Lost In Place (29 page)

“Are you all right?” he asked. I told him what was happening, and a pained look crossed his face. “How much of the exam did you complete?” he asked.

“Most of it, I think.”

“Mark, everyone knows how much you’ve put into this class this year, and everyone knows you’ve had a bad shock recently. Go home and rest, for heaven’s sake. There’s really no need for you to be so worried about the exam.”

I was grateful for this act of mercy, but by the time I got back to my room I began to feel stupid for having been so worried in the first place. What a grade-grubber I was! No wonder I was such a confused kid if my priorities were
that out of whack. I mean, if you’re going to face the great question of what your life means once you know it might end at any time with no regard for your aspirations, you ought to at least have the courage to get a B on a language exam.

That summer I decided not to go home. Charles McBirney, the professor who had rescued me from the exam, needed a part-time research assistant over the summer, and he introduced me to the owner of a Chinese restaurant in town who offered me a night job as a waiter. I rented an apartment in an unsavory but affordable neighborhood right next to the downtown YMCA, and only a few blocks away from the restaurant where I worked.

With school out for the summer I could wake up later and later. On a typical night I would come home from work at ten-thirty and fall right asleep. At one o’clock in the morning I would jerk awake from a nightmare and then toss and turn until three, when I would fall asleep and then start all over again. I usually crawled out of bed at noon. During the afternoons, if I wasn’t working over at the Asian languages building, I usually drove out to one of the deserted beaches an hour or so east of New Haven and sat there until it was time to drive back and start work at the restaurant again.

What was the message? How do we go on? Wasn’t this the very problem that had made my father the way he was? That was it; that was why I had to deal with this once and for all. This might be my last chance to do what I had set out to do so long ago: to bring order to the chaos, to make sense out of my life, to become happy the way my father hadn’t. If I planned on keeping the sacred promise that we all make to ourselves at the threshold of adulthood—never to surrender to hypocrisy, complacency or
mediocrity—I had to resolve this issue
now
. I owed it to my dad to go through with this to the bitter end and not give up this time. I felt I owed it to Michael, too. Poor kid, he wouldn’t have the chance to do it himself.

I asked the big questions all day long, but instead of answers, there was only static in my head. It was almost like being stoned all the time, only it wasn’t nearly as entertaining. Everything seemed drained of its color, flavor and interest. It was like waking up and finding myself in a black-and-white B movie, the kind you might see at two in the morning and watch without getting involved in the action or dialogue. You watch the flickering images because they attract your attention, but without much comprehension.

It was not a satisfying or pleasant sort of introspection, but I didn’t resist it. On the contrary, I welcomed it; didn’t all the historical figures I respected come to do what they did as a result of having answered these questions for themselves? Didn’t my father once say he was glad that I asked questions like these, and didn’t he say that I shouldn’t expect the answers to come easily? Or something like that?

Although I never would have admitted it at the time, for some time I had cherished a whole body of romantic ideas about the nature of genius and inspiration, one of them being that you couldn’t be a real artist if you hadn’t had a nervous breakdown when you were young. The younger the better. However, my impression was that you couldn’t just lower yourself into the depths whenever you felt like it; there had to be a plausible catalyst for the breakdown, a real or symbolic event that set off the psychological avalanche, and I could hardly ask for a more plausible one than the death of a childhood friend. I wasn’t so monstrously
selfish as to be glad that Michael had died, but I was selfish enough to convince myself that it was my duty, now that it had happened, to turn it into something positive.

By the time the fall semester began I was way too busy reading books about nihilism and Zen and staring out my window at the naked city to study Chinese at all. The semester was a disaster, to the point where I felt I had no choice but to drop out.

“Oh, no! Not this again!” my father said when I told him the news.

“At least he’s got his high school diploma,” my mother said, trying to cheer herself up.

“I’m not sure he does. Mark, you didn’t actually graduate from there—did they ever send you a diploma?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

My mother’s eyes froze in abject terror. “You never got your high school diploma? Oh, my God!” When my mother had nightmares, they usually came in one of three scenarios: having to walk across a field of dead birds; giving a concert without having prepared at all and with a strong wind blowing the music off her stand; and finding out that her kids never got their high school diplomas.

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:

“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.