Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

Author:Ben Lerner
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Poetry, Fiction
ISBN: 9781566892742
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Published: 2011-08-22T18:30:00+00:00

The relationship I might have had in the flattering light of the subjunctive.

After the first week of my new dosage, however, a week in which neither Isabel nor Teresa called on me, I achieved a new emotional state, or a state in which emotions no longer obtained. When I would try to describe this condition in chats with Cyrus it seemed utterly contradictory; on the one hand, I now felt nothing, my affect a flat spectrum over a defined band; I could watch videos of beheadings or contractors firing on Iraqi civilians or the Fox News commentators without a reaction and I did. I reread Levin’s most soul–wrenching scenes without the slightest affective fluctuation. Although I still did not leave my apartment because I was waiting for Isabel and/or Teresa to ring my bell and run up the stairs and confess her love for me, begging me to remain in Spain or to take her with me to the States, I waited now without feeling. And if one of them were to appear and make the most dramatic spectacle of her affection, I began to doubt I’d be moved significantly. At the same time, however, I felt a kind of euphoria at my sudden inability to feel, an exaggerated second order of feeling that did not alter the first order numbness. This euphoria, if that’s what it was, was very far from my body, and therefore compatible with my anhedonia; it was as if I were suspended in a warm bath outside of myself. I felt something like a rush of power, the power to experience the world as though under glass, and this detachment, coupled with my reduced need or capacity for sleep, gave me a kind of vampiric energy, although I was my own prey. I could read and write for hours on end with what felt like total concentration, barely noticing nightfall, and in the early hours of the morning, I would wander around Madrid, passing Isabel’s apartment or Teresa’s gallery just to show myself I could do so without a spike in agony. I would often watch the dawn from the colonnade in El Retiro or one of the benches on El Paseo del Prado or take the Metro to a stop I didn’t know and watch the sunrise there, return home, sleep for a few hours, wake and take white pills, hash, coffee, and with an uncanny energy resume my adventures in insensitivity. I was vaguely afraid, of what I couldn’t say; maybe that I would throw myself in front of a bus without knowing what I was doing or break into Isabel’s apartment and tear apart her brother’s notebook or put a trash can through the gallery window or otherwise act out, powerless to stop myself from such a distance. But I also felt, for the first time, like a writer, as if all the real living were on the page, and I had to purchase a stack of ruled notebooks from Casa del Libro to contain my poems and notes.

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