Oblivion: Stories

My whole life I’ve been a fraud. I’m not exaggerating. Pretty much all

I’ve ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in

other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. It’s a little more compli-

cated than that, maybe. But when you come right down to it it’s to be

liked, loved. Admired, approved of, applauded, whatever. You get the

idea. I did well in school, but deep down the whole thing’s motive

wasn’t to learn or improve myself but just to do well, to get good grades

and make sports teams and perform well. To have a good transcript or

varsity letters to show people. I didn’t enjoy it much because I was al-

ways scared I wouldn’t do well enough. The fear made me work really

hard, so I’d always do well and end up getting what I wanted. But then,

once I got the best grade or made All City or got Angela Mead to let

me put my hand on her breast, I wouldn’t feel much of anything except

maybe fear that I wouldn’t be able to get it again.The next time or next

thing I wanted. I remember being down in the rec room in Angela

Mead’s basement on the couch and having her let me get my hand up

under her blouse and not even really feeling the soft aliveness or what-

ever of her breast because all I was doing was thinking, ‘Now I’m the

guy that Mead let get to second with her.’ Later that seemed so sad.

This was in middle school. She was a very big-hearted, quiet, self-

contained, thoughtful girl — she’s a veterinarian now, with her own

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practice — and I never even really saw her, I couldn’t see anything ex-

cept who I might be in her eyes, this cheerleader and probably number

two or three among the most desirable girls in middle school that year.

She was much more than that, she was beyond all that adolescent

ranking and popularity crap, but I never really let her be or saw her as

more, although I put up a very good front as somebody who could

have deep conversations and really wanted to know and understand

who she was inside.

Later I was in analysis, I tried analysis like almost everybody else

then in their late twenties who’d made some money or had a family or

whatever they thought they wanted and still didn’t feel that they were

happy. A lot of people I knew tried it. It didn’t really work, although it

did make everyone sound more aware of their own problems and

added some useful vocabulary and concepts to the way we all had to

talk to each other to ﬁt in and sound a certain way. You know what I

mean. I was in regional advertising at the time in Chicago, having

made the jump from media buyer for a large consulting ﬁrm, and at

only twenty-nine I’d made creative associate, and verily as they say I

was a fair-haired boy and on the fast track but wasn’t happy at all,

whatever happy means, but of course I didn’t say this to anybody be-

cause it was such a cliché — ‘Tears of a Clown,’ ‘Richard Cory,’ etc. —

and the circle of people who seemed important to me seemed much

more dry, oblique and contemptuous of clichés than that, and so of

course I spent all my time trying to get them to think I was dry and

jaded as well, doing things like yawning and looking at my nails and

saying things like, ‘Am I happy? is one of those questions that, if it has

got to be asked, more or less dictates its own answer,’ etc. Putting in all

this time and energy to create a certain impression and get approval or

acceptance that then I felt nothing about because it didn’t have any-

thing to do with who I really was inside, and I was disgusted with my-

self for always being such a fraud, but I couldn’t seem to help it. Here

are some of the various things I tried: EST, riding a ten-speed to Nova

Scotia and back, hypnosis, cocaine, sacro-cervical chiropractic, joining

a charismatic church, jogging, pro bono work for the Ad Council,

meditation classes, the Masons, analysis, the Landmark Forum, the

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Course in Miracles, a right-brain drawing workshop, celibacy, collect-

ing and restoring vintage Corvettes, and trying to sleep with a differ-

ent girl every night for two straight months (I racked up a total of

thirty-six for sixty-one and also got chlamydia, which I told friends

about, acting like I was embarrassed but secretly expecting most of

them to be impressed — which, under the cover of making a lot of

jokes at my expense, I think they were — but for the most part the two

months just made me feel shallow and predatory, plus I missed a great

deal of sleep and was a wreck at work — that was also the period I

tried cocaine). I know this part is boring and probably boring you, by

the way, but it gets a lot more interesting when I get to the part where

I kill myself and discover what happens immediately after a person

dies. In terms of the list, psychoanalysis was pretty much the last thing

I tried.

The analyst I saw was OK, a big soft older guy with a big ginger

mustache and a pleasant, sort of informal manner. I’m not sure I re-

member him alive too well. He was a fairly good listener, and seemed

interested and sympathetic in a slightly distant way. At ﬁrst I sus-

pected he didn’t like me or was uneasy around me. I don’t think he was

used to patients who were already aware of what their real problem

was. He was also a bit of a pill-pusher. I balked at trying antidepres-

sants, I just couldn’t see myself taking pills to try to be less of a fraud.

I said that even if they worked, how would I know if it was me or the

pills? By that time I already knew I was a fraud. I knew what my prob-

lem was. I just couldn’t seem to stop. I remember I spent maybe the

ﬁrst twenty times or so in analysis acting all open and candid but in re-

ality sort of fencing with him or leading him around by the nose, basi-

cally showing him that I wasn’t just another one of those patients who

stumbled in with no clue what their real problem was or who were to-

tally out of touch with the truth about themselves. When you come

right down to it, I was trying to show him that I was at least as smart

as he was and that there wasn’t much of anything he was going to see

about me that I hadn’t already seen and ﬁgured out. And yet I wanted

help and really was there to try to get help. I didn’t even tell him how

unhappy I was until ﬁve or six months into the analysis, mostly because

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I didn’t want to seem like just another whining, self-absorbed yuppie,

even though I think even then I was on some level conscious that that’s

all I really was, deep down.

Right from the start, what I liked best about the analyst was that his

ofﬁce was a mess.There were books and papers everyplace, and usually

he had to clear things off the chair so I could sit down. There was no

couch, I sat in an easy chair and he sat facing me in his beat-up old desk

chair whose back part had one of those big rectangles or capes of back-

massage beads attached to it the same way cabbies often put them on

their seat in the cab.This was another thing I liked, the desk chair and

the fact that it was a little too small for him (he was not a small guy)

so that he had to sit sort of almost hunched with his feet ﬂat on the

ﬂoor, or else sometimes he’d put his hands behind his head and lean

way back in the chair in a way that made the back portion squeak

terribly when it leaned back. There always seems to be something

patronizing or a little condescending about somebody crossing their

legs when they talk to you, and the desk chair didn’t allow him to do

this — if he ever crossed his legs his knee would have been up around

his chin. And yet he had apparently never gone out and gotten himself

a bigger or nicer desk chair, or even bothered to oil the medial joint’s

springs to keep the back from squeaking, a noise that I know would

have driven me up the wall if it had been my chair and I had to spend

all day in it. I noticed all this almost right away. The little ofﬁce also

reeked of pipe tobacco, which is a pleasant smell, plus Dr. Gustafson

never took notes or answered everything with a question or any of the

cliché analyst things that would have made the whole thing too horri-

ble to keep going back whether it even helped or not.The whole effect

was of a sort of likable, disorganized, laid-back guy, and things in there

actually did get better after I realized that he probably wasn’t going to

do anything to make me quit fencing with him and trying to anticipate

all his questions so I could show that I already knew the answer — he

was going to get his $65 either way — and ﬁnally came out and told

him about being a fraud and feeling alienated (I had to use the uptown

word of course, but it was still the truth) and starting to see myself

ending up living this way for the rest of my life and being completely

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unhappy. I told him I wasn’t blaming anybody for my being a fraud. I

had been adopted, but it was as a baby, and the stepparents who

adopted me were better and nicer than most of the biological parents

I knew anything about, and I was never yelled at or abused or pres-

sured to hit .400 in Legion ball or anything, and they took out a sec-

ond mortgage to send me to an elite college when I could have gone

scholarship to U.W.–Eau Claire, etc. Nobody’d ever done anything

bad to me, every problem I ever had I’d been the cause of. I was a

fraud, and the fact that I was lonely was my own fault (of course his

ears pricked up at fault, which is a loaded term) because I seemed to be

so totally self-centered and fraudulent that I experienced everything in

terms of how it affected people’s view of me and what I needed to do

to create the impression of me I wanted them to have. I said I knew

what my problem was, what I couldn’t do was stop it. I also admitted

to Dr. Gustafson some of the ways I’d been jerking him around early

on and trying to make sure he saw me as smart and self-aware, and

said I’d known early on that playing around and showing off in analy-

sis were a waste of time and money but that I couldn’t seem to help

myself, it just happened automatically. He smiled at all this, which was

the ﬁrst time I remember seeing him smile. I don’t mean he was sour

or humorless, he had a big red friendly face and a pleasant enough

manner, but this was the ﬁrst time he’d smiled like a human being hav-

ing an actual conversation. And yet at the same time I already saw

what I’d left myself open for — and sure enough he says it. ‘If I under-

stand you right,’ he says, ‘you’re saying that you’re basically a calculat-

ing, manipulative person who always says what you think will get

somebody to approve of you or form some impression of you you think

you want.’ I told him that was maybe a little simplistic but basically ac-

curate, and he said further that as he understood it I was saying that I

felt as if I was trapped in this false way of being and unable ever to be

totally open and tell the truth irregardless of whether it’d make me

look good in others’ eyes or not. And I somewhat resignedly said yes,

and that I seemed always to have had this fraudulent, calculating part

of my brain ﬁring away all the time, as if I were constantly playing

chess with everybody and ﬁguring out that if I wanted them to move

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a certain way I had to move in such a way as to induce them to move

that way. He asked if I ever played chess, and I told him I used to in

middle school but quit because I couldn’t be as good as I eventually

wanted to be, how frustrating it was to get just good enough to know

what getting really good at it would be like but not being able to get

that good, etc. I was laying it on sort of thick in hopes of distracting

him from the big insight and question I realized I’d set myself up for.

But it didn’t work. He leaned back in his loud chair and paused as if he

were thinking hard, for effect — he was thinking that he was going to

get to feel like he’d really earned his $65 today. Part of the pause always

involved stroking his mustache in an unconscious way. I was reason-

ably sure that he was going to say something like, ‘So then how were

you able to do what you just did a moment ago?,’ in other words mean-

ing how was I able to be honest about the fraudulence if I was really a

fraud, meaning he thought he’d caught me in some kind of logical

contradiction or paradox. And I went ahead and played a little dumb,

probably, to get him to go ahead and say it, partly because I still held

out some hope that what he’d say might be more discerning or incisive

than I had predicted. But it was also partly because I liked him, and

liked the way he seemed genuinely pleased and excited at the idea of

being helpful but was trying to exercise professional control over his

facial expression in order to make the excitement look more like sim-

ple pleasantness and clinical interest in my case or whatever. He was

hard not to like, he had what is known as an engaging manner. By way

of decor, the ofﬁce wall behind his chair had two framed prints, one

being that Wyeth one of the little girl in the wheat ﬁeld crawling up-

hill toward the farmhouse, the other a still life of two apples in a bowl

on a table by Cézanne. (To be honest, I only knew it was Cézanne be-

cause it was an Art Institute poster and had a banner with info on a

Cézanne show underneath the painting, which was a still life, and

which was weirdly discomﬁting because there was something slightly

off about the perspective or style that made the table look crooked and

the apples look almost square.) The prints were obviously there to give

the analyst’s patients something to look at, since many people like to

look around or look at things on the wall while they talk. I didn’t have

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any trouble looking right at him most of the time I was in there,

though. He did have a talent for putting you at ease, there was no

question about it. But I had no illusions that this was the same as hav-

ing enough insight or ﬁrepower to ﬁnd some way to really help me,

though.

There was a basic logical paradox that I called the ‘fraudulence para-

dox’ that I had discovered more or less on my own while taking a

mathematical logic course in school. I remember this as being a huge

undergrad lecture course that met twice a week in an auditorium with

the professor up on stage and on Fridays in smaller discussion sections

led by a graduate assistant whose whole life seemed to be mathemati-

cal logic. (Plus all you had to do to ace the class was sit down with the

assigned textbook that the prof was the editor of and memorize the

different modes of argument and normal forms and axioms of ﬁrst-

order quantiﬁcation, meaning the course was as clean and mechanical

as logic itself in that if you put in the time and effort, out popped the

good grade at the other end. We only got to paradoxes like the Berry

and Russell Paradoxes and the incompleteness theorem at the very end

of the term, they weren’t on the ﬁnal.) The fraudulence paradox was

that the more time and effort you put into trying to appear impressive

or attractive to other people, the less impressive or attractive you felt

inside — you were a fraud. And the more of a fraud you felt like, the

harder you tried to convey an impressive or likable image of yourself so

that other people wouldn’t ﬁnd out what a hollow, fraudulent person

you really were. Logically, you would think that the moment a sup-

posedly intelligent nineteen-year-old became aware of this paradox,

he’d stop being a fraud and just settle for being himself (whatever that

was) because he’d ﬁgured out that being a fraud was a vicious inﬁnite

regress that ultimately resulted in being frightened, lonely, alienated,

etc. But here was the other, higher-order paradox, which didn’t even

have a form or name — I didn’t, I couldn’t. Discovering the ﬁrst para-

dox at age nineteen just brought home to me in spades what an empty,

fraudulent person I’d basically been ever since at least the time I was

four and lied to my stepdad because I’d realized somehow right in the

middle of his asking me if I’d broken the bowl that if I said I did it but

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‘confessed’ it in a sort of clumsy, implausible way, then he wouldn’t be-

lieve me and would instead believe that my sister Fern, who’s my step-

parents’ biological daughter, was the one who’d actually broken the

antique Moser glass bowl that my stepmom had inherited from her bi-

ological grandmother and totally loved, plus it would lead or induce

him to see me as a kind, good stepbrother who was so anxious to keep

Fern (whom I really did like) from getting in trouble that I’d be will-

ing to lie and take the punishment for it for her. I’m not explaining this

very well. I was only four, for one thing, and the realization didn’t hit

me in words the way I just now put it, but rather more in terms of feel-

ings and associations and certain mental ﬂashes of my stepparents’

faces with various expressions on them. But it happened that fast, at

only four, that I ﬁgured out how to create a certain impression by

knowing what effect I’d produce in my stepdad by implausibly ‘con-

fessing’ that I’d punched Fern in the arm and stolen her Hula Hoop

and had run all the way downstairs with it and started Hula-Hooping

in the dining room right by the sideboard with all my stepmom’s an-

tique glassware and ﬁgurines on it, while Fern, forgetting all about her

arm and hoop because of her concern over the bowl and other glass-

ware, came running downstairs shouting after me, reminding me

about how important the rule was that we weren’t supposed to play in

the dining room. ...Meaning that by lying in such a deliberately un-

convincing way I could actually get everything that a direct lie would

supposedly get me, plus look noble and self-sacriﬁcing, plus also make

my stepparents feel good because they always tended to feel good

when one of their kids did something that showed character, because

it’s the sort of thing they couldn’t really help but see as reﬂecting fa-

vorably on them as shapers of their kids’ character. I’m putting all this

in such a long, rushing, clumsy way to try to convey the way I remem-

ber it suddenly hit me, looking up at my stepfather’s big kindly face as

he held two of the larger pieces of the Moser bowl and tried to look

angrier than he really felt. (He had always thought the more expensive

pieces ought to be kept secure in storage somewhere, whereas my step-

mom’s view was more like what was the point of having nice things if

you didn’t have them out where people could enjoy them.) How to ap-

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pear a certain way and get him to think a certain thing hit me just that

fast. Keep in mind I was only around four. And I can’t pretend it felt

bad, realizing it — the truth is it felt great. I felt powerful, smart. It felt

a little like looking at part of a puzzle you’re doing and you’ve got a

piece in your hand and you can’t see where in the larger puzzle it’s sup-

posed to go or how to make it ﬁt, looking at all the holes, and then all

of a sudden in a ﬂash you see, for no reason right then you could point

to or explain to anyone, that if you turn the piece this one certain way

it will ﬁt, and it does, and maybe the best way to put it is that in that

one tiny instant you feel suddenly connected to something larger and

much more of the complete picture the same way the piece is. The

only part I’d neglected to anticipate was Fern’s reaction to getting

blamed for the bowl, and punished, and then punished even worse

when she continued to deny that she’d been the one playing around in

the dining room, and my stepparents’ position was that they were even

more upset and disappointed about her lying than they were about the

bowl, which they said was just a material object and not ultimately im-

portant in the larger scheme of things. (My stepparents spoke this way,

they were people of high ideals and values, humanists. Their big ideal

was total honesty in all the family’s relationships, and lying was the

worst, most disappointing infraction you could commit, in their view

as parents. They tended to discipline Fern a little more ﬁrmly than

they did me, by the way, but this too was an extension of their values.

They were concerned about being fair and having me be able to feel

that I was just as much their real child as Fern was, so that I’d feel max-

imally secure and loved, and sometimes this concern with fairness

caused them to bend a little too far over backward when it came to dis-

cipline.) So that Fern, then, got regarded as being a liar when she was

not, and that must have hurt her way more than the actual punishment

did. She was only ﬁve at the time. It’s horrible to be regarded as a fraud

or to believe that people think you’re a fraud or liar. It’s possibly one of

the worst feelings in the world. And even though I haven’t really had

any direct experience with it, I’m sure it must be doubly horrible when

you were actually telling the truth and they didn’t believe you. I don’t

think Fern ever quite got over that episode, although the two of us

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never talked about it afterward except for one sort of cryptic remark

she made over her shoulder once when we were both in high school

and having an argument about something and Fern was storming out

of the house. She was sort of a classically troubled adolescent —

smoking, makeup, mediocre grades, dating older guys, etc. — whereas

I was the family’s fair-haired boy and had a killer G.P.A. and played

varsity ball, etc. One way to put it is that I looked and acted much bet-

ter on the surface then than Fern did, although she eventually settled

down and ended up going on to college and is now doing OK. She’s

also one of the funniest people on earth, with a very dry, subtle sense

of humor — I like her a lot. The point being that that was the start of

my being a fraud, although it’s not as if the broken-bowl episode was

somehow the origin or cause of my fraudulence or some kind of child-

hood trauma that I’d never gotten over and had to go into analysis to

work out. The fraud part of me was always there, just as the puzzle

piece, objectively speaking, is a true piece of the puzzle even before you

see how it ﬁts. For a while I thought that possibly one or the other of

my biological parents had been frauds or had carried some type of

fraud gene or something and that I had inherited it, but that was a

dead end, there was no way to know. And even if I did, what difference

would it make? I was still a fraud, it was still my own unhappiness that

I had to deal with.

Once again, I’m aware that it’s clumsy to put it all this way, but the

point is that all of this and more was ﬂashing through my head just in

the interval of the small, dramatic pause Dr. Gustafson allowed him-

self before delivering his big reductio ad absurdum argument that I

couldn’t be a total fraud if I had just come out and admitted my fraud-

ulence to him just now. I know that you know as well as I do how fast

thoughts and associations can ﬂy through your head. You can be in the

middle of a creative meeting at your job or something, and enough

material can rush through your head just in the little silences when

people are looking over their notes and waiting for the next presenta-

tion that it would take exponentially longer than the whole meeting

just to try to put a few seconds’ silence’s ﬂood of thoughts into words.

This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions

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and thoughts in a person’s life are ones that ﬂash through your head so

fast that fast isn’t even the right word, they seem totally different from

or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they

have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-another-

word English we all communicate with each other with that it could

easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-

second’s ﬂash of thoughts and connections, etc. — and yet we all seem

to go around trying to use English (or whatever language our native

country happens to use, it goes without saying) to try to convey to

other people what we’re thinking and to ﬁnd out what they’re think-

ing, when in fact deep down everybody knows it’s a charade and

they’re just going through the motions. What goes on inside is just too

fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely

sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given in-

stant. The internal head-speed or whatever of these ideas, memories,

realizations, emotions and so on is even faster, by the way — exponen-

tially faster, unimaginably faster — when you’re dying, meaning dur-

ing that vanishingly tiny nanosecond between when you technically

die and when the next thing happens, so that in reality the cliché about

people’s whole life ﬂashing before their eyes as they’re dying isn’t all

that far off — although the whole life here isn’t really a sequential thing

where ﬁrst you’re born and then you’re in the crib and then you’re up

at the plate in Legion ball, etc., which it turns out that that’s what

people usually mean when they say ‘my whole life,’ meaning a discrete,

chronological series of moments that they add up and call their life-

time. It’s not really like that. The best way I can think of to try to say

it is that it all happens at once, but that at once doesn’t really mean a ﬁ-

nite moment of sequential time the way we think of time while we’re

alive, plus that what turns out to be the meaning of the term my life

isn’t even close to what we think we’re talking about when we say ‘my

life.’ Words and chronological time create all these total misunder-

standings of what’s really going on at the most basic level. And yet at

the same time English is all we have to try to understand it and try to

form anything larger or more meaningful and true with anybody else,

which is yet another paradox. Dr. Gustafson — whom I would meet

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again later and ﬁnd out that he had almost nothing to do with the big

doughy repressed guy sitting back against his chair’s beads in his River

Forest ofﬁce with colon cancer in him already at that time and him

knowing nothing yet except that he didn’t feel quite right down there

in the bathroom lately and if it kept on he’d make an appointment to

go in and ask his internist about it — Dr. G. would later say that the

whole my whole life ﬂashed before me phenomenon at the end is more

like being a whitecap on the surface of the ocean, meaning that it’s

only at the moment you subside and start sliding back in that you’re

really even aware there’s an ocean at all. When you’re up and out there

as a whitecap you might talk and act as if you know you’re just a white-

cap on the ocean, but deep down you don’t think there’s really an ocean

at all. It’s almost impossible to. Or like a leaf that doesn’t believe in the

tree it’s part of, etc. There are all sorts of ways to try to express it.

And of course all this time you’ve probably been noticing what

seems like the really central, overarching paradox, which is that this

whole thing where I’m saying words can’t really do it and time doesn’t

really go in a straight line is something that you’re hearing as words

that you have to start listening to the ﬁrst word and then each succes-

sive word after that in chronological time to understand, so if I’m say-

ing that words and sequential time have nothing to do with it you’re

wondering why we’re sitting here in this car using words and taking up

your increasingly precious time, meaning aren’t I sort of logically con-

tradicting myself right at the start. Not to mention am I maybe full of

B.S. about knowing what happens — if I really did kill myself, how

can you even be hearing this? Meaning am I a fraud. That’s OK, it

doesn’t really matter what you think. I mean it probably matters to

you, or you think it does — that isn’t what I meant by doesn’t matter.

What I mean is that it doesn’t really matter what you think about me,

because despite appearances this isn’t even really about me. All I’m try-

ing to do is sketch out one little part of what it was like before I died

and why I at least thought I did it, so that you’ll have at least some idea

of why what happened afterward happened and why it had the impact

it did on who this is really about. Meaning it’s like an abstract or sort

of intro, meant to be very brief and sketchy ...and yet of course look

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how much time and English it’s seeming to take even to say it. It’s in-

teresting if you really think about it, how clumsy and laborious it

seems to be to convey even the smallest thing. How much time would

you even say has passed, so far?

One reason why Dr. Gustafson would have made a terrible poker

player or fraud is that whenever he thought it was a big moment in the

analysis he would always make a production of leaning back in his

desk chair, which made that loud sound as the back tilted back and his

feet went back on their heels so the soles showed, although he was

good at making the position look comfortable and very familiar to his

body, like it felt good doing that when he had to think. The whole

thing was both slightly overdramatic and yet still likable for some rea-

son. Fern, by the way, has reddish hair and slightly asymmetrical green

eyes — the kind of green people buy tinted contact lenses to get —

and is attractive in a sort of witchy way. I think she’s attractive, anyway.

She’s grown up to be a very poised, witty, self-sufﬁcient person, with

maybe just the slightest whiff of the perfume of loneliness that hangs

around unmarried women around age thirty. The fact is that we’re all

lonely, of course. Everyone knows this, it’s almost a cliché. So yet an-

other layer of my essential fraudulence is that I pretended to myself

that my loneliness was special, that it was uniquely my fault because I

was somehow especially fraudulent and hollow. It’s not special at all,

we’ve all got it. In spades. Dead or not, Dr. Gustafson knew more

about all this than I, so that he spoke with what came off as genuine

authority and pleasure when he said (maybe a little superciliously,

given how obvious it was), ‘But if you’re constitutionally false and ma-

nipulative and unable to be honest about who you really are, Neal’

(Neal being my given name, it was on my birth certiﬁcate when I got

adopted), ‘how is it that you were able to drop the sparring and ma-

nipulation and be honest with me a moment ago’ (for that’s all it had

been, in spite of all the English that’s been expended on just my head’s

partial contents in the tiny interval between then and now) ‘about who

you really are?’ So it turned out I’d been right in predicting what his

big logical insight was going to be. And although I played along with

him for a while so as not to prick his bubble, inside I felt pretty bleak

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indeed, because now I knew that he was going to be just as pliable and

credulous as everyone else, he didn’t appear to have anything close to

the ﬁrepower I’d need to give me any hope of getting helped out of the

trap of fraudulence and unhappiness I’d constructed for myself. Be-

cause the real truth was that my confession of being a fraud and of

having wasted time sparring with him over the previous weeks in or-

der to manipulate him into seeing me as exceptional and insightful

had itself been kind of manipulative. It was pretty clear that Dr.

Gustafson, in order to survive in private practice, could not be totally

stupid or obtuse about people, so it seemed reasonable to assume that

he’d noticed the massive amount of fencing and general showing off

I’d been doing during the ﬁrst weeks of the analysis, and thus had

come to some conclusions about my apparently desperate need to

make a certain kind of impression on him, and though it wasn’t totally

certain it was thus at least a decent possibility that he’d sized me up as

a basically empty, insecure person whose whole life involved trying to

impress people and manipulate their view of me in order to compen-

sate for the inner emptiness. It’s not as if this is an incredibly rare or

obscure type of personality, after all. So the fact that I had chosen to be

supposedly ‘honest’ and to diagnose myself aloud was in fact just one

more move in my campaign to make sure Dr. Gustafson understood

that as a patient I was uniquely acute and self-aware, and that there

was very little chance he was going to see or diagnose anything about

me that I wasn’t already aware of and able to turn to my own tactical

advantage in terms of creating whatever image or impression of myself

I wanted him to see at that moment. His big supposed insight, then —

which had as its ostensible, ﬁrst-order point that my fraudulence could

not possibly be as thoroughgoing and hopeless as I claimed it was,

since my ability to be honest with him about it logically contradicted

my claim of being incapable of honesty — actually had as its larger,

unspoken point the claim that he could discern things about my basic

character that I myself could not see or interpret correctly, and thus

that he could help me out of the trap by pointing out inconsistencies

in my view of myself as totally fraudulent. The fact that this insight

that he appeared so coyly pleased and excited about was not only ob-

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vious and superﬁcial but also wrong — this was depressing, much the

way discovering that somebody is easy to manipulate is always a little

depressing. A corollary to the fraudulence paradox is that you simulta-

neously want to fool everyone you meet and yet also somehow always

hope that you’ll come across someone who is your match or equal and

can’t be fooled. But this was sort of the last straw, I mentioned I’d tried

a whole number of different things that hadn’t worked already. So de-

pressing is a gross understatement, actually. Plus of course the obvious

fact that I was paying this guy for help in getting out of the trap and

he’d now showed that he didn’t have the mental ﬁrepower to do it. So

I was now thinking about the prospect of spending time and money

driving in to River Forest twice a week just to yank the analyst around

in ways he couldn’t see so that he’d think that I was actually less fraud-

ulent than I thought I was and that analysis with him was gradually

helping me see this. Meaning that he’d probably be getting more out

of it than I would, for me it would just be fraudulence as usual.

However tedious and sketchy all this is, you’re at least getting an

idea, I think, of what it was like inside my head. If nothing else, you’re

seeing how exhausting and solipsistic it is to be like this. And I had

been this way my whole life, at least from age four onward, as far as I

could recall. Of course, it’s also a really stupid and egotistical way to be,

of course you can see that. This is why the ultimate and most deeply

unspoken point of the analyst’s insight — namely, that who and what

I believed I was was not what I really was at all — which I thought was

false, was in fact true, although not for the reasons that Dr. Gustafson,

who was leaning back in his chair and smoothing his big mustache

with his thumb and foreﬁnger while I played dumb and let him feel

like he was explaining to me a contradiction I couldn’t understand

without his help, believed.

One of my other ways of playing dumb for the next several sessions

after that was to protest his upbeat diagnosis (irrelevantly, since by this

time I’d pretty much given up on Dr. Gustafson and was starting to

think of various ways to kill myself without causing pain or making a

mess that would disgust whoever found me) by means of listing the

various ways I’d been fraudulent even in my pursuit of ways to achieve

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genuine and uncalculating integrity. I’ll spare giving you the whole list

again. I basically went all the way back to childhood (which analysts

always like you to do) and laid it on. Partly I was curious to see how

much he’d put up with. For example, I told him about going from gen-

uinely loving ball, loving the smell of the grass and distant sprinklers,

or the feel of pounding my ﬁst into the glove over and over and yelling

‘Hey, batterbatter,’ and the big low red tumid sun at the game’s start

versus the arc lights coming on with a clank in the glowing twilight of

the late innings, and of the steam and clean burned smell of ironing

my Legion uniform, or the feel of sliding and watching all the dust it

raised settle around me, or all the parents in shorts and rubber ﬂip-

ﬂops setting up lawn chairs with Styrofoam coolers, little kids hooking

their ﬁngers around the backstop fence or running off after fouls. The

smell of the ump’s aftershave and sweat, the little whisk-broom he’d

bend down and tidy the plate with. Mostly the feel of stepping up to

the plate knowing anything was possible, a feeling like a sun ﬂaring

somewhere high up in my chest. And about how by only maybe four-

teen all that had disappeared and turned into worrying about averages

and if I could make All City again, or being so worried I’d screw up

that I didn’t even like ironing the uniform anymore before games be-

cause it gave me too much time to think, standing there so nerved up

about doing well that night that I couldn’t even notice the little chuck-

ling sighs the iron made anymore or the singular smell of the steam

when I hit the little button for steam. How I’d basically ruined all the

best parts of everything like that. How sometimes it felt like I was

actually asleep and none of this was even real and someday out of

nowhere I was maybe going to suddenly wake up in midstride. That

was part of the idea behind things like joining the charismatic church

up in Naperville, to try to wake up spiritually instead of living in this

fog of fraudulence. ‘The truth shall set you free’ — the Bible.This was

what Beverly-Elizabeth Slane liked to call my holy roller phase. And

the charismatic church really did seem to help a lot of the parishioners

and congregants I met. They were humble and devoted and charitable,

and gave tirelessly without thought of personal reward in active service

to the church and in donating resources and time to the church’s cam-

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paign to build a new altar with an enormous cross of thick glass whose

crossbeam was lit up and ﬁlled with aerated water and was to have var-

ious kinds of beautiful ﬁsh swimming in it. (Fish being a prominent

Christ-symbol for charismatics. In fact, most of us who were the most

devoted and active in the church had bumper stickers on our cars with

no words or anything except a plain line drawing of the outline of a

ﬁsh — this lack of ostentation impressed me as classy and genuine.)

But with the real truth here being how quickly I went from being

someone who was there because he wanted to wake up and stop being

a fraud to being somebody who was so anxious to impress the congre-

gation with how devoted and active I was that I volunteered to help

take the collection, and never missed one study group the whole time,

and was on two different committees for coordinating fund-raising for

the new aquarial altar and deciding exactly what kind of equipment

and ﬁsh would be used for the crossbeam. Plus often being the one in

the front row whose voice in the responses was loudest and who waved

both hands in the air the most enthusiastically to show that the Spirit

had entered me, and speaking in tongues — mostly consisting of d ’s

and g’s—except not really, of course, because in fact I was really just

pretending to speak in tongues because all the parishioners around me

were speaking in tongues and had the Spirit, and so in a kind of fever

of excitement I was able to hoodwink even myself into thinking that I

really had the Spirit moving through me and was speaking in tongues

when in reality I was just shouting ‘Dugga muggle ergle dergle’ over

and over. (In other words, so anxious to see myself as truly born-again

that I actually convinced myself that the tongues’ babble was real lan-

guage and somehow less false than plain English at expressing the

feeling of the Holy Spirit rolling like a juggernaut right through me.)

This went on for about four months. Not to mention falling over

backward whenever Pastor Steve came down the row popping people

and popped me in the forehead with the heel of his hand, but falling

over backward on purpose, not genuinely being struck down by the

Spirit like the other people on either side of me (one of whom actually

fainted and had to be brought around with salts). It was only when I

was walking out to the parking lot one night after Wednesday Night

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Praise that I suddenly experienced a ﬂash of self-awareness or clarity

or whatever in which I suddenly stopped conning myself and realized

that I’d been a fraud all these months in the church, too, and was really

only saying and doing these things because all the real parishioners

were doing them and I wanted everyone to think I was sincere. It just

about knocked me over, that was how vividly I saw how I’d deceived

myself. The revealed truth was that I was an even bigger fraud in

church about being a newly reborn authentic person than I’d been be-

fore Deacon and Mrs. Halberstadt ﬁrst rang my doorbell out of no-

where as part of their missionary service and talked me into giving it a

shot. Because at least before the church thing I wasn’t conning

myself — I’d known that I was a fraud since at least age nineteen, but

at least I’d been able to admit and face the fraudulence directly instead

of B.S.ing myself that I was something I wasn’t.

All this was presented in the context of a very long pseudo-argument

about fraudulence with Dr. Gustafson that would take way too much

time to relate to you in detail, so I’m just telling you about some of the

more garish examples. With Dr. G. it was more in the form of a pro-

longed, multi-session back-and-forth on whether or not I was a total

fraud, during which I got more and more disgusted with myself for

even playing along. By this point in the analysis I’d pretty much de-

cided he was an idiot, or at least very limited in his insights into what

was really going on with people. (There was also the blatant issue of

the mustache and of him always playing with it.) Essentially he saw

what he wanted to see, which was just the sort of person I could prac-

tically eat for lunch in terms of creating whatever ideas or impressions

of me I wanted. For instance, I told him about the period of trying jog-

ging, during which I seemed never to fail to have to increase my pace

and pump my arms more vigorously whenever someone drove by or

looked up from his yard, so that I ended up with bone spurs and even-

tually had to quit altogether. Or spending at least two or three sessions

recounting the example of the introductory meditation class at the

Downers Grove Community Center that Melissa Betts of Settleman,

Dorn got me to take, at which through sheer force of will I’d always

force myself to remain totally still with my legs crossed and back per-

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fectly straight long after the other students had all given up and fallen

back on their mats shuddering and holding their heads. Right from

the ﬁrst class meeting, even though the small, brown instructor had

told us to shoot for only ten minutes of stillness at the outset because

most Westerners’ minds could not maintain more than a few minutes

of stillness and mindful concentration without feeling so restless and

ill at ease that they couldn’t stand it, I always remained absolutely still

and focused on breathing my prana with the lower diaphragm longer

than any of them, sometimes for up to thirty minutes, even though my

knees and lower back were on ﬁre and I had what felt like swarms of

insects crawling all over my arms and shooting out of the top of my

head — and Master Gurpreet, although he kept his facial expression

inscrutable, gave me a deep and seemingly respectful bow and said that

I sat almost like a living statue of mindful repose, and that he was im-

pressed. The problem was that we were also all supposed to continue

practicing our meditation on our own at home between classes, and

when I tried to do it alone I couldn’t seem to sit still and follow my

breath for more than even a few minutes before I felt like crawling out

of my skin and had to stop. I could only sit and appear quiet and mind-

ful and withstand the unbelievably restless and horrible feelings when

all of us were doing it together in the class — meaning only when

there were other people to make an impression on. And even in class,

the truth was that I was often concentrating not so much on following

my prana as on keeping totally still and in the correct posture and hav-

ing a deeply peaceful and meditative expression on my face in case

anyone was cheating and had their eyes open and was looking around,

plus also to ensure that Master Gurpreet would continue to see me as

exceptional and keep addressing me by what became sort of his class

nickname for me, which was ‘the statue.’

Finally, in the ﬁnal few class meetings, when Master Gurpreet told

us to sit still and focused for only as long as we comfortably could and

then waited almost an hour before ﬁnally hitting his small bell with

the little silver thing to signal the period of meditation’s end, only I

and an extremely thin, pale girl who had her own meditation bench

that she brought to class with her were able to sit still and focused for

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the whole hour, although at several different points I’d get so cramped

and restless, with what felt like bright blue ﬁre going up my spine and

shooting invisibly out of the top of my head as blobs of color exploded

over and over again behind my eyelids, that I thought I was going to

jump up screaming and take a header right out the window. And at the

end of the course, when there was also an opportunity to sign up for

the next session, which was called Deepening the Practice, Master

Gurpreet presented several of us with different honorary certiﬁcates,

and mine had my name and the date and was inscribed in black callig-

raphy, champion meditator, most impressive western student,

the statue. It was only after I fell asleep that night (I’d ﬁnally sort of

compromised and told myself I was practicing the meditative disci-

pline at home at night by lying down and focusing on following my

breathing very closely as I fell asleep, and it did turn out to be a phe-

nomenal sleep aid) that while I was asleep I had the dream about the

statue in the commons and realized that Master Gurpreet had actually

in all likelihood seen right through me the whole time, and that the

certiﬁcate was in reality a subtle rebuke or joke at my expense. Mean-

ing he was letting me know that he knew I was a fraud and not even

coming close to actually quieting my mind’s ceaseless conniving about

how to impress people in order to achieve mindfulness and honor my

true inner self. (Of course, what he seemed not to have divined was

that in reality I actually seemed to have no true inner self, and that the

more I tried to be genuine the more empty and fraudulent I ended up

feeling inside, which I told nobody about until my stab at analysis with

Dr.Gustafson.) In the dream, I was in the town commons in Aurora,

over near the Pershing tank memorial by the clock tower, and what I’m

doing in the dream is sculpting an enormous marble or granite statue

of myself, using a huge iron chisel and a hammer the size of those ones

they give you to try to hit the bell at the top of the big thermometer-

like thing at carnivals, and when the statue’s ﬁnally done I put it up on

a big bandstand or platform and spend all my time polishing it and

keeping birds from sitting on it or doing their business on it, and

cleaning up litter and keeping the grass neat all around the bandstand.

And in the dream my whole life ﬂashes by like that, the sun and moon

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go back and forth across the sky like windshield wipers over and over,

and I never seem to sleep or eat or take a shower (the dream takes

place in dream time as opposed to waking, chronological time), mean-

ing I’m condemned to a whole life of being nothing but a sort of cus-

todian to the statue. I’m not saying it was subtle or hard to ﬁgure out.

Everybody from Fern, Master Gurpreet, the anorexic girl with her

own bench, and Ginger Manley, to people from the ﬁrm and some of

the media reps we bought time from (I was still a media buyer at this

time) all walk by, some several times — at one point Melissa Betts and

her new ﬁancé even spread out a blanket and have a sort of little pic-

nic in the shade of the statue — but none of them ever look over or say

anything. It’s obviously another dream about fraudulence, like the

dream where I’m supposedly a big pop star on-stage but all I really do

is lip-synch to one of my stepparents’ old Mamas and Papas records

that’s on a record player just off-stage, and somebody whose face I

can’t ever look over long enough to make out keeps putting his hand in

the area of the record as if he’s going to make it skip or scratch, and the

whole dream makes my skin crawl. These dreams were obvious, they

were warnings from my subconscious that I was hollow and a fraud

and it was only a matter of time before the whole charade fell apart.

Another of my stepmother’s treasured antiques was a silver pocket-

watch of her maternal grandfather’s with the Latin respice ﬁnem in-

scribed on the inside of the case. It wasn’t until after she passed away

and my stepfather said she’d wanted me to have it that I bothered to

look up the term, after which I’d gotten the same sort of crawly feeling

as with Master Gurpreet’s certiﬁcate. Much of the nightmarish qual-

ity of the dream about the statue was due to the way the sun raced

back and forth across the sky and the speed with which my whole life

blew by like that, in the commons. It was obviously also my subcon-

scious enlightening me as to the meditation instructor’s having seen

through me the whole time, after which I was too embarrassed even to

go try to get a refund for the Deepening the Practice class, which there

was now no way I felt like I could show up for, even though at the

same time I also still had fantasies about Master Gurpreet becom-

ing my mentor or guru and using all kinds of inscrutable Eastern

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techniques to show me the way to meditate myself into having a

true self . . .

...Etc., etc. I’ll spare you any more examples, for instance I’ll spare

you the literally countless examples of my fraudulence with girls —

with the ladies as they say — in just about every dating relationship I

ever had, or the almost unbelievable amount of fraudulence and calcu-

lation involved in my career — not just in terms of manipulating the

consumer and manipulating the client into trusting that your agency’s

ideas are the best way to manipulate the consumer, but in the inter-

ofﬁce politics of the agency itself, like for example in sizing up what

sorts of things your superiors want to believe (including the belief

that they’re smarter than you and that that’s why they’re your superior)

and then giving them what they want but doing it just subtly enough

that they never get a chance to view you as a sycophant or yes-man

(which they want to believe they do not really want) but instead see you

as a tough-minded independent thinker who from time to time bows

to the weight of their superior intelligence and creative ﬁrepower, etc.

The whole agency was one big ballet of fraudulence and of manipulat-

ing people’s images of your ability to manipulate images, a virtual hall

of mirrors. And I was good at it, remember, I thrived there.

It was the sheer amount of time Dr. Gustafson spent touching and

smoothing his mustache that indicated he wasn’t aware of doing it and

in fact was subconsciously reassuring himself that it was still there.

Which is not an especially subtle habit, in terms of insecurity, since af-

ter all facial hair is known as a secondary sex characteristic, meaning

what he was really doing was subconsciously reassuring himself that

something else was still there, if you know what I mean.This was some

of why it was no real surprise when it turned out that the overall di-

rection he wanted the analysis to proceed in involved issues of mas-

culinity and how I understood my masculinity (my ‘manhood’ in other

words). This also helped explain everything from the lost-female-

crawling and two-testicle-shaped-objects-that-looked-deformed prints

on the wall to the little African or Indian drum things and little ﬁg-

urines with (sometimes) exaggerated sex characteristics on the shelf

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over his desk, plus the pipe, the unnecessary size of his wedding band,

even the somewhat overdone little-boy clutter of the ofﬁce itself. It

was pretty clear that there were some major sexual insecurities and

maybe even homosexual-type ambiguities that Dr. Gustafson was

subconsciously trying to hide from himself and reassure himself about,

and one obvious way he did this was to sort of project his insecurities

onto his patients and get them to believe that America’s culture had a

uniquely brutal and alienating way of brainwashing its males from an

early age into all kinds of damaging beliefs and superstitions about

what being a so-called ‘real man’ was, such as competitiveness instead

of concert, winning at all costs, dominating others through intelli-

gence or will, being strong, not showing your true emotions, depend-

ing on others seeing you as a real man in order to reassure yourself of

your manhood, seeing your own value solely in terms of accomplish-

ments, being obsessed with your career or income, feeling as if you

were constantly being judged or on display, etc. This was later in the

analysis, after the seemingly endless period where after every example

of fraudulence I gave him he’d make a show of congratulating me on

being able to reveal what I felt were shameful fraudulent examples,

and said that this was proof that I had much more of an ability to be

genuine than I (apparently because of my insecurities or male fears)

seemed able to give myself credit for. Plus it didn’t exactly seem like a

coincidence that the cancer he was even then harboring was in his

colon — that shameful, dirty, secret place right near the rectum —

with the idea being that using your rectum or colon to secretly harbor

an alien growth was a blatant symbol both of homosexuality and of the

repressive belief that its open acknowledgment would equal disease

and death. Dr. Gustafson and I both had a good laugh over this one

after we’d both died and were outside linear time and in the process of

dramatic change, you can bet on that. (Outside time is not just an ex-

pression or manner of speaking, by the way.) By this time in the analy-

sis I was playing with him the way a cat does with a hurt bird. If I’d had

an ounce of real self-respect I would have stopped and gone back to

the Downers Grove Community Center and thrown myself on Mas-

ter Gurpreet’s mercy, since except for maybe one or two girls I’d dated

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he was the only one who’d appeared to see all the way through to the

core of my fraudulence, plus his oblique, very dry way of indicating

this to me betrayed a sort of serene indifference to whether I even un-

derstood that he saw right through me that I found incredibly impres-

sive and genuine — here in Master Gurpreet was a man with, as they

say, nothing to prove. But I didn’t, instead I more or less conned my-

self into sticking with going in to see Dr. G. twice a week for almost

nine months (toward the end it was only once a week because by then

the cancer had been diagnosed and he was getting radiation treat-

ments every Tuesday and Thursday), telling myself that at least I was

trying to ﬁnd some venue in which I could get help ﬁnding a way to be

genuine and stop manipulating everybody around me to see ‘the statue’

as erect and impressive, etc.

Nor however is it strictly true that the analyst had nothing interest-

ing to say or that he didn’t sometimes provide helpful models or angles

for looking at the basic problem. For instance, it turned out that one of

his basic operating premises was the claim that there were really only

two basic, fundamental orientations a person could have toward the

world, (1) love and (2) fear, and that they couldn’t coexist (or, in logi-

cal terms, that their domains were exhaustive and mutually exclusive,

or that their two sets had no intersection but their union comprised all

possible elements, or that:

‘(∀x) ((Fx → ~ (Lx)) & (Lx → ~ (Fx))) & ~ ((∃x) (~ (Fx) & ~ (Lx))’ ),

meaning in other words that each day of your life was spent in service

to one of these masters or the other, and ‘One cannot serve two

masters’ — the Bible again — and that one of the worst things about

the conception of competitive, achievement-oriented masculinity that

America supposedly hardwired into its males was that it caused a more

or less constant state of fear that made genuine love next to impossi-

ble. That is, that what passed for love in American men was usually

just the need to be regarded in a certain way, meaning that today’s

males were so constantly afraid of ‘not measuring up’ (Dr. G.’s phrase,

with evidently no pun intended) that they had to spend all their time

convincing others of their masculine ‘validity’ (which happens to also

be a term from formal logic) in order to ease their own insecurity,

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making genuine love next to impossible. Although it seemed a little bit

simplistic to see this fear as just a male problem (try watching a girl

stand on a scale sometime), it turns out that Dr. Gustafson was very

nearly right in this concept of the two masters — though not in the

way that he, when alive and confused about his own real identity, be-

lieved — and even while I played along by pretending to argue or not

quite understand what he was driving at, the idea struck me that

maybe the real root of my problem was not fraudulence but a basic in-

ability to really love, even to genuinely love my stepparents, or Fern, or

Melissa Betts, or Ginger Manley of Aurora West High in 1979, whom

I’d often thought of as the only girl I’d ever truly loved, though Dr. G.’s

bromide about men being brainwashed to equate love with accom-

plishment or conquest also applied here. The plain truth was that Gin-

ger Manley was just the ﬁrst girl I ever went all the way with, and most

of my tender feelings about her were really just nostalgia for the feel-

ing of immense cosmic validation I’d felt when she ﬁnally let me take

her jeans all the way off and put my so-called ‘manhood’ inside her,

etc. There’s really no bigger cliché than losing your virginity and later

having all kinds of retrospective tenderness for the girl involved. Or

what Beverly-Elizabeth Slane, a research technician I used to see out-

side of work when I was a media buyer, and had a lot of conﬂict with

toward the end, said, which I don’t think I ever told Dr. G. about,

fraudulence-wise, probably because it cut a little too close to the bone.

Toward the end she had compared me to some piece of ultra-expensive

new medical or diagnostic equipment that can discern more about

you in one quick scan than you could ever know about yourself — but

the equipment doesn’t care about you, you’re just a sequence of

processes and codes. What the machine understands about you doesn’t

actually mean anything to it. Even though it’s really good at what it

does. Beverly had a bad temper combined with some serious ﬁre-

power, she was not someone you wanted to have pissed off at you. She

said she’d never felt the gaze of someone so penetrating, discerning,

and yet totally empty of care, like she was a puzzle or problem I was

ﬁguring out. She said it was thanks to me that she’d discovered the dif-

ference between being penetrated and really known versus penetrated

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and just violated — needless to say, these thanks were sarcastic. Some

of this was just her emotional makeup — she found it impossible to

really end a relationship unless all bridges were burned and things got

said that were so devastating that there could be no possibility of a

rapprochement to haunt her or prevent her moving on. Nevertheless it

penetrated, I never did forget what she said in that letter.

Even if being fraudulent and being unable to love were in fact ulti-

mately the same thing (a possibility that Dr. Gustafson never seemed

to consider no matter how many times I set him up to see it), being

unable to really love was at least a different model or lens through

which to see the problem, plus initially it seemed like a promising way

of attacking the fraudulence paradox in terms of reducing the self-

hatred part that reinforced the fear and the consequent drive to try to

manipulate people into providing the very approval I’d denied myself.

(Dr. G.’s term for approval was validation.) This period was pretty

much the zenith of my career in analysis, and for a few weeks (during

a couple of which I actually didn’t see Dr. Gustafson at all, because

some sort of complication in his illness required him to go into the

hospital, and when he came back he appeared to have lost not only

weight but some kind of essential part of his total mass, and no longer

seemed too large for his old desk chair, which still squeaked but now

not as loudly, plus a lot of the clutter and papers had been straightened

up and put in several brown cardboard banker’s boxes against the wall

under the two sad prints, and when I came back in to see him the ab-

sence of mess was especially disturbing and sad, for some reason) it

was true that I felt some of the ﬁrst genuine hope I’d had since the

early, self-deluded part of the experiment with Naperville’s Church of

the Flaming Sword of the Redeemer. And yet at the same time these

weeks also led more or less directly to my decision to kill myself, al-

though I’m going to have to simplify and linearize a great deal of inte-

rior stuff in order to convey to you what actually happened. Otherwise

it would take an almost literal eternity to recount it, we already agreed

about that. It’s not that words or human language stop having any

meaning or relevance after you die, by the way. It’s more the speciﬁc,

one-after-the-other temporal ordering of them that does. Or doesn’t.

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It’s hard to explain. In logical terms, something expressed in words

will still have the same ‘cardinality’ but no longer the same ‘ordinality.’

All the different words are still there, in other words, but it’s no longer

a question of which one comes ﬁrst. Or you could say it’s no longer the

series of words but now more like some limit toward which the series

converges. It’s hard not to want to put it in logical terms, since they’re

the most abstract and universal. Meaning they have no connotation,

you don’t feel anything about them. Or maybe imagine everything

anybody on earth ever said or even thought to themselves all get-

ting collapsed and exploding into one large, combined, instantaneous

sound — although instantaneous is a little misleading, since it implies

other instants before and after, and it isn’t really like that. It’s more like

the sudden internal ﬂash when you see or realize something — a sud-

den ﬂash or whatever of epiphany or insight. It’s not just that it hap-

pens way faster than you could break the process down and arrange it

into English, but that it happens on a scale in which there isn’t even

time to be aware of any sort of time at all in which it’s happening, the

ﬂash — all you know is that there’s a before and an after, and after-

ward you’re different. I don’t know if that makes sense. I’m just trying

to give it to you from several different angles, it’s all the same thing. Or

you could think of it as being more a certain conﬁguration of light

than a word-sum or series of sounds, too, afterward. Which is in fact

true. Or as a theorem’s proof — because if a proof is true then it’s true

everywhere and all the time, not just when you happen to say it. The

thing is that it turns out that logical symbolism really would be the

best way to express it, because logic is totally abstract and outside what

we think of as time. It’s the closest thing to what it’s really like. That’s

why it’s the logical paradoxes that really drive people nuts. A lot of his-

tory’s great logicians have ended up killing themselves, that is a fact.

And keep in mind this ﬂash can happen anywhere, at any time.

Here’s the basic Berry paradox, by the way, if you might want an ex-

ample of why logicians with incredible ﬁrepower can devote their

whole lives to solving these things and still end up beating their heads

against the wall. This one has to do with big numbers — meaning

really big, past a trillion, past ten to the trillion to the trillion, way up

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there. When you get way up there, it takes a while even to describe

numbers this big in words. ‘The quantity one trillion, four hundred

and three billion to the trillionth power’ takes twenty syllables to de-

scribe, for example. You get the idea. Now, even higher up there in

these huge, cosmic-scale numbers, imagine now the very smallest

number that can’t be described in under twenty-two syllables. The

paradox is that the very smallest number that can’t be described in under

twenty-two syllables, which of course is itself a description of this num-

ber, only has twenty-one syllables in it, which of course is under

twenty-two syllables. So now what are you supposed to do?

At the same time, what actually led to it in causal terms, though, oc-

curred during maybe the third or fourth week that Dr. G. was back

seeing patients after his hospitalization. Although I’m not going to

pretend that the speciﬁc incident wouldn’t strike most people as ab-

surd or even sort of insipid, as causes go. The truth is just that late at

night one night in August after Dr. G.’s return, when I couldn’t sleep

(which happened a lot ever since the cocaine period) and was sitting

up drinking a glass of milk or something and watching television, ﬂip-

ping the remote almost at random between different cable stations the

way you do when it’s late, I happened on part of an old Cheers episode

from late in the series’ run where the analyst character, Frasier (who

went on to have his own show), and Lilith, his ﬁancée and also an an-

alyst, are just entering the stage set of the underground tavern, and

Frasier is asking her how her workday at her ofﬁce went, and Lilith

says, ‘If I have one more yuppie come in and start whining to me about

how he can’t love, I’m going to throw up.’ This line got a huge laugh

from the show’s studio audience, which indicated that they — and so

by demographic extension the whole national audience at home as

well — recognized what a cliché and melodramatic type of complaint

the inability-to-love concept was. And, sitting there, when I suddenly

realized that once again I’d managed to con myself, this time into

thinking that this was a truer or more promising way to conceive of the

problem of fraudulence — and, by extension, that I’d also somehow

deluded myself into almost believing that poor old Dr. Gustafson had

anything in his mental arsenal that could actually help me, and that

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the real truth was probably more that I was continuing to see him

partly out of pity and partly so that I could pretend to myself that I was

taking steps to becoming more authentic when in fact all I was doing

was jerking a gravely ill shell of a guy around and feeling superior to

him because I was able to analyze his own psychological makeup so

much more accurately than he could analyze mine — the ﬂash of real-

izing all this at the very same time that the huge audience-laugh

showed that nearly everybody in the United States had probably al-

ready seen through the complaint’s inauthenticity as long ago as when-

ever the episode had originally run — all this ﬂashed through my head

in the tiny interval it took to realize what I was watching and to

remember who the characters of Frasier and Lilith even were, mean-

ing maybe half a second at most, and it more or less destroyed me,

that’s the only way I can describe it, as if whatever hope of any way out

of the trap I’d made for myself had been blasted out of midair or

laughed off the stage, as if I were one of those stock comic characters

who is always both the butt of the joke and the only person not to get

the joke — and in sum I went to bed feeling as fraudulent, befogged,

hopeless and full of self-contempt as I’d ever felt, and it was the next

morning after that that I woke up having decided I was going to kill

myself and end the whole farce. (As you probably recall, Cheers was an

incredibly popular series, and even in syndication its metro numbers

were so high that if a local advertiser wanted to buy time on it the slots

cost so much that you pretty much had to build his whole local strat-

egy around those slots.) I’m compressing a huge amount of what took

place in my psyche that next-to-last night, all the different realizations

and conclusions I reached as I lay there in bed unable to sleep or even

move (no single series’ line or audience-laugh is in and of itself going

to constitute a reason for suicide, of course) — although to you I imag-

ine it probably doesn’t seem all that compressed at all, you’re thinking

here’s this guy going on and on and why doesn’t he get to the part

where he kills himself and explain or account for the fact that he’s

sitting here next to me in a piece of high-powered machinery telling

me all this if he died in 1991. Which in fact I knew I would from the

moment I ﬁrst woke up. It was over, I’d decided to end the charade.

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After breakfast I called in sick to work and stayed home the whole

day by myself. I knew that if I was around anyone I’d automatically

lapse into fraudulence. I had decided to take a whole lot of Benadryl

and then just as I got really sleepy and relaxed I’d get the car up to top

speed on a rural road way out in the extreme west suburbs and drive it

head-on into a concrete bridge abutment. Benadryl makes me ex-

tremely foggy and sleepy, it always has. I spent most of the morning on

letters to my lawyer and C.P.A., and brief notes to the creative head

and managing partner who had originally brought me aboard at Sami-

eti and Cheyne. Our creative group was in the middle of some very

ticklish campaign preparations, and I wanted to apologize for in any

way leaving them in the lurch. Of course I didn’t really feel all that

sorry — Samieti and Cheyne was a ballet of fraudulence, and I was

well out of it. The note was probably ultimately just so that the people

who really mattered at S. & C. would be more apt to remember me as

a decent, conscientious guy who it turned out was maybe just a little

too sensitive and tormented by his personal demons — ‘Almost too

good for this world’ is what I seemed to be unable to keep from fanta-

sizing a lot of them saying after news of it came through. I did not

write Dr. Gustafson a note. He had his own share of problems, and I

knew that in the note I’d spend a lot of time trying to seem as if I was

being honest but really just dancing around the truth, which was that

he was a deeply repressed homosexual or androgyne and had no real

business charging patients to let him project his own maladjustments

onto them, and that the truth was that he’d be doing himself and

everybody else a favor if he’d just go over to Garﬁeld Park and blow

somebody in the bushes and try honestly to decide if he liked it or not,

and that I was a total fraud for continuing to drive all the way in to

River Forest to see him and bat him around like a catnip toy while

telling myself there was some possible nonfraudulent point to it. (All

of which, of course, even if they weren’t dying of colon cancer right in

front of you you still could never actually come out and say to some-

body, since certain truths might well destroy them — and who has

that right?)

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I did spend almost two hours before taking the ﬁrst of the Benadryl

composing a handwritten note to my sister Fern. In the note I apolo-

gized for whatever pain my suicide and the fraudulence and/or inability

to love that had precipitated it might cause her and my stepdad (who

was still alive and well and now lived in Marin County, California,

where he taught part-time and did community outreach with Marin

County’s homeless). I also used the occasion of the letter and all the

sort of last-testament urgency associated with it to license apologizing

to Fern about manipulating my stepparents into believing that she’d

lied about the antique glass bowl in 1967, as well as for half a dozen

other incidents and spiteful or fraudulent actions that I knew had

caused her pain and that I had felt bad about ever since, but had never

really seen any way to broach with her or express my honest regret for.

(It turns out there are things that you can discuss in a suicide note that

would just be too bizarre if expressed in any other kind of venue.) Just

one example of such an incident was during a period in the mid-’70s,

when Fern, as part of puberty, underwent some physical changes that

made her look chunky for a year or two — not fat, but wide-hipped

and bosomy and sort of much more broad than she’d been as a pre-

teen — and of course she was very, very sensitive about it (puberty also

being a time of terrible self-consciousness and sensitivity about one’s

body image, obviously), so much so that my stepparents took great

pains never to say anything about Fern’s new breadth or even ever to

bring up any topics related to eating habits, diet and exercise, etc. And

I for my own part never said anything about it either, not directly, but

I had worked out all kinds of very subtle and indirect ways to torment

Fern about her size in such a way that my stepparents never saw any-

thing and I could never really be accused of anything that I couldn’t

then look all around myself with a shocked, incredulous facial expres-

sion as if I had no idea what she was talking about, such as just a quick

raise of my eyebrow when her eyes met mine as she was having a sec-

ond helping at dinner, or a quick little quiet, ‘You sure you can ﬁt into

that?’ when she came home from the store with a new skirt. The one I

still remembered the most vividly involved the second-ﬂoor hall of our

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house, which was in Aurora and was a three-story home (including the

basement) but not all that spacious or large, meaning a skinny three-

decker like so many you always see all crammed together along residen-

tial streets in Naperville and Aurora. The second-ﬂoor hallway, which

ran between Fern’s room and the top of the stairway on one end and

my room and the second-ﬂoor bathroom on the other, was cramped

and somewhat narrow, but not anywhere close to as narrow as I would

pretend that it was whenever Fern and I passed each other in it, with

me squashing my back against the hallway wall and splaying my arms

out and wincing as if there would barely be enough room for some-

body of her unbelievable breadth to squeeze past me, and she would

never say anything or even look at me when I did it but would just go

on past me into the bathroom and close the door. But I knew it must

have hurt her. A little while later, she entered an adolescent period

where she hardly ate anything at all, and smoked cigarettes and chewed

several packs of gum a day, and used a lot of makeup, and for a while

she got so thin that she looked angular and a bit like an insect (although

of course I never said that), and I once, through their bedroom’s key-

hole, overheard a brief conversation in which my stepmother said she

was worried because she didn’t think Fern was having her normal time

of the month anymore because she had gotten so underweight, and

she and my stepfather discussed the possibility of taking her to see

some kind of specialist.That period passed on its own, but in the letter

I told Fern that I’d always remembered this and certain other periods

when I’d been cruel or tried to make her feel bad, and that I regretted

them very much, although I said I wouldn’t want to seem so egotisti-

cal as to think that a simple apology could erase any of the hurt

I’dcaused her when we were growing up. On the other hand, I also

assured her that it wasn’t as if I had gone around for years carrying

excessive guilt or blowing these incidents out of all proportion. They

were not life-altering traumas or anything like that, and in many ways

they were probably all too typical of the sorts of cruelties that kids tend

to inﬂict on each other growing up. I also assured her that neither

these incidents nor my remorse about them had anything to do with

my killing myself. I simply said, without going into anything like the

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level of detail I’ve given you (because my purpose in the letter was of

course very different), that I was killing myself because I was an essen-

tially fraudulent person who seemed to lack either the character or the

ﬁrepower to ﬁnd a way to stop even after I’d realized my fraudulence

and the terrible toll it exacted (I told her nothing about the various

different realizations or paradoxes, what would be the point?). I also

inserted that there was also a good possibility that, when all was said

and done, I was nothing but just another fast-track yuppie who

couldn’t love, and that I found the banality of this unendurable, largely

because I was evidently so hollow and insecure that I had a patholog-

ical need to see myself as somehow exceptional or outstanding at all

times. Without going into much explanation or argument, I also told

Fern that if her initial reaction to these reasons for my killing myself

was to think that I was being much, much too hard on myself, then

she should know that I was already aware that that was the most likely

reaction my note would produce in her, and had probably deliber-

ately constructed the note to at least in part prompt just that reaction,

just the way my whole life I’d often said and done things designed to

prompt certain people to believe that I was a genuinely outstanding

person whose personal standards were so high that he was far too

hard on himself, which in turn made me appear attractively modest

and unsmug, and was a big reason for my popularity with so many

people in all different avenues of my life — what Beverly-Elizabeth

Slane had termed my ‘talent for ingratiation’ — but was nevertheless

basically calculated and fraudulent. I also told Fern that I loved her

very much, and asked her to relay these same sentiments to Marin

County for me.

Now we’re getting to the part where I actually kill myself. This oc-

curred at 9:17 PM on August 19, 1991, if you want the time ﬁxed pre-

cisely. Plus I’ll spare you most of the last couple hours’ preparations

and back-and-forth conﬂict and dithering, which there was a lot of.

Suicide runs so counter to so many hardwired instincts and drives that

nobody in his right mind goes through with it without going through

a great deal of internal back-and-forth, intervals of almost changing

your mind, etc. The German logician Kant was right in this respect,

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human beings are all pretty much identical in terms of our hardwiring.

Although we are seldom conscious of it, we are all basically just in-

struments or expressions of our evolutionary drives, which are them-

selves the expressions of forces that are inﬁnitely larger and more

important than we are. (Although actually being conscious of this is a

whole different matter.) So I won’t really even try to describe the sev-

eral different times that day when I sat in my living room and had a fu-

rious mental back-and-forth about whether to actually go through

with it. For one thing, it was intensely mental and would take an enor-

mous amount of time to put into words, plus it would come off as

somewhat cliché or banal in the sense that many of the thoughts and

associations were basically the same sorts of generic things that almost

anyone who’s confronting imminent death will end up thinking. As in,

‘This is the last time I will ever tie my shoe,’ ‘This is the last time I will

look at this rubber tree on top of the stereo cabinet,’ ‘How delicious

this lungful of air right here tastes,’ ‘This is the last glass of milk I’ll

ever drink,’ ‘What a totally priceless gift this totally ordinary sight of

the wind picking trees’ branches up and moving them around is.’ Or,

‘I will never again hear the plaintive sound of the fridge going on in

the kitchen’ (the kitchen and breakfast nook are right off my living

room), etc. Or, ‘I won’t see the sun come up tomorrow or watch the

bedroom gradually undim and resolve, etc.,’ and at the same time

trying to summon the memory of the exact way the sun comes up over

the humid ﬁelds and the wet-looking I-55 ramp that lay due east

of my bedroom’s sliding glass door in the morning. It had been a hot,

wet August, and if I went through with killing myself I wouldn’t ever

get to feel the incremental cooling and drying that starts here around

mid-September, or to see the leaves turn or hear them rustle along

the edge of the courtyard outside S. & C.’s ﬂoor of the building on

S. Dearborn, or see snow or put a shovel and bag of sand in the trunk,

or bite into a perfectly ripe, ungrainy pear, or put a piece of toilet

paper on a shaving cut. Etc. If I went in and went to the bathroom and

brushed my teeth it would be the last time I did those things. I sat

there and thought about that, looking at the rubber tree. Everything

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seemed to tremble a little, the way things reﬂected in water will trem-

ble. I watched the sun begin to drop down over the townhouse devel-

opments going up south of Darien’s corporation limit on Lily Cache

Rd. and realized that I would never see the newest homes’ construc-

tion and landscaping completed, or that the homes’ white insulation

wrap with the trade name TYVEK all over it ﬂapping in all the wind

out here would one day have vinyl siding or plate brick and color-

coordinated shutters over it and I wouldn’t see this happen or be able

to drive by and know what was actually written there under all the

nice exteriors. Or the breakfast nook window’s view of the big farms’

ﬁelds next to my development, with the plowed furrows all parallel

so that if I lean and line their lines up just right they seem to all rush

together toward the horizon as if shot out of something huge. You get

the idea. Basically I was in that state in which a man realizes that

everything he sees will outlast him. As a verbal construction I know

that’s a cliché. As a state in which to actually be, though, it’s some-

thing else, believe me. Where now every movement takes on a kind

of ceremonial aspect. The very sacredness of the world as seen (the

same kind of state Dr. G. will try to describe with analogies to oceans

and whitecaps and trees, you might recall I mentioned this already).

This is literally about one one-trillionth of the various thoughts and

internal experiences I underwent in those last few hours, and I’ll spare

both of us recounting any more, since I’m aware it ends up seeming

somewhat lame. Which in fact it wasn’t, but I won’t pretend it was

fully authentic or genuine, either. A part of me was still calculating,

performing — and this was part of the ceremonial quality of that last

afternoon. Even as I wrote my note to Fern, for instance, expressing

sentiments and regrets that were real, a part of me was noticing what

a ﬁne and sincere note it was, and anticipating the effect on Fern of

this or that heartfelt phrase, while yet another part was observing

the whole scene of a man in a dress shirt and no tie sitting at his break-

fast nook writing a heartfelt note on his last afternoon alive, the

blondwood table’s surface trembling with sunlight and the man’s hand

steady and face both haunted by regret and ennobled by resolve, this

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part of me sort of hovering above and just to the left of myself, evalu-

ating the scene, and thinking what a ﬁne and genuine-seeming per-

formance in a drama it would make if only we all had not already

been subject to countless scenes just like it in dramas ever since we ﬁrst

saw a movie or read a book, which somehow entailed that real scenes

like the one of my suicide note were now compelling and genuine only

to their participants, and to anyone else would come off as banal and

even somewhat cheesy or maudlin, which is somewhat paradoxical

when you consider — as I did, sitting there at the breakfast nook —

that the reason scenes like this will seem stale or manipulative to an

audience is that we’ve already seen so many of them in dramas, and yet

the reason we’ve seen so many of them in dramas is that the scenes

really are dramatic and compelling and let people communicate very

deep, complicated emotional realities that are almost impossible to

articulate in any other way, and at the same time still another facet or

part of me realizing that from this perspective my own basic problem

was that at an early age I’d somehow chosen to cast my lot with my

life’s drama’s supposed audience instead of with the drama itself, and

that I even now was watching and gauging my supposed performance’s

quality and probable effects, and thus was in the ﬁnal analysis the very

same manipulative fraud writing the note to Fern that I had been

throughout the life that had brought me to this climactic scene of

writing and signing it and addressing the envelope and afﬁxing

postage and putting the envelope in my shirt pocket (totally conscious

of the resonance of its resting there, next to my heart, in the scene),

planning to drop it in a mailbox on the way out to Lily Cache Rd. and

the bridge abutment into which I planned to drive my car at speeds

sufﬁcient to displace the whole front end and impale me on the steer-

ing wheel and instantly kill me. Self-loathing is not the same thing as

being into pain or a lingering death, if I was going to do it I wanted it

instant.

On Lily Cache, the bridge abutments and sides’ steep banks support

State Route 4 (also known as the Braidwood Highway) as it crosses

overhead on a cement overpass so covered with grafﬁti that most of it

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you can’t even read. (Which sort of defeats the purpose of grafﬁti, in my

opinion.) The abutments themselves are just off the road and about as

wide as this car. Plus the intersection is isolated way out in the country-

side around Romeoville, ten or so miles south of the southwest suburbs’

limits. It is the true boonies. The only homes are farms set way back

from the road and embellished with silos and barns, etc. At night in

the summer the dew-point is high and there’s always fog. It’s farm

country. I’ve never once passed under 4 here without seeming to be the

only thing on either road. The corn high and the ﬁelds like a green

ocean all around, insects the only real noise. Driving alone under

creamy stars and a little cocked scythe of moon, etc. The idea was to

have the accident and whatever explosion and ﬁre was involved occur

someplace isolated enough that no one else would see it, so that there

would be as little an aspect of performance to the thing as I could

manage and no temptation to spend my last few seconds trying to

imagine what impression the sight and sound of the impact might

make on someone watching. I was partly concerned that it might be

spectacular and dramatic and might look as if the driver was trying to

go out in as dramatic a way as possible. This is the sort of shit we waste

our lives thinking about.

The ground fog tends to get more intense by the second until it

seems that the whole world is just what’s in your headlights’ reach.

High beams don’t work in fog, they only make things worse. You can

go ahead and try them but you’ll see what happens, all they do is light

up the fog so it seems even denser. That’s kind of a minor paradox, that

sometimes you can actually see farther with low beams than high. All

right — and there’s the construction and all the ﬂapping TYVEK

wrap on houses that if you really do do it you’ll never see anyone live

in. Although it won’t hurt, it really will be instant, I can tell you that

much. The ﬁelds’ insects are almost deafening. If the corn’s high like

this and you watch as the sun sets you can practically watch them rise

up out of the ﬁelds like some great ﬁgure’s shadow rising. Mostly mos-

quitoes, I don’t know what all they are. It’s a whole insect universe in

there that none of us will ever see or know anything about. Plus you’ll

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notice the Benadryl doesn’t help all that much once you’re under way.

That whole idea was probably ill-conceived.

All right, now we’re coming to what I promised and led you through

the whole dull synopsis of what led up to this in hopes of. Meaning

what it’s like to die, what happens. Right? This is what everyone wants

to know. And you do, trust me. Whether you decide to go through

with it or not, whether I somehow talk you out of it the way you think

I’m going to try to do or not. It’s not what anyone thinks, for one

thing. The truth is you already know what it’s like. You already know

the difference between the size and speed of everything that ﬂashes

through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let any-

one know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what

seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and

yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through

one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if

we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.

But it does have a knob, the door can open. But not in the way you

think. But what if you could? Think for a second — what if all the inﬁ-

nitely dense and shifting worlds of stuff inside you every moment of your

life turned out now to be somehow fully open and expressible after-

ward, after what you think of as you has died, because what if afterward

now each moment itself is an inﬁnite sea or span or passage of time in

which to express it or convey it, and you don’t even need any organized

English, you can as they say open the door and be in anyone else’s

room in all your own multiform forms and ideas and facets? Because

listen — we don’t have much time, here’s where Lily Cache slopes

slightly down and the banks start getting steep, and you can just make

out the outlines of the unlit sign for the farmstand that’s never open

anymore, the last sign before the bridge — so listen: What exactly do

you think you are? The millions and trillions of thoughts, memories,

juxtapositions — even crazy ones like this, you’re thinking — that ﬂash

through your head and disappear? Some sum or remainder of these?

Your history? Do you know how long it’s been since I told you I was a

fraud? Do you remember you were looking at the respicem watch

hanging from the rearview and seeing the time, 9:17? What are you

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looking at right now? Coincidence? What if no time has passed at all?

The truth is you’ve already heard this. That this is what it’s like. That

it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless in-

bent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the in-

ﬁnities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you

a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a

fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know

this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know

it’s only a part. Who wouldn’t? It’s called free will, Sherlock. But at the

same time it’s why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of

others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali — it’s not

English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole.

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One clue that there’s something not quite real about sequential time the way you ex-

perience it is the various paradoxes of time supposedly passing and of a so-called ‘pres-

ent’ that’s always unrolling into the future and creating more and more past behind

it. As if the present were this car — nice car by the way — and the past is the road

we’ve just gone over, and the future is the headlit road up ahead we haven’t yet gotten

to, and time is the car’s forward movement, and the precise present is the car’s front

bumper as it cuts through the fog of the future, so that it’s now and then a tiny bit later

a whole different now, etc. Except if time is really passing, how fast does it go? At what

rate does the present change? See? Meaning if we use time to measure motion or

rate — which we do, it’s the only way you can — 95 miles per hour, 70 heartbeats a

minute, etc. — how are you supposed to measure the rate at which time moves? One

second per second? It makes no sense. You can’t even talk about time ﬂowing or mov-

ing without hitting up against paradox right away. So think for a second: What if

there’s really no movement at all? What if this is all unfolding in the one ﬂash you call

the present, this ﬁrst, inﬁnitely tiny split-second of impact when the speeding car’s

front bumper’s just starting to touch the abutment, just before the bumper crumples

and displaces the front end and you go violently forward and the steering column

comes back at your chest as if shot out of something enormous? Meaning that what if

in fact this now is inﬁnite and never really passes in the way your mind is supposedly

wired to understand pass, so that not only your whole life but every single humanly

conceivable way to describe and account for that life has time to ﬂash like neon shaped

into those connected cursive letters that businesses’ signs and windows love so much

to use through your mind all at once in the literally immeasurable instant between im-

pact and death, just as you start forward to meet the wheel at a rate no belt ever made

could restrain — THE END.

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So cry all you want, I won’t tell anybody.

But it wouldn’t have made you a fraud to change your mind. It

would be sad to do it because you think you somehow have to.

It won’t hurt, though. It will be loud, and you’ll feel things, but

they’ll go through you so fast that you won’t even realize you’re feeling

them (which is sort of like the paradox I used to bounce off Gustafson —

is it possible to be a fraud if you aren’t aware you’re a fraud?). And the

very brief moment of ﬁre you’ll feel will be almost good, like when

your hands are cold and there’s a ﬁre and you hold your hands out

toward it.

The reality is that dying isn’t bad, but it takes forever. And that for-

ever is no time at all. I know that sounds like a contradiction, or maybe

just wordplay. What it really is, it turns out, is a matter of perspective.

The big picture, as they say, in which the fact is that this whole seem-

ingly endless back-and-forth between us has come and gone and come

again in the very same instant that Fern stirs a boiling pot for dinner,

and your stepfather packs some pipe tobacco down with his thumb,

and Angela Mead uses an ingenious little catalogue tool to roll cat hair

off her blouse, and Melissa Betts inhales to respond to something she

thinks her husband just said, and David Wallace blinks in the midst of

idly scanning class photos from his 1980 Aurora West H.S. yearbook

and seeing my photo and trying, through the tiny little keyhole of

himself, to imagine what all must have happened to lead up to my

death in the ﬁery single-car accident he’d read about in 1991, like what

sorts of pain or problems might have driven the guy to get in his electric-

blue Corvette and try to drive with all that O.T.C. medication in

his bloodstream — David Wallace happening to have a huge and to-

tally unorganizable set of inner thoughts, feelings, memories and im-

pressions of this little photo’s guy a year ahead of him in school with

the seemingly almost neon aura around him all the time of scholastic

and athletic excellence and popularity and success with the ladies, as

well as of every last cutting remark or even tiny disgusted gesture or

expression on this guy’s part whenever David Wallace struck out look-

ing in Legion ball or said something dumb at a party, and of how im-

pressive and authentically at ease in the world the guy always seemed,

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like an actual living person instead of the dithering, pathetically self-

conscious outline or ghost of a person David Wallace knew himself

back then to be. Verily a fair-haired, fast-track guy, whom in the very

best human tradition David Wallace had back then imagined as happy

and unreﬂective and wholly unhaunted by voices telling him that there

was something deeply wrong with him that wasn’t wrong with any-

body else and that he had to spend all of his time and energy trying to

ﬁgure out what to do and say in order to impersonate an even margin-

ally normal or acceptable U.S. male, all this stuff clanging around in

David Wallace ’81’s head every second and moving so fast that he

never got a chance to catch hold and try to ﬁght or argue against it or

even really even feel it except as a knot in his stomach as he stood in

his real parents’ kitchen ironing his uniform and thinking of all the

ways he could screw up and strike out looking or drop balls out in right

and reveal his true pathetic essence in front of this .418 hitter and his

witchily pretty sister and everyone else in the audience in lawn chairs

in the grass along the sides of the Legion ﬁeld (all of whom already

probably saw through the sham from the outset anyway, he was pretty

sure) — in other words David Wallace trying, if only in the second his

lids are down, to somehow reconcile what this luminous guy had

seemed like from the outside with whatever on the interior must have

driven him to kill himself in such a dramatic and doubtlessly painful

way — with David Wallace also fully aware that the cliché that you

can’t ever truly know what’s going on inside somebody else is hoary

and insipid and yet at the same time trying very consciously to pro-

hibit that awareness from mocking the attempt or sending the whole

line of thought into the sort of inbent spiral that keeps you from ever

getting anywhere (considerable time having passed since 1981, of

course, and David Wallace having emerged from years of literally in-

describable war against himself with quite a bit more ﬁrepower than

he’d had at Aurora West), the realer, more enduring and sentimental

part of him commanding that other part to be silent as if looking it

levelly in the eye and saying, almost aloud, ‘Not another word.’

[→NMN.80.418]

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