in the hall of mirrors

aargh...

it ITCHES.

Well, it did, anyway. After much rather frantic vacuuming, washing, and a happy improvement in the weather – now merely warm rather than hot – things are finally okay....

It started some years ago – must be about 1990/1991 – the summer that Steven was my roommate. It was after Paul P– moved out, after his life and job disintegrated under the impact of his introduction to drugs that were heavier than he was accustomed to. Steven lived with me for three months – an obviously, even self-evidently, sweet guy, with a serene, rather saintly demeanor. That didn't, unfortunately, make me like him – perhaps the loss of a good friend as a roommate, or perhaps that saintliness, which seemed to cover up a mild, self-absorbed shallowness, acted like a minor but endless irritation on me.

Steven had a dog, a big red setter, who came with lots and lots of fleas. And it was summer... so, when I finally decided I wasn't willing to live with the dog, or Steven, any more, I continued having the fleas as roommates. It was difficult to get them out of the floorboards; and I probably hadn't tried as hard as I could, because for most of the year you didn't notice – only at the height of summer was there inevitably a sudden burst of bites.

When I moved back to San Francisco, I assumed I'd brought them with me, in the rugs or something. And then in Hong Kong, and then later here in England... because every year, at the peak of summer, usually when I was thinking in the back of my mind that this year I would be left alone, suddenly one day I would start to itch like I was being bitten. Completely maddening; hard to sleep, restless but tired, and usually lasting several weeks. At least I thought I was being bitten... a year or two later I heard that Steven had died of AIDS – which was unexpected, as he had seemed distinctly healthier than I when we shared that apartment (or, at least, he was obsessed with his health – but I suppose that was actually the opposite signal). This was all of a piece with the peculiarity that I would live when a lot of friends and lovers didn't – even my entire HIV therapy group (three years later, only two out of six us were still around).

So last summer, I started itching again. Completely infuriated and increasingly frantic, I went to the doctor to get some clear information – was I getting bitten or not? After two visits, and some extended arguing (I must have been at my most irritating with the poor doctor – itching is not amusing, and I was certain something was biting me), the doctor convinced me that there was nothing there at all – that I was simply having a summer allergy to dust, probably to dust mites at the height of summer, a result of not vacuuming enough and needing a new mattress, etc. I went out and spent about £200 or so on new bedding, and anti-dust mite sprays....

So, when yesterday it started again, I knew what to do. And glory be, it worked.

Strange, though: it reminds me of a minor event in Gaiman's Sandman, when Delirium (the personification of madness), in irritation at a highway patrolman who is criticizing her driving, curses him with the delusion that he is covered with insects – forever.

Of course, maybe it wouldn't take such a severe curse. Just, maybe, a rather small curse: if someone, say when they're told to move out of an apartment, put a hoodoo on someone so that, every summer, they would remember the fleas, the dog – and perhaps Steven himself....

Night, heat, stasis, change

Last night remained hot – not very hot, but hot enough to reproduce that feeling of endless night, of I'll-never-get-to-sleep, where faint noises (not traffic – something electrical? an air conditioner a block away?) and the pillow, which is only blessedly cool for a moment when you change to another part of it, create a space of awareness where time stops, and your whole life, mind, imagination are suddenly seen as contingent decisions, as things that actually didn't need to go the way that they did.

I've had many nights that are technically like that; many of them acutely uncomfortable (stomach problems, mostly), or some that were worried (I don't, fortunately, tend to be wakeful in anxious circumstances – good thing, I suppose; instead I stay asleep as long as I can, to avoid them). However, this one was somewhat different, and had instead a resonance with other kinds of nights that are rarer: where I really seem to see everything as an accident, and vaguely wonder how it could all be made different. Where my whole life seems to be a story – and therefore, of course, a story that could have been told differently.

The night that I was reminded of last night: at some point – when would it have been? – we were in New Hampshire for a cousin's wedding, and I was put upstairs in the front room of my grandmother's apartment, along with a handsome red-headed sailor. Impossible to sleep; and impossible to not be aware of this man (I was pretty young – late teens, early twenties? – and acutely disoriented by how close he was, and how attractive he was). A very long night, with I'm sure passionate dreams (now pretty faded or forgotten); but also with a broader awareness of myself in time (made more acute because of the relative narrowness of the house, of the time-scale, of the space-scale, of the area where the Greek side of the family lives – it was always so disturbing for me to imagine myself in a smaller town like this one).

I suppose the normal responses to such a thing are: well, one can't feel that way all the time, if one did one wouldn't get anything done at all. (Which might explain why I get so little done, at all.) Or: that's existential angst, and then you try to figure it out by reading and discussing. (Hmm. Feh.) But I suppose I want something that would touch on my long, close relationship with fantasy, with ideas of science fiction and magic and such – that somehow, if I really can see my life whole, that it could be changed, either retroactively or at least from this point forward.

Today, I was continuing to read Bender's Sandman Companion, where he runs through synopses and details of Gaiman's wonderful Sandman series. (I first read the Sandman books this winter, at Vanessa's instigation – and was surprised to realize that they are indeed extremely good, and very much to my taste.) When Bender launched into an explanation of The Kindly Ones, book 9 of the series, I abruptly became very, well, avoidant – in a way that has been very familiar over the past five years or so: when any novel, story, television drama, reaches the point where terrible things are happening and everyone has to cope with them, I shut down and become unwilling to read/see any more.

Wimpy, I know, but there you are. Although I've always been a bit like that, it was never as bad as it is now, since the Australian debacle. A weakness in the area of dealing with disaster – frankly, all of Aristotle's catharsis theories seem beside the point; or perhaps, more accurately, after one has been through several disasters, the 'created' disasters of fiction don't seem like any fun. At all. (Incidentally, this is probably why I like CSI and Law and Order so much these days – the really terrible stuff happens at the beginning, quickly, and then most of the show is taken up with calmly figuring out what happened, and of course with retribution.)

In The Kindly Ones, many terrible things happen; things that have been made inevitable by various decisions and mistakes strewn through the previous eight books. Change happens – big change, with finality – and a whole relative stasis, where big things return to normal after everything gets a bit messed about, vanishes. Brilliant, but difficult for me to stomach: perhaps the greatest mercy of this book is the speed with which everything happens – you can see it coming, and then it does, and then there's nothing to do but think about the aftermath.

Terrible things happening: yes, I know, These Things Happen To Teach Us, etc. So many people around me are going through difficult times, transitions, trials – C–, P–, V–, and others I'm sure. I know: I should be more willing to be the confidante, the helper, a supporting player in other people's dramas, but even that seems emotionally tiring. Maybe I'm just at a stage – or perhaps more accurately, at the end of a stage – where I'm tired of things happening, and can't deal with them or learn from them. Wanting stasis; wanting time to slow down; wanting a relatively simple, daily approach to life....