Descent Read Online Free Page A

everyone’s itinerary, and generally enact the unremarkable persona of a man about his a.m. affairs. Granted, I was mostly unshaven, ill-dressed, and poorly kept, but none of that was unexpected of me—a buzzer going off, a red flag or clue—and for my children, I hoped, it was just their father. I think that for the most part I distracted or fooled them—post 9/11 it was reasonable to be glum, and so I had that contextual advantage—but doing so was such a strenuous farce that when all had left in pursuit of their business I fell, eachday, into bed again. In contrast to my road insomnia, I now slept long with drugged conviction, as this was the only means at hand to negate an otherwise grueling insanity that in waking life was unremitting. I had only one thing to look forward to, and that was the forgetfulness of sleep.
    I took as second best hiding in bed with the sheets drawn across my head and the door to the bedroom shut. If that sounds pathetic, it was.
    My wife sought to coerce me outward and I complied like a helpless and obedient child—and with no objectivity for what might be redemptive—but these forays abroad were uniformly disastrous. Out and about in the world at large, tagging along behind the grocery cart, I saw fellow shoppers from my watery distance while acutely aware of their Beckerian defenses and the transparency of all their enjoyments. Why would anyone pick out a cheese with any interest in the matter? In the grandstands at a high school football field, on a Friday night bitten with autumn chill, I could hardly care which team was which; my awareness stayed fixated on the fans around me and their meaningless enthusiasm for the contest. This was what stood between them and death—third down, three yards to go—and the thought of that seemed so tragic as to inspire in me retreat. In fact, the mere existence of human beings was enough to induce morbidity in me, so it was preferable not to see them at all.
    There was also the matter of canceling engagements, a duty that left me guilt-ridden. I had to tell the Key West Literary Seminar that I wouldn’t be coming to participate in panels on the subject of American literary landscapes. The show was going on, according to an organizer: the airports were empty and therefore convenient, and not a single registrant or invited writer had canceled citing recent events. (Again I’m put in mind of the Brown study. Here was a seminar presenting twenty or more writers: Shouldn’t at least half be going off the deep end?) I imagined attendees in wall-to-wall sun, accoutred in things floral and swilling margaritas, sipping champagne at the Audubon House, trading witticisms on deep verandas or skiffing the flats after permit and tarpon—sociable meals of stone crab and beer—while out here I cowered under my blankets, counting the drawers in the bedroom wall at three in the afternoon.
    The morning came when I was conscious of the fact that I had a Remington in close proximity that might put a cap on this nightmare. (My most recent novel, East of the Mountains , was about a man who had decided that faced with mortality there was no better choice other than his shotgun.) The notion was abstract but not transitory in my thoughts, impossible but also revelatory, and when I heard from afar this siren call of suicide—a song I wouldn’t admit to my wife—I felt a cold and potent upwelling, a seafloor current, of terror. This is the depressive’s surpassing, final logic—that there is nothing to live for, that life is unendurable, and that death is preferable. After all, everything that once brought happiness, everybody you’ve ever loved, now just occasionspathos. I saw my children and imagined their deaths; my desk I pictured rotting in a corner in some decade hence; my work shredded or lost in a gloomy archive; my wife reduced by time to bones and then to dust and nothingness; everyone I know turned nameless and forgotten; the Earth combusted; the universe