Give Me a Sign

This morning I was once again awakened by the ominous sound of a hard, periodic tapping on the glass door downstairs. This has been going on for weeks, every day around 7:00 a.m., which is evidently the hour when the light strikes the window at such an angle that this dumb silly bird sees his own reflection in the glass (and yes I am assuming this bird’s gender — no girl bird would be this aggressive or territorial or dumb) and, identifying it as an enemy bird, attacks it. This noise persists, a blunt relentless bonk… bonk… bonk until I am sufficiently awake to yell, “You dumb bird!” and he flies off.

I’m still struggling to interpret this omen in any favorable way — this daily wake-up call of a dim-witted creature indefatigably battling itself. I’m in one of those phases when you start taking the universe a little too personally, when everything starts to seem like the kind of sign people ask God for. If you’ve ever had cancer or a pregnancy scare, you know how caskets or baby carriages suddenly seem to appear everywhere, crowding around you, cornering you. At these pivotal moments in life, when your brain is preoccupied by a single question, your pattern-recognition apparatus goes into overdrive, turning everything portentous. Everyone you meet becomes a dream figure or character in an allegory: sage or tempter, exemplar or nemesis, or what Kurt Vonnegut called a “wrang-wrang,” someone who so unappealingly embodies one life choice as to effectively discredit it. Every anecdote you hear sounds like a fable with a moral meant just for you. You start taking fortune cookies seriously.

I can’t help but pause at the crossroads to consider the two irrevocable, radically different futures I have to choose between for this last third of my life.

This tends to happen to me whenever I have a major life decision to make. I am faced with one such decision now — arguably the biggest, after to-be-or-not-to-be. We’re biologically assigned two simple jobs on this planet: surviving and reproducing. I have so far successfully carried out the former and evaded the latter. Now, although this isn’t a pregnancy scare, I am being offered the opportunity, for what is almost certainly the last time, to reproduce. It’s a decision I thought I’d already made a long time ago — or, rather, one I never had to make, since it’s one of the few things I’ve always known about myself, one of the givens on which my entire life has been predicated. (The fact that I think of cancer and pregnancy as equally scary news should give some indication of my attitude.) I have never even briefly second-guessed this decision, which is one reason I’m second-guessing it now: It is possible to hold certain ideas about yourself (I’m the kind of person who _______; I would never _______) that have become obsolete without your noticing it, because you haven’t had occasion to reexamine them in decades. So even if my decision still feels like a foregone conclusion, I can’t help but pause at the crossroads to consider the two irrevocable, radically different futures I have to choose between for this last third of my life.

With this dilemma hanging over me, my summer travels have felt fraught; instead of seeing sights, I’ve been seeing signs. Whenever I ride the train I feel blessedly suspended between destinations, briefly reprieved from time, so I took the Coast Starlight from Seattle to LA, a 36-hour trip: I saw wooded Oregon mountain valleys at dusk, the fogbound gloom of San Francisco, like a cursed kingdom in a fairy tale condemned to eternal winter even though the sun shines on the fields all around it, and, for the last hundred miles or so, the palms and dunes and paradise blue of the Pacific coast. In Seattle I saw Columbia, the capsule that returned the Apollo 11 astronauts safely back to earth, on display for the fiftieth anniversary of the moon landing, its surface gouged and ablated from the fires of reentry, its interior still scribbled with hasty, on-the-fly calculations in pencil. In Hollywood I watched a TV crew shooting a fake funeral in a real cemetery — extras sweating their asses off in black, grips wheeling plaster gravestones around on hand trucks among the marble ones: D.W. Griffith, Harry Cohn, Judy Garland, Fay Wray, Alfred Hitchcock, and the Douglases Fairbanks (Junior and Senior) entombed in a sarcophagus like a fallen god’s. It was all very meta — definitely a scene you’d include in your satirical novel about Hollywood. I attended an ash-scattering on a New Hampshire bay, where I saw 18th-century gravestones carved with blank-eyed angels, and cabin walls scrawled with the penciled heights of children long grown to adulthood.

It reminded me that I ought to salvage the penciled heights of my sister and myself from the upstairs wall before I demolish our own family vacation cabin this fall. Like Columbia, this cabin is as old as I am: I learned to read here from Fantastic Four comics; I watched Nixon’s resignation speech from the same spot where I’m sitting now. But at this point the place is decrepit, borderline habitable, the wood rotten and mildewed and burrowed by carpenter bees. Pretty much every single appliance in the house is broken or requires “a little trick” to work — the shower drips, the washer/dryer hasn’t run in years, eggs freeze solid in the fridge, the oven temperature is anyone’s guess, clothes get mold-spotted and moth-chewn in the closet, and don’t even look in the dishwasher. It’s also rather more permeable to the elements and to wildlife than one typically likes in a shelter; I find crinkled snakeskins twined about old push-mowers and phone cords in the utility room, a rustic touch that fails to appeal, in particular, to female visitors. After having crapped in the bamboo forest for several days while waiting for the toilet to be fixed, I feel a lot less sentimentally attached to the place.

Lately there have been a gratuitous number of reminders of age and decay. Last week my sister asked me to call our mother and confirm that I was still alive; she’d apparently become convinced that I’d been killed in an accident and everyone was covering it up from her. My mother’s health is in decline, and her ideation has become conspiratorial of late. The news of my survival did not placate her as much as I might’ve hoped; it didn’t seem to address her central concern. Her relationship to reality vacillates daily: One day this summer, in a long, sustained burst of shocking lucidity, she delivered a well-informed and resolute statement to her doctor and me about her end-of-life wishes; the next day she was watching an imaginary screen on which were displayed people’s moral transgressions and redemption, as indicated by red and green lights. You weren’t allowed to leave the hospital, she explained, until you’d cleared your name on the board, all green. “Uh-oh,” she said, watching the imaginary readout, “Looks like you’ve got one up there.” I told her I really didn’t think I had done anything wrong, at least not since arriving at the hospital. She looked at the display, then at me. “Not according to this thing,” she said.

Getting through this life without succumbing to either delusion or despair requires a constant act of doublethink, understanding that nothing means anything while believing that it does.

My mother was a nurse, and understands that hallucinations and delusions are symptoms of her diagnosis, cognitive errors in visual processing or pattern recognition. Thomas Pynchon, America’s paranoid laureate, sees paranoia as an inevitable consequence of our facility for finding connections and seeing intention behind things. A penchant for metaphor is a useful aptitude for a writer, but if you start seeing everything as connected, or as a symbol for something else, you’re soon filling notebooks with numerological gibberish or haranguing online passersby about the Illuminati. But even Pynchon prefers paranoia to its opposite — the total absence of any pattern or meaning, the denial of all significance. This, for me, is always a warning sign of depression: the world looks dead, a collection of inert objects devoid of emotional associations or importance. Nothing means anything; it’s just a bunch of stuff. Getting through this life without succumbing to either delusion or despair requires a constant act of doublethink, understanding that nothing means anything while believing that it does.

I’m writing this freshly awakened by that dumb bird again. I would not say I have grown fond of this bird, but I accept him as a part of my life now. My decision remains unmade: I’m still banging my head against the same invisible wall day after day. Today is my last day in this cabin for the season, maybe ever. How to interpret the text of this summer? In the melancholic light of autumn, it’s easy to read everything as portents of time and death. I remember the Apollo capsule, its age almost coterminous with my own, a scarred relic of America’s prime, when we were at our most ambitious, belligerent, and hubristic — shooting for the Moon using slide rulers and pencils. I imagine humanity as that film crew in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, all of us obliviously going on with the show, surrounded by our dead predecessors. A friend in Seattle posed the question to me: What else are you gonna do with the rest of your life? I’m not sure changing diapers is an appealing alternative, but whatever you choose, in the end there are always diapers. What do I want my life to be: incontinence and dementia, or incontinence and screaming? Are there no other ways out of here? Not according to this thing.

On Labor Day weekend — summer’s end, when all the possibilities of June are obviated — I held a valedictory party for my beloved old A-frame. It’s possible it will have been valediction for more than a house, depending on which future I choose. I used to host an annual Fourth of July party here decades ago, when we were all young — a days-long debauch with a lot of scandalous and ill-advised behavior [long list of examples added and then, on reflection, deleted]. This recent party was a more laid-back, middle-aged affair, since we could no longer endure the heroic hangovers of yore and nobody wants to see anyone else naked anymore. Even so, hearteningly, there were still some late-night intrigues, farcical sleeping re-arrangements, and property damage. I occasionally still have dreams about big parties here, which any analyst would probably read as metaphors for the state of my life. The most memorable and mythic of them was like the last scene in the last Narnia book, in which all the characters from all seven books are reunited in the afterlife. All my friends from every circle and era of my life seemed to be there. And as I stepped out of the house, down off the porch, and made my way out into the lawn, it seemed I was going further back in time, until in the center of the lawn I saw my own parents as a young couple, sitting on a picnic blanket, overlooking the water. They were the age they would’ve been around the time they adopted me, the era of the moon landing — my mother slim and blonde in cat’s-eye glasses, my father alive again in his old black horn-rims, clean-shaven with his hair slicked back. And there between them on the blanket, barely able to stand with assistance, was myself as a very young boy. I knelt down on the blanket next to him, and what I said or did next I don’t remember.