Lair of the Cat

The poet Sophie Tunnell once defined fear as “the slinking cat beneath the lilacs of my mind.” The description is a good one.

I felt the presence of the cat in dark corners, its amber eyes intense and unblinking, as I listened to Ricardo Reyes.

I saw it in him as he moved and gestured, trying to explain the sudden, startling terrors that pounced at him any hour of the day or night.

I felt it in the intensity of the heat of the day as we sweltered in the tight, cluttered enclosure of the man’s home.

The cat was everywhere, just out of sight, waiting.

Reyes, 48, a teacher, is among 3 million Americans who suffer from panic disorder, an emotional illness characterized by violent spasms of fear.

It strikes with the jarring intensity of a heart attack, often accompanied by those very symptoms: chest pains, palpitations, dizziness and heavy perspiration.

In its wake it leaves a residue of terror which, by its very nature, can paralyze a life almost as completely as death itself.

Reyes occasionally has found himself afraid to drive, afraid to work, afraid to shop . . . afraid to step out the door of his small Highland Park home.

He remembers one attack: “I became hysterical and began sobbing and crying and screaming. I crawled under the covers, afraid I was going to die.”

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Almost everyone suffers an occasional anxiety attack. Panic disorder results when the attacks come in waves and won’t easily go away.

There may be as many as 200,000 people in L.A. County who, like Reyes, live in the presence of the slinking cat every day of their lives. It often requires extraordinary courage simply to step into the light.

I heard from Reyes in a letter he wrote both, I suspect, as a form of therapy and as a way of shedding light on a disease which, in more ways than one, exists in the darkness.

“I never read anything about this condition,” his note said, “yet it is one of the most horrifying illnesses one could get.”

On the afternoon we met, his home was almost a metaphor for the darkness. Reyes kept the blinds closed during the day, he explained, to keep out the heat. The temperature was in the high 90s. There was no air conditioning.

The room in which we sat was small to begin with and filled almost to capacity with furniture, paintings, books, a computer and Mexican folk art.

In that enclosure, hot and crowded into a corner, I could feel the terror Reyes must experience when the cat pounces from the shadows of his mind.

One way he attempts to rid himself of those fears is by putting them on canvas. In addition to a teaching credential, Reyes has a degree in art. His paintings project an inner turmoil.

One, a depiction of panic disorder, reveals a world turned upside-down in spinning vertigo. A human skull stares out from a corner. Another deals with the abuse he suffered at the hands of his mother, with the weapons of that abuse in stark, brilliant colors.

Reyes never knew his father and was physically abused by his mother as far back as he can remember. “She once threatened to put a burning paper in my mouth. I was 3. She was trying to scare me into behaving, but it planted a fright in me I never got over.”

Reyes has suffered panic attacks since he was 19 and only recently has managed to deal with them through drugs and therapy, though the slinking cat is never far away.

“I traveled in a ‘safe zone’ once,” he said, “an area from here to work or to the store. Outside of that, I was in trouble. Now I’m believing there is no safe place--and that, oddly, means I’m on the road to recovery.”

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Psychiatrist Dr. George Simpson, director of clinical research at USC, calls panic disorder “an incredibly frightening, scary illness.”

“Those who have it,” he said in a telephone interview, “are afraid they’re going to die, go crazy or completely lose control.”

Agoraphobia, the fear of public places, is only one of the results of the sickness, and it can keep a victim behind closed doors indefinitely.

Psychotherapist Michael Aharoni, who treats the disorder, says no one really knows what causes it, although stress is often a factor. Intense studies are being conducted here and around the world.

When I mentioned the darkness in which Reyes’ house was kept, Aharoni said darkness represents safety for those who suffer the malady’s symptoms. “It’s protective,” he said. “They feel they can control a dark environment.”

I felt no safety in that darkness, but neither am I terrified by the light. Reyes, whose memories flash back to beatings with knotted whips and pieces of furniture, deals with life a day at a time.

He wishes that his mother, who died 10 years ago, had lived long enough for them to have healed their relationship. “I had hoped she would ask my forgiveness,” he said, eyes filling with tears, “but she never did. We hadn’t spoken in seven years before she died.”

I was asked once to write an essay that defined courage. The obvious came to mind: those who faced gunfire without flinching, those who gave their lives for others, those who maintained their principles against impossible odds.

Now another would be added: those who live their lives with hope and decency in the lair of a slinking cat whose presence lurks, as the poet said, just below the lilacs of their minds.

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com