Running Is a Kind of Dreaming

by J. M. Thompson

  “I know what you mean,” I say.

  “I ran a marathon,” says the Mourner. “Then a fifty-miler. Then I went to the wilderness and ran seventy miles solo. When I got back to civilization, I had this incredible feeling. It’s hard to put into words . . . I guess the word that comes to mind is safe—I felt incredibly safe. I don’t just mean in the physical way. That was a part of it, sure. Knowing I was back in the city, safe from the lions and bears. But there was this emotional part too. Like there was nothing to fear. Really, nothing at all. Not even death. I thought, Everything’s okay, just as it is.”

  The sun goes down. I say goodbye to the Mourner and hike onward through the trees. It all feels so familiar, this dark place. Not just in the literal sense that I must have spent hundreds of hours on mountain trails just like this one, slogging uphill in the night, seeing a turn up ahead and marching toward it and then reaching it and making the turn and then seeing more trees, and the next turn, and on and on like that, for what feels like infinity. In the light, back at the start, when your legs are fresh and you’re up in the high country and you can see massive distances in every direction, the minutes and steps fly by. You can clock ten miles before you even think to check your watch. But in the night, on tired legs, your view shrinks to a little circle of pale light from your headlamp on the ground and the start of the trees beyond the circle’s periphery, and the time compression of the early hours starts to reverse itself. The dark hours drag on and on. I know this feeling well. The trick is to abandon any attachment to getting anywhere and just put your head down and march up the mountain, grunting. Ugh, ugh, ugh, I go, trudging uphill in the dark.

  * * *

  The parishioners shuffled toward the firepit in the parking lot outside the church, bathed in the flickering orange light, as the priest began chanting the Latin prayers. I gazed into the flames and at the familiar church faces illuminated by their glow. The priest sang in a high monotone, modulating the end of each line upward. The congregation said, “Amen,” and then the priest began another prayer. Smoke drifted across the congregation. The prayers ended, and the priest turned from the fire. The altar boys formed a line and proceeded into the church, the flames of the candles carried by the acolytes radiating globes of yellow light, illuminating the aisle ahead. The procession moved in stages. After each movement, the priest said another line of the prayer until we reached the altar, where the procession halted at a row of candles. The congregation gathered closer to the priest. The prayers ended, and the priest began to speak in English, thanking us for braving the cold outside, his voice hushed and gentle. Everyone looked at the burning candles, as if the priest’s hush implied a visitation among us, as if the very act of listening implied a sound. Dense clouds of incense floated across the church, dispersing through the congregation, shrouding them in bittersweet unguent, making children cough.

  Soon our house smelled of pine needles and brandy and the tree spangled with pink and turquoise fairy lights; perhaps it would snow that year; somewhere there were presents to be found. Sebastian’s favorite book was All About the Bullerby Children by Astrid Lindgren. It was the only book he read. Was it fourteen times now, or fifteen? “Why don’t you read something else?” asked Mummy, but Sebastian didn’t want to read anything else. He only wanted to read the adventures of Lars and Pip and Lisa running about in Sweden. “I don’t know when Christmas starts in other places, but in Bullerby it starts the day we bake ginger snaps . . .” In Bullerby, it always snowed at Christmas, and I couldn’t think of Christmas without thinking of that imaginary snow, suffusing the sodden hills of Hampshire with our winter wonderland of make-believe, for in my mind we were happy Swedish children, no less than Lars and Pip, exploring the hills above Bullerby, a perfect wilderness in which there was not a tree, not a corner of the land, unblanketed by the still-falling snow, unburied by soft white curves and curls, where in the evening the winter sun emerged, like a benediction, to bathe the glacial city in auroras of gold and crimson. Some say magic is real and others that it’s a consequence of the human capacity to invest the universe of things with an aura of the numinous. For Sebastian and me at Christmas, the truth lay in between, as matter and mind comingled and our house turned into Bullerby.

  * * *

  It’s odd to think that I’ll likely remember almost nothing of this time. Perhaps this tree over here is the one that memory will preserve. Perhaps that tree over there. Perhaps every remembered tree merges into a single one in the forest of the mind. What feels infinite in the present shrinks in recollection to a couple of snapshots.

  I feel great right now, running solo in the dark forest. It’s just me and the trees and the trail as they show up in the little white circle of light in front of me from my headlamp. Sometimes I like to stop, turn off my headlamp, and see what real darkness feels like. Miles and miles from civilization, deep under the tree canopy, it is dark—a pitch-black vast round shadow that wraps around my eyes like a raven’s wings. But even with nothing at all to see, the darkness feels like something. A presence, not an absence—or perhaps the presence of an absence. It is quiet, not silent. I feel solitude, not loneliness. Standing very still, I can hear the owls hoot, the flutter of bat wings, the rustle of all the little unseen night creatures as they scurry through the undergrowth. They’ve been waiting all day for the sun to disappear. And now it’s their time, these dark hours when the creatures come flapping and crawling and running through the trees, through the soundless safety of the forest in the night.

  The Island of the Cyclops

  I gazed through my bedroom window for a long time, wondering what was wrong with me. Is this normal? Do all fifteen-year-old boys feel like this? The sensation resembled boredom but hurt in a way that felt like a physical ailment. All the soul was draining out of me. Nothing meant anything; nothing was worth doing. I drifted into an unfamiliar state of consciousness that seemed to stop all thought and freeze my body motionless. Time passed, and for a while this waking dream anesthetized my worry. But the relief was soon succeeded by my recognition of malfunction, an awareness of the frozen state as a kind of trapdoor in the mind into which I had fallen and out of which I might never return. The imperative to escape this paralysis struck me with a surge of anxiety. I jerked my head back and forth, like a dog shaking rain off its fur, and felt my mind restored to vigilance.

  I ran through a list of things I could do. My mind went around in circles. Read a book. Write in my diary. Go downstairs and play on the Atari. Go kick a ball in the garden. I could watch television. But it was Sunday afternoon, the beginning of the scheduling wilderness that began with the morning church programs and did not end until Bonanza. At the start of the vacation, bad TV was bliss. Waking up the first Saturday after the end of term, going downstairs, and turning on the idiot box, knowing I could stay there the entire day, I felt like Moses reaching the Promised Land. I would sit on the couch next to Sebastian, eating bowl after bowl of chocolate breakfast cereal, watching whatever was on, the stupider the better. In the morning was Richard and Judy. They were married in real life, and it was obvious they actually liked each other. You could see it in their eyes, how they smiled and looked at each other and had these little jokes between them. It didn’t matter to me what they were talking about. It could be any random silly thing, like, Hello! Today we have a man from Preston who makes pancakes, or, Now it’s time for the weather. Over to you, Simon. It could really be anything. The point wasn’t what they said but how they said it, the way both of them looked right at the camera and through the screen so I was with them, could feel their kind eyes watching me. I didn’t know if they had kids. I thought they probably did. One time I wondered what it must be like to be that boy or girl and imagined calling them my mum and dad, and then I imagined any of the boys at school knowing I was thinking something so babyish and I made myself stop imagining it. Richard and Judy were on till about noon. In the afternoon there was A Country Practice, and then from four till six there were children’
s programs, like Bagpuss and The Clangers and Grange Hill and The Magic Roundabout, and then the Six O’Clock News with Martin Sixsmith, and then after supper there were all the brilliant American shows, like Dallas and Dynasty, and if I got lucky sometimes a film. Coming up on midnight things got pretty desperate. Sometimes there was something weird and random on, like sumo wrestling, but in the end, around two in the morning, all the programs on all four channels stopped and the screen turned into this multicolored circle with a high-pitched electronic beep . . . If I heard that sound, there really was nothing left to be done except go upstairs and close my eyes and wait till the nature documentaries came on at six. So, yes, I could go downstairs and watch something stupid. But I’d seen enough stupid things downstairs to last a lifetime. It didn’t feel good anymore. It had gotten to a point where it felt like my eighth or ninth Easter egg when I was little, or my fourth or fifth pint of my friend Sam’s dad’s home brew after school that day when I was lying on Sam’s bed laughing and listening to New Order and telling him how I felt like I was entering the fifth dimension, but then I puked all over his carpet and tried to stand and go down the stairs, but I was so drunk it was hard to walk, and as I made for the front door so I could get to the station and take the train home, his mum saw me and she said, “Young man, your mother is on her way to pick you up,” and I said, “Oh, please don’t call my mum, Mrs. McCarthy. Really, I’m begging you. Please.”

  Then I remembered that Sam had once told me how he went jogging at the weekend. Run for fun? Run when you didn’t have to? What a bizarre idea, I thought. But jogging was totally different from cross-country or track, said Sam. It was hard to start out with, but it soon got much easier, and there were no teachers yelling at you, and you could go as slow or fast or short or far as you wanted, and once you got into it, there was this amazing feeling. It didn’t hurt anymore, and you felt like you could just go and go forever. Really it was the best feeling, said Sam. The feeling of running. And afterward it didn’t go away. You could go on feeling that amazing way for hours. You’d be back home doing something boring, but it was like part of you was still on the trail in the woods, winding in and out of the trees. And it was always there. All you needed was your tracksuit and trainers and off you could go again, whenever you wanted.

  I put on my tracksuit and trainers and left the house. If I went right, I’d follow our road past the church and my old primary school to the corner shop and the main road that went downhill past the hospital where I was born and the prison and through the pedestrian precinct toward the shops and the church. If I went left, I’d reach the stairs to the underpass to the road on the other side and beyond that I had no idea. I went left.

  The whole business felt wrong and weird, an awkward, sweaty, breathless thrash of limbs I was happy no one was there to see and laugh at. After about a hundred yards I was breathing hard and fast and my chest hurt and all I could think about was wanting to stop, but I remembered what Sam had told me about how the hurt would go away, and I kept on going until I reached the end of our road and went down through the underpass, past the woods near the bakery, and down the hill toward the fields at the edge of town. By the time I’d descended the steps to the underpass and walked back up the other side, my breathing had slowed, and the chest pain had subsided with it, so I kept on running.

  I realized that I didn’t know where I was going. I wasn’t lost in the normal sense of the word. The road led in a single direction through a quiet suburban neighborhood I’d seen through car windows countless times and whose corner shops and side roads formed recognizable landmarks that oriented me unambiguously in relation to the way back home. But I felt something novel and disorienting in the experience of being outside by myself, farther from home than I’d ever traveled before on foot, liberated of any practical purpose beyond the basic act of forward motion, a sort of loss that gave me something, the restoration of something unknown yet fundamental, a need each forward footstep started filling even if it didn’t yet have a name. As I ran down the road, I became a two-legged sweating animal that nobody was watching. A moving body. A feeling and seeing body. A consciousness formed by the sweaty, breathless effort through the lanes and fields, sensing the birdsong and musty wood smell and crimson evening light converging into one. The road took me to a fence beyond which fields stretched for miles through the countryside. I kept on running as the winter sun sank toward the horizon and the trees shone golden and all my pain melted away and it wasn’t until I looked at my watch that I realized that hours had gone by.

  ON A SEPTEMBER EVENING a few months before that afternoon I discovered jogging, I went to my bedroom and tried to think about the past. My English teacher had told us to write a story entitled “A Childhood Memory.” My mind went blank. I couldn’t remember a single thing that had happened before I was about eleven. The only images that came to mind were from a dream I had once had. It felt like I must have had the dream a very long time ago, when I was little. I’ll write about the memory of a childhood dream.

  I wrote my title, “A Childhood Memory,” in neat black curly ink in the middle of the line. I wrote the lowercase initials “hw,” short for homework, in the left-hand margin. I wrote the date in numerical form, with the day first and then the month and year, on the right side of the page. I underlined everything with my little plastic ruler. The tails of the letter h in Childhood and the m and y in memory curled below the line. I made sure when I underlined the title to leave gaps for where the tails dropped below the line, instead of cutting through them.

  I remembered the dream: I am on a steam train moving through the countryside. I am sitting in a carriage with all these old ladies and gentlemen. It feels like something from a different century, the days of Queen Victoria maybe. I look at one of the old ladies. Her face has turned into a skeleton. Now I’m not in the train carriage anymore. I’m walking down a cobblestoned street. There are these wrinkled old women fighting over rags—no, bandages. The scene shifts again. Now I’m somewhere else, a junk store, surrounded by old furniture, covered in cobwebs. There’s this hat stand I’m looking at. I feel scared. I run away. I can feel the hat stand chasing me, but somehow I know that the hat stand is also the old woman with the skeleton face. I try to run faster, but it feels like I’m stuck. I keep kicking my legs against the ground, but I can’t move any faster, like I’m held in place by some invisible force field.

  “Intense . . . elliptical, almost impenetrable,” wrote my English teacher, Mr. Keene, at the bottom of the page, giving me thirty-three marks out of fifty. For the purpose of my public exams, he said, I would need to write “simpler stories.” How nice that sounds, I thought. A simple story. I knew what he meant. But there was nothing simple about the story I needed to tell.

  YES, I THOUGHT, RUNNING farther down the lane, through the fields, everything started going wrong around the time I wrote about that dream. It was hard after that to remember what order things happened in. Events seemed to blur together in my memory. I could remember singing. I could remember screaming. I knew they had happened around the same time. But they felt like two separate worlds.

  Some nights later I found myself drunk and scared. At the Bonfire Night party earlier, I had gone upstairs with another boy. We drank a pint of brandy. We took turns, slurping the liquor until we had emptied the pint. I was almost too drunk to stand. I went downstairs. I saw Mum talking to a lady I could remember she had once worked for, the headmistress of a school. I went up to them and said hello. I could see the look of anger on Mum’s face. The next thing I knew, I was sitting in the dining room.

  I was aware of her yelling and ranting and cursing. I was aware of the feeling inside of being hated. I understood from her torrent of rage that I disgusted her. “You’ve lost your promise, really gone downhill lost your charms sure you have wee fella you’re really rather stupid yes you’re mean and stupid you used to be quite clever your headmaster said you were really quite clever when you were younger you were rather nice you wer
e an altar boy played in the garden won the eighty-meter flat race the poetry prize but now you’re really very stupid lost your promise really gone downhill lost your charms sure you have wee fella no I can say that yes I can say that I can say whatever the bloody hell I’m a teacher not a typist and you cannot stop me not you I’m not a typist a teacher I used to type one hundred eighty words per minute no you shut up how dare you say that to your mother go to your room this is my house not your house my house not your house why don’t you be quiet why don’t you keep your mean thoughts to yourself I’m not really interested it’s really very boring keep your trap shut keep your gob shut trap shut gob shut you used to be such a nice boy now you’re so rude and boring you’ve really gone downhill lost your charms really very stupid and boring yes I am your mother no you shut up no you shut up no you listen no you shut up shutupshutupshutup—”

  I sat in my chair as her rage poured out of her and slammed into me with an avalanching force. I felt utterly helpless, utterly abandoned, powerless to say or do anything at all but sit and withstand the storm of bile and fury until she decided to stop, or unless I could somehow think of the words that might break whatever evil spell had befallen her, to help her remember something. Mum, I wanted to say. I’m your son. Don’t you remember your little boy? I know I’m older and bigger now. Some days I’m rude and surly. That’s what teenagers are like, sometimes. But I’m still your son. Your child. A human being. But in my drunken and overwhelmed state those words were not available to me. I sat there sobbing, hoping she might stop, but she kept on raging, and all I could think of to say was “You don’t understand that I . . . am good.”

  Time passed. I have no idea how long. It might as well have been infinity, as if a doorway had opened to a separate dimension of reality, outside time, so that when I recalled that night years after the fact, the memory felt split off from anything before or after, and sometimes I was still there, a helpless boy in a room, feeling hated. At last she did stop yelling and went to make me a cup of strong black coffee, thinking it might sober me up. She didn’t put in any milk or sugar. I winced with every mouthful. “Finish it,” she said. I complied with her instruction. Another eternity passed. My father entered the room. He sat down next to me. “I know it seems like she’s angry with you,” he said, “but that’s not anger—it’s love. She loves you.” Love? Are you an idiot, Dad? Or losing your mind? If that’s love, then love must be the most horrible feeling in the world. I clenched my fists so hard underneath the table that my knuckles went white.