Man in the Empty Boat

by Mark Salzman

  But like it or not, for me she had been reduced to a series of transparencies, a slide show in my mind. I couldn’t change that, but at least I could try to choose my slides carefully. I adjusted my search terms. I looked for memories of her when she looked and felt free, and a few answered my summons. One was from that afternoon in Central Park, when she told me that since having a baby, she didn’t feel so guilty about not making art anymore, and then tossed her head back and laughed. That became slide #1.

  Another memory came from the party after her wedding. We had all moved from the reception site to the Tile Shop to whoop it up. As it was a tile store, the floors and walls had all been covered with pieces of ceramic; the room became a giant echo chamber, and the sounds of loud music and shouted conversation all blended together into a bright, noisy mess. When I find myself in noisy places, I tend to get overwhelmed and turn inward. I become oblivious to what’s going on around me and shut down. I was doing it that night, when something caught my eye—someone was waving to get my attention. It was Rachel, in her wedding dress. She was gesturing for me to come over—hurry! I moved through the crowd and she pointed at something. It was our father, and he was dancing. He wasn’t just dancing; he was going wild. He’d been jumping rope that year for exercise, and he was in great shape—the best shape of his life—and he was moving like none of us had ever seen him move before. A crowd had formed around him and was cheering him on. We all stared in amazement at this unprecedented spectacle. It wasn’t just that he was being so physically active; it was that he looked so incredibly happy. Our father, who looked so incredibly unhappy so much of the time. And of all three of us children, the one who most wanted our father to feel happy was Rachel, his daughter, because of all of us, she was the one who knew best what it was like to feel unhappy. Her wedding had brought about the miracle. She and I shared a glance, and the look on her face at that moment became slide #2.

  A few more memories answered the summons, but then the source ran dry, and I ached because I knew that this was where it stopped. I knew this because the same had become true of my mother. She’d been dead for six years, and the slide show I had for her was pitiful. The images didn’t even begin to represent what she’d meant to me when I needed her most. Of the tens of thousands of hours of her presence that I knew as a child, almost nothing was left. And someday, the same will be true of my relationship with my daughters. All that is going on right now between us—the shared discoveries, the unconditional love, the triumphs, the setbacks, the surprises, the delight, the awe—all of it will disappear. When I die, I will become a slide show just like my mother and sister, and when my daughters die, even that will be gone. There may be photographs and stories passed on to grandchildren, but these will have no emotional content, they will have no life.

  I thought about the question I asked myself the day Rachel died: If I could press a button and make the human drama vanish without a trace, would I? My answer that afternoon was that there’s no need to press that button. It’s happening anyway—slowly rather than quickly, and painfully rather than painlessly, but it’s happening. Everything is disappearing.

  So if everything is going to vanish, what’s the use of being afraid or angry?

  I’d gone down this route before—if you accept impermanence, then suffering needn’t trouble you!—and it hadn’t made any goddamn difference. It’s like saying that if you could just accept that the compound fracture in your leg will heal eventually, the pain needn’t trouble you. I’ll take the morphine, thanks. But that afternoon, after watching Koyaanisqatsi for the second time, I wasn’t feeling afraid or angry. I’d been squeezed dry. Then the phone rang. It was the vet.

  He explained that Bowie seemed to be doing well. Normally, he would keep Bowie at the clinic overnight, but he had drive to Twin Falls to attend his daughter’s wedding that night and wouldn’t be able to help if Bowie had another seizure. It would be better, he said, if Bowie stayed with me so that if she had another event, I could rush her to the animal hospital in Hailey. If nothing happened during the night, I could bring her back to the clinic for a checkup first thing the next morning.

  I wasn’t happy about having to spend the night watching a sick dog, but I couldn’t blame the vet. Here he was, working on the afternoon of his daughter’s wedding day and planning to be back at work by eight the next morning. If he hadn’t already been married, and if my sister-in-law who had squeezed her cat hadn’t also been married, I would have tried to set them up.

  I brought Bowie back to the house—she was wobbly but otherwise looked fine—warmed up some dinner, and took it to the study on the far side of the house. That room has my favorite view of the mountains. Bowie followed me. She was being very affectionate and clearly did not want to be left alone. When I sat down to eat, she seemed determined to keep some part of her body in contact with either my feet or my legs. Not even I could resist this. When I taught at juvenile hall, all it would take for one of the kids to win me over was to ask to sit next to me during class.

  After dinner, I poked around Greg’s shelves for another movie to watch. I picked an old, nine-part BBC television series about the development of Western civilization. It was written and narrated by an art historian, an adorably stiff British aristocrat who is identified only by his title, Lord Something-or-Other. I don’t know how Lord Something-or-Other felt about life in general, but he sure knew how to appreciate art. He just loved the stuff, and for me, his enthusiasm was just what the doctor ordered. The first episode of the series is about ancient art—really ancient art: cave paintings, obelisks, pottery, pyramids. I never realized axe heads could be beautiful, but after hearing this guy gush about them, I became a convert. I got a little concerned that when Lord Something-or-Other got to the Impressionists, his head might explode.

  Bowie stayed right in her spot on the floor as I powered my way through Lascaux and Byzantium, then I skipped ahead to the episode about cathedrals. I’ve always liked cathedrals, and something told me that Lord Something-or-Other was going to convince me to like them even more.

  And I was right; he did. They are glorious places. They are the next best thing to staring up into the sky on a clear night. My spirits soared, and I sensed that something good was about to happen to me and Bowie. I felt certain of it. I could feel its approach, but I couldn’t see it clearly yet. I didn’t know what it was. Was it the healing power of art? I tried to get her to look at the screen, but with the same result as when I’d tried to get her to admire the Milky Way. Oh, well.

  While Lord Something-or-Other exulted over the stained glass windows at Chartres, Bowie started panting. She was drooling again, and then she vomited. I watched to see if she was going to have another seizure, but she just panted and stared at me and looked, well, as sick as a dog. I tried keeping one eye on her and the other on Lord Something-or-Other, but the magic was broken. The possibility of having to drive Bowie to an animal hospital in the middle of the night made it difficult to concentrate, so I turned off the VCR and led Bowie into the bedroom and put her doggie bed at the foot of mine. She looked surprised, as if she couldn’t believe her good luck—she was going to sleep in her master’s bedroom! At last! Oh boy!

  Oh boy. Her breathing was rapid and erratic, and the sound of it really got to me because it reminded me of the nights I had spent in Rachel’s hospital room, listening to her labored breathing. And the sound of my mother gasping for breath when her lungs got filled with cancer. And of the night I had my first panic attack, when I felt as if I couldn’t get enough air. Honestly, I didn’t want to think about breathing anymore.

  I didn’t feel like reading, and I didn’t feel like writing. All that was left was thinking, and that’s risky business in the middle of the night when you can’t get to sleep and you’re vulnerable to episodes of acute anxiety. If my thoughts started racing, I would know that I was headed for trouble. I made a kind of chair out of all the pillows on the bed, and I propped myself up against the headboard. I’d learned fro
m my ordeal in March that if I think a panic attack might be on the way, I mustn’t lie down. When I lie down, my thoughts tend to drift around aimlessly; they don’t coalesce, and when they don’t string together properly, they become more likely to fly out of control. When I’m upright, I stand a better chance of warding off evil.

  Warding off evil—that became my topic for contemplation.

  Jessica had given me two books to bring with me on my trip to Idaho, both of them loaded with didactic significance. One was Stickeen, John Muir’s story of a perilous hike across a glacier with a brave little dog as his companion. The other was Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck’s account of his journey around America in a converted pickup truck with his dog Charley riding shotgun. Obviously, I was supposed to learn lessons from these books and apply them to my own life, but I found that I had too little in common with the authors to see them as role models. Muir was a fearless outdoorsman and Stickeen wasn’t even his dog—at the end of the hike, Muir was able to give the dog back, cherish the memory, and live dog-free for the rest of his life. As for Steinbeck, his reason for making the trip was to get out of his comfort zone and rediscover the America that he’d gotten out of touch with since becoming a famous author. And he brought Charley along because he loved dogs. I, on the other hand, had come to Idaho to find my comfort zone—a quiet, empty house—and put myself securely into it. I’d brought the dog out of a sense of guilt.

  There was one story in Travels with Charley that did strike a chord with me, however. Steinbeck describes meeting a Filipino laborer who seemed unafraid of a place that Steinbeck felt must be haunted. The laborer explained that he was not afraid, because a witch doctor had given him a charm against evil spirits.

  Steinbeck asked to see the charm, and here is what happened next:

  “It’s words,” he said. “It’s a word charm.”

  “Can you say them to me?”

  “Sure,” he said, and he droned, “In nomine Patris et Fillii et Spiritus Sancti.”

  “What does it mean?” I asked.

  He raised his shoulders. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s a charm against evil spirits so I am not afraid of them.”

  Wasn’t that what I’d been looking for all my life? Some sort of charm, an antidote for anguish? I didn’t have to know what it meant, I just needed for it to work. Was that too much to ask?

  I could see the moon through the window. It looked brighter and clearer than I’m used to seeing it. My thoughts were starting to pick up speed. That, I knew, was not good.

  I could picture myself at age thirteen, wearing a bathrobe and a bald-head wig so I could look more like a Buddhist monk, burning incense in the basement and trying to become one with the universe by thinking of nothing at all. Next I saw myself at age thirty-six, wearing a towel over my head and a tinfoil skirt around my waist. Then I saw myself at age forty-nine, having panic attacks while trying to meditate. You know what? I’m a one-ring circus.

  I thought about how I seem to get stuck going round and round, thinking about insoluble puzzles in an ever-tightening spiral until I crash. What a colossal waste of time and opportunity and consciousness.

  The panic attack was on its way. The first bloom of prickly heat appeared in the center of my chest, and my heart started skipping beats. Oh shit! I thought. Here it comes. And then something unexpected happened:

  Bowie broke wind.

  It wasn’t a little toot. It sounded as if a three-hundred-pound man had just sat down on a fifty-pound, fur-covered whoopee cushion.

  My first reaction was to feel annoyed. I thought, Can’t I get a break? I’m having a breakdown here! Do you think you could go fart somewhere else? Then I remembered that it wasn’t Bowie’s fault; there was nothing she could do about it. Dogs don’t fart on purpose. Then she did it again, and the smell of it hit me, and I just had to laugh, the whole situation was so absurd. This was the soundtrack to my personal crisis: a farting terrier. And that’s when the idea struck me that changed the way I feel about dogs. The idea was Bowie is an empty boat.

  I wasn’t thinking that Bowie had become enlightened, like the ideal man described in the Zhuangzi, or that she was some sort of machine, like the battery-operated horse in Ava’s bedroom. Dogs may or may not be spiritually advanced beings, but they certainly do have minds. Instead, I was thinking that Bowie’s mind operates just as spontaneously as her bowels. Her moods, her intentions, and her actions are determined by circumstance, just as an empty boat’s movements are determined by circumstance. And by circumstance, I mean the sum of all past and present conditions affecting her, including biological design, individual genetic inheritance, prior conditioning, and present environment.

  Some of these factors are obvious, like the fact that she is a dog, which explains why her vocal cords produce the sound that annoys me so much. She was left at a shelter, which probably explains the separation anxiety. She was almost certainly mistreated by a man, which would explain why she freaks out whenever a man enters her territory. In any case, when Bowie barks, freaks out, or farts, she is not exercising what you and I would call free will. She is not morally responsible for what she does; she can only do what, in some sense, she must do under the circumstances. Blaming her for what she does makes no more sense than blaming an empty boat for where it drifts. And here’s the feel-good part of it: If she is always doing what she must, then for all practical purposes, that is the same as saying she is always doing the best she can. When I thought of her in that context, my irritation with her dissolved.

  Then she farted a third time, and by then my panic symptoms were gone. That’s when I had the idea that changed the way I feel about humans:

  The dog’s not the only empty boat in this room. Count me in.

  I didn’t mean that I’d become enlightened, or that I was a mindless object that only appeared to be conscious. I felt, as strongly and clearly as I have ever felt anything, that none of what was happening that night—either in Bowie’s gut or in my mind or anywhere in the world—was happening on purpose. Everything, including my own thoughts, seemed to be driven by a kind of impersonal momentum, the way gravity drives the planets through their orbits or the way instinct drives birds to migrate according to the seasons.

  Ten years earlier, in a cabin in New Hampshire, I had come to the conclusion that the source of artistic inspiration must lie beyond the realm of conscious control. On the night of the farting dog, I took that idea one step further. I became convinced that the source of all inspiration and action must lie beyond the realm of conscious control. My lifelong desire to gain control over my own mind, and therefore my own destiny, had been as misguided as my attempts to make my book about a nun a bestseller.

  I had a friend who used to take his parents’ car, a 1966 Austin-Healey convertible, out every day for an hour-long drive through the back roads of Westport, Connecticut. Being a sixteen-year-old male driving an English sports car, he drove above the posted speed limit at all times. He soon noticed that by the end of these excursions, his buttocks had become quite sore. Curious about this, he paid closer attention to his body while he drove and made an interesting discovery: Whenever he steered the car around turns, he involuntarily tensed the muscles in his rear end. “I realized,” he told me, “that I had this feeling that if I held tight onto the car seat with my ass when I went around curves, then the car tires would grip the road and I wouldn’t crash.”

  That relationship between effort and control turned out to be an illusion. Once he realized the error in his thinking, he was able to relax his buttocks when he drove, and the pain in his ass vanished.

  I may have suffered from a similar misconception. I had been clenching my mind for forty-nine years, thinking that this painful effort would keep me on the road and lead me to my chosen destination rather than a destiny chosen for me by others. Had it been necessary?

  I led Bowie out to the living room, opened a couple of windows just in case she decided to provide further inspiration, and th
en watched the falling rocket sequence in Koyaanisqatsi once more. Bowie insisted on resting with her chin draped over my feet; if I tried to move them away, she whined. This time, as I watched the film, I felt I understood why I’d been so moved by that scene.

  A conventional psychological interpretation would probably go something like this: The rocket’s trajectory represents the course of a human life. Powering its way skyward, the rocket is like all of us as we go about the urgent business of trying to wrest ourselves free from the grip of circumstance and chart our own courses through life. The rocket is doing what any of us does as we strive to transform ourselves from mere animals into angels. Some of us do fly high, but not all of us are so lucky. Some of us break apart before we reach our goals (or a ripe old age), and we end up in a state of free fall, tumbling helplessly to Earth—dying young like my sister or becoming nervous wrecks like me. In the end, we all tumble to Earth anyway, whether we reach our goals or not.

  Now I saw the rocket in a different light. I was in free fall as I watched it; the panic attacks had taught me that at the very core of myself I am not in control of anything. The attacks had brought me to my knees; they taught me what it means to feel helpless. Not only that: They taught me that I’ve been in free fall all along. I’ve always been in free fall. Everyone is in free fall, everything is in free fall. There is nothing but free fall.

  When a rocket is climbing, it is in free fall. It looks to us like powered, controlled flight, but that’s an illusion. The cascade of events leading to its launch, including the decision to build it, to fill it with fuel, and then to ignite the fuel, the series of chemical reactions lifting it off the ground, and the matrix of physical laws governing how it behaves as it moves through the sky—all of those forces act upon and through the rocket impersonally, irresistibly, as the result of a web of causality. We owe all of what we feel, all of what we think, all of what we do, and all of what happens around us to the spontaneous activity of that web.