White Christmas

Written while watching “The Jacket”.




The doctor is keeping him alive so that he can do experiments on him. The soldier had died, but not completely. He was just lost to the world.

But he came back. And everything is a dream.

(In the mental institution, he met the killer who had been known as Michael Myers. The Halloween killer. Myers escaped; now he is lost to the world. Nobody knows where he is.)

Have you ever been buried alive? Have you ever seen snow from a distance? Let me out of here. Integrate. Show. Slow. Dynamic. Breathe. Blink if you can. The world is a grainy kind of gray, with flourescent lights.

The experiments are about claustrophobia. Can you take it? How many layers do you have that may be peeled away? How many lives, how much feeling, to the raw nerve? Let me out of here.

Jacob’s ladder. Rope. Raw. Breathe.

Blink if you can. Merry Christmas.

What is warm, what is bright? What melts the snow? I mean, really, what? What is heat, what is light? Not “what does it do” or “what is it made of”, but what is it? Can the answer even be known? If so, what knows it? What is “know”?

These experiments were not covered in medical school.

What have you done with the soldier?

The drugs are to keep you calm, the doctor says. I’m sitting next to Moses. The hospital is full. The patients stroke their own arms. Those little fuckers are everywhere. I’m one.

One flew over the cuckoo’s nest. The grainy, gray world. The snow lands on you like birds. You are covered.

Have you ever been buried alive?

The tomb of the unknown soldier.

A womb-like environment. I must be the crazy one. The doctor is the only family he remembers. (His secretary’s hands are covered in wax. Shiny. They go other than where she tells them to go.)

No one knows how the soldier died. This is a restricted area. The patients follow him, as in a dream. He walks in a field of snow.

Nothing is resolved, except that there is light. There has always been light. There is only light.

I have seen a time that is not this time. Anything can be taken out of context and made to sound mystical. The future doesn’t look different. Not everyone in this place is crazy.

But white. And white. And bright, white light, falling from the sky, landing on you like birds, light as snow. Merry Christmas.

You look like you’ve seen a ghost.

Can you imagine a state of permanent seizure?

The Iraqi boy, the one who shot the soldier, is alive. The doctor is dead. The soldier is free, though not alive or dead. He goes with the birds, into the dream, awake.

Go play in the snow. Do not read this until it is finished. Stay with me. Don’t slip on the ice, or it will be the second time you die.

The world is lost. Everything is lost. But where? Everything. What is the location of everything?

The sun has come, though I can still see snow in the distance. I slipped but am alive.

The experiment is over.

Breathe.