The Sorrows of an American

by Siri Hustvedt

  SECOND-SEMESTER ENGLISH INCLUDED the ordeal of writing a proper research paper. I no longer remember why I selected Savonarola, the Italian reformer and martyr who drove the Medicis out of Florence. I had no problem with the subject matter. But I lost my way in the mechanics of research—endless note cards, each one with a special function that had to be filled out just so. More confusing was footnoting, with mysterious terms like ibid. and op. cit. Note cards were scattered in sorted piles throughout my room. As a temporary reprieve from my mental chaos, I checked on my mail. At the post office I opened a letter that instructed me to report to Fort Snelling on March 16, two days before the term paper was due. I returned to my room, swept up every wretched note card, and tossed them into a trashcan. After I went to bed that night, panic struck. What would I do if I failed the army physical?

  . . . We moved from doctor to doctor assembly-line fashion. Our last hurdle was a psychiatrist. “Do you date?” he asked me. Thanks to Margaret, I gave him a confident yes. He waved me on. Ah, such are the refinements of my profession: We’ll take anything standing, but weed out the queers. Lars Davidsen was nineteen. Unless there had been something between him and Lisa, Margaret Lien was the only girlfriend he’d ever had. Before he left Minnesota for the first time in his life, he called her at her dormitory on the campus of Martin Luther College to say good-bye. I did not tell her of my dreary state of mind. We just chatted. But, if I have anything resembling a soul, Margaret’s voice of that evening will certainly be part of it.

  WHEN I ASKED Inga about the Inside Gotham article, she said it hadn’t appeared, and she was hoping it had been dumped. “I’m sure they’re not really interested in what I had to say, and maybe they didn’t get anything juicy from other people, so it probably won’t come out—too boring. It’s ironic, though, because in my book I try to talk about the way we organize perceptions into stories with beginnings, middles, and ends, how our memory fragments don’t have any coherence until they’re reimagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense. But then, that woman isn’t interested in the problem of consciousness and reality. She doesn’t give a jot about philosophy. These journalists actually believe they can get the real story, the objective truth, or tell both sides, as if the world is always split in two. At the same time, ‘reality’ in America has become synonymous with the rank and sordid. We’ve fetishized the true story, the tell-all confession, reality TV, real people in their real lives, celebrity marriages, divorces, addictions, humiliation as entertainment—our version of the public hanging. The crowd gathers to gape.” After this speech, Inga paused. “You know who she made me think of?”

  “No.”

  “Carla Screttleberg.”

  “Your tormenter in the sixth grade.”

  Inga nodded. “The ache has never gone away. She got all the girls in on it. No one would speak to me, or, if they did, it was to say something hurtful. I hadn’t done anything to anyone. I found it incomprehensible, and yet those months are blurry now. I see bits, not wholes, parts of the school building where something cruel must have been said, a stairwell, a hallway, the classroom, my desk, chalk drawn on the cement to play foursquare. All saturated with general misery. It’s as if my sadness soaked the architecture. I can tell you a story about it, and I wouldn’t be lying, but would that reconstruction of events be real or true?”

  “No—just true for you now.”

  “When it happened to Sonia, I felt desperate.”

  “But it ended for both of you.”

  “Solved by a new school. It was like becoming another person. Sonia said the same thing: ‘One day you’re a pariah, and the next day you’re a regular person again.’ ”

  “How is Sonia?”

  “Still too neat.”

  “And the nightmares?”

  “Fewer.” Inga swallowed. “She doesn’t talk much about her father, you know. I worry about it. She writes a lot of poems.”

  “Does she let you read them?”

  “Sometimes. They’re good but rather frightening.”

  “Adolescence is frightening,” I said.

  Inga smiled. “I wonder what she would have been like if there hadn’t been September eleventh.”

  I remembered walking into Emergency that morning. I heard myself explaining that I was a doctor and wanted to volunteer my services. Countless people must be injured, and the numbers would be more than the city hospitals could handle. The memory hurt. “Your description of that day is the best thing in the book,” I said out loud.

  In American Reality: Examining a Cultural Obsession, Inga devoted one chapter to the media’s version of September eleventh and its almost instantaneous construction of a heroic narrative to gloss the horror. She noted the use of cinematic devices in television reporting, the footage of firemen set to music with American flags waving on a split screen, the spectacular images, the pious announcements that irony had come to an end as the bitter ironies multiplied one on top of another. She wrote about the cheering crowds in other places in the world, who had manufactured their own fiction of heroic martyrdom, one so powerful it snuffed out empathy. And to counter the hackneyed pictures and dead words, she told her own story of that day as she remembered it, a fractured account. She heard on the radio that a plane had hit the tower eight blocks south. She decided to get Sonia out of school and began to walk downtown when she saw the second plane ram the other tower. She had started to run then, against the crowd streaming toward her, but she didn’t register what had happened, not really, but raced to Stuyvesant, where she was stopped by a guard. There was another mother, too, whom they wouldn’t let in, a woman whose voice reminded her of a squalling cat at night. Inga remembered the woman’s contorted mouth, her saliva hitting the man’s collar as she wailed, “Let me in! I want my son!” and how the sight of the woman’s face had made her strangely quiet, calm, and distant, and how she had waited for them to find her daughter, standing numb in the lobby, and that when she finally saw Sonia’s face, she felt it must match her own, a mask of pallid emptiness, and how when they left the building the towers were gleaming red like burning skeletons, and Inga had said to herself, “I am seeing this. It is true. I must tell myself this is real,” and then they ran north to White Street without saying a word to each other, running with hundreds of other people pushing forward away from the fires. A man on his hands and knees, vomiting. Another man seemingly frozen, turned the wrong way, as he looked upward, a hand over his mouth. Her feeling of urgency, fear, but not panic. No tears, no screaming. And then the strange impulse that came over her just before they turned onto White Street. She said to Sonia, “Okay, turn around and look.” They did.

  In the days afterward, I couldn’t get in to them. The area had been cordoned off and most of it evacuated, but somehow the police never arrived at 40 White Street to tell its residents to leave. The first weekend, Inga and Sonia managed to travel to Brooklyn, and I cooked for the two of them. We talked a little. Inga told me about the ruined cars piled up on Church Street, the smoking pit a few blocks south, the pale dust that had covered everything like a toxic snowfall, her worry about poisons in the air. And then they slept. They slept and slept and slept, the sleep of exhaustion and perhaps relief to be away from there, the place where it had happened. But on Sunday, when Inga asked Sonia what she had seen from the classroom window that morning, the girl just shook her head, her eyes blank and her mouth tight.

  FOUR DAYS AFTER the United States invaded Iraq, Eggy slipped a drawing under my door. In the foreground two people held hands, a large person and a smaller one. The hands resembled overlapping balls and were attached to skinny arms. Because the shorter figure had a mass of scribbles on its head, I guessed it was a self-portrait. The other figure with a straight line for a mouth was probably Miranda. In her free hand the child held what at first looked like a kite, but when I examined it more closely, I noticed that attached to the long curving line was a tiny airborne man at the very top of the picture. When I looked dow
n at Eggy’s rendering of herself and her mother, I couldn’t help wonder what children might witness or suffer in this new military nightmare.

  And yet, my grim thoughts of war didn’t prevent other thoughts. Sometime after Miranda uttered the sentence, If I did, why should I tell you? I had tried to avoid taking a mental image of her to bed with me. I substituted other women, Laura Capelli, for one, with her voluptuous body and broad smile, and I perused pornography: always effective, but the tawdry pictures left me depressed. I was dreaming of companionship, too, of dialogues and walks and dinners as well as sex. Miranda and I had hardly spoken to each other, and I had to admit that my attraction might be killed by a conversation that revealed a pedestrian mind behind those bewitching eyes. I rationalized that what had happened was just another rejection among many, and I should accept it, but there were three images that had now taken hold of me: Miranda’s drawing of a monster, her portrait of Eggy, and Eggy’s own picture—a girl’s rendering of her family, perhaps? Was the floating man an image of her missing father? Perhaps Eggy wanted to tell the worry doctor what her mother didn’t want to tell me. Miranda’s words had made me think that she knew the identity of the mysterious messenger. Further, I guessed that the connection between the two of them probably had something to do with photography and art, and that it was plausible other pictures had arrived without my knowledge of them. I wrote Eggy a note and pushed it under the door.

  Dear Eglantine,

  Thank you so much for the drawing. I like it very much, especially the little flying man.

  Your friend,

  Erik

  I HAD SEEN too many veterans during my years at the hospital to fall for the moronic patriotism they were offering the public on television: cameras and tanks rolling, flags and dust flying, eager journalists decked out in combat fatigues sputtering in excited tones about our brave troops, the sturdy families back home, sacrifice, duty, America, homeland. Inga’s book had spoken directly to this kind of grotesque spectacle, and yet I was certain that her words would be met by deafness. History is made by amnesia. In the American Civil War, they called it soldier’s heart, and over time it changed its name to shell shock, then war neurosis. Now it’s PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, the most antiseptic of the terms for what can happen to people who witness the unspeakable. During World War I, in the barracks of field hospitals French and British doctors saw them coming in droves—men blind, deaf, shaking, paralyzed, aphasic, catatonic, hallucinating, plagued by recurring nightmares and insomnia, seeing and re-seeing what no one should see, or feeling nothing at all. Clearly, they weren’t all suffering from brain lesions, so the physicians began to tag their patients NYD (not yet diagnosed) or GOK (God only knows) or Dieu seul sait quoi (God alone knows what this is).

  “Dr. Davidsen,” he said. “It’s come back now all these years later. It’s not like remembering, no sir. It’s the shock, same as it was, as if I’m goin’ through it again. I wake up to the impact in my leg, no pain, just the blast, and then I see it.” A chronic alcoholic, Mr. E. hadn’t been hospitalized for trauma. He had had his ascites drained but was sent to me after he screamed at night and woke up the whole ward.

  “What do you see?” I said.

  He had a wrinkled red face mottled by brown spots. He rubbed his cheeks with both hands. His arms shook uncontrollably. “Harris on top of me. Rodney Harris, without his head.”

  Trauma isn’t part of a story; it is outside story. It is what we refuse to make part of our story.

  MIRANDA RETURNED FORCEFULLY to my consciousness that weekend. On Sunday morning when I retrieved my New York Times from the doorstep at around nine o’clock, I saw her on the sidewalk. Her back was to me, and at her feet stood a bucket of soapy water. To my surprise, she appeared to be washing the tree. When she took a step to one side, I immediately saw why. The stranger had left his mark in red paint on the trunk of the tall oak just beginning to bud.

  I didn’t walk down the steps to speak to her. I grabbed my newspaper and shut the door very quietly, but she heard the sound and turned. For a moment our eyes met through the glass door. She didn’t smile, but I saw in her face something softer than the time before. I think I nodded before I returned to my coffee, my whole body electrified by the expression on her face.

  IN AN UNDATED letter from 1944, my father wrote, After a long time at sea, we hit land. The trip over was warm and crowded. I did not get seasick, but many were hit hard. The ceremonies crossing the equator were both cruel and fun. New to me are the natives: fuzzy-haired, small, black, and barefooted people with cloths around their waists. They sell wares in shells and bamboo—or try to. I can say we are somewhere in New Guinea. I write this by candlelight.

  INGA’S FACE WAS flushed with excitement when she opened the door. Her eyes were wide and she spoke quickly. “I found something through the Hall of Records in Blue Wing. I don’t know what it means yet, but it’s interesting. I’ve got a record of a marriage between an Alf Odland and a Betty Dettling in 1922. A year later they have a child, but the name on the birth certificate is not Lisa, but Walter Odland. There’s no record of a Lisa being born to those two people at all. Pappa was fifteen and Lisa had to have been at least his age, probably older, if she was working away from home, so something’s wrong about this.”

  “Maybe it’s another Odland.”

  “The only one in town,” Inga said. “She may have been a child from an earlier marriage. Maybe he divorced his first wife, or she died. Divorce was very common among immigrants on the prairie, of course this was later, but it still would be unusual for a girl to go with her father, not her mother, don’t you think, so death is more likely. Alf Odland died in 1962. Betty lived on until 1975. The good news is that Walter is still alive. I called the listed number, but no one answered. He’s an old guy without an answering machine, but I’m hoping to talk to him.”

  A sudden feeling of reluctance came over me, a sense that we were encroaching on something that might wheel around and slap us. I was aware that it was odd for me—who has listened to so many confessions of betrayal, misery, and cruelty—to shy away from the story hidden behind a few sheets of paper in a hall of records, but the analyst as a person who can hear anything is made possible because of the role played, the position occupied in the room. Outside that room, I occupy another territory: brother, son, friend. “Are you sure you want to pursue this?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I’m thinking of Walter Odland. What if your questions . . .” I was lying. I wasn’t thinking of Walter Odland until that second. “No, that’s not it. Inga, I think I’m worried about what we’ll find.”

  “I keep thinking I’ll mention it to Mamma, and then I don’t. Something stops me, a fear of hurting her, I guess. She’s suffering as it is. Still, I want to know. I think you do, too.”

  “Yes.” I had a moment of guilt about my mother. I should call her, I told myself.

  We spoke of other things then, about Sonia’s project, a long rhyming narrative poem, her plans for college, her silences. “Half the time I don’t know what she’s thinking, even though she’s nice to me most of the time.”

  “And she still doesn’t want to see a therapist?”

  “No, but I don’t think she’d mind having lunch with her uncle Erik.”

  After I told Inga that I’d call Sonia and make a date, my sister informed me that she was writing a book unlike any other she had written. Stories of the philosophers, she said, stories of discovery, stories that demonstrate how feeling and ideas are inseparable. She talked about Pascal’s carriage hanging over the water on the Pont de Neuilly, about his rescue, and the Memorial, written Monday, November 23, 1654, when he recorded the words of his ecstasy, which he sewed into his coat to keep with him always. She told me about a dream Descartes had as a young man, in which phantoms chased him as the wind blew, that he couldn’t make any headway against those gusts but stumbled and then stumbled again, about Wittgenstein writing in his notebook on the Russian fron
t in the summer of 1916, “There are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical,” and lastly of Kierkegaard’s discovery of his father’s secret. Kierkegaard sensed something in his gloomy, strict, religious father, and when his father was dying, he discovered it. He called it “the great earthquake, the terrible upheaval,” which forced on him “a new and infallible interpretation of all phenomena.”

  “I’m burning, Erik,” she told me. “I’m burning, and there’s more, much more, and it’s all very close to me, as if these stories of breakthrough belong to me, too. Real meaning, true insight is rarely dry. It’s almost always accompanied by emotion. Of course, Schopenhauer was a cold fish, but I’ll leave him out. It’s not only philosophy. Think of scientists like Einstein. Think of artists like Max. He was so happy when he found them, his people and their stories. He loved his characters. He loved them, and they were just figments. We all love our figments.” Inga’s voice cracked with feeling, and her animated face seemed to be lit from within.

  My sister had always passed through phases of writing hard, arcs of energetic production that were followed by migraines and the blues, what she referred to as her “neurological crashes.” Had I seen my sister at that moment as a patient, with her shining eyes and rapturous face, I would have jotted down that she presented as manic. As one of my colleagues once said to me, “Every person who walks through my door is a suspect.” “You’re pretty keyed up, Inga,” I said. “I’d be a little careful.”