The Lost Landscape (25 page)

How long I remained at the front door of the residence, I don't remember. I had hoped that fresh air would somehow revive me but it seemed to have had no effect at all except to make me colder, and tremble more violently.

After a while, I decided to return to my room, and not to knock on the door of the residence advisor whose quarters were close by. Sensibly I worried that the woman would immediately summon an ambulance to take me to the ER at the university hospital; such a plunge into the unknown terrified me as a prospect, and, practical like all of my family, I worried that I would be billed for such treatment, and I could not afford it.

Returning upstairs to my room was more arduous than descending, for I had virtually no breath; the slightest movement made me gasp for air; there was no elevator in the residence, or at least none that I can recall. Walking with severe tachycardia you feel as if you are walking on the thinnest of ice; at any moment it will break, and you will plunge through. (Did no one notice me? It was after midnight, and so the corridors must have been deserted. It is strange that I so dreaded being found out, and made to explain why my chest was visibly vibrating and my face was deathly pale; why I could have
barely drawn breath to speak.) What would have required five minutes ordinarily required forty minutes now.

At Syracuse I'd had a similar but much less severe attack of tachycardia while playing basketball, in the fall of my freshman year; I'd been knocked down, violently, by a large, aggressive girl who'd sent me sprawling onto the hardwood floor and immediately my heartbeat had gone wild, and had not ceased its hammering for a half hour or more. (This was the first time I'd had such an attack, and it had greatly frightened me.) The gym instructor herself had nearly fainted with shock, at my condition; she'd helped me walk off the court, to a place where I could lie down; eventually, she'd taken me to the university infirmary where I was made to lie down also, and spent the remainder of the attack reading Wordsworth's
The Prelude
in my
Great British Writers
anthology.

It seems curious to me now, that no one called an ambulance. In our present hyper-anxious time, no university would wish to make itself vulnerable to a wrongful death lawsuit.

The medical term for my condition at the time was
paroxysmal atrial tachycardia
. It is believed to be triggered by stress and caffeine though in my case it seemed purely idiopathic, arising out of nowhere, provoked by nothing, a state of accelerated heartbeat that is associated with persons who have “heart murmurs.” (I must have had a “heart murmur” since birth, undetected by any Lockport doctor.) Tachycardia can be eased by a powerful intravenous medication, and the most severe attacks require emergency medical treatment, but attacks frequently cease as abruptly and mysteriously as they begin, within an hour or, if you are very lucky, within a few minutes.

This attack, which was only the third or fourth such attack in my life, kept me incapacitated for more than an hour. And when it suddenly ceased, and I could breathe again, I nearly wept with relief and happiness; my mouth was so dry that it hurt, and my feet and
hands were icy-cold, but I was happy suddenly, for I'd been spared; my way of celebrating was to continue with
Euphues
as if nothing had happened.

Telling myself—
See? You did the right thing. No one knows!

(
EVENTUALLY, MY FIANCÉ WOULD
learn of my medical condition. That is, I would tell him. For I could not not tell him, if we were to be married.)

(We are all in dread that we will be loved less if we are revealed to be flawed—surely sometimes that dread is not misplaced.)

INSOMNIA ALLOWS YOU TO
see clearly—like seeing things when you aren't present, or after you have died.

In this way, in my journal I tried to comfort myself.

More frequent than tachycardia, insomniac nights. Since the age of thirteen I'd had difficulty sleeping; my brain raced with a kind of exhilaration that was purely mental, and seemed impersonal. (Most of my dreams seem “impersonal”—that is, the dreamer is not me, nor anyone I know; it's as if I find myself in another's mind, or imagination, and not my own. Settings are rarely familiar, other figures are rarely anyone I know.) In Madison, in steam-heated Barnard Hall, my insomnia worsened, unsurprisingly.

There was too much to think about, that was the simple explanation. As if odd-sized objects were being crammed into an ordinary-sized head, distending the skull. What might have been—what should have been—the pleasurable excitement of reading major works of English and American literature under the guidance of distinguished professors was spoiled by so much that was certainly not “major” and by what seemed an insane excess of historical back
ground with emphasis upon “sources.” A play, for instance, was not likely to be considered as a distinctive work of literary art, but rather as a sort of hodgepodge of influences dating back to Roman theater; a Shakespearean tragedy was an occasion for lengthy footnotes and a barrage of “sources.” That literature might be disturbing, mysterious, provocative, joyous, psychologically astute or in some way relevant to the reader was not an issue—as if no one had thought of it.

The major literary work was a sort of beached whale lying moribund or indeed dead on the sand, providing sustenance for myriad scavengers (“scholars”); it seemed to have no significance otherwise, certainly no relationship to anything approaching “entertainment.”

(Though probably I am being unfair, and my professors at Madison did truly love their fields of study. As young people they'd surely read these major works of English literature with enjoyment and interest; with the passage of time, their relationship to them had become professional, with all that “professional” means.)

Insomniacs divide (unequally) into two types: night-insomniacs and morning-insomniacs. Night-insomnia can be defined as simply an extension of day-consciousness: the insomniac can't switch off her brain but remains awake until, if she is lucky, she falls asleep sometime in the night—usually by 4:00
A.M
., in my case. If you are young and in reasonably good health you might not feel the effect the next morning as adrenaline kicks in and you are borne along as by a swift-running stream.
Morning! Sunshine! A new day!
The morning-insomniac, however, is one who falls asleep normally, perhaps out of exhaustion, but wakes suddenly and irrevocably soon after falling asleep—within two or three hours, miserably. At once, thoughts come stampeding through the brain like maddened horses . . .

There is the terror of lying awake until dawn, in either case. The terror of dawn itself.

I wondered if the rushing thoughts, the hypnagogic images of
strangers' faces, were related to the fact that for the first time in my life I was not able to
write
—only just critical and scholarly papers, which don't seem to require the same sort of imagination.
Another world to live in is what we mean by religion
—so George Santayana remarked; but
another world
might also mean the particular solace of art, for the artist;
another world
is the place to which the writer takes herself, a thrilling journey into the unknown.

(When I have completed a novel, which requires enormous concentration and a focusing upon this
other world
, in the aftermath of completion I am flooded with new ideas, or rather these rushing, oneiric visions that exert a powerful spell, and make sleep all but impossible.)

In Madison, I wondered if I was losing my mind—whatever that means, to “lose” a mind.

Or was my distress just sleep deprivation, I didn't know.

Usually I gave up trying to sleep when stricken with morning-insomnia. Two or three hours of sleep is not so bad, for any dreams are better than no dreams.

Early-morning hours when the sky is still dark. From a window, streetlights on University Avenue. Few vehicles, and the red taillights receding—a vision that continues to haunt me, still.

And so I would walk in Barnard Hall, by night. Prowling the semi-darkened corridors as if (if someone were to see me) I was simply on my way to a communal bathroom.

Sometimes, silently, I ran. I loved to run, I have always loved to run, for only when I'm running does my body's metabolism feel normal. What is painful to me, deeply boring, is walking slowly—
sauntering
is the least attractive word in the English language.

My hope was to make myself physically exhausted so that I could return to my room and sleep, if only for an hour or two. The sweetness of oblivion! Insomniacs overvalue what eludes them, elevating
sleep to a near-mystical experience. As a lanky, skittish teenager I'd been subtly reprimanded by our family doctor who'd called me “high-strung” when he'd tried with some difficulty to examine me; the implication being that someday when I was more mature I would become “normal.” And so I had not told my future husband how often I suffered from insomnia, preferring to think that, once I was married, my insomnia might fade.

And so too, I did not want to present myself in any way as “weak”—even to one who loved me. As a young woman in an overwhelmingly masculine, patriarchal, and hierarchical world, studying in a field in which there were virtually no women professors, I understood that to require sympathy, protectiveness, pity might be a solace in the short run but in the long run, it would be a mistake for if I were to succeed in my profession, I would have to be perceived as an honorary male. There was no place in the academic world for the
female.

(This was an instinct shared by other women graduate students of my acquaintance. We were not living in convents exactly, but the qualities of personality cultivated by the convent were desirable—docility, obedience, self-effacement, acquiescence to authority. For years I would publish critical/scholarly articles in academic journals under the gender-neutral names “J. C. Oates” and, my married name, “J. Oates-Smith.”)

Sometimes wandering in Barnard Hall at night I would see a band of light beneath a door. Could this be a sister insomniac, or just a young woman working late? If I longed to knock gently at the door, and meet a sister-insomniac, or an individual as intensely engaged in her work as I was, of course I never dared. Nor did I seek out the room's occupant in the daytime.

By day the obsessions of the insomniac fade like screen images when the lights come on.

But in the night, you can hear, you can feel the very wings of madness beating near . . .

Downstairs in the twilit foyer with its sharp ammoniac smells of newly scrubbed floors and scoured ashtrays—(yes, this was an era in which even sensible, bright young women academics smoked, and sometimes chain-smoked)—I once found on a nubby old sofa the paperback
Notes of a Native Son
by James Baldwin. This was not a book I might have read ordinarily, concentrating as I was on early centuries of English literature; how it came to be in this place, at this time, would be a mystery to me. In heightened states of consciousness we become superstitious, and seek out “signs”: I spent the remainder of the night avidly reading not about ecclesiastical controversies of England in the mid-1500s but a contemporary black American's eloquent and deeply disturbing memoir, the first of this great writer's work I would read, with the insomniac's rapt concentration and sense of fatedness.

(Baldwin was speaking of his estranged, emotionally unstable father who had been a Christian minister; he was mourning the man's death, and trying to comprehend his tragic life.) Though I was a young and inexperienced “white” woman whose skin had granted her privileges through her lifetime of which, like most “whites,” I'd been unaware, I was thrilled by the beauty, calm, and certitude of these words, and by their prophetic truth as it might apply to me.
The meaning which life would give them for me
. I was filled with a sense of mission that had no immediate object, like one on the verge of mania.
I believed that my hateful insomnia had granted me this revelation for a reason and I would not have traded a full night of sleep for this revelation.

Next day I returned
Notes of a Native Son
to the lounge where I'd found it. For a while I lingered in the vicinity hoping that I would see who came to pick it up—but no one came while I was there, and when I returned later in the day the book had vanished.

SOMETIMES, I WENT OUTSIDE
. My most thrilling bouts of insomnia were outside. If it wasn't bitterly cold, or freezing-rain, or snowing, or so windy it took my breath away. Most nights I would have an evening meal with my fiancé and he would walk me back to Barnard Hall at about 10:00
P.M
. I would lie on my bed and work until midnight and then I would try to sleep and by 4:00
A.M
. often I'd given up on sleep in dismay or disgust and decide to get up, to dress, and begin the day early as I'd begun many days in my life in Millersport, in darkness. If you live on a farm the darkness before dawn is a familiar darkness and seems to bleed into the darkness after sunset as if daylight itself were but an idle interruption. Rising early in the dark, in fiercely awful weather, was routine in Millersport. Before I'd been transferred to city schools, and was picked up a short distance from our house by a school bus, I would walk on foot to the one-room schoolhouse across the creek, and did not think this was a terrible hardship since everyone walked to school in any sort of weather. Twenty years before, my mother had walked to the school and would not have thought of complaining.