The Remembrance of Our Misdoings

The Black Veil
by Rick Moody

While still in his twenties, Rick Moody found that a decade of alcohol, drugs, and other indulgences had left him stranded in a depression so severe that he feared for his life. The road of excess led, for him, not to the palace of wisdom but rather to a psychiatric hospital in one of New York's least exalted boroughs.

The Black Veil is Rick Moody's account of that debilitating passage in his life. It is the powerfully written story of a mind unraveling, and of how it feels when the underpinnings of life fall away. The anxieties of early adulthood, of first finding a place in the world — the weight placed upon that first relationship, first job, first apartment — are presented here with enormous sympathy. Anyone who has ever felt his or her own psychological footing slip, even briefly, will find Moody's account of his breakdown and return both harrowing and heartbreaking.

At the same time, The Black Veil is an astonishing exploration of guilt, blame, the public face, and the very idea of self. Looking for clues to his lifelong sense of melancholy and shame, and recognizing signs of this same condition in his family's paternal line, Moody embarked on a search for its origins. This quest begins with fathers ("Fathers refold maps, fathers like to appear as though they have infallible knowledge of direct routes between any two points") and grandfathers ("The idea here is that you have to do the heavy lifting first"). It ventures through stone quarries in Connecticut, among mossy tombstones in Maine, into the coded diary of a tormented Puritan minister, and into the life and writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne. In these and dozens of other places, Moody finds gleaming pieces of the past, and he weaves of them an inspired portrait of what it means to be young and confused, older and confused, guilty, lost, and finally healed.

Funny, sad, and blazingly inventive, The Black Veil is another work of audacious originality by one of the most thoughtful writers of our time.

So there's the matter of our crimes. The remembrance of our misdoings is grievous to us; the burden of them is intolerable. Lies, whispered, of friends' indiscretions; instances of envy — when we hate the people we love; peccadilloes; filched office supplies; inflated expense accounts; violent obsessions of all kinds; reckless speeding; a fender bender whose scene we left; the belt from Macy's we slipped into our own belt loops (they're the easiest thing to take); a copy of Montaigne, nineteenth-century edition, never returned to the library; a kiss stolen from someone else's lover; a night out of state upon a tanned mattress when the energy of adultery seemed so persuasive that we concealed from ourselves all memory of our spouses; gifts never sent; allegiances never acknowledged; inexplicable cruelties to people with bad luck; inexplicable cruelties to friends; the waiter we upbraided that time; we cheated at cards; we cheated at tennis; we cheated at backgammon or at chess or at some board game of our childhood; we tripped that guy in the backfield and then waltzed in for the goal; we took things for granted, took privileges for rights; we demanded things in no way due us. And then with some of us there are worse crimes, crimes unspeakable, though we might write of them, like robbery, battery, or rape. We fell into coercion or abuse or full-scale embezzlement or even murder, the murder of innocents, perhaps; we committed crimes of rage so that afterward we couldn't sleep, couldn't forget, couldn't think straight, and whispered to ourselves, revisiting these instances of our transgression. There's the matter of our crimes.

Down underneath New York City, in a network of tunnels and caverns, rat populated, perspiring, rumbling, lonely, I was troubled, as I have often been troubled, by these alarums of conscience. Who knows why? I was bothered, as you may be bothered yourself, by what I had gotten wrong or by some feeling that I might have done better, or I was bothered by the conviction that I might have done without some luxury, might have put aside some vanity or selfishness. What I liked about this particular cavern of archetypes, the New York City subway system, in the intoxication of conscience, was the farthest end of the platform. I liked to stand in unpopulated spots. To get there, at my particular station, the passage was at one juncture quite narrow, around a stairwell, around a pair of I beams (weekly repainted and that day deepest blue) dank with condensation. It was a setting dangerous in ways both actual and allegorical. Nonetheless, I was purposed upon the end of the platform because I liked to ride in the last car, the car most crowded with people who lived on the trains, with men and women doing their nine to five sprawled out lengthways, their faces turned from their compatriots toward the hard shell of benches. If you are remorseful by nature, you believe that a great evil will befall you whichever way you turn. If you are remorseful by nature, around every street corner is the speeding crack- or booze-intoxicated driver who will veer up on the sidewalk for blocks, flattening pedestrians, including yourself. Your death will be lingering and painful. Thus I often imagined in this particular dangerous setting that I would be pushed from the platform into the path of an oncoming train. I imagined the aftermath, the dismemberment, the morphine drip, a head injury that rendered me speechless or paralyzed. Headlines in the Post. In consideration of my fate — in the landscape of NYC nightmares, where the riders sometimes tongue-lashed one another — I was passing around the I beam I've described, through the narrowest spit of platform, when I came up short in front of an impasse. A fellow New Yorker. Lost in a dance of circumnavigation — should I go left, should I go right — I paid little attention to my dance partner until this New Yorker began to hide, like a sprite, like a pixie, behind the I beam that separated us. To allow my own unimpeded passage to the end of the platform? To push me to my death? Maybe. I intended to catch a look at him, if he were a he, as I passed around the sturdy navy blue I beam. I intended a bland smile of appreciation. I intended to acknowledge our mutual awkwardness by catching his eye, by catching the spot where his life's experience was etched for appreciation. The spot where his harried but polite New York visage might await me, or maybe his furrowed brow, his impatience and irritation, maybe his contempt.

But there was no face for me to see.

He was faceless. This guy. Instead of a face there was a large hooded garment, a sort of ski jacket, probably, an anorak, a cloak, just about, a costume from The Seventh Seal, and accordingly this hood hung down over his face, not just over his forehead, so that no face was apparent there at all, none whatever, no chin, no patch of unshaven neck, no stubble, no face at all but just the hood, in a kind of dusty, grimy taupe, swinging this way and that, a loose integument, so as to permit whatever infrared eyes my fellow New Yorker had beneath his garment to do little but steal a glimpse of the immediate ground before him, if that. The ski jacket was enormous, a body suit; it hung down about the knees, over gray, fouled chinos. He wore gloves. Work shoes. He had some kind of battery acid cologne. So here he was, Death, that personage of the Middle Ages. The guy from the D?rer engravings. He kept the I beam between us and then swiveled up the platform, like a pinball caroming off bumpers, startling locals up and down the platform, a gaggle of parochial-school kids, lawyers jabbering (fresh from the courthouse), the elderly, teens who shouldn't have been scared of anything, least of all another subway freak.

On American mass transit, I have, as all New Yorkers have, seen every variation on sorrow. Watched the guys in the two-seaters with their faces in their hands, wound into postures of despair, was even one of these guys myself, riding the express to midtown the morning of my sister's death, hunched over during rush hour, red and raw, mutely sobbing, with no fellow rider to ask, Are you okay? Subways are the high-volume freight carriers of despair. In time — through the triumph of deinstitutionalization — you learn on the trains a lot about disorders of the soul, you live with schizophrenics, manic-depressives, drug addicts, homeless people, religious pilgrims, panhandlers, and thus, upon the platform, the sudden appearance that day of a man who entirely concealed his face from his community should not have been entirely astonishing. But it was. I did a jig with Death, he went left, I went left, and I gazed at him (on this dreary road, darkened by all the gloomiest trees of the forest), and could not move, was paralyzed until he fled. Was he badly disfigured? Did he haunt the far end of the platform like an untouchable, secreting himself to spare me the horror of his appearance? Was he driven by hallucinatory voices? Was he evading pursuers, was he on the lam, having ratted out some crime syndicate? And what's in a face, anyhow, except the uncomplicated story of a man? What's in a face that makes it the nail on which we hang our ideas about people?

A train thundered into the station and I got on. In spite of the certainty that I had long since seen all the worst that New York City had to offer, I felt heavy with the dark reverberations of some spirit world. Through subway windows covered with scratched names, I watched that ghost make his way up the platform and I felt safer for being shut away from him. His gait was reckless. Yet somehow he was able to see beneath the hem of his cowl. He threw himself impulsively about the platform. Parochial-school kids scattered out of his path. My train lingered with the door open. Would he slip ultimately onto the car? Would he sit with me? Could I talk to him? Would he answer? What catalog of woes would he enumerate? And what would his voice be like? Was it my own voice, a mockery of my voice, flush with bad news about my failures? Don't be ridiculous. Death had no intention of riding my train. Death was not that methodical. The doors rattled shut, and as they did, as we pulled away, this familiar momentarily passed out of my waking thoughts.

Still, I began to imagine, in some other register of consciousness, that unlike the permanent vagrant population of my neighborhood — the Vietnam vet by Borough Hall, the guy with the crutch in front of St. Anne's Church — this apparition really was the projection of my troubled conscience, the personification called forth by a certain average, guilty, middle-class taxpayer. He was my homeless person, my particular deinstitutionalized person, my symbol, my poltergeist. By which I mean that the ghost of the subway station, by his one appearance, ushered forth in me things that long preceded him or his appearance on the platform; the ghost of my subway station was a ghost from my childhood, and perhaps a ghost from before my childhood, so strong was his symbolic heft; like all enduring images, he was spectacularly uncanny, he was something which should remain hidden but which has come to light, he was part of the lore of family, of the very constitutional fabric of family.

Copyright © 2002 by Rick Moody

About the Author

Rick Moody is the author of Demonology, Purple America, The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven, The Ice Storm and Garden State, which won the Pushcart Press Editors' Book Award. He is a past recipient of the Addison Metcalf Award and a Guggenheim fellowship. Moody has contributed fiction and essays to most major publications and has been widely anthologized. He lives in New York.