* * * * *
“Okay, stop. Backdafuckup.” Gellac was beside himself with his bed-side manners. Didn’t teach that in med school. “Just want to make sure I’m hearing you correctly,” he said to his friend in the patient’s chair. “You feel as if some sort of personality shift has happened?”
“Yes,” Blue replied. “I’m the same on the outside, but there’s something different. Something missing.”
“And you can pinpoint the moment this happened, the morning you woke from sleep, good sleep, to find yourself different on the inside. A certainty that your perceptions and processing of outside stimuli have been altered.” Pauses, scratching an internal batch of confused braincells, but starting to get it.
“And because of this, you feel…better?”
At this point, Blue is reaching for someway to explain. Explain so his old friend can understand him. Most difficult. He knows he can find the words, but the will to put them in play does not exist. Nor does he care. But a gathering, a re-collection of the patterns he once knew and used seemed in order for this current task. A puppetry of sorts.
“Mmn, not necessarily better, no. I see you. I see my friend from Berkley. I know the world has not changed.” A beat, sofltly,“I know that.” Stares off into space. Office space. Uncaring attention somewhere else. Gaze.
“How do you feel?”
“Feel?”
“Yes. What are you feeling now?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you think that means?”
“Cut off. Numb.” Thinking. About numb, pulling strings. “Stunned. My earlier words, better…lighter, are not right. Anesthetized is more accurate.”
“So you feel drugged maybe?”
“Maybe.”
“Have you changed anything in your diet, something…”
Calmly, as a wall may think about unnecessary flourescent lighting and the philosophies thereof, “It’s not my goddamned diet.” Tears instinctively wish to well. Water is available, but sans pressure to push it. “It’s been two days. I eat food items and shit normal. Talking to you now is a burden and not a matter of reflex or commonality. Honesty at some point must become virtue, so I’m telling you this because I wan’t you to see me for the person I was. Not as I am now.” The pulleys begin to strain and squeak.
“Wouldn’t you see that as a bit problematic for me?”
“I see it as oversimplified.”
“Why?”
“Because both of us study and practice the field of psychiatry. And you know as well as I do what my statements signify.”
“Shouldn’t we try to further investigate the source rather than jump to the easiest conclusion?”
A sound of old chains moving. Floors bending. Headache without the pain. “I believe the conclusion will be predictable. As are your views of my condition. No amount of psychoanalysis will help. My personality has not splintered.”
“What then?”
“Remember that movie…Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Pods from outer space were replacing people with alien life. Exact replicas. That is how I am. Void of emotion, desire.”
“Are you an alien, Blue? Have you dumped your other body in a dumpster?”
“No. I am just Blue. The simple version.”
“You know most cases of multiple personality…one personality usually doesn’t know the other, or others, exist. He or she believes, in whole, they are a singular personality.”
“Yes.”
“So you must concede at least the possibility you have encountered a division, a splintering as you put it.”
“This is going in circles and as predicted. I can account for my waking hours. I have no blank periods. No missing time.” A sluggish twist of chains. Large, cumbersome. Blue gets up to leave, strings hiss. “I do not think ill of you, nor kindly. Forget I ever came here, please. I will be leaving now.”
“Going to figure it out on your own? Physician heal thyself?”
“If I were a physician, I would amputate your tongue.”
Red Gellac smiles a bit at assumed humour as his friend exits the office. Smiling denotes the presence of a happy or pleasing emotion. No smile was upon the face of Blue Baxter as he crossed the doorway’s threshold. Is a mask truly a mask if it hides nothing?
* * * * *
other amounts of blackness lackluster and weightlessness of bruised air and undulant liquidity combine swirl cohere and part again kane is comfortably lost in and without confusion that slaves built the concrete flumes and gulleys and reservoirs but home is where you hang your grey matter and a bed is no longer necessary but teeth were becoming a problem how to keep them gathered was as bad as sin gets letting them sink to the bottom here beneath the streets is equivalent to stuffing a long rag down ones throat and pulling out slowly as to absorb all the sickness society has injected since you swam the vaginal canal ahh but where to put the rag dispose of properly I no longer bite but you must forgive my rag as it is used and does not feel well fairly large chunks of the corporate fuck machine are getting clumped in my hair please help kane thinks a police state would get beaten to death by discarded abused rags down here and cry for its mother in a very unbecoming and unnatural way but mother is unforgiving and unable to keep appointments for reprogramming her chip is hot due to overbearance and illbalancing of the superimposition of non professional fuck-its kane knows mother well enough and is exceedingly happy to be rid of her influence a grown man cannot live on pussy and cash alone nossir there must be hammers and laws instilled at or around puberty as to insure a young man may not view objects as women or society as vaginal fingernails are another issue altogether kane lost those upstream somewhere surely to be gathered and used by some not so mild mannered mask with who knows what intent down here suspicions do not sneak around corners or plant psychological fingerprints in a part of the mind that should be throwing unrefined muses or burning old pillowcases due to an overabundance of pazuzu oriented murmurs kanes new friends are of the black absence of color persuasion with a healthy smattering of in the know blather to boot up mothers ass a collective of daiseys and sharp razor metallic objects once used to remove the fetus from the womb at one point when his mask was fairly new kane would dream of a time he could climb back in mother inutero sweet sleep wet slumber but now time has looped into itself and become one long repetition like an alloy umbilicus that will not let go and deliver no sustenance mother smiles and waves bye bye
* * * * *
I’ve done this a million times, Blue thought to himself, walking the outskirts of downtown. I know that billiard hall…the cleaners. Always too much starch. One foot in front of the other, mind your balance and the perpetual effect of gravity. The pesky motions of pulling strings. But necessary. It becomes clear he must make conscious effort to blend in. But he looks like them. In fact, he looks unimpressively boring. In his suit, he almost passes for a Blues Brother, sans the fedora hat. But the sinking feeling – or instinct – that something is wrong is godamned overwhelming, like high-inertia vertigo. How can this be? There is no clinical reference for this. How can he be a successful headshrinker one day and wake up Mr. Spock. He should feel something, even worry or stress over his current condition. But that simply did not exist. Only this foreign will to live and a brain that produces only motor function and emotionless logic.
“I am Generic, the basic man,” he said aloud on west 6th steet. “I can fix your head for a nominal fee, but I can not laugh at your jokes. I can make love to my wife, but I am only performing physical motion. I do not love her. She is useless, except she cooks a rather tasty chicken and doesn’t piss on the lid.”
A part of his memory told him this was intended for humour, that it is mildly and ironically funny, a comic book character. No thing is funny. No more. A very strange world this is. Laughter is considered the best medicine. Wish in one hand and shit in the other, which one fills the quickest? Hitler. ...increases penis size and your libido! A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Have a Coke and a smile. God is watching you and Santa Clause, that creepy fuck, knows when you’ve been bad. Nigger. Shop like you mean it! Build a bigger bomb to keep the peace. Channel 83, the one you take to bed with you. Your world, delivered. Barbara Stanwyck. Puppy love. Exorcism. And for a love gift of only $150 we'll send you this beautiful and great smelling Christ-on-the-cross figurine soap-on-a-rope! Red Bullshit. Good night and I have no choice if the bed bugs bite. We don’t make it ‘till you order it. Famine. Wrestlemania. If a rolling stone gathers no moss then how the fuck do you explain Keith Richards. C’mon, c’mon get happeeeeeeeee…
Put on a happy face.
‘Keep your eyes on the road and your hands upon the wheel. Just keep on walking, no one will notice I’ve lost my mind. No one suspects it sprouted legs in the middle of the night and danced it’s way out my bedroom window. Perhaps if I arrange the meat on my face into a smile,’ he thinks as a couple approaches. It worked, they arranged their faces to match his as they pass. Such odd communication. Communion. Union.
One.
He began to experience a sicknees in his head. That vomitous, brain-slithering feeling most commonly associated with fainting and the jittery swoon of extreme horror…but different. This is more akin to repulsion. Repugnant response, spinning. Wheels, cogs churn and clatter. Internal noise. Sick. Wheezing strings.
A young man about to pass. He wears a Starbucks employee pin.
Sick. You.
Blue slugs the kid directly in the face. Nose cartilage shatters sending fragments into the brain. The internal pressure causes one eyeball to bulge and strain out of the cranium. The force blows Starbuck out of his non-skid, non-marking sole compound shoes onto the pavement. He coughs, exhales and stops breathing. Looks like blood, smells like cappuccino.
Instantly the dizzy sick is gone. Complete dissipation. The cure.
(bear with me, it's a work in progress. It's about 1/3 finished.)
