Unto Us
Art: One of my paintings from this incident which I was allowed to take home upon release
In the brightly decorated art therapy room, Amelia is using a special squeeze paintbrush with which she cannot hurt herself. She paints black and red robots on everything they give her, and is immersed in Handel’s Messiah. ‘For Unto Us a Child is Born’ breaks over her mind in waves. For unto us a child is – For unto us a child is – The sopranos begin the runs at measure ten. The vocal acrobatics it takes to sing this piece of music cause the muscles around her larynx to contract and change shape just as if she were singing out loud, as she has done every Christmas since middle school. Strings! Lift the left palm. Amelia conducts the choir in her mind. Maxwell jumps up in his chair and raises his hand.
“Hey you! Fat! This bitchfreak isn’t following directions! She’s got robots everywhere. Not following directions – That is not a ‘soul rainbow!’” Amelia focuses on the pincer-claws of her current painting and the song at measure twenty-two. And the GovernMent shall Be upOn his Shoul— It’s clever here; enter soprano, bass, and tenor. The therapist waddles toward Amelia. —der.
“Don’t you remember how we talked about the soul rainbow?” And His name shall be call-ed “And how each color represents something unique to you?”
Wonderful! “I’m doing robots.” Counselor!
“Well I guess it doesn’t really matter cuz there’s only five more minutes anyway.” The fat lady squishes her shoulders into her ears and shrugs. The Mighty God! “Let’s clean up, everyone!” she calls to the room. The Everlasting Father! “Put your paintings on the piano to dry; we’ll talk about them on Friday.” The Prince of Peace.
Her fingers itching to tap out the simple but hearty accompaniment, Amelia pauses at the piano with the painting in her hand. And the GovernMent shall Be upOn his Shoul— She is close enough to smell the strings. And the GovernMent shall Be upOn his Shoul—der.
“Is it alright if I play something?”
“This is ART therapy,” says the fat therapist. And His name shall be call-ed, “If you want music therapy you need better insurance.” Wonderful! The piano is calling to her with echoes of wit and pain.
“Are you saying that music isn’t art?” Counselor! The accompaniment hops in her head, upright and clean. The Mighty God!
“I’m saying you have no idea how crazy things get if I open that piano.” The Everlasting Father! “Every patient wants a turn banging on it—” The Prince of Peace “—and then it’s MY ass in trouble with the doctors.” Amelia gives the therapist her papers covered in robots and follows the song out of the room.
Mirrors in the Mirror
Photography: Juan Pablo Serrano
Amelia is waiting as the common room fills up with visitors. ‘Spiegel im Spiegel’ tiptoes through her mind. I’ve always been fond of 6/4. She can see the sheet music. Daddy loved it when I played Arvo Part. She glimpses her father signing in. The violin enters with him. They awkwardly stop in front of each other. The piano booms.
“I’m so sorry Daddy.” Amelia’s father tries not to look at her bandages.
“I’m just glad you’re alive. Thank God you called 911.”
They sit down at a card table and the piano booms again. She can’t look him in the eye. Amelia breaks through the barrier of the song. “How’s Mom taking it?” The violin purrs a slow melody while the rhythm continues in her head.
“Not well. Alexis is defending you tooth and nail,” he starts.
“Defending me? For what?” SINNER.
“Being selfish.” You fucking piece of shit stupid, selfish bitch. “According to them. I don’t think you’re selfish. I know you’ve suffered for a long time, and I’m sorry we didn’t get you help sooner.”
“You did the best you could.”
“Alexis keeps trying to explain chemical imbalances to Mom and Andrew but you know how it is— we don’t believe in medication.” She screamed. “Mom thinks you’re not trying hard enough to be positive and your brother is furious that you did it right after his birthday.” Andrew teaching her how to climb a tree – Building a fort in the woods – Giving her her first beer. The guilt is crushing.
“I’m sorry, I couldn’t wait any longer. I was planning for the first of May but then everyone went out of town and I had to take the opportunity. I just couldn’t stand it anymore— I had to! It’s unbearable!”
“You don’t have to defend yourself to me. You might not want to call home anytime soon, though. They’re not ready to talk to you. I never thought your sister would be your biggest champion, but she’s the one helping them process it.” Stupid, selfish, ratshit–infested psycho.
“Well please thank her for me.”
“I will,” her father promises. He looks at the table. “Have you talked to Chris?”
“Yeah. He called off the wedding.” She rubs her eyes. “Said he never wants to see my face again.”
“I’d expect nothing more. Is he at least coming up from Florida to see you?” She puts her head in her hands.
“Definitely not. His dad is dying, so he doesn’t want to leave his side, which I totally understand.” The song soothes her. “I wouldn’t want him here, anyway. There’s nothing to say that hasn’t been said before.” There is a long pause while the violin climbs the staff.
“We should have gotten you help sooner. We shouldn’t have left you to the counselors at church. When you were in high school, we thought it would be just a phase—” The last chorus of ‘Just a Phase’ by Incubus suddenly bursts into Amelia’s head. It is so loud that she has trouble hearing the rest of the conversation. “I just didn’t know what to do. I thought you’d grow out of it. We thought it’d go away.” The song is at its apex. “You’ve been so much happier since you started college, and now you do this months before you graduate?”
“Killing myself before I graduate and get married is just a manifestation of how truly hopeless I am.” The music crescendos and Boyd makes heart-wrenching noises. The open fifths are filling up with every repetition, all the way to her bones. “This is the only way I can be free of it: to die. I want to be dead. I wish I were dead. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth: I wish I were dead.” She watches Mike Einziger squeeze the guitar strings in her head.
“Well, I’m glad you’re not. We’re all glad that you’re okay.”
“I’m not okay,” she says reflexively.
“Safe, then,” he amends. “We’re glad you’re safe and getting the help you need.”
“I love you, Daddy.” She hangs her head as the song deflates. “I’m so sorry.”
“I love you too, sweetheart,” he says, and it comforts her.
Amnesiac Insomniac
Photography: Alfo Medeiros
Amelia is in bed listening to ‘You and Whose Army’ by Radiohead, standing in the field of her mind’s eye at night. Everyone else on the ward is asleep, the late watch staff heavy-lidded. So many universes in which this song is playing. A bayou. A strip club. A graveyard. In some universes all that exists are lights. They’re red in this song – Soft orbs – Sometimes the flash of a infinitesimally small prism, and gold dust swirling around her like sin.
She is the field: every blade of grass, every rotten leaf, every drop of shit, every venomous snake, every insect and bird and inhuman creature. Every water droplet in every cloud, every molecule of atmosphere, every star in the universe. Every grain of dirt. The instruments drop, piano-heavy, changing Amelia’s perspective.
One of her stands in a hole with a shovel, digging. Drenched in sweat. Amelia’s attention multiplies the copy into countless replicas, identical but from different angles. Every single one of her is digging in the hot sun. Puzzled, she watches them while the music aligns. What’s the purpose? What are you planting? They don’t respond; they just dig for the remainder of the song.
After wiping their foreheads and taking off their gloves (if they have them), they all drop their tools and climb into the graves they dug for themselves. What are you doing?! Why — Why are you doing this? This is what you want. For us to bury ourselves. NO, her heart wrenches. The multitude pulls back into one, into Her, and she looks down to find a shovel in her hands.
I won’t dig. I won’t do it.
‘Dollars & Cents’ wipes the entire universe from her mind.
The monster is awake. Enormous, bulbous eyes. No nose or mouth – Always shadowed. Cloaked in matted fur. It wants restitution. (Not revenge, like others.) It shifts into a grain of sand in Death Valley. Content to be one among a countless, seething horde. Another speck of dust – Another perspective. The Middle Eastern woman usually seen with her beautiful, long black hair, loose, is in a burqa. The pain of hiding her beauty is too intense.
She withdraws to the sky, up and up and up until she is ozone. Then rapid flashes of life on this planet: a wheat field being harvested, famine, an Olympian accepting his medal, victims of IEDs, a child learning to swim, migrants drowning in the Rio Grande, war, the aftermath of a tsunami, grooming a horse, closing a business deal, cadaver dogs searching through rubble, BASE jumping, free-basing, and so on. That is also too much. Amelia pulls back to the edge of space where it can be borne, and her capacity to connect plummets to zero in that instant.
::silence::
Radio static. Rwanda and a clear, starry sky and a vulture in a pumpkin patch. Fragments of an Incubus song. Slave ships and table doilies and how men threw a fit when women started wearing pants, and Sam— the percussionist who plays for Aretha Franklin and takes Amelia out for Thai food when he’s in town. Click, static, click. Gassing pigs, octopi being tortured in scientific research, a drooling profoundly handicapped girl strapped into a full-support wheelchair, habitat destruction. The silence hisses. George W. Bush, the specifications of a toga praetexta, water moccasin venom—
‘I Don’t Know Anything’ by Mad Season bursts into her head at full volume. It drags the blood in her chest to the surface. The Mississippi River and shoes made out of bread bags and shark attacks and her aunt’s house with all the taxidermy animals and sulphur water and hawks killing small dogs and cheap earrings and Earl Grey tea and graboids. How gasoline degrades over time and corvids and a book of nursery rhymes illustrated in watercolor she had as a child and every time she’s ever been in a lifeguard chair and church camp and cigars and apartheid and non-peppermint candy canes— the clove ones at Cracker Barrel, and bugs drowning in an above-ground swimming pool and turtles she’s rescued and fish she’s killed and how ‘Black Hole Sun’ remains the best music video ever made.
Tom Collins the drink, Tom Collins the character in Rent, how chartreuse sounds like a shade of pink not green, ski lifts, skydiving, chewing those little soft pieces of ice, Brandon Lee, going to Disney when she was nine and only liking Pirates of the Caribbean because she was too short to ride Space Mountain, the North Atlantic Current, those plants that look like sea oats but thrive in cold climates, and the first time she played the piano on stage and the smell of dry-cleaning fluid and how rat feces get into mass produced food and the apocalypse and B.B. King and fields being sprayed with pesticides and solitary confinement and the Goodyear blimp—
“Bed check.” The orderly widens the crack in Amelia’s door and shines a flashlight in her face, interrupting the song and her thoughts. “You look wide awake. Something on your mind?”
“I can’t remember the last time I saw a blimp. Seems like a dumb mode of transportation.” The orderly makes a mark on her clipboard.
“Go to sleep,” she says, returning the opening to the designated two inches.
In the seconds it took to have that conversation, Amelia imagined a whole scenario in which she met a man who told her he was a pilot, and when she asked him what he flew he said, “A blimp.” He might as well have stapled her panties to her skin. Then they had a nice dinner of steak, green beans, and mashed potatoes, and the date ended there with no kiss. All that in mere moments.
The bed check snapped her out of her thought race.
Amnesiac returns. Track nine: ‘Hunting Bears.’
She’s in the field again, shovel in her hands, accompanied by countless others already in their graves. They’re not voices; they’re just thoughts. I’m part of a collective of perspectives with widely varying interests. We’re all in this together.
::silence from the buried::
She looks down at the shovel and virgin grass.
Do it. Dig — I fucking dare you.
Music References
For Unto Us a Child is Born - Handel
Spiegel im Spiegel - Arvo Part
Just a Phase (starting at 4:20) - Incubus
You and Whose Army - Radiohead
Bonus points for the Tremors reference.
I can't agree on blimps, though. I love dirigibles.
“I won’t dig. I won’t do it.”
“Do it. Dig — I fucking dare you.”
I’m so glad that you stopped digging, Amelia.
I’m glad that I stopped digging, and while that voice is mostly gone, I still hear its echoes, and shudder at the possibility that it’s just outside the gates.
“They’re not voices; they’re just thoughts. I’m part of a collective of perspectives with widely varying interests. We’re all in this together.”
We’re all in this together … I say that a lot about social & societal circumstances, even more so since November.
But I’ve *never* said it about me & Second James: it’s always been a war.
Gonna give it a try, see if we can’t come to an arrangement now that he’s seemingly safely locked outside.
Thanks as always Amelia: your “soul”-baring always seems to bare mine too, in very productive ways. 🙏🇨🇦