Descent Read Free

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.
    A bland and sullen downtown pall. Anyone not despondent, I believed, was wearing blinders. The rightness of unhappiness was obvious and clear. The onlyreasonable response to the world was an overwhelming and excruciating sadness; everything else was willful delusion. And now I couldn’t gaze on innocent humanity, and wanted to hide my face. I wanted to curl in on myself. The pageant around me appeared like a charade in which the players were ignorant of their artifice, and of the pathos they elicited in their audience of one. There was nothing to do but shrivel and surrender, because the sham and tragedy of everything was, moment by moment, and at every turn, hideously too much to bear.
*       *       *
    Home meant being differently mired and newly incoherent. Though I divulged my condition to my wife at our doorstep, there was no deliverance in this confession, and my strained description of disequilibrium succeeded mostly in frustrating me, as if words were a rudiment devised for the purpose of obscuring intended meanings. (“I was much further out than you thought / And not waving but drowning,” wrote Stevie Smith, in an apt summation of the problem.) Meanwhile, my wife was not disabled and my children—ages eight and up—were making plans for recreations. A September stillness sat on our house, punctuated by rushes of autumn wind, and the young whips in the orchard appeared anemic. The pond was low, and deer had chewed inroads against our garden. The many and various pastoral concerns that had comprised for some time my afternoon palette now seemed false, hackneyed, and onerous. And on my desk a fat pile of mail tilted, it too exhausting in appearance. For my work as a writer I had no brainpower, but for hysteria there were boundless synapses, however frayed, available for firing, and I spent them at the altar of the World Wide Web—between long bouts with CNN—feverishly indulging my host of paranoias: looking for hideaway banks in Australia, criteria for Canadian citizenship, Tasmanian real estate, conscientious objector exegesis (I had two sons of draftable age—never mind that there was currently no draft), water purification treatises, anthrax esoterica, analyses of Russian nuclear security, and excerpts from the Al Qaeda terrorism handbook that might yield clues to my future. Complicated, labyrinthine spelunking, but the Web is the paranoid hysteric’s supreme enabler, and its deep interstices and eerie connectivity extend the reach of the psychotic temper, lend insanity the power of corroboration, and provide strange provenance for every obsession and confirmation for every delusion. Clicking and scrolling, I elbowed outward, until truth was shaped by my consciousness (it was a little like playing with a Ouija board). I had merely to start a search engine to make of my sick mind the universe.
    I now suspected that my packet of symptoms went by some clinical name. There’s a bank of drawers in one wall of our bedroom and I had taken up counting them repetitively to confirm their existence in sets of twos, a practice that never yielded satisfaction, one counting always leading to the next and producing fresh uncertainties. The lumber in the ceiling needed counting too, but shiplap in expanse can seem like op art and this girded my deep insecurity regarding the number of boards overhead; mightn’tsome have blurred together? They wanted recounting with a sharper eye, but still I couldn’t be sure. I counted and the rhythm of counting was robotic, or like a child reciting times tables—a silent voice mysteriously impelled but not crowding out my doomsday thoughts; it insisted on itself in parallel.
    The air felt viscous, and it was difficult to act. My sloth was so