Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

It’s a useful analogy, said Villier, this likening of mood to weather. But one has to recognize its limitations. It conveys the idea that at any given moment one has limited command over one’s mood, but I don’t think it captures the sense of what I’m saying here.

Villier went on to describe further the plight of soldiers, the trauma that affects their emotional well-being. He’d already talked about the old man with arthritis who trips on a broken tread and falls down the stairs. But in fact he was just getting going. He went on to talk about a farmer who fails to lock up a chicken coop at night and loses a hen to a fox: The farmer might have some responsibility, but the fox caused the loss. He talked for a while in this vein. He was possibly used to meeting resistance when he gave a diagnosis of mental illness, but with me I rather think he was pushing against an open door.

I don’t know if you were wondering, by the way, but in my view Penelope didn’t bring you here in the expectation I would talk you into breaking it off with her daughter. In fact, my impression is that she’s quite fond of you.

Emily?

Penelope.

The two are not inconsistent.

I’m sorry?

She could be fond of me and want me to break it off with her daughter. In fact, she could want me to break it off because she’s fond of me.

Let me ask you why you think she brought you here.

Don’t you mean what do I think you think is the reason she brought me here?

As good a place to start as any.

Guilt?

I think so.

So do I.

She’s awfully worried about you, that you might do yourself harm. Is that a possibility?

I don’t want to be difficult, I replied, but … but I can’t help it. I don’t want to be difficult, but since we seem to have gone down the road of exactness, I have to say that I can’t answer that question, and I say that knowing you might interpret it as a plea for help, although I don’t believe that that’s my motive. At any rate, anything that can be imagined must be possible, and most people have pretty vivid imaginations, don’t you think?

If you feel the need, or even if you don’t — for whatever reason, you can go to the Rectory clinic. I’m going to give you the address and contact information, he said.

He reached into a drawer at his desk, pulled out a piece of notepaper.

Just show up, he continued, at any time, day or night. They’ll admit you straightaway. Penelope wants this to be available to you so you needn’t be concerned with practical matters.

His eyes dropped. He was talking about money, I thought. Villier was being English. His coyness halved his age.

You’d be under my care. You can stay there as long as you need. You’ll have your own room, of course, and it’s all set in beautiful countryside. I just wanted to put all that before you. Is that all right?

Thank you, I said. I took the note, folded it, and slipped it into my pocket.

Now that we’ve dealt with that, do you mind if I ask you a few questions? I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t at least go through the motions.

Villier’s manner was sublimely English, down to the self-deprecation. I sometimes wonder if the English elites, the upper classes, actually believe themselves when they say these things, their genteel formulations, the qualifications they make at every turn. Their kind of self-belief seems essential to survive what would otherwise assail them as wave after wave of cognitive dissonance, statements of one thing while knowing the opposite, the expression of bare competence while sitting in the leather seat of his clinic on the premier private medical street in Britain, possibly in the world. Surely the dissonance would drive them mad so that the only way through it all is for them actually to believe what they say. But I might be wrong. After all, sallying forth with empire on the brain is a sublimely confident venture.

Villier asked me a variety of questions in a way that nearly concealed the workings of a checklist. I answered them as accurately as I could. But I knew the diagnosis. There are those who say that depression is a Western malady of affluence. That it may be. But when you are as deeply unhappy as I was … Let’s be precise — when your human functioning has been reduced first to wretched indifference and then to worse, when the thoughts that gather around you, that are your own, have all the tenderness of an audience to a bare-knuckle alley fight, such lofty cultural opinions offer no relief. There is a person and there is suffering.

And yet, insofar as I knew, I had not come seeking help. I had agreed to Penelope’s request because I thought it would relieve the boredom, even if temporarily. This boredom is something I’d never known and I’ve thought about it quite a lot since. My thoughts and sense experience used to hop from one thing to another, as if the world was just coming at me with meaningless stimuli, one after another. I couldn’t latch on to a thought and then be carried by it as it moved into new territory. To do that, I think you need a narrative self inside you connecting you with experience, telling you how you fit into the subjective encounter with what you’re seeing and attaching whatever significance it might hold for you. In those days, it was as if this narrative self had decided to go on vacation, leaving me without continuity of thought and feeling.

A few weeks after that visit with Villier, as I was sitting in my bedsit, I saw the dishes mounting in the sink. On the counter next to them was a knife. I glanced at the knife and the glance lengthened into a gaze. When the awareness of what I was doing took hold, I set about picking up a few things from the floor and stuffing them into a canvas bag. I’m surprised I had enough presence of mind to pack some toiletries and my toothbrush. I took a train out of town and from the station a cab to the hospital.

* * *

As I listened to Zafar talk about his time in a psychiatric institution, my thoughts did not stray, as they might have done, to what had happened outside, with Emily, but remained with him. He did not seem the least bit embarrassed to talk about it, and at the time I was rather flattered that he felt comfortable enough with me to discuss the matter. I see now, however, that it was I who was in fact uncomfortable, even embarrassed, about such a thing as going into a psychiatric hospital. This fact, here and now as I write, appalls me. I cannot imagine being so hospitalized without having such an overwhelming feeling of failure, catastrophic failure, that I could not possibly talk about it. For Zafar, there was no discomfort because I think there was no accompanying sense of failure. And herein I find myself confronted by that odd envy he has often evoked in me. The Zafar I know, from first to last, has lived life, taking its bare-knuckle blows, if not on the chin then in his long stride. Even going into a hospital, a nuthouse, a mental institution, a loony bin — in him I saw it as just a part of a life that journeyed out into all its corners. These thoughts come to me now, but when I listened to him talk, I thought of what a stage he and I had now reached that we could talk like this, the years passed, life turning up its disappointments, and how much he must feel at ease with me to open up this way.

* * *

I used to be skeptical of medication, he said, afraid I would lose myself, lose what is me. Yet what is this self that we so fear to lose? It’s never there. The instant we try to reach for it, it slips away. This self seems nearest when I force my consciousness inward, when I compel it to focus, and then it rises like an apparition. But if it is at its most material when I’m conscious, then that self can never sustain a continuous being because any stretch of consciousness, of awareness of self, is cut short by the intervention of all that needs doing in a minute, let alone a day, curtailed by the steady beat of demands that render us unconscious of self and commit our body to this or that task at hand, to prepare supper or calculate a price for an exotic derivative instrument or pay a bill or do the laundry or draft a legal memo or tend a crying infant. Can medication rob us of something whose existence is tentative at best? Is it possible that the self is not an object, not a noun, but the verb characterizing the search for the object? And even as I talk about this self, even as I try to discuss it as if it were a thing apart, as if I were discussing the sweetness of pineapples that grow in the wild, I feel it is not I who am speaking but someone else through me.