Death
EDITOR’S NOTE: Following is Chapter 36 of “Adrift in America: Diary of a Minimalist Mariner,” a work found in the nonfiction section:
Old Orchard Beach, Maine. March 15, 1987.
I awake with a start. There has been a terrible cry, a low moan like someone being stabbed in the stomach, then an angry shout, “GOD DAMN IT, oh, god damn it.”
It has, of course, been me.
I blink at the fake veneer on the side of the refrigerator. I am still alive.
The cabin is cold and damp.
I look at my left hand, which is poised motionless at the end of the arm lying beneath my head. How graceful the hand is. An intricate machine of flesh and bone that with its thousands of nerves and muscles has learned to grasp a breast, clutch a bottle, catch a ball, leaf through a book, play a piano, drive a car. The hand and arm are asleep, separated by their numbness from the rest of me. What my waking shout has acknowledged is that in not too many years, the rest of me will be equally dead. In such a short time, I will be dead permanently and forever. A million years will go by, and I will be dead. Five billion years will go by, the sun will swell up into a red giant and envelop the earth, and I will be dead. When time ends, I will still be dead.
What a goddamned, crying shame.
The clock tells me it is just after 3 in the morning. I turn and prop myself up on the dead arm, rubbing and squeezing it with my right hand. I turn off the overhead light and pull back the curtain. The window is covered with moisture.
A morbid preoccupation with death? I used to think it was morbid until I had enough years to observe the aging process. Life carries with it a knowledge of death. That’s what aging is. A pattern carried in the very mechanism of life that, no matter how vivacious an organism is, will assure that it eventually must die to make room for more of its kind. It’s not a pleasant knowledge, but it permeates every living cell. And occasionally it surfaces into human consciousness.
I have been waking this way for months. It started in the house when I was living there alone. Before the truck plans began.
I rub the moisture and look out in the campground. The matted pine spills are buttered with wet snow. Fog from nearby Old Orchard Beach glows in spheres around the streetlights. I look at mist-dripping rows of motor homes and trailers and imagine that their occupants all sleep peacefully, with smiles on their faces.
Lack of sleep never has been a problem with me, but I don’t sleep at regular hours under regular conditions. The idea of putting a bed aside in a separate room where you must enter at a certain time each night, change into special clothes, draw the curtains, turn out all the lights and then lie in wait for sleep has long been repugnant – maybe even creepy – to me. I prefer to let sleep take me while I’m doing something – watching television, reading, listening to the radio, remaking the bed so that the foot and head are reversed. I understand from the experts that this is the worst way to get to sleep, but I still get six to eight hours a night. Or day.
Sleep is one of the few functions you can’t control. I make a ritual of eating and of preparing the food to eat. I drink most beverages in a stemmed glass – everything from water to wine – and make a ritual of observing their taste, temperature and appearance. I make a ritual of exercise, a routine of stretches and calisthenics sandwiched around long, determined walks that I record in a daily log to assure that I do enough. But you can eat, drink or exercise any time you want. You can’t force yourself to sleep. Any more than you can move your bowels at will. It comes when it’s ready, not when you are.
Sleep may be an excretory function. The sleeping body frees itself from waste fluids and solids that are usually ready to move when you have awakened. From what I read, the sleeping mind may do the same, juggling images and feelings from preceding hours, perhaps even preceding days, months and years, until it decides which to store in memory and which to discard in forgetfulness. In a way, sleep is a temporary form of death as the organism breaks itself down into components and then reassembles them for another day of life. Finally, even if it has dodged all the open manholes and speeding beer trucks, the organism loses its ability to reassemble itself, and life steps in to break it down in death, sending its components to other parts of the living world where they can do some good.
It is a healthy renewal process, but it has taken me half a lifetime to accept it in my brain. It seems to be taking longer to accept it in my stomach.
I pull on my gum rubber boots and yellow slicker and go out into the cold dampness for a walk through rows of motor homes and trailers silhouetted by spherical lights.
– Sid Leavitt
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