It is night, and I am lying in bed. Above me I notice a large drill thrust into the wall. No one is holding it; it begins to turn on its own, and as it turns, I see that long, thin cracks are forming in the wall. The cracks get larger, and then the wall begins to break open. I am overwhelmed with terror and throw myself against the wall to try to keep the fragments together, to stop the wall from collapsing. I’m screaming. I wake my mother. She remembers the night vividly and says that I must have woken my younger sister Liv, who panicked and also began to shriek. When my mother entered the room, we were both howling in fear. She said I had thrown myself against the wall and it looked as if I were trying to climb it. I don’t remember Liv or my mother, but I remember the gaping fissures in the plaster and the revolving drill as if it had happened yesterday. I thought I was awake, but it must have been a dream, one without a threshold—/ occupied the same place in the dream and in reality. The fear has never diminished in memory. I must have been about five years old.
This dream, hallucination, or night terror has haunted me as an adult because it is so simple, nearly abstract in its purity, and like no other in my experience. The bulk of my dreams as a child were long, shifting narratives with witches and ogres and people I knew that took place in streets and meadows and rooms and corridors. The crumbling wall remains an efficient metaphorical expression for both my obscure but omnipresent wound and the fear that often accompanies it. I’m afraid that thresholds and boundaries won’t hold, that things will go to pieces.
My sister Liv and I left our mother and father for the first time to visit our grandfather’s cousin in his little house in High-wood, just outside Chicago. After what was probably a week of our pining for her, our mother came to see us and then a couple of days later take us home by train. If I’m not mistaken, it was a cloudy afternoon. I remember how glad I felt as the three of us walked together through downtown Chicago and the feeling of my hand in my mother’s. On our way, we crossed a bridge and saw two policemen restraining a man who had apparently climbed over the railing. Whether my mother said that the man had been intending to jump off the bridge or I simply knew it I can’t say, but the officers and the desperate man made me feel the city’s danger, and I found that air of menace more inspiring than upsetting. Very soon after that, we turned onto a sidewalk. There was a large gray building to my left, and to my right a crowd of people had gathered around someone lying on the pavement. I know it was a woman, but I have no memory of her. I can’t see her face or body anymore. My mother, Liv, and I all looked at her, because I remember my mother’s distress at the thought that we had seen her. When we walked away, my mother explained that the woman was having “an epileptic seizure” and couldn’t help what was happening to her. We then crossed a wide street on our way to have lunch at Marshall Field’s department store. The light was green and we began to walk, but in the middle of our crossing it changed to red and the cars moved forward as if we weren’t there. This amazed me. My visual memory of that intersection, the cars, the looming building across from us, and the arching ramp above is exceedingly vivid. It may be that what I had witnessed immediately before, a chaotic body, heightened my recollection of what came afterward — the chaotic street. The honking cars that suddenly whizzed past us replaced the other, more threatening image of a woman who had lost control of herself.
In my first novel, I included an epileptic seizure witnessed from the roof of a building in New York. In the book, the woman’s convulsive movements are photographed by one of the characters, and I now wonder if I wasn’t returning to that street in Chicago and recording in fiction what I was unable to remember in fact. I am not an epileptic, but the shuddering body I saw must have echoed some tremor in myself, and it frightened me enough to swallow the picture whole and leave in its place an absence filled only by my mother’s words epileptic seizure.
Like many children, I was prone to inward reveries — long dreaming sessions in which I would lose myself and look out at the world. How strange it is, I would think, that we see and smell and speak and eat and feel, that there are trees and cars and houses, barbed wire, cornfields, and cows. These thoughts were accompanied by a lifting within me that I experienced vaguely as closeness to God and nature (the two mingled in my mind) and as a form of private magic, a secret belief in my own power that set me apart from other people and would take me very far in the world. I have often wondered where this inner conviction came from. I was in no way a prodigious child. My early memories of school are mostly sad ones. I learned to read easily but suffered terribly over numbers. Even now, I cringe when I remember the long rows of intractable digits that never came out right. The complex relations among children — the ins and outs of friendships and alliances, the hierarchies of dominance and weakness on the school ground — puzzled and often hurt me. I wasn’t athletic either, a serious deficit in most places but probably even more so in the Midwest, where physical prowess could catapult both boys and girls into a heroic position among their peers.
And yet, despite evidence to the contrary, I held fiercely to the lonely idea of my own great destiny, and I suspect that I clung to this irrational position for a single reason: my parents loved me very well. It was plain that my mother and my father thought I was wonderful. They made me feel that nothing was beyond me, and their belief in me and in my three younger sisters was unshakeable, a fortress into which we could retreat whenever we needed it. Years would pass before I understood that I came from a family that was remarkable in this respect, not ordinary. We are, all of us, made from our parents, physically and emotionally, and the quality we call “character” partakes of both genetic givens and the mysterious meanderings of a particular psychic history.
Some people are more prone than others to numinous experience — those moments or minutes of transcendence, disassociation, or euphoria. It seems clear to me now that I had a neurological as well as an emotional predisposition to these curious transports of the spirit. As a child I suffered from headaches, and at eight I remember my shock when a friend told me she had never had one. All my life, I have shivered at the mere sight of an ice cube, even on a sweltering day. Little more than a passing thought about ice produces a genuine shudder of cold in me. I once asked a neurologist about this, but he seemed not to know what I was talking about. Around the age of eleven, I suffered from commanding inner voices and rhythms that terrified me with their insistence. They always came when I was alone, and they seemed to want to impose their will on me, to press my body into their marching orders. The danger of madness seemed very real to me then, and I’m lucky they vanished. When I was twenty, I was struck with my first migraine, which lasted for eight months and then lifted. In the years that followed, it became obvious that my nervous system was unstable. I lived with auras that ranged from the very mild — a few black spots and brilliant white lights — to the more dramatic, such as a sudden seizure in my arm that hurled me against a wall. Once, I was subject to the very curious phenomenon known as “Lilliputian hallucinations,” during which I saw a small pink man and his little pink ox on the floor of my bedroom and believed they were actually there. I have also had several euphoric episodes before getting sick, and despite the inevitable aftermath, I recall these moments with pleasure: My vision takes on a sudden heightened clarity that makes me imagine I am seeing what I normally can’t, and then, just as I remark to myself on the fantastic quality of my eyesight, I feel an overwhelming joy.