Schizmo

         Schizmo’s girlfriend was too good to be true. She was beautiful, splendorous; she was sexual, scandalous; she was raw, ravenous; she was fun, tactless; she was a summer’s whirlwind of various Goddesses wrapped in Cleopatra’s skin. She was the veritable echo of previously dreamed-of splendours. Schizmo’s girlfriend, the love of his life, was just too good to be true.
         He first met her before he really met her. It was at a party (a loose description) which Schizmo had spent counting cocktail sausages so as to quench his intellectual thirst. He was aware that he could have spent the time how he was supposed to, talking to dull people about dull subjects, trying in vain to retain eye contact (to a limited degree) in order to appear likable, sociable, human, attempting not to look bored to the bone. He was aware of this, but he didn’t care. His mother had just died, and the host of the party, an old acquaintance whom he didn’t think very much of in the niceness department, thought it apt to suggest that Schizmo put on a false smile for an entire evening in an effort to mask his pain. Schizmo himself saw this as a futile method employed to solve a problem that simply didn’t exist. There was, after all, no pain to be dealt with. He never really liked his mother very much. He didn’t altogether care that she was gone.
         Tabitha lingered in Schizmo’s peripheral for the entire evening, talking colourfully to various humanoids about art, and music, and poetry, and all things ostensibly ‘cultured’. There was not a single moment throughout the duration of the party that he could not hear her talking, or at the very least laughing louder than was necessary. She simply oozed loveable-ness – she was not the loudest, the most active person at the party, but somehow, Schizmo felt, she was at the centre of every males’ attention for most of the evening.
         Retrospectively, it made sense that Schizmo – upon veering round momentarily to catch a sight of the glorious Tabitha – never actually witnessed her talking to other people. He could hear her just fine, when his eyes were focussed for minutes at a time upon the cocktail sausages and quiche, chatting away with people who responded infrequently to her ramblings, but whenever he actually invoked a snippet of courage to turn round to take a long, hard look at her, she was always apart from the crowd, diving a glass into the passion-coloured alcoholic punch, or standing staring out the window, or eating a scrap or two of lettuce from the otherwise untouched heaving bowl of salad, and even – at one point – making her way towards the buffet table where a bashful Schizmo tried in desperation to think of something to say, before eventually conceding into a flurry of blushes. He didn’t speak to Tabitha even once that night, and so, owing to how close he had been to her, he had met her before he really met her.
         Schizmo and Tabitha met again – or rather, Schizmo met Tabitha – by happy coincidence upon a happy day. Like the first time, it wasn’t a proper meeting. It was merely the second time he had met her without really meeting her. That morning, he had awoken feeling fresh, new, as if the mass of duvet were the womb, and he the newborn baby. His mother’s death, which he hadn’t really cared about before, had finally seized him the night before, after several hours of drinking beer alone in his shabby flat, scribbling bad verse into an altogether ultimately unused notepad. Suddenly, it had hit him – his mother, his gateway to Earth, had died. This wasn’t like all those times he had travelled to other parts of the country without so much as a goodbye phone call, only to return to London to an unchanged flat and an unchanged life. This time, it was she who had moved, and this time, construed Schizmo as he sipped at his fourth bottle, the two would never be reunited. He had no siblings, indeed no immediate family whatsoever, with whom he could mourn. All those who would spare a moment for comfort were – as Schizmo saw it – false friends, weak alliances, failed ex-girlfriends and wives. So he was left to himself, and as dopamine played depressingly with his neurones, memories stretching back over a miserable forty-odd years flashed repeatedly through his mind, each one more painful than the last, as if his unconscious wanted nothing more than for Schizmo to wallow in emotions of fury, falling pride, despair, desperation, grief.
         But alas, eight hours of sleep passed as they always do, the sun rose as it always does, and Schizmo awoke a new man, a man who – by any description of the term - was in love. The bad party had been roughly eight weeks ago, and he had not seen Tabitha since, except in his abstract dream moments before he woke: there he was, naked, unashamed, his mother’s face floating phantasmagorical in the wintry air behind him. And suddenly, as if by the power of his wishes alone, there she was, naked also, with a wall of darkness behind her, so that she was incandescent in contrast. Swiftly, her brilliance began to brighten further, and as it did so it seemed to be absorbing all the features of his mother’s face, so that before long, the face was gone, and only Schizmo and Tabitha remained, facing each other in the blankness of Dream.
         Whereupon, Schizmo had awoken, into a brand new life. And for my first act of happiness, he mused, I shall take a stroll through the park. Utterly convinced that this is the sort of thing happy people do, he washed, dressed, ate a healthy breakfast for the first time in twenty-six years, and left the flat with a flourish. The summer’s sun felt prickly and warm upon his skin. Schizmo welcomed it, because, he thought briefly, it’s what a happy person would do. Strolling jovially, Schizmo smiled at strangers for the first time in years, grinned sometimes into mid-air for no reason whatsoever. Once or twice he even wanted to hug passers-by in a momentary craze of benevolence. All the while, his one and only thought was: I’m in love, I’m in love, looping in his mind like a broken record which probably should have annoyed him, but didn’t. He had never felt better.
         Then, a voice. It was fleeting, sudden. It came as soon as it went. But it was full of clarity and determination, as if it were a political declaration. The voice said: “Schizmo!” And then it was gone. Schizmo turned round, sharp, but there was nobody there, no source to the voice. Someone had called his name, and now that someone was gone. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that it was the voice of Tabitha. Memories of the party eight weeks ago flitted through his mind, and as he remembered more and more vividly the sound of Tabitha talking over his shoulder, the more fully he realised that it was she who had called his name. Why, on this bright sunny day in the park, had she arrived, and called his name from afar, only to retreat? Why now? How did she know he was here, in this particular park in London? Something about the whole scenario unnerved Schizmo; it felt too real, her voice had been too real, just too vivid. Perhaps he had imagined it? But no, it was real. He knew it was real. The mind simply cannot play such lucid tricks. Thus the second pseudo-meeting came and passed, and took its toll on Schizmo.
         The period of contentment was over. It had been brief, but Schizmo was used to happiness arriving in small packages. Instead of enlightening him, Tabitha’s voice had only confused him, and over time this confusion spiralled hastily into an ugly abyss of depression. If there was anything Schizmo hated, it was lacking the energy to understand. He did not understand what had happened in the park, and therefore, before long, he regressed to his status quo of not understanding life. And throughout this rather dank lull in his emotional life, Schizmo’s one residing thought was simply: She’s just too good to be true.
***

Ineluctably, the dimension of time continued to do its job. Weeks passed, with the universe experiencing much activity. Planets continued to revolve on their axes, stars exploded, supernovae formed, and an uncountable number of synapses – more than there are atoms in the universe – continued to fire their chemicals from one neurone to the other in the brains of six and a half billion bipedal primates known as Homo Sapiens. And still Schizmo’s life seemed pretty boring, lacking in detail or trivial minutiae. And in time’s hourglass-shaped grasp, Schizmo was dragged kicking and screaming, forward, into future hope.
         And hope did come. Eventually, Schizmo and Tabitha met. They met met. Met properly, with greeting and conversation and valediction and all. They met with cheer and engaged in slight physical contact and great emotional bonding. By the end of finally meeting, Schizmo felt like he held her psyche in his own mind, every nook and cranny, figured out, analysed, understood.
         “Isn’t it funny,” she mused, “human behaviour? Two months ago we were in the same room, sometimes standing as close as we are now, and we didn’t speak a word...”
         Schizmo laughed for the first time in a month. Tabitha continued:
         “…but now we’re alone, with no-one else to glance and comment and gossip, we’re chatting away like soul mates.”
         Schizmo said nothing, but merely pressed his hand on hers lovingly, as they sat in silence on a bench in the park. Nearby, a moorhen stared, and then found itself being chased by a duck, and ran terrified from its vantage point and back into the pond. The duck remained. Schizmo could feel it peering into his mind. Just then, Tabitha’s hand began to move. For a moment Schizmo thought she was about to let go, but instead she slid her warm, conditioned palm over his and rested it on his wrist, gripping with desire, with patience, with trust; gripping, quite simply, out of new-found love. Schizmo looked at the fingers wrapped neatly and comfortably around his skinny wrist, and secretly longed never to be lonely again. Her head rested on his shoulder, his on her head, and they sat for an hour in the way only lovers can – silently.
         Not that they were lovers yet, not in the true sense of the word. They hadn’t made love. That took a while, but Schizmo was quite convinced that he would be happy to face a life of celibacy if it meant having the freedom to sit on a park bench, feeding ducks, listening to the quiet rhythmic breathing of Tabitha beside him.
         “I love you, Tabitha, but I’m so confused. My mind is so confused. Life is so confusing. I feel as though you’re too good to be true. Why is life so fucking confusing? It’s so hard to stay healthy and happy. It’s so hard…” Tears welled up in Schizmo’s copper-brown eyes.
Before long, she had to leave. But before she did, she expounded upon something which seemed to consist entirely of half-formed thoughts Schizmo himself had experienced throughout his life. Standing up, brushing herself down, Tabitha stared Schizmo straight in his fox-coloured eyes and let out a tirade of feeling.
         “Life is easy, really. You act truthful or you cheat your way through it; you sit alone or dance without a care; you remain faithful or you just don’t give a shit; you fall in love or despise someone’s guts; you do things to make yourself and others happy or you sit in a depressed stupor on your lonesome bed; you inhale and exhale until either you pass away peacefully, suddenly, or commit suicide once it all gets too much…life is straight-forward…it’s over-thinking and constant analysis that makes it anything other than a stroll in the metaphysical park; a confused life arises from a confused mind. In the end it’s all about choice. We are all making choices all the time. In any one moment you can either be happy or sad, and considering that neither the past nor the future actually exist, you may as well be happy in the one lingering moment in time to which you owe your existence. One day you’ll be gone, and once the memory of you has deceased also – be it after a few years or after the sun has exploded and all human beings are nothing but dust – it will be as though you never existed anyway. So I see no point in remaining healthy. Smoke, drink, take drugs, get in a fight, forget to brush your teeth, never brush your hair, eat little, sleep less, allow your beautiful physicality to decay, just as everything decays eventually, and join the pile of bones a master of the universe.”
         Tabitha stepped away without another word, without even a backward glance, as Schizmo watched her leave once more, gradually fading into the distance until he was alone in the park again. “Alone in the metaphysical park of life”, he muttered to himself. His hands rested on his lap, thumbs touching, his face forwards; an old, greying man was watching him from the other side of the pond, and Schizmo knew deep down that he was wondering who on Earth Schizmo was talking to.
         “No-one”, Schizmo whispered. “Only to myself.”
         And he stood up, feeling the bones in his legs ache with age, thinking quietly to himself: She’s just too good to be true.

***

         It was a depressing two weeks before Schizmo met Tabitha again. It was a depressing two weeks which he spent counting - at first seconds, then minutes, then days. He felt himself growing more and more obsessive over the thought of her – she was merely a ghost in his mind. Once or twice daily he would catch a glimpse of her in the reflection of the television, or standing behind a tree during one of his peaceful strolls in the woods, only to look again and find nobody there. He assumed this was a natural psychological mechanism of love. He heard her smooth voice upon waking, during that state of sleep-waking in which all senses are synaesthesic and confused, and every time he would fall into the trap of believing that she was there, watching him sleep soundly. He would grin like a goner, open his eyes, and then they’d be filled with tears at the sight of the same old bedroom.
         He had no job, nor any money. He had no family, his mother deceased, and also – he felt – no life to speak of. He considered suicide twice during the two weeks, both times after a distressing evening during which his mind had played the most heinous tricks on him. He listened to music, trying to calm himself; he wrote poetry to no literary avail, and he always fell asleep quickly after taking the razor from his bedside drawer and cutting himself carefully, relishing in the pain and fury, brooding in the absolute monumental depression, trying with desperation to discover if he could feel a damn thing. His dreams were always of invented female bodies – none looked like Tabitha – but with Tabitha’s voice attached to them; seductive sirens leaning back in armchairs in darkened rooms or climbing trees as tall as the heavens and looking down at him like rancid canine excrement found on the bottom of an extremely well-polished boot. He always awoke feeling an inch tall, as if all of womanhood existed merely to tease him, to taunt him, to destroy his already massively battered ego. He took up smoking, hoping with desperation to regain his healthy mind he so missed. He found it ironic that the only solution to mental anguish he could think of involved slowly destroying his body, from the inside out.
         Life continued this way for some time, in the same looped pattern. He would meet Tabitha, spend a period of time feeling depressed and being unable to sleep, and then happen perchance to bump into her again. Whenever he met her, it was in the most unlikely places, and there was never another soul anywhere near. It was as if Tabitha was there to make up for the lack of other human contact which – Schizmo felt – quite frankly seemed more real, more solid, due to the respective differences in levels of perfection. He felt lost and, on dead, futile nights, he often heard voices screaming from the pipes in the walls, one moment emanating from the wall next to his bed, the next jumping out at him from the opposite wall, as he sat with head on knees, sobbing profusely for the loss of his mind, and worrying over the question of just how long ago he had truly lost it.

***

         Schizmo lied back in the black, velveteen chair, trying to let all his deepest and darkest emotions escape from his confused mind. He felt ensconced within the anfractuous tunnels of his own psyche, comfortable yet profoundly distressed. He could feel the cushions under his back, hear the psychiatrist’s voice jabbering away smoothly nearby, and – in one brilliant moment of incontrovertible understanding – knew the true state of his brain. He comprehended now – he was ill. Mentally ill. For the first twelve sessions he wouldn’t allow himself to believe it, he had repressed his own feelings out of interest in and concern for himself only. Tabitha meant nothing to him now, merely a past memory, as he reclined there in the sunlit room, feeling the breeze from the open double window, concentrating on the past year or so of his life, focusing happily upon his own mental awareness.




***

Schizmo’s girlfriend was too good to be true. Tabitha, with all her seductive perfection proliferating by the second in every inch of her pale skin…Tabitha, with her perfectly cut hair waving enticingly in the wind…Tabitha’s entire physique, her whole mind, heart and soul; her face and neck, her breasts and torso, her arms, her legs, her very essence…Tabitha was just too good to be true. She was a mere phantasm; a ghost of Schizmo’s imagination. She was the result of years of loneliness, the morbid, epic manifestation of Schizmo’s mind – the mind of a parentless hermit, the mind of a fool, the mind of an insane, broken fool.
         Schizmo took one last puff from his filtered cigarette, and – whilst looking up at the rays of sunlight stealing the forgotten spaces between the leaves and branches of the oak trees surrounding him – dropped it to the floor, whereupon he caught a glimpse of a Goddess-like woman with perfectly cut hair in his peripheral vision, and stamped on the cigarette defiantly with one careful downward motion of his well-polished boot.
         Suddenly, fleetingly, he heard a voice beside him. Caught in the wind, it hissed with unfeeling admiration:
         “Schizmo!”
         He did not respond, but instead carried on walking through the park, alone.