Love and Other Ways of Dying

Well, here’s your box. Nearly everything I have is in it, and it is not full. Pain and excitement are in it, and feeling good or bad and evil thoughts and good thoughts—the pleasure of design and some despair and the indescribable joy of creation.… And still the box is not full.

John Steinbeck

D
OWN HERE IN THE BASEMENT WE
’
VE
built a city out of blocks, divvied up the Matchbox cars, the toy soldiers and model planes, and begun yet again what we call The Game. We’ve been playing it for years now, my brother and I, on the cool tile floor in humid summer, on the warm shag come frigid winter. In our city anything can happen—and does. We’ve fought back alien incursions, faced down an armed opposition, lost citizens and mighty warriors to various calamities. We’re a widowed, wounded race, living moments of beauty and hardship. Allies have been found out to be spies—and have thus been eliminated. Strange creatures have appeared (one of our AWOL gerbils among them), muttering in gruff tones, here to crush or help us, we don’t know which. Cars collide; planes crash. Everything’s going great in our city, and then, a split second later—blam!—it all unravels. A giant kicks down a building in the north sector, and police and fire come screaming in to repair the damage, check the crime scene.

What gets televised in our house through the evening news filters into The Game, too. An evil group known as Black September takes hostages. A bad guy named Brezhnev is hell-bent on destroying us. There’s a Matchbox that can fly, driven by a great man named Muhammad Ali. Every moment waits expectantly for a hero, and usually we oblige. Ours is a Manichean universe, in which light must eventually triumph over darkness, angels over devils.

Of course, our parents are forbidden from entering when we play, in part because we don’t want their explanations or lessons. Stuff happens in The Game, heavy, unknowable stuff, that baffles even us. Sometimes when we arrive at a pause in the action, one of us wonders aloud about what should happen next. Then, in the western sector, the giant drops a block bomb, or karate-kicks a building—and it all bullies into action again.

The Game is our supersaturated, hypermediated reflection of a world we don’t understand—and the opposite of our peaceful suburban town. Upstairs our mom is drinking Tab, getting dinner ready as she watches a jowly man on TV preside over the Watergate hearings. Where we live, there seems to be little sentiment about this, or about the war in Vietnam. Meanwhile, in the basement, among the massacres and raids, we channel all of our emotion and drama into The Game. We spend hours down here, making a stand, waiting for deus ex machina to arrive.

There must come a day when we play for the last time, but I don’t remember it. After all those hours, days,
years
, there’s no goodbye. No final triumph, no clinking glasses of grape juice. Perhaps we’ve come to the realization that the world isn’t quite so Manichean, or that the stakes here will never be high enough to make it real, that this indeed is
a game
—and we want to be lifted by some huge hurricane, or swept away by a powerful ocean wave. We want to stand on some distant shore where the answers are written in a strange new language of whale bones and scattered mussel shells.

In revisiting the pieces in this essay collection—both old and up-to-the-minute, seventeen in all, spanning almost two decades—I’ve been reminded of The Game, because what I’ve chosen to do with my life ends up being similar in some ways to what transpired in our childhood playroom all those years ago. For better or worse, I’ve continued building block cities, only out of words, and as reflections of events shaped by the fist of a more cosmic hand. If The Game was fantasy and The Work has been cold reality, in both cases they’ve come to represent, at least for me, the same underlying need to make sense of the way that love and loss, justice and devastation, and beauty and pain can fuse to make some bearable, or at least fathomable, whole.

It can be unsettling for any writer to go back and reread his or her work. It’s like watching yourself age right before your eyes. Or like seeing a batch of photographs, some in which the fashions and automobiles seem retro. It’s like unearthing so many time capsules, and wondering why you buried them in the first place. You begin to see your obsessions laid bare, certain themes repeating. At the beginning, none of this is clear. You don’t set out saying, It’s time again to go on that quest for the ecstatic! Or: Hey, let’s memorialize the underdog! Or: Anyone for an elevator ride down into darkness? These themes crop up later, when you sit down to write an introduction like this one.

There’s something else that comes up, a couple of questions that keep nagging. What are these stories trying to say, anyway? Or better: What have I been trying to say
through
them?

Well, here’s a stab: Perhaps no matter how bad it gets—or good—we’re beholden not to look away from the things we fear or revere. The more we examine the grooves and scars of life, the deeper we go in our forensic investigations by trying to name the thing that appears before us, the more free and complete we become, the more capable of identification and compassion and opposition. But it’s not just that. The more willing we are to suffer pain and loss and even great throes of happiness, to live fully inside these big emotions, the closer we come to—what?

The folded hands of the universe?

Our humanity?

Infinity?

It must be something.

We each have our way of finding meaning: work, faith, family, sport, avocation, etc. I guess mine has been this everyday ritual of reporting and writing, these trips into other worlds. I know I ate François Mitterrand’s last meal including its famous birdie, or visited the Sudan during a vicious famine, or that I found true happiness one night in Catalonia, Spain, after consuming the food of Ferran Adrià, because I’ve written it down here. I know that nearly two million people vanished in a country called Cambodia, and that I picked apples with a real giant, named Leonid Stadnik, one autumn afternoon in Ukraine. I know I once stood on a suicide bridge in Nanjing, China, wrestling with a hopeless man who had come to jump, just as I know that one winter, feeling particularly lost in the world, I drove cross-country with Einstein’s brain in the trunk of my rental car, all because these stories now tell me so.

For me, writing is a vital act of memory, and every once in a while, with a lot of hard labor, it can also be means for transcendence. Like a runner’s high, you keep running to get it. And sometimes, with the help of great editors, assiduous fact-checkers, and trusted readers—sometimes you can feel the words lift ever so slightly, and something you never thought before, some Ouija messsage, briefly reveals itself.

When I left that basement for good all those years ago, little did I know all the wondrous and horrible things that lurked in those other worlds beyond, all of them real. On those faraway shores, armies clashed, planes fell from the sky, giants stomped their feet.

I was lucky to be there.

And the greatest gift, for me at least, was that I got to write about it.

I
T WAS SUMMER
;
IT WAS WINTER
. The village disappeared behind skeins of fog. Fishermen came and went in boats named
Reverence, Granite Prince, Souwester.
The ocean, which was green and wild, carried the vessels out past Jackrock Bank toward Pearl Island and the open sea. In the village, on the shelf of rock, stood a lighthouse, whitewashed and octagonal with a red turret. Its green light beamed over the green sea, and sometimes, in the thickest fog or heaviest storm, that was all the fishermen had of land, this green eye dimly flashing in the night, all they had of home and how to get there—that was the question. There were nights when that was the only question.

This northerly village, this place here of sixty people, the houses and fences and clotheslines, was set among solid rocks breaching from the earth. It was as if a pod of whales had surfaced just as the ocean turned to land and then a village was built on their granite backs. By the weathered fishing shacks were rusted anchors like claws and broken traps and hills of coiled line. Come spring, wildflowers appeared by the clapboard church. The priest
said mass. A woman drew back a curtain. A man hanged himself by the bridge. Travelers passing through agreed it was the prettiest earthly spot, snapping pictures as if gripped by palsy, nearly slipping off the rocks into the frigid waves.

Late summer, a man and woman were making love under the eaves of a garishly painted house that looked out on the lighthouse—green light flashing—when a feeling suddenly passed into them, a feeling unrelated to their lovemaking, in direct physical opposition to it: an electrical charge so strong they could taste it, feel it, the hair standing up on their arms, just as it does before lightning strikes. And the fishermen felt it, too, as they went to sea and returned, long ago resigned to the fact that you can do nothing to stop the ocean or the sky from what it will do. Now they, too, felt the shove and lock of some invisible metallic bit in their mouths. The feeling of being surrounded by towering waves.

Yes, something terrible was moving this way. There was a low ceiling of clouds, an intense, creeping darkness, that electrical taste. By the lighthouse, if you had been standing beneath the flashing green light on that early-September night, in that plague of clouds, you would have heard the horrible grinding sound of some wounded winged creature, listened to it trail out to sea as it came screeching down from the heavens, down through molecule and current, until everything went silent.