Running Is a Kind of Dreaming

by J. M. Thompson

  My mother was in her mid-fifties. Yet I can remember my impression that I had no choice but to call her old. Her fragility did not derive from her chronological age, but I lacked the words to say what was actually wrong with her. I shared my mother’s sense of abandonment and anger at Dad. Call yourself a father? You were supposed to protect us. You failed back when I really needed you, and now you’re doing it again. We spoke about once a month on the phone. I can remember my feelings of contempt—how after an incident like my intervention with the heating company, it seemed to me that I was taking on responsibilities that neither of us wanted but which in my opinion surely belonged to him, not me. “I don’t understand why I have to do all of this for her,” I told him one time. “But you don’t,” he said. “Someone else could.” “What do you mean, someone?” I said. “There are people who do that sort of thing,” he said.

  I knew he meant social services. He wasn’t wrong. There likely could have been ways that someone other than me might have engaged those services to support someone with needs approximating my mother’s. But at the time, I wasn’t interested in finding people who do that sort of thing—I was furious about the person who from my wounded and resentful perspective had never done the right thing. That would be you, Dad.

  I wasn’t sure which feeling was the worst, contempt or sadness or shame or fear or guilt, or all of the bad feelings mixed together. I railed at the injustice of my plight. Why me? I’m in my twenties. I’m not supposed to have to deal with things like this. Sure, maybe when you’re middle-aged your parents end up in nursing homes or whatever and you have to look after them. But not now, when I’m so young. And where the hell did Dad go? How come he gets to skip off to his new life in Norway and I’m stuck here cleaning up his mess?

  I felt angry with my father for a long time. I resented him for failing to protect Sebastian and me, for failing to get help. Why don’t you do something? His words from those mad days in Fairgreen Road formed a loop in my memory. How absurd, I would think, that he could have imagined that, of the two of us, not he but I—a fifteen-year-old boy at the time—should have been the one to find some way of helping Mum, as if our responsibilities in the family as father and son were equivalent, or even reversed. You did this to us, I would think. But over time my anger faded. I forgave him. I felt compassion for the suffering he had endured. I came to understand that he had done his best with the emotional resources available to him. He had tried to get Mum to see our family doctor; he had tried to persuade her to participate in family therapy. Her answer always had been no. She—or her illness—was an implacable force. In the end, he had given up trying. I came to understand what a crushing loss that was for him, how my anger at him after our family collapsed was a measure of how much I had loved the miraculous Daddy I remembered from my early childhood. I hadn’t lost Mummy—we all had. Including my mother herself.

  I felt no anger toward her. Her disturbance was so extreme, it had the quality of a natural disaster. Does anyone resent a hurricane? Instead I felt survivor’s guilt, the painful knowledge that while I had survived our family’s implosion and moved on with my life, with each passing year she seemed to be descending further into isolation and destitution in a downward spiral I was powerless to stop. And I felt sadness, shame, loneliness, and grief.

  I didn’t want to feel those emotions. At the time, for the most part, I couldn’t even have discerned my inchoate bad feelings with discrete names. I knew I didn’t want to feel whatever it was I was feeling. I understood there were two ways of blocking out the bad feelings: Ecstasy and terror. When I took a pill in a dance club, I could feel my separate self dissolve into the lights and music. I could imagine all the people, living life in peace. When I rode my racing bike in twelfth gear through dense commuter traffic in the dark or when I shimmied hundreds of feet up vertical rock walls, the universe outside the frontier of the next five seconds fell away, leaving only the present second’s wide-eyed panting imperative not to fall. But then I would return to my flat and sit at my desk and remember the Jungle and the garden and feel sad.

  Once in a while I’d get a phone call or letter from Sebastian. He was in London for a while, somewhere on the outer reaches of the Northern Line, too far for me to bother ever going to visit, then Lyon, Brussels, Vienna. Meanwhile, Mum moved from Dublin to Belfast, then Southampton, Belfast again, Southampton again, Istanbul, then Southampton.

  When now and then I would catch up with Sebastian in his latest foreign country, the conversation would soon drift to crazy stories from Cannon Road. There was a solace of sorts in reassembling the broken pieces of our respective memories into more coherent whole stories; in recalling how lost we both had felt, how strange and awful it had been for us to experience the explosion of our family into four isolated parts, separated now by hundreds of miles across the earth, each one of us struggling for the most part alone to remember how that explosion had occurred.

  * * *

  The forest is as black as bat wings. My mood has shifted. I’m scared. I don’t like the dark now. I wonder if she is waiting for me. I wonder if she will leave me. I have to remind myself where I am: a forest trail on a mountain, a path that has an ending. At the top of this climb is Brockway Summit, the mile-50 aid station, where I’ll take a short nap. Miriam will be there, I know. I trust her. There is absolutely no way she’d ever let me down. Let’s say for some unforeseeable reason she can’t make it. The car breaks down, say. Even then, I’ll be totally fine. There are people at Brockway. Friendly, generous people who can help me. I have a drop bag there. I can eat and drink and lie down on one of the cots for a while and everything will be fine. So if I think about it, there’s really nothing to worry about. The scared feeling must be coming from somewhere outside any conscious thought. Somewhere deeper. Older. Primordial. Sometime when the darkness was an absence, not a presence. When the world outside was frightening and silent.

  ABOUT A HUNDRED FEET up ahead I can see fairy lights in a clearing. I see cars and people and tents hung with fairy lights. Brockway. Mile 50. I hear Miriam call my name. I see her smiling face.

  I sit down. She brings me a plate of food. I eat the food. I take off my shoes. I’ve been on my feet for around fifteen hours and awake for the past eighteen. I need a nap. Miriam has laid down sleeping bags for both of us. We lie on the ground next to each other. “Home, safe, warm,” she says. “Yes,” I say.

  Home, safe, warm. Miriam was first to say this. It was a few years ago. We were hiking in the wilderness. It was dark and cold. We were tired and needed to rest. We were far from camp. “Home . . . safe . . . warm,” she said. I repeated her words like a mantra: home . . . safe . . . warm.

  Mantras are sacred sounds designed to help those who say them remember their deepest purpose or values. Home, safe, warm helps Miriam and me remember that we have committed ourselves as a refuge to each other. Say one of us is freaking out. There’s a bill to pay but no money in the bank. There’s a report due tomorrow, but now it’s midnight and we have to sleep. Forests on fire. The world on fire. Then one of us says the magic words. Home, safe, warm. We’ll get through this. I’m here for you. Almost any trail or trial in life is traversable when you have that feeling of sanctuary. Someplace that feels like home. The place doesn’t have to be physical. It’s a state of mind. Someone who feels like home. The person who really knows you and loves you and you can lie on the ground with and hold and you know that everything is going to be fine.

  I lie down and close my eyes. I can hear loud rock music playing in the tent. Memories of moving through the forest all day form a green tunnel in my semiconscious mind through which I experience a feeling of disembodied running. The green tunnel leads into music that sounds farther away now and into which my consciousness seems to enter. I feel the warmth and love of Miriam beside me and know that I am home and safe and warm. I see foxes and smiling bears in the imaginary forest. I know the dream forest as a dream. I can feel the friendship of the trees and hear their happ
y laughter. Home safe warm . . . home safe warm . . .

  The Hands of Thetis

  There is a rhythm in all things: an intrinsic tendency for ordered systems to reproduce a familiar equilibrium. Consider the thermostat. It has two key components: a thermometer and a switch. Set the thermostat for 70 and when the temperature dips to 65 the heat comes on until the air hits 70 again. And thus a comfortable temperature stays constant. Consider the amoeba. It interacts with the environment to re-create its nucleus and cell wall. Now scale this principle of self-perpetuation from a single-celled organism to the hundred billion neurons of the human brain. The intricate architecture of our neural thermostats underlies every aspect of our existence as conscious creatures on Earth whose survival depends on a certain amount of predictability. We depend on a degree of order, for instance, in the availability of food, water, shelter, and social contact. But chaos can become its own kind of order. We run back to disaster to remind ourselves that we’re strong enough to bear it. Human tragedy is circular, a rhythm that can pull us back into the same old chaos, over and over again. Unconscious forces draw us back to the edge of the precipice. We have been here before, it seems, standing above the abyss, with no memory of ever choosing to come here, as if the abyss made the decision for us. This is why Oedipus kills his dad and weds his mom: he doesn’t know who he really is. We are blind to our true nature. “The patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out,” wrote Freud.11 “He reproduces it not as a memory but an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it.” When Achilles was an infant, his mother, Thetis, a half-divine being, bathed him in the magical waters of the Underground. She held him by his foot. The magic water rendered Achilles almost invincible: he became so fast on his feet, it was said, he could outrun a deer. Yet held in his mother’s hands, part of Achilles was vulnerable. Neither son nor mother knew this. Thetis was half-human, after all, not an all-seeing goddess. We are all Achilles. We are all in the hands of Thetis, compelled by forces outside of our awareness, never fully separate from the relationships that hold us, the human beings and historical forces and physical processes that brought us into being, from the double helix molecules that compose the human genome to the structure of our families and civilization.

  IN THE THIRTY MINUTES that Miriam left me doing chores in the front yard, a day after my return from the hospital, my mind unraveled. On the psych ward, I had erroneously concluded that inpatient hospitalization was doing nothing for me. But on the ward, I was always surrounded by other people. And I couldn’t have acted on suicidal thoughts even if I’d wanted to.

  I was aware of my pain and its ostensible sole remedy. The question in my mind concerned the moment of its ending. I understood the consequential character of the action I was now contemplating. I knew that I stood at the threshold of annihilation. I would be gone forever. I didn’t contemplate what it might be like for Miriam to discover my dead body. I didn’t wonder how Sebastian or Mum or Dad or anyone who had known and cared about me would ever absorb the knowledge that I had killed myself. I couldn’t imagine the unseen threads that bound my soul to others near and far or the rupture felt in the human fabric when one of us cuts their thread and vanishes, the agony for those left behind, all the questions that would never be answered, grieving a life incomplete and now forever beyond completion.

  No such thoughts occurred to me. All I could think about was my horrible pain and my wish for it to end. The past was gone. The future was gone. Hope, faith, the idea of anything ever changing: gone, gone, gone. Then something else was gone. Me. I felt like I wasn’t really me anymore. Everything felt unreal, like a scene in a movie.

  You know that part in a movie when it’s near the end? You don’t need to check the actual number of minutes on the screen. You can tell you’re in the final act from where you are in the story. The war is almost over. The explosions can’t get any louder. It’s obvious now what’s going to happen. The ending might be ten seconds away or maybe it gets dragged out through a series of false crescendos. But either way, the end is almost here.

  That’s how I felt. I was watching the saddest movie in the world. The one in which the hero dies at the end and the hero was me.

  One day when I was about fifteen I found myself in the passenger seat of our family car while my mother screamed at me. Years later all I could remember was the venomous tone of her voice and the feeling inside that I was hated. Please make it stop, I thought, but her screaming would not stop. She screamed and screamed and screamed, and I felt hated and hated and hated, until I turned into a hateful thing.

  I opened the car door. The road sped beneath me in a gray blur. I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I heard my mother calling my name and shouting, “No!” Her rage had disappeared. In its place was a voice that sounded caring and concerned. I had stopped being a hateful thing. I had turned back into a boy.

  By threatening to destroy myself, I had reminded her of the part of her that loved me. Her screaming stopped, and the loving mother I could recall from my earlier childhood appeared in place of the troubled, raging person she had become. We drove home in silence and never spoke of the incident again. Looking back, the memory had the sovereign quality of a separate island of the mind, severed altogether from anything that came before or after it, a runaway instant of experience outside of linear time.

  Once moments of experience become runaways like that, they tend to keep on running. It’s hard to make sense of them, learn from them, or bind them together in a linear recollection of the passage of time, so they fade into history. In the outer world of physical reality, I opened the car door sometime in the mid-1980s, in my teens. But in the inner world of the psyche, no time had passed between the moment I opened the car door in England and the moment I left the front yard in San Francisco, with the noise of screaming still echoing through my mind, and walked into the kitchen.

  I took all the liquor bottles out of the pantry. I picked up a camping knife. I lined up the bottles on the kitchen table. I drank half a bottle of tequila and a quart of aquavit. The hateful feeling faded with every swig of liquor. I staggered to the bathroom. I opened the cabinet. I took out a bottle of Klonopin. I poured the pills onto the palm of my hand. Twenty pills: it ought to be enough. I put the plug in the bathtub. I turned the faucet on. While the water was running, I went back to the kitchen. I drank a few big gulps of aquavit. I went back to the bathroom. This is what it feels like for someone to die by suicide, I thought. I took off my clothes. I could see that my legs were trembling. I got into the tub. I remembered the actions that I now intended to perform. See the wall: soon there will be no such thing as walls or seeing. Feel the water: soon there will be no such thing as water or feeling. Move the fingers of the hand: soon there will be no such thing as hands and nothing moving. I swallowed the pills. I reached for the knife.

  VI

  Jupiter

  Remembering Everything and Nothing

  Lights. Is this death? No. I am thinking. Conscious. Alive. I woke in one of those blue backless gowns they give you in the ER. I was lying on a hospital bed, in the little sphere of privacy formed by the blue curtains on either side of me. How odd to feel so chipper, I thought, floating in the Christmas morning euphoria induced by a fistful of Klonopin, a mood I could see didn’t match the somber faces around me. Miriam. Miriam’s brother Matt. A couple of nurses. Miriam was sitting at the foot of the bed, leafing through The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon. Her brother was in the chair beside her. “Hi, guys,” I said. “Go back to sleep,” said Miriam. “How are you doing, Matt?” I asked her brother. “I just feel bad for Miriam,” he said.

  Miriam had come home several hours earlier that afternoon to find me sitting on the couch, reading People magazine. “I said hello, and you started talking, and this gibberish came out of your mouth,” she told me, much later. “You were slurring your words. I knew you’d been drinking, but I had no idea how much. There was no sign of th
e liquor bottles—you must have put them away. I said, ‘Honey, are you drunk?’ and you told me you’d gone to the bar and had a couple of beers with Ned, and I thought, Oh, good. He’s seeing his friends again. He must be getting better, and for a minute I actually thought it was all kind of funny, the way you were talking gibberish in that slurry way. But then you tried to get up to go to the bathroom, but you were stumbling about, and when you got to the bathroom you puked your guts out. It was obvious you were totally smashed. Not two-beers-with-your-buddy drunk. Falling-down-crazy-paralytic drunk. I got scared. I called your social worker. She said, ‘Get him in the shower and put him into bed and don’t freak out too much. He’s starting our outpatient program in the morning.’ I told you to get in the shower. You were so drunk you couldn’t take off your own pants. There was no way I was going to be able to get you undressed and lift you into the tub all by myself. You’re too heavy. I called Matt to come over and help me. Matt came over real fast, and I turned on the shower and we got you undressed, and the moment we had your pants off I saw your leg and then I just lost it. It was all bloody and there were cuts all over it with this one really big slash down your right thigh. It was fucking horrific. I panicked and called 911, and they took you to the ER.”

  THE OLDEST SURVIVING REFERENCES to the legend of Atlantis occur in two of Plato’s late dialogues, Timaeus and Critias. A long time ago, wrote Plato, Atlantis was a peaceful state. But the Atlanteans fell victim to the dark side of their nature. Plato concludes Critias with an account of how Zeus then decided to intervene to save the Atlanteans from their own worst instincts.

  Zeus was the king of Olympus, the son of Cronus, the god of time, the grandson of Gaia and Uranus, the primordial deities of earth and air. In Rome they called him Jupiter. Zeus knew everything that could be known. Critias ends as follows: