Living & Arts

Part II: Some say that the world will end in ice

In print | January 29, 2009

Unless you’ve taken Clinical Psych (I take great satisfaction in the fact that the psychology department no longer considers me “abnormal”), you probably know only the basics of obsessive compulsive disorder; superlative personal hygiene, exceptional organizational skills, an inclination toward solving mysteries. I’d like to begin this week’s installment with a short explanation of the disorder.

Look up and consider the possibility that, thousands of miles above you, a broken satellite is falling at tremendous speeds en route towards an intimate rendezvous with your skull. I would like you to prove, with absolute certainty, that you are not about to receive an involuntary celestial trepanning courtesy of Verizon Wireless. You can argue that this is highly unlikely, cite countless statistics, and I’m sure these would be very accurate and sciency but they only go so far. You cannot prove anything, one way or the other. Anything is possible. We live in a world not of certainty but of endless incalculable risk. The music of the spheres is chaos.

You say “so what?” and choose to ignore the possibility of your imminent death and continue your day. But imagine “so what” was not good enough, that you could not live happily without absolute confidence vis-à-vis the security of your noggin. So you check the local airport flight schedule, just to be safe. You wear a football helmet to bed and shower beneath a metal umbrella. You lock yourself in your basement, shun human contact, spend every waking moment attempting to broadcast a telekinetic barrier deflecting incoming projectiles. These are minor inconveniences, but aren’t they preferable to being killed by falling debris?

Not really, unfortunately. It is possible for a human being to reach a point where a jagged metal blade bisecting their brain would actually increase cognitive and behavioral functionality.
This is OCD. It’s the intolerance of risk, however minute, and the surrender to protective ritual, however unbearable. The voice of OCD is like that of a beloved grandmother, recently passed away and resurrected by eldritch magicks. It is maternal, condescending and affectionate, with a slight suggestion of righteous indignation, “I know what’s best for you, dear,” it says, a hint of formaldehyde on its breath, its face plastered with funereal makeup, a fly crawling about its unblinking painted eye. You listen because guilt and fear compel you to, despite the sense of unease, and then before you know it Granny Goodness has cracked your skull open and is slurping up your brains with toothless, rotting gums.

OCD demands safety and certainty. It wants life to become a chessboard and then for all the dark squares to be removed. OCD makes the world as small as a room, then small as your head, then even smaller than that. It is an unwillingness to live with what cannot be proven and the fact that nothing really can ever really be proven is regrettable but irrelevant to its purposes. I did any number of asinine, irrational things not because they would protect me but because they might, and I’d be damned if the one night I failed to properly pray the lord my soul to keep was the night I died before I woke.

Indeed only recently have I started to understand how intrinsically fucked my childhood behavior was. Many of my early obsessions fixed, not on illness or uncleanliness, but on imminent apocalypse. I remember in first grade an overzealous classmate claimed that countless generations from now our sun would overheat and explode; the same year a visiting environmental group made the (retrospectively somewhat dubious) claim that given our current rate of deforestation, the Earth would run out of oxygen by 2005. I spent weeks arguing with myself against the possibility of such hypothetical apocalypses, determined to prove they would not occur, but never quite succeeding. But my first-full blown bout with OCD I owe to Kurt Vonnegut. My third-grade teacher, neglecting the handful of her charges suffering from undiagnosed mania, told us about a book she was reading. That book was Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle.” In her pre-digested version of the novel, the world was threatened by the specter of the evil molecule Ice-9, which would supposedly freeze every non-water substance on the planet once released. I imagine that Kathleen (her name was Kathleen; I went to ‘progressive’ private school, so we called our teachers by their first names and drew pictures of symphonies instead of learning long-division) had forgotten this by the end of the day. I imagine the other students forgot it too.

But oh Lordy, I did not forget it. I could not forget it, no matter how hard I tried. The threat of Ice-9 was real, even though I understood that the actual substance of Ice-9 was emphatically not, but if some hack sci-fi writer had imagined the stuff, then surely it could be recreated in reality? Ice-9 consumed my days, it delicately insinuated itself into my classes and assignments and into my dreams. The threat of Ice-9 could not be eradicated, no matter how many times my parents assured me that it did not exist, no matter how many times my therapist had me write its name on a scrap of lined paper and burn it or tear it or flush it down the toilet. My only strategic recourse, the only thing I could do, was to spend every waking moment examining my surroundings and considering my course of action, should hypothetical cryo-eschaton occur. I spent hours studying the position of sinks and flow of water from leaky fountains, planning how I would contact my parents and gather supplies in this inevitable frozen wasteland. No matter where I went or what I did, I was haunted by an invisible wave of cold blue, driving forward, uncontrollable and unstoppable because it did not exist. I bathed ice and showered ice, I slept, drank and breathed it. My brain seized up and solidified, tattooed by frost, a cool-blue chemical pearl.

What eventually saved me was my father. He mentioned off-handedly that I’d had it wrong. According to Vonnegut Ice-9 didn’t freeze everything except water. It froze only water. Suddenly, just like that, my mental paralysis was shattered. Of course! Triumph! The imaginary freezing molecule I had dreaded was only made up, completely different from the imaginary freezing molecule that actually imaginarily existed! Ice-9 only froze water! Of course! It was all a big misunderstanding. My family and I could certainly survive that kind of chemical doomsday. We’d traverse the frozen oceans and hunt penguins. No big deal. Problem solved.

The reasoning behind the whole process was aggressively nonsensical, of course, and could be easily dismissed by any sane individual. “Why didn’t you just stop worrying about it earlier,” I can hear you ask, and my only response is that I was psychologically incapable of doing so. I wish I could offer a more satisfying narrative, with character development and such, but for what it’s worth the whole mess never made much sense to me either. That’s why we call it a disorder.

As I grew older these apocalyptic scenarios lost their potency (with the exception of the zombocalypse which maintains a certain fascination). I never entirely convinced myself they could not occur, but as I grew older they seemed to become less plausible. I learned to accept the possibility of the end of the world, to live with it instead of trying to negate it. Besides, I had survived puberty, I was entering high school and I would soon awaken to possibilities far more horrible than the extinction of all life on the planet.

Hamlet is a senior. He can be reached at hamlet.wrenncroft@gmail.com. The next installment will be published in two weeks.