Catharsis

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Copyright © 2006 by John "Reddywhp" Reddy. Permission granted to archive if and only if no fee (including any form of "Adult Verification") is charged to read the file. If anyone pays a cent to anyone to read your site, you can't use this without the express permission of the author. This paragraph must be included as part of any archive.

What follows is a dramatization of an actual experience of the author.

Comments to skip (at) reddywhip.org

Observe the darkness of space. Trillions of stars sparkle in the infinite reaches, there is no sound. The silence is oppressive. Your view pivots past an incredibly close star to view a small nearby planet mostly covered in a thin film of water and surrounded by a mixture of gases.

As you draw near, you begin to hear the voices, words, ideas, the thoughts of billions of thinking people. Your attention draws to one of the landmasses and the cacophony quiets but is still unintelligible. Drawing closer, falling through the cloud cover, you drop into an area over a smaller mass of water, heading towards land.

The area is dark, as this piece of the planet has just rotated away from its star. The cacophony lowers to a mere din as individual voices rise and fall in dominance. Your vision falls on a small grouping of buildings with tents adjacent to them. There are only a few hundred voices now.

Perspective dives through the roof of one tent as if it was a mirage and there are people walking about. X-shaped wooden frames are arranged throughout the tent, each taller than the people. As if tuning a radio which is picking up multiple stations, individual voices drift in and out of focus. Drifting above a pair, one them takes off his shirt and steps up to the crossed wood frame. The two voices are dissonant. One is planning, firm and direct, the other is erratic but suppressed with tense undertones.

The one standing against the cross has his hands clasped together around the middle of the frame. The other stands behind and as he places a leather strap over the first one's eyes, perspective dives further down again, and sight disappears, returning to black. However, the sound is amplified. Not only do you hear the thoughts of the man against the cross, but you hear what he hears.

You find yourself a passenger in the man's body, watching and listening to the world around him, through him. He may be unable to see, but in his mind's eye, he's seeing and feeling the cross in front of him pressed up against his body as he sets his feet. At the same time he also is looking at his body from behind, a sort of faint ghost image of himself. The view from behind is as if from an inch or two behind and at about the height of his head, looking down.

"Ready, John?" You (he) hears from behind. You (he) nods his head slightly, but perceptibly. Your legs get planted firmly against the wooden frame as your feet shift slightly to better distribute your weight as you push your body slightly away from the cross. Your spine moves back as shoulder blades slide slightly outward. You're bearing your back. "Your"... you've begun thinking of it as your own body. The perceptions are as if your own now.

Wind moves quickly behind you at regular intervals as you dip your head low. The movement of the air suggests something moving downward very near your back. The calm veneer in this, your mind, solidifies as if bracing itself. However, the chaotic undertones continue just barely outside perception. There's several of these air movements behind you and then you feel a couple dozen small, very light, impacts across your back, followed by another, and another.

These light impacts don't hurt. It's more of a feeling like a hand patting you on the back, just all over. In your mind's eye, from the vantage point just behind your back, you can see the tail ends of dozens of narrow black strands smacking your back all at once. These tails are spread out, haphazard.

*thud*

This swing was concentrated on your left shoulder blade, all of the tails together. It had more force and you can 'see' a grayish glow spring up where the impact occurred.

*thud*

*thud*

*thud*

Again and again, the thuds fall, frequently moving back and forth across the back.

*thud* *thud* *THUD* *thud* *thud* *THUD* *thud* *THUD* thud* *THUD*

The impacts speed up, but there's still a noticeable gap between the impacts. All along, the thudding impact builds in strength. In your mind's eye view of your back, the gray glow has spread across your upper back evenly from shoulder blad to shoulder blade. Each impact now seems to create smaller patches of brightness, but rapidly fades back into the even gray.

You hear yourself grunting lightly in time with the impacts. There's a warmth spreading out from your back and the impacts almost feel good.

*smack*

The pain is sharp. Not intolerable, not terribly intense, but it is sudden.

*smack* *thud* *thud* *smack* *thud* *thud* *smack*

The sharper impacts are spread out, interspersed with the dull but deeper thuds. The thuds were hitting below the surface, pummeling muscle. These smacking impacts are not getting past the skin, they are hitting the skin directly. You 'see' the impact points flare red with heat and color then cool off slightly as your attention is drawn to another red flare.

Your calm veneer occasionally shudders for a moment after some impacts, and that turbulent mass of emotion hiding beneath rises up against it. But then it calms down again as you force your mind to concentrate on the rain of blows landing on your back.

*smack* *thud* *smack* *thud* *smack* *thud* *SMACK* *smack* *SMACK* *SMACK* *SMACK*

You lose track of the impacts and patterns. All you know, all you can feel, all you can 'see' is the steadily constant increase in force and sharp targeting of the impacts.

The rain of cracks and smacks of leather on your back comes to a crescendo as you growl loudly and pull away from the pain and push yourself up against the wooden cross. It pauses for a moment as you feel the body move up behind you. He leans against you, pushing you into the cross.

You feel the sweat that's built up on both of your bodies. How long have you been here? The heat radiating off your back is amplified by his body being pressed up against it. In some areas of your back, the flow of sweat almost stings.

In your ear, he says, "More?"

You take a breath and nod, "Yes, definitely more."

He steps back and you re-set yourself in front of the cross, re-adjusting your feet. You take a deep breath and push your torso away from the cross again, presenting your back as a clear target.

There's a pause. There's noise all around: the music playing in the background; the sound of conversation near and far; the smacks and cracks of people engaging in explorations of their own. You hear it, but it doesn't register. For just a moment, you have a silence of mind and soul. You nod once and then dip your head down.

*THUD* *thud* *SMACK* *thud*

The blows fall again. The deeper thuds force you bodily forward. The sharper ones hurt, but less than the recent crescendo. He's working you back up.

*SMACK* *CRACK*

The hits hurt you. They're hurting more frequently. The hurt is sharp and cuts through your image of your back. The silly mental construct of seeing your body simply can't keep up.

*CRACK*

You're grunting at each impact, if not outright shouting.

*CRACK*

They keep coming, building in intensity and frequency. The filler impacts fade away. You can't really tell if he's even using the smaller hits anymore. All you feel is pain.

*CRACK*

Something snaps in your head and you lurch forward against the cross. Something from the deep recesses, something below that calm veneer reached up and grabbed your attention for a brief instant. A flicker of an image and it's gone.

'No. You have control. You have control and you're not going to . . . You have control,' you tell yourself in a flicker of an instant and push away from the cross, presenting your back again.

*CRACK*

*CRACK*

He continues delivering the pain and three more times you fall against the cross. On the third time, you hold onto the cross, breathing heavily. Your throat is sore from . . . grunting? screaming?

He steps up behind you again, leaning into you. You feel his hands under your arms, holding you firmly. "How're you doing boy?"

You don't expect the shiver that runs up your spine when he said 'boy'. You hoarsely whisper "Okay."

"You're almost there. Are you ready?"

In some pseudo-intellectual, far off place, you know what he's asking. None of that matters. What matters now is that he's there. Your're there. And he's asking you if you want more. You're not going to let him down. You nod.

"I'm not going to stop this time. You know that. This time, we finish."

You nod again.

He puts a hand on the back of your head, firmly but tenderly, and steps back. You feel a shiver run through your body his fingertips trail lightly down your neck to the middle of your back before he breaks contact.

"When you're ready, John."

You take a deep breath and let it out. You take another. You're not getting down off this cross without finishing it. You push off from the cross, head down and wait.

*SMACK*

The first hit lands and cuts through your mental preparation. There's no warm-up. There's no building. It's full on from the start now. You've done your warm-up

*SMACK*

*CRACK*

Lance after lance of pain streaks across your back. And each one harshly jars that calm shell inside yourself.

*SMACK*

*CRACK*

*CRACK*

They're coming harsher and closer together now. You didn't even realize you'd been pushed forward until your arms are wrapped around the cross, hugging it. You've pulled away from the assault and it followed you. The pain comes and increases.

*CRACK* And you remember.

*CRACK* You miss him.

*CRACK* And you remember.

*CRACK* He asked for you before he died.

*CRACK* And you remember.

*CRACK* You spoke to him a week before he died.

*CRACK* And you remember.

*CRACK* You saw him as gaunt as a skeleton.

*CRACK* And you remember.

*CRACK* You saw him discolored from the cancer and the drugs.

*CRACK* And you remember.

*CRACK* And you don't remember crying.

And you scream.

You're on the floor, sobbing. Months of pent up emotion and pain come flowing out of you in heaving sobbing chunks. You lived through it all. It happened to you, it happened to the people you loved. Did you think you could go through all that, be that stoic through the affair and not be presented with a bill later, with interest?

The blind fold hasn't come off yet, but on the edge of awareness, you know they're there with you. Your friends, your new family, are there and you know they'll look after you. For now, you can let it go.

And you let go. Floating above the play, you look down and see him and he's going to be okay. You look at the people around him and they're holding him, helping him up physically and emotionally.

Floating up, the tents and building fall away. The lake falls away and grows small. The land falls away. The atmosphere falls away. The planet falls away.

You turn to the wide dark and to the infinite lights and soar on.