The Last Fair Deal Going Down by David Rhodes

Author:David Rhodes
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 2010-10-21T16:00:00+00:00

Because of my inadequacy I turned to the work of other men. I tried to make these novels compensate for and represent the world. Through them I pictured myself interacting with real people. This attitude launched me into the greatest depression I have ever known, and to feed this condition I had many books. My room was full of them . . . books that had been hatefully sold to me after hundreds of ignored overdue notices signed in person by the head librarian; in fact, every book I opened began: I was sickened unto death, and continued to present the unquestionable, irrevocable truth of that statement. And rather than feel relief in that I was not alone, an uncertain comradeship, I was further depressed because of the abundancy of this feeling in the world. There seemed no escape from this. Then there was no hope of escape. I could not talk to Nellie, or Paul. I could not bear the daylight or the outdoors. The dead of summer had arrived and I slept continuously through the day in the damp basement, keeping away from the heat. No, it was not sleeping that I did then. It was mind-writhing, thought exercises that exercised on themselves on themselves over and over and over . . . endlessly repetitious sense and nonsense. I implored my depression to question itself — to ask how it had come, why it had come: I reasoned that the accident had done this to me, that it was because I did not know how to do anything; then I reasoned that this was not the reason, it was that the accident had made it impossible for me to want to do anything. I knew that that was too easy, that it had nothing to do with that. My depression laughed at my calamity. And that depression was all the more formidable because of its promise of the coming of a conception, an attitude a thousand times more horrible.

I thought of depression like that. Though a part of me, and though through its eyes I viewed my miserable basement world, still I was able to see that it was not me . . . rather a “thing” that was not of my own doing, that defined me, not I it. From this position I could hear it speak to me, saying, “The City has sent out its head executioner. Dread her coming; she does not return.”

My body, pledged against me, turned a month-old rat-gray from the neglect of sunshine and the constant embattlement of the slimy air. My teeth rotted and my fingernails broke up into little milk-white chips. Persistent headaches eroded the thinking fibers of my brain, collapsing the synapses, polluting and diseasing my liver; the pain was a companion to me, collecting my perverted thoughts tightly around my mind’s eye, letting not one of them escape, letting not one of them dissolve . . . playing them back to me again and again and again against the backdrop of that clammy delirium.

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