Descent (6 page)

On the eighth of November I divulged my plight to a beneficent psychiatrist fifteen years my senior, a man with a sonorous and deliberate speaking style and a reassuring way of inhabiting his chair, a Dr. K——whose poise while I yowled was pitched to the spectacle. I called him “Doctor” during our sessions, my deference untainted by irony or aggression but not lacking in the corrosive awareness that either interpretation was conceivable. (I was outwardly sincere in the throes of depression; one of its less empty consolations is its tendency to sear clean the vocal cords.) K——seemed capable of an unpolluted tenderness, and so, with broad strokes and embellishments both, I gave him to see that I was thoroughly harrowed, acutely subsumed, out of my gourd, adrift on dark waters, and all of this most painfully, and that such ordeal had occasioned my phone call of exactly a week ago and now my desperate visit, for which I’d lived the past 168 hours in the hope of an imminent, miraculous reversal and of salvation at the hands of bona fide psychiatry—I had, in short, high hopes for talk despite a past tendency to scoff. K——, in reply, didn’t raise an eyebrow or lift his head from his majestic hands. His mute disinterest seemed consciously wrought as he heard me out like a diagnostician possessed of a professional but heartfelt neutrality—no urging me on toward greater candor by dint of gesture or of pitying expression—this from the school of “active listening” and to thwart the patient’s natural tendency to include the therapist in his disease. However it was, I felt drawn to K——, his refreshingly old-school cantlessness and cut-to-the-chase protestations.

K——prescribed Prozac. A child’s dose, in deference to my fear and shame, but still it was Prozac, that most famous of happy pills. This new panacea wasn’t Xanax or Klonopin, which are benzodiazepines, designed to leave you dull but intact; this was a “selective seratonin reuptake inhibitor,” a pill I understood as an overhaul or makeover, a brain destroyer and a soul stealer. These magic bullets were like Huxley’s brave new soma pills, the pills THX 1138 didn’t take in George Lucas’s dissertation film, McMurphy’s electroshock therapy, an Orwellian reeducation as a lozenge, a vampire bite as a tablet.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, or maybe
Night of the Living Dead
, expressed
as a prescription. I was about to be obliterated, but as thoroughly wrecked and diminished as I was, that was possibly fine with me. Rebirth in the Matrix seemed, at this stage, an enormously desirable illusion. On the other hand, I was also a purist, a term that spins favorably my pill paranoia, and felt stricken by K——’s pharmaceutical broadside, though I knew from my brother’s pro bono guidance that pills were favored by the trained. The idea was the efficacy of pill ministration in concert with intense and persistent talk—psychiatry’s redoubtable two-pronged offensive, maximally proficient and doubly dear (though no doubt worth every penny spent), obliquely to face down the gorgon of depression with a proven, if costly, redundancy. But what sort of talk, and with whom, about what? Would I swoon, next, across the Freudian couch, wincing and reading Rorschach blots, free-associating while a bearded shrink à la Edward Sorel hemmed, hawed, and hmmed? Perhaps not usefully. “When I hear of psychoanalysis being used to ameliorate depression,” Andrew Solomon undrily asserts in
The Noonday Demon
, “I think of someone standing on a sandbar and firing a machine gun at the incoming tide.” I had similar reservations and broached them with K——, who responded by suggesting Jungian analysis, since I was probably too skeptical for cognitive behavioral therapy and its transparent manipulations. (“I’m thinking bad thoughts. I’m being negative. I will now think only good thoughts.” That’s the gist if an unfair summation of a cognitive behavioral education in optimism, which involves a lot of practical and immediate rewiring.) In the end, though, it didn’t matter what K——suggested—Jungian, Reichian, or transactional analysis, vegetotherapy or a 12-step program. I would have done whatever he advised.

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.