Short Story: The Depressed Who Get To the Bottom of Things
A seeker, I? Oh, please be still!
I’m merely heavy—weigh many a pound.
I fall, and I keep falling till
At last I reach the ground.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
On 10 November 2017 it rains. The sky is dim and full of clouds. The clouds are thick and bulbous, like a pregnant belly, hanging beneath the waistline, over the ocean, in the wind. Under the sky a towering central mountain comes close to the ocean, leaving only a small portion of beachy flatland. An asphalt road runs along the beach. Cars pass frequently. Coconut groves border the road and comb the mountainside. A muddy dirt road stretches up the mountain from the beach. Not only that: a truck climbs up the mountain, carrying people in the bed, and descends moments later with a man in the passenger seat. The man is a Buddhist monk, probably middle-aged, wearing a saffron robe. He has just completed two hours of meditation, after waking at 4:00 A.M. to the sound of a gong.
It’s 10 November 2017. It’s raining heavily, flooding the roadside gutters. I’m under way at 10mph in the back of an old Toyota pickup, on a kind of flat bench loosely bolted to the truck bed with my head bent queerly to see the wheels slip along up the steep incline into the jungle to the retreat grounds. The humidity is all too familiar at this point, despite it being Thailand’s rainy season. My future, at this point, is shockingly clear, when you think about it. Description of significant characters, their physical appearance and mannerisms—to cite Barth—is one of several standard methods of characterization used by writers of fiction. Writers of fiction are typically morose and self-absorbed, as a general rule, I’ve noticed. The important thing to remember, after all, is that nothing is what it looks like.
When I arrive, I relinquish my name, which is S___, and claim the number twenty-one as my identity marker for the length of my stay at Suan Mokkh Meditation Center. I hand over my phone, laptop, books, notebooks, and writing tools. Blanks, according to various acclaimed authors, were often used as proxies for proper names in nineteenth-century fiction to amplify verisimilitude. This is a matter of small importance. The writer, it would seem, has already failed to grasp his responsibility to reality, or else he has failed to use his imagination in real, waking life. My future is becoming increasingly less clear.
That was three days ago.
It’s 13 November 2017. The sun sets behind heavy dark clouds. It rains sporadically. At 6:04 P.M. local Thai time, I’m sitting alone on a hillside above the jungle, palely backlit and framed by the shadowy mass of trees below, watching a full moon rise above the ocean into a brilliant equatorial sky. I can hear sweeping near the pathway to the dining hall, the sound of birds and insects, and the dribble of water from a broken sprinkler. If I knew all the stories behind all the people here, I’d see that nothing was what it looked like, not even the broken sprinkler. I watch the water pool near the bottom of my bare, muddy feet. Millions of ants perish every day in floods triggered by broken sprinklers.
I imagine a voice calling out once, as though merrily: “Anybody know where the heck we are?”
“I do.” I answer silently, “I know where I am. But where are you in all of this?”
I, for one, know that I am somewhere tucked away in the green interior of Koh Samui, Thailand’s third-largest island, supine against the trunk of a coconut palm on a shaded hillside, teary-eyed, hungry, and looking with no particular thought at the quiet beaches and lagoons down below, at the steep incline of road that brought me here, bumping along in the back of a pickup. I watch cars and motorbikes pass each other on the asphalt road running along the beach. A woman with curly brown hair, barefooted, wearing a white dress, walks up the hill in my direction. She waves when she notices me, apologizes gesturally, and turns to walk in another direction. Before she leaves, I imagine her quoting a line from Oscar Wilde: “We are all in the gutter,” she would say, “but some of us are looking for the stars.”
I respond silently, telling her I feel lost and alone—that I can’t see the stars with all this moonlight. She leaves me staring at her footprints in the dirt. I’m struck with an image of Fontenelle’s heart, thinking: “What you have there, dear madam, is another brain.” I stopped looking for stars years ago, I think. I sit splaylegged with my arms in my lap, thinking about not having a thought in my head. I am painfully entombed between feelings, it seems.
How does it seem to you?
It’s 13 November 2017. What’s the point of this obvious convention? The moon’s reflected light shines upon the ocean. Rain falls lightly. The moon hides momentarily behind round grey clouds. A column of shadow spreads over the mountainside; a bell rings near the dining hall, signaling tea time. I feel somber and alone. I remain as it were flush with the coconut tree, past the men’s dorms and adjacent to the white Buddha statue, with a view of both the retreat grounds in total—minus the dining hall and women’s dormitory—and the flashes of light from Lamai further down. (Naturally Lamai would be the small coastal town three miles below the retreat center, where, weather permitting, flashes of light from the restaurants, bars, and hostels could be seen from the meditation hall—or from the coconut tree adjacent to the white Buddha statue.) It is by all appearances a favorable spot for inward thinking and people watching, though I’d been coached to do basically neither for the length of my stay here. My job—if you could call it a job—was simple: meditate, sleep, eat—meditate, sleep, eat—drink tea—refrain from speaking for any reason whatsoever, unless a medical emergency, etc. So on and so forth, as it were, for ten long, intentionally abrasive days.
Now the fact is, generally speaking, that students from America, according to D___, use “as” instead of “since” or “because,” because they think it makes their writing look more refined. For more astute readers, however, the “as” is only permissible in British English, and even in such cases it only works if it comes at the beginning of the sentence, since it might cause temporal confusion if it comes at the midpoint. It’s a funny convention when you think about it, but the important thing to remember, after all, is that nothing is what it seems.
It’s 2017. I’m an ant running around in the dark, racing from deadly flood-waters. The water from a broken sprinkler threatens to erase me. I have triggered a whole vicious cycle of individual neurochemistry, complex and convolved, moving by the will of its own energy but away from me at all times. And yet there is this very human business of crying for what feels like no reason. Since we started this I’ve had a crying episode that is so tangled and groundless and uncontrollable that I have no choice but to question the very identity that gives rise to it. To erase myself, as it were, because I can’t trust the stability of my own identity. Am I telling too much? Yes…
It’s 20 November 2017. The 10th day. I find myself staring with dumb impersonality at a working sprinkler, watching ants go about their business, thinking of nothing yet unable to forget the least detail of my life. I glance in the direction of the Buddha, close my eyes, take a deep breath, and attempt to center myself. Here I am now. I hope the mix of mysteriousness and normalcy has been irresistible, though I doubt it.
I mean to say only this: If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
[THE END]
