“So
what’s your story, apeman?” the girl had wild, unkept hair, she was in her
early 30’s and we were in a group therapy session in a psych ward in Chicago.
It was late July of 1997 and the girl was talking to me, she asked again, “The
story, apeman?”
“Why do
you call me apeman?” I laughed and shook my head, “Is it because of my beard
and hair? Do I swing my arms wide when I walk or what?”
“You eat
a lot of bananas…” she glanced at the floor, almost as if to say sorry but she
remembered her question and quickly looked me in the eye, “Your story, what it
is?”
“I had a
psychotic breakdown while in traffic on The Edens Expressway…” I shook my head,
sighed heavily, “I don’t know, I was driving to an appointment and then I was
here. That was several days ago, I think.”
“I
shouldn’t be here, I’m not insane.” The girl responded and crossed her thin
arms, “Nobody will listen to me, they think I’m crazy…that’s why I’m here.”
“Yeah?”
I didn’t know what to say and all the others in the group circle simply looked
at the two of us like it was live theater before their eyes, “I don’t think I’m
insane either…just not feeling well in the head, I guess…I don’t know.” I
looked at the therapist but she was looking at her clipboard, seemingly not paying
attention, I continued, “Why do they think you’re crazy?”
“I’m
from the future.” She stated flatly, as a fact and added, “The body I’m in, the
girl who occupied it, she committed suicide so I’m using her body.”
“Really?”
I knew it sounded crazy but there was a conviction in her voice which compelled
me to perhaps listen more, maybe she was telling the truth. I asked, “What year
are you from?”
“Well,
that’s a trick question because in the future, time was reset…” the girl leaned
closer as all the other still sat in silence and the therapist continued
looking at her clipboard, “Once everyone decided the whole Jesus myth was all
bullshit, it didn’t seem to make sense to base our time on a fable…so I am from
the future, about 135 years from now.”
“So, like,
in our timeline, it’s 2132?” I asked, “What year number is it in your future?”
“We
don’t use numbers and the moon cycle to judge time anymore…” the girl was about
to continue explaining when the therapist suddenly spoke up and interrupted
her, “It’s a matter of…”
“Okay,
sorry gang, but time’s up!” the therapist had the tone of a cheerleader as she
stood up and continued yapping, “You guys did great, I think we got something
out this today, don’t you? Now remember, take your meds and check your feelings,
okay?”
A few
days later I saw the girl in my art therapy group. I had learned her name was
Andrea Watson but everyone called her “Ginger” because of her red hair. Andrea
had been admitted to the psych ward the same evening as I did, she attempted
suicide by slitting her wrists. Her mother found her and called for help in
time to save her life, but that’s not how Andrea told it, she had a different
story.
“I hate
they keep calling me Ginger!” Andrea confessed to me as we sat next to another
and each colored our silly emotional drawings. Mine was a water well with
daffodils and a puppy. Andrea’s drawing was of two children flying a kite on a
hill. These images were supposed to help us feel better by recalling our
childhood or something. Both Andrea and I were coloring the drawing with
strange, contrary colors. I colored the stones of the well in a multicolored
tie-dyed looking structure and the kids in Andrea’s drawing were multicolored
too. One had a red arm and a green arm, a purple leg and yellow leg and the
other kid looked as strange, but we both simply colored slowly and spoke softly
while the cool art therapist played some mellow, jazzy sounding music. Andrea’s
blue eyes looked very alive, sparking full of life when she smiled, “Just don’t
fucking call me Ginger and you and me will be alright.”
“Okay,
Andrea…” I grinned, “Just call me The Doctor.”
“Are you
a doctor?”
“No, but
don’t tell my nurse!” I smiled but the lame joke flopped between us as I tried
to continue to engage her with her talk of the future, “So, how does that work?
You time travel back 135 years into the body of a freshly dead girl?”
“Time
travel is not about matter but energy.” Andrea spoke very confident, not
looking up and simply coloring the sky in her picture different shades of pink
and orange, “We, you and me and everyone on the planet, we are bodies of
energy, not an intricacy of bio-systems contained inside carbon based plasma
units…well, we’re that too, but our real being, it’s all energy and no matter.”
“I get
that, I agree.” I was trying to follow along and it was easy because this is a
similar belief of mine, I think we’re spiritual beings having a human
experience. We are energy, we just have bodies to move around in the third
dimension. I was about to explain my own theory but Andrea stopped me in mid
thought, “I have always thought that the experience of life…”
“So, I
cannot travel in time with a body, matter is matter no matter what you do about
the matter, it’s still just matter and will always be just that…” Andrea’s sky
was bright and pink, reminding me of a wet salmon fillet jumping upstream in
the afternoon sun, “Energy can be displaced, removed, transferred and
converted…when I jumped into this sad girl’s body, it was at the very moment
her energy moved out of the vessel and I slide into it…the mother didn’t save
Ginger, I did!”
“I get
that too!” my grassy hill, done in a Monet style of lavender, moss green and
pale blues, was very detailed as I leaned close into it and listened closely,
“Why? How come you came back?”
“I need
to warn somebody, they’re going to do something which will seal the course of
history for catastrophe and billions of people of people will die for no
reason.” Andrea stopped coloring and slowly looked around the room, as if she
was making sure nobody could hear our discussion, “They sent someone after me
too, somebody is going to try to stop me.”
“Who?”
it was a question that needed two answers for me; who is the somebody Andrea is
going to warn and who is the person that is going to try to stop her? I was
about to clarify my question when the guy across the table from us, a big burly
fat dude with long strands of strangling hair and a stubbly gray beard started
to growl. I tried to ignore him and asked, “Who is after you?”
“I can’t
tell you…” Andrea slowly put her crayon down and glanced up at the big burly
growly fat dude and then, like she knew what was going to happen next, she
pushed me away and we fell to the floor right as the big burly growling fat guy
started yelling loudly and leaped across the art table at us! The cool art
therapist hit the panic button and everyone else stood up and started screaming
with commotion and confusion. The big burly growly fat dude was scream and
clawing across the table. I slide on my ass towards the far corner and Andrea
scuttled under the table just as the fat dude flopped off the other side of the
table. He rolled over, started crawling under the table towards Andrea so I
kick him as hard as I could on the ass; my foot slipped and I landed square in
his nut sack! The big burly growly fat dude screamed, howled and stood up from
under the table! Like a crazy Godzilla busting through the floor, the table and
everything on it went flying across the room just as two, and then three big
bouncer sized orderlies came to rescue the group. The big burly growly fat dude
was wrestled to the floor and a couple of nurses rushed in, one of them had a
syringe of sedative and she stabled the wild beastly man in the neck hard. It
didn’t stop him, not immediately, he threw two of the bouncer orderlies off and
one of the nurses fell back and cracked her head on a chair. Just when the
monster madman stood up, however, as he turned toward Andrea and loomed over
her, he started to sway a little before falling flat on his back, landing on
one of the bouncer orderlies and pinning him to the ground. Other staff members
came in and corralled everyone out of the room quickly. We were all sent to our
rooms and stayed there until dinner.
Dinner came, Andrea was not there. After dinner, in the
community room, while we watched some Disney film, I kept looking around for
her but she never showed up. The next day, during group therapy, a group Andrea
was a part of, she wasn’t there and I asked the therapist, “Where’s Andrea?”
“Who?” the
therapist looked at me as if I asked an alien question. I had a moment of
sci-fi flashback, maybe she was removed from history? The therapist waited then
prompted me, “Who are you thinking about, d’Philip?”
“Andrea…the
red head girl?” then I remembered, “Ginger?”
“Oh!
Ginger has the flu…” the therapist nodded, smiled and started the group, “Today
we’re going to talk about identifying potential emotional triggers…”
“One of
my triggers is being lied to…” said a very round girl with deep dark skin and bright
red lips, “I think this whole place is set up to keep us from being free, not
to heal us…this is a prison!”
“Okay
Francis…” said the therapist calmly, “Being lied to is an excellent trigger!”
Later that night, long after everyone else was asleep and
the night staff was safely tucked into watching late night television in the
break room, I got out of bed and roamed the halls. I wandered past the break
room and no one noticed me, I slipped into the community room with the
intention of going to my favorite corner, out of sight of the doorway, where I
could look out from the 9th floor windows of the psych ward. I
didn’t see Andrea sitting there at first, she was squatting on the floor half
under the table. I squatted down next to her, she was shaking and took her
trembling hand softly, “Andrea, what’s wrong?” I asked in a whisper, “Are you
alright? I heard you have the flu?”
“The
flu?” Andrea scowled, “I’m not ill, not at all!”
“So, I
think I believe you…” I glanced at her and caught her eye, “…about being from
the future.”
“You
think you believe me?”
“Well,
it’s a leap of faith…” I flashed a grin and admitted, “I’ve always somehow
known that the universe is a multiple-verse…time is a man made construct, just
because we’ve not discovered exactly how it works, doesn’t mean that it does
not exist, right? Einstein was onto something much larger than E=MC2, but more
important than that, inside myself, in my mind and experiences I’m pretty sure
I’ve been to this planet before, like in another life…so why not time travel,
right?”
“No
wonder you’re in this place…” Andrea glanced and grinned at me, “You are
fucking crazy!” she laughed and then shook her head, put her hand on my knee
and whispered, “But you’re right too, sort of, you know that you are a soul and
you simply have a body.”
“Yeah, I
think so…” I asked, “So, what’s your real name? Not Ginger or Andrea or
whatever…but who are you really? How old are you? Are you really a female?
Where in the world did you live? Is the world still here in 135 years?”
“Yes,
the world is here…I live in a small mountain colony in The Republic of
California” she took a deep breath and answered all my questions in detail. She
was a female, she was about 30 years old but since time is different in the
future, she was considered a “Level 3” individual, she did not have an actual
number for her age. She told me about the world a little, how The United States
of America was no longer a country, not since 2037. There is a United States
Empire in this future she spoke about, but it was a small territory that
included most of the original British colonies, as well as Florida, Alabama and
Mississippi.
I asked about my home cities of San Francisco and Chicago, they
are both still standing in the future too. Chicago, in this future, is the
largest city in new nation of Ozark which extends between the Appalachia
Mountains on the east to the Rocky Mountains on the west. The capital of the new
Ozark nation is Omaha City, it’s the biggest nation on The North American
continent and it’s very much like the best version of what The United States
tried to become originally. Ozark is huge too, on the north it boarders The Arctic
Ocean along the Queen Elizabeth Islands and includes most of what used to be
Canada. Ozark extends south, incorporating all of Texas and Mexico as well as
Central America and the Panama Canal is the only entrance into Ozark. She
smiled with a fond gleam in her eye, “I loved a boy from Ozark once, he was an
engineer in the Mexican solar fields and very sweet.”
“This
sounds crazy, I mean I believe you but, man…” I shook my head, “It’s hard to
imagine, you know? So, what about where you’re from, The Republic of
California?”
“Well, it’s the former states of Washington,
Oregon, California and Baja California and our capital city is San Francisco.
We were the first to declare our independence from the old United States, from
this United States now…we declared independence in 2028 and declared ourselves
The Republic of California.”
“What happened, was there a civil
war?” my eyes were wide, this is my home state, this is the place I always
imagined I would finally rest my bones, I was gripped, “How did it happen?”
“Greed.” She smiled simply, “The
USA was in deep financial trouble and we had all the innovation and resources,
so we bought ourselves free from The United States for a few billion dollars.
No blood, no war…a little cyber hacking and treats, but in the end, they took
the cash!”
“The fucking American Way!” I laughed
and asked, “What about the rest of the country, the rest of the world?”
“Well, the remaining states in between
the Rocky Mountains and The Sierra Nevada mountains, as far south as The Grand
Canyon and as north as the Snake River in the Utah territory is known as The Basin
Wastelands.” She seemed to like teaching me about future history, “The
Wasteland is ruled by tribal communities of religious zealots, outlaws and the
only law is there is no law.”
“Dangerous place?”
“Very dangerous and deadly too. The
Wastelands suffer from extreme sulfur poising from a super caldron which is
leaking from under The Salt Lake, the lake consumed the city and filled the
salt desert too…” she sounded sad, “Nothing can live there for very long, it’s
sad. A lot of people, lost people who are hooked on drugs or violent or
whatever, they go there because anything goes…There is only one city in The
Basin wasteland, New Vegas, in what used to be Utah.”
“Wow,
this is incredible and it starts in the 2020’s?” I asked, fascinated by her
seemingly sci-fi rendition of the future, “What about the rest of the world? Is
it still at war?”
“There
is violence, it’s part of the human nature but after the global collapse in
2022, when China’s secret chief media minister, Rupert Murdoch made his
deathbed confession and the good people of Russia finally took back their land
from the criminal who were running it, most of the world has been at peace.” She
sighed and looked a little tired, “They still fight in the Middle East, but
nobody pays attention anymore and most of Europe is, well, it’s Europe, you
know? Hey, do you mind if this history of the future continues another time, I’m
feeling sleepy.”
No, it’s
cool, I understand…” I started to stand up and held my hand out to help her to
her feet, “But one thing, what is YOUR real name?”
“I’m
called Yehi’Or…” she smiled as stood up, “What about you apeman, what’s your
real name?”
“I’m d’Philip…”
we held hands as we walked from the community room, past the oblivious night
staff in the break room and to our respective rooms. I bid her good night, “Will
I see you tomorrow?”
“Perhaps…”
Yehi’Or looked worried, “I hope so.”
“Good
night.” I smiled.
“Sleep
in Peace.” She nodded back and stepped into her room.
Over the
next three days Yehi’Or and I found many moments to slip away and converse in
private about the future. I asked her some silly questions like when do the
Chicago Cubs win the World Series but was severely disappointed to find out the
Cubs moved to Omaha in 2021 and then 2 years later won back to back World Series!
I asked her who the next President of The United States was going to be and she
said he was the son of former President Bush, his name was George W and though it
was years away, I doubted her because I thought it was a shoe-in for Vice
President Al Gore. I asked her when did this apocalyptic version of the future
start to take shape and she said it had already started almost 50 years
earlier, in the late 1950’s but that the fulcrum, the turning point when the
scales tip and there is a paradigm shift was still yet to happen. I asked her
when that was going to happen but she said she wasn’t sure, that’s one of the
reasons why she came back to the past, “It’s when the towers fall.”
“Like a
Y2K thing?” I worried about that potential disaster but it was still years away
so I felt safe in knowing nothing would come of Y2K, I nodded, “They say planes
will fall from the sky.”
“That
too.” She shook her head as if she couldn’t remembers something, “I can see it,
but I can’t make it out…I think it’s this awful medicine, it’s barbaric!”
“How do
they treat mental illness in the future?”
“They
don’t, there is no such thing as mental illness…” she smiled, “It’s a matter of
balance between mind and body and spirit.”
“Yeah,
but what about, you know, psychopaths and such?”
“There
is also good and evil too.” Yehi’Or radiated in the lightly filter sunshine, “We
will meet again, you and me.”
“In 135
years?” I laughed, “I’ll be 177 years old!”
“No,
before then…” she smiled, “Just look for the light, look at it right, I’m
there.”
“What
the hell?” I laughed, “I think the meds are making you loopy!”
We had been talking for hours, it was a Sunday, not a busy
day in the psych ward and we were just staring out the window, talking, minding
our own business when again, from nowhere, that big fat burly guy came roaring up
behind us and picked up Yehi’Or in her chair, slamming her against the glass
with a violent thrust. Her head cracked, it was loud and instant blood splatter
on the window. The commotion erupted like a madhouse gone mad because that’s
exactly what it was, the patients started screaming and crying, running around
in circles, falling down while the over sized bouncer orderlies and nurses
tried to gain control of a highly chaotic moment. I could see in the big fat
burly guy’s dark eyes, nothing but death, he was going to kill my friend from
the future! I tackled him and he dropped Yehi’Or to the floor while falling
back and tripping over other patients on the floor. I stayed on top of him,
pounding him left and right, as hard as I could, letting all my uncontrolled
manic rage out but it was like sneezing on a grizzly bear; he lifted one fat am
I flew back across a table and banged my head. I was out cold.
It was late Monday afternoon when I realized I was in a
padded room, strapped to a bed. I was alone and I remember laying there for
hours, I knew it was hours because the little window in the corner slowly got
darker with shades of the setting sun. Finally a doctor accompanied by a nurse,
an orderly and an administrator looking lady with a very bitter face and jet
black hair pulled into a very tight bun. The stood on either side of me, the
doctor speaking first, explaining I am having a psychotic episode and they have
me sedated for my own benefit. Then the administrator lady told me I would not
be held responsible in the death of Andrea Watson, however, I cannot press
charges against the hospital nor any other patients in this unfortunate
incident. They told me to sign a paper and I think I did but the nurse gave me
another shot and when the orderly shut out the light, I was again gone.
Blackness, darkness, nothing. No dreams, no memories, no feelings, no nothing
but black and emptiness. I can’t truthfully say I remember anything, not a
single thought or image or notion or anything.
I just woke up one day, in my regular bed in the psych ward,
with my regular room mate Doug and it was eight days later. I sat up, it was
morning, just after breakfast and Doug was making loud sounds from the washroom
like he was shitting watermelon sized turds. I pushed the nurse call button and
started to get out of bed, but as I stood up, I felt dizzy and flopped back on
the bed. The nurse came in as I made my flop and called for help, but twenty
minutes and a doctor’s check later, everyone but me seemed to think I was
basically alright. I was hungry, weak from being in bed they had me eat and
walk around for exercise until noon. Later, in the evening, while the patients
watched another Disney movie in the community room, I sat in the hall outside
and looked at the window, the place I saw Yehi’Or murdered. I felt both sadness
and rage, I was confused and very concerned about the future because I didn’t
know what was going to happen now; did she accomplish her mission or are we
doomed? These thoughts, this crazy ranting in my head would not stop but I kept
it to myself. I knew if I started to talk about it they would just keep me
locked up longer. I wanted out, I needed to get out and find the truth. But
what truth? I didn’t know and that in itself seemed to drive me mad! I did what
I was told to do when I was told to do it, I participated and engaged myself
with others, I played the psych ward game as best as I could but I wasn’t
making progress fast enough so one day, in the middle of a group session about
dealing with paranoid symptoms, I burst out, “Does anyone here remember Andrea
Watson? Ginger? The girl who was here because she tried to commit suicide but
she was really a time traveler?!?” the six other patients, the therapist with a
clipboard and the bouncer sized orderly were all silent. They just looked at me
and I yelled, “Anyone?!? Anyone at all?!?”
“James…” the clipboard wielding therapist
addressed the bouncer sized orderly, “Please take Mr. Chalmers to his room and
call the doctor on duty.”
“No,
wait!” I stood up and stumbled back from the advancing gorilla sized orderly, “Listen
to me, please…aren’t we supposed to talk about feeling paranoid in here? What
the fuck?!?”
“C’mon,
no trouble…” the bouncer orderly grabbed my arm tightly and lifted me like a
sack of small potatoes, “Let’s go see the doctor…”
“No wait,
please…” my protests were futile and after I was in my room, when the doctor
came in to see me, I was calmer, “Look doc, I’m not losing it, I’m not crazy
but I was just trying to ask a question, that’s all…I might have not asked it
right, I lost control of my emotions, but still…”
“Mr.
Chalmers, you had a serious psychotic break, your brain’s chemicals are
creating delusional feelings, they have been creating extended episodes of hallucinatory
behavior…for the past ten days you have been conversing with an imaginary
patient, somebody you created inside your mind.” The doctor spoke very calmly,
gently and with a delicate note of empathy, “Please trust me, sir, we can help
you but you need to work on realizing the difference between reality and
fantasy.”
“How can
I tell what’s the difference?” I mumbled as I felt a medication start swimming
through my veins, rushing towards my head, “What’s really real and what’s not?”
“Just
ask the staff, they know what’s real.” He patted my knee as I laid back and
slipped into another endless, black slumber. I remember the doctor saying
something to somebody else as the lights went out, he said, “He still
remembers.”
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The next
morning I was up early, with all the other patients. I went to breakfast and
sat by myself on the far side of the cafeteria. After breakfast I went to the exercise
class and took a place next to the very round dark skin girl with bright red
lips. We worked out in silence for the 40 minute class but when it was over, as
we toweled our sweating brows and sipped water, she smiled at me and said, “Don’t
you hate it when they lie to you here.”
“Yeah, I
do.” I took a hard swallow of the tepid water, “Fuck them.”
“Yeah,
fuck them.” as she started to walk away, she turned to me and smiled, “I
remember that chick too, you’re not crazy.”
It would be another five weeks before I was finally
discharged from the psych ward but then I had eight months of a “Partial
Hospitalization Program” (PHP) wherein I’d go to the hospital five days a week
for about five or six hours a day and continue working on managing my mental
illness. Eventually I sort of graduated myself from the never ending PHP cycle
by relocating with my wife and family to another state. Three months after
moving to Hot Springs Village, Arkansas I had been “re-diagnosed as not being
BiPolar, but rather, simply have a general anxiety disorder. I was stepped off
the Valproic Acid and other nasty mood stabilizer and antidepressants, I
stopped engaging with a therapist and instead found a both a local synogue and
a Zen meditation group. I continued to see a psychiatrist, I liked him because
he said I wasn’t really crazy, just a little freaked out. That doctor gave me a
prescription for Valium to use as needed and I openly told him that I enjoyed
the effects of marijuana but hated the effects of alcohol. Although he didn’t
encourage me use marijuana, he did tell me to stay away from alcohol but that
everyone needs to unwind and relax, he said he trusted my judgment. Life in The
Natural State was good for many years, I accomplished a lot both in my
marketing career and my artistic endeavors.
You know what happens just when life starts to look like
easy street? Yep, there’s danger at your door and so it was in my life’s
experiences. That one year, 2001, an iconic sounding year ever since I was a kid,
it was that year which symbolized “the future” to me…2001! But it was a year
doomed to eventual ruin me and all I thought I believed in…but that’s a whole
different story (one found in my book “My BiPolar Reality; How Life Goes On…”);
it was when I saw the tragic events of 9/11 play out on the television over and
over again.
In the decade and a half since 9/11, since realizing I had
met a time traveler, I still kind of “look for her” but I doubt I’ll see her,
or any other time traveler, in this lifetime again. It’s like an UFO
experience, I imagine, it happens once and that’s it…some people will believe
you, some won’t but as long as you (that being me, in this instance) can live
with the truth you think you know, then just let it be and don’t drive yourself
crazy trying to fully understand the experience. In reality, any experience in
life is like that too, sometimes not fully understanding something is the right
thing to do because then you’ll have something new to learn for the rest of
your life. It honestly does not matter if Yehi’Or was real or not, she was real
to me during some psychotic moment in my life. I don’t fully understand the why
or how, that’s alright because in the end (the end so far being the now), she
is, if nothing else, a clever little character I made up in an extended blog I
posted one day in January of 2015 and that’s enough for me because I’m reminded
of that Grateful Dead line that said “Sometimes You Can Get Shown The Light In
The Strangest of Places if You Look at It Right!”
Indeed I hope you’ve enjoy this tale of mystery and
imagination, it’s another foggy day in The San Joaquin but I’m set to spend my
time doing the cyber thing, work on my new novel a little (it’s about Mental
Illness, Music and Spirituality, sort of) and, naturally, there are chores
around the homestead and this evening the family will share dinner, view an
episode of Doctor Who, play a game or two before retiring and resting until we
get to do it all over again. I do have several promotional dates this week,
Wednesday through Friday I’ll be buzzing around talking up the book and working
out a new distribution network. There’s a certain part of me that does enjoy
doing that kind of business, but it’s still difficult to manage with my anxiety
levels. The carrot on the stick this week is a family day trip out to Tuolumne
County to view some potential sites for our next relocation; the Farmhouse
Estate has lost its historical status and the present owner is only extending our
lease until the end of June. This is fine by us too, we don’t really like the
area around Modesto too much, we’re more inclined to find ourselves in the
mountains in a place a bit more rural and remote. I’ll write more about that
another time, suffice it to say that I’m happy to share to this story today, I
do hope you enjoy it and if so, please if you will, reshare it at will,
wherever you want. Lastly, a BIG SHOUT OUT to +russel paps, a new Google+
friend who recently bought my book and seems to really like it…
Presently, if
you buy the book from my website (www.dphilipchalmers.net),
you’ll get both an autographed copy PLUS a FREE copy of my original screenplay “Kill
David Spade!” (limited copies available) so, if you like my stories, my style
and want to read more, please pick up a copy of “My BiPolar Reality; How Life
Goes On…” today!
Share Love...
Have Peace...
Find Bliss!
Take Care & Be Well!
Gratefully, with All that Love Is...
d'Philip
19 January 2015
