Storymania - Sickness Of The Young by Mila Strictzer

Sickness Of The Young (8)
Mila Strictzer

RAT IN A MAZE

By Mila Strictzer

Twelfth in order of composition

Mila lay down in his bed. He was not sure if he was asleep or awake. It had just been a normal day of fighting and pain, death and dying, trying in vain, strain and frustration, pulverization and trepidation. He did not really get anywhere but he did get scared. If he could just now listen…

It was late. He had just returned from having a few beers with his friends but he was not drunk, just a little buzzed. The beer made it a little better anyway, kind of slowed things down instead of firing every single barrel with precision timing, sequencing. He could not fight that, anyway. It was all nothing more than an escape for what he knew was to come: the voices.

As Mila stared up at the ceiling, he felt The Them arriving, as they always did, after a few moments of silent anxiousness. The Them is he name Mila had given his voices. The Them, they came from all corners and quarters of his mind, all at once. Some were loud, others very loud, some whispers, or quieter than a whisper. All were overpowering, as if they were daggers to his brain. The Them could not be turned off. The Them would only go away after he had surrendered, when he stopped fighting, and he had forgotten. Then Mila saw a vision, clear as day in his mind.

He was walked by his own self down a dark forest path. As he and himself walked side by side, the forest got more and more darker and deeper. Mila could see in his vision that it was dusk and the sun was setting, but a little quicker than normal, but not too, too much more. Just a wince. Enough to make you uncertain. Then some tiny bit more.

The forest got very dark and mystifying. Mila kept on going anyways. Some of the birds came out at night. The stars were out in the dark. The nighttime sky was clear and sharp. The birds started singing their strange songs so high above, in the trees. The air was fresh and smelled aromatic, almost sensual in nature.

Mila was smoking a cigarette and now he finished and paused in the wood, dropped his cigarette in the dirt of the path, and stepped on the smoldering butt with the toe of one of his shoes. Well, actually, he was wearing army-issue boots, and he rubbed it out, back and forth a couple of times. Then he left it in the dust.

There were feelings, too. Sometimes, the feelings were not as bad as the voices or the visions. Feelings were even welcomed as a distraction, something to focus in on and drown out everything else going on in the room.

One feeling had been the same all of Mila’s life, even as a small boy. It was like being in a huge, wide-open space but there was something else. The space was strong and squeezed Mila all the way up to the ears, to the very edge of his consciousness. Still, it was not a horrible feeling, just an overwhelmingly curious one, as if he were curious as a man might be and then push it a little further. Similar to dejavu, multiplied several times, with pictures and lights. Except, you are playing the video game. Choppy water, for sure, but with some effort by an advanced swimmer, easily navigable. As he got older, Mila was able to master that one particular feeling and control it. He could walk out as far as he wished into the dark space, take a small jaunt into an unknown part, turn, and go back home to his mind.

So Mila lifted his hand up and extended his fingers broadly. And like a real man, ran his fingers through his hair with all the destitute of a blind man. I am not talking about a man who cannot see. I and I say a man who is blind. He kept walking down the forest path in peace.

Mila spied an opening to the forest path and walked into a crystal-clear, blue, calm lake that was in the middle of a wide-open field, the entrance to which was at the end of the path that had exited from the dark wood. The water in the lake was cold and wet, but Mila did not care about that. He reached out his arms and in true swimmer fashion, swam the length and then the breadth, breath exiting his nostrils like an angry dragoon, dying ‘o battle wounds on the battlefield, dreaming of his frickin’ mother.

He climbed out of the lake like a high flalutin’ businessman grabbing a towel from his secretary bitch, fully naked and roaring for some honky-tonkin’ lovin’ with said same honkinly racked and stacked soft thing.

There was one more major feeling: the amplification of insignificant things. Throughout the day, Mila heard other people’s feelings say, ‘sometimes he irritates me’ or ‘I kind of like him’. Or, he felt people thinking about the most minor of actions like ‘I think the wind has died down now’ or ‘perhaps its time to go to bed…seems a particularly dark night’.

Now in his bed, those tiny thoughts and feelings came rushing back to his mind in a flood, "I AM MOVING THE ASHTRAY OVER HERE BECAUSE IT SEEMS TO LOOK BETTER ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TABLE FOR NOW."

"WE ARE GOING TO STOP AT THE BANK, I HOPE HE DOESN’T MIND TO WAIT IN THE CAR. I KNOW HE DOES NOT LIKE TO WAIT FOR LONG."

Then there was the mood. Mila would follow the mood wherever he went; the mood that lingered in the air. He would watch others feeling their way through the mood. The mood only moved along by conversations and subtle gestures, and Mila imagined he could know what direction the conversation should take at any given time like guiding a canoe down a smooth river. He saw people simply reacting to the way the conversation went, instead of steering its course. Then he thought he could see people’s feelings as they reacted to the mood.

The conversation continued on, just like this, at night, or sometimes in the daylight, in his mind. It was as if the voices were his mind’s way of saying it wanted to continue on playing the game. Ultimately, even if the game was ever proven to have veracity, or if the game might even truly have inroads to human consciousness, it was an utterly boring, stupid, and useless game.

Soon Mila reached a point were he did not even hear people speak-he was only following the mood. And he played the game for so long he came to believe it to be real. Then if something discordant happened to break the mood or the mood took a turn toward him, he felt a pain, sharp in his mind. Suffice it to say, Mila was playing a game in his head and for him, the game was very, very real. And he was having such a good time, he was laughing all the while.

The vision in his head, once started, would continue on, unstoppable. It was like a story that had to reach an end. Or a broken record that skipped forever until it had skipped so many times that you became numb from it.

So out of nowhere, a man walked straight up to Mila. He was an older gentleman. He just walked straight up to Mila, who was just standing there, wet, but not naked. The old man, he was naked. But still, he managed to be very gentlemanly-looking because he had a very nice cane. Of wood. Common now.

So there he was, a mastermind of his own defense, a jackal of all trades and shades of shady establishment Rastafarians. Look to the sky, he might always say sometimes, I think I believe, this most logical dudith. Dudi-several dudes. Boni-several bonuses. Whachi! That’s a karate term. I do not know any karate. But my moms did, to protect her, she always said.

A regular, ordinary person might call the old man just a nice man. I say he is a God. He stopped before Mila and asked, rarely using conjunctions, "What are you doing here?"

Mila started to look startled, but thought better about it. He answered, "I was just going to ask you the same thing."

"This is not a place for you and your kind."

"Why not? And what are my kind?"

"I and I say so. And your kind are visionless people without reason or time, vision or sight."

"What? Who are you? You look familiar."

"I am the prophet Bob Marley."

"You are my hero! I am Mila Strictzer, but I do not know why I am in here, or why I am lost in this maze."

"Sit down, cracker boy. Let’s light up a spliff and see if we can find some answers."

"Yes, sir."

They sat down by the lake, and then the medicine man reached into his bag of tricks and pulled out a pipe. He lit it up and handed it over to Mila, who pulled some smoke into his lungs. It tasted funny. Soon the powerful medicine took effect. For that is what it was: medicine for the mind.

"You will see back into time, there are some beasts there, they seem to be demons from hell, covered in spikes and breathing fire if they so desire, but they are not from hell. No, they are from the very beginning of time."

"This smoke tastes funny like."

"The smoke is the breath of God. You must be able to handle it. Can you handle it?"

"I think I can handle it."

"Good, because it will soon overcome you. As if you are a man standing in the desert wanting water. Speak, when you are ready to tell me all that you see."

Mila saw himself move towards an edge, not sure what the edge was to. It was rocky and overwards was a far drop off, so far down in fact, that there was a line of fluffy clouds about half of the way down, that stretched between two close, solid, jagged walls of red rock. Mila did not think twice. He jumped a few quick steps back away from the edge, dug in his heels for a second, and then raced forward. With a last push off he leapt-



           up and leveled and went



     up                                  down 



   up                                       down



 up                                            down

down, all the way down the cliff, his arms spread open wide like a swimmer.

Then, wooosshhh! He flew through the clouds in about a millisecond. But he realized that he had. The walls were moving by very fast to his either side. He was not scared.

His mind was reeling, darkening and fading at times, brightening and intensifying at other times.

Then, splash! He dove into an ocean similar to a diver, with his hands held tight together, pushing out the water away from him. He hit the water with such force that he flew downward under forever and ever, it seemed. But Mila knew a little about the ocean. He knew at the bottom of the ocean are the abyssal plains. They are very far down, as far down as the Titanic dropped.

He sailed down, into the darkness of the waters…suffocating him. He made it to the seafloor, rolled over on his back, and smacked his bare feet into the oozy, muddy, siliceousiclastic bottom. Then pushed back up with all his might against the force of the water pressure above him.

Mila slowed as he fought against the pressure all around him and then he had to start really holding his breath. Now he reached up and paddled his arms, scrambling, trying to make it up to the surface and air. He fought and fought against the dark waters, the currents, and the resistance until, "Pppaahhhhh!"

He sucked in air deep into his lungs, as deep as it would go.

"Sir?"

"Yes?"

"I see some pillars of stone. I am lost in a deep green garden with tall walls of wild flowers that are part of a labyrinth and I see myself trying to find my own self within the maze, and also wishing to, once I find my own self, find a way out of my prison."

"Very good. All right, I will tell you what I want you to do:

Then, and only then, will you see just how powerful your mind is."

"I am spinning around, and now I see myself as one fish in a school of fish, darting with the pack, spinning around over myself, thinking I cannot do that kind of a movement, but when I feel the pack with me, the school beside me, I am feeling as if I can do this thing or anything, blindfolded. I can do this, I can follow the pack with ease, feeling no pain, reeling and rolling with the contortions of the whole school. I worry about my body though, but not much, like it is in the distance."

"Yes, yes, you are indeed good. Irie, even, rude boy. You are the Duppy Conqueror!"

"Alright, next I see myself on another planet where everyone lives in the clouds, because they are all very light weighing. They are like Elves, but even lighter and they never sleep. They only talk around the fire about all the ages of lore. And somehow, it is okay. I don’t see anything more."

"The vision may be fading now, then," said the prophet Bob Marley.

"No, it is not. I can see some people trying to wake me from a deep sleep, like a coma. They are my family, and they are reading to me and talking about my past, stirring images in my mind about my life. They know me almost as much as I know myself, so they can conjure up powerful images.

"I see an image of when I was young, going through my father’s dresser, and finding his old army uniform, but it does not belong to my father because he was not in the army. It belongs to a great writer: Ernest Hemingway. There, I said it. It’s his hospital guard uniform. I am not blunting the thing.

"I feel every single sentence that you write, every single one. Then I want to write like a demon possessed. You went further into what I want to be-an artist and a real man but I went further into where you wanted to go-war and the unknown.

"I finally realize what I knew all along, buried deep in one book, within one story, one line of thought-you are my master."

There was a pause and then Bob Marley said, "Did you find your answer, Mila Strictzer?"

"I did not, sir."

"Then I am afraid I must leave you to your journey through the maze."

"I understand."

Then the old man turned and walked away, a warm breeze making it not so bad to endure in the buff. Mila lay down on his back in the grass that was adjacent to the German wood, all the while just sleeping. There were buffalo clouds high overhead, in the sky, trampeding him, engulfing his horizon muffily. I think it was exactly six ‘o five in the evening because time had stopped on the wall, but I am not sure.

So Mila lay down on his back in the grass that was adjacent to the German wood, all the while just sleeping. There is a way to slow time down to the point of an almost standstill.

Then his name was spoken, "Mila, Mila, Mila, Mila, Mila…" a hundred or more times in a row, without stopping.

The voices he could not control. The voices were no game. They had control over him, made him panic, get over-anxious, run away in paranoia, hide in the darkness, avoid people, and a slew of other strange behaviors expected from a crazy person.

Mila Strictzer was crazy, no doubt about it. He was a paranoid schizophrenic. Before he went away, he asked me to tell you about the voices. Everyone always wants to know about the voices. It used to be that hearing voices was very unpopular. That is not the case, anymore. Now there are songs and movies about hearing voices. I seriously doubt if people hear voices all the time or the world would not function. I am only doing this for Mila. I really don’t feel like doing his dirty work either, but I always believe when a buddy asks you to do something for them, you should do it, no matter what it is, if you can. And I think I can do this.

I only have one thing to add myself. I am very tired of people confusing stupid people with the insane. Stupid people do insane things, insane people do stupid things. Sure, the insane have a few crazies among them and once in a blue moon, some guy escapes from the metal ward and kills someone. But generally, they only go straight to somebody who probably deserved it anyway. Normal people have a lot more crazies than the insane do. To be insane is a personal journey very, very few people understand at even the most basic level. But rarely does a mentally imbalanced person hurt another person, especially physically. The guy on the watchtower with a rifle does not deserve to wear the distinction of being called insane. No, he is only stupid. And quite sane.

The insane have worn an incorrect label for several millennia and its time to stop calling the insane crazy. Crazy is label for normal people. The insane don’t even pretend to understand what it means to be crazy. The insane wish they could be crazy. Then life would be simple. All they would have to do is be crazy once in a while. How hard can that be? To be insane then is, by definition, different than being temporally crazy. Lawyers: take note.

What is God? I am certain there is a God, absolutely certain of it. There is some thing that is God, there has to be. We are not just little cubicles of ice here. We are blood that came from some where. Where is where? When was where, and what’s there with where there? If there’s a nowhere, then there’s gotta be a somewhere. And I know there is a nowhere. I’ve been to nowhere and there ain’t much there, which leads me to believe that there are some things that are there with where, there, some where; a heck of a lot of things, in fact, out there, somewhere with where. Gotta be. The only other conceivable option is there is no somewhere. But that would mean there’d be no nowhere, either. What we’d have is nothing, then. And I just don’t believe in nothing. Let’s be real here. I believe in something, somewhere, nowhere, and nothing; strongly. And I strongly believe that some thing has to be something, and that some where, is somewhere out there. That is what I believe. At least, for now. Tomorrow, I am not so sure about. But for now, the moment is all mine. No, there is a where; some where is somewhere, out there. Somewhere out there, there is where. And wherever where is, I am there. If we ever get to where where is, then I wanna be there too, where where is too. Mark my word. I’m gonna be there. I’ll either see you there or I won’t, I don’t care.

I just looked it up, because I am just as confused as you are, perhaps more, and the number one definition of where is, ‘at or in what place’. Can a brother catch a break? Huh? Who writes this shit? Because I’m gonna kick the mother fucker’s ass!

All I know is is where comes from some thing, that much is certain, as Spock would say. Where is some thing? I wish I knew. Biting my tongue here…where.

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