Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

Awareness of larger themes was something we didn’t much go in for where I lived. We tampered with ignorance to keep our lives miniaturized; the Internet made us feel like ants. We worried that we would no longer care about weather. I treasured my most rural and ignorant patients for the way other humans loomed for them. When someone died, they never said, “ Poof! ” It was always a good-sized tree that fell.

Jinx said that a special meeting of our board of directors had been convened in the wake of the attacks, and that our board chairman had made some remarkably inane remarks. “He told us it was a day that would live in infamy.” Al Hirsch had said, “That rings a bell, Mr. Wilmot.”

I asked her, “Is this like Pearl Harbor?” Jinx’s hot water tank had failed and help from the plumber was several days off, so she was using my bathtub and if she couldn’t get to it until late in the day, she stayed over in my downstairs guest room. It was probably not the best arrangement, as it fueled gossip, but more importantly it kept either of us from getting a good night’s sleep because we talked late into the night. She sat at my kitchen table, a towel wound around her thick, damp hair, her face scrubbed clean of any makeup so that her green eyes seemed brighter.

“Pearl Harbor was the beginning of a war we knew was coming,” she said. “We didn’t know this was coming.”

“I don’t think we knew Pearl Harbor was coming.”

“We knew war was coming. I think we knew that war would require a great effort but that it would be elsewhere.”

“But is ‘war’ the right word? My father was in a war, but it wasn’t consciously directed against civilians.”

“I think in religious warfare differentiating between soldiers and noncombatants is considered a nicety, something superfluous. Look how the Christians went at it in the Thirty Years’ War.”

“The victims in New York were well outside the zone of conflict. It’s hard for me to understand why anyone would do something like this. I hope you’re not making excuses for these people.”

“No, I’m just trying to picture the advantage they might see in waging war this way.”

“Which is what?”

“It’s cheap.”

I was at once impressed by her objectivity and disturbed by her detachment, a perception that faded as we watched television and observed terrible scenes of suffering. We saw older, seasoned firefighters in a sheltered area shudder violently at the sounds of bodies falling on the pavement outside. Jinx covered her face, and when she uncovered it I saw that all her detachment had dissolved into terror. I didn’t question it when she crawled into bed beside me that night, shaking, and I held her in my arms until morning, when we arose with averted eyes, dressed, made coffee, and went to work. She didn’t come back, and though she must have had to make do with cold water at her place, I didn’t ask. But when I saw her around the clinic I was aware of some slight new tension. It wasn’t much, but there it was, and quite mysterious too. It was everywhere.

Mortality is something people in medicine accept more readily than the general population, just through familiarity. I have, however, known doctors who have been diagnosed with fatal diseases and they didn’t do much better than everyone else. Between every individual and the rest of the world is a stupendous firewall breached only by saints. For example, my mother’s antic and superficial style, which I miss. When I say “superficial” I don’t intend it in its usual belittling way; my mother’s gift was to absorb the details and uproar of an ordinary day for what they were and no more — from boiling oatmeal to returning phone calls, from assaulting cobwebs with her broom to humoring my father, talking to her sisters with the phone tucked in her shoulder as she adjusted the curtains over the sink, telling my dad to jump-start her car because she’d left the key on, running out in summer, palms up, to greet a rain shower, doing her taxes, or feeding the cat who never hunted mice because of all the food she gave him — everything was exactly as it seemed, and nothing annoyed her more than the search for hidden meaning.

Her simple belief in God relieved her of a good deal of agitation, and I realized I’d missed an opportunity when I failed to quiz her about the nature of Him, Her, or It. My own conviction that life is somehow purposeful could have stood a little specificity, and my father’s “God is crazy” was not what I had in mind. I’ve tried imagining it: a deity who fails to understand the consequence of His own actions and is unable to understand the difference between right and wrong. Unfortunately this smacks of a criminal defense. Or “crazy” like Patsy Cline, a concerned deity: “Worry. Why do I let myself worry?” There’s a God I could understand. But my mother’s God was a witch doctor; you could talk to Him only in tongues. And you crossed her God at your peril. Over a decade ago, my father renounced religion and promptly had a heart attack which looked like it might be fatal. Sitting next to him in his hospital room, my mother, worried but objective, said, “Soon you’ll be with the devil.” He recovered, though her failed prophecy did nothing to weaken her belief. And my father went obediently back to his imitation of faith.

The attack in New York felt more like a death in the family. A death in the family was something rarely experienced as an event. It was experienced as a change of seasons like the end of summer, or a spell of weather. A death in the family moved us closer to death ourselves. Religion had not made death less ominous: it remained a world we preferred not to enter. My mother’s death not long after I began my career had the effect of removing a sort of white noise from my father’s life and mine, a very pleasant white noise that I thought maybe only women could provide. It was the sound of life, unlike the logic of silence that appealed to men: women sought God while men sought Euclid. I wished they were the same.

I went over these things this way because I realized I’d been making myself out to be a solid citizen with the customary remorse and job weariness of anyone of my age and occupation. That was actually misleading. The temptation to claim common cause with the secret lives of everyone had its basis in fear.

My mailman, Spenser Hooper, had always taken an interest in me. Walking around and delivering mail in all weather had aged Spenser, who having been a couple of grades behind me in school had watched my transformation from nincompoop to physician with kindly fascination. He was very much aware of my troubles at the clinic and, standing in my doorway with a wad of mostly junk mail, he brought it up. “Well, Berl, this is awful, isn’t it? You can’t work, can you? How will you survive? You didn’t actually do that to the lady, did you?” Never mind the assault of Al Qaeda on America.

“Why, that’s the question, isn’t it?” I said. Spenser found this as unsatisfactory as everyone else did, but he merely raised one eyebrow in exaggerated skepticism and handed me the letters. The bafflement of my mailman and onetime schoolmate sharpened my solitude. I saw it as something of a hardened position, neither willfulness nor indifference; and it combined a profound need to learn how I was judged with a disinclination to glorify the proceedings against me. I’m not sure why I was uncomfortable confusing my mailman.

I could tell that Spenser was out of ideas as to how he might continue with me when he said, “I’ll still bring your mail” when he left, “unless your address changes.”

I found this bland remark to be curiously ominous. It reminded me of my earliest school days when teachers would order me to “pay attention” and I would gaze all around the room looking for a suitable object for attention, which the teachers mistook for insolence.