On the day of the second wedding of the old gods, the sun glows crimson in the breast-fed sky, leaking milky clouds to the lips of the surging sea. The trumpets toll and toll and toll.
And midnight might last forever.
The clarions call forth a fourth day, and a seventh, and a tenth, their blasts of scarred sound echoing tremulously amid the pubic jungles of the hotlands.
The mountain rises again in the groping shadows of a fugitive twilight, but — love not lacking, nor even past forgotten — he sinks once more into his silent oblivion, gone with Memphis and the colored towers of Troy.
His transience is less than nothing, in this frozen dawn of time which, being midnight, is not even one day or the next. The wishing stars of luckless days may triumph now, with their triumphs unseen by the clock hands of the factories of time. The dust of hallowed memory may stir and raise a thousand million ghosts into the stillness and the nilness.
The heralds once and for this once alone are resting on their blazoned shields, and for now and this now only my ancestors may wander through my children’s tombs.
And their deaths are merely other transitory awakenings.
I have to travel a terrible road, in the darkest corners of Pandora’s box, where only the last and most hateful of all the evils is left to be my companion.
All horror and pain have flown forth into the world when the sky gapes wide to contain the stars, and the doors of our cage of darkness have yawned.
And yet still we are cut by a thousand hurts, and our bodies bleed, his no worse than mine despite his foul aspect. Poison and storm and icy cold conspire to block our progress from the crannies of the box to the star-filled sky.
“I am Hope!” we cry, together, sweetening our plea with disastrous deception.
I try to cry out and ask the sky to take me instead of my dark companion, but I have forgotten who I am, and why.
Cage of Darkness
“The Secondhand Life of Harker Lee”
Chapter Six: How to Be a Successful Schizophrenic
I fought it.
I think I won. By a knockout in the third round.
It creeps up on you. You don’t even notice it, but it’s there, and one day you just turn around and take a look at yourself and it’s staring you in the face. You’re not sure even then how exactly you discover it or what exactly it is. It’s just there, and one day you know about it.
I worried.
It’s not that you get up one morning and think to yourself, Hello, I seem to be more than usually separate from the world, and my relationships seem more than usually strained, ergo I must be suffering from some kind of communicative breakdown. It would be simple if you were able to start from there, because it would give you an easier approach to the situation.
What you notice first, I guess, is the fear. There’s always a fair quantity of fear hanging around, of course — loitering with intent, I believe, is the appropriate phrase — and this isn’t any different kind of a fear, nor is it particularly intense. It’s just unreasonable. You’re scared, and there isn’t any damn thing for you to be scared of. You wonder what it is you’re scared of. You take a very close look at the sort of things you just might be scared of. You begin to start searching for things that you can be scared of, so that you can justify yourself to yourself.
Etc.
By which I mean, it continues. It’s a process. A syndrome. Self-feeding. Once you’re in it, you’re there.
Etc.
You start off by chasing your own tail. It makes you edgy. You look at other people with a slightly suspicious eye. You’re not so much worried about them as about your attitude toward them. Your relationships begin to get screwed up. You can’t figure things the way they are. Other people get distorted. You begin to consider what they do and say in a new light. You don’t know what the hell is wrong. You’re bewildered. You cut one or two people to bits for no reason at all; harmless conversation tends to breed verbal violence. You hurt people with what you say.
That’s when things start to go around the bend and you become really aware of a situation happening that you’re in but don’t know anything about. You bring yourself up short and you say, “Well, hell, what’s going wrong? What am I doing and why? How does this aggravation arise?”
And then you start to be careful. You don’t dare speak harshly to people. You don’t dare get angry. (You’re lucky if they’re still talking to you, and you make sure they don’t have any more cause to stop.) And once now and again, just occasionally, you’ll say something you didn’t mean to, which is inevitable no matter how careful you are, only things being what they are you’ll begin to wonder about the self-control and whether it’s slipping.
Etc.
That continues, too.
You get broody. You worry about yourself. You find that if you drink you don’t get happy, you just get deeper and deeper into black darkness. Getting drunk no longer takes you into drunkenness. It takes you somewhere nobody wants to go. You give up drinking. If you’re wise.
Nothing is right. The hand of the world is set against you.
You look about you for two things:
(1) You need somebody to blame.
(2) You need to be doing something about it.
If you’ve got any damn sense at all, the person you blame is yourself. If you start to blame the Commies or the fallout or the lady next door or the devil you entitle yourself to a free ticket to the funny farm. You lost. Round one and you’re floored. Assuming you have the sense to be your own fall guy, you’re then in a constructive frame of mind to undertake (2). You have to find that little extra from somewhere which helps you not to go too far overboard on the guilt kick. You can’t avoid the self-pity. You can’t avoid the depression. They’re both part and parcel of the whole thing. But there’s a step and a half in between a party and an orgy, and it’s a step and a half you’ve got to do your level best not to take. If you can stand still and weather the black fits and the crying jags and not crumple up inside them, you’re halfway home to the land of the living. Not to a cure, and I want to emphasize that. Not to getting rid of it, but to getting yourself to where you can live with it. That’s what you’re aiming at — peaceful coexistence, not war. If you opt for war, you lose. Even if you win. It’s like playing poker without an opponent.
So you have your chances made (we’ll assume).
You have still to take them.
(Of course it’s all difficult. None of it is easy. Not any of it.)
Sitting tight is great. If in doubt, hesitate. Sit as tight as you can. Once you’re in, it’s easier to sink than to climb. Staying where you are is positive. It’s working your way. Your first priority is staying put. After that you start looking for the effort and some way to use it to pull you up.
This is when the obsessions begin to nag at you. For every honest aspirin there are a dozen sugar pills, and they taste nicer. You have no difficulty whatsoever in finding solutions, becoming excited by solutions, falling in love with solutions. You lie in bed at night. (You can’t sleep — not for hours and hours of trying. This is part of the positive feedback of the situation — a man without sleep is not a reasonable man.) You come up with something that looks good — superficially. A simple act. A resolution. If only you can do this it will all be all right. In the beginning, the acts are simple enough — doing them will be no problem. What is a problem is the way they go through your mind, and through again, and through and through and through . . .
Etc.
The worst and so on of them all. Over and over and over . . .
And you can’t get that single blasted idea out of the very forefront of your mind. It’s like a record with a jammed needle. A looped tape, Möbius looped, that plays forever. A dripping tap that you can’t turn off no matter how hard you twist it. (What can drive you crazy, craziness can drive.) You can know that
the damned idea isn’t all that good. You can be 100 percent sure that it isn’t going to cure you. You can know full well that you aren’t being logical — or sane.
But it doesn’t stop.
That thought just keeps hammering away. You repeat it to yourself, and you just can’t stop. It keeps you awake. You can be dog tired, exhausted, and it just keeps on. You can go delirious, drugged into mental submission by the insistence of that idea, that one idea, and it just keeps on.
You are possessed by that idea.
Eventually, you have to go to sleep, by physiological necessity. Psychologically, there’s not an instant’s rest. If you dream, you dream that circuit thought. Nothing else. Your brain is stuck. There’s a terrible and constant temptation to get rid of that thought one way or another. If you can’t divorce it from you, you can try to divorce you from it. Pretend it’s someone else. Make it into someone else. Don’t. That’s losing. That’s shitting out. Keep that thought. Hang on to it, no matter how much you hate it.
And you wake up, thinking no time at all has passed, and it’s still there.
That’s a real killer.
That’s when you really know you’re mad.
Yet another time when you have to keep your cool. When you have to stay put.
You get up and you do things. Ordinary things. The big temptation, of course, is to do the thing you’re thinking of. And you will. Not once, but a dozen times. You’ll chase those ideas. They’ll run you to a standstill. It’s no good saying that you won’t yield an inch. You will. You’ll yield a mile. But every thought you kill is replaced, and you learn that. You learn to be frightened of that, and this is where you must not give way. You must not begin to sell yourself for those few minutes of blessed peace in between obsessions. You must not ever treasure those moments of peace so highly that you become an automaton — obsession, appease, obsession, appease, order, action, stimulus, reaction. That’s losing. That’s dying inside.
You do ordinary things. You fight against the obsession to make it give you a few moments’ peace against its will. You work. You go shopping. You ride on buses and you walk along streets. You read a book, if it will let you, or do jigsaw puzzles, or make plastic airplanes, or paint pictures. You talk to somebody, if you can.
That last is best. It’s also not so damned easy. You only think it’s easy when you can take it for granted. Time comes when you need it and you can be biting your nails to the knuckles wishing somebody would talk to you, wishing there was someone you could go to and talk. For the first time in your life, you discover that people don’t know how to talk. For the first time in your life you discover that you don’t know how to talk. Because you can’t just sit down and do it. You have to observe the rituals and the formulas. You can’t just knock on someone’s door and say “Hello, I’m mad.” You have to do it by the book. You have to do it by this week’s rota of permissible ways to feel and permissible ways to tell someone how you feel and permissible ways to let them answer you and permissible ways to let them pretend to understand. And for the first time in your life you find out that there’s absolutely nothing at all in talk except for those rituals and permissible expressions and codes, and suddenly the language you’ve been using all your life becomes a useless, dead thing as far as communicating goes, and it all holds no meanings, and you can’t say what it is you have to say, and if you try they can’t understand you, and they just keep coming back with these silly rituals and these clichés and the multitudinous devices of speech that protect them from communicating, from thinking, from feeling, from even being in anyone’s version of the world but their own except as a cardboard cutout thing.
And this is bad.
You have to hold still. You scream, you lose. They commit you.
Eventually, if you do enough things well enough, and if you’re lucky, the obsession dies without your having to give in. It’s a prideful feeling to outlast your first obsession — but watch that cockiness — here comes the next. It is possible to win (contrary to popular belief) by outlasting your obsessions. But to win one isn’t enough, or two or three. You have to keep on winning and, as everybody knows, you can’t win them all. Some you lose. So you not only have to win and keep winning, you have to stand the losses in between as well.
It’s never easy.
And another thing you have to be careful about in yielding to these obsessions is the old saw about better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. The very fact of not knowing how nasty, how silly, how futile, how utterly mad the next short-circuit thought is going to be is an added pressure on your mind. There’s no crummy joke that fortune can play on you funnier than the obsession to do the thing you just can’t do. That’s a real bastard — the one you have to outlast because you’ve no damn choice. That’s a real triple bind. You don’t do it, you suffer it all times, all ways. You do it, or try, and they commit you, imprison you, kill you, or it kills you. Funny, hey? Or, of course, you kill yourself. But don’t. You lose.
So what do you do?
How do you begin to come back again?
Yes, I mean back again, because now, believe it or not, you are well and truly and wholly there.
Well, again believe it or not, the first time you’re there almost anything can bring you back.
The first time.
Just realizing how badly off you are, realizing it, admitting it, and analyzing it (the last two are difficult and near-miraculous, in that order) can be enough. Ought to be enough. Just knowing things are wrong and having an idea about the pattern of wrongness and the logic of wrongness can make it easy to come back. Score one for psychiatry, self-administered or paid for. But score one and only one. The one thing you mustn’t do is think you’ve won. You have to keep winning. Not once, twice, or three times, but forever.
You have got to take the warning.
You have got to let your first time arm you — to some extent — against your second time.
A matter of days might pass. Good days. Happy days, even, filled with blessed relief. Don’t ever waste those days! Once you’re in the grip of the syndrome the quality of operations within the human sphere of existence goes down about 80 percent. Your work suffers. Your play suffers. You suffer. So when you’ve got those days when you can do something, do. Set yourself up a hole to run to when the next crisis comes. You tell somebody. You ask for help. You make damn sure that the next time the obsessions get you in their claws there’s somebody who can make ready with the tea and sympathy. Especially the sympathy. Paid shrinks are one answer to the need; it’s better if you can find an answer without resorting to that.
While you can, you set yourself up a position in the human race that you can manage to hold. Only a fool thinks he’s clear after one fall. Only a fool doesn’t provide against the chance that he may fall again. If you’re a fool, you lose. In the days between attack one and attack two it is not enough to sit still, hold tight, stand fast. You get few enough opportunities to move forward, you have got to take them.
When it comes back at you, you feel it coming. You know what to expect. You can move one jump ahead of it.
Which doesn’t make it any easier.
In fact, it’s usually worse.
And knowing it, and not being able to stop it in its tracks, that makes it worse still. You know that, too.
Etc.
And this time there really is a basis for the fear, and it really is something to scare the shit out of you. This is madness reaching out for you, and if you’ve come this far you know it. And no matter how you fight it is not diminished. It is still there, much larger than life.
You know the pattern by now. The long hours fretting. The inability to communicate on anything like a meaningful basis. But if you’re wise you have one defense now, something that can’t be taken away from you. It’s not much — it’s not communication, certainly not understanding. It’s only tea and sympa
thy. But, by God, it’s worth something. You have someone to be with, someone who will listen, or just endure your silences.
Just someone.
Without that, you’re almost certainly lost. In one hell of a mess, anyhow.
It doesn’t even have to be someone important. It helps to be able to like him, and for him to like you. But even that isn’t necessary. Just a person. A human being. You might never ever need them again, after once or twice. He doesn’t have to be a big part of your life. He just has to be there when you need someone to be there. He doesn’t even have to know.
This time, the second time, the obsessions can’t quite take such a hold. You’ve had practice. You’re in training. You can take it. It hurts, every time they come, and you know by now it’s never easy, but they won’t get you, not the second time around, provided you’ve prepared for them.
But you can still wake up in the morning with the big shakes and not lose them for an hour or more. Physical things, now — especially the big shakes. Sometimes the bad vision, sometimes the nausea. Mostly the big shakes. You can take a couple of drinks and have your eyes turn fiery and be all set to break up the bar. And worst of all, you can look ahead now and you can think to yourself: this time I can take it and I can surface eventually. What about the next time?
And that’s a killer. The hindsight protects. The foresight disarms. They can cancel, if you let them. If they do, you lose.
You do come up again. You last it out, wear it down, just like last time. But now you know it will be back. You know you’re not clear. You know you have a war on, and you know you can’t suffer the depletion of your forces forever. Comes the time, the big shakes will shake you to death or despair. Either way, you lose.
So you have to make use of the clear days again. You have to take yourself in hand and say: this is it. The test case. This time we go all out. This time we don’t stand still. This time we hit it with everything we’ve got. This time we attack. And even then, you’ve got to remember that if you lose you have to come back again and do it again. That’s a difficulty. You need everything you’ve got in order to attack; you mustn’t even think about the possibility of losing, but, just in case, you’ve got to be able to take the failure, regroup, and come again. Not easy. That’s a thin line to walk. If you fail, and commit everything to one assault, and it doesn’t come off, you lose.
Man in a Cage Page 12