I was attending the University of Texas. In the last week of August I had just rented a new studio apartment and moved back to Austin from San Antonio for the semester when I had an experience I now understand to have been what is known as a "missing time" experience, lasting at least twenty-four hours.
I had moved into the apartment the day before and was sitting on the couch about noon eating a TV dinner when I was confused to discover that the dinner seemed to have hopped from my lap onto the coffee table and gone cold. Now I wonder if there might not have been a period of missing time at that point. I remember getting up to rehear the food and noticing that it was already two P.m. I decided that I had fallen asleep while eating. I put the TV dinner in the oven and turned on the timer to heat it for fifteen minutes. Then I turned back to the oven to check the temperature setting. I was suddenly woozy, my mouth dry, and the sun was going down outside! The dinner was cold again, and I had — and have — no memory of how the intervening hours had passed I got scared, deciding that I had been the victim of blackouts, and tried to make a phone call for help. It was midnight by the oven clock when I put my hand on the phone. There was no discontinuous memory at all, no sense of being unconscious. One moment the timer showed a little after six and the sky outside the kitchen window was glowing, then I moved toward the phone and the timer showed midnight and the sky was black. It was exactly as if six hours had somehow passed in less than a second. I then began trying to make my way out of the dark apartment. I was terrified. I shook with fear, and I was so thirsty I could barely stand it. The next thing I knew, I was in front of the sink.
The water was running and running into a full glass. My watch said four-fifteen. I rushed out the door of the apartment, and found myself in the cool of a Texas predawn. At this point I remembered something of awesome beauty taking place in the sky, which I later told friends must have been a display of the Perseid meteor shower, which was not active then but had been early in August. I drove to an all-night restaurant called the Nighthawk on Guadalupe Street and had a huge breakfast of toast, eggs, bacon, cereal, coffee, and at least six glasses of orange juice. When I described this singular twenty-four hours to Jim Kunetka, who is good at coining words, he invented a name for my state. He called it a "larconic trance." For years we have laughed about the larconic trance, but I am not laughing anymore. There is no evidence that I suffer from any malfunction of the brain. And I was as sane then as I am now.
Some weeks later there was a frightening sequel. I was lying in bed at my grandmother's house to San Antonio, reading Time magazine. It was late at night and I was about to go to seep. In those days I used to stay with my grandmother when I went to San Antonio because my brother, then a teenager, had effectively taken over my old room at home.
Lying in that bed wide awake I had an experience so strange and frightening that I remember it to this day with total clarity. I was suddenly transported back in time and back to Austin a few weeks earlier. I leaped into my car and backed out of the apartment house parking lot. It was night and the windows of the car were closed. I couldn't see out at all. In fact, I could see nothing but the reflection of the inside of the car. I was so blind that I was forced to stop. Something approached the tar. I was frightened to see, peering in the window with its face pressed almost to the glass, what seemed almost to be a demon with a narrow face and dark, slanted eyes. It spoke to me its a high, squeaky voice, and I remember saying that we couldn't leave the car out in the middle of the street.
Then I found myself in an agonizing struggle. I was at once in the car, fighting to keep driving away but unable to overcome an urge to get out and go back into the apartment, while simultaneously fighting, in the real world, an overwhelming urge to -get out of bed and rush outside. I lay on the bed, flopping like a fish. Then it ended. Contrary to my impression, I did not move an inch. The magazine was still propped up in my lap. I could see my grandmother in her bed in the room across the hall, reading quietly. This terrible nightmare had obviously caused not a stir.
Long into the night I lay with the light on. Toward dawn I slept. I believe now that this was a nightmare memory of an attempt I made to escape whatever unearthly thing happened to use in my apartment in Austin. I was reliving an experience which at the time it happened was so unspeakably terrifying that I still don't recall the actual event, only the dream.
There then began a pattern of running that has persisted in my life until the present. A few weeks later I suddenly became obsessed with the notion of getting away from the University of Texas, out of the United States, of going wherever I could, as far away as possible. I fantasized about living in a nice little apartment in some enormous city. I wanted bustle and bright lights, not the sparse Texas landscape and the starry nights.
I didn't have much money, so I contrived various means of getting enough to leave. I obtained a loan from the Minnie Stevens Piper Foundation in San Antonio to study film at the London School of Film Technique. I earned some money translating Seneca's Thyestes into English and converting the translation into a film script for the U.T. Department of Radio, Television and Film. I worked as a camera operator. By January 1968 I had saved enough money and I left for London. I have never in my life been so glad to see the back of a place as I was to see the back of Texas. For years I have explained my sudden departure by saying that I couldn't stand the place after the Charles Whitman sniper incident. The truth was, I could have remained after that incident. It was my secret terror that drove me away.
My first few months in London were bliss. I felt as if a burden had been lifted. The school was fun. I spent a great deal of time in film-history classes watching old movies. My nights were occupied at the National Film Theatre watching more old movies. I met interesting friends. Then, in July, there was another incident. I cannot recall what happened with any clarity. It was simply too confusing, too jumbled. I was at a friend's flat in the King's Road, Chelsea. For years I have described it as a "raid" from which I escaped by "crossing the roofs." What I actually remember is a period of complete perceptual chaos, followed by the confusing sensation of looking down into the chimney pots of the buildings. Then there was blackness. I woke up the next morning in my own place with no idea of how I got there.
Whatever may or may not have happened in the flat was never acknowledged or referred to again by anybody who was there, with one exception, which I will recount in a moment.
The next day I decided to leave London for the Continent. I couldn't stand England for another week, not another hour. One of the people who had been present in the flat warned me against going, saying that I would "never come back." I scoffed. It was to be a two-week vacation. He said that he would get a witch to cast a spell to bring me back. I thought, What superstitious nonsense. Recently I looked him up and asked him about this incident. He couldn't think why he had acted as he did, although he remembered a feeling of dread being associated with my journey.
I took the train to Italy, second class. On the train I met a young woman and we began to travel together. At this point my memories become extremely odd. If I do not think about them they seem fine, but when I try to put them together they don't make sense. I recall that we went to Rome, but that we spent a few days in Florence on the way. For eighteen years I told the story that I stayed in Florence for six weeks. But when I went there in the summer of 1984 to promote Mondadori's Malian edition of Warday, I realized that I had almost no memories of the place. Even so, I placidly accepted this anomaly. For some reason, I left the young woman in Rome and dashed off on the train with no ticket, traveling almost at random.