Descent

by David Guterson

  K——sent me to a chain store for my Prozac, where I might retain some anonymity or could at least depend on the pharmacist’s straight face; Prozac anyway as commonplace as sausage and not necessarily a sign of something grave; Prozac understood as an afternoon cocktail. I told myself I could feign a preference for the slightest modulation in the weather of my happiness and pick up my pills with my cart well-loaded: Popsicles, Variety, Gruyère, pretzels, dates, Prozac, low-sodium pickles, my humiliating bottle of mood-altering drugs duly bagged in paper, not plastic. But the apothecaries in their powder-blue coats were blandly, almost rudely, discreet, either out of training or boredom. While they might have been jaded, this was fresh ground for me, and I nearly dropped my pills in the trash before I’d left the parking lot. In the end, though, I succumbed.

  Prozac has a lengthy interim to onset—two to six purgatorial weeks—and also doesn’t work for millions of people—antidepressants are effective about half the time—so it was possible that I was waiting to discern, maybe as late as by Christmas Eve, that K——’s intervention had me cycling in place; there was no way to know and in the meanwhile I languished in pharmaceutical limbo, uncertain of my stasis or was it my progress—was I moving or not moving like the astronaut looking puzzled in the textbook cartoon meant to clarify relativity? And if indeed I began to move, if I began to notice that, yes, I was moving, would I recognize the manner of this moving as familiar, and more, would I still be me?

  Nothing changed and I remained in bed; it rained and winter felt imminent. The Air Force caused some collateral damage by bombing a clinic in Kandahar; it was said Argentina was defaulting. There was talk of adding, to the federal cabinet, a Department of Homeland Security, and of anthrax released into skyscraper ventilators; the airlines were doomed, the stock market was dead, an airplane crashed in Queens. I dreamed of K——ensconced in a wheelchair, seated in the lotus position, old but not dissatisfied. Much of autumn had already passed with me butting my head against depression, but still no chink could be spied in its armor. I felt like the prisoner-for-life with his spoon, scratching at the walls of the Bastille.

  On I pressed against the dying of the light, but beyond autumn’s equinox now and crawling into winter, against and in accord with my will.

  * * *

  The Jungian analyst K——recommended was a woman who, in the fashion of a Merlin, practiced her art in a study overstuffed with grave and esoteric books. In the foyer of her dark warren of rooms she appeared pallid, diminutive, and owlish, like somebody in hibernation. Her study was small but the chairs were arranged as to provide for maximum distance. I regaled her with certain fables of my youth, but equally germane, it seems to me now, were the simplest rituals of my weekly visit, the practical minutiae of Monday afternoons. I rode a bus to her, taking note of fellow travelers engrossed in their various movable feasts—Ken Follett or The Gurdjieff Journal—and felt vulnerable and claustrophobic. Say our bus was boarded by terrorists with AK-47s and checkered kaffiyehs: Was this bookish band of mass-transit riders up to a counterattack? Disgorged in front of a sandwich shop, I listlessly purchased soup or a pickle—neither of which I wanted to eat—and while seated in a corner felt penetrate through depression’s fog some vestige of the comfort I’d taken once in places such as this one. (“I am of those who like to stay late at the café,” Hemingway’s waiter explains in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” “With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night.” To which Raymond Carver’s weary baker adds, while breaking open a warm, dark loaf in “A Small, Good Thing,” “Here, smell this.… It’s a heavy bread, but rich.”) Nothing was thwarted, but I did recall sanctuary. I remembered the solace of people nearby. Abstractly, and from across a divide, I recalled that I’d once taken pleasure from places where people gathered while it rained outside. This was a spare and economical shop frequented by regulars often in a hurry, where the exchange with the cashier was gracious but quick and the sandwich maker endearingly tattooed. It was cramped and nicely dilapidated—a sloped and fissured concrete floor—utilitarian but clean. On one wall, photos depicted the vicinity of the sandwich shop in past eras: horses, rails, clapboards, shake roofs, and men dodging puddles in tight serge suits (all of them dead now, my mind observed, the busy citizens in those flaking, daguerreotypes painfully expired and forgotten). The tables were held down by working people taking slightly more than drive-by lunches, and the gaunt, unshaven, unpresentable vagrant hunkered over his newspaper and soup—slow, tremulous, distressed, loitering, undesirable but granted his place—was me.

  My Jungian said that I was seized by darkness as one is seized by the claw of a demon, that such a clutch is severe but temporary, and that in most cases there is a gradual release that might be quickened by dream analysis; the dream as a subterranean hieroglyph I had better learn how to read. But a person is impervious to theory while depressed, except for the theory of bleakness. Potential redeemers are heard but not recognized, their distant voices dismissed. Dream analysis, I thought, was chicanery, like pinning my hopes on a horoscope reading, I Ching sticks, or phrenology—and more to the point, I had few dreams for parsing. I tended increasingly toward expensive silence. I paid to wallow in my Jungian’s presence. The best I could offer were snippets of lost reverie. Leaning forward, grimly, in my chair, I called across the room’s small distance. Like Todd, my Jungian offered and then prepared tea; unlike Todd, she measured her speech and tendered just spartan advice. Occasionally, as I unburdened myself, she made a note on the pad in her lap, and now and then the hint of an expression stole across her plaintive face, but other than that her professional distance was consummately achieved.

  My Jungian was a presence both adept and sage, but there was no way around my adamant faith that the problem was life, not me. As I saw it, no analysis of dreams could mitigate against metaphysical nausea, and no fresh grasp of childhood traumas could dispel the unforgiving cosmos. Yes, my anima was underdeveloped, and this was so for discernible reasons—but did that change the existential facts, which remained, as always, intractable?

  My brother had warned me from his post in Pittsburgh that depression steeped in metaphysical gloom was more likely to be intransigent than the varieties stemming from personal tribulation: it was better, for example, to be troubled by one’s spouse than it was to be troubled by the universe. It wouldn’t do to think too much on the awful plight of being human because psychiatry has no antidote or answers in the category of irredeemable cosmic facts. This disheartened me further, and disheartened further, I found the facts worse: and so I churned with my arms thrown out in the whirling cesspool of the damned.

  On one occasion, after leaving therapy, I went by bus to a dark, cramped bookshop, compulsively convinced that in a volume I didn’t possess a cathartic incantation waited. It was there I found Styron’s Darkness Visible, which I browsed with rabid immediacy, starting at the end (as is often my habit), and found there his familiar, even signature, hopefulness, with which he’d perhaps deluded himself through the body of his predepression novels—“E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle. / And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars.”—and spied there also such inviting phrases as “trudging upward and upward out of hell’s black depths” and “capacity for serenity.” I found there, too, Solomon’s depression atlas, which was frightening to me in its determined science: I didn’t want to know about genetic kismet, the chemistry governing depression’s reoccurrence, the percentages of those who never again trudge upward, and with violence stuffed it back on its shelf.

  The words I’d delivered that day to my Jungian had left me spent, so that I boarded my bus, when it hissed to a stop, with a tender empathy for fellow travelers and a vast patience for traffic. I wore my coat buttoned to the throat, a knit cap pulled to my eyebrows, a wool scarf, and insulated gloves, and as we pressed our way along the city’s avenues I hungrily made my way through the Styron, finding in its lucid, exacting descriptions a mirror
reflection of my madness. “Since antiquity,” wrote Styron, “—in the tortured lament of Job, in the choruses of Sophocles and Aeschylus—chroniclers of the human spirit have been wrestling with a vocabulary that might give proper expression to the desolation of melancholia.” While Styron is therein subsumed—nobody will ever fully limn depression: it can only be approached, not translated or uttered—I attest to his enviable and salutary skill in writing on the subject. Commuting, I found myself glad of his pages. I hadn’t been glad for some time.

  * * *

  Thanksgiving was darkly risible. It might have been something out of Tennessee Williams if Williams had been a northerner possessed of a baby boomer’s sensibility, which is to say it was like Jonathan Franzen. This being an odd-numbered year, it fell to us to feast with my in-laws, who reside in one of those “adult communities” with a windy golf course not far from the sea, a marina, tennis courts, and social amenities, in this case a Bay Club and a Beach Club. The elderly couples residing there own, for the most part, unreasonably large houses—sometimes two, in the manner of snowbirds (Manse South in a place like Carefree, Arizona)—dress for recreation in fastidious fashion, and generally endure the abuses of aging with a cheerful and stalwart consensus. My mother-in-law is especially cheerful, an inveterate hostess, and a culinary force, but for various reasons she didn’t wish to labor on this particular Thanksgiving Day and had booked us into a banquet room at the Harbormaster Restaurant.

  As I said before: Franzen. At my in-laws’ house, with its grand bay view, there were too many generous platters of hors d’oeuvres, relentless milling through midday hours, the requisite string of delightful tricks performed by my in-laws’ Boston terrier, the impatient sullenness of the teenagers among us, the approach of geese from across the water, sporadic games of Chinese checkers, home videos shown with withering commentary, and various parties working in silence to resist too many trips to the liquor cabinet.

  It’s widely acknowledged that for those prone to melancholy, holidays are deeply insufferable. The call to merriment and convivial enjoyment is heard by the depressed with unadulterated dread: an especially enervating farce will be required, the effort involved is bound to hurt, and there is no avoiding the obligations implied—all at a time when what one prefers is a hole in which to collapse. How have you been? What’s new with you? My wife took the measure of my mental health, more than once, telling me in furtive asides that my performance of mirth was admirably convincing. I contained myself through all of this, occasionally retreating into the bathroom in order to let my face fall apart.

  We left for the Harbormaster. Our banquet room, smartly prepped for the feast, lay hard by the Wreckroom Lounge. The Harbormaster has many nautical appointments and is meant to evoke the interior of a yacht, not an especially gilded yacht but a yacht nonetheless. Yet a light softened by landward conifers penetrated our private windows, and none of us could see the sea. Settled, we began with a round of festive tippling, and soon my wife’s parents grew fuzzily nostalgic, and spoke of the past with a poignant yearning but in a way that chilled me with its intimations of mortality. They feted us earnestly, declaimed their thankfulness, and publicly displayed their eternal affections; then in variously awkward tones we each avowed our love for one another, my own declaration hoarsely whispered and marked by dullness and brevity. I loved everybody, but couldn’t say it. In my mind, the only thing was to get home to bed. The others went on painting depths of feeling, some with a clearly tipsy effusiveness. Their surfeit of emotion, while potentially cloying, struck me in my bereft condition as a shout against the dying cosmos: do as you will, it seemed to say, but briefly we anyway embraced each another. And isn’t that, couldn’t it be, the point?

  I didn’t know, and repaired to a lonely hall’s end for a respite before finding my way—reluctantly—to the buffet line. Here other families were making the best, too, of not being at Grandma’s house for the holiday—or at any house, for that matter—at the Harbormaster instead. But what did I know? I wasn’t positioned to judge the happiness of others. And I was sure I appeared conspicuously withdrawn. In an overly compensatory effort not to ruin things, I was easy and jocular with well-dressed strangers as they skewered cornichons and addressed purple onions with a difficult set of tongs. The considerable bounty spread before us seemed excessive even in the context of Thanksgiving. The platters of meats and starches overflowed. I casually ladled gravy in the service of my performance and waxed unbridled over cranberry sauce. I loaded my plate, a prop.

  At table, the burden of my emptiness grew in proportion to the enthusiasms of my in-laws for dinner, for the ambience of our banquet room, and most of all, for each other. As they warmed to the task of feasting together, gorging themselves in the prescribed manner and celebrating with food their familial bond, I found I couldn’t lift my fork. My in-laws are mostly gastronomes and, to some extent, gluttons, and this made dinner even more fraught with crisis, as a wan appetite is inevitably noted among aggressive diners such as these. And how to explain my lack of zest? How not to eat and, at the same time, not insult? I moved my food about, nibbled some, wandered off to the buffet line “for more,” and accidentally lost my plate.

  With our meal behind us we took a family constitutional, wandering into the nearby marina to admire my father-in-law’s sailboat. Trudging the docks in the cold at dusk, I noted the fervor of my wife’s older brother for seafaring trim, for spars, lanyards, masts, rudders, sailcloth, anchors, jibs. My wife’s older brother is robust and cheerful or, to put it another way, round and jolly. He has survived Hodgkin’s disease (chemo, radiation, shingles, swelling, long and painful hospital stays) and triple-bypass surgery, buoying to the surface after both mortal crises with his natively happy disposition intact, dispelling any notion of his untimely demise with reignited enthusiasms. Is that merely “chemical”? An activity of serotonin in his head that’s not in mine? I had, in October, divulged matters to him, and he had responded by sharing the avowals and aphorisms he lives by. (“I promise myself to be so strong that nothing can disturb my peace of mind … to look at the sunny side of everything and make my optimism come true … to be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear, and too happy to permit the presence of trouble.”) This hadn’t worked for me. I couldn’t force depression into remission by uttering belief statements to my mirror each morning. In fact, the very notion of so doing, the idea of consciously nurtured optimism in the face of reality, seemed to me a sham. But the bottom line was that here, on Thanksgiving, my brother-in-law, having faced death twice, was walking the docks with a ruddy visage, smelling the salt air, wearing his years well—in the bosom of family, in the aftermath of turkey and pie—while I, with all my rabid thoughts, could hardly drag myself along the docks.

  It’s possible to live too fully in one’s head, which is partly what turned Tolstoy to boot making and the scything of crops, though certainly there is an element of madness in his geriatric vagrancy, in his wandering away from his ample estate under cover of night at age eighty-two—his last-ditch effort to free himself from torment—a sojourn that ended with his death, instead, in the Astapovo railway station.

  * * *

  I had no intimation that the Prozac was working and called Dr. K——to tell him so, more than once and at inappropriate hours—sporadically goaded by a sense of crisis—and left messages hued with desperation. K——, in return, counseled fortitude and patience: like telling someone strangled by a noose to hang in there until the rope snaps. My reading regressed further toward a tantalizing vapidity: manuals penned by survivors of madness who fancied themselves made wise by suffering—self-appointed healers and teachers with strategies for transforming pain into bliss—but I wasn’t convinced by any of them, and felt they were either deluding themselves or intentionally deluding me. Yet I had no filter. A likely title came into my atmosphere and I read it with the utmost hope, as if, on the next page … but it was never so. Here was a chapter on ascetic denial, m
aybe therein lay a salve for my wounds; here was another called “The Fortress of Anger,” “Dreamless Sleep,” “Refining the Gold,” “Letting the Blessings Flow.”

  It was the season of lights now, December in America, the electricity freed up by silenced air conditioners rededicated to neon Santas and tiny, winking bulbs. Three weeks to the darkest day on the calendar, and this year’s celebrations palled over by terror and its insidious underling, economic fiasco. People weren’t buying or frequenting the malls; Osama had us by our wallets. Still, along the streets near my home, neighbors defiantly strung up lights and arranged their kitschy yard displays, and the shop windows all were suitably decorated, as if nothing significant had changed. On the other hand, the newspapers were full of panicked advertisements taking up full folios, and the televised commercials for financial services, digital gadgets, and airline travel were shrewdly somber but hopeful. Christmas was pitched as resurrection 106 days after Armageddon; it was time to buy again, as in days of yore; but were we led all this way for Birth or Death? as Eliot asked regarding the Nativity, that birth which is offered as the reason for the season? In point of fact, as the Druids knew, the reason is darkness, its piercing acknowledgment—a fervently desperate cry against darkness in the midst of an annual fear.

  I strung up my own small lights, in late afternoon, with nobody home, my mood toward dusk appallingly gray, the wind up and roiling the treetops—clashes of limbs against the sky, a dark density of clouds. Frilly cascades, discounted at the hardware store, made in Taiwan by underpaid workers: I draped their handiwork from our stuccoed house in the great northwestern woods. Here I was in Salish country, hanging lights assembled in Kangshan from the portico of my faux-French home and seeing myself as a point on the globe, exceedingly small and far too complicated, while two billion people elsewhere suffered in the name of my holiday aesthetic. And did Bin Laden hate me for this, too? For my extravagant use of electricity?