CZ Studio and Radio Verte presents The Wild Wind by Corey Zimmerman.
Chapter 5
The Wild Wind
On a cold dark night, I could see a dim light reflecting from the windows of the Bronson building.
The hobos had spared no time finding shelter through a broken window.
I sat straight up from my chilled mattress with one thought.
The pharmacy.
First thing in the morning, after watching the hobos leave in search of beans and whiskey,
I was relieved to find the pharmacy undiscovered and fully stocked.
I picked up a bottle, shook it, and the beloved rattlesnake charmed my ears and turned my stomach,
sending me running for the hall where I crapped on the floor.
I wiped with a discarded gown.
I pilfered and filled an old wheelbarrow I had found upside down in the weeds with red ones and blues, ovals, and rounds.
Before heading back to the farmhouse, I found their squat in the library.
I went wild with fury, drunkards pissing all over Dickinson, Wolf, Whitman, Poe, Shelley Plath and Emerson, Hess and Thurow,
filthy rats chewing up the reflections of the greatest minds of mankind.
Plato, Aristotle, and my beloved Homer. It was no simple task at the age of 82,
emptying a library, but two reds and a blue did the trick.
I was then shocked to find Dr. Zola's office intact, his personal museum upon a wall,
a display of chains, cuffs, and straight jackets, a eutica crib, all sorts of medieval devices,
the file cabinet, no task for a pry bar, I discovered was filled with patient files and case notes.
There was a time, case notes, official records of the names and other personal details of the insane,
were guarded so privately most nurses were not allowed to lay eyes upon them.
An example of such might read, he does not know where he is, however, that he might have been brought here to be killed.
After the closing of the hilltop on June 28, 1982, 82 years and 8 days after the day of my birth,
I took possession of those case notes and files, abandoned journals, and various other parcels,
postcards, photos, and diaries, and dumped them into the wheelbarrow.
I hoarded the stationery and the doctor's typewriter I very much needed if I were to be what you, Sam, had raised me to be, a writer.
Writing, the rare pleasure of painful examination of humanity, history, one's self and one's own past,
the suicide of thoughts, daydreams, and night terrors, my withering eye looking down upon those worms slithering through all I ever knew.
Slithering through the 16th century alphabet, through 36,000 plus font families, through 171,476 hazy shriveled up words,
barely dripping from the tongue in time before they dry, leaving one speechless and mute,
fingers jammed and cramped, curling up like claws, nodding, crippled, kinked, and rusted.
Crystallized knuckles, osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, which make the pushing of keys of thought a living hell,
though one worth enduring, as the average person can remember but seven spoken words.
Before a majestic view of lost wonderment, my ears rang with every click, click, click of the typewriter keys,
which took me back in time, fields of time. With a seed, an idiosperm, pericap, germ, and tipcap,
I grew a stalk with leaves and ears of corn, wrapped closely in husks with hundreds of filaments called silk protruding from the top of each ear,
a stalk upon which vines grew toward a heaven which may or may not exist.
On those clean white sheets, perished souls laid in wobbly type, telling a story of shadows mistaken for crows.
Born into my world, or rather, I into theirs, a child coloring between the lines, offering color to an otherwise institution gray.
Story, an account of past events in someone's life or in the evolution of something or another.
An account of real or imaginary people and events, unpredictable tales, unpredictable moods, arcs, plots, and a withdrawn child,
aloft, imprisoned with a glorious universal myth, lost notably to time.
Incorrigible, a person or their tendencies unable to be corrected, improved, or reformed.
Endless, long drawn out, never ending, worn out, need, the keys, the words, the mind, oh time.
Schizophrenia, a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behavior,
leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions, and theories, and false beliefs.
Faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships,
drowning in fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmentation.
My own case note might have revealed what an unfortunate little woman I was, sweet and pleasant,
with fine traits, though prone to erratic, unpredictable, and emotional actions.
My writing exemplifying capricious, whimsical thoughts.
Number 3274.
This man's actions and reasoning were so lucid that I was writing his discharge,
when he told me that he had something to tell me before going out.
What is it, I asked, and he answered.
Jesus Christ cut my nuts out last Monday, and it was not until Tuesday morning that I found out.
He was positive his testicles had been removed.
When I made him examine himself, he laughed and said that surprise.
Well, I made a mistake. I told a lie, but I did not mean it. I take it all back.
Sure enough, my nuts are there.
Then he goes on to speak of Jesus Christ, speaks he knows him well, has often seen him,
that sometimes he appears under the shape of a man, at other times that of a child, etc.
This man is possibly a masturbator.
Number 1012.
Her face is badly marked by smallpox and is very ragged.
She imagines that an angel is in her.
Then she imagines herself persecuted by hoodoos, who have placed snakes in her body and thereby injure her.
Then she will jump up, run about with her hands raised to heaven, howl, beat her feet against the floor, etc.
She makes night hideous by her shrieks and cries,
tears her clothes to pieces and strips herself naked.
In a word, she is a complete religious maniac.
Number 4712.
He claims he was in the war, but is unable to give an account of the date of the war
and knows not if he was in the confederate or the federal army, nor if the war took place five or fifty years ago.
Number 7759.
This boy is crippled and walks with a crutch.
He has been insane from childhood.
He is dangerous to his relatives, has been once arrested in charge with attempting to commit rape.
Number 6846.
Says she is hungry.
Something is gnawing at her insides.
Wants to eat at all times and yet says someone wants to poison her.
Attempts to eat the chair she sits in.
Number 8565.
Says his name is Duke.
I suspect syphilitic affection of the brain.
Number 1321.
Index finger of left hand amputated at the first joint.
Number 9711.
She prefers to be naked.
In no time at all, teens came flocking to the Bronson building like geese.
Not to graze and roost, but to chug and crush beer cans under their sneakers.
Spray painting dicks in the wall which read, fuck you.
Fuck you to who I thought.
I assumed they were screaming fuck you right back into their own faces.
Fighting, breaking glass and noses.
Noses bled upon the checkered floor tiles.
Rat shit in glass shards.
They came in hordes stumbling over one another.
Howling, declawed beasts in search of howling clawed beasts.
Shadowy figures crying in the night.
In the elusive electrotherapy room.
400 plus volts.
Perhaps they might find a truth that is better left be.
They came in search of greater fright than living in a world of constant state of frozen war.
They came in search of a bellow so deep it turned the boughs.
Yet so ear piercing it split the mind.
Yet on the hilltop they found only silence.
As I followed them in the night, I watched as they tripped over their own sneakers.
Arms around each other like brothers.
A quest into peace and quiet.
Dreadful.
Stalked by their own shadows.
Chased by their own footprints.
The elms loomed above, whispering.
Desperate agility.
Smoothly flowing joints.
Blood pumping through mighty limbs.
Unclogged arteries.
Youngsters who in time will enrich the Black River Valley earth.
This youth is but sand through nimble fingers.
Out for cheap thrills.
Flirting with the mere concept of death.
The spirit realms of which they trampled.
In search of the bookbinder's grave.
Shivering young gals and boys laughter.
Masking the terror of midnight.
Young gals dragging boys off begging.
Tommy please.
I don't want to be here.
Come on let's go.
I'm leaving with or without you.
Tommy and his gal disappeared in their sneakers down the bluff.
Laughter echoing through the ravine.
Still the broken bottles piled up.
The fuck yous and the dicks.
And the Tommy and the Jim.
Johnny.
Hank.
Henry.
And Ben was here.
In the sweeter and more tender.
I love Tommy.
Jim.
Johnny.
Hank.
And Henry.
In the bins piled up.
Loud moans of pleasure piled up.
Screams of anger and shrieks of terror.
And fierce thrusting of stone through glass.
Shards piled up.
The seizing of power and expressions akin to the tearing of a mental straightjacket to shards.
All piled up.
Wild hearts howling at the moon.
The hilltop.
The asylum.
Continued to attract madness at will.
No wrangling.
No trains.
No depot.
No training.
No intake nurse.
Squat on her stool.
No gown.
No slipper.
No patient.
No bed assigned.
No question of reasoning.
No readjustment of medication.
The asylum.
A place of refuge.
Re-emerged from the muck.
A sign of the times.
A folk refuge for the mad.
Anguished.
The pissed off.
The pent up.
The horny.
Babies were made.
And bottles were broken.
Well beyond the limits of reasoning and sanity.
I long wondered over the decades who were the real kooks.
And now over my typewriter I knew.
It was the great war that once filled these halls.
It was merely life itself.
A battlefield spread round and round this ball of clay.
Leaving nothing but shards shattered across the halls of the Bronson building.
Shattered hearts.
Shattered minds.
Shattered windows.
Shattered words for a shattered world.
Asylum.
A place of retreat and security.
An institution offering shelter and support to people who are mentally ill.
Shards.
Broken words.
Four letter words.
F-U-C-K.
Waged against the self.
S-E-L-F.
In time I came to pity the teens.
Listening with great delight as they howled at the moon.
An old miner's flashlight lit up a black book emblazoned in a hellish red old English font upon its cover.
A dozen or so young men and women whose flannels, t-shirts, and worn out Levi's
expressed what their blank faces failed as they grew silent amongst the haunting drone crackling through radio speakers somewhere off to the side.
They struggled to light the wicks of candles with the same worn out zippos used to light Marlboros in the Vietnam War.
Newspaper twigs and damp branches aglow.
The cloaked woman, black book to her breast with an attitude of offering, bowed and said,
Come, Almighty Lord of Darkness, and look favorably on this sacrifice which we have prepared in thy name.
Ave Satanus. Ave Satanus.
Everyone held out a particular object to their own breast as she continued.
Come, Almighty Lord of Darkness, and look favorably on this sacrifice which we have prepared in thy name.
With the gesture of a nod, the dozen or so riffraff placed on the ground before them. Ceramic dogs, jewelry, wedding rings, a tambourine, photos, letters, medication bottles, clothing,
sheets of paper rolled up in glass bottles.
And the flashlight grazed my face as I hid in the corner, clutching the cross I never wore, made of heavy metal which dangled invisibly around my neck.
Therefore, O mighty and terrible Lord of Darkness, she went on and on, the book disappearing within her cloak.
The flashlight sat aside as the circle shouted, Ave Satanus. Ave Satanus.
She held out her hands and turned her palms down as someone dumped an old military duffel bag with Jones written on the side.
Hammers, knives, a bat, pry bars, and mallets crashing to the floor, and each person grabbed one before circling again about the flame.
Ave Satanus. The cloaked woman shouted with her head toward the heavens before bowing toward hell.
In a sudden and disturbing uproar of chaotic violence, the objects before them were smashed with cathartic screams and wailing as rodents scurried,
and bats flew from the attic's peak, hell smashed between steel and checkered tile.
I covered my ears until the dozen or so fell calm, falling to their knees into a silent trance,
leaving only the haunted drone from the radio's crackling speakers, which echoed down the halls before being swallowed by the night.
What shards remained were scattered in the fire, shadows dancing wildly in the whiskey-fueled blaze licking the ceiling, blackened with soot by the devil's tongue.
Old Scratch. Not a word was spoken as the bottle was passed around.
I continued to watch, unseen, as death turned to ash in a world as confusing as theirs.
Beautiful Hoodoo.
Homer had taught me of Moira, an impersonal force that was the fount of creation, as in Egypt and for that matter India, a paradoxical manifestation of the One.
Theos and Damien. Damien and Theos. Two make one. Gods and demons. Two make one.
He taught me all men have destructive properties, but that there was no single principle of evil, because one in one equals one.
That all things are beautiful, good, and right. But man, on the other hand, would deem some things wrong and some things right.
Chaos. Plato laboring mightily to explain two worlds, one which the Creator himself was possessed of an erratic chaos, and the other, chaos itself bringing disorder and evil into the world upon its own will.
The Epicurean paradox. Either God wants to abolish evil and cannot, or he can but does not want to. If he wants to but cannot, he is impotent. If he can but does not want to, he is wicked.
After gathering up stacks of case notes and files, making a large pile of them on the lawn, I soaked them in kerosene and lit a match, knowing no one would ever lay eyes upon their mythology again.
Dignity lit up the sky, the stars blinded by the fury of the forgotten. My name is nobody.