waders standing on my chest. To not be married.
‘Have you any history of depression, Mr Easy?’ asked Dr Amir as I dithered with my ballpoint. A sententious expression appeared on her face. She looked candidly through me, right back to the cot I bawled in, aged one, when I was still unaware that, as bad as this being-a-hungry-baby caper is, there’s worse, much worse, much more to bawl about coming later.
‘I’ve been as depressed as the next man, I suppose,’ I lied, with refreshing simplicity.
And as the sentence left my desert-dry lips I felt two awful and conflicting things at once. The first was a galactic sense of enfolding warmth, like a heroin-surge; a blanket of childhood safety engulfing the nerves and bloodstream. Merely the interest from another human being, a stranger, an unconditional hand of heated care reaching out from the squalid sea of indifferent inscrutable faces one encounters on any given day in London, was enough to lift my spirits. How long had it been? How long since anyone had shown any curiosity over my suffering, into what had fucked up this Grand Old Man of Misery? How many aeons had it been since anyone had taken a look at my black-box recorder to see what had gone wrong, what had malfunctioned? Nobody had. At least not for a long time. Not my mother, nor Rudi, nor Antonia and Nick, nor the rest of my sleazily ambitious acquaintances. Not my increasingly malicious wife. No, certainly not her .
The second and simultaneous reaction went something like this: where to begin? Oh, where, where in the universe to begin? I know a lot of life-sentence depressives and, not to diminish their anguish—cold posterity will decide whether what they endured was worth the effort, was worth sticking it out to the bitter end for—nearly all of them have been through some form of counselling, of therapy. I never have. For the simple reason that I know what the root, the core, the cause of the malaise to be. The problem, unfortunately folks, is me . No traumas of hypnotism-induced total recall, no mornings spent baseball-batting chunky pillows in anger-catharsis classes, no costly hours dangling my feet from leather sofas and pouring out histories of incests and primal-woundings will ever resolve it, will ever clear the mess up, relieve the weight, the pure tonnage. Because I am the problem. The problem is me. In essence, my essence is to blame. That thing that crystallises hard into all you’ve got after the world ceases to be a horizon-wide playground of possibilities—one’s very quiddity —is the culprit. In the end, I have done all the damage.
And this is not unusual. It’s just that most depressives haven’t reconciled themselves to the fact. They’re still looking outside themselves for a cause, as if the contingent world really had an effect on the Self. Human beings are pervious to things, to the great shit-storm of occurrence that awaits them after the soft bay of childhood, in different ways. For instance, one individual’s mother could die and leave him or her with nothing much more than a sweet absence, a sentimental vulnerability to any talk of mothers and their passing away. But nothing that would prevent them from leading a productive, coherent life. On the other hand, for another individual, it could spell a life sentence of bereavement; of perpetual howling after the loved-one; of feeling the raw hole of loss in just about everything they ever attempt, as they hurl themselves through one destructive personal relationship after another, like those iron wrecking balls they use to bring down tower blocks. This was the case with her , as it happened. With her, the woman I married.
I filled in the form inaccurately and left. Dr Amir’s sapling-brown eyes would never understand. But the process of confession, of being probed in the very interior by such a simple sentence, had left me high; vulnerable as a peeled egg.
I gained the street and stood in the cornea-slicing sunlight.
‘Have you any history of depression, Mr Easy?’ asked Dr Amir as I dithered with my ballpoint. A sententious expression appeared on her face. She looked candidly through me, right back to the cot I bawled in, aged one, when I was still unaware that, as bad as this being-a-hungry-baby caper is, there’s worse, much worse, much more to bawl about coming later.
‘I’ve been as depressed as the next man, I suppose,’ I lied, with refreshing simplicity.
And as the sentence left my desert-dry lips I felt two awful and conflicting things at once. The first was a galactic sense of enfolding warmth, like a heroin-surge; a blanket of childhood safety engulfing the nerves and bloodstream. Merely the interest from another human being, a stranger, an unconditional hand of heated care reaching out from the squalid sea of indifferent inscrutable faces one encounters on any given day in London, was enough to lift my spirits. How long had it been? How long since anyone had shown any curiosity over my suffering, into what had fucked up this Grand Old Man of Misery? How many aeons had it been since anyone had taken a look at my black-box recorder to see what had gone wrong, what had malfunctioned? Nobody had. At least not for a long time. Not my mother, nor Rudi, nor Antonia and Nick, nor the rest of my sleazily ambitious acquaintances. Not my increasingly malicious wife. No, certainly not her .
The second and simultaneous reaction went something like this: where to begin? Oh, where, where in the universe to begin? I know a lot of life-sentence depressives and, not to diminish their anguish—cold posterity will decide whether what they endured was worth the effort, was worth sticking it out to the bitter end for—nearly all of them have been through some form of counselling, of therapy. I never have. For the simple reason that I know what the root, the core, the cause of the malaise to be. The problem, unfortunately folks, is me . No traumas of hypnotism-induced total recall, no mornings spent baseball-batting chunky pillows in anger-catharsis classes, no costly hours dangling my feet from leather sofas and pouring out histories of incests and primal-woundings will ever resolve it, will ever clear the mess up, relieve the weight, the pure tonnage. Because I am the problem. The problem is me. In essence, my essence is to blame. That thing that crystallises hard into all you’ve got after the world ceases to be a horizon-wide playground of possibilities—one’s very quiddity —is the culprit. In the end, I have done all the damage.
And this is not unusual. It’s just that most depressives haven’t reconciled themselves to the fact. They’re still looking outside themselves for a cause, as if the contingent world really had an effect on the Self. Human beings are pervious to things, to the great shit-storm of occurrence that awaits them after the soft bay of childhood, in different ways. For instance, one individual’s mother could die and leave him or her with nothing much more than a sweet absence, a sentimental vulnerability to any talk of mothers and their passing away. But nothing that would prevent them from leading a productive, coherent life. On the other hand, for another individual, it could spell a life sentence of bereavement; of perpetual howling after the loved-one; of feeling the raw hole of loss in just about everything they ever attempt, as they hurl themselves through one destructive personal relationship after another, like those iron wrecking balls they use to bring down tower blocks. This was the case with her , as it happened. With her, the woman I married.
I filled in the form inaccurately and left. Dr Amir’s sapling-brown eyes would never understand. But the process of confession, of being probed in the very interior by such a simple sentence, had left me high; vulnerable as a peeled egg.
I gained the street and stood in the cornea-slicing sunlight.
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