Victoria Sees It

would tell me I needed to work on things like “derealization” and “depersonalization.” He liked to give me this kind of language. When I felt as if I were an old woman projected back in time to narrate an earlier phase of my life, he said that was “derealization.” When I got confused about whether a feeling belonged to me or the person I was talking to, or when I talked about my body as if it was just a thing, as if it wasn’t mine, that was “depersonalization.” When I said I didn’t know what Jeff meant when he talked about a “me” as the kind of thing that could own a body, he just smiled.

I asked him why I should call these “de-” anything. Why define something by what it is not?

“You call it that because you think I should experience things differently,” I said. “But what if I’m right? I mean, what if the kind of thing you think is sitting here is not a real kind of thing? What if there is no here here?”

“There’s a there there,” he said gently.

“There there there,” I said, patting my own knee.

“They are both forms of dissociation…” Jeff insisted on continuing the lesson. Language works like teeth. We tear into the world and each other, spit it out in little bits. A dirty process that contaminates the material.

“De-something, dis-something…all so negative. The valence seems to be the main thing.”

“Well, I suppose that’s because it’s something we need to be careful about. Careful not to let it overtake—”

“Who’s we?” I interrupted.

“Everyone. We all have things we have to be careful about,” Jeff said.

“But you meant me. You could say you instead of we. It would be clearer.”

“I meant everyone. But I feel as though perhaps you can’t hear me right now.”

“Maybe not. And yet you still want to believe that your language works. Fits the world. You think your words aren’t broken.”

In literature, the way you can tell if a woman’s gone mad is that she’s talking. Let’s take Ophelia. For three entire acts she speaks when spoken to. She says some version of “my lord,” like, thirty times. And it’s her mad voice that’s gone wrong? The one full of flowers and death and sex and shame? Please. We wonder why we can’t see what’s right in front of our eyes, but distraction is a powerful thing. Magicians know this. How do you think the disappearing act works? They make sure you’re looking in the wrong place at the crucial moment. It’s not really anything weird, it’s just evolution. Our brains need to be able to get distracted. This is life and death, like forgetting. And sleep. Not a bug, a feature. Adaptive. Could we make a drug for distraction? If it’s neurochemistry, there should be a drug for it. It would be useful when you have to live through something and you don’t want to, because at least this way you wouldn’t have to pay any attention to it. You would be totally distracted, and you’d remember nothing afterwards. I even came up with a brand name: Inattentalin. You’d pop a pill and then anything could happen to you and you wouldn’t notice. You’d be able to see it, sort of, to feel it, but you wouldn’t notice anything. Maybe you’d get odd nightmares years later, but you wouldn’t be able to connect them to the original situation. A drug like this could make somebody millions. But it would probably only end up being used for date rape. Weaponized inattention.

Have you ever had the feeling that more than half the world is missing? Close one eye and walk around. Like that. The rest of everything is just…blank. Gone. Forever, because everybody was ignoring it. Worse, much worse: what’s left is flattened. We no longer see depth in it. We sort of feel as if another dimension is still there, or should be, but with the loss of binocular parallax our ability to access it is straightjacketed. You know, at another scale, stellar parallax once shattered a moral universe—I mean a universal science. One that grounded out in the vast, dark narcissism of certain Earthlings. This can also be how a circle passes for a straight line: you cannot access that dimension in which the circle is curved, so it looks like a straight line to you. If you’re a one-dimensional beetle crawling around and around the circumference you don’t know any better.

Jeff is sweet. He wants to help. I didn’t mean to be rude to him. Sometimes interpretations clash, I get it. What happens when you can’t treat all the inconsistencies with charity? There is but such a quantity of truth between the stories; just enough to make one good sort of world. He had started talking about confabulation now.

“Sometimes,” he said, “we fill in a story that seems to make sense of what we remember, or of how we feel. It might not all be exactly what really happened, but it certainly seems real.”

I didn’t even bother about the “we” business this time, because obviously he was doing the exact same thing he was talking about. Instead I made one last half-arsed effort.

“Language…is sort of our joint bank account. You see? We all have to invest, but we don’t all get to draw on the funds.”

He didn’t get it at all. I could tell.

—

Whenever I can, I avoid going onto campus. It takes forty minutes on a good day, and at some point either the motion of the bus or the idea of the destination started giving me fierce nausea every time I set foot on board.

Instead, I got into the habit of bringing my laptop to a café if I only had a pile of essays to mark. I walked down my street of leafy trees to the Starbucks Reserve. Might as well go in there. I can’t make things any better or worse by going somewhere else. I like the cafe in Ada’s bookshop