Slowly an image began to fade in from the black: St. Germaine sat cross-legged in a leather chair, with his hands folded over his knee, wearing a gray suit with a thin tie, smiling. Next to the chair was a blank whiteboard on an easel, and between the chair and the easel was a tall potted plant. All this was set up in the corner of a nondescript white room.
St. Germaine began to speak:
“Welcome, welcome, welcome. My name is Paul St. Germaine, and I couldn’t be happier that we’ve found each other and that you’ve decided to embark with me on a journey of self-improvement.”
His voice was warm and richly textured and Oscar was annoyed that he wasn’t immediately able to hate him as much as he would have preferred.
“I can’t see you through the screen, but I hope you’ll forgive me if I make a few assumptions about you, based partly on statistical likelihood and partly on empirical observations that I’ve made over my career about the type of people who most often find their way to me: You are an American. You are safe. You are educated. You are guaranteed never to starve to death, and most of the dangerous elements of nature are of little or no concern to you. You live in a world far less violent than even as recently as when your parents were your age. You work hard but you generally don’t have to worry about money. Or, if you do worry about money, it’s about money for things like the lease on a second car and not for food or shelter. I bet you even have a family that loves you, and you love them right back. But why, then, are you so miserable?”
Oscar was caught off guard by the word choice. Miserable? Who is this for?
He hit Pause and stared at the face on the screen, with its eyes closed as if right before a sneeze. The face that had talked his parents out of everything. He tried to imagine his mother seeing this for the first time, sitting in their television room, holding the remote to the DVD player that Oscar had set up for them. She was a smart woman, and nobody’s mark. How could she see in this man a savior?
Oscar hit Play.
“Let me tell you a few more things about you,” St. Germaine continued. “You are constructed out of matter that was born in the furnace-hearts of dying stars. This matter traveled on a billion-year adventure through many forms before composing itself into you, and then something breathed consciousness into your brain, and you were sent out into the world to do as you would. But you were never given a user’s manual for your body, or your brain, which of course is part of your body. And sometimes things go wrong, just like with a car or refrigerator. And now here you are, with me, at the absolute cutting edge of time, broken and lost.
“Over the course of the fifteen lessons that you’ve purchased, we’re going to write a new user’s manual for our brains. We’re going to learn all sorts of ways to coexist with our brain in peace. We’re going to talk about a number of different techniques, but they mostly can be boiled down into these four main tenets:
We’re going to learn to love our own insignificance.
We’re going to learn to control our frame of reference.
We’re going to remember to always consider the end.
Don’t be scared, but we’re going to reject free will entirely.
“It’s not going to be easy to let go of much of what you have been taught. But if you can, if you’re willing to follow along with me and truly consider what I aim to show you, then I promise that you can be set free.”
* * *
Oscar closed the video. One side effect of his experience in academia was that he was incapable of hearing arguments or ideas without trying to pick them apart, and he was not currently in the proper state to shoulder this dreck.
He left his laptop open while it downloaded the rest of the videos.
Once he heard his father snoring through the thin walls, Oscar snuck out of the apartment, walking around the less creaky edge of the room like he was sixteen again, and got on his bike. His little neighborhood was dark and quiet, although he could hear the thumping bass from a party going on somewhere closer toward campus. He had no idea why he had come outside or where he was going. He picked a direction. Left.
He was almost thirty, his childhood was obviously over and had been for a long time, but what was ending now, and ending so terribly, felt to him like something close to childhood. He felt abandoned, although to say that his parents had abandoned him, his mother into death and his father into helplessness, seemed unfair. But then how to explain what he was feeling?
He biked into town, under the train trestle painted in the collegiate colors, down onto campus, around the science building and through the main quad on the paths that were best lit. It felt good to have the night air in his face, whistling through the gaps of his dorky helmet, his most important decision which way to turn at each crossroads.
As he biked faster and faster, he felt something open up inside of him, some old valve being loosened that he knew was only in his head although he perceived it as if the spout sat somewhere right above his stomach, sickly tar spilling down into his core like a busted pipe in the basement.
Part of the reason that Oscar didn’t consider himself a depressive was that he had never read or seen a depiction of anything that reminded him of the particular way that he sometimes felt terrible. His manifestation of the thing that he didn’t call depression didn’t hover over him like a great black wing, didn’t feel like falling through a void or staring into an abyss or any of the other clichés. All of these analogies seemed too large; there was nothing grandiose about his experience, nothing particularly dramatic. It didn’t even seem like a matter of the largeness of a particular negative energy but rather a smallness.
Each cell of his body felt small and more distant from all of the other cells. His passions felt small. His capacity for love, both to give and to receive, felt small. His brilliant ideas felt small, even though they were correct; that was part of it, they were correct and perfect and still so small, so useless. Anything that bore any kind of meaning or substance for him would get smaller and smaller until it threatened to be sucked into itself like a snake eating all of its own tail and then finally successfully eating the head and mouth that’s doing the eating, and winking out of existence. Was this depression? Probably, dummy, he thought.
He was flying too fast through the darkness from each island of yellow light produced by the sodium poles to the next, lactic acid building up in his thighs, his lungs straining for air, eyes watering against the wind.
On his way back, he biked past the party where the noise was coming from, an off-campus wreck of a house with a wraparound porch that was currently overflowing with students congregated around what looked to be at least three kegs. As he approached, slowly now, regaining his wind, he saw a student hop over the railing of the porch, jog down to a gray car that was idling at the curb, and get in the passenger seat. By the dome light, he saw that the kid had money in his hand and was holding it up to the figure behind the wheel. The hand was quickly pushed down, out of sight.
Oscar took a moment to look back once he had coasted past. The student placed something small into his shirt pocket and gave an emphatic double thumbs-up to his friends waiting for him back on the porch. A cheer went up.
4
“Another plane,” Lee said.
“It’s not a long flight, Dad. Gracie will meet you when you land and take you home.”
They stood outside of security where only two days ago they had met, where the new epoch of Oscar’s life had dawned. The airline had already transported the remains back to Indiana, which was something that Oscar had never really thought about—dead bodies transported via air—but of course it happened all the time. She, her body, was waiting for them at one of the two funeral homes in town, where she had in fact seen both of her own parents laid out and visited by their few loved ones.
“And I’ll be seeing you soon, yes? You’re not going to miss your own mother’s funeral? Will you te
ll me when you’ve gotten your ticket?”
“The airline said that they will bump someone for me if need be. Of course I’ll be there.”
Lee looked at his watch. Oscar expected that now he would say something that passed for goodbye and head over to stand in line, but he remained where he was, and Oscar realized that his father felt the need for something more.
“There’s a lot more we should talk about,” Oscar said. “I’m sorry. I consider that my fault. But I’ll be home soon and we can fix that.”
“Okay, Oscar. That sounds like a plan.”
Oscar looked into his father’s face and was nearly overcome with all that he saw there. Age, pain, regret, loneliness, and of course himself, Oscar, in the line of the jaw and the way that the eyes were set back from the nose. A vision of the future.
“Oscar, your mother—you know how much she loved you, don’t you?”
“Yes, Dad.”
“I love you that much, too.”
“I love you too, Dad.”
The two men hugged, firmly but briefly, and then Lee turned and walked toward his plane.
5
Oscar returned to campus, finalized his travel arrangements, did some grading, and went to bed. The next day he taught his classes, packed a duffel bag into which he jammed his one dark blue suit, and had Sundeep drop him off back at the airport in the evening for his flight.
When the flight attendant came over the PA to announce that electronic devices could now be turned on, Oscar opened his laptop and booted it up. He plugged in his headphones, angled the screen slightly toward the window after the woman sitting next to him peeked sidelong over her nose, and opened the file named PSGvol2.
The audio came up to a fuzzy neutral, like the first few seconds after a needle is lowered onto a vinyl album, and then the Samsara title card appeared accompanied by synthesized tones, and then text that read “Session 2: Foundations.” And then there was St. Germaine, the same room, the same potted plant, the same whiteboard, even the same suit. Oscar felt his heart rate quicken, his upper lip curl slightly.
“Welcome again! You’ve made one of the biggest steps, which is of course deciding to come back, so congratulations. Are you watching this tape immediately after the previous one? If so, I’m flattered, but remember that I recommend that you allow at least a few days between sessions, in order to let what we’ve spoken about sink in. This will become especially important down the road, when I ask you to implement some practical aspects into your day-to-day lives.”
St. Germaine shifted his head and the video cut to another camera only slightly to the left of the first one. The view of the whiteboard and the plant barely shifted at all, but from the new angle, St. Germaine looked like a different man entirely.
“When last we spoke, I laid out our goals, and a bit of the framework as to how we’re going to achieve them. Today I’d like to build on that framework and get us underway. So, shall we?”
He raised a knuckle to his lips in a moment of thought before he began.
“There was something I said last time that might have alarmed you, and that was about the matter of free will. Now, I know that this is an issue with religious implications for many people, and since I don’t claim to be a theologian, I certainly don’t wish to step on anyone’s toes in that arena, but maybe you’ll allow me to ask you a few questions? Feel free to pause the tape at any point if you’d like.”
He got up and uncapped a dry-erase marker that lay on the metal lip of the whiteboard. With a neat hand, he wrote:
1. Define.
“I wonder, can you tell me what free will actually is? Not a definition, i.e., the ability to act without the constraint of fate or necessity, but rather describe it as a phenomenon?
“Let me give you a few examples of descriptions of other abstract ideas, to show how I think free will is a unique case. I would describe love in simple and perhaps imprecise terms, as a profound sense of goodwill toward and connectedness with someone. I would describe the soul as that part of us which contains our feelings and undergoes perception. But what is free will itself?
“Both love and the soul are famously elusive and amorphous ideas, but nonetheless we can at least arrive at workable definitions with relative ease. Can we do the same for free will? Is it just some undetectable force that exists entirely outside the influence of any other force? Perhaps you’d like to say that it’s merely some kind of indescribable state of things that we hope is the case and not a thing itself, but that doesn’t seem to help much and probably only weakens the argument for its existence.
“Maybe you did come up with something. But I know that, for my part, I’ve never heard a satisfying definition. Is this a deathblow for the general conception of free will? Of course not. But it’s a point against, I think.”
Next he wrote:
2. Imagine.
“Take a moment to imagine your life if the free will that you assume you possess was removed from you. You would still make decisions just like usual, only it would be the case, unbeknownst to you, that you could have never chosen otherwise. In what way is this life different from the one you’re leading now? Is it different at all?
“And finally—” He picked up the pen and wrote:
3. Decide.
“Is either case preferable to you? Why?”
St. Germaine capped the marker and went back to his chair. The camera angle changed again.
“Now, I’m very sympathetic to what I’m sure you’re feeling right now, which is most likely some slight alarm or discomfort, the need to push back, maybe even a bit of anger at me. After all, if we don’t possess this thing called free will, then every time you’ve made a moral decision, you actually have nothing to feel good about, as you don’t deserve credit for that which you couldn’t have avoided doing. (I actually don’t think that that’s the case, but we’ll get more into that later.) And of course, the flip side, which is somewhat less offensive to our ego, is that you also don’t deserve blame for the bad things that you do.
“Why does this matter, you’re asking? How does this bear at all on what you’re feeling? I’ll tell you why.”
Here a look came over St. Germaine’s face, a submerged quality rising to just below the surface. He paused for a moment to glimmer at the camera before continuing.
“Because the way you feel has so much to do with thoughts of who and what you are. How useless, how superfluous, how broken, how dumb. How you could have done things differently, led a different life. Because you still think that you are you. But you are not you. You are a collection of impulses currently moving through the same location that that which you call ‘you’ also happens to currently inhabit.”
He took a sip from a clear plastic cup of water that he kept out of frame. An odd editorial choice, Oscar thought.
“I know some of the language I’ve been using might be a little confusing at first, but please rewind the tape if you’ve had trouble keeping up. This will all be very important later.
“All I ask is that you follow me a bit further.”
6
Oscar’s sister had offered to pick him up from the airport, but he decided to rent a car, mostly to provide himself with the illusion of freedom and the possibility of escape. He picked up the car, a black sedan, and in a few minutes, he was cutting through the big-sky expanse of his native land.
So many artists had been inspired by the quintessentially American melancholy of the Midwest, but as a young man Oscar had found the landscape oppressive in its openness. The plains, to Oscar, seemed to impose a logic of their own, something akin to the maddening contemplation of the infinite, or the way the ear strains to the point of hallucination in a perfectly quiet room, desperate to detect a sound.
After an hour’s drive from the airport and a brief detour past his old high school to see if it had changed (it hadn’t), he came to the hou
se. It was low and long like a wall at the top of a rise, a yellow postwar ranch that had faded with time into the color of broth. He had been back here once in the last three years, when his parents bought him a flight to come for Christmas. He parked in front of the garage alongside a white BMW that he couldn’t place, until he remembered his sister saying something about a new car.
This was all cast in a feeling of complete unreality until he stepped out of the car and felt the crunch of the old gravel under his boots and smelled the lilacs that his mother had planted in the side garden. Something inside of him reverted to a former state. He had come home.
He entered without knocking, and his sister heard him from the kitchen, where a pot was simmering on the stove.
“Look at this guy,” she said as she pulled oven mitts off of her hands. They hugged. He didn’t realize until he was embracing her how much he had missed her.
“Where’s the old man?” Oscar said, looking around. There were paper plates, cups, and pizza boxes strewn about the surfaces of the room. Photos of his mother had been arranged on the dining room in a semicircle around a candle, which had gone out. He picked them up. Here she was on horseback as a child, here she was holding a diploma and smiling, here she was in her wedding dress, here she was holding baby Oscar at some fairground, with one hand up to shield the sun from her eyes, shadow over her face.
“Some of the Knights of Columbus guys took him out for a beer. You missed the action by a few hours. Some teachers from Mom’s school. A few kids from her class. The Andersons.”
The Boatwrights had very little family; Lee had lost his older brother to Vietnam, and there was a sister that he never spoke to or mentioned who lived in Oregon. Delia Boatwright was an only child. There had been distant grandparents in small homes far away, and then hospitals, but no longer.
A Philosophy of Ruin Page 3