What a bizarre cityscape I’m seeing all around me!
As I race down the road on this motorcycle I stole, I’m seeing boats moving on the road instead of cars. The buildings are still giant, polka-dotted mushrooms. Instead of street lamps, I’m seeing giant celery sticks of the same height!
Whoa! I just looked up at the sky, which is a light brown instead of blue. And instead of seeing a bright ball of fiery light for the sun, I’m seeing a glowing…basketball.
The pedestrians all have animals’ heads: dogs, cats, elephants, horses, etc., but all in proportionate size to their human bodies. As I wait at this traffic light, the colours of which are pink (go), orange (slow), and brown (go), I can hear the pedestrians’ conversations as they walk by me: barking, meowing, roaring, neighing, etc. A man with a dog’s head is passing in front of me right now, walking his dog, which is actually speaking: “Who’s this ugly guy on the motorbike?”
Thanks a lot, dog.
The pedestrians have all crossed the street, and the light has turned brown. I can resume my getaway from Aunt Jane, my ‘father,’ and the staff of the mental hospital, who are presumably pursuing me. Off I go!
Anyone else knowing what I’m seeing and hearing would naturally assume that it’s all just a series of hallucinations that I’m having. But I know better. All of these surreal images and sounds are just the magical art of Mama’s ghost. She’d have me believe that I’m delusional.
The real delusion, however, so cleverly set up to look as though it’s normal, was my ‘recovery’ in that hospital, imagining that man to be my father. The peacefulness of that whole situation was staged by Mama, set up to distract me from her real plan, which is to escalate the world’s problems, exacerbating the bad economy and the ecological crisis, and of course, to bring to a head the political tensions between the US and NATO on one side, and Russia and China on the other, to bring about a nuclear World War III and annihilate all life here on the Earth!
Such is the scheming of Mama’s mischievous mind.
This is why I must do what I must do, to save the Earth! I can see now that it’s my destiny to be a hero, and a hero cannot be the son of a mediocre man like that one I left with Aunt Jane. I must be someone better than that, the son of a great man murdered by Mama’s treachery!
She’d have me doubt my senses, memory, and perception. That’s why she’s putting all these bizarre images in front of me and all around me. It’s all an attempt to control me! If I’m under her control, she’ll be free to do whatever she wants to do, to destroy the world. I must stop her!
All my life, from when I was a little kid, right up to her death–her manipulating me into killing her with the voodoo doll–she was making me believe that I never perceived anything correctly, that I was always seeing and hearing things. I now know why. She always knew–secretly, of course!–that I have special, magical gifts, inherited from her. (These gifts of mine were clearly seen when I so quickly learned how to block her magical powers.) She had to trick me into having no confidence in my own abilities, so I wouldn’t be able to stop her in her grand plan to become an all-powerful, disembodied spirit, and destroy the world!
I’ve got to stop her…but how can I do that?
I have to stay away from Aunt Jane and that man, because apart from how repellent I already find both of them, they’ll have the hospital staff drag me back into the nut house, to be imprisoned there indefinitely. Staying away from the two of them means staying away from my apartment, my laptop, and my protective circle and witch bottle.
That means I’m homeless.
I can’t make any more money because Aunt Jane is running the Pet Valu store.
I’m unemployed.
I can see towering columns of flame all around me, in the background, behind the surreal cityscape of giant mushrooms, celery stick street lamps, boats on the road, and animal-headed pedestrians. Everyone is going about his or her business, as if the fiery background wasn’t even there, as if there was nothing strange about boats for cars, mushrooms for apartment buildings, and animal heads instead of human ones.
I, however, continuing my racing about on this stolen motorcycle, know that I cannot find any reference books on magic if the library is now either a mushroom or is on fire. I cannot gain access to my mother’s inheritance money if the local bank is either a mushroom or burned to the ground.
I have no home, no job, no money, and no access to sources that can protect me from Mama’s magic.
What the hell am I going to do?
Aunt Jane, that man, and the hospital staff must be pursuing me…I’ll look behind and see if…oh, no!
A herd of stampeding elephants is right behind me!
Instead of elephants’ roars, I’m hearing the voice of that man: “Roger, come back! We only want to help you!”
I’m giving the bike some more gas.
Mama is really giving it everything she’s got to make me lose my mind and defeat me. I can’t let her do that!
I must keep my head. If I succumb to her surreal tricks, if she succeeds in disorienting me, or in having me caught or killed, there will be no one to stop her from destroying the world!
I can’t believe how well I’ve been able to dodge this traffic of boats, the celery street lamps, the giant mushrooms, and the animal-headed pedestrians so far. I’m flying down the street like a professional motorcycle racer…and I’ve never ridden a motorcycle before in my life…and normally, I’m totally spastic, totally without the most basic coordination.
Could my racing away like this really be happening, or is this one of Mama’s tricks, to give me a false sense of confidence, before she springs her inevitable trap on me? Probably. We’ll see.
What’s that up ahead? I’m seeing eyes and fanged teeth forming on the celery stick street lamps! They’re looking at me with threatening faces, like in a bizarre cartoon. Arms are growing out of their sides, arms that are grabbing at me!
The gripping green hands are missing me, so far. I’ve been able to dodge them. Where did my cycling skill come from so suddenly?
Bumps in the road are popping up like bubbles. I’m managing to dodge them, too…so far.
Those bumps are coming up in the most surprising place…oops!
I just hit a big, bubbling bump, and I’m flying off the bike and into the air. In front of me is a huge, giant, brown, swirling vortex with a black hole in the middle. It looks like a giant…asshole?
…and I’m flying right into it.
…screaming as I go in at top speed.
Inside now, I’ve landed with a painful thud that’s hurt my right elbow and hip. Instead of smelling shit, I smell…garbage, everywhere.
It’s pitch black in this smelly place. I can’t see a thing.
I can hear the elephants trampling their way in here.
The voice of ‘my father’ is saying, “He fell off the bike and landed somewhere in this garbage dump. He can’t have gone far.”
“He found a good hiding place,” my aunt just said, as I’m feeling their thunderous elephant thuds shaking the ground. “This place is like a labyrinth. We’ll never find him.”
That’s encouraging to hear. I can stay where I am, at least for the moment, rub my injuries, which aren’t that bad, and think about all of these crazy things that I’ve seen.
What I’ve been seeing must be much more than mere hallucinations. While it’s true that I’ve seen and heard things my whole life, they’ve never reached a level of surreal intensity anywhere near this! Oh, all these nonsensical images and sounds are Mama’s doing, I’m sure of it. This is all her magic, far more powerful than the magic she’d used when physically alive, since now she’s freed of the limitations of the body and the senses.
As bizarre as the sights and sounds have been, they are explicable, in terms of deliberate choices Mama’s ghost has made, her knowing I’d find them disturbing.
The brown sky is the colour of shit, reminding me of a time when, in PE class in high school, I was playing basketball in the outside basketball court. The ball went out on the grass at one point, and it fell on a lump of dog turds. One of the school bullies found the ball, picked it up, and threw it at my head, calling out my name as it flew in the air so I’d get hit in the face with the shit-smeared part. Everyone laughed at me, of course.
I went home crying about it. I told Mama what happened: she laughed, too, saying I should have worked harder at improving my basketball playing. She obviously had me see a brown sky and a basketball sun to remind me about that day. Her cruelty knows no bounds.
I hate eating celery, and as a kid, I was made by her to eat celery sticks one afternoon. I choked on one because of her continued pressure to finish them: I was six, and I thought I was going to choke to death. Again, street lamps made to look like giant celery sticks, with malevolent faces, was another attempt by Mama to re-traumatize me.
When I was ten, on a summer camping trip, I was in a small boat on a huge lake, deep in the middle of the water. A bully pushed me off, and I, not a good swimmer, almost drowned. Back home, I told Mama about it. She laughed again, blaming me for not working hard enough to improve my swimming. This explains the boats I saw on the road.
I’ve generally been afraid of animals, having been bitten by dogs and scratched by cats as a kid. They seem little different to me from people, who all seem like bullies to me. Hence, pedestrians with animal heads and talking dogs and elephants.
Oh, don’t get me started on elephants!
As a kid, I used to have nightmares about being trampled on by stampeding herds of elephants or horses. I’d feel crushed by the idea of…that man…being my father, hence her associating him with elephants.
…and what about that giant asshole vortex I just flew into?
Well, I don’t want to go into too much detail about this, the reasons of which should become obvious soon enough, but when I was about twelve and in summer camp again, one of the counsellors took an interest in me, and he…
I’ve already said too much.
Again, when I tearfully told Mama about it on my return home, she laughed at me and called me gay.
Are you starting to understand why I wanted her dead?
This darkness everywhere is really enveloping me. I feel like I’m floating in endless, starless space.
This is the hell Mama’s ghost is trapping me in.
Without the library’s or any other magical resources, I’ll have to rely on my faulty memory to think of any of the other magical ideas I researched before. I hope I can use it to put up a decent fight against her.
The odds are not in my favour.
Infinite Ocean 