Somebody Somewhere (41 page)

I picked up a stone and drew a circle around him. You are under glass, I announced silently to myself. You are in the void of the Big Black Nothingness. It is a darkness you cannot see, a silence you cannot hear. It is a coldness you cannot feel and a deadness you cannot mourn for, I thought to myself.

I picked up a handful of rocks. “These are light,” I said out loud, and threw them one by one into the boundaries of his circle. “You are in the darkness,” I said, “you need all the light you can get.” Ian could not even smile. There was no smile to be had. There were no feelings to be tapped. There was almost no self for any to come from. The only thing holding on to the Ian space in which he had been was the absence of any façade to take its place. Ian was winning. Even dead, he was still holding on to the space his self belonged in.

On automatic, Ian drove to the homestead we were going to be staying at. He seemed strange. His voice and stance and facial expression began to change every five minutes. He was like a TV with a broken channel changer. I had the feeling I was in the company of a series of strangers and yet even this was frighteningly familiar.

A man approached us along the road to the homestead. Ian pulled the car up and words were spoken. It was a stranger's voice I heard
come from Ian. His stance and expression were foreign. I had seen glimpses of these changes but I had never seen Ian actually become one of his “faces.” The man walked off.

We arrived at the homestead. I felt frightened and alone. Ian was changing minute to minute. Whoever he was at that particular moment suggested we go for a meal. I went along, saying very little.

The meal was ordered by a precise, somewhat professional version of Ian and we sat down. This “face” was on the defensive but it was a “defensive” even Ian was unable to acknowledge or control. It was like watching myself when my own version of “defensive” was to break into Carol or Willie.

Basically Ian had no “defensive.” The characters were his defense as they had been mine. In the absence of self-assertion, they merely stepped in and took over when things got to be too much.

His “faces' ” different conversational angles were all inconsistent with each other, yet they didn't seem to realize it. I was frightened. I knew Carol and Willie had destroyed, contradicted, and discarded each other's stomping grounds, interests, beliefs, and “friends” but had they actually done so in the space of an hour?

As though each moment were detached from the next, frozen in time, Ian had no recognition of the inconsistency in the shifts from one to the other. I was not even really with Ian. He was merely fighting with himself in front of a physical image some part of his brain knew went with the word “Donna.” He now knew me as no more than a role.

There was another reason I was not with Ian. I was afraid. I was afraid of the way his own dissociation echoed my own. I was afraid to see it finally so clearly from the outside. I could finally see why others had sometimes been frightened by my sudden shifts, changes, and contradictions. I was frightened as I sat not with one stranger but a series of them, each of them putting me through a different psychological and emotional grilling, none of which had been expressed by Ian.

I looked at Ian's form for the slightest hint of the person buried there. There was none. A smiling character beamed at me, suddenly
gloating. “Ian feels nothing!” chirped the character gleefully. I felt chilled. It was as though I was caught up in a horror film; Ian was like a ventriloquist doll operated by a phantom puppeteer. It shifted to another “face,” serious and severe, the one who had ordered the meal. The tone of voice changed to social-worker style. I felt sickeningly patronized.

Ian could not “see” me. I was merely a form sitting before him which was vaguely familiar without knowing why. I was as anonymous as an audience member his characters played to.

Then came another shift, a performance that was deep, emotional, and caring. I almost jumped out of my seat with the sharp change. The words, apologetic. The eyes searching deeply into mine as he reached across the table like a priest consoling the relatives of the dead. You could imagine the violins coming out as he launched into a gentle let-down scene. Ian could not see me. He was asleep. There was nothing left to do but to point out the inconsistencies and wait.

I asked the “face” before me how he could have said one thing when he had just said another thing that contradicted it five minutes before. The character changes quickened, each pouring forth a different angle or changing the topic. Excuses poured forth, denial poured forth, psychological distancing warfare went on full alert. The comments stung but I continued. I'm not losing you to the same war I just came from, I thought. You're in there somewhere.

Then Ian came back and collapsed in a heaving mess of tears upon the table in front of him. He was exhausted and disoriented. He didn't know quite where he was, what had happened, what he had said, how to coordinate getting out of this place, or even how to speak. I had seen this in myself. I sprang into order.

I paid the bill quickly. I grabbed Ian's things from the table and put them into his pockets. He was frightened. I encouraged him to get up. “Come on, let's get out of here,” I said. Ian was nonverbal. We walked along in the darkness of a long stony road. The hedges enclosed us under a deep, purple starry sky as we walked in the misty rain to nowhere. Ian was crying uncontrollably. Suddenly he stopped and crouched in the middle of the road, his long arms wrapped around his knees. “It hurts,” he said, “it hurts so much.” “It's emotions,”
I said, pausing, “they can't hurt you.” “I'd do anything to get rid of this,” said Ian, shaking violently and uncontrollably, the image of a junkie going through withdrawal. “Would you want to feel dead like before?” I asked. “No!” said Ian, crying uncontrollably again. “It hurts to have a self,” I said. I reached out and rocked him gently as he sat, a giant crouched in the middle of the road.

Ian got up and walked away. “I'm so glad to see you,” he said. “I'm so glad you're back,” I replied. “I wish I could hug you,” said Ian in a choking whisper to himself. I was not sure I had heard correctly. “What did you say?” I asked. “I wish I could hug you,” Ian repeated quietly to himself, his eyes fixed straight ahead. “I would like to,” I said. We gently stood up against each other, our faces turned away from one another, resting upon each other's shoulders. Our arms held onto each other's forearms lightly by the sleeves as we cried together, glad to “simply be.”

We walked back toward the car. I looked to Ian to name things that were familiar to him, helping him to orient himself again as I had learned to do for myself when emerging from such a sleep state.

We got some hats from the car and walked off in the misty rain. There was a white gravel square that sparkled wildly in the rain and in the light of a tall, old lamp. I had to hear it. I had to hear my footsteps. In the light the mist looked like the stars around me when I was small. It was magical. Ian and I went and stood under the light among rainbows and stars, enclosed and safe.

W
e arrived in a town full of bright, colored lights. I felt part of the rainbows dancing upon a shiny, black, shimmering surface. I got lost in becoming part of bright, red, squiggly patterns. I “disappeared” into a haunting, blue square high up above us, beyond black, curling patterns that went on and on.

My senses went on red alert. I had fallen into meaning-blindness, and my visual hypersensitivity was absolutely sky-high without any
interpretation at all but I had been too hypnotized by beauty to notice it coming on.

Ian was scared for me, although scared was no longer a concept to me. I mirrored his facial expression. It seemed purposeless and meant nothing.

I was like a person on drugs looking at this incomprehensible paradise around me, racing from one form of heaven to the next. I looked at Ian. He was form without meaning, yet still familiar.

I began to become afraid. I tried to name the things around me. I could not. The shapes and patterns and colors could not be interpreted. I began to get more frightened. Would this person with me understand? Was I safe? Should I run? Thoughts drifted by me and I couldn't touch them.

Darkness. I turned down a long stretch of darkness away from the colors. I had flown too high. Each height had topped the last one until I was almost flying.

I hit the hard surface under my hand.
Splat
, said the surface. “Bricks,” I said in reply. I hit another surface, commanding my mind to bring interpretation back.
Thud
, said the surface. “Wood,” I said in reply. “Yes, wood,” said Ian. “Stone,” I said, stomping upon
clack-clack
cobblestones. “A laneway,” I said, looking around and finally getting a whole picture of where I was. “Are you okay?” asked Ian. “Yeah,” I said, “hair.” “Ian's hair,” said Ian, holding it up. I smelled his hair. “Ian's hair,” I said, smiling. It was so familiar.

We walked back. The blue square up high beyond the black pattern was a room with a blue neon light that lay beyond a Victorian lacework balcony. The red, squiggly lines were a red neon-light advertisement on a shop window. The overwhelmingly beautiful rainbow shimmering upon the shiny blackness was the reflection of city lights in the water of a river we had passed. I was so embarrassed. “I accept you as you are,” said Ian, “I don't just pick and choose and take the best bits.”

I
t was late. We had spent the day climbing hills, buzzing on the tiny details and explosive colors of flowers, grass, rocks, and sky, and exploring the perceptual changes that came with a fluctuating sense of background-foreground. We pulled into a hotel for the night. There were chandeliers and the smell and feel of wood. There was the shine of brass knickknacks and there were mirrors absolutely everywhere.