A strange bit of something

It occurs to me that I too sometimes have Drivler-esque stories within me. I guess that the difference is that mine come months later. The story I am about to relate happened somewhere between three and four months ago, and yet I am only telling it now. I'd like first to comment on that.

It would seem to me that the mind has a way of handling that sort of experience that Freud called The Uncanny: those experiences where quite suddenly we are seized with the feeling that what we are looking at is horribly askew with what we know of as reality. Those times, for instance, when we look up and see a stranger in our home only to realize it was some half image at our peripheral and that when we look at it, wheel with our full attention, it is just a lamp with something behind it that we mistook for a coat or an axe. We are, in essence, making connections even with those things we are not directly looking at, and as such, sometimes the mind puts those half-visual images together in strange arrangements.

But there is more to it than that, because what these moments of The Uncanny do is to bring ourselves face-to-face with the impossible. It creates a momentary problem of reality in which our mind is forced to reconceptualize everything in order to make this "thing," even for a moment, fit. It is the sheer size of this consideration that makes this moment horrifying, but then it is gone, the need to include is over, and the horror passes. Most importantly, we forget.

How often are we reminded of some horrible thing in a dream that we have forgotten for perhaps days on end? I remember when I first had my night terrors, it was not until days later that I remembered I had been awakened nights ago by the presence of a demon in my room. Why didn't I think of that horrible thing the next day? Whatever the reason, the presence of the horror disappeared from my memory until quite suddenly it pounced upon me in a moment of quiet recollection. What do you suppose shocked me more, that I'd had a brush with a demon, or that I'd forgotten about it for days on end?

Later, I found out what night terrors were and so I have an explanation for that, but still, why did my mind, essentially, choose to forget the experience? Think of the implications: what other horrors do we daily face that our mind chooses to forget? That is, I suppose the point behind the demons within my novel Shock Tea--the main character, after taking the drug, sees what people continuously pretend not to be aware of in order to maintain their sanity.

This is, I suppose, the long way of explaining why I haven't already told this story on my blog.

When my child was born, I was told that I needed a flu shot. I went to my school, but of course, they didn't have any flu vaccine. They advised that I come back a week later. I informed them that this was an emergency. They informed me that emergency or no, they couldn't help me; they advised I call the county board of health.

So, I called the county board of health. I got a recording, of course. I'm starting to see the world as this intrinsically mechanized attempt to reproduce mimetically Plato's Cave analogy. Now, it is not that we can't get to the real world because we are constantly bufferred by the limits of those senses that we use to explore the world, but we are twice removed by those buffering agents used to buffer our senses...Bureaucracy, phone recordings, help lines to India, etc.. So that my very real problem--I needed a flu vaccine--given to me by a doctor in a hospital, cannot be solved even by that doctor or that hospital, but instead is impetus for a very long quest, the point of which is this lesson: you cannot get there from here.

But I digress, for the recording led me to the website, and the website gave me the number of the county health head doctor guy. I called him. A week later, he called me back, and told me that he had retired. My quest might have ended there except that he gave me the name and number of someone who "might be able to help me."

This is how service is now performed, I might add. Hushed whispers tell of secret meetings and forgotten places where one is able to tell you why your Microsoft Word cannot open, or how to remove yourself from the Coldwater Creek mailing list. I called the woman at the number the retired doctor gave me, and was greeted by a rather friendly, though surprised voice on the other end of the phone. She wondered, of course, how I'd gotten her number. I mentioned the doctor, she warmed a bit and told me that he was a good man. Somehow that doctor had slipped behind the scenes to the position of beneficial spirit: a St. Peter or a Gabriel, a benefactor who could only be reached by those who'd reached rock bottom and who were now trying "alternate" channels like augury or throwing bones.

She agreed to meet with me at her office and we set an appointment, not because she was a busy women, but because she did not work out of her office unless there was good reason. I wondered at the place: a closed in vault no doubt. How often did she visit that haunt, I wondered, knowing full well that only phone calls such as this, directed by doctors who's retirement had slipped them out of a system who's rule is: don't give out that information. He hadn't gotten the memo not to direct me to her, but without such direction, who would find her and summon her to her office.

I was directed to our city's town hall. I needn't mention the Masonic symbols that adorn most of the ancient buildings in downtown Northampton. It might be said that these municipal buildings, though in plain sight, hide rather well. There are three of them, each with a different purpose, and I could not tell you which is which. In my mind, one is the court house, but I know this to not be true: the court house is down the street. Even now, I have said three buildings, but I can't think, are there only two? I don't want to make this more mysterious than it needs be, but there is definitely something uncanny about it: I walked into a municipal building, descended into its basement, entered an office the size of a broom closet in order to receive the only dose of flu vaccine that I could find in all of central Massachusetts. It was there as if waiting for some grand epidemic--the kind one reads of in Stephen King novels or sees on Twilight Zone re-runs, hidden away until someone like me slipped through the system and they thought, 'what the hell, he found us. Let's give him a shot.'

I hadn't thought about how weird it was until I mentioned weeks later that I'd been vaccinated, and someone asked me where since there wasn't a flu vaccine anywhere to be found. I told them, "in the basement of the town hall, there's a little office. There's a woman who'll come there if you call her a week ahead of time and she'll give you the vaccine." Even as I said it, I felt strange about it, and the person I told it to looked at me as if wondering whether I were recalling a dream, and then again the story slipped out of my consciousness--too weird to be allowed to stay there and mess up whatever precious system that suggested a hospital as the most likely candidate for a place to go for medicine until now...

And now, I'm pressed with this sudden urge to go downtown to that building, to descend those steps once again and discover what the hell that office is, what do the people with offices next to it have to say of the place. Have they ever noticed it since it is never open. Have they, themselves, received flu vaccine or are they as in the dark as everyone else as to where to go? But I fear that I will find, like that demon, that the whole thing had been some elaborate dream that my mind, for one reason or another, has traded into my memory and elevated its texture to that of experience.