Machead
9th February 2004, 20:04
This is a novel I have been working on for some time, it contains what I consider to be the defining human themes, and I hope it is as moving to read as it is to write. I would love any kind of feedback, be as harsh as POSSIBLE. Anyways, I hope you enjoy it, here it is:
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“Maybe I’m not crazy, maybe I have reached a level of universal comprehension above that of the average human being, huh? How about that, how about your reality isn’t necessarily my reality, because in fact there is no set constant that is a “reality”, just different ways of interpreting the same… effects, the same stimuli… that give us our realities, huh, huh?”
“Mr. Mason, please, I need to concentrate!”
“Yeah, concentrate my ass, this is what, the millionth time you have tried to, to, to… ‘correct’ my hormones or whatever? Right? Huh? God forbid you let an ounce of profanity leak into your sterile life.”
“Mr. Mason!”
Mason carried on mumbling to himself as he fell back into his bed, his arm held limply to the side by the Nurse as she pumped ocean after ocean of hormone therapy into his body at 45 to 60 degrees (the angle in which a subcutaneous injection is administered, Mason read about it, he read a lot). The room was arid, right down to furniture, Mason had been moved into a safety containment room after attempting to escape, twice, on the same day, using kitchen utensils from the cafeteria. The white padded walls seemed to want to burst from the taught metal cables holding them onto the edges of the room, everything about the room seemed to want to escape, especially him. “I wonder why they call it a cell, I mean think of the most basic organism in life, and then this, the most life devoid prison conceivable by man…”. The Nurse ignored him, as she always did.
“It’s almost amusing, in fates usual sadistic kind of way” he laughed to himself, smirking, starring into the left corner of the room, the one area of the room that wasn’t completely identical, centimeter by centimeter. Three years previous to this day a man named Charlie Ashes had been described as “the most mentally unstable human being this institution has ever seen” had somehow managed to break free of his straight jacket and crave the words ‘eat thyself’ into that corner, with his teeth, nobody knew how, nobody cared.
“What is?” asked the Nurse, only half caring, still starring blankly at the stainless steel coated machine in front of her, displaying the current amount of emotion juice that had joined Mason’s red blood cells.
“This whole concept, when your crazy, like you seem to think I am, you try and cure it by forcing us as far from reality as possible. Somehow I don’t think Mr. Whoever leaves his lovely wife and kids every morning with a Starbucks coffee in one hand and a copy of the Financial Times in the other to be locked up in a completely bare room for two weeks straight, no out side interaction and no inside distraction but the tooth marks of a two years deceased psychiatric patient on the wall.”
The Nurse laughed, removed the hypodermic needle and flicked the off switch on the love-o-meter, collected it into her arms and moved towards the door before turning to Mason. “Your thinking to hard, try not to strain yourself!”, she smiled, as if she found herself acknowledging a comment made by a metal patient rather unlikely, then left. He couldn’t quite believe that once person could be so phenomenally patronizing, but what could he do about it? Write a letter to the head of the institute? He wasn’t aloud to use a pen, he wasn’t even aloud to use paper, the edges could “conceivably be used to slit ones throat”. He let his head fall back onto the pillow behind him.
“So, just me and you wall”, Mason looked around, his degree of vision had been greatly reduced by the harnesses jamming him firmly to his bed. “Don’t worry, we can just be friends, we are too different people. I mean I’m a deranged mental patient, and you’re a mesh of wire and white foam… with a few tiny traces of enamel.”
“Just think of the children” he added.
Ever since he was 15, Mason had been in a mental institution. After being diagnosed with Bi-Polar disorder at a very young age, his parents decide the best thing to do would be to keep him in his room every single day, not letting him see any of the outside world or communicate with anyone other than them. They, as most do, believed that the cure to falling into a dream world of the mind is to make the physical world as unreal as possible too. “Highly illogical” he said to himself, out loud, his thoughts usually overlapped into the ‘real’ world, it was a product of his ‘disorder’. What his parents didn’t know, is that, as a product of his mental illness, he had the ability to work things out. Practically anything, equations, philosophical conflicts, anything. When, on his 15th birthday, he was subjected to a ‘mental home’ for repeatedly holding his breath until falling unconscious until his father agreed to take him outside to see the sunrise for the first time in over 13 years, he realized that his life was more real than anybody else’s. How can somebody understand what they take for granted? Only when you are as far from reality as possible can you truly appreciate, and criticize it.
However, this was all beside the point, none of this mattered. In a few years a groundbreaking psychiatric therapy method would be introduced, and he would be brought back into the ‘real world’. It didn’t matter what his experiences were then, because most people didn’t have them. It seems cultural diversity has been taken over by personality cloning, it doesn’t care if there are billions dying from starvation around the world, it didn’t matter that the experience gained from going on hunger strike was far greater than eating the latest Special Limited Edition Super Deluxe King Sized Big Mac, because most people didn’t do that.
“Cloning, ha! When it’s made legal and families start churning out the latest E-Type Child, they will realize, cloning began a long time ago, when people started modeling their life around Car adverts and Levis Jeans.”
He had already been in the cell for over 3 days; it was about 5:30pm now. He had tried to keep track of the time since he last saw a clock, but he could be anything from a few seconds to a few hours late or fast. Time really had no meaning in this place.
He tried to roll over and get a closer look at the left hand side of the room, he thought he saw a sizable congregation of dust a second ago, but it was useless, the straightjacket was in turn connected directly to the bed which was cemented into the floor which was closed securely with an solid core door in a tower over 30 meters from any other building in the compound. “Jesus, what I would give for a cyanide pill.” He closed his eyes and began foaming his saliva at the mouth, mimicking the convulsions that take place during a cyanide suicide. “Want to know what’s odd wall? They lock people like me up in meter thick walls because we are so different from them, yet they still impose their stupid little laws on us. I mean, sure, maybe suicide is a bad idea in a close knit community of shelf stackers and teenage thieves, but for a man that supposedly has no control over his mind? How can they even relate to my needs?!” he shook his torso and neck, trying to pull himself in to the centre of the bed where it was more comfortable, which was still unbearably uncomfortable. “You know what?!” he shouted, trying to look towards the door in the far right of the room. “I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHY I’M ASKING MYSELF THESE KIND OF QUESTIONS ANYMORE!”, “I KNOW THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT, BUT THE THING IS, I CAN’T DO A FUCKING THING ABOUT IT!!!”, he screamed between his gritted teeth, every so often, 33 years of isolated emotional and social malnourishment got to him, but it passed, the mundane routine of drugs and walls, drugs and wall, drugs and wall, drugs and wall, drugs and wall, pounded any free thought back into place. “Jesus”, tears began to swell up in his eyes, a bead of salty liquid began to trickle down his cheek, “Oh come on, what the fuck is this?! Fucking… tear… fuck you!”, he tried to shake it off his face, it began to cause an unbearable tickling sensation when brushing across the tiny hairs on his face, “WHAT IS THE FUCKING POINT EH?! EH?!”, he began to violently lift his torso up and down, as far as he could. “I’M NOT DIRTY YOU STUPID… FUCKING… TEAR GLAND, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE! CAN YOU SEE ANY POTENTIALLY INFECTED OPEN WOUNDS? HUH!?!!?”. That moment, a large male nurse burst into the room, he strode over to the bed and held down Mason’s shoulders.
“Sir, if you can’t cope with life consciously, we’ll just have to sedate you. Can’t you just keep you mouth shut for one minute?!” he hurled at Mason, who fell still. The nurse made to leave the room, mumbling to himself, when Mason spoke: “I mumble too, I hear them talking about it, they say it’s my brain constantly trying to communicate what it can’t understand to the outside world. It isn’t of course, I know exactly what I’m saying, I’m just saying it quietly because if thy heard what it was I was saying, they would probably have called you to do exactly the sort of thing that you just did. So in effect, you just put your self back in place.”, the Nurse turned round to face Mason, a look of complete confusion on his face, “… what?”.
“By thinking and reacting the way you do, you are keeping yourself from understanding the very thing that can cure me. I mean come on, didn’t it ever spring to mind that maybe everybody’s got this all wrong? And I’m really the sane one, and you’re the nut case? I mean just because the majority of the world is like you doesn’t mean that I can’t be in the true real state of mind. The majority of the world is in poverty, but you don’t accept that as your lifestyle, why should accept yours? Maybe I like it in here. Ever think about that? I mean I’m not saying that I am the only conscious one in this room, but with all possibility I am, and with all possibility you are. So the only thing we can assume in this situation is that we live in different worlds, neither of them correct or false, and the only cure to the whole thing is to broaden our societies cultural horizons, and live together, learning from one another. Sure I may not be able to exist in your house with your wife and your kids driving your Lexus, but I would like to see you exist in a state of timeless stasis in a blank room for days on end. Jesus, I don’t even know if I make sense, but of course you wont understand, I might as well be speaking French.”
“I can actually speak French” the Nurse replied, looking smug. Mason starred blankly at him, law dropped, completely and utterly amazed at the narrow mindedness of this man, Male Nurse Version 2.0, the latest clone. “Heh” the nurse chuckled to himself, “Somebody needs his rest, you shouldn’t think to hard son!”, the Nurse smiled, turned and left the room, closing the door behind him. Mason just remained upright, looking mystified at the wall, how could? But! No… there was no point anymore, he might as well just give in to the systematic consumption of free thought, and let the remaining resisting brain cells be regurgitated as societies latest software package. He heard the Nurse call down the hall outside, probably to the security guard by the level exit, “6pm, lights out time Alf”, he could faintly make out a grunt of acknowledgment in the distance. There was a series of loud clicks beginning down the hall; he could here each cell falling into darkness. Time began to slow to a snails pace, the only way he could tell that it was any slower from the last few seconds is by the rare occurrence of a sound of any kind making it’s way into his ear drums through the think layered walls. He heard the lights fall dead in the room next to him, and then, just as quickly as it had taken for the nurse to slam the door shut, and for the dial of the machine he had seen earlier to go blank, the light in his room went out.
2 Days Later…
“They are the debilitated ones, as soon as somebody’s born with a mental composure over 5 degrees different from the average Joe, they lock them up and throw away the fucking key”. Mason had been alone now for over 48 hours, save only the two, fifteen minute visits from the nurse to correct the levels of endorphin, adrenaline, testosterone and any other reactants of personality variation in his blood stream. From the point of view of most of the Nurses operating on level 7 of Hans Ward , this was a good thing, his violent out bursts had been reduced to hour-long lapses of black hole like depression, it didn’t matter what was going on inside his head, according to them it was a broken computer, just waiting for the latest C++ programmer out of Princeton to come along and fix, any flashes coming from the screen, any sign of life, no matter how distant from the norm, was meaningless to them, little did they know that the man lying in that bed was fighting the worst form of combat imaginable, mental warfare.
The problem with mental warfare is there is no enemy, yet there is. You see your both sides of the war, and neither side knows what it’s fighting about. In your mind there is no outside answer to achieve, because it’s in your head, the bullets keep on flying round the mind, never to hit anything, never to stop firing. It’s like counting in colors. Weighing in letters.
Then suddenly, a man, dressed completely in black, wearing a pair of shades that shrouded his eyes from sight, his jet black hair seemed to absorb all the light from the room like a black whole like depression.
“Good morning Mason”, he revealed a small un-foldable chair from behind his back, dark like his suit, and placed it by the side of the bed closest to the door, right next to Mason. He sat down, looked around the room for a few seconds, sighed, then turned to Mason, completely silent. “Never trust a man wearing sunglasses, if you can’t see his eyes, you can’t tell if he’s lying” Mason replied, coldly, these were the first words he had uttered to another human being since the night the Nurse left his jaw resting on his lap.
“Oh?” the man asked, smiling lightly, starring straight into Masons eyes with his smooth tinted glass eyes.
“Every time you lie, your bodies glands release a combination of hormones into your blood, these trigger numerous observable changes on the bodies surface, most notably in your eyes. When somebody’s lying their pupils dilate, in some extreme circumstances, traces of noticeably different patches of color appears in the iris. I see it when the Nurse tells me she thinks I am getting better.”
“You don’t think your improving?”
“Depends on what you call improvements-“
“And what would you call an improvement?”
Mason chuckled to himself, slyly, as he always did when he knew he was right and someone else was wrong. Also, the hormone therapy caused involuntary flexes of muscles around his body, from an outside observation you couldn’t tell which one of these caused this most influential of facial expressions, though this time, Mason seemed to think, for some reason he didn’t know, that this man, might actually care, of course, that’s only one half of the story, the more important question would by ‘why?’.
“Now you mention it, there isn’t really such thing, I mean, there are no ground rules right?”
“So your not a religious man?”
“Look at me, either the devil took over or god doesn’t care, either way I have no reason to place faith in something that has screwed me over, it’d be like voting republican.”
“Well, I see you have a firm enough grasp on the current world affairs, not like most of the other inmates.”
“They don’t seem to care, they can all understand it, even if it just has to be explained to them in different ways, for some of them the method of projection is why they don’t know who the last president was, for others, their ‘illness’ is a shield. A cave to hide in. I mean no disrespect to them; it’s likely the fault of these… establishments. But either way, you and I both know that there is no real illness that can be cured with hormone therapy and the patronisingly loud voices of Nurses, the world is a different thing to everyone, it can be interpreted in different ways, so the same things can be taught, but unless you teach it in the right way, it’s useless.”
“Well, you’re a very intelligent man Mr. Mason, a shame that these people can’t see that.”
“I figured what I’m saying only make sense to me, not to them, just like a child’s babbling sounds like nonsense to us, but never the less, the child has a meaning it is trying to put forth.”
“Mr. Mason, why are you here?”
“What? Why am I in this stupid asylum? Like I said, the world isn’t ready for individuals.”
“No, I mean, why are you here? Why do you carry on?”
There was a long silence, this was a question Mason had hid from all his life, a question he never really confronted, but the need to never arose, because the state of mind he had built fro himself didn’t permit such a question to be asked, and since he was rarely asked a question more complex than “ARE YOU ALRIGHT TODAY MR. MASON?!” by another person, he had never answered it.
“I… I…”
“Hope? Is it hope Mr. Mason? Is that the reason you cling on to life? Or is it anger? Are you bitter that the world has thrown you a bad piece of meat and you’ve got food poisoning?”
“No! It’s no bitterness, one can’t just throw away his life, it just doesn’t seem to fit into place, I can’t describe it”
Mason paused and thought for a moment, he imagined asking this man to kill him, the image burst into his mind, he shook it out.
“No, though I have imagined it from time to time, but I could never go through with it.
Even if I could, how would I?”
The man smiled, a large set of pearly white, symmetrical teeth peered out.
“Funny you should ask that John-“
“How do you know my first name?!-“
“Calm down now John, there’s no need to be-“
“Nobody calls me by my first name, you don’t work here do you? Who are you?!”
This man really did care, and the ‘why?’ now seemed to fall into place, Mason had no idea why he knew this, but he did. This man had a gun, and he was going to shoot him in the head, and kill him.
“It will all be over soon John”
The man reached behind he waste and revealed a small, black, metal pistol, it’s trigger caught a flash of light from the ceiling of the room.
“No! What the f-“
“This is what you want isn’t it?”
“NO! Nurse! HELP!”
“You told me you wanted to John!”
“What?! When? But-“
The final piece of the jigsaw slid into place, Mason stood back and looked at the complete picture. It was a smear of random, clashing colors, blue and red and brown. Neon green splashed dotted around the page, pink and purple in the odd spot, like a impressionist painting.
“In just a moment, the ringing will stop.”
As he said it, Mason because aware of a loud ringing in his ears, it didn’t seem to start at any time, it was as if it had been going all his life, he just hadn’t been listening.
The man in black slid back the hammer, and wrapped his finger around the trigger. The bullet sped through the air; it was touching his forehead, burning the skin like a white-hot poker. The ringing became unbearable, all he wanted was for it to stop, he gritted his teeth, slammed his eyes just. Then the entire front of his head seemed to explode, the ringing stopped, and he fell asleep.
Chapter II
The humanity of witnessing his own death astounded even him. Through a haze of distortion caused by his mind frantically trying to figure out what had just happened, he could see what was plainly clear, he had been killed, and the scene was looping inside his head. The gun, aiming, firing. His body, helplessly trying to save its self, he could see himself wildly flailing, it struck his heart hard, to see the most fundamental of things before him, life fighting as hard as it can, against all logic and reason to keep its self alive, something John had thought a weak and useless human failure for so long, and just as he saw it, life and its venerability, it’s humility, he saw it slip between his fingers, and all was black…
He woke, four days later, in the recovery room of St. Francis Hospital. His eyelids fought their way open, and the piercing light of the open window in front of him struck like spears into his eyes. Pearly white walls and the sound of a cool breeze outside joined only by the occasional tap of a leaf on the window, being whisked up into the air by miniature cyclones of wind. It was something he had not heard in almost 15 years.
Slowly he regained his senses, one by one, first his sight, then hearing and touch, and smell and taste. Each one felt born again, overwhelmed by the beauty of it’s own mechanics, and then he remembered what had happened, what he thought had happened. “Am I dead?”, his lips weakly formed the words. He sat up, with a surprising jolt of energy, and then fell limply into his own lap. He shuffled his arms to either his side and raised himself up, swung his legs across the bed and sat. He couldn’t understand what had happened, it made no sense, but he was so taken by… himself, that he couldn’t spare the precious time trying to explain it to himself, time that could be spent exploring, experiencing.
He turned his head to face the window in front of him, his neck was stiff, he imagined he had been gone for some time, but he couldn’t think where, all he remembered was a man and a gun, be he didn’t care. The sun was rising, its rays burst through the horizon, revealing every detail of the landscape before it, the pale translucency of a leaf, the crisp brown of soil, the divine aura of a cloud caught in the silky blue of the sky above it.
Then he noticed a sign below, just in his line of vision, a white metal sign reading “St. Francis Hospital”. He remembered everything, and his glimpse of life was gone.
“Couldn’t they have let me die?” He grunted to himself…
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“Maybe I’m not crazy, maybe I have reached a level of universal comprehension above that of the average human being, huh? How about that, how about your reality isn’t necessarily my reality, because in fact there is no set constant that is a “reality”, just different ways of interpreting the same… effects, the same stimuli… that give us our realities, huh, huh?”
“Mr. Mason, please, I need to concentrate!”
“Yeah, concentrate my ass, this is what, the millionth time you have tried to, to, to… ‘correct’ my hormones or whatever? Right? Huh? God forbid you let an ounce of profanity leak into your sterile life.”
“Mr. Mason!”
Mason carried on mumbling to himself as he fell back into his bed, his arm held limply to the side by the Nurse as she pumped ocean after ocean of hormone therapy into his body at 45 to 60 degrees (the angle in which a subcutaneous injection is administered, Mason read about it, he read a lot). The room was arid, right down to furniture, Mason had been moved into a safety containment room after attempting to escape, twice, on the same day, using kitchen utensils from the cafeteria. The white padded walls seemed to want to burst from the taught metal cables holding them onto the edges of the room, everything about the room seemed to want to escape, especially him. “I wonder why they call it a cell, I mean think of the most basic organism in life, and then this, the most life devoid prison conceivable by man…”. The Nurse ignored him, as she always did.
“It’s almost amusing, in fates usual sadistic kind of way” he laughed to himself, smirking, starring into the left corner of the room, the one area of the room that wasn’t completely identical, centimeter by centimeter. Three years previous to this day a man named Charlie Ashes had been described as “the most mentally unstable human being this institution has ever seen” had somehow managed to break free of his straight jacket and crave the words ‘eat thyself’ into that corner, with his teeth, nobody knew how, nobody cared.
“What is?” asked the Nurse, only half caring, still starring blankly at the stainless steel coated machine in front of her, displaying the current amount of emotion juice that had joined Mason’s red blood cells.
“This whole concept, when your crazy, like you seem to think I am, you try and cure it by forcing us as far from reality as possible. Somehow I don’t think Mr. Whoever leaves his lovely wife and kids every morning with a Starbucks coffee in one hand and a copy of the Financial Times in the other to be locked up in a completely bare room for two weeks straight, no out side interaction and no inside distraction but the tooth marks of a two years deceased psychiatric patient on the wall.”
The Nurse laughed, removed the hypodermic needle and flicked the off switch on the love-o-meter, collected it into her arms and moved towards the door before turning to Mason. “Your thinking to hard, try not to strain yourself!”, she smiled, as if she found herself acknowledging a comment made by a metal patient rather unlikely, then left. He couldn’t quite believe that once person could be so phenomenally patronizing, but what could he do about it? Write a letter to the head of the institute? He wasn’t aloud to use a pen, he wasn’t even aloud to use paper, the edges could “conceivably be used to slit ones throat”. He let his head fall back onto the pillow behind him.
“So, just me and you wall”, Mason looked around, his degree of vision had been greatly reduced by the harnesses jamming him firmly to his bed. “Don’t worry, we can just be friends, we are too different people. I mean I’m a deranged mental patient, and you’re a mesh of wire and white foam… with a few tiny traces of enamel.”
“Just think of the children” he added.
Ever since he was 15, Mason had been in a mental institution. After being diagnosed with Bi-Polar disorder at a very young age, his parents decide the best thing to do would be to keep him in his room every single day, not letting him see any of the outside world or communicate with anyone other than them. They, as most do, believed that the cure to falling into a dream world of the mind is to make the physical world as unreal as possible too. “Highly illogical” he said to himself, out loud, his thoughts usually overlapped into the ‘real’ world, it was a product of his ‘disorder’. What his parents didn’t know, is that, as a product of his mental illness, he had the ability to work things out. Practically anything, equations, philosophical conflicts, anything. When, on his 15th birthday, he was subjected to a ‘mental home’ for repeatedly holding his breath until falling unconscious until his father agreed to take him outside to see the sunrise for the first time in over 13 years, he realized that his life was more real than anybody else’s. How can somebody understand what they take for granted? Only when you are as far from reality as possible can you truly appreciate, and criticize it.
However, this was all beside the point, none of this mattered. In a few years a groundbreaking psychiatric therapy method would be introduced, and he would be brought back into the ‘real world’. It didn’t matter what his experiences were then, because most people didn’t have them. It seems cultural diversity has been taken over by personality cloning, it doesn’t care if there are billions dying from starvation around the world, it didn’t matter that the experience gained from going on hunger strike was far greater than eating the latest Special Limited Edition Super Deluxe King Sized Big Mac, because most people didn’t do that.
“Cloning, ha! When it’s made legal and families start churning out the latest E-Type Child, they will realize, cloning began a long time ago, when people started modeling their life around Car adverts and Levis Jeans.”
He had already been in the cell for over 3 days; it was about 5:30pm now. He had tried to keep track of the time since he last saw a clock, but he could be anything from a few seconds to a few hours late or fast. Time really had no meaning in this place.
He tried to roll over and get a closer look at the left hand side of the room, he thought he saw a sizable congregation of dust a second ago, but it was useless, the straightjacket was in turn connected directly to the bed which was cemented into the floor which was closed securely with an solid core door in a tower over 30 meters from any other building in the compound. “Jesus, what I would give for a cyanide pill.” He closed his eyes and began foaming his saliva at the mouth, mimicking the convulsions that take place during a cyanide suicide. “Want to know what’s odd wall? They lock people like me up in meter thick walls because we are so different from them, yet they still impose their stupid little laws on us. I mean, sure, maybe suicide is a bad idea in a close knit community of shelf stackers and teenage thieves, but for a man that supposedly has no control over his mind? How can they even relate to my needs?!” he shook his torso and neck, trying to pull himself in to the centre of the bed where it was more comfortable, which was still unbearably uncomfortable. “You know what?!” he shouted, trying to look towards the door in the far right of the room. “I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHY I’M ASKING MYSELF THESE KIND OF QUESTIONS ANYMORE!”, “I KNOW THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT, BUT THE THING IS, I CAN’T DO A FUCKING THING ABOUT IT!!!”, he screamed between his gritted teeth, every so often, 33 years of isolated emotional and social malnourishment got to him, but it passed, the mundane routine of drugs and walls, drugs and wall, drugs and wall, drugs and wall, drugs and wall, pounded any free thought back into place. “Jesus”, tears began to swell up in his eyes, a bead of salty liquid began to trickle down his cheek, “Oh come on, what the fuck is this?! Fucking… tear… fuck you!”, he tried to shake it off his face, it began to cause an unbearable tickling sensation when brushing across the tiny hairs on his face, “WHAT IS THE FUCKING POINT EH?! EH?!”, he began to violently lift his torso up and down, as far as he could. “I’M NOT DIRTY YOU STUPID… FUCKING… TEAR GLAND, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE! CAN YOU SEE ANY POTENTIALLY INFECTED OPEN WOUNDS? HUH!?!!?”. That moment, a large male nurse burst into the room, he strode over to the bed and held down Mason’s shoulders.
“Sir, if you can’t cope with life consciously, we’ll just have to sedate you. Can’t you just keep you mouth shut for one minute?!” he hurled at Mason, who fell still. The nurse made to leave the room, mumbling to himself, when Mason spoke: “I mumble too, I hear them talking about it, they say it’s my brain constantly trying to communicate what it can’t understand to the outside world. It isn’t of course, I know exactly what I’m saying, I’m just saying it quietly because if thy heard what it was I was saying, they would probably have called you to do exactly the sort of thing that you just did. So in effect, you just put your self back in place.”, the Nurse turned round to face Mason, a look of complete confusion on his face, “… what?”.
“By thinking and reacting the way you do, you are keeping yourself from understanding the very thing that can cure me. I mean come on, didn’t it ever spring to mind that maybe everybody’s got this all wrong? And I’m really the sane one, and you’re the nut case? I mean just because the majority of the world is like you doesn’t mean that I can’t be in the true real state of mind. The majority of the world is in poverty, but you don’t accept that as your lifestyle, why should accept yours? Maybe I like it in here. Ever think about that? I mean I’m not saying that I am the only conscious one in this room, but with all possibility I am, and with all possibility you are. So the only thing we can assume in this situation is that we live in different worlds, neither of them correct or false, and the only cure to the whole thing is to broaden our societies cultural horizons, and live together, learning from one another. Sure I may not be able to exist in your house with your wife and your kids driving your Lexus, but I would like to see you exist in a state of timeless stasis in a blank room for days on end. Jesus, I don’t even know if I make sense, but of course you wont understand, I might as well be speaking French.”
“I can actually speak French” the Nurse replied, looking smug. Mason starred blankly at him, law dropped, completely and utterly amazed at the narrow mindedness of this man, Male Nurse Version 2.0, the latest clone. “Heh” the nurse chuckled to himself, “Somebody needs his rest, you shouldn’t think to hard son!”, the Nurse smiled, turned and left the room, closing the door behind him. Mason just remained upright, looking mystified at the wall, how could? But! No… there was no point anymore, he might as well just give in to the systematic consumption of free thought, and let the remaining resisting brain cells be regurgitated as societies latest software package. He heard the Nurse call down the hall outside, probably to the security guard by the level exit, “6pm, lights out time Alf”, he could faintly make out a grunt of acknowledgment in the distance. There was a series of loud clicks beginning down the hall; he could here each cell falling into darkness. Time began to slow to a snails pace, the only way he could tell that it was any slower from the last few seconds is by the rare occurrence of a sound of any kind making it’s way into his ear drums through the think layered walls. He heard the lights fall dead in the room next to him, and then, just as quickly as it had taken for the nurse to slam the door shut, and for the dial of the machine he had seen earlier to go blank, the light in his room went out.
2 Days Later…
“They are the debilitated ones, as soon as somebody’s born with a mental composure over 5 degrees different from the average Joe, they lock them up and throw away the fucking key”. Mason had been alone now for over 48 hours, save only the two, fifteen minute visits from the nurse to correct the levels of endorphin, adrenaline, testosterone and any other reactants of personality variation in his blood stream. From the point of view of most of the Nurses operating on level 7 of Hans Ward , this was a good thing, his violent out bursts had been reduced to hour-long lapses of black hole like depression, it didn’t matter what was going on inside his head, according to them it was a broken computer, just waiting for the latest C++ programmer out of Princeton to come along and fix, any flashes coming from the screen, any sign of life, no matter how distant from the norm, was meaningless to them, little did they know that the man lying in that bed was fighting the worst form of combat imaginable, mental warfare.
The problem with mental warfare is there is no enemy, yet there is. You see your both sides of the war, and neither side knows what it’s fighting about. In your mind there is no outside answer to achieve, because it’s in your head, the bullets keep on flying round the mind, never to hit anything, never to stop firing. It’s like counting in colors. Weighing in letters.
Then suddenly, a man, dressed completely in black, wearing a pair of shades that shrouded his eyes from sight, his jet black hair seemed to absorb all the light from the room like a black whole like depression.
“Good morning Mason”, he revealed a small un-foldable chair from behind his back, dark like his suit, and placed it by the side of the bed closest to the door, right next to Mason. He sat down, looked around the room for a few seconds, sighed, then turned to Mason, completely silent. “Never trust a man wearing sunglasses, if you can’t see his eyes, you can’t tell if he’s lying” Mason replied, coldly, these were the first words he had uttered to another human being since the night the Nurse left his jaw resting on his lap.
“Oh?” the man asked, smiling lightly, starring straight into Masons eyes with his smooth tinted glass eyes.
“Every time you lie, your bodies glands release a combination of hormones into your blood, these trigger numerous observable changes on the bodies surface, most notably in your eyes. When somebody’s lying their pupils dilate, in some extreme circumstances, traces of noticeably different patches of color appears in the iris. I see it when the Nurse tells me she thinks I am getting better.”
“You don’t think your improving?”
“Depends on what you call improvements-“
“And what would you call an improvement?”
Mason chuckled to himself, slyly, as he always did when he knew he was right and someone else was wrong. Also, the hormone therapy caused involuntary flexes of muscles around his body, from an outside observation you couldn’t tell which one of these caused this most influential of facial expressions, though this time, Mason seemed to think, for some reason he didn’t know, that this man, might actually care, of course, that’s only one half of the story, the more important question would by ‘why?’.
“Now you mention it, there isn’t really such thing, I mean, there are no ground rules right?”
“So your not a religious man?”
“Look at me, either the devil took over or god doesn’t care, either way I have no reason to place faith in something that has screwed me over, it’d be like voting republican.”
“Well, I see you have a firm enough grasp on the current world affairs, not like most of the other inmates.”
“They don’t seem to care, they can all understand it, even if it just has to be explained to them in different ways, for some of them the method of projection is why they don’t know who the last president was, for others, their ‘illness’ is a shield. A cave to hide in. I mean no disrespect to them; it’s likely the fault of these… establishments. But either way, you and I both know that there is no real illness that can be cured with hormone therapy and the patronisingly loud voices of Nurses, the world is a different thing to everyone, it can be interpreted in different ways, so the same things can be taught, but unless you teach it in the right way, it’s useless.”
“Well, you’re a very intelligent man Mr. Mason, a shame that these people can’t see that.”
“I figured what I’m saying only make sense to me, not to them, just like a child’s babbling sounds like nonsense to us, but never the less, the child has a meaning it is trying to put forth.”
“Mr. Mason, why are you here?”
“What? Why am I in this stupid asylum? Like I said, the world isn’t ready for individuals.”
“No, I mean, why are you here? Why do you carry on?”
There was a long silence, this was a question Mason had hid from all his life, a question he never really confronted, but the need to never arose, because the state of mind he had built fro himself didn’t permit such a question to be asked, and since he was rarely asked a question more complex than “ARE YOU ALRIGHT TODAY MR. MASON?!” by another person, he had never answered it.
“I… I…”
“Hope? Is it hope Mr. Mason? Is that the reason you cling on to life? Or is it anger? Are you bitter that the world has thrown you a bad piece of meat and you’ve got food poisoning?”
“No! It’s no bitterness, one can’t just throw away his life, it just doesn’t seem to fit into place, I can’t describe it”
Mason paused and thought for a moment, he imagined asking this man to kill him, the image burst into his mind, he shook it out.
“No, though I have imagined it from time to time, but I could never go through with it.
Even if I could, how would I?”
The man smiled, a large set of pearly white, symmetrical teeth peered out.
“Funny you should ask that John-“
“How do you know my first name?!-“
“Calm down now John, there’s no need to be-“
“Nobody calls me by my first name, you don’t work here do you? Who are you?!”
This man really did care, and the ‘why?’ now seemed to fall into place, Mason had no idea why he knew this, but he did. This man had a gun, and he was going to shoot him in the head, and kill him.
“It will all be over soon John”
The man reached behind he waste and revealed a small, black, metal pistol, it’s trigger caught a flash of light from the ceiling of the room.
“No! What the f-“
“This is what you want isn’t it?”
“NO! Nurse! HELP!”
“You told me you wanted to John!”
“What?! When? But-“
The final piece of the jigsaw slid into place, Mason stood back and looked at the complete picture. It was a smear of random, clashing colors, blue and red and brown. Neon green splashed dotted around the page, pink and purple in the odd spot, like a impressionist painting.
“In just a moment, the ringing will stop.”
As he said it, Mason because aware of a loud ringing in his ears, it didn’t seem to start at any time, it was as if it had been going all his life, he just hadn’t been listening.
The man in black slid back the hammer, and wrapped his finger around the trigger. The bullet sped through the air; it was touching his forehead, burning the skin like a white-hot poker. The ringing became unbearable, all he wanted was for it to stop, he gritted his teeth, slammed his eyes just. Then the entire front of his head seemed to explode, the ringing stopped, and he fell asleep.
Chapter II
The humanity of witnessing his own death astounded even him. Through a haze of distortion caused by his mind frantically trying to figure out what had just happened, he could see what was plainly clear, he had been killed, and the scene was looping inside his head. The gun, aiming, firing. His body, helplessly trying to save its self, he could see himself wildly flailing, it struck his heart hard, to see the most fundamental of things before him, life fighting as hard as it can, against all logic and reason to keep its self alive, something John had thought a weak and useless human failure for so long, and just as he saw it, life and its venerability, it’s humility, he saw it slip between his fingers, and all was black…
He woke, four days later, in the recovery room of St. Francis Hospital. His eyelids fought their way open, and the piercing light of the open window in front of him struck like spears into his eyes. Pearly white walls and the sound of a cool breeze outside joined only by the occasional tap of a leaf on the window, being whisked up into the air by miniature cyclones of wind. It was something he had not heard in almost 15 years.
Slowly he regained his senses, one by one, first his sight, then hearing and touch, and smell and taste. Each one felt born again, overwhelmed by the beauty of it’s own mechanics, and then he remembered what had happened, what he thought had happened. “Am I dead?”, his lips weakly formed the words. He sat up, with a surprising jolt of energy, and then fell limply into his own lap. He shuffled his arms to either his side and raised himself up, swung his legs across the bed and sat. He couldn’t understand what had happened, it made no sense, but he was so taken by… himself, that he couldn’t spare the precious time trying to explain it to himself, time that could be spent exploring, experiencing.
He turned his head to face the window in front of him, his neck was stiff, he imagined he had been gone for some time, but he couldn’t think where, all he remembered was a man and a gun, be he didn’t care. The sun was rising, its rays burst through the horizon, revealing every detail of the landscape before it, the pale translucency of a leaf, the crisp brown of soil, the divine aura of a cloud caught in the silky blue of the sky above it.
Then he noticed a sign below, just in his line of vision, a white metal sign reading “St. Francis Hospital”. He remembered everything, and his glimpse of life was gone.
“Couldn’t they have let me die?” He grunted to himself…