David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

He could not understand why he was so afraid of people possibly seeing him sweat or thinking it was weird or gross. Who cared what people thought? He said this over and over to himself; he knew it was true. He also repeated — often in a stall in one of the boys’ restrooms at school between periods after a medium or severe attack, sitting on the toilet with his pants up and trying to use the stall’s toilet paper to dry himself without the toilet paper disintegrating into little greebles and blobs all over his forehead, squeezing thick pads of toilet paper onto the front of his hair to help dry it — Franklin Roosevelt’s speech from US History II in sophomore year: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. He would mentally repeat this to himself over and over. Franklin Roosevelt was right, but it didn’t help — knowing it was the fear that was the problem was just a fact; it didn’t make the fear go away. In fact, he started to think that thinking of the speech’s line so much just made him all the more afraid of the fear itself. That what he really had to fear was fear of the fear, like an endless funhouse hall of mirrors of fear, all of which were ridiculous and weird. He started to sometimes catch himself talking to himself about the sweating thing and fear in a kind of very fast faint whisper that he’d been doing without being aware of it, and now he began to really consider that he might be going crazy. Most of the craziness he’d seen on TV involved people laughing maniacally, which now seemed totally bizarre to him, like a joke that wasn’t only not funny but made no sense at all. Imagining laughing about the attacks or the fear was like imagining trying to come up to somebody and start trying to explain what was going on, like his Scoutmaster or the guidance counselor — it was unimaginable; there was no way.

High school became a daily torment, even as his grades improved even more, due to the increased reading and studying he did because it was only when he was in private and totally absorbed and concentrating on something else that he was OK. He also got into word search and number puzzles, which he found absorbing. In class or the lunchroom, it was a constant preoccupation to not think about it and not let the fear reach the point where his temperature went up and his attention telescoped to where all he could feel was the uncontrolled heat and sweat starting to pop out on his face and back, which, the minute he felt the sweat popping out and beading, his fear went through the roof and all he could think of was how he could get out of there to the restroom without drawing attention. It only happened sometimes, but he dreaded it all the time, even though he knew all too well that the constant dread and preoccupation were what primed him to have these attacks. He thought of them as attacks, though not from anything outside him but rather from some inner part of himself that was hurting or almost betraying him, as in heart attack. Similarly, primed became his inner code word for the state of hair-trigger fear and dread that could cause him to have an attack at almost any time in public.

His main way of dealing with being constantly primed and preoccupied with the fear of it all the time at school was that he developed various tricks and tactics for what to do if an attack of public sweating started and threatened to go totally out of control. Knowing where all the exits were to any room he entered wasn’t a trick, it became just something he now automatically did, like knowing just how far the nearest exit was and if it could be got to without drawing much attention. The school’s lunchroom was an example of someplace that was easy to get out of with no one really noticing, for instance. Leaving the classroom during an attack in a class was out of the question, however. If he just got up and ran out of the room, as he always yearned to do during an attack, there would be all kinds of disciplinary problems, and everyone would want an explanation, including his parents — plus when he came back to that class the next day, everyone would know he’d run out and would want to know what had made him freak out, and the net result would be a lot of attention on him in the class, and the fear that everyone would be noticing him and looking at him, which would prime him all over again. Or if he ever actually raised his hand and asked the teacher for a restroom pass, it would draw all the bored students in the rows’ attention to who’d spoken up, and their heads would all turn to look and there he would be, sweating and dripping and looking bizarre. His only hope then would be that he’d look sick, people would think he was sick or about to maybe throw up. This was one of the tricks — to cough or sniff and feel uncomfortably at his glands if he feared an attack, so if it got out of control he could hope people would maybe just think he was sick and shouldn’t have come to school that day. That he wasn’t weird, he was just sick. It was the same with pretending he didn’t feel well enough to eat his lunch at lunch period — sometimes he wouldn’t eat and would bus the full tray and then leave and go eat a sandwich he brought from home in a baggie in a restroom stall. That way, people might be more apt to think he was sick.

Other tactics included sitting in a row as far back in the classroom as he could, so most people would be in front of him and he didn’t have to worry about them seeing him if he had an attack, which only worked in classes without a seating chart, 4and could also backfire in the nightmare scenario he tried so hard not to think about. And also avoiding the hot radiators, naturally, and desks between girls, or trying to secure the desk at the very end of a row so that in case of emergency he could avert his head from the rest of the row, but in a subtle way that didn’t look weird — he’d just swing his legs out from the row into the aisle and cross his ankles and lean out that way. He stopped riding his bike to the high school because the exercise of riding could warm him up and prime him with anxiety before first period had even started. Another trick, by the start of third quarter, was walking to school without a winter coat in order to get cold and sort of freeze his nervous system, which he could only do when he was the last one to leave the house, because his mother would have a spasm if he tried to leave without a coat. There was also wearing multiple layers that he could remove if he felt it coming on in a class, although removing layers could look weird if he was also coughing and feeling his glands — in his experience, sick people didn’t normally remove layers. He was somewhat aware he was losing weight but didn’t know how much. He also began to cultivate a habitual gesture of brushing his hair back from his forehead, which he practiced in the bathroom mirror in order to make it look like just an unconscious habit but was really all designed to help brush sweat from his forehead out of sight into his hair in the event of an attack — but this too was a delicate balance, because past a certain point the gesture was no longer helpful, since if the front part of his hair got wet enough to separate into those creepy little wet spikes and strands, then the fact that he was sweating became even more obvious, if people were to look over. And the nightmare scenario that he dreaded more than anything was for him to be in the back and to start having such a shattering, uncontrollable attack that the teacher, all the way up at the front of the room, noticed he was soaked and running with visible sweat and interrupted class to ask if he was all right, causing everyone to turn way around in their chairs to look. In the nightmares there was a literal spotlight on him as they all turned in their seats to see who the teacher was so worried and/or grossed out by. 5