“Tread lightly and beware the rip,” I advised. “You might could find yourself swift and sudden out to sea.”
“Sounds like you speak from experience,” one said.
“Something like that,” I said. “Yeah.”
It was true. I’d been lately regretting how deep down the rabbit hole I’d let myself fall when I was their age and beyond, how hard I’d made it for myself to surface again, and I encouraged them to temper their reading of Wallace with other folks. I directed them toward the Edward Young and Emerson essays I’d been grooving on. And though I didn’t, it would’ve been a nerdy baller move if I’d then quoted them some Young: “Illustrious examples engross, prejudice, and intimidate. They engross our attention, and so prevent a due inspection of ourselves; they prejudice our judgment in favour of their abilities, and so lessen the sense of our own; and they initimidate us with the splendor of their renown, and thus under diffidence bury our strength.” Or this choice canapé from Emerson: “We have never come at the true and best benefit of any genius, so long as we believe him an original force.”
And I know this might sound a little woo-woo, but bear with me: for a moment there with the fellas it was like I was allowed to grasp or glimpse the diaphanous filament of Being that threads us all together. I’m not sure how to describe it, really, but as an instantaneous montage, a mash-up of scenes and images charged with deep sentiment, all laid upon one another as though time had abruptly accordioned together, like Borges’s aleph or the peak of a shroom trip or something. There I was at twenty-one, sitting with a cup of milky tea in James’s apartment, listening intently as he read to me from “The Depressed Person,” but at the same time I was nineteen and waking in the loft bed in my dorm before the sun to read “Little Gidding” by penlight so as not to disturb my roommate, and twenty-four, on a road trip, with a busted copy of Barthelme’s Forty Stories in the backseat of a car being driven by my uncle, navigated by his friend, rolling through Big Sky country, and twenty-two, sitting in the booth of a parking lot I monitored in Charlottesville, Virginia, getting busy with the compelling commonplaces of Lydia Davis. But I was also thirteen and cutting the acres of grass at my grandmother’s house in the exurbs of Richmond, my ass swampy and numb on the tractor’s seat, and experiencing then a new thing: there rose in me unbidden a series of words, words that tried to assert the wet-tangy smell of the grass and the sun incubating my neck and the flutter and sting of cricket-missiles pinging my calves and the electric singe of the seat’s hot vinyl on my hammies, that is to say, a poem, an attempt, no matter how bad and gropey, to capture the grass-cutting experience in language. This great sprawling kinship map of everything I’d read and everything I’d written opened before me. But the intuition or vision or whatever it was concerned more than matters just fussily literary. It was all the ways other people have influenced and continue to live on in me. Pinch any opinion, tug any mannerism, pull at any insight and you’ll find someone else. You’ll find James in the way I sometimes say “adios” or stomp my feet amusedly when someone disagrees with me. You’ll find Garth whenever I consider someone’s point by looking skyward and Christian whenever I’m iconoclastic, whenever I doubt the hype. I could go on and on. And to be filled with anxiety about this suddenly struck me as childish and immature. Our culture’s prevailing notion of individuality itself seemed childish and immature. “We are tendencies, or rather, symptoms, and none of us complete,” Emerson wrote. “We touch and go, and sip the foam of many lives.” What makes us individuals, in this way, is the people we’ve been treated to know and what I felt then was gratitude, a cockles-level appreciation of every book, movie, piece of art or music that’d ever moved me and every person I’d ever meaningfully interacted with. Everything, that is, that makes me me.
The fellas and I wrapped up. I told them to keep in touch, to know that if I was good for anything, it was a glowing recommendation. They’d been my students, my interns, and now, soon, they’d be my peers. I left them with a misremembered quote from Jean Rhys, which correctly goes: “All writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. And then there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.”
“The lake matters,” I repeated, really more for my benefit than theirs. “Adios.”
Two days later I met Tennis Father and his daughters at a complex in Vancouver, Washington, about fifteen minutes from my house. Inside were six courts, three on either side of a waiting area whose many windows lent it an aquarium-like, Jaws 3 vibe. You could head upstairs, too, though, to a balcony that afforded one an overhead view of all the action.
Tennis Father met me at the check-in counter. He didn’t shake my hand but put his arm around my shoulder and steered me to the window, where he nodded toward his daughter, who was on the court closest to us, warming up with an Asian man.
“A show court,” he said, and smiled conspiratorially. His younger daughter was at a table with a coloring book, a rainbow of crayons fanned out in front of her.
“I guess we’ll see,” I said, and made my way out.
Taking the field in baseball has been well documented, well praised, but decidedly less has been made about debouching through the synthetic folds of an indoor tennis court’s backdrop. The way the thwack-pops sharpen and clarify over the electric hum of the industrial lights overhead. How your vision recalibrates to allow for the open space, to account for the presence of so many white lines. The pissy sibilance of popping a new can of balls and their Band-Aid-ish smell. There should at least be a subgenre of light verse devoted to cataloging such phenomenological delights.
The Asian guy left the court unceremoniously and the daughter met me at the benches courtside. Taller than I expected, and thinner, she had on a skirt over warm-up pants, which was oddly intimidating. I’d worn my favorite tennis shirt, a white polo with pin-tuck pleats that made it look like a tuxedo shirt or guayabera. I’d hoped it would convey elegance and seriousness of intent—it was the shirt Federer had worn during a poor showing at the 2010 Wimbledon—but next to her I looked overdressed, which suggested I’d been thinking about the match in a way she had not. While I composed myself, put on a wrist- and headband and opened a can of balls, she put herself through a prematch routine, running backward around the court and doing various calisthenics and stretching. My lack of such a routine suggested another deficiency, was another piece of evidence that I might be in over my head.
We got under way. Warmed up with a few minutes of dinky minitennis from the service line before moving back to the baseline, where we drilled. Forehand to forehand. Backhand to backhand. Forehand to backhand and vice versa. I was tentative, rolling balls in with generous topspin, not going for too much. Tennis Father had moved from behind the lobby’s windows to the balcony up top. He didn’t lean against the railing but stood straight-backed and stiff, and he seemed a little naked without a racket to embrace. The tableau could’ve been lifted right off the cutting-room floor of Infinite Jest. And can I take a moment here to confess a dream I once nurtured? Pause to say that I once entertained fantasies about playing tennis with Wallace? I’d grown close with the novelist Curtis White, a friend and colleague of his from the Illinois State days. They’d played together on the regular and this fact, early on, was reason enough for me to court Curt’s friendship. I’d pussyfooted for a while, talked around the elephant, but after the last time we hit, I put the question to him straight. How would I have fared? What would the match-up have been like? And sick vindication though I know it to be, a pathetic piece of cheap machismo, I was overjoyed when he said that there was little doubt in his mind that I would’ve taken him.
“He didn’t have the firepower to deal with a player like you,” he said. “But he was also in terrible physical shape when we were playing.”
During our drills, both the daughter and I made mistakes. We hit balls well wide or long or into th
e net and so broke the soporific rhythm of our exchange. After one, Tennis Father called out something that sounded like a waterbed set a-sloshing.
“In English, please,” I said. This came out a lot harsher than I’d intended it to, and practically without passing through my brain. I recognized at once the thorny bile of competitiveness, the selfsame thorny bile that, in the interest of preserving our friendship, has kept Scott and me from playing sets. It’s not that we lack the competitive instinct, but rather that it is too strong in us.
Tennis Father looked down at me and cocked his head.
“I’d like to know what you’re saying is all,” I said, trying to dial it back a tad. “If you’re going to be coaching her.”
“I say to her you have the Federer game,” he said. “She must learn to adapt.”
After we’d had our turns at the net for volleys and overheads, we agreed we were warm and that we should begin. We stood on either side of the net and I spun my racket, M or W. She chose correctly, but elected to return first, a ballsy show of confidence. Nerves got the better of me to begin and I started with two double faults, handing her a lead. Love–30. A service winner and an unforced error off my forehand wing made it 15–40. Overly cautious, not wanting to double-fault the game away, I hit a safe kick serve to her backhand, but she was all over it and torched the ball up the line to take the opening game.
On the changeover I tried to compose myself, told myself to calm down. Work the point. Wait for my opportunities. And the first point of her serve, I did precisely that. I put her on the defensive with a return to her backhand and peppered that wing twice more with inside-out forehands of increasing angle. It was then that she left a ball choicely short. I stepped in and put all my weight behind a crosscourt forehand winner that thudded against the backdrop. Though of course I didn’t act on the impulse, I understood why Nadal, after hitting a twirling-undies forehand for a winner, may so often be found pumping a fist and making a thin innuendo of his hips and shouting “Vamos!” I’m embarrassed to admit how satisfying I found it, watching my opponent’s narrow little-girl shoulders slump as she shuffled over to retrieve the ball. It’s a common piece of tennis wisdom, almost a cliché, that it’s only after you’ve been broken that you can begin to swing free. But it’s one thing to hear this and an experience of an altogether different order to actually live it. If I was going to lose, so be it, but there was no way I was just going to roll over and let myself be taken at love.
Mysteries We Live With
It’s an experience that buffaloes my imagination: Kenneth Arnold alone in his small plane, flying from Chehalis, Washington, to Yakima. Home. It’s June 24, 1947, and the sky’s hallucinatory, a blue vastitude. Because he’s in no hurry, Arnold decides to spend some time searching for a marine transport plane that had gone down in the area of Mount Rainier. He’s a citizen, will help if he can. After an hour of fruitless circling he calls it quits and noses his plane back toward home. He’s on this course only a minute or two when a tremendous pulse of light hits his cockpit. And again, quick-like, another strobe flash, another retina-frying dose of luminous energy. This time he catches where it’s coming from: the mountains east of him. He scans, squints, and there against Rainier’s stark-white snowfield he spots a chain of nine peculiar aircraft careening southbound over the ridged, rocky vertebrae of the Cascade Range.
They’re semicircular, arranged in a geese’s V, and appear to be moving as though bound together somehow. He’s never seen anything quite like them. They dart in and out of the valleys between the smaller mountain peaks. They’re dark in profile and blade-thin, nearly invisible, but every so often one flips vertical and flashes against the snow and sky and when the sun hits their highly polished surfaces just right, his cockpit glows blindingly, like a revelation. Perhaps most astonishing, though, is their speed. Some fast math tells Arnold they’re doing about 1,700 mph. That’s almost two and a half times faster than any manned craft had gone in 1947—Chuck Yeager wouldn’t break the sound barrier (an unspectacular 767 mph) until October, almost two months off. When asked later to describe their flight, Arnold will grasp after analogies. They looked like speedboats racing over rough water, he’ll say. Like fish flipping in and out of the sun. But he’ll forever embed a bogey into the public’s imagination when he says, “They flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.”
* * *
“The UFO phenomenon comes in waves,” Keith Rowell said. We were sitting on his back deck in West Linn, Oregon, a suburb of Portland. A short-haired dachshund lay mutely curled in his lap. I had a legal pad rolled open to the questions I wanted to cover—a standard fare of soft skepticism—and kept hoping I’d placed my old mini tape recorder close enough to catch everything Keith was saying. This was my first profile and I didn’t want to fuck things up irrevocably from the get-go. “There’s always a background of stuff going on, but there are peak times of activity. And the Roswell crash came more or less at the beginning of the 1947 wave.”
Keith’s a retired technical writer and has been studying UFOs since 1974. He now serves as assistant state director of the Oregon chapter of MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, an international organization whose mission is “the scientific study of UFOs for the benefit of humanity.” His hair is wispy white and cropped close to his head and he has a well-kept, matching mustache. If he needed to, he could earn easy extra scratch doubling as a late-career Richard Dreyfuss, at car dealerships or insurance stores or whatever. In the way I badly want Ohio to be a palindrome, I’m teased, tortured by how close Keith Rowell’s name comes to being a perfect aptronym. Like Ms. Booker, the librarian, or Dr. Fingers, the gynecologist, he is one letter short of being Mr. Roswell, the UFOlogist.
According to Keith, still very little is known about what (literally, figuratively) went down at Roswell. And much of the event’s intrigue lies in the persistent mystery that surrounds its most basic facts. In the course of my research, I’d come to learn that reading about Roswell (and about UFOs more generally) can be like finding yourself in a narrow, smoke-filled hall of mirrors so mind-bending that you’re sure it must debouch in a nuthouse somewhere. It’s a melodrama that spares not a trapping or trimming—posthumous affidavits, sworn denials, government cover-ups, supposed character assassinations. Faced with all the contradictory reports, all the he-said-she-said back-and-forth, factual truth can seem to hinge on what side your gut tells you to trust, that is, in whom you choose to place your faith.
“There were one, possibly two crash sites within a fifty- to seventy-mile radius of town,” Keith continued. “And we still don’t know the exact date of the crash. If you decided to grind through all the books about Roswell—and it’d take you about a year—you’d find that people report it as happening sometime between July second and July fifth.”
The story’s beginning, by now, is well known. A rancher named Mac Brazel found some debris from a crash on his farm. He moseyed into town the next day to alert the sheriff, who in turn told military personnel—concerned parties relish pointing out that the only atomic bomb unit in America at the time was stationed in Roswell. Lesser known, perhaps, is what followed. News traveled up the chain of command that too many civilians had caught wind of the crash. Questions needed answering. General Roger Ramey approved a press release written by Walter Haut, the public information officer.
“The press release is short,” Keith said, dispensing these names and the sequence of events with the studied ease of a history professor. “Just around a hundred words or so. And it begins something like, ‘A flying disc was captured today outside of Roswell and it was sent to higher headquarters.’ This is big. It’s the only time in history that any government agency—the air force, CIA, NSA, DIA, whatever—has ever issued an official document that acts as if the flying-saucer stuff is real.”
* * *
It’s hard to believe that we didn’t have a working definition of “delusion” until 1913. But that’s when the record shows Karl Jasper
s, the psychiatrist-philosopher, set down a checklist of sorts—guidelines that a medical professional could use during diagnosis. For a belief to be considered delusional, Jaspers wrote, the patient must first believe it with the utmost certainty. He went so far as to reject the idea that a delusion simply consisted of a patient’s false beliefs. No. Delusions are, for those who hold them, true. They grow out of and are confirmed by experience. The second point echoes the first: the patient is incorrigible. He or she will remain unconvinced by even the most compelling counterargument. Finally, and most important, there’s the impossibility, bizarreness, or flat-out falsity of the belief itself.
The first two qualities are self-evident, but words like “impossible” and “bizarre” introduce an element of doubt. “Impossible” and “bizarre” to whom? Because what about spirituality? What about the entire spectrum of suprascientific phenomena? Among the qualities William James attributes to mysticism, for example, are ineffability and what he calls a “noetic quality.” “Mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge,” he writes. And by “ineffability,” of course, he means that that knowledge defies communicability and exchange. It’s a ticket stamped for one ride only: “Mystical truth exists for the individual who has the transport, but for no one else.” That James’s mystical experience sounds a lot like Jaspers’s delusion begs the question: along what lines can faith be considered delusional?
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