The Under Toad
Do you feel it?
Do you feel it licking your feet, wrapping its long sticky tongue around an errant ankle, threatening to suck you under? Do you hear it croaking under your bed; do you see its sallow green skin under the smile of your boss, its yellow eyes in the gaze of your wayward girlfriend?
It’s the Under Toad.
We might less colorfully describe it as a sense of dread or impending doom. But I like to borrow the imagery of John Irving, writer of the great absurd novel The World According to Garp (I am sure poor Irving was struck by the Under Toad upon seeing the film adaptation of his book, which despite the singular joy of John Lithgow in drag, should be destroyed by fire and struck from human memory).
I returned to The World According to Garp during three months of being isolated in Scotland during the pandemic. I read about half of the tome as a teenager, though then the ridiculous psycho-sexual exploration of 30-something domestic malaise and writerly dread didn’t speak to me in quite the way it does now. Irving brings the Under Toad to life through Walt, Garp’s youngest son and a toddler when he is ominously warned of the undertow one New England summer at his grandmother’s beach house. Unbeknownst to the other Garps, the youngest spends years imagining a terrible amphibian lurking in the dark water, ready to pull him under.
Now, life in Switzerland has returned to “normal” (as much as normal can exist on a planet in which the US and the UK are run by evil cartoon characters). Andrew and I drove to the “pocket metropolis” of Basel, at the crux of France, Switzerland and Germany, this weekend, and enjoyed walks along the Rhine, visits to an architecture park and an art museum to see an Edward Hopper exhibit; we held hands and enjoyed cocktails outside on the terrace, ate dinner entirely composed of cheese, bread and wine in bed. It was perfectly idyllic and romantic, and yet… I sensed the presence of the Under Toad.
I saw him in the paintings of Hopper, who was a master of creating a sense of isolation and trepidation (as Jonathan Jones posited in The Guardian, he is ‘the artist of the coronavirus age’), with the suggestion of something hidden just outside the canvas. In his famous Cape Cod Morning, a lone woman, illumated in pale morning light, gazes anxiously out the window at something or someone we can’t see. In Bridle Path, a trio of horses on the bridle path in Central Park are spooked by something hidden in a tunnel (behind them, eerily, is the darkened arch of the Dakota Building, where John Lennon would be murdered 39 years later – 13 years after Hopper’s death, just downtown).
Upon investigation, I sense this invisible dread is for reasons understandable and somewhat pedestrian: I am still anxious and awkward in my halting French, still unemployed, my novel is still getting rejected regularly and unremarkly by literary agents, my fiancé and I are still clumsily (and sometimes painfully) adjusting to the aftermath of a cancelled wedding and lost pregnancy, and every day I live in a place that is quieter, richer, whiter, more buttoned-up and polite than the worlds that I am akin to (New Orleans, New York, Key West), away from my loud family and fabulous friends, in a beautiful bubble that sometimes feels antiseptically pristine and stifling. And I know that, comparatively, I have it great.
I also know the current state of dread is not unique to me. In fact, on my imagined Dread-O-Meter, I am definitely on the low end, when I try to fathom the feelings of people of color living in the USA and people suffering from COVID-19 (not to mention the regular grind of poverty and depression) the world over. In fact, the world seems to have been balancing on the lips of the Under Toad for some time now, even as Greta Thunburg and Ta-Nehisi Coates have screamed at us that we are about to be swallowed. Yet, it is as though the shoulders of Atlas have been replaced by its jaws.
We are wary of the pandemic, of the modern militance of the American police and the vulnerability of black lives; we are afraid of the loss of our children’s planet, not to mention our parents’ and grandparents’ lives. If we are being held by invisible wires above the Under Toad’s jaws, I imagine that with each new report of a George Floyd or Breonna Taylor being killed, one of those wires is snapped, with each hate-filled presidential Tweet, I hear a ping, as the virus surges back in certain states and countries, snap, we we sink a bit lower into its mouth. And perhaps with each Supreme Court decision acknowledging the humanity of our GLBTQ and immigrant neighbors, we rise a bit. With each peaceful protest, each teacher reimagining her classroom, each child daring to grow up and do better than us, each vote cast against bigotry, each reminder of the resilience of the human spirit, we are lifted a bit out of the abyss.
About three-quarters through The World According to Garp, Walt dies. It’s a car accident, in which both of his parents are miserably, unwittingly culpable. Walt does not survive childhood; the Under Toad gets the little guy in the end.
The thing is: the Under Toad gets us all in the end. But might we live with more mad, radical kindness and unglued daring knowing that nobody escapes? Can’t we risk toppling our privilege, upsetting our parents, being humiliated by our attempts at art and love, knowing none of us make it out alive? I think of what it looks like for me, and maybe it means calling out my racist friend at a polite Swiss dinner party, even though it makes my fiancé and me and everyone else uncomfortable. Maybe it means publishing my book myself, even though I’m afraid if this many agents have rejected it it might not be good enough to even matter. Maybe it means eloping on a mountaintop. Maybe it means trying out my French again at the post office, even though the old lady scowls at my indecipherable accent. Maybe it means doing exactly what I know is right, even if I feel terrified of the fallout.
What does it mean for you?
Ribbit ribbit. Tick tock.