by James Murphy
Meanwhile, there was much sitting and waiting to be done, and evil rides on idle time. James caught himself holding pantomime conversations with the trees and shrubs he could see on the hillside. His whole stay on the Seventh Floor, James watched as they cried out to him, and every day he could see the expression in their leaves and branches become more and more desperate. The least he could do was acknowledge their pleas and cries. He’d make faces and mouth words, but about the time he began making hand gestures he caught himself at the thought that someone maybe, and probably was, watching. James may have been Mother-Nature’s favorite son, but it was a far cry to call him safe from the wicked.
The Seventh Floor had a way with warping minds into a muddled tapestry of misdirection, and James was no exception. All that fluorescent lighting probing down the vanishing corridors coupled with the constant smell of baby oil clenched the mind with a wretchedness that screwed so tight that not a single iota of rationale remained. James was a natural man trapped in a synthetic prison. The aromatics oozed through the air, sterilizing the thoughts that filled the warranted minds of the Seventh Floor. That damn scent started to work on James. It didn’t stimulate raw disgust like the mild radioactivity of all the blood in the butcher shop, but the perfume of baby oil echoed in every dim nook and cranny of the Seventh Floor as if to say ‘We will harbor you away from every stitch of mature thought and thinking that you have ever developed. You WILL NOT think for yourself’. James tried to walk a straight line as his senses began to lie to him. He stumbled across and began to loath the floor he was walking on.
Each night James’s dreams became more vivid. Each night James felt closer to the one true God and every divine spirit in this dimension and beyond. When he came to in the mornings, he felt pure with a mental clarity approaching the realm of nirvana. This clarity was not without sacrifice. It wasn’t so much the hunger in his belly that pained him but the sense that someone out there was out to get him. James felt the prowess of evil breathing hot and heavy down his neck. He was not afraid, but he was beginning to get excited. After five years of being covered in blood for 70 hours a week, he became accustom to the wicked and the restlessness that wickedness elicits. On the fourth morning of his fast James sat up in bed and saw a vision. Naato’si, Sun God, was peering down on him with skeptical eyes. A brilliant iridescent glow filled in through the windows and through the walls. The sight of such light sent the eardrums singing. Naato’si’s face couldn’t be perceived in completeness. As James embraced the light and exploded with life inside of his skin, he was limited by his perception. What James could gather was a sense of encouragement, a sense that should he battle evil, he would not be alone. Then as abruptly as the vision of Naato’si hit James’ consciousness, it vanished. James rubbed his eyes then got out of bed. He felt a somber peace about him, but as soon as his feet hit the ground, pain surged through his joints. His knuckles felt like they were slammed in a door. His knees and shoulders exploded with arthritic pain and his neck stiffened like a rod. Hypoglycemia crossed his mind, but James thought to himself, “I would rather die than eat one more morsel of food in this hell.” James took a couple of deep breaths and moved about, slowly shaking his wretch. He walked over to his window and watched the sun slowly change from orange to bright yellow as it rose in the morning sky. James wondered if Naato’si was still watching him as he shone brighter and brighter. Then James began to think of Jehovah, his Christian God, the god he was supposed to put before all others. James was faithful, but the prospect of the Tribal gods was intriguing, and he couldn’t help but wish for their sympathy and power and guidance. His mind was a mélange of mysticism. James became something of a crossroads for the divine. He could feel supernatural powers surge within him, but they weren’t all positive. And, the accumulation of his oppression ignited the possibility of voodoo and black magic within his mind. James felt pain and heard the eeriest whispers in his sleep. He didn’t know what more to make of it than evil, but as he milled the idea over in his mind he couldn’t think who he had crossed that would play black magic on him. He offended the professionals on the Seventh Floor, but they were all too spiritually detached to give any energy into voodoo. Things were getting weird, but it was exactly what James asked for, five years in the making, ever since he ate that button of peyote on Sweet Grass Hill, whether he knew it or not.
The pangs of the spirit world were beginning to encroach on James. His soul was purer now than ever before and evil never passes an opportunity to corrupt the innocent. When James decided to detach himself from his mortal needs and mortal desires, he became a vessel of spiritual energy beyond what the Vision Quest had bestowed upon him. All day James felt extreme pain throughout his body and as he walked the halls of the Seventh Floor. The real challenge was just beginning. He knew he would hallucinate if he kept fasting, but he was bound and determined to keep it together. He craved the clarity he was feeling. The boundaries of good and evil seemed so distinct, and there seemed to be no grey area. Every stitch of reality was either a product of vice or virtue. Dr. Chode, the professionals, the big red Dodge, and the slaughter house embodied vice. That he could always see, but for so long positive energy had been just beyond his line of sight. James was beginning to find virtue and righteousness in most things in his immediate environment. People were what mattered. He was beginning to see that. They were simply a medium of consciousness and energy. The medium through which vice and virtue traveled was inexplicably innocent. It was the intangibles that carried weight. The consciousness carried weight. The intangible id of the mind exposed the quality of energy passing through a person. So many of the patients on the Seventh Floor cried out in pain from the negative energy inflicted upon them, mostly from Chode’s greed. Greed was evil because it put the majority of strength in the hands of a few and was less evenly distributed among the populous. It brewed in darkness and spewed out as wrath. Wrath seemed to be an unwarranted display of strength of the powerful over the weak. They were left helpless, caged in their prison, and denied a fair shake. Pride robbed the commonwealth of due respect. People might argue that money is the root of all evil but James saw through that bullshit. Money had no consciousness. It was just a medium of power, power an individual might be able to hold over others, but showed a complete lack of power over one’s self. Virtue burned bright in James’s eyes. He seemed to glow in the presence of honesty and charity, and other such admirable ambitions, but he found himself in the cesspool with no way out. His methods of striking down the wicked would be hard fought and would be with great sacrifice. Fasting was no direct action against all the professionals that oppressed James, but it was a means of reaching a place that no one could remove him from, a place that was marked by the holy and the pious.
Chapter 11
(end of the fourth day of fasting)
As one day wormed its way into the next and James’ fast continued, his concept of time dematerialized. He had experiences that lasted only seconds, but seemed to last for years. Stream of consciousness passed through his mind with eternal length and eternal depth. James was breaking through to something substantial in the mind and in the spirit. The newness of his thoughts were hard to conceptualize and understand. Space was beginning to appear unnatural, and its relativity to time was losing context. James recollected the visions and dreams of negative energy from his sleep. He dreamt of tall, dark silhouettes smiling with mouthfuls of diamonds as they beat bodies kneeling before them. He dreamt of motherless children drowning in their tears. He dreamt of the faces of animals, wild with fear and bewilderment. He dreamt of dying forests, and dusty plains. They were all filled with the hiss of evil, and cries of the innocent. They smelled putrid, like rotting flesh, and flickered with sparse, dim light. When he thought about them during his waking hours, faces and figures spoke and danced about in his mind. He could hear his heart beat once, then scrolls of dialogue were spoken before he could hear his heart beat once more. The thought of such things left him wide-eyed as his consciou
sness struggled for comfort. He sat paralyzed reeling in words of the evil that spoke to him, as he gasped for breath, slowly feeling the sweat ooze out of his pores, just waiting for the fear to break. He had experiences so gripping that whatever spirits and energy worked their way into his being created sensations so profound that an instant seized him and nearly froze him in his consciousness. James’s eyes had been opened to just a bit of tyranny in the slaughter house, but fasting on the Seventh Floor was beginning to reveal the ugly truth to him in whole. There was so much evil in the world that we never see. James was no exception, but as he left the bounds of mortality, he began to envision wickedness in full. Nothing could have prepared him for the fear and pain that such visions would bring to the young man. He experienced them with sympathy. He became vexed and emotionally drained, but he never panicked. He simply focused on his own situation. He only moved towards fixing the things that were under his control. Wickedness tried to instill fear into James, but he just let the energy pass through him, stone-faced.
The energy would come in waves, positive, negative, then positive again. While James was at peace, the whole day would pass in what seemed like seconds to James. He would sit next to the windows at the end of one of the halls on the Seventh Floor, inhale at dawn, and exhale at dusk. The positive energy within James brought him inner peace. It was warm and comforting. It was an energy that encouraged him and gave him faith in what he was trying to accomplish. He was learning how to multiply his energy, turning small into large. He did not want anything dwelling on discomfort. He would simply wait until he felt the ebb of positive energy, and flow with it, allowing the momentum to build as he carried on. He felt harmony with the world that laid beyond the walls of the Seventh Floor. There was a feeling of naturalness that James developed those nights on Sweet Grass Hill. It was an understanding of spirit and energy that was constant throughout the universe. It was an assertive position in space and time that conserved and sustained the spirit of all that is right and good. He could look out the window and feel the rhythm of the day. Every biological and psychological function within James ebbed and flowed with each wavelength of light, sound, and warmth of the day. Each breath, each second seemed to drift by unnoticed until the cycle of time made full circle. Time ran in cycles. Each moment was significant to what was to come. It created a palimpsest. Each moment built on the last. Space deformed, but time began to make an impression on James as he dove deeper into the spirit world. His perception of velocity was quite askew as he left his Earthly desires behind. He desired nothing, but gained insurmountable connections with what is right and just in the world. Dr. Chode didn’t see it that way.
In Dr. Chode’s eyes, James was getting more and more psychotic everyday. To James advantage, he couldn’t be shipped off to the funny farm until he had stayed on the Seventh Floor for at least thirty days. It was now a staring contest. James could feel the energy from Dr. Chode ebbing and flowing with an ultrasonic frequency. The mere presence of Dr. Chode was irritating to James at it’s most comfortable. He never let James simply be. He was always analyzing James, and James just wanted to sit and cogitate. Dr. Chode knew James was fasting and knew some of the side-effects of hypoglycemia, but Dr. Chode never had a patient hold out for more than two days. He expected schizophrenic behavior from James, but got none. Dr. Chode was smiling inside when the nurses would report that James had not eaten, but James remained so cool and collected that Dr. Chode could not pin a false diagnosis on him.
Dr. Chode was getting impatient with his favorite victim and could do nothing to make his life anymore of a hell. Dr. Chode would roam the halls everyday looking for James to be acting psychotically, but only found him sitting in the lounge or in his room with eyes closed and a peaceful smile on his face. James’s dreams were so vivid and gripping that he spent most hours of the day meditating, connecting with the spirit world. When he went to sleep at night, he could disconnect himself with bounds of this realm, and find spiritual energy in every object in the universe. Every object in creation held an energy and consciousness that was unique and significant. Sun, soil, rain drops, and blades of grass spoke their souls to James. He was in a frame of mind that could listen to, and understand their voices. Energy was personified. It had a face and a name. James found spirit in the energy of subatomic particles and that spirit was transformed as those particles joined with and separated from each other. Matter and energy were all a product of spirit. Every object held a unique aspect and direction. Each object had a consciousness. The universe had a consciousness. Energy and consciousness were infinite. James could be as small as that button of peyote or as large as the night sky. He ran among the stars, and hid between the blades of grass. Fasting opened a world of infinite possibilities to James. He gave up on trying to socially connect with the other patients of the Seventh Floor. Most of them were so far out in left field that no concept of a functional citizen made any sense to them. Purpose, to most of these people, was not to be a part of the world, but rather to be apart from it. They reeled in mania until it produced anxiety so thick that every reaction was erratic, and produced nothing but disorder. These people were the meek, the weak, the conspiracy theorists, and the fugitives. James made no ground with any of them. It wasn’t for lack of effort, but James came to find that rationale was something of a blessing. James may have been a little overboard with his condescending disposition of society, but he did understand that everyone was only human. This leveed no compassion to the wicked , but he did learn to forgive as he matured. As time went on, James found himself sympathizing with the patients of the Seventh Floor, but his disgust with all the professionals seemed to keep adding up. On the Seventh Floor, James was starved from the physical manifestation of everything he believed in. All the virtues that he built his belief system around were intangible from his vantage point. He was restricted in the cage of the Seventh Floor, kept from touching the embodiment of the spirit that so moved him. He could not feel the velvety petals of the flowers, or the warmth of the sun. Without the body, spirit could only be held fast in the mind and soul with blind faith. It was easy to connect with the spirit world out on Sweet Grass Hill, but it was a little tougher on the Seventh Floor. All James had on the Seventh Floor were people with cracked up ideas. Strenuous attempts had to be made by James to connect with what brought him peace while he was on the Seventh Floor. He looked out the window at the trees and bushes as they cried to him. James could do nothing for them. The most he could do from the Seventh Floor was find spirits in his dreams that brought harmony to nature. There was no harmony on the Seventh Floor. At first the professionals were making a lot of headway keeping James from connecting with what brought peace to his soul, but as time went on James found the cracks in the wall the professionals tried to put up. He prayed. He meditated. He fasted. He dreamed. James was beginning to find nirvana in his own hell, but it was all an intangible, symbolic metaphors for all the virtue that brought structure to his psyche, that is until Ron A. was admitted into the Seventh Floor sometime during the thirteenth night of James’s stay.
Chapter 12
(fourth day of fasting)
On the morning of his fourteenth day on the Seventh Floor, James rose from bed and did his usual ritual of meditating after watching the sunrise, then he did something different. When the call for breakfast came over the intercom, James moseyed down to the cafeteria and took a seat across from a new face, Ron A. Ron A. had crew-cut hair and tattoos all over his arms, but something about his appearance spoke to James. James could see Ron was a man well-seasoned with the likes of war, and even though James considered war nothing more than a vile struggle of power between nations, he had something of an admiration for Ron. Ron and James were both served their food, but James once again didn’t touch a morsel. Ron inquisitively asked James,
“Why aren’t you eating?”
“I’m fasting.” James replied. The expression on his face told Ron his mind was elsewhere. It was a calm look of focus. James was c
entered. That was all the information Ron needed. The military conditions the mind to only desire the information that you are told, and be satisfied with that. In that realm of that reality, more information than needed can only breed trouble for those in the know.
Something in James struck Ron’s interest. Ron was a man who spent considerable time close to death, and maybe he could smell the blood encrusted under James fingernails, but something in James brought crude comfort to Ron just sitting across from the boy. Maybe it was something intangible. Maybe it was the shared belief between the two that good will always prevail. Ron was suffering from night-terrors. That’s what brought him to the Seventh Floor. Everynight he woke around 3 AM and felt as though the Devil was breathing fire down his neck. Like James, Ron was brought to the Seventh Floor against his will because he was beginning to scare his family, and fulfilled their wishes to seek treatment. Ron was familiar with the filth of such a place as the Seventh Floor from being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder, and he wanted to keep a low profile, but a man always needs a friend, and in this case Ron decided then and there that James would be his friend for as long as he needed him.