CHAPTER FORTY

In the landscape of our mind my enemy and I meet. Our surroundings are featureless. We each watch the two of us as if from a third perspective. Not my eyes, not his eyes. We are naked. I am a smaller person, with short dark hair and fine features. My face is attractive and symmetrical, an agglomeration of the faces of everyone that I have ever met. My skin is brown and smooth. My chest is slightly swollen and my pubic hair provides a mask for organs that do not exist, because I am androgynous.

My enemy is a large man, with dark, flowing hair, tangled and wild. The body of a barbarian warlord. His penis is a trunk hanging down from his groin. An unkempt beard reaches his chest. His eyes remind me of Alexander the Great, the fullness of his cheeks are Jenghiz Khan’s, that nose belongs to Julius Caesar. If I look hard enough, I can see other facial features that remind of other men that we have known, all powerful and dominant.

Every memory of my renegade fragmental—two thousand years of spite, frustration, and hate—are now part of my memories. I can tell his story as well as I can tell my own. His past is a heavy burden of shame for me. Of course, my enemy never feels guilty. I am the meek, he is the strong.

Even though we are together in a single mind, we are separate, compelled to stand apart, yet able to communicate.

He laughs, the greedy bellow of the unslain. “You cannot kill me, Father. We are stuck with each other now.”

My mind circles and prods at the problem, trying to solve the permutations of a complex puzzle. Up until these past few weeks, I have never fought a battle within my own mind. I know so little about myself. I push forward and find that I cannot force my enemy to leave. For a brief moment, I toy with different ideas of how to lure him out of this body. If I can get him into a body of his own and kill him without touching him, then the world can be rid of him. But he sees my thoughts, just as I see his, and I learn that he will never agree to leave. Despite the prospect of an eternity chained to me, life is too precious for him to let go.

So it seems that he is correct, we are stuck together. Time passes in a way that I have never experienced. There is no sense of urgency. Sometimes we are merely aware of each other, as we float along strands of thought. Other times we meet in a mutual world of images and sound. He relishes his wild, naked barbarian body. He likes to converse and I find myself drawn into discussions.

“Why do you worship the crucified one?” he demands. “You have never seen a resurrection or any sort of real evidence that he was the son of God.”

“I worship him because he gave the poor and the meek hope. He taught that all people are important in the eyes of God, that everyone is an individual, important in their own right.”

“What foolishness. You know that they are sheep, ripe for our uses.”

“I know no such thing. I have learned to respect other people and you have not.”

He scoffs. “Enough philosophical musings.” He blasts images at me from our former life together. A city burning in the background with a line of captives in the foreground being led into the wilderness of slavery. Most are women and children. The men had fallen in battle and the old were dispatched as burdens. The images grow more graphic and personal as my own role in that horror is displayed. These images serve only to harden my resolve.

I loathe sharing my mind with him, but a part of me yearns for company. I have always been alone, without anyone to talk to that understands my nature. While my enemy began as a part of me, he has become other than me. In a way, we are peers, though not equals.

Sometimes I think of myself as nonhuman, but I feel the same pain and longings as other humans. We are all desperately lonely. The men and women who prowl high-school dances when they are young, and then single bars when they are older, whether predator or prey, seek to draw close to another human being, yet never completely fill the void inside themselves. The coupling of genitalia between strangers is a false path to closeness. I should be different. I can converse with my fragmentals, be a multiple me, yet I also feel that void of loneliness.

A nurse comes into the room to check our IV tubing. I allow myself to stir and open my eyes just a little. I so much want to see another person.

The name on her identification tag is “Nancy.” She is middle-aged, with short dark hair. Wrinkles radiate out from warm eyes. There is no wedding ring on her finger, though I am uncertain if that means that she is not married or if she takes the ring off while at work. In the past I would have slipped her a fragmental and found the answer, but I am not ready to allow any of my fellow fragmentals to leave my shell.

She leans across me to check something on the other side of the bed. Her blouse drops open and her breasts hang before my eyes. Then my enemy strikes, bombarding me with images of what he would like to do to this woman called Nancy. He does not see her as a person, but a toy to be tormented. He sees her as something good that must be soiled.

I push him away and cleanse the images from my mind. Nancy leaves the room, unaware of the latent danger to herself.

“Keep these temptations away from me,” I command.

“You cannot order me about.” He ignores my anger and turns philosophical. “Temptation, eh? That word implies sin. And sin violates God’s laws.” He laughs. “Your faith in God is a weakness.”

“My faith or your lack of faith is not important. What matters is that there are laws of wisdom that if we follow them will help people live happier lives. The Golden Rule may sound trite to the cynic, but it is profound to the deep thinker. Do unto others what you want them to do unto you.”

“Laws and rules are for other people, the mediocre, not you and me. We do unto others, they do not do things to us.”

I push him away and seek my own thoughts. Of course, all my thoughts are laid bare to him and he finds them amusing.

He responds with fantasies of slaying me. These inventions are not grounded in the reality of our situation, where I am stronger than he. Instead he imagines situations where the roles are reversed. He plucks a memory from our past, places me within that person, and savagely tortures them. Just before death comes, he removes me from the dying body for safekeeping. He does not want to lose his toy too soon.

Pushing back, I squash his thoughts and fantasies.

“I have a right to think too!” he declares.

“Not like that,” is my answer.

We come together again to converse. He torments me with past memories of our lives together. Oh, how I loathe that need in myself to seek out company. I consider going to that place where loneliness no longer matters. Insanity can be a refuge.

I remember a homeless woman that I met in Cleveland only months ago. Pneumonia had caused her to search out an emergency ward, where the attending physician called me to come by and render a psychological diagnosis. Even though she was homeless, she ate well enough to retain considerable weight. For some people, fat is kind, slowly accreting across the entire body. Fat was unkind to her, jutting out from different parts of her body in fans of flesh. The nurses had scrubbed her clean, removed the lice and transformed her ratted hair into a smooth sheen of amber.

I touched her and learned more about her. A miserable youth, tormented because of her numerous freckles and stolid features. She learned to see her face and body as ugly and decided that all that was inside must be ugly too. She worked in a factory and desperately clung to any man that offered a smile. They usually left after only a short while, leaving behind bruises and broken hope. She aborted every child she conceived because she did not want to burden a child with her genes: as ugly as she was, with such a sagging body.

One day she left her job and her apartment for the streets. Life was just too hard and she did not have the will to cut her wrists. She learned a new life, pushing a grocery shopping cart, collecting bottles and cans for fractions of a penny, making the rounds of the different soup kitchens. During the summer, she slept in the park near the Cuyahoga river; in the winter, she found a cot in one of the shelters run by the Cleveland Diocese.

Occasionally she saw other homeless women attacked and violated, but no one ever bothered her. For the first time in her life, her looks served a purpose. She enjoyed her many friends, imaginary beings in her mind, people like Jarvis the Cat, Bucky the Wolf, Slith the Snake, Harvey the Mouse, and Winnie the Pooh. None of them were human and all of them loved her.

She was not really insane in the sense of schizophrenia or some other biological disorder. The company of humanity had forced her into another place. After I examined her, I realized that I could bring her back, but I realized that she did not want to be cured. Being crazy was easier, because when you are crazy, you do not have to take responsibility. You do not have to feel the pain. You are no longer lonely.

As for myself, in the here and now, as my host lies catatonic in a hospital bed, madness beckons. It would be so easy to just let the responsibility slide away. I walk to the precipice and look over the edge at peace. Just before I step forward, I realize that in madness I will no longer have control over my life. That is the point, is it not, to relinquish all control? But if I am not in control, then my enemy will be in control.

I step back. He may not be able to gain complete control over our host, but if I become schizophrenic, we might bifurcate into two identities. At times, he could gain control of our body. I think of the nurse, innocent of his intentions, and regain my determination to not allow my enemy the slightest opening.