An acute mental problem, unquestionably what was known to professionals in the field as a neurosis. He wasn’t hallucinating, and he wasn’t hearing voices. He simply couldn’t stop his mind from compiling new ways to die.
Thirty-five years later his shrink, Dr. Asher Schiff, suggested that my father had wanted to die.
That doesn’t compute, my father said. Not everything is a reversal. If I wanted to die, all I had to do was jump off the roof of the hospital. But I was afraid of dying.
Of course you were afraid of dying, Schiff said. Come on. Why can’t you both fear and desire death? Are you a machine?
Because I wanted to live, full stop. A desire to die would have been easier to deal with. No conflict there. I jump off the roof.
And did you jump off the roof?
I did not jump off the roof.
Look, I say crazy things sometimes. I probably shouldn’t even have started down this road with you, Schiff said.
This again, my father said.
Schiff had been on the pro tennis circuit before enrolling in the psych program at CUNY, and he had that ex-athlete’s way of moving to avoid pain, every bend or stoop the sum of a careful calculation. Joints gone to hell, every ligament a bit too tight, every muscle on the verge of rupture, he usually sat draped over his leather chair, utterly slack unless movement was absolutely necessary. He had a big head that my father found comforting. His forehead had executed a sort of continental drift across the top of his skull and what hair he had left he kept stubble-length with an electric razor. He transmitted boundless waves of security and empathy. A cardigan over a button-down shirt, button collar, corduroys, big brown Earth shoes. My father had always assumed Schiff was good with children, and then, because Schiff had trained him well, he followed that assumption with a lengthy explication of why he wanted Schiff to be good with children, and whether or not he wished he were Schiff’s child.
Schiff said, You fantasized that the bicycle you rode around the hospital grounds might suddenly become structurally unsound, snap in two, and spear you in the chest, is that correct?
And the inside of the thigh. Femoral artery, my father said.
And the roller coaster? You repeatedly returned to watch the very roller coaster that set the whole thing off?
Yes.
What do I know, but it sounds like you were looking for a way to die. Maybe hoping? Is hoping too strong a word here?
No, it’s just the opposite. I never wanted to die. The fear tied me in knots. It made me a nonfunctioning human being.
Look, you want something from an old textbook? Say you’ve got a teenage boy who says he hates his mother. He storms out of the room whenever she walks in, won’t speak to her, does everything in his power to stay as far away from her as possible. He’s a raging asshole to her. When he does speak, he says vicious things. Every time she tries to give him a kiss on the cheek, he repels her. He drives her away at all costs. Why? His behavior tells a story. He doesn’t understand it himself—here he is, pushing away the woman who has nurtured him for fourteen, fifteen years, a woman he wrote mash notes to when he was six. What’s changed? Why would he behave this way? Because suddenly he has hard-ons for her. Her image invades his fantasies when he’s jerking off. And what’s worse, he’s physically powerful enough to act on his desire. He has the equipment now, and for the first time in his life he’s physically bigger than she is. He knows he could take her if he wanted her. And, oh boy, he does want her. Well, he doesn’t have to have read Oedipus to know how Oedipus turns out.
I never had a thing for my mother, my father said.
Sure you did, but I was only offering an analogous illustration.
I think you got bored and wanted to talk about sex.
That’s possible. Perhaps I got spooked and ran to sex because it counterbalances death? My point, if I even have one, is that an obsessive fear of death would be a natural reaction in a person experiencing an overwhelming desire to die. It’s a reasonable response.
Oh come on. Everyone’s afraid of death. It’s our collective obsession with not dying that keeps us all alive, my father said.
It is?
Yes! Of course it is. You think everyone wants to die? Everyone’s suicidal?
Yes.
You think everyone’s suicidal?
Yes, Schiff said.
We need to switch chairs.
Now we’re getting somewhere. You were insane. Yes or no? Schiff said.
No? said my father.
Wrong! But also right. Certainly no more insane than anyone else. In fact, I think you were expressing a completely sane reaction to your situation.
The roller coaster?
The war.
What war? I was at a resort! The hospital was the Casa del Rey! What was there to be afraid of at the Casa del Rey? Otters?
I don’t know. Were you?
Was I what?
Were you afraid of the otters?
No! I wasn’t afraid of the fucking otters!
Okay. Lemme write that down. Not afraid of otters.
And where were you stationed? my father said.
Would it be useful for you to know that?
Yes. Then I’d have an idea who I’m talking to here.
You know who you’re talking to.
Tell me again, my father said.
I was with the Red One.
Ardennes.
Yes. We’ve been over this.
What were you, eighteen?
That’s about right, Schiff said.
Then I must sound like a complete coward to you.
You sound like a man who suffered greatly during the war, and who’s still suffering.
I helped write manuals, my father said. It doesn’t hold a candle.
What was in the manuals?
Nothing. Instructions.
Survival manuals? Foxhole radio instructions?
No.
What, then?
Stupid instructional manuals. The point is, no one was trying to kill me. The 12th SS Panzers weren’t lobbing shells in my general direction.
Where were your schoolmates? The boys who lived on your block. The ones you’re always talking about.
European Theater. Pacific. Africa.
They were on the front lines.
Yes. Being killed on the front lines, my father said.
And you?
I’ve told you. Instructional manuals.
You persist in saying that as though it were some kind of despicable work.
It was.
Only to you, because you wished to die alongside your friends. And you felt that you betrayed them because you went right on living. Thus you created a world where at any moment a steam pipe might explode and crush your skull or a malfunctioning bicycle might spear your heart or a roller coaster might collapse and send you plummeting to your death. A dangerous world. And you still wish this dangerous world would harm you, to even things up.