Gifted

Swirling arrays of colors, then nothing.

Again the kaleidoscope starts and stops. Henry squeezed his eyes shut, he wanted it to stop,yet no matter how hard he tried, the show continued in an endless loop, each time more detailed, each time more precise.

He opened his eyes between stanzas, the bare white wall stared back at him, then the procession began again; fanciful paisleys, random patterns, lines and colors paraded through his consciousness, using the wall as their canvas.

The cycle was burgeoning into a full production, a creation he neither summoned nor desired. He needed to focus on some vagrant memory to arrest the monotony. He could not.

He remembered nothing, save the last cycle of hues and shapes. He forced himself up from the bed, turned to face the opposite wall. He realized he was babbling with no conception of what he was saying. He wanted to grasp where he was, who he was, but the color show had given him a deep comfort that he failed to comprehend.

This time it took a few minutes but the display ended once again. He took advantage of the respite to peruse his environment. He was in a room with nothing but a bed, four walls and a window. He went directly to the window to view the street below with people going about their business, then the colors superimposed themselves upon the tableau and he was lost once again in the comfort of his imaginary palette.

A few minutes later he found himself sitting on the bed, but this time he remembered the street, the people, he remembered that something actually existed outside of his own perception of color. He arose, babbling, to begin his traverse the few feet to the window before he collapsed to the floor.

Hours later, as he was fighting his way back to awareness, he felt himself being expelled from a fragment of a dream. A foreign experience for Henry, for his reality had the essence of a dream. He was struggling with the process of separating his dreams from reality. What had defined the intrinsic dichotomy between reality and his dream was the fact that in the dream he was a child. He was walking through a field of wheat with his cousins who were chastising him for wearing short pants, something one just did not do because of the chiggers that would affix themselves to your leg. Now that the dream had evaporated he felt lost once again. He didn’t know what chiggers or wheat were. It didn’t matter, for now the warm waves of colors were starting their onslaught once again.

He wasn’t sure, but this time the Technicolor feature seemed to be shorter than the last.
When it ended he tried to recall the meaning of the word wheat. For some reason it felt more fundamental than chigger, therefore easier to define. He pondered this, in lieu of babbling he just kept repeating “wheat”.

The next show failed to comfort him to the degree of the last. The nurturing it seemed to provide fell short of his expectations, its finale abrupt. As the colors faded away he again felt the need to look out the window.

As twilight captured the city, the texture of the street had changed. There were far less people about, vehicles were proceeding up and down the street in an orderly fashion. Henry enjoyed the dance, it seemed to him that there was some type of choreography, some form of meaning in the movements of these machines and creatures.

When the colors once again emerged, he was smiling.
~
It had been four years since Henry had spoken an intelligible word. His mental deterioration had been severe. No matter how she tried, Samantha could not rescue him from his own mental demons.

He had been the center of her universe. Now, maybe, he was coming back. The doctor said he was talking again. She could not keep her excitement in check as she hurtled towards the clinic. Henry! Again!
~
On a very hot summer day in 1971, Samantha Lavelle was brought into the world by two free spirited hippies that embraced loving, laughing and living. They were both militant activists in every humanistic cause they could find the time to support, but nothing could match the love they had for their only child, a beautiful daughter they cherished.

Samantha would brag that her feet never touched the ground until she was three years old because her parents loved her so, maybe that’s why she was so damn clumsy. A fair trade off for all the support and affection bestowed upon her as a child.

But then the 80’s happened. Mom and Dad didn’t seem to care about the world as much as they did about making money. At the same time Samantha had turned from a beautiful little girl into a gawkish pre-teen. She mistakenly presumed that her parent’s lack of affection was all her fault. It wasn’t long until she took solace in drugs and sex. By the age of 16 she was a crack whore. Her loving parents were concerned, then dismayed, then appalled at their angel. In the end they washed their hands of her because she had become a very expensive pain in the ass.

On her 17th birthday her best friend Angela's boyfriend Todd sprung for a nice hotel room for them to party in. There would be six people at this small party, Angie and her friends Jessica and Samantha, along with Angie's boyfriend Todd and two of Todd’s buds. It was the perfect setting for a great little party.

At first all went well, the drugs were varied and plentiful, the music was great and the sexual tension was high. Samantha was in a playful, merry mood. It was times like these that made her glad she had told her parents to fuck off and die, they hated her anyways, now she was in a place where she could be loved. She deserved to be loved.

Around midnight a totally blitzed Angie passed out on one of the beds and Jessica was vomiting in the john. Todd had taken off Angie’s clothes and was trying unsuccessfully to have sex with her unconscious carcass while Samantha was making out with one of the other guys on the second bed. The third guy, his name Samantha never could recall, decided it was time to step the party up a notch.

“Hey you guys, the one bitch is passed out, and the other is in the head blowin’ chunks. I say it’s time we pull a train on the good lookin’ one swappin’ spit with Henry.”

Samantha knew that Henry could feel her shudder as he slowly extracted his lips from hers. They both watched as the boy slid off his pants while saying; “c’mon Henry, you got your hands on the wench, you go first, I’ll take sloppy seconds, sorry Todd, you were too slow to call shotgun.”

Henry gathered in the naked boy with his eyes, then in a gravelly, tired voice said; “I don’t think so.”

Unfazed, with his gaze focused on Samantha, the boy moved towards the bed and said,”then get your ass out of the way cuz my pecker’s ready for some poon-tang.”

Henry sat up straight, gazed directly at the boys growing member and said again; “I don’t think so. Listen Mack, we all have our shortcomings, if I were you I wouldn’t display mine so vividly.”

Todd started laughing. “Yeah, really dude, that thing looks just like a penis, only smaller.”

Samantha couldn’t tell if it was embarrassment or anger, but the kid stopped in his tracks whirled, grabbed his pants and went out the door without putting them on. Before he shut it he stuck his head in and yelled, “I know a real party we can go to Todd, so get your ass in the car!”

Todd looked at Samantha, the bathroom door, then at Angie and said, “this party is dead, I’m outa here.”

As the door slammed for the last time, Samantha looked at Henry then laughed.  Henry looked at her and said, “that kid turned red faster than a communist takeover. “

From the bathroom door an emerging bedraggled Jessica asked; “the communists are taking over? Oh man, I better call my mom.” Instead she flopped next to Angie and passed out.

Early the next morning Henry delivered the hung over Angie and Jessica to their respective houses, when it was Samantha’s turn he asked her, “where to?”

“You’re going to take me to breakfast, I know a place.” Samantha had never been so bold. She had become so impressed with Henry that she even impressed herself. He would do or say something that tickled her fancy, something that made her admire him, which in turn would make her do something she was proud of. This phenomenon became a pattern that stuck with her and grew over the years.

Henry wanted to change the world; Samantha wanted them to be the humanistic couple she called Mom and Dad before they abandoned not only their ideals but their little angel. The temporary solace of drugs and random sex lost all their appeal to Samantha overnight. For eighteen years Samantha and Henry grew to be formidable opponents of big business and all of it’s minions until that fateful night Henry disappeared. It became apparent that he had annoyed someone who wielded a big sword.

When they found him he was a shivering mass of jelly lying by the side of the road. The torture had rendered him irreversibly psychotic. All the king’s horses and all the kings’ men couldn’t do a thing for Henry. He stared at the walls and babbled incessantly for nearly four years. Samantha would visit him almost every day, she would sit with him for hours. He never saw her, he didn’t know that she was sitting next to him. He just stared at the wall and babbled.

The alien encounter was a bittersweet one for Samantha. Sweet because most of the humanitarian causes she had fought for became fulfilled. Bitter because she would never discover who had tortured her Henry to insanity, the intrinsic evil element that initiated such things had all but been expelled from the world. Forgiveness now reigned where vigilante justice had once been king. She quickly replaced her anger and sorrow with compassion for those lost souls who once had believed in the almighty dollar. How sad people once were!

It had taken the aliens a few weeks to run some trials but once these were completed they announced to the world that they had a means to reverse psychosis. It was an elaborate and risky process but the consensus was that it worked.

Samantha responded quickly so Henry was placed on the short list of initial recipients.
~
The colors were fading into black and white. Words were bouncing around in his head. “Wheat, Chiggers, legs.” Henry would say when the movie stopped. Clinic staff would attempt to converse with him, but he looked right through them. They did not exist in his mind, they were part of some other dream that was not his, because he did not recognize them. They weren’t his cousins. The black and white movies were now only short interludes between staring out the window at the beautiful symmetric dance of man and machine on the street. The street now brought him comfort, the movies did not.

He was looking out the window when Samantha entered his room.

“Henry? Henry, it’s me.” He continued to stare out the window but his head cocked ever so slightly at the sound of her voice. “Henry, its Sam.” She hated to be called Sam, unless it was by Henry.

Henry rolled his neck, slowly turned to look at Samantha. He stared silently at her for thirty seconds. “I don’t think so….Mack….shortcomings.”

Samantha became puzzled by the words then suddenly hit by the dawn of realization she screamed like a banshee. “You remember! You remember!  That’s the first thing I ever heard you say!” She ran towards him and jumped into his arms, unfortunately for both of them he had forgotten he was supposed to catch her, so they both took a tumble where she ended up on his lap blubbering uncontrollably while Henry shed a single tear. “A communist takeover”; he murmured.

It was a start.