Prosthetic Mind

 

Prosthetic Mind

 

 

A man had somehow forgotten how to live, misplaced his passions somewhere beneath an important document in his filing tray. If living is the part that happens prior and post-reflection, then he was like a faulty pendulum that had stopped ticking between these two modes of being. His incessant reasoning would ironically conclude ‘a good dose of the irrational is essential in life’, and yet his reasoning couldn’t help him obtain it.

For a year he devoted himself to debauchery, assured that this would overwhelm him into a ‘moment’ similarly to how a large wave knocks you rolling to the shore. However, his meticulous exploration of all the perversions on offer failed, and only left him with an increased immunity to life.

Feeling defeated into inertia, he next spiralled in to the vice of ambitious distractions; he earned himself a promotion, took on more work than he could manage and wasted his free time tangling himself in all sorts of voluntary projects and social affairs. This proved effective at halting his thoughts. And when any spare hours snuck out at him, he combatted them with a self-induced (albeit thoroughly insincere) addiction to soaps and celebrity gossip.

The heart of the matter was this: that he intended to forget completely his own beliefs and all the paths of reasoning that led him there. He dreamt of that part of his mind withering in to a neglected stump. Perhaps he’d become sub-human or animal; be alive without being conscious of it. And those were the last thoughts he’d had on the matter, the last thoughts he’d allowed himself to have.

And now, weighted under his overgrown coat that had become wet in the rain, he stood crumbling like damp cigarette embers, beneath the empty bus shelter.  His day had been like a mathematical equation. Its legitimacy was irrefutable, though it seemed to run parallel and detached from anything of consequence.

The crows scattered like darts of ink. They cluttered branches, shielding themselves from the rain which tapped with increased ferocity upon the steel roof. His pulse began to replicate the speedy drumming. And next his mind, as if caught in its slingshot, had no choice but to follow suit.

Ravenous thoughts were born and - sifting through the desert of his mindscape - they inevitably ended up circling the memory of a woman he passed each day on his journey to work. Seeing her face gleaming like a moon from her window had subtly developed in to the only glimmer in his day. She seemed to be waiting there only for him, and that notion revitalised him, reacquainted him with his own presence.

He stood for a moment, trying to recollect the first time he’d noticed her watching him, and what he could piece together of  her features, or perhaps make a guess of her age.

It was a Friday, and on Friday’s in particular he often had an indecipherable, and incredibly tenuous, internal zing of rebellion. It was as if the dreary symmetry of his week begged him to take a hammer to it. The liberation he felt on a Friday could be likened to a spiralling speeding belt to the surface of the ocean to gasp at air.

This zing occasionally brought about a semi-rash decision on his part. And, twinned with the mental stirrings for the stranger at the window, he now felt compelled to walk to her house where he would look upwards, devilishly, accusingly, in search of a possible moment – a meeting, or confrontation.

Even if only their eyes met and maybe an unreadable smile came of it, well, a smile could last him a month at least. He’d learnt to digest things slowly, as his life so far seemed only to offer him scraps.

And, if the window just so happened to be absent, then it wouldn’t necessarily be a disappointment. Because even then something could be gleaned from it. Evidently, it would imply that she wasn’t always at her window, watching the world. No, she purposely went to the window to watch for him.

At this conclusion, he leapt forward in to the rain, almost in to the speeding shadow of a car that ripped through the world like paper. The hollow beats remained for a moment, making him feel alarmed and untame in his rashness. The perched black-birds shrieked and dove up into the dark clouds.

            He continued again, and this time he was halted by the vision of the face he recognised. His silent watcher, the woman at the window; she was hurrying through the rain on the other side of the road. He squinted at her flickering form; her heals digging at the concrete to give her speed, her hands clenching her coat tight at the neck. And, she was dressed in a nurse’s uniform.

After pausing whilst she turned into an alleyway – which he knew led to the local hospital - he to follow her to her workplace.

His compulsion had grown to unearth the secret of his watcher, his metaphysical lover. This shielded him from his own angst at entering the hospital; a portal – he’d always maintained - to death and all the horrors of human existence.

However, upon entering, the filth he found there exceeded his imaginings. He found there a dripping, destitute hospital bed, deserted in an ocean of excretal mess. The surrounding space seemed wormed with the cavities left behind from the deceased. Everything stunk of negation; dusty silence and shadowed walls. An atrophied wilderness, purposely f*****g its own oblivion.

Even the drips seemed hollow. Yet the wet tiles embraced them, like a virile corpse, excited at each watery serenade.

A half-vanishing creature, only aware of her shame, scuffed past him, s**t slopping down her leg. The rows of beds brought to life their lost lovers amidst the stale burrows of sheets, where sickly stringy muscles had fornicated with their host.

Some comatose animal, foetal and gasping, raised a dying arm. “I’m melting in to my bed”. Her words swarmed to him, as the whites of her eyeballs sank to the floor like discharge. He forced his gaze to the floor, internally screaming the mantra ‘Don’t read the ghosts. Don’t read the ghosts’.

 “Stop hiding boy. We’re all of us bound to matter and decay. Men can hide from it easiest, but you can’t hide for ever!”

He clasped at his forehead; claustrophobic within his own skull and wishing it was malleable to prize open like gates. Her blood leaked through his mind like dye.

The bed sheets swaddled her like the rigid cocoon of a spider’s prey. Someone once told him that spiders gain sexual pleasure when they consume victims and he imagined the shadows beneath her bed, with woven tongues, drooling expectantly over her death. She would evaporate, leaving only stains behind.

The tight shriek of trolley wheels ended the spell, as the nurse – his nurse - mechanically handed out grey jugs of still water, sometimes popping straws in the patient’s unresponsive mouths. She marched past the other staff as if they were weeds in her path, and they scowled and shared whispers about her before returning to their clinically sanguine eagerness to clean up s**t.

Still sunk in his corner, neurotic and now tensely clutching his knees, he was farcically overlooked, as if his outburst was as commonplace as the disinfected floor tiles.

And so he had time to make a few hasty guesses at the nurse’s character, and her relationship with the others. He decided that the other nurses judged her to be a solemn b***h, because she refused to integrate with them through their banal humour. He also had time to ask himself what might become of a mind like her, exposed daily to the grotesque and abject, never allowed to forget her own physicality and inevitable expiry. Would these visions be heavy to carry? Would such a woman need a mental retreat, so that she didn’t . . . sink like a flooded vessel?

His put his questions on pause, as he tried to calculate how much time had passed. He expected an uncomfortable greeting to happen soon – surely his nurse-watcher would have found a free moment to deal with his presence. And, since those other b*****s that worked here hated her so much, they’d probably jibed and nagged at every chance so she’d be eager to get him to leave.

It struck him that he’d never rehearsed a greeting that was based on two months of shared ‘watching’ and he felt a pang of nausea at the prospect of being unrehearsed in his speech.

Eventually she approached him with the clinical indifference only a nurse can possess. Her words tumbled from her with little expression, her tongue were a blank receipt. He took note of her greying brown curls – some were an enchanting pearly white – all static as a wild animal’s tail. Her brown stocking ankles swiftly perched before him like chicken feet. She handed him a cup that smelt of bleach and bile, poured in steaming water and then pushed her trolley away, leaving him with a jumbled collection of her presence and the echo of her shoes tapping on the tiles. Lifting up his cup, he found a folded note, damp with steam, stuck to the palm of his hand.

Come and see me tonight. At home.

 

 He fled, breathless through the swinging doors of hospital. The world dipped and creaked like a lost boat as he wheezed.

*          *          *

       Out on the open streets, his shadow crept the distance of desolation, but his hope became a prominent beacon, pulsing, as if he’d swallowed a live bird. It seemed he was the only movement in an inert space, where every sound thanked him for its birth.
       He walked until he reached the lady’s home, where he had grown accustomed to noticing her watching him from her dirty window. There she coiled amidst the stained glass, a step back from the social world.
         Perhaps she would consider his presence an intrusion. Perhaps she preferred only to gaze within the embrace of her four walls. If you gaze long enough, then when the actuality presents itself, it can somehow seem less real. Or at least a clumsy replica, lacking in the kind of magic that is brewed in solitude.
          Anxious to step out of the purgatory of this anonymous blackness, he strode purposely to her door, hesitated, and then tapped with the bone of his knuckle.
          Was she still fixed at her viewing spot, willingly paralysed? He envisaged her dark pupils, rapt, piercing small holes through her window . Perhaps she watched everyone, and he was no exception.
           He scraped a last disheartened drawl of a tap, against the splintering wood of the door. And this time, his call was answered. She opened the door to him in her white nightgown, and stepped back to let him enter. The trails of her gown danced in dust, her blackened heals peeking from the lace trim. He followed her steps, which led them to the room where the window was focal; the window that had been familiar to him only from the outside, which he was now entombed behind.
          She retook her place there, and he observed that her actions held no warmth to them. Instead she glided solemn and broken. Her body had an untouched purity, glistening like snow and she fell in to the chair like stars. The scent of stale petals made a whirlwind around her. He was captivated and yet he wanted to vomit out every scraping impact she’d made on his insides.
       The clock cracked time like a hammer upon ice until he could hardly bare it. Sweat began to surface on his palms leaving handprints on the table where he’d rested them.
          He turned to his hostess for console or distraction from his irrational terror, but she set a dead gaze on him, as if she’d been stuffed in that very chair. Her features appeared to be subtly sinking as if they concealed a great void.  He stammered “what is this . . .?”
          Her mouth, widening and darkening, began suddenly to miscarry. Blood bubbled and erupted, her eyeballs boiling and shuddering like a horrific orgasm. A witch. With bird’s feet. Bird’s feet peeking from her white nightdress.  
         Insistent, through the blazing blackness, the heat, the fluidic boiling matter, his hands gripped tight to his face, he bawled
          “What is this?! What drug  . . .or curse” 
          “It’s your cure” she snapped, as if scolding an ungrateful child.
He blinked, and the clock struck – its pendulum wiping reality clean and returning him to a blank canvas, where new nightmares simmered below the façade of forms.   
          “Everything is disgusting. Even being with you is disgusting, and you’re the only one who talks to me . . .”
          “I’m the only one you want to talk to”
           “. . . Just make it stop”
She threw back her head to laugh, and as she did so a rain of flies fell dead to the floor, as if her breath was noxious. 
         “This is what you want to see. Don’t tell me it isn’t. You spoilt little voyeur, you want a window to perch at, you want a world that lives up to the artificial carnality you’ve brewed in your solitude.”
         “Make it stop” he repeated, humbly pleading.
She retaliated then, maternal embers in her voice.
        “Come with me to the kitchen and drink some water. It will clear your head”
          She led him out of the room, down a dusty wooden-panelled corridor that smelt of the honey of pine cones.  She seemed quite titillated to be entertaining a guest, despite his apparent misery. Black feathers clung to his feet like oil, but he was grateful to leave behind the malicious clock-beat, that had started to cause a terrible sea-sickness which fortunately abated as he entered the kitchen.
          Propelled in to motion, like an electrocuted doll, she battered round the piles of dirty crockery, scavenging for a clean glass. She broke away from the task briefly to scoop out the rotting food that was blocking the sink and, clenching it until it squelched through her knuckles; she swiped it at the dogs that yapped round her ankles.
          “There. Have that, you fools. . .Can’t you just tell these pups are all men . Tsk. Never ashamed by their own need.”
         She continued to prattle on contentedly as she poured him a glass of water from the tap.
          “Now, listen. Immunity is the worst kind of sickness I could ever diagnose. I know this from experience; my job allows me to become immune to the most violent truths of life. It has made me selfish. Now I only fear my own death, my own pain – but am unmoved by others. I could quite easily kill a person. In fact, the moment I became aware of this disability, this apathy, I contemplated doing so, to jolt me out of it. And my work environment would allow me to get away with one . .. crafty death. As long as it’s just the once, you see, it would be considered an accident.”
She kicked away a dog that was pawing amorously at her slippers.
          “Well, but then I went and had a change of heart. I thought, if only I cared enough for a person, were intimate with them. Then I wouldn’t be acting out of obligation or for a wage, I’d really feel it.”
He nodded sulkily, and tilted the swamp in his cup from side to side, transfixed; a severed robins head came bobbing to the surface.
           “Don’t be dispirited, the hallucinations will subside. Follow me. I have something to show you”. 
With a naive light in her eyes she led him silently to her bedroom.
          “I saved this little treasure all my life. I had it since being a babba."
She reached for a cluster of shell chimes that hung from the window frame, and let them clink in delicate harmonies.
"It still comforts me. Better than any man sharing my bed. I watch this and it sends me straight to sleep. No ghosts.”
         “ . . . No ghosts” he echoed, drained from his visions.
         “You want to feel real, don’t you? Listen, I’m like you. I know that when you look out of the window it may as well be a child‘s sketch and you’re wondering when the outlines are going to fill up with substance.
She accentuated her next line, as if secure in her role as wise prophetess. One finger rose knowingly.
           “When . . . will there . . . be meaning?” 
She’d caught his attention now, and he perched himself upon the windowsill, enthralled. His thoughts however – now cleansed of torturous visions – was impatient for her to arrive at the conclusion, the cure. And this was the cause of his silence, an attempt to forge a direct path through the winding trail of her talk.
          “You know, the world will always be there waiting for you. Well . . . what’s left of it.”
She joined him at the window. Rested her head in her palms and gazed out of it, in a way familiar to him as he had peered up at her from the outside.
         “You don’t talk much do you? I was hoping for more from my friendly stranger”
         “What’s . . . the cure?” he asked directly, wanting to take her knowledge and run. Even his routine of soap operas and morning coffees at work now seemed to magnetise him back to their tranquil glow. The flickering tv, calling to him like a siren. His lonely bed, like a post-bickering apology, lay outstretched in wait of his embrace.
             “I told you the cure already!” she hissed. “I showed you it. Those moments of horror in my own front room were life happening. It’s only since you snapped out of it that you’ve started rationalizing again, wanting to be back there secretly, back in the moment”
He ventured “But can a moment not be. . . pleasant!
             “Pleasant? Pleasant?! How sickeningly dull!”
Her eyes became the black pearls of a crow, inspecting him sideways in sly flickering motion. Grand wings unfurled behind her, shadowing the room.
           “How could anything ‘pleasant’ send you spinning in to oblivion? What you need from your nurse is a good hard dose of . . . HORROR”
Her white gown spilt like sour milk upon the floor, revealing a crawling mass of maggots where her stomach should me. And beneath it, propped upon her pelvic bone, lay a nest-like womb, where bald headed chicks pecked greedily at her stringy flesh.
       “And . . .” she added indignantly, “I am a woman after all, which means essentially I’m infested”
Her two black eyes dropped to the floor like marbles and rolled along the wood to nestle by his feet. Wind wailed through her blooded sockets and ash rained like Armageddon; a small hell conjured in the haze of her room. The door slammed shut . . .

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

Reviews

[TLK]

To travel within words, always leaves me expectant and throughly excited to the point of maddness. I like the way you phrase your meaning with intimate stops, as if, taking a breath with words, a great read, well done.