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2002-2003 Ian Wood |
1. The Steady State Man
They gave me a Nerf laptop so that I could write about myself. But I don't want to write about myself so much, so I'll tell you about Burgess. He lived up the hall.
Burgess was one of those we called the quiet ones. You know, like he didn't say much. He was kind of like a ghost. Often, we'd be in the Rec room watching the video player and he'd be off in a corner somewhere, watching it with us—but far away, standing still and lanky in his uniform. A few of the folks here, they've got uniforms-they wear the same stuff, pretty much all of the time. Their therapists get them to wear five sets of identical outfits—sweat suits in blue with white piping, or jeans, black belt and white tee shirt, or there's one guy that wears a business suit. Me, I'm not to sure about all that myself—seems to me if I had to wear the same thing every day I'd go nuts. Which is sort of funny, if you think about it. Burgess wore a pair of bright orange jogging shorts, and a strappy tee made of some special running-shirt fabric—Nike made it or something. His sneakers were always fluorescently white. His socks were always pulled taut up to the tops of his calves. His hair was perpetually tousled, but his big bristly mustache was always trim and angled. He always looked like he was just about to take off somewhere. The first and only thing Burgess ever said to me was at the occasion of our first meeting—in the aforementioned Rec room, watching the video player. He sort of sidled up next to me and asked me, "Are you running the race?" I looked over, and his eyes were all lit up, like you sometimes see a magician's or one of those homeless people who look like they know something you just don't. He had these pale blue eyes that were like the rime of an iced pond on an unusually warm February Saturday. As his longish hair tended towards the red, his irises somehow became three-dimensional when viewed framed by it. I said, "Um" and he was gone, withdrawing from me quickly, moving with a peculiar grace. I felt that I had failed somehow. He never said anything to me ever again. Burgess lived up the hall from me—well, you knew that. Sometimes, my therapist says, I avoid painful memories with a kind of Jedi mind trick I play on myself. Like just then, I think, my analysis would be that I made that little jump, to "Burgess lived up the hall from me" to you know, avoid upset. It's not that it had anything to do with me, really. Burgess, it turned out, asked the same question, pretty much in the same manner, of everyone he met for the first time. Sometimes, especially in the winter months, you'd hear him speak six or seven times a month. Always asked the same question, though. Never got an answer he seemed to care for one way or another. Another reason Burgess was truly one of the quiet ones was because he never got upset. Some of the quiet ones, you know, every so often they get flipped out, and then the orderlies have to come in and do their work. But not Burgess. He was quiet and he stayed quiet, all of the time. Well, except once. It's not as though I missed anything, as far as I can tell. I mean, Burgess didn't seem to have much in the way of personality to speak of—he just sort of stood around. Sometimes he would read a book, but I don't know what it was about. I figure, if he wanted to make conversation I'd talk to him. But he never did. Kind of makes you wonder. Like, somehow, he had boiled everything down into that one question. Like he could get everything he needed out of human interaction with that one question. Sometimes, I was kind of envious, you know? My therapist has explained certain gaps in my recollections as the result of an acute psychological shock that happened during something I was doing. He said that my profession had proven too stressful and that I had gotten sick, and that I had needed to come here to be made well. He told me that when I first came here, I wasn't quite conscious. I sort of drifted around, for six or seven weeks. Then something happened—I think they switched my medication. He won't tell me what happened, though, so I'm just guessing. There are usually two courses of medication served each day, one at nine AM and one at 5PM. I get a little white one, and a blue one, and every other week I get one of those shots that they give with this sort of pneumatic syringe that goes "puff" and transdermals the stuff. Burgess, though—he had the same pill every hour, on the hour (I know it's the same because I stood behind the med orderly a few times and it was this little green one). No matter where he was in the clinic, someone would show up with a damp paper cone of water and another, more condimenty cup with whatever it was he needed in it. His state never changed, though. Once, I saw him get his two PM dose like twenty minutes late. It was a Wednesday. You'd figure, twenty minutes is like one-third of the dosage cycle of whatever it was he needed—but he just kept reading this little blue book he sometimes had. I watched him, though. Twenty minutes went by and he didn't look up. Didn't turn the page, either. At two-twenty the orderly showed up looking fat and gave Burgess his pill. There was no change on his face; it stayed the same. Then the WB Saturday afternoon movie came on and I had to stop watching him. They don't usually let us see that sort of stuff. I told my therapist once that I thought I was watching too much TV. I figured it out: at least three hours every day on a weekday, and sometimes like sixteen during a weekend. He suggested that I stop watching so much, perhaps take one of the classes they offer to some of the folks here. Not like basketweaving or anything. It was some kind of basic computer course. But when I tried to do the class there was the television again, on my little workstation table. Only now I had to work to make it do things for me. I mean, that's how I felt at the time, but I didn't figure out what the problem was until a month later, in session. Session's good that way. A very strange thing happened one day at mealtime. Mealtime is always an interesting affair, because I've found that I can tell a bit about someone's state by how they eat their food. Like Burgess: on Waffle Day he would cut his waffle into four even quarters with a thin pat of perpendicular margarine on each. Then he turned the patted waffle quarters into islands in a sea of 3% maple syrup. There's that guy Reilly, the business-suit guy. At breakfast, every day, he gets a small Tupperware cup of orange juice and a small red vitamin pill. Me, I eat whatever they've got going on. Eating the same thing for breakfast everyday would make me...well, you know. See, I'm defensively wandering again. Like, I was going to tell you about the strange thing that happened one day at mealtime, but then I started talking about Burgess' waffles on Waffle Day. But that's okay, because I have to go take my pills right now anyway. But the strange thing that happened at mealtime. It was after the meal was done. Burgess, every meal, got a cup of that brown, utterly decaffeinated stuff they serve as coffee here. He always sits at the end of the table, near where the creamer orderly comes around with the sugars and milk. Burgess liked one sugar two creamers. Although I'm just guessing he liked that. He didn't look as if he cared much one way or the other, but never varied in his routine. So this one mealtime-it was a Tuesday, at 6:25 PM. Burgess got his coffee, and it sat in front of him steaming quietly while he waited for the creamer orderly. He looked into the cup for a few minutes. The creamer orderly came buy and dropped one packet of sugar and two creamers in front of Burgess. He looked at the sugar packet, and picked up. He held it up in front of his face. I used to be a theology professor—I studied the Bible and such, and taught about it somewhere down in Florida. It's funny, when I think about that. I mean, I don't read much at all now. Certainly don't read the Bible much either. There's a couple of folks here that always have one or more Bibles on them at all times. There's Frasier, who's got that big bald head of his and a kind of vaguely disapproving slope to his sleepy eyelids. And there's Neville, who's about 90 years old and can't really talk right any more. He means what he says, though. See? Off I go digressing about me and Neville and Frasier. So Burgess looked at the sugar packet, presumably the packet looked back at him, and his hand started to shake. Not much, just a trembling. He sort of fumbled with the packet and managed to neatly tear one-eighth of an inch off its top edge. He dropped the little curl of paper into his cup and dumped sugar on it. He handled the creamers expertly, though, and then sipped dispassionately at his unstirred cup. When he put it down he had a little creamer in his mustache. Frasier says that he can explain anything, using the answers he's found in the Bible. He'll prove it to you, too. I saw him once try to put a fork in Anderson at a Thursday dinnertime because he kept yelling "Jesus fucking Christ" and spraying mashed potatoes and gravy everywhere. Anderson's a pretty delicate guy; he wasn't the same for months. He can't eat mashed potatoes now; he gets niblet corn instead. I cagily ordered a coffee myself—they won't give you sugar if you haven't got coffee. I got two sugars. I knew something had shaken Burgess. I watched Burgess a lot, as you may have gathered. He never changed. He sat in the same places at the same times, read the same page in his little blue book, and needed to visit a restroom at 3:27 PM every day. By association I figured it had something to do with the coffee, but it turned out to be the sugar packets. They were these odd-sized things, with small color portraits of masted ships on the back. I had a SCHOONER and a MAN O' WAR. Normally we get CLOVIS INSTITUTIONAL SUPPLY sugar. Neville might as well be a quiet one, for all the good talking does him. The first thing he ever said to me was "brase bog gulloola," which I eventually figured meant "praise God hallelujah." He sleeps most of the time, in his old black wheelchair with a thin green-sherbet colored blanket over his lap, where he keeps a big battered Bible with a brown leather cover. His deal, as near as I can figure, is that God is just really in charge, and orders things the way they are, and that whatever happens happens according to the will of God. I think he's a Calvinist or something. Like if he crashed down a flight of steps, at the bottom he'd say, "Well praise God, that's over." That's a joke I think I remember from grad school, but I'm just guessing. There wouldn't be much to that strange thing that happened at mealtime except that that was the last time I saw Burgess. A few other people saw him later in the evening in the Rec room and said he was the same as ever, standing over in the corner by the board game shelf and watching Jeopardy! with the rest of the folks. But he wasn't at next morning's breakfast. People like Neville okay, because he's usually asleep and affable enough when awake, if mostly unintelligible. Frasier's a little more problematic; sometimes he hides his meds in his cheeks and spits them out into the toilet later. After three days or so he starts to get a little louder—he'll like sit down next to you and start asking if you’re afraid of hell. You knew that by the end of the conversation he'd be telling you that that's where you were going if you didn't repent. Then he'd start saying, "Ask me anything!" I called it playing Stump The Bibleman. Folks didn't like him much, but I thought he was all right as long as he didn't try sticking me with a fork like Anderson. I've never stumped him, but I never believe him either. He seems like he has it together when he's taking his meds—he'll talk to you about Jesus in an earnest enough fashion, and pray for you and all. But you know, I don't think he really believes all that. Otherwise he wouldn't need it proved so much when he dumps his meds. My therapist told me that I used to have a system that I used to explain everything. I mean everything—it's the kind of stuff that lets you know up from down, in a metaphorical sense I guess. But that stopped working, and I got sick after that. I mean, I've got a system now, and it works pretty well for getting around in here. But my therapist says that there's a lot more I need to know before leaving. I don't mind, though—it's pleasant enough here, and interesting. I watch the people here, try to see what they're using for their explanation of everything. You can tell after awhile who has the better system in place—a lot of the somnambulant sedated types don't have very good systems. Frasier's one of those. When he wakes up he goes all to pieces. Anderson's system works more often than not, but it's all fragile and needs a lot of fixing. And Neville's old. He doesn't need to do much anymore. But Burgess—he had something going on, I could tell. I mean, he was here for four years with absolutely no problems. I figure, if the only thing your system for explaining everything can't explain is why the sugar packets are different today, you're pretty well off.
Posted by Ian Wood on November 05, 2002
© 2002 Ian Wood
2. Anderson's Oatmeal
My therapist says there's no such thing as a perfect life. Pretty obvious, I guess. Especially in here. Lots of broken people in this place, and you don't get that way if you have a perfect life. What I think he means, though, is that no life will ever be free of pain. Buddha talks about that some, I think. My therapist says that part of my illness comes from having a set of expectations that weren't met. He won't tell me what they were, though, and I guess that's okay because I know it's better to figure some of these things out for yourself. It means more, then, because you've worked for it. It's frustrating, though, sometimes. Like I want all this stuff to be out in the open where I can see it, instead of like deep in my brain, where it's all hidden and pops out at awkward moments. I think that's what my little blue pill is for, it has something to do with keeping me even-keeled and level. I'm just guessing, though. This morning at breakfast Anderson started bawling into his oatmeal. Not loudly at first, in fact at first I didn't even notice. I think he was trying to keep it all squashed up inside him or something, but then it started to come out of his shoulders. They jerked a couple of times, and when I looked up from my bowl of Apples n' Spice Quaker mush he was wearing this horribly disfiguring mask, all twisted lips and screwed-up eyelids, and he was making this "huh-huh-huh" noise in his throat, all low and animal like. His eyes were just coursing with tears, they plinked into his oatmeal and splashed milk onto the table. Anderson always loads up his oats with a lot of milk. Then he sort of grabbed at his hair, all long and graying, and—well, he didn't really pull it, but he just grabbed big shanks of it and squeezed it in his fists, rocking back and forth and moaning in this quavery sort of way that made my gut go all funny. It was like watching a mountain full to bursting with magma that was trying to keep itself from erupting, and little rivulets of melted rock were squirting out, fissuring the earth. There was a mighty, mighty despair inside of Anderson this morning. The orderlies brought Dr. Kramer with his white coat and his big old glasses, and he gently led Anderson out of the mess hall and off to somewhere safe, probably. Looking at Anderson's abandoned bowl of milky oats on the table made me sadder, somehow, than Anderson himself did. Funny things strike me poignant like that sometimes. There was a time in session a couple of weeks back when my therapist asked me who I was. I said, "I'm Parker Clark." But that wasn't what he meant. He kept asking me about who I was, at some kind of core level, all deep and inside and whatnot. I told him that I felt like I could paint pretty well, so I thought that maybe I was a painter. He said that we were going to start working on some strategies for finding out more about who I was. I said that was fine, but I didn't see much point to it. I mean, here I am, you know? What's to know about it? It's like asking a toaster to explain itself. Awhile back—before I came here—I had a wife. I'm not sure where she is now, although my therapist told me once that she was alive and well down South somewhere. It's funny, the way my brain works. I mean you'd think I'd remember more about my wife, you know? A marriage is pretty important. I remember that she was short and had long dark hair. Once I had a dream where she was sitting in a car in a driveway, telling me to hurry up and get in. She was very beautiful. I must've been a lucky man. There are a couple of women in this ward; I see them at meals and in the Rec hall sometimes. One of them is tall and thin, willowy with cornsilk blonde hair cut in a bob and amazing features. Broad high cheekbones and a fine jaw, wonderful wide blue eyes that are always a little vacant. Sometimes she cries to herself, but not like Anderson. I asked her what was wrong once, and she looked up at me from her chair with her wonderful wide blue eyes all red-rimmed, and not vacant at all. She said, "Nothing ever happened the way I wanted it to." I told her that was worthwhile crying about, but she didn't say anything else. But I thought that just for a moment I could see who she was, behind her wide and crying eyes. I think her name is Jeri. The other woman in the ward is pretty much the opposite. She's short and squat and fat and has long tangly hair. She only wears a hospital gown that's sometimes open in the back which is not something I really care to see, myself. But she laughs a lot. I mean a whole lot, like at least once every five minutes or so. Sometimes it's a little, high giggle, sometimes it's a deep laugh like when a good comedian's up on stage and having a great night. Being a curious sort I asked her what was so funny once, and she just about doubled over with guffaws and knocked her Lincoln Logs right off the table. I couldn't get a thing out of her. I still don't know what's so funny. And I don't know her name. Right now I'm sitting in the Rec hall with my Nerf laptop, over at the corner table away from the others. Neville is here, sleeping in his wheelchair by the window. Frasier is also here, reading his Bible. His lips are moving. I haven't seen Anderson since this morning, but skinny Billy is here and so is that strange fellow Aldous. To say that Aldous is a strange fellow probably sounds kind of odd, I suppose, because we're not exactly on the high hump of the bell curve in here. But Aldous is strange simply because there doesn't really seem to be anything wrong with him. He's about thirty, I guess, and has short-cropped hair and a long, straight nose that gives his eyes a very focused look, they stare right down the sides of it while he talks to you, fixing you all precise and whatnot. He speaks softly and seems to know a lot about a lot of different things, like history and science and religion. He doesn't get any meds, another thing that marks him strange. I talk to him often, because he makes sense most of the time. He says that he's in here because everything was just "too much." Never gets real specific about what went on, but I feel a kinship with him because like me he seems to have had some kind of life outside of this place that went awry somehow. Some of the people here, you know they've been in and out of places like this all their lives. But not Aldous. A lot of people think that life just kind of happens to them. They are acted upon rather than acting. Me, for myself, I think that my life happened to me up to a point. I think that at some point I made a decision and the consequences of that decision did something to me. My therapist says that that's a healthy thing, to feel that way. He says that by taking responsibility I give myself power to change how I am. He says there's no worse feeling in the world than powerlessness. I think he's right. That's what was so sad about Anderson's oatmeal, I think. It was just sitting there with a couple of tears in it, and could do nothing about its situation. How could it have known that Anderson would surrender to mighty despair and abandon it all alone?
Posted by Ian Wood on November 13, 2002
© 2002 Ian Wood
3. The Funniest Story In The Bible
But the scene entire and not just the multitude was insignificant to Aldous who sidled up to me all quiet and whispered, "Hey! Come hear the funniest story in the Bible." He tugged gently at my arm and his eyes twinkled some more. Aldous is like that, sometimes, like he has a big joke that only he knows, understands, and finds amusing. It’s a different kind of funny than the fat woman in the hospital gown has—her kind of funny, you sort of suspect no one else will ever get. But Aldous' kind of funny you think you might get if you were having particularly inspired morning, or if maybe he consented to sit you down and explain it to you. So Aldous sat me down at a small table with an abandoned game of Chutes and Ladder set up on it and, holding a finger up for patience flitted across the room and stole Neville's Bible off his sleeping lap. Returning to the table with the worn leather tome he sat across from me and flipped quickly through it. “King James," he remarked. “Not my favorite text—the NIV is much funnier—but it'll do." He slowed his flipping as he came to the section he wanted, then traced with his finger until he settled on the appropriate verse. “Ah, here we are." He paused for a moment at wet his lips with the tip of an overly pink tongue. “The Book of the Acts of the Apostles," he intoned," Chapter 19, verses 6 through ten." He read: "And we sailed away from Philippi after the days of unleavened bread, and came unto them to Troas in five days; where we abode seven days. And upon the first day of the week, when the disciples came together to break bread, Paul preached unto them, ready to depart on the morrow; and continued his speech until midnight. And there were many lights in the upper chamber, where they were gathered together. And thereat in a window a certain young man named Eutychus, being fallen into adept sleep: and as Paul was long preaching, he sunk down with sleep, and fell down from the third loft, and was taken up dead. And Paul went down, and fell on him, and embracing him said, Trouble not yourselves; for his life is in him." Without the slightest hint of reverent pause Aldous slapped the big floppy book with the heel of his hand. “Can you believe that?" he asked, grinning. “Here you have Paul, this big wheel, preaching on and on, until someone has the nerve to fall asleep and go right the hell out the window!" I remember thinking how mistaken I had been a moment before, thinking that Aldous' funny was the kind I could understand if he would sit a minute and explain it. “Picture it!" he continued in a low voice suited for conspiracies. “Big old Paul, knockin' 'em dead in the upper room at Troas!" I got a little queasy then. I said, "Well Aldous, looking at other instances of sleep on the New Testament-particularly in Mark 14 and Matthew 26-I think you might find evidence for a more metaphorical interpretation." I pushed one of the pieces around on the Chutes and Ladders board, not looking at him. I felt like a ventriloquist dummy made of wood. “Imagining sleep as a kind of spiritual torpor, we might find that the significance of Eutychus' plunge to his death lies in the detail that Paul did, in fact, raise him from death. The message would thus seem to be one of—" I stopped sharp and sudden, and looked up just in time to see Frasier throw a chair through the television screen. Looking back on it now I guess I should have known he was dumping his meds again. He does it about once a month, and the last time was over three weeks ago—I remember now, he was reading yesterday in the Rec room, reading his Bible and moving his lips, and I know that Frasier doesn’t move his lips from simple-mindedness, but from a kind of agitation that usually boils below his medications like hot mud. It's like he reads the words and they want to come right back out again, loud and boisterous and full of god or something. You'd think the doctors would figure this out and inject him with the stuff, but they can be awfully dumb sometimes. So the chair smashed through the TV screen and blasted sparks and glass everywhere. The TV was up high against the wall, bolted in a kind of bracket, and so sparks showered down from it and acrid smoke billowed. Frasier leaped up at the thing, a spring-loaded piston-legged animal, shouting, "He didn't spare the angels, you cocksucker! He didn't spare the old world! He didn't spare the twin cities!" He hung from the blasted TV like a basketball player hanging from the rim, and sparks burned his big bushy beard. It stank. But the point of most interest was Aldous' face. He hadn’t moved from his chair at the table of Chutes and Ladders, even though I had bolted upright and moved away while Frasier grappled bald and bat-like with the television hanging on the wall, swinging his gangly legs all twisted and crazy. The few other folks in the Rec Room huddled in a corner and looked in turn frightened or slack-jawed or just waited patiently for the interruption of routine to be over. But Aldous—he looked positively delighted. If he'd clapped his hands and giggled I wouldn’t have been surprised. Aldous sat there with Neville's battered old Bible in front of him and watched Frasier hang from the TV with his smoldering beard and just looked like he was watching the best show on Broadway, the finest film, the grandest show of entertainment and diversion. Neville woke up from his sleeping wheelchair by the window and yelled "Gushoom m' book a gallah!" or some such thing, spluttering and waving his hands about his chest. Then the orderlies came bustling all burly and angry and dragged Frasier off of the television and out of the room while he writhed and foamed and yelled about dens of iniquity and whatnot. All very disturbing, you know? But there was Aldous looking as satisfied as if he had just seen the conclusion of a good TNT made-for-TV movie. So now I'm sitting here in my room and it's after hours and quiet, and I guess I'm supposed to be in bed asleep but there's no harm in writing things down. I mean, that's what they gave me the laptop for. But I feel seditious anyway. As if there've been enough infractions of the rules today already. There's supposed to be a kind of order, here, that cushions the soft-minded from whatever it is that makes them need to be here in the first place, but it always seems that any upset causes vast ripples of chaos throughout the place. I've been here long enough to know that there will be "fallout" from Frasier's TV smashing for at least week, from some of the other delicates who were in the Rec Hall at the time, and as the story spreads throughout the clinic it will grow and get transformed and there will be at least three other folks in various stages of disquiet who will choose now to have their freakouts. It's as though, by establishing a place of such defined order, the doctors have in fact placed us all in precarious delicacy, ready to snap at the slightest display of incivility and untoward behavior. Obviously, something is very wrong with this system. I think about Burgess, now. I wonder if anybody ever knew what I know—that it was just one thing, one tiny change, that sent him on his way. What a bunch of nuts, here. And I don't mean just us regulars, either.
Posted by Ian Wood on November 23, 2002
© 2002 Ian Wood
4. Seeing Theo
It's been a week since I last wrote here, with the glowing laptop screen pointed at my face. It wasn't much of a week, which is to say that it wasn’t very good. They tell us implicitly here that these pills in their little cups will make things better, and for some folks I suppose that’s true, but whatever it is they've got me on doesn't always produce the sought after steady state. Last week was kind of a mishmash of anxious moments, feather-filled chests and nervous stomachs for me. It started when Frasier threw the chair into the TV and then kind of went downhill from there. My therapist calls it an "anxious depression." Which on the face of it is ridiculous; it's not as though I have a life that demands much of me in here. No job, no family, no taxes, no nothing. Everything is simple and regimented and comes in pleasing pastels and Formica. Not much to be "anxious" about, but there I was, moping around and spending a lot of time in my room on my bed, sleeping. I do that when I get this way: sleep is the best pill of all, and beckons with soft ladylike fingers. Often there wasn't anything to do but stare at the water stains on my ceiling. There are two of them, one over my bed and one over by the window, mild brown discolorations of the painted plaster from some previous plumbing mishap, I suppose. I could've written, I guess, but who wants to spend all that time staring in the mirror? I could’ve painted another picture, but I wanted to paint with cobalt blue and my tube of that is all empty and dried out. It seemed simpler to just lay around a lot and give in to the deep breathing which both lessened the cotton in my chest and sent me off to sleep. Funny how that works out: what lessens the physical symptoms of anxiety is also soporific. I'm better now, of course. I think. Sometimes I can't really tell. My therapist is an interesting fellow. He's older than me, maybe fifty or so, and wears the same tweed jacket all of the time. At least it looks like the same one; it's possible that he has a closet full of them, like some of the folks here with their uniforms. He is the most disheveled man I have ever seen, with his salt and pepper stubble and his frizzed gray hair. He's portly in an academic sort of way, and wears battered old tortoiseshell glasses. Sometimes he taps his pen against his teeth when he's concentrating on what I'm saying, a habit which I find incredibly distracting. Someday I'll complain about it. I suppose then he’ll congratulate me on having made some kind of progress. So this week we played a game I always think of as "What's Bugging Parker?" It's a game I'm not very fond of, because he always seems like he knows what's bugging me, even if I don't (which is usually the case) or if we never actually state the cause aloud. I usually get agitated towards the end of such sessions, because I feel foolish for not knowing my own mind and for being at the mercy of these roiling, sourceless emotions and sensations. He keeps telling me that I'm in a safe space, and that the reason I'm here is precisely because it's safe. I think it’s meant to be reassuring, but it kind of has the opposite effect, sometimes. Like, if it's so safe, why do I feel like I'm about to get jumped by a pack of howler monkeys? And obviously it's not entirely safe all of the time for everyone, or we wouldn't have smashed TVs and forks stuck in people and so on. I brought my painting to show him, the one of the desert mountain surrounded by the insignificant multitude. He said it suggested Mount Sinai to him. I told him that the people there weren't waiting for anyone to come back down, with commandments or anything else. They were there because it was the biggest thing they could see, and so they gathered close to it to be under its protective shadow. The painting was set up against one of the bookshelves in his office, full of fat tomes and scattered periodicals. I sat in my usual chair. It wasn't quite a rocking chair but it did swivel around some, which I like because it gives me something to do when I'm feeling fidgety or nervous, as I was when I came to see him that day. "So Parker," he said. He starts many sentences with "so;" I'm not sure why. “How's your week been?" I told him that it had been just dandy until Frasier threw a chair through the television and hung from it like a bat. I told him that his beard burned and stank up the place. And I told him about the funniest story in the Bible. “You don't sound very amused by Aldous' story," he observed, with a tone that only therapists have —at least, the therapists I've seen. It suggests insight and offers a certain gentle pressure, a nudging. Like "explore this further; it will be useful." Sometimes I hate that, but I didn't then. I get frustrated when my mind betrays me. Normally I am able to hang around here, and be on a relatively even keel. I don't yell, or jump around, or need to be restrained or any of that. I'm not catatonic and I don’t cause any trouble. But there are times when I have a black hole in my gut that's so deep I feel that everyone around me will be sucked into it, along with all of the light and goodness in the world. The thing is, the hole doesn't seem to be anything that comes from me. It's like some kind of virus that seizes control of my mental acuity and clouds it with a deep column of black smoke, shielding me from rays of sunlight. I hate it. It has nothing to do with me. It's people like Theo—that's my therapist—who somehow seem immune to the gravitational pull and can help me see into it. When he uses that peculiar magic, the insight conferred upon him by a degree in psychology and years of working with nuts, it seems as though he will be the sorcerer who shows me the truth in his blackened looking glass. Sometimes that's good, and I'm eager to go where he nudges me. Other times I resist and talk to him about why I hate winter, or the television, or some other, non-relevant topic. And always, always, there is the knowledge that he knows who I was. Before I came here. He knows about my wife, and my life before now. He only tells me certain bits, usually just after I've figured them out for myself. He never offers any information that I don't already know, really. Sometimes I hate him for that. Other times I'm grateful, because I sense that what he knows I don't really want to know, not now. Maybe not ever. So when he said that I didn't seem particularly amused by the story of Eutychus falling to his death from the upper room at Troas, I clammed up immediately, assigning some significance to the incident that outweighed Frasier's subsequent television violence. "You said," Theo said eventually, his pen resting precariously against his lip, "that you felt like a 'ventriloquist's dummy.' As though someone were speaking through you?" I took a breath and launched into it, the way someone might jump off a high dive board into chlorinated water for the first time. “He was missing the point. Luke was speaking of the acts of the apostles following the death of Christ, acts that were driven first by the resurrection of Jesus and then by the spirit of God. Aldous focused on the worldly nature of Eutychus' sleep; sleep as a factor of boredom. But his sleep was a sleep of the spirit, and it was Paul who then raised him from that death. And—" Bang! My lips stopped moving abruptly, and just then Theo tapped his teeth with his pen. I remained silent and looked at my painting of the desert mountain surrounded by the insignificant multitude, leaning against the bookcase. "So," Theo said eventually. “Was Aldous, perhaps, not paying appropriate respect to the text?" "Not at all." I said. I felt stubborn. "You seem to find the notion of amusement at the incident at Troas disturbing." "No, you know what's disturbing? This place, that's what." I fell silent once more, looking at the desert mountain I had created. I felt blasphemous. Theo gently goaded me to continue, with that way of his. “I mean look at us. We all hang out here, and have our therapy, and our group sessions. And still there's this violence, and there's weeping, and there's pain. We're not shielded from anything in here. We've got this illusion of protection, of safety." Theo wanted to know if I felt safe. It's all about safety, with him. “No, I don't feel safe!" I barked. “You think Anderson feels safe? Or Frasier? Frasier needs to destroy a television to feel safe. Anderson is threatened by his oatmeal. And Burgess!" "Burgess?" Theo didn't even remember Burgess, which I suddenly found inestimably sad. “You didn't know him, I guess." No one did, really. But suddenly he became emblematic of all the fragility that surrounded me, and I couldn’t talk anymore, not about anything that mattered. I used up the last five minutes of my session talking to Theo about getting more paints. So now I'm sitting here in my room, long after lights out, the Nerf laptop's screen glowing at my face. I'm narrating this play, these events, illustrating these characters. For what? Theo gave me the computer. He's never asked to see any of my writing. Is it you out there, my future self? Reading back into time, reading the words of crazy old Parker, long after you've gotten out of this place? Who are you, reader?
Posted by Ian Wood on November 25, 2002
© 2002 Ian Wood
5. I'm In Here For A Reason
It’s very late. Lights Out was hours ago. The little clock on the laptop says it’s 2:30 in the morning. I feel swirly, agitated, Theo would call it anxiety, and ask me what I’m anxious about, but he’s not here, it’s just me and the laptop and whatever future eyes happen to be reading along, so I’ll try and be my own listener. Today was Group Therapy Day, or at least, yesterday was, because it’s now the next day, isn’t it? I can’t get to sleep…I’m hopped up like I’ve had far too much coffee, or like they gave me the wrong pill, which happened to me once. There’s nothing to do. I’m too agitated to paint, can’t focus on a book. Group Therapy Day for the inmates in our wing is often a cause for mild stomach upset. Not for me, usually, because I don’t have as much of a problem interacting with other people as some of the folks here do. The short squat fat woman with tangly hair whose name I still don’t know (the orderlies call her “Barbra;” I don’t know why) always developed some sort of intestinal discomfort every Thursday at around 1:30 in the afternoon. For awhile they let her stay in her room and skip sessions, but eventually, I guess, her therapist decided that enough was enough, and made her come to group session with the rest of us. The thing was, even if the ailment was psychologically based, it was also physiologically expressed, so while the rest of us were trying to ‘relate’ or jump through whatever hoops had been set up for us that day, she was giggling and groaning and passing gas and making things very unpleasant for those nearby. That pretty much sums up the whole group therapy experience, really. But the fat woman and Jeri have both been transferred to some other wing, after that unpleasantness with the orderly, so today it was just “us guys.” Me, Anderson, Aldous, Frasier, skinny Billy, fat Billy, Neville, Reilly the business-suit man, and four first-timers, whose names I soon learned are William (as if we didn’t have enough Billies), Scott, ‘Mr. Newton,’ and some sort of unintelligible mumbling noise that might have been ‘Josiah.’ I’ve seen the middle-aged and doughy ‘Mr. Newton’ around the ward off and on for about a week, but I think the others are fresh arrivals, within the past couple of days. Scott is a young fellow with bandaged wrists, a melancholy cant to his brow and the puffy look of someone who’s been taking large quantities of anti-depressants for a long time. I’m always bemused by that sort of inmate; to me it means that whoever’s supposed to be minding them isn’t paying attention. I remember one young fellow named Tony who spent a month or two with us last year, and confided to me in one of his more lucid moments that all he really wanted was for his parents to stop treating his homosexuality as a symptom of mental illness. Apparently seventeen different kinds of daily medications hadn’t given him a taste for the properly fair sex, so they paid for him to be stuck in the asylum with the rest of us loons. I do believe they thought that he’d be getting some good old-fashioned electroshock, but they don’t really do that much anymore. The mumbling fellow had slurred diction and the dazed, drooling look of the chemically calmed, while William had a ragged shock of white-blonde hair and far too much energy for the session room. He kept starting to leap out of his chair, but was restrained by Moose’s very large, very black hand on his shoulder. I like Moose. He’s got a gentle way of using his bulk to restrain people who are bouncing off the ceiling, and I think that William frequently needs such attention, so they buddied him up with Moose. They sometimes pair up people that way until they figure out which set of chemicals works best. I think that group therapy is frequently used to separate people from their ideas. Someone will come in with an idea about how things seem to them. Then, through the vagaries of interacting with other people, they come to realize that perhaps how things seem to them is not actually how things are. So much of what goes on in here is intended to bring people back to the consensus, to realign them with what most folks agree is how things are. That’s usually a good thing. But sometimes there are folks for whom that’s exactly the wrong thing to do, but there doesn’t seem to be much of an allowance made for that here. As for myself, I’m pretty sure that Theo and Miss Brandon, the Group Therapy Lady, are working to bring me back to the consensus, which I’m pretty sure is what I need, because for me “the consensus” has to do with awareness of how I got here in the first place and why I can’t leave, and that’s also why today’s session was so swirly-making and why I’m up in the middle of the night basking in the glow of my soft laptop screen. Usually Miss Brandon has each of us tell about our week, because that way if something’s happened that we all saw or heard about we can “share perspectives.” This week everybody wanted to talk about Frasier throwing the chair into the television, and eventually somebody got around to asking Frasier what his problem was with the television…Aldous, I think, asked him…and Frasier started talking about a big dream that he’s been having continuously for the past year and a half. I can tell that they’ve really cranked up Frasier’s meds…they’ll do that if you break the rules. Used to be they’d lock you in restraints in the old Padded Room somewhere in a basement. Now they’ve got these pills, little pale red and yellow ones, that just knock you flat and suck up all your energy and make… you… speak… very… very… carefully. Miss Brandon seemed to be entranced or something, because she just sat there with her notepad and her pen and her crossed legs and that kind of vacant Therapist’s Look on her face, the one Theo never gets, and finally I stood up, and walked over to her, and poked her on the shoulder, and when she didn’t move or react at all I got real close to her face and shouted, “Hey, Miss Brandon!” and when that did nothing I hauled back and knocked her head clean off her shoulders, and it fell to the floor thunk and her big glasses cracked and fell off, and all the while Frasier was droning on about the burning of the cities and the Destroyers of the Lord and Neville was hopping up and down in his wheelchair going “Brase bog, brase bog, balullah!” and the Billies were doing something obscene with each other in the corner and the rest of the new people just sat there with bleeding eyes and ears, writhing in place like they really, really had to go to the bathroom. Of course, I didn’t let on that all of this was going on; I kept very quiet and still, and when it was my turn to tell how my week went I just smiled at Miss Brandon and said fine, and that I felt like I was doing very well lately, and that I really wanted to know what Anderson had seen in his oatmeal at breakfast a few days ago. This made Anderson start crying and talking about something that happened to him when he was six. So everybody focused on him, and nobody saw the bloody eyes or the humping Billies or Miss Brandon’s head there on the floor, staring up at the ceiling with its Therapist’s look. Then it happened: a hissing, whispering noise, sort of a pre-echo of speech, in my head, and I looked up and “Josiah” had fixed me with this intense bloody stare that the chemically restrained just shouldn’t ever have, and he spoke directly at me through all the chaos, very clearly, a loud stage whisper. He said, “I know what you did.” Now that’s the kind of thrill I just don’t ever want to have, it made chemicals squirt into my blood that were like liquid fear, hot and nauseating, and that’s what’s keeping me up right now, why I still can’t sleep. It’s the knowledge, you see—whoever you are, maybe you have it, I know that Theo does, and probably Miss Brandon—the knowledge of who I am, who Parker Clark is, why Parker Clark is here, what happened to him before he came here to enjoy Group Therapy and painting in the sun room and the calm measured healing routine of carefully scheduled breakfasts. I mean, that’s the pure nugget, that’s the grail, it’s the ephemeral idea that if it burst full force into my mind would send me raving like Frasier or into spasms of weepy twitches like Anderson. That knowledge has resulted in a diagnosis; the diagnosis has generated a prescription; that prescription is expressed in pills and tablets and these are, finally, the chemistries that govern my identity in this place. It’s a pristine example of the ideal being transubstantiated into the real; beside it, Jesus’ Special Cookies are a parlor trick. So today in the midst of Boschian hallucinatory mayhem—and it was hallucinatory, of course it was, I know that as surely as I know that this isn’t—an aspect of what must be myself projected itself outward onto the drooling “Josiah” and claimed to be privy to this knowledge. Threw that claim in my face, a challenge: come and get it! Come and get the knowing! It was a pretty spectacular effect, very cinematic, with just enough THX surround-sound to get my attention but not so much so that I lost my outward calm and started bouncing off the walls. Very clever…this portion of my damaged mind seems to know that too much outward disturbance will result in further chemical insult, further walls between me and the truth. The point was to bring me closer to that truth. The point was to announce that some part of me knows, and not just my caretakers. The knowledge isn’t lost to me; I don’t have to wait for it to be given to me. I can get it myself, if I want. Do I want it? I don’t think so. No no no. Not if it means heads rolling and nasty whispering demon-voices and staying up ‘till all hours because sleep eludes me and laughs at me.
Posted by Ian Wood on December 15, 2002
© 2002 Ian Wood
6. Monstrous Fruit Bearing Sharp Objects In The Night
I’m trying, I’m trying very hard. Theo says that it takes effort to get better, that mental healing is real work, unlike physical healing, where the body can often repair itself without the focused attention of the mind. So I do work, and I do try, and sometimes I go forward, and sometimes I go backward. The nasty head-knocking-off business at Group yesterday was a Big Backward. Theo tries hard to be non-judgmental, but like everybody else he’s got a whole head full of shoulds and shouldn’ts, and I’d guess that having a surround-sound hallucinatory ho-down in the middle of Group Therapy is pretty high up on his shouldn’t list. He’d never admit it, of course, because he’s had lots of modern training and probably many successful rehabilitations, all based on the Non-judgmental Model Of Dealing With Loons: never let them know that it’s not okay to see things that aren’t there or throw things at the TV or poke people in the leg with forks at breakfast; just find out why they did it and go from there and everything will be just fine. Which is all well and good I suppose for most folks in here, but I know that there’s a core group that this process just doesn’t work for. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be here for years on end, right? They’d get better. And the people they let wander around and play checkers and Chutes and Ladders and sit in front of the big window and stare out at the trees and the lawns are just a part of that group. There’s also a whole floor full of people locked up in padded rooms and restrained with big healthy leather straps who never get to mingle with the rest of us, and those folks are just unapproachable. You can’t put Whooping Guy in a comfy chair and ask him, “So why did you tear all your clothes off and make rude gestures at the nurses with the floor mop, hmmm? ” It just doesn’t work that way. They’re off somewhere else; the radios in their heads tune into completely different stations, and unless you’re willing to go poking about with an electrode or a small hammer you’re not going to change that. But I’m not part of that group; at least, I don’t think I am, so this morning when Theo asked me how my week was I told him the whole story, in all of its freaky Technicolor bloody-eyed glory. I could tell he was startled...his eyes narrowed thoughtfully behind their lenses, and his pen stopped in mid tooth-tap. Theo thinks I’ve been doing pretty well; I can tell that too, because as thoughtful and genuinely interested in helping my recovery as Theo is, he’s also got a fair amount of himself wrapped up in the effort. It pleases him to see me do well mainly because Theo is a genuinely decent person who wants to do good in the world and to help others, but also because it is a measure of his own competence and worth as a person. So when he's easygoing and mellow, I can tell that he's pleased, which means in turn that I'm doing OK. Buttocks! He's concerned, as I am. We explored, a bit, the possible meaning of the phantasm. What is it, exactly, that part of me knows that “I did”? Theo is aware of my ideas about why these hallucinations happen, and he chooses to work on them with me within that framework. I think that’s smart of him. When I first came here, Doctor Phil insisted on working everything I told him into his own pet framework, and we got nowhere. I repeatedly told him outright that his theories had nothing whatsoever to do with my experience; he made me very angry. My mother was a wonderful caring person whose insight and life experience were of tremendous benefit to me until the day she died. But Doctor Phil kept twisting and contorting, trying to find the deep-seated resentment at my mother’s choices as a single parent that drove my zaniness. He just wouldn’t listen to me. Finally, I had to throw the book at him. That was highly amusing, wasn’t it? I took the big huge copy of the DSM VI on his desk and belted it straight at his big bald head. And hit it. I broke his glasses. So he had me doped up for a week; the next time I saw him I wouldn’t say a word and a week after that Theo took over. Theo and I get along fine; he gives me paint and soft laptops and laughs at my jokes and doesn’t think I’m a bad person or a puzzle to be solved, a bug under glass. Anyway: Theo seems to think, as I do, that I’m trying to break through to the essential nature of the disorder in my head, although he won’t call it a disorder. I’m a lot more free with my characterization of my mental state than he is, which can be helpful at times. I mean, it’s not at all helpful to have someone say, “Yup, you’re a loony, a complete no-hoper! ” when what you’re really looking for is some meaning. Some logic. So when I say, “Gosh, Theo, I had a total weirdo freakout in Group yesterday!” and he says, “Tell me about it,” it’s like settling into something soft and warm and comfortable, something that offers hope rather than despair or—God forbid—a Theory. This is a peculiar situation for me, because Theo knows why I’m here, and I've made some associations between the hallucinatory special-effects spectacular and that “why.” I’ve developed the theory--which may or may not be true--that there was an event experienced or an act committed by the Parker Clark that existed before I came here. I feel it, even as I type away at the buttery-soft keys of the Nerf laptop, here alone in the dark of my room. It’s a continual low thrumming in my head. Theo won’t say, even though I know he knows, and he knows that I know he knows. That can be frustrating sometimes, but I don’t feel the urge to lob anything at his head…probably because I trust him in a way that I didn’t trust Doctor Phil. What is therapy, anyway? I mean in an ideal world who needs some Professional to keep the secrets of your broken life from you while you fight cobwebs in the dark? I’ve got to wonder what the doped-up or barely-there types like Anderson or Frasier talk about in their weekly sessions. Why’d you smash the television, Frasier? ‘Cause it was an offense to God. Who’s God, Frasier? My mother’s vagina. Or some such nonsense. But it’s not an ideal world, because if it was there wouldn’t be places like this with me in them, and there wouldn’t be millions of people who aren’t in places like this who still need therapy and will pay for it so that they don’t end up in places like this. On the plus side, if you’re in the bin and you’ve got a good relationship with your therapist and he knows you’re trying very hard and you like to paint, you can generally get good brushes and decent-quality acrylics in the colors you choose. Theo gave me my big fat tubes of cobalt blue and naptha and cadmium red today, and they’re snug in my paintbox on the shelf over there. Hello, colors! Two new white gessoed canvases are leaning against the wall, ready for painting. Goody goody, Parker’s painting, look out! Big splashy imagery awaits its birth into visible light. Always intriguing, that process: in my head, then spoosh! out in the world for other people to see. A painting is an anti-hallucination, I think. It can be seen by others and they can’t lock you up for making one. At least, I don’t think they can. Maybe that’s what I did: made a painting so vile, so socially disruptive that it drove men to rapine and plunder and women to witchery, made children capture and torture housepets and startled livestock into foaming ferality. Someone just ran by my closed door yelling something about monstrous lemons and needles…the voice was unfamiliar. Must be from another wing. And there’s the pursuit! I hear multiple feet running through the halls, trying to capture the disruptive influence before it wakes too many people up. There’ll be talk about this at breakfast tomorrow…it’s more fallout from the Frasier’s Happytime Exploding Television, I think. That’s another reason I kept it cool in Group yesterday…the last thing this bunch needs is Parker going on a screaming bender and assaulting Miss Brandon with her own ballpoint pen. Except maybe for Aldous. He seems to thrive on that sort of thing, but never actually does anything too out of the ordinary himself. He just watches, like yesterday in Group. If I’d let on what was happening in my head, he’d watch me. I don’t think I’d like that. There went Monster Lemon Needle Guy, heading back in the other direction. Go, man, go!
Posted by Ian Wood on January 03, 2003
© 2002 Ian Wood
7. Pentecost
It's warm under my blanket-tent. I used to do this when I was a kid, with a flashlight, pretending to be out in the deep woods somewhere while still enjoying the comfort and security of being in a house. I mean, I'm pretty sure that I used to do this...every kid does, I think, except maybe for kids who grow up in poor desert regions and live in tents all the time. Maybe they build structures out of camel-packs and rugs, and pretend to be in houses. If they do, I'm sure the motivation is the same: to have an adventurous experience while remaining safe. I'm having enough adventures, I think, so I'm focusing on the safe part...a safe soft tent in the asylum, to go with my safe soft laptop. The place has been a madhouse. More so, I mean, than the everyday. Anderson got ahold of scissors and cut all of his long, straggly gray hair off, so that his hawk nose makes his head seem small and pillow-like. He looks like a demented monk. Frasier has been deeply into some new book he’s gotten ahold of…it’s one volume of a 12-volume facsimile edition of the Nag Hammadi codices, each page a high-resolution photograph of a section of manuscript. It’s entirely in Coptic. Frasier doesn’t read Coptic, as far as I know, but he’s been sitting by the big window and staring very intently at the pages, his eyes flitting back and forth along the spiky Greek-like text. This, to me, portends a sudden shift in his theology. Many of those scrolls are full of the mystical feminine bits of Christianity that got edited out and hidden away in the course of the canonization of scripture. I expect that any day now Frasier will throw another chair through the television, but in a more loving fashion. Whoever Frasier’s primary doctor is, he’s a fool. You don’t let loons like Frasier have access to 2,000 year old mystical texts unless you want to send them raving into the hallways. It doesn’t matter whether Frasier can actually read them or not; he thinks he can, and that’s usually all that matters in here. I bet Doctor Phil is supposed to be taking care of Frasier, and that letting him have the book fits into some Big Theory. Even Neville has been agitated, wheeling to and fro in the Rec room and thumbing through his fat Bible, gumming his lip and occasionally bursting out with a "brase bog" or a "rythus!” He’s been more active in the past couple of days than he has all year. Both Jeri and the laughing fat woman have reappeared in the common room; apparently the night orderly with the self-control problem has been fired and arrested. That’s good. Just thinking about that whole thing makes my skin crawl. Jeri, being so pretty and all, is a target for that sort of evil here; it's happened before. The laughing fat woman is back at her chosen task: building vaguely obscene structures out of Lincoln Logs. Jeri sits alone in the back corner, looking sad, but I’ve noticed that she always makes sure she has a clear line of sight to the window, and looks outside longingly. The more I see of her, the more I think she doesn't really belongs here. Theo got me my paints fairly quickly, which means that he felt that it would be therapeutic for me to have them. Nothing ever happens here that isn’t meant to be therapeutic. So while the others have been boogying to whatever strange vibe is coursing through the place I've been working on a new canvas, a big twenty-four by thirty. It’s a mountain in the desert, like the finished canvas in my room. It’s squat and sandy and rocky, and it’s surrounded by the same mass of small people with tents and goats and so forth. Tiny people, little blots, really. I have two different kinds of lovely red, so I set the top of the mountain afire. I used a big fat brush for it, too, that holds lots of the pigment, so that it’s thick and shiny on the canvas. The pale sky is full of dark smoke and lightning, and the very, very top of the mountain is veiled from view by smoke that you can tell is full of fire, because it’s glowing. It’s what I call a Serious Painting. This big expanse of desert smoke and fire has become a troubling hallucinatory magnet for me, an imagistic magic of my own creation that whispers to me from the easel while the others in the Rec Hall mold soft clay pots and play Monopoly. Yesterday as I worked with the paints, I smelled dry desert air and a peculiar tang like burnt rock, mixed with the synthetic color-scents of the acrylics. I swirled my brush into the acrylic flames of the fire that I painted. Others came to smell the desert. Anderson was one; he came and sat next to me while my brush detailed the curls of smoke; and filled the bright desert to its distant horizon with tribe upon tribe of nomadic dwellers come to see the mountain. Anderson said, "Wait—I see something." And then he said, “Prepare yourselves for the third day,” and fell over backwards. He flopped around a lot, and the orderlies had to come and take him away. But me and the painting on its easel remained a sort of center of gravity in the Rec room: everybody came by to visit me, and look into the canvas. Frasier loped over, his fat Coptic colume tucked uner his arm, and peered so closely at the canvas that he got a dollop of cadmium red on his nose. He yelped and cowered in fear under a table, wiping fitfully at his nose and babbling in what sounded to me like Hebrew, which is a weird thing for him to be doing. I really think they need to adjust his medication again. Neville wheeled past and cried, "Jess! Baloolah!". Aldous sauntered by and glanced over at me and said, "Boy! Now you've done it!" Even Jeri got up from her seat and stood silently at my side for almost fifteen minutes, her long-fignered hands clasped in front of her, looking, looking, looking. For just a few moments, I thought I saw the sadness melt from her pale blue eyes, but then it returned and she walked slowly over to the window, placing one hand against the glass and looking out at the green manicured lawns and the distant forests beyond the end of the long driveway. And then, at dinner this evening: Salisbury steak, the industrially-processed meat product that comes in patty-form with reconstituted spicy grazy, salty cheese-laden potato mounds, bright green peas, a pillowy dinner roll with a perfectly square pat of butterfat, and a piece of gooey cherry pie afterwards. I love that stuff. It's arguably the worst meal they serve here, but it's TV-dinnery and, I think, reminds me of something in my distant childhood. So I was in an exceptionally good mood, mostly because of that, but maybe also because of the new, bigger blue pill that Theo ordered for me and which has brought my total med-cup pill-count to an even six. All of us were in the dining hall doing our usual dinner routines. I tuck in fairly randomly. Fat Billy tends to make a big mess, piling everything together and shoveling it all into his round face with machinelike regularity, while skinny Billy often has apologetic conversations with his meal before taking small bites of each item in the same order, round and round he goes, until its all gone. Anderson just stared glassy-eyed at his food and didn't say anything. Neville convinced one of the nurses to feed him, and Frasier got gravy and peas on his big book, because he was looking at it and not his plate. Jeri ate only her peas, and the laughing fat woman mashed everything up with her hands and made a phallic tower out of the whole mess, which she giggled at, covering her mouth with her greasy hands because she was seeing something naughty. Aldous put his napkin in his lap and used his utensils with proper Continental etiquette, fork in left hand, tines down, knife neatly across the edge of the plate with the edge of its dull blade facing him. Midway through the meal, the windows of the hall shook violently. I mean, really shook, hard, rattling in their frames like a freight train was passing by right outside. But nobody noticed. Everybody just went through their dinner behavior. Then it happened again, and the air in the hall moved, rushing and blowing. Bright sparks swirled in the air, and coalesced into flickering, ephemeral flames, whirling around the table slowly, then coming to rest above the heads of each one of us, wavering as through seen through thick water. I looked up into the base of my bit of fire, about a foot above my head. I batted at it: it was like nothing was there at all. A bit cool, maybe. But nobody else saw a thing. They just sat there, eating. I wanted to jump up, and shout: Don't you know what's happening to us? Can't you see it? Look! But I kept it cool. If nobody else saw it, I wasn't going to risk getting doped up and strapped up and miss finishing my Salisbury steak and potatos and peas, not to mention the gooey cherry pie afterwards. But I knew what that was, I've seen it before, I know it. It's clear knowledge, a direct silver conductive wire from the me of now to the me of then. I think that I studied it, back when I was a student, and then a teacher. I even know the verse that famously describes the event: Acts of the Apostles, chapter 2, verses 2 and 3: "And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them." Something is happening to me, and I think that Aldous knows it. During the flaming windy chaos at the dinner table, he kept looking at me from his place at the far end of it, calmly cutting with his knife and fork, placing bits of food into his mouth, and staring, almost unblinking. Then, as the wind seemed to die down and the flames faded from view, he winked at me. A big wink, a conspiratorial, just-between-you-and-me sort of wink. It gave me the chills. I've got my covers over my head, a blanket-tent, and the laptop glows. Maybe it will keep me safe. But I doubt it.
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