The Best American Essays 2014

by John Jeremiah Sullivan

  15.

  One’s intuition looks for immunity to two kinds of people: those who confirm one’s beliefs about life, and those who turn one’s beliefs into nothing. The latter are the natural predators of our hearts, the former made into enemies because we are, unlike other species, capable of not only enlarging but also diminishing our precarious selves.

  16.

  I had this notion, when I first started it, that this essay would be a way to test—to assay—thoughts about time. There was even a vision of an after, when my confusions would be sorted out.

  Assays in science are part of an endless exploration: one question leads to another; what follows confirms or disconfirms what comes before. To assay one’s ideas about time while time remains unsettled and elusive feels futile: just as one is about to understand one facet of time, it presents another to undermine one’s reasoning.

  To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that this muddling will end someday.

  17.

  “But what more do you want? You have a family, a profession, a house, a car, friends, and a place in the world. Why can’t you be happy? Why can’t you be strong?” These questions are asked, among others, by my mother.

  There was a majestic mental health worker in the hospital where I stayed, who came with perfect lipstick, shining curly hair, and bright blouses and flats of matching colors. “Young lady,” she said every time she saw me, “don’t lose that smile of yours.”

  I had liked her, and liked her still after she questioned my spiritual life. I could see that the godless state of my mind concerned her, and that my compliance made me a good pet project. “Don’t mind her,” my roommate, a black Buddhist, said. “She’s from an evangelical background.”

  I don’t, I reassured her. Being preached to did not bother me.

  Then I had a difficult day. At dinnertime the majestic woman asked, “Young lady, why did you cry today?”

  “I’m sad.”

  “We know you’re sad. What I want to know is, what makes you sad.”

  “Can’t I just be left alone in my sadness?” I said. The women around the table smiled into their plates: the good girl was having a tantrum.

  18.

  What makes you sad? What makes you angry? What makes you forget the good things in your life and your responsibilities toward others? One hides from people who ask these unanswerable questions only to ask oneself again and again.

  “I know you don’t like me to ask what’s brought you here,” in the hospital my roommate said. “But can you describe how you feel? I don’t have words for how I feel.”

  I had several roommates—another revolving door—but I liked the last one. Raised in a middle-class African American family in upstate New York, she was the only adopted child among six siblings. She married for love, but on her wedding day she realized she had made the mistake of her life. “For the whole first dance he didn’t look at me once,” she said. “He looked into every guest’s face to make sure they knew it was his show.”

  By the time she told me the story, her husband was overweight, paralyzed by strokes, and blind from diabetes. She took care of him along with a hired nurse; she watched TCM with him because he remembered the exchanges in the old movies. Still, she said she was angry, because the marriage, his illness, everything in their life was about him.

  Had she ever thought of leaving him, I asked.

  She said she had throughout the marriage, but she would not. “I don’t want my children to grow up and think a man can be abandoned in that state.”

  Yet she had tried to kill herself in the farthest corner of Target’s parking lot—an abandonment of both her husband and her children. But this I did not say, because it was exactly what many people would say to a situation like that. One has to have a solid self to be selfish.

  19.

  There is this emptiness in me. All the things in the world are not enough to drown out the voice of this emptiness, which says, You are nothing.

  Perhaps I am only hiding my nothingness from people. I worry that they have been deceived by me: the moment they see my nothingness they will leave me.

  This emptiness doesn’t claim the past, because it is always here; it doesn’t have to claim the future, as it blocks out the future. It’s either a dictator or the closest friend I’ve ever had. Some days I battle it until we both fall down like injured animals. That is when I wonder, what if I become less than nothing when I get rid of this emptiness? What if this emptiness is what keeps me carrying on?

  20.

  On another day my roommate said she noticed that I became quiet if she talked about Buddhism with me. “I don’t mean it as a religion. For instance, you can try to meditate.”

  I didn’t explain that I had read Buddhist scriptures from the age of twelve to twenty-three. The teaching of nothingness in those texts—for the longest time they were the most comforting words, because they diluted the intensity of that emptiness.

  My father taught me meditation when I was eleven. Imagine a bucket between your open arms, he told me, and asked me to listen to the dripping of the water into the bucket and, when it was full, water dripping out from the bottom. “From empty to full, and from full to empty”; he underlined the words in a book for me. “Life before birth is a dream, life after death is another dream. What comes between is only a mirage of the dreams.”

  21.

  My father is the most fatalistic person I’ve ever known. In a conversation last year he admitted that he had not felt a day of peace in his marriage and expressed his regret that he had never thought of protecting my sister and me from our mother, who is a family despot, unpredictable in both her callousness and her vulnerability.

  But the truth is, he tried to instill this fatalism in us because it was our only protection. For years I’ve been hiding behind that: fatalism, being addicted to, can make one look calm, capable, even happy.

  22.

  I read Katherine Mansfield’s notebooks when I was having difficulties last year. “Dear friend, from my life I write to you in your life,” Mansfield wrote in one entry. I cried when I read the line. It reminds me of the boy from years ago, who could not stop sending the design of his dreams in his letters. It reminds me too why I do not want to stop writing: the books one writes—past and present and future—are they not trying to say the same thing: dear friend, from my life I write to you in your life. What a long way it is from one life to another: yet why write if not for that distance; if things can be let go, every before replaced by an after.

  23.

  It’s not fatalism that makes one lose hope, I now understand. It’s one’s rebellion against fatalism; it’s wanting to have one’s time back from fatalism.

  A fatalistic person cannot be a dreamer, which I still want to become one day.

  24.

  “The train stopped. When a train stops in the open country between two stations it is impossible not to put one’s head out of the window and see what’s up,” Mansfield wrote at the end of her life. This is the inevitability of life: the train, for reasons unknown to us, always stops between a past and a future, both making this now look as though it is nowhere. But it is this nowhere-ness that one has to make use of. One looks outside the window: the rice paddies and alfalfa fields have long been the past, replaced by vineyards and almond groves. One has made it this far; perhaps this is enough of a reason to journey on.

  BARRY LOPEZ

  Sliver of Sky

  FROM Harper’s Magazine

  ONE DAY IN THE FALL of 1938, a man named Harry Shier entered the operating room of a Toronto hospital and began an appendectomy procedure on a prepubescent boy. He was not a trained surgeon; he nearly botched the operation, and the boy’s parents reacted angrily. Suspicions about Shier’s medical credentials had already surfaced among operating-room nurses, and the hospital, aware of other complaints related to Shier’s groin-area operations on young boys, opened a formal investigation. By the time the hospital boar
d determined that both his medical degree, from a European university, and his European letters of reference were fraudulent, Harry Shier had departed for the United States.

  A few years later, a police officer in Denver caught Shier raping a boy in the front seat of his automobile. Shier spent a year in prison and then slipped out of Colorado. In the late 1940s, he surfaced in North Hollywood, California, as the director of a sanitarium where he supervised the treatment of people with addictions, primarily alcoholics. In the summer of 1952, at the age of seven, I was introduced to him when I visited the sanitarium with my mother.

  At the time I lived with her and my younger brother in nearby Reseda, a town in the San Fernando Valley. My parents had recently divorced, and my father had moved across the country to Florida. To support the three of us, my mother had taken a day job teaching home economics at a junior high school in the city of San Fernando and also a job teaching dressmaking two evenings a week at Pierce Junior College in Woodland Hills, on the far western edge of the Valley.

  Early that summer my mother had somewhat reluctantly agreed to take in a houseguest, her first cousin Evelyn Carrothers. Evelyn, who was my mother’s age, lived an hour away in Long Beach and was struggling with a drinking problem. Her marriage was also in trouble. Mother couldn’t accommodate Evelyn for long in our one-bedroom house, so she began inquiring among her friends about other arrangements. People advised her to call Alcoholics Anonymous. Someone in the organization’s Los Angeles office suggested that she contact the North Hollywood Lodge and Sanitarium.

  One morning Mother drove us all to the facility at 12003 Riverside Drive, known then around the Valley, I would later learn, as “Shier’s dryer.” In those years Shier was renowned as someone who could “cure” alcoholism. He was also able to relate sympathetically to the families of alcoholics. When we arrived at the clinic, Mother introduced my four-year-old brother and me to “Dr.” Shier. We shook hands with him, and he escorted the two of us to the sanitarium’s kitchen, where we each selected a fresh doughnut from an array laid out on trays for the patients—frosted, sugared, glazed, covered with sprinkles. A nice man. I remember the building’s corridors reeked that morning of something other than disinfectant. Paraldehyde, I was later informed, which Shier used liberally to sedate his patients.

  Shortly after Evelyn had, in Shier’s estimation, recovered enough to return to Long Beach—she would begin drinking again and, a year later, would return to his facility—he started dropping by our home in Reseda. He had gotten to know something of Mother’s marital and financial situation from Evelyn, and during one of his early visits he told Mother that he was concerned: her income was not, in his view, commensurate with her capabilities. He said he might be able to do something about that. (Mother’s divorce settlement required my father to send her ten dollars a month in child support—an obligation he rarely met, according to correspondence I would later find.) Shier said that one of his former patients was in a position to speak with the school board about Mother’s value to the school system. This appeal was apparently made, and a short while later she received a small increase in salary.

  She was grateful. Harry was pleased to help. Shier conducted himself around Mother like someone considering serious courtship. She was a handsome woman of thirty-nine, he a short, abrasively self-confident, balding man of fifty-six. He complimented her on the way she was single-handedly raising her two polite, neatly dressed sons. He complimented her on her figure. Occasionally he’d take her hand or caress her lightly on the shoulder. After a while, Shier began dropping by the house in the evening, just as my brother and I were getting into our pajamas. He’d bring a tub of ice cream along, and the four of us would have dessert together. One evening he arrived without the ice cream. He’d forgotten. He suggested I accompany him to the grocery store, where I could pick out a different dessert for each of us.

  A few minutes after we left the house, he pulled his car up alongside a tall hedge on an unlit residential street off Lindley Avenue. He turned me to the side, put me facedown on the seat, pulled down my pajama bottoms, and pushed his erect penis into my anus. As he built toward his climax he told me, calmly but emphatically, that he was a doctor, that I needed treatment, and that we were not going to be adding to Mother’s worries by telling her about my problem.

  Shier followed this pattern of sexual assault with me for almost four years. He came by the house several times a month and continued to successfully direct Mother’s attention away from what he was doing. It is hard to imagine, now, that no one suspected what was going on. It is equally difficult, even for therapists, to explain how this type of sexual violence can be perpetuated between two human beings for years without the victim successfully objecting. Why, people wonder, does the evidence for a child’s resistance in these circumstances usually seem so meager? I believe it’s because the child is too innocent to plan effectively, and because, from the very start, the child faces a labyrinth of confused allegiances. I asked myself questions I couldn’t answer: Do I actually need protection in this situation? From what, precisely? I was bewildered by what was happening. How could I explain to my mother what I was doing? Physical resistance, of course, is virtually impossible for most children. The child’s alternatives, as I understand them, never get much beyond endurance and avoidance—and speculation about how to encourage intervention.

  An additional source of confusion for me was the belief that I had been chosen as a special patient by Harry Shier, an esteemed doctor and the director of a prestigious institution. A weird sense of privilege was attached to Shier’s interest in me, and to the existence of an unspecified medical condition too serious or exotic to share with Mother. Also, being the elder son in a lower-middle-class and fatherless family, I came to feel—or he encouraged me to feel—that I was shouldering an important responsibility for my family.

  I understood that I was helping my family, and he complimented me on my maturity.

  When Shier came to our house he would inform Mother that we were just going out to get some ice cream together, or, on a Saturday afternoon, that he was going to take me to an early movie, and then maybe out to dinner at the Sportsmen’s Lodge on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City. We would say goodbye and he would walk me to his car and we would drive off. If it was dark, he’d pull over soon in a secluded spot and rape me in the front seat; or we’d go to the movie and he’d force my head into his lap for a while, pushing at me through his trousers; or it would be dinner at the restaurant, where we’d hook our trout in a small pool for the chef to cook, and then he’d drive on to the sanitarium, where he’d park behind the single-story building. He’d direct me up an outside staircase to a series of rotting duckboards that led across the clinic’s flat roof to a locked door, the outside entrance to a rooftop apartment, where I was to wait. He’d enter the front of the building, check on his patients, say goodnight to the nurses, and ascend an inside staircase to reach the interior door of his studio-size quarters. I’d see the lights go on inside. A moment later he’d open the door to the roof and pull me in.

  One night in these chambers, after he was through with me, he took a medical text from a bookshelf. He sat me down beside him on the edge of the bed and showed me black-and-white photographs of men’s genitals ravaged by syphilis. This, he said, was what came from physical intimacy with women.

  In bed with him, I would try to maneuver myself so I could focus on the horizontal sliver of sky visible between the lower edge of the drawn blinds and the white sill of the partially open window. Passing clouds, a bird, the stars.

  From time to time, often on the drive back to my home, Shier would remind me that if I were ever to tell anyone, if the treatments were to stop, he would have no choice but to have me committed to an institution. And then, if I were no longer around for my family . . . I’d seen how he occasionally slipped Mother a few folded bills in my presence. It would be best, I thought, if I just continued to be the brave boy he said I was.

  I know
the questions I initially asked myself afterward about these events were not very sophisticated. For example: Why hadn’t Shier also molested my younger brother? My brother, I conjectured, had been too young in 1952, only four years old; later, with one brother firmly in hand, Shier had probably considered pursuing the other too much of a risk. (When we were older, my brother told me that Shier had molested him, several times, in the mid-1950s. I went numb with grief. After the four years of sexual violence with Shier were over, what sense of self-worth I still retained rested mainly with a conviction that, however I might have debased myself with Shier, I had at least protected my brother—and also probably saved my family from significant financial hardship. Further shame would come after I discovered that our family had never been in serious financial danger, that Mother’s earnings had covered our every necessity, and more.)