The Great Good Thing (16 page)

But the madness had another side, equally tormenting. Something in me must have been horrified by the violence bubbling up in me. It set off an answering explosion of guilt and shame. My mind began to punish me with rampant hypochondria. It took me over entirely. I'd never experienced anything like it before. I would find a mark on my skin, an irregularity in my flesh, and I'd become certain it was cancer. I would lie awake each night in a cold sweat of fear. Each day, I would discover some new symptom that convinced me I was dying. After a while, I could barely think of anything else but the disease I knew I had. I would go to work and sit at my desk for hours without producing so much as a usable paragraph. Probing my own flesh. Fretting. Afraid.

What a wreck I was! Rage, guilt, terror. My heart was hell. The pain was so intense, I abandoned my agnosticism for an eccentric, puling spirituality. I prayed wildly for help to a god I didn't believe in. I grew mystic and weird. I would try to mentally cast myself out of myself, to project my soul into a
tree or a stone in order to separate myself from my own pain. Sometimes, amazingly enough, it actually worked. My mind would seem to travel elsewhere. The agony of anger and fear would subside. For a few minutes. A few hours maybe. Then it all came back: rage, guilt, terror. What a wreck.

The strangest part of all this was that I didn't realize how abnormal it was. My psyche was crumbling like a ruined tower in some gothic romance and I thought it was just the way things were. After all, I had always had periods of depression and mental difficulty. The Bola—it was just part of me. Wasn't that the way things were for any honest-thinking man in this existential horror show of a world? To think is to suffer, isn't it? To think is to know the nearness of death, to understand the ambivalence of love, to carry the weight of tragedy on your shoulders. Isn't it? Isn't that what it means to be an artist and intellectual?

I didn't know that this was madness. I thought that it was life.

So in the midst of this lunacy, I just trudged on. I worked every day. I went on reading through my stacks of books. My bank account dwindled, but I always managed to avoid absolute zero with some freelance gig or other. My wife and I wanted children, so we simply went ahead with our plans and Ellen got pregnant. That only made our situation more impossible, of course. We both wanted Ellen to be an at-home mother, and my income was nowhere near enough to support us in that.

At one point, it actually occurred to me that—hey, since I'd always wanted to write suspense stories—maybe I ought
to dash one off. I would do it under a pseudonym, of course. It wasn't part of my real work of salvific revelation. It was just a way to make some money. I plotted out the novel carefully then enlisted one of my younger brothers, Laurence, a talented playwright, to help me. He and I pounded out the first hundred pages in three days. We not only sold it—the first check arrived as my bank balance dropped to mere pennies—we won the Edgar Award for best paperback mystery and got a movie deal as well. In my heart of hearts, I knew that telling such stories was my gift. I was just too magnificent to stoop to using it.

I don't know how long I would have gone on like this. I've seen people waste their whole lives mired in this kind of psychic trouble. This is just the way I am, they think. This is just the way life is. Maybe I got lucky, or maybe my wild, mystic, lunatic prayers were heard. But finally something happened that, quite literally, opened my eyes to the truth of my situation.

One day during this period, I went fishing at a local reservoir with a friend. He and I went out on a rowboat together and worked the water through dawn into early morning. My friend was a Texas-bred yarn-spinner. As we sat in the boat, he began to tell me a long story about an airplane mechanic. The mechanic, he said, had been lying on his back under a plane's wing working with a screwdriver. The mechanic got distracted—I don't remember how—and the tool slipped from his fingers. It fell on him point downward and poked out his eye. Naturally, the story made a deep impression on my delicate hypochondriacal nerves.

A few weeks later, I was assembling a new writing desk in
my attic workspace. Ellen was sitting in my swivel chair, chatting with me to keep me company. I was lying on my back under the desk, tightening up the drawer slide with a screwdriver. The phone rang and I crawled out from under the desk to answer it.

A familiar voice on the other end of the line brought me disturbing news. One of my brothers had had an emotional breakdown. There had been a dramatic scene. The crisis had passed. He was seeing a psychiatrist. All would be well.

I said the appropriate words and hung up the phone. I told my wife what had happened. We both felt sorrow for my brother, but we assured each other everything would be all right. I climbed back under the desk, lay on my back again, and went on tightening the drawer slide with my screwdriver.

But in a few more moments, my hand began to shake. My fingers went weak. The screwdriver slipped from my grasp and fell toward my face, point down. It struck me just beneath the orbit of the eye, right on the hard edge at the top of the cheekbone. Then it tumbled harmlessly to the floor.

With that, realization opened in me like a flower. I suddenly saw how broken I was. All this time, despite the arguments with my father, despite his unkindness to me and my anger at him, despite my mother's disengagement and distance, despite the violence and anxiety of my school days, despite my long retreat into fantasy, I had tried to tell myself I had had a happy childhood in a happy family. I had tried to tell myself my suffering was just a normal part of a thinking man's life. I had tried to tell myself that my inability to sell my unreadable work was the world's fault.

My brother's pain dispelled all those illusions in a moment. In him, I saw myself, and I realized I was wrong. It was all wrong. My childhood had been miserable. My upbringing had been twisted and hostile. My view of myself was delusional. My view of reality was completely unreal. This wasn't life. This wasn't ordinary life at all. Something was wrong inside me. Something was terribly wrong.

I recovered the screwdriver. I slowly climbed out from under the desk. I tossed the tool down on the desktop, my hand still shaking. I looked at my wife.

“It's not just my brother,” I said. “It's me too. I need help.”

I
have lived two lives. That was the ending of the first: that screwdriver falling. Within days, I had made an appointment with a psychiatrist in Manhattan. What followed was a miracle of recovery, a swift, dramatic, and absolute transformation from one way of being to another. I sometimes like to joke that I've seen many men go mad, but I'm the only person I've ever met who has gone sane. It's not really a joke, though. Sigmund Freud is often quoted describing the psycho-therapeutic process as a journey from “hysterical misery to ordinary unhappiness.” My journey was different: it was a passage from suicidal despair to a fullness of vitality and joy I had not even thought to imagine.

While now I look back on this period and see Christ within it everywhere, at the time, on the surface, he was apparent only in hints and whispers. This was—or seemed—an entirely secular conversion. But it was this conversion that made my
ultimate conversion to Christianity possible, and maybe inevitable, because it freed me to trust my own perceptions and reasoning. As long as I was in mental disarray, as long as my actions were self-destructive, as long as my outlook was deluded, any faith I thought to have, any idea of God I formed, seemed to me by definition unreliable, the comforting illusion of a mind in pain. As long as religion might even appear to serve me as an emotional crutch, I dismissed it as a form of weakness. It was only when I felt certain that my inner life was healthy and my understanding was sound that I could begin to accept what experience and logic had been leading me to believe. For others, I know it was Christ who led them to joy. For me, it was joy that led me to Christ.

These crossroad years, these five years of therapy, were emotionally dramatic. They were full of sudden and consequential insights, unexpected thunderclaps of comprehension that permanently changed the way I thought and lived. There were so many of them, I'm almost afraid to set them down here all together. I'm afraid I'll come across as even loopier than I was, some sort of flighty mystic leaping from inspiration to inspiration like a celestial ballet dancer leaping from cloud to cloud. It wasn't like that, though. I was just a writer making his way, a little slowed by personal damage, a little late to the game. But a writer, to find his voice, must first find himself. I found myself in an electric season of growth and transition, and the discovery was marked by this rapid series of revelations.

I'm going to make a catalogue of those epiphanies here, because they were not only the souvenirs of my journey to
sanity, they were the prized relics I carried with me into a better time. I referred back to them continually in the years that followed. I studied them carefully. They became the basis for the way I thought and for the things I thought. Ultimately, I came to believe they were not so much a series of revelations as fragments of a single revelation, spread out along the five-year path. In effect, I would spend the next decade learning to put those fragments together in their proper arrangement. Only then did I see the meaning of the greater epiphany complete.

A year or two after I entered therapy, I found myself sitting alone at my desk in the late hours of a spring night. I was trying to decide whether or not to end my life. It was the last time I would ever think of killing myself, but it was the worst time; the darkest. I had never considered the idea quite so seriously before.

My wife and I had moved back to Manhattan. We had a baby daughter, Faith. I had a low-level job at a movie studio: not much money, but a steady paycheck with benefits and a flexible schedule that left me plenty of time to write. Ellen and I were both taking freelance work, too, so we were getting by. We had a pleasant one-bedroom apartment in midtown. The neighborhood was good and the rent was low. But it was a small place for a family of three. We had to wall off a dining alcove as a nursery. And our bedroom had to serve double duty as my office, which frequently discommoded my ever-patient and supportive wife.

I was locked away in the office-bedroom that miserable midnight. I was sitting at the same desk I'd been building when I dropped the screwdriver a year and a half before. I had gone in there to work, as I usually did in the evenings, but my work was over now. The baby was in her crib and Ellen was asleep on the living room sofa. I had poured myself a drink—I kept a bottle in the desk drawer like the private eyes did in my favorite novels. I had turned off every light except a desk lamp. I had the radio on, tuned to a baseball game, the volume low. I was just sitting there in the dark, staring into the shadows, smoking cigarette after cigarette, taking an occasional sip of scotch.

I felt a brutal weight of sorrow in me—sorrow and self-pity, a toxic blend. I was a burden to my family, I thought. I thought:
My wife and daughter would be better off without me.
I don't know now how serious I was. Serious enough. I was reviewing the various methods by which I might end it all. Walking off the roof of the building seemed the easiest way. I was pretty sure I had the courage for it. I was even beginning to make plans for when I might do it.

One sentence kept repeating itself in my mind, one refrain:
I don't know how to live. I don't know how to live . . .

Most suicidal people don't do the deed when their mood is lowest. They're too depressed. They don't have the energy to act so decisively. It's when they start to feel better—that's when the real danger arises. And I had been feeling better this last year or so, much better off and on. But the therapy that was helping me was painful too. I could only afford to see
my psychiatrist once a week, but the process was on my mind every day, every hour, and the obsessive self-exploration was exposing parts of my past and my psyche I would have much rather left hidden away. Plus I still had no real idea of how to get along in the world, how to achieve the things I wanted, the career I wanted, the good life I wanted for my wife and child. I could not find a way to use my particular talents as a writer to convey the vision I wanted to convey. My writing career, such as it had ever been, had ground to a complete halt. I hadn't had a serious publication in almost five years.

Then, earlier that day, there'd been a bitter little incident; just a small thing, but cruelly calibrated to unbalance me. I was walking across town, downhearted, lost in my own melancholy reverie, when I glanced up and spotted the famous editor who had published my first novel. He was on the same sidewalk as I was, coming right toward me. Jarred out of my meditations, I wasn't quick enough to realize that he had already seen me and was trying to walk past with his eyes averted, trying to avoid a meeting. Reflexively, I called out hello. He stopped, but only for a second. He was brusque and dismissive, even disdainful. Stone-faced, he said a word or two, then quickly walked on. Like every other editor on the planet, he wanted nothing to do with me. It was a little thing, as I say. But I was already fragile with depression and it broke my heart.

So I came home at the end of the day. I dutifully finished my work. I sat there at my desk with my cigarettes and my scotch, my ballgame and my shadows and my sorrow. I sank into the depths of my anguish and I despaired.

What I didn't know, what I couldn't see, was that it was almost over: this difficult time; I was almost through it. I was already past the most painful phase of my therapy. I would soon experience a series of remarkable breakthroughs. My depression would lift for good, and the past would begin to lose its insidious grip on me. At that black, black moment, I was inches away, just inches away, from finding a light of true peace and gladness within myself.

Within weeks, the first hint of a change in my professional fortunes would make its way to me too. I would win a small poetry prize—a hundred dollars and publication—for a long poem I had distilled, ironically enough, from the transfiguration scene in my disastrous Jesus novel
.
Again, not a big deal, but a legitimate sign that I was finally starting to find my voice, finally starting to figure out how to say what I wanted to say in a way people could understand. Very soon after that, I would read a novel that would complete that process, changing the trajectory of my work and restoring me to my original purposes.
The Woman in White
by Wilkie Collins is a Victorian thriller so brilliant that some scholars suspect it was heavily rewritten by Collins's good friend and publisher Charles Dickens. Two-thirds of the way through reading the book, I would literally sit up in bed with the shock of understanding. I would suddenly see, like looking through a clock to the clockwork, the mechanics of how the thrilling stories I loved to write could convey whatever vision of the world I had. The moment would mark the beginning of my career; it would be the making of it.

It was all right there, a good life, a joyful life, the life I hungered for, so close to me, a footstep in time, as I sat there at my desk and considered suicide, thinking the same words over and over again:
I don't know how to live
.

The baseball game on the radio was a Mets game. I'd been a Yankees fan all my life, but the Yanks were in the doldrums this year and the Mets had assembled an exciting roster of players. I'd become fascinated by them. I identified with them, especially with the two veterans who led the team. They were a mismatched pair. Their contrary personalities seemed to represent something of importance to me. One, Keith Hernandez, the first baseman, was a dark, brooding, cigarette-smoking man-on-the-town type, a student of Civil War history, and a Gold Glove student of the game. Away from the stadium, he was involved in a divorce and a drug scandal. But I loved the thinking man's way he had reinvented the defensive work of the infield. When I began to experiment with my first crime novels after reading
The Woman in White
, I would use the name Keith as part of my pseudonym.

The other player, the catcher Gary Carter, was Hernandez's opposite, a sunny, upbeat, gung-ho future Hall-of-Famer who never stopped grinning and liked to refer to himself as “the Kid.” Carter was a clean-living Christian, and a loud-mouth about it. During postgame interviews, he would frequently thank the Lord Jesus for a victory or a home run. He once said that he could see the interviewer's smile curdle whenever he did it. I could see it, too, and, in all honesty, I always sympathized with the interviewer. I considered Carter's exuberant
faith a character flaw. It embarrassed me. To paraphrase the cynical hero of one of my own novels: Whenever I heard someone say
Jesus
as if he really meant it, it made my skin crawl, as if they'd said
squid
or
intestine
instead. The rest of the Mets, a talented assembly of scoundrels and troublemakers, openly hated the Kid for his relentlessly clean-cut cheer. But I liked the guy. His all-out play inspired me.

Now, as I sat at my desk in a cloud of smoke and self-pitying sadness, the announcer on the radio described Carter stepping up to bat. It was a crucial moment in a close game. There were men on base in scoring position. Carter smacked a grounder to the outfield. A notoriously slow runner because of his bad knees, he took off down the line as fast as he could. Somehow he managed to beat the throw to first. The single scored the winning runs. It was an exciting moment, but I was barely listening. I hardly cared. I just went on thinking:
I don't know how to live. I don't know how to live.

When the game was over, the on-field reporter corralled Carter for a postvictory interview. The reporter asked how the catcher was able to run so fast when his knees were so badly damaged from years of squatting behind home plate. If, in that moment, Carter had done his Jesus routine, if he had praised Christ or sung hallelujah, I don't think his comments would have reached me at all. I think I would have grimaced and shuddered at his happy-talk piety. Then I would have shrugged it off and gone on toying with the notion of self-murder.

But tonight, for some reason—for some reason—Carter
decided to leave the religious stuff out of it. Instead, he answered very simply. He said, “Sometimes you just have to play in pain.”

The words jarred me instantly out of my depressive reverie. I remember blinking in the shadows as if waking up. I remember slowly turning my gaze from the empty darkness to the radio. I remember repeating the sentence silently to myself
.
It seemed to me for all the world as if Carter had heard my thoughts as I sat there. It seemed to me he had heard me thinking,
I don't know how to live
, and had responded over the airwaves with the only honest answer there is.

Sometimes you just have to play in pain.

I nodded in the darkness, my eyes growing damp. I thought:
Yes. That's right. That's it exactly. And I can do that too. I can play in pain. If I have to. I know I can. That's something I actually know how to do.