The coaster had seven hundred thousand nails in it. Warehouses’ worth of nuts and bolts. Millions of opportunities for the two eyes of the maintenance man to miss something. And how many mechanical elements had to fail at once to guarantee an accident? Two? Three? The potential combinations that led to mechanical failure were infinite. Therefore, infinite possible causes of death. To reverse the tape, an infinite number of non-failures had to occur every second of the day in order for my father to go on living.
He had never been known for his nerve. As a boy, he’d avoided swimming at the quarry, explorations of abandoned houses. He was quick to imagine the aftermath of a slip from atop a stone wall. He served as human ladder and, after boosting the last friend through a broken window, lookout, as they climbed out onto the roof of the Uniroyal warehouse, pretended to lose their balance again and again, tottering on one foot, windmilling their arms, while my father’s breath caught every time he managed to bring his eyes up to see their black shoes and drooping socks, their pale white legs.
Putting himself in harm’s way wasn’t exhilarating, it was terrifying; hiking in the mountains with his father, he kept himself well back from the cliff’s edge, so powerful was the call of the void. His head swam when his father, perched on a splinter of rock jutting over a thousand-foot drop, turned his back to the emptiness and called for his son to come on over and enjoy the view.
No, he’d say. No. He couldn’t go to the edge because he couldn’t trust himself not to jump. He wasn’t suicidal, so why couldn’t he trust himself? He trusted his present self—it was his future self, the one who lived five seconds from now, the one who stood at the edge of the cliff, whom he didn’t trust. That future self had lived through a span, however brief, of unpredictable events. How could my father know what he might experience in those five seconds and how those experiences might shape his behavior? Why offer his future self the opportunity to jump? In every situation, the film raced forward to a dire outcome.
He spent the remainder of the afternoon lying flat on his back on the sand. Only there in the constant sun, the waves breaking predictably at his feet, did he feel calm enough to think.
The world was a slave to pressure and velocity, to the calculus of spinning rods and belts and gearwheels, to the transformation of circular motion into linear motion. All vacuum tubes, pipes, valves, flanges, whether taken individually or in system, as in an internal combustion engine, were potential bombs. Cars were nothing more than harnessed violence: beneath the hood, fan blades spun like saws, pistons fired, belts whipped by at blinding speed. The rotational force of the four Goodyears humming along at highway speed translated to potential destructive energy on par with a case of land mines, each wheel loaded for the moment of puncture when hunks of rubber would shear away, shattering windscreens to the rear, cars to the left and right inscribing twin-black sine curves across the tarmac as their drivers lost control, steel tonnage smashing into steel tonnage into concrete dividers, flying off overpasses, the helpless little meats inside pulverized. And what if an entire wheel disconnected, rim and all? He tried to calculate the stress placed on the shanks of the wheel studs, on the lug nuts holding the rim to the axle. How many thousands of pounds of pressure? And how many hands worked on an automobile production line? A hundred? Two hundred? Each set of hands was a new opportunity for a bolt to be over-torqued, under-torqued, mis-threaded—or, god help us, forgotten entirely.
An acute mental problem, unquestionably what was known to professionals in the field as a neurosis. He wasn’t hallucinating, and he wasn’t hearing voices. He simply couldn’t stop his mind from compiling new ways to die.
Thirty-five years later his shrink, Dr. Asher Schiff, suggested that my father had wanted to die.
That doesn’t compute, my father said. Not everything is a reversal. If I wanted to die, all I had to do was jump off the roof of the hospital. But I was afraid of dying.
Of course you were afraid of dying, Schiff said. Come on. Why can’t you both fear and desire death? Are you a machine?
Because I wanted to live, full stop. A desire to die would have been easier to deal with. No conflict there. I jump off the roof.
And did you jump off the roof?
I did not jump off the roof.
Look, I say crazy things sometimes. I probably shouldn’t even have started down this road with you, Schiff said.
This again, my father said.
Schiff had been on the pro tennis circuit before enrolling in the psych program at CUNY, and he had that ex-athlete’s way of moving to avoid pain, every bend or stoop the sum of a careful calculation. Joints gone to hell, every ligament a bit too tight, every muscle on the verge of rupture, he usually sat draped over his leather chair, utterly slack unless movement was absolutely necessary. He had a big head that my father found comforting. His forehead had executed a sort of continental drift across the top of his skull and what hair he had left he kept stubble-length with an electric razor. He transmitted boundless waves of security and empathy. A cardigan over a button-down shirt, button collar, corduroys, big brown Earth shoes. My father had always assumed Schiff was
