From the article archive
World A Week: Dementia Drearium; Pt. Two
I had been confined to the Sanger Home for the Mentally Unfit due to two factors. The first was that I was found laying by a street(a typical aftermath of versing out is versing in at a semi-random location.) And my notebook, of which this is a sample, spoke of crossing the multiverse, of working miracles, casting spells, and other wondrous things. My pampered puddy-tat of a doctor did not believe in wonder. He did believe in Research Subjects.
It took me a fatally long time to decide to break out of the dreary room I was held in. The tyranny of manners can kick in at strange times facilitated by the expectation of my 'good' behavior. But eventually, I began busily using an unscrewed chair leg as a lever to pry the bars off the window when my keepers came back. So close, if only I had started sooner.
They were appalled and impressed. So they put me in an 'inescapable' strait jacket, doped me full of a chancy chemical cocktail that did strange things to my thoughts. It was as if I was standing outside myself at times, and could only watch. They locked me in a barrack room with a dozen other unfortunates. I was the only one so confined, but the others knew better than to help me.
Time, weeks, passed and I finally heard my doctor had taken a summer cruise to Europe. He would deal with me when he got back.
It was not as bad as all that. Days sometimes went by with only a minute of true awareness and conscious choice. I drifted and mentally frayed at the edges a bit in the process.
In a way, this was a vacation from responsibility. It was an excuse to have a month long pity party. So yes, I needed to relax, but in other ways it was truly demonic. The Light wants integration, wholeness, soundness of mind, and I was starting to crack apart just a little bit.
Noting this I began to do little things to pull myself back from the brink. I've always hated crunches, but there are few exercises you can do in a straight jacket while laying down. Soon pumping legs and half jumping jacks(minus the arms) were supplemented by bending over and touching the floor with my head.
This entertained and alternately freaked out the others, and so Authority came down to put a stop to it. But they could not stop me from the isometric exercises. I laughed the day I ripped the strait jacket with my expanding muscles. Unfortunately a nurse was there in the barracks room, and they got me another jacket which they reinforced.
The exercise helped clear the mind of drugs since I sweated the poisens out of my system(which got me a most uncomplimentary nickname, but you can't have everything.) And to my relief, I started sleeping more than an hour at a time. Probably one of the best things to do for the truly insane is a long dose of sleep; on the other hand, sleep deprivation is an effective method of inducing madness. The varying drugs they gave us often forbad sleep.
I tried to protect the others as I could, but little could be done especially since I was temporarily so weak of mind myself. Still logic puzzles to enforce rationality, prayer to soothe the heart, and role-playing games to encourage healthy dreams and exorcise dark thoughts had some good effect.
It was winter, and I found that my doctor had gone straight from the boat and been transferred to a higher post as a director elsewhere. My request for information made them aware that I was not being 'doctored'. It occasioned quite a flurry, and proved the wisdom of keeping one's mouth shut.
My new doctor was much like the old one except a bit younger and more nakedly ambitious.
He came to similar conclusions helped along, I am sure, by a phone call to the first doctor for advice.(Never think for yourself when you can swallow pre-digested pablum.)
So we talked, and he tried different drug therapies, and he denied that I had any items brought with me. (The paperwork was lost, or someone out there liked my plasma cannon as a toy for his kid. Luckily, the tech bias was low enough that the safety mechanism, a rather intricate device with an AI shard, would not function in this world.) I got irritable as the local scholars on whatever Earth or alien place is reading this could well understand. And what with the conditions, I was not at my best by any means.
So he prescribed new and heavier drugs, and I fell back into stupor. Mad thoughts swam out of my heart as I lay there moaning occasionally. I tried to escape, and so they punished me by putting me in solitary. That did not bother me as the constant screams of the inmates had been worse. In fact, in there I started to pray in earnest. Despite the drugs, my mind gradually cleared enough that I could resume my exercise.
So when they came to release me, I did a wheel kick, followed by a crescent kick, and then led them on a merry chase through the hospital. I stopped to read a paper by the front door in shock. I had never really intended to escape; by now I was socialized to living here.
"A Day That Will Live in Infamy." The headline read. They took me back in with some sympathy in this reminder of our collectiveness, and tossed me back into my briar patch. The patch was solitary, of course, which had been my goal for my "escape". Meanwhile, outside, the Allies defended civilization and Christian values against monstrous barbarism.
Time passed, and a new doctor came in. He was a bluff, and chatty fellow with a new treatment that would set me right in no time.
Electro-shock therapy. I fought it with the intensity of a madman, and the skills I had picked up on dozens of worlds. If a detachment of police cadets had not been conducting a tour that day, and if my chains and jacket had ripped more fully, I would have won free that day.
I still remember with satisfaction, the sight of a wide hallway almost covered in white jackets.
"That's one way to escape." I said smirking. "Flatten all the keepers." Then the boys in blue arrived, and even then it took me a while to go down. Terror can do that to you.
I woke with electrodes at my temples, and surrounded by furious and bruised attendants. The shock went on for some time, and when I was dumped back into the cell, all the gain I had achieved by my prayers over the drugs, and over the rage was gone. The 'therapy' took nothing ill, and only robbed me of my strength. Successive shocks finished the procedure. And I was the test boy to be sure; the attendants never forgot the beating I had handed them.
Finally, with drugs and shock, I went over the brink. Raving, cold, murderous are only words until you live them. The crew let me be; my doctor stopped treating me after I nearly cut his throat with a glass shard I punched out of a supposedly unbreakable window. They just doped my food very heavily, and kept me locked up in solitary 24/7 which I have to admit was wise of them.
Time does not heal all wounds, but it is a remarkable physician. Certainly better than any of the learned quacks I had met here. Time passed, and eventually, I grew bored and inquisitive. Bored of my self-pity, and vindictive dreams of vengeance, and the whole thing, I was ready for something different.
It occurred to me that if I really, really tried I could suicide out of here into another world. But, there was a little uncertainty in my mind if I was really a verser, and down deep, I knew that I was not fit to be let out of this hole.
So, I started asking the guards questions. Russia had just exploded a nuclear bomb, and one of the guards was a political type who tried to convince me of the virtues of Marxism. I got him to get me healthy, undrugged food produced by a local farmer, one of the proletariat. And I excerised my mind by asking him questions which forced him to slowly confront the reality of what he supported. Eventually, I think he became a famous neoconservative writer after his conversion to anti-communism. But in that day, he was my outside world.
I began praying and exercising again. It was different; I was more patient and relaxed about the whole thing.
Then he told me a horror story about an insane inmate back in the early forties. It was me he talked about. Then he said I supposedly died, and haunted the place. In a way that was true.
Taking advantage of the Sixties' liberalization, I applied for permission to leave. They studied me, and said that I could not be the prisoner of 1938 since I was not old enough. Well, a verser is effectively immortal; we do not age.
I lost my temper, but this time I held onto my sanity. The trips through the lands of madness had helped me. It is not a voyage, I recommend to anyone, but like almost everything it had its good side. It defused some deep-seated issues buried in my soul. I was calmer, and saner than I had ever been.
Due to my protestations, they brought the first doctor back. He was old, and worn, and up for a Nobel Prize. And with frightened eyes, he denied that he knew me. I understood that I was a threat to everything he had committed his life too. I was an inconvenient fact, a wonder, an obstacle on his road to glory, and a man instead of a rodent.
"Remember what my notebook said about meeting gods and God? Well, me lad, they are real, and unlike me, you are not immortal. I'd spend some time getting ready." I spun and walked away disapointed and disgusted.
They put me back in company in a room, and my crime was to claim to be the Prisoner of '38. I tried to lie, but all the solitary and the prayers had burned away the skills needed for a good face. I told the truth by instinct now.
Group therapy was kind of amusing, and Primal Scream therapy was just fun. The drugs got more subtle. And I was able to block any attempt to get me under the shock again. But they just would not listen. A certain irrationality seemed to have invaded the culture. My former Marxist, former attendant, and still friend had been a symptom of this. You could not reason your way out of anything, because reason was fundamentally mistrusted.
Anger grew again in me, and I fought it with my old standby's but not all that enthusiastically. It, anger, gave me something to do. Still, I had times where I lived in Heaven. The proper attitude can make of a horror show a joy. And the new building built in the early seventies was very nice.
So, I was becoming locked in by habit. I was living here, so I must continue living here, world without end, amen. This fed a quiet depression which went to fuel a slow fire of anger.
And then things changed. A man, not a male, but a real proud guy who was living life like he wanted to live it walked in my room. He had on a military uniform, and he saw me, and then disapointed studied my face.
"Sorry, sir, wrong information." He nodded with genuine courtesy, and prepared to leave. I begged him with my tone to stay, and offered to help. Out of kindness, he did so.
"I'm looking for a Mr. Tadeusz. This was his property." He held up a PDA, my PDA, and I checked my verser sense for my stuff, and it was mine. I practically cackled for joy. There was other scriff-touched stuff out there, but I ignored it focusing on this one thing, this PDA.
"But he is an old man. Not really sure how old, fifties or seventies. We want to ask him some questions about this very interesting device."
I asked timidly if I could see it, and he took in my extremely inoffensive manner, and he let me touch it. So I brought up a screen, loaded a program, and played full color (yes my PDA is a little better than what I could get at home. You ought to see my watch.)Pac-man for the first time in ages.
"How? It took the research guys a month to figure that out."
I smiled cryptically, and shook my head.
"Two conditions, Major Morton. I want to be released from all confinement, and I want a gun."
He took a step back, and said with some promise in his voice that he would see what he could see. It was suddenly too much; others had promised me in this nasty world, and others had failed.
I lashed out in a pointed finger jab at his solar plexus that folded him like a bulletin, and his gun was in my hand and pointed at his skull.
"Go ahead, kill me; you're a Russky spy aren't you. Killed the old man, and waited for me, didn't you?"
I paused for a long moment wondering what to do. My anger had betrayed me.
"Two more conditions. I want a Big Mac, and you can take me to headquarters, your hq." Then I let him go, and hopped out of bed. The naked longing in my voice for a McDonald's confused him. We left the room, and soon enough, I came upon my latest doctor.
Not even wanting to stop myself, I pointed the gun at this somewhat more solid, but still pretty flaky incarnation of my torturers.
"I should kill you, since 1938 you have held me prisoner." But I did not shout the words, I simply whispered them and the doctor never heard me. I put the gun up. The crowd parted before me, and I was at last sane enough to walk out of there.
Major Morton stared at me in surprise. I could see him trying to fit me into a logical pattern with his keen mind, and he was plainly at sea.
"I'm a verser, Major." I said as we walked out the door of my hell.
"Indeed he is." I heard a voice from the lobby behind me. I turned, and a massive man stood from his chair with tattoos covering rippling muscles. His ample duffle bags were filled with suspiciously gun-like shapes.
"I just arrived here. And I sensed one of us, and thought I would drop in for a visit. What are you doing here?"
"Just passing through. Look, guy, the Major has a problem. The Evil Empire is trying to strangle goodness and apple pie. You think we could help him?"
"Hey wait a minute. I still do not know you are not a Russian spy." The Major interjected. He had been quite nervously eyeing my friend. I was one thing with my muscles atrophied, and decked out in my hospital gown, but this guy looked like an advertisement for SOF magazine.
David laughed.
"Him, the Hammer of Tyrants? Ha, ha, ha, you gotta be joking."
Tadeusz
It took me a fatally long time to decide to break out of the dreary room I was held in. The tyranny of manners can kick in at strange times facilitated by the expectation of my 'good' behavior. But eventually, I began busily using an unscrewed chair leg as a lever to pry the bars off the window when my keepers came back. So close, if only I had started sooner.
They were appalled and impressed. So they put me in an 'inescapable' strait jacket, doped me full of a chancy chemical cocktail that did strange things to my thoughts. It was as if I was standing outside myself at times, and could only watch. They locked me in a barrack room with a dozen other unfortunates. I was the only one so confined, but the others knew better than to help me.
Time, weeks, passed and I finally heard my doctor had taken a summer cruise to Europe. He would deal with me when he got back.
It was not as bad as all that. Days sometimes went by with only a minute of true awareness and conscious choice. I drifted and mentally frayed at the edges a bit in the process.
In a way, this was a vacation from responsibility. It was an excuse to have a month long pity party. So yes, I needed to relax, but in other ways it was truly demonic. The Light wants integration, wholeness, soundness of mind, and I was starting to crack apart just a little bit.
Noting this I began to do little things to pull myself back from the brink. I've always hated crunches, but there are few exercises you can do in a straight jacket while laying down. Soon pumping legs and half jumping jacks(minus the arms) were supplemented by bending over and touching the floor with my head.
This entertained and alternately freaked out the others, and so Authority came down to put a stop to it. But they could not stop me from the isometric exercises. I laughed the day I ripped the strait jacket with my expanding muscles. Unfortunately a nurse was there in the barracks room, and they got me another jacket which they reinforced.
The exercise helped clear the mind of drugs since I sweated the poisens out of my system(which got me a most uncomplimentary nickname, but you can't have everything.) And to my relief, I started sleeping more than an hour at a time. Probably one of the best things to do for the truly insane is a long dose of sleep; on the other hand, sleep deprivation is an effective method of inducing madness. The varying drugs they gave us often forbad sleep.
I tried to protect the others as I could, but little could be done especially since I was temporarily so weak of mind myself. Still logic puzzles to enforce rationality, prayer to soothe the heart, and role-playing games to encourage healthy dreams and exorcise dark thoughts had some good effect.
It was winter, and I found that my doctor had gone straight from the boat and been transferred to a higher post as a director elsewhere. My request for information made them aware that I was not being 'doctored'. It occasioned quite a flurry, and proved the wisdom of keeping one's mouth shut.
My new doctor was much like the old one except a bit younger and more nakedly ambitious.
He came to similar conclusions helped along, I am sure, by a phone call to the first doctor for advice.(Never think for yourself when you can swallow pre-digested pablum.)
So we talked, and he tried different drug therapies, and he denied that I had any items brought with me. (The paperwork was lost, or someone out there liked my plasma cannon as a toy for his kid. Luckily, the tech bias was low enough that the safety mechanism, a rather intricate device with an AI shard, would not function in this world.) I got irritable as the local scholars on whatever Earth or alien place is reading this could well understand. And what with the conditions, I was not at my best by any means.
So he prescribed new and heavier drugs, and I fell back into stupor. Mad thoughts swam out of my heart as I lay there moaning occasionally. I tried to escape, and so they punished me by putting me in solitary. That did not bother me as the constant screams of the inmates had been worse. In fact, in there I started to pray in earnest. Despite the drugs, my mind gradually cleared enough that I could resume my exercise.
So when they came to release me, I did a wheel kick, followed by a crescent kick, and then led them on a merry chase through the hospital. I stopped to read a paper by the front door in shock. I had never really intended to escape; by now I was socialized to living here.
"A Day That Will Live in Infamy." The headline read. They took me back in with some sympathy in this reminder of our collectiveness, and tossed me back into my briar patch. The patch was solitary, of course, which had been my goal for my "escape". Meanwhile, outside, the Allies defended civilization and Christian values against monstrous barbarism.
Time passed, and a new doctor came in. He was a bluff, and chatty fellow with a new treatment that would set me right in no time.
Electro-shock therapy. I fought it with the intensity of a madman, and the skills I had picked up on dozens of worlds. If a detachment of police cadets had not been conducting a tour that day, and if my chains and jacket had ripped more fully, I would have won free that day.
I still remember with satisfaction, the sight of a wide hallway almost covered in white jackets.
"That's one way to escape." I said smirking. "Flatten all the keepers." Then the boys in blue arrived, and even then it took me a while to go down. Terror can do that to you.
I woke with electrodes at my temples, and surrounded by furious and bruised attendants. The shock went on for some time, and when I was dumped back into the cell, all the gain I had achieved by my prayers over the drugs, and over the rage was gone. The 'therapy' took nothing ill, and only robbed me of my strength. Successive shocks finished the procedure. And I was the test boy to be sure; the attendants never forgot the beating I had handed them.
Finally, with drugs and shock, I went over the brink. Raving, cold, murderous are only words until you live them. The crew let me be; my doctor stopped treating me after I nearly cut his throat with a glass shard I punched out of a supposedly unbreakable window. They just doped my food very heavily, and kept me locked up in solitary 24/7 which I have to admit was wise of them.
Time does not heal all wounds, but it is a remarkable physician. Certainly better than any of the learned quacks I had met here. Time passed, and eventually, I grew bored and inquisitive. Bored of my self-pity, and vindictive dreams of vengeance, and the whole thing, I was ready for something different.
It occurred to me that if I really, really tried I could suicide out of here into another world. But, there was a little uncertainty in my mind if I was really a verser, and down deep, I knew that I was not fit to be let out of this hole.
So, I started asking the guards questions. Russia had just exploded a nuclear bomb, and one of the guards was a political type who tried to convince me of the virtues of Marxism. I got him to get me healthy, undrugged food produced by a local farmer, one of the proletariat. And I excerised my mind by asking him questions which forced him to slowly confront the reality of what he supported. Eventually, I think he became a famous neoconservative writer after his conversion to anti-communism. But in that day, he was my outside world.
I began praying and exercising again. It was different; I was more patient and relaxed about the whole thing.
Then he told me a horror story about an insane inmate back in the early forties. It was me he talked about. Then he said I supposedly died, and haunted the place. In a way that was true.
Taking advantage of the Sixties' liberalization, I applied for permission to leave. They studied me, and said that I could not be the prisoner of 1938 since I was not old enough. Well, a verser is effectively immortal; we do not age.
I lost my temper, but this time I held onto my sanity. The trips through the lands of madness had helped me. It is not a voyage, I recommend to anyone, but like almost everything it had its good side. It defused some deep-seated issues buried in my soul. I was calmer, and saner than I had ever been.
Due to my protestations, they brought the first doctor back. He was old, and worn, and up for a Nobel Prize. And with frightened eyes, he denied that he knew me. I understood that I was a threat to everything he had committed his life too. I was an inconvenient fact, a wonder, an obstacle on his road to glory, and a man instead of a rodent.
"Remember what my notebook said about meeting gods and God? Well, me lad, they are real, and unlike me, you are not immortal. I'd spend some time getting ready." I spun and walked away disapointed and disgusted.
They put me back in company in a room, and my crime was to claim to be the Prisoner of '38. I tried to lie, but all the solitary and the prayers had burned away the skills needed for a good face. I told the truth by instinct now.
Group therapy was kind of amusing, and Primal Scream therapy was just fun. The drugs got more subtle. And I was able to block any attempt to get me under the shock again. But they just would not listen. A certain irrationality seemed to have invaded the culture. My former Marxist, former attendant, and still friend had been a symptom of this. You could not reason your way out of anything, because reason was fundamentally mistrusted.
Anger grew again in me, and I fought it with my old standby's but not all that enthusiastically. It, anger, gave me something to do. Still, I had times where I lived in Heaven. The proper attitude can make of a horror show a joy. And the new building built in the early seventies was very nice.
So, I was becoming locked in by habit. I was living here, so I must continue living here, world without end, amen. This fed a quiet depression which went to fuel a slow fire of anger.
And then things changed. A man, not a male, but a real proud guy who was living life like he wanted to live it walked in my room. He had on a military uniform, and he saw me, and then disapointed studied my face.
"Sorry, sir, wrong information." He nodded with genuine courtesy, and prepared to leave. I begged him with my tone to stay, and offered to help. Out of kindness, he did so.
"I'm looking for a Mr. Tadeusz. This was his property." He held up a PDA, my PDA, and I checked my verser sense for my stuff, and it was mine. I practically cackled for joy. There was other scriff-touched stuff out there, but I ignored it focusing on this one thing, this PDA.
"But he is an old man. Not really sure how old, fifties or seventies. We want to ask him some questions about this very interesting device."
I asked timidly if I could see it, and he took in my extremely inoffensive manner, and he let me touch it. So I brought up a screen, loaded a program, and played full color (yes my PDA is a little better than what I could get at home. You ought to see my watch.)Pac-man for the first time in ages.
"How? It took the research guys a month to figure that out."
I smiled cryptically, and shook my head.
"Two conditions, Major Morton. I want to be released from all confinement, and I want a gun."
He took a step back, and said with some promise in his voice that he would see what he could see. It was suddenly too much; others had promised me in this nasty world, and others had failed.
I lashed out in a pointed finger jab at his solar plexus that folded him like a bulletin, and his gun was in my hand and pointed at his skull.
"Go ahead, kill me; you're a Russky spy aren't you. Killed the old man, and waited for me, didn't you?"
I paused for a long moment wondering what to do. My anger had betrayed me.
"Two more conditions. I want a Big Mac, and you can take me to headquarters, your hq." Then I let him go, and hopped out of bed. The naked longing in my voice for a McDonald's confused him. We left the room, and soon enough, I came upon my latest doctor.
Not even wanting to stop myself, I pointed the gun at this somewhat more solid, but still pretty flaky incarnation of my torturers.
"I should kill you, since 1938 you have held me prisoner." But I did not shout the words, I simply whispered them and the doctor never heard me. I put the gun up. The crowd parted before me, and I was at last sane enough to walk out of there.
Major Morton stared at me in surprise. I could see him trying to fit me into a logical pattern with his keen mind, and he was plainly at sea.
"I'm a verser, Major." I said as we walked out the door of my hell.
"Indeed he is." I heard a voice from the lobby behind me. I turned, and a massive man stood from his chair with tattoos covering rippling muscles. His ample duffle bags were filled with suspiciously gun-like shapes.
"I just arrived here. And I sensed one of us, and thought I would drop in for a visit. What are you doing here?"
"Just passing through. Look, guy, the Major has a problem. The Evil Empire is trying to strangle goodness and apple pie. You think we could help him?"
"Hey wait a minute. I still do not know you are not a Russian spy." The Major interjected. He had been quite nervously eyeing my friend. I was one thing with my muscles atrophied, and decked out in my hospital gown, but this guy looked like an advertisement for SOF magazine.
David laughed.
"Him, the Hammer of Tyrants? Ha, ha, ha, you gotta be joking."
Tadeusz
Recovered from the Gaming Outpost database backup. Original wording is preserved; damaged punctuation and presentation markup have been repaired. Historical links without a local match point to the Internet Archive.