvious, to be plain about it. To be in a family is to work strenuously to suppress the truth, for reasons I cannot determine, and the shadow, when it came, caused competing strategies in the family I occupied. My wife tuned her intelligence to a dilemma altogether different from the dilemma at hand, and I was confirmed in my belief that survival cannot be outwardly imposed, even within a niche group like a family. Responsibility, during a hardship, is a luxury, and it is a luxury I strove to enjoy, even as it compromised the project. It was decadent of me to show so much responsibility for my family, as it was then defined. I admit to this indulgence of youth. We have our weaknesses. One of mine was loyalty. But hardships necessitate that we forgo luxury, and in this case I needed to move from my own comforts toward the necessarily desolate work I’m doing now.

—Survival, then, but at what cost?

—That question doesn’t become you. I choose to be alive in order to measure the depth of my sacrifice, if any. Are we supposed to gloat from the afterlife that we avoided difficult choices and took the easy way out? If other people, including my affiliates, do not choose to navigate hardship by seeking out full earth swaddling, then I cannot help them.

—In a time of intermittent sun and fee-rationed power, I am curious if you are worried about the people above, as you have called them.

—My views on the darkness are well known. I have found that after the first bracing moments, stepping into an ossified berm of shale, or what have you, when your hand appears ink-soaked and then invisible, and when sounds are suddenly so heightened that you can hear your blood rushing through your body, a release occurs, a lightness, and it is in this space that a great feeling arises. I can only wish that such a feeling has become available not just to those people you name, but to everyone. The shadow has made new experiences possible. In the end, it should not matter how deserving we are, and the people above should not be punished for their mistake. I would hate to think that only a lucky few of us could feel the safety of stone, protecting us from all sides, where we can let ourselves believe that beyond our private walls, another good person might be resting and waiting. If our sight was such that we saw only bodies, and not the stone and earth that encloses so many of our survivors, a floating web of people would appear before us, and such a diagram of the species, hovering there and breathing just fine, would be beautiful.

I
don’t think my mother will die today. It’s late at night already. She’d have to die in the next forty-five minutes, which doesn’t seem likely. I just saw her for dinner. We ordered in and watched a mystery on PBS. She kissed me good night and I took a taxi home. For my mother to die today, things would need to take a rapid turn.

My mother has her share of health troubles. She lives alone, which increases the likelihood of death. I could wake to a phone call and learn that she died shortly after I left her tonight. I’d like to say that the odds are against my mother dying today, since so much of the day has already passed. She needs only to survive at home, in her bed, for less than an hour, and then she will have lived through the day, proving me correct. But I don’t know enough about odds. It would seem to me that the underlying premise of death—the death of an old woman alone in her apartment—is that it does not participate in man-made conceits like odds. People are often said to beat the odds. But then, perhaps, whoever keeps the odds—if he or she is intelligent—must account in advance for the odds being beaten and adjust the odds accordingly. Odds keepers cannot be ignorant of the claim that the odds are often beaten. This must disturb them. And then would they not adjust the odds, in order to make the odds more accurate? I don’t know. Odds should be odds, and they should never be beaten. If they are, then the odds are incorrect and should be changed.

If my mother knew that she only needed to survive for under an hour—in order not to die today—would her chances of living increase? If I phoned her now and told her to hang on, so that she didn’t die today, would her odds change? In other words, does it increase our chance of survival if we consciously try to live? It wouldn’t seem likely, not that she’d even pick up the phone now. It is late at night. She is tired. She was even tired at dinner. When we watched our mystery, she fell asleep. The phrase for people of a certain age, in certain circumstances, is
nodded off
. My mother nodded off. I paid her the courtesy of not seeming to notice, even though I watched her sleep under her blanket on the reclining chair she loves. I noticed how her hair no longer moves, not even a strand of it, no matter what position she is in. She woke up throughout the broadcast, and she actually grasped more of the plot than I did. It is possible she’d seen this mystery before.

The people who work in kitchens, in castles in England, at least in the mysteries my mother and I watch, are far more intelligent than their employers. The kitchens are vast stone rooms with gorgeous pots hanging from hooks. Sometimes the difference in intelligence between employer and servant is striking, a fact my mother relies on for her solutions to the mystery.

I understand, of course, that these mystery stories are invented, but I also understand that the people who invent them are hopelessly bound to what they’ve seen and heard. As much as these people might dream of a kind of pure fabrication, imagining out of whole cloth an utterly new Victorian British society in which petty domestic crimes take place, they cannot do it. They hew, like it or not, to what has already happened, to what people have already done, and what people have already thought. In this case, working-class characters are functional geniuses compared to the slow-thinking, wealthy, overfed people who rule them. The popularity of their shows depends upon it. I depend upon it. My mother depends upon it. Even if, at times, while the shows play in her living room, she sleeps.

People are reluctant to admit that they have slept, particularly, perhaps exclusively, when they’ve done so in front of witnesses. Just when it would seem impossible to deny, people deny that they nodded off. A point of pride is perhaps involved. So I never confronted my mother with the fact that she had slept through the second act, even though I watched her sleeping, arguably more than I watched the mystery. Why would I harass her with the truth? I do my best not to watch my mother when she is sleeping. I think it is impolite. Yet sometimes I fail. When she is awake I do not get to watch my mother so carefully, for such extended periods of time. If it is impolite to stare at someone while they sleep, it is more so when they are awake, aware of your scrutiny. It is not only more impolite, it is essentially impossible to closely look at another person for a long time while they are awake. A code prevents it. I would never think of following her around, staring. I am generally aware of the things I should not do.

And yet the crime is the same: staring at another person. Awake or asleep should not matter, but clearly the fact of being seen while staring at a waking person aggravates the transgression. If a third person could be in the room while my mother nodded off and I stared at her, and this third person—not my father, obviously, oh, God, no—witnessed me staring at my sleeping mother, has my offense thus escalated? I do not know.

When I think of her sometimes forgetting her medicine, forgetting to eat much more than a rice cake, neglecting to drink water, I must wonder if my mother could live longer if only she tried.

Servants in the kitchen, especially the daftest ones who appear idiotic in the first act, end up being the most devious. Look out for the stupid ones, my mother will shout, whenever we watch a mystery. She wags a finger at me and smiles.

I try to get her to drink water and she says the water tastes awful. She feels she’s drinking water that someone soaked his teeth in, even if I have only just drawn the water from the tap. It tastes like a stranger’s mouth, she’ll yell. As if the water would be acceptable if only it tasted like the mouth of someone she knew. A person’s determination cannot—can it?—have too much to do with when they die, unless they are choosing to die, which is another topic. If determination played a role, allowing people to deliberately live longer, death would undergo a fundamental change, and people would exert their will in disruptive ways, living so long it would antagonize their families. I do not like to imagine the kinds of things that would happen in such a world where people could delay their own deaths.

On the other hand, there is a long history of people who, without moving a muscle, have fought for their lives. A person inert in a hospital bed, rigged to bags and lines, is referred to as a fighter. Upon observation, no visible fight can be detected. But a will to live is cited in these situations. The family, gathered at the bed, can detect it. Even when their loved one dies, they say she fought so hard. She was such a fighter. She put up an unbelievable fight.

Such circumstances have always concerned me, and not just tonight, as I wonder about my mother’s resolve to live at least until tomorrow, whether or not her resolve, as discussed, even comes into play.

If I am the patient in the hospital bed, and I am urged, even by a stranger, to fight for my life, will I know how to do it? It simply is not clear, has never been clear, how exactly one fights for one’s life, with no tools, no weapons, no training, no information whatsoever.

Even the doctors, standing there personally watching me die, will not tell me a thing about what I can do on my own, right now, to extend my life and not succumb to what is killing me. Why is this information kept secret? A stranger might cheer me on, exhort me to dig deep and fight—and I say stranger because I did not marry and my brother and sister have passed. A stranger would, by necessity, attend my bed. Or no one. No one is more likely. Why would a stranger stop in my room, stand at my bed, and exhort me to live? What kind of stranger does things like that? And if the answer is a good kind of stranger, I must wonder if it is then my duty, not tonight, because I am busy, but sometime soon, to enter a hospital at night and find a patient alone in his or her room, preferably a patient on the brink of death, and urge them to fight, and fight hard? I should strive to be a good stranger, is that not correct?

My mother, if she were able, would attend my bed, and possibly even urge me to fight for my life, although I cannot picture her issuing such a command without laughing. It is her stated idea that many things we know and say and feel are ridiculous. I would think that by the time I am in my hospital bed being urged to fight for my life, my mother will be dead. She will have already fought for her life and lost. But now, on the brink of death herself, though not today, I don’t think, I fear my mother is similarly in the dark. If I asked her to fight for her life, assuming a calamity brought her to the hospital, she might politely agree, if she could even speak, but to herself she would be forced to admit that she could not carry out such an action. The technique is beyond her. It has been beyond everyone in our family. None of us possess the skill to fight for our lives. One by one we pass away. If the known people of the world were ranked according to their ability to fight for their lives, my family would not score well.

I will hold my mother’s hand and ask her to please hang on. She will want to please me because she has always wanted to please me, and so she will agree to fight for her life, to please me, but when it comes to actually fighting for her life she will be baffled. She will have spent her entire life having no control whatsoever of what happens inside her body, with her blood and cells and bones, not to mention the organs and nerves, and now, eighty-six years into this seasoned indifference, allowing the insides of her body to conduct their own affairs, she will be urged to suddenly pay attention and control her body to such a degree that it does not die. How could anyone ask this of a frail old woman?

In the nature films the behavior is clear. When their lives are threatened, animals shoot through the grass, faster than they’ve ever run before, sometimes shitting out of fright, or they turn and crouch, meet the attack. When they fight for their lives there is compelling evidence, whereas people are meant to fight for their lives without moving, without showing the slightest effort. A strictly internal struggle, not even detectable by medical machinery.

The scullery maid often has a confidant. The confidant might be a beautiful homosexual man, who has his own tricks to play. Someone on the staff has access to the secrets of the wealthy family they work for but at the same time feels too much allegiance to betray them.

I must wonder if I am terribly wrong to think my mother will not die today.

Someone who could easily address the question of odds is my father. He was a statistician by profession. A probablist is the official term. The question regarding the odds of my mother dying today would be an elementary one for my father and his colleagues, most of whom came from India. A fertile country for mathematicians, my father reportedly said. Or, perhaps, only for probablists. My father passed away, so he cannot address the question, and I cannot refer to my father’s publications, some of which I have here with me, because they do not treat matters as elementary as these.

My mother’s odds of dying increase every moment of her life. Right now, sleeping in her bed, she has never in her entire life been in greater danger of dying. So it would seem to me that I shouldn’t be so secure in thinking she will not die today, not that I am particularly secure anymore, if only because it is more likely than ever that she will die right now. This statement, whenever I make it, will be true for the rest of her life. It will be true even if I do not make it. Even if I do not think this thought—that the danger my mother faces has never been greater—it will be true, which suggests to me that there are then likely many more thoughts I have not had, some of which are true. Many more. A tally of the thoughts I have not had would be impossible. Surely some of these thoughts I have failed to think bear down directly on the matter of my mother’s life and death. Of the many things I have failed to think, and within that category those thoughts that are also true, which of them, if only I could think them now, would reveal to me more about my mother and her prospects for survival today?

And, if I should not be secure in thinking that my mother won’t die today, it occurs to me that I would do well to return to her now, so that I might enjoy her company for her last moments alive.

You see, I aim to do what is right with regards to my mother and her last living days.

I need to consider this more carefully, though. By this reasoning, I would never be able to part from my mother again, since whenever I left her I would be doing so at the direst moment in her life when she was more likely than ever to pass away. This will be true, assuming my mother lives through the night, whenever I see her again. I would say good night, wish her well, and depart knowing that her risk of death was increasing while I walked away, while I left her apartment building, nodding to the doorman, and then walked the quiet side street to the busier avenue where the taxis gather. It would be difficult not to wonder at such times what kind of son walks away when his mother is in ever-greater danger of dying. Who does that? Kisses an old woman at her door, his own mother, knowing the whole time that she has never been in more danger?

It would appear that I do that. Every time I have left her, I have done that. If she lives through the night, I will do it again, take my leave knowing that even though yesterday her risk of dying was terribly high, today it has grown worse. It worsens as we speak, and still I must say good-bye to her as if I don’t care that she is in increasing danger of dying.

I did it to her as a child, too. I said good-bye and went to school. I said good-bye and went to camp. I said good-bye on a Saturday morning and who knows when I came home. When I did this, I left my mother dying. In doorways, in kitchens, in living rooms, on lawns. Sometimes even when she was sick with a cold in bed, I said good-bye from the bottom of the stairs, just as her chances of dying had peaked. I said good-bye and went to college, when she was even more likely to die. And when I came home to visit, it wasn’t long before I departed again, leaving her to die. Just as tonight, after watching a mystery on PBS, I said good night to my mother and left her at home to die.