The Evening and the Morning and the Night

One of the symptoms of advancing DGD is an obsessive level of self-harm that will eventually lead to death. When Beatrice asks Lynn about her experience at the ward as a teenager, Lynn interprets this behavior as an obsessive need to “get out” of “[t]heir restraints, their disease, the ward, their bodies” (53). In other words, while self-harm might be an impulsive product of the disease, it also reflects a state of mind in which DGDs are not comfortable with themselves or the world they are in. This is further reflected in the suicidal ideation present in the three major characters—Lynn, Alan, and Beatrice. Both Lynn and Beatrice have attempted suicide, and Alan contemplates it at one point as inevitable once he feels himself begin to drift. The extreme dysphoria of those suffering with DGD in conventional settings and the suicidal ideation of those who still haven’t experienced the worst symptoms of the illness point to a subtext of mental health. While there seems to be a variety of attempts to treat the physiological side of the condition, there is little done to attend to the psychological needs of those with it, outside of Dilg.

Lynn only uses the language “temporal mirror” once, when she is reflecting on her experience at the Dilg ward when she was 15 years old (50). However, it is an important symbol that echoes throughout the story and the way the various characters, mostly Lynn but also Alan, anticipate their future. In reflecting on her previous experience at a Dilg ward, Lynn worries that a woman she sees harming herself is a mirror image of her own future. Later in the story, Lynn also sees Beatrice as a temporal mirror, and she reflects at end of the story that she can’t look behind her as she and Alan leave Dilg because “[she is] convinced that somehow if [she] turn[s], [she will] see [her]self standing there, gray and old, growing small in the distance, vanishing” (68). While she might not feel the same level of terror between these two possible futures, it is clear that she still feels trapped by her possible future.