by Mary Pilon
As for finding a partner, Kevin immediately thought of his friend Morgan Larson. Morgan was the kind of guy who was good at everything, Kevin thought—sailing, being a solid friend, even surfing at an elite level. Whenever Kevin had been in a two-man boat, he had never sailed as successfully as he had with Morgan. Like Kevin, Morgan loved how the wide wings and hull of the 49er allowed it to plane, or soar, over the water quickly—“a wild machine.”157
Highly unusual for any top sailor, Kevin had switched classes so often by now that he felt as if he had sailing attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Once again he would have to rebuild his body and learn how to use it differently. The light, intimate 49er had an ideal combined crew weight limit that ranged from 320 to 360 pounds, meaning that Kevin would have to lose as many pounds as he could. Although Kevin would have to drop some weight, the benefits of teaming up with Morgan and their odds in succeeding in the class far outweighed that.
The pair quickly found that they and the 49er were a well-suited combination. They won a bronze medal at the first-ever 49er Open World Championships in 1997 in Perth, one of the strongest finishes in either of their respective careers. They reclaimed the bronze the following year in Bandol and again in Melbourne in 1999. They patched together their existence from a stipend from the U.S. Olympic Committee, patrons, sponsors, and their personal savings, a typically scrappy personal financial setup for striving Olympians.158 The investment paid dividends, as they were awarded the title of Team of the Year by U.S. Sailing.
Kevin’s sense of security in sailing may have been somewhat misplaced, as the sport had entered a more dangerous era. During the 1998 Sydney to Hobart race,159 which is one of the three jewels in the crown of elite ocean sailing, winds reached 90 miles per hour and waves soared to more than eighty feet. Only a third of the 115 boats made it to the end of the race, and some fifty-five sailors were airlifted by rescue helicopter from their yachts in what was Australia’s largest-ever peacetime rescue operation at the time. All told, the event saw the loss of six lives and five yachts, the most catastrophic outcome in the history of the storied event. The billionaire Oracle founder Larry Ellison, sailing on board the 80-foot Sayonara,160 won the race.
Kevin Hall and Morgan Larson (courtesy Kevin Hall)
“We certainly thought it was possible we wouldn’t make it,” Ellison told BusinessWeek. “It was like being dropped off a four-story building onto asphalt every 45 seconds. That happened for three hours. It was very bad.”
Ellison also said that while he would continue to sail, that race would be his last around-the-world event. He would “not do another Hobart161 if he lived to be 1,000.”
•
Kevin and Morgan’s great success on the water brought with it great expectations of winning a medal at the Sydney Olympics. And Kevin’s dreams began to mimic the big media stories that he was ingesting at the time: Michael Jordan, America Online, satellites.162 He thought about coincidence and saving the universe constantly.
One evening while sitting at home in Ventura, Kevin became fascinated by what he was watching on his VCR—a 1995 made-for-cable movie called Harrison Bergeron,163 a loose adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s short story of the same title. The story was one of a dystopian suburban future in which the government requires everyone to wear a crown of electronic bands that slow their minds to a crawl so they can only ingest banal television programs. In the story, the devices are the government’s reaction to a war and a significant economic depression that grew out of both technological developments and a growing gap between the rich and the poor.
The VCR wasn’t working properly and the television screen began to flicker. Kevin examined the back of the machines and traced the knot of cables back to the TV and the wall. He wondered where the cables led, if there was a camera or some kind of feed in there? He reached his hand into the snarl, wiggled some of the cables around, and ripped them away from the wall.
After some more fiddling, he managed to fix whatever it was that was wrong onscreen, but part of him felt freaked out.164 Of all of the things that could have been on the screen, why did it have to be that film that caused static? Was the Director sending him a sign?
Kevin’s lows started to resemble dark hangovers, complete with a deep desire not to leave his bed, a sense of defeat and exhaustion before the day had even begun. When he was in such a state, taking medication felt like a cop-out, an easy way to escape his deeper problems as well as his looming concerns about the side effects. To think that he could just take a pill and make everything feel better seemed too simplistic to him, an outward solution rather than an inward one.
Meanwhile, in pop culture, reality television began to bloom, most notably with MTV’s The Real World, which followed a set of strangers living together in a shared home while the cameras rolled. Kevin understood that people watching the shows could see themselves on the sets with “real” people, and he, too, could see himself on a reality TV show165 more clearly than on, say, something anachronistic like Gone with the Wind or an Alfred Hitchcock film.
Also, in 1998, the film The Truman Show was released. A satirical comedy, it centers on Truman Burbank, played by Jim Carrey, a seeming everyman who lives his life inside a simulated reality TV show. His friends, family, and wife are all actors on the show, which includes product placements and elaborate set pieces. He tries to leave “The Truman Show,” but his attempts are thwarted, including when a throng of cars pulls in front of him, stopping his exit. “You never had a camera in my head!” an angered, frustrated Truman exclaims.
Kevin watched the film on his VHS,166 using the same player that had spooked him when watching the Vonnegut film. He felt that finally, finally, someone understood167 what he had been trying to explain for years. The film’s scenes with the boats, in particular, seemed prophetic to Kevin. At the end of the film Truman sails out on a boat and hits a blue wall. What he had thought was the horizon, the infinity of water, was just the edge of a stage. He asks the unseen director, Christof, played by Ed Harris, who Truman is.
“You’re the star,” Christof tells Truman.
“Was nothing real?” Truman asks.
“You were real,” Christof tells him. “That’s what made you so good to watch.”
As Kevin watched, he thought about all the times that he, too, had been out on the water sailing alone. He thought of never being sure that he wasn’t going to be blown out to sea. He tried to be vigilant about not getting on a boat by himself when he was spinning up toward an episode, lest he try, like Truman, to keep sailing farther and farther from shore. And just as in the film, Kevin couldn’t help wondering what would happen if he were to do that, if all along the sky, the horizon, had actually just been a wall.
As Kevin turned his eyes to the screen, it was hard not to imagine being on the boat with Truman,168 together.
KRISTINA
Kristina wasn’t a doctor, affording her a distance from Kevin’s diagnoses that her parents didn’t have. She began to question the entire premise of Western medicine, and wondered what had triggered Kevin’s bipolar disorder and given him cancer in the first place, especially since no one in their family tree had a history of either. And, aside from insurance purposes, what the reason for labeling someone in that way? At times, it felt like the DSM was just a handy excuse not to listen.
One of Kristina’s aunts approached her with a theory that connected the mind and the body: Kevin’s cancer had to have been related to his bipolar disorder somehow, but she couldn’t put her finger on how or why. Or, maybe it was the other way around. The timing and circumstances of both seemed too uncanny for her.
Kristina thought the same thing. What had created such a strong backlash169 against Kevin’s brain and his body? Was it some kind of hormonal imbalance? A physical manifestation of his psychological issues? A general discomfort with societal pressures surrounding masculinity? She started reading the works of Malidoma Patrice Somé, a teacher and author from Burkina Faso. In The Healing W
isdom of Africa, Somé explores humankind’s connection with nature and individual destiny, writing that “everyone is born with a purpose, and that this purpose must be known in order to ensure an integrated way of living. People ignorant of their purpose are like ships adrift in a hostile sea. They are circling around.”170
Obvious ship metaphors aside, Kristina wondered if Kevin’s sense of purpose was off in his adult years. “If something in the physical world is experiencing instability, it is because its energetic correspondent171 has been experiencing instability,” Somé wrote.
Reading Somé, Kristina didn’t understand why in some cultures, people with visions of grandeur, who spoke of having portals to higher planes of thinking, were seen as respected shamans, while in modern Western cultures they were strapped to beds, medicated, and stigmatized. Ancient Greeks, in particular Plato, had also viewed madness as a potential gift and centuries later in the 1960s and 1970s, Thomas Szasz and other critics had argued that mental illness itself was a construct, a “myth.”
Maybe the truth was somewhere in between, but at the very least, it felt like a conversation worth having. Kristina presented her more holistic and spiritualistic ideas to her parents, but they appeared uninterested and were quick to dismiss. Much to her frustration, they seemed entrenched in their Western medical perspective. Kristina tried to press them by asking what they thought it was that Kevin was working through in each of his episodes. Did his mania somehow provide him comfort or a defense against something? And, if that was the case, a defense against what?
What if, Kristina asked her mother, the family just put Kevin out in the woods and let him roam in the wilderness, so that he could fully live within his episodes in a space where he felt safe and free?
It was a lovely thought, her mother told her, but not really within the realm of possibility.
KEVIN
Kevin strolled down Wakefield Street, a wide thoroughfare near the University of Auckland’s campus with the Sky Tower, a futuristic white spire. As he made his way down the street, which sloped downward toward the water, he took comfort in the orderly arrangement of office buildings, parking garages, restaurants and bars. He could feel the cameras rolling and the presence of The Director again as he observed one large gray building with an awning over the street, adorned with a red sign letting drivers know that parking spaces were available. The first few floors of the building were devoted to a parking garage, while above were offices. He craned his neck to look up several stories to see a sign with some letters at the top of the building: ORACLE.
Oracle! Of course! That had to be a sign.
Kevin walked toward a silver door—an elevator—that faced the street. No key or parking ticket was necessary for opening it, a fact he marveled at. The Director was once again doing a great job of ensuring that everything had been set up properly. He stepped in, pushed the Up button, and took satisfaction in the whish of the metal doors sliding to a close.
When they opened again, Kevin was all the way up on the roof, where he belonged, cloaked in the night.
The Director told him that he was supposed to jump off the top, just like in the 1997 David Fincher thriller The Game. Like the protagonist in that film, a wealthy investment banker played by Michael Douglas, Kevin had opted into a game that promised to change his life and the lives of others. And the Oracle tower, of course, made the most sense for such a scene, given its cofounder, Larry Ellison’s, passion for sailing. Kevin stood above the hum of the street noise thinking that it would make a really good scene and that the audience would be sure to applaud.
He looked over the edge of the building172 and prepared for flight.
•
In some stories, people standing on the edge of a building or bridge, determined to end their lives, finally come to their senses. They realize that life is worth living. Or a voice of reason, sometimes a friend or onlooker, shrieks and pulls the potential jumper off the ledge to safety.
In Kevin’s case, he just got distracted. As he stood on the roof, a seagull flew by, drawing his attention away from the Director’s commands. He became fixated on trying to look the bird in the eye, and stepped away from the ledge. The bird, quite unintentionally, had saved his life.173
Shaking off his potentially fatal flirtation with falling off the building, Kevin took the elevator back down to the street. As an American, he became engrossed with the sight of pedestrians crossing the street diagonally in an X-like pattern (known as a “pedestrian scramble”). Rather than taking turns and going in one direction at a time in a square formation like in the United States, this seemed symphonic somehow, a coordinated composition of strangers all moving forward yet not hitting each other. Much of New Zealand felt that way to Kevin, comfortable and Western but still quirky.
He joined the sidewalk dwellers with the impending conclusion of his marriage to Anne now weighing on his thoughts. As Kevin walked by a fountain, he examined the wedding band on his left ring finger, his divorce with Anne not yet officially finalized. Removing the ring, Kevin held it in his hand nervously, its circular shape that was supposed to symbolize the eternity of his union with her. Then, feeling the cameras rolling, he took it off and chucked it into the fountain, and with it, his thoughts about his marriage.
Later, a festival was taking place on the outskirts of town, and Kevin hitched a ride, skateboard under his arm, and danced through the night and into the morning. Why sleep, Kevin thought, when there was partying and the world to see? Resting was for the dead. He was alive.
Part of Kevin knew that it wasn’t right for him to feel this good, even if now he was surrounded by other like-minded revelers. Something was wrong, but he wasn’t interested in sorting it out. At least not now. He felt amazing.174
As the music blared, Kevin decided to climb up one of the thick poles of a large tent. The sun was rising and the crowd was thumping, the perfect scene. He scooted his way up. The audience took notice and cheered him on.
Kevin was nearing the top of the tent when he heard a police officer braying at him from below, which confused him. Why didn’t the police understand that what he was doing was a scene in The Show? And a really cool scene, if he could say so himself. Each episode of The Show was wildly different and each offered a unique window into humanity, this one clearly the next great installment of a wonderful series.
The cops coaxed Kevin down. When he reached ground level, they asked him outright: Was he on drugs?
No, Kevin enthusiastically replied. He wasn’t on drugs.
That was the whole point.
And it felt completely awesome.
•
In the aftermath of the episode, Kevin’s good fortune with law enforcement appeared to have come to an end and he was summoned to appear in court before a judge in Auckland. By the time of his hearing, he was medicated, calm, and polite, the opposite of what police had described when they had picked him up. He watched the judge up on her bench as she examined several pages of doctors’ notes he had provided which described his bipolar disorder in detail.175
It must be terrible to live like this, she said.
Kevin was surprised and comforted to be met with such sympathy. He knew that given the circumstances, he had gotten lucky. The judge said that what Kevin had done had jeopardized his own safety and that of others but told him that it wasn’t his fault; it was a manifestation of mental illness. She dismissed the charges and allowed him to go, wishing him a positive and healthy recovery.
Kevin would later become even more aware of the privilege that his race and class had brought him in the courtroom and in other interactions with law enforcement. The Auckland judge could easily have changed the entire direction of his life, but instead he had been allowed to go, and into a robust support system, no less. Incarceration rates for mentally ill people of color were significantly higher than that for their white counterparts by any metric, and particularly so in the United States during the 1990s, as many in local, state, and federal law enforcement
took a “tough on crime” stance. The result, built up over many years, was that many U.S. prisons were teeming not with serial killers, but with addicts and people with undiagnosed or untreated mental ailments. In many cases, the trauma of being incarcerated only made existing psychological problems worse.
Yet for Kevin, life after police apprehension would go on. After the Auckland episode, Kevin’s divorce was finalized. Amanda’s long wait was finally over and she and Kevin could go forward with their lives together. She explained to Kevin that she had tried to date other people and found that none of them had compared to the guy she met as her lab partner all those years earlier. Kevin told Amanda of his own heartbreak when she had dumped him, how the more he thought about it, his marriage to Anne was in the shadow of that rejection. Yet both of them admitted that maybe each of their own respective romantic paths made them less likely to take each other for granted. Some couples grow together and some may, in their own peculiar ways, grow while apart.
She flew to California to meet him and they officially reunited. His words at LaGuardia had not been empty.
•
Kevin knew Long Beach, California, well enough to know that it wasn’t a place of colorful, wavy, wonderful whirlpools, yet there they were, right before his eyes. When the wind blew, the colors of the whirlpools shifted back and forth in an experience that transcended Kevin’s words.
He and Morgan were there that day to race in an important regatta that wouldn’t directly impact their ranking to get on an Olympic team but could help them secure funding. Kevin had begun seeing the whirlpools the day before, when they were on the boat, but he hadn’t said anything to Morgan at the time, worried that he might have been in The Show and was perhaps untrustworthy.176 It was hard for him to discern whether he was witnessing an illusion, hallucination, or just misperceiving something that really was present before him. As fantastical and surprising as the images may have been, they came with an aura of anxiety, and had Kevin wondering if others could see them or if they lived merely in his head.177 He hadn’t stopped taking his medication, but he had been drinking a fair amount of alcohol and missing sleep.178
