Excerpted: Iris and the Dead

I wrote a story for you in a journal and it vanished. Yes, vanished. The journal itself disappeared. Where do such missing things go?

In the story I laid down all the things I wanted you to understand. I wanted to write it because, in the years since we lay in the yellow grass, I have come to some knowledge. I cannot recall the contents of the story in full. Because of its loss, I sobbed and felt like the victim of a cruel and unusual fate.

Do you think you can write it again, said my mother when I told her.

In some ways, I said. I mean, only in part.

But the heart of the story is gone and I no longer own it. Still, my need to speak with you seems to have no end. As I wanted to tell you, in every possible universe, when presented with what you offered me, I take it. May I begin again?

Part I: Sickness

On My Rights as the Author

What do you remember of me? Is it difficult to make out? I know your mind, which doesn’t take much interest in the past, has possibly let me rot for years. Lacking attention, perhaps the sounds we heard together have shrunk and become difficult to name. The colours you associated with me, mixed together now, present a peculiar new hue. Maybe a bronze, made up of grey lake water and the sun.

Some of my memories of you have been darkened by the things I’ve heard and seen in the time since we knew one another. Seeing pictures of you online almost removes you more from me; an image of you in red light by the water seems to have nothing to do with you. It is only occasionally that something comes up in front of me—in that hard way virtual things do, so that the rest of the world recedes—and I’m flooded with feeling. For you, I know these memories might have died. For me, they keep. For you, have they simply been discarded? And if they have, to where? What I want to know is, where are the things that have vanished?

For me, very few things end. I can revisit funny memories and put a different name on them. The uncanny ones I’ve wanted to speak with you about. I am sick to death of being dazzled, of lacking the words. We did not have a love affair.

As I said, I have a story to tell you: a better one than I ever could have come up with at the time I knew you. In many ways, I am teeming with knowledge about what was happening during the time we spent together, and beyond. But I should admit I’m not just trying to pass on the knowledge I’ve come to. I also have questions to ask you. Even as I write with vital information I’m bewildered. But the answers I need may be in that place where the vanished objects go, because I am unsure that even you have them.

On the Beginning

When I was twelve I lost my mind.

The phrase doesn’t bother me. I think it’s correct. I lost my mind as accidentally as I lost pencils and five-dollar bills. Maybe my mind flew down the sky to a land of the dead. I don’t believe this, of course. But it’s better to think it was somewhere.

On the Study of Strange Things

A gift is frightening. It comes with moorings. I am indebted to you, which makes this whole thing stranger. You overflow, my love. You exceed. For years your gift and its consequences seemed uncontrollable.

Part of you helped me because you wanted to free me. That was the gift you gave. But another part of you wanted to keep me in a contractual relation. Because a gift creates a debtor; gratitude flows forever as all of the gift’s effects play out. And in another way you left me so little. I have letters, a T-shirt. There is some documentation of our time together. My unsent emails are a study in bewilderment. When I was twenty I thought about writing to you: Of course this isn’t to overlook the wonderful things you did for me, but I’ve been thinking about the cost…Still, however, the uninformed archivist would never be able to sort our data from noise. A colossus of evidence claims we were meaningless to one another. I myself, evaluating it, could make a strong case for barely knowing you.

I could argue the following: there is only one photo of these women together. Neither has ever wished the other merry Christmas. The one card they exchanged said, “Thanks for everything thus far.” Therefore, these two women knew each other briefly and then forgot one another. These two women spent a few months together and didn’t think much about it after.

But really, the card was written in panic. It implored. “Thus far” actually meant I must have more. “Thus far” was intended to mean I’m old enough now, although I wrote it when I was very young.

On Anatomy (I am twelve)

One is always too young to lose a mind. When I lost mine at age twelve, my universe ruptured. Atypical depression, an underdetermined, mysterious disease of the brain, is strange, and believed by some scientists to be simply a protest to living. Feeling cornered, the mind withholds half its sensory and cognitive capacities and leaves the patient with just a little bit of soul to survive on. If I were to write a medical textbook, I would say: The mind shuts off. Intellectual ability devolves, and the acuteness of sensory organs is dramatically reduced. I would explain to students that, when suffering from atypical depression, it becomes very difficult to remember, imagine, and generalize. The afflicted person can only really observe but does not have the sufficient capacity to observe anything fully. There is almost nothing “authentic” remaining. It is a flattening condition, I would tell students, considered to be traumatizing and solitary. I would write with confidence: sadly I became an expert when I got it.

My first psychiatrist was a well-respected researcher. I was very sick when we spoke.

Because of the depression, I couldn’t read a book or feel the cold. I existed only when I was witnessed. Can’t you be happy this way? my psychiatrist asked me. And then he had an art show, a series of acrylic paintings titled In Sickness and Health. In his images, patients take on a single form. With the same hands, the same sadness, they need. And then, like a gift, health returns to them. But some of the patients, resisting health, vanish. (I don’t know where these patients go, as it is not depicted. They were the subject of only one painting.)

Years ago, when I told you about this art exhibit, I acted like it hadn’t affected me. But I will never forget his paintings. They probably shocked me due to his audacity to be good at two things (science and art), when I was not even able to think. I’ll spend a life trying to find a word for the feeling of seeing these images. Maybe I will write to you in years when I am old and go, Yes! That is the word!

On Symptomatology (I am twelve–fourteen)

For your reference: the first symptom was carelessness. I started forgetting my keys every time I left the house. I forgot to zip up my backpack. I forgot homework at school and left my completed assignments at home. I could no longer recall facts as easily. By the time I was thirteen I struggled with internalizing verbal instructions. I couldn’t remember my schedule. I forgot forms, gym clothes, library books, money, the day of the week, the way to my doctor’s office, and my grandmother’s birthday. All around me, others continued to remember.

I stopped paying attention to the weather: it didn’t affect me anymore. I tripped constantly. I couldn’t play Scrabble. I could no longer balance on skates. By the time I was fourteen, a flatness had set in that was inescapable. By then, I could no longer spell. My favourite novels were just paperweights. My cats were as peripheral as squirrels in the park. Objects, context, lost their ability to affect me. Everything was within reach, but it was no longer received with joy. The boredom was intolerable and so was the horror of losing my emotional connection to art, as the boundary between me and the world widened. I was a quarter of a person, but everyone else stayed whole, continuing to partake in their mysterious consensus about what was happening and what was not.

It might have been better if depression had washed me out of the world, had made it so no one could see me. I might have made an interesting spectator. Instead, throughout my teens I tried to reverse the depressive symptoms through sheer willpower. It did not work, but I tried to bind myself to my flesh, to retrieve all my lost cognitive capacities every day by just trying to process things more clearly. Aware there was suddenly a vacancy in me, I fought against it, at times ruthlessly. I spent hours at the library studying subjects that used to be easy and made myself read long books I couldn’t remember or understand anymore. I practised writing constantly, despite the fact that I had lost the ability to generate language properly. I was estranged from whatever it is that is supposed to speak through the writer. Other times I tried to deny that such a thing was even happening. I regulated my thoughts. I began to believe it was possible for a person to deserve to disappear, construing explanations for my cosmic guilt. I concluded that maybe this was simply an ordinary stage of development, that such a shift in consciousness marked the beginning of the entry into adulthood for everybody. It was in this context that heaven seemed to hand me to you.