The Best American Essays 2013 (25 page)

And the pedestrians! Fit, smiling, upright, well-tended, with not a morbidly obese fellow citizen in sight, the evening crowd on University Avenue appeared to be living in an earlier American era, one lacking desperation, hysteria, and Fox News. Somehow Palo Alto had remained immune to what one of my students has referred to as “the Great Decline.” In this city, the businesses were thriving under blue skies and polished sunshine. I couldn’t spot a single boarded-up front window. Although I saw plenty of panhandlers, no one looked shabby and lower-middle-class. I noted, as an outsider would, the lines outside the luxe restaurants—Bella Luna, Lavanda, and the others—everyone laughing and smiling. The happiness struck me as stagy. What phonies these people were! Having come from Minneapolis, where we have boarded-up businesses in bulk, I felt like—what is the expression?—an ape hanging on to the fence of Heaven, watching the gods play.

And it occurred to me at that moment that Niazi felt that way too, apelike, except that I was one of those damn gods, which explained why he had to inform me about Hell.

“You burn forever,” Niazi said, drawing me out of my reverie. “And, yes, here we are at your hotel.”

Sir
and
Hell:
the two words belong together. After arguing with the hotel desk clerk, who claimed (until I showed him my confirmation number) that I didn’t have a reservation and therefore didn’t belong there, I went up to my room past a gaggle of beautiful leggy young men and women, track stars, in town for a meet at Stanford University, where I’d been hired to teach as a visiting writer. They were flirting with each other and tenderly comparing relay batons. Off in the bar on the other side of the lobby, drugstore cowboys were whooping it up, throwing back draft beers while the voice of Faith Hill warbled on the jukebox. Nothing is so dispiriting as the sight of strangers getting boisterously happy. It makes you feel like a stepchild, a poor relation. Having checked in, I went upstairs and sat in my room immobilized, unable for a moment even to open my suitcase, puzzled by the persistence of Hell and why I had just been forced to endure a lecture about it.

Rattled, I stared out the window. A soft Bay Area rain was falling, little dribs and drabs dropping harmlessly, impressionistically, out of the sky—Monet rain. A downmarket version of an Audubon bird—how I hate those Audubon birds—was trapped and framed in a picture above the
TV
.

I am usually an outsider everywhere. I don’t mind being one—you’re a writer, you choose a certain fate—but the condition is harder to bear in a self-confident city where everyone is playing a role successfully and no one is glancing furtively for the
EXIT
signs.

In his writings and his clinical practice, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan liked to ask why any particular person would
want
to believe any given set of ideas. He initially asked the question of behavioral psychologists with their dopey experiments with mice and pigeons, but, inspired by Lacan, you can ask it of anyone. Why do you
desire
to believe the ideas that you hold dear, the cornerstones of your faith? Why do you clutch tightly to the ideas that appear to be particularly repellant and cruel? Why would anyone
want
to suppose that an untold multitude of human souls burn in extreme agony for eternity? Having left a marriage and now living and working alone, I found myself in that hotel room experiencing the peculiar vacuum of self that arises when you go on working without a clear belief in what (or whom) you’re working
for
and are also being exposed randomly to the world’s cruelties.

The idea of Hell has a transcendently stupefying ugliness akin to that of torture chambers. This particular ugliness is fueled by the rage and sadism of the believer who enjoys imagining his enemies writhing perpetually down there in the colorful fiery pit. How many of us relish the fairy tale of endless suffering! Nietzsche claimed that all such relishers are in the grip of
ressentiment
, whereby frustration against the rulers and anger at oneself are transformed into a morality. Ressentiment is what happens to resentment once it goes Continental and becomes a metaphysical category. After Marx, injustice no longer seemed part of a natural order. And if injustice
isn’t
part of a natural order, then ressentiment will naturally arise, the rage of the have-nots against the haves, the losers against the winners. Sometimes the rage is constructive, sometimes not. For Nietzsche, in
On the Genealogy of Morals
, the unequal distribution of power is simply a condition of things-as-they-are:

It is not surprising that the lambs should bear a grudge against the great birds of prey, but that is no reason for blaming the great birds of prey for taking the little lambs. And when the lambs say among themselves, “These birds of prey are evil, and he who least resembles a bird of prey, who is rather its opposite, a lamb,—should he not be good?”

If you’re a loser, you might as well get used to your loserdom and sanctify it. Thus Nietzsche. The eagles will come down sooner or later and grab you and eat you. It’s how nature works. But if you, the lamb, claim a superior virtue to the eagle, and you band together with other lambs and consign the eagles to a sadistically picturesque Hell, you will, in another life, find yourself behind the wheel, working for Bay Area Limo, instructing the hapless pale-skinned passenger from Minnesota about the manner in which some will find themselves scorched forever on the other side, forever and forever, oh, and by the way, here we are at your hotel.

In one of Alice Munro’s stories, a character observes that the Irish treat all authority with abject servility followed by savage, sneering mockery. Ressentiment has its comic side, after all.

After washing up, I came back downstairs through the lobby—more beautiful track stars, more flirting, and a little microportion of ressentiment on my part against their beauty and youth and sexiness—and ambled to the Poolside Grille, where I ordered the
specialité de la maison
, blackened red snapper (California cuisine: black beans, jasmine rice, salsa fresca, lime sour cream), the snapper itself an endangered species. I hastily gulped down my chardonnay and, like a starving peasant, devoured the fish without tasting it. Gulping and chewing and swallowing, I watched the athletes in their skimpy garb promenading around the hotel, as graceful as swans. Ned Rorem on youth: “We admire them for their beauty, and they want us to admire them for their minds, the little shits.” All the while Niazi’s voice was in my head: “Every day the God gives you a new skin so that he can burn it away.” I paid the bill and returned to my room. Fresh pain! What a phrase. I couldn’t read, so I watched
TV
:
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
, Captain Jim Brass confessing to human failings, played very well by Paul Guilfoyle. Or did I watch another show, some prepackaged drama interchangeable with that one? I can’t remember. I do remember that I drifted off to sleep in my street clothes. There was no one around to tell me not to.

I didn’t see Niazi again for another four weeks. On a Wednesday morning in April, he was to meet me in front of my Stanford apartment at 9:30 to take me to the San Francisco Airport so that I could fly back to Minneapolis. I had been commuting almost every week. At 9:25 I stood out in front with my suitcase beside me, waiting for him. I saw his black Lincoln Town Car in the visitors’ parking lot. He honked, pulled up, and rushed out to put my suitcase in the trunk.

“Good morning, sir,” he said. “How are you?” His eyes, I noticed, were heavy-lidded and puffy. He looked like a box turtle.

“Fine,” I said, settling into the back seat and snapping on the lap-and-shoulder belt. “How about you?” I looked around for a bottle of water. There were two little ones.

“Very tired,” he said, checking his watch before flopping in behind the wheel. “I could not sleep last night. I have been in this parking lot since eight-thirty.”

“You should have called me,” I said. “We could’ve left early.”

“No no no,” Niazi corrected me. “I have been trying to take the nap.”

“Are you still drowsy?” I asked, noting again his nonstandard use of definite articles.

“A little, somewhat,” he told me. “But when I am that way, I think of the Holy Book.”

“Ah.”

He drove us up to Interstate 280, back in the hills, an alternative route to the airport. Here the rain was falling harder, and I noticed that Niazi didn’t bother to turn on the car’s windshield wipers. The rain spattered violently against the glass in an almost midwestern manner. I felt right at home. Stroking his beard, Niazi gazed out at the highway, and after about ten minutes I saw that, with his eyes half closed, he was moving his head back and forth, shaking it slowly, as if . . .
Was this possible? Was I actually seeing what I was seeing?
He was driving the limo, with me in it, while sleeping.

My brother Tom used to get drowsy behind the wheel and, one winter night in 1961, almost killed himself outside Delano, Minnesota, when he dozed off. Another irony: Delano’s major business in those days was the engraving of cemetery monuments, and the town’s motto was “Drive carefully. We can wait.” Unable to walk away from his accident, his car in the ditch, my brother had to drag himself on all fours out of the wreck across a snowy field to a farmhouse. As a boy, I was quite accustomed to my brother’s sleepiness behind the wheel and would keep him entertained and awake with bright patter, for which I have a gift. So: “Niazi!” I said. “Do you have many jobs today? I’ll bet you do!”

“Oh, yes, sir,” he said dispiritedly. “Many. Two this afternoon.” Maybe he wasn’t asleep after all.

The rain fell harder, unusually hard for northern California. I looked around at the interior of the Lincoln Town Car, thinking,
We’re going to crash. But at least this limo is a very solid car
. With the irony of which life is so fond, I thought of two lines of a creepy song I had heard a few months before, by the group Concrete Blonde. The song was “Tomorrow, Wendy,” and two lines serve as the song’s refrain:

Hey, hey, goodbye

Tomorrow Wendy’s going to die
.

And just about then the car began to fishtail. When a car fishtails, you take your foot off the accelerator and tap the brake pedal. Fishtailing occurs often in icy conditions (think: Minnesota winter), less often in rain. But California drivers aren’t used to precipitation, so when the car began to lose control, Niazi woke up and slammed on the brakes, throwing the Lincoln into a sideways skid, and when the rear-wheel-drive tires acquired traction again, they pushed us off the freeway, onto the shoulder, and then, very rapidly, down a hill, where the car flipped over sideways and began to roll, turning over and over and over, until it reached the bottom of the hill, right side up. From the moment the car began to lose control until it came to rest, Niazi was screaming. All during the time we turned over down that hill, he continued to scream.

Reader, this essay is about that scream. Please do your best to imagine it.

Men don’t scream, as a rule; they bellow or roar with fright or anger, but male screaming is an exceptionally rare phenomenon, and the sound makes your flesh crawl. A woman’s scream calls you to protective action. A man’s scream provokes horror.

Inside that car, I was holding on to the door’s hand rest, clutching it, and I was as quiet as the tomb. I wasn’t particularly scared, although things were flying around the car—my cell phone had escaped from my coat pocket and was airborne in front of me, as were various other items from the car, including those free little bottles of water and a clipboard from the front seat—and I heard the sound of crunching or of some huge animal chewing up the car. I thought,
Let this be over soon
. And then it was. They say everything slows down during an accident, but no, not always, and this accident didn’t slow down my sense of time until we were at rest and I heard Niazi moaning, and more than anything else I wanted to get out of that car before the gas tank exploded, but my door wouldn’t open—the right rear door—but the left rear door did, after I pushed my shoulder against it.

Around and inside the car was a terrible smell of wreckage, oil and burned rubber, and another smell, which I am tempted to describe as sulfurous.

“Niazi,” I said, “are you okay?”

“Oh oh oh oh,” he said, “yes, I am okay”—he clearly wasn’t—“and you, Mr. Baxter, sir, are you okay?”

“Yes.” Where was I? Without a transition, I seemed to be standing in the rain outside the car, and Niazi, making the sounds that precede speech in human history, was trying to get himself off the ground, blood streaming down his face; and his shoes, I noticed, were off, which (I had once heard) is one of the signs of a high-velocity accident. Amid the wreckage, he was barefoot, and blood was dripping onto his feet. I reached out for him.

Suddenly witnesses surrounded us. “You turned over four times!” an Asian American man said, clutching my arm. His face was transfixed by shock. “I saw it. I was behind you. Are you all right? How could you possibly be all right? Surely you are not all right?” He opened his umbrella and lifted it over my head, a perfect gesture of kindness.

“I don’t know,” I said. I looked down at my Levi’s. The belt loops had snapped off. How was that possible? I stared in wonderment at the broken belt loops. I looked at the man. “Am I all right?”

He simply stared at me as if I had been resurrected.

The usual confusion followed:
EMT
guys, California Highway Patrol guys, witness reports. An off-duty cop from San Marino, another witness to the accident, said he couldn’t believe I was standing up. He touched my arm with a tender gesture as if I might break. Someone asked me to sign a document, and I did, my hand shaking so violently that my signature looked like that of a third grader. And what was I worried about? My
laptop
. Had it been damaged? Furthermore, I thought,
I’m going to be late for my airplane flight!
In shock, we lose all sense of proportion. My signature on another official document looked like someone else’s, not mine. And now Niazi was standing up, still bloodily barefoot, talking. He appeared to be in stable condition, though they were putting a head brace on him and then lowering him onto a wooden stretcher, as if he had been smashed up. The Asian American witness who saw our car turn over four times asked me where I was going, and I said, “To the airport.”