Conscience Round

At a party last night, a woman I don’t know well asked me if I was happy, and I refused, cheerfully, to answer. When she pressed the issue, something rose in me—so defiantly that I felt that reaction internally, like a bruising within my body. My veins twisted into coils of black. I fought to keep a pleasant, neutral expression on my face as her voice lost the rhythm of language and morphed instead into throbbing sound. I walked home, the autumn wind slicing through my clothes, and heard her question ringing repeatedly through the darkness, like an approaching ambulance.

Just a question—Are you happy?—but there was a presumption of intimacy to it that repelled me. That night, trying and failing to sleep, my mind rolled out of bed to void its contents into a bucket, where my feelings surged against the walls, unanchored from artifice, whipping up into clear, bubbling foam. My mind climbed a rockface, its red-and-blue palms slick, and then flung itself off a cliff older than time itself. I woke up jackknifed in the sheets, tear tracks like tattoos, a returnee from a voyage that I couldn’t remember except in shreds of souvenirs. One of these was a child’s hand, with the three-word question from the night before scrawled across the pinkish skin of the tiny palm. I sat down to write about the dream, and found that I couldn’t let myself do it.

Are you happy? Are you happy? Are you happy?

Sometimes I go weeks without writing because something else occupies my thoughts. I mean that literally: When I visit the door to my mind, I find a column of dark stone blocking the entry so entirely that no light and no sound can pass through. The column often takes a specific shape—my shape. I fiddle with the pen, head casting a shadow over the table, and when I look up I see my double standing there, arms crossed tightly over her chest. Her expression, as she stares down at me, is an uncomfortable tangle of conflictive emotion. She understands me better than anyone, but the greater intimacy has afforded her too close a look at my ugliness. I hear her voice as though from a distance, saying, in a tone reserved for iterant daughters: Stop that. Stop pretending. Write what you want to write. Write about your despair.

“My despair?” I say, slowly, trying to buy time.

“Yes, your despair,” she replies, sullenly, knowing everything about my every attempt at charade. “I know you’re afraid to scare people. But I won’t let you write about anything else until you do this.”

My despair. She is light enough for me to carry through the city, cradled in my arms like an infant animal. She is tender to the touch, like a pustule. The setting sun glazes the pavement in apricot and red. She settles in. My despair is warm and soft and smells like blood. I slow my steps so as to not startle her. I fall behind the crowds, letting the comfort of distant voices lapse into silence. When my despair turns her face up to me, she looks at me with eyes I recognize.

“I’m trying to write about my happiness,” I say to my double, in a feeble attempt to extricate myself from this effort.

“Keep going,” she insists.

At the boundary between the city and the forest, I pause to feed my despair. I let her tear at my breast. I don’t relish the pain, but indulge in it as welcome punishment. Angels land there soundlessly, at this place of limits, where feeling frays into air. When they try to separate me from my despair, I resist them. I step back forcefully when they reach for me, telling me in even, reasonable tones that my despair will change me into a person no one will tolerate.

“You don’t get it,” I say, rubbing the tip of my sneaker into the ground as though it were a lit cigarette. “I am that person already.”

“No,” they insist. Their faces are masks of cool, distant indignation. Behind me, my despair cries out for attention. “You’re happy, and everyone loves you.”

“Yes,” I say, “That’s true.” I pause. A flicker of realization. So this is what the double was getting at. “But it’s only one truth,” I continue. “The other truth is that I am happy and I am loved, and I still have my despair. These things are all related. Do you understand?”

“No,” they say, frowning deeply. We stare at each other in the uneasy silence of adversaries who could have been kind to one another in different circumstances. An impasse between the messengers of God and I. They sigh and throw up their luminous hands, casting rings of light over the undernourished grass. I watch them retreat to the heavens, where it is possible to live rapturously, with the perfect knowledge of pure and righteous life. They can’t see that here, in this dominion of the wretched, all feelings must coexist with despair, in the same world, and in the same person. Are you happy? Happiness and despair are connected, like the systems of a body. Are you happy? Do you despair? Both questions tie me to life with sacred thread. Both feelings are proof.

“Proof of what?” My despair asks, licking her wounded paw in the shadow of the trees. Her human tongue comes away with traces of human blood.

I am not afraid. I squint up at the sky, where the doors have closed against me. My despair sidles up to me, her claws leaving imprints on the soil shaped like a child’s hand.

“Proof of a heart,” I say.

In the moody, saturated, purple-hued world of my dream, I come across his presence. A cross-legged figure, hand resting over a deer’s bowed head, in a glen filled with fragrant, twilight-blooming flowers. He may be one of the lesser stars, but, as he turns his attention toward me, I am reminded that he is a star nonetheless. If I recognize him immediately it’s not because I remember his face, but because I will never forget how he made me feel.

I apologize for my mind, too malformed to attach healthily. I apologize for both wanting and fearing closure. I apologize for a stream-of-consciousness that sought to drown you in its waters, and seeks you still. I know I fixated on every accidental glance and stray word. I know I overinterpreted runes, panting in the crowded hallways with terror and heady exhilaration, as though every encounter between us were executed by a horned deity to whom I would soon owe everything. I know I changed like the tides. I know I left without saying goodbye. I know I cannot possibly have the temerity now to expect you to have stayed in the same place that I left you, your feet buried in black sand, your hands awash in chilly saltwater. I didn’t cultivate these grounds but still somehow want them to have stayed holy in my absence.

In my dream, you have the cool distance of a saint depicted in a pebbled mosaic. You are wary of me. Eyes of pewter, you raise one hand above the head of the penitent. You are someone distant and unknowable but fundamental to the faith. There was a time I followed you everywhere, do you remember? Like a child, or a dog, or a disciple. For years, you spoke to me as though via cipher. Your thoughts were as inaccessible as a drop of rain suspended in the cloudy air above a forest. Foolishly, I took you and your secrecy as a challenge. I thought I could learn you through intensive study and with concerted effort, the way one learns a language. I thought another person’s vulnerability was something you could work for and eventually earn. It took me years to understand that you weren’t particularly secretive or unknowable. You just weren’t interested in sharing anything with me.

It disturbs me to dream so often of you, a man who I only knew as a boy. There’s something profane about it. There’s something about it that fills me with so much shame. I can hardly bear to even write about it. Only the strength of the immediate feelings after I wake propels me forward, toward the cool glow of the computer, toward the dislocation of my heart. The dream fills me as though I were a pitcher, and I pour out over the dusty keyboard, my mind streaming in red and irregular ribbons over the keys. But when the swell of that emotion recedes, leaving only its watery imprint on the sand, the shame remains. Why do I long so strongly? Why do I revisit the memory like it owes me something? Is it a violation of some kind to be changed, to be unable to forget, to dream so much—of someone who was never mine?

She doesn’t believe in God anymore, she tells me. We sit in cracked plastic chairs, hard as diamond-face, on a dusky summer evening, torrid as the tropics, my frizzy hair escaping the ponytail, my attitude chomping at the bit, my attention on the leash with my willpower at the other end, digging in its heels, shame on the brain. God? I’m as godless as they get.

Conversation takes everything out of me; I put impossible pressure on myself to deliver not just a good response, but the best response. The optimized response for this woman, this situation. But my success rate is low, and the despair resultant from failure, great. The daylight long having circled the drain, our conversation has yielded easily to the darkness. Do I have it in me to answer this? I hold my breath. It’s the weekend, and anything can be said. I keep my eyes on her face. I get it, I tell her, though I don’t. I have never understood what it means to believe in God.

Throughout the phases of my life, multiple moons of friendship have waxed and waned. I will take the blame for the deterioration of conditions, for the dozen eclipses. But can anyone inflict pain and not live to regret it, in some form? I have mourned, more deeply than I can convey, the loss of the spirited, affectionate relationships of my adolescence, and, in particular, the soft-hearted, girlish blessing who eventually matured into a woman who wanted nothing to do with me.

I do try to be less hard on myself. I try to think about the circumstances outside my control. I try to be at least as compassionate toward myself as I am toward others. It doesn’t escape me that self-inflicted punishment is fruitless, and just one shade off the purpling hues of narcissism. Nevertheless, I am determined not to lose another friend the way I lost her. I am determined not to cut off the blood to any more plummeting stars.

[The cynic in me, reclining on a velvet divan placed, improbably, in the delectable maze of a fruit garden, rolls her eyes. You would have tired of each other eventually, she says. She separates a sour pebble of a grape from the vine and drops it into her mouth. Eyes closed, chewing slowly, the cynic says: She just pulled the trigger before you could. You just wish you’d been first to leave.]

I squirm in the chair. I keep the muscles of my face locked in place. I am:

Trying too hard!

Caring too little!

Being too much!

Refusing to let anything go!

I’m sorry you’re experiencing this, I say. In choosing my words, in directing the amateur theater of my expressions, I am laboring at the bench, carving, out of an ordinary block of olive wood, the version of me that I want her to see across the table. Poised, but human. Articulate, but approachable. Enviable, but not envied.

[The cynic, head lolling, looks up at me through her eyelashes. You can’t expect vulnerability and then be unprepared to offer it yourself, she says, lightly enough, though she means it, as she means everything, as a rebuke. The tragedy of your relationships is you want to be revered like the main character of a movie. You want your flaws rewritten into virtues. She sits up and, selects a fruit from a bowl without looking. The skin of the apple is glossy with spit where she bites into it. You want to be everyone’s therapist, and then complain about it. You have the temerity to be disappointed in everyone. Don’t you know nothing kills a relationship like judgment?]

I am:

Giving up!

Forgiving nothing!

Forgiving everything!

Cruel to myself, and cruel to everyone!

Judge, verb: Balancing the shining scales. Standing over the penitents who kneel deeply, foreheads pressed to the wine-colored stone. When they look up, faces ochre-yellow in the flame, their eyes brim with tears. Judgment, noun: Something generally under God’s command and in God’s province but that I have always claimed for my own, as a protective amulet, as a particular talent. I’m a good judge of character, I like to say, though this is based purely on my own estimation of myself and not any third-party verification. True to the scripture of the cynic, an ability to judge has won me nothing but enemies. I’ve even made a true enemy of myself.

I don’t say this to many people, she says. Uh, I reply, scrambling for a response. In overthinking how to make a friend, I have spent too much time trawling the swamp of my emotions, trying to fish out the appropriate reaction. I am ignoring, in direct contradiction of my mission, that someone waits, hands folded over her stomach, on the other side. Her expression is obscured by the dark, dense boughs of foliage that the wind has not strength to shake. I stare at her shape, already ready to surrender, to renounce any claim I have to friendship, to launch myself into the churning, gray waters around me and let them drag me into the shadows of fate. But some red-eyed pearl of expectation inside me refuses; it cries out in hope that she might step out into the light, might extend her hand, might call out my name—and then I could finally let go of everything I carry and weep from relief.

As I exit my twenties, I am becoming more aware of my body and its constituent elements. Its constraints, its habits. Its fires, its fluids. Its voids, its veins that newly throb, ocean-blue. When I sleep poorly, I wake up to dim, watery light, feeling, at the center of my hand, a faint, inconstant twinge, as though my body were a chord being played from a far distance.

My face has settled into the granite mask of a total stranger. I look in the mirror and don’t understand who is staring back. But though the whole refuses to coalesce into something that feels mine, I can nonetheless pick out shards of features bearing familial resemblance, borrowed from reservoirs of blood from my mother, my father, and my brother. I don’t feel like a self but like an amalgam of ancient metals that ooze and pool over my expression like banks of clouds occluding the light. Depending on my mood and the hour, the composition changes, like the riddle of the Sphinx; in some variations, I favor one dark-eyed relative more strongly than the others and then, in an instant, the allegiances change. Bent over the laptop, hair in my eyes, I am my brother’s twin. Smiling wanly at myself over fuzzy online conferencing, I see my father lurking in my face. But I expect I will age, despite all vows to the contrary, into a poor imitation of my mother.

The sky opens like a wound. I sit by the windows and watch rain dribble down. The world outside is a growing splatter of darkness. Wilderness served on a platter, and I pick at it distractedly. When lightning flowers, unexpectedly, in my field of vision, I feel myself clench like a fist. So distant from the dominion of nature, in this sterile cloister of millennial life, I forget regularly about the very existence of lightning and thunder. Buried in work, consumed by its million little agonies, I have felt time pass not naturally, but as one colossal, suffocating mass. Not even the wide-eyed face of nature, panting at my window, can shake me from this dream.

I feel my heart seize at the thought that I am twenty-nine and still don’t have any idea what I’m doing, still don’t have a face or life or character that is fully mine. I imagine, across the rooftops, past the telephone lines, that lightning strikes and a thousand ships with billowing sails cast off, content to leave me behind to weep inconsolably, face in my hands, the skin of my knees cut up by the sharp and algae-mottled rocks of the bay. One captain takes pity and yells back, before the ships disappear into the clouds, a final admonition: You court the sublime but must settle for the conventional.

The storm closes up. The sky stitches over its wounds with rays of light. I think of the cold air outside, which stings but is also a respite. I court the sublime but must settle for the conventional. In doing this, I break the most sacred promise, which is the one I made to myself at age seven on a playground on a sunny day, hands scratching at the sand, back during a time when it was possible for me to look out onto the waters of the future and not fear their depths. But this isn’t quite the truth. What holds me back is not imperfect knowledge of what is to come, but imperfect knowledge of myself. What holds me back is fear of what I can do, and fear of what I can’t. I talk too much. I achieve too little. I am still trying to trust myself with more than almost nothing. Forgive me, and then forgive me again.

Is this a good world? The question comes upon me like an unwelcome visitor on a day as clear as unblemished glass. My mood thrashes like a fish in a bucket. Is this a healthy world? To grant myself the opportunity to ponder this question in the fullness it deserves, I pause what I am doing, which is watching an endlessly looping video of a delicate, blue-veined hand with cream-tipped nails spreading green jelly polymer over a broad ceramic tabletop. Is this a good world? Is this is a healthy world? Is this a good—

The shadows of our time speak volubly to the crowds, standing in puddles of light with microphones close enough to kiss. They talk truth; they talk lies. Either way, it doesn’t matter. In the audience, I try to drown out the speech by turning up the chunky dial labeled “white noise” in my mind. I do this more and more, these days. I zone out and find it harder and harder to return.

Is this a good world? Is this the world prior to doomsday? How long can we live here—living too well, at too outrageous a cost—before something reacts? Is this a healthy world? What if it isn’t, and what if we can’t get better? What if we don’t want to? We know there will be no mercy for our behavior in the future. How long can I ignore the signs of the ritual about to take place?

The more I think about current conditions, the more I feel myself come apart. Zoning out feels like wedging my body into a crack in the wall while a storm voids itself above me. Zoning out feels like a safe haven. I struggle, in plain sight, to keep all parts of me connected and, when I fail at that, I retreat into that gap in the wall where I can’t hear the thunder anymore, where I don’t have to negotiate to keep my body together. Looking back now, I realize I have favored this response for far longer than I should have. The zone lives somewhere in me now.

Is this a healthy world? To heal it, I’d crawl into the blood-splattered center of a pentagram. But I’m not the medic. I’m not even the victim. I’m a symptom of the disease.

Because tenderness can be misconstrued as weakness, because weakness means vulnerability, because vulnerability can lead to pain, and because pain reminds us of our mortality, we live in a world that favors pleasure, invulnerability, strength, and ruthlessness over those fragile fragments of the human experience that make this life worth considering in the first place. I have seen how a show of tenderness will make a man an object of scorn, and a woman, a victim of tragedy.

If only you knew how bad things really are. I know when I am in the presence of greatness, not because I have some special ability to discern the wheat from the chaff, but because greatness insists on making itself known. We each, after all, have a receiver attuned to the sudden beauty of a sky acceding gracefully to the hugeness of nighttime. But greatness is an issue of scope, not philosophy. Its bruteness can fall on me like a blow. I walk through the city, for instance, and amid the flickering traffic lights, painted roads, pulsating crowds, I feel the awful greatness of extinction press on me. Nothing about this current life, I feel, can last.

So I entrust my life to art, because it is the only company I know that can soothe me. Art remains the only greatness I can let myself witness without fear or shame. I read books that don’t help me decode any of my present worries, but nonetheless serve to calm them. I watch movies and let myself cry with emotion at their purity—not the purity of their morals, but of their expression. I talk to someone new with as much earnestness as I can muster, because all too often I can let an encounter pass me by without paying homage to the accretion of tenderness in how a stranger extends a hand or moves to let someone else by, and I know we will not get the chance to know ourselves and each other like this forever.

Healing from the past is something more prosaic than it seems. The past is a foreign country and wounds inflicted there don’t fall under any health insurance scheme. I show my bleeding hand to a physician but she can only prescribe topicals that disappear into my skin without providing relief. The pain is dizzying. I try to read her face as she ushers me out of the room, but her expression is flat, illegible, either because she knows better than to deviate from cool professional neutrality, or because I am too out of it to detect the twinges in her eyes that might reveal a reserve of emotion.

Outside, obscenely colorful ornamental hedges line the concrete steps. I briefly panic. I let myself feel the sensation for a moment—horses frothing at the mouth, muscles straining to break into gallop —before crumpling it up in my hand like a gum wrapper and stuffing it into my pocket, to rediscover later. A sparrow vaults into the air and I follow its flight path with my gaze. Jealousy drains me like a syringe.

I know by now that holding a grudge is petty, puerile, and poisonous to everything green and golden in my life. But underneath the bandage, I keep the wound open.