1968 (Part II)

"Ken did what he had often done under problematic circumstances. He decided to sprawl out on the couch and hope for sleep to come, and maybe as his brain clicked and whirred in novel directions the solution to his problem would come through. Except this wasn't a problem like the mountain of the Calculus back at the Institute, which for all its mind-numbing and humbling complexity was well-defined and possible to solve. No, this current "situation", or whatever, was more amorphous, and this dread seemed to reach back to something very fundamental in him."

"A shallow sleep came. Images flitted and collided under his eyelids. He had had a few false starts, interrupted by a bead of sweat somehow ending up in his nose and interrupting his breathing, but as always he managed to settle into a stable pattern. Eventually the image fragments and word fragments began to coalesce. And what emerged was, predictably a landscape of the laboratory at the institute. She is walking through the door, carrying a laundry basket full of dangerous and highly volatile chemicals. She takes the tops off the containers and begins to synthesize. She must work quickly, or the poison concentration in the air will reach unbearable proportions. The pressure does not faze her; it probably speeds her work. Ken is working the stopwatch. Activity bustles all around him. How many more people are working with open-air poisons? But this batch absolutely needs to be prepared. She calls out to him; she cannot finish quickly enough. He rushes over and soon they are both mixing, heating, distilling, running through the complicated procedure as quickly as human hands will allow. They finish twenty minutes later and they make a beeline for the door. The supervisor shouts that they must return in five minutes. Once outside, they cough and sputter. He holds her still as he applies the irrigation bottle to her eyes. This would be a good time to..."

"He woke with a start and in pain. It was neither a sharp pain nor the dull, stomachache-type pain, but rather something like the memory of great pain. (You see, gentle reader, when Ken was young his mother would wake him up in the middle of the night and check under the sheets for what was a very normal occurrence to young boys. Finding his erections, she would yell at him mercilessly. She had said many things that Ken no longer remembered, but the point of all her (verbal and sometimes physical) harangues was that he must become master of his desire and not let it rule over him and blindly push him in dangerous, sad direction. She had said that we must not give in to those primal urges, that that would lower us to the level of mere animals, red in tooth and claw. Her lectures and beatings became internalized, to the point that Ken could never maintain eraction for more than a moment before he was overwhelmed with pain. Was this all in his head? It didn't matter.) He breathed deep to regain his composure. He got up, walked a few paces, wiped the sweat from his face and eventually settled back on the couch. This time he would be careful not to think of that. As the years passed, he had, of course, developed strategies for actually managing to sleep. He would make sure his dreams never dwelled on any one idea for too long, becuase that idea would inevitably link up with her. She was behind everything at the moment. He hoped it would pass."

"He set himself down to sleep again..."

To be continued?

Consider: "...it is more shameful to distrust our friends than to be deceived by them. "