The Horror and the I.V.

1481WORDS

THE HORROR and the I.V.

My name is Nathan Clarke Earle, but I hate “Nathan” so I go by “Clarke”. I suppose I am a misogynist, as I am a committed bachelor. No, I am not gay. I’m also misanthropic. Had I a sense of humor, which thank the god I don’t believe in I don’t, the best description of my attitude toward others is that line from tom lehrer’s “the merry minuet: ‘and I don’t like anybody very much’”. In fact, not only do I not like people, I enjoy using my position and authority to hurt them. I understand that the preachers and bible-thumpers call that “evil”. Well, suppose it is? I enjoy it, at that’s all that matters. This “heaven or hell’ thing is just bullshit. Pleasure in the now is all that matters. 2

I am the director of social services for a suburban county, and have one hundred twenty-two employees. A ripe field for torment, which I harvest from time to time. Not too often, not to much. As the green lady says: “these things must be done delicately.”A favorite amusement was to set employees against one another by joining them in the break room and dropping surgically-precise tidbits of rumor an innuendo about someone who wasn’t there. Barrymores “hamlet” wasn’t a better performance.

It all came to an end, however, when, last january, I slipped on the ice and wound up in the hospital with a broken knee, torn achilles tendon and a “subdural hematoma”: bleeding on the brain. 3The surgeon said that they could do the brain bit without anesthesia, as the brain doesn’t feel pain to itself, but that the knee and tendon required it. As my pain right then was a twelve on thescale of one-to-ten, I just snarled “get on with it, damn you!”, whereupon a nurse slid a needle in to my right arm. I’d had rgery before, of a minor nature, but always the needle and the sleep=juice were painless. This time, the needle felt like it was red-hot and the anesthetic was lava. I tried to scream, but could not, because I had no mouth. As I drifted off, the face of the surgeon seemed to become flexible, as if it were a living mask with something hideous behind it. I slept.

i don’t know whether I awoke or was dreaming. I had my mouth back, but felt no need to scream. The surgery was over and to my surprise there was no post-operative pain. The iv was still connected, but now the needle was inserted into my brain. The top of my skull was gone. And of all things, I was in my pajamas, robe and slippers, standing on the roof of my house! Weirder still, there was a Victorian=era sleigh, eight reindeer and yes, Santa Claus.

Somewhere in my past, probably at my annual denist’s office, I had read an article that explained that our english “Santa Claus” derives from the dutch “Saant Niklaus”. Try saying that, and you’ll understand. Moore wrote the poem in New York, which had been Dutch, and the legend began with them.This Claus, however, was full-sized, as were the reindeer.

“Santas” gestured to me to come sit in the sleigh, and I found myself compelled to obey. I sat, and one of the last reindeer turned and bared its fangs at me. That’s right, fangs. These creatures had never seen Finland. “Hell, maybe”, I thought.

“Precisely, Clarke”, came a voice inside my head. Santa was looking at me, but had not spoken. “My pets are from hell, and so am I. That’s where we’re going, and you, at least, aren’t coming back. It’s Christmas, the season you loathe, and we are in Chelsea, where you live. It’s where Moore wrote his poem. His middle name was also “Clarke”, which is why I chose his poem as the theme for our journey. You will also note that in the few moments we have been here, we have shrunk. Moore’s poem specified that I be a “jolly old elf”, the sleigh be “miniature” and the reindeer “tiny”. And so they have become. The shrinking will continue. It is the law in hell: the “law of diminishing with no return.” With that he lifted his head, cackled and gave out a bone-chilling shriek of laughter. He picked up the reins and turned to face me. His face was the same as the surgeons!

“Here we go, Clarke! You’re going home, the “place” you’ve always yearned for, thouoh it’s not a “place” like New Nork or London. More like a condition. You see – look! The empire state building all lit up. Isn’t it pretty. Your last time seeing it. As I was saying, William Blake was only partly right when he wrote “The Marriage of Heavem and Hell.” Hell, as you will discover, is insubstantial and becomes more so the deeper we delve into it. Heaven, as C.S. Lewis retorts in ‘The Great Divorce’, becomes more and more substantial. Ah, we are now out over the Atlantic, and it’s totally dark. Perfect condition for the transition. He uttered a phrase in what must have been a language pre-dating humans and so foul as to defy description. The darkness before us became impossibly darker, and a yawning entrance like the mouth of a cave appeared. On the rock wall above it were Dante’s soul-devouring words: “All Hope Abandon, Ye Who Enter Here”.

We entered and the darkness closed behind us. The air was that of a city with chemical factories devoid of regulation. It was a pale, sulfurous yellow mixed with streaks of gray-green and orange that swirled in a constant mild breeze. The shrinking continued, and I measured its progress by the size of the “reindeer” in front of me. They were now the size of field mice, and I thought, of course, of that stupid story for stupid chidren, “Cinderella”. Children disgust me, and I them. Works for me.

Although I was experiencing no physical pain nor emotional fear, for the last hour or so, if time exists here, I had felt a growing sense of dread, as if something unspeakably hideous were waiting farther on. “You are correct, Clarke!”, came the voice inside my head. “ There is, indeed.” Perversely, my thoughts, if that’s what they were, went not to the pending horror, but to the trivial question of how a creature with a head now the size of a flea’s could think. I was that creature now.

“Soon”, I saw or seemed to see faces alongside us. I was astonished that the faces were not deformed,ugly or what one would expect in Hell. They were, in fact, radiantly beautiful while remaining humanly recognizable. Many, indeed most, of them, were my former employees or, more correctly, victims. The voice sounded again. “Of course, Clarke, you are neither seeing nor thinking, because you have shrunk to the size of a bacterium. All that you are experiencing is the result of the iv dripping into your brain, which is very much alive and well back in Chelsea. You see, Blake is right: Hell is ephemeral and subjective. None of this is “true” in the scientific sense of substantive existence, but it is very, very real. The substance entering your brain is gradually not only stimulating certain parts of it, but also destroying parts of it. If Doctor Mengele had possessed it, he could have experimented by injecting Alzheimer’s into his “patients”. He didn’t have it. We do.

“The faces you perceive are not here. They are in heaven and, as you see, have been transfigured into their true, substantial and glorious selves. They are examining you through the heavenly equivalent of a microscope. The I.V. drip into your brain is what is causing you to shrink, and soon you will be too small even for an electron ‘scope. You see, in heaven they grow not only spiritually but intellectually. It isn’t a college or university, but more like Plato’s academy or even Socrates’ group of students. You are a specimen now.”

The faces withdrew as I shrank even more. I somehow had left the sleigh, Santa and reindeer far back, and now existed by and as myself alone, with the Voice. The induced Alzheimer’s had removed my consciousness of self. I will not bore you any longer with descriptions of each stage of reduction. Sufficient to say is that as you read this, I have shrunk far, far below the level of a quantum particle and into realms undreamed of by human scientists. And I will continue to shrink forever, for I now realize, with indescribable horror, that there is no limit to the diminution of Hell or its inhabitants, and that The Hideous Vision that awaits will always and eternally be a dreaded expectation, I still shrink.

THE END