I am the firstborn son of a firstborn son, I am left-handed, half-Jewish, half-European, an Aries with Scorpio rising, smart, born to every advantage in life. When I am not thinking clearly enough, I believe I control the universe, because that impossibility is carved into me. It’s like a scar. To say I don’t smacks of weakness, not lucidity. And this isn’t because I think I am so powerful, but because I regret I’m too weak to save my mother.
My mom is smart enough to say that she never asked for saving. All those times she said you create your own reality, she hedged her bets with a little irony but—ironically—she was right. She did create her own reality.
If you were to ask my mother what she thinks of me, she would say she’s proud of me. I’m a put-down artist. She loves me completely and I am spiteful and I am bitter. She wonders if I still play my flute. (I played the flute in 1973.)
She would tell you I am heartless, arrogant, and spoiled. I didn’t invite her to my wedding, which is true. I show my pets more consideration than I show her. I view her as an inconvenience. I’m condescending, judgmental, cold, distant, and will never be a good writer because I lack compassion. I have stolen elements from her life, used them in fiction, and shown her nothing but ingratitude in response.
Nothing you read here will change any of that. I know she feels like this because she wrote an email recently outlining all the ways I’ve let her down as a son. I didn’t read it, but had someone read it to me, and I watched the hands of a clock move as she read. It lasted a little over seventeen minutes.
At one point I burst into laughter, and it wasn’t an insane laugh. I realized this was the unexpected sequel to the story she’d written when I was still a child, My Mother’s Lovers—and Other Reasons I’m Valedictorian! Here was another fantasy about the person I was, only it, again, quickly slid into being about her.
I have empathy for my mom, but I guess she sees, towering over that, how I really do judge her, in the sense that I look at the evidence she’s left behind. When I think of my mother, I see a landscape of payment-due storage units, immolated friendships, bankruptcies, double-wide trailers illuminated by sheriff’s deputies’ flashlights, flies buzzing over kitchen counters with government-issued tubs of ketchup and relish standing open like interrupted surgeries. I see electrical outlets overloaded with octopus plugs, cords frayed and alarmingly warm to the touch, and in the darkness an old solid-state television with its volume turned up to the maximum, the program casting abrupt blue illumination on chipped chrome dress racks on which hang outfits from many generations that smell of someone else’s sweat, exhumed clothes people thought had vanished long ago. I see yellowing multilevel marketing brochures with notations made in pen around the bonus structure, fluorescent lights shining on manila files bundled and standing in empty cubicles like abandoned public housing, dead plants choked with impacted roots, Styrofoam coffee cups and fast-food meals flattened under the wheels of town cars with bald tires and missing hubcaps fleeing down the interstate in the middle of the night. And on the other side of that, there’s my mom, pulse racing, alive, barely, again.
The destruction my mother has brought onto herself is so much larger than how it impacted me. My mother has very carefully, day by day, decision by decision, ruined her own life. She has just as carefully never been destroyed, knowing with the cunning of an aristocrat when exactly to pull her troops back from the border. She’s a survivor.
As I heard the email unfolding the story of how I was a traitor, I realized there was never going to be an end to the carefully inflicted damage. My mother was torturing the person I came into this world loving the most. There was nothing I could do and I was angry about that in every way you can imagine. So I laughed, like a man thrown clear of the wreckage. With that laugh, something in me went free.
* * *
—
Sleeping has never been easy for me. I tend to work at night. I procrastinate. One midnight, calling it research, I sorted through a five-gallon tub of photographs. I found my infancy, childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. I also found a flimsy four-by-six-inch spiral-bound booklet with thin red covers on which the word “Snapshots” was hot pressed. It was a thrifty kind of purchase you could have made in a drugstore in 1968, filling in pictures that you glued to cardboard and protected with little plastic sleeves.
The album contained photographs my mother had taken in an attempt to explain her American life to her family back in England. She’d made a copy for each of several sisters, and kept one for herself. Sitting on the floor of my office, I wondered what my earliest memory unsupported by a snapshot actually was. And that night, falling asleep, I drowned.
It’s not that I dreamed I drowned. Instead, maybe ten minutes after I closed my eyes, I startled awake because I was suffocating. I could see, refracted by currents, distant daylight above me. I was too far from the surface. My lungs were full of water. There was no time for a last thought. I felt my limbs thrash and the sensation leach out of them. There was a useless fight, gray threads piling in at the edges of my vision, and then I lost the battle. Whatever I was, was gone.
I woke up from this, not quite all the way, and then upon my falling asleep it happened again. And again. And again. There were small variations—never in the feeling itself, which was always suffocating terror, but in my understanding of the way death will end me. There was never time for metaphor or resolution, sad little methods (I realized) of trying to distance death enough to lessen its authority.
I couldn’t talk to death. I couldn’t contain it with an analogy. Instead, I felt sensations of smothering, thrashing, and a few seconds of fighting, long enough to turn animal but too short for narration and then my life was snuffed out.
In between, my most vivid feeling was loneliness. Alice was next to me, but she was asleep and she was in her own dreams, not mine. I was alone, as I had ever been. The regret it came with was devastating. I had loved people, feeling that in my final moments I could surely take comfort in having loved. But there was no room for this as I drowned.
My cat Teddy was on the bed and I tried like hell to make his weight on my legs mean I had a connection to make my ending less awful. It didn’t work. I drowned every time I dozed off. It didn’t get easier. Around four a.m., I could sleep for a couple of hours.
The following night, it happened the same way.
* * *
—
What was I supposed to learn from this? That second night, I fought and lost as before, and then when it happened again a few minutes later, I changed the approach of my death, a rhythm I recognized from Eastern philosophy. I tried to relax, and to accept the loss. Perhaps inevitability was a blessing. I died better. I felt a little triumph, as if taking a punch particularly well. Which gave me a shabby happiness. Then, dying a third time, pure acceptance, and I have to admit, impatience. By the fifth or sixth repeat that night, I could no longer hold on to the feeling of surrender, as it was like submitting to an occupying force that doesn’t care about your acceptance, as it’s simply going to destroy you again and again for no particular reason.
Was this what eternity would be like?
I thought of hospice patients who reached upward. I wondered if they were doing so not because they were reaching for something but because it was the posture of acceptance, as they were being taken from their bodies and into something beyond comprehension. The full terror of that phrase, beyond comprehension, resonated with me. What if it’s not oblivion, nor an afterlife, but something our brains genuinely can’t recognize, something actually beyond terror? The enormity of dying is beyond comprehension.
Analogy is what sets us apart from the animals. But in the same way that dogs can never understand where we go when we leave the house without them, we cannot grasp the process of dying. Death is immune to analogy.
I had a glimpse. In weak translation, it was like being a dim light without form, w
ithout senses, without voice, without breath, without control, without the ability to communicate, suspended in a void that was not going to end. All those “withouts” are meant to say that we have no words for the stream-of-consciousness that gibbers in a stew of itself, and only itself, in what could make up eternity.
Oh, I thought, this is what they mean by hopelessness.
There was no further place to go, philosophically or spiritually. I was done.
Then I fell asleep and I drowned again.
* * *
—
Alice was sympathetic. She thought it made sense I’d be tangling with death, given what I was writing about. She wondered: if I fell into this void with the sense of the general benevolence of the universe, then what I was describing was actually joy beyond comprehension.
As I lay in bed that night I thought that death couldn’t be punishment. I didn’t believe that whatever poured us into these bodies in the first place followed that up with an eternity of pain and suffering. There was something inexplicably liberating awaiting me after my consciousness finally seeped away. This was the full understanding I was meant to have, I grasped this. I went back to sleep. I was exhausted.
I felt joy. Which stopped nothing, because I drowned again.
I leaned into it. It killed me, just as painfully and mercilessly as before. I was sick of trying to do this with grace or acceptance. I just fucking wanted to stop dying.
* * *
—
I made a mistake—using pharmaceuticals to sleep gave me hangovers, so I signed up for legal marijuana. Rather than smoke it, I decided to try eating some. There seemed to be no effect, so I ate more an hour later, a rookie move.
About four hours after that, I sprang awake with a complete sentence suspended before my open eyes: THERE IS A METAL DEMON PUTTING THOUGHTS IN MY HEAD.
I had never thought this before, and had enough wherewithal to recall that the only difference between now and the rest of my life was the marijuana chocolate I’d digested. The Internet told me there was a thing called “marijuana-induced psychosis,” and it lasted four to five hours, and then it left without after-effect.
I wrote as much as I could, recognizing flashes here and there of how the more disturbed members of my family must think. I was relieved to realize that madness and creative impulse aren’t the same thing. Madness is disorganized and demoralizing and even in my few hours of trying to negotiate conflicting flashy paranoid thoughts, I felt terribly sad for how much effort empirical thought takes, as every bit of evidence is equally likely, and conspirators are whispering in your ear.
I had nothing better to do, certainly not sleep, so I went back to my old photographs. As a child I had smiled almost every time the shutter snapped. I loved being photographed so very much that I ruined most shots by performing—putting stuffed animals on my head, mock-strangling myself. There was a shot of me on my fifth birthday with my grandparents. I’m wearing a shirt my mother had sewn letters onto: GLEN THE GREAT. In case that message isn’t clear enough, I’m pointing to the shirt with the index fingers of both hands. How long had it taken my mother to select those letters and iron them on herself? I wonder what she had thought while she was doing it. That I’d said, “Mommy’s brain is slow”?
I opened the small Instamatic album my mother had made. A documentation of the cornucopia that moving to America had given her. Barcelona loungers, Danish Modern rosewood wall unit, electric stove, dishwasher, my father’s darkroom, her new Mercury Cougar. It was quite a haul, and my father hadn’t even taken Certron public yet. We were still middle-class.
What could my relatives in England have thought of this? By the time “Tennis Club” showed up they must have dismissed her as a posh showoff who had forgotten her beginnings and who thought she was better than everyone else when all she wanted to do was suggest that they, too, could have this.
A photograph was badly pasted in; I straightened it. Me, on a diving board. It’s the only photograph in which I’m not quite smiling. I’m uneasy.
I felt chills between my shoulder blades.
Sometimes there is no metaphor. Instead, it’s just flat-coated truth trying to get out of a crate. I wasn’t using analogy. I was sending myself a message. My first memory is of drowning.
* * *
—
When I was about two years old, I took swim lessons at a public pool a few minutes by freeway from our house. The prevailing theory then was “sink or swim,” which meant that once I had been changed into trunks, a man I’d never seen before would toss me into the swimming pool. I was supposed to start swimming, but I didn’t. Instead, I sank to the bottom and had to be dragged out.
My vision of shifting light overhead and my lungs filling with water weren’t dreams, but memories. Fished up, on the concrete beside the pool, I hacked and coughed out all the water in my lungs, terrified and weeping. He was angry with me. He yelled. I have always associated the smell of bleach with failure and weakness, and this was the smell of the changing room my mother led me back into.
The next week, we returned. I was thrown into the pool again. And I started to drown again. The week after that, according to my mom, I started crying when we got to the pool, and she had to pry me out of the car. She felt guilty, but she thought she was doing the right thing. Once again, I sank and had to be rescued.
The week after that, when I spotted a water tower by the freeway that meant we were heading to the pool, I started bawling my head off, she says, and we never went back again. She told me the story many times—not the drowning part, but how heartsick she felt when she realized she was punishing a baby. Why did she take me back? The same authority that had told her how to raise a baby was explaining to her that I would learn, eventually, and I would be stronger for it.
* * *
—
Her guilt in telling me of those moments is as strong as cologne. She feels like what she did was unforgivable. The idea she was following the professional advice of the day is something she dismisses. It’s almost what Eichmann said, in her eyes. It’s where she feels like a bad mother. She thinks that I feel she’s a bad mother.
I can almost see her seeing me. I can almost do the voice in her head. She thinks that my infant brain, all emotion and no reason, lashes out, when she was just trying to do the best she could. But that’s not good enough (she thinks, and in turn she thinks I think that, too), there is no real excuse, and so, for reasons that she knows are not her fault, I launched into estrangement when I was two years old. It’s unfair, she thinks, but part of her also understands me for becoming estranged. She deserves it, at the same time that she doesn’t deserve it. I blame her, just like her father did. I’m unwilling to understand, and cannot be led to the truth because I find her unworthy. This is because she finds herself unworthy and knows that I, so much more powerful and condemning than herself, must not only agree but have cruel, enigmatic ways to demonstrate how she has come up short.
I went through that piercing of the onion while the sun was rising and my psychosis retreated. I was breaking a strange barrier by pretending I knew what my mother felt, and within that likely incorrect guess was her guessing, incorrectly, about how I felt. Russian dolls of narrative.
Twice in my life I have taken drugs that have left footprints along a pathway that were worth following when sober. The Ecstasy trip with Lindsay, and this one. They seemed to bookend something.
I don’t hate my mom. Sometimes a parent does something thinking it’s a good idea, and it isn’t. And it leads the next generation into trauma, but it’s not something intentionally inflicted. I needed to remember that, not to condemn my mother, but to let her go. I felt like the kink in a hose had shaken out. I didn’t hate my mother and I also didn’t love her. I felt something clearer and stranger.
There’s a sentence I’ve heard from people who have difficult parents: they did the b
est they could. It’s a sweet idea, especially if you want to get on that scenic road to forgiveness that’s supposed to be how being an adult works. But I’m not so sure every parent does the best they can. I’m not even sure what that means.
My mother, like many parents, did something that traumatized me, and then, like many parents, she stopped doing it. But she gets into danger all the time. What I kept coming back to, working the question like wax in my hands, was this: why did my mom stop bringing me to that swimming pool?
People have asked me if my mother has been diagnosed with something. She hasn’t. I’m polite when I hear them speculate about syndromes and disorders. The axes of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual by which patients are quantified are a complex, evolving net which means to eventually catch all the different oddly colored fish in the sea of mental illness. But to me, if the diagnoses don’t also come with a pill to fix them, they’re only as helpful as astrology. You are forward and brash, you ignore others’ opinions unless they reflect your own desires. You have Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Or you’re an Aries. Either way, it diminishes. My mother is not her symptoms nor her sign.
The deeper question for me at one point was whether her behavior was the inexorable approach of a disease—in other words, was her leaning into punches the result of biology? This meant she was blameless. You don’t blame a tuberculosis victim for falling sick. Or was her behavior her choice? If so, then she could always choose differently.
I came to different conclusions all the time. If my mother was mentally ill, she was doing the best she could. And just maybe there would be a therapy, a pill. If it was her choice to live this way, that meant she could have done things differently and she didn’t, and it made me angry at her. But I also hoped she would eventually choose differently, because how could someone so smart and so worthwhile keep hurting herself?
I Will Be Complete Page 52