Double trouble

This is a work of fiction, and yet...

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

My name is Zen, and Teresa. We have been told we are a multiple personality; but we’re cured now, aren’t we Teresa?

Our story really gets interesting about a couple of months after we moved into the old signing-on building. I started hearing someone answer everything I thought. At first it was funny but when the voice wouldn’t go away I went to see someone about it and this is what happened.

She, Teresa, wanted to have a cigarette, but they wouldn’t allow it. ‘It is for you own good,’ they told her as they closed the gate and took away her shoes. She was stripped of all dignity and abused by indifference, and the number she was given was just the next in a long row. She cried out her hopelessness, the injustice of it all, but no-one answered her plea. She was thrown to the floor and pumped full of drugs. She would struggle but there were too many of them, laughing, as they held her down and made fun of her nakedness.

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Then the drug stopped her from moving, but she could still feel and see everything they were doing to her. After they had finished with her, the door of the padded cell banged shut on her, and on hope. She started to shake with the cold and the drug in her body. All she could do was wait in the corner where they had left her to ride out the effects.

I remember her thinking, ‘come back the sun, come back the freedom, and I will go, and this time I will make it all the way, no turning back.’ But all she had was the sad song and the dark room and the long winter, and she was turning old and time and thought almost seemed to move without her in that other frame of motion and being she lived in which got left behind with the time of watching, in that place of apathy and greyness.

While all around was a big party forever going on, for her there was only there, and she wouldn’t leave. She didn’t choose that place, she got invited. But away in another land, there would be her destiny, and that broken dream she couldn’t build any more. She was crazy, for she couldn’t go to her home, except in the dream, the dream she couldn’t abandon on the other side of the burned bridge. She looked out of her imaginary window with thoughts be-spelled with paradise. She watched leaves dance in the road she wanted to be on, just going, her and her destiny, not so very far from the stars, in a righteous day she could make it there waving to the people beside the road as she passed, on and on seemingly forever, mile after incredible mile along a hot road on a silver machine of power.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

She tried to rise above the madness and see it from afar. “It cannot touch you now,” said the white coat with the impassionate face as it hovered over her. But her hands were covered in scars from fending off the madwoman with the sharp knife. Her only guilt that put her there was her inability to distinguish between dreams and reality. She should never have gone to that doctor for help who was so nice when she said, “I am going to get you a place in a special hospital. Nothing to be concerned about, just a short stay.”

Helpless and lost she couldn’t do anything about it. I remember her shouting, ‘this can’t be happening, I am not here, my mind is my own; you can’t steal it from me with your machines, your razor knives and murderous hands. I am an intelligent woman, a human being, not something you can mess around with.” But they did not listen. They said it would be best for her if she was made less dangerous, it would stop her from trying to escape, but she was strong; she said, ‘I will find a way; I will escape.’ I think I slept then.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

She crept up on me and emptied my mind, filled herself with me, and me her, and then I was doubly caught. It was too dark as I searched around for something. My hand closed over a warmth that grew and grew. I couldn’t leave go of it or push it away, it penetrated me. I could feel it invading me inside, filling me with a heat that spread to my heart which beat to its pulsing throb gushing through my being. When it got to my mind the silver arrow I fired in my youth came flaming from the heavens, piercing me, awaking memories, awaking me, but I had slept too long. The morbid threat of dread divided the beautiful picture and left me there undecided.

I remember I ran for a long time, but I was caught in the end, betrayed by my pain and hunger, yes, so far from safety. I lost it, that wide open feeling, that waiting for heaven’s gate to open. I was finished in that place of nothingness, far from home. Living on the edge of conspiracy and duplicity of desire, with sanity’s burning bonfire and the outrageous souls barraged behind smiling faces. I played their tune for a while, but their little world was far too claustrophobic for me.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

So I busted out, but I made too much noise, frightened their perception of things. I should have crept past the sleeping monster with softly whispering supplication, to make my escape. But like a fool, I turned too late. Then I rode on the flaming dragon with my life, my soul. I stabbed it to the heart but I couldn’t kill it, it had no heart. I screamed in the night, my fear. Nothing was heard. Mirrored was my sorrow, my anguish, my anger. I burned to escape from that laden doom filled room. I was going under, just a small spark left in the embers of my life. I blew on it, saw fingers of flame take hold and grow. I threw my dried emotion to the flame, and then the rest of me on to the growing fire, and I started to burn. I spread out to the walls and crashed in splendour. My head rose, all reason gone, howling a terrible madness.

Muscles pumped the body into terrible motion, to batter the metal door in frustration and desperate agonised feeling.

Come back and I will fight you again. Come back, this one’s not dead yet. Come back and see the madwoman, far from paradise.

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The night dropped down its reign over my fevered mind as I anguished over its reach, its blind abandoning reach, ever present in clamour for acquisition of whatever I could think of; I retired to my tower seeing only what there was to see and little else.

Then Teresa climbed my tower and asked for me. I let her in with many kisses of greeting. She came with a message from one who had a small face, ‘come down he said,’ she said. I lost interest, started turning off the lights. Teresa turned into a witch then and tried to clamber over my defences, they were too well built, but I think she lost a fingernail that I may have seen as I threw fuel on the fire, something did gleam and flare up, fingernails do that when the temperature goes above their melting point, but it may have been the message she had brought; if it was it was gone and she was stranded with a stranger who knew how to pull out eyes, who could count shades of light and lie on grass forever without blinking. Teresa turned about and escaped through the window. I let her and I was glad really for I wanted to be alone. Eventually the dawn’s light brought a peace that filled my tower with a tranquillity that sent me to sleep.

Image by 【中文ID】愚木混株 【Instagram】cdd20 from Pixabay

Teresa convinced them to let us out in the end. She’s the sane one. She didn’t know about me at first but I think she suspected. I’d never had a friend, so I wasn’t going to let her know, she wouldn’t have understood and would probably have hated me and tried to get rid of me. So I’m crazy, so what, there has to be some somewhere. Well here I am, full vinegar and all that kind of stuff, wayward, yeah, take off.

Teresa would come home later, probably with some washed up ass-hole on her arm. She’s so pure, so good, doesn’t need anyone else, the only one of us who doesn’t have a care because she’s blind somewhere I can’t touch nor breathe on; she’s lucky; but one day will come the storm, one day we will sigh together, then will come the confirmation of all our drowning, all my pain. Our oneness then will be restored and we will sink to our heart’s content, ignoring all murmurs of passionless plight so far from anywhere we are now. Our possession will be dispossessed, our carnal delight will white with the wash of oblivion in something we cannot grasp only yearn for.

So I’m crazy, so what, who cares? How do I feel? Have I made it yet? Do I dare, or does the blank stare crash into the dreams I once had, clichés now, of pictures I once longed for.

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Teresa is so full of fears. We stayed in her friend’s house one time. In the middle of the night she went downstairs. A clock was ticking; she was holding her breath, expecting its claw-like hand to reach out from the shadows, close around her leg. If she could just make it to the door everything would be alright.

There was something there besides her, something evil, and it knew where she was. She could feel its manifestation, its menace, waiting for a lapse in her concentration to get her. She advanced another few feet then took stock of her new position. It knew what she was trying to do. It knew if she got to the door and passed through and closed it, she would be safe. She could feel it getting ready to pounce, amassing its strength like a cat about to envelope some small prey. Her back was to the wall. Her eyes trying to penetrate every shadow to find where it was hiding, which direction it would attack from.

The doorway was so close; she could almost touch it with her fingertips. Her nerves were at breaking point, she could hear every beat of the clock like a hammer blow in her head. It chimed once, almost making her scream. ‘Why doesn’t it come for me,’ she thought. Her heart pounded in her breast, growing louder each passing moment. She knew it was there. She just wished it would get it over with instead of playing with her like this.

With an out-rush of breath she broke for the door and as she charged through she was acutely aware of her unprotected back. With one swipe if its claw it could rip her clothes and flesh to shreds. Slamming the door behind her and bolting it she breathed a sigh of relief.

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Somehow she had made it. Safe for a while she thought, resting her head on the door as her fear subsided and her breathing came under control.

As she reached to turn on the light, she froze. Behind her was a sound. The door had been open. She always left it closed. No wonder she couldn’t see it out there, it was in here with her. It had been waiting for her all the time to go to it, and now she’s locked in with it.

Slowly she turned around to face the monster. If she’s going to go, she wanted to see her nemesis eye to eye. She clicked on the light and found the bathroom was empty, cold, and no monster. So she did what she came to do and wished to hell she didn’t have to go through the same thing every night. When she was ready she unlocked the door and eased it open, wondering if she would make it back to bed.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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