Conscience Round

When I stepped off the train after my last day at my last job, the thought bubbled up from some vial of dark ether: “I would like to go get shit-faced.” This specific urge was new to me, though the feelings that motivated it were not. Endings make me melancholy. They twist my frame of mind into something that can no longer hold my portrait in place. The oily pigments of my painted face run all the way to the edges of the frame, and then drip onto the floor. Richly overdramatic purple, green olive, waxy pink. Pooling there, in a rainbow oil slick, until I can run my hand through—my fingertips, teardrops of wet, glassy pink, green, blue that, when mixed, go plummy, like basalt in the shadow of the sunset—and anoint myself anew.

Inside me, a bubble of glass is slowly growing. It expands until it sits right beneath my skin. I feel the membrane of glass against the membrane of my tissue, both surfaces engaged in gentle, exploratory contact. My cells worm their way around the intruder, probing the hard, transparent surface with their plasma-soaked limbs. Then the bubble breaches the boundaries of my body, painlessly. It now holds me within it, rather than vice versa. The air inside the bubble is both clear and cloudy, and I can see the path of the planets circumscribed around it. They flicker past me: spheres of old gold. Constellations that proceed on predetermined paths, that already know their futures. Saturn winks as he passes, teeth bared slightly in warning; I suppress a shiver of disgust.

My mother, the amateur astrologer, arrives via shooting star. She grabs my hand; she pulls me into her orbit, where she holds court in the cosmic theater. She convicts me, quickly, correctly, of the crime of cynicism, which springs eternally from a cup of bone embedded in my torso, irrigating my flesh like blood. In front of an unfeeling jury of my peers, hands folded against my gray tunic, I admit that my cynicism has been known to overcome me, has been known to erupt from my mouth and onto the inside walls of the bubble of glass. A gasp rises from the audience. “But is it not punishment enough,” I plead, “that I have to live with the thorn-shaped stains, crowning my vision forever?” My cynicism, beading on the glass like raindrops, is bile-green, ocean-blue, and streaked with daggers of red. It distorts the patterns of planets. Like torrid rain streaking against a windshield, it obscures my path forward. “No, it’s not enough,” says my mother, in her powdered wig, pounding her gavel with childlike glee. “You’re a danger to society and a corruptor of your own youth.”

As I am dragged away in heavy chains, I think: “My own—?”

I thought I was done writing about quitting my job. But it turns out that I’m still not done with that process. I feel it sitting in my mind like a stack of paperwork. The pages slip and float to the floor; their edges grow a pelt of dust. I retrieve them, sighing, and rearrange them into a more balanced configuration. No part of this endears me to the necessity of reading these twisted pages. “I don’t think I ever heard the reason you left,” a former colleague tells me over a final lunch. I raise a glass of water to my lips. I’ve rehearsed this answer a hundred times, and I’ve delivered it a hundred more times. I put the glass down a little more heavily than intended. “It was a timing thing,” I say. “Everything is about timing.” She nods, solicitously leaving any follow-up questions unasked. We both understand that I cannot be forthright about a place that we have both chosen—her, to stay; I, to leave.

Sometimes, I imagine how to tell her the truth. It begins with a fairytale about a lonely girl who grew into a confused woman. She was not a princess nor a beast. She was not Ariadne and not the Minotaur. Mundane in her mundanity. She was the granite that built the tower. She was the walls of the labyrinth. She was the on-call family therapist all throughout her childhood and adolescence. At the time, the role felt like a privilege, a natural outgrowth of emotional maturity, proof of preternatural wisdom. But she eventually came to understand that it had been an imposition, a form of deprivation, and that it was very possible—possibly inevitable—for a sensitive child to mistake adultness for a propensity for martyrdom. But old habits are hard to break and throughout her twenties she continued in the role, conducting daily relationship therapy between obstinate Minos and cruel Theseus, between Saturn and the painter, between image and frame, between bull and man, between desire and shadow. The most difficult of these was the duel between red-eyed cynicism and its ideological opposite—which was not quite optimism, nor hope, nor dream, but some union of the three that railed against the walls of the maze, fighting to prove that things could be different.

As she was locked in the cell, the keys jangling as the door closed behind her, she wondered: “That what could be different? That I—could be different? I—?”

From the window cut into the stone, optimism answered: “Yes. That you could be different.” (A muffled cry as, somewhere outside on the grass, optimism choked the air out of cynicism, preventing its rebuttal.)

Then, hope, sensing an opening, softly: “Not to mediate, but to create. Not to be underused, nor underestimated.”

Then, dream, with such purity of tone it induced her to crawl to the window frame as it rang out, like a bell: “To fight,”—she wedged her knee against the stone, scrambling for purchase, for a better view, to peer out into the light—”for the future of something you can’t yet name.”

Currently living in a mood that feels like rapture. The rapture is joyless but the joylessness is a comfort. The light on the water has changed from sequins to scarlet, from foam to dust. But I have released any need for anything to be different than what it is.

I nick a finger with a knife. I nick the blade against a whetstone. The moon is a disc of gold and it gloats at me, but I have learned how to ignore it. I wet my palate with something persimmon-flavored. In the laboratory, standing goggled and gowned, Igor raises a bony hand from the lever and asks me if the job is done. My hands are gory with something that looks like strawberry puree. “No,” I say, enjoying the feeling of the word.

I listen to the outro of White Ferrari over and over until I can feel, simmering underneath my skin, the urge to cry. But I can let it go if that is my desire and today, desires are all that will lead me. I look at satellite images of Tokyo, the bay awash in clouds. “No,” I say again, and my expression clears like the morning after the rain.

For your birthday this year, you quit your job. You dropped the reins and let the leather lay flaccid on the grass. You spent a cold morning walking the old city, tears seeding your eyes like pearls. You didn’t respond when your body called out your name. You said: I mean, what for? I cannot look back and retrace my steps across the ocean. You cut those veins and let the footprints fill with blood.

You thought of everything you wanted to write but then, sitting at the keyboard after two months of swimming in a hole of darkness, you raised your hands to the uneven light and found them reduced to lumps of lunch meat. To restore their life would required sacrifice. You said: What do I have left to give? The amphora is already broken.

You spent hours in the red-colored badlands, squatting over artifacts of the distant past. You brushed the dust off their faces with a tenderness that felt pained, jagged, filthy. You scratched out messages with a scalpel. Where did you go? On the pieces of the amphora, a reply, long eroded into sand that shone in the air like scattered light. Once upon a time, there was something whole here, in this place where you hoard nothing but shards.

Magnolia petals on the asphalt, April 1994. For your birthday this year, promise that you will pack up your digger’s tools. Promise that you will cross the desert. Promise you will retreat to the forest, where the ruins of the old city are overgrown with moss, and where the insects have made homes in the hollowed-out traffic lights. There, it is possible to stand in the stream, the fish kissing your knees, their movements a map to a future not yet known to us, and feel clean in a new way, one that the water can neither give nor take away.

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.