Yesterday I walked the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, after the unseasonable warm weather collapsed into a wrenching cold that taunted muscle and bone. I frequently find refuge at the mall, enjoying the energy, the congregation of strangers. I go to walk, but also to watch the human parade as it passes, families trailing with children home from universities and high schools for the winter break, the friendly din of familial connection. It feels safe to me.
As I walked, I felt a peculiar sadness descend, not the sadness of envy, I long ago reconciled with not being able to have a family with children, but the sadness of temporal dislocation, of finding myself much older than I ever imagined being. Does anyone in their fidgety twenties imagine the uncomfortable rigidity of age, seeing themselves as old? I had never envisioned a life beyond my career, never conceived of any other than constantly working, nor imagined that my life would be rendered into tatters by grotesques who sought, and succeeded, in dismantling everything I had built, to be exiled. I live now in a kind of no man’s land, suspended in the territory between the end of my career and the end of my life.
I am animated, still, by relentless and often torturous creative impulses, and yet I am burdened, too, by the anxiety of oblivion, by the knowledge that the life I knew, the life I built, effectively ended on June 13th, 2018, and whatever this is, is merely an afterlife, a postscript to a story already concluded. I’m alive, but everything I did has died.
There is a thing I am loath to speak of, even to my closest friends: how difficult it has been since the acquittal. One would think I should be rejoicing that I am not confined to the Minnesota Correctional Facility in St. Cloud, that I walk free under the winter sky. And it is true, I am relieved, profoundly grateful even, but the struggle against invisibility and oblivion is of a different order than relief. I know we are all rendered into particles and dust barely remembered after we’re gone, it’s the stories that remain, but for those of us wrongfully accused, the ugly stories will be the only memory.
This is not like losing employment, where one might secure another position, or losing a partner, where we might, in time, meet another. I have lost the accumulated work of nearly half my life, forty-some years of building and creating and collaborating, and there will be no other. That chapter is closed, the book sealed.
In this version of death there are no memorials, no elegies composed, no kind words inscribed in some lovely obituary, no gatherings where people speak warmly of what was. The hardest truth of all: there is nothing to show for my decades of effort except these brutal false accusations. My life has become a haunted house, populated by ghosts of my own making, specters that rattle my confidence like chains in the night. I wonder, sometimes, if I will ever be free of the fear that stalks me.
But I am not dead, not yet, and I remain resolved, or try to, to battle against the demons that hunt me in the small hours. Just last week I dreamed I was hiking across a prairie landscape, that great openness I love, when a wolf attacked and nearly severed my leg. It was a dream of being caught between two states: freedom and spaciousness and peace on one side, being hunted and attacked and wounded on the other. In another dream I was consumed alive by a pack of wild dogs. In yet another I was led to the gallows to be hanged. Each time I wake, gasping in the dark, I am grateful simply to be breathing, to have survived another night’s assault.
As an autodidact I am never short of interests, project ideas, but I have few people with whom to collaborate, few companions for the work. In this afterlife, communication with the living has become nearly impossible. I am no Patrick Swayze, able to animate a penny through sheer force of will. The friends and collaborators who once sought my professional counsel, who valued my insight, who worked alongside me and compensated me for my experience, all of them have receded beyond my reach, as if I exist now on some other plane of being, visible but untouchable.
I do not know if my pen is a shovel with which I might dig myself free. I do not know if what I write will reach anyone, or change anything, or matter at all in the great turning of the world. But I know this: when I am writing, I am not in the grave. I am not walking circles feeling exiled from my own species. I am making something, call it art if you must, though sometimes I do not know what it is, I know only that if I do not do this work, if I stop writing, I will drown in anxiety and sadness the way a moth drowns in summer oil.
But it is not enough merely to have a daily practice, to move words around a page, as if a sentence alone can argue with this reality. I have become a kind of poltergeist, restless and agitated, wanting to move things, to throw things, to be obstinate and intrusive and loud and discomfiting. I want to rattle the chains not only for myself and my family but for all the others who are trapped in this same liminal space, this territory between one death and the next, including those who have truly been violated, truly harmed.
In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, John Proctor is arrested for witchcraft. The court offers him a choice: confess to consorting with the devil and live, or refuse and die. When he agrees to confess, knowing it to be a lie, but wanting desperately to live, the court demands more. They want to post his signed confession on the church door, to display it as proof that the condemned are guilty and the court is righteous. But at this final humiliation, Proctor rebels, pleading to keep the only thing he has left, his name. This is from a production at the Globe Theater, in London.
He cries out: “Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!”
Proctor understood what I’ve learned: once your name is stained with an accusation like this, you face a stark choice, disappear quietly into the shadows, grateful you’re not in prison or refuse to let them have the final word. Of all the losses I have endured, of all the things that once seemed trivial, it is this stain upon my name that makes the afterlife so unendurable.
Once you are dead in this way, the stain remains. Words alone cannot rewrite the ending that has already been written, cannot restore what has been taken. But what else do I have? What else is left to me but words? In the end, we’re all the dust and particles of history, but while I’m still here I write. I must write. Not because it will restore my name, not because it will resurrect my reputation or rebuild what was destroyed, but because refusing to be silent is the fight that remains. The poltergeist does not haunt in hope of forgiveness or redemption. It haunts because it is still here, refusing to dissolve into the darkness. And so I write, and walk, and breathe, and rattle.
