These were just some reasons Ruth admired Annie. But none of them adequately explained why Ruth, as a third-year grad student, had suddenly become interested in the Victorian sharpshooter, abandoning her first subject—a study of Western photographer Edward Curtis.
She was even less sure why a healthy academic interest had—after her car accident two years ago—turned into a life-altering obsession. Whatever the reason, Ruth knew it was complicated, because all of her life after the accident was more complicated. The past, present and future had buckled together like the accordioned front of her car where it had caught on the barrier of the Fifteenth Street Bridge.
Ruth didn’t expect this journal to answer all the big questions, but one answer, for now, would do.
The mind has an uncanny way of saving us from unendurable pain.
Ruth wondered if her own mind was protecting itself from something best forgotten.
Ruth took out her contacts, slipped on glasses and changed into her comfiest U of Iowa sweatshirt. She tugged an elastic off her wrist and pulled her hair through it into a ponytail, her default for long days and nights of concentration alone.
Then, from her perch on the couch, she went back to the start, transcribing the parts she’d read to Reece and then continuing, taking in each new sentence slowly.
It was a warm fall night. This was in the Carolinas, a place in the American South, she informed me. Her husband was in another car, up late exchanging stories with some other performers. The train’s windows were open, admitting a deep perfume that she had been savoring just before she nodded off.
Now that perfume was replaced with an acrid smell, the mournful whistle and the shrieking brakes, the catapulting motion as her body left its narrow bed, train car aglow, white light, feathers.
When her recall slowed, I prompted her: Did she see actual feathers, or was she just making a comparison with the appearance of the slow-falling train cars? Could she better describe this experience of floating? How long did this last?
She didn’t answer. Her eyes remained opened, unfocused. Her body, tense at first on the couch, finally relaxed. I didn’t intrude but watched her agitated right hand, set limp and trembling against her waist.
She wanted to stare, she told me. She wanted to remember: tens of thousands of feather-filled glass ball targets—hundreds of thousands—shot in a lifetime. She saw the moment this way, a moment of weighted silence, a moment of dazzling light.
A perception of slowed time. One that she could slow further yet through force of attention.
And finally, a sense of acceleration again, of the oncoming train or the past rushing up to swallow the present, in that moment before everything sped up, before things hurt. In that great rush of pain, she breathed deeply, as if gathering up some kind of diffuse energy, and skipped forward, like a stone across a pond.
“How so?”
“Like I might land, and sink, or skip yet again. In any case, I am moving forward, purposefully but without any control. I understand that it’s the trauma, that it makes one want to flee the danger. I’ve thought about this, you see.”
I didn’t interrupt, even while sensing she had moved from memory to self-diagnosis. There is a temptation, especially among intelligent women, to play the doctor, when what is truly necessary is for the patient to surrender and speak without the need to impress, charm or disguise.
“You are on the train.”
“Not any longer. I removed myself. To a spot where I could see the wrecked train and the rescuers starting to shoot the first injured horses, the ones that had been removed from the first of many stock cars.”
“This was upsetting?”
“Terribly. First, to see them injured, and then to see that man doing such a bad job of putting the horses down. It upset me enough that I suddenly found myself back on the train.”
“Back on the demolished train?”
“No. On the train as it was before, just prior to the crash. I’d only skipped from one sort of pain to another, and then, when this second place was equally upsetting, I returned to where I’d been. But now I knew exactly what would happen next. Soon enough, I’d be on the other side once again, but slower if I did nothing to accelerate it, hours after the accident, hearing the horses being put down again, knowing precisely how many shots it would take . . .”
“Remarkable. Of course, you know there are explanations for this apparent clairvoyance.”
“I am more than able to distinguish fact from fantasy. I’m not interested in explanations, and I’m not interested in clairvoyance. I simply accepted that I had slipped or skipped forward somehow.”
She was becoming combative.
“You’re taking notes?”
I explained that it was part of the method and that I would never use her real name in any notes, private or public. This mollified her, because she continued.
“I’d done it before. Moved forward or slowed time down, or at least had the sensation that it was advancing or slowing. The former, when I was in an unpleasant situation as a child. Removing myself, as I believe many people have done, in situations of discomfort or shame. But never so vividly and completely. Never to a second place as bad as the first.”
“Many people do this, you believe.”
“Maybe more women than men. I haven’t done a study of it. I hoped that you or someone in your field might have.”
“Dissociation.”
“If you’d like to call it that.”
“What would you call it?”
“Survival.”
I pressed her to continue, and she explained how she recovered after the accident and how, during this time, she kept returning to the experience, reliving the brief wonder and deeper terror of the crash. I informed her that the revisiting of the event is a common response, a way of working through it, as if the mind has an unfinished task. It was a classic fixation, a traumatic neurosis created in the moment of the accident.
She listened and considered, but did not seem reassured or compelled, as if this exercise were mere child’s play and she had not yet arrived at the memory she truly wished to discuss. She reviewed the other details of the crash, but only because I asked, with less enthusiasm and without the emotional changes I have come to expect.
Willful ignorance, denial, the refusal to accept what lies buried in the subconscious—these are the very producers of illness. But I was beginning to suspect that this ZN might not be a typical hysteric. She admitted to only one physical symptom, though her reticence to talk about it was a powerful indicator. Unlike a typical sufferer, she did not seem to experience any great relief upon divulging details of either her hallucination or the accident itself. If there was any neutralizing of the episode, or discharging of the imprisoned emotion, she did not seem to experience its benefit. Having found some facility in repeatedly reliving the train accident and its immediate precedents, even while it pained her to do so, she became even more fixated on remembering further back, before the crash. With equal vividness, she insisted.