Jason turned the car around and, when they returned to the spot, Ed got out of the car and began acting as if he were frantically searching for his licence, while he touched the spot in the car park over and over until he reached the number of touches (an even number, of course) that would placate his anxiety. The number was always different, so he could be in one spot for four minutes, or four hours. Fortunately he was able to accomplish the touches he needed to make in just a couple of minutes as he ‘frantically searched’ for his driver’s licence. It wasn’t until years later that Ed admitted the ruse to Jason.
The need to walk backwards and retrace his steps was also becoming much harder to suppress, and consequently more difficult to hide. ‘We’d go into public places and Eddie would have to walk down the stairs backwards,’ recalls Jason. ‘It got pretty bad. I had an idea of what was going on, because I had seen a television programme about OCD, but the other guys just thought he was acting crazy, and would make fun of him.’ Jason recalls some of their friends doing impersonations of Ed’s behaviour when he wasn’t around, mimicking the backwards walking and tiptoeing across tiles. They weren’t being malicious-they were just young guys having fun-but when Ed’s rituals started to include wearing the same clothes over and over, which of course he couldn’t even attempt to hide, they teased him about it to his face.
In 1995, Ed invited his friend Kevin Frye’s cousin, Donald, to live with him when he needed a place to stay. Ed thought it might be good for him to have the company and, hopefully, a distraction from his repetitive behaviours. But the OCD had already created in him the need to manage the perfect placement of everything in his world. It didn’t matter if it was a bar of soap, a magazine on the table or a box on the floor. His world was already becoming an ‘OCD Holy Ground’, and the meticulousness with which he monitored his belongings-protective over them as if they were his children, not wanting them moved, or so much as touched-was extraordinary. ‘I can look at the markings and placement of things, and I can see, within millimeters, if something has been moved,’ says Ed.
In the bathroom, Ed would look at the seams of the tiles, gauge the gap between the seams, and know if Donald had touched his shampoo or soap in the corner of the shower. Ed would become agitated by disruption of his space and the idea that another person had actually touched his things. Each tiny infraction was magnified a thousand times, and it caused actual physical discomfort best described as that feeling you get from sharp nails scratching a chalkboard, creating waves of nausea.
OCD, unchecked and untreated, can splinter into a multitude of manifestations-a sufferer who is afraid to enter a room with tiles on the floor can suddenly find herself with contamination issues. A student who has to write his name on a piece of paper without erasing, and rewrite it countless times until it is perfect, may suddenly be unable to enter a mall with his friends without having to exit through the same door they came in. Perhaps a housewife who can’t leave her home without checking the lock 20 times is suddenly burdened by intrusive sexual thoughts. There is no logical, or predictable, path of progression of the illness.
Donald’s presence triggered the force of Ed’s need to have everything in his world in its exact place. At this point, in the summer of 1995, he was still able to venture outside, and so he made a trip to the chemist’s to buy four sets of bath products for Donald, hoping it would prevent him from using his. But of course, in the ordinary sharing of one’s bath and shower things get moved, touched and used. Ed’s anxiety escalated. ‘Everybody saw my behaviour as controlling, but anybody who knows who I really am as a person knows that’s the last thing I want to do,’ says Ed. While the two men remained friends, they did eventually agree to end their shared living arrangement. ‘That’s why I started living in a hell all by myself, because I didn’t want to be a burden to anybody,’ recalls Ed.
By the autumn of 1995, Ed spent most of his time alone in the basement as his checking, counting, hoarding, rewinding and contamination issues began to meld into a conglomeration of rituals that would lead to his eventual solitary confinement. He was not yet fully immersed in what would become his OCD ‘sanctuary’, however. It was on one of those rare days that he felt OK that he decided to invite Donald to eat out at a restaurant about 25 miles from his home. Don drove and, after an uneventful, quiet lunch, decided to use the airport roundabout on the way home, a detour from the path they had taken to get to the restaurant.
While Don vaguely remembers the incident, Ed recalls, with absolute clarity, yelling and pleading with Don to go another way, or be let out of the car. But Don was in a hurry to get to work, and didn’t understand the magnitude of Ed’s pain. In a state of blinding panic, Ed says he reached for the handle of the door, prepared to jump out of the moving vehicle. But it was too late: the car had already entered the roundabout. He became dizzy and nauseated and could barely catch his breath.
Twenty-five miles later, Ed threw the car door open and climbed out of the car onto his driveway, nauseous, exhausted from arguing with Don and terrified that he had done something that was irreversible that would have some dire consequence for someone he loved. He had to figure out a way to undo the damage.
To passersby who spotted Ed walking backwards-for the entire 25-mile journey ‘back in time’-he looked like crazy person. Young men leaned out their car windows to taunt him, lorry drivers pipped their horns, but he didn’t care. He couldn’t care. If he didn’t do this he would be consumed with the feeling that something bad was going to happen to someone he loved.
Between episodes of counting up even numbers throughout the nearly 50-mile return journey on foot, Ed pushed through by telling himself to ‘focus on the big game’. These are words he attributes to his role model, Coach Wade from Clemson.
Ed left his house at 7 o’clock that evening and didn’t return home until shortly before dawn the next morning. He had indeed made the entire trek walking backwards, and he’d hurried to make it home before the sun rose. He had started the journey when it was dark and he’d had to return to his house while it was still dark because, if the sun had risen, he would have been compelled to make the entire trip over again.
Ed fell into bed exhausted, but could not fall asleep. He lay there mentally rewinding his journey, honing in on every misstep. He instinctively knew he had a responsibility to review every time he’d stepped out of a straight line, every slight stumble, every time his arms and legs weren’t in sync-to make things ‘right’ so no one would suffer for his mistakes. At one point his shoelaces had become untied, which had caused a mental dilemma of epic proportions, because he had to will himself not to tie them for fear that by stopping he wouldn’t complete his task in the correct way. Now, in the safety of his dad’s basement, he had to mentally re-tie them. Retracing every misstep took over an hour, but he soon released himself from this mental trap and fell asleep.
The entire episode marked a critical new phase in Ed’s life where everything became, it seemed to him at the time, completely clear. His life’s purpose was unquestionably to fight the battle against time’s progression. It was the only way to stop death. ‘Keeping everything in reverse, just like watching a VCR and rewinding to ten minutes before, five minutes before, meant I wasn’t ageing, so no one else around me could age, so no one could progress towards [spelling the word out] d-e-a-t-h,’ says Ed.
Chapter 4 Something About Michael
In 1992, the same year Ed got stuck on the path at the Clemson University campus, Michael Jenike got stuck, too. The internationally renowned psychiatrist was held up in a car sitting outside a Worcester, Massachusetts, medical building, paralysed, physically unable to move. He was drowning in a depression so debilitating that he was unable to get out of the car and walk into