As Stephen T. Asma explains in On Monsters, “Monster derives from the Latin word monstrum, which in turns derives from the root monere (to warn). To be a monster is to be an omen.”
"...tell me that the whine was but the result of relaxed eardrums, and the Presence was only the creation of a mind that was accustomed to take too great an interest in such things. I shall not be convinced. Come, rather, with me at the mysterious dusk time when day and night struggle upon the mountains. Feel the night wind on your faces, and hear it crying amid rocks. See the desert uplands consumed before the racing storms. Though your nerves be of steel, and your mind says it cannot be, you will be acquainted with that fear without name, that intense dread of the unknown that has pursued mankind from the very dawn of time." Peter Densham (leader of the Cairngorms RAF Rescue Team 1939-45)
Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one. ~Nietzsche
………………………………………………….
Transcription of Recording of Hypnosis session 17:
A voice clears. Papers heard shuffling.
Dr. Brown: “Can you speak to us? Are you there?”
She had a vague notion of you, but what she actually wanted another her.
We all do, just as you are another me. It is our ego-telling. It's only normal. Instead, you were him. She loved him, but he was not her. You were too much like him and not enough her. She hated that, but she got over it. The resentment went away in her own telling. She told herself that it was normal to resent your daughter. It was okay to resent her for not being enough like her mother. Careful, meticulous. She was rough with you--even as a child. Never hurtful, never digging nails into skin, but rough tugs and exasperated sighs. You were too sensitive to it, really. You were too much. Too much noise, too much tongue, too much want and need. You were not her. You did not fit.
So you cling to him. He delights in you. You are him and he revels in it. Selfishly so. He ignores her further to marvel at you, how you reflect back to him everything he says. You take some pleasure in that--her shunning. She does not understand the things you do together--loud hammering noises, dirty fingers, long stories at night that star you.
Humming can be heard. Metal clinks against metal rhythmically, then a low growl is heard on the recording. More paper shuffling.
Dr. Brown: “Enough. Tell me what happened.”
This newcomer will not replace you. He will be able to fulfill the real boy role. You are excited now, as he will be another you--surely. A boy you. You have grown now to realize that you don't need to be a boy to act like a boy. That it is okay to be sometimes a girl, because he will not love you less. You contemplate that when the boy you comes, he will simply fill in the small gaps you have left for him. He will not overcrowd. He will simply do the things you cannot do, and now do not have to try to do. He will be your usurper of failings. How convenient.
He wasn't you though, was he? At first, you didn't even mind that they paid more attention to him. That was okay. You were changing, becoming a little girl. Round hips and triangular breasts replaced the androgynous child, to the wicked delight of the neighborhood girls who had not developed. They teased you mercilessly. You cried every day on the way home from school. They slapped your budding chest and called you a whore and rubbed your face in the dog-pissed dirt of the bus stop. You spit loam out through your teeth and walked home, watching the crows flock as you tried to hunch your shoulders to hide your bruised breasts. They cawed at you from fenceposts. Ruffling flocks of them cawing and watching with black, lidless eyes.
Then the feeding began. Stuffing stolen mayonnaise-moist Wonderbread in your mouth, hiding in the bathroom stall. You slipped away from their cackles during recess and sat in the gray box sniffling and stuffing automatically—trying to fill that hole inside you. You ate because at home, your brother would not eat. He refused even as his rib cage protruded. And over tears and screams from your parents’ frustration, you silently observed as he shrunk until his skeletal frame and hollow eyes made him ghostly. He would only eat white foods, and all he would drink was milk.
Not water.
Only milk.
All things start with stories. Even you. Someone once showed you that picture. They said, "This is you--when you were little," and you agreed. You made this story about yourself and you told yourself, “That is me--when I was younger.” But you did not know it was you without the story you told. Just as you do not know it is you now. You are always part of the telling.
That's all this is.
Just a telling.
Deep panting begins on recording. Panting increases in pace. Approximate time: 45 seconds. Patient says something unintelligible.
Metallic clinking again, slow but steady.
Dr. Brown: Heavy sigh. “We’re done. Stop recording.”
……………………………
Note found on the back of photograph in Grandma Valle’s house. Photograph is a silhouette: a crow on a branch next to a lake.
Ignore the crows. They will only make you paranoid.
………………………………………………………
I saw an article once about a girl with Echolalia who couldn't speak. She would thrash about and bang her head and only repeat phrases back to her parents. She'd flap her hands and slap her face in frustration that they didn’t understand. Then, one day she found a computer and started to type words: “chocolate,” “Starburst,” “Lemondrop.” She, her name was Kelly I think, spoke on her terms--after all what is the point of language if it cannot get you sweets? She spoke through written word, and eventually explained that her brain was inundated with the minutia of her five senses. Her brain took a thousand pictures every time she glanced at someone's face. She felt her clothes were itching her constantly, and heavy, so heavy. Every tiny little noise crawled up her spine and rang in her ears, reverberating incessantly until she could not do anything but beat the air against its assault. Sensory overload caused her verbal silence.
That is why she could only repeat the echoes of what she heard—they echoed so loudly she had to throw them back at the world. She could not make the gaps in her mind wide enough for the story-words to come out through her mouth. But banging on the keys of the computer helped her create space enough to slip herself out of that interior. Oddly, from the outside, Kelly appeared mad while she typed her letters to the world, hunched over the keyboard, rocking back and forth, slapping one hand against her chest while the other madly typed. Written language helped people understand that she was not mad; she just couldn't tell aloud the stories the way we do. Stories that give us gaps for meanings like time, geography, identity. Stories that may or not may not be true—but that certainly aren't madness.
My brother has a similar condition: Echolalia. At least, that is part of what he has, a symptom of a larger issue. In the 80’s we didn’t know that mercury-flavored word: autism. They mistakenly called Durward’s condition “schizophrenia” or maybe “mental retardation” while staring at us over clipboards.
As a child, I wanted so much to love him. But I hated his constant need. I don’t hate him now. In fact, I’d argue he saved my soul and the souls of a lot of people. If we have souls. I like to think we do.
I saw another article about other children with disorders like Ward. They would sit with “transcribers” who would hold the child’s elbow, and like magic! AHA! The child could speak fluently through the computer. Families paid thousands of dollars to the false notion that their loved one was simply trapped inside a body that would not behave. Sadly, a few years and hundreds of thousands of dollars later, those families learned. The “transcribers” were the ones typing for the kids. That, yes, a fraction of those children were freed by keyboards and now able to “speak” through computers, but these scrivners were no Bartlebys. Most of them were frauds. Most of those parents had spent life savings to be shammed either purposefully or unconsciously by transcribers who were saying what they thought these kids wanted to be said. Kids like Ward are in there, somewhere, but computers cannot free them.
Ward doesn’t really “speak”. He echoes back to me what I say: “Durward, do you want to go outside?”
“Outside?”
“Where is your shoe?”
“Shoe!” But I told stories for him, like the transcribers. I filled in the gaps for him. I said I loved him, because that is what good little girls do.
And I was a good little girl.
…………………………………..
When I was very young, before Durward was born, I had strange ideas that I felt with total certainty were real. Part of this magical thinking was the certainty that I knew when I was going to die. Not in the way that people think they will probably die of a heart attack one day. I knew it would be at 4:00 AM on a Tuesday in October. Courting madness, I would occasionally touch on this idea. Like a tongue darting along an abscessed tooth, before the punch of pain causes a retreat.
When I did touch the idea, I felt a voice bubble up in my brain whispering crisply, wetly—the sound of a cicada hitting a windshield, but never coherent. I would distract myself with reading or playing in the woods. My imagination scared me sometimes, and I have always been anxious, even as a child.
I have vivid dreams as well. One dream in particular recurred with enough frequency that I started to recognize the scenery as soon as I woke into it.
It always started the same way, a darkened bedroom would find me struggling to rise out of a deep, watery sleep. I would wake, lying on my back, to find that I couldn’t breathe. A thing was standing over me, bending down and holding me by my neck. Black mirrored eyes would stare into my own as it leaned in closer so that the stained bone of its horse-skull face almost kissed my skin. Shiny, dark mucus that covered it dribbled onto my forehead and slithered its way towards my mouth. It towered over me, and while in the dream I never saw its feet, I knew with a dreamer’s conviction that its hairy legs ended in cloven hooves. Its chest was a rotting ribcage stuffed with duckweed and leaf decay, heaving deeply. It squeezed my throat tighter and whispered in my ear that it could kill me if it wanted; it had that power. Antlers curved in impossible patterns above its head, whirling and moving like tendrils of a growing stalk. Closing my eyes to shield myself from the black slime, I would twist away and push against it, ripping myself from its long-fingered hands.
I’d find myself standing at the edge of my bed, the thing gone. But now facing my grandmother’s mirror, and even though I knew what would happen next, I always touched the mirror glass.
I fell through in a flash and thumped down into a sun speckled kitchen. An ancient woman, who was little more than a knobby spine hunched over and draped in white and pink lace making her face hard to see, was there—screaming and gesturing at me to fill too-tiny-to-hold-anything tea cups. She would pound her bony fist against the table THUMP! THUMP! Her wailing screeches were not discernable language, but I could tell what she wanted in the way that dreams give you far more knowledge than reality. Her gestures screamed: “Fill the teacups, you idiot! Fill them with this milk! Fill them and don’t spill a single drop!” I feared her reprimand more than the horse-skull man and would concentrate to the point of shaking.
I would try not to look at her face that seemed to be shaped all wrong, a mouth where her eyes should be. When I inevitably spilled the milk, she would shriek a high-pitched equine scream and chase me. I’d run to the water and swim while she watched from the shore, calling me back sweetly, a white stallion by her side.
Recalling these dreams made me shiver even in a Georgia summer.
It was a different summer that found me snooping The Bens while the heat ripples made everything look like so much melted metal. Tucked inside a pill box, folded so tightly it crumbled a little as I opened it, I found a note my grandma Vavelle had written. At first, I thought it was something I had written and forgotten; that startled me. But no, it’s just that our handwriting is so similar, maybe because we spent so much time together that our personalities seems to become one long pattern of repeated gestures with no discernable veil between hers and my own. When I was young, we spent almost every summer together -- from May until August. After my brother’s tantrums became too much, I had to stop visiting her all summer. As Ward became harder to handle, my visits to The Bens became more infrequent.