As a teenager, I refused to leave the house because I thought I wasn’t real. I’d get halfway down the street and the world would morph into a cartoon: harsh, white light flattening the houses into toys, then into television screens. My terror was obscene, adrenaline kneading the air from my lungs. I screamed desperately, indiscriminately, pounding the skin off my fists and into the ground.
When I think of how they started, those attacks of acute unreality, I think of the shopping mall and how I first went mad. I was 14, sucking Pepsi through a straw, breathing too fast under fluorescent lights, the ceiling unloosening itself and melting my mother’s face into the floor. I knew I was going mad, perhaps had always been mad, perhaps had never existed. The doctor who saw me after I deposited myself, shoeless, in his surgery, didn’t exist either – he, too, was a hallucination bobbing at my ear.
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