MONSTER ONE
It wasn’t the monster’s fault. Neither the monster, its creator and now its keeper really understood what had happened but the damage was done. It had to be someone’s fault. Maybe it was’t the monster’s fault, maybe the creator’s, through bad planning, bad design, bad execution, bad intention, bad luck. The gaps in complex construction were too wide or too tight or too something. The pieces didn’t quite fit.
Adolescent science mixed with juvenile vengeance is a combination bit too primitive for success. With one foot in the dungeon and one foot in its mouth, the beast was clumsy, protective and destructive. Sometimes clever, mostly destructive. The parts were all there. They all came together and the beast had life, lots of it, ripping away right and left, inside and out, intending to protect but now with no regard for its creator, who should be its benefactor but instead is relentlessly another of its victims.
The formula came out wrong, with protect and destroy being equal in intention, though they were opposites in the equation, and the meaning of one becoming the meaning of the other. From down a long and distant hallway comes the sound of The Monster’s Manta. “To protect is to destroy and to destroy is to protect.” That’s “The Monster’s Mantra.” He chanted that childish phrase to himself as he sat staring out the window, tormented by his decisions or the monster’s decision… …or somebody’s decision. He chanted that, the first of many monster mantras while watching the days pass, closed up in the room, closed up in his cell, closed up in his mind, closed up in his retreat from what he knew to be true.
“Sex is death is love is war is sex is death is love is….” Mumbling along, passing time.
Only a boy when he built it, he built it as well as he could, with blood, spit, glue, rags and a lot of resentment. Bright but not a genius, his peculiar skills built it subconsciously while locked away for the seeming endless hours in the darkness of his room, never realizing its presence. Maybe a genius could have done a better job, so his defender wouldn’t have become a monster, raging inside of him, scheming alongside him, slamming incoherently against the walls of his conscience, protecting and destroying but never discriminating.
Now, trapped with his monster, skin to skin, he sits confused, not knowing how to communicate with the beast or tame it without sedation, exercising futile efforts to rewire, reprogram, rethink the whole thing, leaving him exhausted and incoherent. Unable to decipher the cryptic messages from his hastily altered ego, he struggles to understand what he simultaneously tries to hide, afraid of and afraid that he might lose that part of himself declared certifiably crazy but, as monsters can frequently be, kind of likable, in between bouts of destruction. Disjointed syllables spread through him in a matrix of mirth, mayhem and maliciousness.
“This monster you’ve described to me, you can’t get rid of it by tearing it out.” The doctor waits out the long pause, hoping for a response. “Have you ever tried to take a monster apart?” He asks. “The monster doesn’t like it. It doesn’t want to be torn apart. Any time you take apart a living being, there’s bound to be a lot of pain.”
The monster understands pain. Monsters are made from pain.
As the moments wind down and fade away, the doctor asks, “What would you think about a different plan?” The dog eared file folder is clamped tightly in the doctor’s hand as he rises from the chair. “Maybe you could,” the doctor hesitates, “adopt the monster instead.” On his way out, the doctor closes the door behind him, leaving silence and the light wind coming in through the window. Though it’s spring, leaves still fall from trees that line the walkway.
How easy for the doctor to talk about what could, would or should be done. How easy. How smug. How disgusting. The doctor never met the monster, never felt the rage, never knew the beast. The patient and doctor share a common experience, both of them knowing the beast as a third person, someone else, someone they can’t touch and don’t know except as witnesses. The doctor only knows the monster by the enigmatic clues it leaves in its wake. For the doctor, it’s another patient, though an oblique one. For the patient, it’s another I, different, weird, living with and within the monster but only knowing it intimately by distant testimony and watching all those distant things happen from within his own eyes, without control or consent, witnessing deeds shaped in a quirky kind of logic, shaped with some humor, some violence and a lot of sorrow. It all happens through a fascinating sort of remote control.
Within the control booth that guides the monster, a cartoonish madman conducts these operations, unable to discriminate between good and bad, right or wrong. Hysterically thrashing about in his control room, this loony operator of this psychopathic wrecking ball jerks control levers in a frenzy of over-reaction, the ball swinging wildly about, all onlookers ducking as they run for cover. An irrational vision in turmoil, exhausted, hair awry, horn-rimmed glasses askew, he descends from his perch with a chipper smile and a disarming “Hi there.”
The monster lives within and without, completely within and totally without his control, coming out in times of need but never by request. Shrewd and deceptive, that part of him rests quietly during moments of rare security, waiting, waiting, waiting and only emerging at the precise instant to strike a decisive blow against a perceived enemy, however guilty or innocent they might actually be. He knows, deep in his heart that in spite of countless hours of therapy, the doctor will never really meet the monster, its twisted brow shaded by a skillful paranoid shield, watching the doctor from deep within the patient’s fractured shell.
He wonders on what Skinnerian pivot point might the monster’s habits hinge. It turns according to what? It shows up why? His monster now arrives by its own timetable, in an arena of its own choosing, where some kind of victory seems assured. For that opportunity, the monster waits for as long as it takes, as long a it takes for the moment of opportunity, perfect in its mayhem, perfect in its pain.
The perfect monster, perfect… …patient.