And bewildered by the world we see, Why do people hurt us so?
Only those in love would know, What a town without pity can do.
If we stop to gaze upon a star, People talk about how bad we are.
Ours is not an easy age -- We're like tigers in a cage,
What a town without pity can do.
-- Gene Pitney, "A Town Without Pity"
Some day this pain you are enduring will seem useful to you.
-- Ovid the Poet, Metamorphoses
A Fugue in the Backdrop
In a moment, as with the swift and urgent clack made by two long fingers suddenly snapping hard on a muscular grown-up's hand, he senses that he can think. His first inclination is wonder and amazement. Then a choking trepidation and ominous fear well up, for he cannot move, cannot see anything clearly, cannot pry open his eyes, cannot speak. Detached from all as it were, he just is. Through a milky cloudbank billowing in his closed eyelids, he can hear some musical strains (a Bach cantata? a classical fugue?), but barely. Someone, no, two people seem to be talking as if in conversation (as if arguing mildly) -- but not with him. To everyone moving about in the bleached, white and antiseptic void called The Clinic, he resembles a deflated collection of burned-up and bandaged human remains, breathing ever so regularly but lightly, youthful heart flouncing mildly under latex white patches pasted to his charred chest and abdominal expanse, a human system full of experimental chemical substances that promise a possibly good outcome. A pencil-thin intravenous tube does its work flexibly, silently, sluicing relentlessly a gooey and opaque white substance into his pierced, sutured, and heavy gauze-wrap of a right forearm and wrist. The Patient has been lying motionless in this clinical bed for days and days (though efficient Clinic staff do appear regularly to flip him over mirthlessly and silently several times per day, a spotless sheet is pulled up to and tucked under his chin when The Patient is flattened supine on his scarred back and legs), as if he were a stranger's afterthought tethered by some nonchalant local natives to a starched and thinning linen pier until some mystery Collector can come, at last, to bundle up his remains to dispose of them.
Most of this reality The Patient cannot sense and does not know. He cannot perceive with his senses and he feels no pain. Yet he has returned abruptly, unannounced, without gestures or words or other signals, from somewhere deep and dark and uncharted on any scientist's or daydream believer's maps. He intuits that he has come back in fragments, shattered, a patchwork identity.
As he ponders the meaning of the milky clouds that now enfold him, his girlfriend . . . . Malia, the scintillating and unavoidable young transfer student from the exotic lakes region of Nyanja, in the southeast quadrant of a territory once proclaimed British Central Africa. Malia Rupert Bananja -- genuine Malawian, a family princess and multi-racial jewel extracted and molded from the iron ore and mineral rich sediment that underlies the African peoples, with such a beautiful and exotic but level-headed manner, her long-legged gait so slinky and expressive, her slightly darkened, almost cafe au lait, complexion so marvelously silken and untainted, begins to materialize in the haze. But it's not really Mal. He can tell. The framework of this chimera's sheer body seems gauzy, see-through, nearly empty, like a ghost conjured by some tricky wizard.
The Patient observes, bewildered, as a perfectly shaped black cat with three exquisite gray paws and one snowy white one suddenly begins to slink, then pick up the pace to a prance, around Mal's slightly parted and silk-slippered feet (the silk pair of shoes he had proudly helped her pick out at the open-air barter market called Araby amidst a transitional Northside Chicago neighborhood), making tight and twitchy figure 8s, crazily, over and over and then over again, rubbing the smooth youthful skin on Malia's shins and foot tops sensuously with its lush mix of onyx fur, sinewy muscle, and curling black tail muscles. The Patient believes momentarily that this cat has caused him some trouble before (and his fragmented mind flashes momentarily on a cheap, wooden dinette table, a thick haze of tobacco smoke wafting through a room and on to a . . . kitchen). The feline's delicate paws leave precise footfalls of source-unknown, sticky blood on the floor. Whose freaking blood is that? The Patient is alarmed!
Malia reaches wide-eyed toward The Patient with her right hand and arm. She frowns balefully as if in mourning. A wrinkled octogenarian, dressed in simple African brown-tint robes from an era long, long ago, sporting a wildly unshaped, wiry, gray and greenish beard on his cocoa colored face, appears without alert and lurks behind Malia, as if the true Elijah or Moses, keepers both of the sacred Law of God, has just been dispatched, chiseled stone tablet in hand, from the flat pages of the Torah in an ancient family bible. The aged, biblical specter wobbles and floats behind the girl Malia. The wrinkly figure then peers over Mal's perfectly rounded shoulder point to direct a stern and disapproving (could that be a hateful?) stare at The Patient. The biblical mirage throws his stone tablet to the floor and it shatters, in a mini-explosion, into microscopic particles. Momentarily, The Patient, quite confused and full of questions, has a flash of recollection?, imagination?, in which a female adult's arm embellished by a tightly closed fist whizzes past his face speedily. As it does this fist plants a solid haymaker of a punch on the former dreamer's cheek and jaw. The rockhard blow spins his face around and a jarring crunch within his neckbones can be heard.
"Of course, you should go," the saddened Mal whispers intimately, lusciously, as if continuing an interchange somehow initiated long ago. Her warm and moist breath and her deeply glowing ruby lips feel like they are brushing very close to his face, stroking and caressing his ear, then lightly seductively biting his lobe . . . . . 'Good-bye, my love' echoes in a female voice throughout the cloudiness. Then, without warning, a flood of tears, like soft tracer lines of corrosive red and bright orange paints, begin to drip from her black African eyes. They snake down to her finely-sculpted cheekbones. Soon the colored teardrops are dripping onto the floor and onto the manic cat's back from Mal's wet and quivering chin. "Of course you should. Stiff upper lip here, mate, as the Brits say" she echoes again melodically, and it irrationally sounds to The Patient like the notes and lyric of an old pop ballad. "Cuz you never ever know -- no, you never ever know -- what a town without pity . . can do."
'Do not stop and gaze. You're like tigers in a cage. For yours is not an easy age,' the cryptic biblical phantasm transmits this musically via mental telepathy or some kind of trickery.
The slinky black feline stops cold in the midst of her prancing, bloodied figure 8s. She darts back into the milky clouded backdrop. Goodbye, my love. The image of Malia begins to fade backward slowly, steadily, and she vaporizes into the haze, not stepping on her slippered toes but gliding back through the smoky air. Goodbye, she waves. I really ought to go to help them out, he repeats to himself while staring at the slim bands of sticky coloring slicing down her face. 'Go. Of course, you should,' Mal's ghostly arm and hand outstretched dissolve instantaneously into ones that belong to some vaguely familiar old male. With reddened and heavy-lidded eyes ('You need to get some sleep before long, young man!' someone says authoritatively in the cloud bank), the old fellow stares cloyingly, nervously, at The Patient. His shaking and wrinkled right hand reaches desperately for a firm grasp on The Patient. But he has begun to sink away, his trembling old arm, head and stooped shoulders disappear, plunge, horrifically, as if he has just been kicked panic-stricken by cruel Fate through an open skyscraper window up in storm clouds.
Down a double shot for me before you leave, old friend, The Patient thinks without prompting, feeling a twinge of grief.
"Well, dammit, you know how it was. Always," The Patient lightly strains to take in that familiar but gruff male voice. This stirs him internally. Wiley, he says to himself. Wilton? In another room?
"You were too hard on him. All of his life, you know that. A rule and a reason for everything, every damn thing. Gotta get it all right. Get it so-oooo perfecto, like you would always demand it. The boy tried to get up to the hilltop but he popped, he got fried you know, under the strain" Some woman had whined this, barely audible, quite near him. "God, I need a goddamed drink."
The Patient pictures agonizingly her fishing for a pint bottle of Kentucky bourbon from her purse.
The Patient actually grasps very little about this real-time scene in the medical clinic --he under-stands that he has returned from somewhere in silence. He knows not when, nor where the speakers are, nor where he has been in hiding. In fact he does not even realize that he is The Patient or A Patient, nor who he happens to be nor how old he is, nor what he should be calling himself. He intuits that he has been cracked into little pieces like atoms on the inside. The Clinic sound-system's classical fugue rolls on elegiacally with a hushed thrum through his back channels. He remains fixed in place, perplexed, inanimate, his fears and confusion suffuse him with a tacky warmth, as from a vulnerable and flickering pilot light on some old-timer's iron stove.
"You really must leave now, my love. But it should be a long study night for me and the girls. Can I please get two or three more of your awesome little pills before you go?," Malia whispers softly to him, seductively, her lips again hugging his ear, while laboring to sound reassuring rather than cloying. She caresses in her lovely arms the sensuous black cat with its blood-stained paws hanging down freely. The Patient reflexively gasps for breath when the cat's eyes blink before him for a long quiet second . He fixes on the ruby red polish on Malia's long, glistening fingernails. The Patient struggles to turn quickly (to run off to . . . . where?) but he cannot move at all. This eerie wish unfulfilled hurls him into an unseen and yawning sinkhole of worry and nausea. The male-female conversation he has barely overheard is becoming more fiery.
"What, I mean what the hell or what, Lulu?" the man says.
"Yes, alright, I was the one who begged him to help them out. Big deal. How was I to know what awful things would happen? For God's sake? They would have never made it alive driving out there in the county and that weather all by themselves," Lulu exclaims.
"Funny the way shit do go," the man replies gruffly, mockingly. "He was working to get better. Going to meetings. Studying every day. Not using, as far as I could tell anymore. You know how it was, Lu. But still -- they were deep and deeper into the bottle. After bottle. After damn bottle. Dammit alive, it was like throwing a lit match into a gasoline pit pushing them all together once Wile had had his car crash."
Loo-loo?, ponders The Patient. ('I gave you life, young man, so don't you ever forget that,' The Patient imagines Lulu sputtering angrily these very words in Myra's dark and smoky dining room long ago, far out in the floating murk. ('Lu, that's enough already! Give him a break,' says Myra, rising slightly, truly alarmed. The young man adds 'But, Mom, you see you can't just all the time . . . ') He grasps afresh, on some barely crafted youthful level, all the the dazed emptiness she has carted through her lifetime of mental abuse, addled thoughts, and alcoholic regrets.
Then inexplicably-- like the sharp click of snapping fingers on a steady hand, or as if a powerful electrical switch has been abruptly thrown, the nameless and faceless Patient senses that he is being gently caressed, enfolded completely into a generous hug, in the way that Malia stroked the onyx feline. His nausea and worries dissipate. He is carefully lowered to a supine position by some massive velvet Force. He floats on the placid surface of an unfamiliar country lake, like harmlessly swaying flotsam lightly tethered to a decrepit pier, indeed barely hooked up to his tenuous life on earth. Adrift on this placid lake, The Patient peers down innocently toward the water's bottom. Instantaneously he feels drugged massively, hallucinatory, chemically clubbed. He beholds a frightening scene shoot up toward him from the lake's depths, as if it were rising action from Dante's imagined inferno. In a moment his muscular athlete's body, soaked and sputtering in an unrecognizable automobile, is sinking weightlessly down after smacking into the side of a steep cliff. It is soon immersed in a swirling, Styxian pool of white-hot, steaming fluids as it clunks on the bottom. A frigid mix of snow and rainfall lands on his scalp through a collapsed sunroof. Burning white waters cascade down the cliff to crush him like an anvil thrown down by displeased gods. His beefy hands and solid forearms suddenly become deeply seared and burn agonizingly, as an acidic fluid shoots out at him. A driver's steering wheel materializes and then melts like intensely hot liquid metal into his fingers and palms, yet he clutches what's left with passion. Now he is being doused by a noxious fire-spray from all sides. It flash fries his body and soul into a charred saucer full of smoldering coal ash. The Patient yells frantically for assistance. Over and over. And yet again. But sadly, no one can hear him, not even Myra or Wilton. Minutes later, The Patient lies inert, seemingly unperturbed, on the bed in The Clinic. The gentle, rocking velvet Force of protection remains stripped cruelly away. He knows that he has dreamed this way manically many times before while laid out languidly on the hospital bed -- surrounded by concerned and efficient staff members, and some lingering family members on occasion -- but never, ever his dark-eyed girlfriend, Malia -- while everyone longed to do more.
For days and days, all is suspended in darkness, a thought-starved twilight, in The Patient's induced abyss. The few of his major blood vessels that were uncooked are pulsing with platelets and whirring away calmly -- thanks to The Doctor's painkilling, memory-blotting substances, while machines digitally declare him to be alive. The electronic banks peer silently at the hushed Clinic workers like the high-strung black cat that leaped onto Wilton and Myra's abandoned dinette table. But The Patient on one afternoon in the future will -- as his dose of The Doctor's special, experimental IV drug is reduced intentionally, judiciously, as hours go by -- at last pry open his eyes slowly and curiously, try to clear his dry and dusty throat, lick his cracked but salve-coated lips, twist his restrained and aching torso slightly to the left then to the right, then plaintively, hoarsely, beg for a cool drink -- just water, please, just water this time. It will be the moment when he first beholds The Doctor gazing down at him silently, like some speechless biblical patron or god, his dark brow furrowed, his white lab coat pulled over a neatly-collared blue shirt, all garments perfectly starched and buttoned-down, holding his hefty notebook and ink-filled pen in hand, as always more than ready to proudly document whatever would happen next.
And This Is Normal
Normal is a small town that was built on a large bluff, in the center of a middle state, in the heartland of the U.S.A. It stands uphill to the infamous city of Bloomington, Illinois. These village twins are sometimes strangely referred to as Blo-No by locals on the prairies. Among other things, Normal is both the home of Illinois State University ("Go, You Redbirds!") and the lone Mitsubishi plant in North America, which in a closed dome of throbbing robotic hums and whirs rolls out shiny new Eclipses and Endeavors around the clock every day. The Normal region's steady population stood at 54,321 one Autumn nightfall some time ago -- but it was decreased by a frantic and disastrous flash of events, plus a simple medicinal miscalculation, by exactly four persons, as an icy cold darkness and a freezing, wintry mix began to fall from the sky. Much of this unfolded in and near the graying, rural Ascension Health Care Center, a severely understaffed medical facility, on the rolling Illinois farmlands, just a few miles away from Normal, in old Ascension County and the raggedy old uplands township known to all locals as Icarus Falls.
A main character in this unlikely fable, The Patient, has been heavily medicated and forced daily to put on scratchy nursing scrubs colored teal or iron gray (thus identifying him as a person in heavy, chemical treatment), feels bereft of all the worldly possessions that he has ever owned, including his memories, his name, and his past. The Patient got his first return look around the town of Normal, and then a glance at the bland and fraying campus of Illinois State, from the smudged window of a crowded college bus carrying the Evansville Purple Aces' wrestling team. He had been absent for two years of hard study and Summer jobs, and lots of drinking. The outskirts of Normal stretched into a patchwork collection of decaying, downscale neighborhoods, including the old one in which he had been born. Before he became The Patient, he had veered, as in a runaway vehicle, to Evansville University in Indiana. At age 20, when this brief road-trip back to a leaf-strewn Normal, buffeted by chilly Fall breezes, The Patient was tall and muscled heavily in all the right places, possessed strong chin and cheek bones, seemed attractive to most of the girls he met, and looked to be a promising athlete -- especially when he suited up in his carefully-fitted Purple Ace sweatsuits and colored uniforms from the New Balance company. At that moment, as the team bus pulled under the arched roof of the creaking ISU fieldhouse, he had no suspicion that he would within nine additional months transfer back, as an intellectually-gifted and strongman junior, thus becoming a varsity wrestling Redbird who had received a generous athletic scholarship. This would occasion his return to his parents' new household and his family members. He would meet Malia. He would accept a first, small glass of whiskey from Wilton and Myra who were scared and trembling, and drunk as usual. He would fish pills out of his blue jeans pocket. Taken all together, these conditions set the stage for a monstrous string of events on one Fall day regarding all things Normal.
Athletic Fieldhouse at Illinois State University
Elsewhere as the day of the ISU road trip came around a second main character, an immigrant herein to be known as The Doctor, studied with vigor and daydreamed in his cramped office space. The Doctor had crafted a daily uniform that he thought of as peculiarly American -- and he wore it with a fierce pride now that he was licensed in neuropsychology. It included a freshly pressed medium blue shirt with a button-down collar, perfectly-hemmed mocha slacks, shiny brown slip-on shoes, and a starched white lab coat with big pouch pockets. He received his first glance of midtown Normal (and then the university campus) when he came for an interview, with his young wife from Algeria, at the medical institute over on the university's margins. The couple had met in Bloomington. The Doctor was a new resident, from Oman, while she was a promising graduate student in experimental psychology. The Omani doctor dreamed constantly that he would soon be on the verge of a major professional breakthrough, a career-building masterstroke, one that would ensure him the brightest of careers in modern neurology, generous professional journal acknowledgements, and envious whispers of "That would be him, yes, over there" behind his blue-shirted back at high-stakes world congresses full of starstruck admirers. He experienced a humorless irony that he was at last a Ph.D. but stuck on treating hayseeds with common emotional blights and textbook neurological issues in a middle-American zone called Normal.These two strangers, the catatonic and scarred survivor of a fiery and remarkably violent night on slippery country roads beyond Normal and the daydreaming but brilliant doctor of science, bounced gently against one another for the first time when the insentient crash survivor was rolled carefully, gently, one morning into a trauma bed in The Clinic near the university. The Omani believed after a few weeks had passed, because the patient's coma proved persistent, that Fate itself had drawn them together. The patient later feared -- once he had been raised out of his long drug-fueled sleep into that fragile awakening -- that the ravenously cruel universe had been stalking him for years, as so many paranoid chemical dependents constantly do, and that it lurked still like a stealthy predator, big panther's teeth razor-sharp and exposed, in the raw chilliness just beyond his frosty bedroom window. Once the two strangers from opposite sides of the globe began to converse haltingly, genuine therapeutic progress remained elusive for weeks. In secret, the doctor began to feel his chance at the big, career-making breakthrough was disintegrating. Perhaps we would not be the lucky and skilled man who was to be revered forever for putting the neuro back into the science. The laggard Patient seemed often to paddle aimlessly around a sea of self-pity, lost in his fragmented identity and confusion -- that is, until the game-changing day of March 25th came along.
*** *** *** *** *** *** ***
 |
| Icarus and Daedalus Have a Bad Day |
Over a few weeks, he has only said three things (each only one time) to The Doctor. By the time the last of this the trio of exclamations had been made the therapist was beginning to ruminate, unsettled, on the possibility that the accident survivor was making a circumspect effort to run an addict's con on him. Months later, an astute graduate assistant looking over the detailed booklet of Doctor's session notes informed The medical man, who did not watch many films, that each statement was an allusion to a legendary American movie.
First there was, 'Really. When you talk that way my head spins like that poor girl who was possessed.'
Second, 'You really want to know the password? Well, sir, it's, it's -- Why so Serious?'
And third came, 'I picture a black-haired girl and a black cat with bloody paws. She said I'm in jail. But hell c'mon let's get going, Jake. It's Chinatown.'
The Doctor was massively frustrated and concerned. Yet, on March 25th, without preface, as hints of the Spring season announced their presence outdoors, The Patient enunciated a spoken monologue, a veritable bursting of a mental dam. Every syllable that was verbalized (as in all past encounters in these quarters) was recorded by a small, noiseless digital drive strategically situated within the therapy suite. The patient was not aware of this. He would not have been pleased had he known. The promising neurologist had posed a simple question while just trying as usual to get the The Patient to crack open his closed and locked front door.
'What happened when you went in there?,' The Doctor asked.
He hopes for a terse little reply at least. Overall, he impatiently accepts this patient's current behavior as a reasonable defense mechanism. He thinks that it will persist until the young man's bodily systems, membrane and cortex and skull included, further adjust, downshifting, via the potent and experimental drugs that he ingests unknowingly intravenously day by day. The flurry of words that ensues is a surprise to The Doctor. He feels flushed and his heart rate quickens. Absentmindedly, he drops his hands, his notebook pad, and his ink-filled pen into his lap. The Doctor's eyes widen, crosses his legs, and listens:
So you want to know what happened in there? When it all came down? Did you know that George Eliot once said in a book that there are entire continents unmapped inside each and every one of us. So. I, I -- I was pretty smart back then. Everybody said so, for a wrestler, they joked kind about that. Jockdom rules they say. The great philosopher Kant once said there are two things we wrestle with the more we study them: the mysteries of the stars and the moral law. Isn't that just terrific? The moral imperative and all that. I had begun to feel like I should do something big and right with my life, or bring some worthy cause to a righteous resolution. To be great. To be somebody. Groomed for it by my parents I was, especially my dad. In the end. To reach the heights of my "potential." -- My parents were freaking me out over school and my scholarship, even though I was doing great. They just loved the money my school work and scholarship saved them. My sarcastic 'you can do it, son' of a mother, who faded in and out with her bourbon shots and bitching rants all my life, and my mopey father with all the strictness and perfectionism and the 'my way or the highway,' and 'you just can't fail, son' lectures kept trying to con me into thinking I had great things in store. Study harder, make 4-damned-0 grades, thank the Lord for the endowment, son. Always at me about it. I was a case, a nervous wreck, dammit. Jesus Christ, I was about a 4.0 junior. What the crap? I couldn't do much better. I was winning all my matches on the wrestling team. So. I was downing handfuls of Dexies, one after the other, for days. There was a little bit of crank and chronic mixed too when I could get them. Other campus drugs. Players can get 'scrips pretty easy. I had aches and pains all the time from wrestling and the long road trips. I just about stopped eating -- with those lines of speedos in me. But I was studying my butt off too. December exams weren't that far away. So. . . . My hands would tremble. That upset me. Taking some things would calm them down. Then, on day I crossed a river, crossed a line, when I picked up the Adderall and some Effie's. I just took off. I stopped sleeping and most of my eating as well. I dropped some pounds. Coach was barking about that. So I skipped a freakin' practice one day. No biggie, I think That afternoon, my mom asks me if I would help drive my aunt and uncle over to the township because of an accident and emergency. I called Malia then went to see her. She told me I should go. And I don't remember much of anything after. Have you ever gone blank, weirded out, dropped off the grid for a while, Doctor? Sometimes I am so petrified, blackouts, I hate them. I had heard about blackouts, but . . . wham! How much time has really gone by since I drove them? . . . You gotta get this 'cuz you are so smart. The playwright Beckett once said that nothing's more satisfying, more exquisite, than unknowing and unhappiness. Which all brings me to my point of inquiry, why I have told all of this to ya. What's the diff between grief and depression? Is there a difference. 'Cuz they both seem the same. To me.
The Doctor is tempted to sigh politely Ahem. He sips some water from a coffee mug. He is trying to get to a main point of what he has just heard. Momentarily, he wonders if the scarred young patient is together enough, secretly, deceptively, to be trying to con him.
The neurologist says, 'Yes. Of course there is a psychological distinction. So, you felt that you were on the brink, on the edge, pressured at all times. Talk about the nerves, the angry resentments you were feeling. What finally got to you?'
Yep, you could say I was on the edge. Well-played, sir. So I had stopped drinking, cold turkey, but I didn't stop the pill parade. For four weeks before. Yeah I was flipping out. Like when someone steps, you know, for the first time to the Grand Canyon's rim, Arizona ledge, just before dawn? That deep black emptiness is just there beyond words. Like an awesome black velvet curtain is pulled across a movie screen. Then the first rays of sun creep up over the eastern horizon. Start bring it all into focus. Truth comes yawning wide. Mystery tells its timeless story, a some poet might say. It plucks the damn breath right out of your lungs. Your heartbeat cranks. Its living on some living thing deep in darkness. So I wasn't sure how not to fall of the ledge. The first drink rang my bell. And I was mad, like let down, by everybody. That's what I felt.
He asks, 'And you saw what as that sun light began to reveal your truth?'
Really, was I in a coma or did you just put me there? I hear months have gone by or what? Here's the deal. What I remember. I was climbing up on something white and flat but I fell back, yanked by the back of my jersey, and then down I went real hard, cranium first. Panicked me like I was gonna die . I dropped back so quick. Powerless. Something or somebody pulled me back. I finally slammed down after descending forever. Something like a trillion volt electric shock shot through me. Then it all goes to the white noise and everything. I sense I'm being burned alive. Look at these scars, man. I can't look in the mirror. I'm awful. Then. So. I go down and there was just the 'Bee-beee-eeeee-pppp' that drags on and on and on. (The Patient imitates the sound of a flatline reading on a digitized medical machine.)
The two gaze impassively at each other. The Doctor says, 'You were badly injured. You slipped into a comatose state. Broken skull, deep-degree burns all over, a swollen ravaged cortex, lost fingers and toes resembling cinders. It is a mystery how you actually made it through.'
The patient smiles. So. O-kay. I went insane in the membrane? Hey, I've got it. I should write this all down. It'll be a heartstopper of a show, man. Broadway stage, bright lights, action. Years of touring company shows and standing ovations. A morality tale about intemperance and human folly. So. You and I will have lead parts naturally, yes we'll be the wisdom chorus. So. That's gonna happen then. For sure.
The neurologist finds that his mind commences to wander. Taped sessions often have this disorienting affect on him. Then in a flash something the patient had disclosed about swinging downward, panicked, from the hospital gurney -- ambition thwarted, head down and flailing toward a stony cold floor -- posed a tentative answer to the riddle he had been contemplating.
The Omani later wordlessly records notes in black ink. First, he draws the universal symbol for depression -- a capital I stroked through a fat O (a zero). The therapist strains to remember all he has learned about anterograde amnesia. -- He scribbles quickly: College wrestler. Falls back. Psychogenic fugue, dissociative. Brain trauma.Guilty or Bluff? Explore conflicts with father figures!
Then the physician in the starched-crisp lab coat says they are almost finished for the day. 'You start to remember some of these details exactly when?,' he inquires.
This induces The Patient's look of pain and confusion. Very quietly, hollowly, the patient shrugs and claims, I don't recall. Honestly.
Icarus in the Land of Nod
Later that day, The Patient writes with a sharpened lead pencil on a legal pad. He shudders when he looks at the extent of the burn scars on his hands and arms. He has taken to avoiding all mirrors. It is now night time. He sits in his scratchy scrub suit in the uninviting lounge reserved for long term in-patients. He concentrates closely on his sentences. A heavy metal tune he has never heard before comes speeding, pumping, thumping rhythmically, ear-piercingly from some wickedly messed-up guy's room down in the darkened labyrinth of The Clinic
Ex-it light
Enter night
Take my hand, Grain of sand
We're off to never, never land.
He has begun to draft his stage play. Here is what he puts down.
Author's note: Lush black curtains part. The lighting on stage silently adjusts to a muted autumn glow. It discloses a cheerless, middle-class apartment in an aging building. Dark outdated furniture and too many nick-knacks make the space seem overcrowded. A sulphuric odor infuses the area due to decades of cigarette smoke and dust on the heavy curtains. A small, cheap wood dinette table and four chairs rest in a nook near the old kitchen. A quart of Old Crow whiskey sits on the exact center of the tabletop. A purplish spotlight, with heavy bands of tobacco smoke wafting in it, illuminates the bottle. Next to the table, a big carton denoting Old Crow holds ten identical quart-size containers, lurking there patient, wordless, and cunning as the militant blackbird stamped onto the shipping box. A lithe midnight black cat with three gray paws and one white one lies on the floor next to carton. Two full shot glasses sit on the table. One belongs to an older man, the husband, Wilton Topper. The other belongs to his wife, Myra. Everything is still. Myra sits motionless, head tilted down. Wilton is on his hands and knees. The cheap brrr-ing-gg of the Toppers' doorbell sounds. Once. Twice. Myra turns her vacuous face to the audience slowly. She seems flushed from steady whiskey-drinking all day. As if on cue, Wilton begins to cry aloud and pounds the floor. He lowers his face close enough to kiss the dusty carpet. The door creaks open slowly, like in a horror film. A tall young adult male, very fit and muscular, steps in gingerly. He is carrying some college textbooks. Myra smiles slightly. The young man's voice sounds nervously thin and high-pitched. He is perspiring from his rush to get there despite that it is a breezy and cool autumn afternoon.
"Aunt Myra?" the young man asks hesitantly.
"The liquor man was just here this morning," Myra blurts absently, as if startled awake from a daydream. Wilton rubs his bloodshot eyes and struggles to his feet. He wipes a few tears from his face.
Kyle dumps his pile of books into a dark, cracked leather recliner chair -- Abnormal Psych, Metamorphoses by Ovid, and a new edition of The Secret Life of Chaos. "Mom said that Wiley was in trouble or something. She wanted me to come down and help you guys. So. How is he doing? What's going on?"
Wilton begins to weep again. "He's dead, dead and gone. My poor, loving twin, my brother's -- dead! Never did he hurt anybody. I swear. My beloved, gone, a great man to all."
"Not dead at all, Kyle," Myra says exasperated. "Wile was in some kind of car wreck out by Icarus Falls. Got pretty banged up. But he'll live. Roads really wind around and dip out there."
"Icarus Falls. Huh. There's a name," Kyle says genially. "So. You need someone to drive you, Mom says. So. Okay, sure. I got it for ya." Kyle looks at the Old Crow bottle with edgy hunger and a deep thirst welling up in him. He has not drunk beers or alcohol, not a drop, for weeks. But he has taken, on this mid-term exam day, three, four -- maybe one or two more of his amphetamine caps since he got up. He cannot clearly recall how many he has swallowed.
Wil and Myra note that Kyle is peering weirdly at the whiskey bottle. "You need a drink, old buddy? Well, come on. Let's have it now, for Wiley," Wilton trumpets. He extends his aged arm over Kyle's broad shoulders and hugs him tight from the side. "You know, you're o-kay. I've always said that. Kyle, my boy, you're really okay by me in my book. Old buddy of mine. God love ya."
"I shouldn't drink. I've been working hard. But I'm not sleeping much."
"Well, then, you need to get some sleep before long, young man!," Wil replies. "You got a big life to lead. Man you're doing great! But dammit what harm's a little belt or two gonna make in the middle of the day?"
"I guess I could really use one. I am feeling kinda jumpy today. So," Kyle says nervously.
For years the young man has hated, seriously detested, Wiley the Twin, the guilty and convicted supreme court justice, ever since his full and sordid story had crept, then bombshelled, into the news. Wiley's fraudulent wrongdoings, perverted abuses, and stonewalling -- and his damned ridiculous slip and slide escape by lying from hard prison time, had led the idealist in Kyle, harboring great resentment over any System that would let a perverted creep walk, to his college focus on human psychology. Kyle thrusts his hand into his jeans pocket, feeling angry that Wiley has survived. He twists around a handful of amphetamine capsules safely tucked away in there with his long fingers. There are some other white tablets down there too, ephedrine or epinephrine or something like that his teammate had offhandedly claimed . Kyle wishes that he had more a stash with him, for a few more jolts of chemical lightning during the long roundtrip drive into the township and for a faux sense of personal reassurance in his gut. But he has just handed reluctantly three or four of the little white wonders in a tiny plastic bag to Malia Batanja so she could alertly do her mid-terms' cramming until late -- with a stiff upper lip, just like my Brit forebears, as she laughingly had mentioned.
I guess I can handle a shot or two then, re-focusing on the sparkling quart container of Old Crow, he says to no one in particular.
Wilton creeps into the cramped kitchen. As always, whenever a visitor comes to drink with the Toppers, he gets out a glass tumbler. Then he fills it with precisely four ounces of tap water. Carefully he wipes the whole surface with a paper towel. He takes the tumbler and a shot glass to the table. Then, Wilton finishes this ritual by pouring whiskey slowly into decorative glasses for all who want or need a fill-up.
"How bad is Wiley then?," Kyle asks.
"We don't know. Not yet. But, but, he's not dead or anything," Myra responds testily. Wilton starts to weep again. He squeezes his eyes shut and his fists tight. "Oh God," he moans. Exasperated, Myra stares out the dirty kitchen window. Seconds pass. "Too, too bad. Oh well," she says, slurring her syllables slightly.
"He could be dead. My beloved twin lying there in the road. Broken. Dead," Wilton declares loudly.
"We should get going soon," Kyle notes nervously. "It will get real dark before you know it. So . . . . Where are we going again?"
"Supposedly he's in the emergency room or somewhere in the Ascension Hospital. Out in the township by the Falls. Can't miss the place they say if you drive the main highway out of town" Myra says.
Wilton eyes the full shot glasses. He snatches his quickly, then lifts it high. He winks at Kyle directly. "I've been there -- couple o' times, oughtta be pretty easy to find, big sign by the highway . . . . But, now, here's to Wiley, here comes Da Judge, a great man, a great lawyer, and the best damned brother, the best ever, that any man could have! Bottoms up."
All three drink the inexpensive whiskey in full gulps. Kyle feels the liquid burn like fire burn down his windpipe. It hits his empty, drugged stomach like a muffled grenade explosion. "Wow," he gasps. He catches his breath, his eyes water a little, and his head starts to spin. "Oh, oh yeah." At that, feeling betrayed and guilty, Kyle feels there is big rumble of trouble to come. He petitions for a second shot. He sucks the stuff down with relish. "So. I guess we better go," he then notes reluctantly.
Once they are outside heading to their sedan, Kyle carts his college texts then squints through the dusty kitchen window. The black cat, Maxwell, leaps onto the dinette set and walks around a while. Then the feline stares menacingly at Kyle with its haunting yellow eyes.
Slip and Fall
The patient writes again with the pencil on a legal pad. Much time has passed. It is the middle of a morbidly hot August. His early writings from back in March sit in a stack beside him, the edges of papers curling up in the humidity. It has taken a long time to get him back on this task. He sits in the long term patients' lounge in his scrubs, feeling perspiration running down his once-cracked up ribcage under his scrub shirt. He gazes down at the yellowed flooring. Remembering, thinking, choosing words honestly proves hard. It is sweltering and dark outside. The music choice this evening, the closing medley of Abbey Road by The Beatles, as on many other nights, is drifting out some classic rock lover's room down in The Clinic's labyrinth.
Once there was a way to get back homeward
Once there was a way to get back home . . . .
Sleep, pretty darling, Do not cry
He has begun at last to draft Act 2 of his original drama. Putting some final, pencilled-in brushstrokes on Act 1 an hour earlier has encouraged him. On this night the climax and falling action of his stage play still need to be spelled out.
(The curtains part. The muted autumn glow has been transformed into a dark and gloomy night filled with cold rain. Three characters ride in a sedan. Kyle Kohl is the driver. His clothes, his forearms, his hands are streaked with tacky smears of blood. He presses a wad of white tissues to his forehead to cover a deep, oozing cut that he has sustained. In the back seat, Myra tries unsuccessfully to pour from a quart bottle of Old Crow into her glass tumbler. She gives up, then drinks a big swig from the bottle. Myra hands the bottle and the tumbler forward to Wilton via shaky hands. The blood on Kyle terrifies her. Wil takes the items and downs another mouthful. A passenger van led by bright headlights whizzes by speedily, going the other way. It's windy wake rocks their speeding car. The tissue wad falls from Kyle's hand. With a shaky grip, Wilton plucks a Kleenex from a box on the front seat. He wipes the open top of the whiskey bottle carefully. Then Wil hands the quart to Kyle, who shakes his head no. Another vehicle, bigger, a rumbling cargo truck, speeds by, its headlights blazing. Their car sways harder this time. Kyle's bloody hands positioned in the 10 and 2 spots on the wheel grip it tighter. He looks over at Wilton. The old man passes him the container of whiskey.)
"You're okay, old buddy . . . My buddy. You're really okay in my book. I ever . . . ever tell you . . . that?" Wilton slurs his words. He does not seem perturbed by the stinking, wet blood all over Kyle. It looks like he is about to pass out.
"Let him be and drive or something. Gotta get home now. Ta, to tooo e-eat," Myra says unsteadily. These will be some of the last words she speaks on earth. She lolls her head back on the seat, and appears to have slipped swiftly down into a deep slumber.
"Wiley, he gon' a be . . . o-kay," Wilton says. He wags an index finger sternly at Kyle. "Not ga-guil-tee. At all. You know, boy."
"Yeah. The man's gonna be a-okay. Up and around and running like mad again real soon, just like new. Sure looks like it okay. For sure. So," Kyle says this ruefully, a slight but insincere grin creasing his face. He is trying to avoid an argument with his uncle, who seems more than ready for a little fight over Wiley's criminal legacy. Kyle had been shocked when he strode into Wiley's emergency suite at the Ascension Center. The injured man was pierced with IVs and tagged with many patches that monitored his vital signs. Wiley Topper, the former supreme court justice of Illinois, was wrapped up like an alabaster mummy. He was aware of their presence but was heavily drugged. The judge waved weakly with his left forearm when he noticed their hushed arrival. Wiley's shy and quiet wife, Hanna, stood and cried a few feet from the judge's bed. Wiley could seemingly communicate with whispers only. Wilton lightly grasped his twin's bandaged left hand with both of his. He leaned low to hear what the judge was attempting to share. Kyle felt like he was spinning on a carnival ride. He craved another blast of the whiskey all of a sudden. His mouth seemed remarkably dry. He snorts over the twins' reunion and walks into the hallway. He locates a drinking fountain. Alone, he swallows another capsule of dex and to of the ephedrine tabs with the cold water that spouts up.
"He says he's really really sorry. Sorry ass of a twin brother. Damn. For every-thing he done he's so sorry," Wilton notes drunkenly to Kyle.
Another sedan, headlights burning bright, goes whooshing past them. Kyle fears he might lose control of the wheel if this keeps up.
"That's what he said. To me. Ta-night. My, my . . . old buddy. You, a good driver you are. Weather's real-ly bad." -- He pauses. "Don't . . . don't tell anyone. Okay. Just for you, I'll tell you it all. Some day. Soon. So very sorry for all of the. . . it that happened."
He should be goddamit, Kyle screams to himself in silence. He's about to meet his Maker and His Maker ain't too damn pleased with his final report card. Kyle has felt secretly ashamed for years to have this creep, this felon that everybody knows about, in the family. Wiley had been impeached, at last, while suspended from his seat on the esteemed court. Kyle had heard the whispers and the sticky insults in school, on the team, on the TV news forever. Adept defense lawyering alone had managed to keep Judge Wiley the Topper free from long and gruesome years of debasing prison time.
"Have another drink with me? A little one at least?," Kyle asks nervously. He wants Wilton to just shut up like Myra had. The uphill slant of the road toward Icarus Falls suddenly goes very curvy and slick. Kyle's head is still spinning wildly -- unsteady, drunk and dopey again.
"He never did it. Never done any-thing . . . bad," said Wilton. "Never. Ain't that right? My-ra? Not gu-gil-guilty of any of it."
As the car hydroplaned toward a sharp bend, a truck racing at a thundering speed -- its headlights blinding, its black steel grillwork reflecting the heavy lines of raindrops in the air -- swerved on two wheels into the oncoming lane. Kyle yelped. Wilton never saw it coming.
Kyle turns hard to the right. The Topper sedan smashes through the flimsy wooden roadside barrier. Now they all fly in the car rapidly, weightlessly, wet and wild, down toward the shallow river that pools in swirls and gurgles at the base of Icarus Falls. Wilton's door flies open suddenly. He grabs for Kyle. But the old man desperately slides feet first out of the car and plunges down quickly, turning to dive head down like a wobbly diver, into the dark water. As the old man's body enters the shallow and roiling pool, the top of Wil's skull finds a soft patch of muck at the bottom. His head slices down in the mud to his wrinkled chin. Wilton's slack, aged frame, lacking all control, curls and twists above the mired head in the foaming waters from the Falls.
Meanwhile, the car rips through more blank space. Kyle frantically peers wide-eyed into the flash of his headlights shining back to him from the geared-up waterfall. The wiper blades on the windshield switch back and forth with a ticking sound as time, for Kyle, begins to slow way down. Everything seems to go silent. Kyle feels the eeriness of flying gravity-free (as in a roller coaster's mad descent) until the sedan's front end tips down and smashes jarringly into the rock ledge hidden behind the cascades of water. Kyle feels his back crack into pieces. Passed out cold, Myra's old body, arms spread wide like curled airplane wings, barrels over the front seat like a thick tree trunk propelled by a horrific wind. Her left hand, made into a panic fist, lands a solid punch on Kyle's cheek as it sails by. Then the crown of her head smashes through the windshield and squirts blood in all directions. At an uneasy rest at last, Myra's wrinkled face, now a death mask, tilts toward Kyle. In shock, he beholds the remaining shreds of her facial features and they seem to be grinning.
Kyle prepares to grudgingly greet his Maker, the One who has unleashed so many evils, pains, and horros on His beloved people. -- Oh well, he imagines insanely that what's left of Myra is speaking to him. The car slams down to the base of the Falls on all four wheels. The tires pop and hiss loudly. Flames jump in a flash up around the crushed-back hood. Instantly, Kyle feels an awful searing sensation and detects the smell of burning flesh. His arms and hands begin to sting and ache deeply, insanely. Some kind of fiery liquid, spurting freely, sears patches of his face and chest off. And then blissfully the suffering lasts not too long. Every sensation begins to meld into a white, insentient cloud bank as he lapses (disappears to himself) like a diver flying off of a high rock mesa into a deeply persistent state of shock.
The Patient squirms in his chair, then starts to furiously scribble additional stage directions though it is getting perilously close to the Lights Out command in The Clinic. It is still that hot August night. But he has reached a point in his story that confounds, frustrates, and leaves him feeling unmoored. The man in the teal scrubs is trying understand why the driver would be smeared with blood while commandeering, as if he were a drunken NASCAR pretender, Wil and Myra's aging vehicle. He strains to piece the story together. So little there, White light leads to white light leads to what?, he wonders. He writes fast before his time expires for the night.
New Scene: The stage set blends into an antiseptic hospital suite. Thunder and lightning can be perceived through a back window. Wilton leans down over a heavily bandaged Wiley on the bed. Faithful wife and mannequin, Hanna, stands by her man. She looks stricken and skeptical as the twins huddle. Myra stands next to her. She grips Hanna's hand. Kyle stands stockstill -- then lurches suddenly as if wrested from a long sleep. Hanna turns sadly to be embraced by her in-law.
"So. I'll just wait in the smokers' lounge or something. I have my books. So. I, I guess I can study," Kyle notes. Wiley and Wilton's overt secrecy bother him."You're okay, old buddy . . . My buddy. You're really okay in my book. I ever . . . ever tell you . . . that?" Wilton slurs his words. He does not seem perturbed by the stinking, wet blood all over Kyle. It looks like he is about to pass out.
"Let him be and drive or something. Gotta get home now. Ta, to tooo e-eat," Myra says unsteadily. These will be some of the last words she speaks on earth. She lolls her head back on the seat, and appears to have slipped swiftly down into a deep slumber.
"Wiley, he gon' a be . . . o-kay," Wilton says. He wags an index finger sternly at Kyle. "Not ga-guil-tee. At all. You know, boy."
"Yeah. The man's gonna be a-okay. Up and around and running like mad again real soon, just like new. Sure looks like it okay. For sure. So," Kyle says this ruefully, a slight but insincere grin creasing his face. He is trying to avoid an argument with his uncle, who seems more than ready for a little fight over Wiley's criminal legacy. Kyle had been shocked when he strode into Wiley's emergency suite at the Ascension Center. The injured man was pierced with IVs and tagged with many patches that monitored his vital signs. Wiley Topper, the former supreme court justice of Illinois, was wrapped up like an alabaster mummy. He was aware of their presence but was heavily drugged. The judge waved weakly with his left forearm when he noticed their hushed arrival. Wiley's shy and quiet wife, Hanna, stood and cried a few feet from the judge's bed. Wiley could seemingly communicate with whispers only. Wilton lightly grasped his twin's bandaged left hand with both of his. He leaned low to hear what the judge was attempting to share. Kyle felt like he was spinning on a carnival ride. He craved another blast of the whiskey all of a sudden. His mouth seemed remarkably dry. He snorts over the twins' reunion and walks into the hallway. He locates a drinking fountain. Alone, he swallows another capsule of dex and to of the ephedrine tabs with the cold water that spouts up.
"He says he's really really sorry. Sorry ass of a twin brother. Damn. For every-thing he done he's so sorry," Wilton notes drunkenly to Kyle.
Another sedan, headlights burning bright, goes whooshing past them. Kyle fears he might lose control of the wheel if this keeps up.
"That's what he said. To me. Ta-night. My, my . . . old buddy. You, a good driver you are. Weather's real-ly bad." -- He pauses. "Don't . . . don't tell anyone. Okay. Just for you, I'll tell you it all. Some day. Soon. So very sorry for all of the. . . it that happened."
He should be goddamit, Kyle screams to himself in silence. He's about to meet his Maker and His Maker ain't too damn pleased with his final report card. Kyle has felt secretly ashamed for years to have this creep, this felon that everybody knows about, in the family. Wiley had been impeached, at last, while suspended from his seat on the esteemed court. Kyle had heard the whispers and the sticky insults in school, on the team, on the TV news forever. Adept defense lawyering alone had managed to keep Judge Wiley the Topper free from long and gruesome years of debasing prison time.
"Have another drink with me? A little one at least?," Kyle asks nervously. He wants Wilton to just shut up like Myra had. The uphill slant of the road toward Icarus Falls suddenly goes very curvy and slick. Kyle's head is still spinning wildly -- unsteady, drunk and dopey again.
"He never did it. Never done any-thing . . . bad," said Wilton. "Never. Ain't that right? My-ra? Not gu-gil-guilty of any of it."
As the car hydroplaned toward a sharp bend, a truck racing at a thundering speed -- its headlights blinding, its black steel grillwork reflecting the heavy lines of raindrops in the air -- swerved on two wheels into the oncoming lane. Kyle yelped. Wilton never saw it coming.
Kyle turns hard to the right. The Topper sedan smashes through the flimsy wooden roadside barrier. Now they all fly in the car rapidly, weightlessly, wet and wild, down toward the shallow river that pools in swirls and gurgles at the base of Icarus Falls. Wilton's door flies open suddenly. He grabs for Kyle. But the old man desperately slides feet first out of the car and plunges down quickly, turning to dive head down like a wobbly diver, into the dark water. As the old man's body enters the shallow and roiling pool, the top of Wil's skull finds a soft patch of muck at the bottom. His head slices down in the mud to his wrinkled chin. Wilton's slack, aged frame, lacking all control, curls and twists above the mired head in the foaming waters from the Falls.
Meanwhile, the car rips through more blank space. Kyle frantically peers wide-eyed into the flash of his headlights shining back to him from the geared-up waterfall. The wiper blades on the windshield switch back and forth with a ticking sound as time, for Kyle, begins to slow way down. Everything seems to go silent. Kyle feels the eeriness of flying gravity-free (as in a roller coaster's mad descent) until the sedan's front end tips down and smashes jarringly into the rock ledge hidden behind the cascades of water. Kyle feels his back crack into pieces. Passed out cold, Myra's old body, arms spread wide like curled airplane wings, barrels over the front seat like a thick tree trunk propelled by a horrific wind. Her left hand, made into a panic fist, lands a solid punch on Kyle's cheek as it sails by. Then the crown of her head smashes through the windshield and squirts blood in all directions. At an uneasy rest at last, Myra's wrinkled face, now a death mask, tilts toward Kyle. In shock, he beholds the remaining shreds of her facial features and they seem to be grinning.
Kyle prepares to grudgingly greet his Maker, the One who has unleashed so many evils, pains, and horros on His beloved people. -- Oh well, he imagines insanely that what's left of Myra is speaking to him. The car slams down to the base of the Falls on all four wheels. The tires pop and hiss loudly. Flames jump in a flash up around the crushed-back hood. Instantly, Kyle feels an awful searing sensation and detects the smell of burning flesh. His arms and hands begin to sting and ache deeply, insanely. Some kind of fiery liquid, spurting freely, sears patches of his face and chest off. And then blissfully the suffering lasts not too long. Every sensation begins to meld into a white, insentient cloud bank as he lapses (disappears to himself) like a diver flying off of a high rock mesa into a deeply persistent state of shock.
*** *** *** ***
New Scene: The stage set blends into an antiseptic hospital suite. Thunder and lightning can be perceived through a back window. Wilton leans down over a heavily bandaged Wiley on the bed. Faithful wife and mannequin, Hanna, stands by her man. She looks stricken and skeptical as the twins huddle. Myra stands next to her. She grips Hanna's hand. Kyle stands stockstill -- then lurches suddenly as if wrested from a long sleep. Hanna turns sadly to be embraced by her in-law.
"We'll be getting back to Normal soon. Before most of the storm. Because we got it now that Wiley's goin' to be okay. Don't go far or whatever," Myra says.
"Somebody tried to murder the Judge. My God, oh God help us. Again its happened. The long nightmare's back. Won't this bad dream never end?" Hanna cries in her Southern drawl. "They tried to kill him again. Bumping him off the road. A black Ram truck a big one forced him off the township road, the police say."
Wil's secret conversation with his brother continues. It seems to be heating up. Kyle wants to flee from the awful room. He strides into the neon hallway. The drowsy security guard posted by the door nods solemnly at him. Kyle nods back, trying to appear normal, sober, balanced. He reaches the sour-smelling visitors' lounge. He sits and picks up one of his textbooks. He tries fruitlessly to concentrate. He rests his head on the back of the chair, then closes his eyes. He craves the whiskey bottle in his Aunt Myra's oversize purse. The book slips from Kyle's hands and bangs on the floor. Kyle's chin tilts forward and goes slack.
(Author's notation: All stage lights go out. Everything settles for a full minute into blackbox darkness and utter silence. Only audience murmurs and the occasional stifled cough can be heard. A hollow, booming finger-snap echoes in surround-sound throughout the theater indicating that something has changed. Playgoers jump in their seats. Then muted, smoky green lights come up once more.)
Kyle races back breathlessly into the hospital suite. There is no security guard around. A commotion of some sort and loud yelling have summoned him. An emergency siren starts to blare loudly, intermittently. Kyle surveys the scene. He feels confused and drunk. Damaged Wiley in his white bandages and IV tubes and digital patches has a choking grip on Wilton's wrinkled neck. Wilton has turned his back on his twin, kicking and screaming for his life. The pudgy security guard is trying to extricate the older twin. He fumbles clumsily to pull his pistol or perhaps a can of pepper spray out of his large utility belt. Hanna and Myra stand near the bed and scream for the brothers to stop.
"It was this bastard damn you," Wiley yells. "I swear. It was him who planned it, ran the operation and all, all the time. I took the fall. He was weak and scared. I paid everything I had for it. My butt went to the line. Confess, you guilty bastard." He pulls harder around Wilton's squeezed neck. Wilton's eyes are bulging and he is turning a bright and scary red color.
Kyle has for years loathed Wiley. But he has admitted that he was young at the most crucial times of the family crises and not certain about all the details regarding the criminality and scandals. He rejoiced, wildly hooting, in his house when the judge fell from his ill-deserved jurisprudent grace. Kyle looks around the suite. He is unsure about what to do. The blaring siren shouts are killed by someone. 'Stop it, you guys, now! I mean it.' he yells stupidly.
Old Wilton makes frightening, gurgling, choking noises. A strong urge to save his Uncle from his malicious brother comes to the fore. As if from a mirage, a shiny and compact Emerson switchblade slides down from a pocket hole in Wilton's pants, where Myra had secreted it back at the Toppers' place. The Emerson clacks to the green floor by Wilton's flailing feet. Kyle stares in horror and disbelief. He looks at Myra and silently mouths 'What?'. His aunt turns her vacuous gaze toward Hanna. Kyle can almost hear her weary Oh well sigh of resignation. Moving hastily, Kyle slides a few feet on his scrubs-covered shins and knees while leaning slightly back, as in a rock singer's big and bold finish to some concert, then grabs the deadly instrument. Kyle presses the spring button on the handle as he raises his arm high. The blade swings out and gleams like an icy terror in stop-action for a moment, an overhead pinhead purple spotlight fixed on it. The women gasp and shriek. The three older men wrestle for control.
'Let him loose, Wiley. This is it dammit. I'm not kidding. So. This warning is the last damn one you'll ever get,' Kyle spits heatedly.
The patient decides to give it one more try with the pencil and pad. The window by his side is frosty. It is snowing lightly outside. He has been trying to finish the climax and denouement of his Act 2 for nine months, but no plausible idea has captured his attention. Most of his memories of the fateful trip to the Ascension Center elude him. It is Christmas Eve. One would expect the music choice in the labyrinth hallways would be obvious. But his classic rock-loving neighbor is gliding high with The Eagles.
But I know a place where we can go, And wash away this sin.
We'll sit and watch the clouds roll by, And the tall grass wave in the wind.
Just lay your head back on the ground, And let your hair spill all around me,
Offer up your best defense, 'cuz this is the end, This is the end, of the innocence.
The pencil tip skips and scrapes across the legal papers once again.
(Final Scene: Kyle emerges like the guilty Macbeth from a billowy, green-tint smokescreen. He wrings his bloody hands and presses tissues on the oozing gash freshly carved into his reddened forehead. He twists his face anxiously toward a sudden clack in the hallway like some fallen Prince ready to flee his family's disintegrating kingdom. Hanna is groaning while slumped in a side chair. Soon she commences to weep uncontrollably. Myra shakes her head in disbelief as she walks unsteadily with her oversize clutch bag with quart bottle of the Old Crow concealed from the opaque green.)
"We've got to be scooting back now, honey," Myra says to Kyle in a tone that is otherworldly plaintive. "Easy now, you're a good, good boy. It's over. You finished it. For us you done it. Like we wanted you too. You . . . you've taken care of our last real big problem. Won't talk 'bout it to no one and Wiley, he won't tell, Wiles will go to his gr-ga-rave without talking. Men are gone. All. Thank you, Kyle. You're a big love. Look at them lying there. The Falls I tell you . . . it's not a good place for us to be right now. Let's scoot back. You got to be hungry. Gotta feed the cat too. But the long headache's gone. And dead and gonearoo. Oh well.'
(Final Scene: Kyle emerges like the guilty Macbeth from a billowy, green-tint smokescreen. He wrings his bloody hands and presses tissues on the oozing gash freshly carved into his reddened forehead. He twists his face anxiously toward a sudden clack in the hallway like some fallen Prince ready to flee his family's disintegrating kingdom. Hanna is groaning while slumped in a side chair. Soon she commences to weep uncontrollably. Myra shakes her head in disbelief as she walks unsteadily with her oversize clutch bag with quart bottle of the Old Crow concealed from the opaque green.)
"We've got to be scooting back now, honey," Myra says to Kyle in a tone that is otherworldly plaintive. "Easy now, you're a good, good boy. It's over. You finished it. For us you done it. Like we wanted you too. You . . . you've taken care of our last real big problem. Won't talk 'bout it to no one and Wiley, he won't tell, Wiles will go to his gr-ga-rave without talking. Men are gone. All. Thank you, Kyle. You're a big love. Look at them lying there. The Falls I tell you . . . it's not a good place for us to be right now. Let's scoot back. You got to be hungry. Gotta feed the cat too. But the long headache's gone. And dead and gonearoo. Oh well.'
Kyle looks at his tired, old aunt seeking a sign of understanding or sympathy.
"Aunt Myra. Look at this mess. What is all this? What the hell? Damn . . . . I'm all flipped over. I'm lost, I'm so completely lost here. What really brought us here? I don't know who I am or what I should do. I don't know where I'm at or why. I feel caught in somebody's web. So. Tell me. Please," he blurts. Then he bows his head and tears up.
Myra hugs Kyle gently and pats his back. You'll come back. You'll be o-kay. Don't ask me. I jus' know it, she whispers.
*** *** *** *** ***
The Patient puts down his pencil. Have a hap-hap-happy Christmas, it's such a hap-hap-happee hol-a-day, he hums to himself. Stinging tears bedevil him. The Patient briefly has a flash of memory -- thin streaks, tears, but whose?, of corrosive dark red and bright orange drip down female cheeks. He wipes his wet, scarred palms on the scratchy scrub suit. The Patient wipes his nose furtively with a his finger stubs on his left hand then again with his long teal sleeve. At midday on December 24 he resolves that he will talk about that hellish night in the township. Walking down to the therapy room, The Patient hums a tune again.
If we stop to gaze upon a star,
People talk about how bad we are.
Ours is not an easy age -- We're like panthers in their cage,
What a town without pity can do.
Fully into a bit upbeat, he gets into the song he imagines. In midstep, The Patient abruptly slides on his knees across the polished floor, a make-believe microphone in his right claw, and he gives the lyric a big loud finish. Caaaa-nnnn dooooooo! Nurses at the nearby station look up with alarm and prepare to sprint. Sheepishly, he rises slowly from the tile. No worries, he reports to the Clinic staff with a blush. Elijah once taught me that golden oldie.
The Patient ambles into the suite of mildly holiday-cheery 'giant' of neuroscience. It is time.
"What was all that in the hallway?" he inquires.
"A song. Just an old song or two. I've got a stack of papers. I've been putting that ballyhooed stage play together. Big stackof legal papers. Maybe I'll show you them some day. So,"
"You're singing and writing now. I have heard some reports of this from the Clinic staff. In good time you are starting to come around, I believe. The drug therapy apparently agrees with you. You display a set of signs sign that I would daresay is encouraging. Good," the Doctor says.
The scarred young in-patient on the spur of an intuition takes a risk. "So. Sir. Tell me, have you always been such a obnoxious and ambitious pretender and jerk since you got your wall full of degrees?"
The Omani recoils in surprise. He feels anger but tries to hide it.
So, it is time the physician decides having given this potential, probable, confrontation much rumination. The Patient has been reacquiring stray memories, like uninvited carpetbaggers, that materialize in the darkness of his bedroom. All words will be recorded by the little digital drive concealed strategically, as they have been for nine sobering and sullen months. The ambitious Doctor feels he will experience no difficulty in paying attention as this standard 50-minute hour will race by. He hopes his patient may kick the doors open, a lasting stroke, on his convoluted story.
"When we left off we were talking about your probable blackout on the evening of the accident," The Doctor notes. "I sense it started when you went to the lounge to let the others talk, if that actually did indeed occur. You concurred with that possibility. Records show you had consumed a large quantity of uppers for days on end, even some ephedrine, epinephrine, and diazepam, wracking your bodily and emotional systems. There was no food in your stomach. You must have been a nervous wreck and dangerously low on blood sugars. Very, very dangerous this was. Potentially deadly. Butg your well-toned physique kept you on your feet and pumping away one thing following another. But the sharp and no doubt stunning blow you sustained to your cranium caused by the security guard pulling you down induced a close to lethal brain trauma. Yet on you went. Adrenaline buzzed until you gave up fighting near the auto wreckage. Medical personnel eventually lapsed you into an induced coma and in time sent you to our clinicians."
"I thought I would be strong, heroic, for real for once," the patient said. "I was a so freaked back in those days, I told ya. So."
"You feel guilty. Good!," the doctor says emphatically. "You were in a prison then most different from the one you experience now. Make no mistake. This is a way to start the journey outward -- feelings of guilt."
"I guess," he acknowledges. "But I look, I look . . . God-awful. Purely hideous. I am . what did I do? What I have I done? I can't stand to feel this way anymore . . . . So,"
The Omani speaks. "You almost lost your right eye and left hand right away that night. Most of your hair was burned off. You've seen all the scarring over your scalp, hands, arms, your torso. Your lips, your ears. Quite extensive are the losses. Horrible business. The deep slit where you fractured open the back of your head. When they resuscitated you . . ."
"I have no one who cares. No one comes. Where are they? My parents? What about my friend Malia? Where's she? She won't come to see me here? I'm so bad? She can't or what?," he feels suddenly undrugged and desperate.
"Your parents may not come anymore now that you are conscious. Not at least until you recover more. Their tone and their presence would roil you as before," The Doctor notes. "They came at certain times while you were under. They were generally very disruptive to you and our staff. Once we had to expel them for their blatant testiness. At present, your father and mother do not do so well. They are in separate facilities. The unfortunate Ms. Hanna Topper is also institutionalized for her many psychological issues and the loss of her esteemed husband. I see her regularly each week here, sometimes more frequently, for therapeutic purposes."
The Patient feels little sense of loss and brushes off the retort. He decides he does not want to hear anymore about Lulu, the Old Man and their generation for a while. "But Malia. She's missing. She hasn't been to see me. I think . . . Where would . . .?," he whines lowly.
"Ah yes, the girlfriend Malia. I have seen her picture. She was most beautiful."
The interchange stops. The Patient gulps reflexively.
"I am afraid I must inform you and it pains me greatly to do so that your Malia has expired," the physician appears contrite.
"Died? Dead? She's not dead," the survivor surges with fear and anger.
"Yes, I am sad to be the one to say so. She is certainly expired. I think this is a bad day for you to find out this truth. But it would have to be done later. Sit back a little. Try to breathe evenly like we have practiced often. Now. You must do this,"
The Doctor nods gravely. He speaks --
"Malia Bananja expired in an unexpected rush on the very night of your persnal tragedy. The official police report remarks that she was found dead shortly after midnight with a psychology textbook in her hands on her dorm room couch. She was clothed in red pajamas decorated with black cats. No foul play or intruders were suspected. A terrible and depressing scene I am sure. Her female study-mates had gone out for a renewed supply of beer, it is said. Malia had consumed some beer recently. Her blood alcohol reading was point-oh-six. Not risky or life threatening on its own. Yet she soon died suddenly all alone with a cigarette burning in a nearby ashtray because she had apparently swallowed a quantity of Ephedrine pills just before. As with ingesting cocaine an initial foray for so many, records show that her heart muscle in her likely fatigued condition could not withstand the chemical assault. A necessary valve exploded. The ephedrine killed her like a poison would as it mixed with the alcohol in her cardiac system. Her heart had a virtual blow out like a flawed tire that pops with a suddenness. Medical records show that she had a residue quantity of amphetamine in her blood that horrible night as well. Perhaps you would know something about this matter? In fact no one else involved in Malia's case seems to. She did not seem to have a chronic drug problem. The authorities and many others gravely suspect that you were her drug supplier this once or perhaps on another occasion. Your tox report post accident at Ascension Hospital authored by the very emergency room doctor you had insulted on your previous visit that night certainly showed a scary, sizable cocktail of lethal substances mixing in your body."
Aghast at these disclosures, The Patient whispers the painful truth and his words come out as from a haunted shellwork, "I gave her those pills, the white little F's and two hits of Dex. She begged me to do it. She said she needed it for the midterm prep. Because I was going out with Myra and Wil and she'd be alone. So . . . Oh my God."
"A grave a very grave mistake in judgment as you are sensing in its fullness. The work of a confused and self-defeating addict on the loose indeed. It will take time to process this experience," The Doctor says without pity. He senses that he is finally getting somewhere with this hardshell survivor.
"It all went blank to a glowing white, I was way off the grid, Don Juan Goes to Hell time." The Patient protests. "I didn't know. After my mother asked me to drive to the township."
"So yes indeed sadness and remorse can lead toward healing. I tell you this for your well-being. Not to punish. But there must not be one more word of blaming of your parents. No more blaming Malia or the quartet of Toppers or anybody else. This will get you nowhere. You will be caught continually in the maze of your life-threatening habituation. No surrender now to self-pity and powerlessness. Accept. It's work you must do. Pain endured is often useful and it will be useful to you I believe as time goes by. Use it. It took us a significant time to stabilize your vitals, let you rest in our twilight coma, and begin to heal your fractured and fire-seared body. Yes the coma was prolonged intentionally. Now do not fight any more. You are sensing what addictive substances do to you. Allow the rest of your recovery to occur. It will take time."
The stern and unlikable doctor has come across smarter and more compassionate than ever before. "You downed that first drink again with your relatives before you left. Then another. A perilous and dangerous game. Yet, here you are -- sober. Drug-free. Scarred. Frightened. Bereft of your best friend and your parents and the Toppers. No one will be permitted to interrupt your recovery for a time. But you are alive. Some would call you a lucky young man. It will be a significant question whether you choose to go on to want on your own to live as we move forward. You will not leave here soon either. I have the power over that. It's the law. And also it's in my judgment what's best for you."
The Patient wants to scream. He prepares to slap the neurologist then bolt from the room. But for a moment -- like a snapshot from an oldtime camera -- a grainy image of a scriptural Moses or Elijah lookalike flashes before his eyes with a stone tablet in hand. Instead of screaming, The Patient slumps and shrugs limply. The battle must end he knows. He feels something relent deep within.
The Doctor looks down as he reads from a transcript style document. He is perturbed at himself because he worries that he may have hit The Patient too hard, too quickly, with his revelations.
"Apparently you ushered your aunt and uncle into their vehicle after they had assessed Judge Topper's medical situation with the house doctor, which was extensive by the way but was not grave at all. The Judge of course is expired too from a swift blade attack to his throat. The police report that it was was raining hard with a nearly freezing temperature as you proceeded during the night. It seems according to detectives' puzzling over events that you got the old folks to wait for you. I'll bet that you drank additional spirits while at the vehicle to fortify your faltering resolve. A blackened empty whiskey bottle was found in the remnants of your aunt's incinerated purse. Even though at that point you were likely well into your blackout. Then detectives think you stole back into the hospital somehow -- only you will ever be able to say why and how exactly -- tricked the security guard at the door of the Topper suite, and you went in to start carving the Justice up on his bed without known comment. His wife's whereabouts at that second are not known or she won't say. Medical authorities surmise that you took aim first at this vulnerable throat artery. The old man's temporary screeches brought medical staff and security. The black-uniformed security guard you tricked into going out to check on Myra and Wilton in the car caught you to yank you down headfirst hard onto the tile floor. Like a drunken Rasputin though, eyewitnesses say you rose up, sliced the guard fatally with a mighty swish of the switchblade, as if your adrenaline had propelled you into superhuman strength. Then you ran away. Apparently you slid into Wilton's car and then you all sped like a trio of escaped prison inmates away in the rain. Your adrenaline flow and emotions must have been off the charts in those moments, or off 'the grid' as you have recounted. Your traumatized and probably dying brain was apparently swelling enormously and achingly hemorrhaging blood, your head hurting and throbbing painfully. You also were bleeding from an unexplained deep puncture on your forehead that was sustained before the guard pounced on your back. During the car chase in the rain, you carelessly or forcibly -- was it on purpose do you suppose? -- wildly rolled the Topper car off the slickened road and it caught on fire in a terrible scene. Many accidents by auto are thinly veiled suicide attempts. But I think this was not the case for you."
"Sorry," the patient whispers feeling at a lost and abandoned. He has nowhere to turn. He wants to stand and run. He hugs himself tightly, then he sits forward and rocks to and fro.
"Ah, chemically-impaired vehicle operators," the Omani notes. "What a lot such persons are. But you know. Always the nail-biting adventures. A drama that plays out in many chapters if the chemically-poisoned is lucky enough not kill himself or herself or others. It's a dangerous game of chance as you have found gthe absolute hard way. By the way, I have been curious. Have you ever run across the male name of Phaeton? Or perhaps Euripides by chance?"
The Patient hears the name as Fay Don. "No, I don't believe so. The other's a famous old Greek playwright. So . . . what is it?" he asks as he suddenly feels a big push of physical and emotional exhaustion.
The Doctor notes his patient's mood altering. "Ah, too bad. We'll explore it later to be sure" is the reply. "The signs are that it is just the time for your medication and we must draw this to a conclusion for the day."
In fact, as this is voiced, the medical man was secretly, already, excitedly drafting mentally his long-desired, reputation-building scholarly treatise about this most unusual of addiction and recovery cases. In fact as the snowflakes fell a few hours later, he became even more gleeful with each sanguine recollection. His proud and long-term prospects for a famous career and notoriety were looking up. A living example of a fabulist's myth, a Nobel worthy epic if he did say so, before him each day. The Doctor decided that he would not go public with any of these developments until he had examined rigorously all the details yet unrecovered and the resulting implications so he could write with confidence his got-to-be brilliant fame-confirming paper.
"By the way your aunt, Myra, was barely clinging to life when she was rolled back into the hospital. She was heavily drugged to alleviate her pain of course and she was choked heavily on the, um, noxious smoke she had inhaled. The notes from the attending physician say she had him lift up her oxygen mask slightly so she could mumble a few hushed words.
"Good God," the patient moans. "Cut it out."
Staring at his neat white coat, the ambitious physician feels a wicked temptation to violate his medical oath. He gives in for a moment as a payback to the sick man's insulting remark some time ago.
"No. Not that. Not that at all," The Doctor says with a deadpan comic's look. "But this is most interesting. You'll see as we go! Aunt Myra beckoned the attending to lean in close. He notes that she clawed his hand with her failing strength. She whispered with a trace of a smile: 'Oh well. Time to get back to Normal'."
The Omani pauses for effect. "The attending physician was never convinced that she had grinned. He did report the distinct odor of alcohol on her dying breath."
An extended silence ensues. The Patient squirms and sighs. All the drugs that protected him for so long seem to have vaporized. He feels raw. The Omani knows he has just jolted the scarred man hard, way too hard, almost for sure, egged on by an experimental neuro-magician's drive to induce a headlong emotional dive by his patient into unexplored and free-fall canyons. The doctor feels worry. He is very worried. The patient grows extremely pale. He is breathing oxygen in gulps, his eyes roll back, and he says he might throw up. He leans forward on crossed arms and rocks to and fro again. He strains to keep his meager stomach contents clenched down.
More precious seconds slip by.
"Will I ever get to see my parents or anybody else?" he asks. "I've been here for a while?"
The doctor writes a note,
"As I have disclosed, your parents came around to see you numerous times since your spur of the moment trip to Icarus Falls. Do you remember times they stood by your bed briefly at least -- here or in the first facility in which you were treated?" he inquires.
"They talked to you at times. Many people have spoken to you in your long reverie. Encouraging you to get well. Stroking and clutching your hands. I believe you will never truly recall all of your experiences since your coma was profound. Traumatized patients can forget then later wake to discover a daunting, blank mural to fill. I must remind you that everyone in this situation -- not just you -- has permanently lost one or more persons to harsh human fate. Significant memories may come forth."
'Like I said, will I? My parents?' the wounded one says timidly.
The doctor subconsciously smooths the ridges in the sleeve of his coat. He leans forward toward the patient who seems suddenly accosted, like in the fiery wreck and roll.
"Well, I must ask you to listen carefully to what I say," the neuro specialist intones sternly. "About your relatives. I am afraid I have some quite bad news. Your father is rehabbing in part from a potent cardiac infarction. His strength now wanes. He has trouble speaking and moving about. Your mother, another story that tugs at the heartstrings, is recovering in a unit for alcoholics. Your mishap, the loss of her relatives, her husband's medical complications seem have scared her straight. You must be done for-ever with the pills and the drinking. No fudging! Her too!"
The Patient thinks. The nausea subsides mildly. He hears fingers snap on some unseen hand. A question pops into his mind, but he feels too weak to pursue it. He gets ready to leave.
"Merry Christmas I guess," he says in surrender.
"Merry Christmas to you," The Doctor replies. "Stop by the nursing station to take your medications. You must. Eat a good supper. Get some sleep, young man. I will see you here tomorrow. At the same time."
"So. Okay," The Patient intones. "I wasn't really gonna go here. But . . . But one thing you haven't talked about yet. It's got me thinking."
"Yes?" the medical man inquires.
The Patient exhales. "You called me a survivor. Am I the one and only that's skimmed alive through this round of playoffs? What about Myra and Wil's cat?"
"Yes, there's the cat," the Omani concedes.
The Patient wonders, "Does your massive notebook of nightmares there say what became of Max, the itty bitty creepy black kitty? Max-a-Million. With the damned bloody paws? Or was he the lucky face-off contestant that got away scott free?"
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
Musical Soundtrack: "Town Without Pity"
Sung by Gene Pitney -- 1962
Musical Soundtrack: "Town Without Pity"Sung by Gene Pitney -- 1962
Listen Here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vAyitZPcMo
Ovid's Moral and Epitaph:
"Here Phaëton lies who in the sun-god's chariot fared.
And though greatly he failed, more greatly he dared."
-- Ovid the Fabulist
No comments:
Post a Comment