THE SIKH PATIENT: Chapter Two

I’m dying, but I think it might take seventy years or so.  The only way you can die of insanity is if you kill yourself, and the truth is; I like myself too much to kill myself.  I’m too narcissistic.  But I have to say that I’m surprised that there is overpopulation, considering how many valid reasons there are to commit suicide.  I’m not promoting it, just so you know. 

            But living in the world, is not easy, especially when you have entry into other worlds.  What are those other worlds?  If I were a better writer I could describe them, for now let’s say they are ‘states of mind.’  Yeah right, like you’re gonna believe there’s a United ‘States’ in your head too.  Then they call you paranoid when you think the F.B.I. (Figments of your Bullshit Imagination) are following you.  There’s a book that I once heard about where a bunch of hippies from the sixties stopped doing LSD (The drug, not Losing you Security Deposit) because of the obvious side effects and started meditating in the woods.  After much practice they claimed they reached the same highs as they did when they were on drugs (and had an apartment they could damage).

            There are moments.  No, I changed my mind, there are no moments.  We don’t have time to talk about time.  Anyways, sometimes I feel what some might call, “high.”  But I don’t get up and jump around, I just lay there, enjoying it the way you might enjoy a joint.  Sometimes I get a little paranoid; sometimes I get sexually aroused.  Is this mania?

            MANIA, you say it like it’s a bad thing.  They say you can’t have a war on a word, but they do it anyways.  Well I have a war on this word: mania.  It’s the ‘terrorist’ diagnosis of the medical community.  If a little kid punches another kid and he’s already on Ritalin, Lithium is the next logical step.  I’m against child abuse, but is slapping the kid any worse than drugging her?  I’m an adult and sometimes I’d prefer to be mutilated rather than medicated.  Sometimes I don’t think there’s a difference.

            Maybe mania is a make-believe fire.  Look really deeply into a fire, if you stare at it long enough the light inside you might start flickering on and off.  But don’t touch it, even one touch, on little touch, and you will be called burned for the rest of your life. 

            Staring at a fire is not supposed to burn you; it’s supposed to make you want to dance.  Mania is not supposed to make you spin out of control; it’s supposed to make you realize we are always spinning.  The Earth is spinning, but somehow we stand still and go on with our day when our entire bodies are being flung around the universe like dice.

            We are the gods’ dice.  Him and Her sit in a room and they play us, Pretending to ‘know’ that we are more meaningful than numbers.  If I had to be a number instead of a person I’d pick nine.  I don’t know, you could do that multiplication thing (which I know is not as cool as the Kevin Bacon thing)… and with 9 you don’t have all the ‘pressure’ of being a 10.  I would make a soap opera out of the numbers in math in first grade because everyone had done everything with numbers except give them personalities.  I didn’t understand math because no one ever told me it had a personality. 

            I was always a 4 then, because it was in the middle, but not right in the middle.  I didn’t want to be ordinary and I had a thing for 2 and 5, 2 was the good guy and 5 was the bad guy, and 6 was the hot backstabbing chick I was competing with.  (If this does not give you a clue to get one of those alleged locks on that T.V.; consider that these are the actual thoughts of a five year old learning arithmetic in 1980).  Funny thing, we’re on page 10 already.  I hope you don’t expect that I’ll keep you entertained for much longer.   

            I know.  I kind of sound like someone who could get manic.  If so, I count myself lucky.  I’m lucky I can escape sometimes, and go into a state of something so surreal.  You call it a delusion; I call it a dream.  I know you may accuse me of romanticizing something deadly.  Well I accuse you of demonizing something astounding.  But I want more, even more than mania.  I’m so greedy, I know.  I want that feeling without the craziness.  God, well he told me a secret too.  He told me there is bliss waiting for me, that if I come to him, really come to him, really, really remember my divinity, I would experience something greater than mania. 

            As a crazy person, there is nothing greater than mania in my memory.  He, you know that big guy, makes promises.  And I listen.  And then there are these moments, where everything is so clear, like as if I see that the world really is made of a substance that is not of this world, that the world is fake, but I’m real and I can’t say this, or even talk, talk about it, talk about it, without sounding like I’m the fake one. 

            I wanna tell you something.  I want to ask you when you last screamed, at yourself.  When was the last time you were free?  Maybe I have felt bliss, and maybe there were even instances of peace.  And maybe, just maybe that was the only time I was really me. 

            The medicalization of everything is accepted now, because medicine is our new religion.  Prescriptions are our prayers.  But there was a time, when people sat around a fire and screamed when they felt like screaming.  They danced, when they felt like dancing.  If they were animals, we are no less animals, for all the killing we do, and all the violence we watch for fun.

            We are animals.

                                                                        *

            “Cut!” Mr. Tennemen stood up, “You’re thinking, stop thinking.  Forget everything you’ve ever been taught, just be, and pretend you don’t have a functioning brain.”  It was like he was asking me to meditate.  He wanted me to be some kind of Zen Buddha master, and god wants me to talk to about it, talk about it, talk about it.  And all I can do is stand here like an idiot with no opinion.  The truth is, I’m a fool.  I’m not good enough for God, for acting, maybe even for this world.  Why does everyone always expect something from me?

            “I don’t know how to not think,” I said in front of the entire Drama class at The University of Michigan.

            “I don’t believe you,” my professor said.  Would you believe me if I told you, have I told you lately, that god loves me? 

            “I don’t know how to not think on purpose,” I tried to explain, we were in the middle of a scene in Macbeth.

            “Then think about how,” he answered and waved for me to sit down. 

            Traps, they set you traps.  All of them, people.  That’s what they do when they can’t figure out what else to do with you. 

            “Jeffery, stand up,” Mr. Tennemen said. 

            “It’s Jeff,” he stood up.

            “Jeffery, I know you’re a big Hitchcock fan, do that scene in Vertigo again.”

            “Can I do something else?” he asked, the only guy I knew who wasn’t afraid of Mr. Tennemen.

            “Fine,” Mr. Tennemen sat down in his chair in the auditorium, as we all sat on the floor.

            Jeff stood up and pointed his fingers like a gun at me, because I was the only one standing, “There’s a passage I memorized from the Bible, ‘The path of the righteous man is bequeathed on all sides by the tyranny of evil…”  Oh God, Pulp Fiction. 

            I interrupted him.  “There’s a passage from the Bible I memorized, ‘Thou shall not kill.’”  I stared at Jeff, a rather thin guy with mousy brown hair. 

            “You’re not Christian, when you quote the Bible it doesn’t mean anything to you,” he said still pointing the fake gun at me.

            “You’re not human, when you quote the Bible, it’s just a line, like a line you would use to pick up a woman.” I wasn’t thinking, or was I?

            “Quote something to us from your bible,” Mr. Tennemen said to me. 

             “Man Jeetha Jag Jeet.  If you conquer your mind, you conquer the world,” I looked right at Mr. Tennemen who seemed like he was in his mid-fifties. 

            “That’s beautiful, now why don’t you try it?” Mr. Tennemen said. 

            “My mind is currently being conquered,” I sighed.  I was wearing a purple shirt.

            “Do you think you’re the only one?” Jeff asked, with his hand-made fake gun still pointing at me.

            “Kill me,” I said and looked into the eyes of a girl with blond hair who looked very interested.

            “I never kill people who want to be killed.  There’s no point.  I don’t do those kinds of favors,” Jeff said and put down his fake gun.

            “What kind of favors do you do?” I asked and stared at a gray wall.

            “I only do favors for myself,” Jeff answered and seemed more muscular all of a sudden.

            “Then do yourself a favor, point that gun at your own head.”  I walked away from him and sat down with the audience. 

                                                            *

           “I never understood you,” my dead father said to me.  Yeah, I talk to my dead dad. 

            “Did you want to understand me?”  I looked at my pillow, it was late.  I was lying in bed in my apartment in Ann Arbor. 

            “No, not really,” he said without any emotion.  It made me mad.

            “Well I never understood you,” I said, in my head of course, because Mona was in the kitchen.

            “You never understood anybody,” he remarked, but I couldn’t visualize his face. 

            “Mom, do you understand her?” I asked because I sure as hell don’t. 

            “Yes.  She is a strong woman.  She is stronger than you, you should learn from her.”  I shook my head as he said this.  That woman is not strong.  “You’re wrong about her.  She could bear my death with grace.  Maybe you don’t know what we were.  We may have fought, but no man ever loved a woman more than I loved her.”  I couldn’t hear him, not in my ears, only in my head.

            “Did you ever tell her that?”

            “No, because I’m not strong.” 

            “It takes a lot of strength to die, doesn’t it?”  I asked and lit a small vanilla-scented candle by my bed. 

            “No, it’s easy.  Living is hard.”  I wanted to cry when he said this.  Because living without him was hard. 

            “You couldn’t do it anymore, could you?”  I asked and stared at the flame of the candle that emanated a deep vanilla scent.

            “I couldn’t do it to you all, anymore.  I died for you.”

            “Don’t glorify your death,” I whispered, then put my radio on a jazz station, in case Mona heard me talking to myself.

            “I have to, it’s the only way.  Glory.  That’s what you want, isn’t it, Yasmine?  You want to be a famous actress so you receive applause.”  I missed the scent of Brute he always wore.

            “Maybe, but I also love the beauty, the act of becoming someone else.”  I wanted to be someone else right then, I wanted to walk out to the kitchen and ask Mona if we could exchange identities.  I wanted to get on my computer and put my identity on eBay.

            “Do you ever want anyone to act like you?”  Now that he was dead, he asked the hard questions.

            “No.  God no.  I don’t want to see myself in anyone else’s eyes.”  I closed my eyes.

            “No one could be you, Yazzy, you’re one of a kind.  I made you, don’t ever forget that.  And I’m so proud, of what I accomplished.  When you come here you realize there are no failed lives, only lives unappreciated.  I didn’t appreciate you enough.  I had so much, and I never appreciated it.  Now it’s gone.”  I sighed as he said this and put on a pair of socks, my feet were getting cold.

            “You have me, you’ll always have me.  I’m not gone.”

            “I hope so, but maybe one day, you’ll think this is all make-believe.  Maybe you’ll give up on me.”  I crept under the comforter of my bed, and for a second I wondered if I was imagining all this. 

            “Oh and one more thing beta, these candles, these shirts and skirts made in India you keep gallivanting around in?  What is this crap?  I lived on a farm, now you look like a farmer.  I brought you here so you could at least wear some decent clothes.”

            “Made in India, Dad?  You were made in India.”

            “I might be dead but I’m still more durable than a shirt made in India.  You’re acting like a hippie again; we had this talk when you were in high school.”

            “What do you have against hippies?  I think they were fighting for your rights.”

            “Well, they didn’t do a good job.” 

            He lost his job and his license for being a drunk Cardiologist who was present when someone may or may not have died regardless, of a heart attack.  Thank God ‘may or may not’ is reasonable doubt, otherwise he would have gone to jail.  It’s just that six other Indian doctors in our town alone lost their licenses that year.  Dad decided later that if you are a foreigner, it’s better not to wear foreign clothes and drive around in expensive foreign cars.  He hated how the hippies were throwing the shit he ran away from in his face, and saying it looked better on them.  And when he turned into a yuppie and looked better than them, they hated him. 

            No, I don’t usually go around talking to dead people.  I have enough trouble talking to the living.  No, I don’t see things and I don’t hear things, although I am envious of those who can.  I just feel stuff.  I felt my father that night, I felt that he still existed.  It made me think that maybe death is not extinction, but another existence.  A different dance.  But we never stop dancing. 

            The air we breathe may be made of gasoline, and the light costs us money, so it’s hard to believe there are things like love, that are free and clean.  We walk on treadmills until our feet become permanent shoes.  And in the end, we’ll be buried with plastic shovels because life is now the alternative to the news.

            I shut off the radio and the lights. 

            Sleep with the lights off because it would be ridiculous to close your eyes and have all the lights on.  The only thing you could do is talk about it later.  How intriguing, the thing we didn’t talk about, later.  The thing never done.  The lights never turned off, went into another galaxy, at their own speed, each light may have its own speed maybe there isn’t a “speed of light.”

            I want to tell my pen to tell this story, just for today, I want to hear it from the pen.  The hand gets timid and asks a friend to live for it.  When your hand stops working and you swear you can’t work because it just doesn’t work.  No one understands.  They understand broken cars, and marriages that fall apart, because.  But a hand that can’t remember how to write and a mind that forgets how to make much…but thoughts aren’t like wax paper, they’re not made of some weird substance.  No powdery plastic, no crushed afternoons, when you remember the day your dog died, even though he was plastic and your best friend threw him away.  And it mattered to you then because you were five, and your dad was alive. 

            I forgot the other day when I looked in the mirror, I forgot at what rate I was missing myself, and running into an image of a stranger.  It’s like smelling fake flowers.  It’s like pretending someone is waiting for you to call, waiting for me to speak, if they could dial me what number would add up to me?  And how should I answer?  Not honestly because that would ruin the mood.  I have to speak like I don’t own this voice.  I’m waiting for my father to call.

                                                            * 

            They were pieces.  Marble pieces, cheaply made in Mexico and chipped.  They were his.  His eyes traveled to the nape of her neck and he intently stared at the pendant she wore, made of bone.  He made no comment about it.  “Do you want to learn?” Khalid asked.

            “I already know how to play, I just forgot,” Yasmine’s syllables were slow.

            “You either know or you don’t know.”  Khalid was very serious.

            “Well maybe I know, but I just don’t remember.  Have you ever read Socrates, or Plato, or whatever?”

            “No.”  I think I’ve read your mind though, he thought.

            “Socrates said ‘You know everything, you just don’t remember.’”  And she wanted to tell him that God wants me to remember him.  The problem is she didn’t have a clue, she didn’t remember Him.  Yasmine folded her hands, but she secretly wanted to stand up and applaud.  Applaud him, because she knew he would win.  And she knew, he wanted applause, he wanted an audience.  He was not that different from her.  She knew: we’re all cut from the same cloth and it’s definitely not silk.

            “That, that’s great.  Do you wanna learn?”  He wanted to take a bath with her really, maybe play chess in the bath, while she washed his back.  He wanted to take a bath with almost every woman he found remotely attractive.  Maybe to clean them, because they made him feel dirty.  When he was in Iran, to think about naked women, was dirty.  But he was only eight then, he hardly knew the difference between girls and boys.  But now, sixteen years later, he still felt like taking a shower sometimes after the sideways glance of a lady made him shiver. 

            “Yeah, I want to learn.”  But it wasn’t chess that drew her to him.  It was winning.  He looked like he knew how to win.  Like her father.  But when her dad played chess in the park, when she was nine, the pieces weren’t marble.  They were made out of plastic and the boards were supported by blue and red milk cartons.  They were old chess boards, from Toys R Us. 

            “It’s really just a mind game,” Khalid said and put his hand on the King.  “Every piece has a personality, you have to get to know your people, your pieces.”  And then he realized, to him, they were people.  Scary people, people who fought for a living.  Soldiers.  Like the soldier who knocked on his door one morning when he was eight and told his father he had to stop working.  The soldier had a gun, and Khalid wanted to play with his gun as the man talked to his father about “Loyalty to the cause.”  Fuck the cause.  Fuck the gun.  Fuck chess.  All he wanted to do was take a nap.

            And she too, understood this.  Understood, because in the end, she knew that chess was how she wanted to learn how to be a soldier.  Sikhs are supposed to be saints and soldiers.  Yet, she felt that she would make a very weak soldier because she was not willing to give herself up completely in order to win.  Do you have to be able, in the end to say, I would even give my life, to be a good soldier?  She was scared and didn’t know if you can be scared and strong at the same time.  And what about the truth:  God wanted her to be a saint and a soldier?  She was a very bad saint.  Very, very bad. 

            Khalid looked at Yasmine, sitting in front of him, at Espresso Royale, as they waited for Mona.  He promised her he would teach her the basics; that’s it.  No more.  He didn’t think he knew shit though, that’s what he forgot to tell her.  “I don’t know shit.  But I can still win.  I have no idea how, but I always win.”

            He didn’t know that Yasmine understood that.  That people who win, that winners, are just at stupid as losers.  Her father was a stupid winner.  He wasn’t a loser.  He died.  But he won at his own game.  Alcoholism is a long and twisted form of suicide.  Yasmine could tell that sometimes, Khalid wanted to kill himself.  She knew, not because she ever really wanted to, but because he asked for it, in his speech, in his way of looking at you.  He wanted you to close your eyes sometimes, she knew, so you couldn’t see him.  He wanted to be invisible.  He wanted to be free. 

            Yasmine just wanted to win.

            “Remember you’re playing me, not these pieces.  You need to know me. I am the God of the movements of these tiny statues,” Khalid said and hoped his hands would not shake.

            “You would never let me get to know you, because then you would lose,” Yasmine said and stared at a pure white bishop.  And she knew God, would never really let her know Him.  She knew she couldn’t play a game against God, because she wouldn’t win.

            Neither one of them realized, that sometimes losing is the only freedom we have.

            All the losers of the Olympics, are maybe the only people at the Olympics, who still pray.  Those who’ve lost a wife, a child, they know what it’s like to miss something, to be lost. Losing a race, when you have run so far, losing must be a true form of humility.  Accepting that you are less.  Living with that.  Living as a loser.

            And isn’t the true victory, losing your sense of self.  Yasmine knew that to a Sikh, ego is the biggest enemy.  If you lose an obvious battle in this world, you can still win if you lose your ego, and it all confused her really. 

            Chess is like algebra, isn’t it?  It’s just an equation.  But then there’s a moment in math, where you have to divide by zero, to get an answer.  There’s a moment in Chess where you have to kill your own man, to win. Oh but you can’t do that in chess.
 And that’s when you touch infinity, when you touch death.  So sometimes you have to lose many times, die many times, so you can win, so you can live.  Like sometimes there’s opposite answers to the same equation, and they both add up. 

            But no one asks the real questions, about the real equations.  Like why isn’t the sky red?  And who made up words?  Was it the same guy, who made up death?  Because it’s a myth, it’s just a word to describe this thing that happens to people.  Who is he?  And how do we know he isn’t a woman?  And how do we know death was the last word she meant to say.  Maybe She’s not done talking.

            Just because women have been quite, doesn’t mean we’re losing.

                                                            by

Nina Kaur