Read Emails from the Edge Online
Authors: Ken Haley
Emails from the Edge (7 page)
Chapter 8
NIGHT VISION
BY COLIN THUBRON IN
J
OURNEY INTO
C
YPRUS
AUGUST 1990
Going mad isn't easy to describe. It is a journey of a unique kind, to a territory where most guidebooks don't venture. Going mad is like visiting another world where all the signs are written in a mysterious alphabet that nothing back home prepares you to decipher. If you travel far enough from your starting point without reliable companions, you will arrive at madness tooâbut I didn't know that then.
Unreliable companions in the form of voices accompany some of us down that sloping road. Although this account of my crisis is spiced with the doubts that assailed me, it would be wrong to infer that I had actual aural delusions. My descent was deep into myself, not into the realm of ghosts.
Towards sunset on that sultry Sunday 19 August, which that hint in the bar had primed me to expect would be so fateful, my plan of action became clear. As someone brought up to believe in God, I reflexively sought out a church I had seen a couple of kilometres from my home in Manama's inner suburbs. In Muslim Bahrain, churches are the virtually exclusive preserve of foreigners. My watch showing 7.30 pm on this day of no rest, to find the church locked fast seemed inexplicable from a rational point of view. But by then I was no longer on good terms with rational thought, sensing it had let me down of late. Creeping paranoia had usurped the throne of thought: wasn't this suspicious, the thought occurred to me, that there wasn't even an explanatory note on this of all evenings? After all, wouldn't Westerners hide or even go to pray there if the Iraqi troops were about to invade?
Had I been thinking logically, even within the realm of cloak-and-dagger hints that I believed were being dropped at the Londoner, I should have been at the airport. But it was symptomatic of my mental agitation that I couldn't join up the dots between theory (belief) and practice (action).
If
expatriates were expected at the airport this evening,
then
I should have hopped into a passing taxi and damned the cost ⦠but dread had washed away the road linking
if
to
then
.
Here I was, trapped in a real-life version of Zeno's paradox, which we had studied at high school. Zeno taught that before you can go from here to there you first have to go half the distance; and before you can go from here to half the distance you have to go half
that
distance; and so on,
ad infinitum
. But because you can never go half the distance (because first you'd have to go half â¦) all attempts to get from A to B are bound to fail. Well, you can never get anywhere with a philosophy like that. If you're stuck fast, you'll never be able to move.
âKnow thyself' is asking a lot: the self remains the great unknowable. All we can do is construct a more or less useful map of who and where we think we are. My map was out of date: the reference markers provided by purpose (work) and friends were absent; and unnerving danger signals now flashed red.
A tintinnabulation of alarms streamed through my consciousness as I left the churchyard and headed south towards my apartment.
If this is evacuation night, everyone else will be at the airport and I will be the only Westerner left in Bahrain. When the Iraqis land I will have nowhere to hide. If I do find somewhere I won't be able to go out and get food. If I have to starve to death it will be a long, slow and torturous process. If they find me I will be tortured too, perhaps just as slowly
.
These fears, and many moreâpresenting extremely remote hypotheticals as impending threatsâreduced me to a state of near terror. I was experiencing the onset of a panic attack. The strings were snapping. Nervous exhaustion was exacerbated by sheer physical fatigue brought on by two hours of non-stop and increasingly directionless walking in the 35°C heat of an August night.
Even more unlikely scenarios shuffled like cards to the front of the deck. The fearâor thoughtâstruck me that maybe the arrangement for Westerners to assemble at the airport was an Iraqi ploy, disinformation, and that the planned airlift (surely sea evacuation? My mind was a blur) presaged a massacre.
Sane or mad, the mind controls the body. As I neared my apartment, my breathing was laboured and I could hear my heart pounding furiously. Others have since explained that I would have been hyperventilating; all I knew was that everything in my field of vision was swaying and swimming in and out of view. It was as if the physical laws of the universe had been suspended, gravity first.
For several minutes, it must have been, I paced the pavement in front of the tower block where my apartment was, in quest of a balance that had deserted me. I have a hazy recollection of taking the lift to my floor, fumbling for the right key, going into the living room and scrawling a hasty farewell note to my parents (while struggling to believe it would ever reach them in the event of an invasion, which now seemed to me a much greater certainty than tomorrow's sunrise). Whatever else I did is lost to memory.
It must have been mid-evening now, but time becomes fluid, neither measurable nor of the slightest importance, when the world appears to be breaking up. To unbuckle my watch and fling it away, heedless of where it landed, seemed the most sensible thing in the world to do. This was the end time, whether the Iraqis were poised to invade or the Second Coming was in the wings.
End time
.
It must have been the mixture of religious and military signals that suggested it. The word âArmageddon' blitzed my mind and the burden that had borne down on my struggling sanity for the seventeen days since the outer world had lost its stability now crushed it utterly, breaking through my last reserves of self-control. I ran down the road, hands outstretched in front of me, screaming, âThe world is ending! This is the end of the world!'
As tends to be the case with such declarations, I was wrong, or maybe just premature. But no one told me that at the time. If anyone had been in the vicinity, no doubt they would have shrunk from the crazy apparition hurtling down the boulevard. But, after what must have been a few hundred metres, I did attract someone's attention: behind me, from out of nowhere, I heard the wailing of a police siren.
The van stopped, officers got out, a couple of them came over, pinned my arms behind my back and dragged me inside, forcing me to lie face down on the flatbed behind the sealed-off cabin. The driver, after furtively looking around and grinning, or grimacing (I was in no position to tell which), gunned the engine and sped away.
In the back of the van, my police escortâbetween trying to keep me prone, with wrists pinned over the small of my backâwere discussing me in Arabic. How easy it is to make sense of a conversation by tone alone, it occurred to me, even when spoken by people whose language you don't know. These tones spoke to me of hostility and uncertainty combined. Yet at no time did I feel threatened by them. âFatalism' is too weak a word for what I felt; it was not so much âwhat will be will be' as âwhat must be has begun'. The unknown held no fears for me, perhaps because it was infinitely preferable to the terror of waiting for what my fevered imagination, fed by other people's fears and speculations, could apprehend.
I was passive and powerless, unable to see where we were going. I couldn't be sure which police station the van delivered me to, while sensing it must be on the edge of the built-up area. But, for once in my life, curiosity had outrun its course. They could do what they wanted with me; careless was I now, in the grasp of Fate.
Once inside the police stationâa shabby block of concrete with mustard-coloured wallsâmy passivity reached the end of its tether. The tension was palpable as my guardians, taking no chances, forced me to sit on the floor while the formalities that govern police procedures the world over were carried out. Asked my name and address, I gave nothing away.
This was valuable time, and I used it to survey my surroundings. What had been an increasingly insistent headache now made concentration difficult, and as I looked at the three photos above the desk officer's headâwhich would usually have been of the Emir of Bahrain and two princesâstaring back at me were the faces of Saddam Hussein, Gamel Abdel Nasser and the Ayatollah Khomeini. I have never been able to make sense of this and seldom think about it, but daresay a psychologist would conclude that to focus on the fiercer face of nationalism in the Middle East was an understandable illusion, flowing directly from recent harsh realities. My perceptions were like a door blown open, unhinged but not yet entirely detached.
Of course I didn't think at the time
I am hallucinating
. The appearance of dreamlike reality, albeit of the nightmarish kind, only confirmed the idea that this was exactly the sort of sliver of consciousness you might retain if your brain had been blown apart. Cut loose from my mental moorings, I became obsessed with the idea that this was Hell and that, to get out of it, I had to fight back against those from the Dark Side holding me captive. So, acting on the principle that action begets reaction, I lunged at the nearest officer with my fistsâclearly the act of a crazy man, since he was armed with a truncheon.
He raised it above his head, and his fellow officers shouted sharply at him, but something told me he wouldn't bring it down. I growled at him, like a wild dog, trying to provoke him, just so that we could reach the next stage of the ordeal. That came quickly, in the form of officers' hands gripping my arms, the cold clasp of handcuffs being fitted over my wrists, and a small posse of police herding me into a corridor that ran off at a right angle from the front desk. With an almighty shove in the back, they pushed me onto the concrete floor of a cell and locked me in.
The cell was surprisingly large for just one person, although maybe it had been built to hold several. A strange inhuman caterwauling in the corridor, which broke out intermittently most of the night, had me wondering whether other inmates had been turfed out because a Western prisoner here would be so exceptional that any harm befalling him would incur consequences for the guards. The cell must have been occupied not long before because the only item in it was a urine-soaked mattress. Its walls enclosed ten metres by four, with standard-issue iron bars high up admitting shafts of harsh electric light.
Avoiding the mattress at first, I sat hunched over, back to a side wall, holding my head in my hands. The front of my brain felt as though lasers were boring into it, zapping the cells and melting them down. The mugginess of the nightâof course there was no airconditioningâand the absence of any water aggravated everything. Misery and suffering are beyond words: anyway, in my psychotic state, it appeared quite conceivable I was dying but more likely that I had already done so. Visions of my parents calling out to me, unaware that I could see but not communicate with them, made this irrational thought highly believable. A flood of self-pity rolled over me, extracting a few salty tears that blended with the perspiration streaming down my cheeks.
The only measure of time now was the watch: not my discarded wrist ornament but the warder pacing past the cell at what I judged to be quarter-hour intervals. In the deepest part of the night, a scream from one of the other cells further along the dim corridor rent the stillness. A policeman's lot need not be an unhappy one; a torturer's work is never done. All at once, I felt that being in solitary meant someone was looking after me.
Sometime just before dawn, the sense of my own miserable state reduced me to lying down on the piss-soaked mattress. My nervous exhaustion induced a state of slumber (I hesitate to call it sleep) that was somehow hyper-aware of my physical surroundings; and the fire in my brain crackled on.
With morning came a change of shift. Gabbled Arabic, excited talk between arriving and departing cops. The officers' talk woke me up.
A Westerner must have novelty value here
, I told myself. Two of the policemen came to the iron door. One joggled a key in the lock while the other kept his eyes fixed on me. I remember thinking,
Don't worry, I'm not going to make a false move. I made all those last night
.
They motioned me further along the corridor, away from âpublic' view, towards the cell where I'd heard screaming in the small hours. One of the jailers pointed to an overhead shower rose, and blinked an order, as if to say, âYou know how to use it. Do it.'
Privacy wasn't an issue, and in my weakened state shame wasn't either. I undressed, piled my clothes out of spray's way, and turned on the tap. The rusty waterworks shuddered and snorted, a sand-coloured squirt of liquid shot me in the head, and I applied the wafer of soap I'd been given to the steadier flow that followed. It was cold, but coming after my night in the furnace that was a relief.
Upon dressing I was led back down the corridor, past âmy cell', to the duty desk where an officer I didn't recogniseâbut at least one who spoke English, unlike his colleagues of the nightâbarked instructions at his juniors before training his gaze on me and saying in the neutral manner of a cyborg, âWe will take you soon.'
I still had no handle on reality. Had the Iraqis arrived during the night? Was this new officer one of the occupiers? Where were they going to take me? Questions dripped like beads of sweat through what was left of my mind. The future would reveal itself in due course, I could make no sense of the present, and instinct was the only survival tool left to me. It told me that to ask where I was going would be construed as a sign of weakness.
The future is coming
, I told myself.
Patience
.
NIGHT VISION
Observe, in short, how transient and trivial is all mortal life; yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of spice or ashes
.
THE ANCIENT GREEK PHILOSOPHER ZENO, QUOTED.
BY COLIN THUBRON IN
J
OURNEY INTO
C
YPRUS
AUGUST 1990
Going mad isn't easy to describe. It is a journey of a unique kind, to a territory where most guidebooks don't venture. Going mad is like visiting another world where all the signs are written in a mysterious alphabet that nothing back home prepares you to decipher. If you travel far enough from your starting point without reliable companions, you will arrive at madness tooâbut I didn't know that then.
Unreliable companions in the form of voices accompany some of us down that sloping road. Although this account of my crisis is spiced with the doubts that assailed me, it would be wrong to infer that I had actual aural delusions. My descent was deep into myself, not into the realm of ghosts.
Towards sunset on that sultry Sunday 19 August, which that hint in the bar had primed me to expect would be so fateful, my plan of action became clear. As someone brought up to believe in God, I reflexively sought out a church I had seen a couple of kilometres from my home in Manama's inner suburbs. In Muslim Bahrain, churches are the virtually exclusive preserve of foreigners. My watch showing 7.30 pm on this day of no rest, to find the church locked fast seemed inexplicable from a rational point of view. But by then I was no longer on good terms with rational thought, sensing it had let me down of late. Creeping paranoia had usurped the throne of thought: wasn't this suspicious, the thought occurred to me, that there wasn't even an explanatory note on this of all evenings? After all, wouldn't Westerners hide or even go to pray there if the Iraqi troops were about to invade?
Had I been thinking logically, even within the realm of cloak-and-dagger hints that I believed were being dropped at the Londoner, I should have been at the airport. But it was symptomatic of my mental agitation that I couldn't join up the dots between theory (belief) and practice (action).
If
expatriates were expected at the airport this evening,
then
I should have hopped into a passing taxi and damned the cost ⦠but dread had washed away the road linking
if
to
then
.
Here I was, trapped in a real-life version of Zeno's paradox, which we had studied at high school. Zeno taught that before you can go from here to there you first have to go half the distance; and before you can go from here to half the distance you have to go half
that
distance; and so on,
ad infinitum
. But because you can never go half the distance (because first you'd have to go half â¦) all attempts to get from A to B are bound to fail. Well, you can never get anywhere with a philosophy like that. If you're stuck fast, you'll never be able to move.
âKnow thyself' is asking a lot: the self remains the great unknowable. All we can do is construct a more or less useful map of who and where we think we are. My map was out of date: the reference markers provided by purpose (work) and friends were absent; and unnerving danger signals now flashed red.
A tintinnabulation of alarms streamed through my consciousness as I left the churchyard and headed south towards my apartment.
If this is evacuation night, everyone else will be at the airport and I will be the only Westerner left in Bahrain. When the Iraqis land I will have nowhere to hide. If I do find somewhere I won't be able to go out and get food. If I have to starve to death it will be a long, slow and torturous process. If they find me I will be tortured too, perhaps just as slowly
.
These fears, and many moreâpresenting extremely remote hypotheticals as impending threatsâreduced me to a state of near terror. I was experiencing the onset of a panic attack. The strings were snapping. Nervous exhaustion was exacerbated by sheer physical fatigue brought on by two hours of non-stop and increasingly directionless walking in the 35°C heat of an August night.
Even more unlikely scenarios shuffled like cards to the front of the deck. The fearâor thoughtâstruck me that maybe the arrangement for Westerners to assemble at the airport was an Iraqi ploy, disinformation, and that the planned airlift (surely sea evacuation? My mind was a blur) presaged a massacre.
Sane or mad, the mind controls the body. As I neared my apartment, my breathing was laboured and I could hear my heart pounding furiously. Others have since explained that I would have been hyperventilating; all I knew was that everything in my field of vision was swaying and swimming in and out of view. It was as if the physical laws of the universe had been suspended, gravity first.
For several minutes, it must have been, I paced the pavement in front of the tower block where my apartment was, in quest of a balance that had deserted me. I have a hazy recollection of taking the lift to my floor, fumbling for the right key, going into the living room and scrawling a hasty farewell note to my parents (while struggling to believe it would ever reach them in the event of an invasion, which now seemed to me a much greater certainty than tomorrow's sunrise). Whatever else I did is lost to memory.
It must have been mid-evening now, but time becomes fluid, neither measurable nor of the slightest importance, when the world appears to be breaking up. To unbuckle my watch and fling it away, heedless of where it landed, seemed the most sensible thing in the world to do. This was the end time, whether the Iraqis were poised to invade or the Second Coming was in the wings.
End time
.
It must have been the mixture of religious and military signals that suggested it. The word âArmageddon' blitzed my mind and the burden that had borne down on my struggling sanity for the seventeen days since the outer world had lost its stability now crushed it utterly, breaking through my last reserves of self-control. I ran down the road, hands outstretched in front of me, screaming, âThe world is ending! This is the end of the world!'
As tends to be the case with such declarations, I was wrong, or maybe just premature. But no one told me that at the time. If anyone had been in the vicinity, no doubt they would have shrunk from the crazy apparition hurtling down the boulevard. But, after what must have been a few hundred metres, I did attract someone's attention: behind me, from out of nowhere, I heard the wailing of a police siren.
The van stopped, officers got out, a couple of them came over, pinned my arms behind my back and dragged me inside, forcing me to lie face down on the flatbed behind the sealed-off cabin. The driver, after furtively looking around and grinning, or grimacing (I was in no position to tell which), gunned the engine and sped away.
In the back of the van, my police escortâbetween trying to keep me prone, with wrists pinned over the small of my backâwere discussing me in Arabic. How easy it is to make sense of a conversation by tone alone, it occurred to me, even when spoken by people whose language you don't know. These tones spoke to me of hostility and uncertainty combined. Yet at no time did I feel threatened by them. âFatalism' is too weak a word for what I felt; it was not so much âwhat will be will be' as âwhat must be has begun'. The unknown held no fears for me, perhaps because it was infinitely preferable to the terror of waiting for what my fevered imagination, fed by other people's fears and speculations, could apprehend.
I was passive and powerless, unable to see where we were going. I couldn't be sure which police station the van delivered me to, while sensing it must be on the edge of the built-up area. But, for once in my life, curiosity had outrun its course. They could do what they wanted with me; careless was I now, in the grasp of Fate.
Once inside the police stationâa shabby block of concrete with mustard-coloured wallsâmy passivity reached the end of its tether. The tension was palpable as my guardians, taking no chances, forced me to sit on the floor while the formalities that govern police procedures the world over were carried out. Asked my name and address, I gave nothing away.
This was valuable time, and I used it to survey my surroundings. What had been an increasingly insistent headache now made concentration difficult, and as I looked at the three photos above the desk officer's headâwhich would usually have been of the Emir of Bahrain and two princesâstaring back at me were the faces of Saddam Hussein, Gamel Abdel Nasser and the Ayatollah Khomeini. I have never been able to make sense of this and seldom think about it, but daresay a psychologist would conclude that to focus on the fiercer face of nationalism in the Middle East was an understandable illusion, flowing directly from recent harsh realities. My perceptions were like a door blown open, unhinged but not yet entirely detached.
Of course I didn't think at the time
I am hallucinating
. The appearance of dreamlike reality, albeit of the nightmarish kind, only confirmed the idea that this was exactly the sort of sliver of consciousness you might retain if your brain had been blown apart. Cut loose from my mental moorings, I became obsessed with the idea that this was Hell and that, to get out of it, I had to fight back against those from the Dark Side holding me captive. So, acting on the principle that action begets reaction, I lunged at the nearest officer with my fistsâclearly the act of a crazy man, since he was armed with a truncheon.
He raised it above his head, and his fellow officers shouted sharply at him, but something told me he wouldn't bring it down. I growled at him, like a wild dog, trying to provoke him, just so that we could reach the next stage of the ordeal. That came quickly, in the form of officers' hands gripping my arms, the cold clasp of handcuffs being fitted over my wrists, and a small posse of police herding me into a corridor that ran off at a right angle from the front desk. With an almighty shove in the back, they pushed me onto the concrete floor of a cell and locked me in.
The cell was surprisingly large for just one person, although maybe it had been built to hold several. A strange inhuman caterwauling in the corridor, which broke out intermittently most of the night, had me wondering whether other inmates had been turfed out because a Western prisoner here would be so exceptional that any harm befalling him would incur consequences for the guards. The cell must have been occupied not long before because the only item in it was a urine-soaked mattress. Its walls enclosed ten metres by four, with standard-issue iron bars high up admitting shafts of harsh electric light.
Avoiding the mattress at first, I sat hunched over, back to a side wall, holding my head in my hands. The front of my brain felt as though lasers were boring into it, zapping the cells and melting them down. The mugginess of the nightâof course there was no airconditioningâand the absence of any water aggravated everything. Misery and suffering are beyond words: anyway, in my psychotic state, it appeared quite conceivable I was dying but more likely that I had already done so. Visions of my parents calling out to me, unaware that I could see but not communicate with them, made this irrational thought highly believable. A flood of self-pity rolled over me, extracting a few salty tears that blended with the perspiration streaming down my cheeks.
The only measure of time now was the watch: not my discarded wrist ornament but the warder pacing past the cell at what I judged to be quarter-hour intervals. In the deepest part of the night, a scream from one of the other cells further along the dim corridor rent the stillness. A policeman's lot need not be an unhappy one; a torturer's work is never done. All at once, I felt that being in solitary meant someone was looking after me.
Sometime just before dawn, the sense of my own miserable state reduced me to lying down on the piss-soaked mattress. My nervous exhaustion induced a state of slumber (I hesitate to call it sleep) that was somehow hyper-aware of my physical surroundings; and the fire in my brain crackled on.
With morning came a change of shift. Gabbled Arabic, excited talk between arriving and departing cops. The officers' talk woke me up.
A Westerner must have novelty value here
, I told myself. Two of the policemen came to the iron door. One joggled a key in the lock while the other kept his eyes fixed on me. I remember thinking,
Don't worry, I'm not going to make a false move. I made all those last night
.
They motioned me further along the corridor, away from âpublic' view, towards the cell where I'd heard screaming in the small hours. One of the jailers pointed to an overhead shower rose, and blinked an order, as if to say, âYou know how to use it. Do it.'
Privacy wasn't an issue, and in my weakened state shame wasn't either. I undressed, piled my clothes out of spray's way, and turned on the tap. The rusty waterworks shuddered and snorted, a sand-coloured squirt of liquid shot me in the head, and I applied the wafer of soap I'd been given to the steadier flow that followed. It was cold, but coming after my night in the furnace that was a relief.
Upon dressing I was led back down the corridor, past âmy cell', to the duty desk where an officer I didn't recogniseâbut at least one who spoke English, unlike his colleagues of the nightâbarked instructions at his juniors before training his gaze on me and saying in the neutral manner of a cyborg, âWe will take you soon.'
I still had no handle on reality. Had the Iraqis arrived during the night? Was this new officer one of the occupiers? Where were they going to take me? Questions dripped like beads of sweat through what was left of my mind. The future would reveal itself in due course, I could make no sense of the present, and instinct was the only survival tool left to me. It told me that to ask where I was going would be construed as a sign of weakness.
The future is coming
, I told myself.
Patience
.
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