Jim thought so too. After a few early misadventures that rattled him badly yet lacked severe consequences, he pushed on in his career as a sailor, confident that his luck would be better next time. But in Conrad’s world, the sea wins every toss of the
coin. Jim’s life-turning confrontation with fate occurred when he found himself the chief mate on a dubious freighter loaded with Muslim pilgrims making its way across the Red Sea from India to the Arabian peninsula. Life and work on board a freighter was a particularly grim comedown for Jim. Nevertheless, on the fateful evening, the sea was as smooth as glass, the sun set to the sound of the Islamic call to prayer—an eerie, exotic, yet deeply peaceful wail—and Jim felt briefly at truce, if not in harmony, with the vexing world. Then, in the night, the ship slid over a submerged object, perhaps (as speculated later in court) a waterlogged, half-sunken wreck. In the awful aftermath, it became obvious that the freighter would sink and there were not enough lifeboats for even a small portion of the passengers. Facing certain death, as they say, Jim made his terrible choice. He escaped with the ignoble captain and crew, abandoning their human cargo.
The horror we feel at our own weakness and failing—is it made worse when the consequences are also horrible or when they are banal? In a particularly cruel twist, the freighter did not sink but was found listing on placid seas and towed back to port, the human cargo bemused by the adventure, confident that God had preserved them. While Jim was relieved so many lives were spared, this fortunate ending only highlighted his cowardice and exposed his missed chance. He knew in hindsight that he should have stayed on board, the only remaining crew member, and that if he had done so, he would have been seen as a hero now, the personification of valour, as though his virtue alone had kept the ship afloat. Wishing he had done so, however, was a kind of torture, because he understood, at the raw pit of his
soul, that bravery without consequence was mere vanity, a show of virtue rather than the real thing. He was nailed to the cross of his shame twice over. There was an eagle ripping at his liver and a snake dripping venom on his forehead both.
Of course, not everyone would feel such complicated self-loathing, and ultimately that is what makes Jim noble and makes his story worth telling. He earned the scars he’d always wanted, but he could not appreciate or accept the accomplishment they marked. The crew, on the other hand, was light about its guilt. The captain and the others sneaked away from the trial like thieves in the night while Jim remained behind to face the consequences of judgment alone. As a result, he came to bear a disproportionate weight of the blame and responsibility for what happened.
It is the willing acceptance of this weight that interested Conrad, or his narrative stand-in, the famous Marlow. That sense of burden, that weight, is revealed over the next several hundred pages in Jim’s delicate, almost aesthetically refined sensibility. He told Marlow his story, exposing his shame, agonizing over every detail of his failing and every facet of his cowardice. He bore the punishment and the shunning of his fellow men. He tried to make a simple but honourable life for himself, incognito, in ports across the region, and so he lived as a wanderer, almost a monk, moving ever eastward into the obscure depths of the Orient whenever his true identity was discovered. He did this despite the fact that many were willing to forgive him. Indeed, some even admired him because his self-delusions had been so cruelly stripped and the remaining virtues were so exceedingly pure. But Jim
could never accept this forgiveness or admiration. It was intolerable to him.
I wanted to believe that of myself as I travelled the same Far East, a region still replete with the exotic mysteries Conrad described. Like Jim, I watched sunsets off the sterns of ferries, and listened to the call to prayer on the glasslike sea. Like Jim, I experienced quick storms that seemed accusatory in their malevolence. Like Jim, I recovered from injuries in breezy hospital wards and spent endless hours in open-walled cafés, surrounded by expats but separate from them. I wanted to believe that I was in search of a new code. That I was learning the virtues of simplicity after a period of excess and delusion. That I had been tested by a cruel fate not entirely my own fault and that the harsh knowledge of my personal weaknesses had scarred me. That I was burdened by consequence and untethered by wreckage. That my character had been polished as a result. At the same time, proving that self-delusions are forever dangerous, I hoped that this mysterious past made me a more enticing encounter, a more desirable sex partner, a more cunning writer.
Unlike Jim, however, I hadn’t faced my trial or borne any undue burden of justice, and I knew the truth of that even though I could tell a good story when I hinted at the particulars of my past in suitably disdainful but actually self-flattering ways. The vanity of unearned virtue was strong in me.
Not
all of childhood is so heavy or dark. In fact, if you’re lucky enough to escape abuse, hardly any of it is. As a result, you forget lessons easily. You don’t know who you really are, so you go
on trying illusions and fantasies of the self, and sometimes they are very comfortable, and the world is tolerant enough to let you wear them for a while. I’m not sure if that’s the reprieve of youth or another manifestation of its cruelty.
We roll forward a few years, from the night of the tree fort, and its unknowable consequences, to the summer before I began college. We move from age fourteen to age eighteen. That’s not so long to jump, though it seemed an eternity at the time. A similar span, say from thirty-nine to forty-three, would not feel nearly as significant. Though you round the hump of a fourth decade and enter middle age, you’re likely to have the same job, the same family, the same monthly mortgage payments, the same car. Your progression through that phase in your life is incremental or gradual even though it can pass in an eye blink. In contrast, the years between fourteen and eighteen are filled with abrupt disruptions, noticeable changes in your physical body, your outlook, your understanding, and in the kind and intensity of your experiences, and yet in spite of all the excitement, the many events, nothing in particular seems to happen, and you crawl through the desert of time on your hands and fucking knees, delirious for some longed-for destination. Maybe mathematicians would chalk the difference up to the proportional amount of time experienced to that point. When you’ve lived only fourteen years, piling on another four means making it a third further and then some. In comparison, four years when you are forty is only a tenth of your lifespan and a relatively lesser portion. But I don’t think the mathematicians have it quite right. There’s something else going on, and I can only point to the episodic eternities of youth, the way
conversations and homework and summers and awkward feelings constitute little forevers among themselves. Math is not quite up to the task of explaining time, just as it falters when trying to explain motive.
Fourteen to eighteen. In the movie, two actors would need to play me to make the transformation convincing. And yet, I don’t want to sweep over four such years without suggesting some of the things we did and felt in between. After all, those were the four years that tightened our friendship. If, when I was fourteen, I was one friend among many walking through the dark woods to Paul’s tree fort, by the time we were eighteen, the gang had fallen away, and only Chris and I remained. It would not be correct to suggest that we spent zero time with others, but he and I were always together and had achieved the semi-permanence of best friends. You can imagine the many different things we did as a duo—we played baseball and hockey, we stole alcohol and got drunk, we climbed trees, groped girls and once or twice got groped in turn, we punched brick walls just to see how it would feel, killed frogs, complained about parents and school, revisited old jokes and old experiences, made up new ones, laughed until our sides hurt, wandered shopping malls, and had many, many what-if conversations about things we might do, things we ought to do, things we wouldn’t dare do, things we’d dare that no one else ever would. One of those persistent conversations involved a life of crime, but I did not take it seriously then, and I don’t think Chris did either.
Even with so much time spent together, Chris remained a mystery to me. I knew where he lived and I knew his parents and I knew his grades and how remarkably far he could throw
a baseball and that he did not like potato chips but did like ice cream. But I still worried about what he would think about the things I said and how he would react to the things I liked or did. I did not trust that we would always be friends. He was above me in too many ways. Bigger, stronger, more graceful, mistake free. He always said or did the right thing at the right moment. I may have been wittier, but my wit was of the reckless, floundering kind. I played the self-mocking fool, perhaps because I feared that’s exactly how I came across. I was ambitious, but my ambition was loud. Even when I didn’t talk about it, you could hear the banging and clanging in my brain, see the herky-jerky nerve spasms pass through my limbs. I wanted to be a writer, and Chris supported that, but I feared the writing profession was a shameful, unrealistic, and unworthy goal, a bit like choosing to be homosexual. Chris had plans too, but they were quieter, somehow better conceived, and more daring and awe-inspiring. Specifically, he wanted to be a police officer, perhaps after serving a stint in military special forces, and I had no doubt that he would be a trained expert called upon to handle dangerous missions and that he would live in a spare penthouse apartment overlooking the city, visiting it after bouts of extended international travel involving the occasional assassination.
It goes without saying that he got laid before me. Getting laid was our abiding obsession throughout most of our teens (and beyond) and for a time, Chris and I paced each other in failure. I took some comfort in that, some solace in the shameful number of times I jerked off daily, knowing that if even Chris remained a virgin, my own predicament must not be entirely my fault. But then, when he actually got laid the
summer before his senior year in high school (by screwing the daughter of a family friend, who happened to be a prosecutor, in town for a visit), I never felt so alone in my life. Those who say virginity is no big deal are standing on the far side of the great divide. There is an enormous and devastating distance between zero and one, between yes and no, between have you or haven’t you. To my eyes, Chris carried himself differently after that, he was even more self-assured, and I felt more desperate, ridiculous, and clownish. It did not help that he continued to get laid, on a persistently regular but randomly partnered basis over the next few years, while I continued to grope and flounder more or less pointlessly, except for the occasional encounter that went much but not all of the way, during which I would feel relieved as hell that someone else was masturbating me for a change, even though I probably could have done the job better myself.
In
the last summer before we started robbing banks, the summer after high school for me, I was once again forced to confront the extent to which our lives had diverged. It started out as an innocent mid-July afternoon at the lake. I had a day off from the bank where I worked as a temporary replacement for tellers who were on vacation. Chris had decided to take a day off from his summer job, pulling rickshaw in the city. In our bathing suits, it was glaringly obvious how our different choices of summer employment had affected us. Actually, I’d had no choice in employment at all. I’d wanted to pull rickshaw with Chris but my parents wouldn’t allow it. They seemed to think it
was a sketchy job and wanted me to earn a steady and regular paycheque while gaining useful work experience. I didn’t put up much of a fight because I knew I couldn’t win. I didn’t have any freedom. But I could see now what a terrible mistake I’d made. Chris was tanned from head to foot and had gained the physical tautness and brute strength of a gladiator. His calf muscles, when he dove into the water, had the sinewy carved quality of knotted tree roots. His shoulders and biceps were rounded and swollen. A swimming race to the floating dock left me heaving for breath, pale and flat chested, a half-dead flounder, him smiling easily, slick as a porpoise.
Still, we were having a good day until the girls showed up and further exposed my pitiful life. We spotted them on the far shore of the lake. We could tell they were girls because they wore bikinis and lay down on towels. We were the only four people at the lake that afternoon and it was impossible not to be aware of each other’s presence. Chris and I sat Indian style and debated what they looked like, how much they wanted us, and what delights they could offer. Then, to my heart-pounding surprise, we realized they were waving at us.
It was the kind of mating dance teenagers do all the time, but this time it was happening to me. We waved back, Chris with amusement, me with a shipwrecked desperation. A few minutes went by and we resumed chatting, though I couldn’t concentrate. Then a voice carried over the water and asked what we were doing.
Chris arched an eyebrow and grinned. I could think of nothing to say. So Chris yelled on our behalf.
Watching you!
A dialogue started up then, but it was the most absurd conversation ever. Each time they spoke, we had trouble making out their words and needed to yell for them to repeat. Whenever we called over, our words seemed to collide with theirs halfway across the water. After yet another miscommunication occurred, Chris gave up.
This is fucking stupid, he said.
He was right. But I could have cried and torn out my hair in frustration.
Come on over and get us.
I was sure that was what they yelled, but Chris disagreed.
What the hell do you think they said, then? I asked.
Chris shrugged. Maybe they said, We like burritos with lettuce.
He could be such a motherfucker sometimes.
Had they seen my rubber dinghy? It was the only possible answer.