Synesthesia

Synesthesia from Terri Timely on Vimeo.

Nonverbal Love Affair

I work in a psychiatric hospital, in an acute care unit for adolescents with mental illnesses and developmental disabilities. When I learned what population I would be working with, I immediately pictured children with Down Syndrome, with misplaced epicanthic folds and soft, low ears. Once on the unit I realized most of them look just fine, if a bit small for their age, and pale from spending so much time indoors. Their appearance can be deceptive, especially in the mornings. 

Four days a week I clock in at 6:45 am and listen to the night nurse brief the morning staff on the state of affairs on the unit. I pour myself some coffee and soon start waking the kids up and showering them. They go to bed early, and frequently wake up well before school and loiter in the hallway, waiting for breakfast. 

At 8 o’clock I pass out breakfast, single servings of cereal, milk, juice, fruit. Some of the patients are awake and demanding, some file past with the lethargy of college students in a school cafeteria, their eyes focusing on some space either in front of me or behind me, pointing at their preferred foods. If I were naive, I would have thought they might shake off their somnolent expression, but they won’t. 

Two in particular wake up early, both barely verbal and prone to violent outbursts. One is a young man who could still pass for a Junior Highschooler and the other a fair haired girl with the mystery of a cat who won’t let you pet it. They approach the nurse’s station and grab their food, then sit next to each other in the airy, still-dark dayroom, and watch cartoons. Toddlers go through a stage when they cannot be made to play cooperatively, and this is how these two prefer to relate, distant yet orbiting around the same hub. Neither acknowledges the other any more than they acknowledge me, their eyes passing over others with no more interest than that given to a lamp or a cup. 

Every morning I wish they would look at each other. They would like each other. But every morning they pick up their things and bounce off each other, as if they were particles in space, in the dark, still dayroom with locked doors at either end.

Oscillation

Today I watched a girl wake up and bash her head into a door until two men carried her to a seclusion room and restrained her hands and feet. She kept pulling her hair out , so I tied it back with an elastic. With a pomp of hair on the crown of her head she looked almost cheerleaderish as she shook her head to refuse food and water, and would not take the medicine her nurse brought in a small plastic cup. Her eyes followed imaginary phantoms around the room– first at one side of the small, brightly lit seclusion area, then tracking something in the space over her head, then recoiling in horror at some invisible thing on the other side of her. I sat in the doorway, monitoring the color of her fingers and her breathing. 

A doctor and a nurse came by and gave her an injection to calm her down. Eventually she stopped abrading her hands against the side of her padded bed and made eye contact with me long enough to ask, “Do you know how to speak Arabic?”

“No, I don’t know any Arabic.”

“I do.”

Then she sang in a tremulous voice, caught somewhere between laughing and wailing. As I said, I don’t know any Arabic, but the sounds in her mouth were clear and confident as she gave a soft delivery to “You Are My Sunshine,” as if she were singing to a baby.

Back when I was an English major…

What else? I am thinking about The Masque of the Red Death and rereading “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” I just checked out Wisconsin Death Trip and Child of God. All fitting, currently I am considering the Southern Gothic style. I learned this term yesterday. It is making me think about the graphic novel Preacher. Somebody buy me the series and I ‘ll probably put out.

I used to read a friend’s copies of “Preacher” after a breakneck race around the dorms in my rollerblades, then wheel into the elevator, drop some kahlua or whiskey (usually kahlua) into my Doctor Pepper. From there I would head to the brightly lit basement and would stay awake as long I could reading. I miss those days. I studied harder back then, too. To be fair, I was moodier. But I did like reading that stuff.

Ok, no more beer. Must switch to coffee. I’m pulling myself in two directions right now. mmmm…..

“A Decisive Moment on the Underground Railroad” III

We hid outside the perimeter until dusk, waiting for our passengers to reach the escape hatch. I watched the shadows creep across that wall, certain she would surface, but the sun dipped lower and lower until our guide signaled us to go. All day I stared at that hatch, and in the end it only took a moment to break my heart.

6/18/2009

I arrived in Keflavik International Airport around 11:45pm, the night of the 18th.I had been terrified, imagining stepping off the plane into a slurry of freezing rain and sand storms, but the weather was breezy and cool, maybe 50F. There were purple flowers all around the landing strip, so counter my expectations I found them comical. The sky was purple and dusky and began getting lighter as I took the bus into Reykjavik, about 30 minutes away. 

My bus driver took me right to the entrance of Reykjavik’s only campsite for somewhere around $10 US. He was a sweet guy, chatting with me and advising me to drink plenty of the water at the campsite. I had already emailed the management team there, and been informed that the site never filled. There is an attached hostel, which was full, but I was on a tight budget anyway. Due to past ad-hoc urban camping, I arrived in Keflavik and honest-to-god I thought I might just roll my sleeping bag out behind some trees and sleep there the first night. I couldn’t wrap my head around Iceland, there was no night and there are no trees.

Camp sites were 1000 kronur a night, around $9.50 US with the exchange rate that summer; tax was included, as always. The campsite was mostly sedate, though the city was filled with revelers. June 17th is some national holiday, or possibly the day before. Icelanders are known to party the day before a holiday, and spend the next day sleeping off their hangovers. As I set up little one-person Coleman, I saw two young men stumbling up the very slight hill of the campsite, before collapsing into a partially unzipped tent.

BDUs, Pufferfish, Forensic Psychology and Sacral Foramina

I am wearing army-issue pants and it makes me feel militant. More than usual. It also makes me feel bigger than I am, because they are HUGE on me, which is good. If I am threatened, I can PUFF UP; like a puffer fish.*
What else?

Oh yeah, I remembered the term “Potemkin” and was frustrated that I hadn’t had it in my vocabulary when it might have applied. Not that the company I kept would have appreciated the reference. Today I also considered the words pedantic and condescending, but refrained.

I saw the movie “Day Night Day Night” for free, because the guy in the window was nice. I didn’t have a dollar to see the movie, but he let me in anyway. I’m glad I didn’t pay to see it. I guess maybe it would have been worth a dollar. It was, let me think, EXACTLY like the other independent films I’ve seen lately. “Cue the close up on the distraught girl’s face. Good. Now keep it there for at least 3 minutes.” Booooo on that director.

Otherwise, I spent most of my day memorizing the minutia of the upper portion of the skeleton. Sacral foramina, anyone? We discussed the technicalities of divorce proceedings and child custody arrangements in my morning class, and I was disgusted by our legal system.

*This will only work outside of a woodland setting, since they are camouflage. Visual displays don’t work well if they are not visible, understandably. It’s like giving the finger in the dark, which is fun, but not effective.

“End of the Line” III

I arrived early to my stop, though I knew that it would not make the train come any sooner, nor was there any possibility that it would be early, nor late. The ticket had perforation marks where it had attached to rolls of identical tickets and which I frayed off with my fingernail. The river coursed past confidently, as if this had always been the path of its inevitable march downhill. Patiently watching the water, I pulled the faded piece of paper out, ready to hand it to a conductor who wasn’t even there yet. It had been hard to find, almost nobody had tickets for this line anymore, but there still were a few left around.

This is the season that the train went under, late fall, I read it in the newspapers at the library. There was a photograph of a handful of gray-haired men in Sam Spade suits. The Army Corps of Engineers routed the river slightly to the west, flooding the tracks and displacing a few dairy cows. Compensation for the land was adequate; most people were getting out of the farming business by then, anyway. The flooding hadn’t garnered much attention, the headline on the story read “Some cows may not give milk for days.” Maybe somewhere under the water there are still a few stubborn heifers grazing alongside the muddy tracks, chewing river moss.

It had been a sedate undertaking, considering the effort involved in moving a river. So sedate that the next morning, a sleepy crowd metronomically boarded their train and handed their tickets to the conductor. A little girl’s head bobbed and settled against her mother’s shoulder, her mother holding her daughter’s feverish hand. The passengers, heading off to work at the bank or the life insurance office, were the sort to take life on its own terms. Sensible suits and neatly cut nails. Get up early, go to work, the routine punctuated only by the odd illness and subsequent trip to the doctor’s office where a file would be made and pushed back amongst shelves of identical files. A man who had the look of an actuarian opened the paper and closed his eyes without ever making sense of the words, resignedly letting the pastoral surroundings escape as the train urged on and away from its stop. Everyone had been right on time, arriving a few minutes early, milling about until the train arrived, as it always did.

The momentum of the train did not allow for much slowing as the train sped into the water. The apathetic glassiness of the water was barely disturbed, until the smoke stack submerged and bubbled for a moment, and then ceased as the inner workings of the engine were extinguished. Water, I imagine, poured through the windows and rushed in first at the passenger’s feet. Had the little girl pulled her feet up as it flowed over her favorite shoes? Had her mother squeezed her hand to quell some childish panic?  We all end up at the end of the line eventually, little girl.

A few moments before my train’s scheduled stop, I could see the black shoulders of the locomotive ascending through the brown water, the light still shining as it must in the darkness of the river’s bottom, and the conductor’s face slowly coming into view. Water rushed out of the door as it slid open, a strand of moss hanging to one side. The conductor, a man close to retirement with a soft, slack body, took my ticket with his waterlogged hand, ripped it, and passed the damp stub back to me. The little girl was still there, though she sat looking at the floor with her hands in her lap now. I sat across from her, but she didn’t look up. Her mother’s watery face caught my gaze and I looked away. The train groaned, its rusty gears grinding against one another, and we lurched backward into the river. Water rushed in again, and if she had the first time, the little girl did not pull her feet up out of it. Neither did I.

“One Day They’ll Come and Find me” III

I’d been clutching the top of a freight train for three days when I passed an abandoned grainery. Standing alone like that in a field, it reminded me of her and made my stomach growl. When the train reached the cover of evergreens, I grappled down the side of the freight car, my limbs an arachnid tangle sliding down the ballast.

I pried open a door at the base of the silo and needled my fingers into the wall, up to the top. I’ve never entered the adjoining warehouse, but the shared upper level opens into an airy abattoir. Rats had plundered the storage bins. Not a kernel was neglected but somehow the rats remained. Nights I could hear them fighting, a weaker one squealing as another ripped it open. They left bloody paw prints on my clothes.

Now that all the rats are gone, I go out at night to hunt. I put up racks to dry meat. For a while in the neighborhood there were cats and dogs. Somewhere down there, a child feels betrayed. Somewhere down there, a parent will soon be bereft.

Some nights I see searchlights. One day someone will see me, clinging to the side of my turret like a spider, looking for her. She can’t come back, but I can’t stop myself from looking. Strange how we consume what consumes us. I have her, now, in my bones. Her whorish heart beats to my rhythm. She’s a maddening thing, but I love her and she can’t get away anymore.

Back When I was an English Major…

What else? I am thinking about The Masque of the Red Death and rereading “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” I just checked out Wisconsin Death Trip and Child of God. All fitting, currently I am considering the Southern Gothic style. I learned this term yesterday. It is making me think about the graphic novel Preacher. Somebody buy me the series and I ‘ll probably put out.

I used to read a friend’s copies of “Preacher” after a breakneck race around the dorms in my rollerblades, then wheel into the elevator, drop some kahlua or whiskey (usually kahlua) into my Doctor Pepper. From there I would head to the brightly lit basement and would stay awake as long I could reading. I miss those days. Istudied harder back then, too. To be fair, I was moodier. But I did like reading that stuff.

Ok, no more beer. Must switch to coffee. I’m pulling myself in two directions right now. mmmm…..