Heterodichotomous Ornithogonality

The third of January stories.  This week’s theme: fraud.
  January 22, 2006

I

Moon.  I’m looking at the moon swinging low in the sky, pushing out pale rays of light to shine up my room.  I regard outways, through the window, up to the sky, clouds raggedy sweeping past like cotton.  The wind must be hurrious tonight.  I can’t tell for certain because I’m locked up and thrown away the key.  My head is happy because my head is empty.  Voices don’t talk to me, the spies have left me alone and blessed silence echoes brass and contrabass all around me, like a dark cargo hold when you shout into its unfilled bigness, and it just whooools back at you.

I am a mental patient, very patient and very mental in a mental patient institution.  I am surrounded by other mental patients, and they are all crazy like butter, only crazier.  There is no telling what they’ll do or say next.  It’s tiring but entertaining, except most of the time, I don’t get to enjoy the entertainment because the spies have found out where I am and they come after me, bribing the orderlies, seducing the nurses and no doubt posing as doctors.  I have detected an unusually large nose on one of the doctors and this leads me to arrive at unfortunate conclusions.  The logic is rustproof: spying devices can be concealed in artificially large noses; my doctor’s nose looks artificially large; therefore my doctor’s nose conceals spying devices.  I look up his nostrils hoping for a glint of tiny camera lenses in each one, but so far all I’ve seen are very long prehensile-looking hairs.  The doctor humors me, thought, the good old chappolino, and lets me look.  Ah, the advantages of being crazy…

II

My doctor—his name is Johnson, I think, or maybe Albrizzio, but I’ll call him Blume—Dr. Blume asks me why I locute the way I locute.  I told him I had an ancient Roman disease called in loco parenti, the one where crazy parents confused their kids’ locutions with their locations.  It skewered up their speech patterns (or, in case of women, matterns).  He disagreed and said that in loco parenti had a totally different entomology but I refused to argue with him, so the discussion died a beautiful death right there.  Requiescat in pace.  I had a cat named Requies once.

In truth, I conflute my speech to offthrow the spies.  At least that was my intention at the start; now sentences just come out of my mouth all gargled because they know no other way to go.

III

…I bring the letter out of my pocket and read it to him verboten: “This is an attempt to collect on a debt you owe.  You have thirty days to notify us in writing if you dispute this claim or any amount thereof.”

Dr. Blume looks cole-slawed with surprise, and no wonder: he thought I was making things up.

“You see,” I say, “spies can be very clever.  They talk to me in all sorts of different ways.  Sometimes they stand behind the door and whisper and run away when I try to sneak up on them and fling the door open.  Sometimes they leave letters like this one, or call on the phone.  Sometimes they leave me alone for a long time, but they always come back in the end.”

“When did you get this?” Dr. Blume asks.

“Over the weekend, when I leave here and go home.  I’m in this institution on a strictly promontory basis, you know.”

IV

So far as tools in the shed go, Dr. Blume needs some sharpening.  He underspoke—id est, I overheard—an argument with another patient today.  The patient is a dim light-bulb named Whitney.  What got Whitney all a-flicker was the idea that he’s God.  He up and announced this to everybody.

Whitney: I’m God.

Patient 1: Shut up!

Patient 2: The three-pronged Martian dinosaur goads!  Avast!  Avast!

Whitney: But I’m God!

Patient 1: Shut up!

Dr. Blume: What makes you think you’re God?

Whitney: I just know it.

Dr. Blume: Oh, come on.  How can you know you’re God?

Whitney: I just do.

Dr. Blume: Am I God?

Whitney: No.  There’s only one God in this room, and I’m he.

Dr. Blume: How do you know I’m not God?

Me: Dr. Blume, can’t you see he’s having a delusion?

Whitney’s mind crackled and popped a long time ago.

V

When I first told Dr. Blume about the spies, he made fun of me, just like he did with Whitney.  I can still see it: “Is there a spy in this room right now?” he says.  “No,” I say, “at least not that I can see.  But that doesn’t mean they’re not listening.”  “How would they listen?” asks Dr. Blume, and I roll my eyes and sigh at his obtuseness.  “Dr. Blume, all they need to do is plant bugs.”  As I say this, I have a vision of a spy slinking around my room with a hoe in one hand and a jar of fireflies in another.  It sends me into peroxides of ineffable horror.

“What do the spies tell you?”

“To give away government secrets, mostly.”

“Do you know any?”

I eye him suspiciously but then decide that in all lovelihood what I’m about to reveal is not anything that he doesn’t already know.

“I get them through an oriental guy who brings my food around when I’m at home.  He sneaks little sweet cookies in with the food.  You wouldn’t be able to tell, but they’re hollow inside.”  (Ollow, ollow, ollow, my brain echoes.)  “And if you open them, you can find secret messages and codes in numbers on a thin strip of paper.”

VI

Tuesday.  My feet have a fascinating quality about them that can be described only in new, made-up words, because no old words in the language are up to the task.  My feet are ornithogonal, in a heterodichotomous sort of way.  I’ve never noticed this until today, and the discovery strikes me dumb.  So I sit and dumbly watch my feet, breathing in the ornithogonality.  The spies are silent again and I’m glad, because this is the most important information I have ever had and I can’t be sure my thoughts aren’t being broadcast around the room against my will.  I try to clamp my skull shut by sheer willpower but only get a headache.

Dr. Blume comes in.  He looks concerned. He tells me he must talk to me but I’m too taken by the ornithogonality, too grasped and twisted by it to acknowledge his words.  He sighs and continues anyway.

“The threatening phone calls you’ve been getting, Tim,” he says.  “The letters, the notices.  We caught the guy who did this to you.”

This catches my attention.  Dr. Blume is like a spider, his words are a big wide web, and my attention flutters in their middle, stuck to their gooey surface.

“You caught who?”

“One of the orderlies, Tim.  He’s been at it for years.  Stealing patients’ information: names, birth dates, social security numbers.  He’d get credit cards using this information, run up the bills, and leave the collectors chasing after mental patients.”

“I told you I’ve been getting calls.”

“I know,” Dr. Blume says apologetically.  “All I can say is, it should all get better now.”

I say nothing and stare at my radiant feet.

VII

Bulbous sun in the bilious sky.  The wind hops across trees.  I can’t stare at the sun for too long but I don’t want to, so it’s okay.

“Dr.” Blume is a nice guy, although our opinions are diametrically perpendicular.  He said calls and letters would stop but I can’t believe him.  The news he brought to me suddenly made it clear that in guarding against spies, I have overlooked the real problem.  Now I know where to look and “Dr.” Blume can’t get the best of me any more.  He’s a fraudster, and the words of a fraudster cannot be trusted.  The “nurses” are in on the swindle; they deny going through my mail and destroying the letters from authorities that would alert me to the massive nets of deception that must still be woven around me.  I am sure that these letters come, though, and I silently wait for the day I get my hands on one of them and learn the whole truth.  In the meantime, I watch the “medical staff” and the “patients” going about their daily “business”, with their “tears” and their “laughter” and their “fear” and their “anger”.  I am in a “mental institution” after all, and these “emotions” are in abundant supply here.  I spend my “days” solving the “riddles” of “events”, trying to tell the false from the true.  It’s exhausting work, and thankless, for time after “time” I come to the conclusion that nothing can be known to me as true with certainty.  Do birds sit on trees, or are they “birds” sitting on “trees”.  Did the “food” really taste “salty” “today”?

“Sometimes” “I” “wonder” “if” “I” “can” “trust” “anything” “at” “all”.

< | Stories Archive | >