The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [101]
Back under my sleeping bag. Shaking, not knowing whether I was too cold or too hot. Cut off. The storm was raging. The fire was out. The heat I had was all there was. There was no way to move. I just lay there groaning trying not to. Way out at the end of Highway 101. A broken phone, broken plumbing, a broken furnace. Were the others dead? Why couldn’t I move? How long had I been lying there? Cabin fever. Jack London. The waiting, lying, trying to hold on to whatever so there would be something for them to save when they got there. Oh, shit, why did I ever leave Massachusetts? Trade the friendly, nicely scaled hills and plants for these monster trees, monster mountains, monster beauty where man didn’t really belong? Barnstable Harbor for Powell Lake? A rotten trade. Rock and water, no mud. I’d give anything for a little mud. Cut off. Shit, fuck, cunt, bitch, whore. Remember old rock songs and old friends to pass the time. Wait for the inevitable, the earth claiming back what was hers. The antibody systems of Mother Earth wiping me out. It made such sense. It was just surprising it hadn’t happened earlier. How long did I think I could get away with it? Stupid stupid stupid. I’d so much rather die in the Barnstable marsh instead of British Columbia. Why, when I got out, didn’t I head home? Talk about being willfully dense. Talk about being Taurus. Talk about being perverse. I’m sorry again, too late again.
When I was a child I fell thirty feet from a tree onto my head. I realized I was dying but wasn’t really very upset about it. I was dreaming, drifting back through my life like a cloud, and everything made perfect sense. The dream had given me promise that pleasant enough things were ahead, so I kept sinking back into that dream world. Why get sore? But gradually I wasn’t able to sink into the peace as deeply as I had before. I kept coming back to the very real pain. The pain became stronger, the dream weaker, and I realized I was going to live after all.
Darwinian explanation of why your life flashes before you just before you die is impossible. Evolution has no use for dying things. Since it can’t be an evolutionary thing, probably all organisms experience something similar. More complicated entities like friendships, love affairs, cultures and institutions seem to go through a comparable process. There’s something in consciousness that seems to favor neat endings.
I knew something was ending. The voices, the dreams, the visions and other wild things were all clues to what was dying, but I couldn’t put it all together.
“Let me go, Mark. Please let me go.” It was my father again, begging me, pleading with me, trying to explain, trying again to make me hate him. Again I got the feeling he wanted to kill himself.
“Don’t you see I’m responsible for all this pain you’re going through? How can you not hate me?”
“If you weren’t the fifteenth joker through here in the last few hours trying to claim responsibility for the hell I’m in, I might be able to take you more seriously. I admit you’ve got a better case than most. A lot of what’s going on certainly has your flavor to it, but there are plenty of others who have a reasonable case. Virge is pretty sure she did it. Mother certainly had her hand in it. Bob Dylan, believe it or not, was just through to apologize and try to make it all better. He figured the whole thing was his fault. I told him to tell you that. Tolstoy was sorry I had taken his work so seriously. Said he was awfully sorry, he just couldn’t have known what would happen but all the same he’s glad to know how it turned out. Jesus said he’d do what he could but I could tell by the look on his face he wasn’t sure he could be of much help.
“The thing I’m telling them and want to tell you too is that it’s not all that bad. I’ve