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back Asylum Letters by Paul Garner, Peter Wilson Number of episodes: 16 Words of previous episode revealed to each author: all of story Written between 3 Sep 2002 and 26 Jan 2003 i open with a symphony of cake. i can't bear to think about it... long drawn out notes stretched out into crystalline... sorry. i should explain - the shift key is broken on my keyboard. i have had several cups of coffee. strong. i am wide awake but still tired... my stomach is sore where my abdominal muscles are tensing involuntarily - my chest feels tight, perhaps the muscles used for breathing are clenching too. coffee. my eyes are watering, i feel a vein in one throbbing. too many nights. they - they, i ask - or, well whatever. coffee is legal, a coffee machine in every office. coffee to get through the day, booze to block out the night. this coffee is good. i'm surprised we get coffee. well it's not good it's cheap shit nescafe instant from a vending machine. but coffee is good. anyway... sleep, well yes... so you know you sometimes get busy in an evening, or like... no, start from the start. i got home from work and got busy. 'it will only take an hour or so' i thought but then like, i got home at half six or nearly seven then at nine i was still going. 'time at last for some dinner' i thought, though i still hadn't even finished. so i stopped and had dinner but like, it was basically some ready made salmon-in-creamy-watercress-sauce that had been - surprisingly - cheap at the supermarket, cos it's salmon right, that's not always cheap, and that'll be quick and nice - and healthy - or something. it'll be a good meal. it's nine o'clock. i put some pasta on to go with it and i'm reading the packet and realise my girlfriend took the microwave when she moved out. would have been five minutes in the microwave - in two bursts of like two minutes, stir inbetween, with one minute to stand or whatever - but now it's like *twenty five* minutes and i have to heat the oven up first. so i turn the pasta off cos it's way too soon for that and light up the oven, it's a gas oven. i open the bottle of wine and have a glass and go watch some shit on tv, i forget what. it's like nine thirty so not the usual shit i watch while cooking dinner but like some other shit. i go back and check on the oven after a while and like it's gone out. it, well you see our oven it - you normally have to turn it off at the wall after you light one of the burners cos otherwise the electric lighter spark keeps on sparking cos the knobs you push in to spark it they get stuck. but like the oven for some reason, it has to be left on at the wall otherwise the flame goes out. so i light it up again feeling mildy annoyed that i forgot that cos i did know really, i just don't use the oven that much. i have another glass of wine or so and watch more shit then go back and check on the oven and for some reason in my eagerness to heat up the oven as quick as possible after my first blunder, i've like turned the gas on a bit too far past 'full on' and it's gone out again. so like now i light the oven a third time thinking 'fuck' it's been half an hour and i haven't even heated the oven yet before i put the damn cheap salmon meal in to cook for twenty five minutes. i'm halfway through the bottle of wine it's getting on for ten and i haven't eaten. well it all goes smoothly after that and the dinner was pretty good but there's some boring shit on the tv and i've drunk the whole bottle of wine and i'm tired and i've dozed off on the couch. so then i wake up at like two in the morning, on the couch, and i still haven't finished what i was doing. and the watercress sauce has dried on to the plate. but i don't care about that cos i can do the washing up tomorrow, tomorrow is saturday. and i kind of stumble round half drunk two a.m. tired and put my dishes away and go up but then i haven't finished what i was doing... it was sort of left there almost as if i'd hardly done anything cos a lot of what i'd been doing before dinner was just like preparing and moving shit out the way or thinking about what i was gonna do. so i can't leave it like that and just go to bed. so i damn well finish it more or less and i'm not tired any more cos i've had a nap and you, you know, you get to that time early in the morning and you're not wanting to sleep any more even though your, like that big lump of dough behind your eyes is kind of heavy. so it's four a.m. and i'm trying to sleep but there's some piece of machinery in the neighbourhood somewhere, like a pump or a generator, some real constant mechanical kind of noise and it's not loud but there's not much else to listen to, and i don't actually want to listen to it, and i feel like it's keeping me awake but really i'm awake because it's four a.m. and it's got too late in the morning to sleep, and then i feel like it's the feeling that the noise is keeping me awake when it isn't is what's keeping me awake. but it isn't, it's just that it's four a.m. i put some music on, 'blue train' by coltrane. nice. it covers the sound of the machinery, and as long as i don't try too hard to listen to the music instead of the machinery - which paradoxically reminds me that the machinery is there to be heard and therefore i wind up listen to it partly - it is an improvement. it doesn't quite help me sleep though. i have some weird dream so i guess i slept for a while. i dreamt my hair was very long, down to my shoulders, like it used to be in my passport photo. despite - or perhaps not - my lack of sleep i get up at a reasonable time in the morning, like nine a.m. i still have a bunch of shit to do after all, gotta go out and buy a few things. and ...well anyway, the keyboard they gave me, the shift key doesn't work, but you get the gist of it. i didn't get much sleep on saturday night either but at least on sunday morning i could sleep in. but by sunday afternoon i was feeling kind of cranky... like i just didn't have patience for anyone's disorganised shit or any of the tedious things you just have to live through sometimes, and i knew it was really just cos i hadn't had enough sleep, and maybe the pot was wearing off, so like i didn't say anything unkind, you know pointlessly snappy just cos i'm whacked deadbeat from not enough sleep... see at that point i still knew what was what and i could see why i was feeling like that and like, knowing that, i didn't have to do what i was feeling cos i - even though all feelings are real aren't they, feeling is what you feel, therefore it's really ...what you feel, what you feel is your real feelings - but like i could see also that in a sense what i was feeling wasn't real because, well because i was just a fucking tired-ass zombie by that stage at like nearly midnight on sunday... i could feel it but i didn't have to act on it, because like... well fuck you get the idea. so anyway. i'm telling you about all this shit when i was really planning to try and start my novel. i'm going to write a novel only it's like, it's going to be written like music... you know, it's going to flow... it's going to - ba dap dap burrrrr dap burrrrr dap ba - you know, like music, it'll soar and be kind of beyond words, the flow you know. but not just like music, it'll be like... man i love food. the food here is terrible. like this fucking keyboard - it's like the cook here has got no shift key you know... or not like that at all, but just equally shitty. man i love food. i dream about food. so my novel it's going to be written like music but it's also going to be like, you know how those academic types and fucking phd students they just like *analyse* [anal-ise yeah] a book and find all the hidden meanings and shit in it by like reading between the lines... and it's always like some real deep shit about the meaning of life. well i'm going to put some of that shit in my novel, only i'm not going to put in like 'my philosophy of life' or 'how to deal with heartbreak' or like explore issues of 'how do we find purpose in the things we do' or any of that stuff like authors normally do... i'm going to put in like a bunch of my favourite recipes and just things i dig about food. you know, between the lines... show don't tell... it'll be like the things my characters don't say are just as important as what they do say. and if you read between the lines and pay attention to the things they don't say then you'll find what they're really talking about is like these great recipes for chicken cacciatore - fuck i would kill for a chicken cacciatore*** [i can't get the fucking exclamation mark sorry] - and like, well no i wouldn't kill obviously. i know that it's wrong to kill. i'm sorry. but like, damn i miss that... god so tasty** a good chicken cacciatore. yeah these great recipes and also maybe some anecdotes about like that time i went to an ethiopean restaurant. but all told between the lines with what they don't say... and written like music, you know, beyond words... the flow... and. well fuck, i was going to fucking write the damn thing instead of just tell you all about it. it starts kind of like this. sorry, i can't get capital letters because the shift key is broken... it was a symphony of cake. long drawn out notes of icing sugar stretched into a crescendo of... Like little girls wake up suddenly one morning with breasts, I woke up suddenly one morning feeling other than sane: a can short of a six pack, a screw loose, not quite right upstairs... ...Like little girls wake up suddenly mad one morning I woke up with a pair of breasts, no, hold on, that's not me you-know I have a friend who had a dream like that once, he dreamed he grew breasts, then he was pregnant, he's the one who you should be talking to, not me... ...It was an emerald morning, you-know, lots of green energy, I woke up not quite feeling anymore, like my head was several rows back from where I was sitting. Dear Gloria, How are things at home? I am well. I am very well. I am brimming with the essence of well. No honestly, I think the daily 'wellness' classes they subject me to are finally taking effect. Sorry. I know you hate it when I joke about this. Well anyway, I am mostly fine. I think the sugar-free diet they have me on is helping, during the day at least. Or it's the pills. Sometimes it seems like my dreams are getting crazier though, as if to compensate. Last night I dreamt, well it was just a fairly typical nightmare I guess, I was in a carpark. Or maybe it was a shopping mall. I was there with Joe and we were just walking through the carpark and a man walked past in the other direction and brushed against me. "Watch where you're going, asshole," he said to me and I thought that was a bit uncalled for, but I just said sorry. But he came back and said something like, "Sorry, oh you're sorry," all dripping with malicious sarcasm, "You're sorry, that makes it all right I suppose?" and I didn't know what to say because this guy was starting to seem psychotic. I just said something like, "Yes, sorry, what else can I do? I'm sorry. Chill out, man." And we just talked like this for a while, the tension escalating. He was clearly trying to wind himself up into getting violent with me, for no reason. In fact I could see now that he'd walked into me on purpose, just to have the excuse to go psycho on me. I was discreetly dialling 911 on my mobile phone, which I had in my pocket, hoping that, even though I couldn't talk to them, maybe they could hear this guy being threatening and abusive and realise I was in trouble. Plus of course I was worried about my brother. Well it was a dream, so there's a bit of an ill-defined change of scene around this point. The action wound up being semi-located at the house where I grew up, you know, in Topeka. There were some other weird things happening which I can't remember clearly. Well, we were back at the house and I was trying to use my cellphone, but the guy had somehow managed to hack into my phone and replace all the text of the menus with creepy threats involving my mother. I was there with Joe and it was getting late so we locked up the house very carefully, knowing the guy was out there somewhere. But we didn't know what else to do so we went to bed. In the morning I got up and looked out the window and there was the guy sitting in his car, which was parked on our back lawn, which was also sort of the carpark still. He was asleep, his head resting on the steering wheel. The car windows were a little steamed up, maybe frosty like it was a cool autumn morning. At about the same time as I saw him he woke up and looked back at me. I pointed at him accusingly, as if to say: "You! I see you! I know your game!" He got out of the car. He had a gun. I ran to the kitchen to get a big knife. My brother was up too. I think he was furious that the guy was still out there harassing us. He ran out to, I don't know, to confront the guy I guess. I tried to stop him and I yelled out, "Wait, he's got a gun!" but I was too late. Joe just called back, "So have I!" but I could see he just had an old red plastic water pistol. I looked outside and the guy had gone. Joe ran out and I grabbed a knife and went out after him. Just then I saw the man coming round the corner of the house, and Joe was running towards him and they both had guns, but only one of them was real I knew. I think the guy shot at Joe but missed and then Joe squirted him with water from the pistol. It must have been soapy water or something because I could tell it was stinging the guy's eyes and he couldn't see. He still had the gun and he was flailing around and I was worried he was going to start shooting at random. I just started stabbing him with the kitchen knife while he was still incapacitated, because I knew that if I didn't kill him first this psycho would kill both of us. I was also thinking to myself that I mustn't make the mistake they make in the movies, you know, stab him a couple of times then turn your back thinking you've done the job. And also, people can actually take a bit of stabbing I think. Not like in the movies where it's one jab and they're gone. So I kept stabbing and stabbing him in the back, and he was still flailing around woozily with his eyes screwed up and the gun in his hand. He wasn't dying quick enough so I started stabbing him in the head, like stabbing a melon. Evenutally he sank to the ground but he was clinging to my leg so I kept stabbing him. We were back in the carpark now. A bunch of young black guys came along, a street-gang. Somehow they were my gang. They saw I was in trouble and came over to help me kick the psycho in the head. We all just kicked him in the head until he stopped clinging to my leg. Stopped moving, and breathing. You know, dead. But I was still wary, because I figured in the movies the psycho is always just faking it, or gets a second wind up and sneaks up and starts throttling you when you turn your back to him. There's a railway running past the carpark. I look up and there's a train going past, a big freight train. I was shocked then, because I could see the psycho on the train. He was climbing out of a door on the side of the engine. The locomotive they call it don't they? There he was, not a scratch on him, edging towards the driver's compartment, and there was the driver, oblivious. Somehow I can't remember now whether the guy I'd killed was still lying dead at my feet at the same time as I saw him on the train, or if his body had disappeared. I do remember thinking to myself though, almost as if it was the whole point of the dream, that this kind of thing doesn't happen in real life. Only in horror movies. But in it's own way that was quite a profound realisation. Because I thought to myself that the only reason for the guy to show up on the train again was in order to scare me. Or even as the setup for a sequel, to put it in horror movie terms. That sort of thing doesn't happen in real life. Things don't happen solely for the purpose of scaring you. Scary things can happen, but always for their own purposes. But then I was in a conundrum because I knew I was in 'real life'. After all, what other life is there? But this inexplicable, miraculous, sinister, event had just happened and as far as I could tell it had happened for what you might call 'narrative' reasons rather than logical, rational ones - just to build tension and scare me. Which meant I was a character. In fact it meant that real life, reality, the universe, existed for a higher purpose, which was clearly (I had the evidence of my own experience) that of entertainment. My reality existed in order to entertain a third party, an external observer or observers, an audience outside of my reality. It more or less ended there. Well anyway, I hope you don't mind me telling you about my dream. I have been thinking about it a lot this morning ever since I woke up and I needed to share it with someone. I didn't really want to share it with my wellness-coordinator though because, well, because of all the stabbing. I hope you don't mind. It's just a dream after all, a nightmare. I am well. I think about you lots. I sometimes have these flashes of vivid memory, but not like memory in my head - memory in my senses. I have been getting them more often along with the dreams. Like just now, I was thinking of you and for a few moments I could feel the memory of your soft skin on my lips. Looking forward to your next visit. Miss your cooking, as ever! All my love, Harvey xxxx Dear Mary, I finally was allowed to use the video here to continue my research. Seven times this week it happened! That's seven times they've crossed over, I fear they will find out where I am soon. I've mailed you this video cassette as evidence. You have to get it to the President if I don't make it, he's protected, but I don't know for how much longer. They are increasing, are building their numbers and will soon take over the centers of power. Everyone here is so blissfully unaware, sometimes I wish I could be like that. I am checking myself out on Friday and heading to D.C. If you don't hear from me again I'm sorry, you know what to do. Thomas. 27 May There was cucumber in the sandwiches again. I don't know how many times I've told them I don't like cucumber. How many times? I don't know. I think they do it to spite me. To say, "Your request? What request? Who are you? You are nobody. Here is your sandwich. Next!" Maybe they're right. Who am I? I'm not real, sitting here now I don't feel quite real. I'm nobody. Or rather, I am body. And pinpoint space looking out. This world is a shell. I think I'll stop eating sandwiches altogether. That'll show them!! 28 May Had shepherd's pie for lunch today. It was not great. I never really liked shepherd's pie actually, but now I realise that the way my mum used to make it was much better. Than what I had for lunch I mean. No cucumber in it though, not that anyone would think to put cucumber in shepherd's pie. Celery maybe but not cucumber. I don't know how they make it so gooey and stodgy, make the gravy thick like that. You have to wonder what they put in it. I requested Soylent Green from the video library but the clerk said they didn't have it. They didn't have Delicatessen either, they never have any of the videos I ask for. Sometimes I think they say they haven't got them just to spite me. "No, we don't have that video. I have never heard of that video. One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest? No we don't have that. I didn't say I'd order it in for you. Who are you? You are nobody. Please leave now without making any trouble. Have a nice day." They are wrong. I read the book once and it said on the jacket: 'now a major motion picture'. 30 May I thought I was staying one step ahead. There was no shepherd's pie today, but there was pizza. They had put cucumber on the pizza. Who puts cucumber on pizza?!! I never saw cucumber on a pizza before. Someone in the kitchen is doing it just to spite me I think. First the sandwiches, then the pizza. That just left tuna salad, but I really couldn't face that... mushed up fishy mayonnaise ooze. I had pizza and picked the cucumber off. It left cucumber taste in the places it had touched. It seems like everything is becoming tainted by cucumber. 31 May They are getting more cunning by the day. Apart from the tainted sandwiches and other salad bar horrors, the usual hot meal slop had been replaced by something altogether more appetizing. Like a fool I believed their lies. "International theme week," they said. "Indian theme today," they said. Lamb curry. Popadoms. Onion bhajis. Delicious mint sauce. I tucked in and began to put my earlier concerns down to paranoia. Dr Weiss did say I had to be on my guard against those thoughts. Then, after our group sharing session, Deadeye Jackson was staring blankly at the wall, like he usually does, when he started reciting a bunch of recipes for indian food. Lamb curry. Popadoms. Onion bhajis. Mint and cucumber yoghurt dip. Fuck! I puked right there on the common room floor. Couldn't face anyone for the rest of the day, fobbed the quacks off with a story and hid in my room. Sinister forces are at work and for some reason the canteen is involved. I think they're trying to spike my rehab, make me flip. I can see this lucidly now, without a hint of paranoia. 1 June Breakfast has always been safe - cornflakes and milk. I skipped it today as a precaution however. By 11am I had a splitting headache and my stomach was eating itself, neither of which I noticed particularly beneath the mounting sense of dread I felt as lunchtime approached. Then salvation arrived in the unlikely form of Curtis, the stoner intern. I passed him some of my medication and in return he smuggled me a Big Mac and fries. I didn't go near the canteen but instead ate outside by the fountain. I should go there more often. By 3pm my headache was driving me crazy (figuratively speaking) so I went to have a lie down... which is when I found out once-and-for-all, beyond a doubt, that someone was trying to mess with my head. There on my pillow, arranged neatly, like those chocolate mints they put on your pillow at fancy hotels, were three slices of cucumber. I stood there in shock for a few moments, then strangely I felt very calm. I went straight to the ward supervisor and explained what I'd found, thinking myself very wise at the time for leaving out all the details which could be considered purely circumstantial, sticking to the concrete facts of my discovery. What a fool I was! I should have seen it, I'm an intelligent man not some vegetable kook, but I was playing right into their hands. So, of course, when we got back to my room there was no trace of any cucumber. It's 4am, this is really a 2 June entry. I feel lead-headed, tranqs wearing off. I am getting the private treatment now. 2 June The private treatment is not so bad. I am on a different wing. A different cook perhaps or maybe, sensitive to my condition, they prepare meals specially for me. This seems unlikely. But still, no cucumber in my lunch today. I feel rested. 3 June No cucumber again, things are looking up. Tedious therapy sessions as usual, though less chatty than they used to be. To be honest Dr Weiss seems, I don't know... almost like he's hurt. Like I let him down. Fuck that! Before long he'll probably have me convinced I made the whole thing up, that's how they operate, these fuckers. Kept asking me the sort of shit they did when I first arrived. I made up a bunch of crap to keep them guessing. Miss the wackos from the general ward. 4 June Was eating dinner this evening when I suddenly realised... all the meals I've had since I've been on this wing have had broccoli in them. What's up with that? People are trees. Long char-black spindles of time, rushing trunks of hope up to hungry leaves. I haven't eaten since breakfast, they are messing with the food, spiking it with tranquilizers or something. After eating lunch yesterday my head felt like a rock, I couldn't think or write, I lay down in consumed dead energy. I found this paper yesterday in the trash outside. The paper they gave me was all wrong: big spaced lines like in a five-year-old's printing book. I've been thinking a lot today, but I'm starting to feel weak, I'm going to find out if they dope all the food, perhaps it's just the drinks, that would be easier. I am going to have to test it out methodically myself, no one here can help me, they are all oblivious - sloping off to nap like a troupe of drunk Mexicans for siesta. Last night I had a strange dream. I was climbing a mountain made of clothes. There was a team of experts to guide me, but even with their skills it seemed at one stage we that wouldn't make it. We did, there were maybe five people in our group, people I've never met, but very real. We scaled down to the caves of fleece-lined jacket hoods, they swung a little in the wind. There were birds nesting there, laying their eggs and each nest had a protective turtle that snapped at us as we approached. The birds flapped and swooped on us, also trying to protect the nests and precious eggs. The strange thing was that the turtles weren't protecting the eggs at all. They were parasites, they lived in the cave-hoods and ate the eggs. The people here scare me. Looking into their big black moons of matt pupils it is hard to see anyone there. Like their mind is gone, but the lizard old brain just keeps on ticking. They've reverted, been taken over. Dear Louise, How are things at home? I am well. I am fantastic in fact. I think I will surely be out of here soon. I haven't had an episode in months and even the doctor thinks I am doing well. I have lost a little weight too, you'll be delighted to hear! I don't tell them about my dreams though, no sense worrying them eh? Like last night, I dreamt I was a little girl, running through a forest. Kind of in parallel, at the same time that I was running through the forest, which was a dark mysterious sparkling sort of forest, there was another creature running through the forest. It was a little smaller than man-size, but bigger than me as a little girl, and basically looked like the Easter Bunny, only with a row of sharp fangs, like wolves teeth. It ran swiftly, upright, on its hind-legs, a silent hunter in the emerald-green evening forest-light. I came to a clearing by a stream. I could see by the bank were two little pairs of child's shoes and two little pairs of socks, as if their owners had removed them to go for a paddle in the water. There were no children to be seen. They were possibly mine actually, I could have been one of the little girls that went into the stream; I had a free associating perspective. Either way, I knew what had happened to them - the bunny had got them. The Werebunny. Forensic teams couldn't find any trace of the children. The Werebunny was not alone, it was one of many, an insidious threat. It could even appear in different forms - it might look like a regular rabbit, or it might appear human to blend in. When it was hunting it preferred its hybrid form though. I soon found I was captain of a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier. Perhaps everyone on the mainland had been eaten, or 'turned'. A panic broke out among the crew, battle-hardened sailors the lot of them, as an inflatable dinghy sped towards us. We knew it was full of Werebunnies from the mainland, come to conquer us too. I manned the helm and cranked the enormous lumbering vessel up to its full nuclear-powered steam in an attempt to outrun them... a modern aircraft carrier has a good turn of speed once underway, but its huge inertia means that acceleration is rather slow. It was no use and the little boat, which ironically was too small and insignificant for our sophisticated defences to attack, was soon bumping against our hull, unloading it's sinister crew who scaled our sides like... fluffy buccaneers. My men, with nowhere left to run, did their best to fight off the Werebunnies, who had taken human form at this point, perhaps hoping that a few could infiltrate below decks unnoticed. But hand-to-hand combat in close quarters with the creatures put us at a disadvantage, as their bite was infectious. More and more of my crew were turned until I couldn't trust anyone... I retreated below decks and found myself in the galley. Grabbing a large chef's knife I ran through the claustrophobic warren of corridors and bulkheads, stabbing anyone I came across that I suspected as being one of them. I remember thinking: Am I the last pure, sane person alive? It seemed that I probably was, so I just kept stabbing and stabbing my way through as many of them as I could. About then I woke up in a cold sweat. Well anyway, that was my dream. Weird eh? I hope you don't mind me sharing it. The quacks here say it is good to share these things and talk them through, but you know sometimes I think they only say that so they have the chance to spy on my thoughts. And hey, I want to get out of here sometime right? At least I have the memory of you while I am presently indisposed... your perfume, the look in your eyes. Do come see me sometime. And maybe you can cook your famous lasagne for me once I'm released (which will surely be any day soon!) All my love, Harvey xxxx P.S. Please do write. Why do you never write me? A dream I had last night. I was walking to work. Ascending the dirty steps in the transfer passage of the subway. I was changing from line 7 to line 5. On my right there was a wall made out of those glass brick things - but it was broken. Bits of it had fallen away, leaving it like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle. There weren't any bricks or bits of broken glass on the floor, I stood there looking, wondering what had happened. As I watched, other commuters brushed past me, going up to line 5. Several people didn't carry on however, but stopped and stood in the gaps of the wall. About five or six of them packed themselves in there - I was going to ask them what they were doing, I didn't get a chance. They lost form. Or gained it. Becoming jelly-like and transparent they started looking less and less like people - their grey and navy suits became opaque, blurring, smudging - and looking more like the glass brick wall. The wall was whole. The people were gone. I woke up. Dear Rebecca, I do so miss you and the children. You are all well I trust? I am very well myself and feel sure that soon you will be able to tell little Sarah that my 'long holiday' is nearly over. It has been like a holiday lately in fact. With spring here I often sit out in the gardens and listen to the traffic go by, thinking Where are all those crazy people going? Honestly, sometimes it seems much more sane in here, sitting on the swing with the sun playing across my face. But that's not to say I don't want to get out of here and back by your side. Maybe we could get a swing! But not a dog though, you do know we can never get a dog don't you? Do you know a funny thing? A lot of the meals here are actually prepared by the patients! I only realised just the other day, when I overheard a couple of the kooks talking about it. Who'd have thought they would come up with a 'cooking therapy'? On the other hand maybe it's just vocational training or something, like they have in prison. You know the funny thing though? I love to cook and I've been here, what, well a few years now, it's funny no one ever told me about that programme. I mentioned I was interested to the quack this morning and he said he'd look into it. Frankly I'm not sure I'd trust some of these wackos to cook my food. Or let them near the kitchen for that matter. Like, there was that guy who left last month, reckoned he could make a bomb out of dish detergent and pork crackling. Stay away from the kitchen! That place must be full of wickedly sharp knives too. Beautiful precision instruments which should only be handled by skilled, sane, people. So anyway, do you still have those dreams about Ronald Reagan? I had a dream about our current President last night. You know how he looks permanently insincere, you know, like how some monkeys look like they're grinning all the time even when they aren't? Well in this dream I was standing in my favourite deli, you know that one on 14th Street? Only the owner was Vladimir Putin, instead of the usual guy with the mole on his neck, I guess because it's a russian deli. Anyway I was ordering a sausage of Otradnoe when in come these two gorillas in black trenchcoats. I mean like real gorillas, not just big ugly guys. Trenchcoats and Ray-Bans and those little earphones with the curly cords. One of them says to me, "Secret Service, sir, please stand well back and don't make any sudden moves." I was kind of like, "What the hell? I'm trying to buy some sausage..." but I did what they said. Next thing I know in walks G.W. only he's sort of like a chimpanzee. He hops right up on the counter and starts fingering all the chops, with his feet, and I'm thinking Yuck, I won't be having any of those then, when I notice that he's kind of foaming at the mouth. Next thing I know he's going crazy, screaming and beating his chest, then he grabs Putin by the ears and starts trying to bite his nose off. I have this flash of realisation then, like you do in dreams, you know, when you suddenly realise a truth about the situation that you couldn't really have known just from looking at it. I realise that Bush the chimp is carrying some hideously contagious mind-rotting disease from darkest Africa and that if I don't stop him he'll spread it throughout the population and, well, I guess that would be the end of America as we know it. So suddenly I know what I have to do: I grab the meat cleaver from the deli counter and just start hacking away at Bush. The gorilla bodyguards are trying to stop me so I'm hacking away at them too. I realise somewhere along the line that Putin is already infected from the bite that Bush gave him so there's nothing for it, it's rather grim but I have to hack up old Putin too. Bush is still twitching and grinning at me and I just can't face it, so I run him through the ham slicing machine, a wafer at a time until his face is gone. I remember standing back and going, "Phew!" like, I'm glad that's all good and done with, then I woke up. Well, I don't really like telling the quacks here this sort of dream as it only upsets them. Personally I think they're rather therapeutic. Try it! Next time you're dreaming of Ronald Reagan just sort of say to him, "Hey, Reagan! You dirty rat!" then stab him to death. And his horse. I never did like you dreaming that dream come to think of it. Do you dream of me at all? I think about you a lot. Do you still have that long hair, so long that you can sit on it? Well, do send some news. Oh, and I'm going to try and get on the 'cooking therapy' programme, so maybe you could send me a couple of recipes, like the one for your famous meatloaf! All my love, Harvey xxxx She was terrifying. We met her on the trail by the road by the Waikato river, her and her boyfriend decided they would come with. She saw my secret tunnel in the pharmacy, she laughed, I had gotten too fat to fit through. So we got on the ferry with the rest of the class to the exclusive theme park high school holiday island. When she spoke the words were incomprehensible - schizophrenic razors, spears of hard white glare - malignant light. She did not illuminate, she followed us, horrified when you pulled the conifers from the ground. The trees were of her kind, they spoke her secret backwards tongue. We had to get out of there. I bellowed evangelical, and that kept her off for a while. She spoke to my father and bade the walls to do her evil tricks. She was beauty from the other side of the glass. She was the cipher with the words that could devolve me helpless protozoa. We evaded her in the toliets and made the ferry boat out. We'd lost her, she was still on the island, I hope, I hope, but can I really be sure? she said that the kitchen was made of flesh. pink and squishy, flesh, flesh walls everywhere. she said it kind of freaked her out and i guess i can understand that. she said she had to sit down, and found herself talking to these three fellas; satan, jesus and god, who were each about the size of garden gnomes but looked like animated characters... scratchy black-and-white photocopied paper animations. she said she chatted to them a while about life and i guess the usual stuff you'd chat to those guys about. i said she was crazy, she said 'maybe...' then she said 'try this' and i did. before long i was crazy too. On God and Reality Dreams often cut and paste scenes from waking life, but from where and when? - There are no absolutes except impermanence - constant change. Everything has an opposite, every force and every concept, all actions a reaction. - Entropy must have an opposite - Creation - The birth of thing-form from no-form no-thing, God must be permanence. - The more you believe in a set of concepts/ ideas / notions, the more that they will shape, become your identity. Self-belief - you are what you do. - Any fixed belief restricts potentiality. Self is restricted by pre-conceived and conserved notions. - Portents are everywhere, portal-hood is ubiquitous, and everything and everyone has the possibility when open to it. On Art - By experience we deepen and extend our appreciation of life and art. - In art we appreciate our experiences, deepening and extending our lives. - By appreciating art we experience a deepening of life. - Life experiences art as appreciation deepens. - Experience art, appreciate life, and extend our: Plant roots are used for support and to obtain water and nutrients, in the plant world success is measured by fulfillment of the life-cycle. I like plants. - By appreciating plants we extend our life. - By eating art we extend plants. - Art is both soil and strata. I was working the vegetable garden last week when I had this great idea: hexagonal mushrooms. I barely need to explain what a fantastic benefit this would be. For example, everyone knows that circles don't tessellate. Well in fact that's the crux of the matter... I think this could actually get me rich. All those mushroom companies selling round mushrooms of different shapes and sizes, imagine if they had even-sized hexagonal mushrooms... they could save a lot of packing space for a start. Probably less would get damaged in transit too, because they'd all be neatly packed with no space between to rattle around and bruise. See... nature has known about the superiority of hexagonal tessellation for a long time. Take honeycomb for instance. Bees know nothing of geometry, that's just the best shape for them to be. Be / Bee. Hahaha! All you'd need to do is grow each one in a little hexagonal compartment, you wouldn't even need to genetically engineer them or anything. Just like those aubergines with the face of Elvis on them I saw once in L.A. I was thinking about the eggplants last night when I realised you could probably apply the hexagonal principle to other vegetables too. Like peppers. I would suggest potatoes too, though as they grow underground it might be harder to fit them into the moulds. At first I was just thrilled by the utility of the concept, for packaging and transportation purposes. I couldn't sleep, thinking about all the technical details, the angles that would have to be covered (60 degrees, interior... ha!) and, I must admit, how rich it might make me one day. After a while I began to perceive that there was something deeper to it... an inherent beauty in the idea, in the perfect, symmetrical, tessellating vegetables. Especially the mushrooms. Can you see it? Imagine then the artistic possibilities for creative restaurant chefs... instead of dotting food around the plate attempting some pale imitation of abstract expressionism, with these bold new-shaped vegetables they could explore other styles... surrealism... cubism... completely new styles even. Sauteed hexagonal mushrooms like bolts, with roasted red pepper nuts.... the possibilities are endless. Not to mention the more efficient use of space on the plate. This morning I was so excited I nearly blurted out the whole scheme to Harvey at breakfast when I realised what a foolish move that would be! That shifty bastard has been angling to get out of here for some time now and would probably steal the idea for himself, leaving me with what...? I should know by now to keep these bright ideas to myself (re: the yodelling incident). I am communicating with myself. My future self. My past self. We (I) all exist simultaneously, we all occupy this same space. This means I can see a lot more and know a lot more than the average or even above average person. Why? I don't know, only that it has always been so, always inside me, a latent ability I am only now beginning to realise. I know that others won't understand. It is beyond them and that is only natural; the paradigm of restricted linear temporal consciousness compared to my consciousness is like comparing two-dimensional images to three dimensional perspective, only that my difference is so much more extreme, no analogy is sufficient. The illusion of three dimensions can only be percieved by very few, my ability - cognitive freedom from time - is even more rare. I held the fish in my hand and it wriggled. It reminded me of my geography teacher in high school, the dress she used to wear. The fish was suffocating in the air, I could tell, and I knew I couldn't give it the kiss of life. The river seemed so far away all of a sudden. I couldn't move. No one knew where we were, there was no one to intrude on the moment, to break the spell. Its eye stared back, incomprehending, shiny, the colour of my grandmother's broach as its mouth gaped impotently. Finally I smashed its head against a stone, dropped it into the bucket of ice. As I did so, I felt a sudden chill of cold. The sky seemed like a cave, a cave with no entrance. With no exit. It was only when the sun had set that the sky seemed open, infinite once more. I realised then that a cave is still shelter, even if it is closed like a prison. I took my clothes off and went for a swim, by the moonlight. The water was very cold. I swam to the opposite shore of the river and started walking through the long grass. I didn't think then, I just walked, leaving my clothes and my bucket of ice with a fish in it behind me. After a while I grew tired. I sat down on a rock that looked like my uncle's bald head. It was cold against my buttocks but I didn't mind. A dead branch fell from the tree behind me, its noise was like a heavy animal making a path through the undergrowth and I jumped up and turned around. It was just a branch. I broke a dry twig off a bush near me and started to scratch in the soil. The soil was reddish brown like my brother's hair. I drew shapes and figures, just doodling, until I had filled all the bare patch of dirt with shapes and figures, right up to the edges of the grass. I just sat for a while then, until I started to go a little numb from the cold, hard rock. I lay down on the grass and looked up at the stars. I imagined for a moment I could see their immense distance, accurately, see which ones were closer, which ones farther. I wondered what their names were, their real names, not the ones given to them by an ordinance survey. It was peaceful, very peaceful. It was peaceful then, but I woke up to much commotion. I signed myself out today. I feel guilty like a tourist - with my trinkets and souvenirs, letters from Harvey, Thomas and Sam. I am heading back to my loft in the city, to my home entertainment suite, my mini-bar - with a sun-tan of superficial experience, I'm a day tripper, yeah. It's too quiet out here, waiting for my ride, a bus back into town, I decide to read some of the papers Sam gave me.   I can see you now when you are old and your sex-juices have long turned parasitic, eaten you up, poisoned your blood - seeping deep into your bones.   Your yellowing paper paws on photograph hearing flashing eyes and horn-dog calls, the whistling wind between your breasts.   Your new dress affectations, drip on face, meet the town, tear up my letters and meet the town... I guess that's for his wife - probably better I don't deliver it. I turn to Thomas' letters, the bus pulls up. I already have the book half done, in my head. Thomas' paranoia will need a bit more detail, something the readers can understand. As it is it's too vague, too obscure (the them of paranoids' worlds so often are). That will be my nights, tonight and for many weeks to follow, sifting through the dreams and thoughts of the mentally ill, what they write about, what they don't always tell the doctors - that's my angle, that's my expose, it's going to be a juicy read, once I spice up the slow bits, I know it was worth it, my months inside, for the book that I'll write. This book will make my career. back © All work herein copyright the stated authors.

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