Story: We get healthy

*

I don't know what it is about heights. Perhaps that they aren't there. You are high, you look down and see the ground and recognize that there is nothing between. Nothing really. It's space, yes, but you see through it. It might as well be nothing. You are virtually touching the ground so why not just go there or be there or admit that you already are? Oh no no no, I say. I'm not doing that. I have an enormous will for negativity. I can't do anything but I am very powerful at resisting something happening that I don't want. Change, for instance.

So I hovered up there with the other students who were so much more graceful than I was. Always. It goes without saying. But they weren't perhaps animated by the same sort of fossilizing fear that held me as if protected in its grip, not grip, but something in its own way ethereal, otherworldly. Embedded in me, in any case. The visuals shifted in front of us, square panels with humans in the air, actually us. I don't know quite what, there were skyscrapers or cornfields in the background. A grid anyway. That was comforting. My foot touched the bleachers behind me, or above me, or back there somewhere. I hooked my foot and hung swinging. Get your shoulders down, away from your ears, the teacher said. Engage your core. Focus. Whatever you do, don't look at your feet.

As I looked at my feet or through them, I saw her gliding, Andrea, so beautiful and in control -- she was so poised she could also do the arm movements, as synchronized, so antiquarian. Whereas I huddled freezing on the side, my foot snagged, my eye all over the room. What would it be like to be nothing but an eye? To wander everywhere, to be virtual and free of risk? "Pleasures of reason are subject to a natural growth or development, reflective of the development of the understanding" (Donald Rutherford). My own reason hung deliciously suspended, it swayed and waited. Did that mean I was secretly happy to be so afraid?

The bleachers went down in reverse. That is: instead of each row extending further than the row above, they went the other way. Or I was looking at them upside down, that had to be the reason. So if I just turned my own self upside down.... And then the hunger to fall, to jump, to break through the non-substance separating me from the ground, that hunger would rest from its constant hunting for me and I could finally relax. I rescued my foot and stood motionless on the bleachers below me. . Then the bell rang and the strangers came plunging into the room. Immersed. And the clock moved forward.

I moved through the dungeons that were segregated by sweat, no, by sex. The grim statues of the warriors were staggered everywhere, too crude to go on display "upstairs". One was stuck with one sock on and one sock off, sock on sock off, another combing his hair like a hideous Spartan, another on the scale, frowning forever at the number he saw. Their balls clattered as their phantoms walked into the showers and washed themselves away. Now I climbed the old stairs and yet I found myself another floor down. How could that be? I felt the muscles in my legs. They were tired but it might have been the fatigue of going down instead of up. There didn't seem to be up just down. The room seemed to lie in the bowels of the world but there was a giant window, which seemed to have a ship embossed on it, no it was moving toward us at an angle. Then the building prudently turned and avoided the crash. All the weights clanked down. The Punishment Room turned on its pivot. Ahead of me but inaccessibly aloft, Andrea was practicing her flying. Her arms moved in perfect arcs.

Think of pain as a massage. That was what my trainer had told me. There was said to be a point in the center of a lift where everything, even the lifter, lay perfectly poised. It was a sweet spot and a still place, full of meditation and the fruits of meditation, but it eluded me. All activity in the Room was sealed both ahead and behind (did I mean up and down?) by rows of hermetic screens, behind which the "scenes of torture and violence" ever played themselves into exhaustion, a form of entertainment for some -- or perhaps a lesson. A screenful of bleeding peasant farmers from a faraway land. A turgid remake of Psycho filmed in 3D and BloodVision. The deoculation scene from Let's Go Swimming. If you tried to look away you couldn't because where you looked away to had another screen. Indeed one felt sealed inside them, both in and out of the Klein bottle, oneself a Klein bottle. One sock on, one sock off. Oh how the enormous Punishment Room weight the spirit down and so like the Psalmist I lifted my eyes, trying to find at least the floating woman who could soar outside the pain. But lifting my eyes was now like lifting steel. Were the eyes then part of the physical body? Was there no escape?

But even mouthing the word "escape" assured me that there was one.

As in a dream I floated backward letting the images grow smaller -- but this was no dream because the space had its own technical specs, which no dream of mine could ever have. That is, I was in a place, with an integrity and intensity of its own. It existed outside me. I was merely here. If I wanted so very badly to renew my relationship with Heaven, I couldn't do it in this palce. It had to be broken down so it would stop blocking our sight of God.

I looked up but the rafters were completely dark. Horrible spotlights beamed down to hurt us.

The Nazi Kommandant's wife was in her customary place, near the door to the washroom and exit. She never left the place, she was always here. Some witch stood over her in trainer's costume of saturated black. She lay on her back holding the weight, the excessive impossible weight halfway aloft. She was too weak to bob it back into its rack. It was too much of a thing to rest on her emaciated chest. So it just hovered. And the trainer did nothing to help. I stepped forward to lend assistance and I bumped into glass. We rested on the curves of the bottle. The woman was real but she was also an exhibit. What then to say about oneself? A weakness and depression began trying to enclose me or seal me off really, like a giant piece of cellophane, which I knew I'd never escape if I once let it get onto me and attached. But no. What this place lacked but what I surely had were alternatives.

I needed to pee so badly and the door to the washroom had as it were climbed to the other side of the gym. That old familiar slog to something that receded from you, a losing game. It was a pinprick in the distance, a painful rhythmic throbbing. This was the pain that wished to be subject not object -- wished not just to be felt but to be the one feeling you and then simply take over. I willed myself to ignore it because there was something else that needed to be done first.

Squeezing around the staticky flickering glass of the TV screens I stepped forward to where someone very special lay. He was so delicate that I wasn't even able to see him except when I had fasted, meditated and slowed my own seeking down. To see him you had to be in almost a hallucinatory state, one that left you unprotected from the world. I cannot explain it more coherently than that.

The ship lurched as I moved forward. He too lay on a bench, he too was oppressed by some weight. It didn't matter how much, any amount was too much. He was structurally nothing, a blob, a white larval shape. There was nothing to be called a carapace, a shell, a skeleton, not even bones. You might say I'd not known the meaning of the word naked before. He was so frail that the slightest touch, I suppose, would break him and kill him. He was like a man of soft foam. And with weights hovering above him!

The gassy liquid in my stomach began to knead itself and leap in its hissing swamp. As so often, my heart seemed to be in my penis and my bowels. And the lights on the ceiling were sputtering. Disastrous music played.

I myself was mostly foam.

I reached down or tried to, I tried to pick up that anomalous weight hovering above him. Dear one, let me take that thing away from you. But my fingers were just froth, they could not establish a grip on the bar nor could the bar hold still. Like a vision the things melted in front of me. And at that point the vision came to an end.

12/24-12/30/08