Sometimes it was a comfort to go over these vertical lines again and again to make them thicker. The act made his fortifications stronger.
Some days he filled the page with his walls, his borders, his spikes. After hours his wrist would begin to ache, but there was still relief in the repetition.
“You repeat the same old patterns—it’s as if you can’t help yourself.”
Some mornings he would get stuck on a pattern, find himself compelled to repeat it over and over and over again until he broke for lunch. Circles, triangles, squares, the same patterns made by the same muscular movements repeated endlessly. Then after lunch, the pattern broken, variety would suddenly be available to him again. And yet sometimes the pattern had been so worn in to the muscles of his arm, wrist, hand, fingers, that the old pattern would simply reassert itself (phantom circles appearing within a complex network of lines, for example), and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
“There are some things you just have to do, no matter how harmful. It’s as if you can’t help yourself.”
Daggers and other blades were a compulsion at times. As were primitive depictions of murder. They arrived at the most inopportune times: once, after his divorce, he was having a romantic dinner with a beautiful young woman, a young woman he someday wished to marry, when she suddenly stopped speaking, stopped smiling, and glared at him with a peculiar expression on her face. He looked down at his place setting then, discovering that he had taken the red ink pen from his vest pocket and used it to sketch the particularly grisly stabbing death of the young woman on his cream-colored linen napkin.
Some days it felt as if his doodles wanted him all to themselves.
“It made no sense. But it was compelling, irresistible, all the same.”
He couldn’t make heads or tails of some of his more unconscious scribblings. They resembled the webs of hallucinating spiders, he thought, or a cheaply made house after an explosion had leveled it. After years, however, he came to recognize these works as maps. All he had to do was find the starting point, and his current position relative to it.
“You feel if you do it often enough, the very structures of your brain will be altered.”
Hours of drawing lines as precisely as possible would sometimes be an aid to linear thinking. Too many nested circles brought a sensation of great fullness, and enormous headaches. Ten thousand sharp edges on a page might lead to a ripping and tearing, and then a brain hemorrhage would begin.
“The more I want not to feel these things, the more I feel them.”
Some days he would try not to draw certain things. The effort proved to be self-defeating, of course. The more he thought about the image, the stronger the compulsion to bring it to light, capture it in pencil on a napkin, pen on a flap of cereal box. Try not drawing a circle. Try not drawing a square. Try not drawing a small child trapped in a burning window, the window fragmented, blotted out by a furious, pen-wielding hand.
“My father used to say, ‘Find the one thing you do well, and do it often.’”
But this was not what his father had imagined, of that he was sure. If he could be paid for his doodles, of course, he would be quite the wealthy man. But who paid for obsession? Obsession was mostly a matter of self-gratification, a private thing, and powerful in that it belonged to the individual alone. He could take his doodles anywhere, whatever his “regular” job might be. There was power in that.
Drawings of strong, squarish hands that covered page after page after page. Sometimes without thinking he would draw these hands on a business report, and have to do the report all over again before an important presentation.
But no one ever found out. His bosses praised him for his neatness, his calm, his organizational abilities.
“You can live where you dream.”
The argument in his head, the ongoing argument with his ex-wife, continued as obsessively as his doodling.
Many of his doodles resembled floor plans of unknown structures rendered in a multitude of dimensions and perspectives unavailable to his normal, everyday senses.
They appeared to vibrate on the page—he imagined he could hear the music they made. In dreams, he did hear, and the music helped him fall asleep. Never mind that he had to be asleep already to be dreaming these songs—the songs led him off into deeper sleeping.
In daydreams he would speculate whether it was possible to visit such structures, such estranged, vibratory spaces. He had his doubts—what caused their vibrations would tear a normal, three-dimensional human body apart.
So why did his desire to visit such places still persist? Because he knew he would feel at home there, even if the peculiar geometries destroyed him. What was architecture but an endless and futile quest to recreate the “home” that existed only in the dream of your body, the dream of your cells? Doubly futile since the architecture can only create the home from within his body—and the client who must dwell there is immediately trapped within the architect’s own body. Primitive peoples had it best—they were their own architects. At least their mistakes in execution in attempting “home” were in service of their own dream, however distorted.
He started renting cheap apartments and trashed-out homes he could redo to his heart’s content, destroying if need be. Expensive furnishings were unnecessary—since the attempt at creating home was destined to failure anyway, cardboard and cheap lumber, even paper mache would do. It was the shape of the space that mattered, the way it fitted around his sleeping form. He made himself cocoons and nests and narrow coffins and sacks that hung from the uterine plaster walls. Yet home always remained out of reach, the terror of its vibrations singing across the darkness to him, tearing at his nerves.
“That drawing looks as if it hurts.”
Some days there were nothing but claws on the page—hooks and barbed triangles, jagged lines of lightning (God’s claws, he now realized). And even when they didn’t resolutely fill the page they were a major motif most days (especially in the late afternoon, when his muscles began to stiffen, and the air seemed heated). Sometimes they appeared to move in currents, to form patterns. At times they resembled graphics he’d seen representing electromagnetic currents, or the auras that supposedly radiated from the insane. He knew that visions in ancient times were sometimes described in terms of an eagle’s talons clawing through the scalp. So it wasn’t as if all these invisible razor claws were necessarily a terrible thing. He imagined they must somehow serve to also energize and inspire. On the other hand perhaps they were the source of migraines in those who relied on them too much.
But whatever the use, they filled the air—we breathed and drank of their arbitrary movements. Thank God they were invisible, he thought, else we would all be horrified in their presence.
“Sometimes it seems everything is falling apart.”
There were a number of scribblings, which might only be described as representations of “generalized corruption.” Lines that broke and ran dribbling down the page, patches of shadowing which bubbled and disintegrated, narrow scratchings chipped and faded away into a dead-skin paleness. It was a game, finding all the ways in which the doodles illustrated death.