Running Is a Kind of Dreaming

by J. M. Thompson

  I put the candy packets in my pockets. The candy made the pockets stick out, so I put the candy in my boots. I went home. As I walked through the front door into the kitchen, the candy made a crunching sound. Step, crunch, step, crunch. I put the milk on the counter. I handed the margarine and change to Mummy and turned to go upstairs. “What’s inside your boots?” she said.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “Take off your boots.” I took them off. The candy tumbled onto the floor. “Go to your room,” she said. I went upstairs and lay on the bed and burst into sobs.

  An eternity passed. I’m bad. Evil. A liar and a glutton and a thief. I cried until my eyes stopped making tears and then I kept on crying. More time passed. I deserve to be here as long as Mummy wants me to. The lonely torture of abandonment coursed through every cell in my little mind and body, until at last my mother decided my punishment had ended and responded to my cry. “Are you crying because you’re sorry,” she said, entering the room, “or because I found you out?” It was like a riddle. I didn’t know what to say. “Because I’m sorry,” I said. She nodded and left the room.

  And then there was the time I was so bad Mummy turned into a ghost. One night I was in the bathtub with Sebastian when I had an idea to play a trick on Mummy. “I’ll go underwater and close my eyes and hold my breath and make myself lie still,” I said. “Then when Mummy comes in and asks you what happened, you tell her that I’m dead.” “Okay,” said Sebastian. Mummy came into the bathroom. She saw me lying totally still underwater. I heard Sebastian say the words I had told him to say. The next thing I knew, Mummy was picking me up out of the tub and holding me under one arm and dragging me out of the bathroom and down the hall toward the top of the stairs. “Mummy, I’m okay!” I said. But she didn’t hear me. Didn’t even notice I was there. This horrid feeling came over me like I was stuck inside a bad dream but couldn’t wake up. I tried to wriggle out of Mummy’s grasp. She held on tight. I could see she had this weird frozen look on her face. She kept repeating Daddy’s name in this low, scary ghost voice: “Joseph . . . Joseph . . . Joseph . . .” I saw Mummy again just before I went to bed. She was sitting by herself in the dining room. She had her head in her hands. I went up next to her. “Sorry,” I said. She was silent. I went upstairs. I knelt by my bed. I said three Our Fathers and two Hail Marys and I told Jesus I was sorry for being bad. “I promise to be a good boy,” I said. “I’ll never be bad again.”

  I knew that something weird had happened the night when Mummy turned into a ghost. It felt like she disappeared. Or I disappeared. Or both of us. She was always disappearing. I didn’t know why. I didn’t like to think about it. Once when I was very little I was sitting in our van. I was looking through the window at the row of houses. Mummy had gone into one of them. I didn’t know why. I waited and waited and waited, and I needed to go number two, but still there was no sign of her, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, and I cried and yelled until I couldn’t hold it anymore. Then Mummy came back and drove home and took me upstairs, and I stood in the tub while she washed all the poo off my legs.

  Another time I was alone in the house, staring through the upstairs window at the dark, empty driveway. Where did they go? They’ve been gone for ages and ages. I looked outside at the oak tree and the dark hedges. I went downstairs to the living room. I went back to the top of the stairs to look outside again. What if they’re dead? The horrid feeling came. I didn’t know what to do. I went back downstairs to the living room and turned on the television. I tried to watch some old black-and-white film that was on. All I could think about was how Mummy and Daddy and Sebastian might be dead. I stared at the screen as long as I could stand it. When I go back and look at the driveway, I will see them. I looked at the screen. I waited some more. I went back to the window. Nothing. They must be dead. My heart beat faster and faster. I ran out the front door onto the driveway. I stared into the darkness down the road. I ran to our neighbors’ house. I knocked on the door. The nice old lady who lived there opened the door. Her name was Mrs. John. She lived in the house with her husband and their big brown dog Megan. If I kicked a ball by accident into their garden, Mrs. John didn’t mind if I climbed the fence to go and get the ball. “Mummy and Daddy and Sebastian went to town a long time ago,” I said. “I don’t know where they are!” Mrs. John told me to come inside. “Why don’t you play with Megan,” she said. I stroked the dog until the horrible feeling went away and I heard the crunch of car wheels on the gravel of our driveway and knew that Mummy and Daddy and Sebastian were still alive.

  One day the future went dark. It is hard to pin down when looking forward turned from delight to terror, when the future became a dreadful vision I devoted almost all my conscious effort to shield myself from seeing. Perhaps the darkness started when I saw the boy with the burns. Once I knew of his existence, it was impossible to imagine what it might have felt like not to know about him. I kept on seeing him. I had to. I did not know why. It happened every time I found myself browsing through the bookshelves in the living room. Our house was full of books. Books in the kitchen. Books in the playroom and bedrooms, and thousands in the living room. Books on astronomy and birds and cooking and religion. Sci-fi novels, poetry, old hardbacks that Daddy had inherited from ancestors in Ireland, like Atlantis: The Book of the Angels, the autobiography of an archangel who had witnessed the destruction of the legendary lost continent, transcribed by a Victorian author called D. Bridgman-Metchim. I loved to look at its monochrome illustrations. The first image, facing the title page, depicted a thin humanlike figure leaping across a moonlit sky. I could look at the pictures in Atlantis for a long time, and then I might read the first few pages of The Structure of the Universe, the parts before the book filled with big words and weird symbols I didn’t understand. Then I would watch my hand reach down to the lower shelf with Daddy’s books from his volunteer work for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and I would pick up the Hiroshima book again.

  I opened the book. I saw the mushroom cloud, the gray and black and monstrous entity rising from the city. I saw the ruined buildings and the shadows of human beings left on the broken walls. My heart beat faster, and a horrid feeling washed over me and into me. I turned the page. There was the boy. He lay on a hospital bed. Against the pure white sheets, his bare legs were charcoal black with nuclear flash burns. How such a horrible thing had come into the world was beyond all reason. And yet it existed. It was a nightmare transcending the evilest imagination. But I knew the boy was not imaginary. A quarter-century before I was born, the Americans dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima. Little Boy, they called it. All the houses blew into pieces, and the people turned into ash and vapor. The book did not state what had happened to the boy. Maybe he was dead now. Maybe alive. I wished that I knew if he was dead or living. I wished that he really was just a figment of someone’s dark imagination. Then I could go back to the life I had had before I saw him, looking forward to Christmas and Easter and the summer and the autumn and then another Christmas again, around and around in the endless wheel of time.

  But there was no going back. Once you knew something, there was no unknowing it. The atomic bomb was real. The boy was real. And now more bombs were on the horizon. American missiles were coming to England in 1983. Three years. I would be twelve then. Three summers, three birthdays, three Christmases and Easters. Then the nuclear war would happen. The thought was too large and frightening to fit inside my head. But it was true. Daddy said so. So it had to be true. He knew things. One time at Gran’s house in Ireland I found his school report book. One of his teachers had said he was “in a class of his own.” He went to college when he was sixteen and got a first in mathematics and astronomy and worked as a computer programmer, in the era when computers were the size of refrigerators and nobody had one at home. I felt like he could fly to the moon. With his shoulder-length curly hair and long hippie beard, he looked like the pictures of Jesus I saw on the Stations of the Cross in ch
urch. Imagine a computer genius Jesus telling you something was true: I trusted him.

  At the weekend we would go on marches to the US Air Force base, 30 miles away. Light traveled at 186,282 miles per second. If the Americans put missiles on the base and had a nuclear war with Russia, it was no good being only 30 miles away. Everyone would die. Me, Mummy, Daddy, Sebastian, Briar, all my friends and teachers, Mrs. John and Megan: all dead. I marched with a sign I’d made out of a breakfast cereal box. I drew a mushroom cloud with my colored pencils. My sign said: I WANT TO GROW UP NOT BLOW UP. Sometimes I would listen to a song in Daddy’s record collection called “Enola Gay” by OMD. That was the name of the bomber that had dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima at eight fifteen one August morning thirty-five years earlier: Enola Gay. “It’s eight fifteen, and that’s the time it’s always been,” went the song. The nuclear missiles were coming to the base in three years, Daddy said. People used to say that World War III was “unthinkable.” The US and Russia had so many nuclear bombs, the war would kill everyone in the world. All the dust from all the bombs might even block out the sun for centuries, killing all the plants and animals too.

  But now a third world war was thinkable. Some insane generals had a mad plan. Russia had put nuclear missiles in Eastern Europe. The US would put them in England. Then the US and Russia would have a nuclear war in Europe, while they stayed safe on the sidelines. It seemed unfair that children like me had to suffer in the middle of this grown-up madness. It wasn’t my fault that the US and Russia hated each other, but their hatred was going to kill me. I had three years until the missiles came. Three years until the end of the world. I’ll be twelve—that’s three more birthdays and Christmases. I hope it’s over quick.

  I could go for days and forget all about the third world war. But then I’d be walking down the road to school and remember. The knowledge would flash back into my head like an H-bomb of the mind. My heart would beat faster. All the trees and the sky and the ground would feel dreamlike and unreal. I could see everything burning white and the mushroom cloud coming out of the ground. I felt the world was ending in that very moment. Don’t think about it, I would tell myself. If I waited long enough, the fear would go away, and I would forget again about this horrible thing I knew but didn’t want to know. How other people handled knowing it, I had no idea. Sometimes I would watch the other boys and girls on the playing field at school, laughing and running about, and marvel at the minds so strong that they could shield themselves from the awful feeling or even from the knowledge itself.

  One night I woke from a nightmare, feeling such a weight of dread and panic that I realized I could not hope to lie there alone and wait for the feeling to pass. I went downstairs. My father was watching television. “Daddy, what will happen if we can’t stop the missiles?” I said. I had no idea what I wanted him to say. I wanted to believe that the mad generals were not the only power in the world, that the rest of us, the ordinary people who just wanted to live our lives, would prevail. Then I could go to bed, knowing I was safe. But what Daddy said was “I don’t know,” so I went back to my room and closed my eyes and prayed to God, asking him to please stop the nuclear missiles coming to England and to please protect me and Sebastian and Mummy and Daddy and all the people in the world from the third world war, and I tried not to imagine all the world on fire, all the mushroom clouds in London and New York and Los Angeles and Moscow and Berlin and Paris and all the children in every city of the world stumbling about the ruins with their stunned, sad faces and their burnt skin sloughing off their bodies like rags.

  YOU CAN’T FEAR THE past, only the future. The past can’t hurt you. It already happened. But fear can play funny tricks on the mind. “Fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced,” wrote the twentieth-century British pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott.4 My nuclear fears seemed to be about an apocalyptic future. I wasn’t delusional: threats of nuclear conflict did loom on the geopolitical horizon. But looking back, I can see how the level of isolation and panic I experienced had an exaggerated quality, even within the context of objective danger. It strikes me in hindsight that what I was afraid of wasn’t entirely in the future. I was afraid of some kind of explosion that had already started happening. Perhaps it was easier to imagine that the danger—however horrific—was on the outside, in the Pentagon and the Kremlin and Greenham Common, separated in space and time from the solid world of my home. Perhaps the really unbearable thought would have been to sense the collapse of the solid world of home, even perhaps to wonder if it had ever truly been solid, to worry that there was a dark and frightening state of being not on the outside but invading the present moment, a world without a mother to carry me.

  And so when I later would recall the day on the mountain and the dark feeling that sent me running, it was hard not to think of the boy with the burns and sometimes even imagine that wounded boy running down the mountain along with me.

  I’ll show you what running ahead looks like, I thought. I sped down the mountain, down the path that led into the trees. I knew the path led the whole way down the mountain and to the seaside house where Gran lived. I’ll run to Gran’s house. How amazing that will be! Mummy and Daddy will be so proud of me. Their son just ten years old, and he ran down a mountain! I followed the path. I wound through the trees and came to the street where Gran lived. I knocked on the door. She wasn’t home. I sat on the chair outside the door and waited. Time passed. I didn’t understand what might be taking them so long. Then I saw Daddy marching down the street. His face was bright red like a tomato. His forehead was covered with sweat. “Daddy, I’m here!” I said. He was angry. “Where the bloody hell have you been?” he said. Something had gone wrong that day, and I didn’t know why. But I knew that I had done something amazing. I had run down a mountain, and forever after, whenever the dark feeling came, I knew I could fly through the air as close to airborne as any wingless creature, feeling the cycle of earth becoming air, the terrestrial and the heavenly, feeling the ground beneath my feet with every step, and hearing Earth say, I am here.

  Ball, Book, Flag

  I finished my speech for Dr. Jensen, imagining he might give me a medal for a stunning level of insight displayed by a first-time patient, but instead he said, “While you’ve obviously done a great deal of thinking about your past, I wonder how much consideration you might have given as to why it could be difficult for you to let it go.”

  Let go of what? What happened when I ran down the mountain? How it felt to find the sleeping hedgehog in the Jungle? The feeling of Gran’s hand on my back, and the smell of the autumn leaves in the garden? Drop all my precious jewels of childhood memory in the trash can of personal history—was that my psychiatrist’s professional opinion? I wasn’t sure I was willing. And let’s say I was. How did a person accomplish such a thing? By talking about it? Really? How was talking about memories I couldn’t let go meant to accomplish anything except make them even more memorable?

  MERCURY WAS THE MESSENGER between mortal humans and the gods. The Romans called him Hermes. Hermes flew back and forth between Earth and Mount Olympus, carrying messages. Nineteenth-century scholars of the humanities likened the sources of human knowledge to Mount Olympus and the interpretation of those sources to Hermes. The word hermeneutics, the philosophy of interpretation, is a coinage in tribute to Hermes. To understand the whole meaning of a book or historical period, you need to examine its component parts. Know more about the parts, and you expand your perception of the whole. Know more about the whole, and you see the parts in a new light. This cycle from whole to part and back again—what the twentieth-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger called the hermeneutic circle—constitutes the process of historical understanding: the loops of remembering and reinterpreting through which we understand the meaning of the past, whether collective or personal. There is a hermeneutics of everything, from the meaning of scripture to the history of America, from the significance of ancient myt
h to the story of your life. Your mind travels back to the old days. Time passes. When your thoughts return to the old days again, you see the past from a different perspective, yielding knowledge that in turn transforms your experience of the present moment, like a series of messages conveyed by Mercury from Mount Olympus.

  Nothing is permanent. Loss is inevitable. Memory is how we preserve knowledge from loss. Nowadays we outsource memory to the internet. But it used to be an art form. The ancients understood memory as humanity’s principal defense against the inexorable ravages of time. An understanding of memory’s interrelationship with tragedy is implicit in a pioneering memorization technique, devised in ancient Rome, known as the memory palace. Cicero described the origin of memory palaces in De Oratore: The poet Simonides attended a dinner in a banquet hall. The building collapsed. Simonides ran out of the building and survived. Later he managed to remember the names of the people crushed in the ruins by visualizing their positions around the banquet table. You can remember anything using the technique Simonides discovered, said Cicero. Visualize a building. Imagine yourself walking through the building. For every item you want to remember, substitute a vivid image and place it in one of the imaginary rooms.

  Centuries later the Renaissance astronomer and alchemist Giordano Bruno rediscovered the Roman memory method and elaborated on it with a complex mnemonic system. Inspired by Hermetic texts from the first century CE, Bruno linked the secret virtues of stones and plants with the power of the stars, reflecting the alchemical vision of a cosmic symmetry between microcosm and macrocosm—the universe in a grain of sand. In the famous words of a Hermetic text called The Emerald Tablet: “As above, so below.”