Chapter One of The Electroencephelographer

He reared up, suddenly awake and fearful. Still fully alive or slipping away? Frantic to know, he turned on to one elbow and drew quick breaths. They came, but not easily. Was the breathing quite deep enough? Inspiration seemed restricted, not full, not of the life supporting kind. Grabbing at his neck, he felt for a carotid pulse, “Please! God?” Yes, yes it was there for him. Hard to get, but only because it was racing! So his shallow breaths could not be just the final few gulps of air drawn in reflexively, like after a cardiac arrest.

Somewhat reassured, he fell back again, not to sleep, but to observe with envy the easy normal breathing of the woman, his wife, whose respirations his own soon mimicked, as he permitted them to recede from his awareness.

Returned to life he was, but forced again by this rude reminder to contemplate the horror of being someday truly dead, the horror of oblivion, of death as reality, not something vague, remote, however guaranteed. He lay there, thinking of the prospect of dying as a genuine experience, a process to be felt, not something just theoretical. Heart no longer pounding, he wanted to sleep again, but thought it hardly safe to do so. Next time, it could happen.

Life, for him, had become no more nor less than death awaited, scarcely different from death itself. And everyone else was on death row too, for a vulgar or sinister reason, or for something else, eluding memory. He could not say he understood this, only that he had an odd sense of things having gone on this way a very long time, a trifle short of existence. His inclination, a bizarre one, was to hold both life itself and some other thing at fault, responsible. He wondered at times if his suspicions might constitute a flaw in an intended order of things and not be long tolerated if some mystery needed preserving.

The first inkling of death had come to him when he was a child of three in the garden of his father’s aunt. He’d certainly had no reason at that uninformed age to grasp the awful implication of his newness. There could be no logic of relationships involving time behind a sensing, felt with infantile awe, that the sweet smelling, almost pitch black earth piled up loosely in that rose bed, was to him, as every other kind of dirt would always be, peculiarly ancient, perhaps even prehistoric. But more than that, he seemed to see in the broken, freshly spaded, aromatic ground; shadowy events, obscure indications, soundings of failed lives and times past, where anyone else, and certainly an untutored groping child, would just observe top soil, or the squirming of an occasional upended worm. He was even too entranced by his special visions to pay any notice at all to the bright and happily bursting plants his parents came to admire or sniff over, and for which his attention was ardently solicited by all of those old ones. “See the pretty flowers! Smell the pretty flowers!” they would urge. He stared, contrarily, at these disturbingly ominous vagaries, at these indistinct revelations from out of the dark mournful ground.

Years later, when as an adult bent on remembrance, he first addressed the nature of such childhood experiences, he inclined, at once, to invoke a theory of instinctual knowledge for his suspicions. He considered his uncanny precocious awareness of unseen but impending and fatally threatening circumstance, to be another of the seemingly automatic ways or divining talents of the species somehow to have found its way into the genes and gotten to be passed along, generation after generation, as a behavioral entry bonus, a sort of evolutionary head start. Its understanding made it possible to know human conduct and behavioral patterns in part as nondescript echoes of all of that ancient suffering and successful innovation. All the same, because what is not entirely understood can be fearsome as well as awesome, it was tempting to dispel his disturbing insights with any kind of reason, however hastily contrived. And so, important disclosures he had stumbled over, or rather, in his case unearthed, were all too easily buried again under the weight of a possibly imperfect logic, shaped quickly out of urgent need. Anything now to stay composed. But he never did achieve through reason the measure of ease required. All he accomplished with his fancy theories was to rebury certain awful premonitions and yet have them still to haunt him.

Digging at things, always digging. It would become his steady state of mind. That obsession started up in the garden of his father’s aunt. And wondering. Wondering why nothing was right. Wondering why, for example, from the outset he felt so old. Too old certainly to be as small as he was and to be put to sleep at night in a crib. Too small for the way he thought. And too small also, for at least a brief while, to be courted by his mother. Courted with toys, and special trips to movie theaters and restaurants, and ardently offered help with lessons, until he was in love. Love, however it matures, always starts out sexual. And this kind, a boy’s love for his mother, soon becomes afflicted by apprehension for its ending. Such a good feeling it had been, and then almost immediately, his hopes and unclear expectations were dashed. He was old enough to sense trouble and yet too young to know what it was about. There was nowhere to turn for answers, but he was beginning on his own to grasp that there was something that gave, and almost as soon as it did so, everything was snatched away. In this early perception of the order of things, there was more than a hint of what would follow.

Now reconciled to sleeping again, even though he risked another harsh arousal, he chanced to think of his dead parents. No solace there. No comfort in the memory of their love or their sacrifices undergone doggedly in his behalf. He recalled their gestures, voices, smiles, laughs, remonstrances, cautionings, and shared times of every kind and variety. No pleasure for him in any of it. To the contrary just sadness, grief, foreboding.

And before he fell asleep that second time, more of the agony which had to be there for a reason, took him over. After all, did not everything have to have a reason? So pain which must have purpose was imposed by the terrible reminder that those two people, his mother and his father, were forever lost to him. They were absolutely, unconditionally withdrawn from his experience as they were from all of life. Even the fragments of them he might glimpse in the faces of close relatives, or the reflections and the sounds of them he sensed in himself, were no more than the cruelly designed, fragmentary reincarnations of their derelict, reminding, pleading parts. To see, to know, to feel, to wonder, his parents would never do any of that again, or be anything for him or to each other. Soon, with his own passing, they would not even be a memory. For he had no children of his own.

Nor were his feelings improved by cemetery visits. Graveside tricks of recollection might be kindly mustered to make such spectacles rewarding for others. They were not so for him. When he stared at headstones, in the hope of seeing beyond them and back to better times, there was only the hideous image of rotting corpses, grotesquely deformed, offensive vestiges of what had once been a delight to behold. To call people dead was only shallow attempt to blur the awful reality. Dead people, including his parents, were not dead or anything else. They simply were not, any more.