On a hazy Sunday morning in late fall—the branches bare, frost blooms on the pavement, his house a mess, his daughters, 14, 11, 8, agents of torpor and chaos, with him, in the parlance, 50/50, week on, week off—he steps out for a jog. Halfway down the block, padding at a light trot, he feels a catch and stab in his left lower back, a minute skew and hitch in a solid bone structure that, if exhumed, would belong to the pelvis. Little tiny muscles wedged in there to some purpose. Hello in there, and what exactly do you do? When we are not sacks of goo, we have the intricacy of timepieces.
Normally, the pain subsides as with the transience of weather. A fleeting squall that ruffles the surface of a lake. This time it transmutes into something else, also familiar, a lit fuse that runs from his hip along the back of his thigh, into his calf, and numbingly into his foot. The last time he experienced something like this was shortly after he and his wife separated. It happened to the other leg. The skin of the calf became dull to the touch. He Googled it and promptly took himself to the ER, where he confronted the realization that he was not just single but alone. He had nobody to inform—his children too young, his mother too old, his wife, the person he had always informed, no longer his wife. A shocking revelation: how many people lived like this?
This was in the very earliest days of COVID, when the contagion was predominantly elsewhere—in China, in Italy, in Korea—before the city sealed off the playgrounds, before the run on toilet paper and flour, before professional sports teams played to empty stadia and canned cheering, when nobody quite knew what it was or would be. He sat in the waiting room at an arbitrary distance from others, inhaling conservatively. Eventually he was seen by a doctor, South African, Jewish—genteel accent, violent land—who diagnosed him with sciatica, not a tumor. A condition common in people his age. A too-sedentary life. Underutilized and underdeveloped muscles. Did he have someplace where he could hang by the arms?
It was a running dispute between him and his ex-wife that he should not magically think his ailments away. But how much of life resolves itself without intervention?
At the boxing gym, one of the better and more affable fighters, only thirty-one, says he’s too old to take it seriously anymore. Past his prime by at least five years. He looks fantastic, like he’s hewn from marble. At the boxing gym, subjects that are anathema in polite society are standard fare—your age, your weight. You’re past your prime by twenty-five years, the younger boxer says to him. They laugh. But he doesn’t really believe it. He has constructed much of his self-image on defying the odds. Founded or unfounded, he nurses the belief that what applies to others doesn’t necessarily apply to him. Maybe everyone reasons this way in order to contend with the loamy prospect of mortality.
There are conventions and percentages, and it’s sometimes hard to distinguish one from the other. Someone else, his mother for instance, would ask if it is natural or unnatural, healthy or unhealthy, to want to defy these as much as he does. But he’s so confirmed in his belief that he never asks. One defies until one can no longer defy. One receives daily reminders to this effect. More and more with the passage of time, like fetid bulletins from the crypt—or even worse, the nursing home, the hospice.
In recent months, his mother reports that several old friends, people whom he hasn’t seen in decades but whom he used to see regularly when he was growing up, have died. A man named Halfin. A man named Gitlin. Zemelman the violin teacher. A woman named Pivovarova. She and her husband owned the pharmacy and had a small white dog and also a daughter to whom he was teasingly betrothed. His mother goes to the funerals and returns disturbed by the conditions of the people she sees or hears about.
Does he remember Sarah? She is in a home. Her mind is gone. Sverdlovsky can’t be left alone. He falls.
He meets friends he has known nearly all his life and they ask after each other’s parents in a way that casually anticipates the worst. Two decades earlier, it was their parents’ parents. He heard the eulogies and paid his respects at the houses of mourning. There went the generation of old Polish Jews, who either got out before or lived through it somehow. Their legacy often taking the form of apartment buildings inhabited by successive flights of exiles.
Two of his oldest friends have parents who have been living husks for years. A woman who may have been the most fastidious person he knew. Theirs was a middle-class suburban house with a living room which nobody could enter, footprints on the carpet would give you away. She raised two sons to be as tidy as she was. His friend, the older of the two brothers, married with three children, is the one who keeps house, aspiring to his mother’s standards. The specifics of what she is like now are not worth repeating. One just needs to imagine the most undignified condition and be correct. Every time he gets a call or a text from his friend he tenses as in expectation of a blow. His friend visits his mother weekly and the only way he evokes a connection is by reciting the few Yiddish words he knows. He thinks of his friend sitting in a small bright institutional room with a stooped, emaciated version of his mother, washed and dressed by underpaid strangers, uttering random phrases in a language neither of them really speaks.
His other friend’s father: as a boy, hidden in a hole by Polish neighbors from the ravening insatiable, he later founded a lighting manufacturing empire. Hospital wings are endowed in his name. His first big account, he landed from a department store by borrowing workers from a neighboring shop who pretended at tasks when the buyer came to inspect his premises. Now, not all the money in the world…
The young man who gives him a massage turns out to be his oldest daughter’s former kindergarten teacher. At thirty, he realized there were more things he disliked about his job than he liked. He sat down, made a list with two columns, contemplated the cons—messy, loud, crowded, apparently futile—and imagined which professions didn’t include them. He feels sympathetic towards the masseur, as he does towards anyone who has made a bold decision in their life. The masseur’s manner is kind and authoritative. The problem, the masseur believes, involves the piriformis, a small gluteal muscle. The sciatic nerve descends from the base of the spine at the L4-L5 vertebrae, out of the sacrum, through the gluteal muscles, and into the hamstring. The sciatic nerve is the largest nerve in the body. It is the width of a finger. It is actually a group of five nerves. The masseur kneads into the piriformis with his hands and with his elbow. When he goes home, the tiny muscle spasms and twitches as if electrocuted.
He has not given much thought to our internal circuitry before. He’s taken as a given that the nerves transmit pleasure and pain. That, if severed, they produce paralysis, a complete loss of sensation and movement. But he has not thought of the nerve as the wire that pre-exists wires, which we could not fully conceptualize until we created its analogue. How often we come to understand the world in reverse. And that, like a wire, the nerve can be crimped, misfire, and then, rather than causing complete malfunction, result in the partial. He considers his leg and his foot: superficially unchanged but no longer the same. The pain has also become excruciating. For two weeks life consists mostly in seeking a respite from the pain and wondering what it would be like if this became his permanent condition. What actually qualifies as unbearable?
Could he have avoided this if he hadn’t reflexively sympathized with the masseur’s narrative and endured obediently while he hurt him? Or is it that he innately sympathizes with masseurs because it was his father’s profession and he loved him and misses him?
Days before he went for his jog, he posed for the first time as a life model. He held the same pose for five twenty-four-minute increments with six-minute breaks in between. The effort was much more grueling than he expected. The oddness of being unclothed and scrutinized by clothed strangers quickly dissipated to a heightened awareness of physical sensation—exertion, discomfort, pain. His spine was a pillar at odds with gravity supporting a large mass of meat. Had this precipitated his condition? What was collateral from his pursuit of the atypical and unconventional in life?
Recently he read: It’s said that your unlived life will kill you. True, but not before it has killed or maimed others around you first.
Is he unusually preoccupied with the phenomenon of the unlived life? Especially now, at the last flail of youth, of even the semblance of youth, the lease expiring, the clearance sale on, and the goading sense of self-reproach about a marriage that did not work out and went on too long.
What is common and what is uncommon in life?
He marries. Has children. The marriage is monogamous—in body if not in mind. Then divorce. He shares custody, amicably, in the parlance. He buys a used Jaguar, with an illuminated check engine light. He creates some profiles. Common unto caricature.
He hadn’t really wanted to marry his wife and he hadn’t really wanted to divorce her. What sort of person is he? He is like a child who has wandered off at a carnival, easily diverted, more exhilarated than frightened. Sensations strobe around him as he skirts the beckoning ghoulish.
Behind are his twenties, thirties, and most of his forties, checkered with regret. Up ahead, through a mist, a vague and increasingly treacherous road of indeterminate length. At the end of his marriage, when he and his wife could no longer agree on much, there had been one particular disagreement. He had shared with her an essay about aging written by a man who had reluctantly acquired some authority on the subject, but it had failed to sway or to amuse her because it hadn’t accounted sufficiently for energy and intention. It was possible that she was right and age was but a number and eighteen and eighty were just different manifestations of a whole and there was as much satisfaction to be derived from one as from the other and all the evidence to the contrary, the bent and the mottled and the palsied and the tottering, was superficial nonsense and he was too primitive a creature to summon the necessary equanimity and this was why they should not be together. (Or she believed in ashrams in the sky and that was why.)
When one iteration of a life comes to an end and you must construct another, how often do you simply replicate what was? What do you want? Where attention goes energy flows. Oh, fine. He had mocked his wife’s thinking but it’s not good to mock. Take everything in your hands and examine it.
During his marriage, his wife repeatedly encouraged him to do yoga. If he had, would this have happened to him? More importantly, would he still be married? Maybe it is the little things, the small accommodations. A friend once said that essentially, in time, one woman is the same as another. No doubt it holds equally for men. Everyone could swap and barely notice.
Is it true that your unlived life will kill you? And kill and maim others around you first? Why is he so quick to accept this?
How many people suffer silently with their unlived lives? Or barely feel them at all? They drive the kids to school and swim lessons. They clip coupons and sort the recycling. They make to-do lists and save for retirement. They don’t abuse alcohol or drugs and are kind to the wait staff. They seem inured to temptation, are frequently exhausted, but fundamentally content. And that’s just the First World.
The physiotherapist he hobbles to see recalls only one other case like his. She is older than the masseur, contemplative, meticulous, as if she deplores the least imprecision or misjudgment. She is careful not to say out loud what hangs in the air between them, is hesitant to assign blame. Has she always been a physiotherapist? She has. There is no history of ambivalence. No dramatic reversals or reconsiderations.
Papa used to say that he would never touch someone when they were in pain, his mother remarks. He would tell them to come back later.
How nice and unexpected, he thinks, that his mother bears this fond memory of his father when in life there was little evidence of affection between them. His father would sometimes place a hand on her back or her shoulder but she would shrug it off as if it was an unwelcome distraction from the real substance of life, which may have been rinsing the dishes or peeling potatoes.
For a time after his father died, for reasons that remain somewhat opaque, he performed the ancient Jewish rite of laying tefillin. Black leather boxes on the forehead and the arm, affixed with black leather straps. A ritual from a guttural, lamplit, cavernous time.
May the evil impulse never tempt us but lead us to serve the Lord as our heart desires.
The perpetual mystery and consolation of a common heart.
But lead us toward what? Tempt us away from what? Doing what we shouldn’t, or not doing what we should?
How to identify a worthy temptation? Not nervousness alone but the convergence of nervousness and need. A cosmic force that sucks at you. And once you have satisfied it? A diaphanous, fluttering gratification. And diffuse moral ache.
Nerve, nervy, nervous: he has never thought about the contradictory meanings of the word. What is the origin? The entire enterprise of feeling. It and its opposite traveling the same route. Like a river system, from the headwaters—everything good and bad, beneficent and maleficent—coursing down.
A woman he has an exchange with who previously experimented with an open relationship describes it as one person having fun while the other cries themselves to sleep. She had believed she was agreeing to one thing but it soon morphed into something else. Boundaries pushed. Mission creep. Eventually, after untold heartache, the dissolution of the relationship. It is not a pain she wishes to subject herself to again, thank you very much.
As opposed, perhaps, to being dominated, tied up, spanked, choked, gagged…in other words, the pleasure of chosen pain in a world where most pain is imposed.
Chosen pain, but can one also become reconciled to unchosen pain? Embrace it. Learn to live with it. He is reminded of a story told to him by his friend whose father is suffering with knees and hips and whose mother is brittle with osteoporosis. His friend’s cousin once got a tattoo that said: What doesn’t kill me, nutures me.
Pain as a form of initiation. Pain as a path to self-knowledge. Pain as the price of boldness. Can you poke your head out of your shell and escape unscathed? What doesn’t kill me. All happy families.
With time, less, it seems, than from anything he has done than of its own accord, the pain abates, as the physiotherapist and the websites said it should. Once it does, it is hard to recall quite how bad it was. It is as though the memory of pain recedes even more resolutely than the pain itself. Except when it doesn’t. But for that there must be something else, cruelty. The difference between emotions and sensations. Emotions linger, are harder to forget. They seem as though they should belong to another system. A curricular thought flash: the limbic system! But, no, those too are conducted along the nerves.
He likes to beat the odds, to be the exception to the rule. Not revert to the mean. It is also possible to beat the odds in the wrong direction. His father died of a cancer related to asbestos exposure. His father’s occupation was not mining or construction but sports. He had a best friend who was born on the same day of the same year. From the age of ten they attended the same schools all the way through university, where they specialized in “heavy athletics”—i.e., weight lifting. They did their brief stint in the Soviet army together. They later worked in the same building for the Riga Dynamo sports club. His father is dead seventeen years; his father’s friend lives in Leverkusen, Germany, a suburb of Cologne. This is not exactly the scientific method, and may Lazik Futterman live to be 120, but how and why?
How strange to reflect so much on pain when it is physical. Is it because one feels particularly trapped by physical pain, cannot imagine anything redeeming? The months leading up to the dissolution of his marriage had been excruciating, he couldn’t recall suffering so much even when his father was dying. His father’s death had seemed unfair but not embarrassing or shameful. It was sad. It was like an archaeological dig of sadness. There were layers upon layers. Whenever he felt he had reached the furthest depth, there would be another. The birthday card his father wrote to his mother two days before he died. The effort it had taken him. Conspiring with the social worker to buy it. He’d wanted it to be a surprise. The plainspoken poetry of it. Could he, his son, ever live up to this example? The thought of it made him want to drive an awl into his head.
And yet.
With emotional pain, you could aspire to transcendence. You could tell yourself to adjust your perspective. What if instead of standing here you stood there? Loss could be gain. Within every circumstance inhered opportunity and opportunity cost.
What had been the opportunity after the dissolution of his marriage? Some things having to do with his children. A kind of autonomy, to provide his take on the world to them unmediated—but it seems a steep price to pay. He hadn’t regarded with envy single fathers and their charges. Rather, with pity, which is just a sanitized superiority. What else? The myth of infinite opportunity, of partaking in modernity, all that had happened since he was last at liberty—that exalted secular condition. He had spent so much time finding fault with his wife, constructing lavish and austere fantasies, and then she had given him his chance to fulfill them.
There is the Kafka quote, “A cage went in search of a bird,” which he had long mistakenly thought was “A bird went in search of a cage.”
Was he bird or cage? He would say bird but wouldn’t everyone? What would his wife say of him? He doubted it was bird.
There is an image he does not like to contemplate. A woman’s hand opens a cage door. A dazed and contemptuous bird peers out.
By the end, everything that was beautiful and good, in the specific way that it is between two people, became tawdry and sad. Humor went and sex went, in the harshest ways. During this time, he spoke constantly to friends about marriage. He confessed a lot, but some things felt too humiliating to say. He knew his wife was doing the same, and he preferred not to think about where she drew her lines, what her friends knew about him. All the friends he spoke to were married, most were men, most were married for the first time. But here was an instance when experience did not furnish wisdom. Lessons were contradictory. One friend, when in the throes of his own marital crisis, had confided in an older man, married for decades, seemingly blissfully. That man said that there had been many times when, if he had allowed himself to say the hateful thing he’d been tempted to say, the marriage would have been over. He was glad he hadn’t said it.
He himself had subscribed to the same principle. He conceived of himself as, in the parlance, not coming from divorce—although occasionally he would remember that his own father had been married once before, a subject he did not like to discuss for reasons he did not care to explain. His wife’s mother had also been briefly and previously married, to a man who concealed from her and everyone—including maybe himself, given the times—that he was gay. What was the lesson there? They were happier the second time, even if they did not always seem happy.
The pain in his leg abates but a curious symptom lingers. A slapstick condition with a comical name: foot drop. When he walks, his toes flop clownishly with each step. His gait is uneven. Out in public he knows he looks like there is something the matter with him. Jogging is out for fear of tripping and falling. Boxing is also discouraged, although he can be up on his toes. (But not his heels. A capability one doesn’t fully appreciate until it’s gone.) How to describe the sensation? It is like a vain concerted anatomical grasping. It is like a span of a bridge that has collapsed. Not a large span. Tantalizingly, one sees the other side. It’s only the toes of his left foot. It’s only the stupid toes of his left foot. But they will not obey. There is a word that he has rarely had occasion to use. It is one of those words that sound like the opposite of what they mean. Enervate, enervating. With exercise—pronation, dorsiflexion, adduction—the condition generally clears up, except when it doesn’t. In which case, it is clown show for life.
Postulate A: Your unlived life will kill you, but not before it has killed or maimed others around you first.
However
Postulate B: A life boldly lived—like a life timidly unlived—can also kill and maim you and those around you, in perpetuity.
Therefore
Postulate C: X(Postulate A) + X(Postulate B) = 1. Find for X.
When the call comes from his friend whose father owned the lighting company, he is on a date. It is nearly two in the morning when he sees the message, sent around midnight. He listens to the message and hears his friend’s lost and weary voice absorbing the thud of the incontrovertible. He calls back and they speak. It should be immaterial what he was doing when his friend called him from the hospital, or when his friend’s father took his last breath. Nobody conducts such a poll. Yet the contrast between him and his friend makes him feel wayward and frivolous, like a person drifting further and further away from himself.
In keeping with tradition, the funeral is held promptly, on a day he is supposed to have his daughters. There is a morning service, the burial, and a reception in the family home for close friends and relatives. He will be gone for most of the day and asks his ex-wife for a favor, to be added to the ledger of symbiotic favors. Please send my condolences, she says.
Send my condolences. Send my regards. Say hi for me. Give a big hug. Sometimes he follows through. There are no grounds for partisanship or rancor. Isn’t what transpired between them just equivalent to a natural and harmless shift in states—solid to liquid, liquid to gas?
Very sad, his mother says. He was an exceptional person. Nobody had a bad word to say about him.
In the middle of a workday, a thousand people fill the synagogue sanctuary. Four generations rise to speak. He knew by name everyone who worked for him, and the names of their spouses. He preferred the factory floor to boardroom meetings. He never fired anyone, especially those least likely to find another job. He always flew coach. He visited his mother every day. He never finished high school but could do complex calculations in his head better than any computer. He spoke seven languages and liked a good cognac and a good joke. He never worshipped money. He valued friendship, family, and community. His wife’s father had to sign a paper allowing them to wed: she was seventeen and he was twenty-two. They were together over sixty years.
There is the kind of eulogy delivered for a family man and the kind for the bohemian who privileges his art over his children, their plural mothers, his many mistresses. There is no kind of eulogy for the half-hearted. Someone insufficiently committed to one or the other. Neither admirably selfless nor selfish. This is the sort of person he suspects himself to be, his sole unqualified loyalty to recreational boxing.
Many of the people who attend the service join the procession to the cemetery. A long line forms to shovel dirt onto the casket, a sign of respect. It is late winter but there has been a thaw and the earth is clay, heavy and lumpy. The tradition is to deposit a few shovelfuls and then stab the blade back into the pile for the next person to take. Only the oldest, those infirm or unsteady on their feet, do not shovel. It is the embodiment of the phases of life: one shovels, one abstains from shoveling, one is shoveled upon.
When it is his turn, he takes the shovel, mindful of his back, but then catches his foot and stumbles over the plywood that supports the mound of dirt. A gasp, and hands reach out to grab him.
On the way from the cemetery to the house of mourning, he indulges in a fantasy about his own funeral and the eulogy his daughters deliver, larded with boxing axioms deployed as sage life advice. Don’t be a target. Never turn away. Never go straight back. Don’t fight angry. Protect yourself at all times.
He has not been to his friend’s childhood house in decades, but it is mostly unchanged. When it was built it was one of the largest houses on its affluent street. By most standards it would be considered a mansion, but it is now dwarfed by newer mansions. His friend’s mother will sell it.
There are many familiar faces, members of his friend’s family for whom he is still inherently a teenager. Whatever has happened between then and now feels largely superfluous. He sees his friend’s mother, sitting surprisingly alone. She has made herself small, as if reticent to draw attention or take up space. He sits in the chair beside her and she reflexively takes his hand. How is your mother? she asks. Good. How are your daughters? Good. She does not let go of his hand.
David Bezmozgis is an author and filmmaker who lives in Toronto. His most recent work is the film The Betrayers, which he adapted from his own novel.