I walked along the sea front, the cries of seagulls overhead tugging at my attention. I had been struggling to keep my consciousness intact and small, but by a process of mystical osmosis it had spilled out into the world again and any sense of separateness was lost. The sky was open and wide and blue enough today for my contemplative union to be pleasant however. Perhaps a little of me had slipped through the cracks to the dark and hidden underside of life, but this was now nothing new, and with time and experience I’d become more or less - mostly less - equal to the task. It was easier, somehow, here in the southwest, amongst the scattered relics of an ancient Celtic dream, far from the grim Nordic realities that reigned back east. Here the old heroes sought something more than bloodshed; their gods were happy to waver in and out of view, and when that fractured sense of self was finally returned to me it always brought a message or two from them.
It still wasn’t all that long since I’d broken out of the godawful old workhouse they’d locked me up in. They used to send women there that had happened to fall pregnant outside of marriage, some of whom remained there yet, unable to function now outside of the institution and its nullifying structure. Nowadays they were locking up anyone and everyone that couldn’t keep up with the chaotic cruelty of the modern world. I couldn’t talk when I was a baby and they were happy enough with me then; so why should they lock me away now, just because I couldn’t talk anymore? I would have been fine in a monastery.
But the world was just as cruel in there - more cruel, even. I’d seen old ladies dragged screaming to electro-convulsive therapy, their fingers peeled away from the furniture onto which they had clutched with their last and terrified bout of will even after their strength had been spent. I’d watched another woman turning tricks in the toilets for single cigarettes, and things were no different even when I offered the woman all the cigarettes she could possibly smoke. There were a few others like me, that I recognised just by meeting their eye, and they recognised me and spoke of death, but I still couldn’t speak.
To be honest, many of my fellow inmates were interesting and kind and compassionate people, and I might well have happily carved a little life out for myself there, if it weren’t for the medication. They force-fed me various chemicals that made my muscles spasm in wretched pain, but wouldn’t give me anything to counter the effect. I tried skulking away and forcing fingers down my throat but was discovered, there being nowhere to hide, and then they wouldn’t let me leave the sight of a nurse. The medication made me so sleepy but I wasn’t allowed to rest my eyes outside of the allotted hours of sleep.
Schizophrenia, they said. This didn’t come as any surprise. In my years of reading about shamanism I had learned that even amongst tribal peoples who retain their traditions of shamanism, sometimes the recently spirit-elected apprentice shaman would fall foul of “white man’s medicine” and invariably be diagnosed as schizophrenic. And if they took the medication it could permanently wreck any chance they had of finding their way and making it as shaman.
A friend I’d made - we sat painting silently together in occupational therapy - ran away and hanged herself. Another, more fortunate, had set out for the railway line to lay his head upon the rails and sleep, but was accosted during the course of the short journey by a woman lurking in the bushes, a patient on account of her nymphomania, who succeeded in changing his mind.
They never gave any kind of explanation why they were doing this to me. I assumed I was simply being punished, having failed so entirely in the quest to save my bird brother’s soul. And I actually could speak if I wanted to; I simply lived in fear of how my words would affect the world around me, the dumb butterflies of my words flapping up a destruction that sped the globe. In retrospect, had they even tried to explain what they were doing to me, this is the best they could possibly have come up with:
We believe your brain is producing more of the neurotransmitter dopamine than is normal (although we haven’t actually tested it), which is causing you to behave in a more than eccentric manner, which we think poses a danger to yourself or others. If you are actually producing an excess of dopamine it may just be symptomatic of other changes which are taking place, but we haven’t really looked beyond the dopamine production. We can’t actually slow the rate of dopamine production, but we can slow down the brain’s neuroreceptors’ acceptance of it. Dopamine seems to control behaviour that ranges from walking and repetitive movement to feeding and drinking; once we stop it from being readily accepted by the neuroreceptors you will experience Parkinson’s disease symptoms such as rigidity, tremor and spasm. I feel I should add that dopamine is only one of at least fifty, maybe a hundred or more, neurotransmitters, none of which we really understand, but other people that were acting a bit like you and took the medication are now fine on sickness benefit, with only occasional relapses. And some are even normal for the rest of their lives, although they do tend to die sooner as a side effect of the medication.
I couldn’t read either - or write - the world was simply too fragile for imperfect, unmeasured thought. But I did look along the book spines, catching the occasional clue of what I was to do. I found a handwritten book hidden dusty and lost behind the bookcase and in it learned of a pilgrim’s experimentation with alchemy. It wasn’t a cold factory of words like the other books, and after much thought I decided it was safe enough to look at. It was a vast work, beautifully illustrated with ornate symbology, that told of one man’s love affair with the art that became a science, and jumped from detailed chemical analysis to complex mathematical algorithm to heavily scored riddles and question marks and elusive scraps of sentences that nonetheless suggested their sense. Towards the end of the work the author had chosen to write the gentle, haiku-like work in a code, but it was easy to crack for he had simply replaced letters with his own icons and then also swapped the first and the last letter of each word around. It was a marvellous and compelling and inspirational work and when I finished it I put it back in its original hiding place, wondering how much more dust it would gather before being turned in human hands again.
From time to time a bat would slip through the crack of open window and through the bars and would flit about the place. I waited until they’d chased it around with a bed sheet for half an hour or more, as a control phase of the experiment, and then sent a signal to the creature from some deep backbrain chasm that spoke its language, and the bat would fly straight back out of the window. One of the patients ate the goldfish. Another filmed with the occupational therapy video recorder a vibrant Hamlet, starring what insects he could muster for the various parts, the prince himself a hawkshead moth who tragically died before the filming was complete and had to be tugged about with invisible thread since no understudy could be acquired.
One afternoon, tired of sitting with a brush and a hand that shook uncontrollably, I stopped to smoke a cigarette by the window, watching a moon hanging ghostlike in the clear sunny sky. One of the therapists came up to me and I knew it wouldn’t be for anything pleasant.
“That’s bad luck when the moon’s out in the day, you know,” he said. “Did you hear me? Bad luck.” I put all my energy into killing off his words before they could spread and infect anything or anyone in that room or beyond, and eventually he walked away.
An hour or so later I stood outside the building, waiting for the escort to take me back up to the ward, but no-one came. There was a sycamore spreading through the air above me and the thought came to me that its branches might offer a brief respite from the world gone mad and its cares and perhaps even my own, and I pulled myself up into its arms and foliage and climbed higher and higher, finding a comfortable vantage point from which to watch the commotion that erupted beneath when the escort did finally come to find me gone. They searched the buildings and behind the dustbins and they called out threats and then called in the police who alerted the outside world with their radios, but never once did they think to look in the tree. I’m up here, I thought to call, but since talking had become so alien to me - and they dissected to dessication any slight utterance that did pass my lips - I didn’t bother.
The cold dark that awaits the sun’s departure before creeping out of the east blew raggedly in, and I shivered there an hour or two more until they’d long given up on me. There wasn’t really anywhere I could get any clothes, so I decided to cut loose and hope that something would turn up along the way. Not that I was actually thinking. This was also now taboo, on account of thoughts causing just as much trouble abroad as words and near enough every chaotic action. I functioned now on an almost entirely instinctual level, like a wolf or a child. There wasn’t much got past me.
I lowered myself from the branches, slipping down the bark like a snake. I had only to keep to the shadows and the thickets and out onto the railway line, which I followed through the night, no one paying me much mind for no one cares to pay much mind to a lone figure skulking along a railway line at night.
Days were spent sleeping off the effects of the medication in plastic roofed dens deep within woods and once within a barn, which was warm and soft and beautiful, a nest of baby blackbirds mewling for the food their parents brought them. During a brief storm, huddled under a plastic sheet, two dogs picked up my scent and menaced and barked and bared their teeth, but their owner thought they had holed a fox and called them away.
The land itself took care of me as I walked. A scarecrow gave me his warm overcoat on the first night, and I took him up on the offer of his flat cap as well, for disguise. I looked so much like an honest to goodness tramp now, tramping around in its natural habitat, that I could forget about my persecutors and simply enjoy the freedom and beauty of the countryside after so many months locked up. I doubted I would ever sleep in a bed in a building again - far better to lie under the stars with the rest of nature’s animals. Why bother being alive if you didn’t feel it?
It was probably a little over a week when I stole away my own van in the night with the keys I’d kept hidden. I’d even had my bank card and a knife all this time. They had found my cannabis, but that was the most dispensable of the four and really no sacrifice at all. No-one had thought to put a stop on my meagre bank account - unless of course the money was laid there as bait so they could track my movements - so I cleaned it out, to fuel my trip. I pointed the van towards the southwest and headed for the Cornish peninsula. And trusted my luck. At the very worst they would drag me back and feed me drugs that made me doubt my brother’s existence. Anything less than this and I was truly blessed.
If they were still looking for me, they could find me in a moment. Surely they only had to listen to any random snatch of conversation, turn on the radio for ten random seconds, open any book and choose a paragraph at random, and they would know my plans. So I kept my plans to a bare minimum and drifted like a foraging beetle or soaring swift, with nothing to hold me anywhere but in a perpetuating now, which was gone and become something else before it had even drawn breath. The van I eventually backed far off the road into a thick copse and covered it with stray vegetation. And from there I proceeded to be as invisible as possible, and set about trying to work out whether the butterfly flapping its wings causes the hurricane, or is rather dancing the same poetry that the hurricane is dancing. And most of all to call my bird brother to me.