Читать книгу Planet Claire - Jeff Porter - Страница 8

PROLOGUE

One fine morning, without having done anything wrong, my wife Claire died. She sat in her favorite chair drinking coffee and shortly after collapsed in her study. Young and resilient, the needle on her life span hardly past midway, Claire died abruptly, as though I had been absentminded or had left the gas stove on or the door open. I looked up from the morning paper and she was gone.

That was a year ago. A year earlier my dog died. Claire’s death was sudden, unexpected. Milo’s was a slow death. We watched him go. I’ll never be the same, Claire said. Me either, I said. And we weren’t. My wife and I were together for twenty-seven years. Then she was gone, in medias res. To say I was broken into pieces, that like Humpty-Dumpty I had fallen apart, is not entirely accurate. Nor is it entirely wrong. Entirely is a word that no longer works for me, if truth be said. That word no longer works either, because of its proximity to the other. Claire died and a part of me flew off somewhere else. To this day I’ve been looking for both, my wife and runaway me. Loss upon loss.

I’m lost without Claire, I said, why go on? My mind is a graveyard. Darkness and devils! Hyperboles sprung at me from everywhere. And yet here I am as alive as the next baffled soul. What followed her death was a year of profound gloom and heartache, obviously. But it didn’t feel obvious. Grief is mysterious, bewildering, painful. I was miserable, still am. It was as though I’d been slit open, stabbed by a large knife, and I savored the pain. There was blood everywhere, even in my dreams. One by one, I said to myself, we are all becoming shades, returning to the dark and wormy earth. I dragged my bones through the empty, tortured space of my life, a fugitive, my mind filling up with quotes from Shakespeare, Joyce, and Beckett. I am like a cork upon the tide, I thought, as if I might find solace in eloquence.

Claire was never fooled by eloquence. She was too keen to be tricked by a pretty sentence. Not that I didn’t try. A meticulous scholar, she lived with tremendous focus. She was rarely distracted and never failed to settle unfinished business. Her planner was a work of art, each week precisely detailed with meetings, chores, events, birthdays, appointments, deadlines, passwords, expiration dates, account numbers, memos. Milo’s annual rabies shots (February 16). Dad’s b-day (March 25). JP Atlanta trip (March 29). See NYT hearing aid article + comments (July 20). Use UN Mileage Plus to book flights to France (September 18). Findlay Market: Blue Oven bread + English muffins (January 2). This was the work of a nimble mind. There was so much chaos in the world it was foolish to live without intention, and so Claire lived life scrupulously, more than anyone I know. To be caught off guard by death, with so much left undone, was worse than death itself. That was not in the plans. We looked forward to growing old. We would do this gracefully together. We would sip coffee in a Portland café and watch the hipsters pass by. We would make fun of our eye wrinkles. Claire would learn how to play the mandolin.

What was in the plans were gardening, a new dog, travel, book projects, some well underway. There was always yard work. The lilac, damaged by early snow, had to come out. The smoke bush: trim back or remove altogether. There was the Beauchamp Pageant project, an illustrated biography of the Earl of Warwick, dating to the reign of Richard III. Another book on tragedy (ironically). So much to do and so little time. As a writer, Claire was graceful and sharp-witted. I loved her work, loved watching her write, pen in hand, bent over her yellow notepad, quietly in her study, at school, in the British Library. An efficient, unrelenting researcher she was, deciphering strange medieval texts with mysterious patience and insight. Her mind was a thing to wonder at, her coherence singular. I always felt I was her cognitive other, the guy whose feet went one way and whose brain went another. I am so distracted, so nonlinear. Wrong-way Charlie, she called me. Perhaps my unruly gestures will get a rise out of her, but that’s not likely to happen. The dead rarely come back anymore—but who knows. Really, we know so little.

We know this. A typical human being possesses about eighty-six billion neurons. It’s hard to do an exact calculation because neurons are so densely packed together, but right now I count only forty-four billion in my brain, barely half. The other half has gone missing. I’m not exaggerating. People on TV exaggerate. People on TV talk endlessly, but I’m tallying unique neurons in the Jell-O between my ears—one hemisphere at a time—and com ing up short. Is it possible to live even a subnormal life with only half a brain? There’s the case of Jody Miller, who suffered life-threatening seizures as a young girl and had half her brain surgically removed. Jody not only survived the procedure (a hemispherectomy) but won a ton of awards and scholarships before graduating college. The left side of her brain was able to take over the role of the missing hemisphere. I haven’t entirely given up hope.

Anyway, I use the word entirely all the time—I need to stop. It imparts a sense of wholeness to things I can’t experience anymore. In its place another adverb—anyway. Anyway is an elliptical word. It doesn’t add anything but subtracts. It’s subtractive, able or tending to remove. When I say anyway at the beginning of a sentence, I do not initiate a full-scale launch of meaning. On an existential level, anyway is a surrender to the economy of being, assuming that being likes to cut costs now and then.

Anyway, when your partner dies, everything around you seems to collapse. You look deep within yourself, not for courage, just for the wherewithal not to lose your car in a parking garage. Please don’t let me lose my car tonight in the hospital parking garage. The bigger question, which you don’t dare ask yourself, is how to keep the nothing that is now you from exploding into bits and pieces that spiral out into space. My hair crackles with static electricity even as I write that sentence. Nothing is more real than nothing, wrote Beckett. Nothing is a word that sticks around, like flies in August or shadows in October. Like an awful taste in your mouth.

It’s very complicated to write about death. Wish I didn’t have to. Can you ever not know again? Not knowing about death is really good. To be so naive—maybe in nocent too. I don’t think I can do this alone. I don’t think you can either. Sooner or later it comes to death. Love flirts with grief every hour of the day.

Outside my study a road worker in brown overalls is breaking up my street with a T-shaped jackhammer and is making ear-shattering sounds. Better that, though, than silence. Silence is scary. When the lamb broke open the seventh seal, says the Book of Revelation, there was silence. Now that’s spooky, like dead air on the radio. Life is deafening.

In the Bergman film The Seventh Seal, Death follows a medieval knight returning home from the Crusades. He is a bitter man, weary and disillusioned, troubled by the silence of God in the face of so much dying. He meets a stranger who doesn’t look too chirpy. Who are you? asks the knight. I am death, says Death. You have come for me? asks the knight. I have been at your side for a long time, says Death. The knight is worried that life is nothing more than senseless terror, so he asks Death to play a game of chess, to extend life just long enough to find some answers. If death is the only certainty, what else is there? Death shrugs his shoulders and accepts the challenge. The knight suddenly feels inspired. “I, Antonius Block, am playing chess with Death,” he says. Death doesn’t really care one way or another. He just looks bored in his ominous black cloak. His indifference is beyond terror.

The crazy jackhammer pounds the street, bashing through concrete. Bone-jarring steel on stone, bits of rock flying off. How does the road worker survive that commotion? Bang, crack, whack. Things are always flying off, more than we know, I think, sometimes disastrously. It’s the law of centrifugal force. Everything is in flight from an imaginary center. Dragonflies, beetles, turtles, swallows, desert nomads, comets, asteroids. Asteroids are the worst because they’re rocky and bulky.

The Kuiper Belt is teeming with asteroids, short-period comets, and icy bodies. Also dwarf planets and little moons. A hundred years ago an asteroid from the Kuiper Belt exploded over Siberia. It just flew off into space. It had no business crashing in Siberia but there it was, a large flying rock. The fireball wiped out two thousand square miles of taiga forest. There was a mighty boom. Eighty million trees went up in flame. The explosion rocked the earth, split the sky in two.

The jackhammer has stopped. The peonies are exhausted and there hasn’t been rain in weeks. I’m wearing a black sweatshirt, blue jeans, and Converse sneakers. I look like a man who is quietly at work, but in my head asteroids are crashing into earth with the force of atom bombs.

As I write, a stink bug crawls over my notebook, across my jottings. Complicated grief can wreck a person’s life, I’ve read. Drinking disorders, post-traumatic stress, increased risk of cancer, dementia, manic depression. The grief-struck sometimes drop out of life altogether. That doesn’t sound good. It’s not that I walk around like a zombie. No one has said to me, Jeff, you need to get your life back in order. The effects of grief, I find, are more subtle. The unconscious impulse to forget is keen. The brain wants to protect itself, what’s left of it, even if that means wandering off topic or ignoring facts. I fight back. I try to remember everything about Claire with vivid directness. Her face, her presence, her blue eyes, her voice, the way she walked, how she sat at her desk, her laugh, her frown, her exacerbation. Claire keeps me alive—even now. Why can’t a man keep himself alive?

An impression that won’t go away, though, is that it’s all wrong. My life is all wrong. How can anything ever be right again? How do you write a sentence when it’s all wrong? It all seems wrong.

I’ve been to the emergency room with knife wounds twice, blacked out and suffered a concussion, crashed my bike into a tree, rear-ended a pickup truck at a stoplight, pulled my lower back yanking weeds. Life is suddenly perilous. Over six thousand deaths occur annually from falls at home. I can detect a menacing soundtrack to the left of my ear, as if I’m in someone else’s dark, weird film. I take deep breaths. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Julian Barnes writes that the bereft cross over into an alien universe after the loss of a spouse, a world without any familiar logic. No kidding. I never once wondered what I might do if something really bad happened. Never once did I imagine that my wife would die unexpectedly. Me, yes. But then I wouldn’t have to pick up the pieces. I am in the house that Claire and I built, in the life we made, naked in the bathtub. I’m shivering. I feel like a wet rug. If I pull the plug maybe the water will drain away.

Runaway me, by the way, left in a hurry. Just couldn’t take it. I call him Space Boy, because he’s airborne. The real world is elsewhere, he hinted. Maybe he preferred not being boiled to death in melancholy. He’s a can-do sort of fellow, doesn’t like moping around. He went looking for her. I admire that. Stress can take a tremendous toll on our bodies, he said before leaving. Downward spiral and all. You’re on earth, he added, there’s no cure for that. And just like that he left. He set off to find Claire and left me to pick up the pieces. He radios home from time to time, from outer space no less.

Doesn’t space take a tremendous toll on your body? I radioed back. Unimaginably, he said. His messages can be strange. The Boomerang Nebula? What’s that? I radio back. A very cold place, he says. Five thousand light-years away. Jesus! I say. It’s a preplanetary nebula, he says. I look up the Boomerang Nebula on my laptop. It’s colder than empty space, it says here, a glowing shell of ionized gas. It’s actually a very interesting nebula, I’ll give him that. That’s where I’m going, he says. The Boomerang. I think she’s there. For some reason, he can’t say Claire’s name.

Obviously the dead don’t need or want our grief. They’re busy with other things, have a whole new set of rules. It’s the living—we poor naked wretches—teeming clueless over this planet. Death always seemed so imaginary. How utterly it rips apart our lives. It leaves nothing behind, maybe some memories, and those you had better keep safe or else. Most of us think neither of death nor nothingness. It’s just not in our bones. But one day, as the knight says, you stand at the edge of life and face darkness. Who are you? I am death, Death says.

This is not your usual memoir but I doubt any book about loss is really typical. When death comes a-knocking, all trivial fond records are wiped clean away as if by the impact of a mile-wide asteroid. The crater inside your chest feels awfully deep. Dust blots out the sun. One starts from scratch, and then with only half a brain. Invariably, you lose a part of yourself. There are consequences to being torn asunder. How the mind works under these constraints is a thing to behold.