Chapter Twenty-Seven
Gram’s kitchen was much as I thought it would be. I could have sworn I smelled the bread baking in her sturdy woodstove, even though the stove was long gone, replaced with electric.She sucked in her breath ever so slightly when I turned up on her doorstep, caked in the dirt of a vagrant, then shook her head and went to make food. I looked around.
In the kitchen I found myself surveying, entire days had once been spent making jam and preserves. Anyone with the gumption to roll up their sleeves and help would go home with their fair share or more. There was the table I remembered, that had been witness to discussion, humorous stories, heated debate, advice, predictions, warnings, and somewhere in there, words of love. Life on the farm always found its way back to the table. Somehow I sensed that time had changed things, that fewer were those who now sat at the table to pass the time.
I refused the bowl of soup offered to me. The voices were telling me just what they’d do to me if I ate. “After all,” one said in a threatening way, “you want to look good for your next film.”
“You don’t want the soup?”
“They won’t let me eat, Gram, I swear.” I felt like running away.
As if she knew my mind, Gram said, “Go upstairs for a while and rest.” I heard her gently put the soup on the counter, as though bemused. I navigated the stairs to the attic and the throngs of flies that always seemed to live there.
I nodded off into a hazy dreamscape. I was flying, gliding over trees and fields until an owl flew up to me and, looking at it, I realized I wasn’t a bird. I had no business in the dark, bluish-purple sky. I fell and saw huge animals on the ground. Then there was warm, clear water to break my fall. I went feet first, right to the bottom where my mother lay looking at me, bubbles coming out of her nostrils and the corners of her mouth.
“You have to eat,” she said, and then, “remember the other one, he needs your help.” I wondered at her ability to hold her breath.
My younger brother’s bloated face floated into the picture. His heart had stopped and he was dead. He needed more than help. I woke up crying and saw my Grandmother talking to my uncle, saying, “He has to eat, look at him.”
I fell into a steamy, sweaty sleep, graciously void of dreams. Over the next several hours I was alternately asleep, dozing, sleeping with one eye open, in a state of what had to have been delirium, and wide-eyed awake, a time I hated, a time when I, without reservation, regretted and despised my entire life, the whole thing from day one. It was a horrible sensation.
One time when I woke I felt as though I was going to cry.
One of the voices started making things worse. “You’re not that sad, you fraud. You’re spoiled. What’s so bad about your life?”
Embarrassed, I closed my eyes tightly and, though the voices continued to mistreat me, they could not get me to open them. Eventually I slept.
The following day my parents came and stole me from my Grandmother. Gram stood with her arms folded, looking sad, yet stern, while my parents rushed me to the car. I’ll be back, Gram, I promised in my mind as I was whisked away. I felt like a celebrity, unaware that if I was it was for all the wrong reasons.
I know about you Dad, I thought as we drove, I know that you are involved in some type of affair with a woman who was betrothed and later married to me, both events made possible by the miracle of telepathy. I believe that you have gone out of your way to make my life miserable and I know that secretly you are a man of means and influence. Where do your transgressions end? How long will you continue to sin?
I tried to penetrate my father’s armour with my gaze. I knew, without a doubt, that he noticed the way I was staring, not a glare but an insistent, probing look directed at the back of his head. From my mind to his, I was asking many questions, but he would not acknowledge me. He was pretending he’d done nothing wrong. My poor father had no idea why I had not spoken to him at Gram’s or looked at him when he had tried to engage my eyes. The mental disease that bound my thoughts was very convincing when it painted my father as a scoundrel.
My mother was on a tirade over the Americans and their electric power plants. “The pollutants they produce,” she said, “sulphur and nitrogen dioxides are responsible for most of the acid rain in our country as well as theirs and still they don’t want to stand up and change their standards…”
“How about some food,” my father interrupted and gave me a look, sideways, over his shoulder. Ten minutes later we were parked and Dad was trying to interest me in something edible. I shook my head both times he asked.
I was by and large silent throughout the long and drawn out trip. I hadn’t much to say anymore. I was glad when the strain of it was over.
I was hard to deal with and hostile, yet my parents did their best to get me into the hospital. They quickly realized trying to use the telephone to make arrangements was useless, so we made our way to the red brick structure and presented ourselves in person, asking for a healing. What the staff saw was someone who was insane and had starved himself to the point of being a danger to himself. I was committed and admitted. When my parents left they seemed confused by it all.
I was hustled off to a room where I was to be examined by the doctor. I was muttering about ‘town’ and ‘Universe City’, blue cars and my bride who was also my king. I had the sensation that all sorts of ghouls had followed me from the prairies. Miniaturized, all those people who wore masks and were in my father’s employ were climbing on me and getting right inside my body through the pores on my skin, my nostrils, ears and mouth.
When the psychiatrist on duty said that a needle could make all the bad stuff go away, I consented. My days of running were drawing to a close for a time. I was going to rest and eat. I was going to try my hand at thinking logically. I would have ups and I would surely have downs.
I remember being given a nourishing drink in a can. After the first few sips I blacked out, and was unaware of anything until I woke the next morning with the smell of fresh food snaking up from the cafeteria, hovering in the air and making me feel sick. That day I was told that if I didn’t eat on my own I would be fed intravenously. I did the math and agreed to eat, reasoning that I could always spit the food out while, if I gave them access to my veins, I’d be stuck with whatever they put into my blood stream. Over the next while I would reacquire a taste for salty bacon, tuna sandwiches, soggy hot beef sandwiches and the like.
By the time my needle had mostly worn off I was much improved and compliant. I waited patiently while the doctor stuck the spike in again, granting me another month of level-headedness.
I was faced with new problems. I was repulsed by what I had become. What had happened, what parts of it all were real and what parts were the meanderings of an unbalanced mind? The line was still blurry; I blamed myself for falling down and not being able to get up.
I was released from hospital when my doctor thought I was well enough to leave. Well enough but not whole, not normal, no clean bill of health; it’s drug therapy for life, get used to it, conform to the rules, take your medicine though it be hard to swallow.