My roommate was a stocky blond girl from Wishek who was so dead set on becoming a nurse that she practiced bringing me things — a cup of water or, when I had a headache, aspirin. I let her take my blood pressure and temperature, but would not let her practice on me with a shot needle. I spent most of my time in the library. I hid out there and read in the poetry section. My favorites were all darkly inspired, from Rimbaud to Plath. It was the era of romantic self-destruction. I was especially interested in those who died young, went crazy, disappeared, and went to Paris. Only one survivor of edgeless experience interested me, and she became my muse, my model, my everything. Anas Nin.
I was lost in soul-to-soul contact. I checked her out of the library, over and over, but when summer came I needed her, worse than ever. I had to bring her back with me to keep at my side while I worked at the 4-B’s, while I hung out the family laundry, while I rode Geraldine’s old pinto with Joseph. Anas. I bought all of her diaries — the boxed set. A huge investment. Hard to explain — she was so artistically driven, demure and yet so bold, and those swimming eyes! I made it through the summer. By the time I came back in the fall to live off-campus in a beautiful old half-wrecked farmhouse, I was soaked in the oils of my own manufactured delirium.
Like Anas, I reviewed every thought, all visual trivia became momentous, my faintest desire a raving hunger. I kept Anas with me at all times, though the difference in our lives had become a strain. Anas had had servants to feed her and clean up after her. Even her debauched lovers picked her clothing off the floor; her dinner parties were full of social dangers and alarms, but afterward, she didn’t have to do the dishes. All the same, I, too, kept careful and replete diaries. Each notebook had a title taken from a diary entry by Anas. That fall’s diary was called “Sprouting in the Void.”
As Anas would have done, I wrote long letters to Joseph. He wrote short ones back. Corwin drove me to school and I read aloud from her diary all the way. He only liked it when she had sex — otherwise he said she was “way up in her head.” Corwin visited from time to time. Our grade school romance was a joke between us, and his theft of my uncle’s violin forgiven after the funeral. He was a dealer, and supplied my friends.
I’d moved in with a household of local poets, hippies, and everyone was dirty. I tried to be, too, but my standards of cleanliness kept me from truly entering into the spirit of the times. I had learned from my mother to keep my surroundings in order, my dishes washed, my towels laundered. The sagging clapboard house where we lived had one bathroom. Periodically, as nobody else ever did, I broke down and cleaned. It made me hate my friends to do this, and resent them as I watched the filth build up afterward, but I couldn’t help it. My fastidiousness always overwhelmed my fury.
Late that fall, past midnight, I had one of my bathroom-cleaning fits. I got a bucket, a scrub brush, and a box of something harsh-smelling called Soilax. I ripped an old towel in four. I wet the bathtub down, the toilet and the sink, and then shook the Soilax evenly across every surface. I looked around for a moment and remembered the putty knife I’d stashed in the basement closet. I fetched it, and a plastic bag, and then I began to scrape away the waxlike brown patches of grease, hair, soap, scum, the petrified ropes of toothpaste, the shit, the common dirt.
The cleaning took a couple of hours and the light over me seemed harsh once I quit, because I’d emptied the fixture of dead flies. But when the light poured down out of its clean globe, a few lines of poetry occurred to me.
My brain is like a fixture deep in dead flies.
How I long for my thoughts to shine clear!
Disperse your crumpled wings, college students and professors of UND, Let your bodies blow like dust across the prairies!
I jotted those lines in the notebook, which I always carried in the hip pocket of my jeans. “Sprouting in the Void” was almost filled. I wanted to take a hot bath to remove the disinfectant stink, but what I’d done in patches just made the tub look dirtier, and wrong, like I’d disturbed an ecosystem. So I showered very quickly, then went downstairs, where there was as usual an ongoing party. This one was a welcome-home party for a fellow poet who’d walked back across the Canadian border that day and was going underground, as he kept saying, loudly. He was also going to shower in my clean bathroom. I deserved to drink wine. I remember that it was cheap and very pink and that halfway through a glass of it Corwin took a piece of paper from a plain white envelope and tore off a few small squares, which I put in my mouth.
She tried everything, Anas; she would have tried this! Spanish dancer, I cried to Corwin — he was my third or fourth cousin. She was in love with her cousin. Eduardo! I said to Corwin, and kissed him. This all came back to me much later. For because of the wine, I was not aware that I had taken blotter acid, even after all of its effects were upon me — the hideous malformations of my friends’ faces, the walls and corridors of sound, the whispered instructions from objects, a panicked fear in which I became speechless and could not communicate at all. I locked myself into my room, which I soon realized was a garden for local herpetofauna and some exotics like the deadly hooded cobra, all of which passed underneath the mop board and occasionally slid out of the light fixtures. I was in my room for two days, sleepless, watching red-sided garter snakes, chorus frogs, an occasional Great Plains toad. I passed in and out of terror, unaware of who I was, unremembering of how I’d come to be in the state I was in. My reclusiveness was so habitual and the household so chaotic that no one really noticed my absence.
On the third day, only one eastern tiger salamander appeared, Abystoma tigrinum. It was comforting, an old friend. I began to sense a reliable connection between one moment and the next, and to feel with some security that I inhabited one body and one consciousness. The terror lessened to a milder dread. I ate and drank. On the fourth day, I slept. I wept steadily the fifth day and sixth. And so gradually I became again the person I had known as myself. But I was not the same. I had found out what a slim rail I walked. I had lost my unifier of sensations, lost mind, lost confidence in my own control over my sanity. I’d frightened myself and it was all the more a comfort to return to the diaries. Anas was so deeply aware of her inner states. She was descriptive of the effects of the world upon her — the time of day, the sky, the weather, all affected her moods. I began to shake as I read some of her entries, so filled with detail. I needed someone to pay close attention to the world I had nearly left behind.
“Everything. The house bewitches me. The lamps are lighted. The fantastic shadows cast by the colored lights on the lacquered walls…”
That was her bedroom in September 1929.
No reptiles for Anas. My own dread kept returning. It was as though in those awful days I’d switched inner connections and now the fear seemed wired into me. Panic states. Temporary shocks — if I were even slightly startled, I could not stop shaking. Frightful but momentary breaks with reality. Daydreams so vivid they made me sick. I managed to function. Because I was so quiet anyway, I hid these dislocations of mind. Only, I had determined that I did not somehow belong with the careless well of the world anymore. I belonged with…Anas. On campus, I watched the well-fed, sane, secure, shining-haired and leather-belted ribbons of students pass me by. I would never be one of them! Instead, as I could not dance — what was Spanish dancing anyway? — and as I could not yet go to Paris, I decided that I must live and work in a mental hospital.