From Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, which will be published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
I’ve always loved snakes. Love includes fear—for everyone, I think, but in the religious mind these emotions are married like grace and necessity, abundance and dearth. Sanctify the Lord of hosts himself, cries wise wild old Isaiah, and let him be your dread.
Recently I mentioned my lifelong fascination with snakes in the presence of my mother, who has perhaps the most saturated, unmediated, sorrowful, solitary, and relentlessly religious mind I know. She flinched and objected as if I’d proclaimed a latent satanism.
Kill the creature. That’s practically the law where I grew up. Love has its sterner permutations, its “lonely and austere offices,” an almost linguistic embeddedness in particular existence that precludes translation into another. I love you, the Father says to humanity as he assents again to humanity’s endless need to annihilate him. I love you, I said to my father forty years ago with a fist to the side of his face. He is demented now and has just escaped again from another icy facility, each time by pretending to be the doctor that he in fact once was. Cunning man, deciding even the terms of his own dementia, carrying himself from place to place like a bag of stolen bones.
My father lost half of his foot to an adolescent rattler coiled in the bushes under his window in the ranch house where he lived outside Fort Worth. He was drunk and had locked himself outside. Thus the window. He was wearing gym shorts and a T-shirt and had simply wanted to sit on his porch while the sun went down. He had no phone, no wallet, no hidden spare key.
My father is a man in whom life thrives as a form of death. There is a cancerous élan to him, a mind of maggots that have learned to eat with just such modest ferocity as will keep their host alive. A few years ago, though, he began “failing to thrive,” a term I thought existed only for infants until the hospice workers, who will take over only when a person’s end is imminent, told me otherwise. He withered to 140 pounds (he is six feet tall), never left bed, and eventually refrained from all speech excepting sudden floods of psychotic invective and rage. There was no medical reason for the catastrophe that was clearly taking place inside this sixty-nine-year-old man. It seemed, like everything else about him, willful. Failure to thrive had it exactly backward.
It can’t be long now, they said, as they removed the feeding tube and discontinued all treatments that were not palliative in nature. I was there for a twenty-four-hour period and he never moved a muscle, never opened an eye. Then said Jesus unto him, Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe. One morning while everyone waited for his last breath, he got out of bed completely naked, tore the tubes out of his arm, and told everyone to get the fuck out of his house.
He sucked the venom from his foot the best he could, fashioned a tourniquet out of his T-shirt, and made his way to the highway, which was about two hundred yards away. He was soon crawling and increasingly delirious. It was a young couple who finally stopped in the darkness to help him. What a brave pair, pulling over and then not racing away at the sight of this hairy hellbound hallucinating ogre on his knees like some insane supplicant. Nothing is more terrifying, more viscerally repulsive, than the animal will for survival, that creature more creature than we are, who will eat razor wire and lick shit from jackboots if he has to, that maw of meaningless breathing down which, when the real crisis of survival comes, our “self” is sucked like vegetable cuttings roared down the disposal.
Once, driving with a woman going mad, I stopped to see a snake. It was on a hot back road in a dead flat place and we whipped right over it though I could see—no, I knew—that it had been entirely untouched. It reared up defiantly in the middle of the road and stared at us—at me, as I was the one getting out of the car and advancing toward it despite the tremulous protests of the woman who was going mad. “Going mad” is perhaps not fair or accurate, as it implies a drama and energy she entirely lacked. Say that two years earlier a scintilla of intolerable sorrow had entered her like a drop of ink in water, and now night was almost all she was. Kill the creature, I thought, which is odd since I am essentially the opposite of the wanton boy I was and now can’t bring myself to kill a spider in the house. I gave the snake a little nudge with my foot to get it moving off of the road, but it only angered and tried to strike me. So I stood for a second staring out at the eternal, infernal fields of my childhood, then went back to the car and the woman who would shortly endure every amalgam of abrasive chemical astringents that would do no good, and radical electroshock that would do no good, and prayer that would do no good. She was huddled in the passenger seat whimpering something softly to herself. What could I say? I’m sorry, I said to the windshield, and to the woman going mad, and to the child I had not realized was so immanent in me that it was he who had insisted I get out of that car, he who stood over that harmless black snake, touching it with his tennis shoe, he who stopped and stared out at the god-shocked wasteland with a gaze so reciprocally blank it would take a native to know it was love.
