pure darkness. I rolled around the room like a lunatic for a while, giving off silent screams, grabbing the walls, knocking everything over, crawling around the floor, until I found the door, opened it, and threw half my body into the dimly illuminated corridor, and lay there until my breathing went back to normal. I have a real sense that this darkness, and this panic, is what my death will be like, except I will never reach the door and find the corridor. Iâd forgotten all about these attacks. I used to have them often, at night, in hotel rooms at conferences, when Iâd drink a little bit too much, close the curtains out of habit, and pass out instead of properly falling asleep. I can easily fall asleep in darkness, but I always wake, always from recurring nightmares, and if I wake and find myself in total darkness, if my eyes cannot adjust to explain why I am not in my bedâalways, for a moment, I forget where I amâI suffer an acute anxiety attack and usually end up falling over furniture in an attempt to escape wherever it is I think I am, or simply to agonize over my blindness. The rooms didnât have key cards. We had keys that were attached to metal blocks inscribed with our room numbers, and we left them at reception if we went out. Two people rotated at receptionâa woman, probably in her fifties, orange hair, very tanned, voluptuous, freckled cleavage, with a stern and humorless gaze, who manned the desk in a mean and unforgiving way during the day, and an Arab man with thick eyebrows, small shoulders, and powerful but dwarfish arms who answered the hotel door if we happened to come home after eleven p.m., when it was locked. We spoke to him on a few occasions, because we feared him less than we feared the woman, and he said he drove a taxi during the day. When do you sleep? my father asked him. When Iâm here, he said. It was never a relief to enter my room. I couldnât sleep well, because of the small duvet, because the mattress was too soft in the middle, and because I had to leave the shutters open, so the bright lamplight outside poured in all night. My father, that first week, couldnât sleep either, and I heard him every morning, around three-thirty or four, showering and getting dressed, pointlessly flipping through channels on the television.
My father left Miriamâs apartment, after our first visit, in a total fog, an incoherence that was massive and still. He never returned, though I would, three times, with the key that the landlady handed me out of a hope that I would clear up the mess. We walked slowly from Miriamâs apartment toward the square. My father walked alone, ahead of us. Trish walked behind him, right behind him, waiting, I presumed, for an opportunity to console him. The immediacy and magnitude of her affection for my father was a mystery. It seemed that her affection and his woe were symbiotic. They walked so slowly that I had time to stop and stare into the windows of stores and offices, a café, a dive bar, and through the open archways of apartment blocks. I was thirsty, I wanted some water, so I went inside a place that served takeout coffees and had a fridge full of drinksâit was not quite a café, not quite a convenience store, just an unadorned room for people to sit in and smoke cigarettes. There was one table, a counter, and four Turkish men who were smoking at the table. None of them wanted me there. Even after I had picked the water from the fridge and placed it on the counter, and taken out my change to count it, it took one of the four men an eternity to get up from his seat at the table and ask me if the water was all I wanted. His tone of voice suggested that if water was all I wanted, I should go somewhere else. So I got a coffee. By the time I ordered it, I actually wanted a coffee. But the coffee he served me came out of one of those machines where you put a cup in a grungy and stinking slot and push a button, and I
My father left Miriamâs apartment, after our first visit, in a total fog, an incoherence that was massive and still. He never returned, though I would, three times, with the key that the landlady handed me out of a hope that I would clear up the mess. We walked slowly from Miriamâs apartment toward the square. My father walked alone, ahead of us. Trish walked behind him, right behind him, waiting, I presumed, for an opportunity to console him. The immediacy and magnitude of her affection for my father was a mystery. It seemed that her affection and his woe were symbiotic. They walked so slowly that I had time to stop and stare into the windows of stores and offices, a café, a dive bar, and through the open archways of apartment blocks. I was thirsty, I wanted some water, so I went inside a place that served takeout coffees and had a fridge full of drinksâit was not quite a café, not quite a convenience store, just an unadorned room for people to sit in and smoke cigarettes. There was one table, a counter, and four Turkish men who were smoking at the table. None of them wanted me there. Even after I had picked the water from the fridge and placed it on the counter, and taken out my change to count it, it took one of the four men an eternity to get up from his seat at the table and ask me if the water was all I wanted. His tone of voice suggested that if water was all I wanted, I should go somewhere else. So I got a coffee. By the time I ordered it, I actually wanted a coffee. But the coffee he served me came out of one of those machines where you put a cup in a grungy and stinking slot and push a button, and I
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