by Marin Sardy
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I should tell you, too, that in 1984, a second type of chemosynthetic ecosystem was discovered on Earth and it, too, lay at the bottom of the sea. Occurring at seafloor seeps—fields of cold sulfurous brine or liquid hydrocarbons that spill from between the continental plates and pool on the ocean floor—these toxic terrains, looking so much like terrestrial marshlands but more closely resembling puddled paint thinner, rely on chemosynthetic bacterial mats that harness the fluids’ potential energy and provide a primary food source for sprawling colonies of worms and mussels and clams. And I’ll tell you that in the months after I learned this, with my head full of facts and memories, I jotted down these words: I want life to be everywhere.
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Meaning occurs in the spaces between things, doesn’t it? From here to Nix it is nearly four billion miles.
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I am thinking of metamorphoses, and ancient Greek myths of transformation. Zeus becoming a bull, Daphne turned into a tree, Orion remade as a constellation. When Tom died, I told my mother that it was possible to send off his ashes to a company that would form them, through heat and pressure, into a diamond. “Carbon to carbon,” she said ruefully.
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In Europa Report, a quiet 2013 sci-fi thriller, a team of astronauts travels for more than a year through black space to reach Europa, to explore the possibility that there is life there. The crew lands among the disordered ridges of the Conamara Chaos, a region in which the ice sheet is suspected of containing subsurface lakes. As, one by one, the crew members vanish and the mission collapses, it becomes clear that there is something deadly in the water under the ice. In the final scene, with the landing pod sinking, the solitary pilot, knowing this is the end, decides to die within view of the wall-mounted camera so that it can capture what is coming to kill her. Her last act is to open the air lock and let the water in. As a giant, tentacled, bioluminescent body spirals up toward her through the flooding hatch, she sees the creature. And it is magnificent. Her footage transmits to Earth. Then she is gone.
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I am thinking that the truth of my brother’s nonexistence, like all great truths, is most difficult to see when I gaze straight at it. Both the absence of Tom and the flashes of him that remain are clearest when I view them sidelong—when twilight gives way to full darkness, after the day’s facts have been perused and analyzed and set aside, and I go out alone onto the patio to lie beneath the sky and feel the night engulf me. There, with the bricks at my back, I catch glimpses. About being and nonbeing, existence and absence, cosmos and void. There it is—there he is—at the edges of my vision, shadowy and still, as strong and delicate as life itself.
What Remains
1. A bathroom, a solitary cube of space. That is where they found him. The rest is questions. Was he on the floor? Did the tiles have a pattern? What color were the walls? Was there a window? Could he see out? What was he wearing? Were his hands cold? Did he feel infinite? Did time seem impossible? What about the future? Was that the worst part? What was the worst part? Was it painful? Did he take a last deep breath? Is that surprising? Should I take a deep breath now, because I can?
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2. There are things we wish to say to the dead. I have wished to tell Tom about happiness. I have wished to say that it is not what I once thought it was. That it has lived, paradoxically, in life’s interstices, the small gaps that I didn’t think meant anything until they accrued. That I could not see it clearly except in retrospect, as a composite formed over time. That it has to do with driving home after school in Dad’s Wagoneer with the front bench seat that fit three across—me at the wheel, the radio playing, Tom beside me, Adrienne in a bad mood. And I couldn’t tell you what we said or recall any moments especially, but such moments are what my happiness was made of. They formed the fabric of it and the fabric felt strong and for a long time it was the thing that held me up. And that is how I remember Tom, and it is what I have wanted to say to him about happiness. That there’s no trick to it. That it’s waiting at the edge of every day, hoping to be noticed.
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3. I’ve been trying to tell you something about Tom. About selfhood and siblinghood and maybe, too, about the places where their boundaries overlap. I want to tell you about the night after his birthday at Y2K. It was New Year’s Eve and he had just turned twenty-two, and we were all in Girdwood celebrating at the cabin. We had friends there—Lindsey and Lindsay and a couple of boyfriends and some others—and a few of the girls had snatched some funky polyester clothes from their closets, seventies thrift store finds bought in high school and stuffed away for years, and they now handed them out to all of us because we were partying like it was 1999. I was wearing a turquoise maxi dress covered in purple tropical flowers, and Tom had on some striped bell-bottom pants and a pale blue granny blouse with pastel swirls. That was the night I opened the bottle of Kahlúa I had brought back from Mexico and ruined myself on White Russians for life; the night I slipped comically on the ice as we walked up to the bar at the base of the mountain. And when we got there a funk band was playing and we danced and drank as the place grew thick with bodies, the air dense with sweat and steam coming off coats and shirts and hats. That was the night Lindsey and Adrienne and I climbed up on the stage during a set break and started our own impromptu performance—I was on tambourine, Adrienne on maracas, Lindsey rapping, talking to the crowd.
Tom didn’t drink much, because he had another plan. It was a secret he had told us, his sisters. At a little after eleven he slipped away and grabbed the backpack he had stashed under a table, changing out of his party clothes into his gear. Outside he had his skis and poles waiting, and then, in a headlamp and an avalanche beacon, with his pack strapped tight to his body, he began skinning up Mount Alyeska in the dark.
As midnight approached, snow began to fall, and I looked out the giant alpine windows up toward the dark shape of the mountain and saw it obliterated by flakes swooping down and catching the light and bursting against the glass. What strikes me now is that I was not afraid. None of us were afraid. While we danced and laughed and kissed, as the moment of the new year struck and rolled past, Tom was reaching the roundhouse at the top of the lifts. Then he turned and pointed his skis back toward us, onto the familiar runs, to become the first person to ski down Alyeska in the new millennium.
I’m trying to tell you that we all have the power to claim things. I’m trying to tell you that his record still stands. That it will stand for the next thousand years.
Acknowledgments
My first thanks go to the family members whose recollections provided this book’s foundation and enriched it immeasurably. Thanks to my father, T.J., for supporting and assisting my efforts to tell this difficult story, and for his unwavering faith in me. Thanks to my sisters, Alicia and Adrienne, for helping me sort through my memories and feelings, for sharing their own, and for offering advice whenever asked. Many thanks to the aunts and uncles—Robert, Phelps, Barbara, Beverley, Sylvia, and Morgan (as well as Kit and Julie, both now deceased)—who answered my countless questions with honesty and generosity. And thanks to my mother, for her kindness and love.
This was a demanding book to write, about events that were themselves demanding, and it was clear to me early on that I could not manage it without consistent support. For that, I thank my husband, Will Palmer. It is not an exaggeration to say this book would not exist without him, for too many reasons to name, not least of which being that he acted as its proofreader. Thanks, too, to my stepchildren, Grace and Henry, for their cooperation in this effort and for all they are.
Numerous writers and scientists read part or all of this manuscript and offered their thoughts, insights, and criticisms. Thanks especially to Sarah Perry and Liz
Blickle for their input, as well as many others in my Nonfiction MFA cohort at Columbia, who formed an enthusiastic audience for my earliest attempts to write about schizophrenia and whose feedback and friendship have been invaluable—Raina Lipsitz, Elizabeth Greenwood, Tara FitzGerald, Valerie Seiling Jacobs, Lindsay Wong, and more. Just as integral were the mentors who encouraged and guided those early efforts, particularly Patricia O’Toole, Cris Beam, and Lauren Sandler. Thanks also to the members of NeuWrite, and especially Carl Erik Fisher, for helping ensure that the scientific and medical information in these pages is accurate.
Thanks to the editors who first published versions of many of these chapters as essays in literary journals. Thanks also to copyeditor Susan Brown. Special thanks to this book’s editor, Catherine Tung, for believing in what it could be and for helping it find its shape; and to my agent, Kristina Moore, for finding it a home. Their faith in my work has consistently exceeded my own.
I owe thanks, too, to the mental health activists who helped me explore my experiences among others who could relate, whose projects first provided me a platform, and whose conversations expanded and sharpened my thinking about mental illness: Rosemary Zibart, Maggie Jarry Atosona, and others at NAMI Santa Fe, Minds Interrupted, the Crooked House, and the Daughters and Sons Initiative. Thanks as well to Gary Travis for sharing his expertise on homelessness, to Annie Zak for helping me acquire my brother’s court records, to Kass Atkinson and Katharine Dean for their excellent counsel, to Dianna Delling for the use of her condo, to Ben Anderson for his insights on architecture, and to the friends who allowed themselves to be named in these pages.
And most of all, to everyone who helped and cared for my brother during his years of homelessness, from the staff at Brother Francis Shelter, Bean’s Cafe, Downtown Soup Kitchen, and Alaska Psychiatric Institute, to “Tom’s cop,” Wendi Shackelford, and the friends and neighbors who stepped in when they could, especially Sean, Kevin, and Zach: Thank you, thank you, thank you.
About the Author
Marin Sardy’s essays and criticism have appeared in Tin House, Guernica, The Rumpus, Fourth Genre, The Missouri Review, ARTnews, and Art Ltd., as well as in two award-winning photography books, Landscape Dreams and Ghost Ranch and the Faraway Nearby. She has also been the arts editor and editor in chief of Santa Fe’s Santa Fean magazine. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has twice had her work listed among the year’s notable essays in Best American Essays. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.
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