On the other hand, it goes without saying the key is moderation. You couldn’t spend all your time taking Obetrols and sitting there doubled and aware and still expect to take care of business effectively. I remember not getting Camus’s The Fall read in time, for instance, and having to totally bullshit my way through the Literature of Alienation midterm — in other words, I was cheating, at least by implication — but not feeling much about it one way or the other, that I can recall, except a sort of cynical, disgusted relief when the prof’s grader wrote something like ‘Interesting in places!’ under the B. Meaning a meaningless bullshit response to meaningless bullshit. But there was no denying it was powerful — the feeling that everything important was right there and I could sometimes wake up almost in mid-stride, in the middle of all the meaningless bullshit, and suddenly be aware of it. It’s hard to explain. The truth is that I think the Obetrol and doubling was my first glimmer of the sort of impetus that I believe helped lead me into the Service and the special problems and priorities here at the Regional Examination Center. It had something to do with paying attention and the ability to choose what I paid attention to, and to be aware of that choice, the fact that it’s a choice. I’m not the smartest person, but even during that whole pathetic, directionless period, I think that deep down I knew that there was more to my life and to myself than just the ordinary psychological impulses for pleasure and vanity that I let drive me. That there were depths to me that were not bullshit or childish but profound, and were not abstract but actually much realer than my clothes or self-image, and that blazed in an almost sacred way — I’m being serious; I’m not just trying to make it sound more dramatic than it was — and that these realest, most profound parts of me involved not drives or appetites but simple attention, awareness, if only I could stay awake off speed.
But I couldn’t. As mentioned, usually afterwards I couldn’t even recall what had seemed so clear and profound about what I’d come to be aware of in that cheap green previous tenant’s easy chair, which somebody had just left there in the room when he’d moved out of the dorm, and which had something broken or bent in its frame under the cushions and kind of tilted to one side when you tried to lean back, so you had to sit up very straight and erect in it, which was an odd feeling. The whole doubling incident would be covered with a sort of mental fuzz the next morning, especially if I woke up late — which I usually did, given what was essentially a kind of amphetamine’s effects on getting to sleep — and had to more or less hit the floor running and hurry to class without even noticing anyone or anything I was running past. In essence, I was one of those types that have a terror of being late but still always seem to be running late. If I came into something late I’d often be too tense and wound up at first even to be able to follow what was going on. I know I inherited the fear of lateness from my father. Plus, it’s true that sometimes the heightened awareness and self-articulation of doubling on Obetrols could go too far—‘ Now I am aware that I am aware that I’m sitting up oddly straight, now I’m aware that I feel an itch on the left side of my neck, now I’m aware that I’m deliberating whether to scratch or not, now I’m aware of paying attention to that deliberation and what the ambivalence about scratching feels like and what those feelings and my awareness of them do to my awareness of the intensity of the itch.’ Meaning that past a certain point, the element of choice of attention in doubling could get lost, and the awareness could sort of explode into a hall of mirrors of consciously felt sensations and thoughts and awareness of awareness of awareness of these. This was attention without choice, meaning the loss of the ability to focus in and concentrate on just one thing, and was another big incentive for moderation in the use of Obetrols, especially late at night — I have to admit that I know that once or twice I got so lost in the halls or stacked layers of awareness of awareness that I went to the bathroom right there on the sofa — this was up at Lindenhurst College, where there were three roommates per suite and a semi-furnished ‘social room’ in the suite’s center, where the sofa was — which, even at the time, seemed like a clear sign of loss of basic priorities and failure to take care of business. For some reason now, I sometimes have a mental picture of me trying to explain to my father how I somehow became so totally focused and aware that I sat there and wet my pants, but the picture cuts off just as his mouth opens for a response, and I’m 99 percent sure this is not a real memory — how could he know anything about a davenport all the way up in Lindenhurst?