Sunday, October 28, 2007

Overnight in the Overnight Asylum

That night overnight in the sanitarium the man overnight in the asylum developed a raking cough the likes of which the manager of the overnight sanitarium had never ever seen. They tried giving him a cough-suppressant but he continued to cough, they applied a warm facecloth to his throat but the coughing prevailed. Finally, after no little propitiation, they managed to arrest his coughing with a menthol lozenge and a tinctures’ worth of Fruit Smack. The man in the asylum overnight was making notes for God. He felt it his job (much more than a simple avocation) to take notes for God, describing in great detail, and with as much perspicuity as he could muster, what was happening in earth, the realm that existed outside the godly realm.

He scribbled notes into a child’s exercise book with a pencil, making sure to date each entry at the top of the page. For example: October 28th nineteen-seventy-seven (he preferred writing out the numerals, as it gave them a stately more important look), Doctor Ballista gave Smith a shot of Thomasine to calm his jitters, followed with an ice-bath, a Smack Fruit enema and a Librium suppository. Smith responded poorly, his eyes turning into the back of his head, his legs jimmying like crazy; then he fell to the floor and bumped his head on the wingtip of Doctor Ballista’s shoe. The head nurse and the orderly Ackers then enacted The Hymn of the Pearl (also Hymn of the Soul, Hymn of the Robe of Glory or Hymn of Judas Thomas the Apostle) which Akers recited in the original Syriac. When Smith was slow to respond to the divine being’s message which came by way of a revealer (Doctor Owens, doctor Ballista’s assistant, a task generally ascribed to Jesus) the head nurse prescribed insulin-shock and a mild apagogic.

He figured the best way to keep God apprised of the shenanigans going on down below was to keep a ledger, an unabridged compendium of the earthly realm (the one God cared not to live in) the very same one where he spent countless nights sitting in a lattice-backed chair in the asylum dining-room scribbling in his child’s exercise book. The man in the hat met the man in the overnight asylum one night when he was visiting a sick friend in the overnight sanitarium. His friend had swallowed a bottle cap (a bevel-edged Spruce Beer cap) his throat tighten like a garrote-knot. The Doctor prescribed a stool-softener and sent him home, saying that the bottle cap would find its way down his esophagus and out through his rectum when he had his next bowl-movement.

No comments:

About Me

My photo
"Poetry is the short-circuiting of meaning between words, the impetuous regeneration of primordial myth". Bruno Schulz
Powered By Blogger

Blog Archive