maxowallis

For Oscar, My Lover

M. R. Wallis

• (An empty silence.)
• I don’t understand.
• You wouldn’t.  You never do.  No one ever does.  He didn’t.
• Do you want to elaborate?
• Do YOU want to know?
• Do you want to elaborate?
• (Silence.)
• It’s Oscar, he doesn’t reply to me.

[Cut, excise

copy and paste

glue, stick, staple

weave, mesh, parcel, ribbons

around and around you

forget my love in the

abstract net of a cage, my dear.

For Oscar,

my lover,

I am forever yours.]

Name: Mr Chadwick

Date: 25^th November 2010

Symptoms: insomnia; lack of appetite; verging on the neurotic; restlessness; chronic depression signified by a complete lack of sex drive; self-loathing; reduction in weight (70kg to 60kg in a two-week period) etc. An—

Dear Oscar,

I woke up today and thought that the world would be colourful.  Instead it is still as grim and as dark as ever.  I am falling through the air, but the ground never comes to hit me.

Forever Yours,

Dear Oscar,

I appreciate what you’re saying, but you know it’s not like that.  I didn’t mean to suggest that you would do that to me.  You know what it’s like.  I mean, what with everything that happened with David last year, you know I find it hard to trust people.  I miss you.  I miss how things were.

Forever Yours,

• David?
• No.
• Who’s David?
• No.

(Pause, bites lip, scratches his temple.)

• Who is David?
• Don’t ask me.  Don’t ask me again.

Dear Oscar,

When you look at the world.  I mean, truly look at the world.  When you realise how much pain and suffering there is.  When you see the homeless men after you’ve been out drinking, with a fag in your lips.  They’re resting outside Oxfam with a sleeping bag (if they’re lucky) and a magazine for a pillow—and you see their small brown teeth and sallow sunken cheeks (smoke trailing away in feathered puffs above you) you cannot allow yourself any happiness.  You have no right to any happiness.  There are only varying degrees of discontent; shifting levels of Sad.  You throw the cigarette away and it sizzles in a puddle.  You take a fistful of your coat and grip it to try and curb the feelings rising in your gut.  That hollow.  That hole which grabs at you and slowly rips you apart.

Forever Yours,

• Is it not the opposite?
• What do you mean?
• I mean, when I read these letters … to Oscar …
• Yes?
• Does it not make you feel like … like you shouldn’t be sad, considering their suffering?
• I should do.

(Silence, shallow breaths.)

I should do.

I know I should do.

But I don’t.  I can’t.

(I can feel my eyes growing dull as my consciousness recedes into a little cave in the back of my skull.)

• But … you do realise.

You have to remember that everyone feels sadness, everyone gets low, but people are happy too.  You have to focus on that.

• There’s no such thing as happiness.  There are just levels of discontentedness.  I think people who are happy are just deluded.
• Are you angry at me, for reading them?

(No reply.)

Dear Oscar,

I know you want me to … I know … I know you think that I’d be happier.  I know you think I’d be less, less, less, less, less I know you think I’d be happier.  But I don’t want to.  I don’t want to have my humanity wrenched out from my skull when I’m not looking.  I don’t want to wake up in the morning and be a cold, lifeless drone going about my deeds. I don’t want to be stifled.  I am already stifled.  I don’t want my whole fucking horrendous perception shut down with little pills and/or needles until all I am is a zombie.  A living zombie.  The undead just with warm blood and warm flesh.  Childhood redux.  This pain is just an echo.

My love lives in your heart, watching as tendons twitch and muscles contract sporadically with each palpitation.

I am within you.

As you are within me.

Every part of me.

An equal percentage of the very essence of me.

You are my love, my life.

I don’t want to give up my life.

Forever Yours,

• Are you happy?
• Pointless.
• Are you happy?
• Edgefew.
• Are you happy?
• Tipimum.

(I blink, I blink, I blink (three times my eyes fall like tumbling refrigerators down a cliff face.))

Pardon?

• Are you happy?
• I …

(Happy, rolled around my tongue like whiskey.)

some

sometimes

• Do you think about death?
• Always.

Dear Oscar,

I cannot sleep.  For fear of dying without allowing myself, I fear the darkness.  I cannot sleep without you by me.  I keep collapsing, midday—as if drunk when I’ve not touched the stuff … at least, not that day; a sort of wide-awake-passing-out.  And in the day I exist as if I’m a door left ajar in someone else’s reality.  I become stolid.

I am a pale echo.  An irrational number.

I am the stranger at the back of photographs, who people always wonder who the hell they are.

I am no one.

I am nothing.

I am receding into the void that has become my life, my dear.

Everything but you.

The whole of my life is spent proclaiming my dearth of innocence.

My bystander arousal.

You watch and hear it all, my dear.

You watch and hear it all.

Forever Yours,

[...]

My body, my mind, my fingertips and the world I coexist in are all merged and stitched together at patched seams.  I am a biological, functioning machine.  I have fleshy parts all wrapped around a solid steel heart.  My eyes are diamonds and I have a lump of coal that sits in my mouth.  I have a furnace in my stomach that’s continually fed. Fed. Fed to keep it burning.  Days roll by and tumble into night.  Bedtime at 4pm. Morning: midnight.  Breakfast at 1am.  Lunch at 4am.  Dinner at 8.  Night becomes my daytime and day becomes my night.  I am seamless and perfusing everywhere and nowhere all in the same instant.   Same mechanical or technological quantum of time.  And although I have company.  Although I have a lover. Although I talk in every other instant of the day to living beings, I am cold.  And I am alone.  At this time, so very alone. Lost in all its completion.

[...]

Dear Oscar,

Please, don’t.  Please.  Wait.  No.  Please.  It is crying outside you know.  The sky is weeping.  It is mourning the passing of the morning.  Please, don’t go.  I’ll do anything.  What?  Yes.  Anything.

Forever Yours,

• It wasn’t my fault. I mean, you should understand that it wasn’t my fault.
• No one’s blaming you.
• Yes but you do understand, right?
• What’s happened?
• Oscar … he … he’s upset.
• Wh—
• He keeps saying that we can’t be together if I’m not on the medication.
• Do you want to be with … him?
• Yes.  Yes.  Beyond belief, yes.
• Do you want to be on the medication?
• No.  No.  Beyond belief, no.

It’s a predicament, see.

(A wry smile creeps up the edge of my mouth, but it is a trite suggestion of my true thought, even tears barely symbolise my infernal internal suffering.)

Dear Oscar,

I can’t, I can’t.  I couldn’t write, I couldn’t paint.  No.  I’d be any other office drone rat-a-tat-a-tat-terring away the banal hours of my existence; all the time awaiting five-pm to scuttle back home to sit in front of the television with my eyes wide open from all the drugs, slipping gradually into some glazed-face expression.

You wouldn’t recognise me.

No, my dear.

I’d become some mannequin; devoid of any personality.

At least this way I have a personality.

Even if it’s tied to the decline of everything I hold dear.

Do you remember when we sat in that Lebanese restaurant and we ordered a load of small dishes but you refused to eat anything because you were full? And we sat there across from each other and talked about everything, anything?  And the staff kept on giving us weird looks as if they’d never seen two gay men having food together?

When we sat on that fairground wheel and watched everyone from above.

When we went to the theatre and talked too much and people gave us disturbing looks.

I don’t want to give this up.

I don’t want to be some wooden man.

Emotion might be raw but at least it’s real.

At least I know that I’m real.

That I exist.

That I feel these things, however painful.

Forever Yours,

• (Tears, weeping, a staccato wheeze of a breath.)
• Talk to me.
• (Guttering, steam engine whistles come frankly from my nose; eyes are small leaking faucets in a pale ceramic bowl.)
• Talk to me.
• He said.

(Pause.)

He said.

(Weep, sigh, brush-of-the-eyes.)

He said that we shouldn’t be together, that he couldn’t be with me if I wasn’t set back to some aspect of normality.  That …

(Tears fall on the beige sofa as if droplets of blood when they hit.)

• I …
• I don’t know what to do.

(Head filled with pressure as if a balloon’s inside and slowly expanding.)

What can I do?

Please …

Dear Oscar,

Do you understand what you’re asking me to do?  I mean, if you loved me.  No, of course you love me.  I think you love me. I’d be cold.  I’d be a statue.  I’d be nothing whatsoever compared to what you knew.  Every time you looked at me would be as if you were looking in an old photograph at someone who doesn’t appear the same to you: tainted.  Not to mention the side effects!  Citalopram can give you tremors.  Lofepramime – short term memory loss.  Venlafaxine – headaches, dizziness.

Cut out my heartache, cut out the clouds that drench my brain.

But you cut out my freedom, too.

Until I’m sat there counting the pills each morning, each lunchtime, each night.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, glass of water, meal, coffee, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16

Rinse/repeat.

Please.  I love you.  Love me as I do you.

Forever Yours,

• (It’s cold, the wind tumbles through the window and ruffles the Dr’s papers on his desk; he has a dark brown toupee and small, circular, glasses.  There’s a moustache on his upper lip that’s like the thick end of a brush. There’s a bit of egg trapped in it.)
• Right, Mr. Chadwick, how … how are you?

(He’s stuttering as if he’s the one who’s getting assessed here.)

• You have a bit of egg in your moustache.

(He nuzzles his nose with the back of his left hand and it makes a sucky noise with all the snot inside.)

That’s better.

• You’re here because of  …

(He ruffles through his files, trying to find the correct sheet.)

• Where’s Dr. Solgrave?

(His name’s pronounced sul-grahv, like ‘carve’.)

• H-he-he’s ill today.
• Oh.

What’s wrong with him?

• (He jerks his head and asks me how I am, again.)
• I’m fine.

(I’m lying, of course: ironic really; I know the shadows in my mind better than any doctor will.

He starts ruffling again.

Of all the people, it becomes increasingly more apparent that, in this instance, I am the sane one.  Doctors.  They’re all either voyeurs or fuckups themselves.  Good company for the deranged.)

Dear Oscar,

D is for:

• Don’t.
• Do.
• Delightful.
• Detriment.
• Doe-eyed, deathly, demon.
• Desiccate, delicate.
• Dreamer.
• It’s for the darkness within my curdled, custard of a mind.

Never say it out loud.

Forever Yours,

• I’ll do it.
• Are you sure?
• Yes.

I’ll talk to him.

If he still wants me to, I’ll do it.

A world without him would be a world without myself, I’d feel lobotomised.  Raw.  Even worse than now.

• I think … as your … as your doctor speaking.  I think it’s for the best.

Dear Oscar,

I … I’m.  I’ll do it if you want me to.

I don’t want to.

But I am so afraid.

I am drowning in a cold sea of irrationality.

I need order to escape the rising typhoon.

I’ll do it for you.

My dear, my love,

Forever Yours,

[lapse]

Notes: Paroxetine (10mg, once a day) administered in an attempt to ease PTSD symptoms categorised by patient’s undeniable anxiety and spontaneous relapses into grief and outbursts of mania during sessions.  Increased to 30mg due to lack of response; discontinued following increased anxiety symbolic of neurosis; constipation; inability to ejaculate following masturbation.

[...]

I give up my very liberties.  My life is curbed by the demands of external, non-recreational drugs and counselling.  All of this for you, my love.  A suffering puppet on the threads of doctors’ hands.

[...]

Cont’d: Mirtazapine, 20mg.  Success.  Patient’s mood improved.  Encountered dry mouth.  Administered sugarless boiled sweets to counteract.  Three weeks later tremors began and medication discontinued.

[...]

I shake for you.  I stall my thoughts for you.

[...]

Cont’d: Chlorpromazine (trade name Thorazine) 100mg every six hours.  Patient became eased.  No further medication advised.  Counselling continued.

[lapse]

Dear Oscar,

It’s been two letters now and still you don’t reply.  Still I haven’t seen you.  Still I haven’t touched you or … or felt your breath on me.  Felt your face against me, your hands around me…

Where are you?

Forever Yours,

• He doesn’t reply to me, he doesn’t talk to me. Ever.  I don’t understand.
• (Muted, barely a whimper, these drugs make me stagnant like washing left out for too long.)
• Who doesn’t?
• Oscar, obviously.  He never replies anymore, not since I started taking the medication.

Dear Oscar,

You said! You said if I did this that … that … that…

Why are you doing this to me?

Do I mean nothing?

Are our whole experiences together, nothing?

I don’t understand.

Forever Yours,

• Do you want him to reply?
• Yes, obviously.
• Why?
• I love him.
• You love him.
• Yes, that’s what I said.
• You love Oscar.
• Yes.  Oscar.
• Mr. Chadwick, are you sure you love Oscar?

(Pause, brief reflection, what the fuck is he on about?)

• Yes.

(He’s fiddling with a clipboard and his face is very cold today.)

• He’s stopped writing to you?
• Yes.
• Ah’m.
• What?
• Mr … Mr. Chadwick.
• Yes?
• What’s your name, Mr. Chadwick?

(Blank, empty silence, followed by the sound of my heartbeat in my ears.)

Mr. Chadwick?

…

[...]

Cont’d: —an obvious suicidal personality, sectioned once in early June 2009.   Suggestions of deeper trauma, highlighted by conversations with the patient as well as letters found, written to himself – Oscar.

Diagnosis: Incident in June 2009 with someone called ‘David’ indicate the possible root of the disorder.  Patient refuses to reveal what occurred, perhaps if one tackled this then the personality of Oscar may disappear.  Tests and symptoms indicative of dissociative identity disorder (formerly known as multiple personality disorder).  Patient treated with medication (paroxetine 30mg; mirtazapine 20mg; chlorpromazine 100mg) to allay his chronic depressive symptomania, which led to the banishing of the personality who would write him letters.  However, patient still suffers from believing there to have been such a person in the first place.  Future of patient is unknown.  Suggest continued counselling as medication seems to at least have reduced the presence of the other mind.  However, there is a chance he might relapse and reject further medication in order to ‘bring Oscar back’; as such consideration must be taken to admit him to St John’s Priory.