As a nightmare breaks before the falling dreamer can hit the ground, before the past could swoop down on me, completing the memory, the situation shifted again. I was once more myself, though confused and diminished far beyond rational thought by the dreadful and dream-like strangeness of these latest experiences, which my sense of reality could barely survive.
My memory of what followed has always remained unclear. I have only a vague impression of reeling away from that place and afterwards of walking endlessly through the falling snow, which obscured the atmosphere and smothered the town in unnatural silence, its huge flakes swarming around the lights, which at long intervals punctuated the empty street, stretching ahead of me to infinity.
I remember how from time to time the pale, undulating veil parted and buildings, hugely distorted, loomed up like skyscrapers and how the white carpet, always thickening under foot, hid the edges of the pavement but would not bear my weight, so that I stumbled often and almost fell. I had the idea that the paving stones grew all the time larger, so that if I could have seen them I wouldn’t have been able to stride from one to the next. I know I was dead tired and moved very slowly with the great effort of every step. And it seemed I would never arrive anywhere but must go on for ever like this, through the interminable, purgatorial, snowy streets, till at last I dropped from exhaustion. It would be very pleasant, I thought, to lie down on the untrodden white and let the snow cover me and hide my guilt out of sight; and I remember thinking how I’d pull this coverlet over my head, as I used to pull up the bedclothes when I was a child and wanted to hide from some disappointment or shame. But for some reason it wasn’t allowed now, and I had to keep moving, alone as surely I’d never been before, in the silent cold night, irremediably forsaken, all warmth, all affection, everything I had loved and trusted withdrawn from me absolutely and for all time.
What comes back to me when I think about it is a childish loneliness and forlornness, growing gradually into that feeling of being lost and internally cold that used to bewilder me during the hard winter of my mother’s indifference long ago, when I piled logs on the fires but could light no corresponding warmth in her heart or my own. It was only the cold inside me of which I was conscious; I don’t recollect feeling cold in my body, though I’d been so long in the snow without the overcoat that I had, of course, forgotten when I rushed out of the flat. I suppose I was feverish and indebted to fever for this resurgence of those old feelings of deprivation and frustrated love that I substituted for others less bearable, which should have been my concern. At all events, I was ill after this and ran a high temperature for several days.
How I eventually got home I don’t know; nor do I know how or why the caretaker’s wife came to appoint herself my nurse, for she neither asked nor volunteered anything and indeed rarely spoke to me at all. Until now I’d only been vaguely aware of this strange, silent woman, who never spoke to anyone as she went in or out of the building and always wore the same blank, discouraging face; but now I was glad she was looking after me, for she wouldn’t gossip, I knew, about anything I might let slip while the fever was at its height.
Throughout this period my guilt pursued me relentlessly, evidence of it appearing frequently in my surroundings, convincing me that I was directly responsible for my parents’ deaths. If I had really planned the double murder in cold blood I could hardly have experienced greater torments of distress and self-loathing than those I suffered in the hallucinatory fever world, where images from the past mingled confusingly in my head with more recent memories.
Wherever I looked, I saw reminders of my crime. The harmless ceiling geography of cracks and stains changed before my eyes into the disastrous mushroom shape of explosion, spouting horrid details, fragments of limbs and clothing. If my gaze fixed itself on the bedspread, the oriental design would soon become a sort of exotic jungle, out of which sneering, sub-human faces would peer, reminiscent of the sinister chessmen at school.
My only respite from guilt was when Carla seemed to be in the room, very lovely, her hair darkly framing her calm pale face; but this was almost as bad, for her serene shining gaze was always cold and indifferent. She never smiled, never spoke to me nor touched me. And though she sometimes leaned over the bed as though to kiss me, I came to dread this more than anything, because of the way her face always became distorted as it approached mine, vanishing at last with a look of disgust or a mocking smile it had never worn in real life.
Spector, too, made his appearance, a tall, shadowy, menacing figure, faceless and almost formless, towering above me in mysterious silent denunciation. And sometimes the two of them would seem to blend into each other as they had done in the porch, so that I couldn’t tell whether one or both kept watch on me from the shadows gathered thickly under the sloping ceilings.
These visitations left so strong an impression that afterwards it was hard for me to believe neither of the people concerned had really been there; which accounted, I think, for my failure — when my temperature fell and the delusions left me — to appreciate the completeness of the break between us. Without consciously thinking about it, I must have assumed that sooner or later one or other of them would reappear and reclaim me, otherwise I couldn’t have been so calm — I couldn’t have given way to the profound lethargy that for some time made me indifferent to everything. Long after I became convalescent and was, physically, on the road to recovery, my mental state remained unchanged. I couldn’t bear the prospect of taking up my life in the world again. At the same time, it was impossible for me not to realize that there was something distinctly abnormal, not to be accounted for by my short illness, about an apathy so deep and prolonged. The mere thought of resuming my former activities was abhorrent to me. And, fascinated, almost, by this heavy torpor, I began to explore it and to write down what I found, thus occupying many long, solitary hours of my convalescence.
It was obvious that, to get at the truth, I would have to delve back into my early memories, as I’ve tried to do here. At first I was troubled by Spector’s over-prominence in the picture, emerging from the start as a huge, isolated, out-of-scale figure, obscuring and falsifying the rest. But his significance always was out of proportion, and I should have been falsifying the scene had I made less of it. And I soon perceived that his influence over me had not really diminished, as, sensing its opposition to my love affair, I’d pretended it had. A secret interior conflict had, in fact, reduced me to my present state, the two conflicting loyalties, which had been tugging in opposite directions till I was practically pulled in half, having ended by immobilizing me altogether.
My investigations had led to a reassessing of intellectual values, and I saw that, though my conclusion was accurate as far as it went, it was not the whole truth. As soon as I decided I’d have to dig down still deeper to uncover the root of my listless withdrawal from life, I became aware of some interference from the past distracting and confusing my thoughts, causing me a sensation that was at the same time oppressive, expectant and empty. In these somewhat contradictory feelings, I came to recognize my childish sense of having run down like a clock that needed someone to wind it before it could go again; and saw that I was now no less helpless than in those far-off days when I waited for somebody to take me by the hand and tell me what to do. On my own initiative I could do nothing, take no responsibility, make no decisions only watch my existence unroll.