Running Is a Kind of Dreaming

by J. M. Thompson

  By the following June, clear differences were observable in my mother’s handwriting and signature. Until September 1986, she used her first name and surname. Nine months later, she used her initials and surname, appending both with the acronyms for her undergraduate degree and teaching credential. In the second of the two signatures, she formed the capital letter C that begins her forename with the bottom curve of the letter extending below the other letters.

  But I knew almost none of this at the time. By the time I understood that a profound transformation had occurred in her, and thus in all of us, many years had passed. Few of the early warning signs of psychological trouble were discernible to my teenage self—she was the only mother I had ever had, and I had nobody to compare her to. When, in my twenties, I started looking back and wondering what had happened, recollecting my experiences of those years, I could remember everything but her, as if she were present as an absence. Most of what I could remember were feelings, perceptions of what seemed at the time like axioms of the universe, a sense of dread or fear or hopelessness that reflected something basic about the world, something everyone understood but agreed not to talk about. It seems likely to me that she suffered from bipolar disorder with periods of psychosis in the manic phases of her illness. But all I knew at the time was that my mother had gone mad. Nothing was more frightening and tragic than madness. And it was happening to my family. My parents had gone mad—maybe all of us had. I felt ashamed. I seldom spoke about my family or the confusing parts of my own mind to others, even close friends, and focused my energy on putting as much distance as I could between the functional human I impersonated in public and the madman I feared I might be.

  EACH DAY THAT SUMMER passed into the next with a feeling of desolation. In the mornings I would walk our Dalmatian, Maeve, around the neighborhood and in the afternoons paint the walls and listen to Utrenja, contemplating the ruin of my life, a disaster of my own making. I could remember the Good Boy I used to be, a few years before, until I started drinking. I used to be going somewhere. But not anymore. I had destroyed my future. Day after endless day passed in this desolate state. I had disappeared. There was nothing left of me. Darkness had swallowed me whole. I lacked language to name my feelings. I would have coped better if someone had been there to help me understand what I felt or provide a wider perspective. It’s not the end of the world. You got a couple of so-so grades this time. No big deal. In a couple of weeks you’ll be back at school, and you can focus on next year. You have nothing to be ashamed about. Remember that we care about you. These were exams, not a final verdict on your entire life. But no one said this.

  Two weeks passed. One afternoon my mother came into my room. “Would you like me to help you with your English?” she said. “I am a teacher. I can help children with English.” “Yes,” I said. She sat down next to me. She showed me a book of language comprehension exercises. They had the “See Jane run” feel of questions aimed at much younger children. I went through the exercises, sitting next to Mum. Where is Spot? Spot is chasing Jane. It was little-kid stuff, I knew. But I could do it. I could do it. I felt myself coming back from the Darkness. By the time the new school year began the following week, I felt like a different person. The old me is gone, I thought. That silly kid who sat at the back of the class, writing nonsense in my notebook, getting drunk on Sam’s dad’s home brew: what a fool. I threw all my diaries into the trash. I sat at the front of the class and stopped talking to Sam. I focused on every single word of every teacher in every single class every day of the week as if my life depended on it. Under no circumstances whatsoever would I tolerate another collapse into the abyss.

  A LITTLE WHITE CIRCLE of light from my desk lamp lit up the books in front of me. The world inside the circle of light was pure and clear and logical. I could stay there all night. I had never felt such clarity and focus. When it got past 1 a.m. I would sometimes feel my energy starting to fade. I yearned to go to bed. Then I would glance at the exam results paper from the Oxford and Cambridge Examination Schools, which I had pinned to the corkboard above my desk, and a memory of the day the letter flopped onto the doormat would rush into my mind with a jolt of terror that would shock me back to vigilance.

  I had to stay awake. If I stayed vigilant, I could see the path that led ahead of me from Cannon Road to Oxford. Where that path might lead after Oxford, I didn’t know. But one thing was certain: by then these days in Cannon Road would have faded into memory. Perhaps I would become a doctor, perhaps a writer. Both seemed like worthwhile occupations. A doctor put broken people back together; a writer served as a witness to our broken world. Though to follow the writer path would surely piss off Mum. She might throw another glass of whiskey at my head, like the time I told her I was thinking about studying literature at university. I understood that reading books had gotten her absolutely nowhere. After all her years in the library, buried in Joyce and Austen, she was unemployed. Better to be a thinker than a dreamer, she said. You couldn’t do both. Either way, I had to stay awake and memorize everything for my exams, even if it meant working into the wee hours.

  I memorized the first twenty chemicals in the Periodic Table of Elements as a single word: HHeLiBeBCNOFNeNaMgAlSiPSClArKCa. I memorized Book IX of Homer’s The Odyssey in ancient Greek. Odysseus, I would be sure to remember, was finding his way home after the great battles described in The Iliad. Along the way, he met the one-eyed monster Polyphemus, who captured Odysseus and his men and came close to eating them, until our hero tricked his way out of the situation, enraging his cyclopean foe. “Hear me, great Neptune,” yelled Polyphemus. “If I am indeed your own true-begotten son, grant that Odysseus may never reach his home alive.”

  Everything felt as sharp as crystal. I could read a page of ancient Greek and commit it to memory in minutes. I would stay awake with my studies till the wee hours, then sleep just five or six hours, then go to school, marveling at the clean and perfect feeling that came from solving simultaneous linear and quadratic equations or memorizing the second-person singular future perfect of irregular Greek verbs in the optative or the chemical formula of glycogen. In the evening after supper, as I cleaned and dried the dishes, I would notice how the world seemed to shrink to my awareness of the aluminum sink and the dish drying in my hands and the sink draining as I watched the spiral motion of the water disappear, dried the basin with a paper towel and mopped every last droplet of water on the faucet and polished the basin until it shone like a crystal mirror.

  Inside the little circle of white light on my desk, the world made sense. When I woke in the morning and took the train to school, I felt as if the circle of light formed a force field around me, a protective sphere beyond whose frontiers I saw the world with crystalline precision and no emotion. Nothing could hurt me anymore. I had the Eye of the Cyclops.

  Yet beyond the perimeter of my cyclopean vision, I understood that unusual events were occurring. Just as I split my awareness off from the possibility of pain, my parents’ minds were beginning to fracture and fragment. Put the mind under conditions of great stress and perception shrinks to a tiny sphere. What counts is getting through the danger now. Surviving. Evolution has shaped the nervous system to shift gears fast when it senses imminent disaster. Your attention sharpens and narrows. When the house is on fire, you run for the door. Your heart is pumping; your eyes are fixed on the exit. Your conscious attention splits off from the peril pursuing you, shoving unbearable perceptions or feelings aside. In this dissociative state, your awareness collapses to a tiny sphere, enclosing only those facts of perception salient in that very instant to survival. What memory records from such encounters with catastrophe will necessarily comprise a scattering of luminous fragments. Much of the experience as you lived through it at the time then vanishes in the void. The brain doesn’t bother to store all those minor details, because a crisis tends to take psychic shape as a sole imperative: Get. The. Hell. Out.

  One evening I went downstairs to the kitchen to discover that
the pantry shelves were bare. I went to look for my father. I found him in the living room, pacing back and forth, dressed in the same striped business shirt he’d been wearing for several days. “Dad, we need food,” I said. His eyes met mine and looked away again as he continued with his walk from one end of the room to the other and back again, twisting a frond of his curly hair with the index finger of his left hand until it wound into a knot. “You need to get in the car and take me to McDonald’s,” I said. He followed me out of the house. We got in the car. He drove us out our road and followed the road plunging steeply into town. The car picked up speed. “Slow down,” I said. His glazed eyes stared dead ahead of him. “Slow down!” I said. The car slammed against the curb. I felt a jolt of panic. I braced myself for disaster. The car lurched back onto the road and slowed down. He parked outside McDonald’s. I ordered burgers and fries and milkshakes for Sebastian and me. We drove home in silence.

  For some time, I came to understand much later, my father’s mind had been drifting into the waking nightmare of a terrifying psychosis. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t think. One night he went into his room to discover that his bed had disappeared. In its place he saw a giant pile of human filth, its surface pulsing and rippling, as if it were wriggling with a million worms. He left the room in a state of terror. Now he understood. He called the parish priest. “I saw the devil,” he said. “The end of the world is coming. People must be warned!”

  I knew nothing of my father’s ghastly hallucination at the time. I saw a worried man in a stinky shirt pacing in the living room. I knew he was unwell. But I utterly lacked the knowledge to understand the nature of his illness or how I was supposed to accommodate my awareness of his suffering other than by ignoring it and keeping my mouth shut. Then one night I was in my room, studying, when I heard the doorbell. Mum opened the door. I heard voices downstairs. I went to the top of the stairs. Our family doctor stood in the hall. He had his brown leather bag in one hand. Dad followed him into the living room. The doctor closed the door. I went to bed. When I went downstairs for breakfast in the morning, Dad was gone. “Your father’s in the hospital,” said Mum. “He had a nervous breakdown.”

  Nervous breakdown: it meant he’d gone mad. Madness was the bogeyman that lurked beyond the frontiers of rationality. The English zeitgeist with respect to mental illness had in essence not evolved in any meaningful way since medieval times. In Britain in the 1800s, poor people with mental illness were locked in prison as pauper lunatics. By the mid-1980s, mad people in England were no longer assumed by definition to be criminals. But anyone unfortunate to find him- or herself afflicted by an illness of the mind continued to suffer a different sort of incarceration: the prison of silence and shame. “Don’t tell anyone,” said Mum. “It’s a secret.”

  We went to visit Dad in the hospital the following night. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, fully clothed and clean-shaven, staring dead ahead, his eyes dazed. “Hello, Dad,” I said, but he didn’t hear me. Didn’t seem to know I was even there. When I sat beside Sam in morning assembly at school the following Monday, he asked about my weekend. “My dad went to the hospital,” I said. “Oh no. What happened?” said Sam. “He had a nervous breakdown,” I said. “Oh . . . God,” said Sam, scrunching up his face like he’d caught a whiff of sour milk. Don’t talk about it. Don’t even think about it.

  It was a springtime day and the raindrops sparkled in the daffodils when Dad came home from the hospital about a month later. In his bright new sweater, he looked like a little boy dressed up for church on Sunday. “Thanks for taking care of everything while I was gone,” he said.

  I had imagined that my father’s return from the hospital would precipitate the return to a semblance of stability in our home. I was wrong. The shifts in my mother’s behavior whose onset I had noticed some years earlier metastasized in a baffling and global transformation of the person I once knew. I couldn’t follow what she was talking about. One night I went to her room to tell her I was going into town when she began to speak. She said something like “I need two pounds for a coffee—not half a pound of tuppenny rice. I lost ten pounds with Weight Watchers at King Alfred’s College. Arthur pulled Excalibur from the stone. Everybody should get stoned. They stone women to death in Saudi Arabia for adultery. They should stone Dr. Riding. I am Mrs. Thompson, bachelor of arts degree. What about Professor Fisher? Come with me and I will make you fishers of men . . . Nuclear fission—we were with CND at Greenham Common. I once had a notion for a boy in Ireland who was a fisherman. He drowned, of course . . . All of us drown in something, sea or sorrow. I drowned my sorrows in whiskey when your father went away. You learned to swim in California when you were three. Then to the isles of Greece, the four of us, do you remember? I was out of my depth back then. A lovely Swede came rushing to my rescue. Like one of those fellas from ABBA—‘Super Trouper, lights are gonna find me.’ You used to like ABBA, didn’t you? ABBA, father . . . Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani . . . Into thy hands I commend my spirit. Do not despair. One of the thieves was saved. The Navajo stole my clothes in Arizona, you remember? Monument Valley. Yea, though I walk through the valley of death, rode the six hundred. We rode horses when you were five. Straight from the horse’s mouth. All mouth and no trousers . . .”

  I tried to understand what she was saying, but the links between the meanings of her words felt random, as if she were following a trail inside her mind that she felt compelled to wander, like a child in a fairy tale lost in a forest of language. I would stand at the foot of her bed, listening, joining her for a while on a trail into a dreamworld through which I could sense her desire for me to follow, detecting her need for me to stay with her inside it, perhaps because she believed we had visited parts of that world together in the past. I would sense, too, her recognition of me as a companion who might find the way in this dreamworld, yet I noticed also that she didn’t appear to register my reluctance to do so. I experienced this fracture between us as an isolation I bore alone. But then as I listened, and she continued to speak, I would feel my attention drift away from her, until my mind went blank. I wished she would stop talking, so I could stop listening and leave, but on and on she would travel, meandering through her dreamworld, until I would start to fear that unless I moved my body that very instant, the sound of her droning on, inaudible and unintelligible beyond the horizon of my awareness, would become a kind of hypnotic spell that might freeze me forever where I stood at the end of her bed. So as her words kept running this way and that through the dream forest of her mind, I would say goodbye to her and leave the room.

  OUR NEW HOUSE ON Fairgreen Road was much smaller than the house on Cannon Road, a narrow two-story red-brick terrace about halfway down a row of identical buildings near the center of town. An accumulation of debt had forced my father to sell the house I had grown up in, and overnight we lost the physical connection to the solid world of the garden and the Jungle and the life before all the madness. A vast body of other traces of our past vanished in the move, including most of our books and records and photographs. When I asked Dad where all our books had gone, he shrugged and said he didn’t know. I might as well have asked him if there could be a connection between the Loch Ness Monster and the Illuminati. All that remained of the books on Cannon Road was Atlantis. On the living room wall was a family portrait my mother had commissioned from a professional photographer. Mum sits grinning in the middle with Dad on one side and Sebastian on the other. That’s me in the right-hand corner, losing all religion: leather jacket, crimped hair, black circles under my eyes.

  Mum kept the electric heater on even on the warmest days. She refused to keep a trash can in the kitchen. She instructed us to dispose of our trash in the plastic bags she hung from a hook on the kitchen wall. The bags would split and strew chicken bones and used plastic microwave lasagna containers all across the floor. When one day I asked my father about the absence of a trash can, he said, “Mum doesn’t want one,” and that was that.

  We sp
ent most nights watching television. Sebastian sat in one chair, me and Dad on the couch. I was conscious of my mother droning on in the background. One night Sebastian told her to be quiet, and she picked up a steel clock from the mantelpiece and tried to smash him in the head. He defended himself with a kung fu block.

  The nights of silence punctuated by bizarre rages continued. I couldn’t bear it. “Why don’t you do something?” I said to my father. “About what?” he said. “About Mum,” I said. “Well, why don’t you do something?” he said. Outside the house, in public, I felt the anguish of recognizing that my mother’s disorientation was conspicuous to other people, conferring shame upon me as the son—I had come to realize—of a madwoman.

  Sometime later we went out for dinner in a restaurant on the high street. The waiter came to take our order. “Do you speak French?” my mother said. Oh Jesus no—please someone make her stop. “Not really,” the waiter said. I could detect the confusion in her voice and eyes. My father sighed, his head downcast. “Je parle Français. Parlez vous Français? Je suis un rock star—like Bryan Ferry. Or Van Morrison. The Chieftains—a sense of wonder . . . Didn’t I come to bring you—What about German? Do you speak German?” The waiter communicated that she had not studied German. “Sebastian here is excellent at German. He went to the Berlin Wall. Sprechen Sie Deutsch? Ich bin ein Berliner. What else, Sebastian? ‘Ask not what your country can do for you’—Eins . . . zwei . . . drei—” I wanted to be somewhere else. I wanted to be someone else. Anywhere and anyone but there, then, being me. A half-smile formed on the waiter’s mouth, and she laughed with an expression I recognized as embarrassment. Sebastian and I made eye contact with each other, a sad mutual awareness forming in our gaze, as if the two of us were cast adrift on an island far away, two young residents of a land cut off in the ocean where among the two older inhabitants one was helpless and the other had gone insane.