The Iowa Young Writers Studio

Belief Will Bid You Lifeless
Chapter 1
The anamnesis reads as follows:
CHRISTOPHER L. BRINKMAN, MALE
DIAGNOSTIC ANALYSIS: PARANOID SCHIZOPHRENIA, PSEUDOLOGIA FANTASTICA, OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER, MANIC DEPRESSIVE DISORDER.
STATUS: ADMITTED (INDEFINITE/INVOLUNTARY)
That’s the document I point to whenever the facility inspectors show up for an interview, asking questions about who I am, what I like. “It’s all there.” I say. “Read column one.” They look at me half-scorned, half-sorry for me, leaving every time with the same quiet sighs and mutterings in their tape recorder notebooks. They think I’m lying, that I’m trying to outsmart them. But I’ve just no idea what to say.
I suppose I could tell them that I like to write, that I like walking through the forest and looking at trees. Maybe how much I like sleep, but Christ if I could remember what it was like. I could tell them, too, what the rest of it says, that I’m allergic to penicillin and chlorpromazine, that I’m five feet, ten inches tall with hazel eyes, Irish-Caucasian and a quarter Filipino. That I was born and raised in Washington, held the honor roll at East Valley High until my parents placed me into the ward’s care. That I’m aggressive, unmedicated and dangerous, a liar, just like it says in capital letters, that my words and actions are “inconsistent and untrustworthy.” That I hallucinate uncontrollably, that I’ve no recollection of the past or understanding of the future. I.D. Number Six-Three-Four-Seven-Nine. One-hundred and twenty pounds, insomniac, size eleven feet.
The document hangs opposite to the two windows on the south wall, small ones with four sections of glass split on them evenly by plastic framing. Faint rectangles of light illuminate it each time the moon surfaces through a gap in the clouds, separated in the middle by frame shadows that keep most of the words hidden. Not that it matters, I know what they all are, memorized down to the colons and parentheses. There’s nothing else to do in here but read it, just as I have since I arrived here, waiting for morning to come to be cleaned and fed and treated. Tomorrow, I’ll be cleaned and fed and placed in the care of the “social integration” sect of the ward, where I learn to work, how to clean floors and dishes and do the laundry of self-soiling lunatics, make their beds with white sheets as they eat lunch and answer questions. Thirty hours without sleep and a whole day of working; my mind never gets around the thought. Social integration, they say.
It’s three in the morning now. I’ve been up for hours, making ticks in my head as one hour passes to the next until six groups of little lines stack up and make thirty. I can feel the sun coming up, just a few more marks and it’ll be beaming through those useless curtains too bright to allow me any rest. I can’t help but think of how easy sleep had come before I’d been admitted, when I was covered by fleeced sheets and sunken in memory foam with an old Korean bead pillow and blinds that kept the light out. But I’m too defiant, they say, too dishonest and ill in the head to remain at home, alone in my room where the dark tricks my eyes. So here I am, surrounded by white linoleum walls with thin rectangular windows positioned high upon them, scribbling little nothings onto the few sheets of paper I’m allowed each day and running my words onto tissues when it’s all been spent. To be cured, they say. “You’re here to be cured.
The clouds pass the moon again so it lights up the frame. I begin to wonder why they put one in every room, nailed the same twelve inches above the same three by five doors on the same north wall where the moonlight shines brightest. It turns the words into little glowing diagnoses, highlighting themselves and glaring into your eyes like out of place fireflies: SCHIZOPHRENIA, PSEUDOLOGIA FANTASTICA, so on and so on, etcetera. Reminders, I think, of what’s wrong with you, of the years of rehabilitation that wait in your future and the hours in the coming day. Proof, I think, that you should be here, that you need to be, that that document will be nailed to your forehead just as long as it’s nailed to the wall. Proof for them, but mostly for yourself. So cooperate, the moonlight says, and maybe the words will glow less bright, maybe they’ll go away altogether and you won’t be labeled as some delusional, lying, destructive psychopath for the rest of your life. And maybe, with enough grace and chance on your side, you won’t even be one anymore.
And so I swear, loud as I can so that the yells bounce linoleum echoes from the rectangular windows and off of the moonlit anamnesis, realizing that I’ve just read it again.

Dr. Strangemind or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Normality

It baffles me how so many people can abridge the complexities of an individual into a single word. One person asks what a certain someone is like and receives an answer of “Oh, Tom? Tom is the nicest guy.” to an obligatory reply of “Oh, fascinating, I’ll have to meet him!” But why, really, when all that’s been told about Tom is that he’s nice and male? For the most part, adjectives are inert and vague, and yet using one or two generally seems to satisfy most amateur psychoanalyses. “He’s wonderful!”, or “He’s a jerk”, or, “She’s crazy!” With as much elaboration as God has put into designing wonderfully crazy jerks, he must be offended.
The most derisory of these ambiguous terms is easily the word “weird.” Sometimes replaced by odd, bizarre, different, strange, and peculiar, nothing is more offensive to the hypothetical Tom than for someone to say “Oh, Tom? He’s weird.” Let’s pretend for a second that anyone cares enough to ask, “How so?,” leaving the hypothetical describer to explain how Tom believes that reptiles control the earth, enjoys dressing in women’s clothing, and will soon be named Emily. Maybe it’s revealed that Tom is a pardoned serial killer who ritualistically nails cow entrails to his ceiling, or maybe he just listens to strange, operatic jazz-fusion bands from France. Either one is fairly weird, but I think my friend Cory and a cow’s equivalent to Ed Gein are at least somewhat distinguishable from each other. Really, of all types of people, the most enigmatic and interesting are the weird ones, and we ironically seem more subject to unfair cataloging than anyone else.
My sympathy goes out to the poor, strange, multi-persona Tom, for on many occasions I’ve been dubbed “weird.” I recall first falling victim to such subjection in eighth grade. The math teacher had been absent from the room for about fifteen minutes, and in that time the class of preteens had been discussing a variety of life’s most trying issues, ranging somewhere from Britney Spears to Captain Underpants comic books. A student sitting next to me-we’ll call him Billy-had become a casual acquaintance of mine. For the last ten minutes, I’d been explaining to him the brilliance of Pink Floyd and the symbolism of their masterwork, “The Wall.” He didn’t seem to care too much.
“You’re weird.” he said. His tone was dead and purely observant, not critical but certainly absent of any sort of reverence. I gazed back at him in a similar way, my mouth drooping open much like his.
“Why?” I asked him.
“Nobody says things like that.”
“Like what?”
“Whatever you said. Symbalick, and something about walls and being lonely or something. Nobody talks about things like that. You’re weird.”
I was confused and more offended than I’d been thus far in my short life. He hadn’t paid any attention to what I’d said; just how strange it was that I’d said it. Suffice to say that I punched Billy directly in the mouth.
Well, no, I didn’t. Actually, I stopped talking to him and never even noticed him again. He seemed to have disappeared, as if my strangeness had discomforted him straight into nothingness. Before ceasing to exist, though, he managed to have quite the affect on me, for I had yet to hear anything so shallow in my life. From then on the word “weird” was a compliment, for it separated me from his narrow worldview, and I was forever liberated, albeit slightly detached, from everyone else who strived to be normal. Still, I remain a bit troubled by the laughable attempts the normies make at understanding us weirdoes.
The adjective “weird” is a valid one. I am weird. But I’m a lot more, too. I’m a writer, a bassist, and a self-proclaimed artist, and a mystic who shuns religion. I love philosophy, poetry and comedy, dystopic novels and off-color jokes, and perhaps even chanting reptilian conspiracies over the chaos of my favorite French fusion/opera group while sewing homemade dresses from cow intestines. I might as well, anyways. To anyone who looks at me, says “He’s weird” and immediately quits thinking, there really isn’t a difference.

On and Gone and Smiles the Whole Way
So it goes, so it goes,
Vonnegut, his rhythm flows,
Down the stairs, a deadly show,
He laughs and so he goes.

Twenty-seven gone today,
Drowned in wood and something sharp,
About the killer, all I’ll say,
I hope he’s eaten yet.

Lend no thought to where they rest,
Floorboards, dust, it matters not,
Back to nowhere, where they came,
They go on just the same.

Little girls that walk the fields,
God only knows they wouldn’t choose,
To go so soon, so loud and quick,
But to their backs, a monarch’s stick,
A king so sick that laps up red,
With wine which wrests from those long dead ,
My God, how high he should be blown!
But children live to do his own,
And so he stays, so he stays,
So warm, his little throne.

Perched upon them, thrones galore,
Millions softly keeping score,
With eyes so wary turned in fright,
From that to string their thoughts too tight,
And oh so high in passive flight,
All fell without a single flap,
Smiles sunk deep in frothing lips,
As the audience just screams and claps,
Encore! Encore! Suicide show!
So it goes, so it goes.

Christ child, Nixon, so it goes,
Vonnegut, his rhythm flows,
Staircase funfair, nukes and warfare,
We scream or laugh and go.

A pretty girl’s explosive strap,
Fat old Jap, writes the rules,
Humans cheap, jewels run steep,
Guess which one he spent.
Cold
The snow had settled soft on the ground but by noon it’d frozen over so that it crunched with every step I took. I’d been walking for almost two hours; straight through the woods to nowhere in what the clouds had made a perpetual darkness. Clouds blocked out the sun while they blew around at the mercy of the wind, like glitter in one of those little plastic globes. An icy crust had formed around my boots and my lips were chapped white as the earth, nearly peeling off with the breeze. I swear if I’d cried my eyes would have sealed shut forever. I was well-covered, layered twice over with clothing on each inch of my body, aside from my reddening face. Eventually, I gave into the weight of it all, plopped over under a mighty pine and hunched my arms and legs together to keep warm.
Christmas was tomorrow. The neighborhood had been draped in red and green and the Christ child was sleeping peacefully in every fourth yard or so. The cold sent my thoughts back to Georgia, where it’d been nothing like this at all. That’s why when my father retired he hauled us up here to Spokane, where we could finally have a nice white Christmas. Just how it should be, so all his meticulous planning and cooking and light-stringing wouldn’t be spoiled by the taunts of an unholy atmosphere. But he’d since moved to Seattle, and my mom didn’t care too much what color it was outside. She was just mad that he’d gone and Christmas was up to her, that I was up to her. Her frustration had begun to eat away at what I thought was an invincible mindset, that mystic awe of Christmas spirit that lives in every American child. Her yelling, her complaints, her threats of withholding gifts, I held no intention of dealing with it all during the best of seasons. So, long before she knew I’d woken up, I left, and climbed the icy asphalt hills up past the newest construction site to freeze myself in the wild for a few hours.
White flakes fell from above and blew into my face. I guarded my eyes and aimed them at the branch they came from, where a squirrel had just slipped out and half-thudded on the hard snow. He shivered as he ran, panicked and freezing, scurrying away to be swallowed by fog. His brown body was speckled with white, just like everything else in view, and it would’ve looked beautiful if he didn’t seem so miserably cold and hungry. Only the trees seemed comfortable, green and tall as they’d always been, proudly giving shelter to all the out of place summer creatures that walked among them. I admired the evergreens, they looked immortal.
A lone bird stood squawking atop one of the pines, bobbing his head back and forth across the wood. He let out a pathetic succession of “twah’s!”, like he was calling out “over here!” to some bird friend of his. I chuckled at his desperation. He had wings and feet and two good eyes, but all he did was sit there and call out to some hoppy brown companion of his that’d probably drowned in the white by now. Dumb little thing. Regardless of his ability to fly, his high-pitched moan continued on and on until I scared him with a well-placed rock at the heart of the tree. Fluttering away, he mocked me with one last “twah!” and glided reluctantly through the forest. He’d likely freeze that night, I thought, if not prey to an owl or a hawk by then, but at least he’d be midair when he finally went.
The clouds shone a darker gray than before. I figured I’d best head home before I froze or fell prey to a coyote and had to answer to the laughter of that insolent little bird’s ghost. “Twah! You idiot, think you’re so clever with your lil’ rocks, chucking ‘em at nature when it don’t suit your comfort? Pompous little brat, look where you are now, not so bright, are we, or warm for that matter? Twah, twah!” Dumb, cockney little thing. I decided to survive, if only to avoid ever hearing that annoying squawk again, and stood up to follow a path of crunchy backwards footsteps back to the neighborhood.
The nervous little squirrel from earlier had found his way across my path at the very edge of the road. He stood there looking up at me with puffy, nut-filled cheeks. To his left was a chubby little female, paying no attention to the creampuff of plastic winter wear that towered above her. She just kept driving her nose into the ground and piling up shiny gold walnuts behind her, all stacked neatly by her counterpart. The male kept staring at me until she looked up, and at once they took up their abundance and bolted off to hide wherever it is that squirrels do. Cagey little things, clever like that. They were scared and weak and unimportant, just like that stupid bird, but they knew it took more than just standing there to get on with it. I laughed for the last time that day and continued home.
As I tried sleeping that stupid bird flew around in my head. My thoughts began to feel dissonant… tense and numb and eased almost simultaneously. Words rose from my chest and teetered on the edge of my lips, but I kept them shut, chewed the words up like mush and sucked them down my throat. I felt like that cockney, brown, speckled-white creature, standing on the top of the tallest tree I could find and just bobbing my head left and right until I froze to death. But unlike him, I didn’t even have wings, and I still managed to keep from sending whiny yelps across the forest. Dumb little thing.
When I woke up, I’d forgotten what day it was. I nearly headed out for the wood again.

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