Running Is a Kind of Dreaming

by J. M. Thompson

  On some level I must have understood that doing drugs all night at best guaranteed jeopardizing my marriage and at worst risked overdose and death. I dwelt in a kind of twilight between knowing and not knowing. We both did. Yet it soon became impossible for either of us to run away from the reality of my addiction. At about seven on a weekday morning in early December 2005 I was hunched over a fat line of white powder on my desk. Miriam walked through the door, a dressing gown over her big pregnant belly. “Oh my God,” she said, seeing the drugs on the desk. “You have to be fucking kidding me.”

  I had done nothing whatsoever to conceal what I was doing. I hadn’t even bothered to close the door. On an unconscious level, perhaps, I had wanted her to find me. Needed her to find me and put a stop to the insanity. She grabbed the baggie and emptied its contents into the toilet. “What are you doing?” I said. I couldn’t believe she’d wasted a whole bag of perfectly decent drugs.

  I drove to work. Within the hour, my brain—deprived of the daily high dose of cocaine that over the past few months had altered the way my mood and motivation were regulated by the neurotransmitter dopamine—entered a withdrawal state that has a psychological quality comparable to but in excess of extreme thirst or hunger. The conventional word for this state is craving. The word doesn’t do justice to the level of torment entailed. My consciousness collapsed into an awareness of not being high and an urge to reverse that situation immediately, a distress compounded by the knowledge that my secret was now out, and for the first time I was facing—in Miriam’s threat of divorce—what appeared to be real consequences for my addiction, an outcome that was unbearable to me. My mind ran back and forth between the picture of a life without Miriam, high, and a picture of life with her, sober but craving drugs.

  Images of doing coke flashed into my mind’s eye like a virtual-reality simulation. I could see the whole scene in front of me, almost as if it was actually happening: the line chopped up on the table, the incomparable combination of immense relief and satisfaction as the drug absorbed through my nasal membranes and the shiny inner lights came back on. All I needed to do was hit REDIAL to reach Martha. The images circled in my mind.

  Hello, said Charlie. I’m here. You know you can call me any time, right?

  Yes, Charlie. But you’ll fuck up my life.

  Hmmm . . . Let’s not get carried away worrying about that right now, okay? Focus on the packet. Open it up. Done that? Good. You know what comes next. Tap those little babies on the desk and chop, chop, chop. Now. BREATHE! Ah . . . Here it comes . . . just—so—good. Isn’t that worth it? Don’t you remember me?

  Yes, Charlie.

  Aren’t you—hitting—redial—to Martha—right—this—instant?

  BY THE TIME I flew my mother over from England about a month later for Christmas I had relapsed and was using cocaine again. I drove to the airport. I stood waiting in the arrivals lobby until she came shuffling through the door with a large leather briefcase in her hand. She looked much smaller than I remembered. It was beyond all understanding, how the lovely lady who sang the ballads I remembered from long ago had turned into this old woman, talking gibberish. In the morning I drove her fifty miles south to see the elephant seals that live on the beach there. I had run out of drugs and couldn’t get back to the city fast enough. I left her with Miriam and went to see Martha and bought an eight-ball. By the time Mum and I entered the lobby of the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park I was already good and high. When I felt myself descending from the peak of euphoria, I excused myself to visit the bathroom. I poured a fat line on the white ceramic surface of the toilet and snorted the drugs into my body. As I left the bathroom and went back to the exhibits, my gaze was drawn upward by a gigantic Gerhard Richter canvas that covered an entire wall, depicting the atomic structure of strontium titanate. Everything is made of protons and electrons . . . strontium . . . me . . . Mum . . .

  Before leaving, we visited the gift shop. I found a book about Australian Aboriginal art. It contained pictures of lizards and birds and kangaroos, drawn from multicolored dots. According to Aboriginal cosmology, all reality emerged from the Dreaming, the book’s introduction stated. Dots . . . protons . . . I felt my heart racing. “We should go,” I said and led my mother to the car. We were somewhere near Market Street when a pressure began building in the side of my head. Oh Jesus, I’m having a stroke—a seizure—a heart attack. I pulled the car to the side of the road. I got out of the car and sat down on the street. I felt my heart beat faster. I was breathing fast but felt like I was suffocating. The street and everything in it faded into an unreal distance. I’m going to die here—how fucking stupid. “Are you okay?” said a stranger, catching sight of me sitting on the ground. “Do you need an ambulance?” “No,” I said. “What’s wrong with you?” my mother said. “Nothing,” I said. My heart rate slowed, and my panic subsided with it. I got back into the car and drove us back to my apartment in the Mission.

  Charlie, you’re a liar. How can you say you love someone and treat them like that? I’d taken drugs because I wanted to feel joyous and alive and free. But in the car that night, verging on cocaine overdose, I felt trapped and frightened.

  Goodbye, Charlie.

  I HEARD A CRY and saw her pink face and half-inch of light brown hair and large feet and the engorgement of her lips. I put out my finger, and she clasped it with her tiny hand. I can remember my awareness of the magnitude of what was occurring, of life restructuring around a division between the world before the birth of our daughter and the new world whose threshold we had now passed beyond. We stayed in the hospital for a week while Miriam recovered from her C-section. When we left with our daughter in the car seat, as I gripped the steering wheel, it struck me as remarkable that a person didn’t need special qualifications for this sort of thing, meaning fatherhood—how strange it was that I needed a license to drive but not to bear the primary responsibility for a newborn human life.

  In the first days and weeks of my daughter’s life the cosmos shrunk to the cradle: the world beyond the nursery fell away. It was as if the feeling of being with our daughter had pulled me into a kind of dream, a space between baby and parent where the two of us ran together.

  On a rare sober night that summer, I was holding my daughter in my arms when I felt an astonishing new emotion. The feeling started in my heart, a tender warmth that then radiated all through me and then between the two of us and then seemed to pervade the room, merging with the pinkish-purple luminosity from my daughter’s night-light. The entire universe seemed to fall away, leaving the two of us there, my daughter and me, in the nursery. I felt as if I had been running, lost in a dark forest of the mind, when a path appeared with a sign that said THIS WAY. I looked into her eyes. I love you. I will protect you.

  I had long assumed that drugs and alcohol helped me feel something. But in truth, they had the opposite effect. A fake chemical connection is a poor substitute for a real and living one. A drug high is indeed a kind of feeling, but it tends to screen more subtle emotions from awareness.

  I decided to quit drugs. I thought that I could keep on drinking.

  * * *

  I lay back in the passenger seat. An atmosphere of menace pervaded the car interior. It was around ten at night. I felt nauseated from the wine I had been drinking nonstop since we arrived five hours earlier at a friend’s party celebrating Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement. I was almost too drunk to speak, a sorry candidate for any sort of reconciliation. Booze was a poor substitute for Charlie. My first few slurps would give me a bit of a buzz, but as I kept on boozing, the buzz would fade away, and the lights turn off inside me, rendering me dizzy and half-asleep. As the car crossed over the Golden Gate Bridge and swung hard onto Lombard Street, I realized that I was about to vomit.

  “Pull over,” I said. Miriam stopped the car. I opened the door and fell to the ground on my hands and knees. The contents of my stomach erupted in spasms upon the ground. I got back into the car, and Miriam drove us home
. Her face registered not anger but disgust. “I’m done,” she said. “This time I’m really done.”

  I understand. I don’t want her to leave. But I do understand. Who could blame her? She’s coped with me suicidal. Then as a cokehead. Can I really now expect her to put up with me as a garden-variety drunk, puking up my guts on the street?

  Soon, it appeared, I would truly be alone. Lost. Abandoned. A failure. Even if Miriam could tolerate such a broken man as her husband, our darling daughter surely deserved a sober and responsible dad. “I’ll get help. I promise,” I said. “I don’t believe you,” she said. I wasn’t sure I believed myself.

  FROM THE CITY, I followed the coastal highway south. I kept my eyes on the road and my mind on anything but me. Thoughts spun around my frightened consciousness. What a fool I am. What an idiot. I did this to myself. I found a motel with an available room. I carried my bag inside the room. I lay down and fell asleep. I woke in the early morning. I drove to the forest. I parked in a campground. I could see the other runners standing near the trailhead in the dawn sunlight. I picked up a little piece of paper with a number on it. I attached the paper to my shorts with safety pins. I went and stood with the runners. I listened to an older man with tan skin and calves like cantaloupes talking to the people standing next to him. He was running the marathon, he said. It was good training for a fifty-miler. One of the very fit people said his wife had once run a hundred miles. He meant nonstop. He had run with her from mile 75 to the end. It was madness to behold, he said. She was a warrior. She ran all day until the sun went down and then she kept on running. Sometime in the dark night he watched her stumble and catch herself from falling to the ground. “I fell asleep,” she told him.

  “That’s what my wife does for fun,” he said. “You wouldn’t know it to look at her, but she’s this insane badass who can run in the mountains for thirty hours straight.”

  There were others like her, the man said. The ultrarunners. They were crazy people. Crazy in a good way. They took their crazy and put it to use. They ran until they were on their knees and puking up their guts and crying and then they got up and kept on running.

  “Incredible,” I said. I could picture the warrior woman of whom the man spoke. I didn’t believe in much of anything, back then. But if I had met this ultrarunner woman, I would have wanted to shake her by the hand and say, Ma’am, I salute you. In a world of broken promises and bullshit, you have done something real. A hundred fucking miles. There could be some global decree from the pope and the president saying you were a no-good piece of shit and what those schmucks said wouldn’t matter in the slightest. “I ran a hundred miles, dude—what did YOU do?”

  In the silence of the forest nobody knew my name. I was the number pinned on my shorts. I was the sweat on my face. I was the feeling of my chest moving and the sound of every inhale and exhale. I was the breeze and the sun and the birdsong. All that mattered was forward motion.

  How could you do that to someone you love?

  Left, right, left, right. Silence.

  Huff-puff, thump-thump, huff-puff, thump-thump.

  A breeze, a whisper.

  I’m done with you. An echo. A sigh. The crunch of feet on gravel.

  Hello, says the bird, hello. Listen, say the trees. We are many. We were here long before all the sad old voices that call you back to the ruins.

  Coo-coo, says the bird. Hush now. This way—look. A path appears. I am before you and beside you and below you and within you.

  IX

  Neptune

  Namu Kie Butsu

  From the summit it’s about a thousand-foot descent to the next aid station. My light-headedness fades as Emily and I lose altitude. At the aid station, I sit down in one of the camping chairs beneath the blazing sun. There are five or six others sitting in chairs with dazed looks on their faces. A bearded fellow carves a hole in an apple with a knife, fills the hole with marijuana, and lights it. I can’t imagine wanting to get high here. I’m already high. LSD was never quite this good. Take acid, and you drop through a rabbit hole into Wonderland. Or hell. This state of mind feels a bit like Wonderland too. But it’s different. What do you call the place where the sun feels really hot and the creek feels really cold and food tastes really good and your loved ones feel so precious you want to weep with joy? Reality.

  Later, ahead of us on the trail, I can see a man plodding uphill with the slow cadence of a Zen monk performing walking meditation. I exchange a fist bump with this mountain Buddha. His face is red with sunburn and the crumpled look of a person who hasn’t slept in several days. His features form into a half-smile, conveying a hardship borne with serenity. His brow then furrows with the intimation of a mind turned quizzical, inspired, perhaps, by the emergence of other human minds in proximity to him, the opportunity afforded by the chance to break his silence, pulling him from the long reverie in which he had been hitherto suspended, for hours if not for days, perhaps his entire life.

  “Was there sunscreen at that aid station?” says Mountain Buddha. “Yes,” I say. “Back there?” he says, pointing down the hill—the aid station was miles away. “Yes,” I say. “So you mean,” he says, “that if I need sunscreen, I need to go back down there?” “Yes,” I say. Mountain Buddha nods, as if in recognition of a noble truth, already known to the Buddhas of the past. Mountain Buddha then turns to face the steep trail ahead of us. He points his finger at the forest. “When we get to the top of this hill,” he says, “do you happen to remember, might there be a parking lot?” “I don’t know,” I say. “I haven’t been there yet.” I doubt the existence of mountain parking lots. Mountain Buddha nods. He has understood something. Mountain Buddha smiles. “Right,” he says. “Because if there really was a parking lot—that would be déjà vu.” I say goodbye to Mountain Buddha and hike onward through the trees.

  IT’S THE MIDDLE OF the afternoon, and I’m shuffling on an exposed section of trail underneath the baking High Sierra sun. I can’t remember that I’ve ever felt quite so utterly exhausted. It’s hard to think straight. Emily and I stop at a creek to refill our water bottles. There are another couple of runners sitting down by the water. I recognize one of them. It’s Don from Belize. “How’s it going, man?” I say. “Hot,” he says. “Tired.” “Me too,” I say. There’s a certain comfort in solidarity. He looks how I feel: sleepy-eyed, frazzled, and drained. You reach a point in this sort of state when it stops making sense to keep struggling forward, getting slower and weaker by the step. This kind of fatigue has a nonnegotiable quality. There is the kind of tired you can power through. Eat some food and douse your head in creek water and off you go again. But there is another kind of tired for which the only remedy is sleep. Like a car with an overheated engine, you need to park your brain in the breakdown lane for a while so the circuits can cool off. I need to lie down. Right now. “Nap time,” I tell Emily. “Okay,” she says. I lie down on the ground by the side of the trail, underneath a tree. Staring up at the leaves and the little patches of blue sky between them, I don’t have a care in the world. A feeling of lovely contentment and peace washes through me. Sometimes I think the point of all my running is to remember what it feels like to stop and rest. I mean really rest. Everything settles and slows . . . down. There’s nothing I need to do. Nowhere else I need to be. If I imagine a perfect death, it would be like this, looking up at the leaves and sky, and feeling this delicious sense of absolute completion. I close my eyes.

  A MAN SITS DOWN beneath a tree. He closes his eyes in meditation. I will not leave here until I understand the nature of my mind, he thinks. He follows his thoughts for hours as they run through his mind. His mind settles. The morning comes. He understands the nature of suffering and liberation. All phenomena are subject to decay. Everything arises and falls away: kings and the great towers of the wealthy and every instant of time. Run after the moment just gone and you might as well chase a ghost. The man stands up. He shares his understanding with others. They call him the awakened one, the Buddha
. They learn how to still their minds in dhyana, concentration. His followers travel north from India to China and from China to Japan. In China dhyana becomes chan, and in Japan chan becomes zen. In the 1960s a Zen priest called Shunryu Suzuki flew from Japan to San Francisco, to found the first Zen temple in the Western Hemisphere, San Francisco Zen Center. Shunryu Suzuki taught Gyugaku Hoitsu. Gyugaku Hoitsu taught Hakuryu Sojun. Hakuryu Sojun taught Shosan Gigen. Shosan Gigen taught me.

  I first went to the Zen Center when I was a couple of weeks sober, to a meditation meeting for people in recovery from addiction. I entered a hall with round cushions on the floor. People were sitting on the cushions with their legs crossed in front of them. The room was very quiet. No one said a word. At the front of the room there was an older man with a dark blue piece of cloth hung around his neck. Behind him was a line of tall Buddha statues. “Find a comfortable way to sit still,” he said. “I can see some of you are sitting in half-lotus like me. That’s fine. But if you can’t sit in lotus position, it’s no big deal. That’s not the point. The point is to sit. Then just pay attention to your breath. When you breathe in, notice that. When you breathe out, notice that. It might help to count your exhalations from one to five. If you lose count, don’t worry—just go back to one. If you reach five, go back to one. For most of us, what you’ll then notice is your mind, running about all over the place. The traditional Zen picture for this is a wild ox. We try to train the ox by putting boundaries around it. The boundary in zazen is your attention. The mind runs somewhere else—come back to this breath right now. And that’s really all there is to it.”