The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld (22 page)

The pool is the shape of a whale, the shallow end like a tail.

You carve over the pool light, your wheels singing across sea-green plaster. For a while there is nothing in your mind but rolling. You are sweating hard for the first time in months. You decide a frontside air is the thing. You try it four times, feet slapping on the cement as you run out.

“Bring it home!” Bronco shouts.

You do.

But you sketch out on the landing and flop like a dead fish into the concrete maw, slamming directly on your bad hip.

Here is your latest situation: you are twenty-nine years old and lying in a dirty hole in the ground, eight feet below the surface of the earth. You cannot move your right leg. Your palms feel like they’ve been stung by a whole hive of pissed-off wasps, and the Arizona sun feels hot enough to burn a hole through your black T-shirt. You’re praying you won’t have to go to the hospital because you have fifty bucks to your name and now that you’re living alone you have no idea how to pay next month’s rent. According to the imaginary bureaucrats in your head, you’re way too old to be skateboarding, though you’re still thinking maybe you can get up and try the frontside air one more time before the pain really sets in. But your already-arthritic hip hurts so bad that you want to just die right there in the deep end, to be sucked down the drain and swallowed into the sandy ground.

Then Bronco slides down and kneels beside you. “Come on,” he says, grinning, “let’s get your ass up out of here.”

A
s my boss repeatedly reminds me, being an editor is
not just a nine-to-five job
, meaning that most days I’m expected to arrive early and stay late, making it hard to reach Rockaway before dark. As a substitute for surfing, some evenings I swim laps in a gloomy municipal pool on Bedford, just a block from our apartment. My therapist suggests I try something more social, like racquetball, but racquetball is not and never will be my style. He has a point about the social part, though. The exercise is good for me; I swim so hard that I actually sweat underwater. But swimming is an isolating sport. With earplugs and goggles and my head underwater, the Bedford Pool is akin to a sensory deprivation tank. Instead of getting me out of my head as surfing does, when I’m swimming laps there’s nothing to do but ruminate.

In the second half of
Moby-Dick
, a curious thing happens. Though Ishmael is clearly the book’s narrator, and has been since page one, we hear less and less of his buoyant voice as the story progresses. We also begin to get glimpses into parts of the ship, including the mad captain’s quarters, to which, as a non officer, Ishmael would never have been privy. Moreover, the narration turns darker and darker as we get further inside Ahab’s splintered mind. According to D. H. Lawrence, “Something glimmers through all this: a glimmer of genuine reality. But it is not a reality of real, open-air experience. It is a reality of what takes place in the musty cellars of a man’s soul, what the psychoanalysts call the unconscious. There is the old double set of values; the ostensible Melville, a sort of Emersonian transcendentalist, and the underneath Melville, a sort of strange underworld, under-sea creature looking with curious, lurid vision on the upper world.”

In the second half of
Moby-Dick
, it’s as if Ahab as a shadow archetype starts to seize control of the book. And my own underworld, under sea self takes over when I swim in the Bedford Pool, where I feel like I’m digesting myself in my own acidic regrets, in the stinging bile of my own self-loathing—for moving to New York, for giving up teaching and stranding myself in the Pit, for leaving Karissa, for not marrying Nicole, for deciding to be a writer in the first place.

This manifests as physical pain in my chest and stomach—a slow chemical burn—and a panicky sense of constriction and loss as my former self slips further and further into the airless belly of the beast. The harder I swim, the more I feel like an emotional depth charge, my crudely soldered seams on the verge of ripping apart, imploding. But then again, the post-swimming exhaustion is the only thing that temporarily soothes the ache.

Maybe this is just something that happens to writers and artists who move to New York:
the White Death; the Melville syndrome
. It’s common among those for whom, like Herman Melville, things don’t go according to plan, for anyone who loses his own life’s narrative. Maybe it’s similar to the Jerusalem syndrome, in which Western visitors to the Holy City wrap themselves in their bedsheets, then roam the streets raving, proselytizing, believing themselves to be Jesus or Moses. It’s such a common occurrence that medical providers in Jerusalem know exactly what to prescribe: a regimen of light antipsychotics and two days’ bed rest. This treatment is so effective that Jerusalem syndrome survivors are usually back on the tour bus within forty-eight hours.

Unlike Jerusalem syndrome, the White Death has no known cure and many victims. David Foster Wallace had more than a touch of it. The poet Hart Crane—who was obsessed with
Moby-Dick
, and who eventually committed suicide by jumping overboard in the Gulf of Mexico—was a definite casualty.

What we need is a treatment center for the White Death and the Melville syndrome; some day I’d like to start one. It’ll be housed on a replica whaling ship in the New York harbor, where residents will learn to tie knots and hoist sails. Instead of reading
Moby-Dick
or slaving away on their doomed creative projects, they’ll climb in wind-whipped rigging and shout out obstacles from up in the crow’s nest. The companionship, fresh air, sunlight, and physical labor alone will do much for their beleaguered constitutions. In the evenings they’ll lounge around down in the hold, eating healthy, balanced meals and discussing
Moby-Dick
. Although they will, very gradually, be encouraged to consider other books as well. During art therapy sessions, residents will create likenesses of their inner Ahabs from biodegradable materials—pieces of charred driftwood and crab shells and bull kelp. After embracing their own Ahab-shadows and the death of their idealistic dreams, they’ll ceremonially toss them overboard, releasing them to the sea.

W
hile my job involves quite a bit of tedium and too many romance novels, I also get to work on some genuinely interesting projects, including a reissue of the famous antiwar novel
Johnny Got His Gun
by Dalton Trumbo—the nightmarish story of a World War I soldier who’s rendered limbless, deaf, dumb, and blind by a bomb blast. It’s one of many titles on my company’s backlist, and this being the height of the Iraq quagmire, we decide on a fast-track rerelease. After weeks of sleuthing I contact the famous antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan and ask her to write a new foreword for
Johnny
. Though she’s busy with a major protest at Camp Casey—a tent city in Texas named after the son she lost in the war—she comes through with a very raw, heartfelt introduction.

Two weeks after I finish editing Sheehan’s introduction, some old friends from Colorado, Andy and his fiancée, Allison, come for a visit. They stay in our apartment a couple nights, during which I have another bout of serious insomnia. On a Friday, after a sleepless night, I call in sick, even though I’m scheduled to present
Johnny Got His Gun
during an important meeting with our sales department. Though I’d rather be out having fun in the city with old friends, I spend most of the day in bed, trying to catch up on sleep. That evening, before taking the subway to the airport for an overnight flight, Allison pulls me aside, looks me straight in my sunken eyes. She tells me that she’s worried about me, that she and Andy talked about it and they’d be happy to have me stay with them.

“We have a nice spare bedroom,” she says. “We just want our old Justin back.”

I’d like to just pack up and go home. I could probably do some adjunct teaching at the university, see a lot more of my old friends and family. But the other person I’d see is Nicole, and I’m not sure I could handle limping back to Colorado, single and broke, just in time for her wedding.

Plus, though I have a love/hate relationship with New York, the biggest sticking point is this: there’s no ocean in Colorado.

D
espite his intense fear of the ocean, in 1996 David Foster Wallace went on assignment for
Harper’s
to take a six-day, seven-night Celebrity Cruise through the Caribbean, where he encountered sundry wonders, including a thirteen-year-old boy in a toupee and a woman in a gold lamé dress projectile-vomiting in a glass elevator. Reading the piece after Wallace’s suicide, you understand that the agoraphobia he alludes to in the essay—a fear of leaving his cabin—was real and not just a literary device. Likewise, if you’ve ever experienced agoraphobia you understand that this voyage must have caused him serious distress. It’s also telling that, in the essay, Wallace mentions a suicide that happened just a couple weeks before his own cruise, when “a sixteen-year-old male did a brody off the upper deck of the Megaship.” Wallace then ponders the cause of this suicide in a way that hits very close to home:

Then there are the shark attack statistics—as a kid Wallace kept an exhaustive mental catalog of history’s most gruesome shark attacks, including “the USS Indianapolis smorgasboard off the Philippines in 1945.” To drive home his aquaphobia, Wallace mentions how in college he wrote three different papers about the “Castaway” section of
Moby-Dick
, wherein the young cabin boy, Pip, jumps from a whaleboat and is left floating for an hour or more out in the open ocean. The sheer terror of bobbing in the infinite, inhuman sea cracks his mind, transforms him into a holy fool.

Based on his experience of despair, Wallace formulates a philosophical theory regarding the cruise ship experience. The Celebrity Cruise ethos is all about pampering; in his lacerating deconstruction of the Celebrity promotional brochure, he notes that the word
pamper
is used
fifteen
times. He thinks it’s no accident that
pamper
is also the brand name of a certain type of disposable garment for infants. His theory, then, is that the cruise ship experience is designed to give fearful, despairing people a return to the pre conscious, pre choice, and thus pre-adult-regrets womb, where all our needs are met automatically, umbillically.

After reading his essay for the fourth or fifth time, I can’t help but wonder if my obsession with the ocean and surfing is like my own attempt to crawl back into the womb, to a place where I don’t have any adult responsibilities or choices or regrets. Maybe I’m just trying to lose myself in another female presence—in this case the feminine sea, the mother ocean.

But the experience of surfing is often more like the pain of birth than the solace of the womb. There’s a lot of thrashing around, intense physical straining. The ocean holds you under and you come up gasping for air like a newborn. There’s not a lot of
pampering
going on during your typical session at Rockaway; even if you’re careful, it’s likely that with each paddle out you’ll instead get spanked by a wave at least once. And unlike on a cruise ship, you’re down sharing the very same water with sharks, a fact that my friend Sadie has confirmed for us all.

A
word concerning the 1945 shark massacre. This is the same massacre that the old, Ahab-like captain details in the film
Jaws
. This fictional captain was in the Navy; he witnessed the whole bloody, horrific scene—he tells Roy Scheider all about it just hours before Jaws swallows him whole.

My stepfather volunteers as a hospice chaplin, ministering to the sick and dying during the last few weeks of their life. If the patients are Jewish, he’ll read from the Torah; if they’re Christian, he’ll read from the Bible; if they’re atheist, he’ll read from whatever secular book they request, avoiding any talk of God. One of his most memorable patients fell squarely in the latter category. He’d grown up Catholic but was in the Navy and witnessed firsthand the 1945 USS
Indianapolis
tragedy. The
Indianapolis
was a naval cruiser that delivered parts for the Little Boy atomic bomb—which was eventually dropped on Hiroshima—to Guam. On the covert return journey through the Philippine Sea, the
Indianapolis
was attacked and sunk by a Japanese submarine. Of the nearly nine hundred men who went into the drink without lifeboats, only three hundred survived. Most died from dehydration and exposure, but many were killed by sharks—in fact, it’s known as one of the worst shark attacks in human history.

After witnessing this, my stepfather’s patient lost his faith in a benevolent God.