2. WASTE OF LIFE

WAS PAUL’S LIFE a waste of life?

The redundancy of the question decoys easy answers: “waste” sandwiched between two thin slices of “life.” Sawdust and glue inside rosewood veneer. If his life was a life, it wasn’t a waste; if it was a waste, it wasn’t a life.

Was it a waste?

Careful. Go slow. Some questions blow up in the formulator’s face. Don’t we all waste our lives to some degree? Leave this question alone. Leave it tied and double knotted, the inner voice says, the same inner voice that masks its temptations with icy calm.

Did he waste his life?

The safe thing to say would be that no one can know. Certain questions can’t be answered. But unanswerable questions go on spilling poisoned sweets, go on asking themselves over and over, rising all at once in a thousand dry bubbles, like boiling sugar. In the scale of the infinite silences that terrified Pascal, aren’t all lives a waste?

No. Some are not.

Reverse the logic. In the hands of a loving God, don’t some unnoticed lives slip through the omnifingers?

Yes. Some do.

This is not the received wisdom, by the way. “Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account,” says an English journalist quoted by Annie Dillard. He was trying to understand Mother Teresa’s Sisters of Charity in Calcutta. “It is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other,” he added. Yet the inconceivable happens all the time. Some lives transcend their given limitations, some never get the chance to. Some accumulate a soul, some wind up as empty skins, as though the very process of life and death had washed right through them. Paul slumping forward in a crowded room, having pinned himself against the wall. Paul staring straight ahead, his blank face sagging and drained of expression, yet upholstered with hopelessness—fists in pockets, trying to act casual, making little clucking noises in his throat. Paul inside his boarded-up world. On the edge of his bed in my mother’s house, mouse on a tray balanced on his knees, watching the computer screen, playing virtual solitaire, freezing television images. It sounds like a washout, a complete surrender, a waste of every heartbeat and breath.

But he’d tried introspection. I’d found diaries and notebooks. He dreamed, he invented. He designed a notch filter for microwave broadcasts. Introspection gives weight. It grants existence to a soul. It’s not the same as self-knowledge, which takes coy brutality, but it surely is a start. It lifts the volume a peg, it means someone notices you—yourself. The introspective man may very well fail to see his own world piling up around him, may look out of, not at, it. His concern with himself—with his health, bowel movements, symptoms, inner twinges—doesn’t, in other words, rule out living on a dump he can’t even see. In thinking of himself, did he feint and dance around—go for the underbelly—miss the obvious, seize the odd—sprinkle ashes on his soul? Did he grow too comfortable with the flavor of his consciousness? Nibble at edges or, however blindly, search for the jugular?

Did Paul waste his life?

Under pressure of work and the patriotic duty to consume, my obliging brother may have decided that introspection itself was the waste of time. To not waste one’s life in the global marketplace is to be “productive,” to work every day, to observe a routine, and to reward oneself with products. When a recluse retires and work is over, however, his personal avalanche of commodities and goods may freeze in the very act of crushing him. Then the unwasted life devoted to work, to productive citizenship, itself becomes the waste. A nightmare like this is not the exclusive destiny of working stiffs, either. A virtual life in a supermarket culture, a life of simulations designed to numb feeling, can happen to anyone: managers, professionals, poets, congressmen, Indians, housewives, teachers, and hockey players. Now and then one such person snaps awake. “And Richard Corey, one calm summer night,/ Went home and put a bullet through his head” (Edwin Arlington Robinson).

There is an alternative. In America we talk a great deal about “making a difference” and “touching other people,” perhaps because we instinctively know that we ourselves are also other people and could use a little help. “Only connect,” insisted E. M. Forster. “Never stop doing good!” urged Ivan Ivanovich in Chekhov’s “Gooseberries.” These desperate injunctions sound like clinging to a life raft. So they are. How else survive? The most surprising thing I’d found after his death was a letter to Paul from a woman in Kentucky. “Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!” it began. “I can’t thank you enough! We paid our phone bill off, paid the utilities before they got shut off and went out to eat with the kids. For us, that’s a major splurge.” It was signed Dori Burns, dated a week before he died. I showed it to my mother, who told me that Doris Burns was one of two sisters Paul had befriended in Boston years ago, daughters of a neighbor. One now lived in Kansas, the other in Kentucky. He’d kept in touch all his life—or they had, apparently. He sent them money. Later, going through his papers in Boston, I found a stock certificate with the other sister’s name listed as joint owner with Paul. Directory assistance in Kansas City gave me her number. Phoning her, I felt like Publishers Clearing House. It wasn’t a lot of stock—118 shares of Loral Corporation, worth a little over two thousand dollars. Still, she squealed with joy. Then remembered herself and expressed her condolences for my brother’s death.

They’d been nine or ten years old when Paul befriended them. Their father had mistreated his children, that’s what my mother thought. Cute little girls, she said, pictures of innocence. Later, as teens, they ran away from home, and phoned Paul, not their parents, when they wanted to return. He drove all the way to Kansas to get them.

Innocence, I thought. Reminders of childhood. We all have our ways of clinging to hope even when life seems to be a waste, when we’re just getting through it. The getting through lurches back and forth in our souls from a burden to a glory, and may result in crushing failures. So fail again, said Samuel Beckett. “Fail again. Fail better.”

This is what a recluse thinks, having given up on life. This is what he remembers from his own childhood: a ragged line of maples, lilacs, and underbrush between Grandma’s and Mrs. Whitcomb’s house—a seesaw sky, wet ashes in the driveway, a bicycle with solid rubber tires to register every pebble and stick. He remembers discarding the bike and creeping around the trees and bushes looking for toads in the underbrush and diamonds in the dirt, shirtless in the autumn heat that follows rain. One unruly shoulder blade plows up through his back—he can feel it. He remembers pretending to be a drunken fool in solitary play, and flopping about in the huge lilac bushes with an empty bottle in his hand.

It’s almost October, yet the leaves in the trees between his house and Mrs. Whitcomb’s still hold great masses of ungloved moisture, not yet the dry yellow-green leaf scraps of early fall—not yet and, who knows, maybe not ever, judging from the weather, from the freak of climate and nature, which has managed to suspend a long drop of time, stretching an especially robust summer two, three, four and more weeks past its normal breaking point.

Mrs. Whitcomb’s house beckons. There she is on her porch. The massive white wedding cake of her house, atop its hill of lawn—with columns and black shutters and a double-wide porch and matching balcony above—dwarfs Grandma’s little cottage this side of the trees, for this spot is the portion of Ash Street where houses suddenly become the central New England equivalent of plantations. And Mrs. Whitcomb herself exists in eternal contrast to shriveled Grandma, who always wears black, summer and winter—black dress, black hair, black shoes, black stockings. Mrs. Whitcomb’s mauve clothes—or pink, or blue—spread, in her chair, across the ocean of her age, and counterpoint nicely the white wicker furniture, her cauliflower hair, the down on her arms, her white soft hands, the lumpy ripples of her face. She always sits. People come to her, especially children, for, from her sheeny folds a plump arm will telescope, producing at its tip—wrapped in wax paper and square as a button—a pale green mint julep, which awaits its Chosen One.

Not today, though. Today she simply points down across her lawn. Paul, all bladed shoulders—all skinny freckled arms and sunburnt wrists, with warts between his fingers and a gash of black hair loosened on his forehead—cranes toward where she points, then glances back with longing at her tent of a dress, to spy a stray green viaticum. Like a loyal dog, he won’t look at her face. Then he does—her pillowed features have formed a question mark around white and round eyes.

A white scar of sky shaves the porch’s far end. At the screen door, her little sausage of a dog snaps and hisses.

And watching Mrs. Whitcomb, Paul sees something he’s never seen before: a raisin-like mole protruding from her neck underneath one earlobe.

“What’s that on my apple tree?” she asks.

As though thrown, he streaks down to carry out an inspection. In its well of stone, that tree is even older than its owner. Paul’s the one who mows her lawn; the stone protects the tree. It’s motionless with apples now, even in the wind, for the fruit restrains the limbs—except for one bizarre branch that, as he can see, has spontaneously generated on one of two forks an explosion of blossoms; the other holds apples. He breaks it off to bring it back. “Oh, my tree!” she exclaims, tromboning her voice from complaint to astonishment. He presents it to her, this mid-autumn wonder of regeneration. Later, when the reporter from the Wire Valley Leader comes to take a picture, having been summoned, it’s Paul whom he snaps gripping the branch with its delirious mutation of alpha and omega—of apple blossoms and apples. And the next day, it’s Grandma who clips the photo from the paper, with its caption declaring that on the branch of a tree holding full-grown apples in Mrs. Whitcomb’s yard—two days short of October—miracle blossoms had appeared.

So the recluse thinks of how summers never stay, but this one did. He clings to it, this picture of his innocence. All his life, he saves it from the dark gulf. He holds the clipping in his fingers, then folds it in his notebook. Then leaves the notebook amid piles of waste in his house.

 

I’d like to rephrase the English journalist’s either/or—the one who declared that life is either sacred or intrinsically of no account. Either all of us waste our lives—or none do. Either life itself is a waste, or there’s a reason to live instead of not. In the Pascalian scale of the universe, “life itself” is a backwater, a barely audible squeal dwarfed by the eternal silence of those infinite spaces. It’s such a thin veneer, a membrane ballooned to the airiest of skins around chasms of emptiness, that we wonder where it gets its fine tensile strength. Quantum physicists tell us that the universe is running down, due to entropy. It recedes from greater to lesser complexity, and someday all will be still and cold. Life on earth, however, apparently reverses this process, via evolution. It moves through random variation and natural selection toward greater complexity, not lesser. So what if life on earth, in quantitative terms, is just a brief moment in the drama of the universe? The same could be asked of life on distant planets. The planets themselves, in fact all the elements heavier than helium and hydrogen, make up less than 1 percent of the matter in the universe, and living matter is surely far less than 1 percent of that. So what? Life itself may very well require that enormous pyramid of stuff to occupy its little pinprick on top. And if the human brain is life’s apical flower (Jean Paul’s phrase), then, as Emily Dickinson said, “The brain is wider than the sky.”

 

Watching that truck haul off Paul’s waste, I felt like doing a jig. I was momentarily overwhelmed by a sense of renewal and new beginnings. As A. R. Ammons says in his long poem Garbage:

 

here is the gateway to beginning, here the portal of renewing change, the birdshit, even, melding

 

enrichingly in with debris, a loam for the roots of placenta.