That night there was a
thunderstorm. Jamie laid phobically rigid in his bed that throbbed with every
crash of his pulse. The thunder would cleave the city in two, Jamie was certain,
and any moment he would go as mad as he had forty years before in Italy. In a
desperate attempt at therapy, Jamie pulled his mind back through his life, using
the years' numbers as knots in a rope of time. He wanted to go back before
Italy, back before thunder and lightening were the Pavlovian signals for the
terror in him to start sniveling and whining and advocating heart attack. "Be a
man like you told Adam," he whimpered in his mind when a thunderclap all but
caused his heart to slice through his ribs.
But that had been the very thing.
Being a man. In medical school he had thought he was a man, until one day he
found himself in another man's arms. He had scuttled out of his medical school
deferment, into the army, into the war, into Italy, and eventually into the
attic where he went mad. He had rushed into the war to be a man. He would be a
man by use of the war even if it meant he would be a dead man, he had sworn. But
either way, dead or alive, his intention was the use the grand manly terms of
war to be cured of homosexuality.
But the shellings and the crackling bullets and the filth and the cold and the
fits of boredom and the crescendos of horror disrobed and defiled the romances
of death and war and manhood more thoroughly than medical school cadavers or
operating theaters could. Before Jamie had seen precise cadavers, precise death.
Even emergencies he had seen had seemed more orderly, despite their random
causes and effects, than this bloody mayhem he now witnessed, that was
politically scheduled, militarily designed. Now as a medic, Jamie saw men--real
men all of them whether sniveling and gay, in shock and gay, or stoic and gay;
or straight and any of these things--he saw these men dying, saw them
dismembered, saw them go mad, saw them cheat and steal and brag, saw them
perform acts of tender kindness and generosity. And he noted how uniform the
boredom was, and how more fundamental it was than the superficial uniformity of
government issue. And likewise it was with the fear, that it was a steady, solid
prehuman elemental current that spiked through the whole outfit.
If this sense of universality did
Jamie any good in the war and his war on his homosexuality, it was shattered by
his personal job: Jamie had to shove hacked up organs back through new cut red
doorways in chests and abdomens and skulls. His hands would slip and slide while
he tried to cap gushing arteries. So Jamie saw that being a man was a flimsy,
messy thing anyway. And that there were forces in the world that treated the
notion of humanity like so many dispensable tons of protoplasm. He saw first
hand that death was anything but the essence of manhood, and that any kind of
honor but personal honor was a filthy macabre joke. He saw that the concept of
manhood, mounted myth upon myth through the centuries, was an intersocietal
fraud. The whole thing about being a man, a human being, a mensch, a person
needed, demanded reworking on an individual basis.
If Jamie could intellectualize
all this, if later he was to firmly grasp that it was better to be homosexual
and a nice guy and alive than a minor detail of blooded debris on one of the
millions of blades of the war machine, during his part in World War II Jamie
functioned to all appearances but was disintegrating inside. So great was
Jamie's concentration on staying alive despite his vows to die, so great was his
effort in keeping as many other heroes alive as his shaking hands could help,
and so slender was the filament of personality that was left him, and so hard he
concentrated on keeping that thread from snapping, that he did snap. In the
attic in Italy, with the rain typing "Life and death. Life and death," on the
tile roof.
And he declined every
sign and vestige of interest and productivity for a year back in the States in a
VA hospital. Then one day was different. The rather wan and scrawny, older Army
psychiatrist shuffled into the therapy room and lectured Jamie:
"None of our brilliant theorizing
today, Jim. There's no more time for it. I found out yesterday that I have
cancer. I'm dying. I'll be leaving here, leaving the Army. Under the
circumstances, I'm going to drop the professional veils--and the persona, nice
chitchat about the universe that you've charmingly wheedled me into over the
months.
"I'm going to tell you
what to do because time is too short for fooling around about these things. My
time is too short and yours, even if you live another hundred years, it too
short.
"For one thing, you're a
homosexual."
Jamie's mouth
dropped open and he began to sputter.
"Don't bother with denial. I
know. You've told me by omission and inference a hundred times. Besides," the
doctor went on, "it doesn't matter. That isn't even your problem. And, by the
way, there's no mention of it in my reports.
"Your problem is that you don't
know how to be. You glory now in your existential depression because you are
young. But believe me, you'll get older and it'll be harder to drag your flesh
around in your miasma of emotional and intellectual devastation. Do you get
that? That you're only human? And you have moral responsibilities to yourself
and the world to boot?
"And other
than a proclivity for intellectually neutralizing everything that might consume
you with interest or passion, you have obvious gross traits in your personality
that you have to abide by and control. These traits are the ones that cancel
each other out at the moment and prevent you from--I hesitate to say progressing
because I don't believe in linear success--they keep you from life.
"On the one hand you love the
great drama. On the other hand you want to keep strict accounts and balances of
everything that goes on. Anal compulsive and anal retentive all at once. But I
lend you my purge. Get over this shit for my sake. I have no doubt that if you
cater exclusively to one or the other side of your remarkably well divided
personality that you'll crack again. On the other hand, you could spend the rest
of your life trying to integrate these two sides of yourself. You could sit in
this hospital for fifty years chasing your tail. Have you seen the guys
downstairs from the last war?"
Jamie gave a shudder.
"Take up
something other than medicine, Jim. Doctors think they are God. You suffer from
a God complex already with the dramatic universe arguing with the orderly all
the time. Let them stay apart. Let them reconcile in your dreams, if they can.
That's their problem. Your problem is you have to do something practical. The
first thing you have to do, because you have to have a template to
intellectually handle this, is realize that schizophrenia is the normal,
natural, healthy human condition. Human's the key word. You think you're not
human just because you're a homosexual? You think you're a separate species? No.
You're a male adult homo sapiens. Now be human. Be a man.
"My suggestion is that you pull
yourself together and get out of this dump. And then go be an actor on weekends
for the sake of your dramatic bent, and make a living as an accountant during
the week for your anal retentive side. It should appeal to your sense of order
to have a double plan and to your sense of drama, as well, to assume two
disparate roles."
Though Jamie
had known that the doctor was only offering examples, he followed the advice to
the letter. He was dismissed from the hospital within a few weeks and he studied
for a degree in accounting in his mornings, and acted and took acting classes
the rest of the time. He was happy. He met Felix Lord and the King of Giggles in
the theater, and later handled their books and taxes.
Having tripped upon Adam's
father's name in his mental wanderings, Jamie thought of the playwright who lay
ill in the apartment down the hall. He looked at his clock and put on his robe
and went to give Adam another tablet. While walking back down the hall, Jamie
nearly collapsed when a crash of thunder bespoke a new storm hovering over the
city. Jamie shook back to bed, realizing that he had almost lulled himself with
memories during most of the first storm. He tried again to remember specifically
having focused all his fear on thunder. He speculated for the thousandth time on
the sagacity of the psychiatrist's advice. Perhaps if he had reconciled the
sides of his personality, he would not be phobic. But then, he guessed with a
shiver, perhaps there could be worse things than phobia. He tried for the ten
thousandth time to remember if it had thundered that night in Italy during or
after the shelling. But all he could remember was the tapping of the rain in the
morning that sounded like the word processor. And so Adam came to mind.
He choked in the soprano range
accompanying a clap of bass thunder, then after a minute sighed about Adam. He
was truly grateful that there had never been sex with Adam. He was happy with
their long friendship. And he had come to think of Adam as a son, anyway. But he
wished Adam would get over whatever it was that was wrong with him. He wished
Adam would get married. Be happy. Jamie was willing to want marriage for
Adam--only if were an absolutely happy marriage--even if it meant that Jamie
would be alone. Jamie wanted grandchildren. But Adam had to get a lot better,
emotionally first, and he had to get out of the house more. Jamie could not
hardly imagine how Adam had hung around the apartment for years, watching soap
operas, reading and staring off into space. Jamie had watched him do it all this
time and he still couldn't believe it.
More lightning and thunder spun
Jamie back to the time when he had recovered from the war. He had grown
healthier learning to count those things that were countable in an unaccountable
world, and learning to refrain from counting what was not. Though he had swiftly
become a very good actor, the main blessing he got from the theater was not
having to wait for his dreams to reconcile the orderly and chaotic universes. A
good play was as good as a dream. He watched artistic genius invent
accountability out of thin air. He watched the births of exquisite algebras
attended by writers, actors and directors. During the magical confines of
performances, good and excellent productions managed to account for an
unaccountable universe. Unlike in his ledgers where numbers and numbers only
were admitted to have sense, in plays balances of words, emotion, plot, and
character were struck. And the sum was always more than the parts. In life the
opposite was true, Jamie knew in his existential heart. In life the sum was
always zero. But that was too grim. Better to leave the gloom to King Lear, to
Hamlet. Those guys who could talk so pretty as they chased their doom that you
could almost be happy at hopelessness. Or at least the articulation of gloom
could give it a shape and form and therefore a manageability. Give it a math. An
accountability. But it was more than that. Hitler, after all, gave Germany a
shape and form for its grimness. The Jews were accountable. With plays, with
art, it shouldn't leave you dangling and thirsting for blood. In plays it takes
you all the way to the door of gloom. And when the door swings open, there is a
mirror inside, poised at such an angle that you can see yourself and a
smattering of the audience, the rest of humanity who surround you. Sympathy.
Humanism. The glory of the story!
But there was more to it than that. Though the mirror metaphor was excellent, if
art were just mirrors, it would be as accountable as physics. Art could be
turned out in factories, if it were that easy, just as vast garbage heaps of
quasi-art are turned out factor style. Real art is unaccountable, Jamie knew. It
is magic. In the end you just have to realize that it is magical. Art is
conceived, gestated, born, bred, and matured by nurturings of an invisible,
capricious parent magic. The mystery of creation. No matter how meticulous and
scientific the critics' dissection of the DNA of a work of art, nor no matter
how fastidiously a biographer--even auto--sifts around in the kitchen middens
where the alchemy of a work of art was temporally historically cooked up, there
is no cloning to be had, no recipe to be copied. Even geniuses did not know
their sources, otherwise they could conjure works by great craft in assembly
line fashion.
Jamie's experience
had registered the power of the matter. In his time as an actor he had played
Shakespearean roles that left him shaken for months after. He had played the
part of Adam's father in Rose and Horses before it went to Broadway.
Though Jamie was no genius, he had been the conduit for genius, he had let the
great words and characters rage and roll and sing through his body. He
understood more of the craft than most members of an audience, but he also
understood better than the most stage-struck amateur the extraordinary savage
power of great plays. He also knew that it was not glitter not prancing
narcissism that made the lines play upon the stage, but again a sort of savage,
primal best and handsomest modulation of insane ravings.
As thunder and lightning guttered
and fanned the fires of his thought, Jamie gloried in the brilliance of these
dark creative worries. As the storm receded, he left off thinking how those
savage strengths of genius had racked Adam all of the years since his early
plays, and that the salt in all those congenitally exacted wounds had been
Adam's own silence. Adam hadn't even been able to mold his torment and bliss
into art. He wasn't even able to assume the postures of adulthood by writing
so-so plays. But Jamie left off those thoughts by embracing the hope that Adam
was done with that period, that this play would be written and live up to the
promise of the first act.
With
the storm abating, Jamie took on less dramatic worry. He wondered how he might
help Adam. He could bandage him, take him to the doctor, make coffee, buy food,
but in the end it was up to Adam, Jamie knew. Or it was up to the muses. Jamie
would do anything for Adam. But in the end it was up to a reconciliation of
contraries in Adam's mind. Or not his mind, Jamie amended. His soul. There was
nothing wrong with Adam's intellect. He had all the clutter of information there
like everyone else to do the job at hand, and he had all the training and craft
to do it. What he lacked, Jamie surmised, was sustained, tuned inspiration.
Grace. Grace was the word. Adam needed the grace to synthesize all the paradoxes
great and small into a whole. Into an accountability. Somehow Adam's sweet
insane soul had to be married to his mind, the horrors that it knew and all. And
then there would be a play. Unlike in his own case, it was in dreams that Adam
must reconcile the orderly and chaotic aspects of the universe. It was in
dreams, Jamie knew, that folks like Adam did their work. And Adam would be
dreaming a lot while the strep raged through him for the next few days. So Jamie
consigned Adam to the help of dreams. Like a doctor calling for the mending
powers of sleep.
Everyone prays.
Just the little things they say to no one in particular. Of course there are
formal prayers, and there are lots of those said. But there are little thoughts
that flit out of the brain that are little incantations, little hopes. Sometimes
big. Jamie was like everyone else and had been the purveyor of his thousands of
these over the decades. But now for the first time in fifty years, he put his
hands together in prayer to a god who had become mightily evolved in half a
century from the boyhood Methodist god that Jamie had last prayed to. He prayed
first to be cured of his phobia. Then he promised that he would make Adam
coffee, etc., ad infinitum. And he asked for intervention in Adam's writer's
block. He asked that Adam be allowed to write his play.
When the thunder at last was
merely toying with the heavens, was rolling around the rim of the city like the
ball on a roulette wheel, Jamie tried to like it. Tried to catch memory of a
thunderclap from his childhood, between the time of infantile fear and his later
phobia. Tried to remember what it was like to not be afraid. The effort was
putting him to sleep, and slowly he began to smell cherry blossoms. The gorgeous
scent nearly sent him from his half-sleep, but he hurried back to the dreamy
perfume.
Cherry Bay, Wisconsin.
Ten years old. A trip in spring with his father to buy land. They were driving
through an orchard in an open car. The sky was pearl grey and it was thundering
and lightning in the distance. A pink, ineffably beautiful single petal of a
blossom landed in Jamie's lap. There was no rain yet, but petals began to fall
in a rising wind so that it was surprising that the flowers were not wet and did
not splash. Jamie had looked up at at branches that looked like black jags of
lightning.
Jamie the sixty year
old jolted awake. "Was I about to tell myself that if cherry trees look like
lightning, and cherry blossoms look like pink rain, then thunder must be the
scent of cherry blossoms? That's ridiculous... It's true," he thought, "it has
been best that I didn't leave reconciliations to my dreams. I understand Adam's
talent, and I understand the little prosaic needs like coffee, but I could never
put it all together. I can act as though the world is a logical place, but I
can't pretend it is. I can't make it accountable. The world is as unthinkable as
a phobia."
He though all this in
a few seconds and fell immediately asleep. In dreams in sleep in nights later in
the week he would dream of having conversations with Felix Lord. He would dream
of acting in Adam's play. But tonight he dreamed about the sweetness of
childhood. And so he found being alive and being Jamie quite sweet for some days
following.