I'm back to my creative nonfiction. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

What You Don't Do

They say that depression is the common cold of mental illness. That metaphor works surprisingly well. It is communicable--there's nothing more depressing than living with a depressed person. It has a season--January--and it hits harder in cold rainy climates.

I remember going into my dad's room on Christmas morning, thick with the smell of sweat, his bed dotted with wool blankets that predated my birth. He stared at the ceiling.

"Are you going to come open presents?"

He was, by his own admission, thinking about his childhood Christmas, where his mother, taking a regimen of 50s diet pills, lost her speed-fueled temper and beat him. It made him depressed. When he talked about it, it made everyone depressed. He waded through days at his private clinic and applied for jobs in a fog, while we went deeper into bankruptcy.

"Um. Yeah," he would say after a few minutes.

"Did you see your stocking?"

"Yes. Thank you."

"Santa brought you some gooood stuff."

"Yes. Thank you."

Depression is a disease represented by what someone doesn't do. They don't take interest in sex, they sleep more or less often, they can't concentrate. I wonder how many conversations with my dad might have been lost to depression. I wonder how many times he stared at the ceiling when we were supposed to be talking about spirituality, teenagerhood, or our mutual love of the X-Men.

Elder Coombs was my first depressed missionary companion. We lasted five days. He was five foot one inches tall with bright dark eyes. In his little white shirt, tie and tag, he reminded me of the smallest mamushka doll in a set.

It was well-known throughout the mission that Coombs was "having a hard time." I thought I might help him. The first day we were together, we spoke about our respective punk bands back home. "Of course it all died down once we got girlfriends," Coombs said. "See, I managed to avoid that part," I said. "I'm kind of proud of it. You know, in an I-never-got-action kind of way." He gave me a half-smile.

We went door-to-door through a rural neighborhood, with quarter-mile walks up the driveways. At the first door, a smiling woman said, "We've been looking for a church. Why don’t y'all come back and talk to my whole family?" Elder Coombs brightened for a little while afterwards. "That's the first lead we’ve had in months in this area."

"I'm magic," I said, trying to provoke a response. He gave me another half-smile and stared at the blanket of deep green kudzu falling across the trees.

At the next door, a red-faced man came out, wearing only shorts, sporting ingrown toenails the size and color of plums. "I just don't understand the people from my church," he said. "They say they're going to help you out, but nobody helps me out. Nobody comes to see me. I just sit out here and get lonely and don't nobody come to see me!"

"I know. It can be really frustrating," Elder Coombs said, with complete empathy. "It seems like no one cares."

"Why do people do that?" the man with the ingrown toenails asked. "Seems like everybody wants you to join their church but they don't care about you after you get saved."

"I'll come see you, man," Elder Coombs said.

I couldn't wait to get away from the guy. Elder Coombs talked to him for an hour.

We sat in a creek bed for a break and I took pictures of Coombs holding a huge frog up by his face. "Aw man," he said tonelessly." It peed on me."

"At least it got you first," I joked as I picked it up.

"Yeah," he said as if he deserved it.

The second day we were together Elder Coombs vanished. He left me a note while I was in the shower that said, "Sorry, man, I gotta jet. If there's a problem call the mission president."

If there's a problem? I hadn't been alone in a year and a half. Leaving your mission companion alone was tatamount to a soldier deserting his platoon in the field. We had rationale--that the Bible said two by two, that it had always been done that way. We needed rules. Coombs had committed the ultimate breach of trust.

He came back later that day, having ensured by this breach of the rules that he would be sent home. Or rather, by reporting it, I had ensured that he would go.

There were no hard feelings. We got Chinese food that night and sat on our back porch and talked about punk music, and he gave me the rest of his orange chicken. That night was the first time I saw him laugh.

Elder Remy followed Elder Coombs. In this case, Elder Remy had been sent home from his mission in Australia for depression. After a trial period, he'd proven himself happy enough to go out again.

The first day we were together Elder Remy took a shower with the door wide open, singing "Come, Come Ye Saints" at the top of his lungs. I couldn't help myself. I filled a pitcher full of ice water, snuck in and poured it over his head.

He shrieked, which was pretty much what I was going for. Then he leapt out of the shower and chased me around the apartment, naked and sopping wet. "I'm going to kill you!" he screamed, until he backed me into the kitchen corner and wrapped his hands around my throat. His eyes got smaller and tighter as his grip closed and he breathed, like a bull, through his nostrils. Finally he let go, backing up in naked rage. "Don't ever do that again," he said.

Elder Remy's depression wasn't the cloud that Coombs's had been, or my father's was. He was a volatile, lurching creature who could only exist in extremes. There were times where he would sit on his knees, solemn as a prophet, before the map of our area, trying to divine the spot where we would knock on the right door. Remy said poetic prayers full of pleading and fulfillment. "Praise God and His Christ, for this work is verily true."

Then when he was down he would talk about sex. "Have you ever smelled the fish, man? When a girl starts to get really horny, you know? I was fourteen, and I was talking to this girl I knew on the phone. I was like, 'Hey, have you ever had sex?' and she said, 'No,' and I said, 'Me neither. Want to?' So she came over and we had sex!" It was not unusual to hear such confessions from other missionaries--in spare terms like, "I used to fool around with this girl." What set Remy apart was the detail. "I didn't really know what I was doing and she was really loose and open, you know, and I had never smelled the fish before--it was creeping me out--so I was just like--I think I came?"

He was haunted by his masturbation habit. I later found out it was the reason for his odd way of showering, in order to try and make himself more vulnerable to discovery and less apt to play around. "I just let the hot water touch my dick a little bit and it feels good--sometimes I shove the shampoo bottle in my ass a little bit--and then I have to touch it and pblllltt--" He made a farting noise that was supposed to represent him coming. He used it a lot. "My girlfriend and I used to play around, you know, we'd get all lubed up and she'd rub against me--she was afraid to actually penetrate so I'd be like, no, oh no, it feels too good and pbllllltttt--"

I couldn't help but be fascinated by his open, destructive way of sharing his sexual history. I told myself I was trying to help him, but even then I was writing in my off times, and I knew I was really collecting material. Once he told me, "I've done some gay stuff. I didn't really think of it that way at the time. I was little and my cousin would want to masturbate with me. I guess it was more abuse than gay stuff. But I liked it, you know? I liked him." The stories of his cousin's sexual abuse were the only ones of his sex stories missing the detail and the 'pbllllltttt.'

When he finally imploded, it had been a long and exhausting week full of his self-destruction. It was seven in the evening and I wanted to call it a night, but he stood in the doorway and said,

"We should go do some work."

"I feel sick," I lied.

He changed out of his shirt and tie, which wasn't unusual for him at home, then put on his only set of street clothes. Still not unusual. The front door opened and by the time I realized that he was leaving, he was out. I ran out into the night, but he was a faster runner than me, especially fueled by his madness.

I called the mission president. "It happened again," I said.

After he came back, Elder Remy chided me. "You should have made me work harder," he said. "I know you liked talking about sex. You could have done better. You just encouraged me. And I knew you weren't sick." I knew he was projecting, but I've never forgot those words. I never forgot what didn't happen.

* * *

When my dad was going through the worst of his depression, he came home from work shirtless, his round body burned bright pink. "My patients cancelled, so I just went to the beach for a while," he said, "and stared at the water." The smell of his burnt skin filled our house's hallway, rubbery.

My siblings and I gathered around and laughed a little. "You should have brought some sunblock!"

"I wasn't planning on going," he said, as if unsure why he had.

We gathered around and laughed in lieu of a hug. He had done something. If he hadn't we all knew the afternoon would have been a void, a mass of typicality and ache. I wonder how many sunburned skins and days at the beach he lost, or Elder Remy lost, or the whole world lost.

Labels: creative nonfiction, Depression, Mormon stories, stories