of self-scrutiny, and correct a little, to find the way out of the maddening circular game where we are forever eating our own tails. Not so, Your Honor. The months passed, and before long I’d turned those pictures of myself to face the wall, and lost myself in writing another book.
BY THE TIME I got back from Norfolk it was dark. I parked the car, then walked up and down Broadway, inventing various errands in order to delay returning to confront the absence of the desk for as long as possible. When at last I went home, there was a note on the hall table. Thank you for this, it said, in surprisingly small handwriting. I hope to meet you again one day. And then, below her signature, Leah had put her address on Ha’Oren Street in Jerusalem.
I was only in the apartment for fifteen or twenty minutes—enough time to glance at the yawning emptiness where the desk had stood, fix myself a sandwich, and, full of decisive purpose, go to fetch the box containing the various worked-up sections of the new book—when I experienced the first attack. It came over me quickly, with almost no warning. I began fighting for air. Everything seemed to close around me, as if I’d been dropped into a narrow hole in the ground. My heartbeat became so rapid I wondered whether I was going into cardiac arrest. The anxiety was overwhelming—something like the feeling of having been left behind on a dark shore while everyone and everything I’d ever known in my life had departed on a great, illuminated ship. Clutching my heart and talking aloud to try to calm myself, I paced the former living room that was now also a former study, and only when I turned on the television and saw the face of the anchorman did the feeling at last begin to subside, though my hands continued to shake for ten minutes more.
In the week that followed I experienced similar attacks daily, sometimes even twice a day. To the original symptoms were added terrible stomach pain, extreme nausea, and more varieties of terror hidden in the smallest things than I ever imagined possible. Although at first the attacks were set off by glancing at or being reminded of my work, very quickly they spread out in all directions, and threatened to infect everything. Just the idea of going out of the apartment and trying to accomplish some tiny, inane task that in my infinite wellness I would have thought nothing of filled me with dread. I stood trembling at the door, trying to think myself through it and out the other side. Twenty minutes later I would still be standing there, and all that had changed was that I was now drenched in sweat.
None of it made sense. I’d been steadily writing and publishing books at the rate of about one every four years for half of my life. The emotional difficulties of the profession were legion, and I had stumbled and fallen again and again. The crises that had begun with the dancer and the child’s cry had been the worst, but there had been others in the past. Sometimes a depression, the result of the war writing wages on one’s confidence and sense of purpose, all but incapacitated me. It had happened often between books, when, used to having my work to reflect myself back to me, I had to make do with staring out onto an opaque nothingness. But no matter how bad it had gotten, my ability to write, however haltingly and poorly, had never abandoned me. I’d always felt the surge of the fighter in me, and had been able to drum up the opposition; to turn the nothingness into something to push, and push, and push against, until I’d broken through to the other side, still swinging. But this—this was something entirely different. This had bypassed all of my defenses, had slipped unnoticed past the halls of reason, like a supervirus that has become resistant to everything, and only once it had taken root in the very core of me had it reared its terrifying head.
Five days after the attacks began I phoned Dr. Lichtman. After my marriage had ended I’d stopped seeing her, having slowly given up on the idea of undertaking vast renovations on the foundation of my self in order to make myself more suitable for social life. I’d accepted the consequences of my natural tendencies, letting my habits slide,