Mamaku

Numbness changes from an adolescent refuge into a practiced method of erasure in the narrator’s account of the events surrounding his senior year at Buckley in 1981. It promises composure and control when fear and loss threaten to overwhelm him, but its apparent power is unstable: memories return through the body, daily routines, and the work of telling. The concept therefore marks not an escape from trauma but the distance between surviving it and being able to face it.

From adolescent refuge to lasting coldness

The adult narrator describes the numbness he found exhilarating in his sophomore and junior years, and carried into his senior year, as something that hardened after the horror of 1981. What had once felt like freedom from ordinary feeling became a remote coldness that took decades to thaw. He identifies a particular weekend in mid-September as the point when the last traces of happiness and warmth remained: he was seventeen, and Ryan Vaughn stayed with him at the house on Mulholland. The weekend preceded Matt Kellner’s disappearance and the discovery of Julie Selwyn’s body. In retrospect, its quiet becomes a boundary: the narrator calls it a brief passage between innocence and corruption, while acknowledging that later calm could never be free of what happened that fall.

The distinction matters because numbness does not simply mean an absence of feeling. It initially appears exhilarating, a condition the narrator can mistake for strength; afterward, it becomes a remoteness imposed by what he has endured. The retrospective voice can mark the transition clearly, but that clarity belongs to the adult looking back. The teenager’s apparent composure is not evidence that the danger has passed.

Rehearsing normality

After a traumatic afternoon, the seventeen-year-old wakes at six-thirty having slept through the night and decides to act as though everything is normal. The decision turns into a detailed program for controlling the day and, by extension, his feelings. He resolves to reduce his drinking, stop using marijuana and Valium, exercise before school, eat breakfast, keep up with assignments, and maintain a schedule. At Buckley he will arrive early, smile, join conversations, play tennis with Thom Wright, and behave affectionately toward Debbie Schaffer. He also plans to ignore news about the Trawler and to push the trauma out of his mind.

The schedule is more than a list of habits: it is a performance designed to restore the feeling of agency. On the drive to school he avoids music because songs might remind him of Matt Kellner or make him feel. At school, he embraces Thom Wright and Ryan Vaughn, apologizes to Debbie for his earlier outburst, and supplies the public affection she expects. The display reassures others and gives the narrator a script to follow, but it does not resolve what he is trying to suppress. The routine’s precision reveals how much effort normality now requires.

Two objects from the previous day disrupt this plan. In the pocket of his gray slacks, the narrator finds white jockey shorts taken from the pool house on Haskell Avenue. Their presence recalls photographs shown to him by Ronald Kellner and forces him to recognize that Matt is gone. He puts the shorts in a rarely opened desk drawer rather than deciding what to do with them. He has also taken a piece of paper from Matt’s desk, marked with the initials RM and a phone number. Instead of disposing of it, he slips it into his jacket. The drawer and the paper become contrasting forms of concealment: one hides a reminder of loss, while the other keeps a troubling connection close. The narrator’s new attitude may make the day easier, but these details show that it has not erased the past.

Numbness as a social and emotional strategy

At school the narrator explicitly wants to become emotionless and to reach the numbness he associates with Susan Reynolds. He frames this as a plan: a way to avoid being moved by Matt’s absence or by his own feelings for Ryan. He can then dismiss the possibility of realizing that love in the social setting of Buckley in 1981 and adopt what he calls a counter-narrative. The performance offers temporary relief by letting him recast feeling as irrelevant, but it cannot make the attachment disappear; it changes how he chooses to narrate it to himself.

The narrator also registers the costs of mistaking a person for an image. During the weekend together, he had understood Ryan chiefly through his beauty and as an erotic prize, while failing to hear the class resentment Ryan expressed. Ryan’s departure without waking him, saying goodbye, or kissing him leaves the narrator with an early indication that the intimacy did not mean the same thing to both of them. In retrospect, the narrator recognizes that his fixation had obstructed his understanding of Ryan as a person. Numbness and idealization thus work in parallel: one blocks painful feeling, while the other narrows what can be seen in a relationship.

On the morning of his attempted reset, the narrator notices a fleeting disappointment in Thom after Susan turns away from their kiss. He alone registers the small change in Thom’s expression and remembers it later. That capacity to notice another person’s feeling sits uneasily beside his wish to become numb. Even as he rehearses indifference, details of affection, disappointment, and rejection continue to register.

When suppression fails

The concept’s limits become clearest in the adult narrator’s attempts to write about 1981. A year after the events, at nineteen, he abandoned an intended novel before beginning in earnest because even gently remembering the people and what had happened to them felt unnerving. He tried again after returning to Los Angeles following more than twenty years in New York, believing that he was stronger and could face the past. While making notes about the autumn of 1981, he drank tequila to steady himself, but suffered a severe anxiety attack and was taken to Cedars-Sinai. The writing did not open an orderly path back into memory; the attempt itself exposed how little the earlier act of forgetting had settled.

In 2006, while writing specifically about the Trawler, the narrator’s response becomes physical and acute. He recalls fear, vomiting, taking Xanax, calling emergency services, and fainting. This episode links the work of narration to a trauma that had remained inaccessible without consequence. The adult narrator had believed that the fiction he published over the years had worked through the past; the return of intense fear unsettles that belief. Numbness had supported postponement, not a completed reckoning.

The later process of writing remains difficult rather than simply curative. As the book moves toward its ending, the narrator’s partner, Todd, disputes the accuracy of some events and leaves their home for days at a time. The narrator, meanwhile, turns to alcohol and medication after working through particularly difficult chapters and listens repeatedly to the songs associated with that period. The old songs now carry not only hope and the idea of leaving childhood behind, but also desire, rejection, and escape. The act of telling gives the suppressed material a form, yet the strain of making that form shows that memory has not become harmless.

Delayed return and partial thaw

The narrator describes the seven years following the 2006 writing attempt as a feverish period of anxiety and estrangement. Stress contributed to a forty-pound weight loss, and he learned that several therapists expected him to downplay the horror or rearrange his account to make it more palatable. A therapist he saw weekly for a year was the first, among the practitioners he describes, not to be afraid of what he disclosed. This contrast makes numbness legible not merely as a private choice but as an accommodation encouraged when other people cannot bear the full account.

By the time of the adult narration, a long-term relationship and the easing of addiction and depression accompany a change in how others perceive him. People who had avoided him during his most distressed years encounter a more amiable version of him, while the dark literary persona associated with American Psycho recedes. The change is real, but it does not amount to proof that the past has vanished. The narrator’s account distinguishes between becoming more able to live in the present and having fully worked through the events he once tried not to remember.

Numbness therefore governs both the teenage performance of normality and the adult delay in speaking. Its apparent calm is repeatedly interrupted by evidence the narrator cannot absorb into his preferred story: a missing person’s clothing, a note he keeps, remembered relationships, and the bodily distress triggered by writing. The concept’s arc is not a clean passage from silence to recovery. It is the recognition that a defense may preserve daily functioning for a time while leaving the underlying experience ready to return.