I knew why I was there, and so did the man who sat with the blank expanse of the desk between us.  At least he thought he did.  The room, furnished to achieve the optimum in blandness, was meant to create a comfortable space where doctors could engage in the examination of the intimate details of the minds of their patients.  My own mind, wandering past the face of the man who sat observing me with detached interest, drifted through the thin transparencies, framed by inoffensive, beige curtains, that separated this room from what was out there.   From my lofty second-story perspective, I looked down on the parkland surrounding the independent fortresses that comprised the physical premises of the facility.  I could see that the leaves on the trees had begun to unfold, revealing their pale green surfaces like hundreds of sensitive hands being thrust into the warming light of the sun.  This surprised me.  The last time I recalled looking out of a window, the trees had been naked in a world stark with snow.  On the paths of crushed rock that serpentined about the trunks of the largest of the trees, I saw people moving with the hesitant steps of invalids, shadowed by their bodyguards.  I had to attribute their shuffling, convalescent gait to the benevolent effects of a spring day, for I had seen many of those same tottering patients successfully throw off three or four of their attendants when the mood was upon them.  Happily, the bastion in which I was incarcerated did not hold such formidable warriors.  Berserkers are what they would have been in another time.  A time when such lethal madness was characteristic of great heroes.

The doctor made a polite esophageal sound, a fly tickling the ointment, and I reluctantly limit my field of vision back into this room and make eye contact with the doctor.  It was odd, considering that such a connection seemed to be what the doctors wanted, but they inevitably reacted by shifting, sometimes almost, but not quite, imperceptibly backwards in their well-padded seats.  I scrutinized the fleshy face, the manicured hands with their two rings, school and marriage, the tasteful, therefore expensive, suit of serious dark wool.  Did I ever look like that?  I can not remember such details.  They no longer matter to me.

“And how are you feeling today?”  This is the second time he has posed that question to me this morning. 

How am I feeling?  I suppose that I am forced to feel with my eyes, since I cannot touch the soft breezes and warming light of a spring day here in this room.  But that is not the answer that is wanted right now, so I say nothing.

The doctor, with studied forbearance, waits and watches.  This patient is like many others he has treated, so filled with flights of fancy and self-deception that they no longer differentiate between reality and delusion.  Though he knows that the patient is unable to cope with ordinary life, this one is outwardly not a danger.  The case file lies concealed in the drawer beneath the doctor’s clasped hands.  Such a pity that one who had attained such stature, such affluence and importance in the community, should be reduced to the shell of bare humanity now sitting on the other side of the table unable to answer a simple question.  The doctor tells himself, it is not smugness but compassion I feel.

I feel the heat before he manifests himself, and I brace for it.  Sometimes the fires are banked, but there are other times when he comes like a raging conflagration and my skin blisters and peels while I try to see through the shifting heat mirage to where he stands.  There have even been times when I would cower with my head cradled in my arms when he appeared.  Now however, I know what to expect, more or less, and am not so easily intimidated by him.  Not that he has lost any of his impressiveness.  Tall and black as a cinder cone, with eyes that glow like living coals, he is Agni, Lord of Fire.  That is what I call him, though he neither confirms nor refutes the title I have bestowed on him.  When he first started intruding into my life, he refused to even acknowledge my presence.  He would pretend that I was not there when, at last, I ventured to speak to him.  Eventually he did come to admit that I existed, though his acceptance of me is usually no more than a grudging acknowledgment.  I have learned to treat him with caution, for I have discovered that his liveliness is apt to flare into violent excitability with little provocation.

He is at my back and I turn slightly to catch a glimpse him as he circles round to stand like a bored referee at the edge of the desk.  At first, he acts as if he does not see me sitting there.  Tossing his long, flaming hair about his shoulders, he studiously examines the corners of the ceiling.  Finally he nods in my direction, a short, convulsive movement that lets me know that, yes, he does grant that we share the same space.

The patient’s eyes betray him!  They always do, the doctor thinks.  That is what he was taught in school, and that is what he notes as he watches the furtive glance over the shoulder and then the fixed stare at a point upwards, half way between the desk where they are both seated.  The patient’s eyes are anxious, they seem to be asking for recognition.  Then they return, laden with guilt, to meet the doctor’s own when the doctor asks: “What do you see?  Is it one of them?”  The question is mildly tendered, only the stress on the last word betrays the doctor’s own prejudice.  The patient’s eyes fall to the floor with a nodding of the head.

I wish that they would stay away when there are others, others looking for the abnormal, near me.  But of course they never do.  They see no need to observe any such considerations.  That is how they first came and how I was betrayed.  No, that is not fair.  They did not betray me, I did that to myself.  For most of my life I fervently supported and participated in the social alliance that has now made them such a millstone for me.  I have become an outcast of the world I helped to build.  In another place and time, I would have been burned alive as a harbinger of demons; or, perhaps, I might have been revered as a saint or a shaman of power.  As it is, I am buried alive in a concrete bunker, to be studied with the sympathy of science by those who think me, too rightly, mad.

Why is Agni here?  What does he want?  Not that it matters.  There have been times, and those times are the most disturbing, when I sense that his appearance is not entirely voluntary.  As if there is some force that wills us to share time and space regardless of the deleterious effects this might have on either one of us.  I once made mention of this to one of my visitors, one more comprehensible than Lord Agni, and received laughter as my answer.

The doctor is repeating his question once again.  At least this question is one to which I have an answer, for there is no point in being diagnosed as delusional if I cannot admit that I am having one of my all-too-real delusions.  “Yes, Lord Agni is here.”  My admission brings a smile, not dissimilar from that a predator might display on getting a clear view of the prey he is stalking, to the doctor’s lips.

“Really?  And what is he doing?”

“Standing.  Trying to ignore me.”  This earns me a growl of contempt from my visitor’s throat.  He still seems unduly fascinated by something beyond my range of vision on the ceiling.

“Do you know why he is here?” 

“No.”

Probing with judicious care, the doctor extends his head forward like the tortoise seeking wisdom.  “Why don’t you ask him?”

“Why don’t you?”  A clumsy riposte.  The doctor does not take a surface offense but waits with professional patience for me to advance or retreat.  Wearily I cock my head and ask, “Is there an imperative reason for your visit, Agni?”

Black shoulders rise and fall like billowing smoke and I find myself staring, mesmerized, into eyes that are like open furnace doors.  None of the myriad nuances our faces and bodies use to convey messages to one another are of any use when talking to a god, or a demon, or an alien.  Even a dog knows when a hand is raised to strike or stroke, but I am always in the proverbial dark with my visitors.  The words have meaning, but I frequently wonder if the meaning has any connection with what I, or they, are really attempting to communicate.

“If he’s here for a reason, he’s not telling me,” is my definitive answer.

“Why do you think he doesn’t want to answer you?” 

That one talks too much!  Agni rumbles this out without deigning to look at either of us.

“I agree.”

“Agree?  Agree with what?”

It happens, again and again.  Do children, talking to their invisible friends, have this problem?  I don’t remember being a child; or at least I don’t remember ever having had invisible friends as a child, so I can not answer this question from personal experience.  I feel the urge to giggle but squash it firmly.  Wasn’t there a time when uncontrollable laughter was a sign of divine madness?  I sigh.  There is no place for such gratuitous hilarity in my world.

The patient is in the grip of a delusional episode!  The doctor almost quivers with excitement.  Careful, careful, the patient must not become alarmed or made distrustful.  So interesting, thinks the doctor.  This patient is very like another patient that he treated some years previously.  In that case he had been able, by the judicious prescription of a combination of medications, to eventually bring the hallucinogenic condition of his patient under control.  Unfortunately, to date, drugs have not proven to be an effective method of treatment for this particular patient.  Neither he nor his colleagues have had much luck so far in controlling the patient’s tendency to hallucinate.  The patient, who when first brought to the facility showed vague signs of understanding the extreme nature of the illness and its symptoms, now seems increasingly inclined to accept these bizarre hallucinations as part of the fabric of reality.  The doctor truly believes that it is only due to the efforts made by himself and his staff that this patient has not yet withdrawn into a catatonic state, slipping away entirely from the rest of humanity.

“Are you agreeing that your “Lord Agni” doesn’t wish to speak with you?  Or is it that you have something to tell him?”

Tell him?  What can I tell the Lord of Fire?  Nothing.  I have questions and I have asked them, but the answers make little sense to me.  Occasionally I begin to perceive the glimmer of something; an idea? a truth?   It is like a little chink of light that illuminates a minuscule piece of the web in which I am caught.  Understanding of why they come to me here, though not what it means or why I am chosen, is slowly emerging.  If you do not create a sacred space when the time comes, the sacred space will come to you.  This is the lesson that has forced me past the brink of insanity.

The sound of massive ice floes breaking uncleanly in half assaults my ears and I prepare for another of my visitors.  Lord Agni’s antithesis and complement arrives with an icy touch on my spine that makes me shiver from head to toe.  Pale of face, with gleaming shards of ice about his head like a crown, he stands looking down at me with eyes that are cold and transparent as glass.  Like Agni he is terribly beautiful, and yet it is the terror of such beauty which reduces me to speechless awe.  I have been told that he is Heimdall, Porter of the Gate and Protector of the Bridge.  He and Lord Agni take little notice of each other.

As so often happens when this one makes his appearance, I find that the jeweled facets of Heimdall’s eyes irresistibly draw my own eyes up to meet his.  Whirling rainbows make my head giddy.  I try to focus on them and find the task impossible, as usual.  I have sometimes wondered, if I could enter and pass through those eyes, where it is that I would end up.  Round and round, I spiral in and out of the vortex of those iridescent orbs.  I close my eyes to break the contact and find the circles of color imprinted on the insides of my eyelids.  Again a fit of shivering takes hold, shaking my bones and setting my teeth achatter.  The path of enlightenment is not an easy one.

The other human, the one who sits there and thinks that he has the answers, hunches forward momentarily, his shoulders twitching, as if the gelid fingers of our latest guest have brushed the back of his neck too.  I find this to be oddly comforting.  It is terrible to be so alone with my visitors.  Long ago, in the before time when I saw no such beings, I never considered what it meant to be alone.  Back then my world was filled with people, many people; family, friends, acquaintances, people whom I surrounded myself with and yet exchanged nothing of true worth.  We were like paper-dolls; all color and glitter, smiles and sentiment, all on the surface.  It is hard to accept that you are treading in the shallows until you are forced into deep water.

“You look puzzled.”

“Puzzled?”

“Do you think Lord Agni is still here in the room?”

I want to shout: Of course he is still here!  They are both here!  They are all here! It amazes me that the doctor is unaware of such dynamic presence.  “Why can’t he see you?”  The question blurts from my lips before I can close my teeth on it.

Because his eyes have not yet been opened.

The doctor thinks to himself, why did I feel cold when the patient shivered?  An interesting reaction.  He has watched the patient’s eyes flick back and forth from one side of the desk to the other.  And then the question.

“I don’t know,” the doctor replies.  “Why can’t he see me?”

Copyright (c) Candace Gylgayton, 1997

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