Running Is a Kind of Dreaming

by J. M. Thompson

  My announcement in England that I intended to emigrate provoked a lukewarm reaction. I told everyone, even my bank manager. After a decade in which I’d run from one mad adventure to the next, I can imagine this latest departure didn’t seem any different. They heard my story about a modern Prometheus in the Nevada desert and the beautiful artist I’d met there after running about naked with bunny ears, and I could imagine them thinking, Sure, Jason. Move to California. See you in a couple of weeks. But this time was different, I thought. I could go live with Miriam and at last settle down, I thought. I won’t need to keep on running.

  I WALKED THROUGH CUSTOMS to baggage claim in San Francisco International Airport, listening to a recorded message on the loudspeakers overhead. “Hi, I’m Willie Brown, mayor of San Francisco. Welcome to the City of Lights, the City of Dee-lights.” I showed my passport to the immigration officer and walked into the arrivals area. I saw Miriam at once, her smile and luminous blue eyes beaming like a beacon. We kissed for quite a while. The road from the airport led to the freeway heading north. I gazed at the bright blue sky above us as she drove us to a street in the middle of the city.

  The weather was weird in San Francisco. It was boiling hot in December and freezing cold in July. The rest of the year was an everlasting springtime. I missed how back in England green leaves went brown in the autumn. Every second car in San Francisco had a bumper sticker that said: I’D RATHER BE HERE NOW. Be Here Now was the Californian religion. But where was this place, Now? The more I tried to Be Here Now, the more my thoughts drifted to Back Then. Time was the most elusive runaway of all.

  I found work forty-eight hours after landing in California, for a fledgling internet video company. It was the height of the dot-com boom. Well-paid work was plentiful. One day everyone on Earth will be making movies on the internet, the company founder said. His vision seemed to me preposterous and utopian. Yet it also seemed to me that work had always meant my assent to credence in another person’s fantasy. I took the job.

  Everything has changed, I thought. I was tired of the past. Tired of always rushing toward the horizon, arriving in some faraway airport to see the row of taxi drivers, standing with their signs listing names of arriving travelers, and imagining what might happen if I were to announce myself as Jeremy Jones or Mohammed Iqbal or François Lejeune and follow a random cabdriver to where random chance might take me. But that was back then, in the days of running and madness, before the Man burned and I met Miriam. Here and Now, beneath the blue skies of San Francisco, the Darkness was at last behind me, and ahead I saw nothing but the boundless future.

  I STOOD BENEATH a shiny disco ball on a crowded dance floor two weeks later as the music stopped and the DJ began the countdown to midnight. Miriam too stood in the kaleidoscopic light, which cast her white feathered diaphanous gown and her cheeks speckled with silver glitter in a luminous circle. I held her close and looked into her turquoise eyes. Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . All the freaks and dot-commers and Goths and ravers shimmering in fluorescent greens and purples chanted the descending digits in unison with tens of millions assembled in clubs and bars and streets and living rooms up and down the West Coast as something massive and without precedent surged from just beyond the horizon of existence toward becoming now. We could feel it, the energy gathering in the sounds of the whoops and whistles and in the knowledge of an entire epoch coming to an end, the millennium that had stretched from Magna Carta to Henry VIII to Auschwitz to Hiroshima to the moon landing to the invention of the web: the world stood at the threshold of another age. Perhaps it was the end of time. The papers and TV news shows had been full of warnings that all the computers in the world might fail at the stroke of midnight when the clocks designed for double-digit years clicked to zero and sent circuits running haywire. The consequences of clocks going back to a zero hour and crashing all the hard drives in the world at once were unknowable and conceivably apocalyptic: planes might even fall out of the sky.

  Seven . . . six . . . five . . . But perhaps the time to come would be one not of disaster but of hope and healing and things brought into being that once we had only dreamed of. A future Earth where six billion human minds joined together in a single World Wide Web: imagine the possibilities! A future where all the rage and darkness of the world in the time before would fade into memory. Four . . . three . . . two . . . Our lips came together as one.

  My first few months with Miriam were blissful. The sky was blue and cloudless, and I felt sunshine in my soul. Some months later we were sitting on a beach when a feeling of great bliss and wonder overcame me. I just turned thirty. I live in California. I’m drinking a chocolate milkshake by the Pacific Ocean with my lovely American girlfriend. How did I get this lucky?

  We danced all night. We went running in the woods. We ate delicious cheeses. Sometimes I had little moments of an old, familiar sadness. But the feeling never stuck around. I could always find some new adventure to dive into. And I could always count on Miriam to make me feel better on lazy Sunday afternoons, lying in the park, when my sadness returned. The following autumn, we got married. Among the vows we exchanged, Miriam said, “I promise to stroke your back when you’re feeling blue.”

  Everything had indeed changed: almost the entirety of my waking existence. A new apartment. A new job. Even the plumbing was different. Sometimes the onslaught of novelty was overwhelming. I flooded the bathroom. I took a bite of Chinese takeout that was spicier than I’d anticipated, and I felt like bursting into tears. The internet video company ran into financial troubles after the collapse of the internet bubble. I found work as a reporter for a technology magazine. I had thought I could migrate from England to the US without much ado. I spoke the primary language, after all. But like a plant uprooted from a known environment and set down in foreign soil, I suffered the shock of transplantation. It wasn’t so much any single place or person or experience back in England that I could identify as missing so much as a billion little familiar details put together, the whole ground of landscape and culture and identity I’d grown up in, much of it taken for granted. There is only a certain amount of chaos the nervous system can handle. I began to crave the comfort of the familiar. For a while, I ate nothing but bagels and cream cheese. I ran the same three-mile loop around my neighborhood. One day my knee hurt. I didn’t know how to take care of it. I gave up running and went surfing instead. It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time. I’d been a runner since the chaos of my teens. Running had been the one constant through fifteen years of change, like a quiet friend who never asked for anything but was always there when I needed them.

  I WAS STILL HALF-ASLEEP when I heard something on the morning radio news about an explosion in a tower. I thought I was hearing anniversary coverage about the bomb in the ’90s. A feeling of apocalyptic dread seized me when I turned on the television and watched a second plane hit the South Tower. The feeling had the ancient quality of a nightmare long suppressed, now crashing back into consciousness. Miriam and I spent the remainder of the morning watching looped television news footage of the towers collapsing as we struggled to integrate the knowledge of an event so big it warped the time around it, fracturing history into the world before the planes hit and the new and frightening time after. I would never again see a jet in a blue sky without picturing a plane flying low above Manhattan and the blue turning into darkness. I heard a story around that time that the dust on people’s faces at Ground Zero came from obliterated rocks once mined in or near the Black Rock Desert, that it was the same dust that covered our faces at Burning Man. Whether or not the story was veridical, it expressed a kind of truth: the psychological need in those fearful days to build new links between the broken fragments of the world when so much of it lay in ruins.

  Thousands of people left the city. I lost my job. I couldn’t find any form of employment. I sat in my apartment scrolling through online job boards with growing desperation. One day Miriam called me to say that a model had walked out of her still-li
fe class complaining of the cold and would I like to come and replace him. The school paid about ten bucks an hour and all I would need to do was stand still. I biked down to the art school. I took off my clothes and stood in front of the art students while they drew sketches of my likeness.

  I embraced the absurdity of my position, remembering random summer jobs I had done in England as a teenager, dressing up as a medieval king for tourists, digging trenches in the ground, walking through cornfields picking weeds, as if none of it was real, like I was some dumb character in a movie, but the sense of distance soon collapsed. The dumb character was me. In the eyes of the world, my worth had collapsed to the status of a physical object, a lump of meat to stare at and register in height and width and girth.

  As the holidays approached, I saw an ad in the local paper for seasonal workers in a toy store. I was hired as a toy demonstrator. I demonstrated the nascent artificial intelligence of a robot dog called Aibo. He had six distinct poses, his manufacturer said, mimicking six recognizable human emotions. Now and then I’d demonstrate the karaoke machine. One day I was singing “Nowhere Man” by the Beatles when a customer came up to me and said, “Don’t give up your day job.” “But this is my day job,” I said. Every day, all day, I would listen to the store jingle playing over the loudspeakers:

  Hear the clock tick-tock while the children play.

  Let the fun and laughter chase all cares away.

  It’s a time for joy for all the girls and boys.

  Welcome to our world of toys.

  I must have heard those words a hundred thousand times as I skated in circles around the store, feeling the clock of my life tick-tock, remembering the Oxford scholar I once had been and imagining what that guy would think about the Nowhere Man I had become. It occurred to me that thousands of people had died in the Twin Towers and that my suffering by comparison was trivial and meaningless. Years later I would learn the expression “Compare and despair”: Nothing good can come from comparing your misery to someone worse off and judging your own as unworthy. Look to others in pain and understand that nobody is spared. Use that awareness to cultivate compassion and the energy you need to commit yourself to the liberation of all sentient beings. But if you break your leg, don’t look at the person in the bed next to you with two broken legs and dismiss your own leg pain as undeserving. Join the brotherhood of the broken ones. Join the sisterhood of survivors. I understood this much later. But I did not know this at the time.

  I was unemployed for a year. At last I found work as a grant writer for an education nonprofit based in Silicon Valley. For a couple of months I was relieved merely to be working. But my sense of relief soon morphed into an existential unmooring. I remembered my years as a television producer in England. I could have gone back to London. But Miriam was settled in her life in San Francisco. We spoke early in our courtship about starting a family. She was in her mid-thirties and could not wait for long. If I went to England, I would be on my own again. The thought was frightening and lonely. If I stayed in California, I was Nowhere Man. I felt stuck. Before I drove to work in the morning, I would write down memories of my childhood in England. It seemed important to me to understand what had happened to my family of origin before I started a family of my own. The memories were all jumbled together and full of holes. I persisted. I kept circling back to the same handful of disconnected images.

  My focus drifted. My mind ran all over the place. Where am I supposed to live? Should I stay here in California or go back to London? What should I do for work—stay in this dead-end job or quit and do something else? Am I ready to be a father? What happened when I was fifteen? Why are there so many holes? Why can’t I fill them in? I thought about staying and leaving and parenting and divorcing and all I could remember and had forgotten, and I thought about everything that might have been and could be and what once was yet now was not. On my drive to work, it seemed to me that I had always been there, inside a metal box separated from the other boxes whose drivers I couldn’t see and didn’t know and whose lives were alien to me. I stared out the window. The task at hand had shifted in some significant yet inexpressible way. At lunch I’d walk to a sandwich shop next to a little artificial lake, where one day I saw a giant blue-beaked bird land, and I remembered that the Romans saw birds as omens, and I wondered what this blue bird might mean.

  A coworker had told me about a new way to find information on the internet. A couple of young computer geniuses had created what sounded to me like a digital version of the ancient lost Library of Alexandria, a portal to all the knowledge in the world, the conversion of all human knowledge into zeroes and ones and the storage of this code in an enormous computer network that spanned Earth. The global library in its resurrected digital form would ensure that nothing known to humanity would ever be lost again, its founders claimed, according to my coworker, insofar as I recalled what she told me.

  I typed in the URL for Google and a white void filled my screen. I watched the cursor flash in and out of existence in the empty rectangle in the center of the void. I contemplated the question then foremost in my mind. Why do I always feel so sad? But am I really sad? That’s not quite the right word . . . I typed the word despair in the search box. In a fraction of a second Google found millions of pages on my chosen topic. I had no idea there was so much despair in the world. I found a book called The Philosophy of Despair, published in 1902 by David Starr Jordan, the first president of Stanford University.3 He was an expert on fish and a proponent of eugenics who covered up the unsolved murder by strychnine poisoning in February 1905 of Jane Stanford, cofounder of the eponymous university.

  In our youth, Jordan argues, you contemplate infinite and impossible questions. You acquire more knowledge. But knowledge is futile unless it inspires action. Thus, you must act. Without action, you fall into pessimism. And the nature of that action is of the utmost significance. “The thing you do should be for you the most important thing in the world,” writes Jordan. “If you could do something better than you are doing now, everything considered, why are you not doing it?”

  I stared out the window at the office parking lot. Am I doing the most important thing in the world to me right now? No. I fled the building and drove at ninety miles an hour to the beach. I parked my car and put on my thick black neoprene suit and strode into the roiling waters with my surfboard and dropped it onto the surface of the water and paddled across the shore break. Paddle, paddle, paddle: my passage through the whitewater could sometimes take an hour. But then I was out past the break, far from shore, waiting for the swells to form on the horizon.

  I seldom caught a wave. For the most part, I fell beneath them. There always came a moment when I would know that I was falling. I would see a swell loom into view. The swell would build to a near-vertical wall, towering fifteen feet above. I would swing my board to face the beach and paddle with all my might, struggling with every sinew to propel my board to match the velocity of the wave. Then I would sense the wave jack up behind me, forming a monstrous dark presence in the periphery of my vision. I would see the wave fall below me, extending from peak to trough like two flights of stairs. I would feel myself tumble through the air toward the surface of the water and crash down into the cold, dark chaos, surrendering to the knowledge that now there was nothing to be done: in an instant the wave would collapse and I would be lost and thrashed about in the darkness, the breaking wave pounding me with several tons of avalanching whitewater, as I floundered helpless in the void, powerless to do anything except submit to the larger forces then spinning me through space, a dark chaos of such violence I would lose all sense of which direction to swim for air. Yet in the end, I always knew, the wave would release me, and I would find my way to the surface and breathe again.

  I must have endured a thousand such frigid ocean beatings. Every icy assault induced a transient numb amnesia for my cares. Yet upon the thawing of my body, my bad feelings returned, no less acute than in the past. In time I came to realize that m
y feelings demanded my attention. They would not be ignored. I couldn’t run from them or smash them into submission. I needed to understand them.

  BACK AT WORK, one day I clicked through the folder architecture of my computer hard drive, searching for a folder in which I kept my personal documents. A message appeared on my screen that said: “You are at the highest level. There is no folder above this one.”

  There was too much I couldn’t remember. So much still didn’t make sense. It felt like something had happened a long time ago, something incomprehensible, like time had exploded into pieces and I couldn’t put it back together. But if forward movement on the trail of life required my understanding of the dark path behind me, what then? Absent a sci-fi DeLorean, how could I understand my past and make sense of it when it had vanished without a trace?

  “You need therapy,” said Miriam. Back in England we would say that to poke fun at each other. You must be bloody mental, mate—you need therapy! I had heard about therapy on television. But in my twenty-nine years in England I had never met anyone who had gone to speak with a living, breathing psychotherapist. It sounded like the kind of measure a person would resort to only in a state of genuine desperation, when something had gone horribly wrong with them. But Miriam’s comment was devoid of derision or irony. Her wish was sincere and her matter-of-fact tone conveyed the message that all Californians went to therapy and took pills when they were sad. Britons had cornflakes for breakfast; Californians sprinkled citalopram on their gluten-free granola.

  I entered an office and took my seat opposite a calm man with a beard and a professorial manner. His name was Dr. Jensen. He was a psychiatrist. I looked at him, expecting him to speak. He stared at me in silence for a while and then said, “Why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind.”