|
|
|
Before you get too far into this you should know. You should know this isn’t the kind of story where anything important happens, or where anything matters much. It’s not the kind of story where a carload of cheerleaders go on a road trip and one-by-one meet gruesome fates. It’s not the kind of story where two lonely singles lost in the bustle of city life find each other through some random accident—choking in an uptown restaurant our hero is revived by a no-nonsense waitress and single mother struggling to make ends meet. If you like stories where the characters remind you of yourself, give up now. Although you may be in here, you probably won’t recognize yourself. This story is not a mirror or a window. Or an hourglass whose slipping sands are trickling away. It’s not anything glass at all. If you are hoping this story will help to explain some messed-up facet of your own life, don’t bother continuing. If you believe that everything happens for a reason, and that everyone has a purpose in life, stop reading right now and find something else to do. Cook someone dinner, or go buy a cat.
This story does not involve a showdown between good and evil.
Maybe you’ll hear it. Maybe you won’t. This story was not written by some distinguished wordsmith, cloistered away in a rustic cabin somewhere in upstate New York, starving for an impossible pristine text. It wasn’t put down deep in the night by the soft glow of a computer screen. Or by the flicker of candlelight. It wasn’t born paragraphs at a time on legal tablets or in some battered spiral bound notebook either. In fact, this story wasn’t even created—it was found. Floating around out there as all stories do. And it was never all that important to me until it got out. Until it was designed, defined, and refined—passed through disaffected hands, and measured for therapeutic value. How about five hundred hours of therapy? Or complete cochlear reconstructive surgery? Totally paid for. I scan the offer as it slides across the table. My answer—I’m not sure how loud. “I don’t care. What good will it do me? I’m happy now.” But you could be so much happier. We can make you better. But we need your help. We need to know where it went wrong. Just as I finish reading the pad is pulled back. There’s more writing underneath when it comes back, now the handwriting more distressed. You should know something. You’re the first, but not the only one. There have been ten more since you got here. Eyes, ears, hands, etc. I can’t help but smile, but only at the corners of my mouth where it’s just for me. The truth is that with all the gauze, tape, and cotton wound around my head I’m really in no hurry to go anywhere. I listen to the blood pumping through my head and the incessant droning that I’ve become used to in the past few weeks. I rock back and forth on the chair I’m secured to. Through the window I can see a spectacled herd of labcoats watching me from the hall. “Okay. Get a tape recorder or something because I’m not writing it all down.” I plant the chair legs hard on the tile floor and clear my throat hoping it sounds calm and authoritative. “And when I’m done I want out.”
The whole thing comes bubbling up from slowly, steadily. The entire
story without a problem, because when you can’t hear yourself
talk it’s much easier to hear yourself think. This story is me, sitting with the dingy curtains pulled back as the cars whiz up the hill beneath my window. I peak out, around and down the corner to where the aluminum siding stretches away, and wonder if anyone can see me sitting here. On the toilet. A liar, a con, a thief, a maniac. This is what someone like that looks like I guess, on the toilet, looking out through curtains. I am everything, all balled up into one, because what does it matter if you are simply one or another? Or maybe a few combined?
|