Seven Sides of Self

by Nancy Joie Wilkie

  “Larilyn! O’lie Peters! Jhovan?”

  “Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him.”

  LUKE 24:31

  OLD MIMS

  (The Savior)

  “WHAT IS GOING THROUGH THAT withered brain of yours tonight, Old Mims?” reprimanded Ormon as he came around the corner of Mims’s front porch. “I would think you’d have better things to do than to sit in that old rocker staring out at the drab sky.”

  “I’m watching the sunset. I’m thinking about writing another story,” said Mims.

  “You’ve been an author all of your life. What can you possibly say about a sunset you haven’t already said a thousand times?” Ormon laughed. “You spend far too much time alone in that broken-down house behind your typewriter! And for what? You’ve made all the money you’re ever going to make.”

  “Don’t start with me tonight, Ormon. I appreciate your concern, but it shan’t change the way I live my life.” Mims rose to greet his longtime neighbor. “What brings you up the road this far? And don’t tell me you’re just checking up on me.”

  “You know, Old Mims,” Ormon started out, “you and I have more in common than either of us might care to admit. We are both living out our remaining days. We’re both alone and we don’t have much to look forward to. Frankly, I’ve been thinking about this state of affairs and, well, I just can’t stand the thought of waiting around for the end. Day after day after day—the same old thing.”

  “You’re just obsessed, Ormon. You have nothing to occupy your mind. Why do you think I write so much? It takes my mind off the drudgery.” Mims smiled to himself in a sort of satisfying way.

  “And what do you write about again?” asked Ormon, almost in a serious tone.

  “Ormon, my poor dear friend. You know I write about life and how each of us sees it from a different perspective—through a different set of eyes. I allow myself to imagine what it might be like to live life in someone else’s shoes. Sometimes the shoes are covered with rhinestones, sometimes the shoes are worn out with holes in the bottom. But people, no matter where they are in life, have dreams and they have their own private little tragedies. There is so much to explore—so much potential within each of us.

  “But you already know that—you’ve read my stories,” continued Mims, “and you know we all dream and some of us push our dreams out into reality where they can collide or collude with, complement, corrupt, or obliterate the natural order of things.”

  “Yes, yes—I do know all of that,” replied Ormon. “You examine the dreams of your characters with the precision of a skilled surgeon. And you claim dreams are incredible gifts given to us. But to help us through times of despair and to tempt us with what could be? I don’t know. You wade through the depths of your characters’ collective pain with equal dexterity. You open them to the elements and expose them to the emotional vultures.

  “And you’re right—I’ve read all of your books and their pages are full of the wreckage of the twisted lives you create. I think you must take some type of perverse pleasure in birthing these defenseless creatures, invading their dreams, and causing them unending pain and hardship. Instead of facing the bleak solitude of your final days by yourself and your own emotions, you sit around and dream up characters upon whom you dump the agony you refuse to accept for yourself. Some pastime you got going on there, Old Mims.”

  “You know, if I didn’t know better, I’d say you’re trying damn hard to—how did you say it—‘dump the agony you refuse to accept for yourself’ onto me!” Mims leaned back in his rocking chair and pushed off with his feet to start the chair squeaking back and forth. After an uncomfortable pause, Mims continued. “You might criticize my approach, Ormon, but at least when the torment of another day’s monotony reaches into my soul and nags at the yearnings there, I have a place to go—something to do, somewhere to put my heartache. Once it’s on the paper, it just doesn’t seem to bother me anymore. And if it makes me feel better, who the hell cares?”

  “You still can’t convince me your bleeding all over typing paper is good for the soul. What I can’t figure out is from where do these wretched individuals you dream up come? Is there some repository of dark characters in the back of your mind you tap into every time you write one of your stories? Have you ever thought maybe someone ‘upstairs’ is dropping these folks into your pitiful little brain because He can’t bear the thought of giving them life any other way? What if a power greater than you or me is pulling all of the strings in this grand ol’ universe and there really isn’t any such thing as individual creativity?”

  A night fly buzzed about Mims’s gray hair. “I hate to burst your philosophic bubble, but you haven’t said anything that hasn’t been thought about or written before.”

  “Eh—a lot of gratitude I get! An old man walks half a mile up the road to check in on an old friend and for what? Nothing but a bunch of backtalk. I think I’ll take my leave now. Maybe that dusty bottle of whiskey down the road will keep me company again tonight.” Ormon got up and made his way down the uneven steps. “Good night, Old Mims.”

  “If you must, Ormon. Take care of yourself.”

  Mims watched the darkness envelop Ormon’s retreating figure as he walked down the lane. Mims thought he noticed a hint of a limp in Ormon’s step, not something a younger Mims might notice, but it did seem to be there. Mims felt sorry for him. Whereas Ormon had been married for many long years and known the pleasures of a wonderful loving wife, Mims had only known his writing. Now that Ormon’s wife had passed, there was a raw blister in Ormon’s heart that never healed. But Mims still had his lifelong love—writing. My companion will be with me until the end, thought the aging author. No heartache for me. Poor Ormon.

  Mims headed for the inside of his comfortable little home. After placing the latch on the front door, he performed his nightly ritual of walking around turning off all of the lights. While his fingers searched for the switches hidden underneath the hot bulbs, he started thinking about what his graying friend said.

  “There is a kernel of truth in Ormon’s words, though. Maybe I am able to face the hard times in life by creating characters and having them live the dreams and bear the pains that I cannot.” He stopped in mid-step to contemplate, then continued on his journey through the darkening innards of the house. “But this stuff Ormon brings up about there being some greater power planting characters in my mind for me to discover and use in my work—where does he come up with these ideas anyway?”

  Mims reached his bedroom, disrobed, and headed into the bathroom to brush his teeth and wash his face. He returned to the bedroom and lifted his now tired body onto the mattress several feet off the hardwood floor.

  “Sleep, my good friend! Come and take me,” he whispered. Off Mims’s mind set for the land of slumber. His consciousness dropped gently down through layers of undefined internal mists until he awoke within the confines of a dream.

  He stood in the middle of a large field. He didn’t find it particularly peaceful and noted the sparse ground covering beneath him and the pale gray sky above him. Then, one by one, figures began to approach him. As they got closer, he could recognize them despite their shifting and often incomplete bodies. He recognized them as characters from the stories, articles, and books he had authored during the course of his career as a writer. As each one approached, Mims noticed their eyes—so often full of sadness and tears. He could hear the quiet cries brought on by the memories of their burdens. He could see the pain within their hearts. It seemed as though he could peer right through their ghostly chests and read the stories of their misfortunes, stories he knew all too well because he had written them.

  “Oh, my GOD,” he said to himself. “Look what I’ve done to these poor folk.” Mims surprised himself as he remembered he was in a dream and these people didn’t exist—they weren’t real! They were products of his own mind, yes, but they lived only within the pages of books. He couldn’t get over the way they all just stood there lookin
g at him—so pitiful. Then he woke up in a cold sweat.

  “It was just a dream,” he told himself without much success. His mind relived the script of the strange dream over and over again. He tried to go back to sleep, but the chorus of crickets outside his partially opened bedroom window seemed to get louder as his frustration over not being able to fall asleep mounted. He tried to turn his thoughts to the story idea that popped into his mind the previous afternoon. The storyline focused on a young man wrongly accused of being responsible for the death of a young girl. Mims thought the reading public to be overly fascinated with these sorts of stories of late. He struggled for ways to make the plot stand out, to say something about the social fabric of the day in which countless innocent people are falsely accused of things and forced to bear the ramifications because of an inability to combat the system. Mims contemplated highlighting the devotion of the young man’s lover, even in the face of adversity. The man would eventually lose everything except his lover, and they would set off to rebuild their shattered lives in the end.

  Mims finally decided to get out of bed and put some of his thoughts on paper or he would never go back to sleep. As he placed the first sheet of blank paper into the typewriter, he stopped suddenly. “What am I doing? I am doing it again, aren’t I? I am creating yet another poor pathetic character who must endure some sort of endless suffering. Why am I doing this?” Mims remembered the faces of the characters in his dream. He took the paper out of the machine and turned off the light in his office. He sat in the darkness for several long minutes.

  “Great!” Mims said to himself. “I can’t sleep and I can’t write. What am I supposed to do now?” As he sat for what seemed a long time, he slowly felt the grip of sleep encroaching on his mind. Pieces of thoughts started bumping into one another and rearranging themselves. New ideas coalesced from seemingly unrelated building blocks. Despite his increasing weariness, Mims could sense the creative process taking place and allowed it to continue without interference.

  Then, in his writer’s imagination, he started to wonder if this place he had visited in his dream might represent a sort of heaven to which characters, at least his characters anyway, went after their story lives were complete.

  He considered the traits his characters seemed to share. He realized the misfortunes befallen the children of his imagination originated from their lack of self-respect, or their failure to accept responsibility for their own lives, or anger they wrongfully assigned to others. It all boiled down to a lack of love for themselves—perhaps this being why his characters found it so hard to love others and so often lamented their unfulfilled dreams. “No wonder they appeared to be in so much pain,” Mims mumbled as he came to these conclusions. “It is one thing to create another individual in your head and put them on paper. It is another thing altogether to meet them face-to-face.”

  He thought about his plan for the man in his latest, as of yet unwritten, story. His plight would be the opposite of those faced by his previous characters. This new character would be innocent and decent. What would happen to him would be the result of the misguided beliefs of others and their desire to lash out, to blame someone else, anybody else, for their own hardships. Mims then took it one step further and wondered what it might be like to concoct a character who takes on the anger, the pain, and the worst that man can offer up out of choice—perhaps even out of love.

  Slowly, the process of working out the intricacies of this new theme switched back on his conscious mind. “What if I created this character? Perhaps he might find his way to the nether world of my dream, take on the trials of those already there, and free them from their pitiful eternal life.

  “What am I thinking?” Mims clenched his fist and banged his desktop. He then noticed he was still sitting in the dark in his office at his desk. He reached for the light, clicked it on, put paper back in his typewriter, and wrote with abandon until the sun stretched its waking arms above the horizon.

  Six hours passed. Mims stopped to give his tired mind and aching back a break. He rose from his chair, eyes wide from lack of sleep, and headed for the kitchen. The angle of the sunlight coming through the window above the sink told him it was midmorning already. The rumbling in his stomach reminded him it was way past time for something to eat.

  After the difficult night, he found some comfort in the routine of fixing breakfast. A creature of habit, Mims usually fixed the same thing for breakfast every day. He usually ate the same thing for lunch every day. Others might think this boring, but Mims preferred not having to make any more decisions in his day than necessary. Only at dinner did he get creative and fix different dishes. He made a hot cup of strong coffee and sat down to enjoy the singing of the birds while he waited for his oatmeal to cook.

  After he drained the last of the coffee from his mug, he placed the dirty dishes into the sink and went to the bedroom to find some work clothes. Yes—some time in his garden might ease his mind and body. The tomatoes and early corn needed weeding. The makeshift scarecrow needed straightening.

  As he reached the cucumbers, a familiar voice startled him. “Good morning, Old Mims,” said Ormon.

  “Don’t you know better than to scare me like that? Are you trying to do in the last remaining person on this planet who will talk to you?” said Mims, agitated.

  “Eh—calm down. No harm done.”

  “Well, now that you’ve interrupted my gardening, why don’t you go around to the porch. I’ll meet you there with two lemonades,” offered Mims as he removed his stained work gloves. “I could use a break right about now.”

  The men rendezvoused on the front porch and settled themselves into their usual chairs. “You know, Ormon, you have a way of making words stick. That spiel last night about someone ‘upstairs’ dropping characters into my mind for me to use as I please and the painful existence I create for them—you really outdid yourself this time—”

  “Finally listening to reason, are you?” Ormon interjected, not being one to miss a chance to score a point.

  “I want to tell you about a dream I had last night,” continued Mims. He paused to compose himself, then relayed the dream with all of its graphic details to his neighbor. Ormon raised his glass to his lips occasionally and sipped his lemonade while Mims spoke. Once Mims finished, he closed his eyes. They sat in silence.

  Then Mims eyes snapped open. “You’re thinking about something, aren’t you?”

  “I’m thinking that’s quite an interesting twist,” Ormon responded. “I started off contemplating where these pitiful characters come from and you wind up with a dream about where they go after you’re done with them. An almost equally bizarre concept, if I do say so myself.”

  “Oh, but Ormon—if you could only have seen their faces. They kept acting as if they wanted something from me and I don’t know what it is. Furthermore, I’m not sure why I even care. I can’t figure it out.”

  “Well, my friend,” said Ormon as he finished the last of his lemonade. “You just keep that prized imagination of yours fired up and I’m sure you’ll figure something out. I’ve got to run now—got a hot date with the hardware store. Oh, and one other thing—you know I hate it when you leave the pulp in my lemonade!”

  “Huh? Oh, sorry. I forgot,” apologized Mims. “Thanks for stopping by, Ormon. I really did need to talk.”

  Ormon got in his rusted-out pickup truck, turned around, and headed off down the road in a cloud of dust. Mims felt tired, went in from the porch, and lay down on the faded sofa in the living room. He shut his eyes and he soon fell fast asleep.

  Before long, he found himself in the same landscape as his earlier dream. When he realized this, he experienced a sinking feeling. He didn’t want to be in this place again!

  Then, as before, figures came toward him. He knew their faces and silently named each as they passed him on their way to form a large circle around him. He heard their cries and felt the pain in their hearts.

  “What do you want from me?” he finally s
houted at them. Several minutes passed without any response.

  By now his guilt spilled over his emotional dam. Mims could not contain it any longer. “I’m sorry I did this to you. I didn’t know there was such a place as this. I didn’t realize that when I wrote, I was actually giving you life. How can I help you? I am not a cruel person at heart. I was just making a living. Please answer me!”

  In the inner ears of his mind, he heard something—not a single voice, but rather a chorus of voices, as if they were all speaking at once. The agony Mims sensed earlier filled the chorus.

  “You created us. You gave us life. You did not completely define us. Our forms are as they are because you described only those parts of us serving your story. We want to be complete. We want resolution for our respective tragedies. We want our loves back. We want our lives back as they were before you found us. We want peace.”

  Mims stood frozen in place, asking no further questions. He didn’t know what to say or how to help. The chorus continued.

  “Unless you help us, your fate will be to join us in our misery—for all eternity. Once you are gone, you can’t ever rectify the situation. You must help us now, while there is still time.”

  Then the chorus spoke no more. There was only the persistent stare from the incomplete eyes of his characters. Mims felt like a pin cushion, their stares acting as sharp metal objects being pushed, even hammered, into his aching body.

  “Stop it!” he screamed at their unhearing ears. “Stop staring at me like that! My stories did not hurt anyone!”

  Mims awoke with a start. Sweat covered his forehead and his upper lip. He sat up and noticed the pattern of sunlight on the opposite wall. Late afternoon, he thought. What do I do now?

  Mims waited for evening before returning to his desk. He wanted his thoughts to clear. He knew he must do something, if for no other reason than to avoid having the dream again. He didn’t know how many more times he could handle it.