The Believer, page 4
In fifty years, Annie will not be too sure of where the marriage took place but she will remember vividly how his family wanted nothing to do with her and she will remember the pain that throbbed all through those months. How she became huge with the baby and the cyst that grew alongside it. How her husband was a policeman by this stage, working shifts. How deeply unhappy the marriage was.
She is alone when her water breaks. Hobbles to the telephone booth on the street, calls an ambulance. Spends thirty hours in labor, delivering her ten-pound son. Holding him, she feels a self-surprising but deep call to have the child circumcised. Some strong attachment to the religion her grandmother had instructed her always to hide.
She tries to leave her husband, takes the baby. She ends up returning to the house, becoming pregnant with her second son.
One weekend, her husband is at work and the boys—not yet school-aged—are at her in-laws’ house where they are welcome but she is not. She knows that she must leave and that this is her chance to do it. She goes to Southland shopping center, sits in the sleek foyer, people shoaling around her. She sees a young man with long hair, a bit of a hippie. Approaches him, though she feels so shy. Oh . . . excuse me but I need a place to stay, she says. I’m leaving my husband and I need help.
This stranger drives her to the apartment he shares with his girlfriend above a butcher shop. They lend her their bed, their little Volkswagen. From this sanctuary, where she cannot sleep for missing her children, she writes to her husband. Tells him that she has left him and will be seeking custody of the boys once she has a job and a place to live. Next day, she borrows the car and finds full-time work as an assistant accountant. Replying to an ad in the local paper, she rents a room in a house with three aeronautical engineers who agree to let her pay her share of the rent whenever she gets her first pay. Under the same terms, she purchases a cheap but functional car. When she tells her family about her plans, her mother—perhaps desperate to distinguish her own act of child abandonment—tells her that what she’s done is shocking, disgraceful.
Her husband asks her to come by the house. Says they need to talk. She arrives to find two of his mates there, policemen in uniform. You try and get custody, they say, and we’ll go to the court and testify you had sex with both of us. Once again she returns.
When the boys are old enough to go to school, Annie leaves her husband for good. It means surrendering custody of her children but she reassures herself with the thought that their father loves those boys, she will see them when she can and perhaps one day they might understand.
At twenty-six Annie gets remarried, to an abusive alcoholic who dies six months later in a car crash on the Nullarbor with the baby-sitter by his side. She goes to the morgue to identify his body. Looks down at him, the stitches where his head has been opened. Sits on the floor, back against the wall. The young man, gone. And her still here, warm in the cold room.
The growth in her abdomen sends her repeatedly back to the doctor, doubled over with pain that goes not merely undiagnosed but entirely dismissed (psychosomatic) until she requires a hysterectomy at the age of twenty-eight.
At twenty-nine she marries a telephone repairman. A nice guy but not a great match. They divorce three years later.
At thirty-three she marries a postman. He wants children and she is done having babies. They divorce after two years.
At forty she marries a younger man from China. They travel between the two countries, start a business and buy the house she still lives in today. They divorce eight years later.
At forty-eight, she marries a con man from Colorado with significant debt. Six months later, they divorce.
Marriage certificates, divorce certificates, passports with different surnames. Annie’s relationship history has been reduced to paperwork but paging through it still feels profoundly sad. Addiction is the word I think of. To something we are physically built to be addicted to: love, the security of attachment. The diminishing returns are less interesting to me than the prenup she wisely made the last guy sign before she married him with girlish braids in her long blonde hair. So although there is a strong sense of futility and of history repeating in this file of personal documents, there is also, in the accounting of his meager assets and sizable debts, an undeniable sense of something slowly rising.
Radical acceptance of uncertainty and impermanence is what one may expect of a person who shares her home with an enormous gold Buddha and a monk, who is currently eating his lunch out back. But Annie’s focus is less on letting go and more on letting in; finding language for everything stifled by the dark silence that society insists on draping over the dying and those they leave behind.
Take the luxuriantly thick washcloth that she is handing over to me so I too can have a fondle. “You can wash the body, or just the face or hands, the feet,” she says, explaining that she chooses to do so without gloves. “As you’re washing, talk about things: what did these hands do when that person was alive? These feet? And the stories start coming up and laughter and tears.” She explains that whether the time you had with that loved one was long or short, remembrance is about connection. “These are things that can be done when your baby has died. Some ritual, some little ceremony.”
She holds up a wool bundle cinched with pink ribbon: a mock-up baby carrier she is trying to present to hospitals to help grieving parents connect with their dead babies.
“It’s soft,” she explains, holding it like a football and giving it a good squeeze. “When a little baby has died and it’s just in a blanket, it’s so fragile, you don’t want to hug it.
“But that child can come home, and the other children can hold it, or the extended family, because everyone is touched by that.”
After the death of her newborn grandchild, Annie saw that people simply did not know what to say. And that silence is to grief what petrol is to fire. “We’re not told about how to respond to a situation like that,” she explains.
And we don’t necessarily do it any better at the other end of the age spectrum. She cared for her auntie who was in her late seventies. Stage four pancreatic cancer. Annie’s mother warned her, “Now, don’t talk about all your death stuff with Betsy, we don’t want to upset her.”
So Annie went into the bedroom, where she saw that her aunt was in pain.
“How you going?” Annie asked.
“Good, I’m fine,” Betsy replied, from bed.
“So what do you know about your situation?” Annie asked.
“Well, I know that I’m dying.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“I do want to talk about it,” Betsy said, “but people won’t let me. They keep saying, ‘You’ll get better.’”
So they started talking.
Like all socialized silences, the one around death doesn’t do what we think it does. Doesn’t make anything easier. Breeds only disconnection, isolation, fear.
“What do you want to tell everyone?” Annie asked her auntie.
“I want everyone to be kind to each other,” Betsy replied.
“This is one of the things I’ve learnt,” Annie says to me. “Everything that was so important—we’ve gotta do this, we’ve gotta achieve this—when faced with our mortality, the simplest things become the most significant. Kindness. Patience. Gratefulness. And that doozy of all things: forgiveness.”
Betsy felt that she was a failure as a mother, in her life she’d been a failure. That she could have done things better. In her auntie’s bedroom, Annie started pulling items out of a box of Betsy’s memorabilia. Things that had been completely forgotten, things that reminded Betsy of her successes. “The victories that she’d had in her life that she had totally trivialized because the negative things were just taking over her attention. Which is quite common, isn’t it?”
8
In the Beginning
Georgia
“Many of us have become accustomed to images of the ark that look like this,” says Dr. Georgia Purdom, clicking to a slide showing a cartoon Noah’s ark stuffed with smiley animals. “As soon as that wave hits, that ark is gone, okay? It’s gonna capsize and considering there’s animals sticking out of everywhere, it’s not gonna be a good thing.”
After killing some time in the gift shop looking at books (The Purpose & Meaning of Life; Dinosaurs of Eden; God’s Word on Gay “Marriage” ), I settled into the Creation Museum’s 4D movie/lecture theater to watch Dr. Purdom, a microbiologist with a doctorate in molecular genetics from the Ohio State University, give her second lecture of the day.
Purdom is a very busy person who says things like, “Relaxing or resting is sort of hard for me, I figure I’ll do that later when I get to Heaven.” Having read years’ worth of her blog before I see her lecture, I find her voice familiar: a strident didacticism containing both the martial and the folksy.
“Now, the thing is, the world mocks the ark,” she continues, looking out at the audience from under the convex curtain of her auburn fringe. “Many say it’s just a story. We help the world when we show them pictures of the ark like this. Like, no wonder they make fun of us, right?
“We know exactly how big the ark was from Scripture. The length was to be three hundred cubits, the width fifty cubits, and the height thirty cubits. A lot of large-scale ancient construction projects used a cubit of 20.4 inches, that’s what we used for Ark Encounter. It’s sometimes known as the Hebrew long cubit,” she adds casually. “That’s about a football field and a half long. It’s about two school buses wide, and it’s about three giraffes stacked. Its volume is equivalent to about five hundred semitrailers. So whatever you can fit in five hundred of those, you could fit in the ark,” she continues. “Now, it’s not as big as the Titanic or the Queen Mary II. But remember those are steel boats and leisure cruisers. Noah didn’t need a golf course, okay? What Noah needed was a cargo ship and that’s exactly what he had.
“Of course it’s perfect, right? Because God designed it, and He knew exactly what the dimensions should be.”
Perfect is a word I hear a lot at the museum. It’s a word I love (or so my self-punitive interior monologue would suggest) but which I am teaching the larger part of myself to hate. Perfectionism is a lie that brings us the opposite of the protection we crave.
“Almost without fail in our modern culture, the ark is shown as fairytale-like . . .” Purdom continues. This is a problem, she says, because it promotes the idea that the flood was fiction. “The fact is that Satan is saying, ‘If I can convince you that the flood was not real, then I can convince you that Heaven and Hell are not real.’ That’s what Satan does throughout time, right? Is to get people to question God’s word. So that’s why it’s so important that we portray the ark accurately, especially to our children.”
To sit in this lecture is to experience a great untethering from what Hannah Arendt called “the human world.” By this she meant a shared world of stable processes, laws and institutions which create the conditions for social negotiations and the pursuit of common goals in an environment that values human diversity.
In Arendt’s words: “The more peoples there are in the world who stand in some particular relationship with one another, the more world there is to form between them, and the larger and richer that world will be.” Because of this emphasis on plurality, the human world is polyphonic, inherently conflicted; confusing, even. Less immediately satisfying in these respects than tidier “pseudo worlds,” which offer synthetic, ideologically consistent ways of being “whose inner coherence defies all factual evidence.” Beware the perfect is, therefore, the lesson of the human world. As in the natural world, we tolerate violence towards its ecosystem at our own risk.
“Now, what animals do you think I get asked about most when it comes to the ark?” Purdom is saying.
“Dinosaurs,” intones a dutiful chorus. My fellow audience members, who remain gravely attentive, largely comprise what I have started to think of as The Demographic: white heterosexual retirees in pairs and young white heterosexual couples with little children.
“And I say: ‘Of course!’ Because it says: Every living thing of all flesh, animals after their kind will come to you to keep them alive. So there’s no doubt that they were on the ark.”
The Titanosaur. That’s what this reminds me of. A dinosaur so grandiose in its construction that it could not stand up once it fell. An arrangement of facts so contingent that one misstep was death. And I am on edge in this audience as though I’d just seen a spider at the edge of my vision; a reflexive fear of certain forms.
We may be the only animals who can think about our thinking, but that doesn’t mean we can be relied on to do it particularly well. The only discomfort we tolerate worse than not knowing is knowing. A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation from rational judgment and the list of our deviations is long. No one is exempt.
We privilege information that confirms our preconceptions (confirmation bias), react to disconfirming evidence by strengthening our pre-existing beliefs (backfire effect), ignore the obvious (ostrich effect). We prefer consensus to critical evaluation (conformity bias), refuse to mentally metabolize that which has not yet happened to us (normalcy bias). We assume the world is fundamentally just and rationalize injustice as something the victim deserved (attribution bias) but we become more sympathetic as our similarity to the victim increases, the pain of others flashing past us and into the distance like a siren in the night (egocentric bias). And all while thinking that we alone see reality as it is, unbiased and objective.
Reality is a shelter that we continuously augment with distraction and deception, insistence and belief. This landed us on the moon but it could kill us before our time.
In 1963, Arendt wrote about how evil is so much more mundane, more banal than she had assumed, and therefore all the more fearsome. This was after recognizing Adolf Eichmann’s “quite authentic inability to think.” It is thinking—in the specific sense of an honest interior conversation that tries to distinguish between right and wrong, both factually and morally—that anchors the human world.
Arendt speaks of the willingness to hold these inward interrogations as the disposition to live with oneself. If we can’t be trusted to live with ourselves, we can’t be trusted to live together, as James Baldwin—writing about racism in America—told us in 1962. This is because the roiling discomfort that lies beneath this type of inner willful blindness too easily gets redirected as external violence. “It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum—that is, any reality—so supremely difficult,” Baldwin wrote. “The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can be only oneself.”
“Some people have problems with: how could animals that size fit on the ark?” Georgia Purdom says. “I hate to break this to you, but the ones they show on Jurassic Park? That’s Hollywood’s version. Most dinosaurs are not that big. In fact, the average size of a dinosaur is a buffalo, okay? So we’re talking cow-size, right? Really not that big. It’s not an issue. And probably it was the older dinosaurs that they show in Jurassic Park. Noah needed to take juvenile dinosaurs. That makes the most sense, because they had the longest reproductive life after the flood. Even dinosaurs start small, okay?
“And some people say, ‘What did T. rex eat?’ Well,” she sighs, “again, this is about survival, this is not about leisure. Some animals can survive on vegetarian diets for a certain period of time. The other possibility is that Noah took dried meat for carnivorous dinosaurs. But I tend to think it’s more that they just survive on a vegetarian diet . . .”
9
Paranormal
Vlad
At the end of the dark hallway, Lee stands on the threshold of a small room, enthusiastically explaining how he was physically pushed out of it moments ago by an invisible entity with a touch that felt like a hand on his skin.
I walk into the room, which is oddly shaped and brightly lit. It contains nothing much—a table, a mirror. Standing there, I feel a coldness on one side of my face, my neck, my arm. Not a cold wind, just . . . cold. I look around for an air vent, find none. Besides that, nothing remarkable.
Just outside the door, two participants, both self-described mediums, chat like they’re waiting for the bathroom at a party. One explains that she senses the spirit of a large, bossy lady. Perhaps the madam of a brothel that may have operated on the premises. Also some barrels, potentially of beer. Lee heads off to get something from his bag in the Bayview Room. Others wander over. Snatches of conversation float into the room:
“I found myself in bed, behind my sleeping body . . .”
“Is that like astral traveling?”
“Sort of, but I didn’t go anywhere. When I went back into my body, it was just like a cold lump of meat. I thought, ‘Now I understand why people don’t want to come back.’”
“There’s more to it than this. The whole world doesn’t exist for us to live and die . . .”
Vlad is inspecting the evenness of the floor in this, the oldest part of the building. He notes the potential neurophysiological impact of the physical environment: how even subtle changes in the gradient of the floor can contribute to a perception that something is not quite right. “Walk down that hallway,” he says when I join him outside the room, “and tell me if your feelings change.” I tell him I did that just before and felt extremely nauseous.
“Yeah?” He nods with interest. “At what point?”
I gesture towards the spot, and he heads over, EMF reader extended before him.
