The Trance
Excerpt from New Trident
There is a desk in this strange room which is the matte brown color of dried blood, as if it had pooled, congealed, and spread itself, allowing only the allusion of wood to exist on its periphery. The rings of the wood like sickly veins spreading out from the dried, pooled blood in which no rings can be seen. The tiny gnarls in the wood like liver spots. Above the desk are two shelves, each possessing the same dimensions and each spaced evenly apart. On the lower shelf are several small trophies awarded to this man when he was a boy for insignificant achievements, an assortment of pens and pastel-colored mechanical pencils, and a small plastic wizard figure bedecked in a midnight blue cloak, studded with white stars. The wizard sculpture is the same height as a trophy which bears the inscription “Third Place Beryl High School Spelling Bee.” The upper shelf contains a collection of cards and letters arranged haphazardly, some in their envelopes, some loose or bent or mangled from who knows what event could mangle a card. Letters he presumably received from girlfriends he’d not thought about in years, cards from grandparents, from relatives, from friends given to him on birthdays when he was at an age when friends gave cards to one another. I can turn without adjusting my position in the green, nylon-upholstered chair I’m sitting on, and I see his bed behind me and at an angle from me. I can turn over my other shoulder and see a stack of books and a twenty-gallon fish tank. The tank bubbles and emits a soothing sound. At night, it glows softly, green and blue. That is enough for today, I think, and walk back to the bed, and I lie on my back, looking up at the ceiling.
Sometimes I think I’m someone else, I think. Sometimes I think I’m a boy living a life I’ve never lived before, in a family unknown to me, with habits, relations, thoughts, possessions, and values foreign to me and to my own. I’m writing in a journal sometimes as this boy. Yes, when I think I’m this boy, I’m writing things down in a journal and with each word I write the projection becomes more concrete. With each paragraph, I am pulled deeper into this false life.
​
The strangest thing happened today, and the boy dares not share much more than that. But he consoles himself with the fact that he can provide context, at least – he can allude to the strangeness without spoiling the secret that he prizes for himself.
The boy thinks about this and then writes on: the strange event in question did not happen to him, but rather positioned itself as an actor on a stage, acting out its strangeness for the benefit of the boy and for him and him alone. Him, an audience of one.
And he thought this actor-audience relationship appropriate, as we all do when extraordinary things reveal themselves to us. Why shouldn’t they, when we are the world that we create and continue to shape for ourselves? We, in our delusions of grandeur, perceive the world only within our field of vision, in the range afforded by our senses, and with a dull, ego-obscured conception that the world persists outside of the self because one remembers a world that is more or less the same regardless of whether and to what extent the individual interacts with it. Skyscrapers construct themselves, and, once built, remain as they are; streams flow in the same direction and do not but on rare occasions alter their course; the tawny, flea-bitten stray at the end of the lane prowls and skitters after mice and wails its lost and pitiable wails to a world which chooses not to listen.
The cat will always do this, for there is an inertia to the world. There is in an inertia in the world. And how can it not be so?
This is the philosophy of the boy. And the boy takes pride in this, because he sees value in possessing a set of guiding principles, without which the widening gyre turns and pulls and grows ever wider. We are all ships in this gyre, thinks the boy. He is afraid of the water.
​
I know I am not this boy. I look at my shoulders and recognize them as my own, feminine, pale, light. I know I am not this boy, but sometimes it seems impossible that I am me and not him.
​
The widening gyre turned less today. The boy, with great satisfaction, felt that he had succeeded in imposing himself upon the whirlpool and enforcing an order to it that he felt proud to enforce.
He did not do this consciously, and he did not even conduct himself in terms of ships and whirlpools – who in their right mind thinks like that, laughs the boy – but he did it all the same.
​
I watch him, and I see him write. And I know his words, but I narrate them myself. It is my voice that speaks. He knows me.
The boy frowned, and wrinkles vexed the bridge of his nose and around his eyes. The day had started well — or so it seemed to him. But somewhere the vigor that he always felt at the start of each new day gave way to a pervasive and general sense of malaise. First, on the walk to a series of chores (grocery, bank, and library) the wind blew too forcefully, forcing him to hold onto the brim of his baseball cat lest it get blown into the street. Either that, or he was faced with the option of cinching it too tight around his head, an option which he entertained for all of a minute. Once the boy arrived at the library, he was met with a gauntlet of sleeping, disheveled, and sickly-looking men adorning the concrete steps leading into the main entryway. A young mother, clutching an infant in one hand and a canvas bag half-full of groceries in the other attempted to negotiate the passage, but she quickly gave up. The boy, too, gave up when he gingerly took a step onto the second stair when an older gentleman who had been asleep and grumbling to himself, awoke and opened his maw, emitting a half-choked sort of snort. It reminded the boy vaguely of a nature show that he’d seen in which a penguin was forced to navigate a beach strewn with walruses, their bulbous bodies and scarred faces marring the scenery of a seascape otherwise steeped in ethereal beauty. The boy left, disgusted.
From there, he lost track of time: the streets diverged and met and forked and converged in a repeated pattern of getting lost and found and distracted and utterly turned around. When he awoke from his hypnosis of movement, he found himself in a part of town he rarely frequented. It was residential and the houses, while more infrequent than his own neighborhood, were more expensive and set further from the road than his own.
New Bedford bordered a park to its north, and the houses closest to the park (and those which boasted a view thereof) commanded the highest price. Their mullioned windows bespoke luxury; their curtains hung delicately in strips of chiffon; their ornaments and fixtures and finishes were in excellent taste. The boy liked this, and he thought to himself that he’d like to grow up and shape himself into the sort of person capable of acquiring such a home, of peeling back chiffon curtains and opening mullioned windows to a world that smiled upon him.
Then, the boy walked home. He was conscious of his walking, and this (his being conscious) made the walk feel immeasurably long and boring. As he entered his neighborhood, two small children were engaged in a savage fight over possession of a large, red playground ball. The ball was deflated and lay in a pathetic heap. And this, rather than the cries of one of the children or the bloodied elbows of both, drew his attention.
It was late afternoon when he got home, and he slept through several episodes of a Spanish soap opera. The soap actually interested him, but it drained him to try to piece together the plot through the facial expressions of the characters or the tone of the music. Strings played frantically as the patriarch reeled from a bullet wound; the brass boomed as the culprit of the attack was found and held accountable; a dark cellar elicited an eerie, high-pitched squeaking. And so on and so forth. Around hour two of his watching, his brother came home, and the boy listened to his brother recount his day. It struck him as particularly boring, but the boy realized that if he was to chronicle his own day, it would appear more so, so the boy stayed quiet.
Dinner was cut short by the announcement that a notable game of soccer was being televised, prompting his brother and father to leave the table. His mother, smiling at him sheepishly as they were the only two members of the family to remain at the table, began clearing dishes and bringing them into the kitchen. His brother had eaten very little of a complicated-looking dish on which the boy’s mother had spent a considerable amount of time, and the boy felt embarrassed on his mother’s behalf, and angry at his brother. The silence was punctuated by a primal whoop from the TV room, and father and (other) son seemed altogether oblivious of the work his mother had expended and the vile thoughts that the boy was directing toward them.
Vile, vile, vile – his thoughts, and people. People, vile; they were, every one. A blood-dimmed tide swelled and flowed in the boy and his movements were rage, personified. His fingers clasped a knife, and his palms were clammy. The cold metal felt hot to the touch. The boy struck the table with the knife’s blunt end and a small indentation bore witness to his hatred.
The boy’s mother entered the dining room, and the veil that had fallen was lifted. The rage was stemmed, and his violence wasted away. The boy forced a smile.
A circular clock perched on the mantel and a spindly black hand kept time: “hate, hate, hate,” it ticked.
​
Who is this boy? Why are these his thoughts? Why do they feel like a memory? Why doesn’t the memory feel like the past?
​
Seven times at the dinner table today his father coughed and on the fifth such cough, the bother’s mother exhorted him to leave the table and take care of himself.
That sounds bad, honey.
It isn’t.
Doesn’t it hurt your lungs?
Nope.
Your bronchial tubes?
It really doesn’t.
The boy’s mother left the table feeling she wasn’t being heard and the boy’s father pushed roast vegetables around his plate, his posture evincing that he had the same complaint.
The boy’s brother was on his best behavior because he wanted to go see a concert at the Masonry, a music hall which didn’t card minors and was well-known as a skeevy establishment whose clientele consisted principally in drug addicts and would-be offenders. He asked the boy’s father questions about his work (he worked as a general manager at Target, and ostensibly hated it but also saw it as a wellspring of interesting dinner table and party conversations, so referenced it with some frequency) and checked his phone under the table while the boy’s mother was in the kitchen and while the boy’s father was distracted. The boy was directly engaged exactly one time during dinner, and it was because his father had dropped his fork, and it clattered noisily before settling at the feet of the boy.
Pass that, would you? How was your day, anyhow?
Sure. Fine.
Make any new friends?
New? His brother chimed in with acid in his voice. He should be happy to make any.
I have friends, the boy replied haughtily.
“Li, ar, li, ar, li, ar,” ticked the click.
The boy shot an angry glance in its direction.
​
I am sick, I think. Part of me wants this to stop. Part of me knows this blurring the lines of personhood and identity is not good for me; that it is wrong; that I am sick. But part of me can’t help it, and slipping into his world is like lying under warm covers on a cold morning. And I don’t want to get up.
​
There’s no escaping what is plainly, and painfully, obvious, from the date at the top of this diary entry. Today is Valentine’s Day. Which, in all honesty, means very little to the boy. But the date, fifteen days before whatever term there was for the extra day came from a leap year (which it was) and three days after the anniversary of his mother’s recovery from throat cancer and a day prior to the commencement of his midterms, was a source of stress for the boy all the same because of the significance the date evidently had for others in the boy’s peer group.
Who would take whom to the dance? Who got the greatest number of Val-o-grams? Who plucked up the courage to ask out Valerie Knowles, the most attractive junior at Henry Lewis High? The questions and answers were beyond banal for the boy, and the repetition of such banalities forced a dislike for the holiday which surprised him, considering himself an otherwise reasonable and level-headed individual.
The boy was writing from his desk today, and it was still light outside. The sun cast reflections of light against his neighbors’ upstairs bathroom window, and pools of undulating, quivering light danced on the glass. The sky was bloody to the west and a charming robin’s egg blue in the east.
Thinking it profound, the boy sat back in his chair and meditated on the notion that things past are beautiful and romantic and things to come are dangerous and lurid.
A call came from downstairs. It was mother, asking if he was feeling any better. This succeeded in grounding him. He had told her he was feeling under the weather: a feeble attempt to ignore his family and their tedious questions and to avoid attending a party thrown by a friend of his, Ghislaine, who invited him to parties out of either pity or what he decided was a morbid curiosity. Whatever her intentions, the boy never attended. She nevertheless invited him to every event that she hosted.
​
Am I losing my mind? I feel lucid. It’s hard to say.
​
Perhaps in connection with his fake illness, the boy took ill on February 15, and was sick the entire next week. This delighted the boy, as it meant that he could watch all the television he could stomach. And it delighted his mother, who thought she saw through the falsity of his “being sick,” and was quite pleased to be evidently proved wrong. The boy’s brother either did not know or did not care, but the boy’s father, however, was annoyed.
Ignorant of the fact that a vent leading from the kitchen to the boy’s room carried along and amplified the sound of conversations, the boy overhead the following from his father as he got home from work to the news that the boy had stayed home from school again.
He’s not sick. He’s faking.
He really is, and you shouldn’t say that about him – he’s your son.
If he was my son, he’d suck it up and go to school. He’s missing midterms, he’s missing wrestling. He’s underweight, friendless, and spends too much time walking in the park and moping around.
He’s depressed, his mother said, softly.
Then that’s because he’s making himself depressed, his father yelled, and then followed a great deal of clattering about as his father set about cleaning up his dishes from dinner and rinsing whatever assorted glasses which contained at various points his afterwork beer and pre-dinner waters (a big believer in hydration, the boy’s father) and dinner beer.
The boy could picture it now. His mother, in her long, navy blue cotton tee shirt and her skirt which extended nearly to her feet and sported a florid checkerboard pattern. His mother, in her consternation at his father, leaning back against the corner of the countertop, the heel of her foot in the air and resting against the front of the lazy soon. The boy’s father, in his all-black general manager’s attire, his hair combed and his face clean-shaven. The boy’s father, in constant motion, exciting the air with his energetic cleaning and rinsing and (probable) muttering. All the while, the family’s kitchen – cramped, cluttered, off-white, and constructed of cheap-looking linoleum flooring and plaster – guaranteed that his father’s mood would only worsen.
After a while, the din subsided, and the boy could picture even more clearly the effort at composure from his father, the uncomfortable but engaged expression on his mother’s face, and all the while the hum of the polyurethane fridge, the eerie white glow of the single bulb overhead, the creased, cracked, warped, and watermarked ceiling above the both of them.
It’s not his fault, I know. His father spoke first. This surprised the boy, and he sat up in bed despite a conscious effort he had made earlier to ignore what they were saying about him.
Yes.
But I just wish –
Yes.
I mean, when I was –
But you’re not him.
I know.
And he isn’t you.
I know. And then, after a pause, his father snorted derisively. Isn’t that the goddamn truth.
Isn’t that the goddamn truth, the boy thought to himself, as he laid back in bed and shut his eyes against the dying sunlight and ambient noise of the outdoors and the continued conversation emanating from downstairs.
The boy closed his eyes against all of that and met with visions of men in suits, smoking cigars in boardrooms; with vague and delightful notions of a future boy with money and riches and prestige; with a hazy conception of the world recognizing his import for what it is. And he saw a world which apologized for being blind to him and a world which celebrated his magnanimity as he forgave them each and every one. The world as it one day must be, in short. The light through his eyelids dimmed and when he opened them at last, the sun had set.
Yes, I am losing my mind. My mind is lost.