Prodigals

by Greg Jackson

  M: Right.

  G: Then, boom! You just gave the ten best years of your life to corporate law.

  M: And you realize nobody really cares. Nobody’s, like, proud of you. The world’s kind of done patting you on the back, scratching behind your ears.

  G: But you’re not broke.

  M: You’re not broke, it’s true.

  G: You have a lot of television options to scroll through while you’re wondering if maybe musical theater wasn’t your passion all along.

  M: Some totally decent scotch.

  G: And you get drunk and bone a stranger who’s not your type and— Surprise, that didn’t help!

  M: And you quit your job and travel in India.

  G: Ashram, roshi, et cetera.

  M: And you come back and volunteer at a hospice.

  G: Which is actually a really great thing to do.

  M: I have, you know, zero doubt.

  G: But corporate law is just the low-hanging fruit, right?

  M: Yeah, no, it’s all of us.

  G: It just comes in different forms, at different times?

  M: One that happens to most of us, I think, is the moment when you’re getting older and it hits you that you don’t really have a “home” anymore. And you think: What is a home, really? Did I ever have one? Do I need one?

  G: The difference between a house and a home.

  M: Mm … Say more.

  G: The house is the physical object. The home is that object inside a narrative.

  M: The difference between a walk and a walk.

  G: Between mushrooms and mushrooms.

  M: Are you feeling anything?

  She nodded. I was beginning to feel something too. The psilocybin had begun gently thrumming the surface of the day. The field below us, blanched in sunshine, was not changing exactly, but it was taking on different emphases. The conceptual had begun to recede, so that the trees, for instance, appeared to me more as the visual elements that made them up and less as the thing we call “tree.” A patch of reddish berries, which I had never noticed in the leaves across the yard, were now the first thing I saw each time I looked up. They seemed to push into the visual field and as the effect deepened, faint mists transpired before me, as though a haze disclosed by the light, the day grew brighter, the clouds spun and broke apart, piercing white, an animate lace whose definition at their wispy edges could only be called preternatural. I laughed, and then I wasn’t sure why I’d laughed. Gabrielle said that it was in this state and this state alone that black velvet art began to make sense to her.

  The thing that happens to me most profoundly on psychedelics, the reason I occasionally do them, in fact, and what happened to me that afternoon for a good two hours or so during the deepest part of the trip, is that my sense of connection to the metanarrative deserts me. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that in seeing the possibility of this connection foreclosed, I become aware of something I didn’t know was taking place, an unconscious process, a limbic subroutine, an autonomic checking-in the brain seems regularly to perform to square what you are doing with the context of the day, the week, the still broader context of the year, your life, what you care about and hope to achieve, how you see yourself and how you hope to be seen. It is in watching this process break down that you become conscious of it, the failure of some mechanism to catch at the appropriate point, and the sensation is not unlike waking repeatedly from a dream without having realized you were asleep.

  This has been my experience, in any case, and it isn’t exactly pleasant. It is instructive, though, I think, to step outside future-directed life, to feel the past slip away, and to confront who you are unmoored from history and intention. It can be frightening. You’re left with very little when these things go. But it opens some brief window on the phenomenology of being alive, of living inside a head, and it offers a fleeting glimpse of the metanarrative unmasked as demiurge, as idol, which if you’re like me you must punish from time to time, smash and sweep from the Ka’aba. The pristine emptiness, when you’ve done this, can seem to verge on holiness.

  The worst part of a trip, we can probably all agree, is the moment when you’ve come down enough to realize you are not down all the way. Gabrielle and I are throwing a Frisbee in the yard, watching it glimmer metallic shades as it zips between us, when this moment comes. Gaby lets the Frisbee fall behind her without making any effort to catch it.

  “I’m going to do yoga now,” she says.

  “Okay,” I say, and because I dislike even thinking about yoga, I decide to take a walk instead of chatting with her while she limbers up. I put on a shirt. I get my phone, some earbuds. I pick out a podcast to listen to. I feel briefly lucid as I set off down the street. It is a lightly wooded residential street, with a few people out front watering their lawns. The occasional car passes slowly by. Once I see the people on their lawns and in their cars, however, and realize they see me, I am flooded with the certainty that they know I’m on drugs, which now that I’ve left the equivocal sphere of the house it seems I really am. But I compel myself to focus on the podcast, on Terry Gross’s familiar voice, her warm, brisk personality, and for about ten seconds I feel fine. I manage to smile at a father and daughter playing catch without, I believe, appearing unambiguously psychotic. And yet I can feel a small worry taking shape in me, a worry I can tamp down but not entirely ignore, and which takes the form of the following question posed to myself: Haven’t I been walking on this street an insanely long time? The right way to put it is that I have no idea how long I’ve been walking on the street, and being unable to reconstruct the experience with any temporal dimensionality feels akin to having been always walking on the street. It is not a long street, I know this for a fact. In either direction it runs into a perpendicular street and ends, measuring along its entire length at most eight hundred feet, a distance a world-class sprinter could cover in under twenty-five seconds. But because my walk is an iterative action and not a coherent experience—because it is not a walk so much as all the component parts of a walk—it does not seem possible, or at least inevitable, that I will ever reach the end of the street. And the more anxious this realization makes me, the more closely I attend to my progress, the rate of which, as a consequence of this heightened attention, seems correspondingly to diminish. And it is right around this time, experiencing the first licks of panic, that I realize my walk has become Zeno’s paradox.

  I don’t remember how I made it back. I must have turned around, but honestly it’s all a blur. A blur not because it went by fast, but in the sense that the recording of a voice slowed down sufficiently no longer resembles a voice. I credit Terry Gross with getting me home, the grounding cadence of her speech, a metronomic standard by which my subjective experience of time was kept from veering into a fatal adagio. And soon enough—or, you know, whenever—I found myself back in the sunny yard, watching Gabrielle articulate her body in serpentine asanas, listening to Terry interview an author I like, and then an actress I like, as happy as a puppy and at peace, because what I understood just then was that Terry Gross’s voice was the voice of the metanarrative, demotic ur-parent, Catcher in the WHYY, the call of the shepherd returning me to the pastures of solicitude and moderation, that cultural plane on which the day’s horrific news—ecocatastrophe, civilizational conflict, postcolonial scarring, and our legacies of violence and extortion—was not diminished or ignored but existed in a strange vaporous adjacency to yuppie mores, triumphalist life narratives, midcult art, and an anachronistic fixation on jazz, this narrow-bandwidth refugium for temperamental decency and civic virtue and a heartbreaking reasonableness that seemed less and less like the earned wisdom of life than a tragic hope laid over it.

  You should not have grown wise before you grew old. Was it my grandfather speaking to me, telling me to persist in my folly, the best way out being through, unless you happen to be standing right by an exit? Is what inaugurates an avant-garde really more than the moment when how it feels to be alive has deviate
d too far from our operative metanarratives, from what we have to understand and draw significance from the ceaseless welter before us, and when it seems no adult or authority is any longer capable of restoring order or putting things right because we lack even a language with which to name the problem, to place it before us, and to talk together as friends?

  That afternoon, as the mushrooms left me gently in the sunlit grass, as I felt the old hierarchies reassert themselves—so that the things I could act upon came forward and those I could merely contemplate fell away—as time regained its normal speed, a speed that seemed almost a trance or deadness, the returning cognizance of how my life was changing felt to me like waking up into a dream. I would write books; people would discuss what to that point had been figments and private reveries, idle inventions—or so I hoped. And I do not mean dream in the sense of nightmare’s obverse, not a long-awaited joy or fantastical delight, but rather dream as pseudo-reality, as what resembles life but has no commerce with it. For if the substance of my work purported to be communication of some sort, the exploration and expression of what I found meaningful, my unshakable premonition was that its result would only be to clarify my perversity, deepen my sense of being misunderstood, and thereby accentuate my loneliness. If so, the prefigured fantasy was just a false dream of home. And I looked at Gaby, wondering again whether I hadn’t attached the wrong labels to my emotions long ago, as though I had puce and mauve backward, had never been corrected, and now were chasing some impossible chimera because I failed to see that all the things I felt for Gaby were love, full stop.

  But it was not a moment to make reliable judgments, I suspected.

  We spent the night in a nearby city, a pretty harbor town where, truth be told, I had once been born. We drank Belgian dubbels in a cellar bar where the decorative stonework peeked out of the walls and made a piping over low arched passageways. We discussed fame, celebrity, renown, what these things were and why we sought them. The beer had washed any last hallucinatory tincture from us, trading mistake for imprecision, and because we had both failed to read The Power Broker for the same class in college, an omission that ever after established Robert Moses as a favorite figure of informed discussion, I now raised his example as a perhaps-instructive case.

  Me: Moses was a famous person. Powerful. People would have known who he was when he walked in the room.

  Gaby: People were interacting with the idea of him as much as with him. Maybe even more so.

  M: Right, and that’s clearly an important aspect of fame.

  G: You’re a representative of the idea of you. Not the other way around.

  M: Which is pretty fucked-up.

  G: Especially when you consider that you’re probably only fractionally responsible for that idea.

  M: But with Moses, right, short of his leading some truly lurid private life—which, having read the Caro, I think we can agree he did not—it’s not like people wanted to buy magazines to read about who he was dating, whether he’d gained or lost weight, his taste in vacation getaways.

  G: Some of that was the era though.

  M: Maybe.

  G: —and you know the blinding glory of city-administration work.

  M: My calendar this year, by the way: our nation’s top comptrollers, topless.

  G: Ooh. I hear March is a total CPA’s wet dream.

  M: He’s posed with like a lamb, a lion cub, and a double-entry ledger.

  G: In a hammock.

  M: In a windowless municipal alcove.

  G: But so you’re saying people didn’t feel on intimate terms with Moses. His fame wasn’t bound up in enacting a social persona.

  M: Which is probably exactly the difference between celebrity and fame.

  G: And which is funny because a lot of what makes us interested in the celebrities as real people, right, is their always appearing to us as fictional people.

  M: We want the fantasy. We also want the fantasy to be real.

  G (with a mischievous relish): And we want to see them crash and burn.

  M: Yeah. We want to see them crash and burn so we know they’re like us. And we want to see these perfect façades so we can imagine there’s some more exalted life out there.

  G: A paradox.

  M: Yup.

  G: But there’s another contradiction too, because the more we tune in to this celebrity gossip, the more we realize they aren’t different from us, aren’t experiencing some, I don’t know, transcendent spiritual election.

  M: Well, I think this is sort of where the dark turn comes.

  G: I just got chills.

  M: Because at some point it’s not about the fantasy anymore, right? It’s not about the thing we’re looking at. It’s about the fact that we’re all looking.

  G: The most photographed barn in America.

  M: Exactly.

  G: And we want to be the barn.

  M: It seems better than just staring at the barn.

  G: Barn watching, the Amish call it.

  M: Right in that sweet spot between hobby and venial sin.

  G: Very strong prohibitions on coveting thy neighbor’s barn.

  M: Thirteen-year-olds sneaking Architectural Digest into the outhouse …

  G: But then why do we want to be the barn if we know it’s all bullshit fantasy? There are plenty of other ways to make money and get laid, right?

  M: I think it comes down to a sense that if God’s not watching, maybe thirty million Americans are the next best thing.

  G: That’s the dream.

  M: Not necessarily a dream we quite articulate to ourselves, but yes.

  G: So the longing behind celebrity worship, if I’m understanding you, is for proximity to God.

  M: One way to put it.

  G: Or …

  M: Proximity to God’s absence. The innermost circle of our aloneness.

  G: Ooh. You make it sound fun.

  M: Dante’s ball pit.

  G: I don’t think I made it to that ring. I got stuck with a gargoyle in a Velcro maze.

  M: …

  G: But is there comfort in this inner circle? It doesn’t relieve whatever loneliness or despair drove you there, does it?

  I told Gaby I didn’t know but I assumed she was right; I was pretty sure the aloneness was only deeper at the center, where you could hear it echo, where enfolding the contingency of your existence always was the weightless, transparent envelope of the idea of you, a public action having expropriated part of you into the social body, culture’s eminent domain exercising its claim on your soul, when all we really wanted were resting points, or so I thought—God, celebrity, accomplishment, sex—weren’t they all just pleas for arrival, for the moment sufficient in itself, that feeling of getting there, dropping your bags, pouring yourself a drink, and sitting down with an old friend on the porch? The spiritual equivalent of saying, Ah, here we are.

  Gaby thought about this for the span of two unhurried sips. “But then the morning after the day of arrival.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  I did. I was not only coming down off mushrooms just then and getting drunk, but also, due to a mix-up in my prescription, going off the SSRI I usually took. It had been five days since my last pill, and as we talked and drank I felt an increasingly tenuous line connecting me to my life, a line I imagined as the tether that keeps astronauts from floating away on spacewalks; I was floating, letting something go, possibly myself, possibly because I was in a different story and felt the need to sever ties with the old, test the tensile strength of the new, even as the game of musical chairs I seemed to be playing with my somatic chemistry had set off a sort of inner vibration in me, starting in my abdomen and radiating outward, a proprioceptive fuzziness, like the atomization of my cells experienced from the inside out, the feeling of what it would be like for them independently and all at once to question whether they belonged together, whether we could come to some flawed consensus that pooled our fortunes and coexist under an umbrella dispensation we would cal
l identity. I trusted that I could ride this feeling out. I trusted that despite its buffetings I wouldn’t decompose or unspool too far, that after years of holding myself together in what felt like an act of will I could unclench, release myself, and let the environmental pressure contain me, like the ocean depths, and that as long as I had one hand on the line, like a grip on Ariadne’s yarn, I could find my way back.

  I want to say that there was something comforting, liberating, ludic in this feeling, but I can’t and remain honest. As we walked the cobblestone streets of downtown, where the faux-gas streetlamps scattered yellow bands in the shadows, and the colored lights jostling on the harbor water below us were flecks of candy on its jellied skin, it was rather placelessness I felt, an indifference to orientation, the way standing on the North Pole gives you only one cardinal direction in which to head; for through the darkness paneling my mind, what I saw at the far end of my tether, far from anchor or cleat, was instead a face, not the face of any person, but the aureole-enclosed fantasy of a smiling recognition, the face that is emblem and locus of celebrity, visible seat of the invisible being, so that rather than securing me to anything firm, I understood, like the velvet rope outside a club, this line was my invitation to the sanctum of celebrated space, my invitation to let go, that is, to give myself over to the idea of me, and like an acrobat transferring lines midair, to swing up up up into the divine and unanchored Valhalla of our debased world.

  I admit that this may be somewhat overstated. Grandiose vis-à-vis the facts. I didn’t mention it to Gaby, to whom, if this was true of one person on earth, I could say anything. But it was the endpoint of this train of thought, I think, that underlay the self-disgust and wretchedness that led me, when we’d shut down all the bars, to buy street drugs from a figure who appeared at my elbow calling himself Little D. I glanced at Gaby, who sort of shrugged at me, as though to say, Sure, why not? And I wondered if there weren’t a bigger D out there somewhere, whether the adjective might not be relative, because our friend looked to me to epitomize male height.