New Moon (59 page)

Schuy was enraged at this outcome. “What’s wrong with alienation?” he demanded. “He didn’t want to be touched. He understood clocks were the enemy. Why couldn’t they leave him alone? Why did some pretty girl come along and invade him?”

But I was all for David’s submission to Lisa, letting her contact and melt his shell. Soon after the showing, a classmate who liked to play literary critic, a guy who later wrote for
Esquire
and
Playboy,
ridiculed the movie at dinner by reciting Lisa’s rhymes in a dopey voice. My words never impeded his ego trips, so this time I picked up my plate of spaghetti and sauce and dumped it on his head.

On a Saturday morning in mid-May I was sitting in a patch of sun in the Phi Psi stairwell, hand-scooping breakfast from a carton of Corn Kix into which I had poured half a carton of currants. I was reading the
New York Times,
feeling mellow and content. There were Mets box scores and articles, plus seasonal averages. Lindy and I were going out that night.

I felt a sudden jolt from nowhere, a shift of texture. The ocher hue on the rug seemed to flicker, become unstable. I took a quick breath and put my attention back into the stats, but they were chaff compared to what was happening.

There was a brief hiatus before the paling came again—a wobble followed by a series of tremors, their sheer output incredible.

I bolted from the stairwell and sank to the floor of my room, squatting with my legs drawn up to my chest. I felt another upheaval materializing, the biggest one yet, dilating from my center.

I told myself that nothing was really happening. It was some sort of passing sensation like heartburn or a headache. Take an aspirin; maybe it would go away.

I knew better. I could tell how fixed and solid it was. Everywhere I turned, it was coming at me like the tentacle of an invisible octopus, looming up from the background, neither simple nor manipulable.

As if to grab its thread, I reached behind my neck and contacted a string of odd bumps. Had I developed tumors? I grabbed frantically along the top of my backbone. It was hard as stone!

I raced to the bathroom mirror, running my fingers up and down my spine. I had always had a backbone, but what was that floating lump above it?

The childhood panic was back. I had thought I had vanquished it, outgrown it like bedwetting. But it had been there all along, an eclipse of an unknown form at the lake, an immeasurable depth of sky and clouds.

There were times as a teenager at Grossinger’s when I woke homesick, which made no sense given I was “home,” or at least where I wanted to be. But the light was too wan, the color of sun on the walls. It made me feel that the joys of the Hotel weren’t that at all.

Usually this melded into something more remote and wistful, too vague even for Dr. Friend’s radar. I tried to explain it to Aunt Bunny because she had perfect psychiatric pitch, but she was stumped too. She assumed it was a form of anxiety, or that maybe I
did
miss my other family.

Flurries of Hotel activity swept away the mood.

Other times I melded with a diabolic presence, like when setting pranks at Niagara Falls.

Yet all told, till that spring morning sophomore year of Amherst, I had not had a full-fledged panic since my tutor Mr. Hilowitz charmed me out of the last one in sixth grade with tales of the French and Indian War. Occasional flutters of terror I rationalized as aftershocks of childhood, normal mood shifts in an erratic universe. I had grown up intrepid and tough, a weed through debris. I didn’t turn into the mental patient everyone predicted or an irreparably damaged teen. I applied to the best colleges, got into one, and went. I was dating the prettiest girl in the Smith book and, even when I found out, I didn’t back off as unqualified.

Despite asocial acts, despite psychiatry’s warnings about primal trauma—its cyclical breakdowns—despite the comeuppances of freshman year, I placed no limits on myself. I could still be anything I wanted. I identified with my sanity alone.

But Dr. Friend had seen the other side of the coin. He expected me to apply to Columbia; he knew that Amherst was pure bravado. He recognized, all along, that panic had been biding, not diminishing, veiling itself in false rollbacks, tracking me through daydreams and compulsive rituals, instigating neurotic gags and numb binges to postpone the inevitable relapse.

For all my vigilance, I had failed to recognize the truth. This wasn’t a stable life I was living like Stan Brakhage or even Paul Goodman. It was phases of a fugue, all the way back through Horace Mann and Chipinaw. For years I had been a centurion, keeping at bay wolves who weren’t wolves and who wouldn’t be held off indefinitely.

My mind had become sophisticated, articulate. I had been trained and taught by adepts. I had replaced the obscure bogeymen and augurs of a five-year-old with informed hell realms, nihilistic proxies, incarceration in a God-forsaken universe—a view validated by no less than Samuel Beckett. To think that I had exalted his lines without realizing Godot
was
the dungeon stairs. I couldn’t embrace its literary form while fleeing its sober fact.

This was a life-or-death matter. If nature was warped and malevolent, existence tragic, there was nothing to be done, no bargain to be struck. Same deal always—spooks and aliens at the window, storm troopers at the door. Same as my brother punching ghosts in the dark, asserting valor against invincible, maniacal intruders.

The real threat was a million times worse than the Cuban missile crisis, for nuclear war would only incinerate life. Beingness would be blasted into nothingness.
This,
however, would go on forever, waking me up from every life and death to experience it again. The only remedy was to be totally expunged from existence—never to have been at all.

I summoned Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus to my aid.
They
knew about the darkness of infinite spaces: the wasted sky, the false dawn, troubled sleep, fugitive reprieves—they understood the void left by an absent or unwilling god. They were not afraid, not like this; they had survived a World War and a Nazi puppet regime. They found dignity in resistance. They didn’t freak out or devolve into berserk jigs.

We were all in this together. The universe didn’t select me alone as its pawn and quarry. My plight was universal not personal. If they could sing in the darkness, I could sing in the darkness too.

Time passed. Colors restored themselves; life began to take hold again. The pangs became a weather front from which I was separating. I sensed them in the near distance, their premise absurd. The cure was
live.
Nothing special:
Just live.

“Hurray!” I whispered to myself, thinking to charm the demons by my ingenuousness. “Hurray again!”

I rejoined the human race at lunch and spent the afternoon studying for a geology exam.

Lindy and I met for dinner in Northampton and afterwards sat on a lawn at Smith; she stroked my suspect backbone, felt nothing odd, and reassured me. The anticipation of seeing her buoyed by the logistics of hitching there had sustained the day. In her presence the world was soft and sensuous again, a mere fraction out of orbit. I thought maybe I could outrun it and live.

But panic came the next morning with the dissolution of dreams. Sleep had not dissolved the spook, it only made matters worse,
much
worse. My nightmares were not showdowns with hideous entities or plummets into an abyss; no terrifying things happened—I was not chased, threatened, drowned, pushed off a cliff, or dismembered by Hitzig. There were only pasteboard events, labels on bottles, from which I awoke dizzier and more frightened than from any “real” nightmare. It was a nightmare
only because it felt like a nightmare
—far worse for scaring me with a banal skit. It was a nightmare without amelioration because there was nothing to ameliorate,
nothing
to ameliorate it with. Everything was a foil of cracking glue.

I was drifting from any landmark, context of any known shore.

Getting dressed, I heard someone’s distant radio like a foghorn in another world. I saw the vernal celebration outside, guys beyond the window in T-shirts and shorts—so much lush easy-going life it was intolerable. Just two days ago I had been one of them—baseball, banter, milk shakes, spring fever. I was a bit of a rebel, a nut, but okay. Now I passed like a phantom. I ate without appetite, exchanged speech without recognition. I plodded through pretenses of classes and conversations. I couldn’t meet the challenge that every “cowboy cool” dude (whom I had so cavalierly mocked) aced with each casual step across reality.

I remembered the alcove of the Y with its fruit machines, as real as yesterday, more so in its mucid gloom. Not only were the apples poisonous, they weren’t apples, they were red decoys. I saw a natal sun through swamp vines from a Miami-bound train. They were dismal then, yet hauntingly beautiful and profound. Now those same vistas were neither romantic nor literary, they were cold and lethal.

I thought: I can wait this one out.

I couldn’t. Every second, my heart beat … and I took another breath. This thing was bigger than the known universe!

I was back with the five-year-old, experiencing a lesion of consciousness, the insufficiency of the world to repel the greater dark,

Through the next night too, I woke terrified from sterile dreams, often with a start—jangly phenomena like a film that wouldn’t stay in its projector track. I dreaded falling back to sleep.

Throughout the following day I paced the world, looking for anywhere to alight. Spates of terror came and went. I couldn’t hold up my end of the bargain or contribute to the collective mirage. I searched inside me for anything mutable, capable of faith or humor. But time itself had stopped. I had moved outside to where existence stood static and still as a grandfather clock in an abandoned house, that would never tick again. The world was a fake paradise, its occasions stale and inappropriate, everything in it a cruel hoax.

I tried to study. I sat in classes in order to be somewhere, but I had to muster every ounce of concentration just to keep myself
moored.

I had truly fallen down the stairs, past Nanny’s grasp, into the darkness forever.

I bolted.

Lindy was studying for an exam but took time off and walked around Paradise Pond with me. We sat on its far edge. “You’ll be okay. You’re really a wonderful person; you’ve just forgotten. It’s as though your mother put something inside you—a curse—and you have to find it and defeat it. Ghosts are so much harder than daylight. But you’re courageous. You’ll do it.”

I returned to Amherst, heartened by her support.

Days passed, interminably. I wrote Dr. Friend for the first time in more than a year. He sent back three sentences of upbeat encouragement. I sensed his unwillingness to admit the obvious, that we were the blind being led by the blind. He was cheery by professional obligation and pride, in honor of Freud, who wasn’t cheery at all. Standing by a bust of the master (in a film shown by Heath to our class), Freud’s biographer Ernest Jones had declared, “Life is not to be enjoyed, life is to be endured.”

Two weeks ago I would have opposed such cynicism on principle. Now it was my mantra.

I hitched grimly back to Laura Scales.

“You show up here looking spooked,” Lindy snapped, “and what can I do that I haven’t done?”

I stood by her, sheepish, agreeing. She was a scholarship student needing to keep up her grade-point average; she had too much schoolwork to squander any more time on someone else’s crisis.

Her down-to-earth obligations shamed me. But I was desperate and she made an offer to study together by the pond. Beside her I was in a state of remission and grace. I finished a week’s worth of overdue assignments as the sun crossed the sky.

We headed toward her dorm, late afternoon, holding hands. She grabbed my arm and wrist together, as though to snap me out of it, coaxing me with lines from David and Lisa:

“Your face is nice; not like snow, not like ice.”

I laughed appreciatively.

“Haven’t you been this bad and gotten out of it?”

“Never this bad. Never like this.”

“Well, maybe that’s just because nothing has been at stake before.”

I knew that she was right. She was trying her best to help, but this was
her
life too, and she couldn’t just give it to me.

I promised to let a week go before I called again. During the days at Amherst I let tremors build and disperse. I tried to defuse them by reasoning against their hysteria, tracing the semblance of their origin in me. I packed in as much mundane life as I could. I asked my panic to teach me. And it did.

I could tell Dr. Fabian now that it wasn’t just the fear of something terrible happening; it was far more convoluted than that. “Okay, Fabian, how about this: a combination of horror, hopelessness, arid grief, and blind desperation? It’s inconsolable because no one can help; obsessive because you can’t take your mind off it; restless because, with your mind on it constantly, you flee frantically from place to place. It is paranoid because it suspects others of humoring and falsely reassuring you. It is isolate, cut off from human contact, the antipode of eros—and ineradicable.

“How was that, Fabian?” I cried out as if from Beckett’s empty stage. “You thought you knew everything, but you didn’t know the likes of it when you led me down the primrose path of Paul and Martha’s divorce. What a red herring! What a song and dance!
You
were waiting for Godot too.”

On a Saturday afternoon, a week into the fugue, I looked back through all the years and saw nothing, just thousands of meaningless ballgames on which I had wasted my life, staged psychiatric sessions bought by blood money, Towers and Grossinger melodrama, pages of nervous-energy writing rejected finally by Catherine Carver. It was a wasteland. It passed for a life because no one had looked at it closely. I wasn’t the hero of my own romance. I wasn’t a scion of magic and vision. I wasn’t a spokesman for my generation. I didn’t care about the greatest good for the greatest number. I was self-involved and ungrateful—Martha’s bane, Jonny’s saboteur, Dr. Fabian’s traitor, a petty prankster. I had been grade-hungry at Horace Mann;
now I was sloppy and negligent—same narcissistic guy.