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If it were up for contest, John Forsyth would surely be right up there at the top of the heap in the “most eligible widower” sweepstakes. A gentleman’s gentleman and a kindhearted dad, John had “catch” written all over him. The death of his soul mate, Jacquelyn, was not something that he or their daughter Cynthia would ever really fully get over; nor should they have been expected to. Akin to self-medicating, John had found himself going through a prolonged period of serial monogamy. Already some thing of a loner, his daughter Cynthia was unable to focus for too long on the memory of her mother; the tragedy was just way too painful for her.
Catherine was John’s latest vice; and it had been taking a heavy toll on his daughter. Chaos attracts chaos, and John’s scattered heart was nothing if not a clarion call of an invitation for women like Catherine to come a’saunterin by. He was blinded by her and failed at being able to ever view her for what she really was – a completely dysfunctional nut job, and this ignorance only served to add fuel to his daughter’s tortured fire.
“Wake up, darling,” John brushed the back of his hand by his Cynthia’s cheek. “It’s a great day out, whats say you get outta bed, have some breakfast, and go to school?”
The smell of John’s buttermilk pancakes wafted on and into the room.
“Awww...fuck school,” Cynthia blurted with a groan.
Cynthia had spent the better part of the school year at home. She could not be expelled, at least not yet. When she was fourteen, she had been molested by her history teacher, producing a bag of blackmail large enough to all but secure her spot in class no matter how absent she was. John did not have the time, energy, or patience right now to rig up some sorta ingenious scheme to get her daughter from point A, bed, to point B, school. He left the room with a frenzied sigh, finished getting dressed, and rushed out the door to work.
Cynthia gazed around her bedroom from the nest of her bed. She eyed the carnation pink walls, a color that she had chosen when she was just a small girl. Her mother had lovingly told her that since this would be her room for a good long while, she should be the one to pick out its color scheme. She slipped out of bed and took a shower sans shampoo. She tried to keep her shampoo use to a minimum due to the makeup of her kinky hair. “Its caused by a high concentration of a certain chemical bond found in all hair, but to a greater degree in curly hair, like ours”, her dad had once explained to her. “I’m sorry that you had to inherit that from me,” he would say.
John Forsyth snaked his way through the labyrinthine maze that was the mess of cubicles labeled Center One as quickly as he could to get to his back office. Paul, the security guard reading the paper by the entrance, let a g’morning crackle through his two-pack a day larynx. John had been recruited a couple years prior by the Center to help with the development of new government technology. During the design process it was of course kept top secret; outside of John, none of the individual developers had a clue as to what it was that they were actually working on. Every engineer perfected his “piece” of the puzzle, but very few were actually privy to the finished masterpiece. John thought himself a white hat hacker - he enjoyed tinkering and getting to the root of things, eliciting for him the personal fulfillment that comes from knowing what makes them tick, and hopefully helping society at large as a by-product. When he first arrived as part of a new government team two years prior, before this project had been a wisp of thought in anyone’s mind, he had already stealthily infiltrated the entire government network that it was to be built inside of. He was on a short and exclusive list of those with seemingly unadulterated access to the entire program – with no one else on the list being the wiser. He had a copy of the program on a flash memory drive locked away securely in his house’s study. John booted up his office terminal, went through his inbox, and, before getting started on his regular work, logged clandestinely into the truly classified shit that he wasn’t supposed to able to see. The “secure” inbox included a new memo at the top of the heap. John skimmed it quickly, skipping to the important part, which was hashed out in bold point:
“...they are alive, just like you and me - there is nothing fundamentally different about them; therefore, unless and until absolutely necessary, we must not make use of it.”
John could not help but laugh. Did the brass not have a clue as to what they were dealing with while the program was being built? Why build the bomb if it just might seal your own fate?
Cynthia Forsyth was different than the other girls that she knew. “Hyper-introspective” was the term that she had coined to describe herself.
The full extent of her psychological complex was, well, complex, and hard to encapsulate and pigeonhole in some curt set of diagnostical paragraphs hashed out inside some thick book on a shrink’s coffee table. Of course her environment and biology played a role in what she currently was – people don’t just come out of the woodwork of a vacuum. Understandably, the loss of her mother at a young age and her later sexual exploitation was a terrible source of pain which her developmental reality had gradually ensconced itself around. But, aside from all that one could ostensibly see and understand about her upon observance, her issues still ran deeper than what might be considered rationally explainable; the sum of her collective trauma was somehow much greater than its known individual parts. An element of her neurosis might have been that, to some degree, she felt that she was more “real” than others. This was, of course, a recipe for disaster; as once accepting this notion as a given, her thoughts would take a dour pattern, a mental thread that by and large would run something like this:
“If I am more real than others, than where does that leave the said others? Can they “feel” any less than I can feel? No, of course that can not be the case. It’s selfish for me to think that I have some special element that is lacking in others. But when I realize this, I feel that my life takes on an air of complete meaninglessness; no reason for me to be, nothing unique for me to offer the world.”
Of course, one might feel compelled to play armchair analyst with her and (logically) explain to her in a thousand and one ways the fallacies inherent in her thought process. But that does not much matter - rest assured, she would, in the end of the day, “out logic” the said analyst and return to her state of depression, as objectively illogical as it might have been. Seemingly endless amounts of her time would be spent scrutinizing herself in front of her mirror.
“I’m too fat,” she would think, when the reality was that she was far too thin.
“I’m ugly,” this line of thought would continue; when in fact she was quite an attractive young lady.
Her wishes and aspirations were quite often related generally to death and specifically to a painless and near-future demise; a sure but steady vanishing into nonexistence. A return to the pre-organic; a plea from entropy to inflict itself on her at near-light speed, this was what Cynthia was looking for. Life, she felt, had been hard on her; she had already given up and was now more or less just running on auto (and empty).
She had installed a demo version of OmniSim (a recently released universe-simulation game) months before, and after enjoying the experience, had since retrieved a pirated complete addition from some shady corner of cyberspace. A diversion at first, she was quickly developing a keen addiction to it. “Millions” of years passed in quick succession as she carefully guided her universe into some sort of order. She was not that adept at the program yet, so she decided to take it slow and focus on just one area of her creation; and for now to at least allow the rest of this universe to function more or less on auto pilot. The area of space she favored most contained a planet that was very favorable to the conditions that foster life. For now, at least, this would be her focus. She enjoyed watching single cell organisms scuttle about in the planet’s big, blue, primordial pool. There was a broadband multi player capability to the game, but she did not make use of it - the wireless signal to her room was moody and could be slow at times, besides which, she just felt much more comfortable using her bedroom terminal than the family room hub. She was a very singular person. She liked being that way. The virtual “years” went by, up to the point that she had primates evolving into thinking persons. She was having a blast.
The real days and weeks fluttered on by. On a beautifully calm autumnal morning, bad news arrived in John’s inbox. He was given the pink slip as government spending was being tightened, and it was decided all around the upper echelons of the powers that be that his entire team could, should, and would be liquidated. Their research was important, and so was a million other scientific, medical, and technological endeavors, but what was really imperative was spending a disproportionate amount of the national budget on destroying other countries.
Priorities.
With each passing unemployed day, John felt more and more emasculated. It made Cynthia’s day that John also received Catherine’s pink slip. Going days without taking a shave, he was becoming a hard-core mess. He continued tinkering around with the classified program that he had retained from day’s yore. It had already been beta-tested to death though – on some level he knew that he was merely chasing his tail. Starting to get shoddy about keeping it secure, he got into the habit of being too lazy to keep it under constant lock and key.
Out of curiosity, Cynthia loaded it up one day when she saw it sitting around on the breakfast room table. She noticed that its executive functions were compatible with OmniSim. So she did what came naturally to her and loaded it up, applying its source code to her universe. No noticeable changes occurred. She forgot about it, returned the flash drive to the aforementioned table, and continued to gently goad the development of her world.
Cynthia went through the never-ending ups and downs of her daily teenage life, at times finding herself completely deflated, and, at other times, absolutely elated.
“Cyclothymic”, she had once been pronounced by a psychiatrist as being.
She had bounced around from one antidepressant and mood stabilizer to the next without any of them being able to help her out too much; antipsychotics were all but ready to be tried in the next round on the carrousel of her mentally-ill life:
“Hey, dollface, Lets just adjust a few neurotransmitters here, some receptors there - we’ll make a star outta ya!”
Unbeknownst to her, the game she had been spending a great amount of her waking hours playing had ceased to be just another one dimensional escapist diversion; in truth its inhabitants were just as real as you and I – credit for that goes indirectly to her daddy, of course. Her sole gratification in life was increasingly coming from her creation. When angry, she would have her way with them; when moods of tranquility would set in, she tended to lavish kindness. The viewable reactions of her subjects would placate her the way opiates might the narcotic addict.
She was dimly aware of the fact that her growing preoccupation and infatuation was removing her more and more from the real world. She had pretty much completely stopped going to school. She had very few friends. She was vegging out – “growin roots”, you might say. She started to think that her brain mass was slowly and subtly – she felt mentally lethargic. She decided at one point to try and fight - albeit weakly - against the tide of isolation that she had created for herself by going for walks (alone, of course) in the public park. There she would take in its beautiful floral gardens, ruddy paths, and all the other visceral and visual delights that nature could provide her with. Her mind would be empty during these daily dalliances. She eventually tired of going to the public park - too many people around. Instead she would drive her dad’s car into some rustic neighborhood, whose inhabitants were all sure to be at work, and walk along the sidewalks hypnotically, taking in the rhythm of sun followed by shade followed by sun, ad infinitum. Becoming more and more detached, she started going to a saccharine psychologist out of her heightened concern regarding her mental state’s growing decline. It did not do very much good for her, so she dropped it after maybe a dozen sessions.
Things finally reached a grand low point when Catherine arrived impromptu at the Forsyth residence to pick up some of the stuff that she had left behind. It was the perfect storm for Cynthia; she had just started cutting herself for the first time earlier that day. After Cynthia went on a manic tirade, spewing all sorts of threats and slurs Catherine’s way (not to mention destroying some of Catherine’s prized shit), her dad rushed her to the hospital. Disheveled himself, he was on alert for suicidal behavior from Cynthia. He started to cry from behind the wheel - seeing that his daughter had cut herself up like that, it was just too much for him.
“Why are you crying?” she listlessly asked
“You failed me, Cynthia; you failed me,” was his only muted response.
She spent the night in the emergency room. A tall, dark psychiatrist abruptly awakened her early in the morning, and asked her a barrage of questions. Absurdly, the important ones were peppered in between the silly ones. They were:
“Do you intend to inflict physical harm on others? Do you intend to harm yourself?”
“No, I do not intend to harm others; myself – that much I just don’t know right now,” she answered honestly.
“Ok, I’ll be back in five, ten minutes.”
By the twenty minute mark, he had still not returned. Cynthia stepped out of her room to check out the sitch...she walked over in her gown and traction-equipped hospital socks to the nurse’s station to ask about the doctor’s whereabouts.
“Oh, I don’t know about that hon, but your transportation will be here within the next few minutes,” the nurse distractedly informed her.
And just like that she was carted out of the ER. She spent the next eight days in a mental institution. It was there that a sweet and scary deepening of her self-awareness set in. She found herself questioning the true essence of her sexuality. In a plain and superficial sense, she was sure that her sexual attraction belonged to men, but on an emotional level, she began questioning herself upon meeting a foreign girl, Yael. Something about her...Yael’s eyes screamed with a searing empathy. With one look, they spoke right into her soul, saying, “Cynthia, sweetheart – I understand you, let me hold you, let me protect you.” When she looked into them, she could swear that she was being enveloped within the Divine. To Cynthia, Yael was a stunning beauty, possessing those sky-blue eyes that seem to continue right on to and through a warm and nurturing infinity. Cynthia was entranced. They would sit together and talk and talk. She felt alive...electric around Yael. She wanted to put her arms around her, hold her tight, kiss her entire face over and over, stroke her hair, and remain in such a protective cocoon forever. Tremendous separation anxiety erupted inside of Cynthia whenever they were not together.
On one of the mornings during her stay on the unit, Cynthia found herself playing a board game with another patient after breakfast. Cynthia was clearly losing. A hospital employee went over to her to ask her about some trivial subject matter, like the weather or something, and Cynthia turned it into a whole topic of debate. The employee found herself a little non-plussed at the dialectic she had been draw into.
“Very intellectual – you’re a very intelligent young lady, huh?” the employee dumbfoundedly offered after their one-sided give and take.
“Oh ya, well if I’m such an earth-shattering intellectual, how come I can’t win a board game against this fucking schizoaffective degenerate dickwad over here?” she thought. She just nodded politely and emptily at the employee instead.
She remembered how the first therapist she went to – they met for a total of one session, mind you - commented early on in her session that she was an intellectual. Her face had noticeably blushed upon hearing that statement.
“I never said that you are smart, although you may be, all I said was that you are an intellectual – more than anything else, it is simply a personality type”, the bearded therapist had let her know. Whatever that was supposed mean.
During that session, the therapist asked her about her deceased mother.
“What is the earliest memory you have concerning your relationship with your mother?” he asked.
“Well I have lots of scattered stuff in my mind from when I was three or so, you know, like her trying to tame my unruly hair, or her pretending like I was actually helping her bake a sheet of cookies, stuff like that. My first clear memory of my connection with my mom is probably from something that occurred when I was maybe five years old, not all that long before she died,” she answered.
“Please, go on and go through the event for me, if you can,” the therapist prompted her.
“Ok, well, it was after school during the early part of summer. It was a nice day out. My mother took me in the car with her to the playground. She gave me some starter pushes on the swing set, and I started pumping away on it like crazy. I went as high as possible – to the point where the chains of the swing can’t take you any higher because the structure of the swing set is not tall enough, so the chains give some slack and you go into a temporary free fall and feel almost weightless for a couple of seconds. Anyway, it was euphoric for me, and my mom was standing and watching with a big smile on her face, like she was so proud of me – all I was doing was swinging, mind you. The chains of the swing were old and rusty, and after a few minutes of this the left set of chains snapped, sending me flying. My head hit the ground with a thud. I was rushed to the emergency room and received a whole bunch of stitches on my forehead.” She pointed to her scar. “Anyway, when my mom was taking me back home after the doctor finished putting me back together, she held my hand while driving; she looked right at me, and she told me how much she loved me, and how she would never leave me.”
“So, do you...do you feel abandoned?” the therapist asked.
Cynthia was misty-eyed and could not produce an answer.
Cynthia’s father would come and see her pretty much on a daily basis during the hospital’s visiting hours. She really did not have all that much interest in seeing him, as she felt completely betrayed by him.
“Why did you do this to me, daddy? Are you completely unaware of the harm your current and previous flames have caused me? How fucking stupid are you?” she hissed at him during one of his visits.
Her father did not have much to say, he just stay there, silent, with a pseudo-introspective look painted on his face.
Looking at her now, all he could think of was his dead wife; and how he did not want Cynthia to meet the same fate. Not now, not in his lifetime. It had been almost twelve years since Jacqueline had taken her own life. She had drawn a bath in their black cast iron clawfoot tub – a nice frothy float of bubbles crowned the water with a thick and foamy head. Jackie lit some soothing aromatherapy candles all around the tub. She sank in and perused through that month’s issue of Elle. She read it in its original French. She had ninety pills of something or other inside of her, quieting down her central nervous system to a low hum. John came home from work and couldn’t process the asymmetrical scene: blood everywhere around the tub, a razor blade resting on the tiled bathroom floor; and Jackie with an angelic, peaceful look on her face. Cynthia had been told that her mother had died in a car accident.
Somehow he knew he had to reach out to his daughter, but he was still so wretchedly filled with misery over the deep losses of his own life - he simply did not have the language to connect with her right now in any way, shape, or form.
“I brought you some food, Cyndi,” John offered. “It’s all wrapped up in paper plates taped together - they wouldn’t allow me to bring anything here inside a bag; safety measures, all those people on suicide watch and all.”
Cynthia rolled her eyes and looked up and at the ceiling.
“I’m, sorry Cyndi, I did not mean it like that,” John said.
“I know dad, I just don’t have anything to talk to you about right now,” she mumbled.
John’s body language displayed an attempt at digesting this entire situation that he and his lone daughter had found themselves in. After a couple minutes of mutual silence, John stood up, stalled for a few seconds, and left the premises.
When going to sleep that night, Cynthia started witnessing creatures of the night appear in her hospital room, telling her that it’s all over, that she should take a proactive stand against her miserable existence. Sleep arrived at some point, and brought with it a vivid matinee.
Cynthia was sitting at the head of a table, with two long tables on either side of hers, forming a big U-like shape, in a great white ballroom. She appeared older looking, early twenties or so. Was this an engagement party - for her? Graduation party? Celebration for recognition of some other sort? Various people got up to speak, she was not sure what they were saying - it was like it was all in some other language or something, but it seemed as though she was on the receiving end of lavish praise. Sometime during the speeches a beautiful woman walked in from the lobby with a flask of liquid in her hand. She walked straight up to Cynthia. Cynthia recognized her for what she was: some kind of a bastardized hybrid of all her dad’s flames, past and present. She spoke warmly to Cynthia, shook her hand and congratulated her ambiguously. She offered her a glass from her antique crystal flask. Cynthia declined.
“Oh but you must try some,” the lady insisted.
Cynthia just shook her head. “No thanks, I’m good,” she said.
Very quickly the lady’s expression turned from one of kindness into one of contorted malice. Cynthia at once was cognizant of what was contained in the lady’s flask. Her urine.
“Drink it, you fucking bitch!” the lady yelled.
Before Cynthia had a chance to react the lady had already taken the flask and spilled its contents all over her.
Cynthia woke up in a cold, terrified sweat. She looked at her watch: 4:10 a.m. She desperately needed the bathroom. Once she was at it, she decided to just get out of bed and start her day. She jumped into the shower. It was the standard mental hospital issue stall: just to wash one’s arms a button has to be pushed four or five times – probably something like twenty seconds of water per push.
After the hospital’s team - which included nothing less than two psychiatrists, two social workers, and a psychiatric nurse - came to the conclusion that Cynthia was ready to go, she returned home. Home is not always where the heart is, not if the heart is so vague that one has to physically feel it and remind oneself that it is in fact still intact, that there is actually a faint but ticking pulse somewhere there. Cynthia did not take Yael’s phone number with her upon her departure. She felt, rightly or wrongly, that she had somehow repelled Yael towards the end of her stay, and whether or not that was actually the case, she just wanted to put this whole phase of her life completely behind her, thank you very much.
When she returned to her carnation pink bedroom, Cynthia witnessed the progress that had occurred on her “world” while it had been running on automatic. Generations had lived and died, hated and loved. She watched how the planet’s inhabitants had organized themselves into various tribal groups of hunters and gatherers. Before long isolated cities had begun to spring up. It was at around this point in time that Cynthia started playing around with one of the more high-tech components of the game, something that she was starting to familiarize herself with. Due to the advanced artificial intelligence that the developers had imbued their game with, she was capable of singling out particular people in order to communicate with them in dialog form. Cynthia found it a little pathetic to fill up the void of her lacking social life by interacting with what she perceived to be no more than strings of ones and zeros, but that sense soon evaporated as she became more and more entranced with the game’s intimate nature. She would hand pick people to communicate with, some of the bold and charismatic born leader types. She was attracted to their style and drive, and became intimately close with them. This pattern repeated itself at various different epochs of her game’s timeline.
The adverse effect of these relationships with her “favorites” made itself known through violent global tragedies. Cataclysmic wars were waged and hundreds of millions were killed throughout the centuries because of one of her intimate’s ideologies clashing with another’s. Cynthia viewed this with a mix of bemusement and horror; it also served to lift her sense of self tremendously – even if it was only virtual beings fighting each other in her name. I don’t know how she would have taken it if had she known that these creations were in fact quite real.
The game had a sort of built in language buffer between the outside, real world, and its own virtual world. Key strokes on Cynthia’s part had to be translated into the machine language that the game’s inhabitants could “understand”, making it that in a certain way the people on the “inside” did not exactly intuit Cynthia as Cynthia, but as something or someone similar, but subtly different. The reverse also applied. The names – and understandings - that Cynthia appended to some of the people, places, and things on her world did not quite reflect the machine language that the inhabitants themselves would use to “communicate” with each other.
Maybe Cynthia’s new meds started to reach a hiccup, as she shortly began to regress deeply back into her formerly depressive states. She now isolated herself completely, even from her electronic game. Running on its own, her world eventually reached a point where it was swept up by a period of stark enlightment, producing an explosion of social change amongst its inhabitants. Rational thought enjoyed a stunning and striking renaissance. A mustachioed man, writer of lucid philosophical thought who attracted a potpourri of great thinkers, got up to declare that “God is dead.”
When Cynthia emerged from her catatonic-like isolation to take a look at her world, she was shattered. This world; the system that she had become so attached to, the one she fostered from before the cradle of its existence, denied her very existence. That was the last straw for her. Her last connection to any reality had become utterly and completely unhinged. She went into the garage and hung herself. As her body was violently writhing, her arms slinging franticly back and forth, she saw Yael in front of her, and she tried swimming in the air towards her until she finally fell limp. Cynthia was dead.
I have been in the Springdale Geritatric Center, a three hundred bed nursing home in greater Chicagoland, for the past six years. In my early fifties I suffered a stroke that took away a lot of my range of movement on the right side of my body. It also stole the vision from my right eye, and reduced my left eye’s sight to what I can only call grainy and strained. Not two months ago, I was sitting in the unit’s dining area, immersed in arts and crafts. A tattooed and goateed volunteer with a terrible scar on his left arm sat across from me. He had very few upper teeth and a gentle demeanor. I do not believe that he knew me or anything about me – I certainly had never seen him before. He did not introduce himself to me. I tried scanning the volunteer identification card that was appended onto his shirt, but could not quite make it out. He started to look at me with a spacey countenance, and his jaw began moving up and down, the words of the story that I have just related to you tumbling out of his mouth. I have done my best to recite what he told me as faithfully as possible. When he was done with his extended monotonous soliloquy, his face returned to something resembling a normal visage; his normal human appearance and mannerisms seemed to reemerge. I asked him where he heard this story. I asked him how he knew the thoughts of its characters so clearly and surely. He did not answer me. He just said that I looked as white as a ghost and asked me my name. I could barely speak.
“Please, who told you that story?” was all that I could muster.
“Sweetheart,” he said, “it’s only a story, that’s all.” He finished the little container of apple juice sitting in front of him on the table that we were sitting at, got up, and walked down the hallway. I never saw him again. I inquired the staff about who he was, but they hadn’t a clue as to what I was talking about. I felt the cold sense of missing out on something so crucial to my very essence.
My name is Yael LaMonde. I do not think I will ever overcome the debilitating sense of the love that I have lost...a love I am not even sure that I have ever even had.
Later that evening, once the lights were out and I started to drift off to sleep, Mystery Man returned, standing by my bedside. He whispered in my ear, ostensibly to avoid waking up my roommate.
“I know full well who you are,” he said with a terrible smile. “I know the name you may go by, those four syllables – but you know deep, deep down that that is not quite the truth, we both know that your true name is Good, just as we both know that my true name is Evil. Now, I am going to kill you just like I killed sweet Jacqueline and Cynthia.” Mystery, or Evil, sat in a chair opposite my bed, serenely chewing a wad of tobacco. “Of course, please be my guest and finish off your journal entry; I can wait a little,” he said.
