Descent Read Online Free Page B

cold; my aged self dying tempestuously for days; then death as a long stint of nothing. It makes sense to me now, in the face of all this, to eat a peach and savor it, but depressed it made sense to skip the peach and go straight to annihilation.
    The scraping of the grim reaper’s scythe at such hot-breathed and intimate quarters had a momentary clarifying effect: I saw the need for intervention and engaged the services of a mental health counselor who advertised himself as specializing in depression. On the phone I was aware of my verbal impotence, of my inability to depict for him how I’d reached the end of my fraying rope; otherwise this counselor, “Todd,” would have dropped every duty immediately, I was sure, in favor of contending with my pressingly mortal case. Didn’t he hear, in my ranting, febrile voice, that I couldn’t endure the 120 hours he needed for other matters? No. I tried insistently to parse for him the lived, felt quality of “unendurable,” rendering it always with fresh inflection and with deeper shades of desperation, but he remained professionally impervious to this, a man who has talked to many sick people, who is always talking to many sick people, who isn’t surprised by this sort of call that is simply part of the fabric of his work life—we made an appointment for Friday morning.
    In the meantime I stayed as etherized as possible. The hysteria emitting from CNN was a cacophonous chorus of ad-laced doom—anthrax, dirty bombs, smallpox, light aircraft—a panoply of biblical plagues. I absorbed a documentary on suicide bombers that convinced me these people would blow up our Thriftway—they were young and full of religious fervor, and their mothers passionately approved of them—and so, with shame, I let my wife get the groceries solo. There was a second documentary on nerve gas that pressed me not to breathe anymore, lest the atmosphere contain, invisibly, the seeds of a painful death. Mail was dangerous, even advertising flyers; worse were packages and boxes. The television, the mail, the newspaper, the radio—none could be trusted, nor air, nor water; our food might be shot through with E. coli or botulism; the propane company might quit delivering; we were all going to die of winter cold, or starve to death, or succumb to a virus introduced by terrorists; we were all on the cusp of apocalypse. The planet was a maelstrom, or a mirror casting back a portrait of my chaos; it was about to implode in a violent cataclysm that would end the human era.
    But I was harbored by my sheets as long as I gathered them around me with last-gasp conviction. I did nothing but I did it with enormous tension and with my mind chattering away frenetically, as if to stave off, with a wall of thought, an imminent final calamity. In a Xanax haze, I counted shiplap or nurtured my embryonic hypochondria. Weight loss and torpor seemed to me now the early symptoms of an inexorable unraveling; maybe the brittle feel of my hair and the psoriatic scaling at my knees were harbingers of a mortally weakened lymph system. Maybe my shallow breathing meant something; maybe the colon cancer that had killed my grandmother at about my age was announcing itself right now as madness before proceeding to ravagethe rest of me. It seemed that way, and I sensed the tumor metastasizing below my rib cage. Shuffling about geriatrically in slippers during brief expeditions away from my bed, I felt exhausted and terrified. I sagged. My pant waists grew loose. My voice, always a reedy instrument, relatively diaphanous in hue, grew wisp-like, timid, and aspirate. And all libidinous impulse died in me; nothing in my soul or hypothalamus spurred me on toward procreation: I was anathema to life.
    My Friday morning was disappointing. Todd was reminiscent of my self-help books—worthy thoughts presented with compassion (I had “let the world in,” and that was good), but where was the miracle of therapy? Why didn’t I feel soaringly