Plain of Jars

8/20/07

“Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.”
-- C. J. Jung

“Let us not seek our disease outside ourselves; it is in us, planted in our bowels, and the mere fact that we do not perceive ourselves to be sick makes it harder for us to be cured.”
-- Seneca
-- Letters to Lucilius, 1st century A.D.

What to write?

Joybubbles, a blind genius with perfect pitch, and minister in his own Church of Eternal Childhood, is dead. Joybubbles, 58, had chosen in 1988 to remain 5 forever, and had the toys and teddybears to prove it. Joybubbles felt that being abused at a school for the blind and being pushed by his mother to live up to his 175 I.Q. had robbed him of his childhood. So he amassed piles of toys, Jack and Jill magazines and imaginary friends. Joybubbles was most famous for his uncanny ability to make free phone calls by whistling tones. Joybubbles’s parents had no phone for five years because of their son’s obsession. An avid collector of Mr. Rogers’s television shows, when asked why Mr. Rogers mattered, he said: “When you’re playing and you’re just you, powerful things happen.”

Reporter, Darren Everson, writes, “Tales of sweaty waits on un-airconditioned planes, smelly bathrooms, dirty seats and tray-tables smeared with mysterious schmutz abound this season.” What the hell is “schmutz”? I went to the dictionary. Nothing. Looking at Everson’s story from the Wall Street Journal reminded me of my last plane flight to Marquette. As 5 Roman Catholic priests and I awaited departure, the boarding agent announced that anyone having to use the restroom should do it before we took off, since the lavatory would be off limits during the flight. Given that I had actually used that bathroom two days earlier, I wasn’t surprised.

So what happened in the interim? Here’s the story as it was told to me by a gnome on the wing. The Saab 340 jet hit an air pocket, causing the sewage to overflow and spill down the aisle. Upon seeing this, I, in my chemo weakened condition, suspected a terrorist plot. Why this backwater? Why Sawyer? What kind of Fox hating, anti-Christ would plague me with this shit-storm on a flight to the U.P.? How low can you go, you Eastward facing limbo boys? Sure, the priests, and, as it turned out, bishops and cardinals, got through it fine; but think about what might have happened. What if these good fathers had ignored the signs (sign, sign, everywhere a sign…). Sandal deep radioactive shit, no problem! Allah be praised! Make no mistake, these men were pros, trained in Laos at a secret camp on the Plain of Jars. They calculated the timing of the spill to the second. It was pre-ordained that the acne scared steward would break his heel as he sprawled face first in the toxic goo. As a way of protecting himself from the world’s homophobia, he only wore his Gucci’s on domestic flights. And they, of course, knew this.

So it was no coincidence when Chaim Heffenlincke threw himself on top of the commode just as its Krapatowa payload erupted. Their meticulous planning had paid off. He knew that waiting just that split second made all the difference in the world; that the steward was now infected by the Milk of Mecca; and that this insignificant act would have earth shattering consequences. The test run of the perfect dirty bomb had gone off without a glitch. Sure, Heffenlincke was humiliated, but the idea that this was the germ of a new paradigm gave him immense satisfaction. Was it possible the nexus between disease and subjectivity might be exploded so completely that the enemy had become a purely biological entity? These are cells as psychopaths: twisted, clever, self-destructive, taking victims down along the way. But where are they from and what are they keeping me from doing? What strange alchemy do they deny me? What transmutative prolongation of life are they fixed on sabotaging? What strange, foreboding land do they beckon me toward, and why do I so dread their visit? It no longer matters, I’ve entered its un-holy borders. Here the enemy is invisible, bald P.O.W.s plod the streets, pushing IV poles while articulating the incomprehensible through graying surgical masks. Where should I, the priests, the doctors, the “Cytotoxic” legions, be deployed to thwart this scourge? Should we train our longbows on the crabby cockroaches in a way that gets them to leave the ground? Fly!

If you haven’t guessed by now, Heffenlincke was a double agent. Sure, he could pretend concern at the septic deluge, but this was really a dry (excuse the pun) run to see if airline sludge-floods might be an effective way to disrupt infidels. He had obviously decided to consult the ancient texts, “The Alopecia,” “The Teratrogenic Verses,” and “The Chronicles of Mutagenia.” Chaim was clever, a shape shifter who could morph from Christian, to Muslim, to pagan at will. Whether saying rosaries, reciting the Koran, or doing bong hits, his affect was flattened in such a way that he never, not even for a moment, doubted who he was. The only thing he couldn’t escape was the dream of Eisenhour. Eisenhour had killed himself. He had run out of negotiations and immunities. The germs in his guts and on his skin; the fungi and molds on his sheets and window sills; the kiss of his lover, were now deadly. He was a victim of myelosuppression. Ordinary life had become his nemesis. He had died of himself and the world. Avoiding produce, flowers, pets and children had been to no avail. Fearing bleeding, he banished razors, dental floss, tampons, barefooting, and sex, from his shrinking fiefdom. He had put on the masque of the red death and it wouldn’t come off.

The doctors had dismissed Eisenhour’s “chemo brain” as a symptom of stress. Pooh-poohing his cognitive dysfunction, they dismissed his inability to find the right word as a sign of age. Stepladder, cappachino, dill pickle, who cares? Eisenhour had seen it all: the tall, gaunt-bald prisoner in leg chains dwarfed by a storm trooper guard; the mentally ill patient who thought the configuration of the infusion tubing was the sign of a coming messiah; the dying supplicant who saw the chemo as a form of Extreme Unction, that last rite of the Catholics which ensures a pass through Heaven’s gate. All hail, Hale Bop! Eisenhour had been in Africa, where the leukemic blood-sludge was so thick the capillaries refused it. He was a veteran of war and disease. And so it goes.