Leaving the Atocha Station (12 page)

“But you said you wanted to see Granada—that’s why we came,” she said, remembering our conversation in bed.

“I did want to see it again,” I said. “And I’ll come back again.”

“Fine,” she said, angry. I wondered if I would be the only American in history who visited Granada without seeing the Alhambra.

After breakfast we took a cab to the train station, bought our tickets, and had around an hour and a half to kill before the Talgo left. It wasn’t until we actually bought our tickets that I realized the last thing I wanted to do was to go back. We found a café and ordered more coffee and the caffeine along with Isabel’s jealousy inspired me to say, “Look, when we get back to Madrid, let’s just stay one night. I can get my work done and we can pack for a longer trip. Then we can take another train to Galicia or Lisbon or wherever.”

Isabel smiled at me, having gone at an alarming rate from anger to something more like pity. “I can’t,” she said. “I have to work.”

“Take vacation,” I said.

“I can’t,” she repeated softly, as if I’d asked her to marry me. “Don’t you have work too?” There was gentle derision in the question. For the first time, I took a joke about poetry personally.

“Is your work more important?” I asked, as if her work were guarding paintings.

“No,” she said simply. I was crushed by how easily she ignored my implication.

We spent the rest of our downtime at the café, then boarded the train, and passed the next five hours reading, napping, smoking, but almost never speaking. I missed my parents terribly. By day the Spanish countryside looked a lot like Kansas.

__________________________

Late in the fourth phase of my project I decided to up the dosage, to take two white pills each morning instead of one. I had enough; before leaving the U.S. I had been given a year’s supply, which required a special letter from my doctor, and earned me strange looks from the pharmacist, and I had already had a month’s worth of medication on hand before acquiring the stockpile, which I had then divided into several small bottles. Besides, I could always see a psychiatrist in Spain—if, for instance, I stayed after my fellowship, maybe teaching English. Or I could just stop taking the white pills when I ran out; I wasn’t really convinced they did much for me in the first place. When I began taking them, I had a very pleasant insomnia, reading until dawn without fatigue; that was the only significant side effect and it passed with regrettable speed. After that, I was never sure what, if any, effect they had; I’d considered going off them at various points, but each time I hesitated, wondering if in fact they were buoying me; maybe my lows would be much lower, insufferably lower, without them.

The white pills certainly did not seem to work for me the way they worked for some people; I always felt a few strains of rumination away from full orchestral panic, I was almost always acutely aware of the bones beneath the face. But then I drank and smoked in a way that made tracking the specific effects of the white pills difficult. The ritual of taking them, however, had become important to me, not because of some possible placebo effect, where the mere fact of ingestion steadied me, but rather because they were a daily reminder that I was officially fucked up, that I was undergoing treatment, that I had a named condition. It was a Eucharistic rite of self–abnegation in which I acknowledged to myself that I was incapable of facing the world without designer medication and thereby absolved myself of some portion of my agency; it was a little humiliating, a little liberating.

When I got back from Granada I began to spiral, not out of control, but downward, nevertheless, in a helix of small pitch. I had not realized how much I was invested in the idea that Isabel and Teresa were invested in me, and now that it seemed neither had the inclination even to feign serious investment, I felt not only rejected, but as though many months of research had evaporated. It occurred to me that I could at least feel less guilty regarding all the lies about my family, as nothing significant had been built upon them, but in fact I felt wave after wave of intensified remorse. It became increasingly clear to me that I would have to confess my slander to my parents at some point in order not to be consumed by it, which added dread to my guilt. My distress about Isabel and Teresa, coupled with my guilt about my parents, opened onto larger questions about my fraudulence; that I
was
a fraud had never been in question—who wasn’t? Who wasn’t squatting in one of the handful of prefabricated subject positions proffered by capital or whatever you wanted to call it, lying every time she said “I”; who wasn’t a bit player in a looped infomercial for the damaged life? If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak. I could lie about my interest in the literary response to war because by making a mockery of the notion that literature could be commensurate with mass murder I was not defaming the victims of the latter, but the dilettantes of the former, rejecting the political claims repeatedly made by the so–called left for a poetry radical only in its unpopularity. I had been a small–time performance artist pretending to be a poet, but now, with an alarming fervor, I wanted to write great poems. I wanted my “work” to take on the United States of Bush, to shed its scare quotes, and I wanted, after I self–immolated on the Capitol steps or whatever, to become the Miguel Hernández of late empire, for Isabel and Teresa and everybody everywhere to read my poems, shatter storefronts, etc. This was a structure of feeling, not an idea, which made it harder to dismiss, and I felt it more intensely in direct proportion to its ridiculousness. And when I doubled my dosage, and the insomnia returned, I began to read and write feverishly. This was less a new faith in poetry than a sudden loss of faith in pure potentiality.

Besides the insomnia, which this time lasted, save for a few nights of long and total and dreamless sleep, for a couple of weeks, I experienced two other notable side effects: first, my jaw was constantly and involuntarily clenched; second, I had what the internet told me was sexual anhedonia, lovely phrase. Both side effects had a certain rightness of fit with my general despondency, which was not diminishing, and I found this correspondence comforting, the way one savors abysmal weather when one feels abysmal. Additionally, I began to convince myself that the white pills were responsible for the intensity of my suffering, that I was having an adverse reaction, and this mitigated my fear of feeling that way forever; if I went off the white pills, I’d feel better. But I was too scared to test this hypothesis, and so, after a few days, I upped my dosage even further, taking a third white pill each morning, and when, after reading or revising poems for several hours, I would suddenly start crying, burying my face in a towel so the neighbors wouldn’t hear, or, when shopping for wine or cigarettes or hash, I felt mild dissociation, the world curling at its edges, I would reassure myself by saying that the white pills were themselves the primary cause.

The relationship I might have had in the flattering light of the subjunctive.

After the first week of my new dosage, however, a week in which neither Isabel nor Teresa called on me, I achieved a new emotional state, or a state in which emotions no longer obtained. When I would try to describe this condition in chats with Cyrus it seemed utterly contradictory; on the one hand, I now felt nothing, my affect a flat spectrum over a defined band; I could watch videos of beheadings or contractors firing on Iraqi civilians or the Fox News commentators without a reaction and I did. I reread Levin’s most soul–wrenching scenes without the slightest affective fluctuation. Although I still did not leave my apartment because I was waiting for Isabel and/or Teresa to ring my bell and run up the stairs and confess her love for me, begging me to remain in Spain or to take her with me to the States, I waited now without feeling. And if one of them were to appear and make the most dramatic spectacle of her affection, I began to doubt I’d be moved significantly. At the same time, however, I felt a kind of euphoria at my sudden inability to feel, an exaggerated second order of feeling that did not alter the first order numbness. This euphoria, if that’s what it was, was very far from my body, and therefore compatible with my anhedonia; it was as if I were suspended in a warm bath outside of myself. I felt something like a rush of power, the power to experience the world as though under glass, and this detachment, coupled with my reduced need or capacity for sleep, gave me a kind of vampiric energy, although I was my own prey. I could read and write for hours on end with what felt like total concentration, barely noticing nightfall, and in the early hours of the morning, I would wander around Madrid, passing Isabel’s apartment or Teresa’s gallery just to show myself I could do so without a spike in agony. I would often watch the dawn from the colonnade in El Retiro or one of the benches on El Paseo del Prado or take the Metro to a stop I didn’t know and watch the sunrise there, return home, sleep for a few hours, wake and take white pills, hash, coffee, and with an uncanny energy resume my adventures in insensitivity. I was vaguely afraid, of what I couldn’t say; maybe that I would throw myself in front of a bus without knowing what I was doing or break into Isabel’s apartment and tear apart her brother’s notebook or put a trash can through the gallery window or otherwise act out, powerless to stop myself from such a distance. But I also felt, for the first time, like a writer, as if all the real living were on the page, and I had to purchase a stack of ruled notebooks from Casa del Libro to contain my poems and notes. I told myself I was going to write new poems of such beauty and significance that when Teresa translated and printed them and I gave a copy to Isabel, both women would realize that they had been in the presence of a poet who alone was able to array the fallen materials of the real into a song that transcended it.

Finally, Isabel came. It was late afternoon and I was reading “The Waste Land” online, stealing phrases. She said something about my apartment being dirty and arranged a few things and it was clear to me that all she felt for me was pity, convinced, no doubt, that she had broken my heart. After saying something about her work that I didn’t try to understand, she told me she was going to Barcelona, probably in the next few days, and would stay with Oscar until they both returned. I experienced the shape of pain but no pain, and said that while it was a shame I wouldn’t see her more, that I was going to miss her terribly, I wished her and Oscar all the best; indeed, if I stayed in Madrid beyond my fellowship, maybe we could all have a drink together at some point, although I understood if that would be difficult for
him.
My Spanish had never sounded so fluent. I heard myself saying that before she left I’d at least like to take her to dinner, drinks. She had probably planned not to see me again after this visit to my apartment, had imagined a difficult scene, but now that I was showing myself more or less indifferent to her departure, and capable of almost alarming lightness, she said yes, sure, that would be great. I told her for some reason that I was busy that night but that if she came by the next evening around nine we would have our good–bye celebration. She kissed me on the cheek, said how sweet I was, and left. After a momentary flash of anger, I felt nothing.

A few hours after Isabel’s visit I walked to the gallery, a half–hour walk, smoking and reciting some of my poems to myself, barely feeling the ground beneath me. It was a warm evening, or I was oblivious to the cold, and the streetlights and shop windows and lights of passing cars were intensely bright; the conversation of pedestrians and the sound of traffic and music from passing cars was intensely loud; I wondered if these were side effects. Teresa wasn’t there, but Arturo was, and appeared very happy to see me. I told him I had been in Granada with someone named Isabel and he smiled at me but asked no questions. Maybe his expression implied Teresa would be jealous. He asked me about my poems and I took four notebooks out of my bag and gave them to him and explained they were just from this week and I wondered which were his favorite poems and if there were any they wanted to include in the pamphlet. He seemed genuinely excited, and I thought to myself that that was both touching and somehow sad, but felt neither touched nor saddened. He said I must come to the opening on Friday for the show of several well–known Spanish painters and he added, maybe significantly, that Teresa would be eager to see me; I said fine. Then for some reason I embraced and kissed Arturo with an ambiguous passion I didn’t feel and walked home. For the first time in many days I was tired and quickly fell asleep.

When I awoke it was a little after three in the morning and I was perhaps hungrier than I had ever been. I’d been eating very little for two weeks, and the return of my appetite, I assumed, represented a shift in my body’s relation to the white pills. I ate an entire two–day–old baguette and as I ate I checked my e–mail and there was a message in English from Teresa, who had only e–mailed me once or twice in the past, saying that she had heard I was back from “traveling with Isabel” and that she missed me. I felt a small, distant thrill, further confirmation that my body had acclimated a little to the drugs, or that the drugs were already losing their effectiveness, and I went easily back to sleep and slept until the early afternoon.