For the third time this week I go on Facebook and find a post on my home page that I don’t recall posting. It draws irate responses from many of my “friends.” I don’t blame them; I also find the message disgusting, going into the hygiene habits of a workmate and friend as it does. Not appropriate details to post if you want to keep a friend or, in my case, a job.
I avoid Mark on campus that day, but when I get home Linette collars me. “Mark called. He’s really hurt. What are you doing, Will?”
“Nothing. It wasn’t me.”
She gives me her look and shakes her head, annoyed that I won’t take responsibility.
I have no intention of calling Mark. What to say? I didn’t post that message. Someone else did. Nor do I recall putting up two earlier postings: one about abolishing tenure (with me mid-point of a tenure review), the other saying that Mel Gibson would make a great president.
“What the hell?” Mark asked when I ran into him on campus next day.
“Dunno, pal. Guess I’m tired of bitching about global warming and greedy bankers. Every few years you need to change magnetic poles.” Feeling the need to explain why I posted them, even though I didn’t.
“Is this you talking or your little problem?”
“It’s all the same in the end.”
“I thought you people were steady-on crusader types. You never change course.”
“What’s this you people crap? Some of us may have radical tendencies; it’s a radical ailment. But it doesn’t make us ‘crusader types.’”
Mark’s fascinated by my “little problem,” as he calls it.
My latest postings elicit a storm of protest. “They let bloody idiots like you teach in the States? No wonder you yanks are going down the loo,” a British guy posts. I defriend him. The dean of students emails and suggests I rethink teaching as a career. I need to do damage control. And fast.
What’s most troubling is that I honestly don’t recall posting the messages. This worries me. Two of my uncles had Alzheimer’s, but I’m only thirty-six. I ask Linette if she’s noticed any strange behavior lately. She reminds me about being on the phone with my sister and starting to recite nursery rhymes out of the blue. My sister found it funny, but it gave me the willies. It reminded me of the time, some years ago, when I was accepting an award from The International Society of Folklorists for my book DEVILISH FLIGHT AND FANCY: The Interplay of Folklore and Mental Aberration, delivering my acceptance speech when I suddenly began reciting random passages from The Brothers Grimm (I’ve memorized hundreds), then jabbering in tongues, people say. It felt as if an imp had leapt from my book onto my back, dug its sharp little claws into my neck, and burrowed into my temporal lobe—the seat of my “little problem”—unleashing a complex partial fit. A few confrères took notes, as if I was revealing a secret code rather than disease-generated babble. It’s the academic instinct, after all, to invest everything with meaning. Of course, I remember none of this since we are zombies during complex partials: puppet ciphers playing out our unconscious roles. Mark filled me in on it later.
Dr. Frankworther, my neurologist, tells me mine is not a disease but a condition. Whatever. It’s a black hole; it sucks you in. Nonetheless, Joseph Smith built a religion on his fevered visions; Saint Paul called it his “thorn in the flesh” (he was obsessed with the flesh). Napoleon and Julius Caesar built states in spite of their affliction—shaky damned states, as you’d imagine, given our typical symptoms.
If I had a glimmer of talent I would have become a creative artist. People are more tolerant of incoherent artists than of jittery academics. Artists are expected to be odd. Standing before that audience jabbering mumbo jumbo as a poet wouldn’t have been so bad. The presenter would have slapped me on the back and urged me to continue the fine work even if no one understood it. As it was, he fled the stage and my former friend Mark Sangerstraw led me off by the elbow, while the bewildered audience was seized between applause and scandal. Germans don’t like public displays of neural disorder. But who does?
Not Facebookers I can tell you. People continued dissing me a week after those postings. My friend Amy May Myers, an expert on ancient Sanskrit texts, tells me I’ve gone viral. Amy keeps up with these things. To understand things ancient, she says, you must understand things current; the present is the past recycled. She says a viral discussion has sprung up about whether it’s ethical to post personal knowledge about a friend’s hygiene habits on social networking sites.
“Only twelve percent of respondents are on your side,” Amy informs me.
“I haven’t taken a side, Amy May.”
“Of course you have. You initiated the discussion.”
“I didn’t post that message…at least didn’t intend to.”
She tilts her head and screws up one side of her mouth, dark hair falls in a cascade down one side of her face and catches the light. Fascinating, but I dare not focus on it, since hair in motion can resemble flowing water with light playing over the ripples. Next thing I know I start to blank out. “You don’t post messages like that unintentionally,” she says.
I plunge into her turquoise eyes and we topple into bed together. We are just disengaging from sex—that awkward moment when you are a little unsure of yourself and, in my case, feeling a little guilty.
“Did you enjoy it?” I ask.
“Enjoy what? Your stinky Mark posting? I know he didn’t. I found it beneath you, Will. Who knows what you will post about me.”
“Tell me—” my voice dropping to a whisper “—have we had sex, Amy May? I really need to know.” Before she answers, I have a reply of sorts: a mind flash so vivid it might be the precursor to an aura, a sensual hieroglyph or palimpsest, both of this world and of the mind’s fancy, internal and external at once, existing in some nether realm between as if in a fairy tale. I see a disheveled quilt covering the hotel room bed at that conference in Heidelberg, crumpled like the relief map of a mountainous region. Right out of The Brothers Grimm.
“You bastard,” she hisses, her eyes polished and hard. The image of that crumpled duvet reflected in them. This alarms me. It happens sometimes: past and present mix together. I dare not linger given the matrix of associations reaching into my temporal lobe and limbic system, a vague memory of having an event while making love with Amy May—or her folkloric doppelganger perhaps. I’m trying to decide who she symbolizes in folkloric iconography: Lorelei, surely, my German siren.
In my book I have a chapter titled “Grimm’s Land” in which I posit:
There may be a territory in the brain that should be designated “Grimm’s Land.”
Not likely a discrete region, more likely a function of many regions of the brain
acting in accord. Likely those of us with diseased or aberrant brains have ready
access to this territory.
I have a memory of entering it with Amy May and of her freaking out. Perhaps she’d been terrified to realize she stood naked before her maker, like Eve.
You must enter Grimm’s Land stark naked, as a child would, leave your book learning
at the door. It’s not welcome here.
I have discussed this with Dr. Frankworther and my pal Mark. Such talk can get you in hot water with academics, this mixing of folklore and brain science. My book was not well received in the academic press (although a NY Times bestseller). Didn’t help that I stress the dark side of folktales, opposing the current fashion that such stories are about a hero’s quest to find empowerment and renewal by outwitting a wicked stepmother or evil dwarf. Utter nonsense! Fairy tales, especially those collected by the Brothers Grimm, are not metaphors of transformation but stories about who’s on top. Take “The Juniper Tree” in which the stepmother decapitates her stepson, who then transforms into a bird; first he sings of her crime then kills her. In this, as in so many tales, the abused gains the upper hand through luck or trickery and becomes the abuser. Tormented and tormentor switch places. These are not stories about living happily ever after but about raw power. Children understand this implicitly, so do people with troubled brains.
I first notice that my condition has entered a new and perilous stage when Amy May Myers leaves a three word message on our voicemail at home: “How dare you?”
“How dare you what?” Linette asks. “And who’s asking? Her voice is familiar.”
Amy May’s voice sounds much like Linette’s, the same lilt, rhythm and timbre, but an octave higher. No doubt my wife has noticed this. Both women grip my ass with both hands when they come, both shout “yes” in three successive gasps. Odd these similarities, as if they are one person split into two selves. I’m not sure what to make of it. Except to say doubling is a common motif in both the folkloric tradition of Northern Europe and the bipolar tradition of western psychology. We are always splitting in two, both in the stories we tell about ourselves and in our lives. Or fear we will split in two. We subsist on the borderline of incipient bipolarity: success/failure, joy/despair, good/evil, angel/whore, homo/ hetero….It is our cultural storyline. Always yearning to be something we’re not. Is that what attracted me to fairy tales? Yet in that parallel world things often don’t work out well. Grandma turns into a wolf. That other side we long for is a chimera. That’s where our auras—we elfin folk, offspring of fairy tales—may be instructive. Auras promise something wondrous just as fairy tales do. They veritably glow and shimmer with mysterious possibility, but what they deliver is a horror.
“Sounds like Amy May Myers at school,” I say, seeing no reason to be coy about it. I have nothing to hide, nothing I can fully remember, anyway. No solid proof that Amy May and I have had sex. I must ask Mark (I keep no secrets from him), but Mark is no longer my friend.
Linette throws me a dagger-like glance. “What’s your friend Amy May on about?”
“No idea.”
My voice mail, email, social media accounts at school are jam full of curt reprimands from colleagues: Absolutely inappropriate, Will…You, sir, are a turd….Misogynist pig…and so forth. The new posting is right there on my Facebook page:
“Amy chants Vedic hymns during sex. She only does it from the monkey position, with the palms of her hands touching soles of her feet and her lover mounting her from behind, with the monkey god Hanuman’s teeth gnashing at his ear.”
I stare at it, mortified. I didn’t post that. No way. Someone hacked into my Facebook account and put it up. Who? Mark Sangerstraw seeking revenge? Some high school hacker in Korea? How could he know about Amy May’s sexual preferences? Did she post it herself? Or did my other self? My trickster doppelganger?
The Brothers Grimm and Dostoyevsky and Robert Louis Stevenson and surely Dr. Freud and his daughter Anna would tell us that the other self is that side of us that is taking a vacation from the tyranny of being good. The superego is a vicious taskmaster; it expects too much of us. Our parents and mates and children and bosses and friends and colleagues and society and heritage all expect too much of us. So every few decades a Hitler shows up, a wreak havoc, an agent of evil. Don’t believe for a minute he only shows up on the national stage; he/she shows up in our individual lives, too. Maybe he has shown up in mine. Actually he’s always there, lurking in the background, staying mostly hidden.
Before my eyes and in my name angry responses to others’ comments about my Amy May posting begin to appear:
– Who cares what you think, a-hole?
– So what’s wrong with monkeying around? I’d guess you’re impotent.
– Freaking prude.
I look to see if my fingers are moving on the keyboard; everything’s a blur. I look away and take slow, even breaths. Blurred vision and the sensation of a thumb pressing behind my eyes can signal an oncoming seizure.
I go at once to see Dr. Frankworther and show him my recent Facebook posts. “Why would you post such compromising messages, a man in your position?” he asks gravely.
“But that’s just it, Doctor, I didn’t. Well, maybe I did…I mean, not me…not the me sitting before you. The other me did…conceivably. Do you think it possible?”
He shakes his head. “Afraid I don’t follow.” Dr. Frankworther has a long face, his chin goes on forever, possibly because he is always stroking it, as now.
“Kind of an automaton thing, like what can happen during a complex partial seizure. I’m suggesting I may have posted the messages without realizing I did.”
He studies me incredulously. When he’s perplexed, Frankworther’s face grows even longer, distended and tense. His eye whites turn mucky gray, like week-old snow. “Facebook seizures you’re suggesting? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“Look, I don’t know. I once had an event while delivering a speech. Another while talking on the phone. Why not while posting messages? My other side takes over for a time.”
He considers this, nodding. “There is the case of a dentist who continued to fill teeth while in the throes of partial seizures. The procedure had become so automatic to him he could perform it unconsciously, you see. Then there’s the prostitute in St. Petersburg whose clients paid her extra to have seizures during the sex act since it enhanced her performance. Seizures while driving and riding bicycles are quite common. But yours would require volitional thought, actual composition, so I’m dubious. Although you write habitually, it’s true.”
“How do you explain it then?”
“I don’t. I’m a neurologist. I have no expertise in computer security.”
I lean forward, whispering conspiratorially. “He reveals the most intimate details, things no hacker could possibly know. Places Amy and I have had sex together and dates. The thing is, Doctor, I don’t remember these details myself. He does. He must keep a journal. Now he’s putting them in the public record.”
Dr. Frankworther is leaning back in his chair, stroking his chin and chuckling. “Online seizures, Facebook epilepsy! Fascinating. I’ve never heard of anything like it.”
“Look! Do you think it’s possible that you can develop a split personality with my disease—your normal self pit against an antagonistic self?”
“As I have said, it isn’t a disease but a condition. We must keep that straight.”
“Right, my condition! A split personality, I’m asking? The conscious me and the seizural me?”
“Now you are psychologizing. It’s not a psychological condition either. We need to be absolutely clear on that.”
“We’re not getting anywhere. This thing scares the hell out of me. It’s compromising.”
“So I can see. You need to remain calm. Stress is dangerous for epileptics.”
“How would you feel if someone was posting outlandish Facebook messages in your name, destroying friendships, revealing secret affairs, and you fear it might be you yourself doing it as an act of self-sabotage? Totally unaware you are doing it.”
“Maybe I’d get off Facebook.”
A lot of help he is.
The oddest case of complex partial I have ever heard of is the man who brushes other people’s teeth during his seizures. Always losing jobs because he starts brushing his boss’s teeth. Not funny. What’s strange is that he actually carries a toothbrush around with him in a shirt pocket, enabling his seizural mode. Like he wants to lose his job or the seizural self is in control, not the conscious self. Out to get him. After all, the seizure focus, that small wounded part of the brain, seizes control of the full brain during fits. Can it take control of our lives? Is this happening with me? My seizural side is taking over from my conscious side? It’s possible that I am enabling my doppelganger by, for example, leaving my laptop on all the time, making it easy for him to put up posts. I shouldn’t. Possibly he won’t be able to boot it up on his own, might not remember all my passwords. It’s worth a try.
There’s a chapter in my book about people at war with themselves, people with certain mental and neurological disorders—bipolar, some forms of depression and autism and mid-stage Alzheimer’s—and how this is reflected in folktales and folklore: werewolf legends and the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are in that tradition, the beleaguered soul who splits in two and wars against himself. The wolf in grandma’s clothing in Red Riding Hood, the deceiver. Evil old Rumpelstiltskin who symbolizes the wicked other self lurking inside us, the doppelganger. Is this also true of my condition? I begin extensive research to find if there is anything to my theory about the seizural split personality. Is it possible that we, too, divide down the middle and go to war against ourselves? What else is a seizure, after all, but the conscious self and the epileptic self doing battle with each other? What to make of the epileptic cook, for example, who kept pulling red hot pans from the oven with his bare hands during fits?
I come upon my latest Facebook posting—or rather his—which suggests this:
JOSEPH THOMAS NUSSY IS A PUSSY
Joe Nussy is Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences and must sign off on my tenure review. Essentially, he’s my boss. This is a total disaster, a sure act of self sabotage.
My former friend Mark Sangerstraw comments: “We might forgive Will’s adolescent stab at drollery. But what’s his point, especially when he’s facing a tenure review? It can’t be political, unless it’s the politics of self-destruction. Go ahead, pal, alienate your dean. You’ve pissed off everyone else.” Dr. Emily Watson Hanes-Smuthers, an expert on southern folklore and part of the Alan Dundes school, asks, “So what’s wrong with pussies, Will?”
CHECK OUT NUSSY’S FOPPISH BOW TIES!
I watch my fingers type out the words but have no conscious awareness of typing them. It is as if I do and don’t at the same time, as if I have parted from my body and stand looking down, watching my other self type. Not knowing what he is typing until I see it the next day. What I have typed—the other me. My true self would never use the word “foppish.”
And so I am determined.
It seems idiotic to lecture an empty chair, so I drape a pair of pants over the seat and hang a shirt over the back of the folding chair and begin: “Listen up, dickhead! I know what you are up to. You were more subtle about it in the past. You caused me tense moments, sure, brought me distress and sore muscles, but you’ve never invaded my professional life before, except for that lecture in Germany. So what’s going on?”
“Is someone in there with you, Will?” Linette asks outside my study door.
“No…no, just talking to myself.”
“What’s all this about?”
“Wish I knew,” I say, opening the door, “but he won’t answer me.”
“Who won’t?” Two quick lines cross her brow. Her eyes flit about the room.
I can find no definitive answers in my research. Some cases of complex partial seizures are so bizarre—victims undressing in public or speeding the wrong way down freeways or running head on into enemy fire while unconscious—that it seems obvious the patient is at war with himself and doing his damndest to self-destruct. But neurologists make no mention of this. When it comes to the totally bizarre, science has no answers. We must turn to the surer wisdom of myth and folklore. Old wisdoms. Lord Byron, who shared my affliction, mistrusted doctors and regularly consulted fortune tellers and shaman and kept a menagerie of wild animals to serve as a mental ballast.
I consider the first story collected in Grimm’s tales, “The Elves,” about a servant girl who goes off to live for three days with the elves in their home in a hollow mountain. When she returns home to her mistress, she learns seven years have passed and the elves have stolen her employer’s child and put a changeling in its stead. If the mother boils water in two egg shells and makes the changeling child laugh, the elves promise to return her true child. The aggrieved mother boils the water and the child laughs, of course, for fairy tales, as every child knows, are not tales of suspense but of good and evil. In this regard, they echo some neurological and psychological complaints, which are less about suspense than about moral cause and effect to those of us who suffer them. The question is not: What will happen next? We know what will happen. The question is: What did I do to deserve this curse? What must I do to end it? Or perhaps: What is causing me to war against myself? What fault? What inadequacy? What indiscretion? The changeling laughs and the elves return the mother’s true child to her.
Or, rather—I argue in my book—the child returns to his true self. For “The Elves” is also a story about those whose ailments cause them to undergo a changeling transformation while in the grip of a spell and become unrecognizable to those around them: “with a large head and staring eyes,” foaming at the mouth, “old as the Wester Forest,” howling, horrible to look upon, laughing grotesquely. After the spell has passed, we return to normal, as if the elves have brought us magically back from their hollow mountain. “The Elves” also makes much of the time displacement or dysplasia which is part of the seizural experience. When the fit is upon us, we have no idea whether three days or seven years have passed. So our ailments are akin to fairy tales.
What a brouhaha of critical howls and laughter this brought from folklorists and psychologists alike. I was a “reductionist lunatic,” in over my head. I saw mental derangement and neural disorders everywhere I looked. I’m not sure which of us answered the critics first: myself or my other self. At that moment we were in angry accord.
It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see my seizure focus as a kind of Alfheim, as the Norse have it, home of the light elves. The little devils are mischievous tricksters. They mean no harm; it’s just their nature. However, their whirling dervish neuron dances around the brain can get out of control and raise havoc. It is as hard to contain elves as to contain electrical currents. Those with my ailment are disciples of the Norse God Loki, the shape shifter, since we ourselves are elfin-brained shape shifters, created in his image. Early Christians were right: we mental and neurological aberrants are pagans. Our texts are folkloric rather than ecclesiastical. There’s no use throwing a lot of “thou shalt nots” at those of us whose behavior isn’t always voluntary, who live outside the box of predictable behavior.
The other night when I was taking out the garbage, I experienced an event. It was a dark chilly night, the mountains to the east snow-covered and glowing in the starlight, the stars cold and distant as if posted in an ancient sky. When I pulled the trash bins over to the road verge, the act seemed charged with great significance. It seemed as if time had slowed and I was watching myself move the bins rather than actually moving them—he was moving the bins in my stead. I stood in the driveway watching him, fascinated. A car’s headlights appeared far down the street and filled me with dread. It seemed I was whipping in and out of the moment: moving the bins and not moving them. And there were multiple garbage bins, red, green and gray, like a child’s set of blocks. Was I about to have a fit? I breathed in the cold air and forbade it, trying to stop the brain chatter. Likely I didn’t lose consciousness, not completely. Perhaps for an instant. The elves had reached down from Alfheim and caught hold of my elbows and attempted to lift me up and leave a changeling in my place. But I fought them off. The odd thing about this event was that I remembered it afterwards. Usually such episodes are erased from memory even if I remain conscious during them. Not this time. I should have known this signaled a turning. The next day I felt logy, exhausted, vulnerable. Does he wait for such moments to make a move, the crafty bastard? Am I more vulnerable to invasion at such times?
I arrive at my office in Thornbird Hall after the long Christmas break to discover that I’ve had an intruder. The SOB has dumped research files for my last book in the trash. In their place is a single thin folder labeled: EVERYTHING YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOURSELF. Inside it a tiny slip of paper which has scrawled across it in an elf’s crimped script:
Watch and learn, friend
[…]
Subscribers can read the full version by logging in. |
___________________________________
William Luvaas has published four novels and two story collections; Ashes Rain Down: A Story Cycle was The Huffington Post’s 2013 Book of the Year. Other honors include an NEA Fellowship, first place in Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open Contest, The Ledge Magazine’s International Fiction Prize, and Fiction Network’s 2nd National Fiction Competition. His stories, essays, and articles have appeared in dozens of publications, including The Village Voice, Glimmer Train, The American Literary Review, Antioch Review, North American Review, The Sun, and the American Fiction anthology. He is fiction editor for Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts.