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Written by Carolyn McGrath
Peter woke in the dark with the now familiar feeling of isolation in the deep silence. He was deaf as a stone without those damned hearing aids. He lay there imagining writing a fanciful story called “Move to Mars” or some such thing, where hominids started out on Venus, overheated it with carbon dioxide, and escaped to Earth. Then they did the same thing to this planet and now had to move on to the next available hunk of rock onto which to attach themselves.
Each time they change planet, however, they must undergo physical changes due to varied amounts of gravity, light, air, water, etc., which throws them back to primitive means of grappling with the elements. It takes eons to build their numbers up again to a dangerous level, during which time they lose all memory of their former errors. Their prophets preach that they’re headed for doom, but that, if they repent their ways, they can save themselves and go on to a different, much better place, far away.
He had to pee. That’s what woke him up. Squinting in the bright bathroom light, he could see that there was still blood. The sight of this pinkness in his urine caused a bolt through his core once again. He felt no pain, had no other symptoms, but it terrified him. So did the need to subject himself to doctors. Fight or flight instinct didn’t help at all in the case of red bloody piss.
You’ll soon be an obituary, he thought to himself. One of those lives bundled up into a portrait of success. His would reduce him to a few inches, listing the titles of the books he’d written, awards, places where he’d travelled, and reminders of the causes he’d espoused. No doubt the Times already has it written in a file waiting for just this. After all, his recent grind has been a dress rehearsal for the end: growing deaf, knee surgery, all these pills in the daily dispenser. And now the kicker: blood from the gut.
He crawled back into bed and reached over to the empty side. Men were supposed to be the first to go. Anne would have told him not to worry, that in the morning they’d find out what it was. Now that she was gone, he didn’t know much about his sons. He was sure they didn’t think a lot about him. He’d loved his wife and children, but they’d been close to one another and hadn’t seemed to need emotional support from him. Fool that he was, he hadn’t anticipated his own need, pandemic or no pandemic.
Nick had come from Texas and John from Chicago to attend her funeral and tell clever anecdotes. Now he wondered if they’d risk travel to do the same for him. And what would they say? He wasn’t famous for being a great husband and dad. As an anthropologist his life had been too peripatetic to develop close long-term friendships. In his old age, Sam had become his close companion. His collar and leash were still on the hook by the door, his ball in the closet. Peter couldn’t bear to throw them in the trash. It felt as though he was missing a limb when he walked in the mornings now. Only when Sam was gone had he realized what it really meant to be lonely. He wanted to return to sleep, but no matter what position he tried, each one brought a different and more distressing future scenario involving strung-out helplessness, pain and suffering. If only he too could be taken to the vet and put gently to rest. He tried to relax every
muscle, but his heart was pounding away in his chest. He might as well be sprinting to a finish line. Things always seem more disturbing at night, he reminded himself.
Rising, he went out to pace the hall, stopping to pull a tissue and blow his nose. His doctor had told him to get out of bed and walk if he couldn’t sleep. Sometimes it worked to comfort his mind by reviewing his life, as though he were drowning. A sort of personal obituary, but too often it led to that moment in Nepal on the steep trail high above the stone-gray river that surged through rocks the size of Trump Tower. That instant when he felt himself suddenly standing on air, disconnected from this world.
Curiously, he didn’t remember it as a moment of terror, but his mind insisted on magnifying that brief moment of time. He couldn’t say that his whole life passed through his mind in a flash, but he could say that there was time for his mind to question how it would experience what was coming. So, in that sense, it seemed to him that he’d died that day, perhaps even longing to become immanent with the beauty of that space, the air so thin, the light so pure, where everything feels infinite, the otherworldly sound of a wind-bell from the monastery at the top of the mountain calling him to enter into the heart of it all. Only later did his body shake with mortal fear.
Had he followed the frozen chunk of rock that broke from the path beneath him, Earth would have rolled on, impervious to just another loss of the life attached to her like fleas. Instead, he’d been resurrected by a Sherpa.
Normally Rama Sherpa had trailblazed ahead, but here on the narrow valley pass, he’d followed just behind on the cliff. Peter had no memory of the struggle to bring him back up onto the ledge where Rama had thrown himself flat. None of that remained to entertain Peter’s sleeplessness. Only the moment itself when his foot broke from the path of life to reach for the unknown.
All his life since then has been a gift to him from Rama Sherpa. Peter knew that whatever he’s said or done since then was granted to him by Rama’s reflexes. His life is a testament to the sense of duty humans have for each other. For all the strife among us throughout our history as a species, there is this spontaneous response to save one another, to answer to what binds us. He’d paid for the surgery to repair the Sherpa’s shoulder, torn by the weight of his body and gear as Rama caught a strut of the backpack. Later he’d paid for Rama’s oldest son to be educated, and now he studies agro-and forest ecosystems in Central Himalaya.
Peter paused and, leaning, pressed his forehead against the wall. He knew this planet well, but for all his travel, his advocacy for wildlife, his study of cultures and languages and comparing of religions…now what? What good is it going to do, all that accumulated knowledge and personal experience packed into his brain? People still wrote to him, wanting to know what he believed, or trying to influence what he believed. There was no possibility now that he would finish that last book he’d wanted to write about the changes in places where’d he’d explored. He’d run out of time. It probably would have been his most important book of all.
He went into the study, sat at his desk and turned on the low green-shaded light. An empty paper pad lay waiting. Most people didn’t see what we were doing to the earth. They preferred to think scientists were wrong when they warned us about the dangerous warming of the planet due to the greenhouse effect, but now they think science will save us. Really, Peter thought, picking up a pen and twiddling it in his fingers, we’ll never find the will necessary to give up our comforts. He himself was no exception. Hell, driving his car a mile and a half to the grocery store yesterday dumped three pounds or more of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, plus much of what he bought had been flown or trucked from hundreds of miles away.
What would he have done differently in life if he’d understood the cost? He thought of all the times he’d flown around the globe. Would he have thought twice about getting on an airplane if he’d known the astonishing amount of pollution it caused? Air travel had been essential to almost everything he’d ever done. His so-called “lifetime footprint” was a lot worse than most. He’d been saved by Rama to go on polluting the earth.
No, a book by him wouldn’t make any difference. What is needed is a great world leader to show the way. Ha! When Jimmy Carter tried to dim the lights at the White House, he was laughed out of office. No, things have gotten worse and worse and it’s too late to stop it. There are too many of us and not much room on the spaceship.
According to Genesis, God told the first humans to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and subdue it and to have dominion over every living thing that moved. Well, we went and did just that. Is this really what the God of the Bible had in mind? A planet infested with too many of one species, needing to be controlled by plagues, tiny invisible invaders?
What would God say about the extinction of other species at our hands? No commandment was handed down that defines that as murder. Shoot a lion, an elephant, a zebra. Who cares? We don’t even have to shoot them. Clearly the Hebraic god made a mistake when he entrusted husbandry of the Earth to us. Humans are on the way to making the planet uninhabitable for life in general, even for ourselves.
His feet were cold. He turned out the light and went back to the bedroom and found his fleece-lined slippers, sat on the bed to put them on and looked longingly at the rumpled sheets and comforter. He was so tired, but it seemed that his mind was no longer his friend. It used to know when to shut itself off for rest and turn itself on again refreshed. He couldn’t face what his mind had in mind tonight, so instead he went down the stairs, hand on rail. In the kitchen under the harsh overhead light were oranges in a bowl on the counter. He picked one up and began to peel it, removing white strands, admiring the golden glow of the inner fruit, seeing the seeds hidden in the segments like babies in a womb. He dug them out with his thumb nail before exploding the flavor between his teeth. Even though he couldn’t hear, he had senses left, pleasures to relish. But of course, he thought, this orange had been transported a thousand miles from Florida.
When he’d washed his hands and climbed the stairs once more, he got back into bed and tried not to think of anything, but his mind refused to be muzzled. It took him back to the hotel in Beijing, looking down at morning traffic. The bicycles were gone, roads clogged instead by cars, the air scarcely breathable. It was said at the time that there was a four-kilometer-high brown cloud of smog above the city. He could barely see one block away. And in Korea, aside from the dogs raised on rooftops for their meat, he’d noticed no animal life other than human, until he went to a station overlooking the demilitarized zone between the North and South, a mere 160 miles long and two and a half miles wide. Only there could he see the beauty that was once the Korean peninsula, white birds flying over the lush forest and along the blue river. Since 1953 no humans have entered that strip of now pristine wildlife refuge. It can only be Eden without humans in it.
What exactly did God tell Adam and Eve? Their punishment for allowing themselves curiosity and knowledge was that humans would suffer and die. That appeared to be a very apt metaphor, he realized, for knowledge condemned us surely enough. The word science was the classical term for knowledge. It’s through our knowledge, our so so clever minds, that we’ve developed the technology to despoil the earth, our garden of paradise. How can science save us from what it has wrought?
Oh, his mind was having a grand time depressing him tonight. He turned onto his left side away from the clock. Looking at it would only make him more sleepless. Well, dammit, Peter thought, all this was enough to reconcile him to his end. If he was going to die, he’d no longer have to worry about all this. He had to wonder where all those end-of-the-world prophets were now who’d believed the end of the millennium would bring Armageddon. Why aren’t they crowing about being right? They don’t seem to realize that all these storms and fires and rising sea levels are the beginning of the slow end of life as we’ve known it. They took the Bible literally, not understanding it as myth, which is to say it’s true in a larger long-term sense.
Faced with clear signs of ultimate doom, some fantasists think that humans can colonize other planets, including Stephen Hawking, who was convinced that humans need to leave Earth to survive as a species. Perhaps Hawking could have done it. He’d been so disembodied here that
it was easy to imagine him flying to Mars in his high-tech wheelchair. People ignored any advice he gave about how to save the Earth, so he spun this impractical idea, worthy of science fiction.
Peter thought about the article he’d been trying to work out in his mind. If he couldn’t write his book, he could at least write an article pointing out that the human race is ungovernable. That in the past century the question was raised about whether we humans should split the atom and release the hellfire of nuclear fission and radioactivity. Just who was the great arbiter to weigh that decision? Whose god was consulted? Forget the Ten Commandments. Those who justified this means of mass killing thought in terms of winning a war. The fact is that humans could do it and so they did.
He wanted to show that what’s happening is a large-scale Greek tragedy. There is no law written to tell us not to tamper with the human genome. Some think we shouldn’t, most don’t know or care, but it can be done, so it will be, by those who choose to see only benefits while ignoring the potential for tremendous harm. No one is in charge. Same with drones and remote satellite imagery. Even our social networks can be used by the forces of evil to foster hatred and destroy civilization, but the genie won’t go back into the bottle. Some warn that artificial intelligence will replace us, bending our will to the amoral decisions of machines. Peter could imagine the chanting of protesters: No one is in charge. We need a leader NOW!
Peter needed to sleep but his mind was still flying. To distract it, he got up for a drink of water, then went downstairs to check that the doors were locked. They were. Back in bed he lay on his back staring at the ceiling. Sleeping pills. Why had he never thought to buy some way of effectively shutting down his mind? That thought only turned it to pondering the end of itself. Minds are easily convinced that they’re not mortal, that there must be a plan. If a mind has worked hard and behaved itself, then there has to be a reward in the end. Right?
He thought about his grandmother who believed that she would see a lost son in the “next life.” It‘s the function of religion to offer belief in an afterlife to which an ephemeral spirit floats away when our bodies die. He smiled to imagine himself buried with the leash and collar, Sam joyfully greeting him, ready for a walk. Naturally minds want to believe that kind of thing, but minds are messy conflicted things. They write themselves a fiction, inventing some essential part of themselves that they call soul. When their body dies, this soul can’t remain here on Earth but must move on to some better place. Not Mars. Some place really really magnificent! With virgins! His mind laughed silently and then reminded itself that in death it would have no window onto anything. Soon it will have lost its senses. It’s already lost the benefit of hearing.
Of all the crazy ideas about an afterlife that have been floated, Peter preferred one where, after our human life ends, we return as a different form of life, a frog say, and experience what it feels like to live in water and croak. That seems only fair. But the ideas that have had the most
fanatical appeal are the most exclusive, claiming that only humans are entitled to immortality, guaranteeing that you won’t have to spend eternity with tigers and wolves, snakes and mosquitoes. A story to fool ourselves into thinking we’re somehow not animals. They’ll die. We won’t. We can look forward to a human paradise filled only with our own unthreatening kind. All you have to do is believe it. And be good, for that’s where you’ll have to answer for the way you spent your time on Earth.
Peter groaned. Religion is so cautionary. He’d found that each religion around the world has its own moral code by which goodness can be judged and where people live in closed systems and hold strong beliefs according to received doctrinaire wisdom. Apparently to many it’s comforting, this idea of a non-secular higher authority and its deferred judgment. Maybe that’s the answer to sleeplessness, he thought, plumping up his pillow: the assurance of accepted truth. If only he hadn’t left that kind of faith behind in childhood along with the wishful thinking about a kind and merciful god.
It’s no wonder, Peter thought, that minds invented a reward theory whereby they could continue in a nice place when our bodies cease. They resist imagining an end for themselves in an indifferent universe. Why wasn’t it made clear after the Thou-shalt-nots? Thou shalt die anyway, no matter what you do! Oh, because minds knew it wasn’t true! It couldn’t apply to a mind. The mind couldn’t die, not after all we’ve invested in it, could it?
Peter reminded his own mind that the brain has now been mapped and the exact locations where our minds operate their various functions have been discovered. It’s all due to mechanical action. So long as his lungs bring oxygen to his blood and his heart brings blood to his brain and the thought canals remain untangled, his mind can live, so it has a great motivation to keep his body alive.
Mind, in the end this body will betray you. When it shuts down the power, all your files will be lost. From the get-go life is a terminal disease for both of us, body and mind. Nothing is a welcome resolution to our existence.
Oh, but the mind mutters, it’s all so despicably unfair.
Yeah, but so is this inability to sleep! Mind, I know all your secrets and you don’t deserve a reward. I’m sorry we must die together. You don’t want to lose this body, and this body doesn’t want to lose its mind, but we’re in it together.
He turned and looked at the clock. After four! He pounded the bed. Mourn for yourself another time, Mind. Forgive this body. I promise we’ll take it to the doctor tomorrow. Now let it go to sleep. Please!
About The Author:
Carolyn McGrath has a degree in Classics from the University of Iowa.
For twenty-five years she taught in the Dept. of English at Stony Brook University, where she directed Stony Brook’s $1000 Short Fiction Prize for undergraduates in the U.S. and Canada. Her publications include short stories, reviews, and academic articles, and she was one of five authors shortlisted for the Faulkner Wisdom Prize in narrative nonfiction in New Orleans in 2017 for Queenbird. Her book, Two Faces of the Moon – A Small Island Memoir, is due to be released July 24, 2023, by Brandylane Publishers.
She lives in Charlottesville where, in a high security prison for women, she has taught poetry and developmental English and formed a book discussion group.