Chapter Twenty-One The Drop
Twenty-One
The Drop
On March 18, 1958, theologian Thomas Merton had a mystical experience: “In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I was theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers…. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”
There was no way of telling people what I’d seen and felt, but I thought of nothing else. I’d brought the paperback edition of Whitman back with me from California. I carried it everywhere like a flower I’d plucked in a dream and found myself holding when I woke up. I had been transformed. How was it possible no one else could tell?
Back home, I tried to resume my old life, but everything felt wrong. Before California all I could think about was being with David. Everything beyond that had been the map of a flat earth; the ships sailed right off the edge. I gazed at the photos we’d taken on that trip like they were of my new baby and I’d waited my whole life to have a child.
But now I felt as though that child had been taken away. When the First Great Awakening ended, Jonathan Edwards said there was a sense that God was withdrawing and Satan was rushing in to fill the void: “Some pious persons…had it urged upon them as if somebody had spoke to them, Cut your throat, now is a good opportunity. Now! Now! ”
David and I had agreed that we’d take the sublimation route going forward. We felt lucky to have had so much already. But the world didn’t make sense without him. The world didn’t make sense anymore, period. I felt like I’d died, and no one had noticed.
In the shower, I left deep conditioner in my hair for three minutes like I was supposed to, to combat frizziness. Frizziness was a problem in the right-side-up world, I recalled. I felt like the alien Jeff Bridges played in the ’80s movie Starman , trying to make sense of earth culture. When I received a text from a colleague, I pressed the button that made the “ha-ha” hover over her words, because I seemed to recall that was how human beings interacted. Every minute that I wasn’t proclaiming the Truth of the divine among us felt like a lie. I felt new sympathy for street-corner preachers. I didn’t understand what had happened, but to quote Pascal, “Everything that is incomprehensible does not cease to exist.”
Contact with the unexplained did not feel like particularly good news for me. When I worked at a music magazine, my nerdy boss, on whom I had a mad crush, said of Gloria Gaynor, “Finding God was a bad career move.” I began to suspect that having a religious experience had ended my hit-making days too. I didn’t know that I’d ever write another book, because how could I put any of this into words? And what else was worth talking about?
For a long time now, women friends, once we were alone, had confided that at night they stared at the ceiling asking questions about what came next and why it could all feel so hard. When I validated their feelings, they’d say: “Yes, that’s why it’s hard, but what’s the answer ?”
They wanted a mantra, a supplement, a club, something concrete and actionable. I’d wanted to give it to them, but I had always come up short. I would offer thoughts on our problems and discuss the value of community, the latest research on hormones, and how to find meaning in the stories of our lives. But now I had a new answer, and it was inconvenient.
“You’re not going to like it,” I imagined myself telling my friends as I looked into their hopeful, tired faces. “The answer is love. Wait, maybe God? No, it’s love! I think they could be the same. How do you find it? I think…fall madly in love with a friend and go to the library?”
Maybe wanting life to feel true and vibrant wasn’t a generational, financial, or physical challenge but a spiritual one. Any spiritual path would do, probably. And yet, I would tell my peers that, while falling in love with someone new and wonderful would certainly distract you from your misery, it would also create a sense of disorientation so profound that you would float down supermarket aisles like a phantom.
What I felt was aporia , an immobilized confusion so great I needed a Greek word for it. Getting groceries, I looked around the store and felt like I didn’t belong there, as I didn’t belong anywhere. I stood staring at the different jams and jellies for what felt like a hundred years. I stayed there the entire length of the Gin Blossoms song “Til I Hear It from You” playing over the store’s sound system, tears rolling down my cheeks. I’d been in the Garden of Eden, and I’d been cast out, forced to roam and suffer.
They say crying clears out the residue of what was there before. When you’re disoriented, crying is a proper response. But what about when you can’t stop ? What about when you dissolve into a puddle that needs to be mopped up by cheerful stockers in Hawaiian shirts?
I felt dead. Only I felt like a graveside mourner too. I kept switching roles, the way I had at times in a moment of orgasm, sexual situations flashing through my brain, only this version was depressing. Now I was the corpse and the doctor and the widow, the candy striper who asks the grieving family if she can get them anything and the We’re losing her, doctor! nurse. The medical examiner leaning against the morgue bay after a long day of autopsies. “Love killed her,” he says, snapping off his gloves.
“You’re really sad, aren’t you?” David asked me in an email. “I didn’t realize how sad you were.”
For my birthday, he sent me an audio file of him reading Whitman’s “Song of Myself” Section 50. I walked around the park near the library listening to it. As I had in that hotel room, I felt my soul lifting out of my body. On a voicemail he said, “We have an ability to bring something out in each other, to be so truly ourselves.” He seemed clear that the struggle in that poem would manifest itself in our lives, and he seemed confident that it was necessary. “The struggle is good,” he said.
It sure doesn’t feel good , I thought.
Still, it didn’t feel wrong . In one way, everything felt righter than it ever had. Maybe goodness didn’t matter so much. Maybe love was beyond good and evil. “There is no problem of evil,” wrote musician Nick Cave. “There is only a problem of good. Why does a world that is so often cruel insist on being beautiful, of being good? Why does it take a devastation for the world to reveal its true spiritual nature?”
I got COVID for the first time and spent a week in bed trying to work on my laptop even as I coughed and faded in and out of sleep. When I was awake, I tried watching television, but everything made me cry. When Mariska Hargitay caught a bad guy on Law or as Bella, and the men as the sexy vampire and the sexy werewolf, the three of us trapped in a cycle of lust. But I couldn’t find solace in any cartoonish narratives.
Paul was relieved that the situation with David was theoretically over now and we could get back to our lives as they’d been before. When he noticed how mournful I was, he said, “You cry at the cast party whether the play you were in was great or terrible. People think the only beautiful things are the permanent ones, but the ephemeral can be beautiful too. That’s how shows are for me.”
I hated that he was trying to reduce what had happened to me to one of his friends’ productions. No one could relate to what had happened to me.
Still delirious as the line on the test strips began to turn faint, I pulled myself out of bed and went and sat alone, masked, in the park by the river. A woman walking her rheumy-eyed sheepdog yelled, “No! She’s wearing black!” I looked up in alarm. She said, “The dog was heading your way. I didn’t want him to mess up your clothes. The fur gets everywhere.”
I cried because she was being so thoughtful.