Attention. Deficit. Disorder.

by Brad Listi

  Been trying in some strange way to make sense of things out here, with mixed results. Originally figured my time alone in the woods would serve well to clear my head and help me untangle some knots and relax a little bit, but in truth, it’s probably made me even more confused than I already was, if that’s even possible. So far, the only real thing I’ve discovered is that when you have this much time to think, your mind tends to fly into overdrive and do a number on you. A week or so in wilderness solitude, and I’m pretty sure I’ve thought about everything that’s ever happened to me in my entire life—every memory, every potentiality, every daydream, every night dream, every pipe dream, you name it. Naturally, this has included excessive time spent thinking about my ex, Amanda, and her tragic exit late last year and all of the requisite psychodrama that the situation tends to entail. Don’t mean to be a bummer or a purveyor of dark-hearted miseries, but the plain truth of the matter is that solo time in the woods lends itself to mortality contemplation. The dregs come up when the sun goes down. Been trying to get to the bottom of it, trying to decide what to make of it, trying to put some kind of punctuation mark on the whole heart-crushing experience, but all that I’ve been able to come up with so far is this: Suicide renders you stupid and afraid. Stupid because you’ll never know exactly why they did it. Afraid because you’re not 100 percent convinced it was illogical.

  Like I said, don’t wanna be a downer, nor do I want to give you the wrong impression of where my head is out here in the woods. Generally speaking, aside from a few stretches of savage contemplation, my spirits are relatively high. I’m having fun, in whatever twisted way this kind of self-flagellation is fun. I’m having an adventure. Wandering through the sticks. Popping blisters. Stomping in the mud. Writing crazy letters. Drowning in the rain.

  I haven’t spoken to another human being since Blairsville, pretty much.

  Wound up calling my parents from my motel room while I was there. My mother told me to be very careful, to keep an eye out for large wild animals of a predatory nature. I told her not to worry, told her that I have little fear of large wild animals of a predatory nature. Out here, I told her, I have no need to fear bears, no need to worry about bobcats or angry swarms of killer bees. I’ve only spent a few short days out here in the underbrush, but it’s been plenty enough to teach me that the most frightening animal on the planet is the human being. There’s very little doubt about it, if you want my opinion on the matter. Out of all of the animals in God’s infinite kingdom, the humans are the only ones who really make me shiver. The humans are the ones who keep me up at night.

  Rumor has it the indelible backcountry banjo player from Deliverance lives not too far from here, in a woefully remote hamlet called Dillard.

  With that in mind, I’ve decided to do a little dance when I cross over into North Carolina tomorrow. A moral victory, certainly, but a victory nonetheless. My first state line. Dancing has never been my thing, as you well know, but out here in the wilderness, where the rain continues to fall in cold, steady, relentless sheets, celebrating one’s minor triumphs is vital to the preservation of one’s tenuous sanity.

  Yours in Christ,

  Wolfgang Fencer

  P.S. My beard is ferocious.

  20.

  A man was walking toward me carrying a hatchet. I didn’t break stride. I didn’t show fear. It was of critical importance that I not break stride, that I show no fear. If I showed fear, he would almost certainly hack me to pieces. On the other hand, if I moved quickly and quietly, with supreme confidence, he would probably walk right on by. Psychopaths, I told myself, tended to pick victims based on weakness. They were predators. They fed on the weak. They had no interest in tangling with someone who might put up a legitimate fight. They had no interest in killing someone who didn’t fear death.

  The man with the hatchet smiled and extended a hand.

  “Ed Griffin,” he said.

  “Wayne Fencer,” I said.

  We shook hands.

  Ed Griffin informed me that he was an Appalachian Trail volunteer. He was a local from the town of Franklin, out for the afternoon in the light rain, clearing the trail for people like me, moving rocks and hacking away slippery, exposed roots with his hatchet, just to be nice.

  “Rain just won’t let up,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “It sure won’t.”

  I told him that it had rained on me steadily, day in and day out, ever since I’d set foot on the trail.

  “Shoot,” he replied. “That ain’t no good.”

  “No,” I said. “It sure isn’t.”

  We talked about the weather for another minute or two before wishing each other well on our way.

  I watched as Ed Griffin walked off down the trail with his hatchet, whistling Dixie.

  Then I continued on my way, whistling nothing at all.

  21.

  I imagined worst-case scenarios a lot. It was a habit of mine. An indulgence. I imagined terrible scenarios, for kicks, as I moved among the trees. Blood and guts. Utter horror. Demon clowns. Roadside psychopaths.

  I often tried to imagine how I would react if I were involved in a plane crash, for instance. I’d entertain myself for hours, imagining myself sitting in seat 18C, an aisle seat, on a long flight across the Atlantic. Suddenly, the cabin pressure would drop and the plane would do a nosedive and flight attendants would stick to the ceiling and hot coffee would fly everywhere and passengers would scream bloody murder.

  I wondered what I would do.

  Would I join the chorus? Would I panic? Would I pray? Would I weep? Would I experience a religious conversion? Would time slow down to a supernatural crawl? Would my life really flash before my eyes? Would I, like the survivors of the Golden Gate Bridge, experience a mystical state of consciousness in which I lost all sense of time and space and felt an overriding oneness with humanity, the entire universe, and God? Or would I simply scream bloody murder and soil myself while begging for mercy in the paralyzed recesses of my terrified mind?

  I liked to think I would be serene. Serenity was the fantasy. I liked to think that I’d surrender. At that point, there would be no sense fighting it. The End, after all, was The End.

  I liked to think that I’d somehow have the presence of mind to reach across the aisle and take the hand of the person next to me, whoever it might be. I liked to think that I’d have the presence of mind to say, Hey. Listen. Don’t worry, my friend. Everything will be all right in the end. I would squeeze their hand tightly, look them directly in the eye, and give them a smile of great warmth. Then, to top it off, I’d wink. Not a sexual wink or a politician’s wink, but rather, a wink of real compassion, a wink of real serenity and real mischief, a wink of confidence and conspiracy. A Frank Sinatra wink. A Cary Grant wink. An Indiana Jones wink. A Morgan Freeman wink.

  A wink.

  I had convinced myself that in a moment of such utter finality, this kind of rare serenity would be mistaken for something supernaturally comforting. My incredibly calm presence would be mistaken for angelic intervention. The person seated next to me would die thinking that an angel had just descended from heaven. They’d die thinking that an angel had somehow appeared on the airplane at the moment of their untimely and altogether unpleasant demise, that an angel had smiled, winked, and calmly informed them that everything was going to be quite all right on The Other Side.

  In so doing, I would conclude my time on planet Earth in a uniquely altruistic manner, having exhibited the kind of unselfishly heroic presence of mind that we all hope to possess in times of massive crisis. The final moments of my life would be spent responding to my very highest instincts. The final moments of my life would be lived for someone other than myself.

  A few things that had dawned on me during the course of my adventures:

  I lived for myself too much.

  I thought about myself too much.

  I thought about everything too much.

  That was what I was doing out there in the wilderne
ss: thinking about everything too much. I was walking through thick forest, day after day, with my mind running out of control. I walked through the mud, in a tunnel of green. I couldn’t even see the sky. I was buried by forest, thinking about what I was thinking about. It was what I did for a living. I did it eighteen hours a day.

  22.

  Ultimately, I came to some vaguely satisfying conclusions.

  I decided, for example, that a person’s state of mind at the moment of their death probably had something to do with how they would fare in the next realm. It was a Buddhist notion, if I recalled correctly. I was pretty sure I’d read about it somewhere once. I was pretty sure Buddhist monks spent their whole lives training themselves to meditate peacefully at the time of death. I was pretty sure that this was the aim of the whole Buddhist enterprise: To face death with grace. To be mellow when the Reaper came.

  When a human being died in a state of utter terror, it probably didn’t augur well. That was my feeling.

  By contrast, if a human being died in a state of deep bliss and serenity, I tended to believe that they would have a better trip. I had no idea where they’d go exactly or how. And in all likelihood, they’d go absolutely nowhere at all. But in the event that there really was an afterlife, I tended to believe that the efficient management of one’s fear was the essential component of a smooth transition.

  Unfortunately, however, this strain of logic was not without its deficiencies. One of the problems inherent in the theory was that a convicted serial killer who died in a state of medicated, delirious bliss would theoretically fare better in the hereafter than, say, an angelic social worker who died in a state of massive dread and panic.

  And that wasn’t fair.

  But then again, life wasn’t fair.

  And if that was true (which it was), then why should I assume that death was fair?

  Death probably wasn’t fair either.

  Another implication of my logic was that suicide would have to be considered one of the very worst ways to die—if not the worst—because people who commit suicide tend to be in terrible mental states at the moment of demise. Sad and delusional to an extreme degree. Utterly hopeless. In excruciating pain. Deeply appalled and frightened by life. Resigned to the bleakest escape.

  And if this was true, then the method of suicide a person chose and, more to the point, the time a person took to kill herself would also seem to be of vital importance.

  Those who shot themselves in the head with high-powered rifles, à la Ernest Hemingway, were probably screwed, unfortunately. They died instantly, pretty much, in a moment of total despair. There was no time to ponder, no time to shift mental states or second-guess. What’s done was done. They went out in a flash.

  By contrast, those who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge had a few seconds in which to recognize the approach of their own deaths. They had time to experience their conversions. For all we knew, they hit the chilly waters of the Golden Gate Strait in a state of total enlightenment.

  23.

  But that wasn’t right either.

  In postjump interviews, nearly all Golden Gate Bridge suicide survivors reported feeling a sense of enormous regret on the way down. In the middle of their respective descents, they realized that their earthly problems were solvable. They didn’t want to die anymore. Suicide, they suddenly realized, wasn’t such a hot idea after all.

  While plummeting, many of them even begged God for a second chance at life on planet Earth.

  And maybe, I told myself, that’s exactly what total enlightenment feels like.

  Or maybe it was just total desperation.

  24.

  Amanda had gone slowly. She’d had plenty of time to turn off the ignition, get out of that car, and go back inside. But she didn’t do it. She sat there, determined, and huffed those bad gases. Her mental state didn’t change. She didn’t reverse course. If she had any second thoughts, she didn’t act on them. She stayed sad. She drank some vodka and downed a couple of Percocets. She breathed in. She breathed out. She stayed in that dark place and let it swallow her. She thought about herself, her sadness, her emptiness, her pain. She concentrated on dying.

  According to some, I should have been mad at her for that. Mental health experts are always saying that anger is a natural emotional response to suicide, that suicide survivors often experience feelings of incredible anger toward their lost loved ones. They feel abandoned. They feel furious that their loved ones have left them.

  Personally, I didn’t feel angry. I didn’t experience any kind of defining moment of rage.

  Amanda, I didn’t say. Amanda, you self-centered bitch!

  Maybe I should have been enraged.

  I wasn’t enraged.

  Amanda had killed herself, and she had aborted our kid without telling me, and I really didn’t feel angry about it at all. “Anger” wasn’t the proper word. More than anything, I just felt defeated. Defeated and deeply sad. Because there weren’t any real reasons. There weren’t any second chances. It made me listless to think about it. She’d done what she’d done. And there wasn’t a goddamn thing I could do about it.

  Obviously, she had agonized over the abortion. Obviously, it must have eaten her up inside. She must have had mental and emotional tangles that nobody really had a feel for. She must have buried them. They must have burned, they must have gnawed at her guts. She must have felt pretty alone.

  I wondered what I would’ve done had I known about it. Maybe I would’ve paid for the abortion. Maybe I would’ve tried to stop her. Maybe I would’ve bitten the bullet and proposed marriage. Maybe it would’ve brought us closer. Maybe we would’ve had the child and lived happily ever after. Maybe we would’ve given it up for adoption. Maybe we would’ve done a terrible job raising it. Maybe it would’ve been a mess.

  I didn’t know what to think about that.

  I didn’t know how I felt.

  Somehow, though, I could imagine how she must have felt in order to get to the point where she was willing to kill herself. Somehow I could actually imagine what it must have been like for her in those final dark hours. I was able to empathize. For some reason, I was able to identify with her.

  Or maybe I was numb and my anger just hadn’t hit me yet.

  My feet were killing me.

  The flowers were in bloom.

  My unborn child had died in a state of utter serenity, in all likelihood. My kid had had a clean slate, an unstained soul. My kid wasn’t even fully developed. My kid was still pure, still innocent, floating blissfully in the amniotic fluid of the womb in a state of heavenly semiconsciousness. My kid, for the most part, was a bunch of congregated cells at the moment of death. My kid wasn’t even really a kid yet.

  I tried like hell to take comfort in that.

  Most likely, Amanda’s parents, Jack and Nora Anaciello, would never be completely comfortable ever again. They’d had a daughter for approximately two decades. And then they didn’t anymore. Their daughter had chosen to die. She’d ended the life they had given her, and she’d left them behind on planet Earth to deal with her decision.

  No matter how much pain I felt, nothing I was going through, nothing I was feeling, could even come close to comparing to the kind of pain those people were feeling.

  They were experiencing the queen of all losses.

  I was somewhere in North Carolina when I decided that I wasn’t going to tell the Anaciellos that I’d gotten their daughter pregnant. I didn’t have it in me, and I didn’t figure it would help anything. It wouldn’t bring their daughter back, and it wouldn’t give them any answers. It would just give them questions. It would just give them someone else to miss. It would just give them more pain. They didn’t need any more questions, and they didn’t need any more pain. And they didn’t need anyone else to miss. Amanda was gone. She’d taken her reasons with her.

  That was enough.

  Maybe it was dead wrong of me to handle it that way.

  Maybe it was dead right.

&
nbsp; I didn’t really know.

  Morality, it seemed to me, was subjective and gray, and shit happened, and everybody had a different take.

  I didn’t know what the answers were.

  All I knew was that I’d been walking northward in Appalachia for some reason, trudging over mountains in the rain, fending off mosquitoes and ticks, seeking strange discomfort, asking for more pain. I was trying to formulate a plan. I was talking to myself a mile a minute. I was thinking about what I was thinking about. I was trying to have an experience. I was looking for wisdom with little success.

  Existence, from what I could tell, could be ugly and difficult, and much of the time it hurt. In response to difficulty, ugliness, and pain, I had a variety of options at my disposal. On the one hand, I could always go jump off of the Golden Gate Bridge. Or I could go lead a life of quiet desperation. Or I could stand in the belfry and shout epithets into the wind. Or perhaps I could be like Ed Griffin. I could pick up a hatchet, walk out into the dark woods, and spend my time moving slippery rocks and exposed roots so that others wouldn’t slip.

  25.

  Benton MacKaye never remarried. He spent the rest of his life as a bachelor. Even to his closest friends, he was reluctant to talk about his former wife or even mention the fact that he had once been married. He fathered no children in his lifetime but was generally regarded as the father of the Appalachian Trail. His entire existence was devoted to the wilderness. He sought to conserve and protect it, to understand its meaning, and to articulate its relationship to humanity.