Life inside the walls of the house felt ever more unreal. I took refuge in the world outside. How strong my legs felt on the road and trail! And what a relief it was to embrace the fire that ignited in my chest and heart and folded me within it, as my legs hammered the ground, and I absorbed the knowledge that the ground communicated of the earth’s stable presence underneath me and the solid feeling it gave me inside. With every step forward, the house fell farther behind. And I knew that this solid feeling would always be there for me: all I had to do was put on my running shoes and get outside. I ran to build a foundation for the formless feelings inside me that I didn’t understand. I ran to persuade myself that one day I would leave all the madness of my family’s past behind and never look back. I ran to remember what was real.
Years passed. I left my family’s past behind. But then I did look back. It was hard to remember what was real, or understand why so much of my memory of those days of madness had vanished into oblivion. I wondered about everything that I had forgotten, and everything that was later irrecoverable because I had never truly known it at the time: the world outside my tiny sphere of Cyclopean vision. And so years later, pacing the hospital corridor, trying to recall those lost days in Cannon Road, all I could remember was a white sphere of light, and a boy in a room looking at the book inside it, memorizing what the Cyclops had told Odysseus, in the words of a dead and ancient language.
Hope Is a Hymn
I held a pebble in my palm and wrote down how it felt cold and hard and round. I observed the little Labrador that came to visit from the animal charity. I played the conga drum. I painted a mandala whose outer rim was radiant in pink and orange and whose core was a sphere of darkness. In the evenings, Miriam would come during visiting hours with bags of Chinese takeout. I watched her unwrap the cartons of noodles and sweet-and-sour vegetables, recognizing them as the relics of a ruined ancient civilization that some distant ancestor of mine might have lived in long ago. In group therapy in the morning, I listened to the sad stories from both newcomers and some familiar faces: Holst, the Shopkeeper, the Prisoner, La Llorona.
One day the conversation veered toward the circumstances that had brought us to the hospital. “I took a bunch of pills and liquor,” said Holst. “I was okay with being dead. I didn’t want it to hurt. I figured, I’ll get high enough that I won’t feel anything. Then I got in the bathtub and I opened up a vein.” He gestured at the bandage on his arm.
I won’t feel anything: I hid this nugget in a secret chamber of my mind.
Seven days had passed since my arrival in the hospital. I had the measure of the place. This place is doing nothing for me, I thought. It troubled me to imagine what I assumed would be lifelong negative consequences for assenting to psychiatric hospitalization.
The social worker on the ward did her best to convince me otherwise. Her name was Sandra. She went by her first name and addressed me likewise. She came to the ward dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. She invoked the concept of recovery and used the phrase “Right on” in every other sentence. I felt much more comfortable talking to her than either Dr. Browning or Dr. Hewitt.
“Soon you’ll be out of here and getting back to work,” said Sandra.
“But I don’t wanna go to work,” I said. “I hate it.”
“Work in general or what you’re doing now?”
“My job right now. I’m a grant writer. I thought it had something to do with writing. It doesn’t.”
“What else would you like to do?”
“I don’t know. There are a million things.”
“Right on. Like what?”
“I go round in circles. I can’t decide.”
“Well, tell me a couple. What do you think you’d like to do?”
“I don’t know. I can’t do anything. I can listen to other people talk. I used to think maybe I could do something like what you do, counseling whatever, but now I’m not allowed.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Because of being a mental patient.”
“That doesn’t matter. There are laws against discrimination. When you get better, you can do anything you want.”
You can do anything. Was it true? In Sandra’s presence, I could almost believe in the future again. But the belief disappeared the second Sandra did. My faith in the future was like my teenage faith in God. While I was inside church and saying Hail Marys and joining in an old familiar hymn, I could feel my lips move and the words come out without needing to think about them. There was something nice about the feeling, so familiar and automatic, even if I didn’t believe in God or Jesus or heaven anymore. The image of a livable future, which emerged in my mind when a believer like Sandra spoke of it, had the same transient existence. Hope was a hymn. It had a comforting sound. Once Sandra was gone, the future disappeared along with her. When I had told her that one day I might want to listen to people for a living, I wasn’t lying. In her presence, it was the truth. But in her absence, nothing was true.
After nine days in the unit, I met one late morning with Sandra and Dr. Browning and Miriam. Dr. Browning told Miriam that I wasn’t feeling suicidal anymore because that’s what I’d told Dr. Browning. Sandra said “Right on” at least twice and told Miriam about the outpatient program I would be starting after the weekend. “Just keep an eye on him over the weekend, and if you’re worried, give us a call,” said Dr. Browning, signing my discharge papers and leading me and Miriam to the door of the ward. The doctor unlocked the door, and I followed Miriam down the hall and took the elevator from the fourth floor down to the lobby and out to the street.
Two days later I stood in the church pews at Glide Memorial, listening to the choir. In my anguished state of mind their voices resembled a wall of noise without meaning or emotion.
I feel nothing here, I thought. All hope is gone.
I left the church. I went home. Miriam asked me to help her do some weeding in the yard. I went to the yard. I picked the weeds. Time passed. Miriam went to the store to get some groceries. A bleak unreal feeling overcame me. I remembered what Holst had said: I won’t feel anything.
V
Mars
Home, Safe, Warm
Years passed. By the time I reached my late teens, almost nothing remained of the life Mum, Dad, Sebastian, and I had once shared on Cannon Road. Even my memories were scrambled and fragmentary. I could recall glimpses of the time Before, the early childhood world of the garden and the Jungle and the four of us standing on the summit of Slieve Donard, but the chaos that had succeeded it was so disruptive to my memory, I sometimes wondered if there had ever been a time in reality when the separate broken parts of our family formed a whole. Before was like Atlantis, a legendary lost continent, long ago collapsed into the sea. In the absence of tangible evidence, its existence was easy to dismiss as a childish fable. But still there were those who claimed that the storied civilization had existed in objective reality. “No, you didn’t imagine it—she was lovely,” my father said, recalling my mother prior to her transformation.
The past made no sense. I resolved to put it behind me. I focused on moving forward: running ahead. I devoted the following decade, from my late teens to my late twenties, to creating an impersonation of a functional human being, building enough of an outer shell of book smarts to convince the world—and myself—that I was someone, that I knew what I was doing, that I understood how to live. I got into the University of Oxford. After college, I got a job as a researcher and then a producer of British network television documentaries. I spent six weeks in Papua New Guinea for the Discovery Channel, flying by helicopter to remote jungle villages. I sought out the hardest challenges I could find, priding myself on my ability to survive anything, to accomplish anything, proving that there was nothing I couldn’t do. Meanwhile the chaos of my childhood and my mother’s ongoing illness remained a mystery I felt powerless to solve. I seldom spoke about what happened to my family in the mid-1980s. I never sought therapy. Fear and shame pursued
me like a shadow that was impossible for me ever to outrun. I medicated the feelings with alcohol, marijuana, MDMA, and LSD. On MDMA, I experienced an overwhelming sense of bliss in which I no longer felt like an isolated mind, painfully separate from the world beyond the frontiers of my skin, but instead lovingly interconnected with others. Yet when the drug wore off, the pain of isolation felt even greater.
I hadn’t understood my parents’ psychotic breakdowns when they occurred: the experiences had utterly transcended my teenage understanding. They started to become clear in hindsight, through successive cycles of remembering, but never with any sense of finality or closure. I tried to remember; I couldn’t remember. I tried to run away from my mother and never think about her again; my route was a circle that always took me back to her.
During the winter vacation of my second year at Oxford I took LSD with my friend Ned at his parents’ cottage in the English countryside. The next day we had breakfast in a café. The locals called it the Nostril. A large main room connected to a smaller room at the back, like a narrowing office, and the walls throughout were painted red, curving in at the edges. I could understand why the café had earned its unofficial name: it was easy to imagine that I was sitting inside a giant nose. I felt calm. In my hallucinatory state, it occurred to me that the organ in which I had found myself was not a nostril after all but somewhere much deeper inside. The womb. A realization dawned on me: My mother is dead.
I recognized the thought as the formulation in words of wordless knowledge I had borne in a bodily ache for a very long while, a realization I had until then succeeded in screening from conscious recognition, because of the shattering grief that came from rendering her loss explicit in my mind.
I wasn’t delusional. I understood the death was not a physical one. The thought connected to an awareness, for the first time with clarity, of grief. She was gone. After enduring her verbal assaults, and then witnessing psychosis engulf her mind, I had severed myself from the memory of the emotional force field that had once bound the two of us as one. I was alone. I realized that I had been alone for a very long time. But this clarity gave way to confusion in reconciling my impression of her psychological demise with my understanding of her physical continuity. Who, then, has died? I wondered.
Sometimes I fantasized that she would suffer a fatal accident or terminal cancer. I would picture a cute girl noticing me in a pub and seeing my sad face and inquiring about my sadness, to which I would respond, My mum died, and I would see the sympathy in Cute Girl’s eyes. It would be so much easier, I imagined, to bear a grief so much more comprehensible, a loss that other people could understand. All the other words I could think of—She’s mad—fell short of communicating my bereavement. I must be evil, I’d think, catching myself in the fantasy of a car wreck or metastatic brain cancer, as if my mind had murdered her. And along with my ambiguous sense of loss came another problem: how to conceive of the identity of the woman with my mother’s legal name who sent me deranged postcards every week. Who are you, Mrs. Thompson? You seem to know things about me. You seem to mention places that I once visited with my mother. Are you a friend of hers, or perhaps a distant relation? I do wish you would refrain from signing your postcards “Mum”—I find it so very confusing.
I can remember glancing at the scrawl on one of her postcards, the loops and curls of her dense cursive inscribed so tightly together that the words joined in places, forming the equivalent of massive compound nouns, and it struck me that I and my childhood self were twins, two beings sharing the same body at different times, grown-up Thompson sailing off on the ship of consciousness while little-boy me drifted toward the faraway island of childhood memory. Why are these words so unbearable to me? Is it the outdated references or the disjointed prose or the eccentric punctuation? It was all of that: the disconnection, the lack of acknowledgment for our family’s collapse, the impression conveyed in the postcards that her own demise was unknown to her. Don’t you know that I know you’re not my actual mother? There were lines between us, my mother and my father and my brother and myself, Clara and Mummy, a little boy and whoever I had now become, umbilical cords connecting past and present, but in my mother’s mind they were tangled, broken, stitched together in shabby scraps. Here are the scraps, she seemed to be saying in her postcards. You piece them together. But I couldn’t, or wouldn’t. Why the hell should I? You’re the one who tore us apart.
But I felt troubled by this impression I had of two women, my mother and Mrs. Thompson, that it was surely a sort of convenient fiction I told myself so I wouldn’t have to go home for Christmas. Was there something unique about her metamorphosis that diverged in any meaningful way from the transformations that occur to all phenomena that have existed in time? We cannot step in the same river twice, Heraclitus told us. A little boy turns into a man: Were those two selves not likewise mutually distinct, separated in space and time, unlike in mind and body? And even in the present, it occurred to me, Am I not this very moment a crowd of conflicting thoughts? Is there really a still point in all this flux, a core me? No, I was a fiction too, so it wasn’t at all clear to me that my mother was any different, rendering my loss of her all the more confusing: I was mourning somebody still alive.
“DID YOUR FATHER TELL you where he was going?” she said. He had. Oslo. He’d met a Norwegian woman on a Gaelic language course in Dublin, fallen in love with her, and gone to live with her in Norway. He insisted to me that he’d been explicit that he meant leaving her forever and told her he had met someone else and was going to live with her in Norway. Either he hadn’t been explicit or she hadn’t understood, or she didn’t want to understand. “He’s in Oslo. I thought he told you.” She said, “No, he didn’t. And he’s not allowed. It’s criminal.”
I understood why he wanted to leave. She was impossible. I wanted to leave too. But I couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. I wasn’t sure. How come Dad gets to leave, but not me? It was a double bind. Weeks would pass and I’d try to forget all about her. Then she would call me at work and start droning on. I’d listen for a while, but then I couldn’t stand it. I felt like she wasn’t talking to me; that she could just as easily have gone on blathering if some random stranger had picked up the phone. I’d hang up, then feel guilty for not caring more, and worried she might have said something important that I missed while I spaced out as she was droning on. I couldn’t bear the thought of her, all alone, crazy and desperate. But I couldn’t talk to her either. I went on circling around like this—from guilt to caring to trying to talk to failing to spacing out and not caring and then back to guilt—for years.
For several years after my father left my mother, she struggled to comprehend that his departure was permanent. In my mother’s phone calls and letters to me, she characterized him as a sort of international fugitive; she had informed INTERPOL, the British Embassy, and the BBC about his criminal act of desertion, she said. She seemed compelled by forces outside her control on a downward spiral toward destitution. My father had left her with a flat in a pleasant neighborhood in Belfast. About a year following his departure, she sold the flat in Belfast and moved to England, then Ireland, then England again, depleting her capital in each impulsive move. One time I called the Realtor, hoping to block the sale. I sent a fax with a five-paragraph essay that would have made my Oxford tutors proud, arguing my case. The sale defied all reason, I explained. All her running back and forth, every reckless movement, should be construed as a message to my father, I argued. You did this to me, one should imagine my mother wishing my father to understand, I told the Realtor. “In conclusion, it thus becomes incumbent upon me, and I respectfully submit to you, sir,” I wrote, or formal-sounding words to that effect, “to take action to disrupt my mother’s self-destructive downward spiral: please don’t let her sell the house.” I can remember the Realtor expressing sympathy for my concern but also an understanding of her freedom as an adult person to do as she pleased.
One day in the winter she called to say that her nei
ghbors in an adjacent flat had discovered a carbon monoxide leak. I told her to turn off her heater. “It’s too cold,” she said. I called the company that maintained the heaters in the area. I warned the person on the phone that unless someone checked my mother’s heater, she might die. “Old lady, is she, your mum?” the person said. “Yes,” I said. She was middle-aged. But saying she was old was a kind of idiom for what I couldn’t say out loud, couldn’t even think, didn’t have the words for. I understood that mental illness was involved. Back then I wasted a lot of time wondering what particular psychiatric jargon best matched her idiosyncrasies. Is it schizophrenia? But isn’t that when people hear voices? I don’t THINK that sounds like her. . . . But could it be? What if she hears voices and never tells anyone about them? Keeps her delusions to herself? But she was never shy of speaking. . . . Surely if she thought aliens were beaming signals into her brain she’d have told me all about it? So if not schizophrenia, what is it? What the hell is wrong with her? What happened to her? To US?
Running Is a Kind of Dreaming Page 15
