Alakh Nirajana.
Let there be light.
†††
It came like thunder. Overnight we had been populated by demoniacs claiming holiness to their title. We know so little about this illness. But we’re told that it’s everywhere. It’s the common cold of psychosis.
I don’t have any experience in the technicalities of psychology. So perhaps my methods and my explanations are elementary. But from what I understand, the diagnosis goes a little something like this:
DIAGNOSIS
SHARED SALVATION MANIA (SSM)* (commonly known as the Cassio Dust Effect)
The condition is characterized by an overwhelming desire to bring peace and salvation to the world. The infected will often express delusions of grandeur, hearing omniscient voices or undergoing vivid hallucinations that affirm his or her sense of power. The result of these delusions is polarized. Some lose empathy and perform blind violent acts, while others experience a severe expression of empathy and sadness for the struggles of other individuals, strangers included.
*Insufficient study of this disorder prevents it from being officially admitted to Axis II of the DSM-IV-TR. Currently it is classified as a psychological phenomenon similar to the like of Stockholm Syndrome. The closest diagnosable disorder is Narcissistic personality disorder. However, this diagnosis is insufficient. Shared Salvation Mania is closer to Megalomania, although this is not included in the DSM or ICD.
SSM has become a household word. Every kid knows they need to avoid the crazy people with the crazy dreams. If you’re real young, you’ll think they’re monsters. But when you get a little older, when you feel disconnected and afraid of adulthood, when you don’t want to grow up and all you want is to grow, you begin to claim these men and women as heroes.
For half a year now, they’ve handled it this way: People are diagnosed, medicated, and let back into the world.
But now, seven months in, the situation has evolved. The medication doesn’t always sedate the impulses. And too often it causes new ones. Whatever synthetic pills they stuff down SSM throats, it shocks one new problem for every problem that is solved.
As a result, these people are being locked up quickly. All patients of SSM are placed in special wards. The most famous of which is at St. Dmitri’s hospital right outside of Austin, Texas.
That’s where you’ll find Cass.
I think Cass and I got on so well because of our opulence. He shares this obsession with me. He wants to take in as much sensory stimuli as his mind can handle. He throws himself with great intention into situations that will smolder in the pages of madness. He’s selfish like that. Only, he doesn’t see it.
“I was a weird looking child,” Cass once told me. “I was a fat child too, which was strange because I hated eating. I ate so little, so little! My mother told me that there was too much sweetness in me. That I indulge in immaterial things. Not on drugs or sex or food, but indulgence simply on the sweetness of human interaction. And that too can make you swell.”
But my desires, my fetish my, loyalty--all gone. They left me a stack of bones. A skin of thin scales—peeling, flaking. Bloodshot sockets. My desires were charred. When Cass started that fire, I saw what it was that I always wanted. In that instant, I uncovered the perfect myth. It’s a miracle really, to discover a well filled to the brim with everything you could ever need to craft the most elegant, articulate story. A legend. An epic. I plunged deep within that well and came out soaked in hope, sorrow and sickness, my mind chasing a god of perverse purity.
It’s a disease that has made Cassio a god.
And if it’s a disease, that means I can catch it. That means it can be mine. We catch the flu from exchanging saliva. We catch SSM from exchanging ideas.
I’m not sure how many of these crazed individuals I need to touch before it spreads to my bloodstream. But I’ve spent six months tracking these people down. I’ve spent 24 weeks running wild across the country and if I don’t stop soon I’ll be out of money before I can make it through the summer. So I’ve returned to my city to pick up some cash and then head back out again. Because where I need to head next is back again where this started. Back in to where I was when the New Year settled in.
I need to get back to Austin. And I need to see Cass.
His presence was minimal at first, but as the months have passed, Cass has become the ultimate god. Cass, the young man who died and was reborn, Cass the golden hero with a desire to save everyone and bring them to that heavenly spirit we envision exists within the infinite void we see in space with our telescopes.
Finding people with SSM is not as difficult as it may sound. You could comb through a crowd and try and discover one by one, a manual algorithm, which individuals are insane. But that would take an eternity that Alexander Marvell taught me we do not have. Instead, I’ve got the Network. As the disease spread, when it seemed like people were making SSM sound like demons, someone, somewhere, created a network. The SSM Network, it’s a complicated system. The purpose is to promote the idea of these people as good people, as mythical people, as proof that we can be sacred. They are doing this out of paranoia that these people will disappear mysteriously; they will be abused or undervalued. The Network is protection. That’s the thing about letting people know where you are—it provides infinite transparency.
Which means people will know where to find you and harm you. But they will also know when you are gone.
Of course there are still millions of patients unlisted. But the database grows as patients became more terrified and submit themselves into the system. Though curiously, it grows at such a rate I’m beginning to think that perhaps they are being over diagnosed. Now it seems like anyone with a bit of depression, a bit of apprehension, is marked as a mad savior.
I’ve kept a chronological list of the people I’ve met with SSM since the beginning of the year. Included by each name is the city I met them in, their age, and the reason they’ve been deemed insane. This is for my own reference. So I never forget. And each night I read the names out loud. I stare at the candle, and then I chant these names so I won’t forget. There are so many of them. So many I never met. So many of them I know the names of and the quality of, but haven’t met yet.
I’ve been hauled up at a 24-hour diner since yesterday, drinking tomato soup and waiting for my move in date to a newer, cheaper and infinitely dingier apartment. The soup stilled my mind. It was a sandy soup. A chunk of unidentified meat sunk in the center. I probably should have spent the last 24 hours looking for a job, instead of staring at empty soup bowls and thumbing through paperbacks, but I’m not picky about my future employment. I just need something that will help me get to Austin. I need to pay for a damn plane ticket.
The watch on my wrist is the wrong time zone. It’s a designer piece of crap I wear to remind me that indulgence of all types means a disconnection with the roots you grow to keep yourself alive. It was a gift from a photo shoot I did last year. They told me my cheekbones should be more sculpted so could you please suck in. I said piss off and they fired me but not before I had already pocketed the consolation prize.
I get up, throw my scraps into the trash, and drop my tray on the counter. I throw the watch away as well and then head out.
The lasting vestiges of my functional life tumble through my bags. There’s a leather backpack and a small duffle bag—both that I had enough of a mind to grab before I ran from the ashram. The fire might have been blazing when I ran, but I remembered enough.
The apartment is only a few blocks away. It’s a shithole of a place, but I expected no more. There are a few shingles in the parking lot. I’m not sure what sorts of wind could send them so far.
I knock. Room 309.
The door opens. The man behind the door is a little bent out of shape, like he played college sports and you can see that build resting beneath a layer of dissatisfaction. He has tattoo sleeves so we by default look coordinated and stupid standing next to one another. Except his are of swirling humans and melting breasts, and mine are of fine literary appreciation.
I’d spoken to him on the phone a few days ago. It’s always strange piecing together the voice to the body. The sound to the flesh.
“Hi,” I say. “I’m moving in. I spoke to you yesterday.”
“Right,” he says, staring a little past my eyes. “I’m Pilot.”
He doesn’t offer my hand to shake. He just backs away from the door like I might shank him, but like he isn’t afraid of that anyway, and I take that as my queue to walk in and close the door behind me.
We stand in the living room. Pilot is dusting his hands on his jeans. The living room ceiling is threatening to collapse in on the supports. There’s a couch, a television and some beer cans scattered on the kitchen table. I see a few of decks of Magic the Gathering on a coffee table. A metal road sign sits on the table with the engraving “If you don’t have anything to do, please do not do it here.”
“So who are you again?” Pilot says.
“Your new roommate.”
He continues to stare at me until I realize that he’s waiting for my name.
“Oh, yeah, sorry, “I’m Nikolai. Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin,” I tell him, holding out my hand.
“Well, shoot. I’m sorry,” he says shaking my hand.
In the past eight months, I’ve avoided using my name. And this time I decided to just scrap it all together. So Nathan has been replaced. And what better name to choose than a man who was haunted by demons? Farewell Nathan. You were only a pretty construct.
“Anyway,” Pilot says, “rent is $450, due at the end of your first week. You room is down there, bathroom is over there.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re lucky,” he says, kicking a beer can under the couch, “the last guy who was here was shot before he had a chance to do anything about his furniture.”
A delightful ending. I feel honored to be a replacement. But a dead man leaves more than furniture. He leaves spacious shoes to fill.
“Oh one more thing,” Pilot says, “we’ve got another guy here, his name is James. He’s pretty stupid but he thinks he’s damn clever. He’s kind of lonely so I don’t tell him that his jokes are not funny. Just be nice to him, okay?”
Pilot disappears into his room. I’m almost insulted. He doesn’t seem to want much to do with me. Which is astonishing, as I’ve come to notice that everyone always wants something to do with me.
I walk to the room Pilot pointed at. My room. My room is faintly lingering with the scent of urine. I see the smell dancing like a nymph in the windowsill. There’s a vomit stain on the floor. I place my backpack down beside the closet, which is curiously missing one of its doors, and sit down on the bed to stare absently at the walls. The carpet is dull and needs a good wash.
I’d learned to shampoo carpets when I was young. My mother was really big on that. She had watched a documentary about the perils of a carpeted homes, as your rugs harbor more disease than the septic tank you still don’t know the location of after fourteen years of living in this house, and my mother made me shampoo my carpet as frequently as I shampooed my hair until I was thirteen when she just did away with all the carpet to save us the hassle and the looming presence of disease and we lived with cold tile ever after.
A need for clean carpets was instilled in me before I hit puberty. These are the sorts of things you never outgrow.
I sit on the bed and take out a book from my backpack. I had attempted several times today to make some progress in Milan Kundera’s Testament’s Betrayed. I’m in the early pages. Kundera references Thomas Mann and this idea he had about the “well of the past.” And I gather that this idea said something of how we get our actions from the collective continuation of what came before us. In that sense I am not acting at all. In that sense I am indefinable. I am limitless. Because the sphere of what I am is a meaningless construct. I supplemented barriers for no reason…
Usually my attentions span for reading is unbelievable. I can step between the pages and phase out any other distraction. But for some reason, and perhaps it’s the unfamiliar territory, I can’t seem to concentrate too well. I drop the book back into my backpack, where it is blends in with the last of my possessions—a stack of 30-cent paperbacks. Four packs of toothbrushes.
Or maybe it’s not really the environment that is preventing me from articulating my thoughts so well, but instead the mere fact that I feel entirely disconnected from the world (though admittedly less so than I did before I bought that soup). But I don’t exactly know where to go from here. My modeling agent has been probably thoroughly bothered that I hadn’t returned her phone calls in months. But I hadn’t had a phone since January so I’m not sure how frequently she called me for jobs and at what point she dropped me as a client. If I could book another shoot then I could get enough cash to support me while I figured out what to do next. But there is no way that will happen. And I look rough. Flailing nutrition and no sleep had taken its toll on me finally. I never thought that recklessness could beat youth. But apparently even my skin doesn’t stand a chance to such potent strain.
Didn’t I turn 24 this March? I must have missed the date.
Modeling is pretty much the only way I know how to earn a living. I’ve never worked another job in my life. My parents supported me when I was in college. And after that I’d done model jobs while I floundered a bit and investigated various grad school programs. I don’t have a printer or any money or a car and no way to even print my resume. I’ve become irrelevant. All the little bits that I once thought to be so distinctly me, seem to have no holding anymore.
In the corner of the room, right where two walls meet and the shadow of the bed falls, I spot a discoloration. Three little white and brown mushrooms grow out of the side of the wall. Spongy and huddled close together.
I take out another book from my backpack. It’s a collection of short stories from Checkov. And I begin to read his short story “An Attack of Nerves.” The plot is about a man’s first experience with a lady of the night. But the short story is about a whole lot more.
In anticipation of his first experience with a fallen woman, the protagonist Vassilyev produces a fantastical vision of what to expect later in the evening. A romantic story, about a prostitute who takes poison because she believes herself unworthy of a gentleman’s love, influences Vassilyev’s belief of how the evening will unfold. In his mind, the process of visiting a whorehouse is enveloped in deep, lascivious drama. The fallen woman will have “the face of a martyr and a guilty smile,” abstracted by a sacred darkness. Vassilyev uses the aura of mystery and guilt as justification that these women, although never acceptable to society, will eventually find salvation in God.
“It would all be dreadful, but interesting and new,” he muses.
Isn’t that just like everything in this world?
However, from his first step into a whorehouse, the beautiful dream he assembled begins to unravel. Vassilyev ultimately falls to an overwhelming nervous breakdown due to the realization that the fallen women and their visitors are not only beyond salvation, but they do not seem to want to be saved either. The combination of gaudy scenery, lustful feelings and intoxication provides an overindulgence in the senses that becomes too much for Vassilyev’s mind. A feeling of melancholic hopelessness envelops Vassilyev and, haunted by the night’s visions, his hypersensitive soul is driven to madness.
Vassilyev begins the evening drinking with his friends, Mayer and Rybnikov. He quickly falls into a state of deep rumination, finding the ease of his companions oddly stirring. Envious and respectful of their light smiles and laughs, Vassilyev commits himself to live “for one evening…as his friends did, to open out…laugh, play the fool, gaily respond to the passing advances of strangers in the street.” Vassilyev’s madness does not manifest in full until he gets a taste of prostitution’s theatrics.
Here he makes his first mistake—he thinks.
When they arrive at the notorious side street, he is stunned to find that “No one was hurrying…no one shook his head reproachfully.” Vassilyev quickly reverts to his introspective nature. He observes the doorman, wondering, “What must an ordinary simple Russian have gone through before fate flung him down as a flunkey here? Where had he been before and what had he done?” He later objectifies a prostitute in a similar manner, his mind flooded with personal questions about her past. Vassilyev’s peculiar “talent for humanity” exaggerates his reaction to the events around him. He attempts to approach the situation intellectually and dissolves into pity.
The more the prostitutes and visitors express their exuberance, the more doomed Vassilyev perceives mankind to be.
Vassilyev’s breakdown occurs because, unlike those around him, he contemplates his position. Tragically enough, the minute he gives into his rational mind, he loses all sight with reality. Vassilyev begins to see everyone as less than human. Operating from their animalistic instincts, “they were not on the road to ruin, but ruined.”
Vassilyev acknowledges that there is beauty in being saved—that forgiveness, and confession are traits akin to human nature. A sense of guilt and shame still leaves room for the possibility of transformation. But the women do not show any remorse at their profession, and the men do not show any remorse for their actions; enveloped in the lurid whorehouses, the desires are only sensory. Vassilyev’s horror transforms into a fanatical desire to save these women, and when he realizes the impossibility of this task, he begins to breakdown. If Vassilyev had actually managed to achieve his evening resolution and simply lived as his friends did, then he would have been spared from such madness. But his acute awareness prevents him from closing his eyes.
As Vassilyev discovers—to see is to breakdown.
To see is to breakdown.
To see is to breakdown.
To see…