Descent
A Memoir of Madness
David Guterson
Vintage Books
A Division of Random House LLC
New York
A VINTAGE EBOOK ORIGINAL, SEPTEMBER 2013
Copyright © 2013 by David Guterson
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Henry Holt and Company, LLC: Excerpt from “Desert Places” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, LLC, Copyright © 1936 by Robert Frost, Copyright © 1964 by Lesley Frost Ballantine. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.: Excerpt from The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, translated by John Ciardi. Copyright © 1954, 1957, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1965, 1967, 1970 by the Ciardi Family Publishing Trust. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Guterson, David.
Descent : a memoir of madness / David Guterson.
pages cm
eISBN: 978-0-8041-6925-7
1. Guterson, David. 2. Authors, American—Biography. 3. Depression, Mental—Biography. 4. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001—Psychological aspects. I. Title.
PS3557.U846Z46 2013
813′.54—dc23
[B]
Cover design by Isabel Urbina
Cover photograph © Tom Thulen/Alamy
Author photograph © Tom Collicott
www.vintagebooks.com
v3.1
For William Styron
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
First Page
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Author’s Note
The literature of 9/11 includes, of course, firsthand accounts—the particulars of that day as a lived experience, and its emotional and psychological aftermath. Descent, though it begins on the morning of 9/11 within visible range of the smoke cloud above the Pentagon, is not, in its essence, among these. It is, instead, a memoir of depression—of an episode of major clinical depression I suffered in 2001.
Depression of this nature often materializes in the wake of a loss—the death of a loved one, for example. Depression, it’s said, often has a “trigger,” a term that suggests a lethal psyche, poised and waiting for instigating circumstances. The psyche as a weapon, its trigger a loss, and the outcome of its firing, instead of death or injury, a nightmarish descent into depression.
In my case the trigger was 9/11. I don’t assert that this is arbitrary or meaningless—that it isn’t telling in some fashion—but I do want to emphasize, here at the beginning, that there was nothing extraordinary about my experience that day. In short, a reader should look elsewhere for an account of 9/11 written to express its drama and pain. This is a book about depression.
My descent into catastrophic depression—my harrowing by what William Styron called a “brainstorm”—began on 9/11 in Washington, D.C. I’d gone there to convene with fellow National Endowment for the Arts panelists over manuscripts submitted for grants; we were to spend four days at it, beginning that Tuesday morning. And so, around eight, I walked from the Henley Park Hotel to the Old Post Office Building, where our deliberation chambers in the Nancy Hanks Center had been readied for us in the style of diplomacy, each station crisply stocked with sharpened pencils, notepads, and bottled water. At nine, we were called to order.
A. J. Verdelle, Peter Ho Davies, Josephine Humphreys, Lisa Howorth, Stewart O’Nan, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, Rick Moody, Cristina García, Marly Swick, Nicholson Baker, Rikki Ducornet, and me. We had hardly moved past pinning on our name tags when an NEA representative arrived on the scene to announce from just inside the door, “As you know, there has been what appears to be an act of terrorism at the World Trade Center in New York.”
We didn’t know it, though. It was news to us. There was shortly a second announcement including such specifics as airplanes and the Pentagon, and a calmly urgent and controlled imperative that we leave the building. Momentarily, we gathered at a window. A smoke cloud rose from across the Potomac. Then, calmly, we fled, by the stairs. I tried to discuss our circumstances with Rick Moody as we walked toward the symbolic protection of our hotel, but he was a Lower Manhattanite preoccupied by matters of substance far beyond my chattering presence, and anyway there were Klaxons, low-flying planes, and military vehicles in such abundance as to command our full attention. What was going on this morning? Clearly something of singular import. At the hotel, I called my wife in Seattle. At that point the phones were still working.
By evening I was dedicated to finding my way out of Washington. My ticket from Reagan to Kennedy was useless—neither airport was open—and anyway I wasn’t really needed in New York, where I’d planned to visit friends who suddenly had far more pressing business. With everything taken into account, I canceled, then tried unsuccessfully to sleep. After a long, bad dream composed of night-owl news coverage, it was time for another round of NEA deliberations. Is it facile to say that in the meeting chambers of the Old Post Office Building, on the dour morning of 9/12, the muffins didn’t look appetizing? Our panel did its work as if the work was solace, though clearly we were preoccupied. No one flagged, or suggested giving up, and we carried on until the end of the day, when it was time to again face new, dark facts. For me that meant sitting at a sidewalk table and examining a left-behind copy of USA Today for hints of hope. There were none, and worse, the diners around me were mostly eating with what appeared to be zeal. The host and servers showed no sign of faltering or of irregular deportment. The people on the street seemed not free of concern but also not adequately aggrieved. There might have been pigeons to complete the scene, a detail complicit in the impression I had of an unwarranted degree of normalcy.
Later, I walked to Union Station and bought a rail ticket to Pittsburgh, where my brother lives. I’d devised a plan to hunker down with him until such time as Bin Laden was defeated. Standing in the ticket line was momentarily therapeutic; though I sensed the station was imminently to be bombed, I was also voyeuristically stimulated. Everyone was under duress and making travel plans. Everyone had a story of woe or complications. The Amtrak clerks seemed liberated by tenderness and treated every comer like an orphan. The conventional animosities of class didn’t exist. On the contrary, the light is terrible at the Union Station Amtrak office and terrorists lurked behind every pillar. Things had changed. We grieved together.
Back in my hotel room, I reversed course psychically and opened a battle to procure a cross-country rental car. There were already reports of interminable lines—frequent fliers stripped of their wings and grouping themselves by destinations—and of rental car companies gouging stuck travelers in cruel disregard for the times. Desperately resourceful, I priced a U-Haul, an expensive means to get my toothbrush home, though not outlandish in view of the circumstances, which could accurately be described as unprecedented.
An hour later, gouged myself—the eventual bill was $793.76 for four days’ use of a 2000 Ford Taurus—I settled in for more insomnia. The thirteenth dawned. Our truncated NEA deliberations came to an end and our farewells devolved into a scramble to get home. Traveling parties coalesced. I visited
a bookstore with a fellow panelist, Rikki Ducornet, for the purpose of buying a road atlas, and the two of us set out in time for rush hour. For Ducornet it was a matter of getting home to Denver—1,656 miles. For me, about a thousand more than that.
Ducornet is a prolific author of novels, stories, poems, and essays. Her art is exhibited internationally, and she has illustrated books by Borges and Robert Coover. She also has an erudite and comprehensive understanding of Gnostic theology, the rudiments of which she touched on as I drove. In fact, well before Morgantown we were immersed in an automobile chautauqua on good and evil, preferring the safety of abstract conversation to the horrifying particulars of the moment. Eventually, though, we stopped for gas, where patrons at the cash register appeared distressed, but less aghast than I was, and it dawned on me in the throes of this observation, simultaneously internal and external, that people were still going about their everyday business, buying beer, Fritos, Pepsi, and Camels, not as if nothing terrible had happened but as if they didn’t need to let it all in, and as far as I was concerned just then, they were wrong and I was right.
In this way—with this sort of darkness, certainty, and alienation—my disease began to express itself.
* * *
At dawn we picked up my friend Nancy Quitsland somewhere in leafy Ohio. Quitsland was among a group with whom I’d shared a car to the airport on that distant morning of 9/10 in Seattle and, knowing her to be as stranded as I was—and capable of sharing driving duties—I ran her down by phone in the Buckeye State. And so we became a party of three sojourning across the stricken country.
Quitsland, a social activist, had come east for a conference. She appeared not despairing but galvanized as she described her volunteer work on the Nicaraguan island of Ometepe and a recent visit to Vietnam with a troupe of adolescent swing dancers. She and Ducornet immediately sounded as if they’d known each other for years, and gradually, over miles, grew intimate. For my part I drove like an automaton all the way through Indiana.
Sleepless miles, even as copilot. We listened to NPR obediently whenever it cropped up on Corn Belt radio waves. Ducornet and I compared book notes for miles, both a consolation and an homage to the days before Bin Laden. As we soldiered on, entering Missouri, it seemed unfair to me, given the circumstances, that there was traffic in Saint Louis. Didn’t these drivers understand that we were hurling pell-mell across the country as if chased westward by the horsemen of the Apocalypse or the sparking scythe of the hooded grim reaper or Osama Bin Laden himself? A strange light fell across the world, a sere and leavened light. Try as I might, I couldn’t restore the heartland to its former, humble luster. Missouri, indeed, looked strange through my lens, and as we passed from Warren to Callaway County I began to feel the terror in all those flags pasted to the glass of cars.
Our highway conversation gained in intensity and I was increasingly impressed by my travel companions, the one with her Apollonian social conscience, the other with her Dionysian muse. At another stratum of consciousness, I worried that the chemical tankers sharing our road would eventually join in a well-planned phalanx manned by Al Qaeda martyrs. But well into the night we made Topeka, and it too looked shrouded in gloom. We sat down where visitors to Kansas’s capital were eating nachos and drinking tub-like margaritas. In the restroom mirror, I caught sight of myself—a washed-out doppelgänger, wan and ill. A simulacrum, and paltry. By midnight I was bivouacked in a motel room with CNN served up full-tilt to goad me deeper into paranoia. A parade of consultants from think tanks was trotted out to make sense of it all, but I knew, despite them, that no one could. How bleak the world was I knew already, but had my knowledge been this visceral before, this deeply felt and damaging?
“Morning: excellent and fair,” as Styron wrote in Sophie’s Choice, a novel that ends with two suicides. My sleeplessness haunted me, but by Abilene or so I had the small consolation of wide, forlorn skies and of the stark, parched American West, where even from the interstate the dry bones of the past lay strewn with a secret import. There were everywhere in Kansas certain wind-bitten testimonials—the Cathedral of the Plains just east of Hays, the Fick Fossil and History Museum, the Prairie Museum of Art and History in Colby, the High Plains Museum in Goodland—and rigorously we visited none of them. Our urgency can be laid at my feet; wrapped tight and rabid, I wanted to get home, where a few days before I’d left myself. And so we pressed on, passing into mountain time. According to the road atlas mileage marks, Ducornet was now only 156 miles from her home in south Denver, while Quitsland and I could count on 1,500 more. In the face of this—and in lieu of eating—I bought a packet of Vivarin, an “alertness aid” favored by sleepy truckers and inundated college students. I popped one and then, copiously amped, drove toward the Rockies with overzealous adrenal glands and a hammering heart.
At Ducornet’s house in Denver, we loitered over tea for forty minutes, but these were minutes I couldn’t abide despite the idyllic feel of the place, its natural light, stillness, and silence, opulent bohemian and third-world appointments, and comfortable sofas and chairs. Quitsland, too, was restless, tapping her toes while I fidgeted and paced, and like me fending off the suggestion that we linger at this oasis. Instead we grimly plowed north through Denver—a city that, like a ghost dancer’s nightmare, seems bent on filling the spare high plains—and discovered the dynamic of our car journey altered; a pair of sober pragmatists, we adjusted to the loss of our poet and muse by making everything around us shipshape and imposing automotive order. I drove, and Quitsland rode with a map on her lap, responsibly alert and awake to road dangers. Yet I took no solace from our steadfast approach and was aware of the futility of most forms of solace. I’m used to tracts of sagebrush wastes and appalling reaches of desert steppe, but I wasn’t prepared for this part of Wyoming. In fact, at this juncture in the development of my disease, Wyoming was sufficient to cause me pain, and the evidence there of erosion by wind, and of the path of water across lost eras—time’s intransigence and perdurable length—seemed acute to my fractured sensibility. So did the sky at dusk over sagelands, where the melodramatic phrase “in the gloaming” made sense—albeit differently from the sense it made on English moors and in Irish peat bogs, where nightfall seems hued by European sorrows. In Wyoming, eternity is longer.
We made Evansville, near Casper, well into the night and took rooms at a Comfort Inn. Quitsland sought to cheer me in a booth at Applebee’s by pointing out that at nearby tables citizens went on with their lives. This was one of those chain restaurants with a massive, colorful, laminated menu, festive Saturday night steak-and-shrimp diners, many mounted televisions tuned to sports stations, and large, no-nonsense desserts. Equipped with this context, I ate something, exhorting myself under the rubric “You have to,” then retreated to my cubicle at the Comfort Inn, which, compared to Applebee’s, was tranquil enough—despite trucks on the interstate and late-hour revelers—to allow me to observe, with deepening dismay, the uneroded presence of my alertness aid, Vivarin, still fizzing frantically in my nervous system. All night my mind watched itself struggle to sleep, with digressions down the halls of doom and into the labyrinth of unfettered fear. This is the end, I kept telling myself: anyone sleeping contentedly tonight is a fiddling, postmillennial Nero.
At dawn I found Quitsland looking relatively hale and handed her the keys to the Taurus. I was pop-eyed and thrumming and within the hour had overdosed on scenery. The Big Horn Mountains reared up in the west and we passed where Custer and his cohorts were slaughtered (this time I felt the pain of the scalped) on what became the Crow Reservation. Here I read map names that once gave me pleasure—towns called Quietus, Recluse, and Node—but came up empty of delight in their presence. At a crowded diner in Livingston we shared a table with a young ranch family bent on post-church pancakes. Livingston should have felt safe but it didn’t, and on this troubled Sunday after 9/11 the streets were empty in the quintessential manner of small towns in the West—broad, breezy, and desolate. Every
one not at the diner, I speculated, must be sweatily reinforcing the underground survival shelters widely believed to be ubiquitous in Montana, the state Ted Kaczynski chose to dwell in.
But once more to the interstate. Neither Quitsland nor I confessed to nostalgia for lost youth as we listened to Janis Joplin’s Greatest Hits—middle-aged baby boomers on an improvised road trip, crossing the continental divide near Butte with “Me and Bobby McGee” as our anthem—but for my part I felt nostalgia for last week, when the world was younger and Bin Laden less infamous. That night, in Spokane, I drank a Guinness for dinner in the hope that this Dubliner’s soporific would lend me poetry and dreams. But no such luck of the Irish. At the Days Inn, I suffered not only insomnia but a fermenting headache and—a banal addiction, like picking at a scab—more CNN.
In the morning the passing country was steadily more familiar as the place I think of, expansively, as home, and I began to nurse expectation. We traversed the Cascades into western Washington and crossed the floating bridge to Seattle. Fully incapable of riposte or barbed words—hardly capable of words at all—I engaged in hapless and losing debate with a Budget Car Rental clerk, who insisted that $793.76 was a normal fee for four days in a Taurus. The driver in front of me had been mildly litigious but his rant had a post-9/11 inappropriateness that gave Budget the upper hand; the driver in front of him had played his aces, the patriotism and national crisis cards, also to no good outcome. Meanwhile, most of the customers queued up looked weary, rumpled, speechless, and defeated, many suggesting in their deportment or carriage the self-effacing and impractical patience I recognize as a trait of my city. Here was a Seattle mise-en-scène—mildly lackluster and full of imposed deference—the kind visitors can find exasperating.
The skyscrapers still stood, but no planes rode the skies, and on the downtown streets I felt the weight of my aloneness—still breathing but otherwise not among the living. I was home but couldn’t really go there anymore, and it was the last straw to find home no salve, because I’d pinned my hopes on the futile notion that being there might miraculously redeem me, that I might be resurrected by geography. Instead I sunk deeper into trepidation regarding, specifically, the remainder of my life and the prospects for regaining equilibrium. I was cowed and beginning to feel, dimly, that I knew things I didn’t want to know.