Tectonic Synapses
by Derek Holst

1. It happens this fast: You brush your teeth, strip down to your boxers, turn off the lights, get under the covers, kiss your wife goodnight, and fall asleep. Everything seems to be going fine, until you fall into a white room, no exits, no windows, just room, and two of your professors looking very concerned your way, talking in hushed tones. You hear things like, “I’ve never seen him like this…” and “We shouldn’t inform the college.” They are wearing white. You are very concerned. This isn’t right. You know you don’t belong here and neither do they. You know this isn’t real. But that doesn’t stop you from pacing the room—like walking could get you anywhere—and crying quietly, afraid the noise will bounce off the walls and wrap you up. But most of all you think of a telephone, of how much you need one right now, because right now you’re caged on the wrong side of reality, and your wife, whom you left sleeping comfortably in bed, is just a phone call away from bringing you back. If only she knew you were here, if only you could find a phone…

Waking up feels like breaking the surface after almost drowning. You gasp for breath and thank God you’re alive. You’re back in your bed, in your home lying next to your wife. You’re still crying. She hasn’t moved.

2. He was wearing cowboy boots and boxers when he opened up the church doors. He said he was God like other people say, “My name is Steve,” with the simplicity of stating a fact so obvious there’s no room for debate. The Sunday suits and dresses went on listening to the preacher preach, unaffected by his grandiose ramblings.

There are other stories about him.

I was sitting in the living room of my parent’s house when I heard about what happened at the gas station down the road. He was there, spinning around in the driveway, dust and rock flying everywhere, saying he was God and he was going to kill everyone. The girl behind the counter didn’t know what to do; he had stolen a cold soda.

3. Imagination is like a muscle car. You open the door, get inside, turn the key in the ignition, let it idle a few minutes, and then you’re off. On a good day, you can get close to 200 mph on back roads; at that speed, you never know what you’re going to hit. You guess that’s why you write. Instead of just zooming off, you can slow down, pull off to the shoulder, get out of the car and inspect what your imagination has come across.

Every once in a while you take a corner too fast and then it's end over end tumbling that finally stops with you hanging upside-down in a nest of crushed metal, in the middle of a corn field. As you hang there waiting for all the blood in your body to pool in the center of your brain, you think names like, Hemingway, Dickinson, and Poe. You ask the question everyone asks, were they writers because they were crazy, or were they crazy because they were writers?

About a year ago my eye doctor told me there’s a slight asymmetry with my eyes, one’s slightly higher than the other. He asked me if I had trouble with depth perception. I said no, I never noticed it before. Now, looking in the mirror is sometimes jarring. I’ll brush my teeth and look up after spitting and just stare at my eyes. I become convinced I can feel one sliding up and one sliding down. It makes me nauseous; I want to throw up, I want to pass out, I want to look away, but I can’t. I wonder if it’s some sort of optical illusion or if I’m missing the first warning signs.

4. He used to play baseball with my older brother. I’d see him at the games. He lived just down the road, came over all the time, that is, until something in his head snapped and he became certain he was God, started making threats and breaking into our house. He never took anything.

The truly terrifying thing is that there is no way of knowing. You could be eighteen catching a pop fly in the outfield—everybody loves you. The next day it’s all earthquakes in your mind; tectonic synapses shifting around. You’re not making any sense. You’re dangerous. People start pulling away. You become a rabid animal. If you don’t keep your distance, they call the cops. It doesn’t always happen this fast. It could be more like getting into a warm bath, a slow and steady progression of total immersion. And though it most commonly begins in the late teens and early twenties, it could also start at age ten, or sixty. The only constant is that, for all practical purposes, once it hits you, you will never be the person you were before.

5. It’s a hard distinction to make between a) being a teenager, and b) being an alcoholic-emotional-train-wreck. In my late teens I liked two things, drinking and writing. I’d see Zoloft advertisements on TV, and I’d think, fuck, who isn’t depressed? Liking drinking became drinking almost everyday, became getting sick, really sick—the kind of sick that leaves you still vomiting and bleeding after you pass out—became trying to kill myself, became getting my ass kicked in the parking lot of an apartment complex by a marine.

I had downed two shots of vodka from one very large shot glass. Total vodka consumed: roughly seventeen normal shots; we had measured it out. Minutes later I threw up in someone’s gin and tonic. After that, the marine led me outside to walk it off.

Here it gets strange. Instead of going for a walk, I start talking about how shitty the world is. He agrees at first, until I take out a razor blade and try to slit my wrists. The marine manages to take the blade away from me, and I manage to take away his glasses. We’re at a stalemate until he throws me to the concrete and everything goes dark.

I wake up in the bathroom the next day. It smells awful; the walls feel slick and textured. I turn the lights on and realize I must have painted the room with blood/vomit sometime during the night.

Was I just drunk? I told my parents as much. Or had I reached the end of some sort of depression-fueled burnout? It seems unlikely that it was a legitimate suicide attempt. The presence of the marine made the timing less than ideal, but who knows.

6. Other people have nightmares about being abducted by aliens, falling from skyscrapers, being mauled by bears, standing center stage behind a podium staring back at an audience with gun sights for eyes, of wandering apocalyptic wastelands in the company of friends and strangers, of being attacked by bugs, giant in size and slimy, oozing malevolence toward soft human flesh, of monsters, big or small, but always lots of teeth, lots of claws, and always, all of them emerging out of an endless and ever-present black abyss to say hello.

Why do we dream the dreams we do?

7. The funny thing is I hardly remember him. My parents brought most of the memories back to me; I don’t know where I lost them. They’re the ones that told me he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. What I do remember is that we got a dog, a German Shepard, all teeth and fur, protective, a good dog. My parents started locking the doors when they went to bed.

It’s late, after midnight. I open my bedroom door and walk downstairs. All the lights are off, but I can still see. There’s a full moon floating outside the windows of the house. I check the locks when everyone’s asleep. I don’t mean once, a casual observation, I mean really check them, thirty times in thirty minutes. I stare at the door and then at the lock. My hand goes out and makes sure the lock is engaged, then I grab the brass knob and pull just to make sure; I stop when I hear the wood straining. Then I disengage the lock, open the door a little, and shut it just as quickly. I reengage the lock and it starts all over.

There are four doors leading outside in my parent’s house. I check them all. A lock is a funny thing, just brass and other shiny metal. How can it hold anything back?

8. You’ve never been labeled with depression or OCD. It took you a while to give names to your behavior. At eighteen you didn’t say, I’m clearly suffering from depression, when you drank too much, wouldn’t get out of bed, do your homework, or talk to your parents for months at a time. You said life is shit and you meant it. At ten you didn’t say, I’ve got OCD, when you couldn’t stop checking locks on doors and every possible hiding spot in your room before you went to bed. You’d say I’ve got to check these locks, these spots or else… You still do.

9. Take the label off of ammonia and I can still tell its ammonia. I’m not stupid.

10. When the homeless guy with the shaggy-dog-beard and the long wild hair isn’t asking for money, he’s talking to himself and gesturing into the air. I look at him and I see what could be me. I cross to the other side of the street.