The Descent of Man
by Mike Nagel
I was walking around my neighborhood the other morning when I found the remains of a North Texas monkey. It was laid on its side with its tail curled between its legs.
Very National Geographic, I thought. Very Descent of Man.
I stood next to it and took a picture with my phone. It looked like it had been dead for a long time. Its bones were bleached white, and its skin had the dried-out, leathery look of an old avocado.
I couldn't help being impressed with this monkey, not least of all because North Texas monkeys don't exist. That its non-existence hadn't stopped this particular monkey from living a rich, fulfilling life in the bushes by my house struck me as a powerful testament to what Schopenhauer called our "blind incessant impulse" toward being.
Despite the drawbacks, life is still the best thing going.
⦿
"That's a dead possum," my brother-in-law said when I showed him the picture.
"No it isn't," I said. "It's a dead monkey. And you're next."
⦿
We were at my parents' house for my dad's sixty-second birthday. As a consolation prize for reaching this milestone of aging ⎯ another personal best! ⎯ we’d given him a $25 gift card to Amazon.
“Here,” we said. “You earned it.”
A few weeks earlier, my dad had become an orphan. After a long battle with old age, his father had recently died of complications due to being a ninety-four-year-old fart in the wind. I hadn't seen my grandfather in more than a decade and hadn’t spoken to him in more than two, so I was surprised to feel a sense of loss at his passing. Not because I'd known him well or anything, but because I'd known him at all. We know so few people in our lives. Most of us don't have anybody to spare.
The passing of my grandfather happened to coincide with the birth of my nephew. It was hard not to see it as one-in, one-out type of deal. My nephew had been born a few weeks early and, from what I'd understood, my grandfather had lived a few weeks too long. A kind of genetic pre-disposition toward missing our cues. Bad timing runs in my family. So does diabetes, fallen arches, and an inability to follow driving directions that involve more than one instruction.
"Take a left," someone tells us.
"A left..." we say.
"Then take a⎯"
"Never mind,” we say.
My sister had been trying to have kids for years. At thirty-nine, she was already well past the age most OBGYNs consider high-risk. That she'd managed to get herself knocked up at this age was considered something of a medical miracle. Technically speaking, my nephew shouldn't exist. According to the doctors, he'd arrived both six weeks early and five years late. The first time J and I saw him, we understood that we were in the presence of an anomaly.
J rubbed his head and kissed his cheeks, but I sat on the other side of the room, too weirded out to touch something so fresh from non-existence.
"Careful," I warned J. "You don't know where that thing's been."
⦿
I don’t have any good guesses about what happens to us after we die. Probably the same thing that was happening to us before we were born. Something completely unrelated to whatever it is that’s happening to us right now.
My paternal grandfather lived into his nineties, which seems like a good sign. My paternal grandmother died in her twenties, which seems like a bad sign. My maternal grandparents lived into their sixties and seventies, which seem like medium signs.
Is it just me, I think, or have the signs gotten a little MIXED MESSAGE lately?
I was walking around my neighborhood the other morning when I came across the remains of a North Texas skunk. Its bones were being picked clean by a pair of North Texas vultures.
"Vultures eating a skunk first thing in the morning," some guy on the walking path said. "Think that's a bad sign?"
"Man," I said. "Do I look like someone who knows what the signs mean?"
But, of course, I knew he was right. Vultures eating a skunk first thing in the morning is a bad sign. Everybody knows that.
⦿
A few years back, when I first started showing signs of some pretty serious health issues, I pretended not to know what those meant either.
"Your blood pressure is terrible," my doctor said.
"I don’t know what you mean," I said.
What bothered me most was not the severity of the issues but their unoriginality. High blood pressure. High blood sugar. High cholesterol. Things everybody has. Or has had. Or will have if they’re lucky enough to live that long. Diseases completely lacking in imagination.
"I'm not blaming you," I told my doctor. "I was just hoping for something a little sexier is all."
"What diseases do you consider sexy?" she said.
"I've always thought Lyme disease had a nice ring to it," I said.
⦿
It took me awhile to get used to the idea that my problems are the same as everybody else's. They don't run in my family. They run in my species. Most of them can be cured with diet and exercise. A mindful approach to nutrition labels. A return, let's call it, to The Fundamentals. I went to see a fundamentalist. I mean a nutritionist.
"How do you decide what to eat?" she said.
"Gut instinct," I said. "I listen to my body."
"What does your body say?" she said.
"It says, 'OH MY GOD! WHY ARE YOU EATING THAT?! HELP ME!!! SOMEONE HELP ME!!!!'"
⦿
Before my grandfather died, my dad went to see him up in Minnesota. He was living in an old farts' home outside of Minneapolis. My uncle had moved him there a few weeks earlier. He'd left the tags on all the furniture. After my grandfather died, my uncle took all the furniture back to the store. They had a 90-day return policy.
My dad said that in the last weeks of his life, my grandfather went from eating solid food to eating baby food to eating nothing at all. A whole life in reverse. It reminded me of a poster I'd seen once, done in the style of those human evolution drawings. On the left side was a baby in its cradle. On the right side was an old man in his grave. In the middle was a man standing upright, in the prime of his life.
The Descent of Man, the poster was called.
⦿
Drawbacks aside, I've known plenty of perfectly sane couples who've paid good money and gone through tremendous heartbreak and difficulty bringing new people into the world. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, they continue to believe that life is better than the alternative.
I don't have kids, but I do have a seventy-three-year-old father-in-law who recently had a stroke. We should have seen it coming. Strokes don’t just run in our family, they run in our species. On the weekends, I hang out with him for a few hours while J takes her mom shopping. He watches murder mystery shows while I read on the couch. I keep my distance, suspicious of anyone who's flirted so closely with nonexistence. I can't help thinking he knows something the rest of us don’t. Sometimes I catch him smirking. I like to wait until we're alone and then grab him by the collar.
"What's so funny, old man?" I say, pressing my nose into his. "What's so goddamn funny?"
Here's something funny. Not a joke, exactly. More of an observation.
“Ever notice how the happiest people in the world are under the age of ten or over the age of seventy-five?” someone asked me the other day.
Or like my friend Matt reminded me recently ⎯ a true-crime enthusiast and lifelong subscriber to National Geographic Magazine⎯ whenever a skull has been exhumed, it's always smiling.
Mike Nagel is the author of Duplex and Culdesac, both from Autofocus Books. Find selected nonsense at michaelscottnagel.com
