The lunchtimes were the best times: she would sleep on the bed, and Sarah would doze next to her between feeds. I would come in from the spare room and lie there, looking out of the window of our new house—so new still that the bright yellow leaves of our neighbor’s backyard tree still seemed thrillingly exotic against the blue sky—and I would read and think about my daughter growing up.
It was not idle reading. I worried about being a father. It suddenly seemed that the books I had been living with my whole life were absolutely filled with them, fathers, and they were either implausibly, unreachably life-enhancing or they were total disasters. The perfect dad is a cliché, and so is the brute, and there seemed to be no middle ground at all.
Inevitably, I decided to use books to solve the problem that books had created. I would fight books with more books, and so I bought books on child development, books on child safety, books about toddler diets and books about the importance of preschool education. If your child does not attend an enriching preschool, these books informed me, they are likely to become a monster. The soft skills will not develop. They will not connect with people. They will have no empathy. There are hundreds of books like this, all eager to pitch their own disasters, all filled with their own monsters.
And I had been buying other books too. Alongside the child psychologies and the conflicting instructions, I had been slowly collecting a selection of the books I had when I was young. A gift for my daughter, I told myself, even though I knew that it was more likely an indulgence for myself.
I read The Spy’s Guidebook, a template for summer busyness with its matchboxes full of secret agent trinkets, its codes to chalk on walls or scratch in the earth. No bullies in The Spy’s Guidebook, just enemy spooks. I already worried about future bullies. Then I read Ellen Raskin, her mystery stories alive with puzzles and nominative determinism, with a hard-won mistrust of adults and the things they do to children—and to themselves.
Back when I first read them, these books all fed into my favorite childhood fantasy, which was simple, thrilling, and entirely useless as a preparation for meaningful adult existence. My fantasy was that everything in my life was a clue, and only I could put it together. I felt this almost all the time as a kid, to varying degrees. Maybe everyone does. A gust of wind leaving the house or the right strain of light slanting through branches overhead could trigger the sensation that I was entering a moment and must pay attention, must try to understand what was happening around me. I collected things I found: broken glass, scraps of paper with other people’s half-finished notes. I drew maps, in which I kept track of the layered, often invisible, aspects of the environment I lived in, and I sensed a deep order in the world, albeit a hidden order. Even then I did not need to understand it. I just wanted to see it. I just wanted to explore it.
I did not assume that Leon would come to think these sorts of things too, but I did wonder what private interactions with the world she would choose to conduct. And I sensed that her arrival might require something new from me—or maybe even something old that I had almost forgotten.
I read on. Late summer became autumn, and then winter. Eventually, I washed up on Treasure Island. The best edition: the Everyman Library, with the map at the front followed by illustrations from Mervyn Peake, who conjured grotesque pirates and set them playing among ferns and bracken. Peake draws sunlight by leaving it out: he draws around the light and then it just radiates off the page. He never draws Long John Silver the same way twice, and his old blind Pew is truly a monster, a thuggish lump with a howling gape of a mouth, hands grasping and reach unthinkable.
I had always known that Treasure Island is a dark book, a book with a child’s morality, but I had never seen that quite as clearly as I did with Leon lying next to me. Although she was rarely up for more than an hour or two, and she generally limited herself to thrashing her legs or smiling very specifically at things nobody else could see, she had somehow crept into the ageless text and rewritten sections, playing up the dangers, underlining the menace. Most of all, she had worked on the book’s central moment. Young Hawkins, Jim lad, has taken to sea in search of treasure. And now, hidden in the apple barrel in the galley of the Hispaniola, he is overhearing the details of a mutinous plot brewing among the ship’s crew. This is all led by Long John Silver, whose murderous deceit is becoming apparent soon after Hawkins has started to see him as a friend, almost a parent. This is deception not just of the upper crew, then, but of a child who has grown to love him—who had assumed, in that childish way, that he was lovable.
For the first time ever, it was a relief to finish Treasure Island. We had a quiet Christmas, just the three of us, and as New Year’s approached, I picked up Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. More monsters of pragmatism. And at the start of Hyde there is a door. A door with something of a mystery to it.
One January morning in 2014, I lurched upright in bed at around six and announced: “I think I’m having a heart attack.”
The main audience for this was Leon, five months old and sharing the bed with us, often sleeping sideways and leaving little snow angels in the sheets. On less catastrophic mornings, she would double as my alarm clock, a warm foot in the face telling me it was time to get moving. (I would often leap from bed to discover, in the chill air of winter in an old, rattly house, that this alarm clock was broken, and it was still before five.)
Next to her was Sarah, squashed up against the wooden bars of an open-sided cot that we’d clamped on to the bed. To accommodate the smallest person, who somehow required the most space, we would both end up sleeping in right angles, facing away from each other. Parenthood has a mysterious geometry all its own.
At the time it seemed that Leon was an amalgam of the two of us, that she fluctuated between resembling Sarah and resembling me. When she was storing up energy she ate and ate and her head changed shape. She became a moon-face like me: round and pale and wide, built for expressing wonder or confusion and little else. When she was growing, she reverted to Sarah as her skull seemed to lengthen. She shifted from Méliès to Modigliani: a blonde Modigliani, amused but otherwise unreadable.
Her temperament fluctuated too, but here she was firmly her own person—two of them, in fact. Watchful one second and endearingly dictatorial the next, both states were enlivened by an eagerness to break off from whatever she was doing and find something in the world that surprised her. Whatever shape her face took, her mouth was forever playing with the start of a smile. She even smiled before she burst into tears.
Wordless at five months, Leon was not fazed by my announcement that morning. Intrigued and amused, she sucked her thumb and considered me at length, waiting to see what happened next.
Sarah, more used to my cheery opening gambits, propped herself up on her elbows and squinted.
“Pain in your arm?” she asked.
“No.”
“Pain in your chest?”
“No.”
She flopped on to her back and blinked. “What’s happening exactly?”
“My hands feel too tight,” I said, as I placed my palms together and squeezed. I steepled the fingers and then pushed them against each other.
Nothing looked particularly swollen, but the flesh was prickly and hot, as if my skin was suddenly being forced to accommodate much larger bones. I sensed an imminent rupture, probably fatal: sausages splitting on a grill. “It’s like I’m toasted or vacuum-sealed or something.” I struggled for an adequate description. “My hands feel like Pop-Tarts.”
Best to keep the sausages to myself.
“Your hands feel like Pop-Tarts.” Sarah rolled over. “Doesn’t sound like a heart attack,” she said as she closed her eyes. “Sounds neurological. Much more likely to be multiple sclerosis or something.”
While Sarah slept, I went into the bathroom, taking Leon with me. Leaning her over one shoulder so I could feel her warm breath on my cheek, I pinched my fingers and felt pins and needles radiating outwards around my knuckles. My most reliable sense of ide
ntity has always resided in my hands, I think. In my mind’s self-image I am still about sixteen, stumbling and elbowy inside a flapping shirt and billowing cord flares. My hands, though, speak to the person I would like to be today: precise and gentle.
But this morning I did not recognize my hands. They were filled with strange electricity, dangerous and uncontrolled, as if a sparking cable were jolting itself around inside me. I looked at my wedding ring, which has never really fitted properly and has worn a neat little groove where it rests. I tugged at the ring and gently eased it upward. The groove didn’t seem to cut any deeper, as I would have expected if my hands were truly as puffy as they now felt. The coloration of the skin didn’t seem any angrier. Yet it was hard to say this with any certainty.
I realized that I was not prepared for illness, if this was illness. I had not taken stock. I did not know myself.
I propped Leon up so that she was sitting on the rim of the sink, leaning against me, and I placed my palms against the cold tiles beneath the window. The sparking in my hands didn’t stop, but I could at least get a better shape of it here. It was not my entire hands that were electrified, just the fingers—just the very ends of the fingers in fact. Maybe I’ve slept funny, I thought, eyeing my daughter, who eyed me back. She wanted to see the wedding ring again, its gold catching the morning sun and igniting patches of the gray light of the bathroom.
Slowly, a memory of the day before returned to me. In the office, writing an interminable review about an interminable game. Dividing my time, as usual, between the keyboard and the control pad. Suddenly, my work seemed like so much abuse aimed at my hands, as if I were sending them down into a salt mine every day and expecting them to do all this mindless toil without complaining.
After work, I had gone out to dinner with a few friends—my first night out since Leon’s birth—and I now remembered that, while I was fumbling around for a tip, I briefly felt something new happening in my fingertips. A sort of pinching effect, as if somebody had placed crocodile clips across the nails. I shook my hands a few times, and then made an easy peace with it when I noticed everyone had stopped to watch me. An occupational hazard: soldiers get shot, firemen get burned alive, and people who write about video games for a living get hunched backs and tingling fingers.
I was still staring at my hands when Sarah eventually came into the bathroom and started brushing her teeth. She had her phone with her, and the screen blinked and flashed with her latest craze: an app that allowed her to track vessels moving through the sea that lay less than a mile from our house. This had been her reaction to our new home, perched on the edge of the coast. As I ranted about bargeboards and soffits (without ever quite understanding what either of these actually is), as I filled myself with tedious knowledge, like the names of the curved tiles that run along the backbone of a roof—they’re called bonnets—she had been drawn toward the sails and the silver horizon: yachts and fishing boats and huge shadowy tankers passing in the darkness.
“That Russian yacht is back,” Sarah said. “The millionaire’s one.” It was a favorite, a wallowing bleached thug that appeared by the marina every few months. And then she clocked my carefully prepared expression: noble suffering, revealing itself despite obvious stoicism. “Still feel weird?” she asked. “Maybe it’s your version of the fireworks.”
This thought had occurred to me: that there was something of a reversal taking place. While fretting about illness is definitely my territory, Sarah’s usually the one who wakes us all, a light but voluble sleeper, forever being ejected suddenly from some dream or another, babbling insanities. None of this is a criticism. If anything, this tendency of hers has meant that our relationship has always been peculiarly intimate. I know the sorts of things that happen when she closes her eyes.
And “My hands feel like Pop-Tarts” could have been her line. Two nights before my fingers started tingling, she awoke me with frantic talk of fireworks erupting over water, colorful and bright. “Did you see the lights?” she asked. “Did you see the lights in the sea?”
“That’s the subconscious,” I said at the time, and nodded to myself. “My dad says that when you dream of the sea you’re always dreaming about the subconscious.”
“Your dad says a lot of things,” said Sarah. The fireworks faded and the sea withdrew, but in the bathroom that morning my hands still felt weird.
Even so, there was little sense of genuine fear. I was still living with the volume down, everything that happened was just voices bleeding through from a distant room. Once we were all up, my fear of a heart attack faded, and so I was left to explain away my tingling hands in a less alarming manner, inattention giving ground to denial.
And the denial worked like this: didn’t my hands often tingle a little these days? And if they did, when had that started? When had my back started aching, for that matter? When had my feet started feeling pinched and heavy? “This isn’t illness,” I told Sarah as I dressed Leon. “It’s so much more awful than that. It’s old age.”
“It’s middle age,” laughed Sarah. “Doesn’t that sound even worse?”
It wasn’t middle age, but I’m not surprised by the category error. I have had to work at being ill. I understand that now. I have had to work at the interpretative side, the filing side, the side that covers the whole muddling business of learning to live with illness. It has been real work too. Grinding work. At times, it has even felt like physical work, in a dull kind of way, as if I have been polishing the lens of an old telescope so as to see distant things more clearly, more precisely.
And I understand that the nature of the work itself is always changing. For a year or more I missed a range of increasingly worrisome neurological symptoms because I did not know how to do the intimate work of discovery. Self-involved as I have always been, I did not yet know how to reach inwards, to feel out the hidden sensations of consciousness, to take a single cognitive oddity and look for the wider patterns it might fit into. (Later on I would encounter the opposite of this: I would grow so attuned to changes inside me that I would sometimes spot things that weren’t there. I would invoke phantoms.)
With my tingling hands, the work was very different, however. I did not know how to tackle denial. I did not know how to dodge my own lies.
In truth, I was becoming increasingly electrical. Static was building up inside me, spreading out from the tips of my fingers and along my arms, spreading up from my toes and through the balls of my feet and into my legs. I was getting an origin story without the superpowers to make it worthwhile.
All of January, I told myself that nothing was happening, even though it clearly was. Instead I argued that the tingling could not last. It seemed such a small, insubstantial thing, even if it was steadily taking over. It was beginning to push me around too. At night, I could no longer do up the tiny buttons on Leon’s bedclothes after her bath. In the morning, I often could not feel my fingers at all, just a fidgeting mass of pins and needles at the end of my wrist, and beneath the tingling there were rubbery hands, like a prop from a joke shop. But still, I managed to find excuses. I was sleeping funny, what with three people sharing a bed made for two. I had pulled something in my neck when I carried Leon in the sling. Fatherhood itself was undermining me even as it continued to delight. The first laugh. The first true look of recognition. The first moment I reached into the tumble dryer and an implausibly tiny pair of trousers came out along with the duvet cover and kitchen towels.
Then, in early February, I found something new. One Saturday I found myself asking: “Do you ever get that thing? That thing when a motorbike rushes past outside, and it’s so loud that you feel the sound in your spine?”
I phrased this question very carefully. I made it breezy—unnaturally breezy—because I had a vested interest in receiving a breezy answer in reply. Even as I spoke, though, I knew I was in trouble. Sarah’s face started to sag as I reached the halfway mark. When a smile sags, you don’t get a look of sadness. It’s more a look of disgust that
emerges. Accidental disgust. Disgust delivered in the place of fear, which is following behind it and needs time to catch up.
“No,” said Sarah eventually. “Nobody ever gets that thing.”
We were in a coffee shop, and the fact is that a motorbike really had just rushed past. And it had been loud. And as it passed, I had involuntarily ducked my head and felt a revving explosion, a sympathetic chugging of wide-band electricity as it roared down my spine and into my limbs, finally free from whatever opposing forces had held it back.
I laughed stupidly: to buy time to think of something to say, perhaps, or maybe because I was stupid with surprise at what had happened. If that pulse of sheer energy hadn’t come from outside, if I hadn’t been rattled about by traffic, then I had just experienced the strangest thing to ever take place inside me. Something a thousand times more powerful than the tingling in the fingers. My tingling: tingling I suddenly realized I had come to accept as a part of me.
Slowly, I tilted my head again. Join me. Bring your head forward, so that your chin descends until it touches the very top of your chest. What do you feel? Nothing, I imagine. But there is a world of sensation you are missing out on: a gentle buzzing that starts as my head begins to move, and that suddenly catches, becoming a fierce corrugated shudder, broad and thick and somehow undeniably friendly, building at the top of my spine and then racing downwards, lighting up my innards as it goes. It used to burn itself out in my lower back; now it tends to turn to embers in my calves. Over time, I have learned I can control it a little: I can play it like a musical instrument, pausing my head at certain spots and lengthening the rumble that’s produced, changing its shape and its complex, endlessly threaded patterns of energy.
The Inward Empire Page 5
