Throughout all this torturous learning, there was still the presence of remaining valued friends that made the experience bearable. Their company made welcome diversions from the surrounding nightmare we were trapped in.
There was Danny who was constantly second-guessing everything anybody said. He would analyze the simplest thing that was said, and go through essay-length deductions, trying to decipher what they were after. Any innocent question made him extremely defensive.
“How are you feeling?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I was just asking.”
“Who’s been asking about me? What have they been saying?”
“No one’s saying anything.”
“Of course not. They already know where I live.”
For instance, saying “Have a long life” could be interpreted drastically. He would look at the speaker and say, ‘I don’t think I can live that long.’
He took everything as a threat, and acted accordingly. ‘Have a safe trip’ and ‘Come back alive!’ had very different connotations even though they both basically meant the same thing.
If asked about the well-being of someone else, he’d reply, ‘He’s fine... for now’, which carried sinister connotations when he just meant that the patient was stable at the moment, but couldn’t predict what might happen in the future. These threatening remarks that were actually innocuous got him in a lot of trouble.
Danny had a bleak outlook of the world. He figured that if he beat others to the punch of putting him down, he wouldn’t have to feel as bad as he already did. Why would things ever get better?
Then there was Clumsy who had trouble with space. He had no idea where his body was in relation to the world, and would constantly bump into things, always getting his clothes snagged by protruding objects everywhere. He was incredibly accident-prone in situations you wouldn’t think could be possible. Frankly, the level of clumsiness he exhibited was astounding. He could trip over a single grain of sand in the desert if he wasn’t paying attention.
There’s a test to determine how good your center of balance is by closing your eyes and putting one foot in front of the other in a straight line. Most of us were able to do this with no trouble. Clumsy practically fell down a hole the instant he closed his eyes.
One day, we were placed in a device that would show the center of our gravity. Normally, this would have us firmly placed in the middle, with the occasional person being slightly off-kilter to the side. Some of the more extreme examples were at the edge of the room. When Clumsy’s turn came up, the device activated, and his center was skewed to outside the confines of our galaxy. It turned out he’d been afflicted with Wrong Planet Syndrome all along.
After getting off the platform, he tripped and fell so hard that he slipped right off the surface of the planet, vanishing right before our eyes. The ONEs spent a lot of time and trouble trying to track Clumsy down every time he ‘tripped’. Until that moment, the prospect of successful escape hadn’t even occurred to us.
We never saw him again.
Then there was Godfrey. He’d been shunted around more than most. He had a superiority AND an inferiority complex. He believed himself to be smarter than anybody else in the room, but ALSO thought that everybody was better than him, and was hiding it from him.
He’d been around longer than I had, and been around more ONEs than anyone. He refused to share any accounts of his previous experiences, but would openly talk about learnings he’d discovered. To him, the world was full of connections that were perfectly obvious if one just looked and paid attention to the details. But he was continuously frustrated at being unable to find anyone who’d agree with his grandiose ideas. Fortunately, I was around to listen, which tempered his attitude much.
He had a tendency where, after doing a grand buildup to a massive sneeze, would then remark to himself, ‘Of course it’s me... who did you think it was?’
He swore he was on the verge of coming up with a grand unification theory that would cover all the loopholes, all the unwritten rules, all the hidden systems that governed not just the universe, but the dimensions and formulas that lay beyond our frame of comprehension. Our current vision was too limited to truly understand the wonderment and potential that could be modified and improved on, if only someone would pay attention.
He was convinced that there was something deeply wrong with the universe, and that if this flaw was fixed, it would become better. If only he could pinpoint the source.
I couldn’t follow his train of logic beyond his fifth sentence, but he had a way with words that was positively hypnotizing. With such a passionate attitude and never-say-die outlook, it’s no wonder he was transferred around so much. Such a charismatic personality would threaten the boundaries of whatever institution he was in no matter the limitations. He had complex thoughts and a complex about himself.
That probably makes what happened to him inevitable.
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