by Jenny Diski
I gave no indication to my putative captors of my state of mind, I think. I am rather good at keeping my madnesses private. I kept to myself as much as I could, but I ate with the family, laughed with Mikey and listened to more of Bet’s stories of her childhood. Yet all the while the bizarre threat remained. Several times Jim and Bet reminded me of it.
‘Hey, ain’t it great having Jenny living with us all the time?’
I laughed along with them. I dreaded the coming night when the fantasy would gain full control and the terror of abduction grow massive. During the night my heart beat so hard I thought I might die of it. In the morning all I could think of was catching the train, but that I was dependent on Jim getting me to the station on time. He might simply disappear to the commissary. What if he took me but contrived to be late enough to miss the train? What if he kept taking me to the train, every day, and I kept missing it, day after day, and we all began to live in a pretence that they were letting me go when it was perfectly clear that I was in fact imprisoned? I feared the politeness of a nicely brought up child who doesn’t dare be rude enough to say to the stranger offering her a lift to oblivion that she doesn’t want to get in the car with him. I thought of suggesting that I get a cab to the station, but I knew my hosts wouldn’t hear of such a thing. I would be trapped by good manners into an eternity of out-of-town Albuquerque. In fact, I had the phone number of the daughter of a friend who lived in the city and worked at the university, but I didn’t phone her. The phone was in the kitchen and I didn’t want to be overheard. You remember that scene in the movie? And I feared too that I would blurt out my panic and reveal myself to a sane stranger to be ridiculous, as well as hear my own absurdity as I spoke the words. ‘I’m afraid I’m being kept prisoner here…’ So idiotic, she would send a doctor to me, and in consultation with Jim and Bet it would be decided that the best thing would be for me to stay where I was, on calming drugs, and wait until the madness passed over. It would, of course, take for ever. I would never be free. I was their prisoner. No, no, I’d remember as the fantasy took off, the point was that I would be revealing myself to be paranoid, in a state of unreality, but all scenarios led back to the pit of fear I had dug for myself.
What all this was about was that I had got off the train. I’d stopped moving, meeting and withdrawing from people. I was grounded in a house with a family, and I wonder if Jim and Bet hadn’t made their Misery joke whether I wouldn’t nonetheless have generated the fear all on my own. Just five days, not even a week, and I was beside myself with despair that I was trapped, that I would never get away from people. To be a stranger on a train is to be inside a private anonymous bubble of one’s own, waving at other passing bubbles; to be staying in a house with a family was to be engaged in a way that I found nearly intolerable, actually dangerous. And when the partial safety of my separate trailer was taken from me with the notion that it might become a gaol, full-blown panic ensued. The people I know at home I trust to let me keep a certain distance, to withdraw when I need, to need a degree of withdrawal themselves. Bet and Jim and Mikey I didn’t know and couldn’t trust to give me leeway, or to want it. The people I know at home I trust up to a point, but not enough not to need to feel I can withdraw. Bet, Jim and Mikey I didn’t know or trust even to that point. I knew exactly what I was doing when I put myself on a train. I forgot myself, or mistook myself, when I got off it.
The final morning was spent in a haze of anxiety, added to by a flurry of will-we/won’t-we-get-her-to-the-station jokes, and by Jim taking off with a teasing grin to buy cigarettes at the base at around midday, an hour and a half before my train left. I did the only thing I know to do when panicking about something that might, but probably won’t, happen: I fast forwarded. I put myself past the time of danger, into the future, and had myself seated safely in the train moving away from Albuquerque. It’s always worked a treat so far.
It worked, for example, when I was coming out of my last major depression in 1984. I’d spent three months sitting on the sofa, immobilised by the worst episode yet. But as you do, though as you don’t believe you ever will, I was beginning to come out of it. I went to Vermont to stay with a friend and spent the final two days (having been warned against it) alone in New York before flying back. I’d never been to New York and I walked for miles around the only city I would recommend during a depression – the energy level buoys the most leaden of moods. I wandered around the park in the late summer sun, and settled on the grass to listen to a jazz band. A Japanese man began to speak to me. Well, I thought, strange city, strange times, go with it. That old grabbing-experience habit again, not quite guttered. We walked around the park and he told me that he had just returned from Edinburgh where he had been researching the use of lithium in pure depression rather than only bipolar illness. I kept a straight face, but was most impressed at my capacity to attract the appropriate professional. I asked him questions and then he was impressed.
‘Are you in the field?’ he asked.
‘No, I just take a lay interest.’
Soon we were talking about diagnosis, and as we sat on a bench he explained to me the set of ten to fifteen questions psychiatrists use to diagnose and assess depression in patients.
‘Like what?’
He asked me the first and then waited, as if we were playing a game, for my answer. After six or seven he began to look at me more carefully, by the final question he looked very serious.
‘A severely depressed patient is expected to give certain answers to half the questions. You have given them to two-thirds.’
‘Oh, I was just trying to put myself in the mindset…’
He was not convinced. Nonetheless, he told me he was meeting a Japanese friend at Columbia and then going on to the best Japanese restaurant in New York. Would I like to come along? He was a round-faced, amiable man in his early thirties, who spoke gently and smiled kindly. Here I was in NY, I was being invited to eat great Japanese food with two Japanese people. Why would anyone in their right, or righting, mind, turn such an offer of spontaneous experience down?
We picked up the friend who had a car. As soon as they met, everything changed. I was put in the back of the car and the two men got in the front. They spoke to each other in Japanese, and addressed not a word to me. I began to wonder … One Japanese bloke in a strange city is another person; two, it turned out, became a cultural phenomenon. I was ignored, geisha-like in the back of the car as we approached the bridge.
‘Um, where are we going?’ I asked.
‘Restaurant’s in New Jersey,’ my friend barked and then continued his incomprehensible conversation with his friend.
My friend in Vermont knew I was in New York, but no one knew I was in New York in the back of a car with two complete strangers whose language I couldn’t understand, heading for the wilds of New Jersey. Now it crossed my mind that I had not behaved with caution. I thought of asking to be let out of the car before it crossed the bridge, but decided it would force the issue, and I didn’t want to know quite so definitely if I was really in danger. I sat in the back, listening to the two men in intense conversation – about how to rape and murder me, or about the funding of psychiatric research in Edinburgh? – and I ran through the newspaper files in my mind for reports of rape and murder by Japanese men abroad. I came up with nothing. I decided to sit it out and fast forward to them dropping me off at my hotel after a pleasant meal in New Jersey. It didn’t make me feel good, so I forwarded further to my arrival at Heathrow the following night. This was good because it also took care of my mild flying anxiety. I stayed very calm and decided that sooner or later death was inevitable and that now was as good … Perhaps I was not quite as over the depression as I thought.
The meal was good. It was ordered without reference to me by my companions in Japanese, which they continued to speak to each other. They did not once talk to me. I picked at this and that, trying not to think of it as my last meal. Finally, a credit card was produced, I offered mine and it was
flipped back at me. I followed them out of the restaurant back to the car. I felt a little better after we crossed the bridge back to New York, but only for a moment.
At 11.30 on a Saturday night my friend’s friend stopped the car at the subway in Harlem and said goodbye.
‘Don’t forget you get the A train. It must be the A train,’ he said in immaculate English and he left us standing.
It was a warm night, but that wasn’t why my friend was sweating. Saturday night in the subway in Harlem was not where tourists were supposed to be, especially ones with expensive Japanese cameras around their necks. He was paralysed with fear, but there was no chance of getting a cab. There is nothing like someone else’s panic to induce calm, I find. I led him gently down into the subway, to his doom he supposed. While we waited for the A train, large young men with blaring boom boxes stood and scanned up and down the platform. My friend was now saturated with fear, but it occurred to me that all these dangerous-looking guys were no different from the kids I taught at the Islington Sixth Form Centre. In fact, they might have been very different, but it’s always good to find a familiar point of view. Anyway, I was depressed, I had just escaped rape and murder and I had a man with me who was much more scared than I was. I stayed in charge, put him on the train and we clattered along under the pavements of New York until we got to a stop that my friend knew was near a jazz club he’d heard of. He jumped up and left with a slight wave of the hand. What the hell. I got off half a dozen stops later, still unmolested, at Central Park where, at midnight, there was not a cab in sight. I had no idea where my hotel was – because I am the only person in the world who, having no spatial sense, cannot orient herself in New York City. I was lost, and not feeling so brave any more. Finally I saw a cop. I asked him for directions to my street.
‘I can’t work it out.’
He looked down at me with wonder.
‘Carn’t? Carn’t? You carn’t work it out?’ He was doubled up with amusement at my accent.
‘Listen, that’s how they talk where I come from.’
He shook his head in wonder and chuckled as he wandered off, quite failing to set me in any direction at all, let alone the right one. And yet, here I am, a couple of decades on, alive and well enough, because moments later a cab drove by, stopped and took me to my hotel, once I had convinced the driver that I really didn’t want a drink, just a ride home. And the next night I was indeed walking through the arrivals door at Heathrow, just as I had pictured on my way to New Jersey with two perfectly strange strangers. Fast forwarding. The same thing, I suppose, as I did when I was a kid, imagining myself dead. The technique has never let me down.
* * *
Seated safely in the train moving away from Albuquerque I shook my head against the power of my fancies. Not that my friends hadn’t had fancies of their own, but what we rely on, and what usually works, is that people have fancies but also the capacity to control them so that they do not spill over into reality. It doesn’t always work, some people lack that capacity, but society depends on it mostly working in order to function. Mine had run too far amok in my mind, though not out into the world. They had kept theirs under control, only letting a little sadism spill out. I wonder, though, if I had not controlled my fears even as much as I did, whether theirs might not have edged closer to reality. So we depend on each other.
I arrived a few hours later back at the oasis in Phoenix. John and Maria had no idea what had been going on, but once again left me to my own devices by the pool. It was a place of refuge, but what I wanted very urgently was to be back home. My trip had come to an end. I would have to continue on the train back to my starting point in New York to get the return flight, but it was now just space to be crossed, not a journey. And the idea of the planned four or five days in New York and Long Island with a writer friend was more than I could contemplate. I called the airline. Could I bring my flight forward? I could at a price. I paid it, and then went to bed and sobbed with relief.
What State I’m In
Journeys come to an end before they end, just as they begin before they begin – with the arrival of anticipation. I was as good as home. I had put my curiosity about the human race, us, me, them, back where I was most comfortable with it: in my study at home. When I was there again, I’d do some thinking; right now, I had a trip from A to B to take to get me there. John got up at 4.30 on Wednesday morning to drive me to Tucson train station. I waved him off gratefully and he, equally gratefully I imagine, drove back to bed in Phoenix, while I settled down on a bench to wait for the Sunset Limited. It would take me to New Orleans for the night of Thursday, then I would catch the Crescent early Friday morning heading up north and get in to Penn Station, New York at 2.10 on Saturday afternoon. I had just an hour or so to wait for the train, plus an added hour for how late it would be. As far as I was concerned, I was heading home. My journey was done, even though there were three and a half days and an Atlantic flight before I’d be in my study. I wasn’t watching, listening, waiting. I was travelling to a destination. Game over.
‘I heard you speaking to your friend. You sound English. And you look Jewish. My two favourite peoples on the planet are the English and the Jews. The English gave us our blessed language. The Jews gave us the Book. I thank you, ma’am.’
The speaker was an elegant tramp sitting on a bench opposite me with the rising dawn glowering over his shoulder through the waiting-room window. Spread on either side of him was his breakfast, a thermos, sandwiches and biscuits, which he had been eating and drinking absentmindedly while leafing through unruly sheaves of papers perched on his knee. He wore an ancient but once good, long raincoat, a pair of very worn but sturdy walking boots laced with string, a flat tweed cap, and had a well-aged, open, but still bulging satchel propped between his feet. He sat straight and was long-legged, in his late sixties, perhaps.
I nodded an acknowledgement that he was right about my English- and Jewish-ness and smiled weakly at the reasons for his reverence of both.
‘Jack W. Grey.’ He bobbed his head. ‘I would be honoured if you would share my breakfast.’
He held out a packet of digestive biscuits. I wanted to say, I’m on my way home, I’m not being a curious traveller any more, I’m no longer on the lookout for interesting encounters with eccentric types – perhaps I wasn’t really in the first place. I swear, I’ll just stay put once I get home. Not go out. Stay in. Keep quiet.
I took a biscuit and thanked him.
‘Ah, your lovely accent. What do you do?’
I have often answered this question with the information that I am a biscuit packer in the Peak Frean factory. At the look of blank boredom that comes over my questioner’s face on hearing this news I’m inclined to embellish.
‘I work on the Fancy Assorted Tins line. It’s so much more demanding than you might think. First there’s the responsibility to the product. A Fancy Assorted Tin is designed, you know, and not just on the outside. It isn’t at all superficial. Each biscuit type has its place in the overall scheme and if the packers don’t concentrate it would be easy to ruin the whole thing by slotting a careless jam whirl in the coconut cream section. It only takes a moment’s distraction and the whole pattern is destroyed. And then again think about the nature of the tin of biscuits. It’s a Special Occasion product, people bring out their tins of biscuits for Christmas, give them to people for their wedding anniversaries. Imagine the disappointment in finding that half of them, or even one, just one Viennese Dainty say, were broken. The whole illusion is smashed, the luxurious becomes the tawdry. Packing biscuits is not just packing biscuits. There’s a whole social and cultural aspect to it…’
