I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness

by Claire Vaye Watkins

  I asked my therapists when we would stop calling it post-partum depression and start calling it regular depression. One said, “A few years.” The other said, cheerfully, “Right now, if you like!” For insurance purposes she read aloud the regular depression diagnosis in the DSM. I was seven for seven, ever the overachieving first-born Aries. Mostly I was a frame or two outside my body, a blur in a tintype at home or at work, driving or biking, pretending to listen to a supposed friend, our hands curled around small glasses of small-batch bourbon, to a student in Joyce’s office, careful not to smudge the crescents of dried red wine dotting the laminate desk.

  I drank. I smoked. I spectated. I sculpted reality as I moved through it. The only people I liked were the ones who gave me something for the page, yet I never wrote. I had more or less given up on the bullshit I flung to my students about stories bridging what divides us, about fiction’s power to save the world. It was not even my own bullshit to begin with. It was not even my own pitchfork doing the flinging! I wanted to heave myself from the fetid hot tub of the human condition, so sick was I of everyone splashing around in there together. Narrative was failing me left and right. All it was was fallible. I checked various copyright pages and confirmed these to be unforgivably dated observations.

  Yet the magic facts remained: On the first day of fall a woman woke up another woman. She didn’t notice it at first. She had only been sleeping for two minutes after all, a morphine-induced micronap in a hospital suite. She woke, pushed and pushed for hours for nothing, then was wheeled to a freezing cold operating theater—a blustering plastic bodysuit was fitted to her and hot air blown inside it. While she heard only the whir of an industrial fan inside the world’s most expensive blanket, a baby was cut out of her. She was sewn up and then, after she reminded the staff that she was there—they were comparing dashed plans, for it was a holiday weekend and they’d been called in—and wanted, very badly, her baby, wanted her right now, the two were wheeled from the operating room back to their suite, where the light suggested dawn though it was midday. Outside, it was raining biblically. She looked out the window then at the baby and back out the window and the overflow culvert below was completely and suddenly filled, the parking lot flooded. Cars floated down the hill. Certain wings of the hospital became barges, bobbing in the sea.

  Yet through all this, she did not realize that she had become another woman. She did not realize this until well after the water receded and the baby turned from bruise purple to yellow to pink, until blood was squeezed from her heel and she slept three nights wrapped in a glowworm blanket. Until well after they scanned the baby’s bar code and her bar code too, snipped their tags off and released them. Through all this she mistakenly believed she was still herself. Then she took the baby home.

  The smells in her supposed house were foreign, the foods someone had packed into the freezer gray and unappetizing with ice. She found the books all around impenetrable, the furniture pointy and hazardously arranged. Shockingly violent films arrived in the mail, ordered by some psycho with her Netflix login. Her clothes and shoes did not fit. It had been summer when they set out for the hospital, only a few days ago. It had been early morning and late summer, mists hovering over shorn cornfields, humid. But it was cold now. The handwriting on the family message board was illegible to her. She was a new person now, which so many American women aspired to be—remade! She herself had often wished it. But now that she had been made anew she found it frightening. She did not know anything about this new person who was her. What were her interests? Who did she love? Was she also a writer? So far, no. The new woman was a mystery and a blank—she didn’t seem to think much. She had trouble completing her sentences. People hit in the head had symptoms like these, she thought she remembered. She asked her husband whether she’d fallen in labor. She was maybe on the back end of a spell of amnesia, for some evidence could trigger memories of the woman she once was, such as this key ring on this hook, with its gym fob, library fob, shopper’s club fob, three brass keys with imprints that read now like the names of isotopes: PH-007, LCA-3201, PH-111. So she had a job, somewhere, this woman I was, but I did not investigate further. Eventually, by some somnambulist logic, the new woman went on fulfilling the public and private obligations of the old, kept promises she herself had not made. People sprouted wings every day.

  * * *

  —

  I found Rust and Ty and told them it was time to go. Rust asked one of those questions they all like. “What’s your problem?”

  In couples therapy recently I’d told Theo, “My problem is I have trouble thinking of you as a person. I just forget to wonder what you’d want.”

  I’d taken the professor job without consulting him. The chair had called and said, “We’d like to offer you the job here,” and I said, “Sure. Sounds good.”

  “You don’t have to answer right now,” he said. “Take some time to think it over—”

  “I don’t need to,” I said.

  “—consult your family,” he continued. “Talk to your husband?”

  “No thanks,” I said, Theo beside me. “I’m good.”

  My problem is I can’t figure out how sorry to be for the way I’ve been. I’m either a little sorry, very sorry, or not at all sorry.

  My problem is some nights I come in late and forget to lock the door behind me. Some nights I leave the porch light on. Some nights I have been touching my knee to another’s beneath a table.

  My problem is I have too much space and spend a great deal of my time curating warm, inviting work tableaus that I do not then use. I am always moving my desk from one room to another, always rearranging the furniture then walking into it in the night, always taking over the kitchen table.

  My problem is I get an email re: moment of silence but get it too late and the moment has passed and the moment was silent—I can recall it, only a half hour or so earlier—but while the moment was silent, in that I was alone, working, and silent, I did not, I don’t think, use the moment to consider those we’ve lost, their sacrifices, nor the losses and sacrifices of their families, as the email urged. My problem is I have my own moment of silence and think not of victims, their families, but of the perpetrators, and the wrong ones, the early ones, their trench coats, their swastikas.

  My problem is I can’t find my phone, keys, wallet, sunglasses, regular glasses, shoes, purse, book, pen, lipstick, earrings, watch, mug of cold coffee and suspect these things are all hanging out somewhere without me.

  My problem is I don’t miss you.

  My problem is I cannot grasp how final death is.

  My problem is I have the job she never got to have and the education she never got to have and I’m intimidating and not as nurturing as anyone thought I’d be. My problem is I didn’t convert. My problem is I’m all set.

  My problem was born in Las Vegas at University Medical Center on April 28, 1957. My problem was almost fifty. My problem taught me to drive stick shift, to buy two boxes of hair dye, for we had the same thick hair. My problem taught me the names of all my body parts and that I decided who could and could not touch them. My problem is I never got to say goodbye, or I was always saying goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye so the meaning absconded, as meaning does.

  My problem is I grew up poor. My problem is I’m derivative, a copy of a copy, all faded. My problem is I have the thing where the wires in my brain are crossed and everything that’s supposed to be joyous is frightening and vice versa. My problem is we married other people. My problem is I am hardly ever putting one foot in front of the other. I have a rock collection of rocks whose names I do not know and do not pretend to know. My problem is I am only a little bothered by all of this and want to change not at all.

  * * *

  —

  Downtown Reno goes pawnshop, wedding chapel, dispensary, cowboy bar, biker bar, tourist bar. Tattoo parlors with neon blazing and
pictures of flesh taped against the windows. Karaoke bars and sports bars and a piano bar for bachelorettes. Antique store, liquor store, bail bondsman, strip club where you can get a blow job, strip club where you can get a steak. Chocolate bar, wine bar, a fight in the street outside Eighties Night. Motor lodges for the otherwise unhoused. Casinos turned condos, the Tongan church, the Catholic church, the Straight Edge coffee shop, generic new bistros and gastropubs by the river. Coach’s was now a Segway store, the Satellite a yoga studio. We got a drink at the wedding chapel where Raymond Carver got married, now a self-described eatery. From there we walked to a dusty pizza parlor on the ground floor of an hourly motel, a suitably haunted place with TVs everywhere. On one TV was Wicker Man, a ghost who carried a picnic basket full of severed heads around western Mass. But how many human heads could really fit in one picnic basket? Three at most. Perhaps he had upset the Puritans, this ghost, but post–Sandy Hook, Wicker Man was quaint.

  On another TV a single mom had found a way to monetize her mania. She took a sledgehammer to drywall. She yanked non-period light fixtures off the walls and peeled back brittle ribbons of linoleum with her bare hands. Rust said, “I love this woman.”

  On another TV an Illinois woman stopped an intruder with a medieval sword given to her as collateral for the loan of a horse, which was never returned to her because “it excaped.” She used the sword, the reporter said, because at the time of the intrusion she could not locate her handgun. “I did not have to do it,” she boasted. “No, I did not.”

  I said, “Do you think it’s a bad sign that the touchstone of our generation is a genocidal, ecocidal video game?”

  Rust pointed out the scummy window. “Is that Stevie?”

  “Where?” I said, aghast. Stevie was the last person I wanted to see.

  “Across the street. The hesher on the skateboard.”

  Stevie had been in a thrash metal band called Slasher with my dead ex-boyfriend, the one who’d lived with Ty and Rust and Ivy and me. The apex of Slasher’s career was without a doubt their brief sponsorship by Steel Reserve, who kept the malt liquor flowing in the basements of northern Nevada and southern Idaho where if Slasher took the stage at all it was with one or more band members having vomited or bleeding.

  “He works in the vitamin aisle at Whole Foods now,” Rust said. “I see him all the time.”

  Ty said, “The last time I saw him was that New Year’s at the lake with Jesse.”

  Disambiguation: Jesse. Hebrew meaning “king” or “God exists,” father of David, king of the Israelites. I hadn’t heard his name in a long time. I learned he was dead from Lise, who found out on Myspace, very Oregon Trail.

  I seethed at Stevie where he waxed a curb outside a pawnshop specializing in wedding rings and sterling silver. “Fucking Stevie. You know I missed my grad school orientation mixer because I was having Jesse’s abortion? It really put me at a disadvantage socially.”

  “That wasn’t Stevie’s fault.”

  “No, it was Jesse’s fault and my fault and I can’t take any more punishment and Jesse is dead.”

  Rust flinched. “You don’t have to say it like that.” After Jesse died, Rust painted a mural of him high on the wall of the Hacienda, the flophouse where all the Polish teenagers who worked the casinos in summer stayed. The mural was painted over when the Hacienda was turned into condos, but for years Jesse had watched over the city, or Rust had. I’d been in Ohio with no one watching over me.

  “I’m going to say something to him.” I got up, feeling righteous. I always do something stupid when I’m feeling righteous. I marched out of the restaurant and across the street. When he realized who I was, Stevie said, “Oh, shit,” and hugged me. I let him. He smelled good, yeasty from skating, and my wires were all crossed.

  “Rust said you were over here,” I said, gesturing to the window of the pizza shop where he and Ty watched us. Stevie wagged a hang ten at them and they waved.

  “I heard that guy is hella rich now,” he said, meaning Ty.

  “That’s Tesla propaganda,” I said. “You know they don’t pay taxes? We pay their taxes. Not me, but—Did you know the gigafactory has no windows? Are you aware of the impact of lithium mining in the Great Basin, these mining companies poisoning the water and extincting snails and bulldozing old-growth sage forests and shit!” Buzzing quiet. “We were just talking about Jesse.”

  “Oh, bro,” said Stevie, shaking his head. “I think about Jesse every day.”

  “So do I,” I said, though this was not remotely true. “I guess you didn’t do much to help him.”

  Stevie looked down to where he gripped the nose of his board. “Those were crazy times.”

  I said, “Did you even, like, care about him?”

  “I loved him like a brother,” said Stevie, plainly hurt. “I tried to. But you can’t love when you’re . . . that way. You can’t think of anyone ’sides yourself. Not even yourself, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” I admitted. I knew the words to this song but couldn’t sing along.

  “Jesse wasn’t like that though,” Stevie said, “even at his worst he wasn’t an addict. He was the most giving person I ever knew.”

  “Me too,” I said and meant. “But I still hate him.”

  Again we stood in silence for a while, then Stevie followed me into the restaurant to say hi to Rust and Ty. He and Rust talked about colloidal silver for a really long time. Apparently, Steve was also growing his own mushrooms now, because when our slices came he offered to sprinkle some on top, an offer I accepted on behalf of all of us. There were ghosts and omens all around and we needed all the interpretive help we could get.

  * * *

  —

  After eating, Ty and Rust and I heard drumming on the street and drifted toward it, giggling and waiting for the shrooms to kick in. From the Sierra Street bridge we saw whirling wheels of flames spinning across the courtyard of the Pioneer Theater and went to them like moths. It was Controlled Burn, a local fire-dancing troupe who performed at Burning Man, decompression parties, proms and casino openings, I learned from a business card someone handed me. The Pioneer seemed to me a little upscale for Controlled Burn. It was the only non-smoking venue in town, usually had the Reno Phil or a play going on under its gleaming gold geodesic dome. Late at night Jesse and I used to climb atop it to look at the stars, though we knew they’d be annihilated by the city.

  Dancers flung fireballs on chains, twirled flaming staffs and batons. We tried to stay upwind, for Ty had a time trial in two weeks and felt the butane fumes would compromise his lung capacity. The crowd was upper-crust Burner: white men with dreads in tuxedos, women with septum piercings in evening gowns. Rust sent some texts and soon said, “My buddy’s working the door.”

  The buddy let us into the Pioneer, its lobby decorated with sculptures and photos of art cars. Some sculptures were for sale. The theater was set in rounds for dinner, chandeliers and centerpieces, wedge salads splayed on small plates, ice water sweating. A fundraiser, Rust’s doorman buddy informed us.

  We perused the works in the lobby, ignoring sniffs from the paying patrons. The sculptures—bike parts, wire, rocks, driftwood and plaster—began to shimmer a little. I looked to Rust to confirm that we hated them, but he’d disappeared and once again where Rust had been a sparkly thing approached.

  “Excuse me, Germinator?” She was talking to me. “Remember me? You gave my friend some advice for the present?”

  Ty joined, beaming at the woman’s breasts heaving beneath a thousand little disks of metallic plastic. “Can I touch your shirt?”

  “No thanks,” she said, raising a stop sign hand. “I’m all set.”

  Ty pointed at her hand. “That is awesome. I really, really respect that you said that,” and he left.

  She turned back to me conspiratorially, a bit sheepish even. I could tell she was about to say something that was difficult fo
r her and resolved to honor it, whatever it was. She took in extra air and said, “I was wondering if you could tell me about the future. About marriage and motherhood. Is it as bad as you say? Can you really not be an artist? Are all the holidays ruined?”

  I thought about it. “Some get better, actually. Christmas. Halloween. All you need on the Fourth of July is a box of sparklers. Pregnancy makes you appreciate your body kind of. And living with another person is . . . nice. Things appear, get bought even though you didn’t buy them, get cleaned even though you didn’t clean them. They get fucked up too, by the kid, but even that’s kind of magic. You turn around and something’s in shards—something you were given, something you thought you liked but see now that maybe you never liked, this thing you maybe even asked for but it made you feel like shit without you even knowing. Knowing it up top, I mean. In the deep, you always knew. Your body knows. Things you thought were important to you suddenly aren’t. You have an excuse to get out of anything you want. You can work on your, what do the blogs call them? Found family—and give up on your real family. That’s my favorite part.”

  She blinked slowly. Her eyeshadow had run into her lid creases and I ached to wipe them. “That sounds amazing,” she said. “My real family has been such a disappointment. Not my brother. Well,” she revised, eyes down, those shining lines of whale fat and rock dust, “him, too.”

  I went on. I said one nice thing about the future is you can admit what you’ve given up on, admit it to yourself I mean. “Not to your person. That’s something else,” I said. I said there was much about these thresholds that was impossible to describe from the other side, especially when everyone’s mind was stuffed full with so much Disney garbage and other costly distractions, but that basically I found it to be a demolishing, a taking down to the studs at least, and that I believed that while it rarely happened—most people went back, wanted their bodies back, their old self back—on some occasions it did make you new.