Somehow, I have overdone it. Among the thousands of delicate calculations I must make each day, one has gone awry. Perhaps I stood for too long in the sunny kitchen making a chicken stir-fry, when I should simply have stuffed the beast into the oven and got out. Or perhaps I went out slightly too early at dusk or, pleased with my progress, decided to risk, on my evening constitutional, a slightly smaller hat.
It hardly matters now. Every mundane activity is a potential doorway to disaster; in the game of snakes without ladders that is my life, snakes lurk on every side. I have plunged down one; once more I am in total darkness, my skin flaming, waiting for the burning to subside. And when it does, days, weeks, perhaps months stretch out before me, while my skin slowly stabilises before I may be granted the boon of another slow climb back into the light.
The first days after a relapse are days of rage. I go over in my mind the minutiae of events that have led to my downfall, trying to pinpoint what I did wrong. I castigate myself for an over-optimistic idiot, an inattentive fool, a stupid blundering imbecile. I spool back in my mind to that fatal stir-fry or hubristic hat, and feel how easy, how simple, how trivial it would have been to have done something different. I yearn to turn back time, not to right a gross wrong, but to amend some minor mundane choice. Surely this should be allowed? It is so insignificant a thing, there could hardly be any weird or unintended consequences, any dropped stitches in the fabric of history, if I were to be permitted to have worn a different hat.
I visualise my alternative, in desperate vivid detail, paint it across my mind as I sit flaming in the darkness, see myself put on my coat and boots, reach out for my hat, open the front door, set off into the golden sunset, walk up the hill, do all that I did do but with a wider brim shading my face. Could I not by sheer force of will, by repetition, hammer this version on to the past, like a pattern hammered on to steel? But time spools resolutely forward, like the tapes, the endless tapes, of talking books to which I now return.
The stage after rage is despair. I no longer chastise myself. Instead, I feel I am accursed, that periods of progress are granted to me only so that they may be snatched away; that I am engaged upon a Sisyphean enterprise, but unlike Sisyphus, I never even reach the top of the hill, to look out, even briefly, over the universe, before my boulder crashes back down; that the task of perpetually second-guessing the whims of my skin is simply impossible, like a problem in a maths exam where there has been a misprint in the figures, and the equation, despite hours of earnest, intelligent effort, can never be solved.
I fall into a dark well. The darkness itself starts to have a horror for me—I have to force myself in and quickly slam the door. I find myself perpetually drifting out to fetch a drink, or just walk up and down the stairs. Like a bubble of air in water, or a toy duck in the bath, I have to be kept forcibly submerged.
The huge black fish called suicide breaks from its mud hole. Back and forth, back and forth it swims. I feel the steady beat of its fins and see with unprecedented clarity the gleam of its spiked teeth. Ten times a day tears fill my eyes, my face twists, I give a few short howls. My talking book is failing to provide the balm of distraction. Its attempted seduction seems callow and unskilful, its characters angsting about problems that are trivial in comparison to my own. To see, to smell, to move about the world before you die—these huge boons granted, why fret about the rest? I become hypersensitised to literary descriptions of nature or the weather, no matter how brief or clichéd. The opening of curtains on to a fresh crisp morning, a view of distant mountains, evening in a summer garden—all prickle me with horrible doubt: perhaps I will not see such things again.
In a phone call to my mother, I break down. My mother acts fast—a visit is arranged. My brother Sam will come the next day, from London. He has cancelled something he had planned that afternoon.
My brother is a gentle soul. He makes soup for our lunch. Perturbed by not finding an onion, he chops a whole head of garlic into the pot. The soup is delicious, but after a long discussion about music and politics in my dark sealed-up room, the garlicky miasma which has developed there can be cut with a knife.
BY THE FIFTH or sixth day, I have reached acceptance, slipping back into the remembered rhythm of my dark days. “See, it is not so hard,” whisper my walls to me. “You have done this before.”
And days, weeks, or months pass.