Panic

Trigger Warning:

This episode contains references to trigger warnings

Content Warning:

This episode contains references to rape and animal cruelty. Also infrequent strong language. 

Transcript

Panic

For the majority of Professor Laetitia Saville’s lecture, Hugh Hughes had been bothered by a persistent and unbroken hum. Looking up, he suddenly pinpointed the source of the hum. There it was, like an idea. A lightbulb. The lightbulb swung freely from a length of wire, like a distended testicle, continuously emitting that faint, high hum. The lightbulb should have had a shade around it. Shorn of shade, it looked like the establishing shot of a scene of torture in a slasher film. The grubby ceiling, too, was equally able to suggest such unpleasantness, apt to encourage the burgeoning of such an idea in Hugh Hughes’ mind.

The lecture, on the topic of independent 90s cinema (with an emphasis on female auteurs of colour), was taking place in the usual timetabled room. Because the cohort was small, the lecture took place in a classroom rather than a lecture theatre. Hugh Hughes sought out the face of the class’s one black student, the one black person present (apart from the professor). He was, as usual, interested in what her reaction would be to a subject which he felt pertained to her specifically, more specifically than any other student, but, of course, he didn’t want her or anyone else to see him looking, he didn’t want to be observed in the act of looking. As a matter of fact, she invariably looked particularly disinterested and this baffled Hugh somewhat. A number of the movies on the module were racial in theme, (a fact he didn’t necessarily attribute to the fact that Professor Saville was black). If Hugh had been black, Hugh estimated, he would have made sure that he appeared alert and focused, ready to disagree or object, when people- most of them white- were talking about black people, or so-called “black” issues. Hugh worried about all this. It kept him up at night. Which was only right, he supposed.          

Hugh had never noticed the lightbulb before, nor the grubby ceiling above it. He had never been bothered by the hum. Or perhaps the hum had never been there. This soft, disturbing tinnitus- like some quiet, muted voice of mania- was new and unusual in this room. Or so Hugh thought. 

Hugh always took the closest possible seat to the screen, to the lecturer. It was one of those things he did automatically, without even thinking about it. He looked behind him and cursorily scanned the room. None of his peers seemed bothered by the hum above their heads, by the lightbulb swinging back and forth in the breezeless room, shedding its unclean, pale light.

He was quite gratified at first, when the wind picked up outside and started wailing. Hugh listened to the intervallic howls of blowiness, peaks of intensity separated by long quiet patches. The sound of nature’s huge ventilations distracted him from the hum of the lightbulb. 

He could not concentrate on what Professor Saville was saying. This was not out of discourtesy or disinterest. He was unable to make sense of her words but he saw, clearly, the slide images: black-skinned women clad in the accoutrements of that sought-after directorial power, so long withheld: baseball caps or headsets on their heads, an open script in their hands, maybe a particular angle of lens on a cord dangling down from around their necks.

Because of Miramax’s role in aggressively distributing and Oscar-campaigning on behalf of independent cinema, Harvey Weinstein came up. The huge pre-MeToo image- not the recent mugshot, not the post-verdict photographs of him in handcuffs, not the court-artist’s impression- showed a grinning Harvey Weinstein. The image was from the nineties. It showed him, basking like a big, bipedal lizard, at the peak of his power, the long blood-red carpet on which he was posing stretching indefinitely into the distance- a distance where curious, clustered figures became indistinct and spectral. 

Now, ten minutes before the end of the lecture, both sounds bothered Hugh with matched intensity. The quiet hum of the lightbulb remained destructively audible; the gale outside remained strong- the gaps between the peaks seemed to shorten, and, at times, the fast, pressured, giddy winds really did sound like screaming children. Not like children in pain. More like children going down slides or flumes that were more frightening than they had expected. 

Still, Harvey Weinstein’s big, smug, shit-eating grin remained there on the screen, large and garish. It was all there, his compact, curled head of hair, the thinly stubbled jowls, the heavy-set physique. And that grin! So big, and hellish. 

Hugh began to feel himself possessed by an unusual feeling. Professor Saville’s voice, a comforting, indistinct monotone, seemed to echo. He could still pick out some words. But they all belonged to a particular lexical set: rape, sexual assault, sex offender, harassment. 

The panic spread through him, spanned him, and thickened in his blood like any intoxicant. With the panic, fed and fattened with wailing wind and lightbulb-hum and Weinstein smile, came a feeling of doom. Poor Hugh Hughes, Poor Hugh Hughes, Hugh Hughes kept telling himself. He would never be happy again. He had never been happy. He was earmarked for humiliation and failure, he had always been earmarked for humiliation and failure, he just didn’t know it yet. Now he knew it. He might forget it again. But he would find out again, one day, he would find it out. Nobody liked him and he had no friends. He was content. Most of the time. But this panic: this attack of panic: this was a moment of clarity in a dishonest life. He was fucked, mortally injured in some non-physical way. 

Hugh left the room and stood in the empty corridor. Breathing had suddenly become a struggle, something once instinctive which he now had to put a lot of thought and effort into. He breathed, deliberately and deeply, feeling that each breath, deep as he tried to make it, was failing to adequately supply him with air. The breaths quickened and shortened. Soon he was panting, gasping hysterically.

It didn’t take long. With merciful swiftness, this thing flowing through him decided that Hugh had been punished enough and it relented. The intense response it had elicited in Hugh calmed right down. Soon it was as though it had never existed, and his composure was perfectly restored.  Hugh re-entered the room and sat back down in his seat. The slide-show had moved on. Harvey Weinstein was no longer there. He was not mentioned again.

The events of that hour puzzled Hugh. He had never been sexually abused. And yet, somehow, he had been triggered by the mention of sexual abuse. Professor Saville had provided scrupulous trigger warnings at the start of the lecture, just as she always had done, and they elicited from Hugh the same distrust as he felt for gender ideology, as he felt for words and concepts of the sort that are over-used in contemporary academia, words like “hegemonic”. He had been so sceptical of trigger warnings, so unconvinced by their necessity. Now he had, himself, been triggered; he had experienced a panic-attack, the event that comes of being triggered. It was awful.

But why him? He had no business being triggered by references to rape and sexual assault, having panic attacks. Thinking about it in the library after the lecture, he came to the premature conclusion that nothing even remotely traumatic had ever happened to him. 

Maybe that was his cross to bear? To be so unscathed, so boring. 

He briefly, unintentionally recalled Harvey Weinstein’s big grin, pictured the image that had apparently most upset him. Then Hugh started thinking about the bad things that he had endured, the few bad things he had endured. What really, genuinely was the worst thing he had ever had to contend with, what was the most upsetting sight or scene he had witnessed, what was the most distressing experience he had ever experienced…?

Well, when he was quite young, he had got rather lost on somebody’s land. It was during a party at the house of one of his mother’s friends. He had somehow got separated from the other children. He had gone to piss behind a bush. When he had re-emerged, they were gone. He could hear the voices. He had called out: no response. That was bad. He felt sure, as sure now as he had then, that he would never forget that feeling, that that feeling would always live inside him, the feeling as he advanced around desolate, lonely corners of that small woodland, calling out the name of one of the children, hearing no reply.   

When he was a little older, during one of their extended Spanish holidays, his father had taken him to a bull-fight. That was fairly traumatic. The event had given him diarrhoea. That had also been traumatic, for all involved. 

He tried to justify the idea that all of this- (or something of this)- had found expression in Harvey Weinstein’s horrible grin. But he knew really that Harvey Weinstein’s horrible grin had nothing to do with it, nothing to do with the haunting woods where he had become lost, nothing to do with the black, bloody beast writhing on the ground at the centre of that amphitheatre of elated Spaniards. Nor did his rapes. Rape was a million miles away from Hugh. Rape was another planet. Of rape, he had no conception at all.

No, it really was inexplicable. It was an inexplicable trigger-event. And, also, strangely insufferable. Hugh Hughes found his own panic attack insufferably self-indulgent. He chastised himself, aloud, in third person: Oh, Hugh Hughes…

In his mind, Hugh heard again the hum of the lightbulb (that swinging pearl- so forbiddingly free and unsheathed- unchecked, like a globule of spittle, like a little white worm of ejaculate), and the howling winds (though these were calmer now). He remained haunted by their musics, their joint-assaults.

Maybe that was why he was here, in this university, studying a subject his father looked down on, which he himself looked down on, in some ways: to expose himself to things outside his experience; or maybe, more accurately: to imperfectly tiptoe on the string-thin border separating two countries, two worlds.

He went to the campus clinic the next day. He booked an emergency appointment and explained himself to the short, brisk woman who led him from the reception area into the little office-room. She was flustered, though she pretended not to be. She nodded vigorously, made a face like she was listening. Hugh knew that she wasn’t listening, not really. But he didn’t mind especially. She suggested that he suffered from anxiety, and prescribed Valium.

“Hugh Hughes. That’s a funny name,” she said, as she processed his prescription on the computer.

“Yes, it is rather,” Hugh agreed, coaxing a laugh into being, around the words. He said it with a well-practiced self-deprecation, with a masochism which, out of necessity, he had long felt forced to command. 

He picked up the pills from the chemist’s later that day, and took one as soon as he was out the door.