Mainland

Chapter One
Preoccupation

Why won't anyone believe you when you say, I have had a revelation?

Why does it have to be led up to, foreshadowed, given a clear motive, when in fact, very few things have motives in the first place, much less clear ones? I admit there are circumstances, but motives? Please. Personally, I'm still trying to figure out what people truly mean when they use a word like motive. I actually looked in a mirror and asked out loud, "Eli, what the hell is motive?" It's like character, which is something novelists create and readers talk knowingly about. There is no such thing a character, a fixed, final thing. All it amounts to is novelists enjoy writing lies and readers enjoy reading lies, which is not without merit. But the real thing is something novelists don't know how to create. And if they tried, the result would not be a novel.

As far as the search for motive, I have noticed that people look back on what happened prior to a revelation and construct an entire architecture to explain why someone's life has shifted. But the difference between revelation and realization is that a revelation doesn't ring the doorbell. Revelations do not follow Evil Kneivel's meteoric swoop over a heap of burning vehicles: a fall, rise and another long drop that matches oh-so-coincidentally the theoretical pattern of human sexual response, a theory that misses the point completely. Revelation, like desire, sneaks up on you.

Escaping death, a temporary situation at best, is usually pointed to as the cause for revelation. I know this for a fact. I've seen that tilt of the head, the narrowing eyes, the expression of pasted-on wisdom from people who have decided I should thank my illness for every insight. The connection isn't as tenuous as I once thought. Lying around waiting for more pain, more bad news, more lying around, you begin to understand things differently. You have a change of mind, which is usually precluded by a change of heart or a change of some other vital organ, so, of course, you'll have these new realizations because the change in you has already occurred. But these are not necessarily the realizations you thought you'd have.

At the beginning, you imagine yourself behaving in a lot of ways, none of which you ever thoroughly manage. You think you'll be either brave or cowardly, stalwart or whiny, alert or dazed, but you're usually all those things at the same time. I remember quite clearly that in the recovery room I was the second coldest I have ever been in my entire life. All I could do was scream for more blankets and for someone to turn up the heat. The nurse told me to be quiet in consideration of the sick people recovering from their surgeries. They didn't need to hear me as they came out of anesthesia.

This had no effect. What did shut me up was that I had never considered this progress of events. That I would act this way. I was ready for pain, expected it, maybe even looked forward to it as something to concentrate on, but I hadn't even considered that mere discomfort would drive me into cowardice.

While I waited for my pathology report, people with all the best intentions came to visit, thinking to offer me solace. Instead, they looked to me for comfort. I understand how you feel ranks right above I didn't mean to offend and right below I was only kidding in my list of phrases full of shit. Most of the people who visited me understood nothing. I could see that they were thinking, you are living my nightmare. Some even came right out and said it. Now, how in the hell are you supposed to respond to that? What are you supposed to do with all of the new information about human nature that you get from these situations, knowledge you don't really want on a good day, much less on a day you feel dizzy and depressed and ready to puke at any second?

I am running away from my point, but gressions—di, re and ag—fill my conversations. I am a compulsive confessor. There ought to be a twelve-step group for that. You go to a meeting where all you're allowed to do is sit there and say absolutely nothing. When I start counting up the people I know who ought to be going to those meetings, I tell you, I should hand over my Rolodex. Then imagine what would happen. For some, it would be the end of them. Sitting in that room, not allowed to say anything—their heads would explode, I swear to god.

I will state here and now that my life is more than the effects of illness on my existence. I'll also say that my revelation isn't a delayed response. I've had my share of made-for-TV-movie moments and this is not one. I didn't learn much from being sick, other than that I didn't like it. But this is not pertinent to my question: Why won't anyone believe you when you say, I have had a revelation?

Revelations ought to be recognized as such. And whether my revelation came from a god or a misfiring somewhere in my cerebral cortex, my life has altered. Not much, I admit, and like everyone else, I will probably act under its influence for a couple weeks and then give it up. Who's to say a life change is always permanent? How many times have you started something and broken down three days later? There's no reason to be embarrassed about this. Embarrassment is, I think, a kind of orgasm, an intimacy no one should bother to go looking for. If you can avoid it, avoid it, that's my advice.

My life has shifted. Maybe now things will be easier to decide, but I suspect that decisions will get harder, more apt to twist me into a migraine or that great desire to drink so much mescal I actually look forward to eating the worm. Take it from me: revelation doesn't turn you into something bigger than life. Personally, I'd like to have a day when me and life are the same height, but I've been accused of having delusions of grandeur as it is.

I will admit that if there's anything that predisposed me to this revelation, maybe it's a strange inability of a deeply personal nature, which I noticed after I lost my right breast. Lost. As if I should post reward signs and go out looking for it. My breast was amputated and I won't get it back, ever, just as I will never again possess that personal time machine lodged within the human brain, that part of the mind that throws a person into the future. The part that manufactures the chemicals of ambition.

Carl Sagan—good old Carl, part of the cosmos now. There are a hundred good reasons for having a space program and one is to release by rocket the ashes of people like Carl. We're all the stuff of stars; some are just better equipped to enjoy it. Anyway, he once wrote that the frontal lobes are involved in controlling both bipedal posture and anticipation of the future. Evolutionarily speaking, it would be handy to be able to stand up and get a good look at a coming disaster before escaping it, so next time you can plan better. This offers a potential origin for rubbernecking, as well as magic, legal codes, ethics, science and knowing how to program your VCR. But the price you pay for being able to anticipate the future is feeling anxious about it. So it would seem fair that since I can't imagine myself getting on with the habits of life, I just can't see myself out there in time any more, I shouldn't feel so worried about the future in such a personal way.

But I do. Fiercely. Some days this is only an intellectual problem, which is not to say that intellectual problems don't have their own levels of anxiety. And when I mention that I see no future with me in it, most people get either very uncomfortable or very crusader-like. The uncomfortable excuse themselves and make a quick getaway. I know why they're running. Understanding can be unbearable.

The crusaders, however, display a zeal as recognizable as the smell of rotting meat, proselytizing about whatever it is they say or do or believe to get through their lives. And since anything rotten tends to be pretty disgusting, I learned a valuable lesson. I no longer let on that my disability with the future tense has been impaired unless I recognize this same difficulty in someone else.

My friend Harry had, to a certain degree, this same problem. His machinery for the future had somehow malfunctioned. He had long ago recognized there was no salvation in the stations of the cross, Mecca, Graceland, Hollywood, Benares; stopped relying on spectacle, horse sacrifice, miracles, the Rapture, a nuclear-free zone, Beautiful Necessity, Torah, Koran, Gospels, Vedas, koans, movies or USA Today. Perhaps it was his work. Perhaps he was capable of an insight it took cancer for me to gain. Whatever it was, like me he wrestled with conjuring the future. In this way, we were kin.

For him, life was a series of framed moments. This made life easier, but it wasn't easy. I admit that for me, life is a struggle. Most things, well, you just have to put up with the small events that diminish you. People can be magnificent with the backdrop of destruction around them, but it's usually not falling rocks, hurricanes, wars that get you. It's the little things, like the shoving when trying to get on the bus or laughter that comes from a car rolling slowly up a dark street—public laughter has a cruel edge more often than not. And I'm not Walt Whitman looking to yawp or yap or yip and I'm not going to pretend that I am. That world in a grain of sand crap sort of neglects that for some us, there's too damn much of the world already.

Face it, there aren't many things in everyday life you can point to and say, yes, that's one—there's a good reason to stay alive. Deciding to live or die isn't the problem. I say, you decide to stay alive, so then what? You rush around looking for something to grab onto, something to give your life weight.

Now as I sit, bound for the island, on my voyage out of my old life, my old job, my old way of looking at the world, I am unsure of what that may be. At this moment, uncertainty is having its way with me, and happy or unhappy, right now I can't escape. Do you see? I have difficulty imagining the future, while still feeling mighty nervous about it. Luckily, I can think of a few things right now that make sticking around worthwhile.

1. My own sense of humor—I knock myself out, I can be so damn hilarious. I am a riot waiting to happen. My favorite joke: How many Dadaists does it take to screw in a light bulb? Answer: Fish.
2. I am still one hell of a hula-hooper. Since childhood I've been able to shake my thing with the best of them.
3. Sex. Yes, an easy one to see, but it's true. Even sleazy sex is something to marvel at. And when it isn't cheap, when it's spectacular, when you get out of bed glowing, well, then, the question isn't am I good enough for life but is life good enough for me?

I can go on like this for days. My mother says it's because I have no self-control. So what's the big deal about self-control anyway? Sometimes it's just best to lose it completely. Admit it, haven't you ever wanted to break down so thoroughly all you can do is leave a note: Gone berserk. Dinner's on the ceiling. People who say your dignity is invaluable, that you should offer your suffering to some god or another—to hell with them. How do they know God wants it?

Some people struggle better than others. They actually manage suffering with grace and there's something in that to be admired, but I refuse to think of suffering as a sign of nobility. There's nothing noble about pain. Suffering is one of the undertows in time that every now and then ends up pulling you along, sometimes pulling you in too deep, and when you finally come up for air, all you can do is relive those moments of almost drowning.

Suffering is no cosmic payback. I'll say it now: you can't cut a deal with the universe. There is no bargaining, no contracts, no rewards, no covenants, no what-goes-round-comes-round, there aren't even very many rules. We're all just here. And if you want a god, then love God the way God loves you—as a charity case, a lunatic, someone in need of the deepest, most disinterested compassion. For your own sake, quit groveling and start accepting that you belong to life and there are treasures to be found. There is an inevitable end, but in the time between now and then, there is the deepening of friendships, motion of stories, color, music, release from ambition, all part of this life, this complicated web, this garden of forking paths...

(I gave fair warning about my incessant sidetracks. My thoughts often wander like a herd of amnesiac cows. I will continue to duck in and out of what I find interesting, so parenthetical comments will bloom like flags on the fourth of July. It's not going to get any better and if you want out, leave now. Just walk away. Go watch TV, some old show rerun on cable late at night, like that show with Sally Field. That one may be able to help both you and me, because a flying nun can cover a multitude of sins.)

I'm damaged. So aren't we all?  I don't need anybody to run the fabric of my life through their fingers like testing the quality of bed sheets. Wait: this is not my revelation. This is not a moment concerning the dearness of life. If it takes facing your death to force you to recognize just how tight your grip is on life, then you got more problems than I can help you with.

For the sheer elegance of examining the fact of death, you got to admire the Mexicans, celebrating the Day of the Dead by painting their bodies blue like corpses, dancing with skeletons and eating little marzipan skulls. In Mexico, Death slaps you on the back. Death has a body. Death has hands and feet and walks around. And everybody knows that Death carries an appointment book in the inside pocket of his jacket with your name penciled somewhere.

This is so disagreeable to those of us with that quasi-religious belief in progress (towards what and from what I'd like to know), that everybody acts as if death doesn't exist except as a joke. Nothing is quite so funny as the sight of a corpse, especially one falling out of a coffin. Nobody takes death into account, while the fear of it twists to extremes. The last unlamented century has been a remarkable achievement in the field of slaughter: World War I, Auschwitz, the Gulag Archipelago, the Isle of Pines, the killing fields of Cambodia where children play among skulls and thighbones as if they were merely features of the landscape. This century of miracle drugs, hygiene and contraceptives is also the century of concentration camps, Hiroshima and electric chairs. Think about your vocabulary: when did you learn words like jugular vein, serial killer, forensics, sociopath, collateral damage, star cluster bomb?

Maybe you think I'm picking on the twentieth century and maybe I am. I know every time has its horrors, but that was a century which is the most image- filled. The pictures are ever-present. I can't help thinking that with this century, human beings have lost the last excuse. If only we knew more is just one of those things people say to justify sitting on their butts and doing nothing. How much more do you need to know? When you pick up a newspaper, you know what you're looking at. While not everyone is able to place that image of destruction in a historical context, we all pretty much know suffering unto death when we see it.

I realize that I am, in fact, a huge hypocrite. But I will say at least I am cognizant to my hypocrisy and I will, I swear it, change my habits. I was once the most politically-involved person you'd ever meet, acting out of sheer fury. But I realized I was on the verge of getting stuck there. I could only rage and condemn; while rage is necessary, often creative and fun (though you're not supposed to admit that you enjoy being really mad), it isn't everything. Human beings are supposed to get angry. We're supposed to rebel. It's how we're made. Forcing yourself to become a creature that never gets angry, never rebels, well, then, you're just educating yourself to be an idiot.

There are times when fury is the best response, times when laughter is the proper way to show love and respect, and times when you just have to grieve over the state of the world. But there is a difference between sadness and grief, between grief and despair, between despair and depression. After hearing me go on and on, lots of people refuse to believe that I am not depressed. (I have been depressed so I have experience recognizing the symptoms. I've also been burned out before and figured I'd know it again: I'd go up a lot faster and with a much brighter flame.) Many people accuse me of being in denial. I long ago decided that I like my well-placed denial. Among other things, it's a rather impressive piece of emotional machinery and I am pretty good at denying what I want to deny. So I always ask my accusers just how long they think they would last without denial deflecting the circumstances of their lives. That shuts them up.

So I'm not asking to be cheered up because I am cheered up. That doesn't mean I'm not angry about being sick or that I'm not still grieving. I am. But I'm at the age to expect disasters. I now have the habit of mentally sticking and then it all burned down to the ending of every story. This is a simple fact. I just wish people would quit telling me that someone will come along to fill my heart. I don't want it filled. I'm not ready to let go of my loss. I'm not ready to say, okay, I'll lose myself in art or love or politics or pursuit of profit. I don't want mementos, souvenirs, anecdotes or even memories of my lost ones. I want what was there, what no longer exists and will never exist again. And dammit, I'm not going to fill up with well-intentioned acquaintances. People aren't replaceable parts. My affection isn't modular. Who could fill those places in my heart? The ones who were there were superheroes, able to leap over the obstruction of my distrust and see with x-ray vision the beauty in me.

But this, too, is not relevant to my question: Why won't anyone believe you when you say, I have had a revelation?