Selected scenes

 Surgeon Dr Robert Klein slowly approaches his patient’s daughter and extends a soft hand to her.

“Chelsea?”

“Yes…” she says rising slowly.

“So… your father is stable for now…”

Chelsea begins to sob once again, and can barely speak. “Can I see him?”

“Well, yes, but not just yet. We haven’t moved him yet from surgery. But soon…we’ll let you know.”

Chelsea slumps back into her chair.

“He was very fortunate… you know, to have collapsed here on campus. That by itself is why he is still alive Chelsea.”  He pauses a moment to gauge her response, her readiness for more detailed information.  “I must tell you however… it is very unlikely he will regain consciousness… at least not as we may discern.”

Chelsea looks up at him with tears still streaming. “What do you mean?”

“It appears he may have had a serious form of stroke you see… what we call a Basilar Artery Occlusion… meaning that the upper portions of his brain may not have been affected dramatically… but most certainly he is paralyzed from the brain stem down.”  Dr Klein is about to put his hand on her shoulder but stops as she stands up.

“Wait, so… you are saying his mind is alive but he can’t communicate? I want to see him please!”

“Yes, but no… hang on, I totally understand⏤we can’t know for certain what will happen but just give us an hour or so okay. We’ll have him in a private room where you can stay as long as you like, okay.” Chelsea looks at him through glistening eyes and after a moment of gaining composure nods an okay.  

“There is another complication however. The investigators that arrived with him have determined he was attacked…”

“No! No, no…wait, what?!

“…struck on the head in fact.”

Chelsea’s memoire extract:

—When I dream he speaks to me. Maybe that’s why it’s still such a disappointment that when I visit him he does not. He’s been in a coma since his stroke a few weeks ago, they say it’s locked-in-syndrome, but I continue to believe he can hear me, see me, when I talk to him. I tell him about my day, about how the sun feels when I draw the curtains open, all the while thinking maybe he will literally be moved to join me at the window. As I rotate the small cacti on the window sill I utter things I feel in my heart will draw him out. Things I can visualize him responding to in reality, or rather a better reality.

I tell him too that I haven’t given up finishing his book for him and not to worry. I read a few passages each time I visit praying this if anything will awaken him. He’s such a perfectionist, and so… so not like this… prostrate.

For as long as I can remember father had been working on what I thought was a “case study” as he called them. This latest project as it happened however was a book, this book, the book I am attempting to finish for him. The more I delve into it though it becomes more and more my own story I suppose… so call it a memoir then. And I pray he would forgive me for that. Strange though, how this field of psychology—psychiatry resembles mine in a way. I’ve been a firefighter and an EMT for more than fifteen years now. Saving people and property from devastation isn’t at all like being a therapist but you get the idea. It’s a far more dangerous profession for one thing but I imagine failure might be just as painful for all involved, families especially⏤to learn for example of a suicide of a client⏤as it is for us to discover that someone has succumbed to smoke inhalation or worse, burned alive. 

As an adolescent my tears were an entirely different sort of tears though for he was always so busy, and sometimes cruelly so. Don’t get me wrong, he said he loved us quite a bit so we got the required hugs after meals or before bedtime, but in between⏤in between, something was wrong, missing. It was as if he needed more. Something to fill the gap in his selfish esteem. More than us. More than mother. More of something. So, I suppose you could say his book provided that something more. Something to take him elsewhere. On occasion he would say things that implied he resented his domesticity, and by implication… us. We could tell he grew weary of mother too but my brothers and I were all on our own by the time their marriage was finally dissolved so we were spared the ultimate alienation…me not so much, perhaps because I was the youngest. It hurt. Really hurt.

Years ago when I told father I had passed my CPAT and about the new friends I’d made through cross fit training it took him more than a week to question me more about it, to show sincere interest. He eventually did come around to a sustained interest when I was literally saving lives. I just didn’t know then though what had really gotten its hooks into him, what he’d been obsessing over—not just a cohort’s infernal notebook, the origin of his most recent study before his loss of consciousness, but something that preceded all of it.  I feel a bit like the first narrator in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, listening to Marlowe dredge up dark discovery from under the canopy of a frightful jungle… to what end will I finally attempt to fathom for you must remain as yet uncertain. But today as I write I am forebodingly aware that my father continues to wander alone in a much darker place, an elsewhere he hadn’t anticipated.

So, again, call this a memoir if you like, me trying to circle back to what might have gotten under his skin, and ultimately cracked through his skull!  and thus now onto my laptop. And you may well be wondering what on earth inspires a first responder to write a book, much less what gives her the confidence to share it. Well, don’t get your hopes up on that front but I have been keeping a diary my whole life. I even intended as an adolescent to be a writer, but, you know, like they say: Life—and sometimes near death—happens.—“It seemed to me father was losing his mind attempting to reconcile Alex’s composite particle/wave sketches with what quantum physics he thought he understood…  but he kept getting caught up looking for interference patterns as “lumps” in an hourglass-like experiment—as if to say our limited reality is itself bicameral, the first interference,  our consciousness is the primal slit.

In this I find it difficult to separate Alek and father; that writing father’s memoir causes me to see my own dual nature. That is, I have up until this point avoided discussing that I have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and that I’ve discontinued the pharmaceutical treatment for it.”

Chelsea ruminates as she revisits her fireplace memories… in her father’s study! ( the comfort aspect of being near her father in this way but remembering him talking about being methodical, life as a science of building upon what we know, and that knowledge starts as a visual accumulation, and that language can muddy up what we’ve learned. She thinks about the life in her and wanting to preserve her child’s spirit of adventure, how to let go (anatomical hourglass theme into uroboros theme of mother/parent as a regenerative cycle, nurturing yet controlling, stiffling of a child’s desire for independence.)

This ultimately is the psychological/“neuroboros” meaning of the story as she is currently on maternity leave from the firehouse. 

(Chelsea begins to leave a voice mail to her older brother Grant whose middle name is David):

“Davey…, Please — 

(Grant picks up) okay, stop already. 

(Chelsea continues) No wait, listen, I assure you what I’m doing is every bit for daddy not just for me. I am NOT being selfish as you’ve accused me—I want him to wake up but frankly I am certain he is conscious. He is in there Davey and I want to be there when he comes back. 

(Grant tries to interrupt her) Achhh, Pep! (Pepper is their nick name for her)

(Chelsea continues with somewhat of a hoarse throat) 

—Don’t you want us to be there? I can’t do this alone

(Grant) Come on that’s not fair.

(Chelsea) But how can you suggest it is better to let him die?! How can you even be this cruel?! And to demand I stop writing in his office? What the hell’s that got to do with anything? 

(they both are silent for a moment)

(Chelsea asks) Wha’d Peter say anyway? He’s not answering his phone now.

(Grant) Alright look—I don’t—won’t agree to turning off the support for now, until we can at least get Peter to commit one way or the other?

(Chelsea silently gathers her resolve) 

—Davey, I can’t let him go (and she begins to sob).

Chelsea:  Dad, I just don’t get what you see in him…

George:   It’s not about what I see Chelsea… it’s about what he sees!

Chelsea:  Well… what is that exactly?  

George: (sighs, exasperated)… What we can’t see.

Chelsea: Right, so let him do it.

George:  What?

Chelsea: This. That. (Pointing). Let him put it into words…. a story?  Your character study or whatever—from what I can see dissolves into nonsense. It’s inane.

George: He puts it the only way he knew how… how I’m trying to put it.

Chelsea:  Ah... I see. So he’s schizophrenic? Is that it? 

George: (shakes his head.) No. He’s a synesthete—how else can I illustrate that?

Chelsea: A what? Right. So you’re trying to see through his eyes?…like looking down an hourglass!? You’re making me crazy just thinking about that, what it’s doing to you… to us. I’m sorry. I can’t help you with this anymore. (She pauses a moment) Make it a children’s book! You were always a good story teller. Just tell it like a dad.

George: (Slowly and nearly whispered.). I’m sorry… (but under his breath) Good idea. Alek as the “voyant-visible"

Brothers Tied Chelsea to a tree. 

Chelsea’s revenge:  buttoning their sweaters together; them toppling into a shelf of ball jars, dispersing a cloud of dried, dead mayflies from a window sill. 

(In their father’s house.)

Grant: "what are you doing?"

Chelsea: “I'm moving into my old bedroom”

—“Why?” 

—“I already asked dad about it and he said it was OK he knew that I needed —“

—“But why? So your rent is going up but you can still afford it can't you?”

—“That’s not why I'm moving in.”

(Grant closes the refrigerator. 

Chelsea continues. "look are you gonna help me or not?  I don't have that much stuff.”

—“It’s — it's not a big deal. I mean it's just bad timing.”

(Chelsea rolls her eyes and is about to walk away. And thinking about her pregnancy nearly tells him that she is on maternity leave.)

—“I’ll help you okay. Just not right now.”

—Great thank you Grant!  (Intentionally not using his nick name) “ So when? I need to get out this weekend.”Last scene. a park bench. The Pacific ocean.

George (having just sped north on the PCH in his Mercedes with the top down): 

—“It’s funny how many lives end this way… how many remorseful conversations are held on benches like this one… facing the sea… facing a future bleak as this stormy twilight… an end to suffering must be happier than continuing to live don’t you think?  How do we do it Alek? How do I give it all back to you now it’s been sucked down under like an innocent child by the undertow?”