One

For a long time I’ve had these bad times that I call the White Terror. It usually happens to me in the morning after a long night of dreams. Murderous dreams; dreams of bodies lying headless and cold that I stumble over on some ordinary errand, on my way to school, or going into the bathroom, or down to the kitchen. In the dream I’m sometimes me as I am now, sometimes younger, but always moving along on some ordinary errand. And then I stumble over something hard yet mushy and I look down and there’s a body, a headless rotting corpse. A paralyzing terror grips me. I can’t move, can’t run, can’t go past the body or away from it. And as I stand there, my heart threatening to rip out of my chest, I feel myself dissolving, shrinking away into emptiness. And I scream, No! That’s the point at which I wake up.

I’m always in a sweat, my heart whacking away, and as I thrash aside my covers, the emptiness is still there. And I wonder who I am, who is this person, this boy, this body? Am I real? Sometimes when it happens, I think I’m dying, but by now I know to just lie in bed until it subsides.

I was dead serious when I named it the White Terror, but I had to laugh when I found that same phrase, the White Terror, in a book I was reading about the Russian Revolution. After that, I tried calling my White Terror the American White Terror, but that sounded like a racist superhero. The American White Terror strikes again! Indeed, it does. And again and again, and never when I’m expecting it or telling myself to prepare for it. In between the times it happens, I try, only half successfully, to forget about it.

For a while I did magic things to keep it away, like always taking the same number of steps from our house to the corner. Or walking around the dining room table seven times when I came home from school. Or touching each corner of my bed as soon as I came into the room. Nothing helped. All I had to do—no, all I could do—was wait for it to come, wait for it to go. Well, why not? Half my life had been spent waiting. Waiting for word from my parents, waiting for their letters or the rare phone call. Waiting for this terror, this thing, to pass—was that so different?

I noticed that almost every time it happened, there was one small cool part of my brain that remained uninvolved. I dubbed it my Man Brain and began to think of it as the better part of me. I’d be sitting up in bed, gasping like a fish on land, with wave after wave of this emptiness and fear rolling over me, and my heart actually thumping so loud I could hear it, and all the time there was also that rational voice in my head, my Man Brain, telling me, Your heart’s beating … you’re alive … you do exist … you are alive …

The whole thing never actually lasts very long, maybe four or five minutes at the most. When it’s over, that doesn’t seem like much, but while it’s happening, those four or five minutes are as long as eternity. Sometimes it ends abruptly, like a snap of the finger. Now you see it, now you don’t. More often it goes like a fog slowly seeping away.

One morning I especially remember. I was sprawled in bed, in a stinking sweat, limp, shaking, the covers twisted around my legs, when, from across the hall, I heard my uncle clear his throat. Eh, eh, ehhh. I could see that sound, see it traveling through the wall of his bedroom into my room, see it bouncing off the bookcase, touching the desk, then slowly … slowly … sinking to the floor. It was agony, real agony, to watch that sound moving and wait for it to reach me.

Then it did. Eh, eh, ehhh. Just that, and the terror was gone. I was released. I lay there for a moment, letting it all go, then I was up and out of bed, whooping with relief. Instead of fifty push-ups, I did seventy-five, and I yelled across the hall to my uncle, “Gene, I want fried eggs this morning. French toast! Sausage! I’m a starving man!”

Released from the White Terror, I was—myself again. Someone real, who lived with his uncle, who had a name. No, two names: Pete Greenwood. Pax Martin Gandhi Connors.

But what did any of that matter? I was here and glad of the day, and for now, at least, the White Terror was gone.