Man in the Empty Boat Read online

  Jessica feels differently about AASFaDs than I do. She, her parents, and her two siblings have owned so many of these creatures between them that I’ve lost count. As far as I can tell, they’re all the same dog only with different-size ears. This dog-of-many-ears isn’t mean or dangerous, and it is certainly loyal to the humans who feed it. My complaint is that this composite dog—and its composite owner, whom I adore and admire in every other way—cannot imagine that anything a nonbiting dog does could possibly get on a person’s nerves. And if anything short of biting does get on someone’s nerves, it’s the person’s fault. The person must be uptight and unable to recognize a “happy” dog when they see it. A happy dog, by my relatives’ definition, is one that does pretty much whatever it wants and receives unconditional love from human beings, and unconditional love is what all dogs receive from my in-laws, bless their hearts. And I do mean all dogs. Lucky indeed is the mud-soaked, half-starved, three-legged, blind, diabetic stray who wanders within sight of a Yu, because that dog will be a stray no longer. It will henceforth be a dog with a name and a home, and it will be happy—but it will not receive much in the way of training. He’s happy and that’s all that matters. If he doesn’t feel like sitting or staying, or if he doesn’t feel like resisting the impulse to bark, well, he’s just a dog being a dog. What’s the big deal?

  On this point, I thought Jessica and I had come to an agreement: no dogs. She’s an insomniac who rarely gets more than four hours of sleep at night, and those four hours usually fall between four and eight in the morning—unless a dog wakes her up. Which is what happens when we go up north to visit her parents. Destry, their golden retriever, starts barking just before dawn, but it’s not his fault. He’s just responding to the commotion in the front yard, where John and Connie’s roosters compete with their peacocks and geese for the title of Loudest Domestic Fowl.

  Allow me to present this English-language transcript of the opera that is performed there at first light every morning:

  ROOSTER: LISTEN TO THIS! DO YOU BELIEVE THIS? YOU CAN’T TOUCH THIS!

  DOG: HEY! HEY! HEY!! HEY HEY HEY HEY!!!!

  CHICKENS: Dog bad. Dog bad.

  DUCKS: We live in mud. We stand in our own poop. Life is like that.

  GEESE: MAKE WAY, FUCKERS!

  SEXUALLY FRUSTRATED MALE PEACOCK: PLEEEEEEEASE! Let it be TODAAAAAY!

  INDIFFERENT FEMALE PEACOCK: With a tail like that? THINK AGAIN.

  ROOSTER: AMATEURS, ALL OF YOU! AMATEURS!

  DOG: HEY! HEY! HEY!!!

  CHICKS: help help help help help help . . .

  My in-laws don’t just love dogs; they love all animals. They’ve built an honest-to-goodness, Vermont-style barn in their front yard just to hold the food for them. Jessica grew up surrounded by pets and can’t imagine life without them. I’ve done my best to accommodate her wishes—I thought I’d been a pretty good sport about the fish and snails and the zebra finches and the cockatiel and the Chinese robin and the two cats and the guinea pigs—but I drew the line at dogs. No, I said. This is nonnegotiable. We are not getting a dog.

  Imagine that! A rabbit telling an eagle how to feather her nest! Nothing obstructs Jessica’s will, because she has never met a problem she couldn’t solve. She researches, she considers, she decides, and then she tells me what we’ve decided to do. In this case, we decided to adopt a pretrained adult dog that had been rescued from a shelter.

  Jessica went online and found an outfit in North Carolina that caters to clients who don’t have the time to housebreak or train a puppy. The husband and wife who own this company rescue abandoned dogs and then train them before finding adoptive homes for them. Our dog, Jessica assured me, would not chew, it would not dig, it would not jump, it would not chase, it would not sniff human asses or lunge at human crotches. We would give this wonder hound a home, and in return it would play dead all day and night, and everyone would be happy.

  “You’re going to love having a dog,” Jessica assured me. “It’s so obvious.”

  That’s exactly what she’d said about having children, and as she will happily tell you given only the slightest encouragement, she was right—about having kids, that is. In theory, the same thing would happen to me once we got a dog. I would fall in love with it and wonder why I’d waited so long to come around.

  I dreaded the arrival of the AASFaD, but since it took several months for a dog to be selected and trained, I thought less and less about it, until I’d managed to forget about it completely. I had bigger problems to think about that spring: The economy had collapsed, we had two kids, our savings had nearly run out, and I owed my publisher a novel. They had paid me an advance for it six years earlier, and I had written the book three different ways, but none of them had been accepted. What was I going to do?

  Remember my epiphany about the relationship between creativity and conscious will? The one that made me feel so free? Well, now it worked against me. Believing that I couldn’t force the Muse meant that, for all I knew, I might spend another six years writing another book that turned out to be a dud. Book sales were down across the board, bookstores were going out of business, and every week there was some new story in the trades about the emergency measures publishers were taking to recoup their losses. I had to start something else, finish it soon, and hope that it turned out to be a story that an editor could love. And this time, I couldn’t afford to fail.

  Thirteen

  IN MARCH OF 2009, I woke up in the middle of the night feeling that something was not right with my breathing. The rhythm was normal, but I felt as though not enough oxygen was getting into my blood. The air in the room felt thin. I yawned a few times and opened the window next to my bed, but the feeling remained. What happened next wasn’t subtle. A shock wave of adrenaline propelled me out of bed. It was as if I were reacting to a gunshot that my body had felt but my ears had not heard. A tingling sensation burst out from the center of my chest and then ran down into my limbs and up into my head. My heart rate shot up to nearly three times its resting pace, and I was having lots of skipped beats, and then my left arm and the left side of my chest began to feel tight.

  I thought: I’m forty-nine years old, I’ve got two young daughters, and I’m having a heart attack. Shit!

  In order to get her four hours of sleep, Jessica creates her own Fortress of Solitude each night out of cloth, memory foam, and Ambien. She forms a boundary around herself with a U-shaped body pillow, lays a folded towel over her eyes, inserts soft earplugs, and then covers her head with a second pillow. I couldn’t bring myself to wake her up (I wasn’t thinking very clearly, obviously), so I stumbled out to the kitchen. But then I realized that if I collapsed there, the kids would find me when they got up wanting breakfast.

  That’s when the terror set in. I’m a guy who knows what anxiety feels like, and this was not anxiety. I’d never felt anything like it. In the first Star Wars movie, there is a scene where a spaceship makes the “leap to hyperspace,” meaning it attains the speed of light. The characters in the ship are looking out the window at the stars when it happens. The stars begin as fixed points in empty space, but when the leap occurs, the stars stretch out into lines, and then—pow!—the ship is gone. That’s what the leap from anxiety to terror feels like. One moment I was aware of clear, distinct thoughts in my mind, then they suddenly got stretched until they were unrecognizable, and then—whoosh!—the part of me that feels like “me” was gone. Instead, there was just animal fear.

  I put a cordless phone in my hand, but I couldn’t remember the sequence of numbers that you dial when you need help. I stood there, frozen, too scared to do anything. I tried sitting down and breathing deeply, but the moment I sat down, another explosion of adrenaline propelled me out of the chair. If you have ever stepped off the curb of a street only to have a car or bus roar past you, inches away, with its horn blaring, you will recognize the subsequent experience: a sense of tingling heat rushing throughout your body and then a wave of trembling, sickening weakness. I
paced in the kitchen until my heart rate went down and my thoughts began to clear; then I put on my clothes and walked very gingerly up and down the driveway, still with the cordless phone in my hand, until dawn. Ava and Esme came down for breakfast at around six o’clock, and feeding them and getting them ready for school kept me focused and made me feel slightly better. Still, when our housekeeper, Olga, arrived at seven thirty, she looked aghast when she saw me.

  “Your face is green,” she said.

  I told her that I didn’t feel well and asked her to take over. I roused Jessica from the Fortress of Solitude and told her that I had to see a doctor, but I assured her that I would be fine to drive myself to the hospital. Halfway there, I had another spell of whatever was going on. This time, I felt as if my consciousness were somehow being pressed from all sides, and crushed down to a small point, and that if it got any smaller, I would pass out. Individual words appeared in my mind, words like “car” and “phone” and “hospital,” but they didn’t line up in any sort of coherent pattern. I pressed as hard as I could against the floor of the car with my left foot, thinking somehow that the muscular effort would keep me from passing out, and I kept driving.

  Checking in took only a few moments. The nurse led me to a room, told me to lie down and remove my shirt, and got me hooked up to a machine right away. The results of this test indicated that I was not having a heart attack, at least not at that moment. The doctor on call looked me over and listened to my chest with his stethoscope, noted the palpitations, and detected a heart murmur. He paged a cardiologist.

  Meanwhile, my heart rate had gone down to eighty beats per minute, and the other symptoms had diminished. While we waited for the cardiologist to arrive, the doctor asked if I drank heavily, if I used any recreational drugs, if I smoked, if I was taking any medications, and so on. When I answered no to all of those questions, he asked about my diet, exercise, and sleep habits. I described what I ate and told him that I exercised nearly every day, slept well, meditated regularly, and had been doing tai chi for thirty years.

  Been under any unusual stress lately, he asked? Financial problems? Marital strain? Depression?

  I told him that I was a writer who was having a hard time finishing a book, and soon I was going to have to share my house with a dog, but other than that, I had plenty to be thankful for. I’d been happily married for twenty years, had two beautiful children, and my wife was working steadily. No lawsuits, no foreclosure notices, no crazy neighbors.

  The cardiologist arrived and, after listening to my heart for a while with a stethoscope and doing a lot of frowning, recommended that I visit his office later that morning for more extensive tests. An hour later, I watched in awe as he passed what looked like a computer mouse over my chest, generating a full-color, real-time, moving image of the inside of my heart onto a screen right next to me. The cardiologist determined that my valves were working properly and that the murmur was benign. He advised me to contact him if the symptoms came back but otherwise not to worry. As we get older, he said, things happen.

  I went home feeling giddy in the way that only someone who believes he has just dodged a bullet can feel. I picked up the girls from school, and they never looked more beautiful than they did that afternoon. The four of us went out for dinner, and then we sat on the couch in the living room under blankets and took turns reading stories aloud. I went to bed that night feeling grateful for everything and fell asleep at my usual hour. Then, at two o’clock, another explosion of adrenaline woke me from a deep sleep. My body lurched out of bed again, and I did exactly as I had done the night before, putting the cordless phone into my hand and pacing until the symptoms died down.

  I felt discouraged in the way that only someone who thinks he has dodged a bullet, only to see the bullet change course in midair and head right back toward him, can feel. The spells kept coming every hour or so until dawn. At seven o’clock, I called the cardiologist’s office, and the receptionist told me to be there by eight but not to hesitate to dial 911 if I felt it was an emergency. Was it an emergency? I felt, in a classic example of irrational, magical thinking, that if I made the dreaded emergency call and summoned an ambulance to my home, I would somehow tip the scales of reality in favor of catastrophe. By refusing to make that call, I was holding tragedy at bay through sheer force of will. Still, I glanced at my image in the bathroom mirror and saw that Olga had not been exaggerating—my face was, in fact, green.

  I made it to the cardiologist’s office, but by the time I got there the symptoms had died down again. He attached me to a portable, twenty-four-hour heart monitor and told me to wear it under my clothes until the following day and then to bring it in so the information could be downloaded and examined. He advised me not to change anything about my daily routine—not to make any effort to be unusually calm or relaxed.

  That night, I was supposed to take Ava to a special event at the Museum of Natural History. She had been looking forward to this event for months. Ava was obsessed with paleontology and all matters dinosaurian that year, so although I was feeling shaky from my experiences the previous two nights and concerned that I might have another spell during the dinner event, I decided that I couldn’t bear to make Ava miss this opportunity. With sensors plastered to my chest, wires running under my shirt, and the heart monitor hidden in my pants pocket, we drove downtown, and the event was all that it had been cracked up to be and more. Before dinner, we received a tour of the museum’s new Tyrannosaurus Rex exhibit, and Ava had the chance to ask the paleontologists questions while they cleaned and prepared an actual T. Rex skeleton. Ava and I were both enthralled, and I had no unpleasant symptoms all evening. Once again, I went to bed that night feeling very happy to be alive and confident that all would be well. I didn’t wake up at all that night and felt fine the next morning. I turned in the machine at noon, and later that afternoon, the cardiologist called to say that everything looked normal. He scheduled me for a treadmill stress test the following week and advised me, as before, to be concerned but not fearful and to take a “wait and see” attitude.

  The next day, once the kids had been dropped off at school and preschool, I decided to try getting some writing done. I sat down at my desk and looked over what I had written a few days earlier but found it nearly impossible to concentrate. By the time I read to the end of a sentence, I had lost track of how the sentence had begun. Writing was out of the question; I couldn’t hold even the simplest thought in mind long enough to connect it to other thoughts.

  Understandably, the discovery that I couldn’t think straight made me feel anxious. To calm myself, I tried closing my eyes and counting my breaths. I got to the number five and then—bang! Another spell struck. This was the first time it had happened during the day.

  Something about daylight makes unpleasant experiences more bearable than having them in darkness. I felt less terrified by what was going on this time, and besides, this had happened several times already and I had not dropped dead, and I’d been seen by a doctor and a cardiologist twice, so it seemed likely that I would survive this episode. Something was wrong with me—that was certain—but I felt pretty confident that it wasn’t going to kill me that day. I left the house and went for a walk. When the symptoms had passed, I decided to try doing my tai chi routine to see how that felt. It felt good at first, but just as I felt my mind beginning to relax—bang! Another spell.

  Walking briskly seemed to be the most effective response to the symptoms. Knowing that I had a scheduled appointment with the cardiologist the following week, I decided against any more trips to the hospital unless something radically different happened. I had another spell that evening, just as I was falling asleep, and then two more in the hours between three and five o’clock in the morning.

  A few hours later that morning, while I sat in the house not really knowing what to do with myself, a dear friend of mine—a neurosurgeon, no less—called to say that the operation he was supposed to perform that morning had been cancelled. Wou
ld I like to meet him for lunch? he asked. “Would I ever!” I said. An hour later, we met at Descanso Gardens, a beautiful spot with a small café set up near the entrance, and I think that poor Srinath was a little taken aback by how glad I appeared to be to see him. I barely gave him any chance to eat as I described what was going on.

  It must be hard for doctors to have to hear their friends’ medical crisis stories, but he responded with just the right combination of sympathy and clinical detachment. He said that a heart-valve disorder would have been his first guess as to the origin of my symptoms, but since that had already been ruled out, he leaned toward anxiety as the most likely culprit. Then he told me that he himself, after suffering from a bout of stress-related depression, had been treated with a form of hypnosis therapy. He found it so helpful that he decided to learn the technique himself so that he could use it to treat those among his patients who would likely benefit from relaxation exercises. He invited me to come over to his house that night and we would give it a try.

  This lifted my spirits. After dinner, I drove to his place, and after his wife had put their two kids to bed, Srinath had me settle into a reclining chair. He put a pillow behind my head and covered me up to the neck in a blanket, and then he led me through a visualization exercise that was deeply relaxing. But at the most relaxing point of all, just when I felt as clear as water and as light as air, the adrenaline burst in my chest again and my heart started racing again.

  How disappointed I felt! It seemed to me that if the source of the problem were anxiety rather than an organic pathology, it wouldn’t make sense for me to have the attacks when I was most relaxed. Srinath told me not to be discouraged, however, and advised me to try going through the exercise on my own once or twice a day for the next week. I promised to let him know how it was going, and then I went home, where I spent another night without getting much sleep.