Outer Banks

by Russell Banks

  This was a cruel rationalization that was but a subtle means of sustaining my desire, of feeding it like some kind of parasite that had attached itself to the interior wall of my gut. But I did not understand this at the time, because I was weak and out of contact with the voices of the dead, for I had not my coffin at this time. My dreams were silent, and I had no voice but my own to advise me, and whatever construction I could put upon the scriptures that yet rang in my head, and while my own voice told me in consoling terms that my desire was a natural one for a man who had been cast away in prison, the scriptures, or so did I construe them, told me that the appetite that cannot be sated, the longing that knows no end, the desire that feeds only on itself, these are but a few of the many paths out of time. Anywhere, so long as it is out of this world! cries the prophet Walter (vi, 12). So I reminded myself, and thus, at the bottom of my pit of longing, would I raise up my head and listen, and soon a consoling peace would come over me, and I would sleep.

  For several months did this circle turn in me, of complaint followed by longings which evoked glittering images followed in turn by gloom which I nightly escaped by rationalization and misconstrued scripture. It was in the early spring, when I had been imprisoned for almost a full year, which at that time seemed a great long while to me, that several unexpected events occurred. Most men and women who are not of our faith would not regard them as events, but that is of no importance here. For events are what they were, and what follows is how I understood them then. Though I will reveal shortly how I eventually came to understand them, through the guidance of the dead, for now, so that my trials and tribulation can be better grasped by the reader, let me withhold my later comprehension until I come to describe its fortunate arrival.

  The first event was simply that I noticed one night while I lay in my cot and conjured images of loaded boards of steaming food, before I had come to the part in my nightly sequence when I began the quick slide into despair, I realized that the feast set before me was one I had already imagined, was a meal I had conjured several months earlier. This came upon me first as a surprise, for I had thought the menu could be infinitely varied, and then as a disappointment, for immediately the image of the meal seemed less succulent, less attractive, less necessary than before, and my mouth did not fill with water quite as before. I did not understand this diminishment of my desire, and somewhat fuddled, I tried again, and I sent the broiled trout back to the kitchen, as it were, as if the waiter had made a terrible mistake, and ordered again, this time a crispy roast pig stuffed with apples and sausage. But this meal too was familiar to me, for it too had I earlier brought forth from my imagination (for there did I then believe these images to emanate from). Again I returned the meal to the kitchen and called for another, barbecued swordfish, but this too, when it appeared steaming in its juices before me, I saw I had already ordered once, and thus it went sailing back to the chef, who by now must have been close to despair himself. On it went, one after another, until I began to grow shrill and wild, ordering rapidly and without care.

  Suddenly, as if to quiet me for a moment while the poor harried chef struggled to assemble his masterpiece, there was set before me a glass and a dark bottle of twenty year old port wine. I poured a glassful, raised it and with my eyes praised the regal hue of the wine, sniffed it with pleasure, and let it into my mouth. This was the second event. For it was as if the wine had replaced the banquet of before, and instantly my earlier endless desire for delicious and various foods had been replaced by a new endless desire, this one for fine wines, hearty whiskeys, froth-topped ales and sharp tangy liqueurs and brandies that heat the chest. In my mind I drank off the bottle of port wine, and as soon as it was emptied, I tumbled as before into my pit of despondency, where I nursed myself with consoling rationalizations concerning the spiritual quality of my desire and with scripture appropriated and translated for my own greedy use.

  The next night I requested a brilliant beaujolais, and then the following night a chablis from an obscure but old and honorable vineyard, and then, one night after another, one excellent old wine after another, until it occurred to me that a peaty ten year old whiskey from the north would be pleasant, and then a bottle of cognac, a coffee brandy from the tropics, a rice wine from the orient, a powerful honey liqueur, a pale and breath-taking rum, and on and on, long careful solitary nights at table as I raised glass after glass to the light, admired the color and texture, brought the glass to my lips, and while it still quivered there, suddenly plummeted into the pit of frustration, resentment, gloom, there to anesthetize my pain with specious argument and misapplied scripture.

  So it was that I did also complain as before among my fellow prisoners when at leisure or at table, except that now I whined about the prohibitions against alcoholic beverages and other intoxicants, and that now the prisoners among whom I gathered to complain were the swollen-bellied addicts of alcohol, the slaves to gin, the nervous red-nosed lovers of whiskey and rum, the bleary-eyed connoisseurs of wine. No longer were my consorts the epicureans with their jowls and gout, the feasters and thick-lipped lovers of dripping chunks of flesh and all the fastidious gourmets of my small society. To exchange one group of complainers for another, however, was merely to rattle the chain that bound me, though I did not realize that then. I believed instead that I had moved from a dull group of misanthropic associates to a group more responsive and sensitive to my spiritual quest. Such was the extent of my delusion, the degree of my depravity. And so it was that by night I conjured images that eased my hungers and slaked my thirst without releasing me from either, while by day I sourly studied and discussed prohibitions and limits without attempting to transcend or overleap them.

  I do not know how long, as my condition, this would have gone on, or if in the end I would have profaned myself utterly and turned irreconcilably away from the dead, had I not one night exhausted the inventory of wines, whiskeys, brandies, liqueurs and ales that were available to me and had I not, while wildly sending back each new bottle as it appeared to me, suddenly been distracted by the image of money. Be not astonished by this, for someday you too may find yourself in a similar trap, and then may you recall that after the desire for food comes the desire for drink, and after the desire for drink comes the desire for money, cash, coins, currencies of all nations, bullion, personal checks, bank checks, refunds, all forms of money, one after the other, in bound stacks, in high trembling columns, in glimmering solid bricks, in all the forms that you have ever seen. Oh, what chests of money I had hauled out, what safe deposit boxes, what caches and stashes I rifled and gloated over during those long summer nights! What great good fortune suddenly would shower me with riches, coins of all realms falling through my fingers, bills stuffed into all my pockets, my wallet bulging like a thick mackerel in my hand, while I lay there in my cot in the darkness of my cell, counting on into the night, tens, hundreds, thousands, millions of dollars and cents, pounds, pesos, francs, marks, pesetas, reals, ruples, yen, lira, and on and on, as if the numbers were able to run endlessly on all the way to infinity.

  Precisely as I had before, I moved to a new link in the chain that bound me, turning my backside to my former friends, the lovers of drink, so that I could complain alongside those who were poor, those who resented the wealth of certain individuals among us or the wealth of the jailor and his assistants, who, by bribery and other emoluments, had managed to supplement their salaries quite handsomely, and even resented the wealth of the citizens who remained outside the prison and whom we never saw but still remembered. Thus, as before, my days were spent with all my attention directed bitterly to the limits that bound me, and my nights were spent in vain fantasies that those limits did not exist, with the inevitable collapse against the unavoidable knowledge that they did truly exist, and the last self-solacing whimpers at dawn that this terrible cycle somehow expanded my spirit.

  Oh, foolish, deluded, self-profaning man of time! What will save you from yourself? What will turn you away from this path
etic ferreting about? Must you count all the money in the world, all the dollars and all the cents, all the bills and coins ever issued by all the treasuries in the histories of nations, before you can see the truth? Must you exhaust all the finite inventories in the universe, and still go on longing, before you realize what it is that you long for? Do you not know that while you are counting, still counting, long before you have neared the end even of this finite set, death will come and take you, and everything will have been for nought, for zero, as if you had never counted the monad that all along stared you in the face?

  These are the questions that came to me, then, one slow word at a time, until it appeared to me that the chain I was forging was itself endless and that it could go on longer than I could. For while it is the chain of delusion itself that is infinite, my own delusion was that each finite link was infinite. Had I possessed my coffin during those months of my vain desires, I surely would have seen that each set of desires was a finite set, for I would have seen, as I see now, that each set depended on my personal memories of food and drink and monies in order for me to image any particular member of that set. And when I had seen, by virtue of the grace sacrament provides, that I had been all along experiencing nothing more than the desire that springs from memory, no twisting of scripture would have worked for me to excuse myself. Thus armed, I would have steeled myself against the desire by denigrating the memory and then by turning all my attention to the further contemplation of the dead, who have no memory.

  But without my coffin, without access thereby to the sacrament that could have provided grace with ease, I was forced to lengthen the cycle, to add link to link, until at last, no matter how I squirmed and wriggled, I could not deny the evidence that all the links would be the same and endlessly, and that all I was about during these complaining days and dreaming nights was the business of binding myself into time. It was a discovery made possible by intellect, rather than by rite, but it was no less gratuitous for that and thus no less an aspect of the grace that flows from the dead. I fell on my knees, as I do now, and I thanked the unruffled, objective, endlessly uninvolved dead for the freedom to think clearly and thereby to free myself from the bondage of the finite, the chain of life, the links of the desire that springs from memory.

  This episode in my spiritual growth marked the end of my weakness for nostalgia. By cleansing myself of my desires for varieties of food, for varieties of drink, and for endless numbers of money, I cleansed myself of the taint of nostalgia. And thus was my growth allowed to continue, where before it had been impeded and had even been thrown backwards so to create a diminishment. It was a painful period in my life, and often a bewildering one, but all that was to make my ultimate freedom from it the more victorious and exemplary.

  FOR REASONS AT first unknown to me, when I was falling regularly into disputes with those prisoners who previously had joined me daily in my complainings, I felt compelled to blame myself. Later I saw that my reasons were natural if not well-founded, for as much as I had made myself come forward after months, even up to a year or possibly more, of complaining and then dreaming and then making specious argument, by that same distance as I had come forward was I regarded by my old associates with mistrust. Now, this is in the nature of things, that when a companion comes forward and leaves you behind, you will bridle at him when he speaks to you and attempts to bring you forward also to stand beside him. You will try to argue that he has fallen away, and he will argue that he has come forward, and so the two of you will fall into dispute.

  It was not wholly a legitimate thing for me to do, then, when I proceeded so quickly to blame myself for the disputes, but after all, I was the one who had moved out of step, and I could not think of my movement except as a forward one, and so naturally I could not help but attempt to convince my fellow prisoners to follow me to that place, which place I knew was no more than a quickstep nearer to death. Yet all the same, I knew that if I had not tried so diligently to bring my fellow prisoners to a deeper understanding of the worship of the dead, there would not have been those painful, sometimes frightening disputes and arguments and the numerous sudden flights of irritation. My companions did not want me to leave them, whether by means of a step forward or of a falling away, but once I had done so, they did not want me to try to take them with me.

  Yet I had no choice in the matter. It was my calling to make coffins to aid in the further worship of the dead, and in the absence of conditions which would make that activity possible, in order still to practice my calling I was obliged to draw others unto the dead in whatever ways there were available to me, and in this case, at this time, the only means available to me was argument. And so, whenever possible, I met my fellow prisoners with argument and deep reasoning, with intent talk and formal challenge and with careful discussion, bringing my own most complicated and subtle thoughts to bear on the question of the proper place for a human being’s attention, and in the process drawing forth from my fellows their most complicated and subtle thoughts on the question. Thus, if I could not make my fellows a coffin, I would make them some deep and thrilling argument instead. If I could not work for the dead in one way, I would do it in another.

  The first of my previous companions to grow weary of my company and to show it to me were those who in the previous winter had got me to dress myself up as a famous actress and go about in the exercise yard where there were many of the simpler prisoners and offer them my autograph, which they excitedly accepted and soon were squabbling over amongst themselves, to the lasting amusement of my companions and also to me at that time, although later it seemed to me a pointless and even slightly cruel thing to do, and I was ashamed of myself for having done it. But after I had gone through my long winter and spring of complaining and griping and fantasizing and rationalizing, and eventually had come to know myself in this matter, then I could no longer join these fellows in their play and their jokes on the other prisoners. I was forced to refuse them on several occasions, first when they came to me and invited me to join them in their attempt to trick up some of the exercise equipment in the gymnasium so that the bigger, athletic men would be likely to fall and hurt themselves when they began to exercise, and then a few weeks later when they wanted me to help them decorate the dining hall for a Mayday masquerade party. I thought both activities wrong headed, the first because it would cause unnecessary anger and possible injury and the second because the celebration of the first day of the month of May was a deliberate carry over from the days when it had not yet been thought of to worship the dead and men and women went around year after year making holidays out of seasonal and celestial cycles and changes which they foolishly associated with the patterns and needs of their own mortal lives. The amnesty associated with the solstice and applied every year to the short-term prisoners and the tried and convicted political and religious offenders willing to sue out a pardon, as they called it, was a celebration of this type. Possibly this amnesty was one of the reasons why Mayday, too, was regarded as such a significant holiday in the prison. I could not say for sure, but when I offered my reasons, as described above, for not wishing to participate in the preparations for the masquerade party associated with the holiday, I was told by one of the celebrants that soon the amnesty would be made, and then all the prisoners in his group, and here he waved his hand in a circle to indicate to me his many friends, would be gone out of prison and would be lost to one another forever. Some of them even had wives, he said to me, as if this were a sad thing, and many of them would be obliged to go back and make their residences far from one another all across the nation. Thus, he said, Mayday was an important holiday for them.

  I could feel a certain sympathy for them. It was true that most of this particular group of prisoners would indeed be affected by the workings of the amnesty at the solstice, for most of them, as it turned out, had been confined for political reasons, in so far as the manner of their affection for men and their preference for the company of a man to the company of a woman
were to be understood as crimes against the state. For indeed, when the continued good health of the state is economically dependent upon the family and upon sexual unions therein between a man and a woman, to withhold oneself from participating with eagerness in such a union is to undermine the very foundations of the state. Though I myself was not guilty of this particular crime, I was, however, guilty of a crime similarly identified, and for that reason I felt a special kinship with these surprisingly good-natured fellows. I say surprisingly because I knew how much they had suffered for their predilections and derelictions, and it would have been a reasonable thing for them to have been far more bitter and belligerent towards those of us who were not of their particular persuasion as regards the family or as regards copulation with women. (Many of them, in confidence, did tell me that they often had copulated with women and in fact were very fond of the company of women, even more than was I myself. I found this hard to understand. Actually, I found it hard to believe, and that is what I found hard to understand, for why should I not believe what I am told by a man I do not hold to be a liar?)