Indecision (19 page)

She didn’t reply. She looked at me inquisitively.

“All right, my problems . . .” But pretty soon I’d just been lying there with my eyes closed for several minutes thinking ineffectually about a whole host of issues each of which seemed indistinguishable from the others. Finally I said, “Mom and dad would think we were
so
crazy doing this.”

In totally therapeutic tones she was like, “Do you often consider what your parents will think?”

“Um . . . No. But on the other hand I bet I’m aware at the back of my mind of a constant guilt owing to this failure to think about what they’re thinking. Yeah . . . I think that’s true. But also I feel like I’m just waiting for the big denunciation to come from them before I deal with it. Yeah. It kind of feels like nothing’s happened yet in terms of parental judgment. Also—and I don’t know if this is relevant but—”

“Go ahead, free-associate, that’s the idea. More or less discredited, but still . . .”

“Okay, you know how I just said it feels like nothing’s really happened so far? All right and then you have this poster from when Eastern Germany still existed—so that was a big deal, right? The Wall came down, whole world changed, now we’re not going to die in a nuclear holocaust anymore. But it didn’t really
feel
like anything happening—not to me. I feel like I have a certain resistance to events. They don’t always seem to happen, even when they do.”

“Well . . .”

“I know what you’re saying, current events don’t seem like they happen to anyone. But I mean also personal events. Mom and dad get divorced, I enter into romantico-sexual relationships, I get one job and then another, and yet—”

“We do have to talk about your job.”

“No don’t make me think about work when I’ll actually
be
there in”—I looked at my watch—“in like half an hour. Wow. Psychoanalysis goes so quickly. No wonder it takes so long. But what I’m saying, Al, before I go, as the attempted major revelation of this particular session, is how I feel like I’m
event-proof.
That’s one idea for a major problem I must have.”

“I think I understand.” And speaking in her authoritative professorial voice, she sounded like she really did. “Think about it, Dwight. Think about the Cold War, think about—”

“Free association alert! I just got one. Cold War equals mom and dad’s marriage. Rival superpowers, mutually assured destruction, clashing policies . . . What do you think? Ah, I never free-associated before!” I started snapping my fingers, free-associating like crazy. “Cold war mom and dad day after golden pond olympic gold nostradamus HBO red dawn U2 . . .” I snapped my fingers three times, but no more associations came. “Fuck! It’s not working. In fact when I do mom-and-dad all I really picture is mom. I don’t even get dad so much. Damn. It was working so well.”

“It’s all right, we have enough for now. Think about the Cold War—as I was saying. Remember that during certain would-be formative years you and I both imagined that full-scale Armageddon might not be too far off. And therefore that—”

“But not me. I never thought it would happen. I think I thought people may not be very nice, but still, nuclear war? I think I figured even the Russians don’t suck that much. Or then again if a few of them maybe drank too much vodka one night, down in one of those silos . . .”

“Right. So you acknowledge there was a serious question of whether we’d live to see twenty-five. Remember adults would ask us about what we wanted to be when we grew up? And didn’t you always feel like you were humoring them, no matter what you said? And then,” Alice went on, “how it came as a shock to discover midway through prep school, with the Wall coming down, that there really
was
something to prepare for after all. Yet you had no plans for adult life—none. We could never imagine growing up because the future could always be cancelled at any time. So beyond a certain narrow time frame our desires ran into a kind of horizon and had to stop. There was
no such thing
as the long term.”

“Interesting . . .”

“And now, Dwight, now your desires have to find a place in a world which you never imagined you would live to see.”

“They knew what they were doing when they made you an adjunct professor, didn’t they? I’m impressed.”

“So why do you sound sarcastic then?”

“Do I really? I don’t know.” I really didn’t. And
did
I sound sarcastic or did she just hear it that way? Already I could feel the psychoanalytic situation sucking me into the whole mirror mirrors mirror problem, the bad infinity thing. “I love you, Al,” I said because it was so bedrock true.

“But I want you to think about something. What institution also came to an end that, as you say, you happen to associate with mutually assured destruction?”

“I don’t know. Destruction death grateful dead cosby show family ties summer vacation . . . Nah, not working.”

“You doofus!
Mom and dad
—it’s what you said yourself. That’s what ended too, along with the Cold War. Ten years later. And you never once expected it.” Suddenly her eyes filmed with tears. “And now,” she said, voice cracking, “now . . .”

“Alice. Hey. Hey there.” I nearly got up to hug her, before the patient-client relationship reasserted itself and I resumed my reclining position.

“I’m fine,” she said. “They never belonged together anyway. It’s better. I’m fine. I even wish she still liked Dr. Hajar.
I
liked him.” She sniffled. “He was funny.” Alice was kind of abstractedly looking at nothing. Then she recovered. “Do you feel this helps at all, talking like this, Dwight?”

I reflected. “It’s interesting. So that helps. I feel that anything that’s interesting helps a great deal. And I come back tomorrow, right? So—”

She wore a look of misgiving as she stood up to see me out. “What would you think about coming in only twice a week? I’m sorry. Four times a week might get kind of intense.”

“Sure, two’s a good number, good even number. I hope you’re okay, Al. About mom and dad. It doesn’t really bother
me,
you know. People should probably get divorced more often. Then they wouldn’t bother each other for so long. You know, more abortion, more divorce.”

Alice had been arrested at the 2000 Republican Convention in Philadelphia, where in addition to other First Amendment crimes she had formed part of this large group chanting “More abortion! More divorce!” at the passing conventioneers. She’d ended up spending a night in jail without access to a lawyer or a bathroom.

“More toilet breaks!” she was saying now. “Which is a serious political problem, you know. Work in a maquila in Mexico, work in some EPZ in Vietnam, not enough toilet breaks.”

“I’ll look into it.” I glanced at my fancy parental graduation-gift watch which ran on my own motion, so that you hardly had to wind it: “I’ve got work in five minutes.”

“Till Wednesday,” she said standing in her doorjamb. “In the meantime I want you to think about something else. I want you to think about what it’s like for you to live in a consumer society in which tiny portions of desire are constantly being solicited from you and frittered away so that you can never save up enough passion to spend on any one thing.”

“When am I not going to live in a consumer society?”

“Come on some fieldwork sometime.” Before turning her attention to American garage-filling culture, Alice had lived for a while among the Akha people from Laos, where a bridegroom will be daubed with soot, mud and dung in order to give him a foretaste of married life. She much more favored the system of the Na people in China, among whom a lady is visited by whoever she likes at night and then raises her variously-sired children in a longhouse with her brother.

As I pulled open the elevator door I chanted out, “More abortion! More divorce!”

She stood to attention, gave me this crisp military salute, then slouched back inside her apartment in her pajamas and faded tee shirt. What would she
do
in there all day? Presumably she would read for a while, then leave to teach, then come back, reading or writing until it was late at night and she took some melatonin to fall asleep.

I walked out of Alice’s building and started hustling to work. Along with the morningtime coolness there was also something new in the air: this slight kind of back-to-school tightness. The sunlight seemed faintly to smell of sharpened pencils, a sensation that comported very nicely with the feeling of renewed education you get from being psychoanalyzed. And along with back-to-school flavor there was a definite edge of anticipation in the air as well. Because going to school year after year—it really schools you, and so at every onset of fall I’d always feel a certain seasonal imminence of big games and difficult exams, new crushes, homeroom disasters. At the beginning of every school year and now into adult life I’d walk toward class or work in the morning and think
Something big is going to happen this year.
At some point during these nine months that will seem longer than a year, something is definitely going to take place. The statistical near certainty, combined with the utter vagueness, sent the same chill through me that was already in the air.

SIXTEEN

Readers may object to too many descriptions in this book of waking up. But then they will have to acknowledge that waking up is a very common if not always fully complete experience. The point is, on the third jungle morning, day eleven since I started on the Abulinix, I could feel something good drawing me awake, and when I opened my eyes it was with this birthday-boy or Christmas Day eagerness not always experienced by the full-grown even when on vacation.

And what I saw with opened eyes was Brigid lying inside her hammock under the veil of mosquito netting. She was lying there with her chin raised up and her hands pressed together (as you could tell from the shape) between her thighs. Either her eyelids were fluttering or else it was just the effect of light strained through mesh and wavering across her sharp pretty face with the high round cheeks and the—already, perceptibly—darkening complexion.

I put on a favorite tee shirt soft with much washing—A NUTTIER BAR FOR NUTTIER TIMES, it claimed on behalf of Mr. Goodbar—slid out from the mosquito net, laced up my boots, and after yanking from my pack my dog-eared copy of
The Uses of Freedom,
its pages slightly crimped with jungle damp, I went and stood outside in the warming sauna of the jungle morning and looked again at a favorite double-underscored passage:

When at last we have reached our position of trembling certainty as to the nature of the world-request
[
die Weltbitte
],
then immediately we become aware of what has been for us the most perilous risk so far. We stood in the forest, and listened with intent—and discovered with disappointment that no sound was yet to be discerned in the air but the restlessness of wind. How tempted we were to make out an articulate sound! Instead we endured our difficult patience; we awaited the world-request. With difficult forbearance, we did not attempt to preempt it with our own demand. And now that we have arrived at last at our late certainty, we see that it was by our patience alone that we passed through a dangerous moment, the misuse of which would have led to years of frustration and continued exile.

What a great philosopher, saying shit like that! Thus after breakfast I just plodded patiently and optimistically behind Brigid and Edwin through the twitching jungly gloom. There was zero breeze—like the whole place held its breath. Meanwhile Edwin picked out routes along worn trails as the undergrowth thinned out, and the canopy got higher and denser, and everything became less claustrophobic, but also warmer, moister, obscurely more profound.

Edwin let me take the machete at one point and hack the trail clear. And he gave me the thumbs-up and a smile when following his directives I crushed some lemon ants between my fingers and licked the digits clean. Brigid also gamely partook, and likewise joined Edwin and me in painting the thick red nectar of an achiote plant across one another’s faces in these fierce very savage-esque streaks.

“You look good as a savage,” I told her.

“As you do,” she returned in a curtsying tone.

“Of course Edwin looks best of all,” I allowed.

I’d smeared myself with DEET, but nevertheless my legs and forearms were budding with weltlike mosquito bites erupting up through the excessive, matted hair. So in spite of all the luminous patience I was feeling on the inside I trudged along scratching at myself with one hand and with the other hand waving in lazy constant genuflections to ward off the mosquitoes. Edwin by contrast seemed unmolested by the bugs.

“Hey Bridge,” I said over a lunch of more patecones. “Would you ask Edwin what he uses to keep los mosquitos away?”

“Dwight quiere saber something something los mosquitos.”

To which Edwin replied, “Te mostraré something cuando something something, bien?”

Yet post-lunch we just continued hiking in our prima facie directionless way, wading on through the watery light and thick air—until, somewhere deep in the afternoon, Edwin turned to me and pointed out with his machete the thick cinnamon-colored roots of an unknown-type tree that did indeed somehow stand out a little from the rest. “Mira, aquí something something necesitas.”

The tree stood about twice our height, and beneath its dome of heart-shaped waxy leaves were these strong-looking roots buckling up like octopus tentacles through the overgrown jungle floor. “Sí?” Edwin asked.

“Sí!” But to Brigid I was like, “Cómo?”

“He is telling you that this is the bobohuariza. It counteracts the mosquitoes—but it will make your hair fall off from wherever you use it.”

Suddenly I went light-headed and dizzy. And when I tried to blink the feeling off, instead there came into my mind this rare unprecedented image in which I saw myself being handled by strange fingers reaching out of the dark. In my mind’s eye the two sides of some dress shirt I was wearing popped open to reveal a hairless chest; loose pants were then pulled from my legs; and there my legs were, undisguised by hair and palely shining in some ambience-filled imaginary room. Was this the Abulinix making me see this—this—? This must be the Abulinix!