Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 66

‘What I’m trying to ask, I think, is whether this feeling you’re communicating is the feeling you associate with your depression.’

Her gaze moved off. ‘That’s what you guys want to call it, I guess.’

The doctor clicked his pen slowly a few times and explained that he’s more interested here in what she would choose to call the feeling, since it was her feeling.

The resumed study of the movement of her feet. ‘When people call it that I always get pissed off because I always think depression sounds like you just get like really sad, you get quiet and melancholy and just like sit quietly by the window sighing or just lying around. A state of not caring about anything. A kind of blue kind of peaceful state.’ She seemed to the doctor decidedly more animated now, even as she seemed unable to meet his eyes. Her respiration had sped back up. The doctor recalled classic hyperventila-tory episodes being characterized by carpopedal spasms, and reminded himself to monitor the patient’s hands and feet carefully during the interview for any signs of tetanic contraction, in which case the prescribed therapy would be I.V. calcium in a saline percentage he would need quickly to look up.

‘Well this’ — she gestured at herself— ‘isn’t a state. This is a feeling. I feel it all over. In my arms and legs.’

‘That would include your carp — your hands and feet?’

‘All over. My head, throat, butt. In my stomach. It’s all over everywhere. I don’t know what I could call it. It’s like I can’t get enough outside it to call it anything. It’s like horror more than sadness. It’s more like horror. It’s like something horrible is about to happen, the most horrible thing you can imagine — no, worse than you can imagine because there’s the feeling that there’s something you have to do right away to stop it but you don’t know what it is you have to do, and then it’s happening, too, the whole horrible time, it’s about to happen and also it’s happening, all at the same time.’

‘So you’d say anxiety is a big part of your depressions.’

It was now not clear whether she was responding to the doctor or not. ‘Everything gets horrible. Everything you see gets ugly. Lurid is the word. Doctor Carton said lurid, one time. That’s the right word for it. And everything sounds harsh, spiny and harsh-sounding, like every sound you hear all of a sudden has teeth. And smelling like I smell bad even after I just got out of the shower. It’s like what’s the point of washing if everything smells like I need another shower.’

The doctor looked intrigued rather than concerned for a moment as he wrote all this down. He preferred handwritten notes to a laptop because he felt M.D.s who typed into their laps during clinical interviews gave a cold impression.