Idlewild

Don't place faith in human beings. Human beings are unreliable things. machines of loving grace, "butterfly wings" P R O L O G U EDAY 1I'm not dead.A dim realization but an important one, because I should have died. The shock of whatever just ripped through me was strong enough to do it-some kind of electrical overload lighting me up from head to toe like a fireworks display. But my brain kept repeating the mantra: "not dead, not dead, not dead,"and pretty soon I had to believe it. One eye popped open and then the other, and consciousness (if you can call it that) slowly returned. Cold and dark. Orange. Harvest. A damp, musty smell; sound of crickets; the bite of a monster headache. Yes, I was trapped in a pumpkin patch, twisted and tensed, taking shallow breaths like a newborn kitten. Clarity did not follow consciousness. My mind felt sluggish, and all attempts at coherent thought made my temples ache worse. Why? What had happened to me? I remember the shock and......and nothing. Just the shock. Disturbing doesn't even begin to cover it. Sitting up seemed like a bad idea, so I tried to grab my hornet's nest of a head. Simple. Left hand, up. Right hand, up. But nothing happened. My arms won't move,I realized. I tried to wiggle my legs, fingers, hips, toes, nose, ears and neck. They didn't answer the bell.I'm paralyzed.I could feel my pulse coming faster now and I wondered what would happen if my breathing stopped. No mystery there, eh? My brain would atrophy like a wilting flower and the consciousness I'd fought for would be hideous as I spiraled down the path of no return. Panic hit me hard. I started making desperate deals with phantom deities I invented on the spot. Please,I thought, don't let me die. Whoever you are, if you can hear me, get me up on my feet. I'll do anything. I'll give you anything...well...Well, what? What did I have to offer? Nothing. I know nothing, and thus I have nothing. I don't even know my own name. Puzzles have pieces, don't they, so why can't I remember?A new theory came to me: brain damage. Two words I didn't want to consider, but they made frightening sense. The paralysis didn't need to stem from a broken vertebra, after all-I could have simply forgotten how to move, the way I'd forgotten everything else. Let's not jump off that bridge just yet. If you forget something, surely you can remember it, given enough time.That's me-looking on the bright side, like always. I clung to hope and faulty logic and waited to remember. And waited. And waited some more. Words came to me in my senselessness, another mantra from the dim recesses of my jigsaw mind: "There is no pain. Keep control. No pain in the house, just keep control."But I didn't have control, damn it, it hurt like fire and I just stayed sprawled there, useless and pathetic, for who knows how long. I'm not a control freak, mind you-not per se-but deprive me of something basic and I begin to go stark raving mad. The possibility dawned on me as I lay there. Stark, yes. Mad, possibly. But raving? Was I raving? Hysterical paralysis, they used to call it. Hysteria: a psychoneurotic condition characterized by violent emotional and sensory disturbances, by paroxysms in the motor functions, and by changes in consciousness that are symbolically or psychically determined. Hysterical, sure, but somehow I didn't feel like laughing. Could I be dreaming,I wondered? Half awake, eyes open, body still asleep, dreaming my paralysis-a hypnogogic state? I was, perhaps, a prisoner of my unconscious mind... Friction of the forewings; the crickets kept pissing me off. There's a formula for crickets, just like there's a formula for everything. I don't mean their genetic formulSagan, Nick is the author of 'Idlewild' with ISBN 9780399150975 and ISBN 0399150978.