Indecision: A Novel Read online

  “By the way,” I said, “there are some pretty sound reasons to masturbate, you know—if you’re a man. There are scientific, supposedly lowers the risk of . . .” I put out my palms to say what can you do.

  “But what is causing you to suffer like this?”

  “Nothing. Nothing’s wrong. I just think that when we get out of the jungle I don’t think I’ll mind going back to New York. Where really nothing is wrong.”

  Skipping the detail of the Abulinix, I revealed to Brigid how I’d come all this way to set about changing my life, but in the end had resolved that my life was just fine as it was. “I didn’t want to tell you that at first. I wanted to surprise you with my new decisive ways. No one trusts a convert.”

  “But a convert to what do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. To action! I was tired of doing just maintenance on my life. You know, put on clothes, do laundry. Eat food, brush teeth. Excrete waste. Go to work. Have or seek girlfriend—”

  “You did have a girlfriend?”

  “New York is a really tragically unfair city—there’s such a surplus of attractive women that frequently they end up with people like me! And in addition to maintaining a romantic entanglement of some kind, generally I’d try and keep up my friendships. And—”

  “But what about Alice? You enjoy her.”

  “Listen, a mediocre person can only be so close with other people.”

  “But who is so mediocre? You are quite unique. You are even very strange.”

  “What I’m trying to say”—I felt a little annoyed with Brigid that I wasn’t arriving at the point—“is that I was eager to change or be converted or whatever. But my tastes, my interests, my relationships and beliefs are all really mediocre and typical, okay? And so as of today what I’ve decided with utter decisiveness is just to resign myself to mediocrity and being totally clichéd.” She looked a lot more concerned than I felt. “No, it’s not so sad. Right now I’m twenty-eight. If a young twenty-eight. But it’s going to be ugly if at forty-two there’s still this like holy grail I’m hoping to trip over—”

  “I lose you.”

  “Well, I’m well lost okay? Even if I get rid of my hair, off of my body I mean, I’m still only kind of good-looking.” I was hurt she didn’t contradict me. “I’m arguably intelligent in my own secret way, but not really very.” Still nothing. “Furthermore I’m misinformed, as you constantly inform me.”

  “You have made a study of philosophy.”

  “You want to know what my study of philosophy is? It’s one enormous elaboration of increasingly total ignorance. You know what Otto Knittel said? He was like, ‘Philosophizing ultimately means nothing other than being a beginner.’ He actually said that.” I shook my head.

  “I like it.”

  “No.” I met her eyes. “For a long time, Bridge, I’ve been thinking of myself as just this beginner who’s some kind of novice at life. But the fact is that I’ve developed a system of mediocre habit as if I’d been working on it for like two hundred years. And it’s in that rut of never learning or changing, but always feeling like you’re about to—that’s where I live, and that’s the rut where I’ve decisively decided I am now content to go on living.” Jolted with feeling I said, “And can you guess what the result of all this will be?”

  “You will go on a shooting attack with a gun?”

  “No.” I was suddenly calm. “I’ll become just as happy as I’ve always been tempted to be.” An image or vision came to me and I said, “I plan on becoming a motivational speaker traveling across the United States.” My eyes filled with tears at the prospect. “I plan to go around preaching the gospel of mediocrity to already mediocre men. I want to tell them that the new heaven and earth will never arrive until we finally give up on them and accept our florid total mediocrity”—I imagined the packed halls of overweight mediocrities, bald and nodding, their eyes shiny with tears—“into the least little ventricle of our average American heart! Or hearts. Our hearts of darknesses!”

  “You are joking? Maybe train to be a comedian instead.”

  “No, I seriously plan to become the satisfied denizen of my somewhat flabby and already declining body, which if I’m lucky an imperfect but loving woman, chosen by me entirely at random”—I thought with a pang of Vaneetha—“will nevertheless manage to caress with actual if unreliable passion. And with this vaguely-pictured woman I plan on settling down into the paradise of being average. My job, when I find one, may not especially grease the wheels of neoliberal capitalism and contribute remarkably to the immiseration and environmental despoliation of huge tracts of the globe”—I looked around me, imagining it with satisfaction as a smoking waste—“but nor am I going to be some kind of gum in the works or clog in the wheels. Or whatever.” The thrill of mediocrity appeared to have supplied me with a certain semi-eloquence: “And on the holy day of Sunday, I plan to drink too much coffee, look at the paper, and run some errands. I’ll go with my wife to an overcrowded museum or watch the game on TV. Before my death from prostate cancer we’ll have sex if nobody’s too tired.”

  “But—Dwight, do you have a fever?”

  “All I’m saying is that all along my mediocrity has been just what I needed to accept, to embrace, in order to have a healthy, happy—”

  “Not particularly happy!”

  “Right, just an okay sort of life, all right? A new sort of just fine, merely okay or actually pretty good but never very special . . . yes. Okay?” So I wound up, having apparently gone insane. But Brigid seemed unmoved. She was wearing a pained look, about one part amused to three parts disappointed. Well, intelligent, ethical Brigid, damnably attractive and a good singer, fluent or close in three modern languages—she wasn’t my target demographic anyway.

  I imagined pounding on the lectern before the assembled men. Our life sucks only because we wish it didn’t. Meanwhile we immorally betray the world’s laboring and unemployed poor people in the nation of Ecuador and elsewhere by our failure to enjoy the fruits and nuts of our privileged consumer lifestyle. We have to be happy with this arrangement, so that someone can be. Then I saw myself returning to the front row to thunderous applause, and letting fall across my features (if anyone cared to notice) the serene mild look of the Buddha as he is depicted in certain statues of porous sandstone (such as mom had a nice coffee table book of).

  “I think that you are right,” Brigid was saying, “that it is very mediocre to be so verbose. Good. But what is best is that you have recognized that you are not actually such the beginner as you suppose. You thought you were very open to whatever can happen. But the reason you have remained so open is that nothing can enter you. So this is not actually to be open. Very good that you should see this. Nothing can happen to you. You are that type.”

  I started to protest—“The real thing about mediocrity is you’re misunderstood even worse than a genius”—but Edwin had returned with our food. We ate our lunch in silence, and for me at least the fun of eating beetle larvae had gone out along with the novelty. In fact I felt that earlier I’d mistaken the novelty for the fun.

  Post-lunch we persisted on our march, going vaguely uphill and following trails more abandoned and overgrown than the other ones we’d taken. We ducked under branches, kicked through fronds, pressed past grasping tendrils, and definitely I couldn’t see the tall forest for the equally tall trees. And even the trees . . . Some identified themselves to me as rubber trees, and others as mahoganies and ceibas—but mostly they were just trees, totally as various as they were nameless. I plodded on among them listening to Brigid and Edwin talk to each other in the incomprehensible parlance of Spanish. Their words signified nothing more to me than the occasional whistle of a bird, or the table-saw buzz of a cicada, or the odd creaking laughter of an invisible monkey. And in fact as the day wore on my own words in my mind began to seem as alien to me as the babble of all outer nature; and somewhere deep in the afternoon, with the fluent silver light shifting to bronze, and the shadows beg
inning to heap on top of one another, I tripped over the concealed root of some unknown-type tree—not a bobohuariza or anything I knew—and stumbled into a kind of wordlessness or true mental nothing. I felt it would violate the endlessly multiplied zero of the natural world to think a single thought or say another word—much less become a traveling motivational speaker. My mind had gone green and empty, and I was feeling futureless and frightened, when we spilled out onto what somehow seemed to be a road.

  The sudden appearance of a ten-foot-wide line of stubbly earth, shooting clean into either distance with the jungle wall on both sides, seemed to save my sanity and restore order and logic to things. However there weren’t any tire tracks on this “road.”

  “What is this?” I asked Brigid. I had a strange sensation of suspiciousness, like somehow I might know.

  Tersely she said, “A seismic exploration. That’s what to call it.”

  The words had a weird, familiar ring—and vaguely a feeling of sitting down to dinner in the Lakeville house filtered back through me. Possibly had I actually listened to certain after-dinner debate-a-thons at which Alice and dad had gone at it on the extractive industries?

  “Perhaps I shouldn’t take you to where we are going.”

  “Is it closer to the exit where we’re going?”

  “It has that virtue, yes.”

  “So let’s go then.” I was being jerkish, hostile, too aggressive—and maybe one effect of Abulinix (if it had one) was to disorder the patient’s limbic system so that the famous fight-or-flight response upon which all mammals rely got confused into a single unattractive impulse to fight with the person you are fleeing.

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “The oil companies cut these seismic exploration lines to test for oil. Or maybe they pay the people they’re displacing starvation wages to do it for them?”

  No response, and the three of us continued walking single file down the cut with the sun dropping at our backs and the mosquitoes coming out from the trees in doubled numbers like the fact of sunset particularly annoyed them.

  Around this point I noticed the dark and then darkening soil laid bare by the cut: it failed to reflect the dwindling light in even the modest way of regular dirt. And its matte finish became more and more visible as the forest wall declined on both sides into jungly hedges and tropical shrubbery, and the ground cover got more sparse. Soon the jungle had turned into a mixed population of dead or dying trees, and living ones with their leaves threshing in the picked-up dusk-hour breeze. Maybe a mile or two in the distance I saw an enormous tip of flame reaching up into the sky just above the tree line, and I got the almost-strange or even uncanny feeling that I knew what this might be.

  Edwin led us off the stack cut and we followed him uphill through a quieter forest than before. I had the unreasonable sensation that I was going deaf. And then to our side was some sort of leaf-studded swimming pool of black crude waste. A few enormous green leaves were stuck motionless on its fearsomely still surface like a parody of lotuses or lily pads floating on some lake. This was not where I wanted to go on vacation.

  “And there, in the distance, through the semi-denuded trees,” I said like a chipper cicerone, “tourists will be interested to note a high tower of flame reaching high into the air. You can all take out your binoculars and cameras now because that’s an oil separation station along the oil pipeline. Welcome to the source of the Nile.”

  “I am sorry, you are not in a good mentality to see this.”

  “Now are you going to tell me how Ecuador is trapped in a spiral of dwindling commodity prices where it takes increasing amounts of their oil as well as shrimp and flowers to import the same amount of manufactured goods? Because I know that. My father is—or was—a high-level commodities dude, whereas my sister is an old-time leftist of some kind, and I have sat around some dinner tables in my time, and I have heard some things”—the terms themselves were coming back—“about the plight of the commodities-based national economy and its declining terms of trade. So I don’t know that there was such a need to drag me here.”

  “I can see you learned something at your father’s—”

  “He’s of the opinion, by the way,” I said to her apologetically, “that I’m an obedient dog.”

  I was suffering from some serious mental-health concerns and a generalized sylviphobia or forest fear when Edwin—nice, pleasant Edwin!—turned to Brigid and addressed her like I had in distinctly hostile-sounding tones.

  “What’s he saying?” Suddenly I was flush with sympathy for Brigid, and completely in emotional disarray. “Oh Brigid,” I said helplessly.

  “A very free translation would be that Edwin too thinks I am a sadomasochist to bring us here—”

  “I never said you were a sadomasochist.”

  “—he says that I must like to injure him and myself to have made us return here.” Her tone was sharp and brisk as usual, but from behind I could see her shoulders slump forward in frankly a heart-prodding way—and I considered the sad possibility that she was considering the sad possibility that Edwin might have supplied her with an accurate psychological diagnosis.

  “You’re not a sadist or a masochist,” I assured her. “You’re a very nice person. So am I. Usually. So I’ll try to be nicer now.”

  But she didn’t turn around, and so it was from her posture alone, plus my one-week knowledge of this strange or at any rate foreign woman, that I deduced the dejected look slapped across her expressive face.

  Pretty soon we’d come to higher, uncontaminated ground, where, in the dregs of the grapefruit-colored light, with uncomfortably large bats patrolling the air, you could make out an abandoned hut to one side of what must have at one period been a clearing. The treeless chunk of space was thick with new-ish ferny growth, so that the jungle reached to touch you from all sides in a fashion guaranteed to remind the human person of his native fear of an unknown touch in the dark.

  Edwin placed the lantern on the ground and began pacing the perimeter of its light, swinging the machete. He hacked away at the ferns or fern-ish verdure with slow, deliberate, brutal strokes, meanwhile talking to Brigid.

  Eventually I said, “Why’s he saying nada nada?”

  “Nothing is here, nothing is left.”

  “Tell Edwin I think he’s a very good guide. And maybe we can pay him an oil spill–related bonus? He doesn’t usually take people here.”

  “He doesn’t usually take them anywhere. You know he has not enough business! That is why we came at all.”

  By now Edwin had stood up and stopped hacking away. He was talking to Brigid in tones of a certain shakiness.

  “He is saying perhaps he should follow them down the river.”

  I found him sympathetically reminiscent of something too basic and also vague to be identified.

  Brigid looked at me, blinding me with her headlamp. “I am sorry to everyone that I did this! I am sorry to bring us here. I mustn’t always do these things.”

  “Come on, don’t make a meaning out of it. Today is only today. You don’t do these things.”

  But without a word she’d walked off into the woods. There were several possibilities for why this might be, and I was unable to estimate how long she would be gone. The reason I wondered was that while I had painfully little idea what to do about Brigid, vis-à-vis Edwin I had come up with a plan I felt most comfortable executing just between man and man.

  I flipped in a hurry through my Spanish phrasebook/dictionary, looking for the words. And possibly Abulinix worked after all, since now I was very deliberately shaking half my supply into my hand, stuffing the pills in my pocket, and presently going up to Edwin with the prescription bottle in hand. With a certain stealthy gesture—like a drug dealer in the Washington Square Park of bygone years—I folded the bottle into his cool, flat, somewhat stub-fingered hand.

  His eyes shone a little, but whether this was just the common human moistness wasn’t something I could tell. In any case I said, “Estes te puede a
ider. Maybe. Uh, these can help you. What is Spanish for maybe? Anyway, tiene una para día. Solamente uno. But each day. Todo los días, okay?”

  Probably if he remained in Baños I could get his address somehow and send him some more if they worked, and he wanted. Although if the way they worked was to make him go back down the river, then he was out of luck medication-wise. In any case I could hear more than see it as he took one Abulinix, chewed it up—not the recommended procedure—and swallowed it dry. Then somewhat violently—almost somewhat sarcastically I felt—he knocked his forehead into mine.

  I shook his hand in the most general fashion.

  When the rain began to pour Brigid and I took shelter under the rasping thatched roof of the hut. Standing between the leaks that were drilling the ground at our feet, I switched on my headlamp and looked around. At first when my eyes registered all the poised dark blotches covering the wall, I figured there were so many of them that they must be patches of moss or I don’t know what. But then with a feeling of slowed-down time and horrific lucidity I determined that the spots were in fact enormous spiders, and some were on the move.

  “Brigid,” I said. “There are spiders all . . . over . . . the . . . They’re everywhere in here.”

  I’m not sure if outside of movies I’d ever heard someone literally gasp in horror before.

  I grabbed her hand and pulled her from the hut.

  Brigid and Edwin and I trekked all night through and out of the jungle, until eventually we stood without talking by the side of the road in the dawn. After a while a courteous gap-toothed fruit seller slowed down to pick us up and in his truck we hitchhiked back to Edwin’s van. Seated on fragrant crates of guava, lemons, grapefruit, papaya, guanabana, and oranges, we listed around curves, jounced violently over washboards, and said basically nothing to each other as we watched the red dirt road unspool behind us or else looked out the slats of the truck bed at the trees and more trees, the occasional chicken, pig, mule, guy on a bike, barefoot schoolkid, raw garden plot, or hut raised on stilts, TV set bawling inside.