Zod Wallop by Spencer William Browning

Author:Spencer, William Browning [Spencer, William Browning]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

HERE HE WAS again, down in the Great Tiredness of Group. It was a little different, of course. At Harwood, he had never been in group therapy with Emily, Allan, or Rene—and they were definitely here in their catatonic, truculent, and volatile (respectively) selves. But Harry had been in group with Raymond, and it was Raymond who dominated this new, mandatory gathering, Raymond with his gaspy, mustache-fluttering fervor, his wild eyes and sweeping gestures.

Today, it was difficult to make out just what Raymond was saying. Harry felt oddly meaning-impaired. He could not seem to get the sense of words. That is, he could recognize individual words (a word like “danger” would suddenly come up to him, as a curious fish might approach a scuba diver’s mask) but these words refused to shake down into logical sentences.

That was probably the result of the drugs they had given him. The drugs were, he assumed, designed to make him more receptive to his feelings.

When they asked, he said, “I’m tired. I’m really tired.”

That, apparently, was not a legitimate feeling. They kept at him.

“Where am I?” he asked, but they said that he was trying to change the subject.

“Sad,” he told them. “I feel sad.”

They wanted him to elaborate. He said that he felt sad for everything. He saw the President on television and felt sad that a man could be so filled with need that he would become a politician. He then felt sad for the media pundits who came on after the President in order to savage him, leaning forward in their chairs as though something besides their balance was at stake, mean-spirited, unhappy people whose parents had never, not once, said, “You are important. We love you.” He felt sad for the talk-show host and the talk-show audience and the desperate guests. He felt sad for the actors on sitcoms and the people who crouched in dark rooms and watched them zing their one-liners into the void, and he felt sad for himself because he was one of the watchers, and so he got up and walked to the window and saw the children laughing under the streetlamps, and he felt sad for them because the futures bearing down on them were heartless if not actively malign and mostly he felt sad that being a human being was such an embarrassment of fouled motives and excuses that weren’t good enough and transient desires and cheap dodges against death’s unwinding.

They nodded their heads, took notes.

They were after something, and it seemed to Harry that what they were after wasn’t his mental well-being at all. Perhaps the drugs had awakened a deep, unlooked-for intuitive sense. Or maybe, like many crazy people, he was simply growing more paranoid.

Still, it seemed to Harry that these doctors believed that he and his companions shared some secret, some vital information, and that with careful and relentless prodding, the truth would be revealed.

“I don’t know anything!” Harry wanted to shout. Certainly nothing that anyone would want to know.

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