This is the work of a writer whose modest intellectual abilities have been scattered to the winds by the most degraded type of postmodernism. In this mongrel book, rootless cosmopolitanism finds its aesthetic correlative in shopworn irony. Among the low points are a flaccid discussion of French New Wave cinema, in which the writer inhales the last fumes of 1968 and strikes postures intended to impress us with his radicalism, and an essay on the figure of the setting sun in Western art that tilts at being a critique of Eurocentrism and the notion of decline, but loses its way in a porridge of half-understood concepts drawn from the great German Romantics. Seen from the cliff top, with the sea wind in your face and the ancient stones close at hand, there is no challenge here, just cowardice and confusion. True wisdom arises out of primordial fear, which is fear of the unknowable essence of things from which all authority derives. The author of this collection of platitudes is neither smart enough to intuit that essence, nor self-aware enough to know how afraid he ought to be.

The apartment seemed much the same. Nina’s toys were scattered around, books and magazines piled on every surface. Rei had, perhaps inevitably, spread out slightly while I’d been away. A pair of her shoes were discarded under the sofa. Several folders of legal documents were wedged on the kitchen counter between the toaster and the fruit bowl. As ever, the windows were filthy. The landlord never responded to our requests to have them cleaned, and we hadn’t got round to organizing it ourselves. The late summer light filtered in, a dirty yellow, outlining a trapezoid on the dusty Afghan rug. Nina was using this shape as a sort of abstract table as she hosted a tea party for her dolls, slicing imaginary cake and telling off her guests for snatching before it was their turn. She paid no attention to me, which was good, since I was finding her little game almost unbearably moving.

Each night, Rei waited until I had finished in the bathroom, before taking her shower and brushing her teeth. I would go into my own room and close the door. Then I’d hear her slippered feet in the corridor outside. I slept badly, another side effect of my medication, but I never left the room. Since I found it hard to concentrate on reading, and I didn’t want to make Rei nervous by wandering around the apartment, I spent my insomniac hours in an activity that I would have sneered at just a few months previously, filling in elaborate mandala patterns in one of those “adult” coloring books that are marketed as tools for stress relief. It was a pointless task (in general I’ve never liked doing anything “just to pass the time”) and it made me feel like a prisoner whiling away his sentence doing weaving or scrimshaw, but I persisted. I was determined to get well, to be normal. Whatever it took to come back home.

Every so often, Rei and I tried to talk, with mixed results. I’ve always found it hard to speak on cue about my emotions. I am an articulate person, but only about things that don’t touch me. As soon as someone asks what I feel, I get confused. I don’t have the immediate access to my feelings that seems, to my eternal amazement, to be the birthright of most human beings. What question could be more profound than how are you? It feels lazy to say just any old thing, so I look inside myself and invariably this is a terrible idea. Searching for feelings is like being the lookout on a ship, shining a lantern into thick fog. Objects that appear close at hand recede into the murk, or reveal themselves as chimeras. Somewhere off the port bow are icebergs. At any rate, it takes me a great deal of time to formulate a response, and to the questioner it must seem as if I’ve been struck dumb. [...]

[...] Let’s just hold each other, she said. So we did, lying under the covers, our bodies molded together, big spoon and little spoon. Gradually her breathing became deeper and more regular and I realized that she’d fallen asleep. I stroked her shoulder and felt a vast gulf between us, formed out of all the days when we had not been together, the days of my absence and the days before I knew her, when she had said and done things I would never find out about. I could touch her, brush my fingers over her skin, but it was like touching the surface of some mysterious ancient stone. Inside, Rei stretched away to infinity, a galaxy of unseen stars.

How do you camouflage despair? If I tell the truth, I suspect that I’ll set myself on the yellow brick road back to the clinic. But if I don’t tell the truth to her, someone who is paid to listen, then what hope do I have of finding a way through the selva oscura? Why do you think you find it so hard to speak plainly, the therapist often asks. She tells me not to make allusions, to try to talk directly about myself, without filtering what I say through references to books or films or art. She says she doesn’t care about my references. I say I don’t know how to speak any other way, it is how I understand myself. These references are my work, what I do. She says it’s deflection, a form of resistance. I can run down the clock by talking about Kleist or Chinese scholar’s rocks, but I won’t get any better. I am trying, she says, to present myself as the expert, instead of the patient. It is a thing a lot of her male clients do. I say I don’t think of myself as an expert in anything. I never set out to be any kind of authority. I just wanted to be left alone. At some point during every appointment she will remind me that getting well means accepting certain things about what has happened. It means understanding that my picture of the world is distorted. I find this hard to hear, and not just because I’m bored of listening to her say it. It is shameful to be a broken mechanism, to have to sit obediently while someone else goes about putting you right.

It’s not that I’m important or special, just that up until now there have been two tracks or timelines: the one that Rei and this little group of our friends live on, in which the future is predictable, an extrapolation from the past, a steady progression in which we are gradually turning into our own mothers and fathers, men and women who make plans and save for retirement, who go to our kids’ schools and participate in parent-teacher conferences, our adult bodies too big for the child-size furniture. Then there’s the second track, the occult track on which all this normality is a paper screen over something bloody and atavistic that is rising up out of history to meet us. I am the ragged membrane, the porous barrier between the two. Somehow, through me, through my negligence, the second track has contaminated the first. My madness, the madness for which I’ve been medicated and therapized and involuntarily detained, is about to become everyone’s madness. The proof of my sanity, my fitness to exist in the ordinary timeline of parent-teacher conferences and 401(k)s, was an acceptance that the two streams must never cross, that it was my job to keep them separate. I have not done that. Now all our throats are bared to the knife.