His Gift

He filled the form out carefully, slowly, taking his time with the
answers, turning them over again and again in his mind.

"Have you ever taken any illegal drugs?"

No. The occasional glass of wine didn't really count as illegal. He
considered it relaxation, not a sin.

"Please list any illnesses you have had, operations, and list any
medications you are currently taking."

He had had asthma as a child, but he'd outgrown that now. He'd had an
operation to remove his wisdom teeth when he was sixteen, a dreadful
form of modern-day torture. He reached up with his hand to feel his
jaws, remembering how they'd swollen until he looked like a chipmunk
with food stuffed in its mouth.

"Have you ever suffered from a mental illness?"

Suddenly he stopped and looked up. A dart had found its way straight
to his throat, and stuck itself right in his windpipe, causing him to
gasp. Yet no one in the office seemed to notice his discomfort. The
woman behind the desk was serenely tap-tapping on the computer,
pausing to answer the telephone in her professionally calm voice.

He was back there, again, in that place, that time. It had started
when he was a high school student. He'd noticed that in times of
extreme stress - before a test, or the night of the high school prom,
for example - he felt as if he was losing sense of time, just a little
bit. He assured himself that it was four seventeen p.m, he'd look at
his watch, but something made him feel that it wasn't quite right. And
he'd look again, and it was still four seventeen. He shook his watch,
held it to his ear, even unstrapped it and put it back on again. And
the second hand would stutter into action, reassuring him that things
were all right again. That's all it was, a slight disorientation, a
glance at the clock made things normal again.

But soon, he was not so easily reassured. He could remember moments of
confusion, where he would look at himself in the mirror, and for a
moment, not be able to recognize himself. The face looking back at him
in the mirror was a stranger, and not a very friendly one at that. He
felt the stabbing finger of panic as he realized he couldn't remember
his name, what he was doing there standing in the buzzing fluorescent
light of the dorm bathroom. Wasn't he someone else, didn't he belong
somewhere else? He forced himself to remember his identity, he said
his name to himself over and over again till it sank in, till things
snapped into place.

"Hey man, are you all right?"

Blink your eyes. Shake your head. Look up at him. Smile. "Yes, yeah,
I'm fine. Thanks. I don't know, I suddenly felt a little bit
dizzy. Yeah, I'll get something to eat. I know, I know."

He found himself anxious at the oddest of times. When there was a
thunderstorm, or when he could hear the rustling of the leaves against
his room window. He always felt as if someone might be there, just
outside the window, a ghostly face peering in through the panes of
glass, hoping for an invitation into his room, his mind. He began to
keep his window shades drawn, even during the day.

And his thoughts. He noticed that his thoughts sometimes moved
quickly, with the speed of snakes or of hailstones, biting at him,
pelting him, leaving slight bruises on the insides of his skin. At
other times, his thoughts trickled slowly down from the top of his
mind, into the corners of his head, to be released slowly, like
molasses, into the atmosphere. These images fascinated him, and he
often spent many hours thinking about them, instead of writing the
term paper or doing the problemset that he'd been assigned.

The dean had a lovely voice, he remembered thinking, and such a
sorrowful look on her face as she told him that his performance was
not up to par. "What's going on, David?" she asked him. "You seem to
be having difficulty in class. You're barely passing your courses. Is
there anything you'd like to talk about?"

But he found he couldn't talk about it. About any of it. The
nonrecognition of his own face, the pelting, biting thoughts, the face
at the window. He shook his head sadly, looking down at his hands. "I
don't know what to say," he remarked, and his voice was far away,
distant, as they were both discussing some third person.

"Perhaps I can help you," said the dean.

The next day he found himself sitting in a cool white office, in front
of a man with a beard and a worried way of folding his hands together
while he talked. Instead of concentrating on what the man was saying,
David watched him lace and unlace his fingers. It reminded him of the
time when he had watched a bird put together a nest out of twigs and
feathers and torn-up shreds of newspaper. He wondered how many times
the man had laced his fingers together today, yesterday, all week, his
entire life. The man's sadness arched through the air and hit David
like a stone in the chest. He would have cried out, but something held
him back from making any sound.

When the man gave him a prescription for some medication, he took it
wordlessly, and turned to leave the office. This didn't matter, he
told himself then, and also later, when he was looking at the large
yellow pills sitting on the table in front of him. He picked them up
and swallowed them, without water.

Burning. Itching. Disconnection. Fragmentation. David felt his whole
body come apart, each day that he swallowed those evil yellow
pills. Every cell in his body was picking up just a concentration of
poison and transporting it around his entire being, unloading a little
bit of it at every stop. Like a bus that disgorged passengers at every
street corner, and came back to the depot to pick up more and more. He
found his mouth was dry at the oddest of times, and his head ached and
pounded with a powerful pulse.

"How's the medication working?" asked his doctor.

"It makes me feel bad," said David.

"That means it's starting to work," replied the man. "Take two a day
now instead of just one. You should start to feel better in another
week or two."

But he couldn't stand to do it any longer. He couldn't bear the
buzzing noises in his head that started from the moment he woke up and
lasted till he fell asleep, nor the intense, insatiable hunger that
caused him to gain fifteen pounds in the first few weeks. He put the
pills back into their bottle and hid them safely away in the back of a
drawer, where he couldn't see them, and they could not see him.

He went to his classes, he endured the strange thoughts, the face at
the window. In a moment of sheer desperation, he shouted at it.

"Damn you, go away, what do you want from me?"

It spoke, hesitantly. "I am... your gift."

"Are you crazy?" (The irony of his question still stayed with him
after all those years). "How can you be a gift? I hate you! Get out
of my life!"

But the face said, "I am your friend."

David slammed his fist into the wall, and blinked back the tears that
hurt his eyes. But for the first time in months, he suddenly felt some
of the anxiety slip away from his body. At least it wouldn't hurt him,
even if he was going mad.

"And what do you want from me?" he said to the face, his voice still
jagged with pain.

"To... help you," came the reply.

David snorted and turned his back to the window. The face said nothing
more.

But over the next few weeks, he kept an eye at the corner of the
window, and one ear tuned for any more words. They came to him slowly,
intermittently, but not through his ears. Instead, they seemed to
carry the quality of light, not sound.

One morning he got up to go to his early morning economics class. The
face, which usually only said things to him in the night, was
there. "Don't walk by the oak tree," it said. "Don't go there."

David shook his head, shouldered his book bag, walked out of his
room. He stopped, hating himself for doing so, at the bottom of the
hill, where the college trail split - one pathway led to the oak tree,
and the other around the back of the pond. He paused, studied the cold
grey sky, his eyes unfocused. Then, abruptly, he walked towards the
water.

When he came back at noon, the police cars were still parked on the
roadside, their lights flashing but their sirens eerily silent. The
first year student, he learned, had been rushed to the hospital with
multiple fractures and much loss of blood, the remains of his mangled
car locked in a passionate fatal embrace with the tree's sturdy trunk.

David came back to his dorm and vomited in the bathroom.

Slowly at first, but with increasing confidence, David began to
awaken. It was as if a space inside him had been filled, one that he
knew should not have been empty in the first place. Suddenly, colors
and light and sound were layered together, on top of each other,
instead of existing in separate spheres. Time did not limit him the
way it seemed to trap others. If he could describe it, he would say
that he had started to feel alive in a world in which he had only
previously sleepwalked.

And his thoughts, too, started becoming more and more focused. He
found that if he concentrated, he could pick up on what people were
thinking, saying, feeling. They came to him in the images, but the
images now had a purpose, instead of being just random thoughts. He
could look at a girl and see a dark peach cloud around her belly, and
realize that she was attracted to him. He could hear a voice singing
an old song, and moments later it would play on the radio. He knew
things without knowing how he knew them.

Yes, thought David. Yes, and yes. This is what I am. And no, I am not
crazy.

He picked up the pencil and wrote a forceful "NO" underneath the
question. The woman at the counter caught his eye, and smiled at
him. He could see a soft blue wave around her head, and the picture of
a warm fire, and a faithful dog came to his mind.

He smiled back. As he got up to hand her the form, he said, quietly,
"You don't happen to have a dog, do you?"

Her eyes widened with surprise. The words tumbled out of her mouth
almost without her even realizing it. "Why yes, I do. How did you
know that? His name's Hal, and he's lovely."

He smiled again. "You just seem like the kind of person that likes
dogs, that's all." And the woman, who had not told anyone about her
dog because they weren't allowed in her apartment building, and who
certainly hadn't told David about her dog, frowned in puzzlement and
wonder.