The 33rd Year

The 33rd Year

A Novel

Copyright 2016 by Neal A. Yeager

Smashwords Edition

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And John was clothed with camel’s hair,

and with a girdle of skin about his loins,

and he did eat locusts and wild honey.

—Mark 1:6

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V

Part VI

Part VII

Maybe it was the thought that Jesus died at 33. Maybe that’s what did it. Although now that I think about it, it’s probable that Jesus didn’t have a damn thing to do with it. Maybe it was that at 33 I realized that I had already achieved most of my goals in life—I was old enough to be disillusioned with success yet still young enough to be really bothered by that disillusionment. But maybe that wasn’t it either. Maybe it was just stress. Or maybe there actually is such a thing as Fate. I really don’t know. All I know is that it was at 33 that a certain shift occurred, a shift which first showed its strange face when, at 33, I really started thinking about DEATH.

That’s right. DEATH.

Now don’t turn around and walk away. Please. I promise you that these DEATH thoughts were just a starting point. After all, if you want to start thinking differently you first need to have a different thought. If you want to gain enlightenment you first need to open up your eyes and look at what you don’t want to see. So, as twisted as it sounds to be thinking of DEATH these morbid musings opened up some other part of my brain which ended up thinking some much better stuff later on. Trust me. But there in the first weeks of my 33rd year all I knew was that I could not stop thinking about DEATH.

Not just thinking about it, obsessing about it. DEATH is usually one of those subjects that you just kind of shove into the background. Who really wants to think about it? I don’t imagine that anybody does. It’s just not the type of subject that you like to dwell on for any length of time. But I dwelt on it. Constantly. DEATH. DEATH. DEATH. DEATH. DEATH. DEATH. DEATH.

By the way, have you ever been impaled on a fence? Just asking.

I think this time saw my first inkling of The Flow—what I like to call The Flow—but at the time it was just this strange feeling that I couldn’t put my finger on. It was as if there were puzzles pieces floating around in my head but they refused to connect themselves. I could almost feel it, a physical sensation of things floating around inside my head. The puzzle pieces floated in slow motion—imagine swimming though molasses, that’s the physical feeling these thoughts produced inside my skull. Floating. Floating...

Before all of this I had always been proud of my ability to focus, focus, focus. You don’t get to where I’d gotten in my career without focus. Without drive, without single-minded determination, without constantly paying attention to your goals you simply do not become an upper-level executive at a large corporation. I was a professional, dammit: smart, driven, successful. Yet there I was... floating.

Let me give you an example: one day I realized that the image on my computer screen was made up of thousands of little dots. So what? Right? But I stared deeply into my screen, entranced by the dots. It seemed like there was something deep about the fact that the dots were always there yet you never saw them. You only saw the picture they created. And in my head I could feel those puzzle pieces floating around. This feeling felt wrong, yet it felt right. Every day a different strange thought. Every day that floating. And behind it all, every day were thoughts about DEATH.

Now, let me clarify that earlier remark about Jesus. It was during my 33rd birthday party at this fancy restaurant downtown that someone stuck the idea of Jesus in my head. He meant it as a joke when he said that if I survived this year I would have lived longer than Jesus. But something about that got to me. Though I’ve never considered myself to be particularly religious I couldn’t get the image of Jesus’ death out of my head. It wasn’t the religious aspect of Jesus that got me, rather it was the Crucifixion that wouldn’t leave my head. Can you imagine what it must feel like to be crucified? To be strapped to a couple of cross beams then to have sharpened stakes explode through your hands and feet? What pain there must be. What blood.

Through the rest of the party I couldn’t get this image out of my mind. At one point I felt a sense of moisture on the back of my hand. My mind immediately screamed, blood! But as my glance shot down to my hand I realized that I was shaking so badly that what I had felt was my drink spilling over onto my hand. I quickly put down the glass, jammed the quaking hands into my pockets and dashed out of the room. For quite some time I stood on the balcony overlooking the city lights and shivered. Shivered uncontrollably.

I began to imagine what DEATH might be like. I would lie in my bed at night, staring at the ceiling, terrified that if I closed my eyes they might never open again. I thought of how cold DEATH must be, like a layer of ice covering your entire body. Forever. I thought of the darkness inside of a casket. Occasionally I thought of Heaven, sometimes of Hell, but mostly the terror of fading to nothing. The coldness of oblivion.

Again, please hang with me. Morbidity was just the beginning which led into something much better. I swear.

Just so you know, as far as I’m aware I’m not terminally ill—except in the sense that we are all terminally ill, all headed toward the end—so that wouldn’t explain anything. Certainly you would expect someone going through chemotherapy to have those thoughts. But a healthy person? A relatively young person? A well-off person with a loving wife and a beautiful home in a well-to-do neighborhood and all of the fancy toys he could ever think of possessing? My cars were fully loaded and fully paid for. So why the DEATH thoughts? What in the world was going on here?

Maybe this happens to everybody. Maybe not everybody at 33 precisely, but everybody at some time or another. Or, if not everybody, then to enough people that it wouldn’t be considered abnormal. It could be that people think about DEATH obsessively for a while and then it just fades into the background of everyday life—like it was before. Like maybe it should be.

But it wouldn’t let go of me. It hung on.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that I enjoyed thinking about DEATH. It’s not like I was fantasizing about committing suicide in some novel way or something. No. In fact, the topic scared the hell out of me. But for some reason I just couldn’t let it go. The fear didn’t stop me. In fact, the fear seemed in a way to be driving me forward. It was so consuming that there for a while I had to wonder if maybe there wasn’t something wrong with me. You know, something wrong with my head.

Now I’m not a psychiatrist so I don’t really know what constitutes mental illness. How is it defined? If you are mentally ill are you always mentally ill from the day you’re born until the day you die, with your illness exhibiting itself more at some times than at others? Or do you just go crazy? And how far do you have to go to be considered having gone crazy? Does impaling oneself on a fence while delirious from pneumonia qualify?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. But after a whole lot of thought on the matter, I am convinced that I was not, am not, mentally ill. I don’t think I was going crazy. I think that I was just beginning to think about things in a different way. And thinking about things in a different way feels, well, weird. Add to that the fact that society has often labeled people who thought in a different way as being crazy. Actually, I suppose that’s probably society’s definition of crazy: one who doesn’t think the way that everyone else does. And since I was a member of that society when I first started really thinking differently it is perfectly understandable that I was gripped by a paranoia that maybe I was just going nuts. But now I know better.

The first thing that seemed off was when I started going to cemeteries. I think most people like to avoid cemeteries, vampires excluded of course. But I found myself drifting toward them more and more often, pulled by a strange fascination that I didn’t understand. Several times a week I would find myself standing outside the cemetery gates, hands shaking in the pockets of my overcoat, yet my mind felt the pull, felt the strange allure dragging me inside this place once again. This peaceful place. This beautifully landscaped place. This was where DEATH lived.

Where I found myself especially drawn was to the new graves — fresh, as they say. Here was a person who until very, very recently had been a person. Had been breathing. Had probably been walking and talking. Had been an actual human being—and we’re talking only a few days ago. This was a living being who would not appreciate being placed in a box and buried under six feet of clay. The thought of being buried alive is terrifying yet a few days ago that is exactly what would have happened to these people. But now they didn’t mind it?

Or did they?

What if when you’re dead you have an awareness that you are being buried? God, that would be terrifying. I started wondering what if dead people are just in a state that they can’t express their horror? Kind of like lobsters. You know, people throw live lobsters into a pot of boiling water. But what if lobsters could scream? Could you imagine being in a fancy restaurant and hearing aaaaaaaaaaaah! from the kitchen? I can’t imagine that we would do that to lobsters if they could scream. Or what if, one better, what if lobsters could talk? Then in addition to the screaming, you’d get something like, aaaaaah! Get me outta here! Oh, you dirty bastards! Aaaaaaaaaaah!

Luckily that doesn’t happen. And luckily when we pile the dirt onto a deceased person we don’t hear screams of horror and noisy banging and clawing from the inside of the coffin.

I spent a lot of time at cemeteries. So much time that I became something of a cemeteriologist. I discovered that there are different varieties of cemeteries and they evoke different feelings. The older cemeteries are interesting because you realize that these people have been gone a long time. A hundred years ago this person was a person just like you or me, going about his daily life. He had his problems to work out. He had his joyful moments. And then one day that’s it.

He’s put in the ground and now a hundred years have passed. Not only is he gone, all traces of him are probably gone. The house he built has probably been bulldozed over to make room for a new mini-mall. All of his possessions have gone onto the trash heap. And the worst thing is that everyone who ever knew him is gone as well. No one remembers this man. He’s gone. Forever. And a hundred years have gone by and a hundred more will go by and a hundred more. Yet he’s not coming back. And that’s the feeling that you come away with from an old cemetery. An image of the relative pointlessness of that tiny little time spent alive as compared to the giant chasm of eternity which passes by. And passes by. And passes by...

A newer cemetery gives you more of that feeling that I was talking about earlier—that realization that this death happened in the present. Not a hundred years ago but last week. While you were driving to work last Tuesday this person was dying. DEATH is here. It’s always with us. And any moment DEATH may damned well be coming to wrap its bony fingers around you. It’s here. It’s now. It’s all around you.

Stand beside a new grave and the smell of the freshly turned earth really hits you. Sometimes, I would kneel down and pick up a handful of this loose soil—disturbed only recently. I would stare at the dirt in my hands, running it through my fingers, letting it fall to the fresh grave of the latest victim of mortality. And my thoughts floated...

Another kind of cemetery is a veterans’ cemetery. Row after row of identical headstones. The thoughts that you come away with from one of those are more along the lines of what a waste. You really dwell on the thought of war. And how stupid it seems that all of these people had to die. And why? Why do we need to kill one another to work out problems? Those are the thoughts that greet you at a veteran’s cemetery. Also the enormity of it. That many of these people died at the same time. Born in different places, leading different lives, some happy, some sad, only to come together at this one moment in time to be snuffed out in one bloody, brutal stroke. Sudden, enormous waste.

Then there’s the type of cemetery that you don’t find everywhere: the celebrity cemetery. Now this is a damned odd thing because you actually see tour buses making their way through them. It’s kind of obscene but there they are. Yet there is a certain attraction in seeing famous graves. And I guess the thought that comes up there is one of no matter how rich or famous you are there’s a plot waiting for you somewhere. You can’t buy your way out of it. Whether you’re talking about the Egyptian pharaohs or Hollywood movie stars it all ends the same way. DEATH.

The point of all the preceding was just to let you in on where my brain was heading at the age of 33. Up until then, I had led a fairly normal, definitely successful life. I had been by all outward societal measures happy. But then it all changed.

Now the thing about obsessing over DEATH is that it leads you toward other thoughts. The kind of thoughts that you don’t usually think because you don’t usually head down that path. The big thoughts. Thoughts about things like, oh, say, God. Certainly DEATH and God go together. Sounds odd to say it that way, but I think that’s an accurate way to put it. Some people say that God is life, but if that’s true then you also have to think that God is DEATH.

Do you not?

If you credit God with life, well, you have to blame him for death too. That’s assuming of course that there even is a God to whom can be assigned credit or blame. And those kinds of thoughts pop into your head as well. What if there is no God? No Heaven? No Hell? What if when your life stops you just stop? Stare down at enough graves and you can’t help but come away convinced that maybe that’s all there is—dirt, dust, decay...

So we can see how my thoughts flowed from DEATH to God to existence to Hell to even extraterrestrials. Okay, I didn’t mention the extraterrestrials, but those thoughts were there too. Once your thought process heads down the path of thinking about those things that we all avoid thinking about, it becomes like a snowball effect. At least it was for me.

Still there’s that feeling. That feeling that things are drifting around in your head and if they would just link together you might feel a whole lot better. But they refuse to link. They just won’t do it. They floated and floated and floated and floated...

Maybe if there had been someone to bounce things off of, then maybe that would have helped. I don’t know. Maybe discussing these things with someone else might have prevented them from growing so big in my mind—and in hindsight, what a tragedy that would have been! To have missed out on all of this!

Anyway, I thought about discussing things with my wife but, I don’t know, it just didn’t feel right. Maybe that was a marital problem. Maybe if you really love someone then you should be able to discuss anything with them. Hell, I found it impossible just to ask her to try new sexual positions, let alone tell her that I felt like I might possibly be losing my mind and that my eternal soul might not be far behind. I couldn’t do that. However, I don’t think that would qualify as a marital problem. I loved my wife. She loved me. We were close. We were just different people. And we were the kind of people who didn’t talk about things like that.

So who could I talk to? For a while I thought that maybe a priest, or a preacher or a Buddhist monk or something. Surely someone like that had put more thought into these big questions than had most ordinary people. Of course even if he had, he would have a slant wouldn’t he? It’s like a car salesman might be an expert on cars but he’s going to steer you toward the car that he’s selling. So would a preacher lead you to his religion’s explanation of the big questions while there might be other, very different answers out there.

So who could I turn to who might help me try to figure things out? How about the Internet? I could go about this the same way that I would research statistics for my job. But the first problem was: what am I looking for? I went to a search engine and just stared at it. Enter the word you would like to search for, it said. Well, what the hell am I going to enter there? The big questions? I don’t know. I think that this calls for narrowing the search a bit. But how can I narrow the search when it’s the big stuff that’s exactly what I’m looking for?

I was, quite simply, lost.

Remember a while ago when I said that the first odd thing—you know I shouldn’t use the word odd because that brings us back to that sticky definition of mental illness; instead I should say the first thing that was not ordinary for me. The first non-ordinary thing was the cemetery visitation. But that was something that nobody noticed. Since I didn’t tell people where I was going and since I didn’t stay there for unusual lengths of time, my little hobby didn’t attract attention. It was my little secret. If it was a clue to some mental slippage, I was the only one available to see that clue.

The first non-ordinary thing that anybody noticed was when I went for a walk one Saturday afternoon... and didn’t come back until Sunday night.

That was noticed.

My wife went through a rather interesting emotional sequence when I came back. First was extreme relief. She had naturally assumed that I had been run over by a truck and her imagination had apparently been running wild with images of my frail little human body squished beneath the wheels of some monstrous vehicle. So she was elated to see me on Sunday night. When she asked me what happened and I told her that I had just been out walking, since the previous afternoon, she was puzzled.

After she had some time to think about the fact that I had wandered off without telling her, that I was not squished but hadn’t had the courtesy to pick up a phone and call her, next came anger. Then as she looked deeply into my eyes, next came worry as she must have been herself grappling with the definition of mental illness and of how it might apply to her husband—I think that pretty much anyone in her situation would wonder if her mate had just lost his friggin’ mind. After that she swung back to great relief and we made love on the living room floor.

But before that, back on Saturday afternoon I had been washing the dishes—you know, the ones that you have to wash by hand because they won’t ever come clean in a dishwasher—and I suddenly had this uncontrollable urge to walk. Just walk. Now, I was not in the habit of walking just to walk. That theory never made a whole lot of sense to me. Our ancestors had to walk because they did not have luxury automobiles. Modern people no longer club their meals into submission before lunchtime and they don’t walk someplace that they can drive. Maybe I was feeling some ancient stirrings of my Neanderthal past. Or is it Homo Habilis past? Anyway, I wanted to walk. I felt like I needed to walk.

I looked down at the hand which held the soapy squeegee. It was shaking. My hand was actually shaking. And as I saw my shaking hand, I felt an anxiety passing through my entire body, feeling like a low-current electric shock. My heart raced. And something in my head yelled Walk! It was not a suggestion, it was a command, Walk!

So I walked.

I think I called out to my wife that I was going to the market. I must have done that because that’s where she thought that I had gone. I then grabbed my car keys—and who the hell knows why I grabbed car keys to go for a walk—and I walked out the front door.

I was shaking. Head to toe shaking. The electricity ran through my body. I could feel my heart pounding and I knew that walking was the only solution. If I would walk then that electricity would dissipate into the air. If I didn’t walk then it was likely to fry me alive. So, you can bet that I walked.

Didn’t know where I was going. Didn’t care. It was just the walking that was important. So I walked down the street, turned the corner, went down to the next block, went straight for about a mile or so, turned left there by the market, and kept walking and walking and walking...

I had never really stopped to do the math before, but I remember once hearing that a human being walks at an average pace of 3 miles an hour. So from Saturday afternoon to Sunday night adds up to 29 hours, times 3 equals 87 miles. I didn’t make quite that good of an average. I only went approximately 72 miles. Not bad, but a bit disappointing for someone like me to be less than average.

Actually, averages aside, I was surprised at how far I walked. It seemed much faster than I would have thought. I guess it was because I wasn’t really thinking about the walking. My head was swimming with those puzzle pieces that floated and wouldn’t click together. More than two this time. Many more than two. But every now and then I’d come out of that head-swimming and I’d look around and realize just how far I’d come.

And I kept going.

Why so far? Why so long? I don’t know. To this day I don’t know. Truth be told, I probably would have turned around after about half an hour or so if it weren’t for the cut.

By the half-hour mark my shaking had stopped. My heart no longer felt like it was going to explode out of my chest. My thoughts were coming back to their normal focus. So I began thinking about heading back home, wondering just what in the world I thought I was doing in the first place. But as I was walking I walked past this chain-link fence. And just like a little kid would do I dragged my fingers along the fence. There’s that weird thunk, thunk, thunk sound as you drag fingers along a fence. And that’s really when you notice that you have tendons, when you feel your fingers snapping back with each little ridge of the fence. Snap, snap, snap, thunk, thunk, thunk. Until you do that you don’t really notice that you even have tendons. It’s strange how something you live with can go completely unnoticed until you drag it along a fence.

Slash!

As I was dragging my fingers I came across a sharp section of the fence and it cut me pretty good. My first reaction was the natural one: I snapped the hand back, I grabbed my finger with my other hand, I waved the held finger around in the air, I stamped my feet on the pavement and I cursed profusely.

After those reflex actions I looked at the cut. I saw that it was bleeding so I wrapped my shirt around it. Natural enough, right? But then I got another series of non-usual thoughts. Why was I stopping the bleeding? Because when I was a little kid my mom told me to? Animals don’t cover up