Novel Treatments / SEABURY
I have two sons, but I can’t remember their names. There’s lots of things I can’t remember anymore, like who I am, and who I used to be, and where my arms and hands and fingers are. That’s one of the reasons I’m here at Seabury.
It’s not a bad place, as far as hospitals go.
I know I used to live with my sons in a big house Somewhere in America. And I know I was with them, that I was their Mother, for a very long time. I remember their births and I remember teaching them the alphabet and how to learn to read. I even remember driving them to the little grammar school a few blocks away from the big house near that Somewhere in America; and I’m pretty sure that they went to high school and that they might even have gone to college.
But I could be imagining that. They might still be little boys and the high school and college I imagine them having attended might be ideas I’ve conjured up, little seedlings of thought, pollinated in the dark wind of my vast and shattered mind.
I just don’t know.
I can’t hold a thought of them long enough to be certain of anything beyond their births or the grammar school and that Somewhere In America I used to live that I can no longer place in History or in Time. The truth is I can’t hold a thought long enough to be certain of anything at all.
That’s another reason I’m here.
I don’t know when I got here or how long I’ve been here, but there are no other patients and there aren’t even any doctors or nurses – except the ones I talk to in my mind.
When I first got here, there were all sorts of doctors, but they made me so tired that I had to chase them all away. I didn’t like how they kept poking me with their needles or probing me with the same stupid questions day after fucking day. And I hated those long lab coats that each of them wore to cover up the clothing of their real lives. I think I could have tolerated the needles and even their stupid questions if it hadn’t been for those lab coats.
Most of the coats were white, but some of them were blue or light grey, and each of them had the doctor’s name sewn above the chest pocket with red thread as thick as yarn. Their red yarn-names looked like thick fresh scabs to me and I wanted to pick at them and see the holes where the needles had sewn the thread in and in and out again: “What is your name now,” I wanted to ask them, “you with nothing but holes up there in the fabric of the cloth you use, like a comma, to put a white space between your reality and mine?”
Every now and then, one of them would get my attention. I think it was the same one, although I can’t remember anymore, but there was definitely one of them that got to me more than the others.
There was something soft and tender in the lilt of his voice when he leaned in close to talk to me. I could hear it in the last words of something he’d said and the words would wake me up a little bit; make me remember something about talking, but the remembering was so vague and so very far away that it felt like I was in a dream and when you’re in a dream one thing doesn’t follow another, not in any orderly way, so even though I could hear the last words of what he’d said, I couldn’t hold it long enough in my head to answer him and the words that I was able to push out of my mouth must have made me sound like a real nut job.
That frustrated me beyond anything because I really wanted to answer him. I wanted the words that had slipped from my drugged lips to match up with the ones that came out of his mouth; match up like the double-helix strands of the DNA molecule, each syllable finding its companion amino acid – cytosine to thiamine or guanine or whatever -ine it pairs up with. I wanted to make a ladder of words with him so we could dance The Human Genome together, one rung at a time.
It’s the last thing I remember Wanting.
I hope that I was able to convey that want to him and this hope, which I no longer have, is the last thing at all that I remember Hoping. I don’t know how Hope and Want are related, but it seems that they must have something in common. They’re both about things that Aren’t Yet; because if they were about something that Already Is, then you wouldn’t want or hope for it – you’d already have it and your wanting and hoping would have to move on to something else that you don’t have.
The last time I remember seeing him, the last time I remember Wanting, was early one morning.
I know it was morning because even though the change of light in morning can seem very much like the change of light at night, I have studied them both very carefully and there are many subtle differences between them and it was those subtle differences that made me certain it was an early morning although I cannot say or even guess how long ago that was.
I must have had a Bad Night, because my wrists had leather bracelets around them that were chained to the silver posts of the bedside and I sometimes think that if my arms had been free I might have been able to push up a few syllables that matched the questions he was asking and then we could have danced a little bit.
But I was talking to him from inside a thousand dreams, my mind traveling at the speed of holy light across different realities: one moment, I’m 3-years-old, trapped under a porch; the next moment I’m a grown man, wet with monsoon rain, creeping through the rice paddies of Cambodia with a squadron of helicopters chopping the air overhead; then I’m in Zimbabwe, curled up in the curve of an Acacia tree, next to a smiling cheetah, watching the natives paint their skin with thick colored oils as they dance around a hunting fire. And then I’m down there with them, the cheetah laughing at me as I’m sucking hallucinogenic smoke from a long reed pipe and all the Zimbabwaens are dancing around me and now they’re laughing with the cheetah and one of them is drumming and then I’m Somewhere in America and it’s the 4th of July and my son is flipping his drum sticks through the air as I snap a photo of him in his marching band uniform with the strap of his blue hat curling under the beautiful skin of his baby chin.
I remember trying to talk Through This Dream to This Doctor, but each word took so much effort to form and as I pulled the letters and phonemes together in my mind, it seemed to me that the words I was trying to make had never existed before.
I knew I had to make words that were strong enough to penetrate through the dreams. They had to be like arrows, or prehistoric flints because of All The Time and Reality between the dreams and him in his coat standing there next to my bed with my arms tied so tightly to the steel posts. So I made my word-tools and flung them with all my might, trying desperately to match the slow-motion syllables of his last words. But nothing matched up at all: there was only the random chatter of cheetah and Acacia trees; of little girls trapped under porches and of lost sons, marching in a parade, swirling their drumsticks through the 4th of July air in a Nikon, kodachrome moment.
* * *
Looking back on all of that now, I think that was my last contact with any of the people I used to know. I can’t even remember the question he was asking me, but I think it had something to do with a different morning – the last morning I was together with Alice and what it felt like for me to watch her die.
Whether he was asking about that or whether my dreaming mind had made it seemed like that was what he was asking, I only know that his question moved me like nothing had moved me in years. I tried so hard, as hard as I possibly could, to stir something within me to formulate a coherent answer to him. But as soon as I heard the words crack through the half-light of early morning, I could tell that cytosine would never meet thiamine, and that we would never dance the slow, swirling waltz of the Human Genome.
When I realized that I would never be able to answer him, that I would never dance – Little Girl feet on Daddy’s Big Shoes – I had to chase him away, too.
I never wanted him to leave.
But I don’t care about that anymore. He wore one of the colored coats, so if he had stayed, that would have been as much a problem with him as it was with the others, but there was something different about him and he’s the only one I wish I could bring back.
I didn’t care about the other doctors. None of them ever thought to ask me about Alice, or if they did, they misconstrued my garbled response and moved on to the next stupid fucking question. But I wasn’t interested in their questions. I was interested in who they were, behind those coats, because if I didn’t know that, then I might as well have been talking to walls or statues. I wanted them to take their coats off so that I could see something of who they really were; what other clothes might hang in the closet they opened each morning as they walked in the dark from their ceramic-tiled showers with a monogrammed towel tucked above their health-club waistlines?
I wanted to know how many and what color shirts they had and if the shirts were kept on one side of the closet, organized by color like the spectrum of bending light. And I wanted to know about their ties. Where did they keep them? In the top drawer of their bureaus, neatly folded, organized by color and pattern like samples of paint at a hardware store? Or in the closet, hanging flat from one of those Hammacher-Schlemmer gadgets?
Show me your ties.
Take off your coats.
If you want me to answer your questions, then wear your pajamas and slippers to work, so we can talk in whispers like it’s the middle of the night, like I used to do with Alice, when we’d both wake for a moment or on those other nights when we couldn’t get to sleep at all.
But none of them were ever there at night. And when they came in the morning and asked all those stupid questions about my sleep, I’d want to pick away at the scabs of their names or ask them where they kept their ties and what their closets looked like and if they kissed their sleeping wives good-bye in the morning as they walked out of their houses, slipped quietly into their cars and drove through the indigo light of dawn along the roads that brought them here to Seabury.
Seabury Hospital.
Not a bad place, as far as hospitals go.
My room has big tall windows that look out onto the sea which is always changing colors because of the clouds. It took me a long time to figure that out – the thing about the sea changing colors because of the shadows cast by the clouds that pass through the sky and float or drift or hover above the water.
Sometimes, the clouds are so thick that they cover the entire sky. On those days, the sea is just a muddy grey, like the color of water that’s had beans soaking in it all night. On days when there are no clouds at all, and the sky is very tall and full of a light that seems to have no beginning and no end, the water is a riotous, sparkling, sheer blade of blue that seems to go on forever and ever.
I love those days. I love the way the sea looks, flat and thin, like a sheet of blue saran wrap that someone’s spread over a holiday dessert.
That blue sheet entices me.
It’s good to be enticed. It’s good to feel desire, because desire is motion towards and it makes you go somewhere – like it made Alice go somewhere – and even if it doesn’t get you all the way there, it at least stirs a yearning to want to go to that somewhere and if there’s hardly anything at all that you remember, and if you can no longer Hope or Want, then desire, when it comes, is a great, great gift. It can wake you up from the deepest of slumbers. Even just the yearning can wake you up.
I don’t believe in god, but on those days when the blue entices me, I get this feeling inside of something warm and golden unfolding from the center of my heart and it seems to me that this feeling must be caused by something outside of me.
I think there must have been something of that warm and gold in the lilt of That Doctor’s voice when he leaned in close, because I remember it was the force of that feeling that made me want to push the words up over my lips and that it was a force that seemed to come from outside of me. If it were in me, I’m sure I’d find a way to make it unfold a little bit everyday or even just find a way to remember the feeling in a way that would bring just a tiny drop of it into Now.
But I am never able to do that, no matter what I do. So when I have this feeling, which I almost always do on those days when the sea is that thin sheet of blue, I pretend that god exists and I pretend that I believe that god makes this feeling happen inside of me. And this much I have become certain of in my days alone here; this much I have figured out by myself, without the help of doctors or nurses or janitors or pills: that there are far worse things one can do than pretend that god exists when all that stands before you is a thin sheet of blue, a tall sky and a radiant light that seems to circle forever around the earth.
Whether it’s god or some mysterious magical power that I’ve kept secret from myself (I’ve kept a lot of secrets from myself, so I must admit the logical possibility of that), all I know is that I cannot resist the great calling of the blue sheet of sea: it makes me want to run to the closet down the hall, grab my ice skates and lace them up as I’m dashing, full speed towards the water so that by the time I get there my skates are tight as foot casts up around my ankles and all I have to do is slide over the edge and fly Away, Away, Away – to the end of that god-glorious blue where the earth curves off into infinite space. If I’m skating fast, fast, fast, and if I catch it just right, I’m certain that at the end of that curve is the great mouth of the earth and I will race across its tongue and slide straight off it into the sheer, thin air of the uncharted universe.
But I never make it that far.
Actually, I can’t find the key to the locker where my skates are kept, and even if I could, the truth is I’m a little afraid to go outside, even to the blue sea and even when that warm golden liquid beats out of my heart because of the great beauty of the water and of the light and of the possibility of god.
I don’t know what could make a person so afraid to go outside with those three things in sight – blue sea, golden liquid, and the possibility of god – but I am that person and the truth is that I have never skated on the water, except in my mind, where I glide at the swiftest of speeds: a baby meteor, burning across the ice at the speed of holy light.
But even in my mind, behind the safety of these barred windows, without anyone here at all who could possibly hurt me, I never get airborne. I always stop just as I feel the slope curving up into the great unknown and I make that abrupt twist near the edge, the one that causes the sharp blades to spit up crisp shavings of white ice.
White ice.
New York.
I remember a swanky restaurant. An atrium of light. And impossibly tall green plants growing up somewhere among the great steel walls of Manhattan. And I remember Alice, a radiant jewel, glittering in the speckled light of the sun that curved down through those tall Manhattan walls and bounced up from the warm ceramic floors.
We were drinking a “flight” of some Scandinavian hell water – six tall glasses of clear lethal liquid that made all that New York sunlight melt the insides of our minds. I remember how that light passed through a bead of sweat that was trickling down Alice’s forehead and how, when she bent her head back to laugh, that bead of sweat turned into a crystal and a great wet rainbow of light curved out of her head an arced across the room.
Alice must have felt the rainbow coming out of her head, too, because she had to get up and leave the restaurant. We had barely touched our food – many kinds of fish on a long, dark, Danish blue plate and when the waiter came to clear the table, I wanted to tell him to toss it all back into the sea. But the rainbow had stolen my voice and all I could do was make a motion with my hands, so he cleared the table and the fish never returned to the sea.
Some weeks later (or maybe it was months, I can’t be certain) – on that last morning with Alice – I thought about all those dead fish. It was one of the last thoughts I remember having before the police had to break open the window of the rental car to get me out. What I remember is that I saw the fish coming back to life; I saw them jump from the Danish blue plate and swim into their skeletons in the dark mercurial sea that had flowed out of me and into the rental car. It was like a nature film, only everything was going backwards and after they swam into their skeletons, I saw them find their skin and heads and then I watched them wiggle away from the hooks in their mouths.
I think this must have happened towards the end of those hours in the car, because if I had seen something like that right away, I believe it would have frightened me. But nothing about it scared me at all and nothing about it struck me as the least bit strange. I must have been Somewhere Else from the time I last saw Alice until I saw those fish hitch a ride on Darwin’s shoulders and swim back to life.
I’m good at being Somewhere Else.
That’s another reason I’m here.
Every now and then, as I’m walking the corridors of the various buildings here at Seabury, I can see that it is quite a strange thing to have seen dead fish come to life inside a sea that had flowed out of me into a rental car parked on a beach an hour north of Boston. It sounds like a dream, because things like that don’t normally happen in Real Waking Life. But it wasn’t a dream; I know that much. So, between those now and thens, when I’m walking down these corridors, on my way to group therapy, or on Saturdays, which I spend from sunrise to sunset mopping all three floors of Westfield; I can say, if it’s a good day, and if the sun and sea are friendly, I can say that I might have imagined all those fish springing back to life from the Danish blue plate, and that I might have done so because of what happened to Alice.
But it seemed so very real to me at the time, and it is a very hard thing to get your mind to turn something that seemed real into something that you imagined. It’s the second hardest thing you can ask your mind to do, because once you start turning The Real into The Imagined, it’s like everything is fair game and before you know it, everything you think you’ve experienced, everything that ever seemed Real to you, can end up being a figment of your imagination.
It’s like being Rip Van Winkle, except that he had a life before he went to sleep for twenty years, so when he woke up, he could tell how things had changed. He had some measure to go by. He could look at the Maple tree in the park by the river and see how Different it had become; and he could walk by his house, even if someone else lived there now and even if the name of the street had changed and he could say that he used to live there; and if he had sons – two sons – he could probably remember their names; although, depending on how old they were when he fell asleep, he might not be able to recognize them in the town.
I’d switch places in a minute with Mr. Van Winkle. I’d give anything to have a measure to go by; a yardstick to hold all these things in my mind up against and to be able to say, of this one, that it is real and of that one, that it is an imagination and of this other one – this Little Girl who You Are, a Little Girl trapped under a porch, who Lives There Now, who has Always Lived There and who cannot get out no matter what Tender Voices lure her to Present Time – to be able to say of her that she is a memory.
That’s the hardest thing you can ask your mind to do – turn Yourself into a Memory – because it goes against all that you know to be real and true.
It’s like you’ve been living in a dream your entire life, and that is all you know because you have never woken up from the dream, so for you that is what is real. And then one day you start waking up and the room is filled with people who haven’t been living in a dream their entire lives. They’ve been living in Reality, and every one of them is yelling at you from the four corners of the earth; yelling at you and telling you that you’re dreaming: that what you think is real is really a dream and Who you Think You Are is Really A Memory.
And they tell you other strange things, things like one of the professors said on the first day of class when I was in graduate school back in that other life Somewhere in America. He walked in with his philosopher’s beard and pipe, stared out the window for a moment then turned to the small circle of eager students and said: “Last night, while you were sleeping, the universe doubled in size. True or not?”
The small circle of eager students looked at one another. A tentative hand went up. The professor nodded and the eager student said that it was a question that you couldn’t answer because you needed something to measure the doubling in size and if everything had doubled, then all the rulers and yardsticks and tape measures had also doubled; so, even if everything was twice the size it was yesterday, you’d have no way of knowing, because everything would look the same, relative to everything else.
That was the right answer, although you wouldn’t have known it if you measured the rightness of an answer by the time it took for the professor to respond. It seemed to me that he puffed on his pipe for days and days before turning from the window and asking the rest of us what we thought.
I said I thought I would Feel Twice as Big, that something inside me would sense the momentous change that had taken place, even though I could not prove it. He said I had a good point, that not everything that was True could be shown to be True and that many mistakes have been made in the history of human thought by people who equated the True with the Provable. Then he quoted Shakespeare, something about Horatio and how there are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies and with that the class called “Truth and Reality” was off to a running start.
I never finished graduate school, but I remember that moment in Truth and Reality and I held fast to it those first days here at Seabury, when all the doctors and nurses kept poking me with needles and questions and telling me that what I thought was Real was really an Imagination and that what I think is Happening Now is really a Memory.
I could hear them, especially Him.
You could hear them, too, but you couldn’t believe them because the Dream is Still Happening and all the realities of the dream fill your waking and sleeping mind as being True and Real and Here and Now; except for those Tender Voices which are somehow different because, like that warm golden feeling that pulses out of the heart, they seem to come from outside of you.
Were it not for those Tender Voices that I once heard, I would be alone with the great sheet of blue, alone with the swift speed of Holy Light, and alone with the Possibility of God. And this too I have been able to figure out by myself: that there are far worse kinds of aloneness than one that has blue and light and the possibility of god within it.
But I am alone with the Realities of Me and no matter what I do, I cannot turn them into Memories. That’s what the doctors and nurses tried to get me to do when I first got here: convince me that what I thought was Real was either an Imagination or a Memory. So right from the get go, I knew I’d never be able to trust them; except for that One Doctor with the tender lilt in his voice when he leaned close to me. I know he believed me; I know he believed in the Real Things that were happening Now and that they weren’t memories at all. That’s why I kept him around the longest.
That’s why I wish I could bring him back.
I would bring back Alice, too, but I was never very good at bringing her back. A part of her had always existed elsewhere.
I saw this in her the very first time I met her. I saw it from across the room, “across a crowded room,” just like in the song, and it came at me with such force that for those first few moments, I saw and felt absolutely nothing else at all. To this day, I can’t saw what it was that I saw, but it was something profound and great and something so deeply sorrowful that I felt like an earthquake had suddenly ripped the earth in half and I could see deep, deep, deep beneath the mantle and into the sizzling hot white core of the planet where everything that exists on the surface would be obliterated in an instant. Except for the sorrow that was Alice: one look at her eyes made me see that even the hot fiery core of the earth could not extinguish her sorrow.
Then the earth closed back up again, sealing away Alice and her sorrow and I didn’t see her again for several months until I ran into her, quite by accident, in the revolving doors of a tall building on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, California, on the other side of America.
On that first night when I saw her and felt the earth open up and reveal all that sorrow to me, I couldn’t understand how the whole room didn’t split right in two and all the people in it slide straight off the edges into the dark depths of the unknown earth beneath us. It was like all the laws of physics had been suspended during that moment and there was no gravity or magnetism or strong or weak forces.
I don’t know how long the moment lasted: it could have been just seconds. She wasn’t even looking at me, not the whole time anyway. She was involved in a conversation and had turned her head away for a moment when her eyes just happened to fell onto mine. And there we stood for an instant, two strangers with locked eyes and suddenly it was as if I knew everything important about her. Then she looked away and resumed her conversation and the laws of physics took up their old governance.
I don’t know if anyone else felt it, but I felt it, clear and true and real and when I met her again in California, and began to know her, I always had the feeling when I was with her that I should have something to hold onto – like the handrails you grab on a boat being tossed in a storm at sea – something to hold onto or some special glasses or a bell to ring; although I don’t know what the glasses would have done nor who would have come at the sound of the bell or if anyone in the world would have heard it besides me.
I wanted something like this, because that thing I felt and saw in her on that first night had a great power about it; a power that seemed to come from far beyond the earth or even the Milky Way. A power so unlike anything else I had ever felt that it seemed to me as though it must have come from the Big Bang Itself – as if some clumped molecule of stellar dust hadn’t exploded with the rest of Matter at the Beginning of Time and had somehow come to rest inside the nuclei of her very cells.
I could never touch that part of her, so I didn’t know anything about how to try to bring her back, either from the Beginning of Time, or from something that had happened to her here on earth, after she was born as a baby and grew into a little girl and then into a woman.
That day in New York when the rainbow spiraled out of her head and arced through the restaurant, I had that same earthquake splitting the room feeling and all those laws of physics momentarily suspended. I remember seeing her leave the room, but it was just at the beginning of that feeling and once the feeling hit full force, it seemed to wipe out everything in existence, including Alice, and it took a while for me to get the pieces of the world to fall back into place.
When the world started to come back into focus, I had a vague awareness that I should be attending to something, but I couldn’t put my finger on it and probably didn’t even know where my fingers were. It was like the way your mind feels when someone’s working on a crossword puzzle and they ask you a question, like the name of the villain in Othello, or something Napoleon said, and the answer bubbles half-way up and you think you’re about to say it out loud, then everything goes silent and dark and you no longer have any idea of the answer but you can still feel the impulse of it flopping around in your brain stem.
The frontal lobe of the cortex must not like this feeling, because after a few moments like this, the brain just turns to something else and makes you shrug your shoulders. My brain turned to the waiter who startled me by setting a colossal dessert under my chin, and as he did so, the rainbow and all of its delicious colors had vanished.
I found myself staring down at a dark chocolate flourless cake surrounded by shavings of white ice on a blue porcelain plate. And it is this that I remember when I’m skating on the endless, infinite blue in my mind: the blue plate with the chocolate and the white ice; the rainbow of light fading from the room; and Alice – the lost source of all that light – waiting for me somewhere outside on the streets of New York.
I think about Alice when I look through my windows at the sea, on those blue sheet days and on the days when the water is constantly changing colors. You can stare at those changing colors for hours and hours and for a very long time – maybe months, maybe years, maybe your whole life – you can think to yourself that all those changing colors come up from the bottom somehow, the way people used to think the earth was flat and that if you sailed to the end of the water, you’d fall straight off the edge and into the fires of hell.
For a long while, I was just like those people when it came to considering the source of the constantly changing colors of the sea. There must just be something going on down there at the bottom, some hand of god stirring the mantle soup. But I’ve been here a long time now and I know it is not the hand of god down there that causes the sea to change colors. It is the breath of god, lonely and sad, smoking his philosopher’s pipe and puffing out clouds, sometimes softly and gently, sometimes harshly and gravely, into the great circular perfection of the earth’s atmosphere. And it is these puffs of clouds, floating, hovering or howling above the water that make the colors of the sea change from blue to green to grey to purple.
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Reviews
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This is sad! very sad! I couldn’t imagine how to even handle not knowing anything about anything. Its sad but good poetry.
i like how you wrote it, You have tallent and writing is always good for people.
I encaurage you to write it help me anyways and I thinkg it will for you too!
Tamara*
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You spend a lot of time talking in the first person. Talking first is alright up to a point but eventually one has to start and focus in on other things. Have some one visit her, it can be situation that dramatic it not only the fact that she probably won’t remember them I guess, but it would also be uncomfortable for the companion.
I enjoyed this piece. I thought it different and refreshing. You start off the story very well, the first sentence really brings you into feeling for this man. I didn’t notice any such typos or anything throughout the story but did notice that there were some words in odd places that were capatilized—like Wanting and Now. Was that on purpose or by accident?
One big thing i noticed was that there wasn’t any dialogue at all. The entire part was solely the inner thoughts of this man. I thought it would have been easier to relate to events and people if there was more dialogue. Is the entire story like this? Because I can see how that can get kind of repetitive. But I still enjoyed it a lot. I look forward to reading anything else of yours or even more of this story. Keep up the good work.
This was a greatly detailed peice. I like your main character. It’s sad that he couldn’t remember his sons names. I like that your character is going through a problem and dosen’t really have anyone to turn to. I’m glad this is complete that means we’re going to see more right? I really enjoyed reading this.
Gosh! 360 pages. You must be so proud! I’d never be able to write a book. Well I might do… Anyway I’ll stop nattering on. I liked this very much, though I think it’s not my age group, I like the story line. Just one tiny problem though with the last sentance.
Before:
And it is these puffs of clouds, floating, hovering or howling above the water that make the colors of the sea change from blue to green to grey to purple.
After:
And it is these puffs of clouds, floating, hovering or howling above the water that make the colors of the sea change from blue, to green, to grey and then to purple.
But I’m not sure if that sentance leaves me satisfied at the end of that chapter, or the half of that chapter.
This is a fascinating story. It takes a lot of attention and planning to be able to get inside the head of a mental patient. I like how it is written in first person because it makes me better able to “feel” your character. I picked up on a few things right off.
“There’s lots of things I can’t remember anymore,” Grammar check..There are
“Their red yarn-names looked like thick fresh scabs to me and I wanted to pick at them and see the holes where the needles had sewn the thread in and in and out again” This is wonderful. I love the image and feeling of aggravation I get from it.
“I know it was morning because even though the change of light in morning can seem very much like the change of light at night, I have studied them both very carefully and there are many subtle differences between them and it was those subtle differences that made me certain it was an early morning although I cannot say or even guess how long ago that was.” This is awkward. I believe it would read better if you ended the sentence after the word “carefully” and started the next with the word “There” The paragraph right after it has the same problem and the one after that. You have a lot of those, actually.
“But I wasn’t interested in their questions. I was interested in who they were, behind those coats,” This is a sentence I can easily relate to and I think it brings more realism to your character.
Since I don’t want to point out the same problem several times I will say this instead: You could use some attention to sentence structure and you have a talent for bringing your character into the real world. I also love your descriptions.
This is story is really good. It has great descriptions and lets the reader know exactly how the main character is feeling. I was even able to picture her lying in the hospital bed and talking to the only doctor who could get to her. You write clearly enough for the reader to be able feel what she feels.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but you begin this storyline with a character that is obviously a woman, who is either suffering from alheizmers or dementia and is hospitalized in a nursing facility somewheres at a place called Seabury. This place is rather confusing to her and she is rather confused with the many doctors/nurses she is confronted with daily. She is remembering her sons when suddenly her character is changed to that of a man who is suffering from alheizmers/dementia and who is obviously grieving over the loss of his wife, Alice. This sudden character switch is rather confusing to your reader. The question wrestled with is whether or not your main character is a woman or a man here in this storyline.
Overall, I found this to be a good basis for a novel and that’s why I rated it a 10 on overall novel treatments. For it would definitely make a good beginning to a novel, if you could establish whether your main character is going to be a woman or a man. Also, give a little more detail regarding your main character such as who they were prior to their illness, their background, their family life, likes/dislikes/hobbies, etc..that sort of thing. It would make the storyline as a whole, a little more flavorable.
Again, very good storyline idea and a good beginning basis for a novel. I would love to see this developed on into a novel, for I strongly suspect it would be interesting reading if it did, especially for people who have loved ones who either suffer alheizmers/dementia or have known of someone who has suffered from such illnesses. It could prove to be a source of encouragement to them.
Wow, what an introspective way to start a novel. It was well written and uses an amazing volcabulary… almost to the point of overwhelming. On the realistic side it is hard to rarionalize someone who in their hallucinations and delusions is so far removed… yet at this time she remembers it all fluidly, if not lucid. Enough to map together this estrangement. It draws hard on the imagination to read it and give her account credibility. But then again she may not be a credible character… I suppose only the remainder of the novel would tell.
There were a few instances of paragraphs that ran on into a way that absolutely lost me… for the sake of avoiding earning credits off of copying and pasting I only included this one example, abbreiviated.-
I could hear it in the last words of something he’d said and the words … me sound like a real nut job.
- It is towards the beginning of the piece. I didn’t quite catch what she was trying to convey… after multiple readings I only could catch the emotion of confusion and desperation, not the true meaning of what she wanted to explain. I would read through it a bit and try to make a little more reader friendly.
But overall, it looks like you have a great piece in the final stretch of completion. Keep up the good work.
I really liked this story. It was throughly engaging in all aspects. The characters were interesting, nice plot and the sentence structures and narration was spot on. I thought that there were times when it slowed down so I started to lose interest and kinda skip around but it definitely picked right back and kept me right up until the end. I think your title was very good not just because it was the place she was also because it seemed to me to convey a much deeper meaning than just the place and that immediately made me ready for a completely engaging roller coaster story. All in all I thought it was a brilliant story that fluxuated in keeping me interested fully but once I was there was no doubt in my mind that I was going to love this treatment and I very much did.
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