Snatch XIV

In charge. What an idea. More control than I've ever realized. Well, the illusion of control. Whatever hand is on the plug no doubt can pull it without warning, on a whim or by some preordained schedule, no way for me to know. No way to know if there even is a hand or a plug. And would I want a warning? That's something to chew on, and for all I know I have plenty of time for the chewing. All the same there are plenty more things on which to chew, so many that merely prioritizing them could take forever.

If not, though, if the plug comes out before I finish this thought, is this the thought I wish to be my last? Well, it must be, or I'd be thinking another one. So there goes the illusion of control and the pressing weight of its responsibility. A luxury, this sense of free-fall, for the moment anyway, riding a whimsy that steers away from the darker concerns. Plug? What plug? Pain? Sanity-robbing pain? Yes, yes, of course. I've mentioned it, it's uncomfortably near, in memory but congealing to theory the longer absent. My faith's in the whimsy now. She's in charge. Why deny her?

Snatch 8 (of the Union progression)

The voice, when he heard it at a low ebb of his throbbing cry, was different: “Feel better?”

It wasn't the shrink's. The shrink, he saw, was no longer there. The chair she'd occupied was vacant. Sometime in the immediate aftermath, along with the coalescing of his inherent questions, he recognized he'd stopped screaming, and with this, incrementally, he came to understand there no longer were sounds to be heard. None. Not a peep from outdoors, not the building's mechanical ticks and thrums. No footsteps, no squeaks. Not even Aggie's humming.

He might have gone suddenly deaf, he wondered. But thence came a clarity: It was not just external sounds that were gone. His tinnitus, as well. Oh, gracious mercy, oh, the voice his mind affixed to his thoughts, which now came to him in silent, verbless waves, this, too, his internal voice, had left him, leaving only the idea of sound, its curious memory.

Panic seemed imminent as this cloak of dark, mute awareness enveloped him with a musty, invasive sentience. No time at all even to cringe--surrender, utter capitulation, unbidden, unwelcome, unexplainable, obviated any other conceivable response.

The word help! appeared visually, glowing through a dreamlike haze, its letters barely discernible in their filigreed configuration, tacitly jeering, mocking him as his heart reached at it, in vain.

Something now on his cheek. Cold, moving shyly along the skin, its icy tearful trail a glad respite.

Snatch 7 (scream)

The instant of his knowing lasted barely long enough for the sense of recognition alone to adhere, that he knew the scream and the face, falling shy of particulars of what he knew. No more than a flicker of insight that leered just beyond his reach like a vague itch or a scent so nebulous it might well be illusory. Yet it remained, with its promise of intimate revelation nourishing deep within him a seed of unholy dread.

He could avoid the face now. This was in his power, to exclude sight. He could ignore the visage, but not the scream. The scream allowed no diversion, no denial. It was shrill, swelling in volume and authority, invading, enveloping.

In desperation he parsed nuances in the accosting decibels until he found aloof one faintly audible frequency combination, a pair streaking high above the main in an apparent duel for supremacy as, entwined in primal struggle, their nearing the very edge of human detection torqued a frail valedictory tremolo which of a sudden rattled the cap off a conditioned psychic restraint and loosed an explosive geyser of such maddening ironic appreciation that under ordinary circumstances would have burst forth in foot-stomping hysteria.

As it was, as he attempted to communicate to the shrink something to account for his apparent distraction, hoping by this to release enough of the emotional pressure to return to his stoic posture, as he began to pronounce with great care the name Mad-e-leine, getting out only the Mad, the full counter-interpretative weight of the hyper-falsetto squeal still gripping his distilled attention, now, without the grace of transition, rendering utter pathos, the intolerable, unthinkable agony of its significance to the human soul, forced out of him a scream of his own, a wail, more accurately, a raw, wretched, verbless testimony of unrequited sorrow and grief scraping up from his intestines and through his abdomen and throat and out into the room and the world and further, further...

Union (snatch 6)

“Scream.”

“What?”  His reaction was spontaneous, despite a synchronous understanding of what she meant as she uttered the imperative. He felt her face turn to him. He kept his eyes on her ballpoint, frozen a half inch above the pad.

“It might help.”

Her voice had softened further, reaching a tonal intimacy that cupped his heart with an easy, intuitive confidence. Alarmed, he raised his eyes to her face, and in doing so he heard it, the scream. He thought at first it was Aggie, that her humming had moved to a higher register, ascending to soprano or beyond. A ragged crescendoing shriek, it seemed. Could it yet be music? A cry of terror? The questions went moot when the swelling sound oscillated and then became two. Aggie's ditty tripped away, leaving the shriek in solo.

He knew it now. Knew it well. He moved his focus to the face, and realized he knew it now, too.

Union (snatch 5)

Oh shit in neon lit up his mind an instant after he heard his voice say it, the “I'm scared of dying.” He'd meant it when he said it, he thought, but with the oh shit came a deeper understanding of how he really felt at that moment. Well, how he felt now, not at the moment he'd blurted it out. A more philosophical construct had winked at him soon as he'd said it, calling him first on using such a colloquialism, as if he'd lifted a lyric from “Old Man River” or regressed to something a child playing in a sandbox might say, and reminding him he'd long before conquered with sophistication his primal fear of personal finis.

His blurting it out had come on a whim. Nothing more, he decided, and began probing for the whim's derivation. An instinctual breakout? Was he losing control, his cognitive authority reverting to rationalization? He suspected this is what the shrink was thinking, had been striving for, employing professional dicta to unveil. He watched her ballpoint execute swift, exuberant swirls on the legal pad, while her face, he saw with a flicked glance, yielded nothing save studied dispassion.

  He knew she believed she had him. And maybe she did. Ordinarily he dreaded blushing, so much so that merely thinking about it could bring it on. He felt the heat rush to his face now. A flash of panic, then the realization his blood betrayal should signal he was onto her trick. She must know he was no fool. He wanted to sigh with relief that this instinctual eruption might be saving him from the other.

Out of control yet, though, riding his hard drive. She'd found the chink, happily noting nuances. Dangerous. What the fuck, he figured, and sighed, remembering almost too late to keep his lips apart.

Union (snatch 4)

So tearfully gratifying was the promise of Aggie's melodious humming it whisked away into its customary ignorable background the interminable locust chorus. A downside accompanying this positive note arrived with the voice of the shrink du jour.

“What are you thinking?”

He flashed on the shrink, this one a youngish woman with regular features spoiled by the pinched, nervous expression skin would instinctively assume fighting a facelift. Her narrowed eyes peered at him with rote interest. Annoyed on principle, he nonetheless wanted to share the delight of his newfound joy. To this end he smiled, shifted his glance with deliberation to her shapely legs and back to her face.

“You really don't want to know.”

She tugged uselessly at the hem of her Confederate gray skirt and swiveled her hips ever so slightly away. Her mouth twitched a single instance, eyes relaxed a tad then retreated back to their professional squint. A yawn stifled her sigh, fingers providing genteel cover for both. Remnants of the sigh adhered to her vocal response, softening the voice in a way not prescribed in training texts. “But I do, Jack. It's what we're here for.”

The “we're” dispelled whatever reverie had seemed to be forming. His irritation was sudden and visceral. He wanted to say It may be what you are here for, lady, but I have no choice in the matter. No fucking choice, and, oh, by the way, leave those legs of yours here when you go. I'll tell them whatever they want to know.

Instead he said, “I'm scared of dying.”

Union (snatch 3)

It took him a long time, a long long time (subjectively, as he had no technical means of measuring duration, and had not determined a way to objectify its sense, understanding in theory the Indonesian concept of Djam Karet: “elastic time” or, less poetically but perhaps more definitive, “tachypsychia”) to accept with

nonchalance that he might never capture a fixed image of Aggie in his imagination. And with fairly rapid diminution succeeding acceptance the notion of picturing her in his mind ultimately and with virtually no whoop di do relinquished any purchase whatsoever on his conscious agenda. Somewhere in this deconstruction of expectations his aural faculty started transmogrifying.

Deaf. This is what first came to mind. I've gone deaf. It came near the end of an extended silence, a blessed silence at the outset. But when it stretched beyond the ordinary gaps in vocal communication, when it reached into conscious apprehension of the tinnitus that had rasped interminably for as long as he could remember but which normally submitted to distractions of the meanest sort, when now the rasping dominated completely, smothering whatever words emitted palpably from his larynx, words he felt with his tongue and lips that had to be responding to something most likely uttered by the current shrink but which he evidently had not received aurally, he suspected he'd gone deaf in a way undoubtedly unique in whatever annals were kept for hinky shit of this nature. He puzzled over what he seemed to be saying in reply.

This puzzlement found no relief. None, despite many repetitions of the apparent tacit communication. He was settling in to deeming it merely one more mystery of life (sans the “ah, sweet”) when a sound made it through the febrile wall of noise with such piquancy it evoked a tear from his left eye (the one that routinely moistened with little warning or rationale except predictably in changes of exterior temperature).

It was a musical sound. A small, lyrical, artfully rendered, wistful, frolicky tone. The sound of Aggie humming.