The Futilitarians

PREFACE

From the deck of a pleasure boat in the Yokohama harbor, I watched the world's largest clock recede through an early-June drizzle. The Cosmo Clock 21 is a digital display mounted in the center of an enormous Ferris wheel swirling with carnival lights. Time as amusement-park ride. It disappeared as we motored into the glittering nocturnal realm of the Shiohama Canal, whose intricate skyline of smoke and steel reflected shakily on the black water around us, intensified by low storm clouds. My husband, Brad, and I were on a nighttime industrial jungle cruise with a group that included two expat friends from New Orleans I hadn't seen in years. We passed by refineries, oil terminals, and steel mills along this dredged shipping channel of the Sumida River, cut through with a network of canals and man-made islands. The yellow logo that adorned the tour company's brochure had transformed its Japanese characters into stylized pipes, valves, and smokestacks. Language as refinery.

The crew served up a toxic-green complimentary drink, the name of which translated as "Night of Deepening Memory." Brad joked that this sounded like something we'd serve at the ECRG. Adjusting our hats and jackets in the tumult of the wet salt air, he and I explained to the others that six months earlier, at the start of the year, we'd struck up what we called an Existential Crisis Reading Group with some friends back home in New Orleans. The usual response: a blend of bemusement, appreciation, skepticism. Invoking the ECRG within that ethereal nightscape, amid massive civilization-powering machinery obscured by the eerie romance of steam and sodium lights, seemed appropriate. The ECRG had become part of how we engaged with the world, had begun to inform our lives and experiences in so many ways.

Brad went to the lounge belowdecks to see if he could get a refill of Deepening Memory, and my friends huddled with a crew member by the bridge, trying to get more information, since the tour was given in effusive, staticky Japanese and we didn't really know what was going on. I didn't mind, though, was even comfortable in the disorientation, watching girls in neat cardigans clutch the rail, holding their short skirts down against the harassing wind, and pose unsteadily in front of the brilliant menace of the gargantuan TOWA refinery. The pleasure boat lingered there, listing as couples and grinning young women rushed starboard to have their pictures taken with the backdrop of the miles of trusses and angled pipes made eloquent by light and steam.

Halfway across the planet from my home, halfway through this first year of the ECRG project, I was filled with both wonder and dread by this heightened moment, feeling its searching pull, attentive to my own reactions. This curious tour on the Sumida River seemed a fitting end to a trip to Japan defined by disaster and novelty. I'd been here to participate in an academic post-disaster symposium at a Tokyo university where one of my New Orleans friends taught. At the conference and in the bars, scholars from all over the world theorized, analyzed, and relived various individual and regional disasters, both natural and man-made, focusing on how people negotiate the aftermath, move forward. This urgent sharing of ideas and findings, the collective preoccupation with destruction and survival, the drinking, were all ground we covered during any given ECRG, only this was on a different scale, on a different continent.

As we sailed deeper into the shipping channels, it was easy to succumb to the unreality of it all, to let our minds swerve and detour. My friends joined me at the stern. At a Japanese railroad company's energy hub, enormous gantry cranes stood motionless at the water's edge, surrounded by piles of coal that looked almost scatological. One of my friends said the cranes reminded him of Cerberus guarding the gates of hell, another said a giraffe. To me, they just looked prehistoric and expectant, heads raised against the glossy night. Then we became silent and entranced again, lost in our own interpretations.

Our friend Chris had set the ECRG in motion back in December. Manic and intensely thoughtful, he would often show up at our house unannounced, his existential angst trailing and puffing restlessly around him like the dirt clouds attached to the Peanuts character Pigpen, or at other times swirling Tasmanian Devil–style, with dizzying urgency. But he's hardly cartoonish or two-dimensional, just vivid and physical, with an extra dose of animation that's deeply, internally driven. Mortally tormented and Boston Irish, Chris had spent most of his adult life in New Orleans, as an actor, burlesque MC, nonprofit administrator, and construction worker. Our house usually welcomes his particular injection of agitated anima, especially if I'm making dinner and feeling sorry for myself. Chris is a commiserator in the condition, though the trappings of our respective conditions are very different. I write, teach, have kids and a husband and days tightly bound by responsibility. Chris is like an emissary from a land I left years ago, and sometimes remember fondly, who brings exotic, weary tales of its customs—frequent, ill-advised hookups and all-night benders, and more current rituals like sexting and Facebook feuds. He had recently asked if I'd want to do some reading with him, sit down and talk through some philosophical issues one-on-one. I immediately said no, my life was already a thicket of personal obligation, but I'd be happy to do it as a group, open it up as a social venture.

So, a few weeks before Christmas, at the Hot Wok Buffet in a suburban strip mall, Brad and I made a list of names on a paper napkin. Beneath the branches of a fake tree reaching toward a chandelier galleon with Lucite sails, we discussed people we thought might be interested in an existential crisis reading group. Our two sons, twelve and five at the time, made frequent trips to the all-you-can-eat serving islands steaming and glistening with immediate gratification. Some people on the list were shoo-ins, others debated, a few eventually scratched off. The boys returned to the table with plates full of anarchy: pizza slices, sushi rolls, Jell-O cubes, and, since we live in south Louisiana, a couple of whole shrimp to dismember.

As we made the list, we realized that there did seem to be a need for something like this among our friends. Flux was the norm—divorces, jobs lost, jobs gained, children birthed, children considered, sustained economic insecurity, and unexpected windfalls. People were on edge as 2011 was winding down, and 2012 seemed to carry some portent. Chris had sent us a handmade postcard featuring the etched disc of the Mayan calendar: Let's do this! Hang on in 2012. It's going to be a wild ride. Another friend, Case, showed up at our house one day with his forearm tattooed with the admonishment Yes in 2012.

And the time felt right for me personally. My father was two years into worsening leukemia. His illness called for frequent hospital visits. Parking meters, frigid corridors, small talk with a chronically pissed-off dad, clenching fear in an elevator descending from the oncology ward, people in scrubs just doing their jobs. Weekly breakfasts with my mother, who needed someone to listen to her. Our kids were getting older and the demands of parenting becoming more complex. I found myself in the unanticipated fulcrum of midlife: balancing youth and age in my body, in my head, in my family. But, of course, there was no balance, only low-grade near-daily skirmishing.

Besides, much of my adult life had been gouged with crises. I'd crawl out of one trench only to be kicked down into another. In my late twenties, soon after I'd finished graduate school and thought I was embarking on a more accomplished, or at least certified, life, my youngest sister, Rebecca, committed suicide. A year and a half later, just as I was beginning to feel normal again, her identical twin sister, Rachel, did the same. There were eight of us growing up. Now there were six, four sisters and two brothers, a fourth of our brood gone. Losing a sibling, especially in youth, is a particular blow, a lateral loss of shared history and DNA that lacerates your identity. Your old narrative is shattered. Your new narrative becomes shapeless, full of confusion and pain. Double that.

When the worst of the grief was over and life opened up again, I met a kind, funny, creative, handsome man named Brad. Brad had suffered his own traumas. His partner had died from a brain tumor the year before, at the age of thirty-three, and left him with a three-year-old son to raise on his own. Both of us knew grief well, but were committed to living. We married within the year. Barely unpacked from our Mexican honeymoon, we were forced out of our home when Hurricane Katrina made landfall and destroyed much of the city. Stunned exiles, we forged our new family on the road, with a kind of refugee freedom and clutching love. When we were finally able to return home, our new life was overtaken by not only destruction, but also creation, as we discovered that on that Mexican honeymoon, somewhere in Oaxaca between bottles of excellent mescal, I'd gotten pregnant. In the first few years after the storm, we were in survival mode, raising young sons, engaged in civic triage and the exhausting work of reconstruction.

By 2011, life had settled. The kids were fine, our jobs were good, the city was recovering in its imperfect way. There was ample love and sometimes even happiness. Finally, some space in the aftermath for contemplation, for reckoning. It was in this space that I felt a persistent, daily, unsettling dread. I would become hollow at the checkout counter, watching items being scanned, or dazed in traffic with the kids in the backseat, convinced, vaguely, that everything was wrong, this route, my parenting, humanity. Later, through the ECRG, I would learn a name for it: the Metaphysical Hangover. When Chris approached me about the readings, it seemed like a possible remedy.

With our Hot Wok list finished that day, Brad and I paid our check beneath the glittering galleon, bellies full, anticipating an afternoon of gastric regret. Some shared qualities among the people on the list turned out to be: an oft-glimpsed sad or jittery introspective bent, niceness, a sense of humor. Some had a tendency to haunt the periphery, but a few were moths to the spotlight. All seemed to be searching, just in different places. Many of them were strangers to each other. We were wary of our own project, which we knew could by turns seem pretentious, goofy, or totally necessary. Over the next week, we approached some of the roughly twelve listees in person and sent emails to others.

Having been a little sheepish in our invitations, we were surprised at the enthusiasm of the responses. Some said yes seconds into our rambling pitch, others asked cautious questions. What do you mean by "existential crisis"? You know, an urgent moment of questioning, a desire to search for meaning or purpose. How depressing is this going to be? It doesn't have to be depressing at all. Existentialism is really about optimism and engagement, not despair… I think? How would it work? Each month someone would choose a reading, then hopefully the next month's reading would naturally arise from the discussion, keep the dialogue ratcheting forward month after month. A few names for the gathering were thrown out there—the Futility All-Stars, Existentialists Anonymous, and my favorite, the Futilitarians—but we would remain generically identified and subsequently just refer to ourselves as the Existential Crisis Reading Group. One recruit asked if we'd have a secret handshake. Sure, why not? We decided on an earnest grip, a too-long gaze, and a deep sigh.

We would head home to New Orleans the day after the pleasure cruise, which gave the night a valedictory feel. Toward the end of the tour, the boat captain asked the passengers for a show of hands as to which color of lights they had preferred, the red or the white. White won. He was pleased and talked about the spiritual healing powers of the white light and white smoke. One friend translated this as some of us furrowed our brows, skeptically. Throughout the tour, my friends, who'd also grown up in south Louisiana, kept remarking how much it reminded them of home, of the clusters of light and fire rising out of the swamps along I-10 and lining the Mississippi River like intense little cities. The same distant, intermittent drama of the flare stacks, the same petro-sharp smells that changed properties with the wind. Deepening Memory indeed.

But spiritual healing?

"People can find spiritual healing anywhere," Brad said. "Besides, this is like a night journey. A transformation that can only occur at night, outside the context of your regular life." He was referring to an ECRG reading from a few months back.

As usual, I was burrowing toward the darkness while Brad was digging toward the light. As usual, he was right. The tour did feel transformative—images that we see in our everyday lives we were now re-seeing in a different way, from a different angle, informed by new thoughts and influences, a dreamlike metaphor for the year of the ECRG. This trip to Japan, which I thought would be a break from the grief and stress of the past six months, was instead punctuating it, certifying that this truly was a time of deepening, of interrogating life.

Tomorrow, we'd cross over the international dateline, feeling scrambled and anxious to reach home, to shower gifts on our sons, to scroll through pictures and try to pass on to the boys the amazingness of everything we'd seen. Brad gathered us high school friends together for a picture on the slick deck in front of a structure that looked like a rocket launchpad about to blow. It occurred to me that we hadn't all been together like this for over twenty years, since goofing around for our senior-prom photo at a downtown hotel, masquerading as fancy adults. And here we were in a dazzling and seething shipping channel in eastern Japan. I felt a flickering amazement at how life in its arborescence keeps reconnecting us to our pasts in unexpected branching ways.

With the tour over, we headed back, weather-battered, to the pier, back to the illuminated office buildings and high-rise hotels of Yokohama, back to the Cosmo Clock 21's dizzying, spectacular countdown.