Chapter Seven: The Night the Walls Came In

Chapter Seven: The Night the Walls Came In

There was one night — I was seventeen, it was during the last weeks of my first college year — that I want to describe in detail because it was the first time I understood that something was genuinely wrong inside the machine I had been confidently operating. It started as ordinary insomnia. I had been lying awake for an hour, the ceiling fan turning, the city sounds doing their usual nighttime arrangement — the distant traffic, the dogs, someone's television through a shared wall. The kind of night that should be navigable. I had navigated hundreds of them. Then something shifted. the ceiling is closer than it was. no it isn't. check.

it is the same distance. why does it feel closer. chest.

there is something in my chest. not pain. not pain exactly. pressure.

like something pressing outward from the inside. like something trying to get out. breathe.

breathing is not helping. I have been breathing incorrectly for seventeen years. no that is not a real thought.

stay with real thoughts. what are real thoughts.

I got up. Went to the bathroom. Ran the cold tap and held my wrists under it for a few minutes, which I had read somewhere helped and which helped slightly, or

perhaps just gave the panic something concrete to push against. I looked at my face in the mirror above the sink. This sounds like a scene from a film. The young man at the mirror at midnight, confronting himself. I know how it sounds. I am telling you what happened. I looked at my face in the mirror and I thought, very clearly, without dramatics: I do not know this person well enough. I have been living inside this person for seventeen years and I do not know him well enough to predict what he is going to do next. He has made decisions I would not have predicted. He has felt things that do not map onto the story I have been telling about him. He is capable of things I prefer not to think about and he is probably going to be capable of more. This was not a thought about the girls. It was not even a moral thought. It was something prior to morality — a recognition of fundamental opacity. The self is dark. The self is not transparent even to itself. The self contains things that announce themselves only when they are already too large to manage, which is the exact opposite of how you would design a system if you were designing it deliberately. I am not designed deliberately. None of us are. We are built by accident and environment and the specific people who happened to be present during the years when building was occurring. And then we are handed to ourselves and told: manage this. Good luck.

I went back to bed. I did not sleep for a long time. When I did sleep I slept badly, with the particular quality of sleep that is more like a negotiation than a rest. In

the morning I got dressed and went to college and performed, with reasonable accuracy, the person I was supposed to be. The performance was good. No one noticed. Performances are most effective precisely when they are most necessary, which is perhaps the one reliable irony of the whole arrangement.