From: <Richard Pell>
To: <Adam Sanecki>
Date: Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 8:44 PM
Subject: re: greetings
My worry never exactly dissipated—I’d still bolt upright in bed from dreams of slipknots—but hope began to flicker when it suddenly seemed—this was the development we’d been told to watch for, by professional horror-treaters—he wanted to be well. He was “engaging in his own treatment.” Which refers not just to the jobs, but to finishing his plate at dinner. Taking showers. Referring to future things: “when I go back to school,” “when I move out,” even once (Sally cried, raced from the room) “when I have kids.”
He’d started seeing Dr. Lennard, and we thought it had to be the medicine—blue pill for depression, period-sized white one for panic. I could have written sonnets to Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, odes to the roses in corporate New Jersey flower beds. For the first time since he’d been home Sally and I went out to dinner—asked for the check with our entrees, sudden gush of dread, but still, a step.
And then he’d mention travel—at first it was guidebooks on the coffee table, browser windows left open to Inca Trail tourist sites. We thought, Yes, please, to travel is to care, to refill your plate with experience. We thought, We must have misimagined his life, but no problem—we’ll gladly be the parents stepping off a plane in a strange city, meeting a foreign wife, hearing grandchildren arguing in someone else’s language. Compared with three months ago, when all we could think of was visiting a ward, a grave—we were in rapture.
So, India. Suddenly the focus was all India. And I began to—I’ve had time, an infinity of nighttime hours, to regret this—plug his enthusiasms into the amplifier of myself. India? Here’s the best bio of the Buddha. Narayan novel. Account of independence. This churn is what I do. Will it be north or south? Work or study? When will we visit? How large a supply of pills can Dr. Lennard prescribe at once?
Sally was less taken. More hesitant, to her credit. She said, If he’s ready to rejoin the world, he should prove it by holding a job for six months. Crawl before you walk. But it had been three, almost four years. That phone call from Columbia, an asterisk on the calendar. And I wanted another. Another date to mark—when he got well, when the avalanche revealed itself as something else. Benign.
In addition to which, I’d started to have—I shouldn’t be writing this—secret inklings. That his life, broken husk, might be given over to the supraworldly. Maybe the torments he’d been suffering, the terrors and private panics, were his induction. One of my—not regrets, but compromises in bringing Thomas up in D.C. was the paucity of … that which couldn’t be discussed on soccer sidelines over orange slices. Teachers, parents, very charming, wonderful—but living, fundamentally, between the forty-yard lines of George Will columns. Spirituality as the Montgomery Mall Christmas choir.
My own twentysomething crisis, thirty years earlier, had entailed a trip, not to India but to Thailand, this was just after the war—thatch hut by the Chao Praya, morning mist, an actual tiger (seen once, at a hundred feet, mini-fridge head lowered to a riverbank). This had been, for many years, the great adventure. I’d try to describe it at dinner parties, second bottle of red wine, Sally kicking me under the table. But there had been—under the influence of kratom and possible undiagnosed malaria—a vision one dawn in my hut. The moment—until Thomas was born—that I would have presented if aliens had descended, asked us to sliver up our pasts like cold cuts.
You must, it occurs to me—if you ventured into the Penn philosophy department at all—have read William James. More humane than his brother, better writer too. He gets to the end of The Varieties of Religious Experience—brilliant babbling encyclopedia of trances, conversions, shivers beneath crucifixes—and finally offers up the great unifying X between Christians and mystics and lotus-posed Japanese: “the ‘more.’ ” The sap in the veins of all religion. The nagging feeling that outside the frame, or behind the canvas, there’s … that which all the costumes and stories and nonsense can only gesture at.
I wondered if that’s what Thomas had tasted, was seeking to taste. If—again, cursed vanity—the neighbors and ex-teachers who saw him in his Blockbuster uniform—no, no receipt, thank you—who played the parlor game of imagining what had gone wrong, if the joke might be on them. He could be great on a scale outside the stadium entirely. India.