Worms - Part Four
Theo’s apartment was small, smelled like mildew, and had a single rectangular window opposite his bed.
Time dribbled along the window, which was permanently propped open. Closed, the space quickly became stifled and humidified, so Theo never closed it. There was an old curtain he pulled across occasionally, but mostly it remained a rectangle of constant change. It reminded Theo of the passage of time by bypassing his (often clogged) frontal lobe and plugging directly into the parietal. Time stimulated the lizard brain via temperature and light. The lizard brain was therefore in control of routine, freeing up Theo’s limited cognitive capacity. His thoughts were so much more jumbled now, it took an immense effort to follow them, let alone organize them into coherent ideas. He began keeping notebooks, filling their pages with chaotic drawings, fragmented phrases.
His window changed, day by day. He was also losing weight, and couldn’t be quite sure if the reason he was shivering was because he refused to close the window in January, or because of the ten pounds he had left somewhere. When he wasn’t working, he floated through life covered in blankets, gripping mugs of tea, scratching symbols onto paper and internet surfing.
He didn’t spend much money. That was handy– if he did, he would have trouble paying off the immense sum that he had written in big, blocky numbers and tacked to the wall. The Hospital Bill (post insurance). To be paid in monthly increments, with interest, for the rest of his life, unless his or America’s money situation changed anytime soon.
So it was lucky that he didn’t mind this little town, didn’t pay for heating, didn’t own a car, ate mostly free meals from work, and never went out. Still, forty hours a week barely covered it, and he spent all the free time he could either walking or sitting in his room desperately grasping at pieces of internal understanding that flew around in his head.
And the little rectangle continued to cycle it’s way through the weather and the seasons. On the rare rainy day, Theo would lean out of the window to feel all the little wet kisses on his skin. The cold soaked into his face and neck and arms and dripped down into a puddle on the floor. Eventually Theo would mop it up, but only after he was soaked through to the bone.
He had an old desktop computer that he used to scroll endlessly through various internet communities. In his life, he had seen the many puberties of the internet, each stage had seemed it’s most mature form before breaking out into terrible acne and voice cracks once more. When Theo tried to visualize the maturation of internet communication, he saw an endlessly subdividing tree fractal. There were no longer internet-wide phenomena as there had been just a few years before. To understand any joke, relate to any content, one must now occupy a niche. There were new niches every day. Each niche was more extreme than the last, composed of ideas farther and farther from the mainstream as they matured. Theo wondered if any of this could last. It was such a deviation from forms of communication from the past, where proximity to the mainstream dictated how broad of an audience one could acquire. The inverse seemed to be true now, at least to some degree.
It confused Theo, but interested him nonetheless. So he dove into the fractalic niche tree in a frenzy, consuming as much as he could bear. He gave none of his own feedback to any niche, however, in a small attempt to remain planted in reality and avoid throwing sticks and squirrels or killing mermaids. Notebooks piled up on his desk, his thoughts becoming less scattered and longer form. He could produce pages of writing now rather than mere half sentences. He exported his mind to the internet and the blank pages of his notebooks.
When Theo’s mind was not exploring the world of information outside of himself, he had to focus very hard on containing it. Increasingly he found that an idle mind spelled doom for his entire day. Left to wander without taking input or generating output, it snaked its way around his throat and tightened, rendering Theo depressed, anxious, and generally immobilized. Sometimes he would spend hours in bed, unable to get up despite knowing that his shift at work had already started, his thoughts racing in suicidal loops like an ant mill.
He devised a strategy to deal with this antiproductive issue. With effort, Theo honed his ability to focus on whole-body sensations, therefore occupying the entirety of his cognitive bandwidth with the firings of direct sensory neurons. It was difficult at first to concentrate for more than five minutes, but as the days rolled on and the many-zero’ed bill on the wall refused to hop down and leave, Theo felt an accompanying sense of impending doom and panic to top off his depression, caused directly by the depressive episodes’ most severe symptoms; his inability to function resulted in anxiety about the inability, creating a disastrous feedback loop. All of these feelings, it seemed, were mitigated by constant vigilance of his somatosensory cortex. So Theo practiced, and eventually got to the point where he could remain calm for long stretches by following routines and focusing as much of his brain power as possible towards taking in the various feelings that drifted through his system.
One such day, Theo had been in a kind of focused trance for an entire shift. He narrowed his spectrum of thought into a laser that examined in detail as many pieces of sensory stimuli that he could hold at once. He felt the hot smoke of the burners as it brushed his face and eyes. Felt the textured plastic handle of the knife he wielded to cut through the multitude of textures, colors, smells. Moved in deliberate strokes, focusing on the technique and minute adjustment of every move. He listened to conversations of the other cooks and let their little nothings settle into meaning in his head. He was sweating from concentration by the end of the shift, but had managed not only to avoid intrusive thoughts, but also to have his productivity praised by the owner at the end of his shift. He nodded vaguely and walked to a bus stop, where he hopped on a bus that would take him to his doctor’s office.
Routine checkup and a half hour of physical therapy. Theo’s mother had called that morning to make sure he was going to go, and Theo would humor her. He would rather not have to endure the physical contact and focus on his contorted body, but this was the last one he would be compelled to do, he told himself.
A dingy, off-white room with cracks in the ceiling paint. It smelled like sweat and bleach, a dim reminder of the hospital but with a crumbled feeling of abandonment, despite the people who worked in it every day. His doctor was a small blonde woman that reminded Theo of a large rat he had seen on a trail once. Theo sat on an examination chair in silence while she tack-tacked away loudly at her computer for several minutes, before turning to Theo to ask, “Do you smoke cigarettes or use nicotine devices?”
“No.”
Tack tack tack.
“How often do you drink alcohol?”
“Once or twice a week. A few drinks.”
Tack tack.
“Recreational drugs? Marijuana?”
“Sometimes. Not lately.”
Tack tack tack.
“Are you sexually active?”
“No.”
The doctor finished with her bureaucracy and pulled out a stethoscope. All fine. Then the blood pressure sleeve. She stared at the results and lifted an eyebrow.
“Is there a history of high blood pressure in your family?”
“No, why?” He could guess. The doctor went back to the computer, typed madly and peered at the screen.
“This is much higher than last time you came in, according to the chart, and higher than is healthy. Have you had any serious stressors recently? Work been difficult?”
Theo blinked at her.
“Well, it’s best to try and avoid high stress environments. I can refer you to a therapist, but you will likely have issues with insurance, so we’ll schedule you for another check up to see if this is ongoing before I prescribe anything.”
Theo nodded, knowing he would not be returning. The next half hour consisted of painful stretches, unhelpful proddings and unenthusiastic encouragement from the doctor. He was wearing a thin gown that did not restrict his movement as much as the jeans and button down he had been wearing when he came in. The gown was not fully closed on the sides, revealing the white tendrils of scar that wriggled their way up Theo’s side, neck, and head. He was conscious of every glance the doctor made towards him. He thought he saw flashes of disgust, but he had never been very good at reading people. So, he stared at his feet, or the wall, avoiding eye contact whenever possible.
At one point, the doctor asked Theo to stretch out his left arm above his head. The skin on his left side was taught by the time his arm was perpendicular to his body, and Theo could not move it beyond that.
“All the way, you can do it,” the doctor said, eyes raking Theo’s twisted scars.
“I can’t. The skin... it won’t stretch.”
“You can. Here.” She pushed Theo’s elbow upward slightly. Blotches of red clouded Theo’s vision as a ripping sensation filled his left side. He let out an involuntary gasp and nausea bubbled up from his abdomen. He was dizzy, tears welled up in his eyes. He toppled from the chair he was sitting on and just barely caught himself before he would have smacked onto the linoleum floor.
“Oh!” The doctor rushed to help him, but Theo turned on her, wild-eyed.
“Don’t touch me,” he snarled. The dizziness was replaced by a new burning in the pit of his stomach. Nausea was set aside to make room for anger. He no longer cared enough to contain it. He stood, feeling the burn of this new acceptance of rage coursing through his veins.
“I’m leaving.”
The doctor shrank back in silence and watched as Theo ripped off the gown and yanked on his clothes. His left side pulsed angrily. Theo glanced at her briefly, saw the expression she was making. So hard to tell what was beneath that rat face. Fear? Pity? Relief? All three, probably. He left without looking back at her.
Black clouds looked down on Theo and he cursed them. Sounds screeched incoherently in his ears. He could hear the rush of blood just beneath the skin. He had tried so hard to avoid this, focused so intently all morning just to escape the emotions that roiled beyond the barriers he had meticulously set up. And for what? For his blood pressure to build to the point of bursting? No more, he decided. He would let himself feel even if it killed him. Better that than living a life as a shell. A husk. A mere eyeball taking in information but never interpreting, never synthesizing. He saw his life twisted and shrunken, full of hate and devoid of control. Hate for himself, for the cruelty of the world that did this to him.
"You did this to us." The words reverberated through his skull. The image of the blackened flesh on red scales, the full lips and sharp teeth flashed in front of him.
"You did this."
A synapse seared through his amygdala and meaning infused the black clouds framing the setting sun. He watched as they collided, sending the shock of static electricity as sound through the airwaves, thundering like gods over the small town. Theo would write his life like a poem. He didn’t care anymore about the imaginary values that hung just beyond reach like carrots dangled tantalizingly, never to be touched. Life was never going to be very long. Numbers meant nothing in the face of feeling, real emotion. How many dollars of debt? How many mmHg pushed against his veins? They meant nothing to him. But the black clouds did, the thunder that vibrated his body. The static electricity in the air that whipped the dark street into a frenzy of whirling leaves and chaotic raindrops. The unquantifiable death rattle that lived permanently in the back of his mind.
His life was his own. He promised himself, standing in front of the bus stop as the bus headlights rounded a corner, that he would get out of his own way. He would release the pressure of numbers and let his life churn forwards uninhibited by his own mental sabotage.
He got on the bus, buzzing. Sat at the back. The ride home was accompanied by surges of feeling every time he glimpsed the thunderclouds and the orange streaks of sky. They contradicted themselves in ways he had never felt before. Gratitude meshed with anger. Fear spliced into longing. All swirled in his head uncontrollably.
He opened the door to his room and looked around as if he had never seen it before. His bed was unmade, clothes lying on the floor. Post-masturbatory tissues littered the ground near an overflowing trash can, mingling with crumpled up paper balls. He picked one of them up and uncrumpled it. It read:
He didn’t remember writing it. The handwriting was messy, slanted, and the other side had a car insurance ad on it. He must have written it during some fitful and restless night.
He walked over to his desk and tore the Hospital Bill off the wall, crumpled it and threw it towards the trash bin. He pulled the tack out of the wall, smoothed out the crumpled scribbles, and tacked the words up where the Bill had been. Then, suddenly exhausted, he fell into his bed and slept a dreamless peaceful sleep until morning.
Walking home from work the next day, Theo took a longer route that twisted around a neighboring residential district rather than take the busy sidewalk that ran straight through town. Today, the sky was clear and the day was warm. He bought a cheese pastry at the bakery and then turned down a street that would lead him around, eventually, to his little apartment.
He ate the pastry as he walked. It was quiet in the area of town. Few cars, mostly people keeping to themselves. An old man hunched down beside a retaining wall ahead of Theo, focused intently on a twisted mass of wires he was working in his hands. As Theo passed the man he saw that the mass of wires formed the lower half of a figure. The man was wrapping a wire around the figure’s waist with a pair of pliers, extending the sculpture. Theo stopped to watch.
“That’s sick,” Theo said to the man, who was wearing a tattered green canvas jacket, oily jeans and no shoes. His white beard and hair melded together in a craggly explosion.
“You got a pill for that?” The man asked, without looking up from his sculpture.
“A what?”
“You got a pill for that sick?” The man repeated.
“Oh… no, I mean it’s cool,” Theo puttered, pointing at the wire figure. “What’s your name?”
“Professor,” the man said.
“Professor is your name?”
“I’m your professor.” The man finished a wire twist with a flourish of his pliers and pulled out a coat hanger from his jacket, began unwinding it.
“Ok, well my name is Theo,” Theo told his professor. “What do you teach, Professor?”
“This.” The professor gestured at the wire figure, still without meeting Theo’s eyes.
“I’d take that class,” Theo chuckled.
“You got money for books?” The professor asked, shooting a concerned look upwards.
“Money for…” Theo blundered, confused. The professor reached into an open bag beside him and nabbed a five dollar bill with his pliers, offered it to Theo.
“Oh no, I don’t need the money,” Theo said, “Thank you.”
The professor squinted at Theo, asked, "Do you have the time?"
Theo checked his phone.
“Four fifteen.”
“Time flies!” The professor said, “Be careful, now. Take the money and buy the books.”
“I’m okay. You keep it.”
Theo’s professor shrugged and put the bill away, and fixed his eyes back on the sculpture. Theo pulled a bill out of his wallet and put it in the professor’s bag. The man did not appear to notice, so Theo made his way home.
He was happy, he realized with a start. Content. The day had been a good day. He hadn’t been as productive at work, in fact his manager had been annoyed at his tardiness and frequent bathroom breaks, but the shift had been enjoyable nonetheless. The walk had been good, and the strange conversation sat in his head, playing over and over again.
How could that man live like that? Content to follow the whims of an artist, happy to live completely outside of reality? Why was anyone who was unhappy willing to stay in reality when all it brought was misery?
Maybe, Theo thought, he could do that too.
Maybe.