Make Like A Tree (Rorshcach Test)

 

 

Truth is a Rorshcach test—highly open to interpretation.

The truth of the matter remains grainy.  No matter how much foil you twist onto the end of the antennae or how you turn the wire hanger on the back of the old television.  It remains a partial picture without vertical hold; a desert scene coated in techno-snow, a wilderness blinded by forest trees.  Though truth, especially hidden truth, is usually as obvious as the nose on a person’s face, one is as likely to see it as the vague periphery of his own nose when he looks down.  So people make it up, and spin it, and turn it into an easily digestible sound bite. 

He remembered the tirade the way he usually did:  through the softly drifting fog of early morning hangover.  He remembered, foggily, the philosophy professor and the history professor and an off-campus bar full of Abercrombie& Fitch and his heavy boots rattling the wooden table beneath him as he screamed those words as inarticulately as any street corner wino with the beer spattering over the edge of his mug and the need to urinate suddenly taking over most of his concentration.  He remembered it, and remembered telling them all to go take a flying f**k at the moon as he resigned to shower the front row in recycled Budweiser draft.  And, sitting there on the edge of his dorm-furnished bed, he wondered just what sort of affect that might have on his dwindling history grade?  His grade-point-average as a whole?

Doesn’t matter, he decided, because truth is a Rorschach test, an inkblot, and highly open to interpretation.  The truth is:  he had a little too much to drink but ultimately everything he’d had to say was well thought out and earnestly delivered, and if that wasn’t the point of higher education he didn’t know what was.  He had an idea higher education might really be about student loan indentured servitude to the federal government and widening the gap between the middle class and everyone else…but he would not digress.  If his interpretation of the truth was unacceptable to higher education, well, he supposed higher education could kiss his a*s.  He surveyed the tiny dorm room through blood shot eyes and found a filth so unique to college bachelorhood it was its own kind of truth. He noted his roommate sleeping half-on and half-off the glorified cot the university called a bed, and the slender, charm-braceleted arm of some girl draped across his naked back.  He explored the artistic naiveté that impressed college kids: posters of popular movies and black and white cityscapes and fliers for local bands swiped from telephone poles.  This was supposed to be the last great bash before selling your soul to whatever corporate infrastructure you could fool into believing your degree meant something.  Yet he didn’t feel like he was having a good time.

He sat thinking, staring into the neon vacancy sign of his roommates wide-open though sleeping brown eyes, how there are whole groups of people who never learn to read a Dick and Jane book but live their lives searching for truth in the spilt chicken guts of their daily religion.  Whole cultures where those who close themselves behind temple gates and stare blindly through their third eye while chanting baby-noises are revered for their deeper understanding.  No moral chains to bind the ankles from that long walk down an unbeaten path, just truth, and the ability to control the vertical hold.  Crystal clear digital reception on the nature of things.

  Besides, this would surely be the last straw that broke the dean’s back.  This would surely be the one to move him out of academic probation and into the halls of expulsion.  Compared to the rape of the University’s mascot, the lovely and pliable Baathsheba the snow-white sheep, pissing on a philosophy professor with tenure carried serious weight.   It ranked higher than holding a male freshman down in the courtyard by his neck until his eyes dilated to see how long it actually took to make the skin go blue and if this in any way corresponded to the release of a real and practical soul or only bodily wastes as the muscles relaxed beyond control.  This was no mere attack and beating of a teacher’s aide for arguing that social classes don’t exist in America and this is the only country where anyone truly can be whatever they want to be.  His parents bought him out of that last scrape with a promise to fund an east wing for the chemistry building (and don’t think the irony wasn’t lost on him), but he’d reached the end of the family’s multi-million dollar rope.  The dean would happily—east wing or no—show him the lead painted exterior of the university’s gilded door.  Why give them the satisfaction?

It was time, finally, to make like a tree and leave.  But first, he had a point to make.  He might have finished it last night but for the bouncer carrying him off, wang dangling, into the night-soaked street.  There were still hours before his roommate (or his bonny lass) lifted a sentient eyelid and the dean would be relaxing with tea and Pepto-Bismol on a Sunday morning praying to the Gods of industry and taxation to allow a tuition hike for next year without too much fuss.  Truth, after all, was just a Rorschach.  He would show them what voodoo priestesses in the bayou and beyond already knew.

He stood; waited for the room to stop spinning, and grabbed a pair of boxers not too badly soiled from the pile at the foot of his bed.  Next, he locked the door so as to avoid any unfortunate interruptions.  That done, he quietly crawled into his roommate’s bed, careful not to jostle overmuch, and grabbed the narrow hipped girl by her ankles.  She moaned lightly, tossed her whey-blonde head to the left, and went on with the task of sleeping.  It must have been a long night for all of us he thought.  He recognized her without The Gap styles barely masking her too-thin body from the bar last night.  And had his roommate been there too?  He couldn’t remember and really, did it matter?

He dragged her slowly, carefully toward the end of the bed.  His roommate neither stirred nor snored.  As her thighs fell heavily over the edge and the first signs of real disturbance broke upon her sleeping face, he leaned over her and, with one hand over her mouth, heaved her up by the arm.  She awoke, eyes wide, windows to the soul or so they say.  He searched them, just to cover all the bases, finding nothing he gripped her tightly to him and squeezed his hand against the first weak series of screams.  She didn’t fight as much as he imagined she would.  Probably she had been passed along enough frat houses to know when it was in her best interest to just go limp.  She had that sort of look to her. 

She went willingly enough, still trying for that weak breathless scream against his hand.  It felt like moth wings tickling his palm.  He forced her like gravity and as a unit they went down on their knees on the floor between his roommate’s bed and his own.  He searched her eyes again for some sign of soul…and there was soul of a sort, soul that walks hand in hand with misery like the blues, but not the inner soul that separates man from, say, rock or glass.  She’d made the connection between her lover’s roommate and the nut job from the bar last night.  Had she not been so drunk she might have wrestled free of the jerk and gone back to her own room, would have if she’d known he shared a room with ‘Psycho Sam’ the campus freak.  He could read all of that as surely as that voodoo priestess could read the soul of the world in a pile of chicken guts.  He knew that’s what they called him and he knew that was a kind of power.  The power to repulse was still a power.

He forced her on her back and she went easily enough, again, letting herself go limp so the carnage would pass without a blow to the face or hands around her neck.  She figured he wanted her and she was used to that, even spread her legs slightly before him in the hopes cooperation would keep him from violence.  Too bad he wasn’t horny, and she wasn’t exactly his type.

 

Campus police were alerted to the scene by passersby, who heard the wordless unintelligible screams of someone in Pious Hall, probably on one of the upper floors.  People circled the old brick dormitory, listening, letting their imaginations fill in the blanks regarding what was happening.  Campus police stormed the building and followed the screams to a room on the third floor.  Three overweight security guards without guns took to the stairs and, huffing and puffing, slammed open the room door.

Before the door had time to ricochet off the far wall, they, all three, stepped back out again.  One lost his breakfast between the tree-trunk solid pylons of his quaking legs.  The other two only stood, half breathing, staring at each other like retards at a spelling bee.  When the campus security guard, vomit drying on the sides of his shoes, finally caught his breath and stood upright, he suggested calling the real police.  This was no task for minimum wage-making mace carriers.

The crowd tripled by the time the police arrived.  The imagination of the crowd grew beyond the boundaries of solitary dreaming.  They had each other to feed upon after all, and the grim grey faces of the campus police being escorted from the building only fueled the fires of horror-movie and evening news inspired ideas.

The officers, of which only two detectives and one uniform could stomach being in the room at all, stood staring stupidly at the young man screaming with his knees folded beneath his chin and his eyes closed so tight they nearly disappeared.  He was completely naked and reeked of alcohol.  His neck and shoulders bore a cacophony of bluish-red hickeys and gentle scratches still showed up and down his back. 

The body of a girl lay strewn like broken bits of bamboo on the dorm room floor.  He throat was cut and the rug beneath her was saturated with blood.  That was bad.

She had been eviscerated and that was worse.  Her abdomen was sliced open like a bad cesarean.  Foot after foot of intestine had been pulled free and then splattered against the bare wall like modern art.  A massive red stain soiled the wall and bits of tissue still dripped, slow to succumb to the forces of gravity, from the main blot.  Just above the massive splatter a hasty finger-painted note in what appeared to be the girl’s own blood read:   “Looks like a tree”

The detectives shared a glance and shook their heads.  The boy outside, hopped up on alcohol and who knows what—crystal meth maybe, or PCP—had disemboweled his girlfriend.  Sucks, but s**t happens and aint it the truth?  The lone uniform studied the stain on the wall, the heaped remains of the girl on the rug, and then the wall again and said to himself though even the officers in the hallway heard:  “no, looks like a butterfly…or, or a moth.  Looks like a moth.”

 

 

Reviews

[Idyllwyld]

Judging by your choice of avatar/icon whatever, I'm sure you know of the phrase "Roland would have understood."

Here, The Magician would have understood. He can find beauty in forests and in battlefields, in wastelands and in savannas, in two lovers coming together and in two lovers being torn apart.

While the last line is undeniably juicy and wonderful, I found this entry story heavy. Have you ever read "Watchmen" by Alan Moore? There's a character called Rorschach; he would have understood too. I will say I saw the girl's fate coming, the allusion to the voodoo priestess being obvious enough. It worked plenty fine. There was a pang of pity for the girl, just enough to send shivers and disgust through the average person. For me? Heheh, well the pang comes from my waning good-side, thankfully now no longer predominant.

Very good, very strong. Very in your face---I like it. "Make like a tree," a phrase for the ages. And the true beauty of the final line is that, against what we morally and instinctually revolt at, he says it as it is.

"Truth is a perspective"?