Post by pinstrike on Sept 20, 2007 22:31:53 GMT -5
Documentation of the recording:
Doctor Cane: You’re very quiet today, Harvey.
Harvey: I’m thinking.
Doctor Cane: What are you thinking about?
Harvey: about
Doctor Cane: What are you thinking about?
Harvey: About
Doctor Cane: About what?
Harvey: what.
Silence
Doctor Cane: Are you playing a game?
Harvey: (Laughing) game.
Silence
Silence
Silence
Harvey: Butter-butterfly
Doctor Cane: I’m sorry?
Harvey: Butterfly
Doctor Cane: Butterfly. What do you mean?
Harvey: Mean?
Doctor Cane: Now Harvey, No more games.
Harvey: No. I mean what do you mean what do I mean? Butterfly godammit!
Doctor Cane: Well, are you thinking about butterflies?
Silence
Harvey: I….suppose so. (Whispering) I suppose so.
Doctor Cane: Harvey, you either are or are not thinking about something. So. Again. Are you thinking of butterflies?
Harvey: Not that—Not that ……..
Silence
Harvey: ….simple
Doctor Cane: What isn’t that simple?
Harvey: Only a word
Doctor Cane: Go on.
Harvey: Not that simple. Only a word.
Doctor Cane: Yes, we’ve covered that. What are you telling me?
Harvey: It isn’t simply thought or word, word and thought are not as banal as you’d like to think. Butterfly is only a word, requiring little thought to form, a few movements of the tongue….Butt errrrrr flllllllllyyyyyy. Just like “doubt” or “try” or “sedate”. Only “butterfly” happens to be a noun.
Doctor Cane: Well, doubt can be a noun.
Harvey: Now, Doctor, no more games.
Observation: Doctor we’ll ask you now to leave the examination room. We’ll call you back in when ready.
Silence
Silence
Silence Static
Silence Static
Silence
Silence
Silence
Silence
Silence
Observation: Doctor Cane, We’re ready for you.
(Tapping)
(Grows Louder)
Doctor Cane: Thank you.
(Scratching)
(Creaking)
Silence
Doctor Cane: So, Harvey. We were discussing butterflies, I believe.
Harvey: (Sigh)
Doctor Cane: Is that not what we were discussing, Harvey?
Harvey: The praying mantis spoke a fallacy when he said the butterfly dictates man’s dooms and not man itself. For are not all things butterflies?
Doctor: Butterflies again.
Harvey: Why, Doctor, are the butterflies so damn important to you? It is only a word, and you try to put thoughts into my head. That, doctor, is a game. And a very dangerous one to play with someone like me.
Doctor Cane: No. It seems that you are the one playing a game.
Harvey: We are both of us at play. All of us at play in this great playground of existence, Doctor, and winning and losing are relative, save for the gods, who move the pieces, make the pieces, break the pieces.
Doctor Cane: Who are the gods?
Harvey: Me and my likenesses.
Silence
Silence
Silence
Silence
Static
Silence
Doctor Cane: So, you are a god?
Harvey: One of them.
Doctor Cane: Where are the others? The other gods?
Harvey: Doctor, you talk to them often. You know the gods, yet you ask their names, you play games. Well, I tell you they are in Ward 4. Bound and sedated, leaving their world in disarray without them.
Doctor Cane: So your abilities make you a god?
Harvey: (Laughs)
(Laughs)
Doctor Cane: Harvey?
Observation: Doctor, we will ask you to leave the room immediately.
<<Additional sedatives administered>>
Harvey: Abilities.
Doctor Cane: Yes.
Harvey: Tell me, Doctor, what my so-called abilities are again.
Doctor Cane: Well, you are, uhh..
Harvey: No! In that flowing technical tongue they write about us with!
Doctor Cane: <<Regards Notes>> Hallucination Manifestation. Hallucinations developed in the mind are by methods unknown transferred into tangible…
Harvey: reality.
Doctor Cane: Yes. Taking ideas and thoughts, visions, and
Harvey: make them into real things. I cannot control it. (Stifled Laughter). But what I see everyone else sees. Even dreams. I redefine, or add definition to what already exists. What else merits the title of god?
Silence
Silence
Silence
Doctor Cane: (Wet Sounds)
(Cracking Sounds)
Harvey: I’m right here
I’m right here
I’m right here
I’m right here Never die Alone
Never die alone
I’m right here
Die With the butterflies
I’m right here
Witness’s Testimony
As delivered through interview
Where were you?
I was in Observation. It’s a big mirrored sphere overlooking the examination room. The whole sphere is a window of bullet-proof glass. Not that we expected bullets, but we never expected Harvey either.
When were examinations held?
It depends. With the five in Ward 4, it was every other month to the day. Just to, you know, check up on their condition. The others were rarely, if ever, the ones on the above levels, ever examined. They weren’t there to be helped or learned from. They were there to keep them from eyeshot of sky.
The normal procedures for examination?
The examinations of the Ward 4’s were primarily to learn how they did what they did. So, they were restrained, sedated to keep them at what I can only call a human level. The average heart rate—and we don’t know how they survive their own existence—is close to 310 bpm. So we took them down to a talk-to status. The restraints were put in place so that the patient could stand up rather than sitting. Honestly, I don’t know how it made any kind of difference. Anyway, we waited a while after that. Maybe an hour or two, depending on the “patient”. Let the sedatives kick in. Really kick in. Then, we would examine his vital signs—the devices for which were built into the restraining apparatus. Then, when we felt it was safe for the doctor to come in, we called him in for the examination. This was pretty much just sitting and talking with the ward 4. This usually lasted an hour to an hour and a half. Depending on how many times we had to take an intermission in order to administer additional sedatives, which happened pretty often. Any question might set him off, and his vital signs would start to go up. This was necessary to the safety of everyone present. One examination might require enough sedatives to put two grown men into a catatonic state.
Anyway, after the oral, a needle connected to a robotic arm took blood, then spinal fluid was taken in the same manner, the needle inserted into the base of the vertebral column. The restraint devices were deactivated and the ward four was escorted back to his chamber. All said and done, the whole examination lasted 4 hours, around that.
On the incident
Damn. Well, we were in observation—hold on a second, alright—its still a shitload to handle, let alone talk about, even after three and a half fucking years, the lump in my throat’s still there. Ok. Ok. Well, the sedatives were administered—the initial ones—at least three hours before we thought about calling the doctor in. Harvey was different. His hallucinations were violent. Homicidal. Bizarrely so. The incident was by no means an exception to this part of his nature. While all hallucinations made manifest are dangerous and potentially lethal, Harvey’s were devastating. No one but surveillance cameras and sound recorders ever survived to tell the tale of such an encounter. So we brought him way down. Below even what I called human level. Monitored him without event. Finally, we called the doc in. Doctor Florence Cane, Harvey’s analyst, had gone through the procedure hundreds of times. I always got the feeling that Harvey considered themselves friends in some twisted way; pieces in Harvey’s games.
And games he played.
Especially with Doctor Cane. His favorite game was playing Echo. Repeating only the last word and shit until the doctor was forced into a verbal corner, and had to discontinue evaluation without any more answers than he had when he entered the room.
This particular occasion, he was starting out real slow, I mean real slow. I don’t know if it was the seds or if he was fucking with us. But the doc pushes it. Gets whatever answers he can. That’s his job. Get the answers, devil be damned. Or whatever the hell that phrase is. So doctor gets responses, Harvey plays games. The way it always went.
Then his vitals went up.
And they wouldn’t go back down.
We kept adding sed upon sed until we were afraid his blood would become diluted. But he wouldn’t fall back down. Just kept going up and up and up.
We didn’t know what to do. But [Harvey] wasn’t acting belligerent, so we let the doctor go on with the examination, which had gone over-time due to the problems with the sedations.
But Doc should have known.
It wasn’t our fault.
He should have left.
But by the time any of this mattered, it didn’t matter anymore. The doctor was dead. Not just dead—Shit—give me a damn second.
Alright. The tearing sound came before anything else. Just a sound close to bed sheets or curtains tearing in short, sharp intervals. The tearing grew in volume and length until it reached an unbelievable pitch which, when it had reached its zenith sounded as if the world was going to split before or after our eardrums did. And I was ready to welcome either one. Anything to end the terrible sound.
The tickles came when the tearing left.
To be accurate, it felt like a thousand feathers or tiny wings floating over and through me. I could feel it over every inch of my skin, starting from my back, through my body—I could feel my heart itch in my chest, my intestines shift to make room for the sensation—and past me, through the glass, which rippled and swirled as the invisible Movers swept through it and everything else we assumed solid until it all seemed to coalesce at the doctor. I guess his throat was fucked far past function before he even realized it was an opportune moment to scream. His mouth shot back into a vile grin that reached past his ears. I thought of the metaphor and how rarely people would use it if they could see what it really looked like. Here it was, fear or pain or both ripping back white lips to reveal gums and teeth moist with blood and bile welling up in his mouth for want of anywhere else to go.
Everyone was looking at the screens or at Harvey, so no one really saw when it happened or how.
Except me. I was watching the doctor.
His skin began to lighten, to take on a translucent hue. He was quivering and twitching all over. I realized, without actual thought—I think he wanted to be aware, to have perfect knowledge of what he was doing, he put the thoughts into our heads, or something, put the answers on the tips of our tongues, that we could bear full witness to his genius—what was happening.
But by the time it mattered, it didn’t matter anymore.
His fingers were sucked in on themselves like accordions, the bones and tendons shooting out the back of the hand, spraying the tan suit red with blood as the arteries in the hand were punctured. These, too, were receding into the body. Veins and arteries and capillaries slithering beneath the skin like snakes. It was as if all his substance was being sucked back in towards his midline. I saw the blood well up from his shoes and knew his toes had followed suit. His eyes, now, were retreating into his skull, squeezing the remaining blues and reds from behind them.
Hello, world, we’re the colors and oozes—the wet parts behind the scenes.
Whether that was his thought or mine I don’t know. I just remember thinking it.
And midway through it, it happened.
It all fell in on itself—what was Doctor Cane—like a Styrofoam cup in a microwave. Only with blood. Lots of blood. Reds and purples shown what oxygen was too soon to turn red blended together in a fountain of fleshes.
The cracking of bones.
The sound of wheezing.
Squelching.
If that’s a sound.
You get the picture.
All mixed into a cacophonous symphony that would not have shamed Beethoven.
Ode to Bleeding.
Da da da wetsoundswetsounds dadadadadadada. That was his.
Anyway.
Flesh and sinews and tendons and ligaments spewing into the air like a Las Vegas fountain.
And none of it hit the ground, save for the blood.
The pieces began flapping in the air like butterflies. Flaps of flesh and deeper tissue beating the death-choked air softly like insects, spraying the white walls with reds and purples and bile yellows and sickly blacks.
There was nothing, not a damn thing we could do but stand with our nausea and watch as the wet bits landed on Harvey with wet slaps, embracing him like a father. Thousands of wet skins flying through the air, trailing blood vessels like the tails of kites.
And, soon enough, Harvey wasn’t Harvey.
I thought, ridiculous as it was, of radioing somebody. But I had already vaguely heard the breaking of static in short intervals, the moments between filled with the slightly too nonchalant “Situation in Examination room. Requesting assistance.”
I just kept on staring. I can’t say I was standing in horror. That’s cliché. I was standing, watching, because there was nothing that my human instinct or anything above it would tell me to do. Nature doesn’t prepare you for certain things.
Watching a man split to pieces then reassemble himself over the flesh of another man is one of those things.
Harvey’s intention was not mere homicide. That wasn’t the purpose of the hallucination. It was escape. The thought of it had traveled along the same mental pathway so many times that it had developed its own scenario in his mind, melting around his love of butterflies and blood.
By the time this all ran through my head, Harvey was covered over every inch of him with the doctor’s flesh, creating a decoupage of what had been a person but moments before.
And then I knew what Harvey had done. His plan seemed so simple then. What was now standing in the restraints was not Harvey. It was the doctor.
I blinked.
And when I did, Harvey was sitting on the chair that Cane had, amidst all the pieces that hadn’t made the trip over—grainy bits of bones, shit and bones and bits of other things only an anatomy student would know the names of; an A student. All the bastard did was switch places. Played a sadistic game of musical chairs, in which he was the music, he was the winner, and the loser got stitched back together by his own pieces.
The Doctor gurgled and moaned in the restraints as capillaries and arteries acted like thread, passing through lacerations on their own accord, sewing him into a crude joke of a being. Pieces were put where they shouldn’t be.
I saw a piece of the jaw twitch, gnawing at a raw shoulder, and wondered what it was to feel pain. Real pain. Pain like I was watching and would have to wait for hell to suffer. His heart was hanging from the aorta, which was attached to where the lower jaw should be, pulsing blood into veins that ran through torn flesh, and spat and sputtered at areas where there were still holes. And there were still lots of holes. I looked at the walls and the torrents coming out of him, and wondered, with a smile, how much fluid could still be in the doctor.
I—I probably shouldn’t say this, but the sight alone—you do want me to, aw fuck it.
I couldn’t help but let my eyes play over the mass of human ruin. And the groin solved the mystery of what happened to the eyes, which hung from, and stared down a mass of intertwined blood vessels, throbbing, pulsing with some unnatural rhythm. His spine rested in his left leg, and his feet were mere stumps with bits of bone jutting out at awkward angles.
Tearing sound again.
The sensation, this time, not of feathers, but of a million razor blades dancing over my goose-flesh. I flailed my hands to my ears and felt the blood running down my face from everywhere, and saw the window was gone, the glass shards flapping through the air like butterflies, wet from lacerations, I wondered what had happened to the liquid moments between the sensation and the transfer into reality. The last thing I remember, was meeting Harvey’s stare. My God, I was bleeding, he was smiling, everyone was dying. I let blackness take me. It was his blackness, but anything was welcome to the terrors of Harvey’s sight. So I gladly took his blindness.
I came to in the blackness, but this was a different dark. The air here didn’t taste like decay smells. It smelled like sterility. It smelled like latex gloves smell, and I knew where I was.
I suffered severe blood loss, and had over seventy glass shards several inches beneath my skin. I asked to keep some of them. They said no. I asked if I could keep one of them. They said no.
While in recovery, I received a package. It was unlabeled, save for a butterfly on the envelope, drawn with the talent of a first grader learning how to trace. Inside was a copy of Moby Dick. Or the Whale. By Herman Melville. Every page was blank. White like the whale that should have been in them.
Except one.
The last one before the other blank pages are found, had only one line, but I read it over and over again everyday. And every time I did all I could see was his face, his eyes staring into mine, as if they were looking at the moist pieces behind them. I knew why.
“I alone lived to tell thee”
I learned so much from Harvey. His are games of learning, even if it costs the death of a thousand meaningless men, the one that’s left is the only one worth two shits. Because, in the end, we may all be hallucinations of a mad god—you’ve watched the surveillance tapes, right? Notice how, for periods of time, the screen goes black, but Harvey is still visible, a sharp white speck in his straightjacket. That’s the tearing sound. That’s him stripping off reality like a glove. Any reality or image after that is his. His world.
No god has ever had more control over a world than the mad have over theirs—with little or no say in our sort or substance, as extinguishable as a dry spot in the corner of the eye. All it takes for us to die is a blink.
All Harvey did was play a game with the world. His or ours is of no consequence (consequence)
Harvey enjoys games. (games)
And Harvey wins his games. (games)
And no one knows what happened to him, because they’re all dead. And that part of the mystery was one he wouldn’t let even me have the answer to.
But, he’s alive. Know this.
Are we, are we done? With the interview? I’d rather not discuss this anymore.
Yes. We’re done. Thank you for your time.
My pleasure.
