He comes to realize he is dreaming after a few days. Or maybe it's a couple of seconds. Time isn't so much nonexistent as unnecessary while he is here.
While this is good, it is also terrifying. Because he is fairly certain that the "here" he is experiencing is the inside of his head. The "what," it seems, is a tipping point. From atop this fulcrum, the experience can either expand or contract.
For now (He needs to stop using these time-words; any movement is only by volume, not direction. He should have been a physicist. Ha! Second-minute-week-forever-nothing. Irrelevant. Oh, God...is this acclimation? Already?), there is tenuous balance. Self-assigned balance, but bugger the distinctions.
This is workable, he thinks: the current cozy roundness of his frame of perception. He nearly admonishes himself for the use of "current," but decides policing his words will do just as much good as trying to control whether the sphere in which he is a captive inflates or collapses.
Perhaps it's not a sphere. Perhaps he's not a captive. Maybe he's outside, looking in.
The Frederick Chilton who wore mirror-polished shoes and favored a hair cream that could only be ordered online from a company specializing in the resurrection of long-defunct consumer products would tend to think-and not hesitate to say-that those…abstractions were so laughable as to be unworthy of the term "concept."
The Frederick Chilton who is suspended inside his own mind while his body lies on a hospital bed may yet reconsider. When one's flesh is a cross-stitch maze of wires and tubes-electroded and cathetered, intravenously violated, subject to all the physical indignities of medical helplessness-one may find that abstractions gain a little appeal.
He should have been a philosopher.
What is man? Man is himself.
Frederick imagines himself a tinier version: a homunculus, dressed in his clothes, blank, clay-like face projecting contentment. Perhaps he (it?) is smoking a pipe-something he never would do in life out of a vaguely pretentious fear of seeming pretentious.
Pipe or no pipe, miniature Frederick looks so comfortable lounging in the bowl of his own skull. And it is Frederick, not "Fred" or "Freddy." No one had ever called him either of those. Anyone who tried was schooled with a withering glance.
Not even his own mother used a diminutive. When he was in trouble, of course, it was "Frederick." When he was in her good graces it was "L.T." (short for Little Terror, which probably should have said something about his mother's good graces though it was always said with fondness).
Oh, dear Lord. A few paces into a confirmed (semi-confirmed) dream and he is already invoking his mother. Sigmund, you inveterate hack.
Well, if it meant plucking the low-hanging fruit of nostalgia, he'd do so to stay ensconced in that space. On second thought, though, he nixes the pipe. Too Sherlockian. Skating too close to an edge past which lay a fractal unfolding of dusty corners and their long-packed boxes. No, thank you.
The very notion of a mental mansion is appalling to Frederick. He likes his surroundings clean and uncomplicated.
Look at the expanses of white tile inside his house! Cream-colored laminate, frosted glass in blue light. Not sterile-soothing, all of it. From the kitchen in which he barely cooks to the bed in which he rarely sleeps. All of it kept spotless by a tacit team of immigrants that comes in once per week while Frederick is at work.
As he half-travels, half-recalls those gleaming spaces (this can be done inside the mind, moving and not moving), there comes the first sign that something is wrong. There is a black puddle on the tile. Its edges are ragged, and this displeases him. Every now and then a languid drop falls into view from an unseen source and contributes imperceptibly to the puddle's creep across the floor. The view makes a lateral shift; perhaps Frederick has moved to get a better look at it.
Now a scythe of light from the open door lays over the pool. No, it's not black. Very deep red. Frederick wrinkles his nose, though there is nothing to smell but the plug-in air freshener with the ridiculous name. Calm Seaside. Field of Lilies. Something like that.
There is black, though. At the periphery. Fluttering like poorly spooled film. He senses in a removed way that it is more frightening than the puddle marring his impeccable floor. It's low, like a visible sound. A drum, or the deep, bow-shredding notes that float up from within the dark body of a cello.
Frederick wonders whether it is a product of his damaged brain or the damage itself. His stock in trade: damaged brains. Oh, the irony. Just past where he's willing to look just yet, there's a sense that he's been making rather large withdrawals from the karmic bank, and that it's high time for repossession. Even that sounded a bit too positive. Frederick might agree to a number of previously unsavory things to be able to repossess himself. More like foreclosure. The body he both disdained and took for granted until he ended up open like a picture book on a makeshift table-missing one kidney but with eyes regretfully intact to stare at the ceiling of Hell.
Is that "now?" Or was it "before?" (Quite the thing to lose track of how many times one has been cut open.) Frederick fights to remember without dipping too far into his mental residue, but finds himself unable.
Able.
(Wait…)
Abel.
Abel Gideon. There's triumph in the recognition, but it also makes the thrum of blackness oscillate, eating further into the tableau of Frederick's compromised kitchen. He is afraid now. For a split second he sees an apparition; somehow it's connected to the blackness. The semi-transparent figure of a man is seated on his kitchen counter, which is a strange and incongruous pose to take in the first place, never mind that it's made stranger by the fact that the man is cradling his spilled entrails in his lap.
He gasps. (Can you gasp in your mind?)
Then a vivid green spot appears, hovering, superimposed over the laminate cabinets. It is oval in shape, nearly a perfect negative image of the puddle below. The scene fades, dimming to a soft and non-threatening maroon. Not black, but the rich velvet comfort of an old-fashioned stage curtain.
Frederick laughs with relief. (Can you laugh in your mind?)
Cigarette burns.
This is what he thinks, and at once the shadowplay he'd witnessed takes on the throwaway, two-dimensional quality of a movie.
Cigarette burns. That's what they used to call the spots that appeared as a warning to the projection assistant that it was nearly time to change the reel.
Time to change the reel, indeed. Or maybe just can it and stuff it away. He doesn't want the shapeless blackness returning for an encore. Theater, film. Mixing media. What a perfect explanation of what the brain does-concise and lovely without actually explaining anything at all.
It makes Frederick crave a smoke, which is odd because he's never smoked in his life. Maybe it's time to reintroduce the pipe.
Who smoked? Not his mother. Not his father.
Oh, yes. Frederick realizes what the craving is. He must be further along in dredging the depths than he figured, because he hasn't had a thought in years about his one and only college girlfriend.
Truly, the best word for her was "exquisite." Frederick couldn't believe his luck at first. With black hair and the brand of frosting-light skin that even a few minutes in the sun would brutalize. Her fondness for high-necked shirts and frills made her seem even more the frail-looking but constitutionally hardy Victorian heroine.
He seems to recall that her major had indeed been literature, but he also recalls that he didn't much care, so firmly was he under her spell.
Her name should have been Ada, Charlotte, Helen, maybe Isabella (...Bella? Why did that sound familiar?), but it was Linda. Frederick had been happy to sacrifice his virginity to her (okay, it wasn't that huge a sacrifice).
He remembers fingers as thin as bird legs, a long neck, a single, raised black mole on her shoulder blade. Its presence both intrigued and disgusted him. The disgust had embarrassed him. Frederick had never kissed it but had imagined doing so many times.
Linda was incisive and wry and quick to laugh but had a violent temper and would swing down into long periods of lethargy in which it was hard for her to leave her bed. At that point, Frederick had still been a biology major blasting up a narrow track to medical school, and had not yet decided to concentrate in psychiatry.
He sees the depression more clearly than he sees Linda. She is only white curves on a blanket.
At first, her turns only added to the air of cobwebbed mystique, but soon enough they were nothing more than exhausting. Frederick had waited until she had emerged from one to tell her that it wasn't working out. With the break came relief. He would go on to miss not her but the idea of her. (He would miss the sex, too.)
Outside the sheltering dome of his dura mater (now there's an image), his attitude is reversed. He loves the illness for its complexity and hates its vessel for its predictability. Inside his mind, he resents the illness for the damage it inflicts.
And dear Jesus if that isn't all idealistic and swoony-hippie drivel. Frederick wonders at his newfound proximity to the phenomenon of coming untethered. The very idea that he may float away if not for his stubborn pragmatism. Pragmatism or denial?
Frederick Chilton is not often one to muse. But there is a certain romance to damage, and it only gets more gothic the more obscure its source. He feels a little self-congratulatory for scoring the example of terribly abstruse damage that is a bullet to the face.
Was that what had happened?
Shocking...if not for precedent. Frederick's face had always been where he was most vulnerable. When he was growing up it was enslaved to his emotions, which had been the typically histrionic ones of the very bright child.
A precocious adjustment to the adult world translates to maladjustment to the microcosm of childhood. Young Frederick had been despised and shunned by his peers (then again, that could be the impression of his once over-dramatic nature on the situation itself). No matter how he tried at playing somber, he always betrayed himself with a look.
He likes to think that the intervening years of practice have afforded him an air of patrician detachment. Those whom he allows close-which is no one at the moment save those who are currently invading his body with the routinized boredom of an efficient hospital-may also know that the dignified cleft in his chin is, in fact, a scar.
The kid that threw the rock-funny the things you'll never forget-was Roger Dunne. The same dime-a-dozen playground tormentor who used to call Frederick "Rat-face." Thank God the prep school had been in Pennsylvania and not the South, or it might have been "Chitlins."
Dunne wasn't a beater, but he was capable of cruelty that seemed plucked out of thin air, and that was almost worse. Frederick had made the mistake once of raising his head, responding on instinct to Dunne's calls. Rat-face! Rat-face! The stone-could have been a chunk of tarmac-impacted right at the point of Frederick's chin, splitting it open and sending a bib of blood down his front.
Out of the shimmer at the side of the memory comes an image of himself wearing a blood-spattered suit, a walking blot against white snow. With the recollection, that shimmer becomes the whipping slice of blackness. Frederick knows enough to be wary now.
Somehow the blood on his polo as he watches the injury Dunne inflicted being treated is a comfort, even though the child he had been is trying really, really hard not to cry.
That'll be a doozy.
This from his incurably Midwestern mother-one of those round and perpetually aproned figures though he was pretty sure she never owned or wore an apron in her life.
Scars are cool, she said. Girls like scars.
There is no one to mop up or smile this time. To fret over the ragged divot below his cheekbone.
Would they pull the sides in to stitch, leaving one side of his mouth canted upward in an involuntary smile? People who always smile are either objects of scorn or serious distrust. Well, Frederick has already been both-there goes that bugbear.
Maybe a graft, then. Amazing how they always look hasty and slapdash no matter how deft the surgeon's hands. He should have been a surgeon. He regrets the thought because it conjures the vibrating shadow, which spits out a faultline of darkness across his mental landscape, angry and persistent as the false topography of an EKG line.
(Surgeon?)
He backpedals in the face of more inverted lightning, fancying he smells ozone.
Think something else, something else. Find shelter in scars and blood.
How the hell is that sound logic?
Time and effort can smooth the edges of a graft, but never hide. Is it more honest or true than psychopathy? Traits like sores on the mind that end up showing in the long run. Better to have it up front, prima facie-literally. There's a laugh there. He should have been a lawyer.
Frederick Chilton does not often laugh. He imagines his face, the real one, laughing. Pulling the stitches into little pluckable bands, ringing through the barrel of his mouth. Or straining the edges of the graft. Whichever.
He can't stop, because it drives away the dark. It will never properly heal, Frederick, if you don't stop laughing. Complete seriousness is the key to successful re-integration. The laugh is a thing for children and maniacs (not entirely distinct from one another, the two of those…)
Oh, to hell with that. It'll never properly heal anyway.
That'll be a doozy.
Frederick Chilton, the Patchwork Man. Oh, there's a laugh there, too. The heartless and deflated one you give up to the air in a room where you're alone. Like this one. Except, as he's come to find out, his head is far from unpopulated.
He should have been a psychiatrist. Wait...he is a psychiatrist. (Another grumble from the periphery.)
That may have been the plan. Flee. Reach. Project. Forever running from who he is. Probably doesn't even know. Possibly afraid he isn't anything.
Or worse, is a collection of pieces that never quite coagulate. He is bits of himself, he is bits of others. All of their faces are his face, all of their minds are his.
Get into the skulls of others so you don't have to be in your own. Because that turned out so well for you, Frederick.
Some part of Frederick is indulging the mundane fantasy of sitting on a warm beach, another of being in bed with a woman-things his headmaster of a conscious mind would call trite, superficial. But the headmaster has checked out of this particular hotel.
Elvis has left the building. Also something Frederick would never say aloud.
To be honest, it should be in there somewhere, though. Probably just taking a back seat. Nothing gets free.
Wait a minute, he thinks. That is not remotely fair. There's a violation of the law of this place going on here. The people who are in the cages are the ones who are out of their minds. In, out. They complement each other. You can only take one of each, no overlap.
And here we have Frederick, layered over himself like a fucking Venn diagram. ("Fucking" is not a word that he would say aloud in any company, polite or otherwise. But down this particular rabbit hole it appears that all bets are off. Reminder: he's decided not to police his language.)
Just a moment: was that Frederick Chilton making a decision not to impose limits? Astonishing that he didn't notice it before, if "before" was any less probable than "now." To the matter at hand, though, the man who is entirely in his mind is in the cage.
A cacophony of metal striking metal. The growling shadow flings an array of horizontal lines across Frederick's vision. He knows already that it responds to his thoughts, but this is the first time it has displayed specificity.
Closer. Come closer to the bars.
The picture is still beyond the bars, diminished to Polaroid size. He sees it hovering there and grabs for it. It hurts, this strain. Frederick is not a man who cares to be discomfited. Though discomfort has been thrust upon him of late.
Some men are born into discomfort, some men achieve discomfort-
Seriously, shut the fuck up. (My, but that is awfully liberating, even in the face of mortal terror. Assuming that mortal terror has a face. Frederick himself might not have a face.)
Scars are cool. Girls like scars.
The picture from his mind is a postage stamp now. He'll hang there until he seizes it out of sheer force of will.
Will.
Will.
In Frederick's palm is a jumble of black letters that takes a nanosecond to resolve into something recognizable (with a nod to the fact that, of course, a nanosecond is an eon in a dream).
WILL GRAHAM.
He holds it and practically dances like a child, even though there are terrible things inside that name. Terrible things surround it, as well. The darkness has become a quaking circle that compresses what Frederick sees into kaleidoscopic nonsense.
To think he had scoffed at the simplicity of the story of Pandora. Can't for the life of him remember who or what in the story had put the evil inside its box in the first place.
The Western Mythology course, intended to fulfill part of the undergraduate Humanities requirement, had been a blowoff. Only because Frederick refused to remember how soundly it had kicked his ass. He'd always thought himself immune to inventions.
The immunity was an invention.
Who put the evil in the box? Who put the box in my hands? Who put me in this box?
One by one, the boundaries blow away. He becomes concentric. At any moment the tight fissures of his skull will rupture with this new limitlessness, peeling his scalp and face rapidly away like the skin of a popped water balloon in slow motion.
He pictures what that would look like, but it's cartoonish. Overblown as compensation. There is a reason why the manically funny is termed "hysterical;" it bounces along the blood-smeared edge of lunacy.
Funny to the point of incoherence, too, are these outdated terms for mental illness. "Hysteria." "Lunacy." Woman-sickness. Moon-sickness. Hell, "funny" itself-as in a variety of farm.
Should have been a clown. Send me in.
All at once, Frederick decides that coping mechanisms are phenomenally stupid. They slap a face on horror, and it never fits right. For God's sake. He's a medical doctor. Everyone is a dripping horror beneath his face. The face itself may be a horror. A relief to take it off. Consider the plight of his own abused mug.
That'll be a doozy.
Scars speak clearly. They're frank, they're safe.
Frederick wants very much to be safe. Non-threatening. Even if as an object of ridicule.
It took being framed for a string of atrocities as long and blood-bright as Christmas lights to be taken seriously.
A plate of blackness slams over his vision. (Can you really see in your mind?) When it rolls back, it does so only in part, and what lies beyond is hazy and spinning.
He expects a ring of cartoon bluebirds, conjuring the most innocuous things in creation. If he's to be given the province and consideration of a fragile shaking thing like this (Linda's fingers holding a cigarette, the spidery stitches in his chin, trembling chains attached to a steel table), let it be.
May they call him petty. May they call him narrow.
Please. Oh, please.
Let me unlock this one final box and I promise I'll fade. Raise my head in my own domain and never again in others. Be contained.
The dark is all-encompassing now, but it has a sheen, stealing light from an undetectable source. Its sound is the tumbling of cookware: some ringing and some smashing.
Then the surface spiderwebs and sheds gleaming, spinning chunks around a black bullet hole behind which is something blacker. Either he dives into that hole or the dark slides toward him and punches his spine through the back of his neck on a bridge of splintering vertebrae.
Frederick Chilton has never been more terrified.
No, that's not true.
Once he has: entering his home, inviolable outside of the fact that it reeked like an abattoir. Stumbling through a waxwork horror show. Falling on a face ruined one last time by emotion and looking up at the only other living thing in the house. Maybe not living, but it was moving. Reaching for him.
The blackness reaches, too.
Hannibal.
The box opens. Frederick jumps.
A membrane of light swims up and he hits it like concrete. It hurts-oh, Jesus it hurts so badly.
This is not just a cut on his chin. He's going to have to cry for real.
But there is a woman. Dark hair, pale face.
Linda?
She is holding his hand.
"Frederick?"
Alana Bloom. Holding his hand.
She hates me.
"Hey" she says. "I see you. Come on back."
Frederick sobs and it hurts. He breathes and it hurts.
He can't tell if his real face is smiling. The one underneath?
It only hurts.