Down Around Midnight (19 page)

My father, a practical man, who'd come to terms early in life with the idea that Jesus had been crucified, was no less open-handed than my mother in the dispensation of positive thinking. While my mother administered the optimism, he wrote the prescriptions for confidence. That confidence translated as often as not into blissful ignorance on my part, but ignorance, I submit, of an indispensable kind, the naive sort of arrogance that enabled me, for example, to just up and write a book. It simply never occurred to me that it couldn't be done. I never entertained the thought that I would (as I did) encounter anything that as a writer I hadn't come up against, even though, until then, I'd never reported a story that had run much longer than five hundred words.

But more than confidence in my ability to succeed, he gave me confidence in my ability to prevail. I cannot remember the circumstances, but at some disheartening moment in my life, I was sharing my misgivings with him, and what he said to me in response to my troubles he framed in such a way as to make the words self-fulfilling. He said quite simply that I shouldn't worry about it too much (whatever it was that was bothering me) and by way of telling me why assured me that
he
wasn't worried.

“You always seem to manage to land on your feet,” he said.

He didn't say it as though trying to encourage me. He said it as though sharing a secret, the way another parent might say, “You're adopted.” As if it were something I had no control over, something I couldn't escape. He was simply sharing an observation, a conclusion anyone else might reach.

There are moments in the lives of all of us when the words we need to hear at the time have an impact that is way out of proportion to their everyday throw weight, and this was going to be one of them. There is nothing—no weapon, no wind or vaccine—with the power to match the naked, instrumental might of simplicity, and that simple observation ventured by my father somehow gained the force of prophecy.

It was not something I'd ever thought about. But to doubt it would have been to doubt
his
success, for he was the one who'd equipped me with whatever capability I had. It is the responsibility of all parents to instill in their children the heart needed to prevail, and my father was no doubt speaking out of a certain pride in himself when he pointed to what he perceived, and wanted me to perceive, as my ability to land feetfirst.

But that belief in myself—and my optimism along with it—took a dark turn after the crash. I can see it now, looking back. After the crash, I found myself, when things were going well, just waiting for them to go sideways.

Mary had a different way of looking at the tendency that my father had led me to have faith in. And her reminding me of it was a bit more left-handed:

“Bob, you'll always be lucky.”

Not until after the crash was it a tendency for which I felt an apology was necessary.

There's nothing wrong with being lucky, and there's a lot of truth in the belief that we tend to make our own luck. But after the crash, being told I was lucky was something I didn't want to hear. The notion that I would always wind up on my feet, the proposition that had been my ally for so long, now presented itself as the enemy. I could not escape the idea that somehow I was
just
lucky, that I didn't earn my luck or, more important, deserve it. And any suggestion that I had luck on my side—however it was intended—just reinforced the symptom. It wasn't a symptom I necessarily recognized, certainly not a feeling I recognized for what it was. But it was a feeling that could only have flourished in the fertile soil of what I would come to understand to be the syndrome known as survivor guilt.

 

 

Hospitals, I guess, are like prisons. One of the things you pick up from convicts, an observation you're not apt to make if you've never done time yourself, is that in lockup, they never shut off the lights. Not all the way. It's how the people keeping an eye on you keep an eye on you at night. Inmates, who by definition don't see much of the sun, never enjoy the benefits of darkness either. You have to wonder if there's a flourishing market in a hellhole like San Quentin in those little courtesy packets they hand out on airplanes that contain sleep shades and earplugs. I didn't notice it at the time, or let's say I didn't find it conspicuous, but as I lay in bed in the hospital, comforted by narcotics, there was no part of the ward or the hallway beyond it that was not at least dimly illuminated. So it wasn't until nightfall of the day I was released that I discovered I was afraid of the dark.

When you say it like that—the Dark—it has an almost metaphysical ring to it. It smacks of eschatology, like something out of Revelation, something unknowable hiding in the second law of thermodynamics. I mentioned it to Suzanne. Yeah, she said, me too. She just said it. We didn't discuss it. It passed. It was like the flu. Me, I slept with the lights on for a few days and was careful for a while thereafter not to be outdoors at night. Brian said he experienced it also. It seems to have passed as quickly for him. What didn't pass that quickly, he told me, were the nightmares.

“I had nightmares through college,” he said. “I still have dreams about planes crashing.”

But the nightmares were not the worst of it.

“The magnitude of something like that,” he said, “that you could get up and walk away. I didn't think I was supposed to be here.”

By which he meant, to be alive.

“I had survivor guilt for several months,” he said.

Survivor guilt, once a specific diagnosis, is now recognized in the medical literature as an associated symptom of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Diagnosed in those who have escaped horrors in which others have been killed or seriously injured, it expresses itself in feelings of sadness and shame, a debilitating sense that one really shouldn't be alive. Because it is largely limited to mortal events, the term can be misinterpreted. Or so my experience suggests. It is not always the death of others for which you necessarily feel guilty. Death is just the fundamental reminder of what was supposed to happen to
you
. It triggers the Why not me? response that leads you to believe you
should
have died, the weird notion that in some way you had an obligation to do so, that you don't really deserve to live. Not only is your survival unfair to the dead, it is unfair to the living as well. You have no right to be that lucky.

“Why am I still here?” was the question Brian asked himself when his nightmares awakened him.

It was not an ontological question, but at least he gave it voice. I don't remember asking it. I just remember being prepared for the worst. However well things were going, there was always something to fear.

“I'd wake up in the middle of the night,” Brian said, feeling that “I dodged a bullet. There's another around the corner.”

The feeling, he said, lasted through Christmas.

Kevin Roberts carried the same feeling around with him for just about thirty years.

“Why am I constantly in fear that the bottom is going to fall out, and I'm going to end up tomorrow on skid row?” was the question that haunted him, convinced, as he was, that “whatever the worst is, it will happen.”

Kevin is the friend who told me that when he and fellow veterans talk, they never talk about combat. We were sitting on the beach in Eastham below the vacation cottage he and his wife had rented, as they did every summer with the kids. It was the middle of the day, and the tide was in, pushing us back to the edge of the dune on which the two-week rental was situated. It was a perfect day to be on Cape Cod Bay, and while everyone else was enjoying it, he and I had found a quiet spot to discuss all the terrible things that keep people up at night.

I knew precisely what Kevin was talking about when he mentioned asking himself why he was always in fear of the worst. The answer for him, as it was for me, was, Well, because you deserve it. It's that metaphorical bullet you dodged. But Kevin's PTSD was complicated by more than survivor guilt.

“I was never afraid, all the time I was there,” he told me, of his tour of duty in Vietnam. “That's a symptom of PTSD. Not talking about it is a symptom of PTSD.”

He waited thirty years before seeking therapy, and had been in therapy for a full two years, when his therapist said this:

“Wait a minute . . . you were in Vietnam?”

It had never occurred to Kevin to mention it.

“I hadn't gotten over the nuns yet,” he told me. “And a whole lot of other things . . . ‘Oh yeah, Vietnam, maybe that too. . . .' By the time you're in your fifties, there's stuff in there that's pretty hard-wired . . . ‘I'm not special.' It goes back to the nuns. ‘I'm not special, why would you be interested in me . . .?' ”

Oft told is the ancient Arabian tale of the servant in Baghdad (probably best known as recounted in a play by W. Somerset Maugham, whose version is paraphrased here):

There was a merchant of Baghdad who sent his servant one morning to market, where the servant, buying provisions, was jostled by a woman in the crowd. The servant turned to see that it was Death who had jostled him, Death, in the disguise of a woman, looking directly into his eyes. Recoiling from a threatening gesture, the servant ran from the market, returned home pale and trembling, and reported to his master what had happened. The merchant loaned the servant his fastest horse, and the servant fled the city to escape his fate, racing to Samarra, where Death would be unable to find him. The merchant went down to the marketplace and found Death standing among the crowd. “Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?” the merchant wanted to know. To which Death replied: “That was not a threatening gesture. It was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”

The belief that you can outlive your fate only as long as you can outrun it is your ever-present companion in the experience of survivor guilt. Like the servant, we all—Kevin, Brian, and I—had come upon Death in the marketplace. What made us different from the servant, of course, was that we knew how the story ended. Our escape was only temporary. All our running, we knew, was merely directed at our keeping that appointment in Samarra.

 

 

I spent the first week of my recovery at my parents' house outside Boston. Mary was still on the Cape and was more than qualified to look after me, but the house there, still under construction, wasn't quite ready to accommodate me. I wasn't yet up to roughing it. My sister Terry, still in her teens, was living at home with the folks, and she took responsibility for my physical therapy, which really consisted of my lying around thinking up clever ways to milk my injuries, at her expense and to her endless delight, and a lot of other clowning around.

“When you came home to recover,” she recalls, “you were pretty upbeat, almost silly at times. I remember that you had lost a lot of weight. I had been handing my jeans down to you in those days, but they were now too big for you, which was a bit of a blow to my ego. You had a great sense of humor and a very positive attitude, two attributes the family employs when times get difficult. Humor, especially, has always worked as a great cover for all of us. I think we get funnier the more troubled we are.”

Trouble didn't really reveal itself until later, once I was living on my own. Mary had returned to New York to start her new job—not until the fall, by which time I had advanced to the use of a cane, did I feel capable of negotiating the city—and I remained on the Cape with a lot of time to myself.

Says Terry, “I don't think you really crashed, so to speak, until after your physical recovery. There was a very dark period after you went back to the Cape. You became introspective and more distant. It seems to me that it was during this time that you really focused on the accident and how close you came to getting killed. This is the period of time where we were all acutely aware of how helpless we were in helping you through this process. We were all very worried about you. You and I would have long conversations into the night when I'd come to visit. But I can't say that any of it was helpful to you. We all just prayed that you'd survive it—though we had faith that you'd ultimately get through.”

I did get through, ultimately, and my doing so justified my own faith in the attributes that had been engendered in me growing up.

“Once you figured things out—or decided that you would never have the answers you were seeking—you moved on,” Terry says. “Your optimism and your confidence came back. And that's where I think the influence of the family comes in. Who you are was established long before the plane crash. It didn't change you. Who you were before was the person who was able to get through it. And it was the family that made you that way.” It may be the military background, she says, but she believes that we as a family are not given to easy indulgence in a lot of existential thought. “We're not prone to drama. We don't dwell on things for too long. All setbacks are only temporary. You did the only thing you know how to do. You brushed yourself off and moved on.”

As I look back on it now, I don't know how precisely to classify my correspondence with American Express, whether it was a latent example of the “signature silliness and humor” that Terry says she was alert to or an illustration of the short fuse on which I was operating at the time. It appears to be a little of both. When the charge for the flight showed up on my monthly statement, I dropped a note to the card company's Customer Service Department:

“I have paid, but dispute, the charge . . . credited to Air New England. . . . The flight on which the charged ticket was issued terminated short of its destination—the charge is subject to adjustment. Please contact the airline and credit my account accordingly.”