[sic]: A Memoir (16 page)

(Although death
was
frightening for my father, who was my kind of guy, freaked out by the non-notion of nonbeing. The first time I saw him cry I was around ten; I was sitting on the burnt-orange carpeting of the second living room in the addition we’d built to our house—I can remember when it was still lawn—reading, believe it or not, an art book [this is becoming a recurring motif]. The picture windows looked out onto the back lawn, which was desaturated; it was autumn, afternoon, chilly. He was standing in the middle of the backyard, looking up at the leafless trees; there were crows huddling in the branches, but they weren’t calling, they were just sitting there. That was the moment, he said, he knew his mother was dying. He turned around and was crying. His mother was afraid of death, even to the point of asking him if he’d be willing to accompany her. He wasn’t willing. She felt betrayed. He felt guilty, betraying her, and also angry at her request. She died. He watched her die. He described the grimace on her face that turned into a smile, and he said from that moment on he had no fear of death. A couple of years later he collapsed in the kitchen; I was in an adjoining room. He’d snapped an incisor in half against a bone in a pork chop, and later he learned that this shock, mercifully perhaps, had triggered a minor aneurysm. Suddenly he wasn’t in the kitchen, but was on the banks of the river Styx, facing Charon, whom he described as having a face without features, and who did not speak, although his words were audible, physically; he could have sworn the air molecules were tickling his tympanic membrane. He said he was overwhelmed by an abiding calm, enveloped in warmth. Charon asked him if he wanted to get in the boat. He was a bit afraid to say no for fear of offending the poor boatkeeper, just as he had offended his mother; but he declined nonetheless. That’s fine, Charon said. Any time you want. Just know that we’re here for you, to take care of you. Now this is what he told me. Did he make all of this up, to reassure me? Or to reassure himself? Because when he really was about to die, he called me up from his place in Oceania, LA, and—opened-mouthed but wordless, unlike Charon, who spoke words with closed mouth—howled like a wild dog.)

But if my experience wasn’t frightening, it was—a banal word—sad. There were three things that were sad. There was the external world of, shall we say, appearances, like the appearances of the nurses at the door, the faces of de Kooning’s women. But the apparition of these faces seemed to rise slowly to the top of the field of vision: the crown of the heads were cropped, then the foreheads were gone.

Then there was my body, rapidly moving from uninhabitable to unimaginably uninhabitable; therefore taking leave of it was not only not marked by sadness but not entirely without, if not happiness, at least relief. It wasn’t exactly the rational wager of taking the chance that what was in store couldn’t be worse than this; but it was the recognition that, while not knowing what cards were in that hand that had yet to be turned over, it was now an impossible bet to refuse. In other words, more the feeling of an inevitable flow, a tremendous swell and rise.

Along with the sense of leaving the body was the sense of leaving the mind, feeling it recede. And then there was something new: I first saw it in a flash, but I kept going back to it: a smooth black form, floating in a dark red field, slowly rotating.

What was this thing? Where was it? Each time I saw it, it was easier to discern, as if it were lit by a gradually brightening light source on a dimmer. My mother’s face, then this thing, then Nothereal’s face, then this thing now slightly better lit than before: still the deepest black I’ve ever seen, but I could make out a texture on its surface I’d previously held to be as smooth as the surface of undisturbed water, as sheer as a shard of glass cleanly broke. I knew what it was. I recognized it, floating there innocently, suspended. It was the most familiar thing in the world. Funny it was black. When I was around twelve, I’d say, I was surprised to discover, among the thousands of books in my father’s library, a book of testimonials of near-death experiences: I was surprised because the book seemed so vulgar. A remarkable number of interviews reported the same thing on the threshold of death: a diffuse white light, an infusion of warmth, an inundating sense of comfort. (A small chapter was given to botched suicides: a remarkable number of subjects reported the overwhelming feeling of having committed a profound breach of metaphysical protocol. Again, how vulgar.) But mine was black, not white. It was there, then my mother was there, then it again, then Nothereal. Like how a movie is edited. Music is the least representational of the arts, and movies are the most. Or are they? Kubrick said once that if one were to compare witnessing a car crash (or some other violent catastrophe visited upon a person, assumedly) to witnessing its representation in any medium, the film version would be the closest to the original; but he also said film adds nothing to the arts that’s not already there—except editing, that’s unique to the movies and you can’t find an analogue to editing in any of the other media. And how we edit our lives. My near-death experience was edited, cutting between the thing slowly rotating and the hospital room; and when I was in grade school, in the classroom, I would easily become bored and restless, particularly in the afternoons, and I would pass the time by “editing” a scene together by employing the six extraocular muscles to switch between the cardinal positions of the gaze, at varying rhythms: between the teacher and the students, say, at different speeds. The teacher’s droning monologue wouldn’t change, but the difference between staring at her for a whole minute and switching like wildfire between the faces of my comatose classmates—I remember marveling at how this simple choice could change the meaning of what was going on, marveling at how good the actors were, thinking that if a film featured performances this strong and subtle it would be by far the greatest film ever made. The hospital was like this, but not through choice. The views of the black shape were longer in duration now, the views of my mother’s face, or Nothereal’s, shorter. At first I thought this trend—in music you’d call it a gradual process applied to rhythm—was illusory, a trick of the mind. But no, it was definitely happening. Each time I saw the black shape, it lingered longer than the last, it was closer, and the light source clearly divulged the texture of its surface, not smooth, inscribed, scarred, with traces of being impacted by love, hope, sex, dreams, laughter, joy, loneliness, sex and sex and sex. It wasn’t my body and it wasn’t my mind, but it bore abrasions from contact with my body and my mind; it was beautiful; it was capable of producing beauty. I beheld it with awe and grief and gratitude. “You’re going to be fine,” someone said, distantly, in the hospital room. I was seeing less and less of the hospital room. I was losing my body and my mind, and I was approaching this thing—not the body nor the mind—and I wasn’t quite ready but there wasn’t time to get ready, so I realized I was ready.

I briefly studied ancient Greek, and there’s a word in Greek,
ψυχ
η
´
, transliterated into English as “psyche,” which has been variously translated, often as “spirit,” but what’s important is that the word is derived from a verb meaning “to cool, to blow” like a breeze.

I might parenthetically add at this point that there was an unfortunate period in my life and in the life of a woman I loved and who loved me, and we were living together in Paris and were happy and unhappy at the same time, because we loved each other but could not trust each other for reasons too complex to describe here and perhaps elsewhere. We had enjoyed many conversations—in different cities, sometimes in planes, once, while driving across a black bridge, as the sun was sinking—but we had somewhere along the line acquired the unfortunate habit of accidentally, yes, accidentally catching glimpses of each other’s notebooks, the ancient Greek equivalent of accidentally, yes, accidentally running across an e-mail or a text message addressed to someone other than oneself. In essence we had designed a perverse epistolary correspondence that ran its course on a stratum parallel to that of verbal communication, and the tension between these strata was seismic in its sudden short shifts and rumblings. One morning when she was in the shower I glimpsed a phrase in her lovely, smooth as sandalwood penmanship:

—
The wind of the senses

O what gorgeous minds we had. I was sleeping with someone she knew and she was sleeping with a friend of mine, and I realized with a start that she was quoting me, quoting a phrase she had accidentally glimpsed in one of my notebooks I had accidentally left open like a mouth that opens in order to cry out. She had quoted me out of rue and spite and above all envy. But in her haste and, I’m certain, fear of being discovered, she’d gotten the quote wrong. What I had written (emphasis mine [I mean it’s mine now, it wasn’t there then]) was,

—
The wind
beneath
the senses

which isn’t better, just different—but for our purposes, more apt. For this is what I saw: the black form of the cooling
ψυχ
η
´
, the breath of the wind beneath the senses.

Meanwhile, the hospital staff was trying to save my life. My mother’s record:

I am horrified when Dr. Q. says to Joshua, in a rather demanding/threatening/curt tone, “What day is it today?” (I didn’t even know what day it was!) Joshua replies, Wednesday. In fact, it’s early Thursday. Then Dr. Q. continues, in this matter-of-fact tone: “Who is the President of the United States?” Joshua just looks at him in a confused state. As do I. He says to the doctor, “I don’t think I can answer any more questions right now. Could we do this on another day?” He begins to cry.

I’m holding my tongue, but furious that Joshua is being subjected to some kind of interrogation. And all of these “white coats” surrounding him. It is very intimidating. And I look at Joshua and he looks just like my husband. It is a moment of some kind of special “out-of-body” experience, this father-son relationship, and I am shaken by it. I begin to cry. I am “seeing” my husband and know he suffered when he died. I am overwhelmed by emotion, confusion, by—I don’t know what. I started to cry. A young nurse sees me and tries to comfort me and I am angry and cannot be comforted. I tell her to leave me alone, which she does, reluctantly. My heart is breaking over so many things: Joshua’s pain, his being hit by this obscene disease, his incredible courage in being a good and cooperative patient, in his tolerating a situation which never should have happened to this beautiful and good young man, the medications which do not seem to be helping . . . so many things. All I know is that I am furious with God.

And apparently I was calling out for my father. And I don’t remember saying this, but I said to my mother,

—Oh, this is the last place I’ll ever see.

It’s interesting that I used the word “place.” I was referring to the hospital room. But I remember thinking that the hospital room—the place—was not the last
thing
I would ever see. I remember the hospital room disappearing, and then I was alone with the beautiful, beckoning, softly curved, black
ψυχ
η
´
within the red field. It was very close now. There were rivulets, webs of parched canals, that reflected the light like insect wings. A Babylonian stele, the underside of a beetle or scarab. Nothing viewed from such proximity could possibly be smooth. And there was no doubt that its slow, pulsating rhythm had been perfectly timed, perfectly leading up to this moment, like Debussy’s use of time, the perfection of that. I couldn’t see my mother and I couldn’t see Nothereal, but they could see me, and here’s the very real sense in which regarding the suffering of others is worse than experiencing one’s own suffering; it was I who was spared seeing them.

•

THEN ONE OF
the millions of random meds they’d been pumping into my body this whole time kicked in, and I was back in the hospital room feeling pretty much fine—horrible but normal horrible, not incomprehensibly unendurably horrible—and Nothereal’s stunning beauty was tearstudded, crying in relief. I think I was too. That was the moment I knew I’d make it through, and I didn’t think about the
ψυχ
η
´
for a good long while; there must be some mechanism that kicks in, at that point, so that you don’t think about the
ψυχ
η
´
, for a good long while.

I did not want to die: I still don’t want to die: I did
not
like not yet having been born.

•

A MERE FEW
pages later into my mother’s journal we find this:

Josh says “something feels very positive”

•

(LATER MY MOTHER
would write:

I tell Dr. Q. that I was unkind to the young nurse who tried to comfort me in the foyer, that I need to see her, to apologize to her. He finds her for me. I ask her to forgive me. I hug her. I cry, and I tell her I hope she never, once she has children, ever has to see her child so sick. She is sweet and lovely, tells me she understands, tells me she will check in on us all day long (which she does). I tell her I am lucky to have her with us. I say to her, “forgive me.”)