“throb” as “to pulsate or pound, esp. with abnormal force or rapidity.” Exactly
what my heart was doing.
In Vegas, on the 19th floor of the Rio… A room in which the entire wall is
your window… Lighting a cigarette, taking a puff, putting it out (my heart
throbbed harder with even one drag)… Not knowing yet that it was “electrolyte
imbalance” caused by extreme heat (104deg.F at midnight) that had jolted my
heart… Wondering at its rhythms: a pounding that would shake my whole frame,
then no beat for moments, then a fluttering of beats hardly felt, then more
pounding, while I tried to breathe evenly and sit quite still… Then wanting
another cigarette, and laughing at God: “You gonna kill me for a lousy
puff? Seems hardly fair, but have it Your way — You always do….”
Taking the puff, as a kind of game, a dare (electrolyte imbalance impairs the
judgment, they say — but what’s my excuse most days?)… And Las Vegas spread
before me, the pastel patterns of the Stardust’s neon, the bright cacophony of
the Riviera’s, the huge white skull of Treasure Island, “Alas, poor Michael, I
knew that fool well — or thought I did….” The lavender of Circus Circus, the
gold of the Mirage… And millions of small glittery lights, as though this
wasn’t the harshest of lands and the most brutal of cities, but a lake
reflecting the desert sky….
Couldn’t sleep. My heart shook my body so hard it jolted me awake. It would be
days before my friend Elliot (a doctor) would explain about electrolytes and
tell me to guzzle Gatorade to steady my heart. Sickly sweet Gatorade, of all
things. (He said that once you get to this point, just drinking quarts of
water, as I was doing, wasn’t enough.) He told me this is one way heat kills:
congestive heart failure due to lack of electrolytes caused by dehydration. But
such knowledge was for later; in that room, I was after another kind of
knowledge.
There is fear and there is terror. They are not at all the same. I see now
that I was sitting there (when I might have been calling 911 or
somebody) out of some imperative to break through the terror. The fear
seemed inevitable, the terror insupportable. It had always been
insupportable, so why had I supported it? Long ago I’d learned the arts of
hiding it; still, it had been with me all my life. More than a terror of death,
it was a terror of everything, a terror that merely showed its face most
starkly in the presence of a death. Had I been born with it? Had my childhood
instilled it? Those questions didn’t matter anymore. Thinking about it
had been useless. What mattered was that I’d had enough. Had there ever been a
morning I’d wakened with no terror? I wanted, for once, to stare the terror
down and make it leave my body. Perhaps it wouldn’t leave that room, or any
room I would ever enter, but I wanted it finally to leave my body.
To do this I had no tricks and no words. My heart had begun a terrible
irregular pounding, and my instinct was to sit and feel it and face it. I don’t
present this as, for want of a better word, a lesson. (Never take such a
lesson from someone whose eyes you haven’t looked into.) I present it only as
an experience which began spontaneously in one moment; that moment led to the
next and the next; ’til gradually, as the sun rose over Vegas, I understood
what I was up to. I was betting my life against my terror. I was sick of my
terror of death (which had meant a terror of life, don’t you think?) and I was
sitting with it. If I sat with it long enough, with death near, maybe the
terror would somehow leave. I didn’t know what else to do.
Oddly, not-knowing was my only refuge. My heart would beat, then stop, then
start, in rhythms impossible to chart. The terror would rise and fall. I would
wait, and try not to fill the waiting with attempting to know what I didn’t
know.
After a long while, into that space of not-knowing something entered: I had
the sensation that I was sitting beside myself, holding my own hand. A verse of
Ikkyu, a 15th-century monk who called himself “Crazy Cloud,” rose in me: you
can’t be anyone but you/therefore you are that Other one you love. I knew
what was holding my hand.
My life was holding my hand. My life was my friend, while I was… me. We were
not quite the same. We held hands. I know it doesn’t sound rational, but the
feeling was strong: There was my life, who was my friend, and there was me. If
my life let go my hand, I would be what people call “dead” — but even then my
life would be watching, and it would be all right. Because one day one’s life
must let go your hand. Nothing can stop or change that. So I waited to see if
it would let go now, and somehow this act of waiting let me feel and know this
stranger and friend, my life.
We had met before, obviously. But if we’d really accepted each other, would
terror have accompanied me every day?
The experience was: because of the presence of death — because I could not
resist the impulse to withstand and stare down my terror — my life became my
friend. It had always been my friend, I realized. A difficult friend, a friend
I’d sometimes not spoken to, sometimes betrayed, sometimes forgiven, and
sometimes it forgave me, but still: my friend. Stronger than I, somehow.
Watching my antics with astounding tolerance. Trying to get through to me. Not
with any particular message, but with something more: a kind of acceptance. I
don’t know how to name it except to say, my life, no matter what it does, is my
friend — and I, no matter what I do, am its friend. Now there are times with
others when I pause, see their life beside them, and wonder if they know
they are accompanied by a friend.
See, a while ago I realized I had to forgive my life. Not just forgive myself,
but forgive my life. All of it. Maybe that’s when those moments at the
Rio really began. As though when I forgave my life, it knew (though I
didn’t yet) that it was my friend. Perhaps then it was only a matter of time
before it would become palpable and hold my hand.
This may be why, when the terror shook me and I really thought I would die, I
had no impulse to call anyone. That would have only frightened people, and what
could they have said? The same thing I would have said if I got such a call:
“Go to a fucking doctor right now.” If I was dying there were no
good-byes to say. (“Good-bye” is so feeble, and no one ever really means it.)
Nothing that had been wrong could be made right. And there was nothing to
resolve — the heart is too complex, it laughs at attempts at resolution. Or
hides. (Soon will come another overwhelming moment that shatters all supposed
resolutions.) As for being comforted — Zelda Fitzgerald wrote to Scott, from
her perch in a mental ward, “Don’t look for comfort, there isn’t any; and if
there was, life would be a baby affair.” (Yes, I trust that tortured woman more
than I do most philosophers and literary lions. They play for prestige and she
played for keeps.) So…
Sitting in a Vegas hotel room beside my life, my friend, which was me yet
not-me, while my heart pounded, stopped, pounded — the fear never left (the
body does not want to die, however reckless the spirit may be), but the terror
found this question unanswerable: “If my life is my friend, then isn’t my death
also my friend? Hasn’t my death given me this night of extraordinary life?”
The question shocked me. Somewhere in the reverberations of that shock,
sometime the next night, the terror left.
A woman I know asked Carlos Casta�eda how she could develop a spiritual
life. He said, “Sometime each day, sit down and remember that you are going to
die. You’ll develop a spiritual life.” When this was told to me, months after
those nights in Vegas last summer, I laughed. (The truth makes you laugh
sometimes, like a joke.) He was saying that her death is her friend, and that
if she sat with that friend, it would teach her something every day. That’s how
good a friend one’s death really is.
Now, when things of the day get too upsetting, I consult my friend — my
death. Its presence has a way of putting anything in perspective.
On the second or third night, I forget which… when the lights of Las Vegas
had become like an inner landscape to me, as though I were projecting them
myself… and the great murderous desert that surrounds the city had become for
me what it really always was, an immensely strong being that invites our
greatest extremes to enact themselves… the terror left my body. Because life,
my life, with all its failures and contradictions and paradoxes, had
held my hand. I can’t explain it, but that’s how it was. I drove back to L.A.
Got the medical attention I needed. My death had visited, and I flatter myself
that, after so many years of being met as an enemy, it was a little surprised
to be treated like a guest.
This was months ago. It’s winter now. I’m as silly as ever, but the terror
hasn’t returned. It’s still in the room, but my body is free of it. I no longer
awake with it. My heart occasionally misses a beat and pounds harder. The
specialist said not to worry about that and I don’t. It isn’t important to me
to live a long time now that I know my life is my friend. I will not die alone,
for something that is me and that is not me has always held my hand.
n
This article appears in February 16 • 1996 and February 16 • 1996 (Cover).