* * *
A month later I stood in the shadows offstage, in my cowboy boots and ten-gallon hat and gaudy stage mascara—as Curly McLain in the school winter production of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma!—while the school orchestra finished the overture. Feeling enclosed within absolute concentration, I thought of the first word of the opening number. I listened to the flutes and violins. I looked at the wooden house on the stage. I took deep breaths to calm myself. Memories of my disgrace on Bonfire Night had vanished to a separate domain of my consciousness, the shadow land of crying and feeling helpless and hated. The orchestra fell silent. “There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow,” I sang. “The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye, and it looks like it’s climbing clear up to the sky.” As I walked onstage, the orchestra launched into the lovely melody of the musical’s opening number, “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’.” Illuminated by searing yellow stage lights, the little wooden imitation farmhouse shone with an almost cartoon luminosity. The school assembly hall was full of people, all the way to the back and on every row in the balcony, a crowd of hundreds. I felt the power of our voices, and of a feeling of immersion in an alternate world that had taken, it seemed, half the school to make—the actors and cellists and oboists, the boys who had built the set and made the lights work, the teachers who had taught us to sing and act and had helped us with our costumes, all the friends and family members who had come to watch and clap and sing along. But then I felt a wrenching sadness, as if shaken awake from a magical dream, when I walked into school on the day after the show’s last night, and tried to cope with the thought I would never be happy again.
In the following six months, my focus drifted from schoolwork. In the early summer of 1985, I sat my first two public exams, known in England as O Levels. I entered the exam hall. I took my seat. Midway through the math exam, the paralyzed feeling came over me. I sat there, frozen, unable to think. After the English exam, I swapped notes with Perry, a boy I sometimes sat with on the train to school. He asked me about one of the comprehension exercises in the exam. It referred to a passage about a person reacting in a certain way “for fear the house might fall.” What might the author be attempting to convey through this image of a falling house? “It’s obviously a metaphor for the collapse of something larger, right?” said Perry. “I said the British Empire—the rest of the poem was about the colonies. What did you put?” I remembered that in the stress of the exam the figurative meaning had been completely lost on me. I had taken the sentence at face value and said so on my answer sheet. But Perry was right, it was obvious. I didn’t tell him. I felt afraid.
AMERICA! THE VERY WORD sounded like a marching band. Look, here comes Mickey Mouse and Obi-Wan, here comes Spider-Man and Van Halen singing “Jump”; here comes Curly and Laurey riding in the surrey with the fringe on top, beneath the Rocky Mountains, exactly like they looked on Dad’s Coors T-shirt; here comes Marty McFly in rocket shoes and the boundless frontier of the future world. We’d landed in JFK at night and took a cab into Manhattan. Colossal illuminated towers came into view, magisterial and holy, like concrete hands held aloft to Creation: What minds had made such marvels? We stayed in a bed-and-breakfast in an apartment hundreds of feet from the ground. I was kept awake by car horns and police sirens and people whistling and yelling. We explored Manhattan. I followed my mother and father into a SoHo bookstore. I looked at the expensive hardback art books displayed in the center of the store. As I was leaving, I made eye contact with the store owner. He smiled at me. “We’re going now,” my mother said. The store owner gave me a small paperback book, the contents of which I didn’t have time to register. “I wouldn’t want you to have to leave here empty-handed,” he said, laughing, the enigmatic cadence of his sentence prompting a conspiratorial look that flashed between the store owner and his grinning young male assistant. We got into a taxi. An atmosphere of menace pervaded the cab’s interior. “Do you understand what those American fellas were doing?” my mother said. “Yes,” I lied. “They were homosexuals. Men who have sex with each other. Are you a homosexual?” “No,” I said. I shuddered with dark rage. Who the hell are you to tell me who I can talk to? I’m not gay. At least I don’t think so—not that it should matter. And straight or gay, my sexuality is none of your fucking business. I started to cry. “I hope you don’t get AIDS,” she said.
From Kennedy Airport we flew to Los Angeles, where we saw the pits of tar into which mammoths and saber-toothed tigers had fallen in the Paleolithic era and where after a chilly dip in the Pacific I ordered a waffle piled six inches high with whipped cream and blueberries—it was the most expensive item on the menu and my father complained that we couldn’t afford it. “Why do you always have to ruin everything?” my mother said to my father. “Sorry,” he said. The waffles arrived—a huge stack of which I could only manage half. Our next stop was Vegas. A teenage girl emerged from the giant hotel pool, jewels of water sparkling in the summer desert sunlight on her lean, tan body. I had seen her chatting to a muscular Frenchman in the shallow end, how she laughed at his jokes and said, “Oui, d’accord,” in a twang like a Dynasty character. I watched her walk to one of the white plastic pool recliners and put on mirror shades and lie down.
“À bientôt, Jacques,” she said, winking, as the Frenchman left the pool and waved goodbye. The girl lay motionless as the jewels of water evaporated from her skin in the oven-like Nevada heat. She sat upright and lathered her body with sunblock and then reclined again, aquamarine ripples from the pool reflecting in her shades.
Knowing Mum and Dad, our itinerary was a mystery. Even the next hour might well entail a lurch into chaos. I had to make my move that very second. I remembered something Sam had told me. Sam had been on holiday in the US the previous summer. “Yank girls go mad for English accents,” he said. Open your mouth uttering English-sounding words and a gorgeous American girl would stick her tongue in there right away. I went up to the girl and sat down next to her. “Hello,” I said. Silence. “I am from England,” I said. Silence. I could think of nothing else to say, so I leapt into the pool and swam the crawl until my triceps started cramping. Then I got out of the pool and lay down and looked at my paper-white skin and realized there was no hope whatsoever of going back to England with a suntan, and then I followed Mum and Dad inside for lunch. The buffet was all-you-can-eat, a goal whose outer limits I was reluctant to explore: a day or so before I’d watched Sebastian at a casino eatery, likewise licentious of gluttony, load his dinner plate high with shark, lobster, beef, shrimp, pasta, turkey, and mashed potatoes—more-than-he-could-eat, it turned out—and flee from the restaurant to throw it all up in the toilet.
After lunch we got back into the car, and from Vegas we drove to Arizona. I stared at the dry wilderness that stretched in sci-fi technicolor hues to arid crags in every direction. The highway extended to a faraway mountain pass, beyond which extended expanse upon expanse of scorched dust and emptiness. I don’t remember where we stopped when my father tired of driving—conceivably it was Flagstaff. The next day, or the one after—that time is a desert in my memory—I stood at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon and looked down, contemplating an immensity of such scale it swallowed up all prior notions about what big was supposed to look like. The North Rim was so distant it had different weather, clouds in fortresslike formations that stacked through the day and erupted in forks of lightning.
I endured more time in the car. One morning we left a motel in a hurry—who knows why. We were hundreds of miles away, possibly no longer in Arizona, when my mother opened her suitcase and couldn’t find all her clothes. I’d seen her put some of them in one of the drawers near the television in the previous night’s motel. I kept this recollection to myself; if I told Mum I knew where she’d put her clothes, I’d be the one who took all the blame.
“Somebody must have stolen them!” she said.
“I don’t think so,” my father said.
“It was that Navajo woman wh
o came into our room. The cleaning lady. The Navajo stole my clothes.”
Sometime later I was eating clam chowder from a bread bowl on a foggy late afternoon at a restaurant on the wharf at San Francisco Bay when the conversation turned to anticipation of the next school year and the arrival in about a week of my exam results. I stared into the distance and felt my mind go blank.
About a week later, back home, I was lying in bed one morning when I heard the mail flop onto the doormat downstairs. My heart beat faster with dread. I got out of bed. I left my room. I went across the landing. I reached the staircase. I walked downstairs. I wished I could leap into the next millennium or turn into a dog in France—be anything except me there and then, a fifteen-year-old boy about to learn the results of my first two public exams. I saw that a skinny envelope sat upon the doormat. I saw my name written on the envelope in small black capital letters, and in the top left-hand corner I saw the words OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE EXAMINATION SCHOOLS. I walked back to my room with the letter. I sat on the edge of my bed. My mother followed me into the room and sat down next to me. I opened the letter. I took out the little slip of white paper inside it. I looked at the words on the paper. A moment passed between my sight of my grades and the catastrophic meaning my mind attached to them, like the pause between a child’s fall to the ground and the cry registering his shock.
English LanguageB
MathematicsC
What a disgrace. “Oh no,” I said. “Well, that’s just terrible, isn’t it?” said my mother. I detected in her tone a feeling toward me of utter disgust and contempt. I might as well have heard a judge’s verdict for a heinous crime. A wave of shame engulfed me. I burst into tears. My mother left me alone in my room, weeping.
I cried for hours. I cried until my eyes stopped making tears. I kept remembering my mother’s scornful words. I wished that I could forget them. But the memory of her voice of hatred refused to fade away, and the sting of shame that this memory induced in me only seemed to build upon itself with each unbidden recollection, as if her remembered voice had formed a kind of indelible footnote in the margins of my awareness,* forcing my mind forever to run back and forth between the reality of the present moment and the recurring insult that resounded in the background of consciousness. It was the loudest sound in the world, but I alone could hear it.
Sometime later that morning Sebastian walked past me. I saw him examine me with a look of pity and curiosity, as if Mum had instructed him to preserve my isolation. I picked up a paintbrush and began to paint the walls. We’d been redoing the paintwork in the previous week. As I brushed the white paint on the walls, I became aware of the space inside, where the feeling of Me used to be, collapsing into nothing. I can’t believe how stupid I’ve been. I don’t understand why I ruined everything.
In the mornings I painted the walls while listening to classical music albums on Dad’s hi-fi. I couldn’t imagine the words of any human language adequately describing my perception of self-implosion, the impression that in place of the phenomenon where the pronoun I formerly stood as a signifier an anguished abyss had broken open. The only music I could tolerate was equally wordless. Among the stack of Dad’s albums on the living room shelves I found a record by the composer Penderecki called Utrenja: The Entombment of Christ. I heard voices droning and muttering and wailing in a language I didn’t know and screeches and cries in a cavernous silence as within this cacophony I received a communication: Others have suffered the abyss before me. There are no words for this stab in the soul I am feeling. But there is a sort of music. Someone understood the feeling. Someone felt the horror of the dark and turned it into sound.
IN THE PHAEDRUS, PLATO says that our best explanations of the world are those which classify phenomena according to objective underlying categories, or “carve nature at its joints.”
Theories across the centuries have proceeded with that Platonic ambition in mind, from those of nineteenth-century German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin—who sorted his observations of people regarded as insane into two categories, dementia praecox and manic depression (the diagnoses later known as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, respectively)—to the current proliferation of 297 mental disorder categories in the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). Psychiatric labels can be stigmatizing, but they can also be useful: they organize inexpressible chaos into linguistic form. Looking back as a clinician now, I could likely hazard a diagnosis for my mother, my father, and me. But I won’t. Even assuming I could be objective, I don’t have much data to go on—really just the contents of my own fallible memory. And even in some science-fiction parallel universe where I could travel by time machine back to 1986 and administer a battery of psychological tests to my parents and produce an accurate diagnosis, to convey such information would be to falsify the experience I lived through, the traumatic nature of which was in no small part constituted by the absolute absence of any kind of organizing theory, in my mind or anyone else’s, to sort the sad, scary madness of our family’s implosion in neat and comprehensible categories, to tell me or Sebastian or Mum or Dad what was happening to us, and what we might do to keep our family from collapsing.
I must have been aware on some level—in the instinctive way children and even dogs and cats can sense the presence of danger—of seismic ruptures in my family life, cascading from the feelings of fear and confusion I had experienced since my early childhood. Years later I would come to trace the sequence of perplexing alterations in my mother’s behavior that had begun to manifest about four years earlier. She had an affair and invited my father to embark on a similar liaison. She changed jobs several times, following intense verbal confrontations with colleagues, and then became unemployed. She sent a series of letters to my uncle and aunt containing obscene and threatening language, which prompted my uncle to consider legal action against her. She spent money in a compulsive and reckless manner. Debts accumulated.
My father recalled a period of depression she had suffered years earlier, when I was a small child, for which she had received antidepressant medication, and he understood her subsequent behaviors as symptoms of a mental illness. Yet she presented no signs to him of understanding herself as ill and resisted all attempts to seek the few forms of treatment then available. It occurred to him that in the absence of psychotherapy she might be amenable to family therapy, but this too she declined.
One of the central features of both bipolar disorder and schizophrenia is a phenomenon called anosognosia, an inability of the person suffering an illness to recognize that they are ill. Great skill on behalf of clinicians can be required to engage people with those conditions in any form of treatment, because they do not think of their experiences in terms of illness. My father implored his beloved Clara to seek help—for the sake of their marriage; for the sake of our family’s survival; for the sake of her own sanity—but she could not or would not listen. She was impossible. There was nothing more he could do. So he gave up trying.
Years later he told me what had happened to him. His worries had begun when Gran sold the house by the sea in Ireland and moved to England. Though he hadn’t lived there since he had left home in his teens, the loss of his childhood home perturbed him with a novel anguish. It seemed to him that he was now forever severed from the past, the land of his Irish ancestors, the green hills and forests and rivers through which he had wandered as a boy. His thoughts drifted to his father, dead for a decade but whose loss he now began to feel with a sense of regret and impossible yearning. “I wasn’t sure if I’d ever really talked to him,” he told me years later. “Not really, I mean. Obviously we spoke. But we’d never really talked. He was just there, in the background. And I suppose in some childish way I thought he always would be. Then he was gone. But for years I didn’t really know he was gone, you know? It sounds silly, but while I could still go back to the house, it felt like he was still there somehow. Like my father was part of the hous
e. But once the house was gone, I really knew he was gone. He was never coming back.” His mind then turned to a path not traveled from his childhood days as a mathematics prodigy. He could have become a math professor. He could have spent his days focused on a timeless realm of pure abstraction and infinite possibility. When and why and how did he abandon his boyhood’s wonder at the infinite? How had he wound up a middle-aged working stiff, married to this woman, once so lovely, now transforming in such an incomprehensible way?
In the spring of 1986, my mother was admitted to the hospital for a medical procedure, for which she received general anesthesia. As my father stood by the hospital bed after the operation and my mother started to talk, he had the distinct impression, he told me when we began to speak of our family’s collapse about a decade later, when I was in my mid-twenties, that she had somehow changed. He could not quite say how. It was as if he were examining a family photograph that had shifted out of focus: a change so subtle that it was hard to identify whether the alteration resided in Clara or in his own vision. The transformation reminded him of a phenomenon he had encountered in Celtic mythology. There are stories in Celtic legend, he told me, of spirits called the sidhe that enter the human world to kidnap souls. To live on Earth, the sidhe require bodies to live in, so they kidnap souls and take them to the faery world so they can use the human body as a host. On Earth, the person still appears to be alive, but everything about their personality has changed. When a person underwent a radical change in their personality, the Celts said that person was “away with the faeries,” my father explained. He understood that science offered another kind of explanation, invoking disordered biological mechanisms in the brain, whose objective validity he did not dispute. But the jargon of science fell short of articulating his unbearable feeling of loss. To name the feeling, myth still offered a closer match: Clara was gone. She was away with the faeries.
Running Is a Kind of Dreaming Page 13