“That could be your problem right there.”
“In a manner of speaking.”
He pulled over at a liquor store. “You sure you don’t want anything?”
“I am sure I want something that I had better not have.”
He drove me back to the campus. There I was taken to a wood-paneled office with two consultants and a whiteboard on a folding stand, or is it a wipeboard, it’s never been clear to me what people call that thing.
“I still don’t understand. You went outside?”
“These people keep telling me I am saying their thoughts for them.”
“I’m sure that is true,” one of the consultants said, pulling his chair closer to mine. “Never mind this game now. I’m talking to you seriously, man to man. Do not walk away from here filled up with everybody else’s shit, full of other people’s feelings. You aren’t doing them any favors. That’s their shit. Leave their shit here, for them to deal with. I’m warning you.”
But it was no use warning the child who had once put his hand on the grill because he had wanted to know how it felt to be a hamburger.
When someone leaves a group-relations conference early, it’s called a casualty. Who dies? The one who leaves, or the group that is left behind?
By electing a single member to contain disowned psychotic anxieties and extruding that member, the group both “kills” him and dismembers itself.
Before lunch on the fourth day, during seventy-five minutes in the large group, I became uneasy about the group’s enforcement of Tommy’s prolonged silence. His wish to be told to shut up had been cruelly granted: he had not spoken for more than twenty-four hours.
He was seated on the floor outside our circle. It had become impossible not to see that we were no longer seeing him.
All of the people seated behind the director had their legs crossed, their arms crossed, hands over their mouths. It was extraordinary. They were a wall of defense—defending whom, from what? And behind them, behind that wall, on the floor, with his back to us and ours to him, sat the sullen, silenced Tommy.
I wanted Tommy out of quarantine. I wanted whatever we had put inside him and walled off and banished from our consciousness to be returned to us at once, for his sake and for the sake of the group.
I tried to explain this, but I opened my mouth and was surprised to find that I was incoherent.
And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
After that meeting I locked myself in my campus apartment, in the dark, but my room wasn’t dark enough. I got into the closet and closed its door. That wasn’t dark enough, either. I began to tie a shirt around my neck.
I am in a room in the dark, I thought, inside a larger locked room in the dark, strangling myself. These are the actions of a disturbed person.
It was my punishment for refusing to forget Tommy: his role of group “demon” had been reassigned to me, as Pazuzu leaps from Regan to Father Karras in The Exorcist.
I threw my suitcase out a window and jumped out after it. Any landing you can walk away from is a good one. I limped to the nearest town and hired a car.
When I got home, I ripped paintings and photographs off my walls, shouting, “Demons, I cast you out,” and threw armloads of framed pictures out my front door, but then I had to sweep up all that broken glass, and while I was sweeping I began to vomit, and now I was sweeping both broken glass and vomit, not the most sweepable of mixtures, and I continued to attempt to clean up the mess while—honesty requires this admission—at the same time I continued, with my ceaseless vomiting, to create that same mess, and soon I had to get three antipsychotic prescriptions to calm down. It took me five months to calm down. Otherwise I suffered no adverse effects.
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Copyright © J. D. Daniels 2017
J. D. Daniels has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York in 2017
First published in the United Kingdom by Jonathan Cape in 2017
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The Correspondence Page 8