Pareidolia

Why sometimes I believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

The Queen of Hearts, "Through the Looking Glass" by Lewis Carroll

The world as it had been shown to him was a piece of unreason, an idiot's dream.

from "They" by Robert Heinlein

Perhaps you are too young to comprehend what we ‘ave lost, she muttered under her breath, her eyes gazing out the window like the answer might be hidden within the sky outside the bars.

Once upon a time when I was still good the stars in their legions sparkled with life in the celestial dark and the dawning yet filled my ‘eart with anticipation of joy.

The shadow of a smile crept across her worn features at the feeble memory of it and then it was gone forever. She gazed at me frankly as if fervently wishing I might understand, even if only for a moment.

And then she wearily closed her eyes for so long a time that I carefully watched her chest rise and fall and listened for the catch in her breath that would signal the beginning of the end. In that prolonged silence, other members of the ward gathered in a quiet circle around her bed.

While I quietly watched her shallow breathing, she abruptly started, her head barely rising above the pillows.

I see faces, she whispered hoarsely. I see 'em in the roses at my bedside, I see 'em in the creases of the blanket that keeps the cold at bay.

I see 'em in the ceiling tiles in the night when I cannot sleep. I see 'em when I close my eyes. I see 'em when I sleep and again when I awaken.

She returned my horrified gaze, her eye’s red with exhaustion and lids swollen from lack of untroubled sleep. I shivered with dread.

I'll see you on the other side, doc, she whispered, but will you see me?

For the past few weeks, I've asked myself that question every time I walk past her room and pause to gaze at her bare mattress trying to remember her still in it.

She lived in the psychopathology ward of St Agnes Mental Hospital for the last fifteen years of her life. Instituted for grandiose delusion, her true pathology was prolonged grief disorder. But since it was not added to the DSM until 2022, for most of those fifteen years she was treated for her most remarkable symptoms rather than for the one that would eventually claim her life.

Every patient in the ward believed they were someone they were not, most of them historical figures long dead. But she believed she was Legion, the demoniac in the gospel.

Daedalus himself fashioned the maze within this temple that holds us all, she once told me, tapping her head. I contain multitudes. Grinning like the devil himself, she warned, Careful where you wander.

The sun, low in the autumn sky, fills her room with light, briefly blinding me when I enter. She was so tiny in the end that I could barely see her among the mounded coverings upon the bed. A heavy cloud slowly crossing the sun's cruel face begins to darken the room and I stare sadly at the naked mattress remembering.

In my mind's eye, her ghost appears amidst the sheets and blankets, her small head cradled by pillows pressed against the headboard, her deep-set eyes wearily gazing at me from the other side.

Are you at peace, Cassandra? I whisper. I saw how you suffered in the end.

We all did, a voice behind me echoes.

Turning I see ten residents of the ward gathered behind me, those same who a month before had gathered around her bed and heard with me her final words. They are even more changed than I.

Shakespeare stopped quoting himself and no longer answers to Will. Marie Antoinette, she of the perpetual pout and nose in the air, seems another, happier person altogether. Cleopatra and Kublai Khan are much the same as the first two, I hardly know them anymore. A few more weeks will tell the tale. If this continues for much longer, I will likely recommend most of them for release back into the world prior to my resignation taking effect.

I will see you on the other side, doc. I still don't understand my emotional response to those words save that I want to believe in something better than this sorry, mad world. But I embraced the scientific method as my religion, biology as my faith, and education as both hope and prayer long ago.

What exactly did Cassandra believe? She quoted both the Bible and Shakespeare with equal ease. She knew world history well enough to quibble on points that I would have to look up later.

She told me stories of the courts of Nimrod and Cyrus the Great, supped at the table of King Dionysius the night he surrendered his throne to Damocles and suspended a sharp sword above his head with a single strand of his own hair.

She stood at Alexander’s bedside as he lay dying, poisoned by his lover Roxanne, and threw rotten vegetables with other jeering groundlings at King Richard the ‘turd’ during the play’s inaugural performance at the Globe.

She spoke of the sage judgment of Thamus when she attended the court of the great Pharoah, sometimes in the regal finery of a queen, at others a child perched like a captive ape on a golden leash. But in the end, she was simply an old woman with posture stooped and hair whitened by age, not unlike the wizened figure who lay dying in the bed before me not thirty days past.

Eyes sparkling with tears, she had whispered, I can still see the glow on ‘is godly brow as ‘e judged the deeds of lesser gods and mortals, the world yet young and innocent in those lost days. How I long to return to ‘is courts and ne'er leave them again. But no matter how many times I visit I always waken ‘ere in this cold and soulless 'ell.

Did you ever visit the court of King Solomon the wise, I asked in response.

Her mouth turned downward and she answered Solomon, wise? Pah!

The Pharoah was Thamus the Wise millennia 'fore King David spied Bathsheba bathing and did wickedly ply ‘er. David always loved Bathsheba best and favored ‘er son Solomon though ‘e ‘ad many other.

They say old Solomon ‘ad seven ‘undred wives and three ‘undred concubines. I ask you now, where's the wisdom in that? Where's the justice? That encapsulates this fallen world in a nutshell. Powerful and unaccountable men tellin' the rest of us poor schmoes how to live our lives and then doing whatever the 'ell they want!

But grandiose delusions never killed anyone. And make no mistake, our precious Cassandra was dying, not from rare illness nor cancer, but a diagnosis that the medical profession stopped using more than a century ago, Nostalgia, a sometimes-fatal form of homesickness.

But her loss of home was the nation where she was born in the mid-fifties and no longer recognized, so different it had become since her childhood. You might even say she was not nostalgic for a place but rather a state of mind lost in adulthood - her youthful innocence.

Still standing before her empty bed, her fellow madmen and women gather once more around it, and we take one another's hands just as we did that last day when she was still with us. Impossibly, this sharpens my memory of the causative event.

I remember her opening her eyes to gaze at me sadly before asking for water. Gingerly I had held her head up and placed the glass to her lips and she drank a little before sinking back into the pillows, the memory returning so forcefully that I feel the hairs upon my arms rise up in terror.

When I was a child I believed and it was counted to me as righteousness, her memory murmurs sadly. We still had heroes in those days, people who believed in something greater than themselves.

But the people lifted hands in supplication unto the everlasting Father, saying 'Make us a King to judge us like all other nations,' and ruthless men wrested the keys to the kingdom in answer to their prayers. They ‘ave slain the prophets, torn down the altars of God, desolated the ‘igh places of the kingdom in our name.

And across the impossible distance now separating us she gazes at me from the other side and calls out Cry, Trojans, Cry! Lend me ten thousand eyes, And I will fill them with prophetic tears.

I warned thee all! she weakly shouts anew, her eyes wide and face twisted by indignation and grief. I rent the ‘air upon my ancient ‘ead and beat my breasts with guileless fury. But you ne’er listened, her voice trailing off to a whimper, None of you e’er listened.

And then she cried out as if in the throes of vision, I was there, she hoarsely howled, two score and five years ago I was there I tell you, but no one believes me. I saw the mighty towers fall and felt the earth shake in its terror, tombs opening and the dead raised appearing to many.

What do you mean? I had asked in horror. But today I simply weep.

Gazing piteously at me her words spilled forth in a torrent - I was there, high in the spire when the enemy smote the tower in the north and we felt the heat of its killin' flames and choked on its noxious fumes. But in our terror, a reassuring voice cried out - 'Rise up, friends, and climb to the top where the air is clear.' A second voice contradicted the first, commanding 'Do not climb, for that way lies death. Follow me downward brothers and sisters, for narrow is the way which leadeth unto life.’

And we knew not whether to climb or descend, and many were the numbers who climbed while a bare ‘andful of us descended into the nether regions below. When the enemy then attacked our tower those who climbed were trapped above while we continued to brave the descent below.

Two thousand steps through smoke and ash we took, the sands in the 'ourglass winding slowly down till we ran into the light and in terror beheld the tower we had escaped crash shortly after to the earth and minutes later its sister, their smoke twining into the sky like Leviathan of old and blackening the sun, the ash of their ruin falling upon us in 'eaps as we ran.

Her ghost whispering simply, I was there, she turned her head away and began to weep. Standing, I had gently touched her shoulder.

The twin towers? You were there? I asked her softly. But she only nodded without speaking and continued to quietly weep. Cassandra?

In our collective memory, Marie took Cassandra's left hand with her right and Shakespeare's with her left, and I knew instinctively that he reached for Cleopatra's, a tiny miracle extended with it, one by one around the bed till Kublai Khan took mine and I reached for Cassandra’s to close the circle.

And peace descended upon us all, the mad and the sane together.

Time did not stop but for a tenuous moment I did, the discontinuity of the experience euphoric and in the same moment deeply distressing, cognizance of self-briefly subsumed by 'we.' Even though our hands remained connected for only a few moments, something lasting and profound happened when I touched Cassandra's hand, multiplying a hundred-fold as the connection sped around the group.

(1)

From the corner of my eye I saw the tears spilling over Marie’s eyelids, her madness welling in my chest as if it were my own, and I found my eyes turning helplessly toward hers with an emotion that was almost love. And there we stood till Cassandra whispered to us all, I will see you on the other side. But will you see me?

Though Cassandra's suffering and death appears to have awakened and returned several patients to their wits, for me it had the opposite effect. I now see the world through her embittered lenses and recognize that those in charge of it are far more mad than she. Perhaps one day I too will return to St. Agnes as a patient and die of the illness that killed Cassandra, Once upon a time when I was still good.

Who am I to say what is madness and what is sanity or to judge over anyone at all?

Author's notes:

My tale includes a quote from Shakespeare's play Troilus and Cressida, as well as snippets from the Bible.

(1) Quote from my unfinished novel Once Upon a Time When I was Still Good.