When I was sixteen I had a panic attack that lasted three days. It all started when I looked in the mirror in my bedroom and felt wrong. Misplaced. Befuddled. Like I didn’t know who I was or where I was. Like everything was foreign and unrecognizable. Realizing I could feel that way was even worse than feeling that way because it meant it could happen again. I wanted to escape but I didn’t know where to go. What I needed, I thought, was to leave my body, because I felt trapped and suffocated. But that was impossible. I thought about how I was stuck in my body and the lack of choice was suddenly disturbing. The existential unease spiraled from there and never went away, but it got easier with time. A breakthrough arrived a few years ago when I read Sartre’s famous 1937 novel Nausea, in which a Frenchman walks around in disquietude, wanting to know the point of life. In the final couple of pages, he feels comforted by the sound of a song and contemplates art as a solution to existential dread.
I think of this as I read Michael Clune’s debut novel Pan, in which a teenage boy named Nick is randomly struck by anxiety attacks that tear at the fabric of reality. Clune has written academic books and memoirs, including the critically acclaimed White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin, which proved Clune’s proficiency for putting words to what many would consider indescribable experiences, such as the mental gymnastics of addiction. He dives headfirst into introspection in an almost nauseating fashion; everything you know becomes unfamiliar. This is also true of Pan. Sometimes the plunge into the unknown is so deep that you get lost, but that’s not such a bad thing. You just have to close your eyes and trust—and it’s easy to put your faith in Clune.
Nick is fifteen living with his divorced dad in a suburban Illinois neighborhood called Chariot Courts. “Cheap housing’s always more or less exposed,” he says of cold winters. “There was a housing project in Chicago where they found a four-year-old girl dead of old age.” Early on, Clune offers clever one-liners as such, delivered in the charming nonchalance of a jaded teenager. The weather, like in White Out, is a tool that distorts perception: “Bright winter sun turns kids skinless. Skins them.” Clune knows how to haunt in just a few words. A math teacher who uses his leg to portray angles. You can almost hear the awkward hum of the radiator and the sighs of bored-to-death students. Nick’s first panic attack arrives out of nowhere one night while he’s reading. He tries to focus on the book, but then he finishes the book. He tells his dad he thinks he’s having a heart attack and they go to the ER, where he’s told it’s just a panic attack. He’s given paper bags to breathe into.
Armed with the remedy, Nick becomes more confident than ever. He asks out Sarah, a girl in his class. She says yes. At her place, they bond over “More Than a Feeling” by the band Boston, raving about the spaciousness of the music, likening it to a UFO. Nick confides in her about his anxiety; together they rummage through paperbacks at the library and discover Pan, Greek god of the wild. Their research turns anxiety into a mystical, exciting phenomenon, as well as a hiding space away from the dreadfully monotonous schooldays.
Meanwhile Nick’s best bud Ty befriends the enigmatic Tod. Soon, a group forms: Tod takes Nick and Ty to The Barn, where Sarah hangs out with Ian, Steph, Larry. Here, it feels like Nick and Ty have actually been abducted by aliens. The Barn has the essence of a place detached from Earth, a sort of black hole or glitch in the galaxy. It has a religious texture to it: “A church is a building made to conceal a god.” There’s an endless supply of weed and LSD and the conversations never bother with the mundane. Ian and Tod—both older and oppressively mysterious—are unreadable strangers. Intense interrogations are masqueraded underneath the sound of snickers and coughs from the smoke. The line between serious and facetious is blurred to oblivion. A made-up holiday—Belt Day—involves a ritual of taking off your shirt, receiving red paint on your chest, taking ecstasy, engaging in a group dance, and crawling through a tunnel with mice to wait for a vision.
The scene brings to mind the time in middle school my troubled friend convinced me and another friend we were werewolves. In her backyard we howled at the moon. A couple of months later the cops swarmed her house after her dad snuck into the bathroom while the babysitter was showering to put a hamper over her head. There was also the drug dealer living in her basement.
One of the worst parts of exiting childhood is leaving fantasy worlds behind. Fantasy worlds are necessary for survival, especially in the face of turmoil. When I was convinced I was a werewolf I perceived the world in a new way. Everything was tinted blue. It was exhilarating and new. Ian reveals he, too, has problems with anxiety. Nick and Ian are strangely connected through this, believing they’re both possessed by Pan. Nick finds solace in art, from Bach’s Orchestral Suites to Oscar Wilde’s Salomé. Like The Barn, these pieces of art are a hiding space from reality—they’re fantasy worlds.
Nick has the revelation that his anxiety comes from his parents’ divorce (which he refers to as Divorce theory)—that without the stability of his family, his existence is untethered and aimless. Soon he begins to write about his days and it offers relief:
Good writing, I came to believe, was the careful, painstaking replacement of each part of this world with a part that looked the same, but was deeper, more mysterious, richer… A home for the familyless. And when you moved into it, panic wouldn’t move with you. You’d have created a level of the world invulnerable to panic.
The group disbands when Ian moves to Boston to join a Buddhist monastery. Nick’s anxiety returns in the form of insomnia, a fear of falling asleep, believing slumber is a kind of microdose of death. Writing, instead of serving as a source of consolation, becomes frustrating and dissatisfying. Creation is a double-edged sword; it can take away your insanity, but it can also worsen it. I like to think that Nausea is a simple story, that making art is our purpose in life. But I’ve lost my mind while working on a novel enough times to know that it’s more complicated than that. Escaping from reality through fantasy and art has its risks. The scenes from The Barn feel like being on acid in a funhouse and it can be truly unsettling. Despite Nick’s Divorce theory, the existential tribulations persist. Before Ian leaves, he asks Nick: “The Buddha said your house is burning. What do you do? Do you first try to find out who set the fire? Or do you first put it out?”
Shit goes down, but we don’t exactly know what. Nick only hears sirens and rumors. Rumors of Tod and Steph getting busted by cops for selling acid. At one point, Nick worries Ty is going to kill his father, who once sliced the back of his mom’s arm with a knife. We never find out what really happens. You get the sense Ian might kill someone in Massachusetts. I don’t know. I guess I don’t really need to. Pan ends with Nick involuntarily returning to his mother’s house, which makes him worried his anxiety will intensify. The abode is unfamiliar, as ungrounded as a boat in the middle of the sea. In the living room, the wall has a panel that pops open to reveal a vacuum system that roars like the white noise of a highway. “Do you think,” his brother Alex asks, “that the sound is always there? Or does it just turn on when you open the panel?” The allusion to Schrödinger’s cat is obvious, but I’ll let Clune have it. There are gaps in reality everywhere, portals at our feet. Only some of us can see them. At The Barn, Ian proposes a theory that there are two levels to life: One on which everyone operates, and another where people like him and Nick—possessed by Pan—wander in the shadows, noticing patterns and connections, as if the world is one big puzzle.
The concept reminds me of Georges Bataille’s 1949 essay The Cruel Practice of Art, in which the French philosopher contemplates, “Only a few of us, amid the great fabrications of society, hang on to our really childish reactions, still wonder naively what we are doing on the earth and what sort of joke is being played on us.” While many leave curiosity in their childhood, some of us—often artists—drag that simultaneous gift and burden into adulthood. We can’t help but wonder why we’re here; we can’t help but feel disturbed by everyday things to which everyone has become accustomed. As a kid I would sob at the inconceivable notion of the universe. Now I write, read, listen to music, drink too much, and take Lexapro to cope. Pan balances the wildly imaginative nature of childhood with the wisdom of adulthood. If I read Pan before I started taking Lexapro I would’ve cried. As uncomfortable with inexplicable existence I often am, I find immense comfort in the fact that I’m alive at the same time as the publication of Pan.
