Running Is a Kind of Dreaming

by J. M. Thompson

  Zeus, the god of gods, who rules according to law, and is able to see into such things, perceiving that an honorable race was in a woeful plight, and wanting to inflict punishment on them, that they might be chastened and improve, collected all the gods into their most holy habitation, which, being placed in the center of the world, beholds all created things. And when he had called them together, he spake as follows:—12

  The text runs out into the void. The rest of Critias is presumed lost. What Zeus said in his effort to save Atlantis is unknown. But maybe Plato had nothing to say. Maybe Zeus had nothing to say.

  I WOKE WITH NO recollection whatsoever of anything that happened in the four hours that elapsed between the moment I swallowed the pills with the expectation that I would soon be dead and the moment I woke in the hospital still alive. That time is a void in my memory. In the strange twilight of suicidal consciousness in which my actions seemed to unfold with the unreal, unwilled quality of a dream, I entered an alien zone of experience where I was no longer I. Insofar as this not-I shared anything with the original I it once had been, my former selfhood, now shrunken into silence, it was the anguished recognition of loss, a kind of grief for the feeling of being someone, now gone, forever gone. I wanted out. I wanted to run away from being a dark mass of pain, trapped in the hellish circle of thoughts going round and round and leading nowhere, the fear and shame and sadness that had spiraled downward and abandoned me outside time, the nobody that I had become.

  But something had stopped me from following through on my plan. I won’t feel anything—I had remembered Holst’s words. I was going to get blind drunk, then open up a vein in my arm. But I had initiated this plan with the knowledge that Miriam would soon be coming back. The plan left open at least a possibility that I might be found and helped before death became inevitable. Maybe I tried to cut my arm and missed. Maybe I then saw the horrible reality of bleeding flesh. My flesh. My body. Me. Maybe in seeing and feeling the wound on my leg, no one turned into someone, not-I back into I. This isn’t a dream, perhaps I thought. This is reality. I could die. Maybe, restored by fear to some vestige of self-awareness, I realized who and where I was, and could picture the ghastly scene unfolding through Miriam’s imagined eyes, so I put on a show like everything was normal. By the time she came home, I had drained the tub and put all the liquor bottles back into the cabinet.

  So many maybes. It’s impossible to say for certain what chaotic thoughts occurred to me during that void in memory. But one thing is clear: part of me still wanted to live. I had thought that I wanted to die. But I was much more than my thoughts. I was my feet and thighs, my breath and beating heart, the wordless knowledge still within me of the power to get up, move forward, and survive. I wanted to die. But my body wanted to live. My legs had always led me from disaster.

  THE NEXT MORNING I woke to find myself in bed in the ward in my blue hospital pajamas and top, back in the same room with the Prisoner and Rip Van Winkle as if I had never left. I still felt high from the Klonopin.

  I’m not supposed to feel so chipper. I tried to kill myself!

  After breakfast I went and stood by the pay phone and paced back and forth, unsure what etiquette demanded in my circumstances. “I’m sorry,” I said. “How could you do that to someone you love?” Miriam said, and hung up. But I’m not sure it was really me. Not that I had anyone else to blame.

  I called Sebastian. “Why don’t you think about someone other than yourself?” he said. “What would have happened if you’d succeeded? You’d have damaged me and Dad and Mum irreparably.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “But what if it happens again?”

  “It won’t,” I said.

  “But you said that before. When I called you. Miriam told me you were suicidal, and I asked you if you’d ever actually do it, and you said no, it was just a feeling.”

  “That was true, then,” I said, “but I won’t do it again. I’m feeling a bit better now.”

  “But how am I supposed to believe you? How do you know you won’t feel worse again?”

  I didn’t know what to tell him. He’s right. I might feel worse again. Sebastian asked me if I needed anything in the hospital. “Sheet music,” I said.

  About an hour later a nurse handed me some faxed pages of piano music. “From your brother,” she said. It was a piece by Oscar Peterson called “Hymn to Freedom.” I sat in the dayroom for hours, playing the first five bars over and over again.

  DR. BROWNING DIDN’T EXACTLY look thrilled to see me. I could get why she was mad. Imagine some Goody-Two-Shoes whose lifetime worst screw-up was a single B minus in sixth grade, staking her name and reputation and legal liability on the disheveled Englishman who swore up and down he no longer posed a grave danger to himself only to find him back on the ward in less than forty-eight hours with self-inflicted knife wounds: Who could blame her if she hated me a bit? I had told her that I didn’t intend to act upon my recurrent thoughts of suicide. This wasn’t false. It wasn’t true either. Perhaps that sounds crazy. But this is how that logic goes: The two problems in the statement are I and intend. Say you intend to do something. Normally an intention tends to last a bit longer than, say, the five seconds it takes for the words to come out of your mouth. I intend to order the chocolate mousse for dessert: no one cares if you change your mind. I intend to feed your dog: it matters to the dog and dog owner if you follow through. But when the doctor asked me about my suicidal intentions, it felt more like the chocolate mousse sort of intention. Any second I might feel differently and change my mind. The I that said I wasn’t going to act on suicidal thoughts and the I that acted on them were not the same I. I’d told Miriam that being stuck inside the hospital wasn’t helping me in any way whatsoever. But I was wrong. Hospitalization had indeed helped me. It had stopped me from trying to kill myself.

  The doctor handed me a piece of paper she had printed out from a medical website. It described an illness called borderline personality disorder. Its symptoms were “emotional instability,” “feelings of worthlessness,” “impulsive behavior,” and “impaired relationships.” Doesn’t everyone feel like that? I wondered. The description referred to the borderline patient’s “frantic efforts to thwart real or imagined abandonment” and the tendency of individuals thus afflicted to self-induce physical injuries to stimulate chemical responses in the body that can reduce emotional pain.

  “Does this sound like you, Mr. Thompson?” she said. “I thought it might fit, because of the cutting.”

  The cutting: I had indeed cut myself. I had cut myself off from the land where I was born. I had acquired a way of coping with life by severing my mind from difficult experiences. It wasn’t far-fetched for Dr. Browning to see the gash on my leg and hear about the chaos of my adolescence and match these two pieces of information with the criteria for a disorder that included similar features. Still, I experienced our interaction about the cutting as strange and distancing. There is nothing wrong with reductionism. To explain or understand almost any phenomenon necessarily means attending to the important parts of it, and neglecting others. To do otherwise would be like asking someone for directions to a street address and hearing them describe every square inch of the road and the molecular composition of asphalt. The person who gave street directions in such a manner would be giving an answer at the wrong level of explanation. Dr. Browning’s interpretation of my knife wound and family history as perhaps symptomatic of borderline personality traits was a coherent formulation, on its surface. But it is worth asking what this explanation accomplished. Did it yield more information than was already self-evident? No. I had cut my own leg; I felt worthless. And diagnosis was its own kind of violence. It cut me down to a set of disease criteria. It cut out how I felt on the inside. It cut out meaning. In different ways both of us were cutters, Dr. Browning and I.

  AROUND TEN AT NIGHT the nurses turned the television off. It was quiet on the ward. Most nights I would see one or two lonely souls wandering about
the empty corridors. I sat down, leaning against a wall, and took out a scrap of paper. I drew a line down the page like one of the counselors had told me to, dividing it into two columns, one for pro and the other for con. I tried to think of how to divide the loop running through my head into two and tell the difference between pros and cons when the whole problem was not being able to say that one thing was really any better than another, because the moment something felt like a pro, all I could think of was how it was really a con, and vice versa, so everything went round and round from pro to con and back to pro until it turned into pro-con-pro-con-pro-con. One evening, as I sat on the floor, lost in thought, a young woman with long dark hair, wearing a robe over her blue hospital pajamas, wandered past and then sat down next to me.

  “What are you writing?” she said.

  “Nothing,” I said. I showed her the page with the line on it and the words pro and con at the top. “I can’t write anything anymore.”

  “Why are you here?” she said.

  “I tried to kill myself,” I said.

  “How?” she said.

  “With booze and pills and a knife,” I said.

  “Can I see?” she said.

  I hitched up my hospital pajamas. She saw the long red gash that extended from my right hip to my kneecap.

  Her face scrunched up with a look of revulsion. “Oh Jesus, that’s fuckin’ horrible,” she said. “How could you do that to yourself? Oh, dude—I mean what the fuck, that’s just fuckin’ gross.”

  She looked about nineteen. She still lived at home with her mom and dad, she said. They called 911 when she took a bunch of pills. “I’m always doing shit like that,” she said. She got mad and told her parents she wished she’d never been born. The whole world was fuckin’ stupid, so why bother? The only thing that helped was painting. She made screen-print T-shirts and had a little business selling them to other kids. The name of her business was Invisible Laserbeam.

  “Why can’t you write anything?” she said.

  “My head goes round and round,” I said. “Nothing makes sense when it comes out. Just random words.”

  “What’s wrong with random words?” she said. “A poem is basically random words. Sometimes I write poems. You should try it.”

  “I like poems,” I said.

  “Ever write any?” she said.

  “I have spread my dreams under your feet . . . Tread softly because you tread on my dreams . . .”

  “Write that shit down, dude.”

  “It’s Yeats,” I said. “‘Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.’”

  “Give me that paper.”

  I gave it to her. In a couple of minutes, she filled the page with a poem entitled “Missing Equivalency”:

  Speaking of speaking in times historical

  Documentation has preconceived

  The notion of space to fulfill

  Endlessness in all of the space

  Left to fulfill. Dot, dot, dot. Right?

  Okay, so here’s the issue: time being

  Equivalent to space in the respect

  Of absence and some sort of ending.

  “Like I’ve never wanted out.”

  What it’s like never knowing,

  What it’s like never needing feeling in and out and around the

  Glove that I wear to find sorrow.

  Captivation confusion, letting go,

  Remembrance.

  How can I remember everything

  And nothing at all at the same time?

  How can I remember everything and nothing? You got that right, sister. If the doctors had names in their textbooks for the way people like me and Invisible Laserbeam were really feeling, not the wounds on the outside, the signs they sorted into labels, they would listen to her poem. Whatever happened way back in the time before, who knew. People like me and Invisible Laserbeam were never speaking of the time itself but speaking of speaking in times historical. We had chronic What It’s Like Never Knowing. We had severe Captivation Confusion. We had child-onset What It’s Like Never Needing Feeling. You could say such talk had nothing to do with science. You might suppose the brain doctors were working with their chosen organ much like heart doctors evaluate the ticker. There was something broken in folks like me and Invisible, no doubt about it. One day in the future, maybe, someone would make a map of every brain cell, all one hundred billion of them, and every electric signal between them, like a trail map of the forest of the mind. They could follow every thought and feeling and sensation flowing down every single path, like a GPS satellite tracking the motions of runners in the woods from far above, and know when someone was lost, when feelings disappeared in the dark undergrowth in the nighttime, when thoughts ran in circles and never found their way toward meaning anything. But until that day came, there was no map. The doctors looked at what we said and did. There was no blood test for crazy, no brain scan for a wound in the soul. Frantic efforts to thwart real or imagined abandonment. Yes. What it’s like never needing feeling. Yes. Captivation confusion, and never knowing, and remembering everything and nothing: Yes, yes, yes.

  I CONTINUED TO EXPERIENCE some relief from my own anguish in my informal role as listener to the suffering of others. I must have looked better on the outside than I felt on the inside. Perhaps it was the English accent, or a quiet demeanor that passed for introversion instead of the maelstrom of panic and shame and suicidal thinking I was actually experiencing. This paradox was sometimes disorienting for others. One evening a young Black woman came in on a gurney, her body shaking in violent convulsions. I saw her the following morning in the dining room. I sat down opposite her. I said hello.

  “I’m Naomi,” she said. She was eighteen years old, she said. She looked younger. She had frightened eyes and a tremulous voice. She had swallowed about a hundred lithium tablets and half a bottle of vodka the night before, she said. She told her mom. Her mom called 911. She was taken to the ER. The doctors pumped her stomach and then they sent her to the psych ward. Her heart was going baboom, baboom, around 180 beats a minute, she said. They couldn’t give her any medicine for it because her liver and kidneys couldn’t handle it. “The doctors told me I’m lucky to be alive,” she said. She took my hand and pressed it to her racing heart. “I’m so lonesome, I could die,” she said. I saw her notice the wedding band on my left hand. “Your wife is a lucky lady,” she said.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “One day you’ll meet someone too, I bet.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You’re a wonderful person,” she said. “I’ll miss you when you’re gone. You’re going home today, right?”

  “No, I just got here,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said, in a disappointed tone, as if I had broken a promise. “You think you know someone. But then you don’t.”

  Naomi didn’t know me. Neither did I really know myself. But the staff on the ward continued to do their best to make sense of my self-destructive behavior. The folks who ran the meeting at seven in the library always brought chocolate cookies, one of the nurses told me. “Real big chocolate cookies. And you should definitely go. I don’t think I need to tell you why.” I was about to say that he did need to tell me when I remembered that I had wound up in the hospital after washing down a fistful of Klonopin with an entire bottle of hard liquor. Okay, I get where you’re coming from, I thought. A patient comes in half-dead after he drinks a whole bottle of tequila, no wonder you think he’s some sort of wino. And sure, I’d drunk a lot over the years. But didn’t everyone? I knew that I had problems. But alcoholism surely wasn’t one of them. Alcoholic—the word summoned images of a homeless geezer collapsed on the sidewalk, puking. I’m not THAT guy. But real big chocolate cookies? Sure, sign me up.

  The meeting was convened by two men from the Hospitals and Institutions committee of Alcoholics Anonymous. One of the men read the preamble and asked me to read the steps. I was the sole patient in attendance. “I don’t think I’m an a
lcoholic,” I told the visitor. “The nurse told me I was supposed to come here.” I told the visitors about my use of drugs and alcohol. The tall man said, “I don’t know either—you might be or you might not be.” He gave me a copy of a thick paperback book with a blue cover. “Check it out,” he said. “You might find some of it interesting. Especially the stories.” After the meeting, I went and sat in the corridor and opened the book.

  He was right about the stories. Reading the book, I understood that my image of an alcoholic as a homeless wino lying in his own piss and vomit on the sidewalk was a misleading stereotype. Alcoholism was an equal opportunity illness. There were alcoholics in every corner of society—from the park bench to Park Avenue, as they say. According to the Big Book, alcoholism wasn’t even about alcohol. Booze was the symptom. The disease was in the soul.

  One of the stories in the Big Book was entitled “The Man Who Mastered Fear.” It was written by a man in the Midwest who drank his way through years of crippling anxiety in the era of the Great Depression until he met Dr. Bob, one of AA’s founders, and embraced the program, which he credited with saving his life. The words introducing his story were as follows: “He spent eighteen years running away, and then found he didn’t have to run.”

  IN MORNING GROUP THERAPY, the counselors would encourage us to speak about our thoughts. The approach struck me as consistent with what I understood to be a core principle of American positive thinking, the notion that urges the Debby Downers to turn their frowns upside down, derived from the conception of psychological suffering as an outcome of negative thoughts, whose removal or restructuring would form the pathway to mental health, rather along the lines of the directive in a popular 1940s song: “Accentuate the positive. Eliminate the negative. Latch on to the affirmative. But don’t mess with mister in between.” It was consistent too with the entire history of Western philosophy, which likewise proceeds from an emphasis on the efficacy of reason, exemplified by the dialogues between Plato and his teacher, Socrates, in which fundamental life questions about the nature of reality, society, ethics, love, and so on are explored by probing the conventional thoughts held about them. “I think, therefore I am,” wrote Descartes. But I didn’t think, at least not in a way that felt like coherent thought. Therefore I was not. I was Mr. In Between.