God’s Addiction — Chapter 5
The Id Monster
Zooey was second in command of the facility, yet one of the guards challenged her order to clear the room. A beefy, dark-haired coarse-faced fellow, wearing a well-tailored suit and holding a down-pointing automatic weapon, said from his post near a door, “Ma’am, that’s against protocol.”
Zooey paid him little attention. As she stalked toward me she said to the guard, “Randy, fuck with me and you’ll be recruiting assets in Prypiat by breakfast.”
Randy apparently knew the place — a ghost town-turned-tourist-attraction in the Zone of Alienation around Chernobyl. He rotated on a heel and joined the staff exodus out the door. Tigger, true to form, waltzed out last, making faces and waving hands in what-the-fuck gestures.
When they were gone, Zooey drew a gun from under her blazer — a Chinese QSZ-92, according to a Gun Digest I’d leafed through at the Mark Twain Library. Lack of a bump on the trigger guard classified it as the 5.8 millimeter version, which loads armor-piercing rounds. I quickly revised my guess as to the larger organization I’d been captured by. An American agent in need of that kind of firepower would likely carry the Belgian FN Five-seven, used by the Secret Service.
She kept the QSZ on me while she punched console keys with her other hand. “Recording disabled,” she said with a twisted smile on her pretty face. “Now pull all those god damn wires off.”
I popped cables off the adhesive pads and pulled the IV out too. “You dosed me with some nasty shit,” I said, holding the needle-tipped tubing aloft. “Almost blew out Frances’s mind.”
Zooey faced me, ten feet away, her firearm held with both hands now. “I knew you were dangerous, goddamnit!” she said. “I ought to put you down right now.”
“Why are you so angry?”
“I’m not angry — “
“ — she said angrily,” I replied, grinning. If she was going to shoot me, so be it. But she wouldn’t. A voiceless voice enlightened me: Zooey desperately needs you for something. Was it Akashwani, the Hindu ‘voice from above’? Or Rickman’s Metatron in Dogma — the voice of God. Whatever it was, I knew my quantum talent had intensified with the Frances episode. It had evolved from leakage to ability.
“That drug…” I said.
“Truth serum,” Zooey replied, seeing my train of thought. “Our own special mix.” Her eyes narrowed. “Tell me exactly what you can do.”
“Why do you want to know?” I rose from the chair and Zooey backed up a step, keeping the gun rock-steady. I wrapped the sheet around my waist, reached under it, and detached the last electrode. “Ouch,” I said, smiling. At the same time, I extended my awareness into her mind, hoping the talk and action would distract, and she wouldn’t notice my intrusion. I’d no idea how my tunnel was experienced from the other end. Would it be fear, a cranial cringing? Or just a tickle in the thinking. I’d have to remember to ask her later — if later ever came.
My question, why she wanted to know, divided in two inside her head. One version bounced around her verbal cingulate cortex, while the other steeped in the emotional depths of the limbic system. Also present was elusive fear that I didn’t yet understand, hidden from both her and me. “This power you have is dangerous,” she said, her tone bellicose. “We have to understand it to keep it from being used against us.”
It wasn’t clear which of the two ways she had answered. I’d assumed the NSA or FBI had grabbed me, until Zooey’s Chinese handgun and her put-down of Randy had demanded a re-think. “Your own power is substantial,” I said on a hunch, and her brain lit up in my inner vision like a Ferris wheel at night. Her last response didn’t feel like a job-related answer. So who was we? Who was us? Was there another self, an ego-construct split off by the deep distress I had sensed? The tiny redirection from me to her would, I hoped, allow me to inch inward toward her suffering.
My perception slid deeper, as I had done with Frances. Undetectably, I hoped. Zooey’s voice echoed as if from above: “I’m second in command here.” I heard the pride, yet sensed that it covered buried early trauma. “I call the shots.”
The twisted skein of a human ego can be filled with happy memories — freeze tag in the sun, fishing for perch, soccer matches. But deep inside of Zooey I found an aggregate of vile memories, full of fear and loathing, blazing, daring to be touched. I felt the heat, and understood that this core — whatever lay inside — had constructed her life.
“It hasn’t been easy for you,” I said. I was now suspended between two worlds: the lab where my body stood, and the depths of Zooey’s mind. I could no longer see the lab, and I wondered what she saw of me. Was it like driving, the outer me making appropriate automatic responses while my mind roved elsewhere? Or like the Beta unit in The Last Starfighter, a doppelganger fooling the homies while the real identity battled Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada.
“You’ve overcome monumental opposition,” I said. I’d thought to say, ‘stiff opposition,’ but somehow I knew she had been sexually abused by her father, for years. Stiff was the wrong word to use with Zooey, on this metaphysical tightrope.
“I’ve overcome plenty.” Her voice wavered, not just because of her suppressed memories, but because, I sensed, she was walking her own tightrope. This was her need for me — to use my talent to free her from the pain that imprisoned her life. In doing so she, we, would be killing a fundamental part of her ego. A part that mostly controlled her. It was a dangerous mission for both of us, because there was no telling what that inner fire might do.
“Tell me your greatest achievement,” I said, as I slipped around in the upper levels of her psyche. Zooey may have still been talking to a naked man wrapped in a sheet, but I could no longer see her. Instead, inside her mind, I was in a dark cavern, standing on a thin bridge like the one where Gandalf battled the Balrog of Moria in The Two Towers. No fiery monster confronted me there — rather, from below, flaming whips lashed upward, as if the Balrog had already fallen. The movie imagery had colored my perceptions and a new worry formed: was my whole world, now and before, simply a construct in my head, a meaningless Legoland built from films and books and the brief weeks I’d had in Los Angeles?
I heard, or perhaps felt, Zooey laugh, and not angrily. There was lightness I’d not seen in her before. A distant sighting of impending psychological freedom? Her voice echoed in my mind-cave: “Greatest achievement? I feel like I’m in a fucking job interview!” She laughed again, this time with irony. “It’s not what you might think. I once held a gun on someone, a scumbag who deserved to die a hundred times over. I could have easily pulled that trigger, but I didn’t. That’s the achievement! I didn’t shoot the bastard.”
She had released part of her terror to me, and there was more to come. I was to be much more than a therapeutic witness to her pain. Rather, I would be a warrior to kill the inner demons that kept her from her true self. She had been sharing her head since childhood, with her anger and paranoia. Now she had me on board to face the abyss too.
In our entangled minds, I viewed the incident she spoke of: her father when she was fourteen years old. The termination of a horrendous decade. He was raging drunk, but not so much as to charge a loaded gun. Her finger tightened on the trigger. Tightened. Tightened. Then slacked. She slammed the door and never saw him again.
“You took control of your life,” I said.
“Damn right. I never looked back.” Her voice was younger now and fully discarnate. I sensed what she sensed…the joy of future freedom. The joy her demons had hid from her since childhood. Joy like I had felt when I was minted as a new person. I saw rays of sun parting black clouds — and then, disaster. The bridge crumbled like in the movie, chunks falling into the flailing unknown below. I fell down, down.
***
A dark floor was racing toward me. Red and orange flashes in the blackness, then fiery arms reaching for me. An illusion? Like Snow White’s brief night of terror in the woods? I was inside Zooey’s head, a psychic voyage perhaps never known so intensely by another. Nothing in my memory bank could decipher this experience. The visualizations I was having came from God knows where. Suddenly a disturbing thought arose — this was a lot like the plot of The Cell. Zooey as Starger. Both abused by odious fathers. At least she wasn’t a serial killer. As far as I knew. But my Legoland was more like Dark City. Aagh! Would I never escape the movie parallels?
In an instant I hit, and broke through. Fragments of sky cascaded beside me as air tore at my face. I plummeted past glaciered peaks and down toward the ground.
Bracing for the hit, I was suddenly in the middle of my last memory of Happy. We sat at a tiny table outside a Los Angeles cafe. The aroma of roasted coffee mingled with her lilac fragrance. I had thought then, this is a perfect moment, sufficient, true. Was this my brief life passing before my eyes? But now…I wondered, had it all been an illusion? I had already lost one whole life. Was the vision of Happy any more or less real than what I was in now? Might I be stuck in Zooey’s head forever?
Happy and the cafe shattered as I hit. Liquefied earth rose around me. It was as if I was doing a cannonball in the Jesse Owens Swimming Pool — before the hole was dug! I held my breath and struggled for the surface, gasping as I broke through. But who plunges into the earth? Was this all my mind could conjure up, my limited experience leaving me no alternate visualizations? No movie scenes here?
I stood up on a now-solid grassy field, filled with a bounty of wildflowers. White-capped mountains touched cotton clouds in the blue sky. A scene from The Sound of Music? Damn it! I thought. Another fucking movie analog. Where were my real thoughts? Maybe I’d never have any…
Completing my rotation I encountered, not Julie Andrews, but a raven-haired girl of perhaps five. She turned to me. “I had this once,” she said. It was the older Zooey who spoke through this younger likeness. There was no sound, yet words. Words known but not heard.
Together, we gazed across the expanse of Alpine meadow. Thin cold air entered my body making me feel as if all things were possible. “It’s lovely,” I said.
“I want it back,” she said. Then a vapor separated from the girl, floating skyward. “How long have you been here?” I asked.
“What do you mean? I’ve always been here.”
Zooey-the-elder had left me alone with her…kernel? Marrow? Epicenter? I didn’t know where the Zooey-I-knew was now — unconscious? Asleep? Eating lunch? She had entrusted her essence, who-she-was-before-her-life-went-sour, to me. Did that older Zooey even sense what was going on here, underneath her consciousness? “How old are you?” I asked.
“I’m five and a half. Want to play with me?” She held out a hand and I took it, feeling a tingle that she apparently did not share.
Bill Wyman’s ethereal Stones song, In Another Land, floated…in what? I couldn’t be sure if it was only on my side of the equation or if we both heard it:
In another land where the breeze and the
Trees and flowers were blue
I stood and held your hand
And the grass grew high and the feathers floated by
I stood and held your hand
Of course, the Stones’s song, from Their Satanic Majesties Request, continued:
Then I awoke
Was this some kind of joke?
Much to my surprise
I opened my eyes
And so I probably should have been prepared.
Our linked minds now sensed a threat behind us. Ominous music from Jaws played, at least in my brain. The air was thick with portent. Some kind of metallic screaming happened behind us. Little Zooey and I turned from that spectacular mountain landscape with mutual dread. Only with our combined wills was rotation possible.
We faced a raging energy being. The glowing specter towered over us, a behemoth ghost sparking and crackling like the Monster from the Id hitting the perimeter fence in Forbidden Planet. Perhaps the visuals were just in my mind. We held hands again. I understood that this creature was fabricated from the fear and anger that Zooey had gathered over decades. It fed on her life, forcing outer confrontations that bred more rage, more bitterness. It was her, but not her core. This pseudo-self, born of the horrors of her youth, now called the shots and stood between the primal Zooey and any hope of true freedom.
“I’m scared,” the girl said, her hand trembling. “Don’t let it eat me.”
But this wasn’t my subconscious we were in — my fear could only be superficial. Yet I knew, somehow, that this creature was capable of destroying Zooey’s mind. Or, more likely, warping it irretrievably so this phantom would be the only part of her left inside.
“Get behind me.” I pulled the girl backward. Then I walked toward the hideous aberration with unfortunate bravado. “You can’t hurt me,” I said, actually smiling.
What had let me get this far into Zooey’s head was my lack of worldly experience and lack of personality. This creature had never encountered the likes of me — someone with no buttons to push. There was little I had to lose, and so, little to threaten me with. Or so I thought. Now the beast mutated into what looked like a cross of the giant squid from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and the Balrog. Flaming whips surrounded me.
At first I felt magically protected from the firestorm — then pure pain seared across my chest and back as fiery tentacles gripped me. “I’m not even here, damnit!” I yelled. How could it hurt me? And then I saw: Happy, held aloft, screaming, in the grip of one of those tentacles. And Hushpuppy in another. Psychological fear was somehow mapped to physical threat and pain — and what a pain it was!
There was no analytical thought here in this emotional foundation zone, yet I discerned truths, perhaps with the aid of Metatron. This grotesque miscreation was a metaphor, inner real as outer real: if I didn’t succeed in destroying this part of Zooey, the monster would cause her, the external Zooey, to harm the only two people I cared about.
I was vulnerable. And alone. When I looked back, the black-haired girl was gone.
Then, when I turned again to the beast, I knew its weakness. It had no thought, no reason. Its power over me stemmed from the only deep feelings I had in my brief new life. I could destroy this schizoid parasite — if I could quell my own fear.
In Robert Silverberg’s novel of Earth takeover, The Alien Years, new rulers of the planet sense aggression at a distance. Humans, their technology destroyed, could never get within striking range. But a Muslim youth had — by way of a hellish childhood — achieved mastery of his own mind. He knew inner stillness. Like the stillness I had been reborn with in Los Angeles. The youth had softly crept up to one of the aliens. He sought to kill it, as I now desired to rid Zooey of her fiery brute. Yet only with full inner peace could Kahlid Haleem Burke approach the invader within range: Loving it, admiring it, even worshipping it, Khalid calmly lifted the grenade gun to his shoulder, calmly aimed, calmly stared down the gunsight.
And, His soul was filled all the while with love for the beautiful creature before him as — calmly, calmly, calmly — he pressed the stud.
That was the trick. No fear. No emotion. Easier said than done. I grasped my own fear, tried to choke it, shove it down. It writhed and intensified and I screamed, wordlessly and with yet more terrible pain. My fear gripped me from behind, at the root of my being. Had I lost?
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when my fear is gone I will turn and face fear’s path, and only I will remain.
Never was I so glad to remember a movie quote as this one from Dune. With great difficulty I faced the fear…barbarians swinging heavy axes and swords rode huge horses toward me. I crouched on the ground, pulling inward, reducing my profile. Then, despite an inkling of terror deep inside me, I calmed my mind, like Khalid. I even managed to love the perfection of this igneous being in Zooey’s mind. Loved its exquisite quasi-existence. This nightmare phantasm that endured only while she gave it life.
I surrounded myself with the present moment, and my mind slowed with inner peace. There was no way to fight the fear. I had to embrace it. And then let it go. I accepted that I was human and vulnerable and that I had no power here. Bend like a reed. I stood and raised my arms. Do your worst. It was as if I had no thickness and no texture — the horsemen raced past, intent on another goal. Metatron informed me that they were headed for the future, where all fears live. With nothing about me to grasp, they could not drag me with them.
But the encounter was far from over. I turned again — and now faced the giant Fezzik, from The Princess Bride, holding that big rock. Boulders and trees surrounded us on a hillside. And just like in the movie, the giant said, “We face each other as God intended. Sportsmanlike. No tricks, no weapons, skill against skill alone.”
What?
Was my mind taking the unfathomable and turning it into movie pulp — the only way I could grasp what was happening? The Id Monster had lost the weapon of fear. Was this the next tactic?
I played along. “You mean, you’ll put down your rock and I’ll put down my sword, and we’ll try and kill each other like civilized people?”
As in the movie, Fezzik brandished the rock. “I could kill you now.”
It was so ridiculous, I could hardly not laugh. Had Zooey seen the movie, and her subconscious demon thought to communicate this way? Then I understood more fully. This whole scene was all from me — the best approximation my mind could dredge up of what confronted me, given my pathetic life history. I tested the waters further. “Frankly, I think the odds are slightly in your favor at hand fighting.”
“It’s not my fault,” the giant said, speaking his movie lines, “being the biggest and the strongest. I don’t even exercise.”
My knees gave way and I dropped to the ground laughing. Fezzik weaved but kept his distance as I stood up. It struck me that I had reached a level in Zooey’s mind where her anger was primitive, uncalculating, simple — like Fezzik. It was chapter two in the defiled tale she knew as her life, a time when a rock thrown at the enemy’s head was an answer to an unspeakable past. I had to get further back. Yet I knew, in an instant, that memories are not thoughts, and time doesn’t exist except as the fiction we create to file them away. It’s all just one moment, the present moment, the only real moment. There is no “further back” in the mind. There are only doors to other places. I had to find a door to the younger Zooey, yet not so young as the innocent I had met earlier.
Silently I asked Metatron’s help. The answer came wordlessly, and following directions I approached Fezzik and put my arms as far around his middle as I could reach. Quantum entanglement, the basis of my talent, requires contact…and then the process takes its course. The quantum river flowed, as a channel opened between us. Abruptly Fezzik shrank. I was left hugging the blond child Kristýna Kohoutová as she appeared in Jan Švankmajer’s Alice — a dark Czechoslovakian retelling of the Wonderland tale.
We were in a dismal space in what I knew was a small castle built from blocks that sat on a table in a garden shed. In the movie there had hardly been room for Alice, let alone me.
“If I can’t get in the door, then I’ll go in through the window.” The voice of the White Rabbit, spoken through Alice’s lips, rang in the air and mingled with the creaking of toy bed springs. Alice shrugged me off, intent on the former taxidermy specimen who had now mounted a siege-ladder to the castle window.
As in the film, she pushed him hard in the face. The ladder fell and the unattractive creature tumbled onto a glass cold-frame, smashing it with classic breaking sounds. Birds chirped and a distant rooster crowed outside.
I had reached Zooey-center, her Delphic omphalos. The gravamen of her life. I knew, without Metatron, that this was the moment when Zooey was first violated by her father. She had rejected the event — pushed the rabbit out the window. I marveled at my own fortune of having been provided with such an exquisite film parallel. Yet I knew the abuse had continued for many years. She had split in two — one part clinging to the Alice of innocence, the other being dragged down a rabbit hole. Though there had been no stuffed lagomorph in Zooey’s past, I felt the resonance of truth with the images in my mind.
I had found the door.
Although the film Alice showed little emotion toward the White Rabbit, I saw Zooey/Alice form a core of anger. It was a red dot in her mind that turned white hot and expanded. This was the first true animosity in her short life — and not just anger but hatred. Venom. A wish for revenge. All the rest, the troubles that had dogged her later life, the glowing whips I had seen, the Id monster that attacked me, all sprang from this early seed of loathing.
My course was clear. I was to be a psychic surgeon, cutting out the cancerous rancor. This was the quest the adult Zooey had tasked me with. I picked up a piece of broken glass from the floor and approached Alice as best I could, ready to attempt the operation. She stared at me with vacant eyes. Then for a second I saw Hushpuppy superimposed on Alice’s face. Hushpuppy! I felt her energy, and the joy she concealed behind her irreverent street attitude. At once my confidence faded — I was no longer certain of my plan. Happy and Hushpuppy, the centers of my existence, might well be endangered by an enraged Zooey if I failed in my mission.
And so, what little ego I had, crept into our entangled space. Images of Happy and Hushpuppy floated lightly around Alice and me, and, not through words but by an inscrutable dimension of awareness, an offer was apparent. My help for Zooey’s help.
Bad idea for a therapist. Bad idea for a mind intruder walking a razor thin line.
That former creature of blinding energy flared again, encompassing Alice and myself. With resplendent heat it rolled over us. Our charred bodies lay on blackened ground as my viewpoint was yanked violently upward. I felt I was being turned inside out, and then as if I were ejected vomitus. A gray veil lifted from my sight and the laboratory room reappeared.
