Songs of the Maniacs Read online

  SONGS OF THE MANIACS

  From her office at a mental health institute on the outskirts of modern day Miami, a troubled young woman counsels deeply disturbed clients while coping with her own heightening concerns. These include frightening consciousness lapses, violent memories of a high school sexual relationship, a menacing stalker, and an annoyingly arousing visitor who may or may not be insane. All this on a single stormy day as SIPD, today’s flavor of mental health disorder, threatens to distort memory and identity, unmooring the validity of reality itself.

  After a morning spent with clients suffering from illusions, nightmares, and lack of self-definition, the protagonist finds herself trapped in a tropical storm. She is rescued by the mysterious and attractive older man from her office building who has been offering her a chance for a romantic interlude. If he doesn’t turn out to be an inpatient, that is.

  An evening spent with the inarticulate and troubled Malaise Group takes an unusual turn when a visiting student from the local university invites her into the city. The protagonist begins to enjoy herself while fighting off the feeling she’s being followed. The creepy stalker and other strange coincidences lead her to believe she has lost touch with who she is. Could it be that she, too, is a sufferer of Stand-In Personality Disorder, the strange and life-changing disease that is afflicting so many young people and ruining their lives? Does this mean that she, too, will begin to dissociate and, eventually, become someone else entirely? Or is everything in her world—the lurid institution, her professional career, confusion about love and sex, the truth behind her own identity—all in her own head?

  In stark, lyrical prose, Songs of the Maniacs shares a young woman’s search for illumination as she attempts to understand her past, present, and true self. When she allows herself to take a deeper look at the people and events that make up her life as a counselor for the insane, she is drawn into the hallucinogenic reality her clients are struggling to control. The hypnotic pull of the story lies in the mystery of the storyteller herself and her murky, uneasy sense of doom. Her world is a wounded one, but familiar and uncomfortably close to our own.

  Originally from Boston, MICKEY J. CORRIGAN lives and writes in the lush ruins of South Florida. She publishes with pulpy presses with names like Breathless, Champagne and Bottom Drawer. Recent books include the edgy novellas in The Hard Stuff series (Whiskey Sour Noir, Vodka Warrior, and Tequila Dirty); the spoofy Geekus Interruptus and F*ck Normal; and the thriller Sugar Babies. Her new novel, The Ghostwriters, features the ghost of J.D. Salinger.

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  Published by Salt Publishing Ltd

  12 Norwich Road, Cromer, Norfolk NR27 0AX

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © Mickey J Corrigan, 2014

  The right of Mickey J Corrigan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Salt Publishing.

  Salt Publishing 2014

  Created by Salt Publishing Ltd

  This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  ISBN 978-1-78463-015-7 electronic

  1. A Moment

  Victor and I are sort of friends, then we are sort of lovers, and later he has his hands around my throat. It is that kind of relationship.

  He is choking me and I am coughing and he is saying, “If you want to escape from all of this, you have to work with me here.” I start to see a blackness like an ink spot seeping into my vision from the corners of my eyes. “I know we can do this. Together,” he is saying.

  His voice is faint. And getting fainter. I gurgle and cough. Even this seems distant.

  Something is lodged in my throat, something cold and hard. Victor’s tight clasp on my neck is forcing the thing in my throat to edge up my windpipe or my esophagus or whatever.

  I am choking and, at the same time, the blockage in my throat is coming loose.

  Far away, a woman coughs. I guess this is me.

  Victor continues to squeeze my neck. Drool from his contorted mouth drips and splashes on my cheeks. The spittle is cool. This turn in our relationship is an unexpected one. But so was sleeping together.

  I could get fired for this. If I live.

  I am staring up at the ceiling out of the middle of my eyes. Around the edges, the ink spot is spreading. Are those real stars I am seeing? Of course not. Those are stains, a splatter of stains on the ceiling that have seeped down from the floor above. Where have I seen that pattern before?

  My memory is not what it once was.

  But I can remember everything that happened today. Every detail. The way the day began with a morning in my office like any other, Miami warm and well lit and lightly salted. Celia and her dreams. Justin and his photo. How the breeze turned cold and raw, ripping the palm fronds from their trunks and pitching rain against the window glass. The storm, Victor’s cotton bathrobe, the quiet. The brown pelicans above the hard-packed beach sand. The toss of blue-green waves. Sasha. Ben. The noise and the smoke of the bar. Francis and the gun and the lawn man. The stink of cheese fries and that suffocating smell of gasoline.

  The thing in my throat.

  “When your dreams are more real than your reality?” Victor is speaking in a distant whisper. The air feels suddenly ice cold and the black folds in on itself and becomes even blacker. “Then which one is your real consciousness?”

  Victor is talking in riddles, but I know what he’s getting at.

  The snake patch on a leather jacket.

  The number one hundred and eleven.

  A mirror with someone else’s reflection.

  A certain kind of personality. Smart, not slick.

  When you really don’t care about anything.

  Interchangeable living beings.

  SIPD, that is, Stand-in Personality Disorder, the epidemic transforming our world.

  I am limp in Victor’s hard grasp. My head sags forward. His hands have loosened their steely grip, but it is too late. It looks like this is it.

  But wait. Are these the kinds of thoughts you have when you are dying? Most of these thoughts are fragmented. Random. And heavy with undisclosed meaning. Someone else’s meaning.

  How disappointing.

  Here I am, limp and blue, dead in the arms of a violent lover, and all that flashes before my eyes are little pieces from other people’s lives?

  This is just so me.

  “The self you believe is yourself is not the real you,” Victor is sayin
g. His voice comes to me in its smallest version, the one you hear from the far end of a long dark tunnel. I am thinking about the words floating on his gentle tongue and easing past his fleshy lips. Too bad he stopped kissing me and put his hands around my throat instead. Too bad he had to ruin the moment like this.

  It always ends up badly with me and men.

  “If we can destroy the false self, that will be our salvation. Yours and mine,” comes Victor’s voice from a pinpoint of light in an infinite black void.

  From the vanishing point.

  From the God upstairs.

  I guess I made a sort of final decision today. Not entirely by choice, though. Decisions can be made through lack of choice. And some days can decide everything for you. Some days can choose you.

  Today was that kind of day.

  Or maybe I just fucked up.

  2.

  Let’s rewind the memory reel and start from the beginning.

  This is how the day begins. How it always begins for me.

  The breeze is sweet and mild with only a pinch of salt. I can’t smell the ocean, but I don’t feel the tension of The City, either. My office window overlooks the quad and I am casually scanning the sidewalk for my ten o’clock. Celia may or may not show up this morning. Her lack of self-interest is her biggest problem and the main reason, in my opinion, she is not making any progress.

  Most of the people here at this institution are like Celia.

  That’s the first thing you notice about the people here, the residents. They lack self-interest, yet they are completely self-involved. There seems to be a missing need to be loved. By self and others. It takes a while before you realize just what is strange about everybody here, but when you are trained to look for this trait, you can spot it within a few minutes.

  I am trained to look for these kinds of traits. I am trained to diagnose subtle (and not so subtle) symptoms.

  These people, the residents here, the ones who come to me, they are more and less themselves. They are no longer exactly themselves. First they are less. This may last for days, weeks or years. Then later on, quite suddenly, they are more. Much more.

  I spend most of my time here, both my work time and my “free” time. (Really, what kind of time is free?) However, I am not a resident. Residents are the people with symptoms. I am not a dorm advisor either. Dorm advisors are the people without symptoms and, in my opinion, without heart. No, I am a translator. A listener. An expert ear tuned to the strange frequencies of others. To the pulsating songs of the troubled. To the troubling stories of the troubled residents and, sometimes, their families. And there are students who speak to me, too, men and women only a few years younger than myself. They come from the nearby university and they are training to do the kind of work I do.

  Some of the students are troubled, too. After all, like seeks like.

  This is not easy work. It requires technical skill, and a special type of personality. Almost a lack of personality, but one founded on a strong ego.

  Personality is a kind of faith in one’s inner meaning despite the absence of evidence to support this.

  I did not choose my work, my work chose me. I have always been one of those women to whom others come to spill their guts, seeking not approval but solace and advice. Advice they almost always ignore. My personality, which I see as open and non-threatening, fits their need for non-judgmental guidance and support. I can listen to the most perverse fantasies and desires, the most disturbed dreams and ideas, the ugliest life details, without flinching or frowning.

  Whatever.

  It is exactly this type of uncritical response the people who confide in me are seeking.

  The key is to care to help but not care who or what you are helping. To assist those in need while not acknowledging their needs.

  To offer them total indifferent acceptance.

  The air is still today, warm and still. I could be sitting in a greenhouse, the air is that wet and quiet, everything natural so beautifully tamed. The grass in the quad is a flat emerald carpet, recently mown to perfection. Sleek palm fronds glisten and pose like on a postcard from paradise. Even the sun sits itself down on the wooden slats of the park benches below me with a benign sort of sheen.

  The day is not what is seems, however. The local news channel is all excited chatter, experts full of dire warnings about another tropical wave in the Caribbean. Outside, the air is calm. The trees that outline the quad and spread back to cover the grounds, all this greenery stands silently. And the cloudless blue sky remains nonchalant.

  This part of the world reminds me of a feral cat. Crouching here in the lap of the sun, lounging and lazing, but full of a secret primal urge to pounce. See all those palm fronds waiting to leap out, to clutch and choke? Everything becomes a weapon in certain situations.

  I catch a glimpse of the thinning orange crown of Celia’s head as she slips in the front door of the building, which is directly under my office window. Surprise, surprise. Maybe she has something to say to me today. Maybe an insight has come to her. One never knows with the residents here.

  What I do here mostly is what I call “ears and verbiage.” I listen carefully and at length, then I offer my professional and personal opinions in the form of words. The kind of words that dissolve in the air like sugar on a wet tongue. Disposable words. Soft, pliant words that have only a temporary effect. Nothing lasts around here, not with these people. That’s the second thing you notice about them. Their complete lack of continuity.

  There is a demanding, childlike knock on the door, which is half open, and Celia slides into my office. She is a small woman with a knobby face and overly flexible extremities that make her appear spring-loaded. If she had any energy left she might be bouncy, but Celia drags her bones to the long butterscotch sofa against the far wall and collapses. In a heap.

  The brass and glass clock on the wall above the sofa clicks in a brittle way each time the second hand sweeps past the twelve. I should get a new clock, a quiet clock, but I’ve been forgetful lately. I spend too much time thinking about the people here. The residents and their battered, worn out personalities. Their wasted lives, their once rich buttercream lives, reduced now to dry crumbs.

  Everyone here once had a deep-dish dessert of a life compared to the ones they are living now. Now everyone settles for leftovers, or goes without.

  Celia wears a sea-green hospital gown and a matching plastic bracelet. On the bracelet her name and dorm are typed in tiny black letters. She is not required to dress like a hospital patient, but for Celia, life has come to this. Dressing like a mental patient is a style that suits her outlook.

  Her hospital pants are gathered with a drawstring at the waist, but she has to hold them up because she is so thin. Skeletal. Talk about thigh gap. I remember when I first met Celia she had a trim but fit body, the kind of body a young woman takes to the gym four or five days a week and puts through the paces on the treadmill for at least forty-five minutes.

  We have a gym here but exercise is only recommended, not mandatory. Mostly it is the dorm advisors who use the gym. Late at night, it is rumored, some of these men (big men, they are all big men) lift weights and smoke weed when they are supposed to be watching over the residents. There’s an Olympic-sized outdoor pool here too, where the residents can swim on especially hot days. Some of them just sink into the popsicle blue water and wait there until one of the dorm advisors pulls them out.

  Celia lifts her head for a moment and looks at me, then slumps again. She might have taken a little too much Adjuster this morning. Adjuster is the current mental straitjacket of choice. When the residents lie around a lot, it can be from too much of this month’s flavor of pharmaceutical. Sometimes it’s from the condition itself, though, from the damaged personality. It’s hard to tell.

  I clear my throat and that seems to perk her up.

  “I feel like I’m still
in last night’s dream,” she mumbles. “Do you ever feel like you can’t get out of your dreams?” I smile encouragement, so she continues. “I guess I’m starting to realize I’m awake. It just feels wrong somehow, though, you know?”

  I ask her if she would like a glass of water, and she says no. Then she looks at me carefully. “I guess I can tell you the dream. No harm in that. You already know how nuts I am.” What passes for a smile flickers across Celia’s craggy and crinkled features. Her flesh has shrunk but not her skin, so it hangs oddly from her bones. Like those clear plastic bags they put around your dry-cleaning. “You know how it is,” she says.

  The clock clicks over. Water beads and slides on my plastic bottle of Diet-Water.

  “This time I was a man,” Celia starts in, sitting up a little straighter on the couch. “This time I was a man who liked to hurt women.”

  All the residents tell stories like this.

  Dreams are stories. Stories you tell yourself when you are asleep. And your life? Your life is a story too. Your life is the story you tell yourself about yourself. When you are awake.

  And the truth is, every story has an unhappy ending. This is a truth you have to accept. If you cannot accept this truth, you might end up in a place like this. Trying to rewrite your story. Over and over.

  As Celia tells me her unhappy dream, the unhappy story inside her head, the unhappy truth of her life, I say nothing. I do nothing. I simply listen, my face a blank sheet of paper for her to write her words on, a flat mirror she can look in and see a reflection of herself. A self that does not look back in anger or distaste.

  Celia goes on. And on. She unwinds her story, the tangle of images, her dream of childhood torture and abuse. Tears run down her crumpled bag of a face.

  “What does it mean?” she asks me. “Why do I dream I’m these horrible men all the time? In my dreams now I’m the people I’ve always been most afraid of. Why? Why can’t I just have normal dreams?”