Dr. Islington put down his pen and steepled his fingers. His eyes twinkled under a heavy brow. "Henry, I can't tell you with certainty what's happening to you. But I do have a theory. This procedure I used on you, as you've known from the beginning, is an experimental one — a marvel only possible in this enlightened new century. But rerouting the channels of your brain to bypass the tissue damage that had blinded you all those years ago … to be honest, I was operating a bit blind myself." The doctor gave a low chuckle then shifted himself in his chair as Henry, unaware that he was staring, bore into the man's face with his eyes. "What I believe is occurring,” Dr. Islington went on, avoiding Henry's gaze, "is an awakening. A rebirth of what the philosophers have called the mythopoeic mind. See, Henry, before science eclipsed the scientist himself and recast the human psyche in its own rigid image, our minds were much more fluid and intuitive. Our perception was wildly subjective. Long ago, for instance, two individuals from two different tribes of man could look at the same object — a stick, say, or a snake — and see two wholly different things. The wars of that pre-scientific era weren't simply conflicts over resources. They were battles between epistemologies, between distinct interpretations of sensory input, between irreconcilable empirical realities. In a way, men fought over the right to see the world the way they wished, and to populate that world with objects and gods of their own invention." The doctor paused for a moment to peer out the window of the examination room, his eyes lingering on the artful arrangements of shrubs and stones in the garden beyond. "What I'm proposing, Henry, is this: These are no mere hallucinations you've been witnessing. They are what I would classify as mythopoeic manifestations. In short, sir, they are metaphors." Henry rubbed his temples in hard, small circles, as if trying to accelerate his inner processing of the doctor's ideas. "If you're right," Henry said eventually, his voice rising, "then what about my eyes? What are these dice supposed to be goddamned metaphors for?" The doctor answered with Henry an unreadable expression. Then he smiled at the younger man. Henry made every effort not to scream as the doctor's face suddenly flowered into a violent, bruise-colored cloud. The smoky mass spread upward from his starched collar to the ceiling, seething all the while with tiny figures that appeared to be either locusts or vultures. "Why, it's obvious, Henry," the doctor's voice echoed from deep within the purple nimbus that had been, just a moment ago, his head. "The dice symbolize uncertainty. Everything that is not yet known. Wasn't your entire operation, after all, a gamble?" That night Henry laid awake and listened to the apple trees beyond the garden swish in the stiff wind of an incoming storm. The trees, he comforted himself, at least sounded like trees. 11 NICK FLOOK, CELESTIAL FALLS - @FLOOKO
14 Publizr Home