The Futilitarians Read online

  Case clicked on the final link in the body of the Wikipedia entry on the screen, an image of that cemetery, where Gaugin is also buried, on a paradisiacal hillside overlooking neat white boats anchored in too-blue water. “Didn’t Brando go native in Tahiti for a while, too?” Chris asked. “Yeah, that’s right, he did!” we assented. Ah, the lush island beauty, the isolation, the mind-clearing sea buffering the disappointments of civilization, the women, the privilege of fleeing your domestic life for the fantasy. We finished the cheese and bread and overpriced Belgian beer I’d picked up while running errands around the hot city earlier in the day. I wondered what Brelian desires were swirling inside these men here in the living room, and how much they differed from my own.

  AUGUST

  The Metaphysical Hangover

  My sister Susan takes copious, sprawling notes at each ECRG meeting in a standard black-and-white composition book. On the subject line of the cover, she’s written: “He appears to be the bearer of an undecipherable message.” She’s an enthusiastic recorder of life—writes in her journal prodigiously, loads her camera’s SD cards with thousands of pictures. Her swooping, idiosyncratic half-print, half-cursive style scrawls on month after month, skipping lines between the scraps of the discussion that seem important enough to snatch and capture. One steady thread from the last several months, stitched into the notebook’s blue, wide-ruled lines by Susan’s unruly handwriting, was the often-fraught relationship between the individual and the collective.

  August’s reading was an interesting tangle in that conversation. Nate, for whom drinking was still more sport than self-medication, had chosen the 1971 essay “The Hangover,” from Everyday Drinking, a collection by Kingsley Amis (yet another brilliant alcoholic philanderer). He meant it to be a follow-up to June’s “Swimmer” though we had to leapfrog over the hot, social sinkhole of July to land on it. Drinking, for better or for worse, was an integral aspect of the ECRG project. It marked our place in the several-thousand-year-long continuum of people sitting around together, sipping and gazing upon the navel of humanity. It’s always interested me that for millennia humanity has contrived with nature to supply itself with never-ending and varied ways to take the edge off the condition and alter individual consciousness, to both connect more easily to others and hopelessly isolate ourselves.

  Amis, whose vast, global knowledge of and experience with drinking was formidable, asserted that since “conversation, hilarity and drink are connected in a profoundly human, peculiarly intimate way… the collective social benefits of drinking altogether (on this evidence) outweigh the individual disasters it may precipitate.” Everyone in the living room was familiar with the destructive powers of alcohol and everyone partook anyway, telling ourselves, like Epicurus, that excess is the enemy, while knowing full well that drink contains a cunning chemical underminer that subverts judgment. Funny, erudite, chummy, and biting, Amis’s writing on drinking is a cocktail invitation to take issue with him, to enjoy the unresolvable argument that is humanity.

  In the essay, Amis first gives advice on dealing with the Physical Hangover. According to Amis one should begin by making vigorous love to whomever you wake up next to, unless it’s someone you’re not supposed to be with, then abstain, because it will only compound your guilt and shame. And if you wake up alone, don’t “take the matter into your own hands,” for the same reason. Though this advice was disputed by at least one person in the room, who thought it was useful for getting the blood going after a rough night. Other possible remedies include alternating between hot-as-you-can-stand showers and baths, eating unsweetened grapefruit, and more drinking. He includes a few he had heard about but hadn’t tried himself, like “Go down the mine on the early-morning shift at the coal-face,” and also some “notable” breakfast recipes, my favorite being Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s: “(Sundays only) 6 fried eggs, 1 glass laudanum and seltzer.”

  While people had lots of topical, animated things to say about the Physical Hangover, we soon had one of those moments of conversational gravity that unite the room when we moved on to Amis’s description of the Metaphysical Hangover:

  When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover. You are not sickening for anything, you have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a shit you are, you have not come at last to see life as it really is, and there is no use crying over spilt milk. If this works, if you can convince yourself, you need do no more, as provided in the markedly philosophical

  G.P. [general principle] 9: He who truly believes he has a hangover has no hangover.

  Amis’s cure for the Metaphysical Hangover is to make yourself feel worse before you can feel better. He proposes that you do some cultural wallowing by reading and listening to music that will take you down to the depths (John Milton’s Paradise Lost or Solzhenitsyn’s account of a Siberian labor camp; Tchaikovsky; Sibelius) and then work toward more bracing, affirming selections to give you hope for man. (“If you can stand vocal music, I strongly recommend Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody—not an alto sax, you peasant, but a contralto voice, with men’s choir and full orchestra.”) I think this is something many of us do intuitively, giving our woes more texture and universality through art. And though I know exactly no one capable of so much heavy reading while hungover, it’s nice to have someone lay out the course work for you.

  The subject of hangovers in general brought out a tender, contemplative side of people. It might’ve had to do with the vulnerability of the condition, which is usually predicated upon a confounding combination of bad decisions, communal fun, and/or individual despair. A hangover is the visceral reality of a price being extracted. The uncomfortable grip of consequence. Many in the group seemed to agree that there’s some opportunity to be found in the painful melancholy of the hangover:

  “Everything shifts—the cadence of time, perception—when you’re forced to confront this transformation, caused by your own self-poisoning.”

  “And all the self-questioning—what did I do last night? With whom?”

  “Then there’s the weirdly beautiful, empathetic state of the hangover—‘I am so miserable that I can clearly see the thread of misery running through other people’s lives.’ You’re like, ‘Oh my God, those people, they’re waiting for a bus.’ And you want to cry.”

  “But it’s also such a personal space, how you’re isolated in your experience.”

  “You don’t move as quickly and must pay attention to every move you make. Kind of Zen, like, ‘I must cut this onion.’”

  “Best if you just embrace the misery of the hangover.”

  The general gist seemed to be that though intensely isolating, the wretched dissolution of the self can also make you more sensitive to those around you, lower your defenses, help weaken the barriers we put up between ourselves and others and between ourselves and our selves. Like Amis’s description of the Metaphysical Hangover, so much anguish is connected to the things we work to create and maintain. Hangovers can exacerbate the thought that somehow we’re not worthy of what we build up, including our relationships. After all, the existential definition of “anguish” is our deep recognition that our lives and decisions and choices are all connected to other people. When we fuck up, we fail humanity, too. (See also: Dread; Learning.)

  That night, I do remember sharing at least one personal instance in which a hangover was inadvertently useful. One bright Saturday morning I found myself solo-parenting in a damaged state at my son Silas’s middle-school fair, my husband at work on a set, probably at some plantation somewhere, artfully painting a layer of picturesque decay on top of the regular old decay. The night before, we’d happened upon Soren and his wife at a downtown bar, and instead of running the other way, as we should’v
e, we allowed him to buy us shots of Chartreuse, aka “the Truth.” Chartreuse is our family drink, maybe because things often end badly after spending some time with it.

  Tickets, confetti eggs, kids in face paint, parents loitering behind barbecue grills and manning unambitious games of skill. After looking for a place to hide, I gratefully propped myself up on the inflatable base of one of those jumping tents/bouncy houses/space walks, which was rather stationary, the rest of its pillowy architecture lurching above me as my boys threw themselves at each other inside. The gentle, steady roar of the nearby generator felt stabilizing.

  A former courthouse built in the 1850s, the school was one of the oldest public school buildings in the country, and looked it. I had actually gone there, back when it was a high school. Not sure how they’d gotten away with repurposing the old firetrap as a middle school, with its narrow hallways and canted floors, but I loved the place. Antebellum-high ceilings and crumbling plaster, walls impastoed with decades of institutional paint jobs, the “cafetorium” and portable buildings that were supposed to be temporary thirty years ago but were now being used by my son. I remember watching an Orleans Parish Prison detail in orange jumpsuits whitewash the huge, neoclassical columns across the façade while a deputy stood by with a shotgun. Outside my sophomore-English classroom window. Different times, the ’80s. I seemed to be having Time Hangover as well, dread washing over me in tepid, fading waves. I’d been in this town too long, a stick snagging the water while time surged past but the basic scenery stayed the same.

  A woman I know came around the corner of one of the portable buildings, holding a toddler and looking distressed. A therapist, she’s usually very well turned out, with carefully managed hair, makeup, and clothes, and the alert, gentle demeanor of someone who earns a living helping people with their problems. She makes me feel like an amateur human, always afraid I’ll say something misguided or unhelpful.

  “Hi,” I said from the ground, squinting up at her, knowing the polite thing to do would be to stand up, but my body was temporarily indifferent to manners. “How’s it going?”

  She replied that she was really upset because the night before she’d gotten into a Facebook fight with her brother-in-law, who was kind of a right-wing jerk, and normally she doesn’t engage but she’d had a couple of glasses of wine with dinner and now she was feeling so terrible about it, about antagonizing her husband’s family, and she couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  She’d put her daughter down on the ground as she spoke, as though not wanting to sully her with all this adult tension. Inside the space walk, the kids kept hurling themselves against the net above me, which would catch and return them to the buoyant chaos of the interior over and over. Without pausing, or thinking, I said something like “Don’t worry about it. Y’all are both adults and responsible for your own words. He can deal.”

  Impassively confident, definitive. This didn’t even seem like me talking. The woman produced a rare, startled look of connection that you don’t often see in casual social interactions. She said it was so great running into me and then chased after her little daughter, who was taking off her sandals in the hopes of joining the big kids in the inflatable Thunder Dome. The next time I saw the woman, she thanked me so much for being so helpful about her brother-in-law, what I had said was so true! In another state of mind my response to her problem might’ve been diluted by doubt, or overthinking, or impatience with Facebook, but bullshit is something that hangovers have little tolerance for. I thought to myself that she should’ve thanked the Chartreuse (but not Soren) instead.

  A friend once described drinking Chartreuse as akin to having a thousand-year-old monk shove balsa wood down your throat. I’ve seen grown men, seasoned drinkers, tear up and run for the bathroom after a shot. It’s become a tradition on Mardi Gras morning to serve it early, when people start arriving at the house around eight for breakfast, lining up shot glasses in the kitchen, everyone toasting the first big mistake of the day, which is drinking what I’ve put in front of them. Though pagan in origin, Mardi Gras is a thoroughly Catholic contrivance, one that allows me not to feel even a pinprick of guilt that I get to roll out of bed on a Tuesday and have a shot of bourbon before brushing my teeth. That’s what Ash Wednesday is for, another Catholic ethical escape hatch, like confession.

  My favorite job of Mardi Gras is manning the rented champagne fountain in the courtyard, shooting corks up in the air and seeding the garden with tangible future memories of carnival. All year long I find corks like truffles in the dirt whenever I’m planting or tending. As much as I enjoy Mardi Gras, I love Ash Wednesday possibly more. The pained hush over the penitent city: the Civic Hangover. Such a relief—the permission to stop all the nonsense and get back to work. The streets have been bathed and cleaned but still bear some traces of the big party: crushed plastic cups here or there, shiny worthless beads tangled in trees and overhead wires. Discarded, errant pieces of costumes that got too cumbersome or were too ambitious to begin with.

  During our August meeting, Tristan brought up another kind of citywide hangover: the Rebuilding Hangover. Tristan reminded us how after the drama of Hurricane Katrina’s destruction had subsided, we were left living in its heavy, burdensome aftermath, waking up every morning and remembering that impossible, awful thing that had just happened, that the city was still mostly destroyed, the National Guard was still patrolling our neighborhoods, the schools were still closed. Then we’d have to get out of bed and deal with it all over again, power through the endless work and headaches, the questioning and planning. Curse the forces that would slow the recovery—bureaucracy, crime, skepticism.

  After a few years, the city’s transformation that accompanied the Rebuilding Hangover was followed by the stubborn, natural, but rather American forgetting, a collective survival mechanism, a getting back to “normal.” But I think that once you’ve seen firsthand what the wholesale destruction of your home looks like, the memory of it forms a substratum in your consciousness, alive and molten under the optimistic layers of the reconstruction, under the new foundations and drywall, new roads and schools.

  In this sense, the Rebuilding Hangover resembles the Metaphysical Hangover that accompanies a death or a great loss. When the Metaphysical Hangover first hits with its full force, it’s a disorienting overtaking of your person. Your days are pulled apart beneath the weight of it, you lose your sense of time, lose focus, lose desire. But gradually, over weeks or months, the world comes back to you, days regain their shape, it takes only a few seconds to remember what you are retrieving while standing in front of the open refrigerator, browsing online you see a pair of shoes and put them in your cart with a small sense of relief at actually wanting something again. Your relationships regain their normal contours, people their full dimensions. Each year lays down another fresh coat of paint over the trauma. Life gets easier, smoothed over. But something else happens simultaneously—buried beneath so many layers, the trauma becomes attached to your very structure, changing you in deep, imperceptible ways.

  Someone once asked if it fucked me up having two sisters who committed suicide. I gave a wrongish, three-beers-in answer—“Yeah, when I think about it.” But, wanting to cut that line of inquiry off, I didn’t explain that I thought about it a few times an hour for the year and a half between their deaths and then for about another year after Rachel died. These continuous sucker punches to the gut wore me down in ways that weren’t evident at the time, and maybe still aren’t. Subsequent years were textured by the fragile, damaged quality of a Metaphysical Hangover. The roiling uneasiness of aftermath gives way to despair, then teases you with moments of relief and normalcy only to pull you under with another current of grief.

  In those initial years, some of us siblings retreated more fully into careers, others into family life, extra scrutiny given to the next generation of children for any trace of the twins. Amy, the youngest once more after growing up a middle child, who was home with the twins during the wor
st years, felt the most immediate responsibility for them, took off for an extended sojourn in the grand consolation of the isolation of the Grand Canyon. Unmarried, insecure, and chronically confused, I became paralyzed in my personal life, unable to make good decisions to move things forward. Floundered creatively.

  After Rebecca’s death, Mom and Rachel attended Survivors of Suicide meetings together once a month. At the meetings, you were supposed to introduce yourself and talk about the person you’d lost. But Mom could never say Rebecca’s name aloud. Could not physically speak it. (The transformative power death gives a name is formidable—it would take almost ten years for my parents to have the girls’ names engraved on the tomb in Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, to carve their deaths in stone, so to speak. And when I visit the tomb to this day, the rigidity of the lettering is still impossible to reconcile with the vibrancy of their lives.) In addition to finding some kind of solace in connecting with other suicide survivors, Mom thought that Rachel, a mother herself, witnessing Mom’s pain, hearing the stories of the damage and suffering caused in the aftermath of suicide, couldn’t possibly follow Rebecca. Apparently, 50 percent of surviving twins die within two years of their sibling. It was Rachel who told Mom this symmetrically cruel statistic. Was it in warning, preparation, out of fear? I imagine the path becomes more tempting, as already a part of you has gone down it, cleared some of the brush. While we tried to be attentive and supportive (Susan called Rachel every night as a surrogate for Rebecca to temper the void), we couldn’t have known the depth of the loss she was feeling, how thorough the destruction of this vital part of herself.