Fear of Dying (17 page)

I am beginning to think that death may not be the worst thing that happens to a living creature. Lingering may be much worse.

I have always been a vivid dreamer. I can sleep for ten hours a night, dreaming endless dreams. After Belinda dies, the dreaming grows more intense.

I dream I am crossing a muddy river, my long skirt covered in slime. A dial is in my hand. How it got there I don't know, but it points to a number, 1888—and a young man with a dark, bushy handlebar mustache is crossing behind me, screaming at me in Russian. Terrified, as in a dream, I yell: “Not this far back!” I dial forward—1932—and there are my young parents swimming in the sea—without me.

“No!” I shout. “No!”

“Why do you think you can pick the time?” my mother asks me.

And forward goes the dial to some blurry number starting with 20 and four young people are staring into a coffin—and weeping. The corpse gets up—me—“Too late!” she says—“Too late.”

I fiddle with the dial—which is made of light—and the numbers run in one direction, then another—like pages in a book you are trying to find a quote in. Can't find the right page, can't find the right page. There is a towheaded three-year-old on a beach, a teenager in a prom gown, a bride, another bride, then back again to my parents in Provincetown climbing a steep dune, then my grandfather escaping from Russia, then the coffin, then my parents again.

“No! No!” I want to wake up. But I can't wake up. I keep running back and forth in time, endlessly unable to find a fixed point. The dial spins. The light flickers—and here I am—but where I've stopped the clock I can't know.

Backward and I'm at the beginning of time. Forward—I'm dead. The dial keeps spinning as if it has a mind of its own. Which it does.

Imagine your life—the before and after of it. And imagine that projected against the curve of time. The dial of light races quickly forward and back. If you could see your life that way, where would you stop? And is it up to you? Can you decide which parallel universe to enter? Or is it all determined by a game of chance? Grandparents, parents, racing through time, throwing you out as if you were DNA dice, not knowing where you'll land.

Our deepest wish is to stop time, to slide between the branes of memory and outwit the Angel of Death. If I could stop time anywhere I would stop it when I met Asher and realized how right we were for each other. I remember our wedding, his love for my daughter, the hysterical laughter we still share. How can I dream of losing any of that? Clearly I am terrified by his illness.

*   *   *

Most of our lives don't last. The delusion of lasting is usually wrong. Fires and wars destroy papyrus, even animal skins. Paper rots. Digital files succumb to holocausts we can't yet imagine. The will to endure is strong, the fact of enduring usually wrong. Even our planetary tabula rasa won't last—though we go on as if it will. And here I am, trying to dial back age as if I were trying to hold back the ocean.

We think we have forever to fiddle with time, but we don't. Time is ruthless. It may be a “winged chariot,” but it's a winged chariot bristling with automatic weapons. It's the ocean practicing oblivion. The wave is the meditative practice of the sea, say the Zen masters. But it means to wipe us out.

And now I am back staring at the lighted dial.

*   *   *

When I blast away from the tattered planet as if I were traveling by satellite, I can see the green earth turning brown in great dusty patches near the equator. Clods of earth turning to dust take off and fly into space. But my home city is drowned. Skyscrapers are up to their towers in seawater. Little boats,
motoscafi
from Venice, putter about trying to rescue old people before the towers crumble and fall. The old people—me!—don't want to depart with the rescuers. We used to imagine New York blasted by bombs when we were in elementary school. But soon New York may be flooded like Venice! Spin the dial backward if you can. Spin, spin, spin!

The thought of a flooded city reminds me of Venice when I was young and in love with a man who called me
pane caldo
—hot bread. We used to make love on his boat in the middle of the lagoon. Making love on a boat is like being on another planet. The waters of the planet engulfed and enfolded us as we rocked inside each other. Every motion of the boat brought him deeper inside me.

*   *   *

Young again, my whole body humming with the old energy, my heart in my mouth, my loping, skipping walk belonging to me again. And the horizon bobbing up and down, my feet spring up from the earth as if I could fly.

Everything has been so serious and now my riskiness is back. My life is a pogo stick, hopping.

I walk down the street no longer cursed with the invisibility of older women, followed by an invisible dog.

At least I am young again in my dreams. That will have to be enough. Perhaps my mother is also young again in
her
dreams and that is keeping her alive!

*   *   *

When you have been housebound with someone ill, you venture out onto the street as if for the first time. I knew New York intimately. And yet I didn't know it at all because New York is always in the process of being rebuilt. The city constantly shifts under our feet. It's like a primal planet with lava flows and storms and cacophonous noises. You always expect the ground to open under you and reveal the molten heart of the city. Perhaps that's why native New Yorkers are ready for anything—even our imminent destruction.

I wander east amid the troughs of what will never become the mythic Second Avenue subway, through the roaring traffic, and come upon an old man having an I-thou conversation with a hydrant.

“You're not just a water hole!” he shouts. And then something else—but I have known too many crazy people in my life to stick around. I admire an old woman with neon yellow hair piled on top of her head. And I pass another woman who has dyed her white dog the same fierce red color as her coiffure. Ah, the Upper East Side—home to the homeless, the crazies, the capillarily challenged.

Almost without planning it, I find my way to a church that has an AA meeting at noon-thirty. I have never gone to enough meetings, though I don't drink anymore. I've finally accepted that it depresses me. Downstairs, in the bowels of the earth, the lost souls are gathering. The chairs scrape on the floor. People cough and greet one another. The speaker commands the microphone.

She's an older woman I don't recognize. Her hair is white and wild and her makeup is perfect.

“I'm an alcoholic,” she says, “and my name is Cynthia.” She then begins a story of an alcoholic childhood—her parents alphabetized the booze in file cabinets—siblings who died of the disease, husbands who died of the disease, and several suicide attempts that didn't work.

“I can't believe I tried to shorten a life that is already so short. What was I thinking? I was furious at God. Now I know I was furious at myself. When we try to destroy ourselves, we are deluded. We believe we can escape from pain. But there is no escape. The only way to escape from pain is to join forces with your higher power. Get on your knees. Humble yourself. Ask for help. Unless you ask for help, help will never come. To be human is to be self-will run riot. The only way to happiness is surrender. Surrender is the key to everything. Surrender
is
everything. Surrender is peace. For most of my life I wanted More More More. Nothing was ever enough. I was full of envy and resentment. I thought everyone had more than I did. Now I know that the More More More obsession is a disease, a delusion. We all have enough. We just don't know it.”

I shoot my hand up. “I have also suffered from the More More More disease,” I say. “I am so grateful to you for mentioning it. I wanted more sex, more control, more money, more everything. More, More is a disease.”

After the secretary's break, various people in the room compliment Cynthia on her wisdom, her kindness, her survival.

Why is it so hard to be a human being? I wonder. Why do we have to surrender? And to what? What if you refused to believe in a higher power? What if you thought
you
were the only trustworthy higher power? I have done that my whole life and I know it doesn't work. You are not enough. Your will is not enough. But God? God is a pagan dream, conjured out of neediness. God is a glitch in a too-big brain.

Glitch or not, we seem to need a power greater than ourselves. We seem to need enormous shadows of divinity stalking us. We know we are weak. Alcoholics are, above all, lonely, fearful people who make a fetish of loneliness, who think they—we—are too good to be part of the human race. And we have to be humbled to remember who we are—stumbling human beings, more ape than angel.

I have been through that with my daughter, with myself, with the men in my life. I need constant reminders of my vanity, my weakness, my foolishness. I am a human being who will die. What I do before that may matter or it may not. Only those who come after us will know.

Men have humbled me. Work has humbled me. Life has humbled me. I have to remember that ultimately I am just a bag of ashes like Belinda.

One member of the meeting says: “I loved your qualification. I also belong to the More More More Club.”

More More More seems to have struck a chord because many people mention it. We are all so alike in our grievances, in our troubles.

*   *   *

After the meeting, the speaker comes up to me.

“Don't you remember me?” she asks.

I look at her blankly.

“We were in elementary school together on the Upper West Side.”

I stare at her, looking for the little girl she was. I can't remember.

“You really reached people with what you said,” she points out.

“Did I? I never know. But I always feel better when I speak.”

“Amazing, isn't it?”

“We're all so similar. We all struggle over the same stuff. You'd think we'd know that by now.”

“But we have to learn it again and again. I loved your description of the liquor in file cabinets—V for vodka, R for rye,
S
for scotch,” I say.

“When I was a kid, I thought everyone did that,” Cynthia says.

Then other people come up to congratulate her and I bump straight into my friend Isadora Wing.

“I didn't even see you,” I say.

“Well, I saw and heard you,” she says. “Isn't it strange to find such intimate exchanges in the riot of New York. We descend into a church basement we never knew was there and total strangers are talking about the deepest things in their lives. Then they pack up and go away again. If we go often enough, we know many faces and names and the whole city will seem like a different place—like when you have a dog.”

Fear is a universal emotion that nearly everyone struggles with, I think. But fear of what? Of pain? Of death? Of loss? It's pointless to fear death because death obliterates the fear of death. Loss of loved ones? You can't really prepare yourself for that no matter how hard you imagine it. It will always affect you differently than you thought it would. So fear is useless. It's just a way of blotting out the present and living in an imaginary future. Meetings have a way of dragging you back into the present. Why they work is impossible to tell. Why they bring a measure of peace is mysterious. We walk into the church basement in a tizzy and come out calm.

“I love you,” Isadora says. “Gotta go.”

Walking in New York. Isadora is right. When you feel fear, you have to lullaby it to sleep.

New York is full of all these secret worlds. The world of AA meetings. The world of theatrical people desperate for roles they'll never get or writers determined to finish books no one will read. Or violinists desperate because they haven't practiced enough. So much desperation. So much striving. The air is thick with it. You can feel it. And nothing in this world succeeds without sheer excess. Too much serenity doesn't do the trick. But that is the conundrum of New York or any striving place. You have to have moxie. You have to have guts. And then you have to know when to turn it off and surrender to the flow. Is everything about surrender?

The flow takes me smack into my former friend Nadya Nessim, who has just written a book about her amazing cunt. Nadya hasn't talked to me in several years, ostensibly because she didn't like the advice I gave her about her work. I should never have told her that she's making her readers feel bad. But there was more to it than that.

Nadya is a beautiful, redheaded narcissist, in love with her own reflection and unable to stand anyone who perceives any flaw in her beauty or her character. She's six feet tall and forever posing as if her profile is about to be photographed. Her first book was called
The Tragedy of Beauty
. I'd dared to question whether writing so self-adoringly might have distanced her readers. She did not take it well. She was a legend in her own mind and she hates any criticism.

“How are you, Ness?” Nadya asks, full of fake friendship. What's going on here? What does she want from me?

Female friendships are so strange. I had taken Nadya under my maternal wing when she was going through a dreadful divorce, had nurtured her, treated her like the daughter she wasn't until my own daughter got jealous and Nadya wanted More More More. They always want More More More. Glinda resented her deeply. Two beautiful redheads who hated each other.

Nadya is a creature of opportunistic ambition that she hides under a passion to change the world. Not to mention her own beauty. Mostly she wants to change the world to worship her uncritically, but she doesn't know this. She has less self-knowledge than nearly anyone I've ever met. It's sad. She's beautiful and smart but lacks emotional honesty.

“Not so great. My father died, my dog died, my husband isn't doing so well either.”

“Can I buy you a drink?”