Mirror, mirror

What is that strange whimpering noise? It echoes round inside my head like a rotting dream. Like a hound tied to a tree inside a storm of rain. Inside my head. Like a storm of echoes inside a rotting tree.

I need to stop the thinking. It has eroded my senses ever since I took that helmet-on-helmet whack.

Concussion protocol be damned. I managed to fake it and went back on. Took another whack. Maybe that’s where it started?

I was blind. Couldn’t see a damn thing, though I heard the team doctor talking, asking me to follow his finger. I can’t see for chrissakes. How can I follow your finger if I can’t see? Then all sensation seemed to cease. At least for a while.

I became aware again in hospital. Small noises, maybe they were voices. Then they said to a woman who called herself my Mom that they thought I might have had detached retinas but it was just that my brain had decided to stop responding to external stimuli while it dealt with its own problems. They thought I was still out to it. In some ways I guess I was, but I could think.

My brain made decisions about itself without my involvement? Is the brain independent? Can it make decisions I might disagree with? Is one part of the brain arguing with another part?

Do I have a brain chimera? A twin’s brain absorbed into my brain? Or is a new persona roaming at will in my thoughts, my motivations?

‘I’d prefer to see and hear’ I said to my thoughts ‘so give me back my sight, my hearing. Whatever you are, stop making decisions without me.’

My sight came back like an eclipse grudgingly sliding off the surface of the moon. My hearing rode the eclipse like a rodeo rookie, bringing tinnitus and a tinkling of little bells.  That faded, which was a pity. I had looked forward to dropping tintinnabulation into conversations.  

After a few days the doctors decided I was fine and they sent me home, with orders to rest and not exercise while my damaged brain healed.

Define ‘fine’! Someone keeps trying to take over my thoughts, my impulses, my motivations. I tried to tell the doctors but they laughed and said my confused thoughts would settle down in a while.

Define ‘a while’. Sounds to me like an excuse covering ‘we have no freaking idea’.

They sent me home anyway. I had no say in the matter. Seems to happen to me a lot lately.

Janey came to visit. She apologized for not coming to see me in hospital.

Thanks for not caring enough. I blinked. Yep, I thought that. Not like me. Then the memory drifted into my conscious.

I didn’t get up from the sofa. I stared at her and grunted replies to her questions.

It was rude of me, sure, but I had remembered a conversation between two of the team when I was supposedly unconscious in the hospital bed. I seemed to remember it, though the memory was hazy, half-formed. About Janey and Boneyard the quarterback.

“Jake doesn’t know does he.”

“No, though everyone else seems to.”

“Someone ought to tell him.”

“Assuming he makes it out of this.”

Serving a greasy slab of betrayal to me on a great big crazy-glazed plate.

Janey straightened up, cast me a dirty look and walked out to the kitchen where Mom was cooking. They whispered but I heard most of it. Strange. It was almost like someone else was hearing and playing the words in my head.

“Is he all right?” Janey said. “He seems…different somehow.”

“The doctors said he could take a while to recover. He isn’t allowed to play for at least two weeks, and you know how much he loves his football”

“Still…”

“I know sweety but give him a little time. The old Jake will be back with us soon.”

The old Jake, I thought. I wonder who she’s talking about? Someone different to her son lounging on the sofa? The guy who was wondering if he dreamed that conversation in the hospital or if it was real?

Maybe the girl I had been crazy in love with was someone else completely. Someone happy to cheat on me behind my back. With Boneyard. Boneyard the Beast. Not his best friend, but… the team.

There’s that whimpering again. Like a stinking river through the rotting gutter of my innards. Like a bolus crawling through my bowel, an alien substance cruising the canals of my guts. A cruel intruder.

The back door slammed. The Mom person came into the living room.

“Are you all right J?” I remembered that. She called me J. Not Jay, J. You can’t make the name Jake any shorter than that.

“Mmmm,” I grunted.

“Janey left. She said you were very terse with her.”

“Did she seem embarrassed to you?”

“Why would she be embarrassed?”

“Like she was embarrassed to tell me something…something personal.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Something I heard. Heard people saying in hospital.”

“You were unconscious.”

“I could hear. Sometimes.”

“Are you sure you weren’t dreaming. Janey’s a lovely girl. I really like her. I thought you did too.”

I shut my eyes and laid back on the sofa. She got the message and went back to the kitchen.

She called back. “Janey said she’d drop by later. You’ll be on your own so you can have a good chat. Clear the air.”

The air needs clearing?

“Where are you going?” I said.

“Have you forgotten I work nights?” She laughed. Like she thought I couldn’t possibly have forgotten that. I didn’t reply. I had no idea she worked nights and no idea what she did. Waitress? Shelf-stacker? Whore?

Where did that come from? A nasty thought, as if from somewhere else in my mind.

I couldn’t remember much about Mom. Just that she was probably my Mom and she was looking after me. That thought, the word ‘whore’, didn’t seem normal. Came out of nowhere. Weird.

Mom seemed attached to me in a nice kind of way. I guessed there wasn’t a Dad with us or she wouldn’t be working nights. I couldn’t remember a father.

Maybe she was having it off with Boneyard?

My head jerked back. Where were these thoughts coming from? They were ridiculous! It was like I was looking at a mirror and the face on the other side was saying outrageous things that did not come from my own thoughts.

I often used imagery to get myself to sleep, imagining myself floating down a river or watching a sunset. So I imagined pointing a shotgun at a mirror and blowing it to pieces.

But the face stayed there and tittered, more real than before. Disgusting, creepy. The mirror re-formed around the face.

Drugs. They must have given me some really strong stuff. Messing with my head. It felt like my own thoughts were retreating into a corner. Then a mass of rats poured into the room, each carrying a pill or a syringe. Rotting rats. The smell was over-powering then the rats overwhelmed me and I yelled out and thrashed my arms.

Mom ran back into the living room. “What is it?”

I stared at her as the rats dissolved and disappeared.

“Hallucination,” I gasped.

She knelt down beside me and took my hand, wiped my forehead with the tea towel she was carrying. I took a deep breath, felt the calm spread through me.

I squeezed her hand. That felt good. I squeezed a bit harder. She winced. I squeezed really hard. It just felt enjoyable, her grimace, her squeak of pain. Harder.

She slapped me with her other hand and pulled back. I let her go. I blinked. I was in the mirror looking out. I laughed.

She ran from the room and soon I heard the front door slam. Bitch.

I got up and went to the kitchen. Warm chocolate chip cookies on the bench. I wonder who cooked those? I tried one but didn’t like it. I threw them into the rubbish bin. Found a packet of Oreos in the cupboard and ate those. I put the empty packet onto the baking tray. That made me laugh too.

I turned the TV on but there was something weird with a crowded stadium where teams of men in different coloured tights were throwing a ball and smashing into each other while other men in black and white stripes blew whistles and stopped play continually. IT made no sense to me.

I went back into the kitchen and noticed a block of wood on the bench which had knife handles sticking out of it. I pulled the knives out one at a time and thought about what the different shapes were for. I remembered a man, maybe it was my father, taking me hunting when I was a lot younger. Tried to remember the shape of the knife he had used to butcher a doe he had shot. Where was that? In Idaho? The knife was different to the ones in the wood block. A Bowie knife! I remember the knife name. The only Bowie that came to mind was a musician though. He had danced in stage in tights. Why do people wear tights? When you take off tights you peel them down your legs.

I remembered the way a doe’s skin peeled from the flesh after it had been shot. A little hissing noise as the skin separated from the flesh.

Would a person’s skin peel off just like that? I must have been 10 years old then. A man had shot the doe. Maybe that was my father?

Was I the same person? I walked out to the hall and looked at myself in the mirror. Not 10. A very different face looked back at me. Distorted. Angry. Holding a knife like a weapon. Ugly, cruel. Who was that? Is that the same mirror?

The doorbell rang. I put the knife on the dresser under the mirror and answered the door. Janey. A clinging black dress. Black tights. Long dark hair, the small round face. Bitch.

“Sorry I was rude before,” someone said. It wasn’t me. The voice from the face in the mirror. Faking kindness, imagining cruelty. I have to stop that. A last attempt to regain control. I imagined a shotgun, but the mirror laughed. The shotgun melted. I faded into the background. Impotent.

“Come on in,” it said. “Would you like a cookie? Mom just made some.”