The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [48]
At the urging of others I made a few more attempts at food between then and the hospital, but it never went much better.
It had now been about a week of Mark acting more and more strangely since the magic of our joint Eden. Simon, Kathy, and Jack were getting more and more alarmed, but there wasn’t much they could do except talk to me a lot and hope things worked out.
Zeke was more and more my closest companion. No matter how screwy and frustrating things were getting with people, Zeke was always there, always loving, always utterly understanding. He seemed to know that something was up and stuck closely by me, giving up his usual solitary jaunts. He was my guardian angel. His unfathomable wisdom, compassion, and protectiveness were slightly spooky, but they made me feel not half so alone or scared. The third floor, where we usually slept, was accessible only by ladder, which made it impossible for Zeke to get there. I moved my foam pad and sleeping bag down into the little library-sewing room off the kitchen so that I could always be with him. Even though I couldn’t sleep, I lay down from time to time to get a little rest and slow things down a bit.
What to do while the others slept? I had read War and Peace and Anna Karenina a couple of weeks earlier and had started through Jack London. I had finished The Call of the Wild and a collection of short stories and was working on The Sea Wolf. About halfway through, the whole thing started getting too real. It was dualistic, good vs. evil, and the evil was just too real and the descriptions too moving and…and it had to be more than just a book. The pages and words would twist and blur in the really gruesome spots. I had to stop and catch my breath after every two or three pages. The closer I got to the end the worse it became. I was convinced that I really shouldn’t finish the book, that if I did I would die or the world would end or worse.
Since reading was out, I got my old Olivetti and started banging out letters to old friends, to Virginia, to various members of the family. I was trying to clue them in about all the wonderful things that had been happening to me and all the wonderful new truths I had found. Unfortunately, the typewriter bit didn’t work too well. I had trouble hitting the right letters and even more trouble seeing what was wrong about the wrong letters I had hit. One key was as good as the next. While there was a lot of truth to that, I felt it was only fair to the people who weren’t quite where I was yet to make an effort to make myself as intelligible as possible. I switched over to longhand. I still had some of the same problems but to a lesser extent.
Seventeen pages to Pa, twenty-one to Ma, twenty-five to sister Edie, twenty-four to sister Nan, sixteen to an old professor, and so on. I was writing like the wind. The words just came like magic and they were all just right.
As far as talking with the people who were really there, I kept coming back to my old question. “Is there a struggle going on?”
“Is there a what?”
“Is there a struggle going on? I’m not really quite sure what I mean by that. I’m just sort of curious as to what you might feel about it.”
“I think I know what you mean but I don’t know. It’s hard to say.”
“Oh, well,” said I and tried to get away from the sticky unpleasantness in the pit of my stomach and back to the sheer beauty and glee of it all. But the question haunted me.
IS THERE A STRUGGLE GOING ON? Why on earth would there be a struggle going on? Struggle means some sort of pain. What sort of sense can there be in pain?
“Do you remember the other day when I asked if there was a struggle going on?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about it some and I think there probably is a struggle going on.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I’m not exactly sure. It’s just something I feel within myself.”
“That there’s a struggle going on?”
“Yeah. And I think