Savage Feast

by Boris Fishman

  Divide among 2 baking sheets, with the bottom parchment intact. Place on the middle oven rack and bake until the edges become golden, approximately 15 minutes, switching the position of the baking sheets halfway through.

  Part III

  Chapter 13

  January 2015

  What to cook in the dark

  Outside, a soft snow lined the railings of the balcony. I went out there several times a day to smoke. I ate little—food hadn’t lost its taste, but hunger was rare—though cigarettes were as delicious as a good meal. I wasn’t hungry, for the first time in my life. Wasn’t thinking about what I would eat, how I’d cook it, where I’d get the best ingredients for the least money. I was dazed by how much time that left unclaimed. I felt spectral. The cigarettes helped. I inhaled; the orange end lit up and ate a little paper; I still existed.

  I was in a friend’s apartment because I’d rented mine out to make extra money—I had been supposed to go to Mexico for a month. It took me two hours to leave bed in the morning, so a trip abroad seemed unimaginable. But people said I should go, try to distract myself.

  People were full of well-meaning counsel. Most of it was about finding ways to think about anything other than what I was feeling while presumably, behind the curtain, it made its slow way off the stage. “Time,” they said. “You’ll get better,” they said. These comments made it hard to believe they were paying attention. So I doubled down on my disability—in my impairment, I performed a greater impairment, like my grandfather pissing himself to get out of the draft. I wanted people to say something like “It’s very bad, isn’t it,” or “There’s nothing I can say that’ll help you, so why don’t we just sit here, I’ll hold your hand, and if you’d like to weep into my shoulder, that would be fine.” But I didn’t have the self-understanding to ask for that, so I just wished someone would catch my frequency. I became so despondent that I told an old friend—he called me almost every day, though with platitudes—I couldn’t see him again. Another friend had said it: “You’ll never have the same friends again.”

  I was destroyed for a reason men are not supposed to be destroyed, or at least show it: love that had failed (again). Outwardly, Amy (not her name), the woman with whom I’d fallen in love two years earlier, in 2013, could not have been less like me—her people could have come over on the Mayflower. But we found the other so interesting that we spoke for hours—three hours, five hours, six hours. We read the same kinds of books, and hoped to find the same things in them. We looked at the world with the same doubtful, laughing eye. She was neither neurotic nor repressed; was deeply connected to her feelings but not owned by them—something people often lay claim to but rarely carry off. Certainly I didn’t have it, but she didn’t mind the intensity.

  When she and I met, two years after the end of my relationship with Alana, I was dating with the terrified industry of a late bloomer starting a second career. Nothing worked. With American women, I felt Russian; with Russian women, American; with Jews of either nationality, like a heathen.

  I was as interested in one among them, Yvonne (not her name), as I’d been in any of the hundred women I’d met. She had completed the Camino de Santiago, the five-hundred-mile religious walk across northern Spain. She had worked with orphans in Romania. She was well read, conscientious, so pretty. But only she said something I’ll never forget.

  Yvonne was skeptical and guarded, as many New York women have reasons to be, so I’d set to melting her brick wall, as I had with so many others. I spent hours crafting e-mails balanced between wit, sincerity, and intelligence. When we went out, I worked so hard to get her to laugh that you would have been forgiven, were you at the next table, for assuming here was someone doing a dry run of his stand-up routine.

  Eventually, my fever eased enough for her to get to say some things, too. When she did, I didn’t feel any of the connection I’d been certain was there. She was, indeed, smart, interesting, and accomplished—but it wasn’t the kind of chemical match that makes you unable to sleep. Feeling like a madman, I began to back out. Yvonne became upset, and wrote this message: “You looked at me like I was a refrigerator and you just couldn’t put your finger on what you wanted to take. Like you have some craving for some feeling that you can’t identify. And then instead of discerning it, you eat whatever is there until you’re sick and too exhausted and full to want anything more.”

  It wasn’t Yvonne I was interested in. It was in not being alone. Most people mourn the end of an eight-year-relationship, and many would choose sealing the wound through serial dating over figuring out what had caused it. But with me, it was an addiction. Being with Alana from twenty-four—the age I moved away from my parents—to thirty-two had concealed it. So had the fact that, whereas it was I, the single child, whom my parents wished to keep near, it wasn’t them I was desperate to have close but, in a person’s experience of intimacy, their reincarnation: a romantic partner. A reasonable thing—unless it caused problems. And it did, though it wasn’t until Yvonne’s message that the real reason—the addiction, which had until then worn the camouflage of a blameless desire to meet someone—became impossible to ignore. An evening alone at home without prospects harbored something unbearable—I couldn’t focus, didn’t eat, just paced the apartment. I didn’t need to sleep with someone—it was enough, simply, for there to be a person in the mix. But that I needed. It turned out I was as incapable of being alone as any of my elders.

  The discovery of all this was as surreal as realizing that as an American adult seventy years after the war, my grandmother dead for a decade, I devoured food with the same desperation she had in 1945. The hungers came from the same place, the trauma-derived mother-hunger that won’t give you a moment to wonder if you’re really hungry underneath all that worry. Unless, somehow, you free yourself of the worry—of the mother-hunger itself. But how? The hunger and the worry—they’re home.

  Yvonne’s judgment was like discovering that an illness I thought I’d survived by distancing myself from my family had actually entered the bone long before, and so I carried it still, in ever-metastasizing ways. I met Amy before I grasped the solution, but after I realized there was a problem. Meeting her held out the magnificent possibility that maybe there wasn’t, like the doctor calling to say you were accidentally read someone else’s results and you were fine after all.

  I did go to Mexico. I set my alarm for two hours earlier than I needed. The first hour to keep pressing the snooze button—it was only while I slept that I didn’t feel pain; contrary to expectation, my dreams were mostly untroubled—the second to work on leaving the bed. I tried to will it. I imagined myself separating from the useless body on the bed; the cover turning back; my feet touching the floor. Perhaps this would be the day I would want some breakfast. I made deals—I would count to twenty, and then. I would count to fifty, and then. But the floor was cold, the kitchen far away, and the comforter thick and warm. I wanted its weight. It reminded me I was there, because hours went by during which my mind was elsewhere, and when it returned, I couldn’t say where it had gone.

  In bed, I would sit up. Then slide back down. Turn over and rise on all fours, like a dog, hoping it would serve as a prelude to liftoff, but then my arms would collapse and I would fall prostrate. Every part of my body worked—certain parts of this frozen house were quite thick with action—but I couldn’t fire the neurons that would make them work all at once. Sometimes, in my chest, I felt an anthill—very small things crawled around in there and droned. Sometimes a stone; sometimes wire-like lines inflamed by rough touch. I saw this inflammation mapped as if on an MRI. When my mind wasn’t blank, it was the opposite: I kept hearing my mother intone, in Russian, “Oh, it feels very bad, very bad.” Had she ever uttered those words? The apparition-mother quaked, held herself in her arms, rocked back and forth—none of these gestures like my mother’s—and said, over and over, “Oh, it feels very bad, very bad.” Other than that, I kept hearing a voice say, in Russian, “And what is your
name?” “And what is your name?” “And what is your name?” “And what is your name?” “And what is your name?” Sometimes it sounded as if the voice was saying it to mean “And who do you think you are?” and sometimes just informationally.

  I had spent the preceding twenty-five years in a frenzy of productivity. Every morning, I mapped out my days to the quarter hour. I took pride in my efficiency. I was out of bed as soon as the alarm clock went off. The two-minute increments of loose time in line at the supermarket that others used to check social media, I used to read two more pages. I was a good machine. This is where you would expect to hear all the costs—the great human mess does not submit to such formulas; he was efficient, but without friends or lovers or pastimes; et cetera. But none of this was true. When factors outside my control interfered, I adjusted. I made time for friends and lovers and much else. I just always had my eye on the clock. The one real cost was that I couldn’t allow things to take their own time rather than mine.

  In that bed in which I spent hours every morning trying to rise, my horror as my eyes crossed the clock was proportional to each quarter-hour increment that passed without action.

  I did make it up the morning of the Mexico trip. I managed to put some things in a suitcase. (Maybe I was getting better?) My frugality didn’t permit me to take a taxi to the airport, so I bounced on subways for nearly two hours. I hardly noticed the time—mind-vacating paralysis makes the downside of frugality easier to ignore. At the Aeroméxico gate, I made no effort to dry the tears that dropped from my eyes; I couldn’t summon the usual energy to think about what the people around me would think. The gate agent who scanned my ticket neither smiled nor looked away. For this I was grateful. It was a non-American person’s reaction. She did not wish to cheer me nor pretend it wasn’t happening.

  From the Cancún airport, I rode for two hours to the spot on the northern shore of the Yucatán from which ferries departed to the island where I was heading, for a friend’s wedding. Then I took the ferry. The island did not allow vehicles—it had no paved roads, only sand—and a golf cart delivered me to my humble hotel. Recent rains had turned every walkway to mud. I had dinner. I smoked half a pack of cigarettes. I slept—sleep was the most welcome part of the day. When I woke up, I hired one of the golf carts to take me to the ferry dock. I got on the next one back to the mainland. There, I hired an expensive car—even my frugality had fallen away—to take me back to Cancún, and then I paid Aeroméxico a lot of money to put me on the last flight of the day back to New York. I was back under the thick down comforter before midnight.

  In Andrew Solomon’s lucid, compassionate, and frightening book The Noonday Demon, the account of the onset of his first episode of severe depression goes on for many pages; his approached incrementally and without linearity, like an ambivalent love interest. Mine seems to have been many years in the making, but when the time came, it happened in no more than several hours, like that cliché about losing money gradually and then all at once.

  My connection with Amy felt so singular that it obscured the moral degradation of what we were doing, something neither of us had ever imagined we could. She was married. With children, to a good, talented man with whom the original passion had turned into something less peaked—an old, familiar story. After a year and a half, I finally managed to break it off. Two weeks later, I received a message from Amy saying she would leave her husband.

  For the next month, my heart felt like a balloon filled with too much. Because Amy was, short of a miracle, past childbearing age, I would be giving up the chance to have children of my own, which I very much wanted, and committing myself to a city I’d wanted to leave for a long time. It all seemed worth it. For once, I’d let go of all my unreasonable expectations in order to live in the real world, glorious and imperfect, with all the other normal people. This prospect filled me with relief rather than fear. I took comfort in the symmetry with Alana’s experience: The man she had met, whom she was about to marry, was also older, and had children from a previous marriage.

  But Amy did not leave. Her husband, ears finally open after years of distracted nodding, came to and said all the right things. It was December, an unhelpful month. I had gone to a country home borrowed from friends to try to finish my second novel, so I was surrounded by silence and snow. After receiving the news, I was overcome by a terrible feeling—feverish, queasy, cold; dead and bursting at once. My chest was slowly filling with the drone that would be its unleaving presence for months. I lay down on the living room couch and did not get up until the next morning. I did not get up even then. Who knows if I would have plummeted in this way had my intense disappointment after the end of my relationship with Alana not started me on the descent. But I did.

  After two days without food or even the coffee without which life had previously seemed unimaginable, I realized I was incapacitated and reluctantly called my parents, who came and brought me back to New Jersey, as my place was already rented—I kicked myself out whenever I could to make a little money to live. I spent the next week in bed or smoking on the balcony in my father’s warm jacket, watching the reservoir in front of their apartment building freeze over. I read through Graham Greene, his books the right combination of bleakness and beauty. Grief is devouring, but if it makes room for the self-centeredness of self-pity, sometimes the world feels like everything it’s saying, it’s saying about you.

  Shut-eye’s the answer to all, isn’t it. . . .

  Saturday came and passed, then Sunday began its long course. . . .

  For it only deepened my sense of being without parentage.

  My parents made my bed, and fed me, and even made themselves say nothing when I smoked on the balcony, though I knew my father would throw out the jacket after I left. But they couldn’t hide their terror—“It’s been a week, shouldn’t you pull yourself together?” my father said—nor my mother restrain her desire to keep having explained to her, over and over, what had happened and why. I called the friend with the empty apartment and, on a frozen January day, moved under her comforter. Her apartment building happened to sit across from mine, rendering my exile cruelly comic, and surely metaphorical, too: I was only one hundred yards from home, but could come no closer. The restraining order was against myself.

  The Mexico trip laid me out for three days. As a snowstorm piled up outside, dampening further the already dampened sound of the world, I stayed under the comforter and read Andrew Solomon’s book. It had a sick urgency; in the pages of his clear-eyed and deeply empathetic story, I was seeing myself as I couldn’t in the eyes of some friends. But the more I recognized, the more afraid I became.

  That vital sense of purpose that is the opposite of depression. . . . Grief is a humble angel who leaves you with strong, clear thoughts and a sense of your own depth. Depression is a demon who leaves you appalled. . . . Racked by this thing no one else seemed to be able to see. . . . Every second of being alive hurt me. . . . You cannot gain pleasure from anything.

  That was the first five pages. The book had 443.

  On the fourth day, I became so afraid that I sprang out of bed, as if to prove to myself that our stories weren’t alike, that I was getting better. I was cold. I was cold all the time, even though my friend’s high-rise heated wantonly. Pacing the small living room, I felt as dizzy, feverish, and chilled as if I didn’t have the comforter wrapped around me, its tips “cleaning the floor,” as the Russian went. (In my haze, I heard my dead grandmother say, “Take care, the tips are cleaning the floor.”) I stopped and gazed out the wide windows—late on a weekday morning, the world at work, there was a man pacing the living room in T-shirt, boxers, and a massive down comforter, its tips cleaning the floor. I sat down on my friend’s sectional (she was of Russian descent, and less ambivalent about it than me, which meant that her living room was incomplete without a sectional sofa) and dialed my grandfather. I knew my parents wouldn’t have said anything about my situation to him; whether to Oksana, I wasn’t sure. I pleaded f
or her to pick up, but his voice came on and I had to go through ten minutes about whether I had all the shampoo and toothpaste I needed. Finally, he gave her the phone.

  “Can I come cook with you?” I blurted out. I was about to mention the borshch in Ivano-Frankovsk to reassure her it didn’t have to go badly, but before I could, she said, “Yes. When? Tomorrow?”

  “Today?” I said. “Right now?”

  “Come right now.”

  Yes, they had told her.

  I hadn’t left the apartment in days, and I’d just signed up to travel an hour each way. I dressed myself, then sat back down on the sofa, already sweaty and spent. According to Russian superstition, a person must sit down before a long trip—his or her last peace for a while. I sat there so long I collected enough luck for ten trips. Does the luck still accrue if you don’t go on the trip? I stood and went outside.

  Watching cars flood down the street, I was overcome by a monstrous new feeling—if I stepped forward, the pain would end, as it did when I went to sleep, only that this sleep would go on forever. I stood, frozen; the light changed, then changed again. I remained on the curb not because I was remembering all the people who loved me, or thinking of all the books I wanted to write, or because my grandmother had fought so hard to remain alive. Because I was in shock. Every day, I awoke with a hope: Perhaps today I’ll get better. But I was getting worse. Tears in my eyes, I backed away from the curb and took the far side of the sidewalk, just in case. Once I was in the subway, the long ride was welcome. For an hour, I didn’t have to do anything.

  On the ten-block walk from the subway to my grandfather’s, I practiced smiling. Like a wrestler before a match, I flexed my shoulders, rolled my neck, pursed my lips, raised my eyebrows. I made myself utter phrases such as “No, nothing new on the love front” and conjured scent-deflecting jokes such as “You offer me shampoo one more time and you owe me twenty dollars.” And then I was there, in the glazed, sweet-smelling heat of their apartment.