The Faraway Nearby (19 page)

“The kindness of our parents is said to be as vast as the horizon of heaven.” These matriphile Buddhists quantified the milk with an arbitrary figure—180 pecks, or about 1,500 gallons—but made its value unquantifiable. The debt was so boundless it could not be repaid and did not have to be—except by donating to the Inexhaustible Treasuries of the monasteries, so that, like Jean Sans-Peur, the mothers would have monks praying for them—saying sutras for them in this case. What I have to say could count as a sutra or another sin.

T
wo pints of those apricots from a summer long ago still survive. I live a few miles away from where I did when I canned them, my mother's house from which the apricots came was sold years ago, both of us are different people, and so much has happened, so much has changed, but not inside those glass jars. The fruit as I look at it now on the table before me is a solid deep orange color, halves heaped up on top of one another to the rim of the lid, the syrup still clear, though the length of vanilla bean has disintegrated into black crumbs at the bottom of the jar.

The fruit is in wide-mouth jars whose golden lids are a little dusty, but whose vacuum seal has held. Each jar is full, though not so full that the halves crush or confine each other; they float free in their tiny ocean of sugar water. I no longer know what occasion would be momentous enough to open the jars or who I would feed them to, this fruit from a tree in the garden of a long-gone house, this windfall that arrived one faraway August day.

The two jars before me are like stories written down; they preserve something that might otherwise vanish. Some stories are best let go, but the process of writing down and giving stories away fixes a story in its particulars, like the apricots fixed in their sweet syrup, and the tale then no longer belongs to the writer but to the readers. And what is left out is left out forever.

The mountain of apricots that briefly occupied my bedroom floor was so many things besides food. It was a riddle and an invitation; it fed imagination and inquiry first. Upon its arrival it seemed to be an allegory for something yet to happen. A year later that unstable heap seemed like a portrait of my life at that time, my life that also had to be sorted, the delicious preserved, the damage pared away. Processed and turned into jam, preserves, and liqueur, the actual apricots went onward as gifts to the people I was close to and the people who helped me during that era of emergency. I ate some myself and drank plenty of thimblefuls of that liqueur.

But I now see the apricots as an exhortation to tell of the time that began with their arrival. As a gift from my mother, or her tree, they were a catalyst that made the chaos of that era come together as a story of sorts and an invitation to examine the business of making and changing stories and locate the silences in between. “It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole,” Virginia Woolf once wrote.

She continued, “This wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what. . . . From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art.”

The sudden appearance of the patterns of the world brings a sense of coherence and above all connection. In the old way of saying it, tales were spun; they were threads that tied things together and from them the fabric of the world was woven. In the strongest stories we see ourselves, connected to each other, woven into the pattern, see that we are ourselves stories, telling and being told. Stories like yours and worse than yours are all around, and your suffering won't mark you out as special, though your response to it might.

One evening, while listening to a blues program on the radio, I heard the blues musician Charlie Musselwhite tell about how he stopped drinking himself to death. In 1987 a toddler fell down a well in Midland, Texas, and the story of her rescue dominated the news for the fifty-eight hours it took hundreds of rescuers to get her out. Jessica McClure, not yet two years old, stuck twenty-two feet down a well eight inches in diameter, sang nursery rhymes and a song about Winnie the Pooh, while workers frantically drilled through the hard bedrock of her backyard.

Radio personalities talked about her, television news programs swarmed the site and focused obsessively on her plight, and newspapers made it a national front-page story. The event was said to be the accursed birth of cable-network news and round-the-clock news coverage. Musselwhite heard about her on the radio when he was driving to work and thought, “Man! My problems were small compared to hers. Why couldn't I be even half as brave as she's being? I thought ‘That's it. Until she gets out, I'm not having another drink.' It was a form of prayer for her from me. By the time they got her out, I was out too.” He never drank again.

A physical therapist told me that chronic pain is treatable, sometimes by training people to experience it differently, but the sufferer “has to be ready to give up their story.” Some people love their story that much even if it's of their own misery, even if it ties them to unhappiness, or they don't know how to stop telling it. Maybe it's about loving coherence more than comfort, but it might also be about fear—you have to die a little to be reborn, and death comes first, the death of a story, a familiar version of yourself.

It was as though Musselwhite forgot himself, got lost in the forest of stories, and came back not so attached to his story. That stopping drinking was his first thought shows how much it was already on his mind. It was as though he had been staring at the door when a key fell through the window, and of course he himself was the prison, the door, the window, and the key. Like a fairy-tale protagonist, he was rescued by his empathy with an even more fragile creature, and if the story of the girl in the well was a ladder out of his own hell, compassion was the force that got him to the ladder and maybe up it. His will to rescue her rescued him.

What the singing child at the bottom of the well means depends on whose life you look at. A photographer got the Pulitzer Prize for his image of the swaddled, injured, dirt-smeared girl being returned to the surface of the earth in a crowd of men in jumpsuits and hard hats. The slender firefighter who got her out was overwhelmed by the attention he received and maybe given no room to be traumatized by what was supposed to be a triumph. His mother collected all the stories of his feats and subsequent honors in a scrapbook he took to throwing across the room.

He had gone headfirst down the parallel hole the rescuers drilled, trapped in a narrow stone passage that pressed on his chest, using lubricant and props to inch the child out of her trap—one account compared him to an obstetrician delivering a child, upside down and underground, but he was also like a man who was forced back down the tight passage of birth that was also potentially a grave. After the fanfare died down, his marriage failed, he lost his job because he was strung out on painkillers, and several years later, at the age of thirty-seven, he drove out to his parent's ranch, borrowed their shotgun and some shells, telling his mother he wanted to shoot a rattlesnake, and killed himself.

The story meant something else to the philosopher Peter Singer, who used the incident of the child in the well as an example of the irrationality of our impulses. People moved by the story sent the child at its center money, perhaps as much as a million dollars. The donations didn't get her out of the well, though the money did help her teenage parents move to a better home. The rest of it was put in trust for her to collect when she turned twenty-five in 2011. Singer pointed out that worldwide about 67,500 children died of poverty-related causes during the two and a half days that Jessica McClure was down the well, and the money that didn't save her could've helped them.

He talked about our “two distinct processes for grasping reality and deciding what to do: the affective system and the deliberative system.” As he explains it, the former deals in images and stories, and generates emotional responses; the latter works with facts and figures and speaks to the rational, reasoning mind. It's clear which one he values most. But it must be the affective system that brings something to the rational mind, that chooses to listen to a story about a child or 67,500 children, that is convinced they matter and that you must respond.

Stories of suffering and destruction are endless and overwhelming these days, and you cannot respond to all of them. If you don't shut them out entirely, you must choose which to respond to and how to respond via both affective and deliberative processes. The two horses are harnessed to the same wagon; maybe there is only one horse who thinks and feels, and maybe there should be one word for the process too, like the word
understanding
we use to mean forgiving or being aware.

Jessica McClure avoided the public eye, went to college, married, had children of her own, grew old enough to collect her trust fund. Poor children continue to die of preventable causes, and other poor children live because of strangers' kindness expressed in money and involvement. Charlie Musselwhite got out of his well thanks to his empathic involvement in McClure's story. You can't calculate in advance who will be saved, how effect ripples outward. His most recent album, his first entirely of his own material, tells the story of his hell and his salvation. It's called
The Well,
and the tidal rhythms of the title song demand dancing.

The child had fallen down the well because her mother went inside to answer a ringing phone and because someone had removed the well cover. The dei ex machina are all around us, all the time. Julia Princep Jackson Duckworth was happy with her first husband, who one day in 1870 reached up to pick a fig for her, ruptured an abscess, and died quickly of the resultant infection, leaving a widow whose second husband would beget Virginia Stephens and three other children upon her. A phone call, a fig. It almost didn't happen, and then it did, and lives were changed for the worse and the better.

Virginia, the second daughter born of that union brought about by a fig or an abscess or both, grew up, married a kind outsider who gave her the name of a wild animal, and began producing a miraculous cascade of books in between her descents into madness. And then came the last descent, a literal one into a river with a big stone or stones in her pocket, when she was already dragged down by grief and dread, by the pain of depression that is in part fear that the pain will never end. But Virginia Woolf killed herself partly out of compunction, out of unwillingness to put her husband, Leonard Woolf, through another bout of her suffering, or so her last letter said.

Deus ex machina: there's another story about the way that a methamphetamine user and a mass murderer collided and changed each other's courses. The story seems like a modern
Thousand and One Nights
condensed down to one night, when Ashley Smith of suburban Atlanta talked all night to fugitive Brian Nichols. He had taken her hostage in her home at the end of a day in which he'd escaped from the courthouse where he was being tried for raping his ex-girlfriend, critically injured his guard, stolen her gun, and shot dead his judge, a court reporter, a sheriff's deputy, and later, a federal agent.

He was driving the agent's truck when he crossed paths with Smith in her apartment complex in the middle of the night. She was out and about because she had gone to get cigarettes. At gunpoint, the ex–college linebacker made her lead him into the apartment she'd just moved into, tied her up but didn't gag her, and eventually untied her. She told him over and over again about her young daughter, whose picture was everywhere in the house, how much the child meant to her, how she was looking forward to seeing the child again the next morning, how her death would make the child an orphan. She gave her captor the last of her meth and declined to join him—she never used again after that night.

She also talked to him about her addiction, about how her life had fallen apart, and about what had caused it in part: the stabbing murder of her sometimes abusive, sometimes drug-dealer husband in a fight he'd sought out. He had died in her arms, bloodily. After that she took more drugs and worse ones until she found meth or meth found her. Meth produces enormous euphoria while incrementally destroying the brain's pleasure receptors, making ordinary pleasure more and more impossible and more and more meth necessary to feel good again. It's as though you dug your grave with what you thought were wings. Smith's hair was thinned, her teeth were rotting, her family was fed up, her daughter was in her aunt's custody—though she was beginning to put her life back together when Nichols took her hostage. All her stories were stories of loss, but they were also the currency with which she gambled on a chance to save herself.

Something wonderful happens to you and you instantly look back over your life and see it as a series of fortunate events stretching off into the distance like mountain peaks. Something terrible happens and your life has always been a litany of woe. The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.

Even a constellation of damnation can have its uses, though Smith was going to realign her stars. Nichols asked her if she'd ever been in jail, if she'd ever fired a gun, and she talked about her experiences with both, drawing him in in every way she could with stories and anecdotes and information that might rouse his empathy. She showed him her husband's death certificate to make murder real to him. A born-again Christian, Smith vowed to God to change her life if she survived. In the morning, she made the fugitive pancakes and eggs and kept telling her story, a low-rent Scheherazade talking the sultan out of his murderous habits.

Nichols let Smith walk out the door with the unspoken understanding that she'd turn him in. He surrendered willingly that morning, leaving his guns behind. When she returned to the apartment a few days later, she found that he had helpfully hung the huge, heavy mirror over her sofa in the brief time between her absence and his surrender. It was slightly off center. The police took it as evidence. The African-American Nichols had his own story, in which he was a slave in rebellion against an unjust system, and there was something to that story, but it didn't explain his utter lack of empathy, from the brutal rape through the four murders. During his subsequent trial his lawyers argued unsuccessfully that he was insane.