The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld (27 page)

I
n late October I head for a twelve-step meeting for artists, hoping to talk out my decision, even if it’s with strangers. It’s located downtown, in a LGBTQ advocacy center. I walk in and the place is mostly empty, except for a volunteer who points me toward the third floor. Walking upstairs, I pass a gorgeous Latina woman with thick black hair, pouty lips, a masculine jawline. Something happens when we pass—we both turn around, take each other in.

I make it to the third floor, but the place is a labyrinth. I wander around, looking for the right room, until I see the woman coming back up the stairwell, apparently looking for me. I turn and walk the other way, heart racing. I duck into the men’s room, thinking I might lose her there, close myself in a stall.

Attiq doesn’t answer his phone when I call; wanting to avoid detection, I don’t leave a message.

Then the bathroom door opens.

High heels click across the tiled floor.

She opens the stall next to mine, enters.

Her feet look like women’s feet—women’s feet here in the men’s room.

I’m sweating now, feeling simultaneously aroused and sick. I’m still making the difficult transition onto Celexa. Still wracked with indecision and at what amounts to the all-time low point in my life, when I’ve never wanted a moment of connection so badly—I imagine how it will feel, like swallowing an Ativan, how all my problems will evaporate for a few minutes of bliss. This cold collision in my head—between Portland and New York, man and woman, wanting to live and wanting to die, hope and no hope, God and no god, Ishmael and Ahab—comes to some kind of violent, jackknifing apex, and I want so badly to make contact, to crack through the thick ice of my paralysis with just one moment of blowtorch heat.

Then someone else enters the room.

In response, the woman in heels clicks back out the door.

This new visitor wears a pair of nineteenth-century fisherman’s boots, the aged leather creased with brine, soles worn thin by hard, remorseless service and his world-weary gait.

He too takes the stall next to mine, but remains standing and impenetrably silent. And I sit there beside him, missing the entire meeting, the whole room bleary beneath a saltwater tide that keeps rising and rising and rising, the force so strong I fear it might drown me completely.

I finally get myself collected, stumble out of the building and onto the street, where my phone rings. I tell Attiq what happened, that I can’t make up my mind about anything. That I’m afraid I might be completely losing it. He says he’ll have to call me back.

I buy some tea and sit in the park, still feeling dizzy, nauseous. He calls back, says there’s something he wants to do for me, that I should meet him in an hour at a museum on the west side.

I take the train to Seventeenth and Seventh, to the Rubin Museum, an unassuming building that houses a large collection of Buddhist and Himalayan art. Attiq doesn’t arrive for another twenty minutes, so I sit and listen to a group playing Indian music beneath a spiral staircase—one man on sitar and another on tabla, streaming out rich, soothing melodies and rhythms. There’s a trickling fountain in the lobby, the smell of frankincense and chai tea.
Breathe
, I tell myself.

Attiq arrives and takes a seat at the table I’ve saved in the museum café. He asks me what’s happening, so I tell him what I’ve already told him, six or seven times—that I’m paralyzed with indecision, that I can’t figure out whether to stay or go, that I don’t think New York is healthy for me, but I also don’t want to take what they call in twelve steps a “geographical cure.” That I’ve always wanted to live in Portland, but I’m scared to move there for a low-paying job with no health insurance and Karissa’s impending marriage. He listens quietly, as usual, trying not to appear alarmed as my mind continues to split itself down the middle.

Until he stops me.

“Listen,” he says. “We can sit here and have this conversation, and you’ll just talk yourself in circles all night, like you’ve been talking yourself in circles for the past month. So I want to try something different.”

He takes me up to the café counter, where he buys us both large bowls of asparagus and shrimp soup with French bread on the side. And two steaming cups of tea.

“I’d like this to be a silent meal,” he says. He tells me to pay attention to every bite of my food, every sip of tea. And to feel gratitude for it all, for the sun that grew the asparagus, for the soil and rain that fed it, for the clouds that created the rain and the ocean that created the clouds. For the people who prepared the food and the families who raised them. He tells me to feel gratitude for the fact that we have homes as winter approaches, that we have so much abundance right here in front of us. And he instructs me to listen for my inner voice, to hear what it tells me.

“We’ll take our time,” he says, “and then we’ll go upstairs.”

I follow his instructions. Savor every spoonful of what tastes like the best soup I’ve ever eaten. I take deep breaths in between sips, and feel, maybe for the first time in weeks, a sense of calm, silence. And from that silence comes a small voice, the same one from my bathroom back in Colorado.

The message is clear now:
It’s time for you to go
.

After eating, we walk silently up the spiral staircase to a sunken alcove with red meditation cushions and walls covered with paintings of deities—gold deities, red deities, black deities, deities with many heads stacked on one another like a totem pole, deities with multiple arms. A crimson demigod drinking blood from a cup. Teachers and saints floating on stylized clouds above mist-ribboned mountains.

Attiq asks me to sit down. He instructs me to close my eyes, take deep breaths.

“Listen to what they have to tell you,” he says. “If you ask, they’ll answer.”

I’m well beyond irony now, willing to try anything, even begging assistance from a bunch of old paintings.

The response is different than it was downstairs; instead of one voice I now experience a convocation of voices, but it’s not crowded or chaotic—they’re all saying the same thing, that it’s time for me to go.

What if I get to Portland and have a total breakdown?
I ask.

The answer is clear:
Your breakdowns have always been breakthroughs
.

What about Karissa?
I ask. At this there is laughter; a voice explains that I’m not to worry, that I’ll meet a girl who does yoga and surfs. This strikes me as fucking ridiculous, but I remind myself that this is just me talking to myself—that yes, maybe I’m channeling some kind of disembodied spirits here, but mostly this is just me—my own inner wisdom—leading me back west.

It’s okay
, the voices say.
It’s really time for you to go
.

Attiq walks me outside, where I explain what happened and thank him for this kind thing he’s done for me. In my months of agonizing over this decision, he’s the first to not give me direct advice, to instead create a situation in which I could guide myself.

“It seems like you manifested this job,” he says. “And you’ll get into recovery out there. It’s not just in New York. Recovery is everywhere.”

He instructs me not to talk about what just transpired, not to process it too much or get back in my old ratio cerebral Ping-Pong game. He tells me to buy some incense, listen to some calming music. Sleep on it.

We hug good-bye and I watch him cross the street toward the West Village, walking with his slight limp, dressed in his orange cap and his fleece vest, until finally I lose sight of him in the crowd.

I
n
The Odyssey
’s eleventh book, Odysseus descends into the underworld, where he consults with the soul of the prophet Teiresias, in order that he might find out how to get back to Ithaca—that after such a long battle, he may finally reach home.

Teiresias asks for a blood sacrifice, and once he is appeased, he and a host of spirits tell Odysseus what he must do.

T
he next day, I tell my therapist what happened at the Rubin Museum, that I think I’ve made up my mind.

He looks at me like I’m crazy. He doesn’t like the idea of me hearing voices, even though I’ve explained that they were inner voices, a form of channeling, maybe, and nothing like aural hallucinations. But still he launches in with a line of questioning I know is designed to determine if I’m bipolar.
Do I have bursts of energy? Have I ever gone more than three nights without sleep? Do I ever have racing thoughts, grandiose ideas?

“I know where you’re going with this,” I say, “and I’m not bipolar. I’ve never had anything close to a manic episode. The problem here is that you’re totally unwilling to accept the validity of mystical experience. You and me sitting here, this whole conversation is like a microcosm of the shortcomings of Western medicine. I tell you I just had this subtle transformative experience that finally helped me make up my mind, and you start trying to
diagnose
me. But it’s a moot point,” I say, “because I’m leaving New York.”

Though I tell my therapist I’m going, I don’t truthfully find the inner resolve to leave until Thanksgiving—more than two and a half months after accepting the Portland job—when my father and stepmother come to visit me in New York. Having family around buoys my courage, especially when my father offers to make the cross-country drive with me.

He helps me pack up my truck, strap my surfboard on top, and together we begin the three-thousand-mile trip back west, driving through the aftermath of a Midwestern ice storm that transformed all the tree limbs and fence posts into sharpened, sun-glinting harpoons, and where I’m surprised to find myself unnerved by so many miles of barren, un occupied space.

I
drop my father off in Colorado and pick up my stepfather, Jerry, who makes the second half of the drive with me. Somewhere in Wyoming we begin hearing unsettling news reports about a California family that went missing deep in the wilderness of southern Oregon.

As night falls in western Wyoming, Jerry and I pass a string of oil refineries, like some dark vision of Hades, fire spouting out smokestacks, feeding on the night air, releasing a dull chemical stench. In the “Try-Works” section of
Moby-Dick
, Melville describes the American whale ship as a kind of floating factory, complete with a furnace—a “try-works”—for rendering whale blubber into oil. During a night watch, Ishmael finds himself mesmerized by the hellish scene of the “savage” harpooners tending the try-works. It occurs to him that “the rushing Pequod … laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.” As it occurs to me, nearly two centuries later, that this monolithic Wyoming refinery is the material counterpart of Dick Cheney’s soul, George Bush’s soul, the light and dark soul of America. Of my own soul as I drive in a gas-powered vehicle toward an uncertain future. But as Ishmael warns, “Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me.”

J
erry and I roll into Portland around noon on a gray day in early December. We drive down Hawthorne Boulevard, toward my new rented room, not far from my stepbrother and his family’s home. My friends have all assured me that Portland is not that small, that the likelihood of bumping into Karissa is slim. But I haven’t been in the city for more than five minutes when she sends me a text.

I just saw your truck drive by! Welcome to town:)

As it turns out, the hair salon where she works is located five blocks from my new house.

I’m tempted to flip a U-turn, drive myself and all my shit straight back to Brooklyn.

Jerry takes me out to lunch, orders some tea to help calm me down. It’s pouring outside now, and the cover of the
Oregonian
shows a surfer riding a thirty-foot storm swell down at Lincoln City. Below that is a follow-up to the headline news about the lost California family. They’ve finally been located—it turns out they got their car stuck in the snow on a remote back road, and the wife and children lived in this vehicle for days, burning the tires for warmth, rationing out energy bars and bottled water.

All except for the husband, who made the choice to leave his family, wander out in the snowy woods in nothing but tennis shoes, jeans, and a rain jacket, searching for help.

It wasn’t the right decision.

A
fter four years in Bequia, my uncle John and aunt Ann moved to Seattle to raise their children. By the mid eighties, though, they craved more adventure, so they took my cousins out of school for a humanitarian mission to Sri Lanka. Their plan was to spend a year or more building a water system for a small village. But soon after their arrival, civil war broke out between the Tamil Tigers and government forces. The U.S. Embassy advised my uncle to leave, but after the Red Cross gave him a special sticker for the family’s van—allowing them access to remote villages where they could deliver much-needed food and supplies to refugees—he decided to stay on.

They witnessed suffering and atrocities, but they survived the civil strife and helped hundreds of people. Things were going along okay—that is, until my uncle’s ocean obsession got the best of him. Down at the local harbor, he discovered a deal on a sailboat he couldn’t resist. His plan was to fix it up and eventually take his family cruising in the South Seas. Not long after he finished rebuilding the derelict craft, though, armed forces came aboard and located two handguns hidden up in the hold, likely left there by the former owner.

My uncle was thrown into a cramped prison cell with concrete floors and a bucket for a toilet, which he had to share with five other inmates. Within a week of his incarceration, infectious conjunctivitis rendered him practically blind; he developed a terrible case of dysentery and lost more than thirty pounds. He was so sick that he found himself wishing for death, but another prisoner was kind to him, helped nurse him back to health. Once my uncle regained his vision, this man drew all the Hindu deities on slips of paper for him. He taught John their names: Shiva the lord of destruction, Kali the Destroyer, Vishnu the Preserver, Ganesh the elephant god, Hanuman the monkey god.