Four ways of looking at manslaughter: "No Time Like the Present" by Gabriel Brownstein

Gabriel Brownstein's short story "No Time Like the Present" is one of those narratives that give enough ammunition to various ways of reading it that you could make a plausible case for  interpretations that are directly contradictory to other possible readings. It's like the Bible: if you want to show that God is anti-capitalism, you can find it in there. If you want to show that God is pro-capitalism, you've got passages you can pull out of there, too. I can think of at least four ways to read this story, four "what it's really about" statements. First, a summary:

Summary of plot

Sebastian has anxiety, and the night before his wife goes in for a lumpectomy, his anxiety plays such havoc on him, it leads to a series of events that will likely completely wreck his apparently mostly happy life. After his wife takes a pill and goes to sleep the night before her procedure, he is unable to stop worrying about the broken front door handle. He imagines people will break into the house, or there will be a fire they can't escape. So he goes out into the middle of the night to get a new handle from the hardware store, forgetting his wallet on the stand by the door where he put it when he was trying to fix the door.

He's drunk, because he'd been trying to use whiskey to deal with the anxiety of the surgery. Presumably, when he started drinking, he never intended to go out driving, but once the anxiety took hold of him, he was helpless to tell it to wait until he was sober. When he realizes at the store he doesn't have his wallet, he steals the new handle. Security chases him to his car, and he tears off out of the parking lot. On the way home, he hits a bicyclist. He gets out to help, but the bicyclist attacks Sebastian before the severity of his injuries overtake him and he passes out on the road. Sebastian panics and flees the scene. He comes back home and frets over the night's actions until his wife wakes up for her surgery.

Relax. Let me guide you through this four-way intersection. 

Reading #1: It's a story that encourages the reader to sympathize with those who have mental illness

Sebastian most likely has a pathological level of anxiety requiring treatment, not just enough anxiety to be an occasional nuisance to his wife. We learn that Sebastian's father "never sleeps," suggesting there is a family history of anxiety. When the idea forms in his head to fix the door, he is unable to resist its insistent suggestions: ""What if there were a fire? Would they be able to open the door and escape? If there were a fire, would they all be trapped?"

Sebastian doesn't seem to get treatment for his anxiety. Perhaps he's a fairly high-functioning anxiety sufferer. He owns his own business. And his wife, Katya, is a yoga teacher who seems to be the right amount of chill to offset his anxiety. Maybe it's worked for him.

The night before the surgery, just before it all went wrong, Sebastian and Katya fought about his anxiety. She was trying to get him to read a book called "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" by Jonathan Garment, M.D. She also accidentally insulted him by substituting the word "panic" for "anxiety." This led to angry words in return from Sebastian, which is part of the reason he can't stop obsessing. Katya is his main prop keeping him sane, and when things aren't right with her, it's hard for him to keep himself together.

Ultimately, although we can't really excuse Sebastian's actions, we are meant to understand them. They do have a cause that's understandable, and that cause, by and large, is his mental illness. At the end of the story, his wife announces that it's "time to go to the hospital," and the reader is meant to see this as having a dual meaning. She has her lumpectomy, yes, but Sebastian's own anxiety has now gotten so bad, he also needs to deal with it. We see anxiety like we see cancer, "metastasizing," and as real a medical issue as a tumor. 

Reading #2: Don't hide behind your illness, fucker. This is all your fault

So Sebastian has anxiety. Lots of people have anxiety, and they manage to get through the day without drunk driving, stealing, and killing (maybe--we don't know that the bicyclist is dead) innocent people. Sebastian manages his anxiety well enough to own and operate a business, to take care of a child, to live in a comfortable home. His string of mistakes on this night are partly because of anxiety, sure, but they're also from a string of moral failings beyond anxiety. He's vain. He's selfish. He fights his wife when she tries to offer help, and he internally argues with the book when it offers ways out.

This reading leads us, inevitably, to the never-ending question we face in a culture that really likes to come up with new diagnoses of mental illnesses. Can everything people do that's bad be explained by mental illness? More to the point, can it be explained away by mental illness--that is, is what we normally call evil or at least vice really just the manifestation of some kind of underlying mental pathology the asshole in question has no control over? When are people responsible for their own actions?

We can sympathize with Sebastian when we see anxiety taking over his mind, but there were many spots in the narrative where Sebastian really had the ability to do better and didn't. A truly anxious person should have worried about the possible results of driving drunk. A truly anxious person would have checked his pants for his wallet six times before leaving the house. A truly anxious person--whose anxiety was rooted in concern for his family--should have thought that stealing from a big-box store with cameras everywhere might have impacted his ability to take care of that family. Anxiety might cloud our minds with worries we don't really need to worry about, but I'm not aware that it makes us stop worrying about obvious threats. Sebastian's night of bad decisions was nothing more than the bubbling up of narcissism he normally managed to keep just below the surface. When the police find him, they should throw him in jail for a long time, and Katya, if she lives, should find someone better.

Reading #3: This is a critique of shallow Western interpretations of Eastern mysticism

Katya is a yoga instructor, and the book she tries to get Sebastian to read is chock-full of the kind of Western interpretations of Eastern thought we're all used to hearing. From the story's opening paragraph, we can see that Katya and Sebastian are upper-middle class. They're the kind of people who probably pay too much for organic everything, who get suckered by every new hippie fad that comes along. Sebastian is more skeptical than Katya, but lacking his own philosophy to replace hers, he's susceptible to falling in for the snake oil of Dr. Jonathan Garment. (And doesn't the name "Garmet" suggest the author of the book is hiding something?)

What Garment's book offers is just pure hogwash. Repeating a phrase, like "present moment" or "beautiful moment" will force the brain to switch off its overactive neurons. This will help stop anxiety, which is, Garment says, "the thought that thinks less than in thinks." With this slender rod, Sebastian is supposed to beat back the demons of his anxiety.

Katya offering this book to Sebastian is like trying to fix her possibly malignant tumor with crystals and essential oils. He's got a real problem, and this bullshit is just offering false hope when what Sebastian needs is real science. He ends up killing someone by refusing to treat his disease for real, just like parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids sometimes end up killing others with their stubbornness and stupidity. 

Reading #4: The mysticism is fine, but you've got to be careful how you introduce it

While there's probably a good deal of bullshit in what Katya believes, it also seems to be working for her. She is never calmer than when she's under stress, Sebastian observes. We all survive off telling ourselves some things that aren't true, so maybe it's not really necessary to fault Katya for believing in lies that are useful for her.

The problem in the story is that Sebastian tries to suddenly change his own set of lies--or, if you prefer, his set of coping mechanisms. He has pointed out to Katya that as much as anxiety sometimes made his life difficult, it also provided advantages: "He'd just been trying to make a simple point about anxiety: that sometimes anxiety prevented one from seeing things, but sometimes it helped one work things through."

There are a lot of people with mental illness who claim something similar. Some bi-polar people claim that they are so creative and productive in the manic phase, they can't imagine the benefits of controlling it would outweigh the positives. And they're right--until they're not right anymore.

Sebastian is getting to a point where he is possibly ready to do something new with his anxiety, the point where his old coping strategies aren't working anymore. This is necessary to him getting more control over his illness, but it's also a dangerous time for him. In the past, he probably would have had enough worry over the consequences of his actions to stop his chain of bad decisions long before it ended in hitting a bicyclist. But he's trying something new this night. He's trying to be "present." He's trying to be less anxious, rather than embrace the good and the bad of anxiety, and that's where the danger lies.

As a novice in being "present," he interprets what presence means all wrong. He repeats the mantra about "present moment" just before accelerating off into the night and hitting the bicyclist. Where anxiety would have formerly told him to quit doing stupid things, tonight, he is trying to not listen to his anxiety, and that, paradoxically, is what makes it all go wrong.

If he was going to live with anxiety, he needed to live with it entirely, both the good and the bad. If he was going to try to overcome anxiety with meditation and mantras, then he needed to be all-in on that. It's when he's in the place of transforming from one to the other that he's vulnerable.

In this reading, we might reflect that one of the most dangerous times in a person's life is the time when he's actually trying to improve.

A nitpick I should have enough sense to leave well enough alone

Blame the presence of this little nitpick on my own obsessive-compulsiveness. Sebastian is at Home Depot at 1 AM. But there are no Home Depots in New York City open past midnight. I checked, because I've never seen a 24-hour Home Depot. Therefore, I choose to believe that Sebastian really dreamed the whole thing.