Saint Dympna

The Ward
I work with mental patients.  Most people send these people here because they can't deal with it at home.  The breakdown of their loved ones is just too much. Out on the streets of the city, more of them roam, gathering up trash and scraps.  But those people, they don't have anyone to care for them, especially not themselves.   In here, though, there are white walls, pale pills, and me.  Everyone's seen me.  I'm the big, bearded bouncer of the ward.  I'm the bear-like creature that wrestles patients to the ground when they get out of control.  On TV and in movies, I wear white and I am portrayed as a reason you don't want to be in the ward.  In real life, I wear a faded brown uniform and I am actually one of the nicer people you will meet here.  I won't disregard what you say until you're shot up with sodium pentothal, like all the doctors here.  But I'm not a doctor.  No, I'm like a nurse-bouncer.

I believe in listening.  I believe, as long as you aren't hurting anyone, your reality is yours alone.  If you asked me what I thought about the Bible, I would tell you it is an interesting story.  A good story, a good version of reality, is more entertaining than anything else.  Seeing the universe through someone else's eyes.  Living vicariously.  These are ways to reach out beyond our internal experience.  Every patient I see has their own volume.  A reality they author.  Sometimes through incoherent babbling, sometimes through art, and sometimes through violence.   There is only one particularly violent case here at Saint Dympna's Ward.  A man I call "Hero."  Muscles ripple over his body and hatred fuels his motives.  And now I understand why.  We were keeping him from something important in his life.

Rounds
At the beginning of the day, I make my rounds through the building. Nothing interesting or significant happens.  The afternoons are where I enjoy my job.  It is art and social therapy time in the cafeteria.  In one corner, child-minds doped up on some prescribed lifestyle, they fingerpaint.  One of them manages to make a turkey with her hand.  I tell her it's cool, but one of the other nurses just stands there looking past his nose and he says, "It's not Thanksgiving yet."  His parents were probably condescending to him, too.

In the middle of the room three patients idly drop red or black discs into a yellow frame.  They are playing Connect-Four, a two player game.  Click. The first player, Jones, drops his red disc into an empty slot.  Click-click, two black discs fall, one from Tamera and one from Doc.  I guess if you expanded the constraints, you know, the yellow grid, more people could play.  The two players with black, Tamera and Doc, aren't using what amounts to a two-turn-in-a-row option(?).  They're playing against each other with the same color.  They're playing by their own rules.

And then, by the windows, Strawberry and Hero.  The windows are the kind you see in bathrooms with the pattern that disallows viewing, but still lets light in.  When they constructed Saint Dympna's Ward, they decided the outdoors would distract from what was going on inside.  They may as well have built the complex underground and set up a synthesized sunlight system.  Real or otherwise, the light is hitting Strawberry's flaming red hair, and you immediately understand her name.  She wasn't bald upon birth.  She had one single strand of the most crimson-red hair, so her parents named her Strawberry.  The day the father was driving the family back from the hospital, they got twenty feet from the parking lot.  And a Ford pickup slammed them.  No one died, but both parents were sent right back to the hospital, twenty feet back.  Both in a vegetative state on arrival.  The grandparents of Strawberry put her up for adoption, but kept her parents on feeding tubes until she was twenty one.  Then they sent her a letter.  "Your parents are alive," it said.  Well sort of, they meant.  And she broke down.  And she's here.

I am talking to one of the patients about their awesome rendition of the human hand via finger paints when a table flips from the other side of the room, crashing into the wall.  I turn to the noise of a splintering wooden table.  Against the wall is Strawberry, her head facing upward towards the heavens, eyes closed.  Around her neck is a hand.  Hero's hand, gripping tightly, fingers pressed inward on her skin.  Inside, her wind pipes begin to strain under the pressure.  Choking.  The owner of the hand, Hero, his brow is smushed in on itself.  His eyebrows tell her that he hates her.  His eyes are ablaze with the reflection of her hair-- now dancing up from her back, situated over an air vent.  It rises and falls.  Rises, oscillates, falls.  Extends itself outward, reaching maximum buoyancy, and falls.  In this split second image, I am rushing over to bear-hug Hero and wrestle him to the ground.  Before I can, a doctor gets there and tries to negotiate.  She is strong-armed to the floor with a swift, balled up fist.  I step over her crumpled body.  The next thing I know, there is a colored pencil in my throat and I am laid out.

Roommate
It is a day before my neck covers a sea-green colored pencil in blood.  A day before Hero grabs a single, makeshift weapon from a box of seventy-two potential tools, I am lying in bed-- naked.  Next to me is my girlfriend, a beautiful blonde-in-disguise, with a voice angels envy.  She writes her own songs and sings them to me.  Sometimes they're about me, and how, in the past, I have been a stupid dick to her, but, it's okay, because here and now is what matters, and here and now is perfect.  Here and now, she is snoring.  Her incredible range is being utilized by runner's lungs, keeping me awake.

Before getting out of bed, I lean to her and kiss her on the forehead.  In spite of her snoring, she is the most devine creature know to man.  To God, or this, or whatever anything is.  I stumble through the ambient light from the street, looking for my boxers.  They are hidden under a sheet that was, with my boxers, kicked off the bed earlier in the night.  I wiggle them up my waist, and grab my girlfriend's pack of cigarettes.  Be right back, I say to her snores.  I crack the door and slide through, sideways.  I walk to the back of the apartment.  I notice her roommate's door is open.  That means she's not here.  She's never here.  Only in the mornings, when her alarm is blaring for hours, is she here-- sleeping.  My girlfriend tells me near-insomnia is the only means she has left to get fucked up.  She tells me she has a bad past.  She killed people.  Not on purpose, but on accident.  She had been speed balling one night.  This is when you mix heroine and cocaine.  One is basically a downer, the other an upper.  In addition, she was drunk.  And driving.  Swerving across the road one night, she slammed the right side of the car into a tree.  The car wraps around, metal frame hugging wooden trunk, and two of her friends die instantly.  Now she goes to AA meetings.  Now she stays up until her body can't handle the sleep deprivation anymore, and she just passes out.  Now she does art therapy.  Just like a case at Saint Dympna.

I reach the kitchen in the back of the apartment.  To my left, the microwave reads 0:18 where it should say 2:48AM.   To my right is the door.  Before I exit and smoke, I light my cigarette with the oven.  This singes my eyebrow and the room fills with that burnt-hair-smell that no one seems to like.  One of my feet rests in a black square while the other rests within a white one.  At the door, I slide locks from left to right, and twist the door knob.  From left to right.  It opens and I am through, to a world of light pollution.  Living in the city, you don't really see the stars.  It's like being in a mental ward where the windows are only partially translucent.  You get some light-- a fraction of the big picture.  You are only graced with a relative abundance of stars on clear nights like this, when the air is thin and cold.  I shiver momentarily, but the head rush of nicotine quickly comes to my body's aid.  Aid.  I am a cigarette's patient today.

I focus on the cherry, which is glowing brightly against the wind.  In French, they call it le fraise.  "The Strawberry."  It makes me happy that some things are naturally universal, like this. Fire.  The color of it, the idea of it, is intertwined in human history, I think.  But now, though not everywhere, there's electricity to give us warmth.  Century old technology.  Wires in the sky.  Big cylinders, converting energy.  These things aren't beautiful.  We don't relate to power plants.  Fire is so basic, so elemental, that its beauty is ingrained in us.  Especially now, as I shiver on the back porch of the third floor, 2425 E. Fields, apartment six.  Alone, sharing my experience.

The faux-gold emblem of a camel on the side of my cigarette isn't wearing scrubs or a lab coat, but right now, he is my doctor.  With every deep drag, the cold retreats from my skin.  Doctor Camel will be with you shortly.  With a sufficient headrush I go back inside.  The roommate's door is closed as I walk by.

I lay down next to my girlfriend and wrap my arms around her.  In the bathroom adjoining the two bedrooms, a light is on.  The roommate is in there, taking a shit.  Plop, is the last sound I hear before a blaring alarm wakes me up in the morning.  My girlfriend is gone to work, having woken me up briefly to say goodbye.  I don't remember this clearly, but I remember it happening as the alarm was going off in the background.

My girlfriend leaves for work at six in the morning.  It is now seven thirty.  The alarm has been active for an hour and a half.  Before leaving, I put my clothes on and go into the roommate's room.  Blankets cover her windows, making it dark, but trapping the sound.  The constant beep, beep, beep gives me a headache.  I can't imagine what it is doing to her dreams.  Several prescription drugs lie on her dresser, filled in those transparent orange bottles you get from pharmacies.  One of them has pot in it, the only thing she didn't quit.  Medicine bottles are like the next step up from your standard issue sandwich bag.

I hit the off button.  Next to the alarm, I notice a box of colored pencils.  A sea-green pencil is upside-down in the box.  I flip it around to be right-side-up.  I get the idea that I will bring this for my two favorite patients at the ward, so I leave a note for the roommate.  In the note I am telling her they are being put to good use and that I will have them back to her at the end of the night.  Or, the beginning of her day.

Physics and Biology
Two ideas cannot occupy the same space simultaneously.  This is why I have a hole in my neck.  A sea-green pencil and my neck had a dispute over who should be where. Over the hole is a big white bandage framed in surgical tape.  In the ward's cafeteria, there are also holes.  In the walls.  From Hero and his massive fists.

Hero, the patient that stabbed me, he tells me he is sorry, but she had to die.  The other nurses and doctors believe he is only sorry because he is now in a sort of solitary confinement.  Fettered to the walls with some metal covered in nylon, something they use in special cases like this.  Special cases that also call for a muzzle.  A face mask, situated around the back of the skull like a belt on a waist.

After I was stabbed, Hero was quickly surrounded by the rest of the staff and backup is summoned.  There are now five individuals encircling him.  He punches the wall behind him to, they assume, show his strength.  These are those cinder-block walls painted over white that you see in nearly every institution.  They are strong, but where his fist lands, the wall crumbles in around his arm like a sand castle.  The surrounding crowd takes a collective step backward.  Hero has frightened a ten legged monster.  A mob.

The monster rears its head forward, toward Hero.  It is another nurse, breaking from the crest of the outward semi-circle, making his way for the center.  Everyone calls this nurse Big Mac.  This is because every day, at lunch, he has a hamburger from a burger chain.  Every day, a standard helping of processed perfection.  On Wednesdays, that's today, he shares his number seven selection with millions of other Big Mac guys out there.

"And then he bit my ear off.  He bit my fucking ear off," Big Mac tells me.  "He cups my chin with his big hand and lifts me.  I am two-twenty-five, man!"

It's true, he's a big guy.  You don't eat number fours for breakfast every day and lose weight.  He turns to me and hands me his pack of cigarettes, saying, "I know you're not ready to admit that you're a smoker.  Here."   His bandage, a painted window frame on his face, covers a sewn up ear.  His smile nearly reaches it as I take the cigarette.

Yeah, I tell him, I smoke, but I'm not a smoker.  Buying my own pack, that would make me a smoker.  A prisoner.

"Oh yeah," he says, "they want you inside.  Something to do with the maniac."  He's referring to our very own Mike Tyson.  I go inside and start my Wednesday morning in the ward's basement.

Odds
"Four-hundred-to-one odds is what I'm up against," he says, "and I can't defeat four men in brown suits because they have shock-sticks and stinging spray cans."

My superior tells me I am the only one Hero will talk to, and here I am, listening to the tail end of his story.  Being surrounded and tasered is the last image Hero remembers before waking up bound to a metal-dungeon in the basement of Saint Dympna's Ward. I ask him what he means by four-hundred-to-one odds.

"These are numbers I have no problem with," he says.

No problem with doing what, I ask.

"Killing."

Oh, I say, killing four hundred innocent people without a thought.  Like Strawberry.  He takes offense.

"I'm sorry, but she had to die.  Just like everyone I've killed."

Why?  Why is the red-head that likes colored pencils dead?  Why couldn't she live.  She was the soul survivor of a car accident, an orphan, a smoker.  Why couldn't Strawberry live, I ask him again and again.  He is silent for several minutes, refusing to tell me anything beyond "she had to die."  I ready myself to leave and motion to the guard at the door.  The guard is going to put the muzzle back on.  Before he does, Hero, he says, "Wait."  He'll tell me.

Strawberry sits across from him, happily dazed by the day's regimen of drugs, coloring.  She draws a bronze sword and says, "You're going to have to kill me."  Hero looks up from his blank page, but she remains coloring.  Now she is drawing a deeply tanned hand gripping a hilt of a bronze sword.   She barely colors in the lines.  It's all blurred.

"What did you say," Hero asks her, reaching across the table to put his hand on hers, stopping the colored pencil.  She looks up and, using her other hand, removes his.  She goes back to drawing an arm, saying, "She is waiting for you, but you have to get out of here first.  And then you have to be led."

Hero says he can get out himself.  He can make it on his own, as he has before.  He has used rocks to crush skulls.  He has toppled war elephants.  He has traveled countless distances.  But this is different.  Strawberry explains to him that he needs guidance, and there is only one person in the ward that can help.  One person he can rely on.

"And that one person," he says in the metal dungeon, chained to the wall, "is you."

Gods
"Isn't that what we are?" she asks, looking past the steering wheel in her hands.  This is my girlfriend driving me back to her place.  We get off of work at roughly the same time, and there she is, outside in her Red Honda.  It faces away from me, so I sneak up and push on the trunk, rocking the car.  She twists around and looks out the window, laughing.  I smile at her and open the passenger door.

Now we're on the road, heading to her place to cook dinner.  I have just told her about Hero and she seems overly interested.  Any man that can usurp her attention from me in any form and I suddenly feel less confident.  And, Hero isn't just any man.  He has served in World War I, II, Korea, and Vietnam.  He has used swords, pikes, and the occasional axe.  A battle-axe, like his body.  God, his body.  A tank build.  And she, unlike everyone else, doesn't think he's crazy.

"I mean, we're talking about Gods here," I remind her, "powerful entities who control the course of mankind."

She says, "I know."  What we are, she thinks, are individual gods, encapsulated within our minds.  "Just listen," she says, "willpower."  She looks over, her black-hole pupils radiating to amber.  Amber stretching, in tendrils, to blue-green.  She looks at me, her crinkled forehead accentuating her word, Willpower.  My eyes meet hers.  I see the whole universe in a split second glance.  And then it is refocused on the road.

"Willpower?" I ask.  Willpower, as defined by American Heritage Dictionary, is "the strength of will to carry out one's decisions, wishes, or plans."  She tells me this, her driftwood-brown hair streaming through the invisible wind.  The wind streaming through her hair.  The wind streaming through rolled down windows, outside to in.  The mind streaming through it all.

"And what makes us different from ants?" she prompts me.

"Well, in regard to willpower?

"Yeah."

"We have more."

Right, she says, we have more willpower.  From an ant's perspective, humans and larger animals are gods, who have the ability to exert their unstoppable will over them. We can smash them, burn them, save them, arrange them. Through our imagination and innovation, we wield unending power over them.  So, above us, out there, is there anything advanced enough, through tool use or mental/physical prowess, to play god with us?  At parks, this is why she tip-toes through blades of grass.  Why her eyes are focused on the ground more than ahead.  She doesn't want to arbitrarily end the life of a lesser being.  Because why couldn't a galactic foot just snuff out our life?

She asks me what's so hard to believe about a goddess watching over Hero, using him for the benefit of mankind. She asks me if I think it's as romantic as she does.  She asks me if I'm going to help him.

Paranoia
One of the patients here has a severe case of psychosis.  The third player in Connect-Four.  The second black disc.  His name is Doc.  The reason his name is Doc is obvious.  He was a doctor at a local college campus, taking care of students.  In student health, it's pretty much the same thing every day.  Kids worry about having unprotected sex with more than three people in the last couple of months, and they need to get tested.  Suspicious partners looking for proof.  Others with concerns about the heroine they shot last night.  Some not worried at all, carried in on stretchers from alcohol overdose.  And then there's Doc, who worries alongside them-- for them and himself.

Some of the time he is genuinely concerned about his patients.  Other times, he is genuinely concerned about his patients suing him.  His patients, with their rich mommies and daddies and their combined law degrees.  Or worse, political backgrounds.  Mafia ties.  Alien descent.  And it started with simple auditory hallucinations.  The kind of thing you can write off as a mistake.  Hearing your name whispered in the wind is nothing.  Suddenly your name becomes a list of things-- everything but the name itself.  "James" becomes: fame, tame, maim, trains, feign, blame, anything to convince yourself you're not crazy.  You're in a crowded room and everyone's talking, someone must have been talking to another "Greg" over by the window. The high pitched police siren and distant jackhammer sounds you just heard combined to make a sound similar to "Monica."  Having a more unique name makes all of this self-convincing difficult.

After the initial stages of auditory hallucinations, then come the delusions.  The conspiracies.  Doc, he says he would change his route to work every day, just in case someone was watching him.  Ex-Special Forces do this, he says.  They're powerful tools, and just because they're not in use anymore doesn't mean the government is just going to let them live out their lives.  What if they snap and kill innocent people?  They could.  What's from stopping them?  Knowing that they are always watched by someone, that's what.  So what's to stop them from watching Doc, he thinks.  Maybe they worry he'll start removing people's innards to sell on some Chinese black market.

And near the campus, there's a tobacco manufacterer's headquarters.  The name's not as important as the placement.  It is two blocks from where Doc works.   He says it's ironic, and comments on the smoke stacks around the city.  The tobacco company owns all of them.  They're all venting nicotine into the air, getting us addicted.  And that's controlled by the Bildeberg Conferences.  And those by the lizard men at the center of the earth.  And that's about the time that he checked himself into Saint Dympna's Ward.  Not because he thought he was crazy, but because he knew it would be one of the last places they would look for him.  And here I am, watching him from across the room, thinking to myself about the nature of paranoia.  Paranoia like my fear of Hero, and my girlfriend's fixation on him.  It is not so much Hero that threatens me, but the idea of someone being better in her eyes.  Hero fights for his Goddess over the course of eons, in hallmark conflicts across the globe, and I help loose realities focus on dabbing fingers in paint.

Sword And Shield
Through the fractal cafeteria windows, I see a pastel smudge of red.  It is my girlfriend's Honda, colored outside the lines.  I walk outside, sneaking up.  Only the eyes of the tail-lights know I'm there.  I press my hands, palms down, on the trunk, and rock the car.  My girlfriend laughs.  I get inside the car.  This is the part where I tell my girlfriend everything Hero told me.  Right before she goes off on what it means to be a god, and whether or not I'm going to help him.

Goddess was the shield, Hero the sword.  Sort of like Christianity- of truth, and of faith, but less about spreading a belief.  They were armaments for the good of mankind.  And these gods, they're real, every last one of them.  These gods don't have specific affinities, they work more like a loose net of visitors to our planet Earth.  They don't always stay, unless they like what they see.  Some came too early, seeing basic creatures--humanity in its early stages-- and left for more fruitful ventures.  Others have come, set up shop, making business of the human condition.  Others come bearing pity.  Some genuinely care.

To think that Earth was so special that it would only have the one and only god, and that god would make Earth the pinnacle of all creation, this is absurd.  Earth is just another spinning atom.  Another wave on the beach.  

Goddess visited Earth first as a spectator of the great battles humans would wage.  Because Gods don't have warfare, this was sport. Gods don't do battle in the physical sense, they just deny each other joy.  This is worse than death.  Human warfare began small, with boney fists and hurled rocks.  This is when Goddess enters the picture.  She witnesses Hero.  Hero, standing tall over the body of a little girl, bruises all down her cheek like bludgeon-tears.  All around him, four men, bigger and broader than Hero himself.  The girl stole something from the men, a fruit.  So they beat her.  And Hero stepped in.  But it wasn't enough.  Hero's tall body takes blows for the girl.  One man falls, eyes gouged to mush.  Grapes smashed, red wine spilt.  The other three men bring rocks down on Hero's back, his body wrapped tightly around the girl, protecting her.  And then Goddess steps in.  And ever since, he has been her sword.  Defending the defenseless here and there.  Acting as Aegis.

At this point in the story, the Red Honda has stopped, dead, at a red-light.  My girlfriend leans in and kisses me on the lips.  She looks up from closed lids and asks, What happened next?  I tell her, You'll love this.

Hero fell in love.  Unfortunately, to be with her, he would have to die.  But she was his shield, and thus made him invulnerable.  It was torture.  She was just an echo.  A shadow.  To have her exist seperate from himself, he became detached and angry.  In battle, this served as his edge.  He would slay a million men putting himself in impossible situations.  To die.  But now she loved him, too.  And she wanted him to experience what he had given so many defenseless individuals.  Life.  So they were both unhappy, serving each other.

One day, in the last couple of decades Hero says, other Earth overseers hear of Goddess and Hero's love affair.  Repulsive.  God and man.  An abomination.  So the gods, they take away Goddess' joy.  They made her mortal, no longer able to protect Hero.  It was his turn to play shield.

My girlfriend urges me to continue.  But that's all he told me, I say.  The next thing I know, he's complaining about being downed by nurses in faded brown uniforms.  We talk about Hero's idea of gods, she asks me if I'm going to help him.  It depends on what he wants me to help him with, I tell her.  Then she asks me what I was thinking about cooking for dinner.  Some sort of seafood, I say.  Shrimp, she agrees.  We head to the market before going home to her place.

Applause
A room full of applause, and the only sound is my girlfriend's high heels clack, clack, clacking her up to a stage.  Through a field of waving hands, she struts, down a swath cut in black foldable chairs.  She is accepting an award at a local elementary school.  This is where she works.  Not here in this particular room, we're in the cafeteria-- a large room with high ceilings and white tiled flooring.  The windows are tall, crystal clear gateways to the outside world.  The outside world covered in bright green grass and metal playgrounds.  The kind with bridges that connect towers, with little useless steering wheels made out of plastic.  And those steering wheels, they take you nowhere, except in your head.

My girlfriend reaches the front and scales the stairs stage-left.  She looks out over the crowd.  A multitude of individuals, clapping silently for her.  I wave my hands too, back and forth, rotating to a point, stopping, and rotating back across the air.  I clap the same clap that a girls' chorus might use in one of their songs in an elementary school just like this one.  But not this one.  There is no singing here.  But there are spirit fingers.  Applause.

Waving hands begin to descend against laps as my girlfriend raises an open palm out toward the crowd.  Her right hand, thumb crossed inward, reaches her chin and then up away from her body.  She says, "Hello."  She goes into her wordless speech about art.  This is what her award is about-- art.  She is getting an award for revitalizing the school's once-dying art program.  Dying, like the deaf community itself.

With advanced hearing aids, the deaf needn't learn a sub-culture so detached from normalcy.  Hearing is important.  And they can fix what's wrong with you.  With advanced procedures, stem cell research, transplants.  They want to help you, restore your ability to experience the world.  What little perception we do have, it is to be cherished, and everyone sitting around me, they're missing out.  Missing out on tone.  They're missing out on music.  And sirens  and distant trains in the night.  Babies crying.  Lovers grunting.  Girlfriends snoring.  They're missing out on the obnoxious alarm going off in the next room for an hour and thirty minutes.  

While they're missing out on sound, we're missing out on heightened reliance on sight, smell, touch.  The nuances of tone have nothing on the nuances of facial expressions and hand gestures.  Maybe we're missing out.   But the numbers don't lie.  Majority is normal.  If not that, then plurality.  If not that, whoever's in charge of things is dictator of Province Normal.  High arbiter of all things usual.  

Dying or not, this packed room of the hearing-impaired is all focused on the woman at the front of the room, high above us on stage.  Single-handedly, she saved the art program at this school.  She struck a deal between the school and a local church.  On weekends the local church would use the school for one of those twelve step programs.  This quasi-religious recovery-program off-shoot of the church would help fund the school's need for art classes.

I went to Glorify Recovery, the twelve step program, only once.  I went because my girlfriend wanted me to.  She was going to show her support for the program.  More like her support of their support, I told her when  we entered that cafeteria a few years ago.  She scowls at this remark.  This is the kind of thing that got her writing songs about me with phrases like "You're a stupid dick. . ."

My girlfriend, the tower on stage, links everyone's mind to a single concept--intent.  She says art is intent.  The physical embodiment of your art aside, intention is, in and of itself, art.  Expression, something these kids need to understand is not limited because of their "disability," she says, is the essence of art.  Her intent was to save the art program, so, during Glorify Recovery, the twelve step programs on weekends, she sells art.  All proceeds then go back into the school's art program, and she sees none of it.

Glorify Recovery was on its first step when she sold four paintings.  The first and most difficult step-- admitting you have a problem.  Four people went up on stage that first meeting.  They all left with a painting.  All of them feeling relieved of some pressure, and wanting to help a good cause.  One guy, a sex addict, he goes home with a transitional piece about a goldfish that was squished.  He really hit it off with my girl.  Being a sex addict, I didn't trust him.  Infuriated that she would even talk to him, I walked back to my apartment.  A twelve block walk, because my girlfriend wanted to draw people in and sell art, to fund the expanding horizons of her students.

The guy, he said he was going to give it to his wife, whom he had cheated on.  She didn't know.  She wasn't there for his soliloquy on that.  She was at home fucking his best friend.  The goldfish guy would find them and leave, infuriated like me.  I saw him in a gun shop that day, while walking those twelve blocks.  I couldn't imagine why. He had just discovered he had a problem and he can work through it with the support and love of his new found recovery group.  I couldn't imagine why he was in the gun shop until I read the paper the next day.

I didn't kill anyone and I didn't need a gun.  I was just a stupid, jealous dick who disappointed his girlfriend.  Time and time again.  And she broke up with me.  It wasn't until I started working at Saint Dympna a year ago that I realized my problem, admitted it, and got back together with her.

 
Ceilings Don't Exist
Something strange happens before I exit the bathroom in the cafeteria here at Saint Dympna's Ward.  When I exit, everyone in the cafeteria is staring up at the ceiling.

It is May 18th, Thursday, when I go into the bathroom in the cafeteria.  The bathroom door is wooden, with a metal plate drilled into the middle, on the right side.  This is for hands to push, but all around the plate, there is evidence to the contrary.  Grease stains from a thousand hands, avoiding the metal, pressing the wood.  I avoid all of it, and press the top right corner of the door.  Probably still contributing to the expanding stain of hand oil.

Inside the bathroom, I now wash my hands.

With furtive grace, a silent giant creeps.

All movement outside the bathroom ceases.  Through the thick wooden door, I can't hear this, but it is happening, going on without my involvement.  I go to exit.  On this side of the door, there are no grease stains from hand oil.  Just a metal handle.  The door only opens one way, and on the inside, you have little choice as to how you will open it.  How you'll get out.

Met with gaping mouths, I then look up.  Before words can spill from my mouth to ask the others what happened, everyone falls to the ground in unison as a blast of air explodes against our bodies.  Chairs and tables shatter and little game pieces go flying.  Paints splatter and mix together against the patients, nurses, the walls, the floor-- everything covered in a sick mix of brownish orange.

The cafeteria is ceiling-less.  The blue sky and clouds are now fixed within a blank box.  On every edge of where the ceiling would meet the rising walls, there are flames slowly rolling down the white paint.  This probably releases some sickeningly toxic fumes, because several people are throwing up on themselves.

Hero once told me, "The gods won't hesitate to cleave the tops of mountains in order to crush the misbehaving villages in the valley.  They don't view humanity as a group of individuals.  When they punish a small group by killing them, that's like kicking your dog.  Where you kick the dog, that's where it's going to hurt, but only because it sends a message to its brain telling it that it's going to hurt.  If the gods punish one group, the rest of humanity is supposed to learn.  And like a dog having been kicked many times throughout its life, it's supposed to fear."

City officials would later tell us it was two low currents of air that ripped our roof off.  Riding one of those currents was a low flying jet.  The jet was flying fast enough to cause a delayed sonic boom.  That's what knocks us all down.  They didn't comment on the flaming walls or the toxic paint.  Our problem, they said.  Dressed up with a tie and suit, but Our Problem was the message.

A problem my superiors didn't address was that of a missing patient.  The building's foundation somehow shook and loosed Hero from his shackles.  Fearing him, no one said anything.  His prison lie cracked and empty.        
 
 
The Sea
"Imagine your home by the sea.  Standing on the beach, feet deep in the water, your home before you-- in flames," she tells me.  This is Tamera telling me a story.

Quick-sand recession as your weight buries your feet, the air all salty around you, clean and clear in your lungs on the intake.  Chest rising, chest sinking.  Exhale.

Waves are strange the way they lap up, slide up on and in and around your toes.  The glass of water seems flat.  From space, the brilliant diamond eyes see flat water atop Earth, but everywhere, close enough, there it is-- choppy.  Up, down, up, down.  Expand, contract, expand, contract. To that glass of water, that little ocean, we are gods--like the sun, and it's daughter, Luna, the moon.

"There is a storm in Hero's lungs," she says, "Push-pulling in the fire by the sea."

Another story Hero has told someone about his struggle.  How did he convince Tamera?  Science.
This is Tamera's idea of romance.

"Imagine you were engineered, genetically and behaviorally to need someone.  You would roam the earth with emptiness until you found them.  Every detail matters in the equation, especially the eyes."

Eyes, the window to the soul, she tells me, are the most important physical feature for this engineered person.  Once they lock with another's, they can tell one thing about them--whether or not they are their match.

"And the person you seek is the same way.  Engineered like you.  All of your attributes are the most attractive possible in that person's mind.  Everything you say matches what they would ask."

Like signals and receptors in the body, she tells me.  Biology.  I took that, I tell her, in college.  That and psychology.  I know how it works.

"And imagine standing there, on the beach, sinking.  Watching your home go up in flames.  Your life sabotaged by those who created it, those involved in the project to bring you and your lover together.  Sabotaged because it was becoming beyond their reach, beyond their abilities to stop.  And that person you have been searching for your whole life, burning up inside.  Your receptor gone, and now you have nothing left.  What do you do with your life?"

You find your offspring, she tells me.  Find the child born to human and goddess, birthed right there on the beach.  Make sure it's alive, she tells me, and you will be whole.  And make sure your creators suffer.

Final Vignette
It has been three days since the roof of Saint Dympna's Ward was torn off.  Unexplained as it was, the only thing I can believe now is what they have given us.  Maybe a god really did swoop in an shave the top of the building off, capturing Hero in the process.  Maybe a top secret special forces team took him back to the lab where he was created.  I am too small a man to say one way or the other on such big concepts.  Too big are they to examine objectively.  Too close am I.

I realize that Goddess and Hero, they weren't serving each other by being sword and shield. They weren't created in some lab to fall in love.  They just were in love.  And maybe that makes some people crazy.  It makes me insecure, I know.  But with her, I am stronger.  Able to take on more stress, more pain.  More joy than I ever thought possible.  I realize you don't have to be a hero or a god to overcome the problems you create in your life.

I look at her in the kitchen doing the dishes all alone.  I get up from my chair and put my book face down, stopping the story mid-sentence-- characters frozen at my will.   I walk up to the sink and stop.  My right foot is in a black square, my left in a white.  I roll up my sleeves, tucking them into themselves and pick up a bowl.  I turn on the faucet and begin washing it with  soap and a sponge.  She looks over, sees my soapy and wet hands, and smiles at me. This is worth my time. This is worth my time and we don't have to be saving the world for that to be so.

For B-B

if I were to continue this story(WHICH I AM NOT GOING TO, SO DO NOT READ BELOW, I would begin with the ending, and the end would begin like this. . .
Control Theory
People would like to think they can control things.  More than that, they believe they control themselves.  They feel like their actions are not just a series of circumstantial events that narrow their reality.   I believe that, too, now, faced with the end of the universe.  

"You are important," he tells me. 

I don't believe him, but he tells me he knows me better than I think.  My soul is bound to the same fate as his.  The same as the love of his life.

When I was sixteen, my older brother told me something disturbing.  Our parents got married on the basis of a "psychic feeling." 

Hero showed up three days ago and told us, "You have to come with me.  Both of you."
He shows up at my girlfriend's apartment while I'm helping her with the dishes and says we have to leave, immediately.  I don't know why we listen to him, but we do.

My parents were married after six months of seeing eachother.  This is not the strange part.  My mother met my father once, at a party in college.  It was the only party she went to.  My father and her hardly exchanged words.  The next week, my father gets a phone call.  My mother had spent days looking him up.  Trying to figure out his number.  My father picks up the phone, and it is my mother.  She tells him, "I think we are meant to be together."  He says he feels the same way. 

Three days ago, we tell Hero to wait while we discuss it in the kitchen.  He tells us we will come with him because it is our destiny.  And he seems certain, like it has already happened.  In the kitchen, I disagree with what my girlfriend says is a "feeling."  An inclination.  A draw to him.  I tell her I have a draw to her, and that going with him, I would be abandoning that draw.  That sense of protection.  But she says she feels more strongly about this than anything else in her life.  I get a sick sinking-into-myself feeling.  Does she mean she feels more strongly about going with him than staying with me?  She goes.  And I, of course, go with her.

And now I am faced with the end of the universe.  Whatever authored all of this set up safety nets in case the lifeforms living within attempted to gain control, Hero tells us.  We are in the middle of a field, where it is now raining.  My girlfriend, she is screaming at Hero to stop.

"You are important," he repeats with a new inflection, "does not mean you are good."  He shakes the gun in my face.  Killing me is the only solution, he says, and I am almost. 

"I'm over my jealousy," I tell him.  I swear, I am.   But it is not good enough for him.  My jealousy is the result of an experiment that controlled two human beings, from birth.  It made them believe they were meant to be together, and the result was me.  The first child, my parents planned.  The second child was me.  I was an accident.  I was meant to look like an accident, he tells me, raindropps splattering on his lips as he speaks. 

Whomever I have a child with will die.  My seed is virus ridden, he says.  I tell him I've been having sex with her.  "Only upon birthing the child, severing from your love, will she die," is his rebuttle.

The gods had left Earth a long time ago, and they set in place an agreement with several governments of this world.  To ensure the safety of Earth, they must devise a way to destroy Hero and Goddess' child.  Their child, my girlfriend, and I, the weapon intended for her destruction.  Hero tells me she is his daughter.  And I must die. 

He squeezes the trigger and I am shot.  As I lay bleeding, reality begins to shatter around me.  My girlfriend is screaming, holding my head up, blood on her hands, and in the distance I hear Hero sobbing, muttering that he had misinterpreted the situation.  Everything was safe, until the daughter, my girlfriend lost or was severed from that which she loved.  A child would have continued the love, as it did for Hero and Goddess.  My girlfriend was the last thing holding this world together.  My world.  And I was the last thing holding her world together.  Our world.

(But since the story was already finished, this is just an interesting, overly complicated backstory to where I was eventually headed if I hadn't stopped writing when I did.  I think it's fun to make things more epic than they really are, but in regards to this, I realized that epic or not, true love is a special rarity that few people ever witness or take part in.  I am a part of it.  A part of something meaningful.)

 

Comments

[lightandstorm]

[this is good] Beautiful.

[Socceraholic..]

[this is good]

this was amazing...