Mu

“no,” “not,” “nothing,” “without,” “nothingness,” “is not,” “has not”

Modern Chinese, Japanese, Korean

 

MU HAD FINALLY grown weary of running from his sorrow.  His entire life had been a tapestry of shadows, a matrix of hypnotic boxes, a sea of spirit traps.  He realized that his hundreds of little Internet videos, on Cyber Diary, formed an imaginary bridge, a way of falsely transferring himself across an abyss of remorse and hopelessness.  How much longer could he pretend?  Until now, his words repelled the truth.  It was as if the very air that shaped the sentences in his mouth was the invisible resistance that compelled two magnets to repel one another and truth was in the center of that repulsion.  Mu videoed what he knew would be his last words, hoping that speaking the truth might bring him some salvation before he ended his life.  Where was the woman he convinced himself was in his life every day and night?  She never became a woman.  Mu finally uttered the unutterable in front of the humming video camera.  He shuddered as he spoke the heartbreaking words, his hand twitching dramatically like a divining rod pointing in the direction of underground minerals.  “She died at the hospital.  She was fourteen,” he said to the staring black instrument that, on this final, fateful evening, acted as a faceless confessor, a way for Mu to admit to himself that everything had been a fantasy.  He checked the revolver to be sure the chamber was full; then he made what would be the last entry in his video diary: “The real imposter was my phantasmagoric wife, my conjured life that I invented so I could escape the reality of being responsible for a horrible thing.  I ate peanuts and forgot about her allergy.  I kissed my beloved at the movies and she died shortly afterwards.  I loved her so!  My sweet Juliet.”  Even though she was only fourteen and Mu barely more than sixteen, it was an intuition of soul mate destiny felt and certified only in the hearts of those who know it.  “After her death,” Mu continued, “I used my videos to create in words and images what the years of our evolving lives might have been.”  Mu turned his video diaries into the life that this tragic accident had taken from him.  He was always fascinated by the mechanics of video and film, the neuroscience of sound and image reproduction.  His father frequently bought him small, primitive video recorders and 8mm cameras; he spent countless hours filming and playing back anything that crossed his path in a normal day: traffic, footsteps, dogs barking, his parents talking, television commercials.  No wonder that his tragic, life-long obsession with creating an illusory world of words and images was so easily facilitated by his desire to make a visual record of the world he knew.  The Internet, with websites such as Cyber Diary, enabled Mu to upload and maintain hundreds and hundreds of these self-reflexive visual narratives, lasting several seconds to several minutes each.  It was unfortunate, ironically, that at the time of the accident, he had chosen the areas of video technology and psychoacoustics for his college study and envisioned future profession.  Literally from the day after the death of his girlfriend, until this very moment, Mu lived, if one could use such an extravagant word as “lived,” only through his constant, multi-dimensional narrative, in which nothing horrible happened that night at the movies, the girl nestled her head against his shoulder as he drove her home, her hair smelled like jasmine, like aloe, and they were married on the beach, she loved antique furniture, he taught video and cinema history at the university, she gave birth to twin girls, he laughed at the way their boyfriends got confused the night of the prom, his wife made lovely things to eat, he helped with the banana cake mix, she painted by the shore even though her hands shook slightly from a thyroid condition that worsened in her sixties, and the patches of gray in his hair were more visible when he tied it back into the ponytail that his granddaughter compared to Paul Revere (she was studying American history in the second grade).  One day, the hellish psychological torment of years of self-imposed subterfuge took their toll.  “I began to challenge the authenticity of my self-validated mirage, as if this non-existent lover and companion had been mysteriously substituted by a double or imposter, and the original whisked away into an unknowable dimension, never to be recovered.  Instead of allowing myself to realize that the girl in question had died at fourteen, I let her live and grow older, to be in a life with me, through the energy of my videotape entries.  The video recordings kept her alive.  Just as tragically as Lear realizing far too late that Ophelia was the daughter who truly and selflessly loved him, I came to the realization that my whole life was a myth, a fiction, and I attacked the veracity of what my mind and my voice created, not realizing that I was calling the counterfeit an imitation; that I was rejecting the illusion for being unreal; that I was denying the incantatory for being ethereal.”  Raising the gun to his temple, Mu finished this final video record of his suicide; he beseeched his loved one to forgive him; and he promised to spend eternity at her side.  Mr. Mu stopped speaking for a moment.  He pressed the STOP button on the video recorder and stared at the table, as if his body and his mind were mysteriously arrested by some kind of trance or hypnotic state. His last thought was that another life in another place seemed to be a fair reward, a special gift after we have atoned for the mistakes we made here.  He pressed the RECORD button on the camcorder for the last time and spoke: “To be given the chance to love and live again after death, like children reassured after a nightmare, like children eternally playing…”  Mu pulled the trigger.

 

 

 

Hearing the distant church bell, Mr. Mu’s doctor set the clock on his mantle and rubbed his sore wrist before lifting the heavy, thick book from the elegant mahogany stand, placing it upon his desk, and turning to the desired page.

 

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)

 

The Capgras delusion is classified as a delusional misidentification syndrome, a class of delusional beliefs that involves the misidentification of people, places, or objects.  Cases in which patients hold the belief that time has been “warped” or “substituted” have also been reported.  It’s also known as “Imposter Syndrome.”  People who experience this syndrome will have an irrational belief that someone they know or recognize has been replaced by an imposter.  They may, for example, accuse a spouse of being an imposter of their actual spouse.

 

“Give her the epinephrine now!  Look at the swelling!  She can’t breathe!  She can’t breathe!”

“I’m getting the syringe out!  We’ll be pulling into the emergency room in a minute!  The hospital is two blocks away!”

The nervous paramedics moved with an urgency that milked their training and confidence for the precise decisions that were needed but also made their lack of choices all the more desperate.  A girl of about fourteen with a dangerously swollen esophagus was about to suffocate as a result of an allergic reaction to peanuts.  The syringe with the life-saving drug had to be retrieved from the floor of the ambulance because the sweaty fingers of the attendant let it slip.

Mr. Mu rubbed his tired eyes before lifting the old, dusty, wooden milk crate from the place on the shelf where it rested alongside dozens of identical wooden crates.  The decaying, splintered boxes were filled to the top with thousands of neatly, evenly stacked, videocassettes.  Sometimes, as on this occasion, Mu liked to watch selections from his immense video library by playing the original tape on the old VHS machine.  On most evenings, though, he preferred going to the Cyber Diary website, where he had previously uploaded the videos, and watch them unfold in myriad waves across the little square screen box on the computer, like an infinite series of undulating spider web compartments.

These cassettes were stored inside black plastic jackets approximately five inches long.  Mu carefully sifted through the top layer of tapes, looking for the most recent date.  Many of the tapes in the other crates went all the way back to his teenage years.  Finding the one he wanted, Mu pushed it through the slender machine, pressed the “Record” button on the video camera positioned a few feet from his head, and began speaking in a clear voice.

“…let it slip.  That was the day that my future wife almost died!  All because I insisted on kissing her in the theater before our date was over, even though I had peanuts during the movie and I knew how devastating her allergy could be.  It completely escaped my mind!  It meant so much to me.  After all, I was sixteen and this was our third date!  It was time to kiss her; I really liked her!  She was so lucky that they had a powerful antidote.  They got her to the emergency room on time…”

Suddenly, Mr. Mu, as if exasperated by what he had said, violently rummaged through the crate, moving and disturbing the tapes so ferociously that some of the plastic shells cracked and little loops of videotape spilled out, like curling rivulets of brown blood.  It was not clear if he was disgusted by his own account of having been indirectly responsible for causing his young girlfriend’s attack and near death, or if he remembered another passage that he recorded previously and wanted to find it as quickly as possible.

“…They may, for example, accuse a spouse…”  So you see, Mr. Mu, there is nothing so very alarming here, I mean, in the sense that it has not been diagnostically and statistically examined and encountered many times.  Your wife—

—is not my wife.  I cannot give you every utterance in my soul that tells me she has been replaced.  It would be like the sun asking a lake to prove it deserves to wear the morning on its face.  She may reach for a cup; try on a new dress; retrieve a delivered parcel from the front steps.  I hear her laughter when something amuses her in the garden; I see her muddied knees after an afternoon of planting.  But these are the semblances; some kind of evil incandescence of the one who appears to be her, but is not.  It is some kind of sinister metaphysical arrangement, designed long before I was born.  A punishment, perhaps, for wrong doing in a past life?  I don’t know.  Some malevolent force has taken away the delicate, sweet creature who came to rescue me from loneliness, and replaced her with a surrogate; as if all madness had stuffed itself into one dark corner of my brain, refusing to leave, removing every hope I might have, every moment I wanted to have, and all the memories I dared to cherish.

“…in a minute!  The hospital is two blocks away!”

“Oh God!  No!  No!  She’s going into shock!”

Mu’s parents continued to provide him with a vast collection of video recorders, plus a steady supply of blank VHS tapes, in spite of the advice from the boy’s doctor warning against it.  The good will in their hearts blinded their minds to the simple fact that they were enabling the obsessive-compulsive ritual of a traumatized seventeen-year-old boy.  A year had passed since the tragedy and the young man continued keeping a videotaped record of it, as though nothing else in his life or his thoughts mattered.  He spent every moment of his personal time sitting at his desk filming himself endlessly talking about that day, and then uploading the new entry to the Cyber Diary website.  The doctor’s recommendations to get Mu out of the house, to introduce departure from routine or change of scenery, fell on deaf ears.  Certainly, his mother and father were alarmed by the morbid accumulation of scrupulously labeled, rectangular plastic tapes in black jackets, yet they felt this was a form of therapy for the boy.  They felt that, like an exorcism, the video recordings would eventually free his spirit from the suffocative grasp of negative thoughts and irrational guilt.

“The parents will be here in a few minutes to bring the girl’s clothing and leave a deposit.  I’m going downstairs to turn on the lights so they can choose a casket.”

“Good.  I’ll print out the invoice for them.  What a shame, huh?  Only fourteen.  You’d think something like that could have been prevented.”

“I heard that the boy she was with—“

“You mean at the movie?  Her boyfriend?”

“Her boyfriend, yeah.  I heard he really lost it.  He’s living in a kind of—“

“The psychiatrist?  The video tapings?”

“The video tapings, so you heard?”

“My cousin lives near them.”

“Near them?”

“Across the street, sweetie.  She’s such a pretty girl.  Why don’t you ask her out?”

“Oh mom, c’mon!”

“I’ll bet she falls for you!  Do you have any classes with her?”

“We’re in History, last period.”

“Good!  There’s that new movie—“

“Mom!  We haven’t even spoken—“

“No one has.  His parents are keeping him out of school for now.  While he’s in therapy and living his life talking to his video cameras.  I wonder what that poor girl’s parents think of all this?”

“Shh!  Here they are!”

This was a special day for Mu.  A third date with the girl that he loved so dearly.  He wanted to show her that he was serious.  After all, he just received his driver’s permit and a temporary license!  Mu’s father was letting him use the family car.  “Don’t forget,” warned his father, “If you scratch the fender, you lose a month’s allowance!”  Mu promised to be careful and, smiling benevolently, his father’s tone softened to warm encouragement as he told his son to enjoy himself.  “You’re a young man now,” his mother added as Mu walked down to the car parked across from the front door, “Are you ready to fall in love?”  Mu, a little embarrassed, responded that it was only their third date!  They were still in High School, how could they know if they were in love?

Once he was behind the wheel, Mu summoned all the memories he dared to cherish, all the happy thoughts his mind had stored away.  Mom must be right, he thought as he drove away.  “I must be in love!”

…many times.  Your wife, Mr. Mu, is a creature of fantasy, a different and unknown being, only in those secret places of your mind where memory and perception are strangers.  How could this woman, who you have known since she was fourteen, how could she not be the same person?  Was she mysteriously replaced by an alien double in the middle of the night?  Did some demonic force suck her soul and personality out of her body, leaving only a barren, lifeless shell or mould?  Once the mind becomes shipwrecked on some strange island of emotional and spiritual uncanniness, there is little for the conscious part of our brains to do except be carried in tow by our subconscious as it relentlessly explores that island.  Are you listening to me?

“Did you hear me?!  She’s not breathing!”

“We’re here!  We’re here!  Hurry up!”

The frantic paramedics jumped out of the back of the ambulance as it pulled into the entranceway of the emergency room.  They banged open the white metal rear doors of the vehicle so forcefully that a violent burst of air made the pair of green movie ticket stubs fly out of Mu’s shirt pocket.  Frozen in place from shock and the insidious unreality of what was happening, all the poor boy could do was watch the gurney carrying his precious one as it was whisked into glaring hospital lights.  He was so terrified.  He could not move.  He stood there, his arms outstretched, palms facing upward like a supplicant seeking guidance or begging forgiveness.  Like a damned sleepwalker on a supernatural path leading towards nothing, radiating outwards in concentric circles of hopelessness, a special kind of subterranean hopelessness designed, like the ninth circle of Hell, only for him.  He could not measure the weight of endless shame and guilt that had settled upon the center of his spine.  He could not comprehend how he had forgotten about the lethal danger of her allergy.  Someone in a car parked a few feet behind him had just turned on the radio and a commercial for tropical vacations came blasting out of the car stereo.  The sound of crashing waves overwhelmed Mu with a sense of entrapment, as though he were being swallowed by sonorous enclosure, surrounded by miles of walls of water, buried in an avalanche of suffocation.  Maybe this is a nightmare, he thought.  Mu wondered: if he concentrated hard enough, if he could palpably and realistically transport himself back to the movie theater, just before he leaned over to kiss her, that maybe the insanity of what had really happened could be somehow transformed or rolled back like a rug being taken out of a room and moved to a new house.  There was a truck engine backfiring in rapid staccato bursts: he heard the repeated, failed attempts of the defibrillator.  They could not revive her heart.  There was a bar across the street with the door open and the third quarter buzzer of the basketball game rang out in a long, linear monotone: he saw the flat line of the droning heart monitor.  They could not bring her back.  There were dozens of bundles of roses, tight bundles of roses all around her coffin.  There were so many times when I thought we laughed.  We grew older.  She became my wife.  It was such a beautiful house!  She loved pastels.  She wanted Art Deco furniture.  I was saving for a surprise on her birthday.  A beautiful bar from the 1930s.  Lovely marquetry inlay with woods from exotic places.  A feast of complexions of wood.  Imbedded beautiful layers that shined like an aurora borealis, a kaleidoscopic glow of polished wood.  Remember?  You were so surprised!  So pleased!  You hugged and kissed me so many times I began to feel faint with joy.  They didn’t want me to go to the funeral.  My parents were afraid for me.  Especially because they had heard that her mother passed out several times; there was talk of her father waiting for me with his gun at the entrance to the funeral home but that turned out to be a rumor.  It felt strange seeing so many familiar faces in such an unexpected, unusual place.  Students from my math class smoking outside; classmates from Geometry in the front, waiting to kneel at the coffin and pay their respects.  We made a home!  She didn’t die like that.  They got her to the hospital in time.  The paramedics were ready.  They gave her the shot in the ambulance.  We made a home!  We were so happy.  Long walks on the beach at sunset.  Listening to the intimate echoes of large shells.  Running with the dogs along the shore.  Looking at the rows of caskets was too much for the dead girl’s mother.  She ran up the stairs, sobbing hysterically.  It must have been horrific to be so brutally confronted with the death of her daughter.  Realizing that she was going into shock, I ran madly into the movie theater lobby to tell someone to call an ambulance.  I collided with a man who had just purchased a large container of popcorn.  He lost his balance and spilled the yellow puffs all around my feet.  They glistened with liquefied butter that created a reflective cluster.  I must have remained in that spot, immobilized by fear, because I remember seeing the black wheels of the ambulance stretcher reflected on the oily shine of the popcorn garlands as the paramedics whisked past me.  Someone asked Mu if he was with the girl.  All he could do was feebly nod his head, still staring at the constellation of scattered popcorn pieces.  The theatre manager or a security guard (Mu could not remember) grabbed his arm and quickly ushered him outside so that he could get into the ambulance and ride to the hospital.  Mu tried to compose himself and focus his thoughts on how he might be able to help.  He asked himself what he knew about his girlfriend’s allergy; what useful information could he share with the paramedics.  Many teenagers enjoyed group viewings of Cyber Diary and Mu’s videos had become very popular since his girlfriend’s death.  “I don’t want you looking at that boy’s videos anymore!  It’s sick!  He talks about that girl as if she’s still alive,” warned the concerned parent.  “Oh mom…We all do!  We log on and usually ten of us are looking at the same time.  It’s really cool!  Mu has like hundreds of little videos up there and we put them on our screens ten at a time.”  A bizarre cult had formed around the morbid ritual of students from Mu’s school gathering separately and in unison to watch the videos Mu created in which he seemed to slip deeper and deeper into the psychosis of believing that years were passing and he was having a mature life with his girlfriend.  For most of the parents, this became a forbidden form of entertainment, akin to using a Ouija board or experimenting with drugs, forcing the teenagers to arrange more and more clandestine viewings of the website.

They could not revive her heart.  He saw the flat line of the droning heart monitor.  Across from the emergency room cubicle, into which the paramedics had wheeled the gurney, an old man was sitting in his soiled hospital gown, holding a little portable radio.  A rush of cheering shouts, in bursts and crackles of static, emanated from the little black instrument on the old man’s lap.  Under the deadly weight of guilt-ridden thoughts that was enveloping and crushing Mu’s conscience, his mind was assaulted by a final stabbing irony: these choruses of frantic approval belonged to spectators at the basketball game that, if not for the movie tickets Mu had already purchased, he and his girlfriend would have attended.  It was the girl’s father who had invited them.  He never missed a home game and he would have been sitting courtside with Mu and the girl (he always made sure he procured excellent seats).  Racing, pathetically helpless thoughts made Mu  imagine that the girl’s father was standing with the crowd, shouting for his team, but that he could somehow see what was happening to his daughter in the hospital, because of Mu’s carelessness, and his gleeful yelling about a sports victory was nightmarishly and surrealistically combined with a wide-eyed stare, the fixed, terrifying, zombie-like stare of a madman, a stare centered directly and solely upon Mu.

“Hurry up!  Let’s get inside!  There’s no pulse!”

“I heard you!  I heard you!  Open the door!  Help me!”

“Get the stretcher ready!  The wheels are still locked!”

“Let’s get inside!  C’mon!  C’mon!” 

So let’s get inside the caves on this unknown island of the subconscious mind.  Let’s try to see that the thoughts we distrust the most are usually our pathway to mental health, while the thoughts we wholeheartedly embrace often lead to emotion and psychological chaos.  I have never met your wife but when you explain that you have known her since your early teens, I must rely on empirical reality, as a doctor and as a rational being, and come to the only plausible conclusion: she must therefore be who she is.  She has always been who you say she is.  I’m sure you have repeated this to yourself many times.

“How could I think of this as anything but a special day?”  Mu’s racing, excited thoughts engulfed his mind and controlled his actions.  Yet this was only his third date with the girl!  Did he love her dearly?  Was he really a serious young man?  Mu wondered how he could prove his sincerity.  “Don’t forget this!” said Mu’s father, playfully handing his son the driver’s permit that the boy had so eagerly awaited.  “A temporary license!” exclaimed Mu just a few hours ago, when he discovered that the long-awaited document had arrived in the mail.  Wanting to help his son to relax, Mu’s father, in a mock serious tone, admonished him to return the car in perfect condition or he would lose driving privileges for six months.  Seeing that Mu was chagrined by these remarks, his father quickly added that he was confident of Mu’s driving skill and encouraged the boy to have a good time.  Mu realized, with surprising maturity, that he was still young a man.  He wondered if he was ready to fall in love.  “Why should I be embarrassed by all the memories?” Mu asked himself.  Mu decided that with so many happy thoughts, he must be in love.  He must be ready. 

“So does your cousin ever see the guy, the kid I mean, Mu?”

“No, I don’t think so.  Nobody does, I mean not since it happened.  He never comes out.  Stays in his room all the time making those little videos that he uploads to Cyber Diary.”

“Will you keep your voices down!  The girl’s parents are here and we have to show them the caskets.  I think I heard the mother crying.  This is the beginning of the hardest things for parents and relatives to do, picking the casket I mean, and clothes for the deceased, flowers, things like that.  It’s when the reality of it really hits home.  Very hard to watch.”

“Sorry.  Do you think they’ll want to see wood or metal?”

“Not sure.  Just let them look at everything down there.  Maybe only the father will go.  I can still hear the mother.  She doesn’t sound too good.”

“We have some of the smelling salts here just in case, right?”

“Yes, in that drawer over there.”

“What are they, by the way?  I’ve always wondered exactly what’s in them.”

“Ammonia mainly.”

“Did you say Ammonia?”  The funeral assistant didn’t hear the man properly because of the news station on the radio they brought with them and some resounding church bells from a few blocks away.  “Really penetrates when someone faints?”

“Always does the trick.”

Mu’s parents wanted to pay their respects and go to the girl’s funeral.  They felt it was the right thing to do.  Mu’s mother suggested it, as she was somewhat friendly with the girl’s mother (they had gone to college together).  Mu’s psychiatrist thought it might be cathartic for them but recommended that Mu not attend.  He wasn’t pleased that they continued to provide Mu with a vast collection of video recorders.  The steady supply of blank VHS tapes alarmed the doctor when he stopped by to have occasional therapy sessions with Mu.   In spite of his advice, the good will in the parents’ hearts blinded their minds to the simple fact that they were enabling the obsessive-compulsive ritual of a traumatized seventeen-year-old boy.  Hadn’t a year passed since the tragedy? Yet the young man continued keeping a videotaped record of it.  There was no way to dissuade Mu from thinking and behaving as though nothing else in his life or his thoughts mattered.  “He spends every moment of his personal time sitting at his desk, filming himself endlessly talking about that day, and then uploading the new entry to the Cyber Diary website,” wrote the doctor in his therapy journal after one of his conversations with Mu.  It was extremely frustrating that the doctor’s recommendations to get Mu out of the house, to introduce departure from routine or change of scenery, fell on deaf ears.  Weren’t his mother and father alarmed by the morbid accumulation of scrupulously labeled, rectangular plastic tapes in black jackets? thought the doctor.  Somehow they felt this was the most effective form of therapy for the boy.  They believed that the video recordings would eventually free his spirit from the suffocative grasp of negative thoughts and irrational guilt, like some kind of emotional exorcism.  No matter what he said, the doctor could not dislodge Mu’s parents’ from this belief.

“…blocks away!” 

“…shock!” 

“She’s turning white!  She’s turning white!”

“Give her the shot!  Give her the shot!”

First you tell me that I created all of this in my mind because my girlfriend died from the trace of a peanut butter sandwich on my saliva, then you say my wife is obviously a real person because she could never have been replaced.  Yet every utterance in my soul tells me she has been replaced.  I cannot give you proof because the certainty resides within me.  “Try a little mental exercise, like imagining the sun asking a lake to prove it deserves to wear the morning on its face.”  Mu laughed at the doctor’s ridiculous attempt to make a metaphorical or poetic suggestion.  He explained that his wife was such a clever non-entity, that she knew how to invisibly transit between the real and the unreal.  He explained that she might reach for a cup; try on a new dress; retrieve a delivered parcel from the front steps.  “I hear her laughter when something amuses her in the garden,” Mu explained.   “I see her muddied knees after an afternoon of planting.”  “These are not semblances!” exclaimed the psychiatrist, raising his voice and deliberately adopting an authoritative tone.  Sometimes a sudden change in demeanor can challenge or shock a patient and force them to confront their own subterfuge and self-deceit.  Mu knew the secret.  He knew this was some kind of evil incandescence of the one who appears to be her, but is not.  Or maybe it was some kind of sinister metaphysical arrangement, designed long before he was born?  “A punishment, perhaps, for wrong doing in a past life?  Like the little girl that wasn’t ready to be born?  Jung.”  The doctor hurriedly scribbled these notes into his black leather journal.  I don’t know.  Mu’s thoughts echoed what the doctor wrote.  Some malevolent force has taken away the delicate, sweet creature that came to rescue me from loneliness.  I recreated her so perfectly.  Can’t you see?  The doctor glanced at his appointment book and realized that Mu’s time was almost up.  He had skipped lunch and was famished.  There was a new Thai restaurant across the street that he wanted to try.  We came home together from the movie theater that night.  We continued dating.  We went to college at the same time.  “His guilt layers are so dense and strong,” wrote the Doctor in a scribbled handwriting.  He had become jittery with hunger.  “I’m not having any success penetrating these layers.  He will not remember what really happened that night at the movies.  His girlfriend died that night.”  Why was she replaced with a surrogate?   It was as if all the madness of the universe had stuffed itself into one dark corner of my brain, refusing to leave, removing every hope I might have, every moment I wanted to have, and all the memories I dared to cherish.

“…accuse a spouse.”  Mu’s father slowly closed the psychiatric manual with an attitude of morbid resignation.  He shook his head sorrowfully, in pitiful recognition of his son’s tragic fate.  He could already see the life of his son, continuing to shrivel and die within these imagined scenarios that he videotaped every day, then uploaded to the Cyber Diary website each evening.  He envisioned the hundreds of conversations that would occur between his young son and his later self, preserved like an electronic ghost on these videos.  With great sorrow, he saw his son, grown into a pathetically confused mature man, a man who had remained so imprisoned and poisoned by his own mental cages, he could never be at peace, even if he were to find a woman to marry.  Mu’s father could not hear or see a future world for his son that was not contaminated by the boy’s contorted, infected, insane belief that his girlfriend (who had died purely by accident because Mu had forgotten about her peanut allergy) had in fact lived, that she and Mu married, had children, and enjoyed a long, productive life together.  As Mu’s psychiatrist had prophetically warned long ago, the fantasy eventually turned in on itself, and Mu began to believe that his wife (who did not exist in the first place) had somehow become an “imposter,” a malevolent doppelganger, determined to destroy his soul.

Mu remembered so many things; too many things.  He remembered another passage that he recorded previously.  Suddenly, he wanted to find it as quickly as possible, as though it held the answer to one of the special secrets that slowly burrowed into Mu’s mind every moment of his life.  “That’s ridiculous!” Mu said out loud.  He was exasperated by these thoughts.  Speaking to himself, just like the thousands of short videos, was his way of creating and preserving a dialogue with his soul.  So he rummaged through the crate more and more violently, like a gasping man on some prehistoric planet clawing at old materials trying to find an oxygen mask.  He dug into the tapes, smashing and flinging them ferociously.  Cracked shards of the plastic containers, the “shells” that held the videotape, flew into his face.  Fortunately, this explosion of sharp pieces did not cut Mu’s skin.  The loosened tape spiraled out, like rivulets of flowing brown blood.  What could have upset him so much?  It might have been one of his earliest videotape diaries.  During that period, Mu was vehemently disgusted by the realization that he had nearly caused his girlfriend’s death.  It was the tyrannical combination of desperation and fear that filled Mu with so much rage.  His utter stupidity almost cost this girl her life, the person that Mu, carried away by the ardent fantasies of youth, had hoped to marry.  In one day, several months after the accident at the movie theater, Mu consecutively uploaded fifty videos to the Cyber Diary website.  He liked doing it that way, as opposed to saying everything he wanted in a single videotaping and then loading the solitary video.  There were no time restrictions.  Cyber Diary allowed its mostly teenage users to pontificate, rant, and rave all they wanted.  The only rule or restriction was that each video entry had to have a kind of “slate” at the beginning and the end, the way the familiar black and white clap board is used in films to mark a new scene with both an aural and visual cue.  It was so that the Cyber Diary audience could become more intimately familiar with those “Cyber D’s,” as they were called, that they liked the most, and it also served as a kind of branding or host identification, with each person saying who they were and engaging in a little small talk, at the beginning and the ending of the entry.  Letting it slip, failing to include these little bits of personal business, could cause a suspension of use for the “Cyber D” who ignored the procedures of the site.

“…we went over this so many times, man!  We trained!  Oh God!  Got her pulse!”

“…sorry!  What do you want?!  I got nervous!  My hands are sweating!”

“What if she dies!?  What if she dies!?”

“Here!  Here it is!  Got the syringe now!”

This could have been a terrible shame, an unforeseen, monstrous tragedy.  Yet somehow, miraculously, they got her to the emergency room on time.  This could have been one of those cases where an allergic reaction was as deadly as a bullet to the heart. 

I hope he kisses me!  He’s so cute.  It’s our third date!  I really like him! 

“…he must be an idiot to forget a thing like that!  Peanuts!”

“…a faint pulse!  OK!  OK!”

“She’s lucky we had the right antidote!”

After lifting the coffee mug to his lips, the detective continued typing the report about the girl who died from an allergic reaction.  He felt sorry for Mu’s father.  He rubbed his red, tired eyes before inserting another form into the old, dusty typewriter.  The precinct was being slowly outfitted with a new communications and computer system.  The ancient Royal typewriters were all that could be set up for now.  On the floor next to the officer’s desk was a crate taken from its place on a shelf in the Mu home, where it rested alongside one or two identical wooden crates.  The new, smooth, blond wood had a pleasant smell, like freshly cut pine.  The crates contained a few videocassettes used in early SONY camcorders that were bulky and somewhat difficult to operate.  The detective asked Mu’s father if his son had used the video camera on many occasions.  He said that Mu liked to watch selections from the immense video library at the university he attended.  He played many original tapes by current and previous students on the old VHS machines.  Mu was just beginning to explore the technology and hadn’t shot many of his own tapes yet.  He had begun to familiarize himself with the Cyber Diary website and spent most evenings at home exploring it.  The detective had heard of the website and Mu’s father explained that from what he had gathered, it was extremely popular with high school and college students. It was a forum for the students to upload their videos that featured all sorts of biographical content: their hobbies; their romantic exploits and conflicts; their taste in music and clothes; academic interests, career plans, and so forth. “It’s like an infinite series of undulating spider web compartments!” was the elegiac explanation Mu once tried to articulate to his father, attempting to justify spending countless hours sitting in front of his computer, watching hundreds if not thousands of these videos unfold like myriad waves across what appeared to Mu’s father to be a little square screen box.  “That’s the Windows Media Player, dad!” Mu explained. 

On the day the detective retired, several piles of case notes had been made available to him.  He was given special treatment at the precinct because he was well liked and had spent thirty-five years on the force.  The “Mu” case was special to him because even though he never revealed personal information to Mu’s father at the time that he typed the report, he was especially touched by what happened to Mu’s girlfriend because he and the girl’s father had been friends for many years.  Of course, once the circumstances surrounding the girl’s death were determined to be accidental, and the case was officially closed, the detective filed his notes and moved on.  Now, all these years later, he wondered about Mu the middle-aged man, still living in his parents’ house, and, from gossip that occasionally made its way into the precinct, still obsessed by the same demons, the same videocassettes.  The detective finished his report, typing that these cassettes were stored inside black plastic jackets approximately five inches long.  Mu carefully sifted through the top layer of tapes, looking for the most recent date.  Many of the tapes in the other crates went all the way back to his teenage years.  Finding the one he wanted, Mu pushed it through the slender machine, pressed the “Record” button on the video camera positioned a few feet from his head, and began speaking in a clear voice, looking directly into the camera.

It took many years of psychotherapy for the young paramedic to rid himself of his irrational guilt.  He tormented himself with the unshakable belief that the girl died only because his slippery grasp of the syringe caused it to fall to the ambulance floor.  He retrieved it almost instantly yet it was impossible for anyone to convince him that those additional two or three seconds meant nothing and could not have saved the girl from death.  For the unfortunate young man, these seconds might as well have been days.  He was so overcome with grief that he tried to take his own life on several occasions.  He would have been successful had it not been for the watchful eyes of his parents.  Fortunately, after more than a decade, and the sensitive support of his mother and father, he began to see the event through an objective lens that revealed his blamelessness, rather than the expressionistic vision of his imagined guilt and incompetence that had been tormenting him for years.

“Why isn’t she breathing yet?!  She’s not breathing!  Isn’t the epinephrine working?!  What happened?!  What happened?!

“Look!  We’re pulling into the emergency room now!  I just gave her the shot!”

“I thought you lost the syringe!  What were you doing on your hands and knees just now?!  Did you drop it?!  You’re sure you gave her the shot, right?!”

“Yes, yes!  I gave her the shot!”

Cases in which patients hold the belief that time has been “warped” or “substituted” have also been reported.  Patients suffering from this affliction do not experience time as a linear companion.  Instead, they are often terrorized by what appears to be the malignant intrusion of time, as though it did not belong where it insinuated itself, as though it attacked instances of being or memory with irrational and contradictory elements, elements that did not make logical sense, leaving the patient in a kind of kaleidoscopic daze, a jumbled landscape of illusory, ill-fitting, sardonic parts, not the pleasantly discordant parts of a fantastical dream, but the monstrously mismatched parts of a hideous nightmare.

           

Mr. Mu’s doctor only worsened the arthritic symptoms he had been feeling in his wrist by slamming the gargantuan psychiatric tome shut with all the force of disgust he could muster.  Such elegant descriptions! he thought, hating the impotence he felt over his inability to reach Mu and help him see reality.

“Did you hear that?”

“What?  I don’t know.  C’mon, it’s your turn.”

“It sounded like a gun shot.  Didn’t you hear?”

“Yeah, so?  Maybe a car backfired.  C’mon.”

“We’ll get our Easter dresses dirty.  My mom will kill me.”

“It’s just a little Hopscotch, silly.”

“All right.  All right.  But we’re stopping as soon as mass begins.”

“You had to jinx us.  There go the bells!”

“Let’s get inside!  It’s Easter mass!”

“I never stood so close to a church on Easter Sunday before!  The bells are so beautiful!”

“They are wonderful!  So many, too!  But so loud!  I can barely hear you!”

“I can barely hear you too!  Sister at school says the Easter bells tell everyone that the fasting is over!”

“Right!  Because Christ has risen!”

“Right, the Resurrection!  The chance to live again after death!  Let’s get inside!”

“Let’s get inside!”

 

Bong!   BongBong!  BongBong!  Bong!

BongBongBong!

BongBongBong!

Bong!  BongBong!  BongBong!  Bong!