The Last Laugh

by Arjuna Ardagh

  I could feel the tightness in my jaw as I clutched the hand rail of the bus. The driver smiled this time, and I tossed coins into his cold money machine. “Fuck you, you miserable loser,” I said with my eyes. He withered.

  As I climbed the stairs to my attic room, more than grapes and a sleeping bag and pictures of Peru awaited me. It came in waves. I desperately tried to block it in my chest.

  I lay in the cold darkness, my body innocent like a baby, craving rest. Give me comfort. Give me breast milk. The horror sent spasms through my tortured belly. The clenching left me on the edge of retching the whole night. I would feel pulled for a few minutes into welcome oblivion, and then an image would come, just a fleeting thought, sending spasms of pain back through all of me. It was not as I had thought. One could only laugh now, or better, weep at my delusions of grandeur. They were not jealous. They saw through my trumped-up self-importance. Nothing, nothing, I was left with nothing. Children, wife, best friend, the man I had trusted these days as a teacher, all gone, all dust. All quicksand upon which I had been building my house. My body finally dropped into sleep, and threw me into a toxic dream, wild parties, hundreds of writhing naked bodies, rubbing against each other, but not for me, the outcast. I woke up in a cold sweat.

  It must be morning. Tortured long enough. Switch on the light, find something to do. 2 A.M. It had come down to this. Nothing. Fooled by a madman, his shallow tricks just thimbles offered in cruel jest to bail out my sinking boat. I sat. I tried to retch. It had always been this way. I remembered interviewing a biologist on the radio. It’s all in the genes. The DNA. Nothing you can do. Predetermined from birth, the hand you are dealt. Mine, all low cards. The two of clubs for weakness of resolution. The three of hearts for an endless destiny of betrayal. The two of spades, all effort just digging a deeper grave. Genes. Biology. I am the product of biology. Hopeless.

  When my parents died it made the headline news in every country, suspected terrorism. They never knew for sure. They were flying back from burying my grandfather. A weak man, the death certificate said he died of heart failure; those who knew him would call it a more generic habit of failure, an oblivion to all passion. My parents carried back the urn as hand luggage, together with their inheritance of mutually supported weakness. My mother was asthmatic. Always wanted a bigger family, but the strain on her frail body of giving birth to me had almost killed her. I would have had a brother, Philip, but she had a miscarriage at seven months and almost died. The doctors told her she was playing Russian roulette to try again. So it was, she lived out her life in timid resignation to the limits of her body and her fear.

  My father was an engineer, worked for a big airplane manufacturer. Gave my mother just the formula of security and regular routine that would allow her to survive the day, but nothing more than that, no direction, no mission, no higher purpose to admire. He wore sensible thermal underwear under his button-down shirts and long-sleeved cardigans. His wire-rimmed glasses were the only bridge he had to the outside world. They were as fragile as his self-confidence. A hearty slap on the back would shatter them into a thousand pieces. But he worked hard, did what he was told to do, eventually designing high-tech killing machines under a cloak of government secrecy. My mother could finally find some pride in her man, bringing in huge sums of money, serving his country. I called it organized genocide and wanted no part of it.

  I left home at 18, when I went to college. I purposely chose a campus far from home. I was ashamed by the flag they hung over the front door, a token of their obedience to organized cruelty and imperialism. I refused my father’s offers of financial help through college, preferring to work in bookstores and late-night cafés. They were heartbroken, and asked me again and again why I didn’t come home. One Christmas, about a year before they died, I did go back. My hair was long by then; I smoked ostentatiously on the porch. See, I have my little stubborn spots, too. My mother baked and cleaned and fussed, and silently pleaded with drooping eyes for the return of the son she’d raised. But I was adamant. The war machines or me, choose. You can’t have both.

  The night before I left, after my mother went to bed, I sat out on the porch, smoking in the cold night air. My father must have been working late in his study. To my surprise, he came out and sat beside me. And to my even greater surprise, asked me to roll him a cigarette.

  “I know you don’t like the work I do,” he offered. Silence. “And, honestly, Matt, neither do I. But your mother is frail; we need the income, and this is what came my way. You don’t always have the free choice to do things exactly the way you’d like to. Sometimes you have to compromise.” Yes, buddy, but you can’t make compromise a way of life.

  We talked for a while that night, my father and I. I argued a little, he defended himself. As I look back, he was pleading for my approval. Pleading for me to forgive his crippled life. He offered me a hand to shake, smiled a little tensely, and went to bed. After they died, they left me money, plenty of it. But I was angry. It all smelled to me of the machines my father was building to wipe out entire villages in Asia or the Middle East. Children mowed down in their sleep, women widowed, life hardly begun. For what?

  I donated the entire amount, under the heavy influence of marijuana, to the Save Tibet Fund and Amnesty International. I figured I could make it on my own.

  Genes. Biology. What more can I hope for than what I’m made of, this legacy of embarrassed compromise, of failure to stick to one’s course? But it’s so much bigger than that. I’m not only shackled to a family of mediocrity, but to a species that’s bent on consuming its way to destruction. This is the legacy I pass on to my children, this legacy and this example. I come from a long line of weak-willed men, generation after generation, whose ideals are so faintly conceived and asserted that they are washed away in the current of the status quo.

  I conceived my children like Nero did, when the culture was already beyond the point of no return. Just last week I read somewhere that global temperatures are averaging three degrees above normal. The signs are everywhere, but like lemmings, we rush, following power-crazed self-righteous leaders over the cliff. Give me a bigger house, an upgrade to my airline seat and my RAM, and I’ll turn a blind eye to the madness.

  It’s all dying. Not dying in a natural way: dust to dust, ashes to ashes. The very system that supports a healthy life and death is itself dying. Every year more species are wiped from the globe by this collective trance of greed. A huge machine smashing everything in its path, chomping everything greedily down its gullet. Bigger and better SUVs blindly adding to the burning of fossil fuels and forests and simple values, the assuring of an uninhabitable planet for our grandchildren. What possible difference would it make anyway if I bailed myself out of my current crisis? Even if I did bring myself back into alignment with the great machine, where is it going? What nobility is there in participating in mass stupidity? Ours is an economic system so out of balance that more than two billion people live on less than a dollar a day, while puppet politicians and their corporate friends and sponsors gamble with stakes beyond our capacity to understand.

  What’s the very best that I could do? Write a book? Make a movie? What’s the very best that I’m capable of—and who would listen? And if they did, how quickly would it be forgotten? What kind of books do people read? The daily journal of a golf celebrity, the interior decorating of your favorite film star. Guide books on how to fiddle more successfully while Rome burns all around you. Corporations corrupt, governments corrupt, the very fabric of our living corrupt. I’m really no different from the rotten machine to which I belong. My failure, my greed, my mistakes, no different than the rest of the lemming pack.

  It was getting light, but it made no difference to me. There was no point to any of it, only a pit where my belly used to be, an empty hole with my spine aching. Even to undertake the almost impossible task of bringing a life back into balance, to what end? What possible nobility would we find there?

  I once read a story in the
paper about a man, quite well-to-do, good job, worked for one of the long-distance phone companies, with a wife and three children, all doing well. One day he shot them all and then committed suicide. The question we all ask ourselves is “Why?” When all is going well, why? In my attic at dawn, cold, alone, I knew why. Perhaps that poor crazy man was saner than the rest of us, perhaps he saw through the futility of trying to make something right that is plunging, out of control, into something wrong. Perhaps he saw the future he was raising his children for; one with polluted water, polluted hearts. One in which love and nobility are insidiously turned into products to sell.

  It was light now. I ate the grapes greedily. I didn’t care how long they had to last. I didn’t care about anything. I lay back on the bed and masturbated fiercely, fantasizing about women with black lipstick and spiky hair. I needed to feel something. Anything. I came quickly, before I was even hard. I wiped myself with a sock I found lying on the floor. I lay back exhausted. I hadn’t slept. I wondered if masturbating was against the rules. There was still nothing. I was empty. I thought again of the bridge. If I were there in this moment, I would jump, but just the process of getting there seemed like too much effort. All Joey’s advice seemed pathetic, infantile even. A cruel joke at my expense.

  So the day went on. Every now and then I did what I could to pull myself out of the hole, but with every hour the motivation grew less. What point was there? For whose benefit would I try to find some energy, some motivation to continue? Hour upon hour went on in this way, and by the time the sun was going down, the world was already gray and dismal. I could not remember one single thing to give me reason to continue.

  Paul knocked at my door, looking sheepish. I didn’t even bother to try connecting with him. I followed him down the stairs, the way people walk after receiving electric shock therapy, mechanically, lacking the energy to do anything else. We drove in silence. We walked from the car, one behind the other up the stairs. I didn’t even try to connect with anyone, just left my shoes, stepped through the door into the room, sat down, and closed my eyes. Joey must have come in at some point; I didn’t look to see. He began to speak; I didn’t try to listen.

  Then something else began to creep over me, slowly, barely noticed. It was a silence, a nothingness. It wasn’t blissful; it wasn’t mystical; it wasn’t ecstatic. It was just empty, devoid of anything, devoid of desire, devoid of any energy or motivation to change anything anywhere. Utterly empty. Utterly still. Devoid of enthusiasm, devoid of despair. It was really as though Joey, and his meeting, and the people, and my family, and the whole human drama, and even Matt Thomson himself were in another room. Here it was silent; there was nothing happening nor had there ever been. It felt neither good nor bad.

  Joey stood up to leave. I didn’t even open my eyes. I sat there as though dead, and in a way I was, for everything I had called human life had ceased to operate. He left the room. No one tried to connect with me, and I left them alone, too.

  After a few minutes, a hand lightly touched my shoulder. Alan. He didn’t speak, just motioned for me to follow. He ushered me in to Joey and left the room.

  “Sit down,” Joey said.

  I felt nothing. I was neither happy to see him nor resistant. I just sat. He looked at me. In a certain way he was also dead, but somehow with a difference. He had some humor; I had none.

  “How’s the retreat been?” he asked.

  “Hell,” I spoke without emotion. “Just hell. Nothing you’ve taught me makes any sense now. I find no reason to live but also no particular reason to kill myself. It’s just empty, dull, and lifeless.”

  I sat looking at him, aware that I was expressionless. He didn’t react in the slightest, just looked back at me, very still. Finally, after some minutes, he left the room for a moment and returned with a very old leather-bound book.

  “I was given this book in Istanbul,” he said. “By a Sufi named Ishmael Bul-Jamal.” It meant nothing to me and I didn’t care. “This book is very old,” he went on. “It contains many secrets.”

  I just looked. He laid the book on his knee and thumbed through the pages until he found an elaborate colored print, covered by thin tissue. When he lifted it, the colors were bright and luminous. It showed many symbols, and an arrow, like a snake, weaving through them all.

  “The Sufi map of the human soul. See here, down at the bottom, death. Just above it is apathy. Then comes anger, hate, and destruction.” I assumed he must be talking about my state, but I really didn’t care. “And so it winds its way up; above hatred and destruction comes restlessness, desire, then greed, and creativity.

  “In the middle of the diagram is Love, the heart open. Many people think that’s where it ends. But look where it continues.”

  He pointed. I couldn’t read the script; it was in Arabic.

  “Beyond Love, there is Clarity, the capacity to see things and speak of them clearly. Beyond Clarity there is Intuition, knowing without the need for perception. But look here. Before the final open sky of freedom, there is this. Despair, complete despair. It’s what the Christians call the dark night of the soul. It precedes freedom. You must pass through where you are now, and no one can go there with you. That’s why I gave instructions to everyone to ignore you, to give you no support. Everyone has to come to this place of absolute nothingness, sooner or later. To this place where there is neither fear nor desire, neither attraction nor repulsion, just a clear seeing of the futility of all of it, and the lack of motivation for it to be any different.

  “It’s not finished yet, but you’ve reached here on your own. You have to become friends with the darkness. The Zen poet Bunan said once, ‘Die while still alive, be absolutely dead. Then do whatever you want; it’s all good.’”

  I heard him; I saw him. I felt no flicker of anything in particular. He was clearly done. I stood up, and without any formal acknowledgement, I left the room.

  Paul was waiting for me outside, with head still bowed. I now knew why, but it made no difference. He drove me home. I climbed the stairs and went to bed. Not with happiness, not with sadness, not with anger, not even with peace. I lay down in the darkness and didn’t sleep.

  CHAPTER 23

  FREEDOM

  Where was I? I looked around. Slowly I recognized the pictures of Peru, the clothes, and the sleeping bag. I sat up and stretched. The last day. One more lesson, if the restaurant tasks were eight and the darkness thing was number nine. This was Wednesday. There would be no meeting.

  I had no arrangement to meet with Joey. It felt suddenly absurdly unimportant. I remembered that my children were living with their grandparents; my wife would obviously still give me a chance. My world might be going down the tubes, but I could still make a small difference today. I was still feeling empty, but now it was different. The day before I had no motivation to do anything. Now it had expanded, I had no motivation to do anything, but equally no motivation to resist what obviously needed to be done. The impulses to action were no longer coming from me, they were commands I was bound to obey.

  I rose from the bed and took a few deep breaths. I wanted to write a to-do list, start aligning jobs, get my hair cut. Still, I felt a certain obligation to complete this time with Joey. He’d given me a lot, and I would see this tenth day out, even if the tenth lesson eluded me, and even if I never reached the giddy heights that he offered.

  I spread my sleeping bag out on the floor, did some of the yoga postures I could remember from Sam’s class. I did them very slowly, breathing deeply down into my belly all the while. I must have passed a good hour and a half in this way. There were still a few grapes in the bowl. I knelt on the bed, spine erect, and ate them slowly.

  No desire, only readiness.

  It was Wednesday; Paul would be working the whole day. Around noon I went down and let myself into his apartment. I showered, washed my hair, and put on the clean clothes I had brought with me. I spent a few minutes cleaning up his mess and then went back upstairs. My movements were all sl
ow. I figured if I saw the day through until evening, I would have given Joey’s assignment at least a fair shot.

  For the afternoon, there was really nothing that I could do, so I just sat there. My spine was straight. I just sat and waited. I noticed the way thoughts would drift into a variety of different directions and then come back again. I really didn’t care. The tools Joey had given me at the farm seemed ludicrous, self-indulgent, the preoccupation of New Agers with too much time on their hands. I was just sitting, waiting, until I was free to get on with my life, until I could take action. It really didn’t matter now whether these actions would succeed or fail. It made no difference; that was not the point. I knew for sure a response was being called forth from me. There were things that needed to be done. Not to do them would be an act of defiance.

  Finally, around six o’clock, I put on my jacket and shoes; I made the room as immaculate as I could, and stepped back down the stairs into the evening. It was still cold, a little damp, but no rain. I decided to walk across the town and find Joey. My steps were brisk, pulled forward more from my belly than my head. I could feel the contact my feet made with the sidewalk. I said good evening to almost everybody I passed; it seemed like the right thing to do. By 6:45 P.M., there I was, back again on the Donahue Bridge, 11 days later, everything the same as it had been. The smells of Asian food, Indian food, mixing with that of American diners. Neither disgusting nor attractive. Just smells. I breathed deeply and looked into the water below.

  Eleven days before I had stood in this spot and considered jumping; I had wanted to end my life. I could do it tonight, too. The difference between living and dying seemed almost a technicality. There was no clear reason to jump, so I didn’t. There was not much greater reason to stay alive. The moment stretched out forever. I stood on the bridge, looked into the water.