Chapter Two: The System and the Boy Who

Chapter Two: The System and the Boy Who

Learned to Play It There is a particular loneliness to being good at a game you do not respect. I moved through the last years of school collecting first positions the way a bored man collects objects he does not need — methodically, without joy, because the habit of collection has replaced any original purpose the collection might have served. But underneath the performance of competence, something else was building. Something that had no name yet and therefore no shape — only a pressure, the way weather builds before a storm that the sky has not yet committed to. I would notice it at night. Lying in bed after studying, in the ten minutes before sleep arrived, the mind doing what minds do when they are finally left alone: turning itself over. Examining its own contents. Finding, sometimes, things it had put there without remembering the putting. I had a friend I will call Zain. He was the kind of friend who is present for everything and understands almost none of it — not because he lacked intelligence but because his interior life was organized differently from mine, more peacefully, more horizontally. He did not have the underground. He lived on the surface with the ease of someone for whom the surface is sufficient, and I envied this with a ferocity that I mistook for mild irritation. We talked about films, football, teachers. We did not talk about the things that mattered. We did not have the language. Nobody gives you the language for the things that matter — you have to find it yourself, usually by suffering the thing first and naming it afterward, when the naming is too late to be useful as a warning.

*** The first time I had what I now recognize as an anxiety attack, I did not know what it was. I thought I was dying. This is, apparently, the standard misdiagnosis. I was sixteen. I was in my room, studying for an exam I had already prepared for adequately. The room was quiet. The fan was turning. Everything was, by any objective measure, fine. And then it was not fine. The not-fine arrived without announcement. One moment I was reading. The next moment my chest had become a small room with the walls moving inward, and my heart was doing something percussive and wrong, and the air in the room felt suddenly like a substance — like something I had to actively push through rather than something that simply filled me when I breathed. breathe. I am breathing. why is that not helping.

the ceiling is very far away. or very close. why is my heart doing that.

is this what dying feels like. I have a test tomorrow. I cannot die before the test.

breathe. this room is too small. this room is the same size it always was.

breathe.

It passed. They always pass, which is one of the more disorienting things about them — the complete conviction of catastrophe followed by the complete absence of catastrophe, leaving only the shaking and the question of what, exactly, that was.

I did not tell anyone. This is important. The silence around it was immediate and instinctive, a reflex that operated before I had time to consider alternatives. Boys in Karachi in 2010-something did not have the vocabulary for what had just happened to me. Men did not have the vocabulary. The vocabulary was considered, by the ambient culture in which I had been formed, to be a kind of weakness — and I was not weak, I was first in my class, I was the boy who had understood the machine. The machine had feelings. This information was inconvenient. I filed it in the place where I filed inconvenient information and went back to studying and passed the test and did not think about it again for a long time. The not-thinking-about-it was its own kind of work, a background process running constantly, consuming resources I did not know I was spending.