Descent Read Free Page A

great as to make dressing ponderous. Gravity lay heavy on me; nevertheless I was urgent, always, to wrestle with my condition. Compelled to it by a dire panic, I called my doctor and told his receptionist that I needed to see him as soon as possible regarding a troubling stomach pain, a deception that seemed to me entirely necessary as a means of avoiding humiliation.
    My doctor is competent, sturdy, gracious, and has a trace of Kentucky in his delivery and manner. He had tapped on my bare chest at intervals past and taken the measure, apologetically, of my prostate, but despite these intimacies he seemed now appalled to hear that I’d succumbed to madness. I made a number of bereft confessions regarding the depths to which I’d sunk and described myself as “behind glass.” My doctor, meanwhile, sat stoically on a wheeled stool in his perpetually pill-less woolen sweater-vest and registered my symptoms with an air of tragedy and with a disconcerting haplessness, as if my condition were Ebola or a brain tumor. He sighed more than once, his shoulders caved in, and his hands stayed folded against his khakis. The modulated certainty evaporated from his voice as he fumbled in an effort to prescribe something soothing and urged me in the direction of psychiatry.
    Next door I endured embarrassment again when my kindly pharmacist of many years handed me a bottle of Xanax pills and quietly said, “I’m so sorry.” I prevaricated in the face of this drugstore affront, claiming the prescription was for use judiciously on future airplane journeys. I also yearned for an anonymity my neighborly world couldn’t afford. Knowing nearly everybody in my neck of the woods, which had heretofore seemed for the most part pleasant, now seemed like an unnavigable morass and demanded of me convoluted perjuries. Yet try as I might to wear my old face, my eyes were telltale windows into darkness, and everybody seemed to look right through them, and sadly, to see how I’d declined.
    At home my pretense took punishing forms—an excruciating pose of normalcy over dinner, or staring down, for the benefit of my children, the bleak news emanating from the television. The Xanax made me mildly sleepy but otherwise provided no ameliorative boon, and surreptitiously I called my brother—a psychiatrist—to discuss the remedy my doctor had meted out, this call made with the bathroom door locked and the door to the shower stall closed, me inside.
    My brother asked diagnostic questions, cautioned me regarding the addictive quality of the entire class of benzodiazepines, applauded as appropriate and widely standard my doctor’s choice, and dosage, of Xanax, then reminded me that a stock explanation for certain kinds of creative output—for example, the writing of stories and novels—was a latent mental illness. In fact, the writing is the illness, the illness expressed as words instead of illness, with the punishing symptoms waiting for the stories and novels to finally wane over an inner horizon and descend out of the way. Something like that; I didn’tquite follow. In my agitation I couldn’t comprehend. I probably misrepresent my brother, but I don’t misrepresent my confusion about things, there in the shower stall.
    Hemingway, London, Woolf, Borowski, Shelley, Plath, et cetera—writers go mad (and kill themselves). The relationship (“inspired madness”) is widely embraced, a reading discussion group or classroom commonplace, sometimes conceived as a riddle or code—a poem deciphered as a portrait of madness—this is what some students take away from lit courses and biographies of Anne Sexton. On the other hand, there’s also science in corroboration of this, with numerous studies establishing a link between creativity and serious depression. One says that artists are eight to ten times more likely than others to suffer from a major depressive disorder; a second stops at seven; a third, undertaken at Brown University, that 50 percent of