Journey to the Day

FL YNN 59 ELIZABETH FLYNN JOURNEY TO THE DAY For me, madness was another place, much like the places inhabited in dreams. I came upon it as the science-fiction hero encounters time-warp: a sudden transport to altered reality. Nothing incongruous, merely different. The house in which I found myself, for instance, was arranged much like my other house, but there seemed to be more rooms. There was a basement and an attic; there were more outside doors. There was a television camera, trained on me, and crowds of people (not quite strangers) came and went without formality. At first I zapped back and forth, finding reality no more in one place than the other. One house had a telephone, the other did not. One had a picture window, through which I one day watched a school bus wreck and overturn. It was then necessary to return to the "old" house to report this disaster to the authorities. By the time the police arrived, I was a mind away, attempting to bring some order to the ever more raucous parties in the house with the basement, ment. It was as though I lived in a particularly vivid dream—a fluid world of telescoping time and possible impossibilities. Meanwhile I was seen to move about in the real world: getting up in the morning, dressing, eating, watching television. I did those things without consciousness of them. The body moved, the mouth spoke and ate, while I—the essence of that thing which I call "I"—played out the melodramas of insanity. I became aware, after a time, that my new world was altering. The hordes of people grew, became hostile; they watched me. In my closets, under my bed—they were everywhere. I could not find my husband—there was no one—no friendly face. You must consider this frenetic "I" to be myself , as I do, because it is where my memory resides. That bubble of hallucination is all that I remember—no recollection of the move to the state hospital, although my husband tells me that I cursed him roundly, and chain-smoked all the way. It did not happen to me. I was, as they say, out of my head at the time. The implications of this misplaced identity are fascinating, in retrospect. If I regard the insanity as a dreamlike trance imposed upon my real self, I am copping out, and I know it. There are possibilities of consciousness of which we are not aware, in the ordinary run of events. It is perhaps better not to know about them, because they are scary. In the days of my madness , my quintessential self moved about with a freedom which is not, in 60 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW point of fact, possible. I was tied to my body, but by a longer looser tether than I ever had suspected. The clamor of my persecutors rose; they importuned me to follow them -away-the place unspecified, but of the greatest urgency. They seemed to be telling me (although not clearly) that disaster lay ahead. Hope lay in flight. They pressed about me, pushing, reaching for my hand. There was a great explosion, its wake a strong wind sucking the clotted people through its eye, surely to safety. They whirled away. And as they went, they called my name, tugged at me. I could still choose to go, but only in the instant. The eye was closingGoing would have been easier, and I can recall only two inconsequential reasons for my resistance. I had a nagging sense of something left unfinished . And besides, I had never liked being hustled into things. They hadn't even taken time to tell me where they were going. As the wind died I was alone in cotton-batting stillness. It was a descent into deep unconsciousness, perceived and remembered by the disordered mind as softness, whiteness—as drifting snowflakes. Time did not exist in my deranged world, but from certain clues I later discerned its pattern. The crowds and frenzy represented two weeks spent in a hosptial receiving ward, a wandering loony among many. One evening, in the crush before supper, I lost balance...