Signs

One day last fall, around the time my parents came home from a summer of packing up and selling off their summer home and started packing up our regular home to sell it and move, I started seeing signs. I knew that was a bad thing. If I start seeing signs, I'm usually looking for evidence "out there" to confirm something I am trying not to feel.
I learned about signs the hard way, back when I was very young and I saw so many signs all the time that I had to talk myself out of looking for them. Things had stopped having clear meaning; everything was open to interpretation—the placement of a plant, the timing of a traffic light. I had to accept that if, for example, I was thinking that so-and-so reminded me of a horse, and then I saw a horse, even a rocking horse or a horse on a bathroom towel or something, it did not mean anything. I might want it to mean something, in order to give a sense of living power to the universe, but, sometimes a horse is just a horse.
Then came my relapse in the crisis of 1996; I was driving my car home to New York from Boston that difficult fall and I came to that point on the Westbound Massachusetts Turnpike where the big signs—the actual road signs, big green ones suspended on steel posts—say, Albany this way; New York that way. I was trying at that time in my life to decide whether I would leave New York for Albany, where a job waited. But it was breaking my heart to think of leaving New York, where I had an amazing apartment in Park Slope. I mean, this was the kind of brownstone garden apartment with a fireplace and French doors that other people get but the rest of us only dream about. And living in it, there was a girlfriend—a girlfriend who seemed to hate everything I liked in this world, but then went sort of catatonic when I mentioned the possibility of leaving, so that I might pursue the things I liked without disturbing her any longer, or making her go to see movies she despised. She would give me this ghostly dumbstruck panicked look and say, "fine." And then say, "don't leave me." And then we'd cry until we had to lie down.
I had the sick feeling that if I left we’d both die pretty fast. I can tell you—I will tell you, eventually, in the future of this narrative—that this girlfriend, R., taught me almost everything I know about panicking: how to do it, how to let it take over your life, how to prostrate yourself utterly to her highness, Anxiety, though I don’t blame R. for giving me this capacity; I was a very good student. Anyhow, that was the crisis, that year; that was the fateful fork in my personal road: move for a job with good benefits and earning potential, or stay stuck and aimless and emotionally hogtied in an incredibly cool New York apartment, and when I saw that sign hanging over my car, I became so distracted by it that I forgot to exit at all. New York: apartment, demon lover, unemployment? Or Albany: security, sanity, obscure dying city where not one of my friends will ever visit me again? And in my fog I ended up not exiting but staying on the road to Albany, when I was supposed fork right and go back to New York.
Wait, so I was heading to Albany. So, was it a sign?
Were the signs telling me that I should go to Albany instead of New York?
For a moment, instead of feeling irritated that I was now about to drive 120 miles or so out of my way (for, in my mental fog, it took me a long while to realize I had failed to turn south), I was not distressed but relieved. Here at last was a SIGN. My decision was made. Twenty pounds lifted off my shoulders. Hey-hey! But…
Or, but, wait. Wait. It was a "wrong turn." I was going to Albany because I’d made a “wrong turn.” Was heading for Albany a “wrong turn”? Was this the true “sign”? New York was home, and Albany would never be more than a mistake, a wrong turn.
I felt a terrible panic. The answer was unknowable. And meanwhile all the cars around me seemed so clear about where they were going, seemed not to sense danger all around, though it was always there. I was swept along with them; it was all I could do, just drive along in that steel pod, trapped with my uncertainty. There was a sign in there, by god; the answer was one of those two things that hung over me, but which? Which sign? I had no idea. I knew then that all I really was, in my car and in my metaphor, was lost.
And so I hated signs, then. I swore off them.

But then last fall things began vaguely to become invested with meaning to me, and I knew that I was on an emotional precipice. Things started to turn ugly, to take on a certain gloom. Were there signs that a bad change was coming? I was walking my dog Colby in the park and lately, I noticed, there had been a lot rats around. Big gray rats the size of squirrels, foraging around in the dead leaves. They really looked a lot like the squirrels, these rats. I often had mistaken them for squirrels at first glance and I had been happy to see them outside, scampering about in the leaves, getting ready for the big change in life—the change to the dark, cold winter days, the days they had to simply survive. The squirrels and the rats were busy. But the rats, well, I thought the rats should not prepare to survive the change. They should just die.

There were big gray rats in the leaves of Bennett Park. I had to look twice to know what I was seeing, as they blended in so well with the squirrels. The rats, I noticed, had adapted squirrel-like attitudes. They sort of hopped along, taking long bounding strides over the sidewalks and jumping off into the weeds to sniff around, their pink noses in the air. It was late September, and acorns covered the ground. It seemed as if the rats were gathering up the acorns, just like squirrels do, instead of just grabbing hunks of garbage and running behind a rock.
I saw a rat dash over to the base of a tree and just sit there, looking around, catching his breath, blinking into the blue sky. He did not hide, the way rats hide. He sat up and checked things out. Farther along the path, a rat shot up from a patch of grass, and after sniffing around he scootched up to the base of a tree, found another hole, and disappeared back into the ground.
Now of course I see that many trees have little holes, right at their base, and that I realize it is quite possible that rats live in all of them—all the holes, in all the trees. Rats like little hobbits. I stopped letting my dog go near them, then. The trees. The rats owned them. They were taking over. It felt ominous.
And then one day in early October, an acorn fell and hit me right on the head. It seemed funny. I said to my dear S., who was walking with me, “The squirrels! They’re attacking!”
But then I started to wonder. Could it have been a rat up in the tree? What if they had studied the squirrels to the point where they, too, took to the branches and ran through the treetops?

The rats in the trees would eventually get smart enough to drop down on our heads. They would. If the rats climbed the trees, they would eventually attack. And they could win. Finally, they would have the benefit of surprise; they would take over.
I didn't want to stop liking the park. But, I had thought of this. And the world seemed to be turning into a strange and hostile place.
I have seen people sit in the park and feed the rats. One rat, anyhow. An old person, and a hungry rat, keeping each other company. How lonely it must be to be old, if you feed rats for company.
I studied the treetops. The leaves were changing, as they do. Everything changes. Or, no; things stay the same, unchanged, for a very long time and then, BAM all at once, things change. And suddenly rats fly. And I never thought my parents would sell the house I grew up in. I mean, I knew they would. But not really. And I think about it and try to make everything that is happening all at once make sense in one brilliant uniform theory--everything is a sign, everything ties together and it's all invested with meaning, it all adds up to something I can understand. But what strikes me as I pack my parents up and throw so much of our collected lives into the trash, is that really, nothing means much at all. There are no signs, there is no meaning. And that idea has it all over treetop rats in the world of truly scary.