Beyond the Worst-Case Scenario

"What Comes After the Dark Night of the Soul?"

In the early hours of the morning, I like to lie awake worrying about things I’ve forcibly ignored all day. One of the frequent items on the 4 AM agenda lately has been my car. My car is in another state, making it an ideal object of worry, a Platonic worry. It’s sitting on the grass beside a dirt road, at the top of the drive where my house is allegedly being rebuilt. I received a notice in the mail that I needed to get the car emissions tested—a simple procedure, but one I would need to travel several hours to execute. I have already been granted one extension on this test, but the extension date, once comfortably distant, was now approaching. I have driven this car about once a year over the last three years, both because I’ve been quarantining in New York and because the house I would normally need it to live in is currently nonexistent. The last time I drove it, every maintenance light on the dashboard lit up. My girlfriend assured me that this did not necessarily mean that everything in the car had suddenly broken simultaneously; I just needed to take it in to a garage. I was going to have to take a cab from the train station to the car, and I’d only left myself two and a half hours’ turnaround time in which to get my emissions test before I had to be back at the train station. So what if the car didn’t start at all, I worried. Then what?

As it turned out, my fears were grounded. My car did not start. Also, when my cab driver offered me a jump and I went to get the cables out of the back-back, I opened the compartment where the emergency equipment is kept, and a dozen small mice burst out of a nest they’d made out of down stuffing from an old pillow in there. Also, note: the mice didn’t run outof the car; they scattered in all directions and vanished into every crevice of the vehicle (which was filled with crapola I’d rescued from the house last-minute and hadn’t yet had the heart to throw out), and hid. Meaning that even if I did get the engine running again, I would then have to drive to the emissions test station with a car full of mice. Frightened, desperate mice, mice who might well feel they had nothing left to lose. (My friend Boyd and I were once attacked by such a mouse, whom we thought we had cornered in a pincer movement, in a bold kamikaze charge.) My worst-case scenario had not come to pass after all; it was considerably worse.

You play out these disastrous hypotheticals in your mind, but then then your imagination freezes up and leaves you there, stranded forever in the worst-case scenario, a formless void of dread and failure. You never try to imagine your way past that moment. Whereas, in real life, the worst case happens and you are, embarrassingly, still there, and you just have to deal somehow. You figure it out. You go on anyway. My girlfriend recently googled “dark night of the soul” during an early-morning bout of her own, and one of the autofilled questions was: “What happens after a Dark Night of the Soul?”

My friend Annie has always been more terrified of death than anyone I’ve ever known. Of course we’re all secretly more or less terrified of it, but Annie can’t seem to repress or sublimate it as most people manage to. This fall, less than a month after her fingers first brushed against an odd hard nodule under her skin as she was putting on a shirt, she had a double mastectomy. At her stage of cancer, for a woman of her age and health, the five-year chances of survival are 70%—pretty good odds for, say, a carnival game, but less comfortable when what you’re betting on is your own continued existence. An “aggressive” course of chemotherapy and radiation can boost those odds to a more reassuring 80 to 95%. Annie did glumly wonder whether this increase was worth subjecting herself to six months of nausea, bleeding gums, hair loss, and who knew what other side effects. Even before her diagnosis, she’d lost a lot of her enthusiasm for life; the summer before, she’d found herself feeling not so much depressed as just bored, done with this crap.

Annie is also—and this may be less contradictory than it sounds—an antinatalist, someone who resents having been born without her consent, who feels that life ultimately nets out as a bad experience, and formally objects to it. But it turns out that when you’re finally faced with the unimaginable worst-case scenario in real life rather than in fantasy—once you’re waist-deep in the shit—you say okay, here we go, and just slog on through. You put your head down and focus on the next goddamn thing you gotta do: the biopsy, the surgery, recovering from surgery, getting your chest port installed, recovering from the port surgery, getting through the first treatment, recovering from that, then the second treatment, and so on into the future, with your eye fixed on the time, indefinitely far ahead and uncertain of arrival, when some doctor says cancer-free.

And in the meantime, it has to be admitted—without denying that the situation sucks, or that you’d trade anything to be out of it—that, given the circumstances, things aren’t altogether bad. It is not a formless void of dread. Neighbors bring you Thanksgiving dinner. A friend flies in from out of town to drive you home from your chemo appointments and keep you company, and the two of you you do daily word games and puzzles online and go to matinees and watch your favorite show together and take prudentially filched narcotics and hang out goofing off like you always do.

Our anxiety fantasies are too unimaginative; they never account for the odd plot twists and non sequiturs life always presents us. What I hadn’t included in my own (far less worse) worst-case scenario was my driver Zaid asking whether he might bring his son back out to my property to go fishing sometime, and then giving me his personal cell number so I could text him if my car wouldn’t start. On his way back out the long dirt lane he passed the caretakers of the retreat center at the end of the point and stopped to ask them to offer me a jump. These proved to be the nicest people in the world, a couple who owned a café with a very Old-Testament-sounding name in the nearest town. Merian had just finished writing her first book, and was planning to start work on a fantasy novel based on the collaborative stories she and her daughters used to improvise when the girls were young. Her husband Ed didn’t talk at all, just obligingly got out and hooked up the jumper cables.

My car never started; the battery was past resuscitation. But good old Zaid came back and got me. I felt bad now about needlessly evicting the mice, who’d had such a cozy, defensible home. I unscrewed the license plates from my car, planning to call the county and have the vehicle declared legally street-dead so I could stop paying insurance, but Zaid urged me to call his neighbor, who, he said, would replace the battery and clean the car inside and out (pest control included), for $200. And he got me to the train station on time, although my train was an hour late. But eventually I made it down to DC, where I had the traditional steak dinner with my friend Margot, who filled me in on the cat/marital drama unfolding in her household.

When I called the MVA they just gave me another extension until April.

Life doesn’t stop, not even in the worst case. It just keeps going, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. This implacable persistence is life’s ultimate torture, as when you wish the world would be torn to its foundations by your grief, but instead it keeps going about its idiot business and making its picayune demands—but it is also its ultimate mercy. It refuses to leave you alone to suffer or mourn in stasis. It’s like an annoying friend or sibling relentlessly pestering you to laugh at a bad joke or dumb pun when all you want is to be pissed off and feel sorry for yourself forever.

I have of course learned nothing from any of this. I have a new stable of late-night worries: my house is horrifically over budget and my contractors keep sending me invoices and ignore my repeated demands to know what is this going to cost?; a throbbing toothache has spread to my jaw and eustachian, and I fear an infection. I can’t envision a future where I have a home, when this pain is gone. I lie awake watching Jupiter and then Orion progress slowly across the hours through the window, waiting for the feeble gray watery dawn of the soul.

Annie just sent me a photo of herself with her new buzz cut, her long, lustrous red hair, which she used to call her “crowning glory,” preemptively chopped off and donated—this woman I still think of as the impetuous, persnickety twenty-year-old I met my sophomore year of college. I’m going to fly out to stay with her again for a few weeks in February to be her cancer companion/manservant. She’s still provisionally feeling merely lousy, but the effects of chemotherapy are cumulative, and will only worsen over the months to come. We’ll play games and solve puzzles and get a lot of take-out and watch movies and TV and take drugs both licit and il- and hang out goofing off like we always do. And we’ll have to see what happens.