‘To a psychiatrist?’
‘Or a psychotherapist. Or both.’
Friends suggested I go into therapy when my marriage to Susan broke down, but I concluded I was better off running and reading to deal with the depression. I stopped running at some point between deciding to leave Oxford and reestablishing myself in New York, and reading on its own is no longer enough to deal with the anxiety. Reading, in fact, produces its own forms of anxiety. Worries and preoccupations suggested by some other person’s prose start flurrying into my brain, preventing me from sleeping through the night. I realized I had been sleepless off and on for weeks, medicating myself with scotch and Miles Davis and midnight screenings of old Coppola and Alan J. Pakula and Sydney Pollack flicks from my childhood, telling myself that The Conversation or Klute or Three Days of the Condor were really research, preparation for the class I was teaching on the Cinema of Surveillance, and trying to convince myself that no one had thought adequately about the formal techniques used in the films, techniques that might be seen as outgrowths of a changing cultural landscape in the 1970s, the decade in which film, video, and audio surveillance were becoming commonplace, form and content united, a consequence of historical forces, as much about advancements in technology as the entrenchment and expansion of the military industrial complex and its imbrication with the intelligence community. This was what I did to help myself sleep. This is why, I am beginning to think, I remain unable to sleep. My mind will not stop churning.
‘I’m not interested in talk therapy. I don’t think there are any traumas that might explain what’s been happening. I’m fairly certain I’m not delusional or suffering from blackouts. I’m anxious and a little depressed, but probably not significantly more so than most people who find themselves whiplashed by cultural dislocation. No worse, in fact, than most New Yorkers.’
‘We could always try an anti-depressant, or even a mild anti-anxiety drug. Some people need it, others find they do not. People of high intelligence, like you, Jeremy—’
‘For the sake of argument,’ I said, interrupting her, ‘if the problem were in my brain, what might it be?’
Dr. Sebastian raised her chin, holding my gaze as she moved her head, and at the same time her hands reached across to her desk for the ledger in which she had taken notes on our previous meeting. She glanced down, opened to the relevant page, and looked up again.
‘It was just an apparent memory lapse, correct?’
‘That was the first issue. Since then I’ve been receiving boxes of very intimate files. It has been suggested to me by some members of my family that I might have sent myself the files, to shore up my belief in what they judge to be a paranoid delusion.’
‘You have no memory of sending yourself the files?’
‘None whatsoever. Not even the faintest glimmer of a memory. Every box that arrives is a surprise, and a horror.’
‘And so, you want to know if you could be doing this, sending yourself these files, and yet have no memory of it each time?’
‘Essentially, yes. We’re not talking about a single event, but a series of events, a suite of behaviors, if you like, about which I have no memory.’
‘If that were the case, and I want to underscore my skepticism, then we might be looking at some kind of dissociative disorder, although I would certainly then suggest you see a psychiatrist as well. There are really no childhood traumas? Military service?’
‘Nothing I would call traumatic. Mild, boring, a completely dull childhood in the suburbs. No broken bones, two loving parents who were married until my father died and never did so much as spank me. An adult life lived in libraries and classrooms and academic offices. Although I suppose that can be traumatic in its own way.’
Dr. Sebastian looked down at the ledger, as if it might contain an answer. ‘Let me ask you some questions.’
‘Shoot.’
‘Shoot?’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Right. Do you ever find yourself driving in your car or riding on the subway and then realizing you have no recollection of the beginning of the trip?’
‘No, nothing like that.’
‘When you’re talking to someone, do you ever have the sense, all of a sudden, that you have not heard what the other person is saying?’
‘I suppose so, on occasion. Not very often. I try to be a good listener. Susan, my ex-wife, she used to complain that my mind would wander whenever she started speaking, that I would just grunt my approval without listening attentively, but no, for the most part, I am present when someone is talking to me.’
‘Have you ever looked up and wondered how it is that you are where you are?’
‘In an existential sense, or a physical one?’
Dr. Sebastian smiled. ‘Physical.’
‘No, nothing like that.’
She asked me whether I ever found myself in clothes with no recollection of getting dressed in them. No, never. Discovering objects in my belongings that I did not recognize as my own? No, not that I can remember. I know the contents of my life, my possessions and losses.
‘Has anyone ever approached you, insisting they have met you before, or know you well, and you have no memory of this person?’
A cold sharp pain throbbed in my chest. ‘Yes, that did happen recently. Thanksgiving weekend. I met a young man — I’ve been meeting him regularly, all over the city, even outside of the city — who insists he was my student, but I have no recollection of having taught him, or even of having met him, and yet we seemed to know each other — according to him — for a considerable length of time, at least two years, more than a decade ago.’
Dr. Sebastian scribbled in her ledger. ‘Is this young man the only such person?’
‘As far as I can remember.’
Question followed question, and in most cases the condition she described did not fit my own experiences, or my sense of those experiences, and yet enough of the questions did fit that I began to feel a swelling anxiety that manifested itself as shortness of breath. I described to her exactly what had happened with the boxes, how their content seemed to include material I could not objectively have produced myself, and how the files were now undergoing forensic examination by lawyers and private investigators.
‘Let me ask you,’ I said, after she had finished, ‘if the authorities came to ask what you had gleaned from this single conversation, what would you say?’
‘I might be required to divulge what I know, or what I have concluded about you on the basis of our consultation, particularly if I feel that you might be a danger to others.’
‘In other words, you might tell the authorities I was crazy.’
Dr. Sebastian grimaced. ‘If that was my conclusion, and if I was required by a court to give evidence, then yes. And if it was a federal case, you should know that there is no doctor — patient privilege.’ She paused, narrowing her eyes and inclining her head. ‘Have you committed a crime, Jeremy?’
‘That is the question. Whether I might have committed a crime, or whether I’m crazy, or both, I suppose. Every morning I get out of bed and try to go about my day, I cannot shake the feeling that I might be crazy. Am I crazy?’
‘Let us rather not use that word. What I can say is this: your brain scan is normal, although that does not necessarily give us a complete picture. In some ways the technology is still rudimentary, and just because the brain looks normal does not mean that other psychological factors cannot be at work. On the basis of the questions I have asked and the answers you have given, it is possible that you have some kind of Unspecified Dissociative Disorder. But, and this is a very important qualification, the fact of the boxes, and the way you keep meeting this young man, the sorts of coincidence that do not seem like coincidence at all, as well as your demeanor, the way I observe you behaving, your general appearance, all that leads me to believe you are very intelligent and also very sane, as much as any intelligent person can remain sane in a world largely governed and determined by far less intelligent minds.’