Otherwordly Experience

I sleep fitfully in New Trident, and I always have.

Not that I sleep much better when I visit my relatives where they live (for I rarely leave New Trident for any reason aside from that one). And, if anything, the difference becomes more pronounced and all the more evident to me when I can hear the alternately sonorous and stertorous drone of my cousin and his wife snoring in the room next to mine, and the softer, more breathy sound of their daughter sleeping in her crib, and the barely audible, regular breathing of their son in the same room as the daughter. 

When I am surrounded by sleep, I am left to wonder how and why so great a number of people appear to be so easily taken in by something which eludes me most cruelly. 

My cousin—Daniel, let’s call him—points, as the reason behind my relative insomnia, to a failure of faith on my part. But when I hold hands with his family before their dinner and hear them speak mumbled words of religious devotion, I feel only the clammy hands of his wife and the sticky, unwashed hands of his son, and I don’t possess anywhere in me a shred of the religious fervor which Daniel swears courses through the hands of the family and which permits them such easy rest.

Maybe it’s sin, suggests Daniel one day. (Quite confrontingly to me, I might add.) Maybe you’ve sinned for something the atonement for which will give you peace.

Maybe. But when I expiate myself for all my slights against God—real or imagined—I feel as though I am speaking to myself only; half-heartedly apologizing to myself for offenses which I don’t believe myself to have committed or which I have already forgiven myself for. Who am I to grant myself absolution? And how else am I granted it, if not from, or by, myself? For—and this is important to me—while I believe in something, be it God, or a spirit, or some omnipresent and indiscernible pattern to the universe, I have never in my life felt a godly connection and doubt very much if many people have. 

Annabeth had, she told me. Once. Had an honest-to-God religious experience, I mean. 

She went bathing, she said, in a little green pool situated in a wooded creek in Nice, a picturesque town in the French Riviera, when all of a sudden, the wind died down and the surface of the water glassified itself, so that it became the perfect crystallized, mirror image of the sky above it. There were no ripples in the water, save those created by Annabeth, as she stood to marvel at the calmness of the pool. From above, a single, pale-green oak leaf described lazy, arcing circles in the air as it fell toward the pool and soundlessly landed on its back, its crumpled edges forming the bounds of a gnarled claw, pointing skyward. And then it just floated there, propagating from itself concentric circles in perfect, little rings. But instead of the ripples abating, as she expected them to, they only increased in intensity, until tall and imposing waves, awesome in their symmetry and form, shot out from the leaf and crashed into her. 

But she did not feel them touch her.

Instead, she felt a frisson of pure sensation: the skin on her neck felt like ice and the neat little hairs on her arms stood up on their own. She felt that she was awash in some mystical power which she longed to possess but knew that she could not, for she could neither understand it nor ever contain it. And then she woke up in a bed in her hostel. She was naked and covered in water from head to toe. Though she had evidently been sleeping in her bed, it was dry. Only her skin was damp, and the water obstinately refused to disadhere from her. At length, she took a shower in the communal hostel washroom. And when she toweled herself off, she was at last dry, the droplets cleaving from her skin like beads of glue. 

The rest of her day passed by in blissful clarity. She did not deviate materially from the range of activities in which she would ordinarily participate, but she performed them with such vigor and enjoyment that the day stuck out in her mind. And she remembered the mundane details of her washing herself, reading, eating, and exploring the shops in the little square by her hostel in sufficient particularity as to relate them to me at a party in detail, and in chronological order, many decades after first experiencing them. 

Daniel, too, would likely claim to have had such an experience himself, though I haven’t asked him about it. And I am equally certain that if I were to relate Annabeth’s experience to him, he would return with a story of his own which would be more in line with the details that Annabeth provided me than if I had kept Annabeth’s story to myself. 
That’s how he is, and I know he is not unique in that respect.

Daniel, who I call my cousin, is really my father’s half-brother’s son, and his turn to religion was a spectacle for all those in my family. 

I know this because I was more involved in family gatherings (and attendant family gossiping) in my younger years, before I faded away when I got older, as if I stepped back into the mists of New Trident and allowed them to obscure me from my family. To wash away whatever remained at that point of our filial connection. 

Daniel is in recovery from a past addiction to methamphetamine—a drug that never quite fit him right, I always felt, since he was far too energized as it was, and hardly needed the jetpacked buzz that meth gave him.

But nonetheless, he persisted in his addiction. And he continued to get high in imagined secrecy; and he continued to animate family gatherings with long, rambling tales of his post-college exploits, spreading lies about his accomplishments for his own self-aggrandizement. 

He had a son by that point, and his boy—who was no more than eleven months old—was allegedly capable of speaking in full sentences “when he wanted to.” “When he felt like it,” said Daniel. 

And it was the darnedest thing that the infant never wanted to speak (as he allegedly did in private) whenever the family was assembled and when his father positioned him just so at a family party, as though his position at the head of the long, oaken dining room table were a dais from which his infant son would pontificate. 

The collection of bemused adult faces invariably provoked the boy to cry, at which point Daniel, crestfallen, would mumble some lame excuse and hurry from the room, infant son in tow. 

The family guessed at his drug use, but it (surprisingly, looking back on it) somehow was not a point of concern. And then one day, Daniel—of his own accord—sought help at a rehab facility in Menchata, a rural Oregon agricultural town which smelled like a poisoned mixture of a paper mill and the desert. The Oregon high desert has a distinct crisp quality to it. Which is too light and unassuming to compete with the acrid stench of a paper mill, but which, at times, is capable of penetrating the paper-thin coating of fermented air and making Menchata life more palatable.

The program was only four weeks, and when Daniel returned, he seemed a changed man. 

The change was all the more evident come Christmas, when the family gathered in my grandma’s house in Mothswain, Washington, and Daniel pronounced himself a “proud and unaverring man of God.” From the date of that pronouncement, members of the family spent several years reconciling this new Daniel with the Daniel that displayed his infant son like a treasured bauble and spoke incoherently about cars or sports (or sex, when he was surrounded exclusively by his male relations) or whatever minute matter of little importance was weighing on him. 

But it was impossible for me to reconcile the two versions of Daniel; they were just too dissimilar. It was as though his old self was a varnish that he had assiduously removed and re-finished in some coat, the quality of which I was still attempting to evaluate. He at least paid lip service to something less superficial than his old regular topics of conversation, but what he spoke of now was still just words, and in that sense, nothing came of the change in himself—aside from the fact that he had successfully quit his use of meth.

His son grew into an ill-tempered boy with an intolerably shrill laugh. 

His daughter was too young to say anything about, but I thought she looked angelic sometimes, like when she slept on Daniel’s knee as he sat on his heavily stained couch, eyes glued to whatever televised sporting event was being broadcast.