by TJ Price
Thursday afternoon—though it was early evening, already a septembric dusk—I found myself in a used bookstore somewhere distant from my normal routine and habit. The occasion was a doctor’s appointment, and the office was about an hour’s drive away—a specialist, who I prefer to see in person. Thankfully, the temperature had cooled from the suffocating heat of the prior week, and venturing out of doors was not as Herculean as it had been. In fact, I was actually looking forward to my little sojourn; felt it would be a welcome shake-up. My routine of late had grown stale, felt like it was collecting around me in great sheaves of cast-off dead matter. Skin cells. Dust. This, mostly due to the quasi-hermetic sealing of the apartment so that the air conditioning can keep it livable. The windows are firmly shut, locks turned, the plastic and glass probably bulging in its frames. All that is within cycles endlessly, dragged up and around, scudding across the ceiling, and then is released, hovering for a time in mid-air before then descending anew. But one morning you wake up, and the angle of the sun outside the window is slightly different—noticeably so, as if there has been a sudden, violent change overnight, and now it sags slightly in the sky where it rises. It is enough to now snag on some of the glass objects on my windowsill, and flare a little brighter through their lenses a little earlier in the morning. I worry about the intense, pure spot of light that is projected onto the wall opposite, and for a moment I convince myself I see a little curl of smoke rising from its center. There’s something different about the quality of the light, too, and then of course there’s that classic something in the air—the first crispness, the intimation of a shift. We are maybe the only ones who can articulate how that feels with language; animals certainly sense it, but to them it is as natural-feeling as blood or danger or sleep. But we wonder at it! We attempt to cloak the feeling in words, to enrobe it with our perception. What it means. A confusion of competing instincts: cold on the rise. Winter soon. The urge to gather, harvest, bring inside. It will begin, sure, as excitement, anticipation. The first crystalline curls of frosted breath, the first delicate dance of flakes in the air. But there is something else there, too. A quickening amongst all the gladdening, the minute stumble in the waltz of the heart. A bit of hurry enters the world. Alarm and alert. Of course, there’s also commodified solace in the presence of pumpkin spice and apple pie and warm and goo; there’s the holidays to consider, the shopping and the shipping and the travel and the headaches of End-of-Year hassle, all to throttle down toward New Year’s Day and another resolution, maybe, if we’re lucky, a revelation. There’s alarm there too: what have I done with this year? What has it done with me? And that’s really the question: how has this year manhandled us, tossed us around like rag-dolls, all (of course) against our protestations. Won’t be sad to see the back of this one, we’ll say ruefully. Something I think I hear a lot more frequently these days. Maybe something to do with getting older. Maybe something to do with the way the world is trending. We survived, goes another cynical New Year’s refrain, and the hands on the Doomsday Clock tick another hemi-demi-semi-second—or whatever quixotic increment they’ve decided to use now—to stave off the inevitable titular catastrophe.
I was impressed with the variety and scope of the used paperbacks on offer in this bookstore, and the quiet that plushed the walls. A bookstore—especially a used one—is a special kind of paradise for me. It is a motel of pages, a salle d’attente of images and ideas like the place the Jewish mystics call the Guf: a treasury of new souls. Being so far away from everything, so chucked from my day-to-day track, I felt unmoored in that room for a moment, quite alone—and happy to be in the company of such open solitude, frankly. Crouching in front of a shelf brimming over with books, I went to stand up and became suddenly quite dizzy. Darkness—is it ever-present, gathering greedily at the perimeter of the visible?—rushed in as if suddenly freed, crowding out my sight, and I stumbled, momentarily off-balance. When I righted myself, I looked around sheepishly, already pre-performing my embarrassment, despite knowing there was nobody else in the room. Jewish eschatology has it that the world will come to its end when there’s only one last soul left in the Guf—casting its glance around the big empty bowl before taking its prophetic plunge. (Incidentally, this is also the narrative used in the late 1980s flick The Seventh Sign, starring Demi Moore, which I used to get confused with Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, a very different movie—yet still about souls, and what happens before death/after life.) The souls that populate the Guf are said to be products of the Tree of Life, which of course, makes me think of leaves, and paper, and books, and I imagined then that every page in the room was riffling in its spines with some kind of divine wind, and the feeling of intense loneliness passed.
(I often joke with my husband that by building up this massive library (my god we have so many books) I am actually carefully curating the materials for my eventual chrysalis, from which I will emerge one day completely transfigured. Despite the gruesome image and impossibility of the act (I could never), the metaphor feels appropriate. Maybe it’s more than each book is a little sapling, from which may grow a new tree of souls, from whose branches the Guf can once again be filled.)
I left the bookstore lighter—if not in spirit, than in wallet—and the sun was already crouched low behind the trees of the unfamiliar town. Just the day before, I’d seen an image on the Internet of the radar over the state: to initial viewing, the bright green and yellow splotches would have signified precipitation, but instead it was the equipment picking up a dense migration of birds, migrating south. This sky, though, was unmarked by feather or beak or claw—only a mess of unstructured clouds, pinking at the edges. A chatty host of cavalier college students crossed the street against the light, then whooped and hollered at the car that zoomed by, honking its horn in frustration at their insouciance. Later, other horns, as I drove home on the highway. I hate highway driving, so closed-off from every other face or indication of emotion—humans rendered into blocky metal shapes with blinking (or blaring) lights. Velocity is the only language of the highway. I spend most of my time gripping the wheel uncomfortably and trying not to grit my teeth, repetitively and obsessively checking all my zones for what might’ve transpired in the last half-second. On the highway, a half-second is all you get between yourself and certain doom. So much depends on whether or not you can rely on your reflexes, but sometimes it’s just pure dumb luck. I’m told that those in vehicular accidents who are drunk typically suffer less injury, because of how relaxed they are at the point of collision. We’ll start with something less upsetting, said the doctor—the specialist. Like a three out of ten. Something that gets under your skin, but isn’t destabilizing, like road rage.
I laughed. I’ve had my share of road rage experiences; when I was growing up, my mother was a school bus driver. Even in our own car, I’d grown up hearing epithet after epithet flung at reckless others on the road, and unfortunately it seems that brand of vehicular frustration has been seeded into my genes. Of course, my mother had the excuse of precious cargo to explain her emotions—she found it unconscionable whenever another driver acted badly around the bus, ignoring warning signs or speeding or other related infractions. When one day the brakes on her bus failed during a kindergarten run, she’d radioed into dispatch for assistance. Behind her, the peeling leather seats were filled with the little souls she’d been charged with ferrying between their homes and their school. It was the middle of the day, she was going downhill with a boggy brake pedal, and there was no response from dispatch. She slewed the bus to a gentle halt, heart thudding, the kids behind her completely unaware, still shouting and climbing all over one another. Eventually, someone at the bus depot responded, and they sent out another bus—but what a calamity not to respond immediately in a time of danger! A night or so later—at a public referendum to discuss how the new bus company was performing—she stood up and made her complaint to the shocked members of the town government. The next morning—a note from the bus company: she had been terminated, effective immediately. In the long run, this was probably better for her. Working there had been toxic for a long time, and she’d been deeply unhappy, which had leached into our family life like ultraviolet radiation. In the doctor’s office, I smiled and nodded that yes, road rage was as good a place to start as any. She asked me if I knew anything about her specialty, and I replied that I’d done some reading before coming—had briefly familiarized myself with Dr. Shapiro’s book, knew how the treatment had originated and via what means. I understood that, during times of trauma, the brain “freezes,” like a computer caught in a kernel panic, and “misfiles” memories inappropriately. Memory is made up of four components, or “channels,” my reading had explained: picture, cognition, affect, and physical sensation, and the pathology for trauma involved the brain’s “completion tendency,” a psychodynamic information processing model where the incident is continually reworked until it is reconciled with internal schemata. The doctor was taken aback, but smiled, and admitted that she’d never had a patient before who had read Dr. Shapiro’s book prior to engaging with the modality. I confessed in turn that, while I’d read some of it, I had deliberately skipped over descriptions of the actual process out of a fear that I’d be somehow less susceptible to its application. All I knew was that it involved some kind of bilateral somatic stimulation, in an effort to “distract” the brain while the memory was activated and while the trauma was “reprocessed.” There is a difference between recalling and reliving a memory. Recalling allows perspective to stay grounded, aware that the memory is in the past, not occurring in the moment—autonomic reactivity, like a tendency to tachycardia or hyperventilation, is less likely. Reliving a memory, however, causes the opposite to occur—the person suffering from trauma immerses themselves as if there, in that moment—an kind of involuntary somatic time-travel. In phenomenology, the term for the distinctly human capacity to access memory is autonoesis: a projection allowing conscious experience of the past while remaining grounded in the present. But when trauma occurs, autonoesis is disrupted. “Indeed, many traumatized individuals frequently experience intense emotional states to the point that they no longer have the experience of having an emotion but rather feel like they are the emotion,” explains Dr. Ruth A. Lanius in a commentary on trauma-related dissociation and altered states of consciousness. In times of trauma, memory is stored in what is called a “restricted associative network,” which “loops off” and isolates the event and all information associated with it. If any thoughts come up that are related to this loop, the brain immediately accesses the restricted network and becomes lost in its endless cycling—commonly called “triggering,” though for me, this term has lost some of its salience in recent years, due to both overuse and misapplication. The past becomes the present, and the involuntary “time-travel” sends the body reeling. How can one exist in two times simultaneously? This is paradox, and as we all know from science fiction, paradox is the tug that unravels the skein of reality.
Arriving home that night, after the doctor’s and the drive home, I sit in the truck in the parking lot, letting the engine rumble down to a sullen, ticking quiescence. Above already the moon, slowly fatting with wax, yellowish through the windshield. Sometimes I joke about how I wake up every day someone else, that I feel this weird sense of pressure when the day is winding down, if I sleep too early, how I won’t have to time to make manifest whoever I was that day. Each day like a mayfly, most unremembered. Some days, wasps. My skin prickles when I step out of the cab—a light, desultory breeze has sidled up alongside me in frottage. It has about it the whisk of a stiff corn broom, a bearded stubble. It carries with it the memory of a future about to repeat itself: the cold, the chill, maybe even the snow. I desire it with an intensity that makes my cheeks flush, but it’s gone as quickly. Still, I feel something rising. I look up at the trees, whose leaves are also lifted, improbably buoyant, defying gravity with an astonishing display of will.
When I step into the apartment, the first thing I see is the shelves, crammed with books crammed with leaves of a different sort, and my husband in the kitchen, cooking. The room is dim but for where the wash of light falls over his head. His headphones block out my entrance and he does not notice I have come in, so I stand at the door and I watch for a second. I think about how much I want to rewrite that sentence, replace the words ‘the apartment’ with ‘our home.’ There on the threshold, as I do now at my desk, I think about how badly I want the future to step in, to take over the present, to replace a past that seems to keep repeating, over and over.
My eye tracks from space to space: from wall to wall to wall to door.
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