Panic Room

For a long time, you have had the feeling that everyone experienced the same event, but few seem to care about finding out what it meant. Most seem eager to pretend that it did not happen at all. That has made you feel alienated and frustrated.

The worst of the "temporary" changes made to grapple with the event have become permanent parts of ordinary everydayness. You were assured that they were emergency measures. Desperate contingencies. Most seem not to notice or care. It is almost as if two thirds of your book club has shown up without reading the bloody book, and then shamelessly shouted observations and sarcastic barbs, heedless of what they are talking about.

Gradually, you have felt the world getting stranger and less hospitable. You have palpated your anger, and found fear metastasizing inside it. Irrational, animal terror that has no proximal cause, no specific parent you can name. Most of your day scares you or infuriates you, or does both.

You have begun to panic, if you're honest. You're embarrassed, but you do not want to lie to yourself.

The past month has been grim. You were told that the entire floor of the crumbling high rise where you have been renting a tiny, ugly apartment that you dislike had to be treated by pest control.

You can remember an innocent time, before the event, when pest control seemed like a quaint anachronism, like plagues or fascists or abundant goods worth their respective prices. Those sunny days of yore, when few had ever seen a cockroach or a bed bug or a case of measles or an illiterate journalist, seem more and more to you like the details of a story you thought was news, that turned out to be fiction.

You followed instructions, though. You cleaned your sorry abode with rigor. You gathered up clutter that used to mean a great deal to you and pitched it into the bin, steely eyed and merciless.

Who clings to a high school yearbook or a photograph of a smiling, vanished lover or a copy of a dissertation that no one will ever read again? Everything disintegrates into amnesia by and by.

Things don't deserve your loyalty.

You went to the team of creaking, insatiable dumpsters behind the high rise where life is low with a teeming cardboard box of the past. You condemned it to the yawning, plastic mouth. There is a smell among the dumpsters that is too familiar. Good enough being eaten alive by insufferable. Moldy bread used to make grilled cheese.

You remember seeing an industrious member of your neighborhood's burgeoning unhoused population (you had no concept of an unhoused person, in the before time, when cartoons and cereal were enough to convince you to wake up smiling) in the little herd of dumpsters behind what you wish was not your home. You know you should have made more of it at the time, but you're still a sentimental idiot. You hoped he'd find something useful, or edible, or worth a pawn broker's time.

What he found was an old checkbook of yours, at the bottom of your box of rotting memories. He started nibbling at your modest balance, then took a slavering, hungry bite.

Your bank watches everything. Your bank alerted you. You could not believe it, lying on the implausibly comfortable bed in the hotel room you could not afford, where you were spending the night so that you would not breathe the poison that was supposed to convince the pests to leave your sorry nest in the sky alone.

You were robbed because you were proud of your detachment from worldly things.

You go to work and discover that none of the young people with whom you have been looking forward to discussing a novel you love have read any of it. They think it's funny that you expected them to read it, in fact.

You are old fashioned, primitive, naive. No one does the reading anymore. Why would anyone read the whole thing when the AI can give you a clear summary in a heartbeat?

For that matter, how dare you ask your students questions about something they're supposed to have read? You are rude. You are awkward. You are full of big words and bad, old ideas that no one understands or cares about. No one can read cursive anymore. You might as well be scrawling hieroglyphics on the white board. Where are the slides?

You have the familiar, terrible feeling that a job you loved has rushed to become something smaller and more efficient. A shiny, mechanical bullshit generator has replaced the shaggy, plodding animal called thinking.

So you go to the panic room.

When you are there, it is like you were sent someone else's, posh dream by mistake. At first, you feel like you don't belong. That fades pretty quickly. They know you there. You are not just another consumer. You are consumed.

By dread, by regret, by guilt, by incredulous outrage, by disease and decay and debt and all of the other, nasty children of time. You are devoured by dreams that are too vivid and rich in nuance and plausibility to be dead. You knew a better life well. Your nostalgia is acute. Ghosts show up to reminisce with you, and you resent their freedom from corporeal captivity.

The goat god and his genial companions understand. They offer you a kind of hospitality that is practically extinct in the desolate, digital days we call the present. Pan has explained it to you. He is a god himself, so he knows that any, disheveled, distracted douchebag who turns up at his door could be divine.

Cunning costumes come cheap when you can curate reality, or parts of it at any rate, with your will. He told you about his name, too. Pan means "all" in the native tongue of the first people he met, eons ago. Simple folk, the Arkadians were sure that all of the deities on Olympus must have rejoiced when Pan was born. You think it would take a special sort of person to be comfortable with a god that is mostly an animal. In fact, you can't help but wonder if the idea of a goat god occurred to a regular person at all. Perhaps it took a mind with supernatural objectivity to see that immortal intelligence could call a creature like Pan home.

He told you the other connotation of his name: panic is named after him, because he was reputedly capable of spreading it like warm butter over the bread of every mind around, just by shouting. Panic is the fear that reminds you that your body is indistinguishable from any other ape's. Panic tells your body to flee, before you can think of the word, or understand its meaning.

Your panic made him answer when you knocked, the first time. No one understands it better than the father of its name.

His genial companions have laughed like mad every time you've shown up. You can't decide if they bet that you wouldn't have the nerve, or if they find every visitor equally ridiculous. They always seem a little drunk. Pan has that effect.

The first thing they insist upon doing is feeding you. Roast game; feta; lakes of wine that they cut with water and spice up, to make it seem harmless. Bread that seems to be gently massaged by the Mediterranean sun before it's torn into rough chunks and slathered with pleasure. Then they want to talk.

Pan is mostly interested in why you are afraid. You tell him about dead monsters coming back to life: war, plague, famine, ignorance, rapacious, amoral greed, religious zealotry and hypocrisy, intelligent machines and drooling idiots without the natural intelligence the gods gave a goose. He's always amazed.

You told him about being robbed, and about the bugs coming back despite the pest control. He was incredulous, insisted that you have more wine, and told you to chat with his genial companions.

Pan's genial companions (Daphne and Syrinx, if you remember correctly) claim to be wood nymphs. If Pan exists, you can accept that they do. Syrinx sometimes shifts shape, and becomes pipes, which Pan plays. Filthy double entendres about blowing proliferate after these performances.

Daphne and Syrinx can't believe that you have never been married. Their perplexed pity seems authentic. They insist upon getting naked with you, once the serious talk is over. They love being embodied, and the fact that you are too seems always to strike them as exciting serendipity.

No mortal makes love like an immortal.

You wake feeling spoiled and happy after each visit to the panic room. You are prepared to face another day. You know it will make you knock in a way that Pan will answer.