Twelve

John Symonds in Repose

     Bartholomew Brent is a cheery old gent.
     His elastic skin sags past his cheeks down to jowls that pool at the base of his chin just like cowls if he sat upside down. And his smile full of teeth shark sincere and a tongue bloated blunt yet severe is a scowl is a frown (upside down).
     Brent stands with the crowd at the side of the bed and his eyeglasses won't let him look in my head but he smiles and he scowls and he passes me pills that they push past my jaw that I clench oh so tight 'cause I won't let them numb me I'll fight and I'll bite...
     But Firth says to let them. He's probably right.
     Numb is the color of my true love's smile, in the morning, when I rise...
     "Thirty years," Brent says, as the patient settles back onto the bed, waiting for the drugs to hit home, "Almost thirty years this patient has endured life through the grim fog of paranoid schizophrenia. Visions, voices, waves of mania, depression, seizures, delusion, psychotic episodes... a cornucopia of symptoms. He's practically a textbook unto himself.
     "But a text is valueless without... what, Stevens?" Brent points at a tall young man.
     "Con-text, sir," the youth replies, grinning.
     "Absolutely correct! We must get the context to truly understand the disease." Brent's British accent was most pronounced on words like "understand".
     I cahn't stahnd it. I cahn't.
     "You, Sorrelson, what do you suppose the context of this case might be?"
     "He looks about fifty;'Nam vet?"
     "Go ahead, son. Ask the man."
     The kid, Sorrelson, looked down at the man on the bed with thick-glassed owl eyes. "Hello, Mister Symonds! How are you to-day?"
     The man in the bed looked away, fighting against the Numb.
     "Mister Symonds? I'm Doctor Sorrelson. I need to know a few things about you."
     Hiss, hiss, there were snakes in the walls.
     "Mister Symonds? Were you in Vietnam?"
     John Symonds looked up. There was pain in his eyes, pain and fear. When he spoke his voice was a pale rasp. "There's someone else behind my eyes."
     Doctor Sorrelson looked nonplused. "Mister Symonds, I asked if you were in Vietnam..."
     "There's someone else behind my eyes, goddammit!" Symonds threw himself against the restraints, twisting and straining to no avail. He collapsed back onto the bed with a sigh.
     "There's someone else behind my eyes. There is."
     Doctor Bartholomew Brent smiled and put a hand on Doctor Sorrleson's shoulder, soothing the disconcerted look from the student's face. "Relax, Sorrelson. Symonds won't answer you. I don't believe he can."
     He took a half-step back and addressed the other students. "I brought you here to see a face, and to face a truth yourselves. This face, the face of the man in the bed, is a face of Failure; not John Symonds' failure, but our own. We cannot cure John Symonds, or the thousands more like him; at best we can only hope to make their quality of life just a little bit better. John Symonds' mind is gone, it won't be coming back."
     "What happened to him?" asked another of Doctor Brent's students, Mishi Tonuga.
     Doctor Brent nodded, acknowledging her question. "Context, Ms. Tonuga, I mentioned context. As Mr. Sorrelson correctly surmised, the key to Mr. Symonds' problem can be divined through generational context, though he was not, indeed, a Vietnam veteran. No, Mr. Symonds never left Arkham to reach this sorry state. Right here in this town he acquired all the stimulus needed to drive his mind into this sorry state.
     "Ladies and gentlemen, you see before you a living breathing example of a syndrome that many believe to be mythical, or at best legendary; a patient whose diagnosis has been the subject of debate in psychiatric circles from Maine to Morocco; a victim of one of the most talked about and least frequently witnessed consequences of the excessive narcissism of the 1960's."
     Doctor Brent paused for effect, then said it.
     "John Symonds is an Acid Casualty."
     Oh how wide they grow (they glow) these wild blind child eyes.
     "Doctor Brent!" the tall one, Stevens, said, "All the literature indicates..."
     Brent waved away the rest of the statement with a casual hand. "Yes, yes, that the term 'acid casualty' is a bug-bear created by forces opposed to LSD research; virtually every mental breakdown attributed to the drug at the time turned out to be of indeterminate origin due to mitigating factors such as use of other chemicals known to cause mental problems, particularly amphetamines and alcohol; family history of mental disorders; traumatic stress; and other similar circumstances. Yet, here, he is, John Symonds, the exception that proves the rule."
     John Symonds flashed a phony smile.
     He heard their words. He knew who he was, knew where he was. He knew who they thought they were. Doctors. Sometimes, when the pills slowed his mind to the point where he could see and hear in normal clocktickforward time, he even attempted to communicate with them, speaking "words" that were part of a "language" and not sudden colored expressions of thought, which he had come to realize that the Doctors were unable to see. A laugh! He was imprisoned for their insufficient sight.
     But the eyes behind his own were troubling, this day.
     "Symonds," Brent said, "Has none of the mitigating factors, at least as far as we've been able to ascertain. He comes from a sound, stable family, never used amphetamines or depressants, never abused alcohol. There was a stress factor involved; it's difficult to know just how much this particular traumatic event impacted upon him, however. There were many other persons present at the time, and none of them have experienced this degree of breakdown..."
     "Doctor Brent," Sorrelson spoke up, "You've implied that LSD was involved. Could the combination of hallucinogenic chemicals and traumatic event combined..."
     Brent grinned. "Ahh, but, as I already mentioned, Symonds is the only one present on that fateful night who emerged this psychically wounded. And he was not the only person using LSD at the time; the average state on that evening was 'altered', precipitously so. Some said that the LSD was somehow tainted, that it was 'bad acid, man'."
     Everyone chuckled as Brent flashed a peace sign.
     John Symonds had a momentary vision of his teeth leaping from his mouth to sever Doctor Brent's upraised digit; just the index finger, leaving the Bird upstanding next to the shorn nub and staring Bartholomew Brent in his screaming face, like a pantomimed poem he had seen little kids perform back when he still saw little kids: