Lightninghead

All it takes is a stormy sky, and there I am dreaming of lightning again.

Lightning, in perfect forking streaks, striking and burning the inside of the back of my head like a diamond hammer scraping lines into stained glass. In truth, I only really remember the very last time, all those many previous occasions have long dispersed from my mind, like wisps of the clouds floating here and there up above, slowly joining the dance of wind atoms. Blown to blessed smithereens.

The lightning was administered by a cold, smiling faced doctor named White, a first rate medical practitioner, make no mistake. I remember how he'd tower above me, his head upside down in my field of vision as well as in my estimation of his morals at that moment of excruciating pain. Bushy white eyebrows sat comfortingly under those thickly magnified eyes, shiny scalp of bald spot playing the role of cleanly shaved chin amidst a professorial head of beard. I can see him just as if it was now; looking down at me as I lay snugly strapped to his chair. As if he'd just given me a first rate haircut.

“That's it. You're done for now Robert.”

He exhaled the words like claps for his own perfect record, which I would have answered accordingly had I not been so dazed. At this point I barely recognised the name as being that which my mother and father had given me. Probing thoughts of my parents drew blanks, as did all lines of thought which aimed misfiring bullets anywhere outside of my immediate physical circumstances. The bright lights, the smug doctor, the straps, the lightning pain that had only just ceased to rattle my brain.

“You can go back to your room now. When you're ready, I want you to think about what you did again. Try to put it into your new perspective. You remember?”

Remembering made my synapses bleed, but I somehow managed to give him a nod as they carted me out. His eyes looked like melting ice cubes behind those glasses. Now that I think about it, that was probably just my tears.

It took me longer than the time available to recall anything significant. Looking out the window of my little white room, I did glimpse some familiar looking cloud formations. It may sound strange, but those shapes were the only things that ticked any boxes inside my head. One looked like a bird in flight, gracefully draping itself almost from horizon to horizon with its cotton wool spread. Suffice to say, these things stick in the mind, and at that point in time, still with a smothering haze all aflutter about the inside of my skull, the seeing of that cloud pricked something deep down in the cavern of my restless soul. It was black and unwashed, something definitely worth forgetting, yet still sleepy and shapeless, quite unlike the pretty curves of that sky.

I pondered this, of the remains of the morning, once I had managed to raise myself from an old fashioned deep-sea-diving-sleep upon my devilishly hard top bed. My back felt as straight as planks, at least, but before I had done anything much except scratch my head and yawn and stare out again at those strangely familiar clouds, there they were to take me back to see the old vaguely familiar doctor. I wasn't particularly enthusiastic, as you can imagine, since I have already mentioned him as being smug and upside down from the view of one reclining in his special seat.

“Come on Robert,” they said.

“Say there guys...” I greeted them, finding myself leading on to a whole host of unexpected questions. I hadn't planned to utter a word, but a shudder of earnest confusion began dancing itself uncontrollably all about my plank straight frame, like a storm tossing my splintered sides.

“What I am doing here? What should I remember? What have I done? Give us a hint, guys, go on, I don't want to play the fool with the smug old doctor...”

And the sallow looking fellows seemed rather to perk up all of a sudden.

“Now, now, Robert, we wouldn't want to spoil the surprise, you just come with us and have a recuperative bite to eat. Maybe get a spot of exercise after that. Who said anything about rushing off to see the old man?”

They chuckled horribly, like I was some kind of idiot child. I had to follow them in shame, too, just like an idiot child, with feet dragging and slowing me down even though it was my very own shameless brain pulling each reluctant toe from one step to the next. Pathetic, but what choice did I have?

So I ate the flavourless brecky they gave me, and sat amongst the freaks and the mad men in the canteen who I won't even attempt to describe quite simply because I made it my business to ignore and blank face each and every sorry one of them. The one thing I couldn't help noticing was the little white Tupperware pill boxes they all handled with great care, like live grenades about to explode and paint the room with white dust. They'd all placed them very carefully beside their plates, opening them and counting them, clearly fixated on the counting as if they were their very last pennies. I was afraid that I too might be given some little Tupperware pill box of my own, afraid that this place of freaks and mad men was my home. Above all else I did not wish this to be the case, and so I tried desperately hard to remember.

The more I tried the more it felt like trying to piss nails, but I kept at it, brute force getting me nowhere, until my penis began to sting and hurt, quite inexplicably so given that it was my brain doing all the pushing, and it was blessed memories that wouldn't trickle through. I sweated and scrunched my eyes, but all I could see was that funny looking bird shaped cloud formation.

Soon my stomach began to reject the half cooked breakfast with all the exertions I was putting myself through, so I sighed and sat back with dejection. Any hope I had was tinged with dread. Why should I have to count pills for eternity? Yet why should I not?

Then it was all “Come on Robert,” again, one of those grinning sour faced fellows shaking me by my shoulders.

Following once again, I found myself directed to the exercise room, where I walked in endless, supervised circles, and imagined that I was a great big dog with fierce teeth under my shaggy grey coat, choosing not to bite the leash on which they kept me out of some ridiculous animal loyalty to my masters. Thus, for a few brief minutes, walking in that white and mirrored room, I managed to forget all the other freaks and mad men about me.

Still, though I had intended to keep on being a well meaning canine, I ended up somehow visualising the casual sex that might be had whilst one strolls through soft carpeted corridors, or across fields of soft grass, in soft sunlight, with the occasional floaty soft cloud peeping down at us. And there it was, slapping me on my sides: us: her and I.

And by God I realised I had actually remembered something, the first real something, though at this stage it was but a fragile floaty soft feminine thing.

“Come on Robert,” ordered that pushy grinner, and it was already time to visit the doctor. Already time, and I hadn't really gotten anywhere except for that strangely familiar cloud, and the dark, smelly something it stirred in my guts, and now also a “her” I'd managed to identify in a walking daydream of “us”.

“It's something to do with her, isn't it?” I demanded of the doctor with my forefinger digging deep into the table, as soon as he'd sat me down and offered me a nice cup of tea which I politely declined since the offer had followed the swift pills and water which he himself had given me to ease my growing headache. I didn't want to be excusing myself for the toilet like a schoolboy.

“It's normal to get a bit sore after your kind of treatment, Robert,” he reassured, ignoring my pressing question.

Yet then he smiled his smug, professionally blank smile, opened a drawer in his desk, pulled out a file, and took out a picture which, once he showed it to me in the cold light of day, turned out to be a picture of the very girl, the she of the “us” who strolled so blissfully naked in the soft fields of my mind.

And for a second I was back again, strolling naked through green and pleasant pastures. I was Adam, and she smelled of sweet apples.

“Why the smile, Robert?”

The serious look on his face shattered my revelry. It was quite a shock I can tell you, after that otherwise interminably smug smile he always wore. Indeed, this new professionally blank seriousness worked just perfectly, boiling my blood with anxiety, as if a fire alarm had blared it's screaming, warning wail across the corridors. Something awful was coming.

“I knew her...”

I struggled to express my meaning, rather not wishing to dirty the doctors bright room with my naughty words.

“Intimately.”

“And that makes you smile...”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because... She was nice.”

“Nice how?”

“I don't know, she was good. Kind. I think... I'm sorry doctor, I can't remember details. Why not just tell me, doctor?”

The doctor laughed.

“You'd never believe me...”

“Why not?”

“If somebody told you you were actually just a figment in someone else's imagination, but that that person had already decided to alter your personality and appearance for your role in their next daydream, and was in fact in the process of forgetting you even as you spoke, would you believe them? What would you make of such an existential dilemma, Robert? How would you deal with that?

It was as if he'd gone mad, and I could gather no sense in it whatsoever, so I just stared at him, and he stared back with his big melting glass eyes. Then he took out another picture from the folder, a man with thick eyebrows that almost met in the middle of his forehead, and a wide nose that dictated totalitarian terms to the rest of his weak features. It was an interesting face.

“Do you know this man, Robert?”

I sighed. Both the doctor and I knew that, of course, I knew him, otherwise why would the dear doctor be dangling his picture in front of me? Still, I didn't recognise him.

“He's your brother.”

“If you're telling me who he is, why not tell me of the girl?”

“Good point... OK, she's your wife.”

I sighed with relief. At least she wasn't my sister. But still I couldn't remember.

“So why am I here?”

“Now that is the question, Robert. A question that you're going to have to answer entirely for yourself.”

It took me all afternoon to answer it, but with the soothing pills and the doctor's patient help, we managed it somehow, without him ever really telling me anything, just prompting and asking questions like that one about the day dream and the “existential dilemma”, questions that were incomprehensible at the start, but which eventually came to make sense once I slowly pieced together the memories that popped up like bubbles in a muddy cauldron of slime and dirty shoes and messy panties that I discovered had been, and, in a quite proper though still quite confusing existential sense, was still my mind, even though most of it had been erased and forgotten. In truth, he acted far less a doctor, far more an alchemist or a magician, with a magic wooden spoon stirring away at the dregs that lay settled and unseen, lying dormant like sticky snot on the soiled back pages of my mind, released into circulation once again. To be honest, I wish they'd stayed that way.

“So I tried to kill her, when I caught her with my brother...”

This was the basic truth of it, and if it had stayed at just that, everything would have been just fine, would have made far more sense, in fact, than the messy maze of pathetic motivations that, in fact, constituted my long list of crimes. Most were not illegal, yet perversely, the legal ones seemed far more reprehensible.

“Well done, Robert. But that's not all. That's not why you're here. Keep going...”

I coughed to cover my embarrassment for the next part, the part about motivations. And so, coughing again, once, twice, then wiping my brow, wiping my upper lip, breathing deeply and smelling cold disinfectant tinged with fried potatoes from the half cooked dinners about to be served, I made ready to keep going, boldly, miserably, terribly remorsefully.

“I was a bad husband, a terrible partner. I was never there for her, and even when I was, I was always in my own little world. Preoccupied with internet shopping, gambling, gossip, internet social sites, internet TV, internet radio, music downloaded from the internet, internet games, video games, books, though very occasionally, but mostly just internet porn and internet sex...”

I stopped, the giant memories clanking to a halt.

“Just get it out, Robert. Get it all out.”

“First I had casual sex with strangers, arranged on the internet. Then, when I realised I could get better looking girls if I paid for it, I started seeing prostitutes.”

“Were you bored with Mandy, Robert? Was that it?”

The name made me shudder.

“Not bored, doctor, not exactly. But I wanted more. I could have gone out and chatted up women like any other man, cheated on her properly, but I wanted more than that. I wanted perfection.”

“Perfection? From a prostitute?”

“Yes. Anything I wanted, everything I wanted, just for me, only me, backed up by cash. That's what did it for me, what made it so great: I'd pay them while they did things, I'd stick the money between their teeth while they straddled me. It was a high, and I got hooked.”

The sickness was almost upon me again, and I tensed my hands around the sharp edges of his desk.

“I'm sorry doctor, I can't go on like this. I was such a weak, twisted, idiot. And when she did what she had to do, it was only after staying by me for months and months, taking my distance, taking my absence, trying to deal with it, trying to figure it out, figure a way to make it better between us. But I wouldn't let her, and we fought, and even when she was with him, my brother, I know she was still with me, she was still hoping it was all just a bad dream, hoping that her affair would somehow shock us both into making things right again...”

It all began in Amsterdam, the Red Light District. Too much for me to take, way back when a smile and a wink was all it took to seduce me. I remember that stoned feeling of doing the wrong thing, of being in the wrong place, smelling the wrong smells, touching the wrong ladies, feeling great to be so wrong for once.

“So what happened when you caught them, Robert? Tell me, again, get it all out Robert, don't hold back the tears, Robert. Don't hold back.”

“OK, well, yes, hmm...”

My mind was spinning by now, let me tell you, throwing all sorts of warning signs up at me, but I followed that damned doctor's advice to the letter.

“I found them at his place one night after I'd been on an anonymous car park shag. I was getting lower and lower by then, a little drunk with this little flask of whisky I'd taken to carrying with me on my adventures. It was meant to give me Dutch courage, or something, but I knew it was just there to make the encounters more interesting than they were actually becoming. In truth, I was getting bored with it all, just stuck in my own vicious little circle. So I took a half drunk drive after doing the deed, and somehow ended up wanting to chat with my good old brother, who was just back from a couple of months travelling somewhere hot and sticky. I should have gone with him, I knew, he'd invited me along, and up till then I'd avoided going to see him for fear of I don't know what exactly. Jealously, I suppose.”

I sweated the words out now, and the more wet I became, the easier they slipped out. It was like the last painful rush of childbirth: necessarily gory.

“When I arrived at his building, the door happened to be open on the ground floor. I saw the light on upstairs, so I decided to go in and give him a little knock, surprise him. When I got to his door, I heard guitar and laughter, so I thought he was having a little get together. It made me happy, because my drunkenness would go unnoticed, be a plus even, and I'd be able to have a good old sing along. So I knocked and waited for his answer which was a little while coming. The guitar stopped first, eventually, then the steps came, and there was my brother, in a t-shirt and pyjama bottoms, looking a bit flustered but inviting me in anyway like a good brother. And inside the living room were dim lights, and a woman wearing my brothers dark blue dressing gown, the back of her head strangely familiar. It flustered my brother to see her sitting there, and I'm sure he went white, just as I did when I stepped over to face her, and she gave me a dark frown, with no remorse whatsoever, not even a little intake of breath, not even shock to be caught like that. And what happened next, I hardly remember, it was so fast and furious. I lost it, I couldn't stand that remorselessness in her. “I'm sorry Robert,” said my brother, sounding truly ashamed it has to be said, but once I started slapping her about he came in strong, his backpackers muscles throwing me to the floor. Got me in one of those grips, he did, and I was helpless. I struggled like a animal, but I was helpless.”

By now, I will admit, I was in tears. I couldn't help trying to keep them back, even though the doctor said not to, but he was right, because it was like plugging an ocean.

“After a few minutes, he thought he'd calmed me down, but it had only made things worse. He let up, and I grabbed at anything, trying to use it as a weapon. I smashed him over the head with a vase, I grabbed a hardback, thinking to bludgeon her with it. She hit me a few times. All I can remember is screaming “you fucking whore!” over and over again. Then, after I had scratched his face, my bro eventually managed to get me out of the flat. I downed the rest of the whisky, banged on the door for a while, then I just left the building and wandered out onto the streets.”

This is part where that bird like cloud formation appeared in the morning light, catching my eye as I left the building. I remember now, but I don't tell the doctor.

“There's a little park opposite my brother's place. It was early morning by now. I'm crazed, and decide to go for a run. I run around and around the park, screaming, crying, screaming some more. When I inevitably slip up I fall down a grassy hill, hit my head on a bench. When I wake up, God knows how much later, the sky is full of bright clouds, and I am facing up to it all. I wonder who I am, what will become of me, still with all that unleashed rage inside of me, and as I turn to pick myself up, I spot a hammer lying next to a tree on the other side of the path.”

Despite the unwanted nature of the truth that I am about to put into words, I force myself to go on. The doctor has maintained his blank face beautifully throughout my performance, so I hardly know what impact my story is having on him: his eyes provide no window onto his soul, no mirror for me to see what kind of monstrous fool I truly have become.

“It gives me such a sense of power, this hammer. Just an ordinary household hammer left there, God knows why, but once I pick it up, it gives me this little shock and tingle, so that I begin to laugh like a crazy man, and I just start going around the park bashing things with it. Gates, playground, trees, anything. I can hardly describe the feeling...”

“Go on Robert, you're nearly there. What happened next?”

“Next. Yes. The police arrive. Somebody must have seen me, reported me. No, it was my brother... I think... Yes, I remember now. Yes, oh God yes, he called the police when I...”

When I smashed through his flat door, tried to make a comeback, to destroy their little world. I can no longer express things to the doctor any more. My head spins as I recall the sound my brother's hand made as I smashed it, cracking his music fingers, the scream that Mandy made, and that terrible regret that overwhelmed me, paralysing me to the floor. Why couldn't it have come a few moments earlier? Hadn't I done enough? But when it did come, it was so strong it caused me to turn inwards, at long last, for that's where I really needed to look. But it didn't let me just look, didn't just knock me down, because this inward rage was like a tornado, and even as the police were finally surrounding me, in a flash I brought that hammer down to bear on my own skull, my own sick brain. I smashed my own head in, my last act as a free man.

“Let it all out, Robert, let it all out,” the doctor, God bless him, was rubbing my back now, while I, the crazed former hammer wielding lunatic, was stung with tears the size of bumble bees.

“Doctor, I was so stupid. Oh was I stupid. I just want to move forward, just want to let it all go.”

“Oh but you can, Robert, that's why you're here Robert.”

“But I can't ever forget such evil deeds. Against myself, yes, against Mandy, yes, but against him, my own brother, it was just too much. I can recover, the damage is only mental, she should recover too, in time, but Craig never will. He's a musician for Christ's sake! And I took that away from him... his right hand, his whole life...”

Never mind that Craig cheated with Mandy, I could forgive him that, she needed help escaping from the black hole I'd dug for myself.

“How can I go on like this doctor, how can I move forward? The guilt and shame is too much. I just want to forget it all, doctor, I just want to be reborn...”

“That's it Robert, that's it...” the doctor just kept on cooing and comforting me, and as he did so, the last memory let itself be known. The last piece in the puzzle was recovered, and it might sound impossible, but it made everything seem a million times worse.

“You've done very well, Robert. You've come such a long way. This is what it's all been about, you know, Robert. Gaining the proper perspective for what you've done, gaining remorse in proportion to your actions, and dealing with them like a man. That's all you can do, all you can ever hope to do to get through this. To escape your denial. You're there, Robert, you're there. Well done.”

But so help me God I didn't want to be there. I wanted to forget, needed to erase. I wanted more lightning in my head, wanted more of that blissful state of ignorance that, just a few hours ago, had been mine. Fool! I'd worked so hard to recover my past, when that's precisely what I'd come here to get rid of. There was no future for my former self, it needed destroying, and that's why I'd asked for the lightning: that's how I'd cleverly worked my way through the courts, away from prison and via the Mental Health Act into a nice, comfortable institution, with a nice routine of pill counting in soft plastic containers that popped open on the hour, every hour. And, more importantly, a nice order of therapeutic shock, extractive lightning, a wipe of clean electricity to the dirty brain. Call it what you will, I'd have it on the morn, every morn.

So, as you might imagine, I was completely dumbstruck, and also heartbroken, when the doctor next told me that he didn't think I needed any more therapy, didn't need to sit in his magic barber's chair any more.

“What? No, doctor... I feel worse than ever now...”

“But don't you see, Robert, that's just it. The worse you feel now, the more balanced you are becoming, because any sane, balanced man would have to feel the utter remorse you have finally discovered for the actions you have taken. Now you must learn from your mistakes, go back into the world, and live a better life.”

Such words couldn't have hurt me more. It was like a guillotine slicing my soul.

“But...” was all I could muster in my defence, and he'd reverted back to his winning grin. That meant there was no arguing to be done, he'd made up his mind. And he was the doctor, I was the patient. He was the barber, and I the overgrown customer, and he'd cut all he could, restored all he could. There was nothing more to be done.

So on that last fading day of lightning to the brain, I had to accept that I could get no more salvation from the doctor and his reclining chair. They kept me under observation for a few more weeks, but it was a catch-22 situation. There was nothing I could do to convince them I needed more therapy. I thought about feigning mad antics, but it was useless. I'd lost the spark of insanity. The doctor had done his job, my madness was cured. In it's place he'd left only a dull, relentless pain, a vague nauseousness of unrelenting shame and guilt. It returns every time I see a hammer, come close to a woman, or hear the strumming of a guitar.

And furthermore, as I mentioned earlier, all it takes is a stormy sky, and I can't help thinking of lightning. Take this morning: a little thundery, and there I was deciding to go out for a walk. Clouds, lots of them, all over, no bird shaped clouds, nothing strangely familiar, but I wasn't looking for painful memories. I lay myself down on this hillside far away from trees or pylons, a view across miles of fields and toy houses. Streaks in the far distance, thunder storm brewing above. Bliss.

So now here I still am. Rain patters on my face; it's pleasant, a warm summer storm. The lightning's on it's way. I feel electricity in the air. Maybe I'll get lucky.