Here's a new short story for 2007:

Seltenberger’s Syndrome
By T. Alex Miller

I don’t remember exactly when it was that I first experience drifting, nor do I recall whether it came on suddenly or gradually grew until it became this regular thing in my life.
I finally went to someone about it, expecting full well that they’d shrug their shoulders, ask a lot of questions about my life like depression or drug use or whatever, then maybe suggest I go to some kind of real doctor and get an MRI, or a CAT scan.
While that’s more or less what happened, the person, a Roberta Someone-or-Other, did do one good thing: She asked me to write down what drifting felt like. It read as such:
“Have you ever heard the expression about whether someone is comfortable or not in their own skin? It’s obvious when someone isn’t, isn’t it? Or when you look at someone on stage, a veteran performer, and that person is so at ease up there, they could be in front of thousands of people and they are just completely on, totally themselves. Or at least seem to be.
So, in drifting, I’m like the opposite of that. And mostly it happens when facing a group or I’m with someone senior to me either at work or just in age or status. I suddenly feel very self-conscious about what I’m saying, and the more I think about it, the worse it gets. And that’s just dumb anxiety, or insecurity, right? Everyone, or at least most people, know what that feels like. But the drifting is something beyond that. So I’ll be sitting there, say, in the publisher’s office (I work at a magazine as an editor), and I get highly, acutely aware of the fact that I should be speaking intelligently or creatively about something, and the self-consciousness starts and then … I drift.
It feels like an out-of-body experience, like maybe a little one. Not an epiphany, a big journey to some metaphysical place, but maybe just a short trip. And I have to reel myself back in. But that’s not always easy, and sometimes it’s impossible. A drift can last for hours, sometimes days, I’m not even always sure when it begins, or ends.
I know at this point I’m supposed to make some caveat that I know this sounds nuts or I don’t believe in out-of-body experiences or something, but since you’re a shrink, I imagine you can handle that. Plus, I read a New York Times story not too long ago where they figured out some of the physiology to the out-of-body experience, and also how there’s a brain explanation for how people lose themselves and speak in tongues. I imagine it’s something like that, this drifting. But more low-key. I mean, I don’t speak in tongues.
Another way to describe it is this: Have you ever seen like in a film or a commercial where they use a special effect to make a person appear as if he or she is splitting into two people? And then one of them, usually a little on the diaphanous side, drifts away from the other, and then the two mirror images sort of regard each other with this curious expression? That’s also kind of what drifting feels like, although I don’t really see that mirror image so much as feel it. I could be sitting still, but it feels like my body has shifted an inch to the left. Or maybe it’s just part of my consciousness that’s shifted.
So that’s drifting. There’s some other elements to it, like visual weirdness sometimes, but those are the basics.”

I e-mailed this to the shrink before my second and final visit. I’d spent a fair amount of time on it, trying to describe it, so I was anticipating that she would have spent a commensurate amount of time studying it, perhaps doing some research to see if my description matched anything anyone else knew about. The way I see it, people may all be different, but we’re made out of the same stuff and go through a lot of the same experiences, so it stood to reason that someone had identified drifting before. It probably had some other name, like Seltenberger’s Syndrome or something. I don’t know; I just made that up.
But it seemed apparent to me that Roberta had hastily read the note just after her last appointment left, and she didn’t have any insight or information. She asked me more questions about it, like how drifting made me feel, how long it lasted, things like that. I was keenly aware that she was trying to be all professional and smart, but that it wasn’t going to help. When I left, I resolved not to return. If she couldn’t be bothered to read my assignment more thoroughly and follow up in some way … that’s not going to work for me.
The reality is, I think I know where my Seltenberger’s Syndrome comes from. I’m recently divorced, separated from my three kids except for two weekends a month, broke from all the lawyers and child support payments, and I typically sleep only four or five hours a night, if I’m lucky. Am I depressed? Of course I’m depressed, who wouldn’t be? But I’ve pored over pages and pages of information online about depression, and drifting, or anything like SS, is not implied anywhere that I could find. I have a new symptom of depression, one might be led to believe, but as I’ve already said, I doubt that’s the case. I wanted to find a chat room or a support group filled with other drifters, maybe get some tips on how to cope.
But I never found one, although I continue to look. Instead, I started making up chat room chatter, featuring drifters who wanted to find ways to return to what they call “Real Space” — or “RS.” (I was quite proud of creating my own imaginary piece of jargon.) A typical exchange would look like this:
“Ted123 writes: Whenever I’m in church, sitting there in the pew, I start to drift. It’s not simple inattention, because I can feel myself shifting somewhat corporeally. And no, it’s not religious fervor or anything. Anyone have any suggs on how to deal, get back to RS?”

“Gina456 responds: I have the same problem in this reading group I’m in. When I feel myself start 2 drift, I find it’s helpful to move. I’ll stand up, tell the other folks my leg is cramping or something, and I’ll stand behind the couch a few minutes. That really helps put me back in Real Space.”

I liked Gina456’s advice so much that I tried it at our last staff meeting. It was about 15 minutes into it, and I started to feel like my brain was moving outside my skull, like a lump of dough sitting in a bowl on a space ship, floating away in zero gravity. It was when I was in this place that I dreaded questions or any attention directed at me. I’d be afraid I would open my mouth and nothing would come out; or what would come out might be a high-pitched wail, or an animal sound – like that of a whale , or a marmot. And drifting is often paired with a stiff neck, like my head is stuck atop a steel pole that can’t move. So if the person talking to me is in a place that required me to turn my head to face them, I had to sort of move my whole upper body, which had the effect (I imagined) of making me look like a guy in a neck brace.
I should point out that, so far as I can tell, my Seltenberger’s Syndrome is not noticeable to others. No one has ever said anything to me about what seems to me like aberrant behavior. But, then, the strange behavior of many people is probably not described back to them; they never know. Or maybe they do, but they can’t stop it and figure people will get used to it.
The publisher is the kind of woman who hates anything interrupting our meetings, cell phone calls or bathroom breaks and the like. So I tried to move very slowly, thinking she wouldn’t notice. My goal was to move to the corner over by the coffee machine. I could get a cup, then remain there, maybe for five minutes. If anyone asked, I’d use Gina456’s cramped leg excuse. I was set.
As soon as I stood up, I felt the publisher’s eyes on me. When it became clear that the coffee machine was my destination, her eyes resumed their usual course of targeting everyone in the room in a random order: questioning, seeking, accusing.
I don’t typically drink coffee, so I went through the steps as casually as I could, feeling all the while as if I were performing a delicate brain operation with a dozen observers looking on. My greatest fear was making any kind of noise or otherwise drawing attention to myself, so I lifted the pot of coffee very carefully, filled a paper cup about halfway, replaced the pot, then eyed the condiments: three different types of sweetener, powdered cream, plus a small cardboard box filled with red plastic stirrers.
What kind of coffee drinker might I be if I were a coffee drinker? Not black, I decided, reaching for a packet of creamer stuff. I knew it was just some kind of powdered fat, and likely no good for you, but its presence near the coffee machine told me that others used it, and I was all about fitting in at the moment. I tore the top off and poured the powder into the coffee, expecting it to somehow dissolve. But it didn’t; it just sort of sat there in a pile, not moving. I reached for a stirrer, feeling pre-guilt about the fact that I would soon use a small piece of plastic – an essentially non-renewable resource – for about five seconds before consigning it to the landfill. What a waste. But what were the options? This most definitely wasn’t the time to make some kind of statement by stirring with my finger, or with a pencil.
It was at that precise moment, reaching for the stirrer, that Laura, the publisher, said my name, sharply. The steel post holding up my head swiftly descended, like a downward periscope, to the base of my spine, and the hand reaching for the stirrer stopped as if frozen. It was then that I realized that Laura had stopped speaking, perhaps some moments before, and that the room was silent.
“Ken, that coffee is from our last staff meeting a week ago. Allison’s on vacation, so nobody made a new pot this morning.”
At any other office, someone might at this point crack a joke at my expense, and life would go on. But the magazine I work for is an insurance trade publication, and it may well be the most humorless office I’ve ever worked in. We work in silence, mostly, and we hardly know each other. I’d only been there six months, but I was already looking for other jobs. I just couldn’t bear continuing to work in such a joyless place, not when my own life was such an unhappy thing.
So, with Laura confronting me on the coffee and the eyes of six or seven other people on me, I had some critical decisions to make, and I needed to make them rather quickly. And you see, that’s one of the other things about SS: Time slows down. The lump of dough was still floating outside the bowl, even if my coffee-procurement activities had slowed it down somewhat. A typical person in this situation would turn around, say something like “Oh, crap! I didn’t notice,” then dump out the coffee, throw out the cup and resume his seat.
Another option might have been to make some ridiculous, face-saving gesture like “I like my coffee old and cold,” and start drinking it. Could maybe get a laugh there, too, if you played it right.
The other thing I was thinking about was how I could have been so out of it as to not have noticed that the coffee was old, cold. Surely there would have been a little red light on to indicate something; steam would have come off the liquid sitting there in the cup and, of course, the powdered fat would have dissolved instantly, I see that now. I should have recognized it when it just sat there, that I was holding a non-viable cup of coffee.
So, while I was considering my options and chiding myself for my cluelessness and feeling as stiff as a shellacked fish hanging on a wall, I made an odd and sudden choice: I sat down, right there on the floor in front of the coffee maker. First, though, I grabbed a red stirrer stick.
More than anything, I wanted to vanish, which is an odd feeling, too, but one with which you might be familiar. Probably there was a time in your life, maybe as a kid, when you were so embarrassed or humiliated that you just wanted to either die or disappear. As we grow older, our ability to handle these moments with more grace makes the urge to die go away (unless, of course, you’re suicidal, but that’s another affliction altogether).
I supposed I could also have walked briskly from the room, but that would have seemed like admitting complete and utter defeat. In this instance, the reptilian part of my brain chose a course of action for me that my higher brain rejected outright – just a nanosecond or two too late. And now that I was sitting, with my higher brain ready to resume command, it seemed like it would have been worse to suddenly stand back up, admitting my faux pas, and return to my chair.
So I stayed there, facing a cabinet door that instantly assumed a preeminent place in my here-and-now. There was a handle, a simple pull knob, the door itself a dark wood. There was a horizontal scratch about two inches long just a few inches above the carpet – a wound no doubt inflicted by a vacuum cleaner at some point, I reasoned. I had the cold coffee in one hand and the stirrer stick in the other, and I was sitting cross-legged, facing away from my colleagues.
Observing people confronted with a highly unusual event or action is something that’s consumed the time of a great many psychological researchers, not to mention the producers of various television shows where marks are set up to be shocked, baffled or scared for the amusement of the audience. In this case, although I couldn’t see the looks on the faces of Laura and the other editors, I could tell from the silence that they, too, were now confronting some difficult choices. These might have included:
1. Laura saying “Ken, what the hell are you doing?”
2. Ignoring me and going on with the meeting as if nothing were amiss.
3. The person who felt most friendly toward me, Alan maybe, getting up, coming over to me, putting his hand on my shoulder and saying “Ken, buddy, let’s go get some air” or something like that.
4. Remaining still and silent until such time as I moved, spoke or died.
In fact, they chose none of the above. It was mostly No.2, though: They acted as if nothing were amiss but included me in the meeting. I actually answered several questions and gave a rundown of my section’s content budget for the following month, all addressed to the pull knob on the cabinet. When the meeting was over, they filed out, saying nothing to me while I continued to sit there. (Although Chelsea, who handles AD&D policy topics, dropped a handout in my lap on the way out.)
As soon as I was alone, the dough returned, albeit slowly, to the bowl and I stood up. I did some of that typical soul-searching stuff, like looking out the window and contemplating all the people out there going from one place to another and wondering what the hell it was all about. Then I slipped out the back stair and walked the 17 flights down, where I grabbed a bagel from the lobby deli and headed out for what would turn out to be a four-hour walk all the way back to my apartment.
There’s no better place in the world to be weird and alone than in Manhattan, and as I made my way up 10th Avenue, I imagined I felt a kinship with some of the homeless folks I came across. I wasn’t too different from them, I thought, and no doubt many of these men were husbands, fathers, employees at some point; guys who’d perhaps suffered a Seltenberger’s Syndrome episode of their own, and who sat down on the floor at a meeting one day and then never went back.
The disdain I used to feel for the panhandlers on the street morphed into a new-found respect when it occurred to me that I lacked the ability to pull the plug on my life like that. Yes, they’re weak, awful men who left their families for a bottle or a needle or because they couldn’t handle mortgages and health care co-pays. But you’ve got to hand it to them: They removed themselves from it, those painful situations. And now here they are, free from it all.
But I wasn’t one of them. I went back to work, the next day. I needed the job and the money, for sure, but I was also intensely curious as to what kind of reaction I would get. I got some averted eyes, certainly, but mostly people acted as if nothing happened. At one point, halfway through the day, the publisher popped into my office and said this: “Let’s stick to the chair for our next meeting, ’K Ted?” I nodded and she left and that was the last I ever heard about it.
Isn’t that amazing? That you could pull off a completely bizarre act like that and, well, get away with it? Shouldn’t I have been fired, or sent to counseling or reprimanded by some crone from HR?
***
And what happened was, after the coffee episode, my bouts of SS started to decline. Eventually, all the divorce stuff was behind me, the lawyers got paid off and I slipped into the unfair, unfulfilling yet inevitable routine of being with my kids every other weekend, with a week at Christmas, half the summer and alternating spring breaks and Thanksgivings. I still do feel SS sometimes, though, especially when I’m putting the kids on the No. 1 train to go back uptown to their mother. I’ll be standing there on the platform, and the train slides away and the dough starts to float and it becomes impossible for me to tell whether it’s the platform or the train that’s doing the moving. Relativity.
But I figure that, if you’re going to drift, that’s the place to do it. That way, if you start acting all wiggy, you’re just another freak in the subway, and people just walk around you. Chances are, though, they won’t even notice.