James Skinner
Consider Dr. James Skinner. From a fervent Midwestern family, holding firm, fostered beliefs; the owner of an elegant sense of justice. He ran the mental institution and, although aware of the time's prominent methods and treatments, preferred simply to speak with his patients. Attempting earnestly to understand them. Resisting all haste, force, and cruelty until the point at which law interceded.
His son James Jr., having taken more than just his father's name, moved to the city and prescribed pills from an air-conditioned office. His wife being deceased, the doctor lived alone in an immaculate and secretive house, pondering her..
Why had she done it? He yearned to understand a mind which he found simultaneously logical and insane. One who's rational and impulsive thoughts were so bundled together that they became indistinguishable. Infected by an imbalance between experience and language. Her memory, vocabulary, reasoning, were sharp. She encoded the world around her into exquisite and succinct maxims. But they were heavy, and burdened her until she was too leaden even to rise from bed...
So he listened to the words unravel and shake from distant and paranoid minds. Often finding deep meanings and hidden truths in their allegorical ravings. As if they were on the lip of understanding, simply viewing it from the wrong angle, the oblique light warping truth just enough to give the wrong impressions. Each had their own epic poems spoken in self-referential allusions and made-up idioms. Personal histories wrapped in impenetrable metaphor.
He often felt that they simply needed a slight shift. That words were trapped inside them like ice-cubes blocking their own exit from a freezer door. If you knocked the correct spot—in this case if you said the right words—meaning would tumble out from them and the troubling congestion would be relieved.
They were word puzzles, locks to be opened by ancient magic, spirits to be released by sacred incantations. He began to speak rhythmically, calling upon his vocal chords to match the pitch of his emotion. Certain patients required thick staccato vibrations mixed with long periods of deep intonation, while others required more soothing, swaddling cadences. He began to prescribe his patient’s moods and learned to construct perspectives and associations in their minds. He cleared the mental obstacles that prohibited their words from flowing naturally, returning their associative currents so that they could once again see language as an ally. When information became comfortable, they no longer needed his help.
As his professional success grew, so did his awareness. In his later years, he learned that he could shake loose several people at once, and eventually whole rooms. He would look at you and know, with those half-lidded brown eyes, dark and wry, precisely what to say, how to say it, when.
He found that even with sane people (or at least those with less irrational pronouncement) his suggestions were always followed. Strangers looked at him endearingly; he once visited his son in the city and was stopped, on more than one occasion, for a hug. But when he was alone in his bed without family and without patients, he often felt desolate, unable to feel the way others felt about him.
Over time, as he reached a noble, silver old age, his powers became more acute. He could look at you and perceive your thoughts, enter the realm where you store experience in language and see precisely where, in the strands that filled your head, you have become tangled. He could reach inside of you and untie these knots, snip bits out, add his own lines (where a value or sentiment has become ingrown and self-preservative). Ideas, he thought, should never be let to grow wildly, but should be maintained and hedged like a rosebush.
He felt language as it was being used. As if it were a giant cloth in the sky that people all over the world were pulling down to pad and adorn their skulls. Taking strips of it, appropriating it, creating little rooms in their heads where they can store their thoughts and emotions comfortably. His awareness became so percipient that he could feel it inside every human on the planet; how some people's strands were tied to other people, and some to inanimate objects or systems of belief. He felt it so acutely that he began to feel physical sensations associated with its use. If it were being particularly abused, say by a news outlet, a hateful parent, or a cruel despot, he would itch, writhe, and, shake. Small abuses were necessary, for he saw that the cloth was patchwork and therefore in constant revision. But a large abuse affected the fabric in ways that limited it, stunted its growth and made it ugly, sometimes even lending it a foul odor.
He was unable to let such abuse stand unopposed. So, when he felt a wrenching or a tearing, when he smelled chemical smoke, he fought back in defense of the unseen.
Although none in the world were as great as Dr. James Skinner, many others possessed similar powers. And when Dr. Skinner prohibited linguistic abuse, some of the men and women he prohibited, noticed; pausing blankly during speeches, fumbling over syllables during nasty possessive remarks, or finding themselves simply unable to close a hard sale. Eventually these people formed an organization pledged to and escape Dr. Skinner's detection..
One night, as he was eating lentil soup, reading entire lives from his cedar table, nine men and women in purple helmets crept like velvet into his house. At the very moment Dr. Skinner was curing an Afghani boy of his drone-induced night terrors, they pounced upon and subdued the old man. The boy, I'm told, has yet to recover.
Dr. Skinner awoke in a bitter chamber strapped securely to an ancient studded wooden chair. His captors obscured their faces and kept their helmets on at all times, fearing silent retribution from the innocuously powerful old man. At 108, his eyes remained piercing and knowing, untempted into shaking or milkiness.
For days they stared in the chamber, eighteen eyes to two, attempting to unravel the old man. But Dr. Skinner had arranged the cloth in his head in such a manifold and condensed manner, in such a complex system, that in purpose it resembled a fortress or a strand of DNA.
The helmets were clever, he gave his kidnappers that. They were cloaking devices; entering, copying, and relaying the real-time strand sequence of multiple random civilians, creating human shields and thus drowning out the thoughts operant behind the helmets. The old man loved puzzles, especially moving ones, and waited until he'd organized each of the strand-streams into separate and distinct regions before acting. On an angry whim he severed them completely. Instead of sheering their buds, he tore the flowers out by their roots, killing both his kidnappers and their shields instantly.
In a panic, he attempted to salvage the innocents. He gathered up their thoughts (which no longer had any place to anchor) and tied them to vacant vessels, using the exact same formation they enjoyed in their living bodies. These experiments always ended poorly. Without their original bodies, the consciousnesses had no cogent memories, were prone to violent outbursts and silent reveries.
He cursed his arrogance, his inability to think. How could he not have known this would happen?
At some point, and nobody's really sure when, he began to stare at himself in the mirror. Sometimes for hours. Considering the linguistic strands (and in his case, folds) that constituted his character. He brooded, weaving his ideas together until they created a grand tapestry of emotion and memory so intricate that each strand physically touched and influenced each other strand. He became perfectly balanced and neutral so that each encoded word carried precisely as much efficacy as any other.
It was then, at the end of his life that he understood what he had set out to so many years before. He knew why she had done it; and in that perfect moment of understanding, added his tapestry to the giant patchwork we all share, and died.
