Lesley Jenike, featured in the new Ocean State Review
What a Fool Believes
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself”—Walt Whitman
“Do not think that I am not sad, though I laugh.”—Bram Stoker
I like my brother’s SUV. It’s clean and smells nice, unlike my SUV. The interior is all black leather. The moonroof is open at an angle so precise, sunlight and breeze neither burns nor whips, only fondles. My brother probably paid a lot for it. There are no moldy Goldfish crackers in its crevices, no stickers from the grocery store on its back windows. It doesn’t smell faintly of vomit. A person can relax in an SUV like this. And so I do. I relax. I lean back in the passenger seat and close my eyes. “Rich Girl” by Hall and Oats comes over the stereo. Suddenly it feels like early August again by which I mean I am warm and momentarily unburdened.
And I don’t even like summer. Not really. In summer as a student I used to be poorer. Now I’m just sadder. In summer, I have expectations that never get met. I’ll write more, I think. I’ll fall asleep randomly in hammocks. I’ll fly to Paris; my next best idea is waiting for me there. But it’s not. And nobody cares. Still, I fall for summer every time.
I look over at my brother. He’s a good man. A good son. Handsome. Kind. My brother the athlete. My brother the doctor. I enjoy my time with him and I don’t get it often. We really shouldn’t be here, I think. We should be on someone’s back patio, drunk. We should be throwing up rainbows. We should be playing keepy-uppy in a swimming pool. Our mother shouldn’t be dying. There should be slutty lifeguards and whippy-dip with chocolate jimmies plastered on the backs of our eyelids when we lay ourselves down to dream. There should be fireflies and bare feet. We should all be half-naked. It’s summer. I should be half-naked.
I’m indignant now about my fleece hoodie and long pants. But it gets so cold in the hospital. When our sister called, I just threw a bunch of shorts in my bag and ran out the door. I wasn’t thinking: cooler temperatures slow the spread of bacteria, reduce anger, promote optimal brain function, even when a brain isn’t really functioning. I wasn’t thinking. So I went to Target with my best friend and she helped me pick out this pair of pink sweatpants. My brother thinks they’re ugly, high waisted, pulled “all the way up to the tits,” but I wasn’t thinking then either. I mean, I wasn’t thinking about clothes, about what would actually look good. I was thinking about death. We bought an extra throw blanket for Mom who every half hour or so complains about the air conditioning.
Somebody once told me that casinos pump oxygen into their game rooms. There are no clocks on the walls, no watches on the delicate wrists of cocktail waitresses. And there are no windows. So gamblers wander around high, drunk, and confused. Hospitals–however closely they resemble casinos with their beeping monitors and flashing lights, closed-circuit surveillance and hour-sucking antechambers–don’t deny time. They assert it. They assert time’s primacy over and over, asking our mother, “what day is it?” and “what season are we in?” They ask her, “who’s the president?” and “when were you born?” She always gets the answers wrong–all except her birthday. She remembers that. She clings to it somehow, the way Dorothy clings to Toto. And it’s so cold, it must be the middle of winter. She was born in the bleak midwinter. Tornado season?
The nurses write the current date on the dry erase board opposite her bed. They write it in bold red ink every morning. August 3rd, 2023. Fresh hope, I guess. But it never works. She doesn’t know. Who can blame her? She’s been removed thoroughly from her own context. Like she’s been thrown smack dab in the middle of a craps game she can’t win. As for oxygen, they crank up her machine when she dips low, but all that extra air doesn’t seem to make our mother any more willing to gamble. The House always wins. I feel safe in saying so. I’ve heard that saying a million times. Though I’ve never been to Vegas, never even played the slot machines at our local casino, I have played the claw machine–that omnipresent game of chance you’ll find in arcades and the lobbies of fried chicken restaurants, and I don’t have to tell you, I’ve never won so much as a fifty-cent stuffed animal.
No, we can’t pay off all the old debts in one long day at the hospital, my brother and I. Neither of us is earning nearly enough. We’ve spent eight hours already, and our mother’s memory resets every five minutes. “Oh look who’s here!” she’ll say. Her room’s windows overlook an office park’s little pond and a flock of Canada Geese. There’s one fake swan under a tree. Are geese scared of swans? They should be. The sky’s gray, so who cares what time it is? We told her, we love you. We told her, it’s dinner time so we’re going to go get some dinner. We said, see you tomorrow, then we left.
Now, in my brother’s SUV, driving away from the hospital and toward food and martini, Christopher Cross, Michael McDonald, and Kenny Loggins seem safer than R.E.M., or Leonard Cohen, or Radiohead. “How about some yacht rock,” my brother says. And by safer I just mean intro, climax, and resolution in three minutes or less, a less demanding vocal, lyrics that make sense. That’s what we need right now. That’s what I need. I need a song like “Sailing,” and as “Rich Girl” fades into Michael McDonald’s “I Keep Forgetting,” and just as I’m just about to set sail in my mind, my brother goes and fucks it all up.“What happens when we die?” he asks me.
I could kill him.
We’ve just left the hospital where we met with the lead nurse, the attending physician, oncology, spiritual services, hospice. Where we were given pamphlets about grieving. Where we watched The MEG and House Hunters and Vampire Academy. Where fed our mother french fries. Where, to break up the monotony, we went to the bathroom farther down the hall and sat on the toilet longer than was necessary. Where I sang “Part of Your World” from The Little Mermaid for our mother and danced around and my brother filmed me. Where we learned that she’s dying and there are no two ways about it. Actually, there are two ways about it: we could up the dosage on her chemotherapy and watch her suffer, or do nothing and suffer the fact that we chose to do nothing.
“What happens when you die?”
“Speaking for myself?”
Now I’m thinking of this bit of dialogue between two characters in Mike Flanagan’s Netflix series Midnight Mass. One has just had a miscarriage, or–actually–a vampire-blood-induced miscarriage. (It’s complicated.) The other has killed a young woman in a drunk-driving accident.
Here’s the premise: a priest who lives with his parishioners on an isolated island off the coast of New England has brought a vampire home with him from the Holy Land. He mistakenly believes the vampire is an angel. By drinking the angel’s blood, the priest has gotten younger, and after the priest serves the angel’s blood to the people of Crockett Island at mass, they get younger too. And better. And stronger. A girl who can’t walk starts to walk. A woman with dementia starts to remember. Then, the fetus vanishes from Erin’s womb as if it had never been there at all. Things, in other words, take a nasty turn. Religion turns out to be very bad. But in-between the goodness of healing and the horror of blood-letting, these two characters–Reilly, an altar-boy-turned-alcoholic-turned-atheist, and Erin who’s just lost her baby–sit on a couch in Erin’s living room and dignify the sanctity of their lives by telling each other stories about their deaths, how it’ll be for them.
“What happens when you die?” Erin asks
“Speaking for myself?” says Reilly.
“Speaking for yourself,” says Erin.
Reilly begins to describe the natural processes by which his brain will enter a state of ecstatic dreaming before it ceases activity forever. He describes how organic matter breaks down, his organic matter, telling Erin,
“…I’m feeding life and I’m broken apart and all the tiniest pieces are just recycled and then I’m billions of other places and my atoms are in plants and bugs and animals and I am like the stars in the sky that are there one moment and then scattered across the goddamned cosmos.”
It’s a version of death that smacks of the Eucharist, it seems to me, as in “Take, eat; this is my body. Take, drink; this is my blood,” the point being: look hard enough and you’ll find echoes of one inside the other. God in my blood. My body in the bug.
And now, goddamnit, I’m thinking of Walt Whitman who always makes me weepy, who called grass, “the beautiful uncut hair of graves,” who said, “All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, / And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier,” but what’s lucky about it? And didn’t Bram Stoker, inventor of the world’s most famous vampire, have a strange affectionfor Walt Whitman? They wrote letters to one another–rich, intimate letters about life and about poetry. Whether it was romantic love or just lusty admiration who’s to say, except there’s something in Stoker’s conception of the cyclical, recyclable nature of blood that sings of Whitman, and there’s something of Whitman’s conception of eternity as nature’s endless return that reminds me of Stoker.
“Remember, Reilly, that you are dust and to dust you shall return,” says the unnaturally young priest as he smudges the recovering alcoholic’s forehead with ashes.
I guess vampires are monsters because they refuse to give themselves up to nature. They cannot grow old, cannot return to dust, that is, unless the sun shines on them–the good sun, the reliable sun, the thing that rises even after the longest night without fail, the thing we don’t let set on our anger, the predictable, inescapable, relentless march of day into night into day and so on. But vampirism disrupts time, which makes the vampire a tragic figure. Dracula himself exclaims, “To die, to be really dead, that must be glorious!” The grass is always greener,
which reminds me: our mother had been mysteriously losing blood during the night. The on-call doctor seemed sincerely flummoxed by it. Where is all this blood going? She’d had bag after bag of other peoples’ blood pumped into her and still her red blood cell count was low. Her nurse, when hooking up yet another bag to the IV, leaned in and whispered sweetly in our mother’s ear, “You’re a vampire.” We all laughed, even Mom. A little light comedy. Nobody knew until it was too late, not even her oncologist who somehow couldn’t believe her multiple myeloma could reassert itself so quickly, in so little time. And he’s a professional! But what’s time to cancer? It only wants to grow. The way a child only wants to grow. They way we sometimes want to stop it from happening.
I look out the car window. A pair of ten-year-olds on bikes look back at us from a crosswalk. One gives us a peace sign. The other makes a heart with his two hands. Since when do ten-year-old boys play nice? I give them a heart back. I blow them a kiss. I remember those long-haul drives with Mom when, out of boredom, my brother and I made the pull-your-whistle sign to truckers and lo and behold, the truckers pulled their whistles. A gaze goes two ways. It’s reciprocal. I used to look out car windows and see adults. Now I look at car windows and see children. God, when did that happen?
I decide that I like the Doobie Brothers’ “What a Fool Believes.” I like it pretty non-ironically. (“She musters a smile for his nostalgic tale / Never coming near what he wanted to say / Only to realize it never really was.”) I like Michael McDonald’s voice, it’s richness, the rounded vowels so objectively good as to be laughable, the kind of voice that sounds like captain’s hats and clear liquor. And who doesn’t need that, not after a day so inviolable, so absolute. I think to myself: I’m never taking off my sunglasses again. I think to myself: there isn’t enough gin in the world.
Then “What a Fool Believes” becomes Toto’s “Africa.”
The early eighties spawned a certain strain of colonialist pop music, didn’t it? A lecture starts to form in my mind, but I shake it off. I hate it when critical theory intrudes on real life and I’m beginning to feel a horrible, excited feeling, the feeling that comes when real life starts, the feeling that this is real life, that yes, this is it! I could drone on and on in the classroom about violence and death and loneliness and loss but I won’t ever really know it until I know. But, as the professor, I do the annoying thing and turn the question around on my brother.
“What do you think?”
“I think it’s lights-out,” he says.
Great. Now I’m picturing Mom as a little kid and God is yelling at her for staying up past her bedtime, just like her own father did. He yells at her for scribbling in her journal, for reading her comic book, for giggling on the telephone with her boyfriend when the world has long been asleep, asleep already for ages, and God comes to her bedroom door having drunk too much whisky and fought with His wife, exhausted and ready for silence and darkness, but goddamnit, our mother is still awake, so He says,“Lights out,” and flicks off the lamp with a single, terrible finger.
Maybe this particular vision is an attempt on my part to punish my mother for something–but for what? She did nothing but give me “the love that loves that love that loves to love,” and if I interpreted my brother’s answer in a more scientific vein, then I guess what he means is that the heart stops. The brain stops. Everything stops. The end. The human condition is bad enough. No need for further damnation. No need to beat that dead horse. Add insult to injury. But why did he have to go and use a cliche to describe it, a metonymic expression, a short-cut for what amounts to eternity? Of course, I don’t blame him. He’s human and anyway, I couldn’t do any better. In fact, I don’t. I say, “I believe in the mystery.”
I’m nothing if not predictable, quoting from Hamlet (“there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”) to underscore my point: I am learnéd. I am well-schooled. I believe in art. I’m the sort of person who insists art can save us, even against my own better judgment–but save us from what? That’s the mystery.
So, yeah, I guess I believe in not knowing.I believe my mother’s end is just that: not for me to know, but rather for me to feel, like one of those Modernist paintings that delight and confound the viewer just because. Maybe death is like a Rothko–so vibrant you could turn around in a gallery and still feel it humming at your back. But you have no fucking idea what it means.
“Hmm,” my brother says. He thinks for a minute.
“Ok. But everything I’ve learned,” my brother says, “convinces me that we just end.”
So maybe I don’t want our mother punished, like Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Mermaid who arrives daily as a dollop of seafoam, though our mother always did like the ocean. Maybe I’d just experienced a momentary hiccup in an otherwise smooth-sailing spirituality. I want my mother to find her mother again. I do! But what if her mother is in her own heaven? Will they miss each other, two ships passing in the night? Night. Maybe my brother’s right and there will be endless night, but the good kind: lots of stars, live oaks overhead, the creak of masts in a harbor, kids with ice cream cones in their fists, maybe some faraway music. Summer. What is it? What are they playing? Van Morrison. It has to be Van Morrison. “Sweet Thing.” It’s that bass line that makes it. (“I will drive my chariot down your streets and cry / Hey it’s me I’m dynamite and I don’t know why.”) Or maybe it’s some folksy trio covering the Pogues’ “A Pair of Brown Eyes,” (“and a rovin a rovin a rovin I’ll go”) yes, the kind of song that stops time though time is unnecessary here and nobody asks and asks and asks what day it is and there are dolphins in the bay and handsome men showing a little chest hair and our mother is wearing a diaphanous white dress and she’s beautiful again and remembers everything and the cancer is gone, as if she’s drunk the angel’s blood, as if she’s drunk on the vampire’s blood.
But I was always the one who loved Van Morrison, not Mom. And the harbor? That’s all mine too. I’m doing it again. I’m hearing the question, “What happens when we die”as “What happens when you die?” Maybe for our mother, death is actually the sound of Neil Diamond (“Holly Holy”) and maybe for me, death will be music-less and that will be my punishment. I should be punished.
They call it a “silent miscarriage” when a fetus just stops growing. If I’ve been bad, if I’ve been a bad, bad person, I’ll be forced to listen to that silence forever, forced to look at the sad little sonogram with all its blacks and grays and grainy weather. I’ll lay half-asleep, half-awake as in some bed somewhere in terrifying upstate New York, turning this way and that because I can’t get comfortable, and every now and again while turning, I’ll see a pair of eyes looking back at me and (I swear) I’ll hear someone whisper my name in my ear, but no one and I mean no one will be in the room with me, and still I’ll look around startled, my heart racing, as if I am in love.
Of course all this happened years ago. I’m fine now. Everything’s fine. But at the time, my brother told me he was sorry and that the miscarriage would leave a scar on my heart. My brother is a good man, a good brother. He’s a good doctor too. He can be annoyingly rational. I remember wanting to punch him. But I don’t want to punch him anymore. I’ve decided that death can be built on intention and preference. If I prefer to think of death as a dream and my dead fetus as a dreamer, then that’s my prerogative. It’s Erin’s prerogative in Midnight Mass, who, intending to speak for her own lost fetus, says,
“…the only thing she ever knew was dreaming. She only ever dreamed and she didn’t even have a name and then, in her sleep…just lifted up… .”
“Ok, but, is that your final answer?”
“I don’t know,” my brother says.
There are so many churches in this neighborhood. “How can there even be enough people to go?” I say to fill the air. The Quaker meeting house that looks like just another red-brick, seventies-built split-level has a sign out front that reads, “Feeling troubled?” We drive past. The sun is still high. Plenty of daylight left. It’s excruciating. I’m feeling mutable, like the yacht rock playlist, rambling off into darker corners of the popular imagination. But then again, it seems to me that a playlist will always eventually wander far afield. You can start with Led Zep, for example, and end up in Motown. Often these wanderings are good. They are serendipitous. The universe–I mean the algorithm–is telling you something.
Maybe death is Spotify.
No.
Maybe death is a nonstop flight to San Francisco’s Avalon Ballroom, 1969 where Van Morrison is playing the entirety of Astral Weeks and it’s so good,I just fucking blister and turn to dust, I just evaporate in the sun like a goddamn vampire at the opening chords of “Madame George” whose lyrics are uttered ecstatically, stipped of any conventional meaning (“the love that loves the love that loves to love that loves…”), or, maybe he plays Veedon Fleece’s “You Don’t Pull No Punches (but You Don’t Push the River”) and it just goes on forever and why not? I was a good person and I deserve this. And anyway, there are two characters in that song, like my brother and me, two characters on a quest, two characters going West, two characters, a man and a woman who “was contemplating Baba.” Of course, I don’t know if Van Morrison means Baba Yaga, devourer of children, or Meher Baba, Indian mystic, or Baba Vanga who at twelve years old was picked up and tossed by a tornado. And I don’t have to know. All are inventions of God’s imagination, as is the idea of a whole person or any person, whole or not, as is a leaf my brother stopped to admire on our walk this morning. He held it tenderly and said, “This is just an idea of a leaf, just molecules that decided to arrange themselves somehow into the shape of a leaf.” We say what we mean to say. “I believe in the mystery.” I don’t know how else to describe it.
I could bullshit my brother. He could bullshit me. But where would that get us? And we don’t have to toil needlessly either. No, we just go with the flow–an old, worn out saying that, nestled inside a bed of churning music, becomes more like a religious directive. That’s when the real song begins. “The real soul people. Talking ‘bout the real soul, people.” So many failures of money and logistics and time, but we can only exist in this moment. We are hardly whole in this moment. We don’t exist in this moment. We are leaf. We are leaf-shaped. We fall into a river. We are the river into which a leaf falls. We was contemplating Baba from hospital to dinner in my brother’s clean, sweet-smelling SUV, going “as much with the river as not,” thinking about the expanse of time and memory and country she’ll cross embodied by the droning synth, fuzzy guitar feedback, the glorious haze of a really long song whose movements and changes Greil Marcus once described as, “…the feeling of a series of clouds passing. Turn your head, look up again, and the last one you saw, the one that looked like a face, is already gone.”
Lesley Jenike on “What a Fool Believes“:
It’s very difficult for me to understand the people, events, circumstances, and cultural detritus of my life without giving them a shape through writing. And I don’t say this as a point of pride. It’s just a fact, a fact that can be pretty inconvenient, since writing takes time, aloneness, and deep concentration, and because I have difficulty expressing myself in other ways. So, I’ve been trying to give my experience of my mother’s illnesses and her death a shape or, I should say, shapes, and this essay is one of those shapes. One of those attempts. It is, afterall, an essay. And, if I struggle to say it in gesture or everyday conversation, I hope this particular written attempt conveys the love and deep respect I have for my siblings, our shared history, and our sense of humor–one of the many gifts our mother gave us.
Lesley Jenike is the author of full-length poetry collections Ghost of Fashion (CW Books) and Holy Island (Gold Wake), and chapbooks How We Came Ashore (Dancing Girl Press) and Punctum : (Kent State University Press, 2017). Her poems and essays have appeared or will appear soon in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, At Length, NELLE, phoebe, The Bennington Review, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Rattle, Smartish Pace, Waxwing, Blackbird, Passages North, and many other journals. She’s the recipient of awards, fellowships, and scholarships from the Ohio Arts Council, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Academy of American Poets. She was awarded an M.F.A. from The Ohio State University in 2003 and a Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati in 2008. She’s currently a regular blogger for Ploughshares as well as Associate Professor of Writing, Literature, and Philosophy at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio where she lives with her husband and two small children.