by Mark Salzman
The next morning Mom called the high school, and the vice principal explained to her that I lacked one gym credit, so they could not issue a diploma for me. How I felt for that poor guy! I could see what was coming a mile away.
Mom hung up that phone so hard she practically tore it off the wall. When I was good, no one supported me with more enthusiasm than she did, but when I got myself into trouble, no one became half as angry or as determined to straighten things out. She went right to the car and drove herself to New Haven, where she had my dean write a letter attesting to the fact that I had lived for a year on the fifth floor of a dormitory building with no elevator, and simple arithmetic showed that the exercise I received from going to and from my room easily exceeded the state’s requirements for a year of high school physical education. Mom brought this letter to the high school office, sat down in a chair and said she’d wait. She didn’t get up again until the diploma was handed to her. When she came home and handed it to me her teeth were clenched so tight that two of her fillings rubbed together and sparked, and by God, I was on good behavior for the rest of that weekend.
The moral of my diploma story is that it’s no coincidence that the toughest men in the world have the word “Mom” tattooed on their arms. Think about it.
Mom felt better when I got the diploma, but my year of darkness was just beginning. I continued my work with Professor McBirney a few hours a day and waited tables a few nights a week, but mostly I stayed in my room and brooded. I suppose I should have walked the streets late at night if I had really wanted to live on the edge, but with my experience in the cemetery still fresh in my memory, I thought it best to deconstruct myself in the safety of my apartment.
It got worse and worse. I slept fourteen, then sixteen hours a day, I found it almost impossible to get out of bed at all, and when I did I was always short of breath. I was frantically rereading all of my old Zen books, and even finding the Chinese versions of them in the library. To my disappointment and supreme aggravation, they were just as impenetrable in the original as they had been in the translation. (The moon’s reflection in the water is just a reflection. When you understand this, you understand this.) I had majored in Chinese for nothing.
This. Thisness. Be Here Now. I forced myself to contemplate Thisness, I practiced Being Here Now, but all I could think of was This feels like Shit right Now. I saw flyers for a local Zen Buddhist temple and attended some of their morning meditation sessions, and sat through one of their harsh weekend retreats, but it wasn’t for me. Why the robes? Why the incense and Buddha statues? Why the chanting in Korean? I’d done this already, and I didn’t have the patience to try to take it seriously again; I felt I was running out of time.
No longer worrying about being prepared or not, I made an appointment to see Tungli Shen, the poet/scholar/philosopher I’d heard about for so many years. When I entered his office he was practicing calligraphy. He looked up and smiled, and just one look at his gentle face convinced me that he would have the answers I needed. I didn’t want to burden him with my whole story, so for our meeting I brought along a single passage I’d chosen that I hoped got to the root of the whole problem of meaning and meaninglessness. It was written by Chuangtse, a Taoist who had lived in the third century B.C. I showed the quote to Mr. Shen and he translated it something like this:
Roosters call out, dogs bark
This is all we know.
Even the wisest men don’t know where these voices come from
And can’t explain why roosters call out and dogs bark
When they do.…
“What does it mean? I mean, what does it mean for us?” I asked him.
“Oh, I think it just means that there are lots of things we don’t understand.”
“Yes, but … how do we live with that? How do we live with not knowing?”
He smiled and closed his eyes. “Aha! Yes, that’s the problem, isn’t it? But that’s just it; nobody knows how to do it! If you knew, then—well, then it wouldn’t count as something that you don’t understand, right?”
“Yes, but Mr. Shen, I don’t understand the meaning of life, and I’m obviously unhappy. You say you don’t understand the meaning of life, yet you’re obviously happy. What am I missing?”
He laughed. “About fifty years of age, I think! A lot of these things seem to make better sense as you get older. Don’t feel in such a hurry. That’s what’s making you so uncomfortable, I’ll bet.”
This wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I decided to try with one more line of questioning. “So are you saying that this quote means something different to you now than when you were my age?”
“Yes. Sure.”
“Can you tell me what it means to you now?”
He closed his eyes and laughed again. “You’re smart! I hadn’t thought of that. Still, it won’t do you any good. That quote means something to me because … because of all the experiences I’ve had. Now when I read it, I put it together with my experiences. My childhood memories of Peking … such a beautiful place! Living in Hong Kong when the Japanese bombed it, seeing the atrocities of the war. Moving to this beautiful country—a foreign country to me!—raising my children here, teaching for many years. All of that is my answer to this quote. Your own life will be your answer to it. That’s the way it works, I’m afraid. I don’t know of any shortcut.”
I was grateful for what Mr. Shen had told me, but instead of cheering me up, it struck me like a mortal blow. There was no point in my asking questions about mortality or meaning, he seemed to be saying, because in any case those questions would only be answered when I was really old. After this I was no longer in an existential dilemma; I was simply depressed. If I saw someone I knew approaching me on the street I pretended not to to see him and hurried off because small talk had become unbearable. Telephone conversations with my parents were agonizing. I could hear the concern in their voices, but instead of making me want to reassure them that I was fine, their worry made me feel guilty and defensive, so I sounded even worse than I really was. But I never thought of seeing a counselor or psychiatrist because to me this would have been both shameful and dangerous. Dangerous in the sense that I believed that any counselor would, for the sake of getting me back into school and into the system, do his best to seduce me into accepting the very sort of complacency and mediocrity that I had set out to destroy in myself. Also dangerous in the sense that a good counselor might see right through me and say, “You’re not depressed because of your friend’s death! You’re like this because you’re just disappointed that you can’t be even more privileged than you already are by becoming some kind of sage! Frankly, we see a lot of this at the fancier schools, and it never ceases to disgust me.” It did not occur to me that perhaps somewhere out there I could find a counselor who would be on my side, who would want to help me sort out my difficulties in a way I would have liked. It also never occurred to me to think that I might be wrong about complacency and mediocrity and what constituted the examined life. The more depressed I became, the more desperately I clung to the belief that I was right to be depressed. The possibility that I was seriously mistaken and going through all of this for nothing would have been unbearable.
I can only be grateful that Professor McBirney, whom I saw nearly every day at the Asian languages building, noticed I was in distress and took it upon himself to make sure I didn’t go for long without friendly conversation. He treated me to several lunches a week, and as we became closer he began inviting me to dinner. He was not unlike my father in that he understood that one way to be a good friend to someone in need is to be a good listener, and he let me bore him for literally hundreds of hours. It helped me to be able to express my thoughts to someone, and the fact that a full professor took such a keen interest in my philosophical gropings was the one source of self-esteem I had left. But many years later he confessed, to my great relief, that ever since graduate school he had possessed the ability to appear to be listening when in fact he was working out
grammar or translation problems, so I hadn’t tortured him as much as I’d thought.
The months crawled by, the weather got colder and wetter, the days grew shorter, and I slept more and more. By December I was at the end of my endurance. I had been so uncomfortable for so long that I became desperate for some kind of relief. But what relief was there for this sort of thing?
Naturally, in earlier moments of intense unhappiness (as when Dad found my pot plants), I had imagined myself jumping off a cliff or slitting my throat, but that was always more of a revenge or punishment fantasy than anything else, and it passed in a matter of hours or even minutes, like a mild fever. But now the idea of oblivion—permanent and total relief—came to have a kind of sensible appeal. Instead of being an impulsive fantasy of desperation, it began to seem like the only merciful response to a problem that had already turned me into a zombie and was only going to get worse. I didn’t want to drag anyone else down with me, and I knew I couldn’t stand what I had gotten myself into for much longer.
It seemed like the rational choice, but as long as my parents were alive it was a hopelessly impractical one. The thought of what it would do to them was so revolting, so inexpressibly obscene, that I could only shake my head and think, Maybe tomorrow I’ll come up with something, maybe tomorrow a miracle will happen.
On an impulse, one Saturday afternoon I asked Professor McBirney if I could borrow his car for the weekend and visit my parents. If I was keeping myself suspended in a living hell for their sakes, I figured, they could at least entertain and feed me every once in a while. He agreed. I thanked him, drove home and spent that evening on the couch wrapped up in the green blanket, watching Dad work on a watercolor. As usual, that night I had a stupid anxiety dream—only, this one was so stupid that I made myself remember it when I woke up so I could tell it to my dad in the morning, thinking he’d get a kick out of it.
In the dream I had been invited by NASA to give a lecture to a blue-ribbon committee of engineers gathered to discuss the construction of a space capsule that would carry a man to the planet Jupiter and back. Because of my extensive experience as an astronaut on several of the Mars missions, the engineers wanted to know what suggestions I had for the Jupiter capsule. After I’d been introduced, I opened up my briefcase and produced a sheaf of diagrams I’d prepared showing exactly how to build the new capsule. As I lowered the first one into the projector, nervous laughter filled the room. I looked at the screen on the wall and saw, to my initial confusion, a crude drawing of a cardboard box.
It must be a prank, I thought, examining my pile of diagrams. When I held them in my hand they looked exactly as I’d drawn them, elaborate and precise, but as soon as I fitted each sheet into the projector, they turned into sketches of the cardboard box I’d sat in as a child dreaming that I was an astronaut. The nervous laughter in the audience turned to annoyed silence, then to an ominous murmur. At last the director of NASA asked me to step down. I tried to protest, but two men in dark suits with reflective sunglasses and tiny ear radios picked me up roughly and threw me out of the auditorium.
“What do you think of that?” I asked Dad.
“Pretty stupid, all right,” he said distractedly, getting his brushes ready for the afternoon’s work.
Obviously he hadn’t been paying full attention; otherwise he would have given more of a response. I didn’t say anything for a few minutes, while he picked up where he’d left off on the painting the day before. It was of the woods outside our living-room window at night, done almost entirely in shades of black except for two bright green plastic lawn chairs, facing each other and glowing eerily in the light coming from our house.
“You know what I want to call it?” Dad asked, looking at the painting and grinning.
“What?”
“ ‘They Think We’re Only Lawn Chairs.’ ” He chuckled, but I, feeling angry that he hadn’t shown more interest in my dream, didn’t respond. When he started touching up one of the chairs, I decided to return to the subject.
“You know what’s weird about that dream, though?”
“What?”
“It’s kind of true. I mean, I am a phony, if you think about it.”
“How are you a phony, Mark?”
“Think about it, Dad! I’m always trying to change myself into somebody I’m not. It’s the story of my life.”
He nodded and kept painting. I suppose he thought I hadn’t finished speaking. I was annoyed with him, but something about his way of handling the conversation—he hadn’t exactly rushed to disagree with me about my being a phony—provoked me to continue.
“Look at what I’ve done since I was thirteen: first I tried to become a kung fu master, then a concert cellist, now a professor of Chinese, and none of these are really me. I might as well put on a cape and pretend to be Superman; it wouldn’t be much more ridiculous. Other people do things gradually, but not me. I don’t want to have to take little steps to get somewhere; it’s always the Big Leap for me, always the Complete Transformation. Of course I don’t ever get there because I’m a quitter.”
To drive the point home, I went on to produce the evidence that I was a quitter, evidence that also showed that I consistently quit things whenever I was about to be revealed as a phony:
1) I had quit martial arts because kung fu hadn’t turned me into a fearless warrior, something that any idiot could have told me I would never be.
2) After ten years of cello training, most of which I spent trying to please him and Mom, I heard Yo Yo Ma play once, which made me quit. If I couldn’t be him, I apparently didn’t want to bother at all, though any fool could have told me that Yo Yo Ma, besides being a genius, had been practicing six hours a day since he was three years old. But did I think I should have to work that hard? No way!
3) After becoming a Chinese major because it was the one subject I had a head start in and could therefore look smarter than I really was by focusing on it, I became convinced that reading Chinese philosophical texts in the original language would transform me into Tungli Shen. When I finally did read some of those texts in the original, however, and remained unenlightened, I lost all interest in Chinese culture.
4) (Most ludicrous of all) I had quit college because I was too depressed over being a quitter to concentrate on my homework.
Lastly I reminded my father of the pointlessness of everything, just in case he’d forgotten. “We’re just big clumps of atoms jiggling around in patterns. It’s just like you always used to say: We think we’re so special, but then if we give it any careful thought we realize, Who do we think we’re kidding?”
Dad didn’t look as if he was going to contradict me on this point, so I continued. “It’s finally dawned on me that all the people I like or respect have admitted to not knowing any of the answers to the great questions of life and death. Still, they all seem to live with that; they move forward. But I can’t! I’m constantly feeling, Is this all there is? Even when I was little I was like that, which is probably why I was always daydreaming. Now I can’t daydream anymore because I’m old enough to know that all of that is just kidding myself, it’s just a smoke screen I throw up to distract myself. Now that I don’t even have that anymore, all I can see is fifty or sixty years of drudgery, after which I’ll probably drop dead in a retirement home. That what it’s all about, isn’t it?”
I paused dramatically, waiting for either a verbal response or at least applause. It had been a devastatingly good speech, I thought. But Dad didn’t even look up from his watercolor, so I decided to force him to speak.
“Jesus, Dad, you’re a social worker,” I said, allowing myself to feel angry. “You must have something to say about all this.”
At last my father put down his brush and raised his head to look at me. He pushed his reading glasses a bit higher up his nose, and examined me for what seemed like a long time. He raised one eyebrow, then lowered it; his mouth opened slightly, then closed again. He seemed to be running through several possible responses
before settling on one.
At last his face broke into a grin. “Welcome,” he said, shrugging.
He waited to see what I would do. When I found that I really had no choice but to grin back, he nodded, then resumed painting.
EPILOGUE
A person is never himself but always a mask; a person never owns his own person, but always represents another, by whom he is possessed. And the other that one is, is always ancestors.
—NORMAN O. BROWN
In June of 1993 a trio of astronomers discovered a comet that had broken into several pieces on its last trip around the sun. Soon after they announced their discovery, other scientists observing the comet realized, by calculating its speed, position and trajectory, that the pieces would crash into the planet Jupiter in July 1994. The collisions, they said, would be of such magnitude that if they were to occur here on earth, civilization as we know it would cease to exist. Some scientists predicted the impacts would be so violent that we would be able to see evidence of the destruction through even amateur telescopes, four hundred million miles away from the action. Other scientists insisted that the comet fragments were too small, and would be swallowed up by Jupiter’s cloudy atmosphere and liquid-hydrogen surface like marbles dropped into a colossal milk shake. They warned astronomers not to get their hopes up for a cosmic display.
“We’ll never see it from here,” my dad said, agreeing as always with the naysayers, but that didn’t stop him from driving five hundred miles from Tucson, Arizona, where he and my mother moved after he retired, to California with his new telescope so that he and I could watch from the top of Mount Wilson just in case. I already had the old telescope with me in Los Angeles, which he’d given me, along with a good pair of binoculars, as a wedding present. We would set up the two telescopes side by side and compare the optics.
