Things Won’t Always Be This Good
A few days after his fortieth birthday, a friend of mine fell out of the sky. His friends have always known this was a hazard of his favorite activity, which is leaping out of airplanes. Nonetheless it was horrifying to see the photos he sent of the Wile E. Coyote-like hole in a warehouse roof, and to watch the video of the accident: two tiny parachutes drifting down through a California sky, then one veering into the other, the two suddenly snarled, spiraling down fast like a couple of handkerchiefs with a tiny figure dangling from the bottom, while the videographer starts running and shouting “Oh, fuck!” It was a relatively minor skydiving accident — “minor” meaning the kind where you live — but Dan now has a swath of bandages the size of a leg of lamb wrapped around his forearm, protecting all the metal screws and “external fixators” protruding from his flesh that are holding his splintered carpals together. He is, as he’s been repeatedly told, and tries to remind himself, lucky to be alive.
I myself would prefer to be shot in the face rather than go skydiving, but for all my determined cowardice I, too, once had a near-death experience years ago. It was similar to Dan’s only in that I, too, used to frequently place myself in risky situations (dive bars rather than the sky), got careless and failed to see someone coming I should have. What I learned from that experience is that there isn’t much to be learned from such experiences, other than what you knew, intellectually, going in: Life’s short and we can die anytime, so, you know, call Mom, write that screenplay, go to Lhasa, laugh while you can.
In my experience it’s the less dramatic, slower-dawning awareness of your body’s decline — blurring eyesight, slowing metabolism, three-day hangovers — that impresses upon you the reality of your own mortality. Around the same time Dan fell out of the sky I had an amuse-bouche of mortality myself, when I experienced an episode of cardiac arrhythmia. I’ve felt the occasional skipped beat or stuttering catch-up thump before, as if my heart were slurring its words, but suddenly it was happening all the time, for a week. I was sent for some tests, one of which required me to lie on my side in the dark listening to my own heart on a speaker. It sounded like a pulsar or deep sea vent. It’s always made me feel queasy and faint to think about my heart — it seems so implausible that it can labor uninterrupted night and day for decades, that consciously thinking about it seems likely to jinx it, the same way that wondering how you keep your tongue out the way when you’re chewing inevitably causes you to bite it — so I did not enjoy listening to the cosmic sloshing sounds of the blood sluicing through its ventricles, or watching its fluttering valves on a monitor, ghostly as tissue paper underwater. It seemed absurd, an outrage, that the whole vast outside world of human civilization, which can genetically customize designer babies and use the whole planet as a camera to photograph black holes, might be helpless to fix a single muscle in my chest, even if it were going to kill me. I’ve always remembered Frank Zappa, who died too young, shrugging in an interview: “What can you do? People get sick. Sometimes they can fix it and sometimes they can’t.”
It was one of those weeks when it’s hard to avoid the woo-woo suspicion that the universe is trying to tell you something — though of course it’s only trying to tell you the same thing it always has: that it’s trying to kill you. My own cohort is now at the age when we get to watch our parents’ decline: one friend’s mother just died at 90; another’s has been diagnosed with one of the less coveted forms of cancer, and I’ve been visiting my own mother a lot lately, watching Parkinson’s slowly pull her apart like a kid plucking legs off a spider for fun. The woman with throat cancer remembers her own father saying that, once his own parents had died, he realized he was “next in the checkout line.” But at the same time all this was going on — the Parkinson’s and cancer, fractures and palpitations — I heard from my friend Zoey, an artist living in Berlin, who’s days away from giving birth. She described herself as “huger and [more] Violet Beauregard-like than conceivable with the human imagination.” I tried to imagine how strange it must be to go about your normal day, your chores and errands and emails, knowing that at any moment your body might suddenly become an ancient inexorable engine designed to dispense an entirely new person. Just another reminder that for all our fancy ideation and clever inventions — our concertos and mosques, prolegomena and interplanetary probes — we are, to borrow a phrase from the great B. Kliban, all meat puppets.
It’s a time of year when we’re all feeling lucky to have survived. In New York City the weather is an ongoing, slow-motion disaster we’re all stuck in together, like the subway system: February and March, when the temperature hovers in the ghetto of the forties and the world spans the palette from asphalt to dog shit, are the low point of the common morale, but by April it’s tentatively starting to seem as if the cruel fake-out springs and last-minute sneak winter squalls are past. Although Easter’s been appropriated to commemorate the latest incarnation of a resurrected demigod, it’s a holiday that’s been around in one guise or another since before history began, and what it’s always really celebrated is the slow tilting of the planet back toward the light. It also coincides with the most sacred holiday of the New York year — the Festival of the Sundresses, on the first really warm day of the season, when the ladies break out their formidable, long-hoarded spring wardrobes, we see bare limbs again for the first time since September, and the whole city gets giddy with hormones. “The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols,” Thomas Mann writes in The Magic Mountain; “in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together.” Maybe it’s appropriate that the modern symbol of Easter is the rabbit.
The reliable passing of the seasons, the sun’s rise and setting, our clocks and calendars and daily routines, all reassure us that time is cyclic: another May, another Monday, another morning. But this is an illusion: the seasons rotate, but the climate’s changing; sex suckers us into reproducing, but someday the species will go extinct; your heart keeps on ceaselessly beating, until the day it doesn’t. Beings who lived on a planet with no axial tilt or diurnal cycle probably wouldn’t have so many resurrection myths. Time is a one-way arrow, as ruthless as gravity, plummeting us toward a date no one wants to know, like the ground expanding toward us. Dan tells me that at terminal velocity your brain wouldn’t have time to receive signals from anything past the last six meters before impact. But aging is a more leisurely descent: I’m 10 years older than Dan, and sometimes a thought like I will never live in California drifts into my brain and I get an all-body chill of dread and regret, like the distant echo of someone screaming.
Not long ago Dan who fell from the sky and I were sitting in the courtyard of our favorite Brooklyn bar, drinking beers and politely ogling women. Dan got all the surgical screws pulled out of his wrist with a hand drill from the doctor’s own garage. My arrhythmia was diagnosed as one of those weird things that went away on its own. My friend’s mother has been given a leaden Phantom-of-the-Opera mask to wear during radiation treatments, and a hopeful prognosis. And Zoey in Berlin produced an 11–pound colossus she announced as “a Pisces with a penis.” Reprieves and renaissance all around. For now. I was telling Dan that my life right now was going well, but all felt ultimately untenable — “as if I’m enjoying myself now at the cost of pain later on.” Dan pointed out, not unreasonably, that this is true of all of us, at all times. He remembered a conversation he’d had years ago with a friend who’d moved to the Bay Area at the same time he had. It was a brief sweet spot between the first dot com crash and the current tech boom, when baristas or bike messengers could afford to live in San Francisco. They were walking through their beautiful, foggy neighborhood near Golden Gate Park, both of them making decent money, both in happy relationships for once. “You know,” she told him, “things won’t always be this good.”
Things Won’t Always Be This Good
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