When Tommy was only four, he drank eight ounces of Nyquil and passed out on the floor.
***
He’s awake and he’s not supposed to be up, but he’s not one for rules. His crib is a thing of the past. He’s not afraid of the dark but the night-light sticking out of the hall socket helps him find the bathroom. He scales the toilet and hoists himself onto the sink from the closed lid. An orange glow cuts into the room at a steep angle.
The medicine cabinet swings open on its creaky hinge revealing a shelf of potions NOW accessible to Tommy’s discerning palate. He goes for the green bottle with the clown face. There’s something about that clown. He’s seen it in dreams. The clown is a friend with a sweet tooth who likes to share. The clown gives him candy.
The bottle with the clown on it was impossible to open before bedtime but NOW, somehow, he knows what to do. He twists the lid with downward pressure, popping it off. It was a spirit, he thinks, like the holy ghost they told us about in church. A spirit helped me. He giggles at the idea of having a spirit helper. His parents won’t believe him. They never believe anything. They don’t see ghosts either. They go to church to pray to invisible ghosts. Holy ghosts. And they only move forwards in time like they’re stuck on a train trip. But here he is, little Tommy Lewis, full of the spirit of the lord, sticking his finger past the rim of the bottle to sample his reward.
He knew the stuff inside would be sweet but this is a new order of sweetness, an intensity he’s never experienced before. ZANG! Licorice is nothing to this rush. He dips in another finger and sucks off a thick coat of purple sludge. It’s like maple syrup with a bite. A buzzy bite. It makes him feel buzzy. And there’s a whole bottle! He dips in another finger, slopping syrup on the sink. Before long he’s buzzing around like a bee and sucking up nectar. He feels like flying. He thinks he can fly.
***
He doesn’t know where he got to but it looks like the dollhouse from the fever. He’s on the floor. Everything is gigantic. He’s not himself anymore, he’s a bug, and his old self is going to step on him. That’s how it works. The floor is scrunching up – it stretches to a horizon at the end of space and coils around him at the same time, curdling in grotesque wrinkles and mockeries of perspective. He doesn’t like the floor being alive like this but he can’t do much about it. He understands that his parents and his house have ceased to exist and there is nothing anymore but a breathing floor blanket that doesn’t like him and is trying to throw him off. But he can’t get off. Or up. Silent paralysis panic.
He sees the green medicine bottle roll away, the clown face spinning into view and out again. Finally it rests against the wall. Tommy stares at the clown face and barfs. It just comes out, no warning. The clown face floats off the bottle and grows larger and larger. It’s coming at him. Tommy tries to scream but dribbles puke instead. The clown face enters him. He is the clown now and he’s not sure how he feels about that. The spirit is a demon. The demon is his spiritual self. There is a split of some kind. He is too much person for one body. But he can barely feel the body anyway. What he can sense feels like poison. The clown lied. But he’s the clown. Why would he lie to himself?
Liar lair, pants on fire. No, they’re wet and squishy. He’s on his side. Things are too heavy. He feels like he needs to throw up again but his body won’t cooperate. He’s going to sleep. He must rest his head on a pillow of puke. He doesn’t feel a thing anymore.
***
A blank. A bastard blankness answerable to no reality or concept. It frames trans-physical pain, cycling from confusion to comprehension of the finite loop, keeping it real, unreal, maximally terrible. Hell. Where else but hell? Here. For drinking the forbidden medicine. He wasn’t sick. Now he is. Sickness. The ness of sick. So sick it will have to end soon. And they think a child can’t know death. When it comes knocking, every living thing knows.
***
After a million years and a thousand lives he re-enters – something. Something in the middle of a life in progress, a very familiar-seeming life. Tommy! A whollop of deja vu! It’s Tommy’s life, yes, but it has hardly anything to do with the tiny dreamy lego-master he was for four years. This is a new domain to add to the vocabulary. This is the hospital, that much is recognized, but later he will come to associate this memory with the "emergency room". It comes into definition as a bright overhead light. Shadows move in the fuzz. They’re his parents, he can tell by the contours. The two-torsoed beast has come to save him! Bring him back to earth! His eyes tear up and his mouth tries to call out to them but something is blocking the voice. Does he have a voice anymore? There was some titanic transition, God knows what he’s retained. The fact that time has returned is amazing – an exotic movement. But he can feel his body again. It’s faint. The clown is still with him. Part of him. The clown’s eyes tear up like his do, the makeup runs down the face in smeary clownish superposition, and yet he giggles, guilty. GUILTY. The clown’s power is frightening but it’s a stuck power, a beast in a cage and he’s trapped in that cage, at the mercy of the beast. Underlying this is a sense of vast good-for-nothing alien wisdom, emanating from the clown, inapplicable here. The situation is flush with meaning that Tommy can’t find words to describe and will soon forget.
His parents save him from this vision. They’re clarifying as his exterior vision comes back in a flood of terapixels and although their faces are wrenched with worry, their figures emanate angelic grace. Tommy can see the yellow aura of their Christian faith like he’s never seen it before. The overhead light is dim in comparison. Mom and Dad glow stronger than the entire cathedral on Christmas. He knows they prayed for him. Pulled some strings. Pulled him out.
Mom bursts into tears as Tommy blinks back into the world. Dad is stifling a similar reaction. Mom lunges over to cover his face in kisses and he still can’t speak. He realizes with horror that he’s hooked up to machines. He wants to cut the cords but he’s not ready to interfere with this world on that level. Not yet. And he can’t move. But he’s back, he’s really back. And he can stand a battery of maternal smooching for a while.
***
"Christ saved you", Dad whispers as he drips holy water into the font from a slack pinky. Mom says it was God that saved him. Tommy is more partial to the latter, the impersonal. He doesn’t feel the holy ghost anymore. Something has shut down inside him since the syrup but he can’t put his finger on what that mysterious something is or was. Something evil probably. He’s saved now.
He takes the God stuff seriously and pays close attention in church. Father Fred is sermonizing. Tommy tries to understand who God is, but this sermon is no more enlightening than the last dozen. It seems an appeal to house pets, contradictory for a thinker. Mercy and vengeance, heaven and hell, cattle prod and a carrot on a stick. He hasn’t derived much satisfaction from Mom who’s always vague on the subject. Dad just prattles on about Jesus, a man Tommy doesn’t understand. What did he die for? His sins? What would those be? Sneaking out of bed to watch TV last night? Did he kill Jesus by doing that?
***
Tommy is lying in the front yard under a tree, the day after a disappointing eighth birthday. He should be playing Nintendo right now but there isn’t one. He didn’t get anything he really wanted. He needs more friends so he can get more presents. But here in the Sunday morning sunlight, skipping church, he gives himself the best present he could ask for: spiritual authority.
He finds himself thinking back to the syrup incident for the first time in who knows how long. He doesn’t remember much but his parents told him he "overdosed", just like the guy who stuck a needle in his arm and ended up convulsing on the floor in the DARE video they showed at school. He’s the only person he knows who’s come that close to death and returned. And somewhere during the half-life was a feeling that recurs. He remembers it better than he remembers hell, which only haunts him in the weekly nightmare. The good feeling is the experience his dad calls "infinity" – what he knows is really God.
He sees it as a thin shaft of light beaming out from the crack of a black door on a black field. The shaft is an emotional sum transcending imagination. It contains every Easter morning chocolate egg hunt, the tingling anticipation of Christmas Eve, the sublime silliness of the pretend adventures in the real forest, and the couch forts when every flailing spontaneous body-spasm communicated that perfect energy – rising above friends or roping them into the game where he was master, the game that becomes a hard series of inflexible rules when the light goes out. Why does the light go out? The shaft is the punchline to the best jokes, the best times with coolest folks, the last day of school when you don’t do any work, just celebrate the coming of summer vacation. All expressed in light. It’s also the luminous overmap of every candy he could have tasted, every joke untold, the righteous comebacks to mean jerks thought up a day too late, and the adventures he’s been unable to embark on because of some stupid law of people or nature. The shaft accounts for that. The shaft shines with joy and every potential joy that’s passed through his ken, attached like temporal tentacles to his eight years of life. When he imagines the shaft he can bathe in it and warm himself from any chill.
But the door is open a crack. He can never visualize beyond the door because that is where infinity awaits, beyond his life and all possibilities branching off it. His shaft is a tiny ray beckoning the observer toward the crafty sun behind. How can the door be open a little but not all the way, he wonders. How can his brain keep the light of the real sun, the source of all energy, from spilling out? He knows it’s there but it’s restrained. Maybe that’s what a brain is for. It’s like the dark glass they gave him at recess to watch the sun through during the eclipse. When his brain was dead during the overdose ("clinically dead" his dad had said before going on the miracle rap again) he connected fully with the source. Entwined with it his short history and infant fantasies and ghost story realities. But this is a fact he recalls and not a feeling.
The sun shines through the canopy of the chestnut tree. He grins at its adorable audacity. He knows it’s a star, and a cheap doppelganger for the sun inside, a projection the inner sun likes to cast on his pretty little cumulous cloudscape. The inner sun gives the outer sun an orbit, celestial purpose, astronomical properties. But it’s nothing more than a spark.
The real sun is what creates the illusion of darkness and the brown color field behind closed eyelids. The blackest black is still a pixel alight somewhere in the energy field of the real sun. Tommy is content to contemplate the source without actually joining it because the shaft alone is a handful, an idea to bask in, tear off fantasies from. These fantasies are so much more defined than the source, so much more useful, so much fucking funner, in full four-letter word bad-assery. He thinks it would be a thousand years before he’d even have to peak inside the door and dip into infinity.
He’s about given up on having the inner light explained by Father Fred. He’ll have to describe it to himself. Someday he’ll write a great book about it, he thinks, and people will understand. He’s an authority on God because of his near-death experience. He’ll hypothesize the raw testament material on his own while Father Fred quotes scripture in a soothing drone.
No comments:
Post a Comment