The Long Accomplishment

by Rick Moody

  It was nearly impossible to fathom that this particular thing was happening again, that we were going through another loss, and that we knew all the treatment options for treating a missed miscarriage, and that we had been told we had pulled it off this time, but in fact nothing of the sort was happening, and now we had to drive back up to Saratoga Springs, and pretend that everything was all right, when it was anything but all right. And then we would have to come back down the following week for a D&C, after my two weeks at Skidmore, and then Laurel would have to recover from that, and then we would see where we were.

  Laurel’s sobbing outside was matched only by her rage. She had known the week before! Why had I tried to convince her otherwise the week before? (Because I know no other approach than the optimistic approach.) Why didn’t anyone believe her when she already knew? And how the hell were we supposed to get through two weeks in Saratoga Springs? And what the hell were we going to do now that we no longer could use that Upper East Side reproductive endocrinologist, because she wasn’t taking our insurance anymore?

  We did drive north again, and I finished my class, because of the myopic style of professionalism I have already alluded to, and we told no one of our plight. We told only our friend Amy Hempel and one other friend in Saratoga Springs what had happened. And I didn’t do anything in the classroom I would not have otherwise done, excepting that every time I went to the classroom, or did individual meetings with the students, I was leaving a distraught Laurel alone in the dorm.

  It’s an experience of being that one has in the most spiritually destitute of times, where the extraneous is cleared away, and suffering is exposed as a really unique and critical approach to knowing that you are in the world, because you are a being who does not know when the suffering is going to end. Laurel got into bed for a while in Saratoga, and if she made a few appearances in public, they did not require her entire person, because the majority of her person was engaged in suffering.

  The silliest and strangest thing that was the only outward manifestation of my own loss, in all of this, was that my floaters suddenly got dramatically worse. I tell this story only because it’s an example of the condensation and displacement that adheres to human events amid a repetition of losses and high-stress occurrences. I couldn’t really talk about my own anxiety, because it needed to be significantly less important than Laurel’s, in order to keep us moving forward, and so instead of worrying about Laurel and miscarriage, I worried a little bit about my eyes. I’ve always had a little bit of sludge in the visual field of my eyes. In my thirties, I got my nearsightedness fixed, through laser surgery, and all was well for a while, and vanity was preserved, spectacles foresworn, but then the floaters really began to achieve a certain colorful density. While gazing on any white background, now, I can see what sort of looks like one of those environmentalist advertisements about petrochemical flotsam in the ocean, and the horror thereof. The floaters, those bits of my own vitreous material, have become the flavor of much of what I can see. Occasionally, these days, they affect my reading a tiny bit, and despite all of the literature—which suggests You’ll get used to them over time! Your brain will correct for them!—mine only get more numerous and larger.

  And there are some flashing lights too. Which of course means: retinal problems. Or scintillating scotoma! I really came to love the description of scintillating scotoma, which if you haven’t read yet you owe to yourself. With scintillating scotoma, which is either predictive of a migraine (I have only ever had a couple of them) or its own otherwise asymptomatic migraine, you see these very carefully arranged light patterns. Some people get teichopsia, which is when you see a star fort! So excellent! Mine isn’t as good as a star fort, though I have seen the psychedelic equivalent of a flashing pink, red, and blue parallelogram in my field of vision in both eyes, and while it’s happening I can’t read, or drive, and it doesn’t matter if I close my eyes. I still see it with eyes closed. Luckily, it only lasts for forty-five minutes or so, or that has been the case so far, after which I do not get a headache, although I feel sort of dizzy and weak.

  While Laurel was suffering, therefore, I was also worrying about my eyesight, or about having to have my retina stapled back in, or about macular degeneration, which afflicts others in my family. I went to the eye doctor, who subjected me to a battery of tests, and suggested that my visual field test was awful. He gave me three chances, and eventually I passed a visual field test. “It’s really just a baseline reading,” he mumbled. He celebrated this accomplishment by sending me off to the retinologist.

  There were a lot of visually impaired people at that practice. People being helped inside by others, people with canes. As my job is the writing of books, and, in parallel, the joyous reading of books, I didn’t want to be one of the people being helped into the practice.

  And the retinologist must have been a reader, because he was very interested in my profession and wanted to talk about it, and how he was stuck inside in a darkened room all day, and he’d really like to write a book someday, and by the way my retina was fine, and don’t do the floater removal operation, it’s like the old needle in the haystack, he said, and there’s nothing that can be done now, and you’ll probably get used to the floaters after a while! Your brain will correct for them! He subjected me to another battery of visual field tests, and said that if I didn’t do better next time I’d be shipped off to see if I had a brain tumor.

  This was the couple in July, the emotionally distraught couple, one of whom was prostrate with PTSD from pregnancy losses, and the other who was grief-stricken and two and a half years sexually sober and worried he was going blind, the couple who then went to yet another clinic to do the D&C, after our missed miscarriage. We had been effectively ushered out of the foregoing practice where we did the IUI, because of insurance, and were now embarked on a third practice, well-known as the cut-rate infertility choice in New York City, but in the meantime, we had to terminate the pregnancy. So we went to another place in Midtown. The pregnancy removal operation was noteworthy for a lot of younger women, who had perhaps collaborated in the employment of unreliable contraception, or who were involved with guys who were careless, or worse, and many of whom had come here by themselves, and it reminded me of times in my life decades past, whose shadow of grief is the shadow looking back into you, the shadow colonizing you, the shadow occluding the visible and perceptible. At least I had come out of the low days in search of opportunities to support and love, and now was my chance.

  Before they would do the D&C they did an ultrasound, to make sure Laurel was pregnant, and that was when the following sentence was uttered:

  “Neither one of the fetuses has a heartbeat.”

  To which Laurel said, “Neither one of the two?”

  “There are two, and neither one has a heartbeat.”

  Twin boys, reader, they were twin boys.

  In my heart, I always assumed I would have another daughter. Or, rather, I assumed this, because I really liked having a daughter, and felt great infinite waves of love for my daughter, couldn’t live without her, no matter how challenging I found being a dad sometimes, and how ill-equipped I believed myself to be, short of the requisite patience and sometimes the reserves of compassion.

  But my sense of the moral architecture of the universe is such that my preference for a girl was definitely, it seemed to me, going to be rewarded with a son. So certain was I that I sort of knew, somehow, that there were twin boys in there, twin boys lost to the world, now, or in the process of being reabsorbed into the first spark of the universe, to be reclaimed at a later date. I honestly don’t know how I could have taken care of twins, nor do I know how Laurel would have done it, with our elderly and in some cases infirm parents. But I knew that the loss of two was an enormous loss, a sort of accretion of losses that no one should have in one year, and that the reabsorption was going to take place, someplace out beyond Alpha Centauri, and then we were just sort of going to move on, but this did not seem p
ossible.

  Total up some of the hardships, reader, and ask yourself how we could possibly continue. We were two people who had been married less than a year, and we had already dealt with multiple losses, a dying mother, a dying stepfather, the deaths of acquaintances, suicide, the loss of a six-year-old girl in our community, and we were supposed to be successes well known in our fields, but we felt more like a traumatized couple, battered, and worn, and bruised.

  Laurel, like the incredibly strong person that she is, went through the procedure somehow, because there was nothing much else to do in our desolation, and then we were out the other side, without a clue in the world about how we were going to do in vitro fertilization cycles, not in terms of the money, which is astronomical, nor where we were going to do it, nor when. And in addition to those considerations we were supposed to go visit my parents for a week.

  August 2014

  The staging of memories in a marriage, it seems to me, is vitally important. A marriage is a sequence of stories you tell about yourselves, to yourselves sometimes, in order to encourage the marriage to signify, to stand for something. The stories support the marriage itself, and perhaps sometimes they support the very idea of marriage. They are effects of the marriage and causes of it, too. And therefore I’d be remiss, especially in the month of August, a holiday of a month, and a month of grief, if I didn’t tell you a couple of the stories that I have left out of this account so far.

  The first involves the moment in the summer of 2013, the summer before the October when Laurel and I were married, the summer when a former student of mine wrote to me about a theatrical experience she’d had in which she’d been the only audience member for a performance by a theatrical entity called Odyssey Works who design performances for an audience of one. That is, they design a theatrical experience just for you. My student said her life had been changed by her experience of Odyssey Works. I definitely did not have to be told twice, as life-changing experiences with art are (by definition) rare and formative. I immediately began looking into the matter of Odyssey Works.

  Why did I do this? I did it because my divorce had just come to an end, and I felt bulldozed inside, inert, depleted of meaningful reserves of the human, and I wanted to do something with myself, in the months before Laurel and I married, to restore my faith in creativity and in art-making. That is, I totally saw the Odyssey Works experience through the lens of creative selfishness. I wanted to refill the tank a little bit, in the same way that I went to Burning Man while finishing my novel The Four Fingers of Death, or in the same way that I went to a Meredith Monk vocal training workshop at the Omega Institute. Being off-balance, uncertain, baffled, challenged creatively, these often resulted in the kinds of experiences that I like to write about. (Another example would be giving a reading at an ashram on Lower Broadway.)

  Laurel has slightly different impulses. Her interests initially, as an artist, were partly in documentary work, when she was an undergraduate, and she really believes in depicting what is, and in the daily struggles of people, and the nonnutritive New Age stuff, the whacky spiritualism, really irritates her. I think her mother’s fascination with alternative spiritual systems when Laurel was young may also play a part in her resistance to adventures of these kinds. Her attitude about Odyssey Works, especially when, in the intake period (I was accepted as the audience member for summer 2013), they called her to talk over how the odyssey experience was going to work for me, suggesting briefly (though only briefly, as I understand it) that they were thinking about throwing me out of a plane—with a parachute—her attitude was that it would all be a ridiculous amount of time spent away from my family, meaning herself and Hazel, with nothing much to show for it.

  I cannot deny that it did result in a lot of time away from my family. My odyssey ended up taking a not-insignificant portion of three months, and it began, one night in May, when I went to the Russian and Turkish Baths in the East Village. It had been a long time since I was there, so long ago that the last time I’d been there, for someone’s bachelor party, I still wore glasses and therefore could not see a thing in the baths and kept running into naked people. I did not quite understand, and never have understood, the allure of the public bath, although I suppose I liked them a little bit when I was in Iceland. I have also been to the Roosevelt Baths in Saratoga Springs, where you get your own room. In Saratoga Springs, the baths were a lot like being in the psychiatric hospital.

  But Abe Burickson, artistic director of Odyssey Works, who was and is an architect, and taught architecture, loved the idea of the public bath and was interested in trying to think up new ways of designing baths, or that is something that he told me while we were sitting in the baths, and losing body fat, and then occasionally diving into the cold water, only to lose some more pounds in the steam room thereafter.

  Abe, it turned out, had been a Sufi spinner when young. Not a Sufi spinner at Hampshire College who was pursuing a major in Proto-Industrial Conceptions of Religiosity in Modern Byzantium, but an actual trainee with professionally and spiritually legitimate dervishes in Istanbul after he got out of college. Abe’s mother is a painter, and I think Abe was looking around for something like a meaningful, epiphanic, transportative spiritual experience apart from the history of painting, and the answer to this search was found among the whirling dervishes of Istanbul. I think he worked at Sufi spinning for some two years.

  It happens that though I cannot dance, cannot remember any kind of choreographic routines, I dated dancers almost exclusively in my later college and graduate school years, and on one occasion I appeared in a dance, a dance in which a certain text of Gertrude Stein’s was recited, and during which the movement of the piece consisted entirely of Sufi spins. So, at that time, I undertook for several weeks some training in how to do a Sufi spin, which involved looking only at my hands, and retreating into some deep space in myself, and not turning my eyes until the last moment in a certain 360 degrees. This involved a lot of interfacing (this was my particular solution) with the music of Steve Reich and Meredith Monk, and some hoping that I would not throw up. I think the piece was influenced by Trisha Brown, who was a choreographer I loved then, and I think in our campus environment it was original and provocative.

  I told Abe about this, but Abe’s story about training with the dervishes was far more interesting than my college experience in dance. Abe’s story was about spiritual awakening and Sufi spinning. While I believe in spiritual experience, while I believe that spiritual experience is the kind of thing that enabled me to stop drinking and which undergirds some of my work, and which has brought order to a life that was in no way orderly in prior years, I am also a skeptic, and sort of want to make everyone with a spiritual awakening defend their story, because the defense, in the first person, is often very moving. I was, as you might be, somewhat skeptical about the ability of a guy from the United States, whose only qualification was that he had studied some architecture and written a few poems, simply to enroll in a class in Istanbul, after which he would experience what Sufi spinners have tried to have for centuries. Why Abe? What was so good about him?

  If it were a short story, instead of an encounter from the year of the Charles Manson autographed postcard, I would instantly push Abe Burickson to the most dramatic recitation of his story, and I certainly tried that. I don’t know why, because when I talk about being redeemed by sobriety, or the moment when I was in a James Turrell skyspace piece in Santa Fe and the light did something that I had never imagined light could do before, I try not to tell the story in a way that exaggerates it. I try to allow epiphany to happen without overselling it. And this is exactly what Abe Burickson achieved, he slowly teased out the long and solitary nights of practicing over and over and over, not really knowing much Turkish, not knowing anyone much in Istanbul, constantly doubting the validity of the undertaking, constantly thinking he might as well go home to the United States and figure out something else to do. But then his story rose to some peculiar and uncanny cl
imax, and I can only imagine that it was this way because we were in the baths, and perhaps all the relevant electrolytes had been sweated out of my system. Abe, it seems, had the requisite experience of God, while doing some extended bout of dervishing, or, if not God, the infinite, or, if not the infinite, the numinous and unexplainable, the beyond words, and perhaps because it was beyond words Abe could not fully explain it to me there in the baths. He said only that something spooky and unexplainable happened, and that after that time he left his training in Istanbul and came back to the United States and, presumably (or so I was led to believe there in the baths), started Odyssey Works. I don’t think it actually went that way, but I think Abe led me to believe it in the baths, because it would seem appropriate to the performance we were about to collaborate upon.

  Because of the James Turrell skyspace epiphany I’ve just mentioned, which I had shared with Burickson during the long Odyssey Works intake session, along with my pronounced fear of heights, and my feelings of tedium about dreams, dream recitations, and dream work, I expect that Abe understood that this idea of epiphany, and of achieved meaning in the area of the arts, was somehow essential to me, and maybe the Sufi spinning story was itself spun in order to have the desired effect or to be predictive thereof.