Commanding the Wind, Part 1
An excerpt from What God Is Like. Our protagonist is discharged in disgrace from the Marine Corps and remanded to a military hospital for psychiatric treatment. It is here she collides with another lost soul and forever alters the course of both of their trajectories. And all of this is merely a preamble to the most devastating and most exhilarating events of her young life, which our author will tell you about in parts 2 and 3, respectively.
The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spoke to them; and whether they did not think at the time that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.
Isaiah answer’d: “I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in everything, and as I was then perswaded, & remain confirm’d, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote.”
-William Blake
I don’t remember leaving Parris Island and arriving at Winn Army Community Hospital on Fort Stewart Army Base in Georgia that day. But they weren’t the first two places where I’d left not entirely lucid and arrived no longer my own ward. So, if I had to guess, I would assume that, upon being pressed by my CO’s (commanding officers) about my fitness to serve in the Marine Corps and the truthfulness of my answers, I devolved into some shame-fueled, hysterical, blacked out fit. I vaguely recall being escorted off the base by MPs (military police) and put in the back of an ambulance, but in a way so cinematic that I feel I might have invented that memory to fill in the gaps. I tend to leave my body when stressful things happen and watch myself like in a movie. The memory is even cast in those blue overtones like the flashback scenes in an action drama, so I don’t trust it outright. But my brain can’t leave it alone, that I was made to leave somewhere the likes of Parris Island and I have no real experience of it whatsoever, so it digs and digs, like an itch that can’t be scratched. If one of those grunts that waved me a snarky goodbye were to tell me about it, I bet I would be stunned and horrified. The snarky waves goodbye I remember clear as day.
When I felt that familiar prick of a 50 mg shot of Prolixin-D, a powerful anti-psychotic and heavy sedative, stabbed right into the fatty chunk of my hip, I momentarily regained awareness of my surroundings. I looked around in a panic trying to assess my whereabouts but was disturbingly quelled by the sterile, yet dingy features, the sharp, but non-threatening hospital corners of a psych unit. It was enough to know I was relatively safe. When the shot kicked in a few moments later, I surrendered whatever fight I was putting up with the staff, collapsed on the stiff, itchy white bed sheets, and abruptly fell asleep for several days.
When I finally woke with enough energy to get up and wander around, I left my room and discovered just 10 feet down the hall was the common room, filled with boxy, awkward vinyl chairs all facing an antiquated box murmuring low with daytime network television. Behind the chairs was a ping pong table, meant to encourage focused recreation instead of the senseless ruminating all us patients would undoubtedly prefer to do instead. The people in the room were as plain and non-descript to me as the diarrhea orange furniture. Except for one. When I staggered into the room and looked up, in a vinyl chair directly in front of me sat a long, skinny boy hunched over, looking down at his open hands, nested one within the other, but staring into them in an unbroken gaze so deep it seemed to penetrate the subatomic space within them.
I saw him, but not clearly, not at first. First, I saw an aura, a swollen, angry aura. I hadn’t seen an aura so clearly in a while. The young man, as I said, was stooped over slightly, and so, spurting spontaneously from his back, energetically, were these small fires, like volcanic eruptions. They were violent swirls of orange and yellow light, but they subsided quickly and smoldered, choked out without steady fuel. Then all around him were hazy layers of smoke, grays and browns, wafting, swirling. I could feel him locked in an obsessive thought loop of shame and disgust, anger and despair. Occasionally, it would add a sputter of fire to the aura, and his penitent trance didn’t allow any of the smoke to clear. I just watched it thicken around him as though he were in a glass oven. He sat transfixed in the chair, hands palm up in his lap, weakly clasping an imaginary object, his eyes locked onto an unforgiving abyss. I saw in his mind’s eye, a heavy pistol, a handgun.
I didn’t know exactly what had happened to him, but I knew he was trapped by some fact of his existence, irreconcilable and yet immutable. From outside he appeared suspended, but inside his mind there were the screams of torment you might imagine you would hear in hell as the boy willed with every ounce of his soul for this reality to not be so. And it created the most unbearable agony for him. I moved between the two perceptions of him, of his interior world and of looking at him from a much quieter, calmer outer world, with an ease I’d not had since childhood. Not that it was comfortable, just that it was easy. Then, suddenly and swiftly, a voice washed over me, more tangible than any other voices that spoke to me on the ward that day, and it said, “Witness to that boy.” It came over me in a wave, gone as quickly as it came, leaving me with chills and standing, mouth gaping and eyes wide, baffled and silent in a room, desperately looking around for someone who had heard what I heard, who could see what I saw. But it was just a room full of faceless people and unintelligible conversations. Oblivious, indifferent white noise.
I don’t remember how I made friends with Charlie, how I first approached him, but somehow, I did.
His name wasn’t really Charlie. Close enough that I asked if I could call him that. Years before, when I had been an exotic dancer, my stage name was Charlie. I asked him in a flirtatious way, “Can I call you Charlie?” Like I was still on that pole in a long red halter dress with the slit up to my hip. It should have been embarrassing to me, to flirt in there, with our limited access to hygiene products and dressed in hospital-issue drawstring pants and plain cotton T’s. But I’d lost any sense of myself or the true social meaning of my actions long before this day.
We went on FAB’s together, “fresh air breaks.” The military gave everything an acronym, and if it could be slightly ironic, it seemed, all the better. FABs were when the military nurses would take us out to smoke. Charlie and I would talk on these breaks, I don’t remember about what, but I remember feeling enthralled, and feeling little pieces of him sputter back to life, a little bit of the smog around him clearing. We worked out together on the ward; they had some mats and equipment. I remember trying not to fart as he held my feet while I did sit ups. Trying to cut through to him, gaining his attention and being his presence, triggered some real excitement in me. I quickly became manic and slipped so inconspicuously into these euphoric states of semi-consciousness where deep, spiritual messages just seemed to flow effortlessly from my lips, and he seemed to hang on my words, even though I couldn’t really make out what I was saying or regain control of my body or quite trust my perception of Charlie’s reaction to me. These states were intermittently punctuated by brief lucid moments where I tried to inventory my words and behavior, the real state of Charlie’s demeanor and feelings towards me, how the staff assessed my condition. Did they know I was out of control? Drifted into some kind of messianic delusional state? The lucid moments were invariably knocked offline by an overwhelming sense of shame and dread. I returned to my ether where I was nothing more than a willing channel for our Divine guides.
Charlie was discharged well before me. I would be there a good two or three weeks more without him. And I wouldn’t see or talk to Charlie for a while after he left. But we reconnected on the outside a few months later and became very close. And he would play a pivotal part in me commanding the wind, which I’m going to tell you about after I tell you about what happened to me when I came home from the hospital.
