Somebody Somewhere (16 page)

Contracts poured in. The book was sold to more than ten countries. It would be in many languages including Japanese. There was talk of a future film offer. I was going to be rich. My life was going to change completely. I was miserable.

I opened the door of my apartment and stood looking at my furniture. I walked to the wardrobe and opened it up. Furniture from the Salvation Army, second-hand clothes, and cheap accommodations that flooded at least once a year were all I'd known. Old, worn-out underwear, darned nylon socks, borrowed sheets and pillowcases, had been part of my life so long they were interwoven with my personality. I was Donna, who shopped for the cheapest cuts of meat, the specials in the fruits and vegetables department, economic meals of flour and rice, half-priced day-old bread from the baker's. What on earth would I do with money?

I began to get dizzy constantly and found that my body was forgetting to breathe again. It was like I had an inner compulsion to stop existing but I had no conscious control over it. I began to lose weight. My conscious mind was trying very much to be there. My subconscious fought for supremacy and, in failing, seemed to be trying to knock me off.

All my effort went into remembering to breathe and eat. Day after day I found I couldn't get the steps together to complete a whole meal. Shaking, I would tell myself, “Food. Eat.” I'd remind myself, “Food. Fridge.”

I stood at the open door to the fridge. A mass of colors and shapes stared back at me. “Food. Eat,” I reminded myself. I took out a few things and stared at them wondering what to do.

“Food. Cook,” I prompted myself, and stood there wondering how. “Cook. Stove,” I went on, half an hour already having passed. “Cupboard. Pots,” I said, going to open the cupboard but I couldn't
because I already had things in my hands. I put the things down and took out pots and pans and stared at them. “Pots. Stove,” I said, and looked at the stove. “Turn it on,” I ordered, and on it went. The pots and pans on the hotplate, I left and stretched out exhausted on the floor and watched the ceiling. Shaking, I reminded myself, “Hungry? Food.”

An hour or so later, the pots and the pans and the food were still waiting to be dished up. I began to cry. I felt hopeless and helpless and all the university degrees in the world weren't going to save me. Every impulse was being blocked by its antithesis. A compulsive force of unrecognized self-denial made every inch of self-ownership and expression into an Olympic Marathon. Seductively oblivion tapped upon the doors of my conscious mind, luring me inward, where it was restful. I would lie down for a minute and several hours later climb back out of a spot in the wall in which I had been lost. I didn't want to take a nosedive headlong back into “my world.” I wanted to stay awake, aware, alert, and alive.

Over the next few weeks I lost almost ten pounds and I was afraid. I tried to remember to eat but had no understanding of my own sense of hunger. The stress of all of the change around me fed straight into the hands of the Big Black Nothingness. It was like an invisible big, black spider trying to reclaim me and take me “home,” where I “belonged,” where nothing changed, to an inescapable world of guarantees.

T
heo Marek suggested that I see him at his home for our straighten-Donna-out sessions.

It was one thing to enter a house of people you didn't have to speak to or communicate with at all. You could get to know them through their things and the feel of the place and leave without them ever knowing that you had gotten a better sense of them than ten years of blah-blah-blah could achieve.

I felt smug in this ability to know people without them knowing
I was knowing them (and often I too knew without knowing I was knowing). I certainly didn't feel the same way at all about going to the home of someone I was meant to communicate with, especially in any ongoing way. How on earth was I meant to be free to know them through their things and their place when they would observe this as a way of getting to know me?

It was a glorious old house. I wished straightaway that Dr. Marek didn't live there at all because it was exactly the sort of house I would want to explore.

The whole house echoed with the hollow, woody sound that comes from high ceilings and long corridors. The smell of dust and old fabric, wooden cabinets, roses, cats, and Asian cooking filled the place from wall to wall. Leadlight windows called me to touch the sunlit colors and trace the outlines. Wallpaper drew me into its endless patterns. Pictures with deep backgrounds, set in dark wooden frames called me into their depths. Beaded curtains dared me to make them tinkle and sway, to be touched by the sound:
clack, clack, clack
. Shells with mother-of-pearl begged me to pick them up and swim in the rainbows I would see in them. But Dr. Marek's kitchen was a nightmare.

The kitchen had fluorescent lights and yellow walls, one of the worst combinations ever. Even from the doorway I could see light bouncing off everything.

In my tense state everything climbed to hyper, vision included. There were no whole objects in that room, just shiny edges and things that jumped with the bouncing of light. The fluorescent light bounced off the yellow walls like sunshine on water. Dr. Marek wanted me to go in there and be blind. Forget it! Why didn't it bother him? How did these people manage to grasp everything in such a room enough to actually use it as a kitchen?

“Come into the kitchen, Donna. I want you to meet someone,” said Dr. Marek. I stood at the doorway looking at the light, my eyes jumping from half-object to half-object trying to take things in. Maybe then I could relax a bit and pay attention to this person I was supposed to meet. She was Mrs. Marek, a face upon which the light danced manically, turning her into more of a cartoon than a human
being. Welcome to Toon Town, Roger Rabbit. I'd like you to enter this torture chamber I call my kitchen and meet my wife, who is a 3-D cartoon. She just wants you to look at her in pieces, say hi whether you mean it or not, and treat her like a human being.

“Hello,” I said, having no time to get my voice into gear. The word tumbled out, the syllables melted together. How can they sit in this room? I wondered. Perhaps it was me? Perhaps their volume and brightness control didn't go up like mine did. Perhaps their maker set their switches, and that was that. Perhaps their switches didn't slip out of tune every time there was something new to take in. Awesome. Their make and model seemed more custom-made, with fewer faults than mine. I was like a European car driving on the other side of the road in a climate it wasn't built for. Another demonstration that God has a sense of humor.

Each visit to the Mareks' house was a lesson in disarmament. I needed to control the impact this had on my life beyond his house.

I walked as fast as I could through the long entrance hall of his house. The hallway was the connection between the living room, where our discussions took place, and the world outside. If I moved quickly through the hall, then I didn't get enough time to take the hall in. Perceptually the hall didn't exist. I saw its shapes and colors as it whooshed by. It could have been anything anywhere (or nothing nowhere).

If the hall didn't exist, then Dr. Marek's house was a separate world, unconnected from “the world” in terms of my perception. Anything uncovered or tackled there was safe. I could integrate it at my own pace and only if I chose to.

Dr. Marek's house
was
“a world” and a bridge between “my world” and “the world.” I tried hard to understand him and he tried hard to be clear. It was as though either my ears worked or my voice did but not at the same time. When I spoke, I heard noise but was deaf to most of the meaning I was making. I had to take it on trust that I was making meaning at all.

“Am I making sense?” I asked Dr. Marek. “What do you think?”
he replied. “I can't tell,” I answered. “I can't always hear myself with meaning.”

My brain was like a department store where the people running different departments were working alternate shifts. When one came to work, the others went to sleep—background, foreground. Lucky for me I could sleep-walk and sleep-talk.

I said a lot of yes, yes, yeses. Cups of tea arrived without any connection between their arrival and the yes that had brought them there.

“Don't just say yes when you don't know what someone has asked you, Donna,” said Dr. Marek. He had observed my standard answer to the trigger words “tea” and “drink”: “Black tea, no milk, no sugar,” came the verbal ejection in response to the prompt. I did Pavlov and his dogs proud. Skinner would have loved me.

The tea arrived again and again. I looked at it in wonder (sometimes not visually making meaning from this round white
chink-chink
thing with black
slop-slop
in it). Generally, I said nothing and let it go cold. “When someone gives you something, you should say thank you,” said Dr. Marek gently. These people were weird.

These were the harmless yeses, and even though I never liked black tea I liked the ritual and the security of inclusion that it symbolized. (To this day I drink the damned stuff and still don't like it.)

In the short term, people were more likely to go away and leave you alone if you said yes than if you said no. If you said no, they tried to reason or argue with you.

Unlike people deaf to sound, I couldn't say, “Oh sorry, didn't hear you.” I could obviously hear sound perfectly. I couldn't say, “Sorry, didn't understand,” when I was obviously clever. By the time I got around to it they were usually half a dozen sentences further on anyway. Years of people saying, “Don't listen to her, she's just waffling,” or “Listen. Are you deaf or something?” had knocked a lot of the trying out of me. For a long time I gave up waiting to understand or to be understood.

It frustrated me that the only person I had been able to hear directly with meaning had been myself. No, I am lying to myself here. This inner isolation hurt like hell. But because I had no choice, I could not acknowledge a hurt I would never be free of; I was, therefore, merely frustrated by it. I was isolated by it. My lack of hope and acceptance of it became part of my own identity.

I could only comprehend about five to ten percent of what was said to me unless I repeated the words to myself. The security of having the time and space to wrestle with the relative importance or significance of spoken words was so unreachable as to not even be worth dreaming about.

I hadn't connected my comprehension difficulties to the drowning feeling of my inner isolation, the persistent aloneness I felt in relating to others and the sense of myself as the only real person in a two dimensional world. This isolation, aloneness, and being the only real person in the world were my “forevers.” “Forevers” became assumptions, and assumptions were buried and never looked at again.

When I was about ten I had begun to hear bits and pieces directly with meaning. I stumbled upon the strategy of saying people's sentences inwardly to myself and found I could get meaning from a whole sentence that way. Over the years I developed the skill to the point that I could speak to the other person with an almost imperceptible delay. I would try to imagine what I would have meant if I had said those words from my own thoughts. I tried to make pictures of the words coming in as though they were my own, a kind of reverse thinking. My strategy brought knowledge and meaning to my life, and the world of facts opened up to me. I blossomed in the birth of having a mind to fill. I began to read with meaning. I exhausted one obsession and topic after another but eventually found the world was still empty. I could not be affected. Meaning without inner experience was as empty as inner experience without meaning. I had no concept of enjoying a conversation for company's sake, even though I'd learned to perform one. I had no concept that a sense of “self” and “other” could exist at the same time.