Adamson frowned.
“Nice going,” he mumbled, “good job,” but he wasn’t even listening.
Obviously the man wasn’t cut out for that line of work. Later that morning, as subtly as possible, I suggested that he take some time off to reevaluate his career objectives. “You don’t put out any effort,” I told him. “You don’t pay attention, you don’t listen, you don’t do anything. It’s all me me me.” I could see sweat stains at the armpits of his shirt, but I had to lay it out for him. I was crisp and clinical. “For openers,” I said, “you’re definitely the most depressing human being I ever met. How can you expect to help people? Even if you wanted to, which you don’t, how could you cheer anybody up? I mean, those eyes of yours.”
He touched his forehead. “Lay off, William. My eyes are fine.”
“They’re not fine,” I said. “Look in the mirror, for Christ sake. Those sad, miserable little eyeballs. Think how your patients must feel. And it’s dangerous. Sadness. It can actually kill people.”
“Kill?”
“That’s right. Kill.”
I moved to his desk and picked up a wooden ruler and slapped it against the palm of my hand.
“I’m no expert,” I told him, “but the first thing is to take a good look at yourself. Stop covering up. Stop pretending.” I waved the ruler at him. “You might not believe me, but I’ve had some experience with this sadness stuff, and there’s one thing I know for sure. Self-deception, that’s the killer. You can’t get well if you don’t admit you’re sick. You have to open up the gates. Cut out the complaining. Have some fun, for crying out loud. Find yourself a hobby.”
Then I filled him in on the virtues of rock collecting. I told him how stable it was, how rocks never deserted you or let you down.
“Safety?” he said.
“There it is. Safety.”
Adamson made a crisp, decisive motion with his jaw. “I get the message. Locked doors and rocks.”
“For sure,” I said. “The main thing, though, is to find something you’re good at, something you enjoy. Just trying to help.”
He nearly smiled.
“Yes,” he said, “and I appreciate it, William.”
“Rocks.”
“Rocks. Thank you.”
I shrugged and pretended to tie my shoe.
“No sweat,” I said, “that’s what friends are for.”
Basically, that was the end of my therapy.
On the last day we got involved in a rambling, pointless conversation about the end of the world. Ridiculous, I thought, but for some reason Adamson was all fired up about the subject. It started out very innocently. I was giving him pointers on how to get set up in the rock-collecting business, listing the various tools he’d need, and then, out of nowhere, Adamson brought up the fact that he used to own a toy telescope back when he was a kid. I couldn’t shut him off. He kept chattering on and on about how much he’d loved that telescope. “Astronomy,” he said, “now there’s a magical hobby—astronomy.” He gave the word a cushioned sound, as if it were somehow breakable, and that’s when I made the mistake of asking a couple of questions. I did it to pep him up. To prove I cared. Right away, he was off and running, giving me the entire in-depth lecture on stars and galaxies and the chemical composition of Halley’s Comet. I’d never seen him so excited. Almost smiling, almost happy. “Astronomy, that’s terrific,” I finally said, “but if you’re so hepped about it, why not take some action? Buy yourself a new telescope.”
Adamson wagged his head. “No,” he murmured, “I don’t think so. Too depressing.”
“You were just telling me—”
“Super depressing.” His entire posture seemed to change. It was back to suicide-as-usual. “You want to know the truth?” he said softly. “Why I gave up astronomy?”
I didn’t, but I nodded.
“Doom,” he said.
“I’m sorry?”
“Doom.”
Then he almost shouted it: “Doom! End of the world, end of everything! You want a depressing hobby? Try astronomy—doom! Christ, you don’t know the half of it.”
He was right, I didn’t, but he wasn’t shy about laying it out for me: How someday the sun would begin cooling down, losing energy, and how our pretty little planet would freeze up into a shining ball of ice.
“Doom!” he yelled. “Nothing else, just doom doom doom! Frozen oceans! Frozen continents! Doom, that’s the lesson of astronomy.”
He rubbed his face.
For a moment he seemed lost, but then he took a breath and went on to explain how the sun would pull one final trick before it died. A terminal flash. Nothing left, he said. Not a tombstone. Not a mountain. Not a statue or a book. Nothing. No trees or grass or amber waves of grain. No bacteria. No people. Nothing. Not a single footprint. It was inescapable—a law of nature.
“Doom,” he said. “And that’s just the start. It gets worse.”
Then he explained how the entire universe was scheduled for destruction. Not just our own puny planet. Everything. Every star, every speck of dust. It was hard to follow the technicalities, which had to do with whether we live in a collapsing or expanding universe, but his main point was that no matter how you cut it, whichever theory you believed, the end result was doom.
“The end of the world,” he said flatly. “Don’t kid yourself, it’s in the cards. Can’t prevent it, nowhere to run. Just a question of time.”
He stared at me, half smiling. There was a smugness about it that touched a nerve.
Showdown, I thought.
I sat up straight and pointed a finger at him and told him I was fed up.
“The same old bitching day after day,” I said. “It’s a sickness. You’re happy to be unhappy. That’s how you get your kicks. Unhappiness. A disease.”
He shook his head.
“Science,” he said. “You can’t ignore it.”
“Here we go.”
“Doom, William.”
“So what?” I snapped. “We all die. You’re a doctor, you should know that.”
“Oh, I do know.”
“And?”
“Nothing, I guess.” He looked at me with an expression of intense disappointment. “Nothing. Except I thought you and I were on the same wavelength about this.”
“About what?”
“All of it. Civilization. I mean, yes, we all die. But we have these … these ways of coping. Our children. The genetic pool. The things we’ve made, books and buildings and inventions. Doesn’t Edison still live in his light bulb? Switch it on and there he is. Immortality, in a way. A kind of faith. We plant trees and raise families, and those are ways of seeking—I don’t know—a kind of significance. Life after death. That’s what civilization is: life after death. But if you wipe out civilization—”
He stopped and waited. It was as if he were asking me to complete the sentence.
“See the sticker?” he said. “Nothing lasts. Doom, it means no children. No genetic pool. No memory. When the lights go out, Edison goes out. And what significance did his life have? Erased. Shakespeare and Einstein. You and me.”
“But nobody—”
“Right, nobody realizes,” he said. “Nobody cares. People just keep diddling on. A joke, they think. But it’s not. It’s our goddamn silhouette.”
We sat facing each other, eye to eye, and for an instant there was something very much like a bond between us, as if we were touching, or embracing, shared knowledge and shared vision, two losers drawn together by the interlocking valences of terror.
“Imagination,” Adamson said gently, “that’s what you and I have in common. A wonderful faculty, but sometimes it gets out of control, starts rolling downhill, no brakes, and all you can do is hang on for dear life and hope you don’t—”
“Crack up,” I said.
I looked down at the ragged edges on my fingernails. And then suddenly, without planning it, I was talking about bombs and missiles and radioactivity and thermal blasts and the s
ound of a Soviet SS-4 zipping across the night sky. Real, I told him. The silos and submarines and launching pads. Things you could touch. Real things. It wasn’t some theory, I said, it wasn’t a ghost story, it was real.
My voice caught.
“Crazy,” I said.
Adamson sat very still. “No, just special. Very special.”
We were quiet again; that bonded feeling.
Adamson finally smiled at me and came across the room and shook my hand. It was an awkward moment. He kept squeezing, hanging on.
“Well,” I said, “I hope that helps. Sometimes it’s better to talk things out.”
He laughed and said, “You bet, it helps plenty.” He clapped me on the back, fairly hard, as if signaling something, then he led me out to the elevator. Funny, but I felt a little choked up, almost teary. We stood there in the hallway, not quite looking at each other, and then we shook hands again. “Adios,” he said. But a strange thing happened next. When the elevator doors opened, Adamson got in and rode down to the first floor with me and followed me all the way outside. Like an orphan, I thought, or a stray dog.
My mom and dad were parked across the street, ready to head home, but I couldn’t just walk away. I thanked him for all the help. A good listener, I said, a good sharp mind. Adamson shrugged. He took out a pencil and a scrap of paper and jotted down a telephone number.
“Keep it in your wallet,” he said. “Night or day. I’m here.”
He looked away.
There was a short silence, then he laughed and said, “A charade, you were right.”
He pointed up at the dome on the state capitol.
“Politics,” he said. “A new racket. What the hell—run for governor.”
“You’re a shoo-in, Chuck.”
“You think so?”
“Absolutely. I mean, hey, you’ve got the sympathy vote all locked up.”
We smiled at each other.
“Friends?” he said, and I said, “Friends,” and then my dad honked the horn and I turned and trotted across the street.
Those six days in therapy did not turn my life around. The headaches disappeared, and my plumbing problems cleared up, but otherwise things remained almost exactly the same. A wobbly gyroscope; a normal guy in an abnormal world. But now and then, when the pressures began to accumulate, it cheered me up to think about Chuck Adamson, remembering that dismal face of his, imagining his campaign for the governorship—anti-high school, anti-baseball, anti-social. A hard person to pin down. How much was acting, how much was real? Even now, in memory, it all blends together. Those moist, fearful eyes and that weary posture and the way he’d sigh and tap his pencil and gaze out at the bright golden dome on the state capitol.
I missed him.
That much was for sure. I did miss the man.
Except for a few postcards, I had no contact with him for the next seven or eight years, and yet there was still a certain consolation in having his phone number tucked away in my wallet, just in case. Like a safety valve, or a net. Often, during bad times, I’d take out that wrinkled scrap of paper and quietly rub my fingers across it, memorizing the numbers, and on one or two occasions I came very close to putting in a long-distance distress call, person to person. I’d dial and break the connection and then spend an hour or so in a nice relaxed conversation, almost real, as if we were back in his office again, discussing telescopes and loneliness and the powers of the human imagination, figuring out ways to cope with the end of the world.
4
Quantum Jumps
DIG, IT WHISPERS. Two weeks on the job, and my hole is nearly four feet deep, ten feet square. It’s a beauty—I’m proud—but I’ve paid a terrible price. My daughter says I’m nutto. My wife won’t speak to me, won’t sleep with me. She thinks I’m crazy. And dangerous. She refuses to discuss the matter. All day long, while I’m busy saving her life, Bobbi hides in the bedroom, quietly cranking out those insinuating bits of verse. She uses silence like a blackjack; she withholds the ordinary courtesies of love and conversation. It hurts, I won’t deny it. Those damned poems. Christ, she’s baiting me—
THE MOLE IN HIS HOLE
Down, shy of light, down
to that quilted bedrock
where we sleep as reptiles
dreaming starry skies and ash
and silver nuggets that hold
no currency in life misspent.
Down, a digger, blind and bold,
through folds of earth
layered like the centuries,
down
to that brightest treasure.
Fool’s gold.
I don’t get it. Meanings, I mean. What’s the point? Why this preference for metaphor over the real thing?
Fuck her, the hole says. Dig!
Bobbi doesn’t understand. She’s a poet, she can’t help it. I’ve tried to talk things out. I’ve presented the facts. I’ve named names: Poseidon, Trident, Cruise, Stealth, Minuteman, Lance, Pershing—the indisputable realities. Trouble is, Bobbi can’t process hard data. The artistic temperament. Too romantic, too sublime. She’s a gorgeous woman, blond and long-legged, those shapely fingers and turquoise eyes, a way of gliding from spot to spot as if under the spell of a fairy tale, but she makes the mistake of assuming that her beauty is armor against the facts of fission. Funny how people hide. Behind art, behind Jesus, behind the sunny face of the present tense. Bobbi finds comfort in poetry; Melinda finds it in youth. For others it’s platitudes or blind optimism or the biological fantasies of reproduction and continuity.
I prefer a hole.
So dig. I won’t be stopped.
I’ll admit it, though, these past two weeks have been murder, and at times the tension has turned into rage. This morning, for example. After a night of insomnia and celibacy, I came to the breakfast table a bit under the weather. It was hard to see the humor in finding another of Bobbi’s snide ditties stapled to the Cheerios box. I wanted to laugh it off, I just couldn’t muster the resources. Besides, the poem was cruel, an ultimatum. Fission, she called it.
Protons, neutrons.
Break the bonds,
Break the heart.
Fuse is lit.
Time to split.
I can read between the lines. Split, it’s not even cute.
Who could blame me? I lost my head for a minute. Nothing serious—some bad language, some table-thumping.
“God,” Melinda squealed. “Crackers!”
Bobbi remained silent. She lifted her shoulders in a gesture that meant: Yes, crackers, but let’s not discuss it in front of your father.
“Daffy Duck,” said my daughter. “Hey, look at him! Look, he’s eating—”
I smiled. It was a mark of sanity, the cheerful face of a man in tip-top health—I smiled and chewed and swallowed Fission—and then I asked if they’d kindly put a lid on all the name-calling stuff, I was fed up with wisecracks and Mother Goose innuendo. “A little respect,” I said. “Fair enough? Time for some understanding.”
Melinda stared at her mother.
“You see that?” she said. “He ate your poem.”
My wife shrugged.
“I think he’s flipped!” Melinda yelled. “He did, he ate it, I saw him.”
“Now wait a minute—”
“Daddy’s flippo!”
“No,” I said, “Daddy’s smart. He’s a goddamn genius.”
Melinda snorted and flicked her pale eyebrows.
“Selfish Sam,” she said. “What about my feelings? What happens when everybody at school finds out? God, they’ll think I’ve got the screwiest family in history.”
“They laughed at Noah, princess.”
“God!”
I tapped the table. “Eat your Cheerios,” I said. “And cut out the swearing.”
“You swear.”
“Hardly ever.”
“I just heard it, you said—”
“Hustle up, you’ll be late for school.”
Authority, I thought. Don’t b
end. Don’t crack. I ignored their coded mother-daughter glances. I made happy chitchat, humming, stacking the dishes, buttoning Melinda’s coat and then marching her out to meet the school bus. A splendid morning, despite everything. That smooth blue sky, wildflowers everywhere, the wide-open spaces. And the Sweetheart Mountains—beautiful, yes, but also functional, a buffer between now and forever. Shock absorbers. Heat deflectors.
But Melinda had no appreciation for these facts. She wouldn’t look at me. We stood a few feet apart along the tar road.
“Well, Flub-a-dub,” she finally said, “I hope you enjoyed your breakfast.”
I reached out toward her, but she yelped and spun away. Again I offered extravagant apologies. Too much tension, I told her. Too little sleep. A lot on my mind.
“Holes,” Melinda said, and glanced up for a moment, soberly, as if taking a measurement. “God, can’t you just stop acting so screwy? Is that so hard?”
“I suppose it is sometimes.”
“Eating paper.”
She closed her eyes.
“You know what Mommy says? She says you’re pretty sick. Like a breakdown or something.”
“No way, baby.”
“Yeah, but—” Melinda’s voice went ragged. She bit down on her lower lip. “But you always act that way, real flippy, and it makes me feel … You know what else Mommy said?”
“What else?”
“She says if you don’t stop digging that hole, she says we might have to go away.”
“Away where?”
“I don’t know where, just away. That’s what she told me, and she means it, too. That poem you ate—that’s what it was about.”
I nodded. “Well, listen, right now your mother and I have this problem. Like when the telephone doesn’t work. Like a busy signal, you know? But we’ll get it fixed. That’s a promise.”
“Promise?”
“On my honor.”
Later, when the school bus came grinding up the road, Melinda generously offered me her cheek, which I kissed, then I watched her ride away. A beautiful child. I love her, and Bobbi, too.
Isn’t that the purpose? To save those smooth blond hides?