Burnsome Journal, Entry 2

The chance operation of a machine about which one knows very little is never a good place to start hypothesizing. I want you to think of me as the Nietzsche that became a physician instead of a philologist and then with the burden of age and an atrophied brain went in a whole other direction from what happened to Newton (the Bible, which he turned to in all his seriousness under similar conditions). Now atrophy is a funny thing. It can turn an unborn foetus into a tumour and a mind into a swamp. It happened to several people around me. I first noticed it in my aunt, my father’s younger sister, two years six months and eleven days. She forgot how to eat soup one day. Then I saw it take my uncle, my father’s older brother, a full decade’s gap there, who started getting lost on his way back from work around the same time my father started getting better, which effectively put him right back where he had been working his way out of. He soon stopped going out of the house altogether, eve the paper boy understood it after a week and stopped making any further deliveries. I remember we had made a fort out of old glass bottles one afternoon; it was the strangest and most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Of course, I had never been to San Francisco at the time. Then one day my father went out, I saw him cautiously make his way to the front gate, shielding his eyes the whole way, delicately opening the latch, and stepping out so carefully it was almost as if he were learning to walk. Then he never came back, and after four days of lazily making calls to people who may or may not have any news, they decided, they being the aunt who doesn’t know how to eat soup and the uncle his own way home, that he must be dead, since he was sick in the head, as evidenced from the glass bottles stacked up against every window in the house, giving it an eerie look of being infested by strange dancing spots of light in an otherwise almost entirely lightless setting. I had to go away and live with a lady I was told was my aunt the first time I met her—by her, and she said I was to be staying with her until better arrangements could be made. She looked very clean and smelled very strongly of something that must indisputably be called an enchanting smell, since it reeked of luxury. I knew it was the expensive kind even back then, because in my house, the one where I lived with my father till he disappeared, there was nothing even remotely similar to what I found there, all of which was better in every way, but also somehow strangely intimidating at the same time. I remember feeling odd about being frightened by a desk even as a six year old boy. It was and remains absurd, although for increasingly complicated reasons currently. There are even some other symptoms that have begun to manifest themselves, but it may not be the best idea to accurately document them all in the same place, for they would then provide a rather misleading picture as a whole. They won’t be able to help themselves. I grew up with a lot of strange composite characters partially or completely invented as a coping mechanism, apparently, and that has led to there being an ever so subtle bridge between my memory and my actions, which is, apparently, conveniently filled by blank spots that are put in place by my brain in an attempt to block out the precise actions from being recalled. I swear, the first time I heard it I almost threw the doctor out the window of his eleventh story $300 an hour office for telling me my brain was actively and acutely working against me. It still sounds absurd, but now I have indisputable proof, so there is little hope for a battle left anymore.

It was quite a while before it struck me that the way my uncle and aunt’s minds have reacted to the accounting system of time could be something they all share in their blood. Which meant it must have been in my father too, the uncontrollable urge to control nothing. Maybe that’s why he went out and simply never came back. Because he decided that the experiment (me) was no longer feasible or in possession of any potential. Maybe he’s working on something much bigger right now in a place nobody has ever heard of because he named it. Maybe I too will one day walk out that door and never look back. I have always admired people who can do that. They just walk and walk till they reach someplace new and then they stop for a while, and live a little story there, sometimes with people, sometimes without, and they just up and leave again till they arrive someplace else and find a new friend. They are the best kind of people. I wish I was someone like that. Perhaps this hole is not meant to be crawled out of, that’s why there’s no way to dig in heels or carve out steps. Perhaps some people are meant to stay inside holes and stare out hopefully, maybe serving as warnings to some other people, or something else equally petty if anything at all. For lack of any potential for evolution, there are a lot of uncertainties about a lot of vague and variable concepts when you’re always trying to crawl out a hole.