The internal dialogue sang and shouted, a pychotheatre on a stage with ideas and ceptions, victories, defeats and compromises all dancing it out. Andrea once suggested that quieting the "internal dialogue" was a good thing for feeling better, being alive and all that. So have others. Still, the board of directors met in his head every day. There were decisions to be made. Some of them could be important.
As if this weren't enough to contend with, Bob dragged his young corpse through the underworlds of medicine and the cultures of resentment, judgement, fear and sickness. He was a tourist, and Hades could not conscript him, but he felt like he was waiting in Casablanca. Truly he was waiting for a piece of paper to take to a chemist and to get a prescription for a drug that was meant mostly to prevent seizures. The whole pursuit of the piece of paper consumed at least two hours, conservatively.
A young student doctor asked him questions from a form. Even though the questions were not her own and he was feeling very sciencious about answering them, the only thing that interested him during this whittling away of his life and time was hunting down her ethnicity through her married name and muted accent. When he found it, he made some cordiality with her as a patient. She then let him phrase short answers for her paper of questions.
The doctor was less jovial than other times, but Bob still felt a gratitude that she addressed him with some familiar respect. Saving words put him at ease. Iterations and reiterations of the obvious were torturous. His hands were sweating and he felt a techtonic tide of anxiety and frustration welling up. When he had the paper and a sample of yet another drug, he made his way to the door, and with his hand on the doorknob the Doctor stopped him, "Hey, hold on I want to make you another appointment." So she did.
On his way home he was enjoying the company of the Committee in his psyche. It was calm and well paced, rhythmic and more at ease than usual. He decided that he wasn't really that smart after all. The day before he had been arguing with some anonymous coward on the Board about how one could be phenomenally smart and at the same time an impossible fool. Wisdom and intelligence are separate qualities. He was defending himself; who knows why? As he made it through the streets, he adjusted himself to fit into not being that smart at all.
A woman walked across the street in front of his car. An old man hobbled on his cane over 5 lanes of traffic with green lights. We all stopped and he just kept smiling and pecking away at the steps. Jaywalking as a hobby. While Bob waited, he remembered being younger than 7 and telling his father that he wanted to be a jaywalker. His dad did not like the idea. Bob couldn't remember the actual response, but came up with an appropriate one. That was one of the hard things about his memory. He didn't trust it.
Two years before, he was running across 5 lanes of traffic with a green light to catch a bus at a stop before it left. He then woke up in the hospital. His head hurt more than anything he could remember, and maybe he could remember less with the head injury. Jaywalking is a dangerous practice. Some lessons are learned the hard way. "Bought lessons," Jeff had told him when steeping in a regret one day. As he sat in a quiet apartment on Tuesday when he wished he were at work he thought about how much tea he drank when he lived in England.
He thought a lot. All those questions that crop up, or drop themselves like dirty boots onto one's psyche he hoped would be answered in an afterlife. Bob didn't want streets paved with gold, 42 virgins, perfect teeth or any of that. He wanted to know god's thoughts. That's all. He lived, and so did the other Jaywalkers. Philosophically, he could give himself to the uncertainty and bareness of proof of much and embrace sciencia as much it gave the opportunity to speak logical truths. You can imagine how tiresome that can become as well, and how little other people like it.
As he opened his door, he remembered a doctor he used to work for. They worked on systems for patient records. The notion that patients should be processed like data and the processing and data should be governed by standards and rules, that the laboriousness of a rigorous bureaucracy had its own beauty. The discipline there would give the patient at least a continuous thread to follow and road to forge. Determinations could be made, respected, drawn upon, and data would have their own specie.
It just doesn't work that way. By the time he was upstairs in the apartment, he considered the words he had used to describe a painting he had done. "Space Angel" was the phrase he had used. A smile crept on to his face as he thought about the aliens whom undoubtedly introduced the catalyst and blossom of the reflective consciousness and the very human protolanguages smashed with the tower of Babylon. True space angels, he decided, were those very aliens who maybe did it. These revelations were more fun than the doctors. "It's better to go a little bit crazy than a lot crazy," Mario reassured him through a golden capped grin and ancient eyes.
The back of his T-shirt that he wore to the doctor said, "Yes, I am a Rocket Scientist." He got it at White Sands Missile Range the year before. It was a good shirt and idea that others would challenge. Fuck them, really. This was the beautiful thing to be learned from the company of complete bastards: What other people think about you doesn't usually matter to you. The doctor student was Russian. He wasn't really a rocket scientist. His greatest achievements included the usage of an illy brand espresso can as a directional 802.11 radio antenna shield. It sounds impressive, but it's more putting a square peg into a square slot than anything.
So he wasn't so smart. At least he got laid. What did he have to do more than the ethically right thing? In the simplest living that was all he had to know. Since he wasn't that smart, he was given, consciously given to the simplest living. The getting laid part was more than enough trouble than he needed. He was better at throwing rocks at the sky than studying rockets, but he wasn't all that good at throwing rocks. Beautifully, he realized that throwing rocks at the sky was also dangerous. They might come back down, and if one wasn't careful it would be possible to get hit in the head.
So he had been hit in the head by a car while he was jaywalking. The doctors had looked at images where Bob's brain had gone dark. No dye, no blood, no oxygen, no life, no soul. It was just the rocks in Bob's head. He loved the pictures of it, though, and he hadn't used up all his brain, at least. There was some still in there, still ticking. The Board were still meeting and he was still looking at the dark spot. He would rather still be using it, but that happens if it does. Even if he tried the hardest he could to think with that part, think using that part, or use that area of the brain however it was used to the best of his ability, then he would have no guarantee for anything other than driving himself a bit more mad than he set out as.
When the doctor asked what the neurologist said, Bob rambled about a few things. Eventually, the doctor sort of waited and Bob resolved, "...I mean, who wouldn't want pictures of their brain?" The doctor was not amused. She gave a strong flat eye. Then she said, "They teach us in med school that if we learn that there is something different... then what?" Bob cut her off, "I know, I know." Bob probably didn't, but that's what he said. It ended the dialogue.
Yes, life is a game. It is lived, or played, as it is dealt. As a statement or perspective it seems childish, maybe, but it felt true. Why Andrew didn't like it was not Bob's problem. Bob had his own problems. To be judged as a patient was not worth the paper. He didn't like the medicians any more. They seemed really uptight as a whole. He was very prone to bouts of uptightness, and he was concerned about contagion. If he looked at what he had found and learned along the way, he would certainly see that it was less and less beneficial.
There was the game of resource to be played, and he would because otherwise he would regret not playing. Importantly though, he knew that he was playing not for himself but to solve riddles of guilt. He was just a dumb kid. How could they have a problem with it?
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