The Night Ocean

Paul La Farge is the author of the novels The Artist of the Missing (1999), Haussmann, or the Distinction (2001), and Luminous Airplanes (2011), as well as The Facts of Winter (2005), a book of imaginary dreams. His stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Believer, McSweeney's, Nautilus, Conjunctions and elsewhere. He has won the Bard Fiction Prize, two California Book Awards, and the Bay Area Book Critics' Award for fiction. In 2013-14 he was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

1.My husband, Charlie Willett, disappeared from a psychiatric hospital in the Berkshires on January 7, 2012. I say disappeared because I don't believe he's dead, although that would be the reasonable conclusion. Charlie's army jacket, jeans, shoes, socks, and underwear (though, strangely, not his shirt) were all found at the edge of Agawam Lake the day after he left the hospital. The police say Charlie's footprints led to the edge of the lake, and nobody's footprints led away. Even if Charlie could somehow have left the lake without leaving tracks, they say, it's hard to see how he would have survived long enough to reach shelter. According to the National Weather Service, the overnight low temperature in Stockbridge was 15 degrees, and Charlie didn't have an extra set of clothes: the girl who gave him a ride swears he wasn't carrying anything. What's more, no one denies that Charlie was suicidal. The last time I saw him, in Brooklyn, he told me he'd taken a handful of Ambien, just to see what would happen. What happened was, he slept for twelve hours, had a dizzy spell in the shower, and sprained his ankle. "My life is becoming a sad joke," he said, "except there's no one around to laugh at it." He looked at me entreatingly. I told him there was nothing funny about an Ambien overdose. It could kill you, if you took it with another depressant. "Thanks, Miss Merck Manual," Charlie said. "I'm still your wife," I said, "and you're scaring me. If you really want to hurt yourself, you should be in the hospital." To my surprise, Charlie asked, "Which hospital?" I thought for a moment, then I told him about the place in the Berkshires.Two days later, Charlie was on the bus to Stockbridge. He called me that evening. "I feel like I'm in high school again, Mar," he said. "The food is terrible, and everybody's on drugs. I nearly had a panic attack, trying to figure out who to sit with at dinner. Who are the cool kids in an insane asylum? The bulimics look great, but the bipolars make better conversation.""Sounds like you'll fit right in," I said, and Charlie laughed. He sounded like himself, for the first time in months. What had he sounded like before that? Like himself, but falling down a well in slow motion: each time I saw him, his voice was fainter and somehow more echo-y. That's something Charlie might have said; normally, I am more cautious with my descriptions. I have never heard anyone fall down a well. "Are you on drugs?" I asked. "I start tomorrow," Charlie said. "Wanted to call you tonight, in case there's anything you want to ask before they erase my mind.""Don't joke," I said. I thought about it. "What's your favorite nut?" I asked. "Oh, Mar," he said, "you know the answer to that one."Charlie called again two days after that and told me they had him on 2 milligrams of risperidone-which was more than I would have given him, but never mind-and it made him woozy. "But the characters, Mar," he said, "the characters!" He was taking notes in his journal, for an essay he planned to write about his downfall . "Take it easy," I said. "If they think your journal is antisocial, they might confiscate it.""I am," Charlie said. "I've only got enough energy to write for, like, five minutes a day. The rest of the time I watch Lost on DVD." He didn't talk about his therapy, but I didn't expect him to. We had always respected each other's privacy. "How long are they going to keep you?" I asked. Charlie said, "They're saying a couple of weeks." I said I would visit as soon as I could, probably the next weekend. Then, afraid that Charlie would draw the wrong conclusion, I clarified: "I just want to know you're all right, and that you aren't making the doctors miserable." Charlie said it was his job to make the doctors miserable. Then he said, "Just kidding. My job right now is to make a world I can live in."