Running Is a Kind of Dreaming

by J. M. Thompson

  I STOOD BY THE window. It was gray outside. There was an immense silence into which I had fallen. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I had no thoughts. My sole emotion was fear. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to stay. It was gray outside. I stood by the window.

  There are no words for madness. There have never been words for madness. Call it a crack-up or a nervous breakdown and you face an identical barrier. I don’t dismiss endeavors to rid our language of stigmatizing labels. It is good that people of conscience avoid the bad old labels—words like psycho and schizo and bonkers and nuts and loony and crazy, the terms by which those of us with turbulent minds have been marked since the dawn of time as emotional lepers. Neither do I disparage the giant accomplishments of the mind sciences with their nomenclature for the myriad forms in which psychological distress can manifest. I am talking about a different problem. All the foregoing words describe madness from the outside. It is important to have objective descriptions. We have to call it something. Language is a function of reason. To put experience into words, the mind turns signals into symbols. Something seen or heard or felt becomes a kitty or a cupcake, an echo or a sigh. You can understand this sentence because you and I share a capacity for our eyes to absorb the symbolic patterns that form the words you and can and understand and this and sentence and process electrophysical signals from the optic nerve via the occipital lobe and the five layers of visual cortex into meaning. For perceptions at the outer frontier of experience, we can reach for a comparison. It was like this, we say. It was like that. But madness isn’t like this or that. Madness resembles nothing except madness. It brooks no comparison—tending to serve, by contrast, as a descriptor of other things, if we want to dismiss something as nonsensical. I could say that madness is like getting pummeled by a giant ocean wave. I could say that it resembles the feeling of falling through space, the rush of fear, the awareness that there’s no way out. You are going five fathoms down to the Kingdom of Poseidon. Well, madness is nothing like that. Waves come and go. Relax. Any second now, you’ll figure out which way is up again, push from the sand, and make it to the surface. Then you’ll breathe again. That kind of fall you can put into words because it’s made of something you can see and touch and feel, a chaos of air and water. Madness disrupts something much more fundamental, the very medium in which things like air and water show up to us: consciousness. That is why there are no words for madness. Madness disrupts the foundation of communicability that language presupposes. And that is why it hurts so much. Your suffering is incommunicable, so you suffer it alone.

  It was gray outside. I stood by the window.

  “YOU COULD DIE,” said our couples therapist, Thelma, observing my wretched demeanor on the couch one evening, mute and shivering, swaddled in a blanket, anesthetized by another ocean beating. “You need to go to Langley Porter.”

  A mental hospital. I had heard of it. Who knew what dark sorcery occurred there. The prospect of confinement was frightening. And yet I sensed my need for it, for some external structure to fold around me. Perhaps that meant walls. I imagined the feeling of them. I imagined a human chrysalis, a cocoon containing all the broken bits of me, holding those pieces until they grew together and were transformed. A couple of days earlier Miriam had said, “I wish I could take you someplace.” I was in her arms, crying, as usual. “Like an island,” she said, “a place where you’d be safe. Somewhere you wouldn’t need to worry about anything.”

  When I imagined the asylum, I felt a measure of solace. But I also felt afraid. Once inside a psych ward I would need to relinquish any pretense of normality. I would be one of those unfortunates mocked and shunned as psycho, schizo, bonkers, nuts, bananas, crazy, loony, mental, crackers, or wacko, a designation that, like the literal brands on the skin that had marked the insane in medieval times, could never be removed. Transit across that threshold would incur a permanent mark of inferiority—a secret about which I could never speak a word.

  The consequences of others knowing I had been there would presumably be ruinous. One part of this marginalization, I imagined, would be overt: jobs, for instance, I would never have. But I anticipated the worse part would be covert: whispers and odd glances from people who thought less of me or in whom I inspired pity; the judging gaze of the people who now saw me as broken; the gossip I’d never hear but whose inferred presence I would have to tolerate in my imagination. Remember Jason? You know he totally lost it, right? Yeah . . . there was always something weird about that guy . . . I would need to remain silent about it forever. In the country’s de facto caste system, it seemed to me, mental patients got lumped together with junkies and prisoners and pedophiles among the American untouchables. Yet along with this dread I yearned for a period of respite—a place of refuge. I remember one time looking up monasteries online. I found the application page for one of them. You could not enter the monastery with ongoing mental illness, the document stated. I couldn’t become a monk. And I knew the island of which Miriam had spoken existed only in her mind. I wanted a place where life could stop. I imagined something like a nineteenth-century sanitorium high in the Alps, the kind of place to where consumptive poets retreated in the terminal phase of their illness, a place where poems were written in fresh mountain air above a panoramic vista. But my imagination also summoned more horrifying specters of the asylum: there would be electric shocks to the brain and a straitjacket for misbehavior, like in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I assumed. In sum, the prospect of psychiatric confinement inspired me at once with fear and desperate yearnings. Maybe, I thought, the shrinks would strap me to a table, or imprison me in a barrel of eels, as in the days of yore. But maybe what they offered would be instead a place of sanctuary, the type of healing refuge whose ideal version as a magic island Miriam’s words had summoned in my sad and frightened mind.

  BALL. BOOK. FLAG. Those were the three things the nurse told me to remember.

  “Do you know where you are?” she said.

  “In the hospital,” I said. “In San Francisco, California.”

  “Do you know what day of the week this is?” she said. “What month and year? The number of the month?”

  “Near the end of January 2005,” I said. “Maybe Thursday.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “Can you tell me the name of the US president?” she said. “Or maybe a fairer question for you would be, who is the British prime minister?”

  “Bush is president,” I said. “Blair is the British PM.”

  “Okay. Now can you try something for me?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I want you to count backward by seven from one hundred.”

  I performed my arithmetic task per the instructions of the nurse. “Ninety-three . . . eighty-six . . . seventy-nine . . .”

  “What would you like me to put down,” she said, “voluntary or involuntary?” There were potential merits to involuntary admission, she explained. My insurance company, she said, might be more inclined to pay the bill for an involuntary admission. The inpatient ward was reserved for the most serious forms of mental illness, one marker of which was that the patient didn’t want to go to the hospital. A voluntary admission implied that I was making a choice in my own best interest. From such a voluntary decision it could be inferred that I retained the capacity to exercise the faculty of reason—emblematic of sanity—in which case I wasn’t that sick after all.

  I considered the logic of her question. It had the nuance of a riddle. Was my will to act against my will, she had essentially asked me. I didn’t know how to answer. To speak at all seemed to be something which by definition I was choosing. The concept of involuntary admission summoned images of madmen in straitjackets. He was taken to the madhouse: Who’d say yes to that? Of my two bad choices I picked the one confirming that I had indeed made a choice. I would take the risk of a giant medical bill. But it would leave me with something that money couldn’t buy: the knowledge that I had chosen my own direction.

  I SAT
ON A gurney. A large man in a dark uniform with a gun and a badge stood guard beside me. “You can lie down if you want to,” he said. It was the middle of the afternoon. I wasn’t tired. I had sustained no physical injury necessitating bed rest. I did not understand the reasons for my placement on the gurney. Perhaps I am supposed to lie down. Time passed. “You wanna stay there while I wheel you up to the unit?” said the guard. “No,” I said, “I can walk.” I stood. He took me to the elevator. I could sense no malice directed from the guard toward me. Yet upon entering the hospital I was aware of my transformation in the surveillance of those who ran the place from person into patient, subject into object. This one seems harmless, but with the crazies you never know, I could imagine the guard thinking. The elevator reached the fourth floor. From the elevator the guard led me down the hall and inside the ward, and then he locked the door behind me.

  The One and the Many

  I reach the bottom of the long descent. I follow the trail as it flattens and continues through the trees for a little while until I can see a white gravel path ahead of me, leading out of the trees into a clearing. There are a couple of people by the side of the trail—the first sign of human life I’ve seen in hours. They clap and whoop as I run by. I must be approaching the mile-10 aid station: Stephen Jones.

  Run a 10K or even a road marathon and the received wisdom says: Keep going. Slow down and walk for a bit if you need to, no worries. Likely you’ll pass tables now and then with friendly, generous people handing out little cups of water or energy drink. Drink it. Thank the friendly, generous people. Keep going till the finish line. This can work for 6 miles or 13 miles or even 26.2 but if you go beyond the border of the recognizable universe where runs still finish in a single calendar day and travel into Freaky Land, soon enough you run up against certain facts of your biology. You got to the start line from a longer path that began billions of years ago in the Archaean ocean, the single-celled life-forms that turned into the fish that flapped on the land that stood on two legs that wandered across Earth that turned into the grizzled ultrarunner, a person with a history and a mind and complicated thoughts but who in essence is still just a bunch of cells, a chemical entity that needs replenishing with ingredients from outside itself. Water. Food. Aid stations.

  I can feel my brain shift gears. My mind’s still in the high country, letting thoughts and feelings and memories run wherever their fancy takes them. But now I need to stop. Think. Plan. Decide. Because there are so many choices to be made! I’m standing in front of a table full of little paper plates. One is loaded with peanut butter sandwiches, another with sections of banana. I see cookies and candies, chips and cups of Coke and ginger ale. And that’s not all, oh no! There are pickles and boiled potatoes and quesadillas and watermelon. Up in the high country, everything flowed into a single choiceless dreamy stream of sight and sound and breath and feeling and wondering and remembering: the many became one. But now I need to wake up. Choose. Carve the one back into many. Split perception into pieces. Behold the magnificent bounty! Verily, the gods and race organizers have smiled upon me and blessed me with this harvest, for they are wise and powerful and I a humble ultrarunner before the tasty morsels showered from the heavens in this sprawling smorgasbord.

  Maybe I should eat the chips first, then drink the ginger ale . . . Or should I start with the ginger ale? So hard to know. And yet I must take action, ignorant though I may be. And beyond the choice of food, so many other tasks now face me. I must refill my water bottles. Apply sunscreen. Pack enough food for the twenty miles ahead. Dowse my head in ice water—it’s boiling hot now. I shuffle about, picking up a boiled potato, refilling my water bottles, eating something else, drinking, eating again, conscious of my regression, of managing my tasks with the disorganized quality that can be observed in a tired kindergartner sorting Legos of variable dimensions into plastic bins—which is to say that I get my job done in the end and all the kind helpers applaud me when I pack up my satchel and wave bye-bye and run along to play. I like to run! Running is fun in the hot, hot sun!

  III

  Venus

  Heat

  The trail leads back into the forest and heads uphill. Onward. Running, you always look forward. You have to. This feeling now, seeing the trees, planting the right pole, then the left, knowing I’m getting somewhere, must be the absolute polar opposite of how I used to feel, circling around in my head, going nowhere.

  The mountain summer heat is scorching. I can tell from the position of the sun overhead and the glare of the light against the white gravel path on the way out of the checkpoint toward the trailhead. But some of the normal signals are missing. You can’t necessarily discern the heat from how you feel. Under extreme conditions, the signals get harder to read. The air’s so dry in the mountains the sweat vaporizes so fast you don’t even feel it on your skin. You don’t always experience thirst. It takes a steady fluid intake to stay hydrated. You learn over the years to spot the early warning signs. The way your mouth dries up. A vague overall feel of the forward effort getting harder. The body is crying out, I am thirsty, but using a different language than the one you’re used to. It must be in the high 70s now, a few hours after I left Stephen Jones. I’m almost out of water, running on an exposed stretch of trail with the sun baking down on me, breathing dry and dusty air that parches my lips and builds into a weary depletion that doesn’t feel like thirst but which I hear as the speech of my shriveled cells, crying out for a drink. The body under stress speaks its own special language. You might think that a thirsty body would cry, Water! But instead it says, I’m tired. I want to stop. This is stupid. I didn’t train hard enough for this. You learn to turn your attention to this voice and listen to the basic need that in its cranky and whiny way it’s trying to communicate. I get it. Don’t worry—I’ll find water.

  I can hear the trickle of a creek on the other side of a little mound on the left side of the trail. It looks like an easy scramble up no more than about twenty feet and then down the other side of the mound to the creek. A couple of runners overtake me. I’m not sure I know why they don’t bother stopping. Either they didn’t notice the creek or they’re not low on water, or they figured it’s too much hassle to climb the mound when there’s likely an easier spot to access the creek farther down the trail. It’s possible they’ve studied the map with a level of focus and rigor that’s made them certain about where that next, easier spot is down to its exact GPS coordinates. If they’ve geeked out on the maps to that degree, good for them. If they’re blowing past this awkward refill spot because they still have plenty of water, that makes sense. If they missed this spot, too bad. But if they’re low on water and planning on running farther in the hope or expectation that they’ll soon get somewhere better, in my experience of these adventures that’s not a good call. Maybe the easier spot is ten minutes away. Maybe it doesn’t exist. Then you’re running on empty for miles, until the next aid station. By the time you reach water, you might notice your fatigue or a headache, but what you won’t notice is the depletion deep on the inside, things you can’t feel yet, hidden stresses in the basic structures underpinning life, which have a nasty habit of compounding on themselves and in the end leading to a breakdown. You’ve crossed a border into a different physiologic state—a whole different physical country, even. Bad things happen there. You can only go there if you know what you’re doing, and have a plan to get back home again, or if someone’s available to help you.

  I scramble over the mound and down to the creek. I take off my shoes and socks and soak my dusty, hot, and bloated feet in the cold alpine water. It . . . feels . . . so . . . good. The instant my feet come out of the tight little feet prisons called shoes that they’ve been living in for the past six hours and dunk them underwater, the chill is such a tonic for all their angry inflammation, I can almost hear them saying thank you. I take out my ultraviolet-light water-purifying device, a fountain-pen-size plastic rod, stick it into one of my water bottles, press its postage-
stamp-size rubber ON switch, and wait sixty seconds until the little smiley face comes on to tell me that my water is now pure. Forty-eight . . . forty-nine . . . fifty . . . It feels like an eternity. A frowny face appears. My water is impure! I try again. Fifty-eight . . . fifty-nine . . . smiley face. Now for the second bottle.

  I soak my legs underwater. After all the hours of pounding on the trail, every muscle, joint, ligament, and tendon from my navel to my pinky toe has already taken quite a beating. In a run that lasts a few hours or even a whole day, I wouldn’t normally indulge in this regimen of cold therapy. It wouldn’t be worth the time. Barring a broken ankle, my thought in response to almost every conceivable hobble, owie, ache, or boo-boo—I believe those are the correct medical terms—is to keep on keepin’ on and witness the natural magic of a moving organism spontaneously restoring itself to harmony, to run it off, as they say, and take care of any lingering aftereffects the morning after. But I can’t do that here. Tomorrow I’ll still be running. And the next day. And the day after that. And maybe the day after that. Twinges can turn into nerve damage, aching knees into a kind of agony you can’t ignore.