The Philophrosyne Complex

Frankie, born Francis, rolled down the stairs, cursing furtively at each step as he did, and landed with a head aching crunch at the bottom of them, a maelstrom of clothes, toothpaste and protruding limbs. He didn’t have time to nurse his bruises though, even hurrying and speeding all the way he would be late for work. The damage could only be mitigated, not fixed. Frank’s alarm clock had perplexingly reset itself as if a storm had knocked out the power, but it’d been an unblemished night with no room for a power outage, and his boss wouldn’t accept random act of God as an excuse. Several ironically fake yet more realistic sounding excuses floated in his mind like rain drops in a storm, each just as fleeting.

Moving as fast as a hopping man pulling his, naturally, mismatched socks on could, he ran the last little stretch to the kitchen, impressing even himself with his quick reflexes as he leapt over a conspicuously fallen chair, just the legs of which was sticking out from the doorway like a disembodied foot. So impressed was he with himself that he missed the t-shirt lying on the floor, a descending foot quickly wrapped up in it like a mummy’s bandage and sent slipping out from underneath him. Arms wind milling desperately for balance, he fell and landed heavily on his back. A blast of air shot out from his lungs and a glob of toothpaste jumped into the air like a frothy cannon ball, suspended for a second, then plummeted back down, slapping him with a wet glop, his right eye coated sticky and nostrils filled with foam that smelled of fresh mint.

Wheezing from his recently purged lungs, Frankie pushed himself up off the floor for the second time in as many minutes. “You’re kindling when I get back,” he promised the chair with his first new breath. With no more time for angry threats directed at furniture he hurried over to the sink, spitting the remaining toothpaste as he dashed water against the congealed eye, shoved the toothbrush, still pasty, into a cup stocked in the dishwasher, and charged outside, knocking the door out of his way, getting half way down the driveway before he realized he had forgot to lock it. Swearing up and down the blacktop as he ran back and forth, he hopped into his car, expecting it to follow the course of the still early day and stall. To his extreme amazement the tumbler turned and he felt his Toyota rumble to life. The pristine, well kempt suburban neighborhood abruptly turned into abstract smears of color and went streaking by as Frankie shoved hard on the pedal, the outside world looking like a blur to him as much as he looked like a blur to the outside world. It was a beautiful day, sunny with a few puffs dotting the azure sky and a light gust of wind that breezed by perfectly as one began to feel the first tingling of sweat running down their brow. The rarity in such weather went quite unnoticed by Frank.

Five and a half red lights later (the last one was orangish) the tardy employee whipped his car into the parking garage, steering wheel vibrating against clenched hands as the tires screeched out a song of protest. Hurriedly he parked and ran the expanse of the garage, blowing his nose like a bull as he dislodged the remnant of a toothpaste and snot ooze, clacking noises echoing as his feet slapped across the concrete and towards the light of day streaming from the half underground block. Exiting the car lot he saw his destination: a large sky scraper that loomed over all the other inner city buildings, all shimmering glass offices and strong concrete foundations, he could even seen little ant people as they walked around the labyrinth of cubicles. The glittering tower lay just across the street. Which had four lanes. And was driven upon by maniacs.

The saving of his job relied on Frankie being crazier than the speed freaks that would soon surround him. Before he had time to reconsider just how stupid this idea was, figure out that it was “just a job” and back out, he rushed forward with multiple starts and stops plaguing his straightforward route, dodging one car than another and another and another. Angry motorists passing shouted curses and threats of violence that became whispers as they zoomed past, though they went unheeded either way, his heart pumping as fast as his legs when the last stretch appeared without obstacle before him. He’d just finished crossing the street, the door to his goal in sight, hand extending, when a sad voice addressed him.
“Any change sir?”
Frankie looked left just as he yanked the door open, swinging it too fast and nearly hitting himself in the face. The old man sat but three feet away, tattered clothes clung to his body like loose linen held together by a clothes peg, a dirty beard harassed his chin and cheeks. Two eyes shone through a face tempered a different color because of all the dirt. He could have been a coal miner.

Muttering oaths under his breath Frankie picked at his wallet, grabbing the first folded bill he saw without bothering to check the accompanying number and tossed it to the beggar before continuing in his quest for non unemployment, a “God bless,” hurled at him just as the door closed.

Of course he wasn’t anywhere near the door by the time it shut and hadn’t heard the hobo’s word of thanks at all having already resumed his frenzied pace, this time his goal being the elevator, the last leg of the journey. With the moments he didn’t have to lose already lost Frank zipped past a secretary, squeezed through two officious looking upper managers, ducked and spun under a coffee wielding assistant, and aimed himself to the nearest elevator, the door of which miraculously sliding off to the side as though he had just shouted “open sesame!” It was the first good thing to happen all day. Stumbling on the edge of the mechanical box in his hurry, Frankie began popping the button in and out so many times it hurt his finger, the number sixteen flashed before his eyes.

Just as the elevators began to close, just as Frank breathed his first sigh of relief, just as he retained a slight possibility of keeping his job, he heard a faint cry. “Wait!”

Against his better judgment Frankie peered through the shrinking gap the doors presented. A woman in a scarlet dress suit, frumpy and tottering on high heels like an egg balanced on tooth picks, carried a visage of such distress and desperation that she could have been Frank’s twin sister. She had curly black hair held back in an awkward, tilting way and makeup that seemed to have been done in a moving car, and most likely had been. She owned the word pity, Frank could just imagine her life story being just a variation of this scene. It bothered him, he hesitated. Her eyes locked on his. “Wait! Please! Hold that elevator!”

For not the first time in his life or the hundredth time that day Frankie wondered just what the hell he had done to have pissed lady luck off in such horrible fashion. Forfeiting his job with a jab of a finger while wondering how big of a push over one man could be, Frank pressed the open doors button, watching the giant cookie pan like metal sheet slide in reverse and pop wide, hearing his career seal shut instead of the automatic door.

The woman waddled in through the door with a gasp as Frankie held it at bay with an outstretched arm, the bastion of disgruntled chivalry. She teetered on her stilt like shoes and even at a standing position didn’t look quite safe, wavering like a tree in the wind. “Oh thank you so much, I’ve had such a horrible morning, you wouldn’t believe my luck!”

“I bet,” he said sarcastically, somehow finding the strength to reign in his temper at her choice of words. Her stubby fingers, nail bitten to the pulp, covered a number, seven lighting up as she moved them away. The carriage began to rise and the hapless two stood in silence, her precariously shifting from one side to the other like a teeter totter, him mute and despondent, wondering how much time he’d have to pack his things. For what seemed like awhile the only change was the floor they passed through.

“You’re a good man, you know that?” Something about her tone caught him off guard. He looked over at her and the pathetic demeanor seemed to vanish before his eyes like water through a sponge. She even carried herself differently, posture straight and no longer listing on heels, but tall and erect, her frumpiness looked strangely regal now. She watched him with clear eyes that generated a peaceful aura. For reasons he couldn’t explain, Frank felt embarrassed by his previous annoyance at woman’s insistence that she had been having a bad day, like he’d been a little child complaining hotly about school to a mother who’d just came home from a long days work. The sudden metamorphosis from caterpillar to monarch unnerved him.

“Nah,” a hand reached up to scratch the side of his head uneasily. He searched for the words to add to this simple retort, but was at a loss as to what to say in the face of such scrutinizing serenity, and instead remained silent. The cart shook slightly and was the only sound heard for an eternal moment. The woman let him view a bemused, knowing smile as if she heard what he couldn’t say and the smile was one of humorous doubt at the expense of his humility. The calmly piercing eyes switched to watch the lights. “You’re a poor liar Francis. This is our stop.”

Before the befuddled and oddly cowed white collar worker began to form the words of a reply, before the thought of how she knew his name ever occurred to him, before he could point out they were only on the sixth story, before any and all of this had started, something stopped. A high pitched keel surrounded them as Frankie felt his stomach bounce off his heart and ricochet back into position, their little world shook back and forth like a rattle. He took a stumbling step backwards into a corner, throwing his hands wide against the walls as the elevator jammed to a halt. He had time for one fleeting glance at his fellow occupant, her face the mirror of tranquility, so alien from his own. She didn’t even flinch.

Frankie’s innards began rearranging themselves again, rising up this time as he sailed downwards, the metal casket plummeting to the earth. They began to shake back and forth, the elevator, free of its bonds, bouncing between the walls and bellowing an awful grating sound, the lights flickering dangerously with each jerk, menacing with the darkness they could impose. Every muscle on his torso seemed to tense and stretch, his hands becoming white with effort to hold onto the walls of the flying tomb while the lower half of his body got a different message, his legs slithering forward from underneath him, leaving him crumpled on the floor. His body was a battlefield of neurotransmitters as mixed messages twisted past each other and Frankie’s brain went into total “Oh shit,” mode, panicking with a thousand different hare brained schemes ranging from climbing up and out of the elevator to jump on the wall to opening the doors and seeing if he could slow down the accelerating, two ton box with his leather soled shoes to pinching and slapping himself with zest, wake up and out of this dreadful dream before it became a nightmare. As his physical being went into a biological haywire he could only think of one word: Please, please, please, please, please his mind whispered behind clamped eyes. His self induced blindness nearly missed everything.

Frankie opened his eyes because he was supposed to open his eyes. He saw what he saw because he was supposed to see it. The woman in front of him was clearly no longer a woman and perhaps she never had been. From her eyes and mouth a soft, yellow-white light emitted, basking the inside of the fast descending metal shell in a glow like a jar of fireflies. The light was comforting; it transformed the coffin into a haven. Little, gold flakes like pollen floated soon after the emanation of bliss, drifting outwards, occupying the tiny space, inattentive to the careening chaos. One touched the quivering mans forehead. Francis, who moments ago was consciously struggling not to loosen his bowels in fright, who was still very much aware that his death was imminent, no longer felt the stubborn grip of fear.

Her face began to change without changing, one moment it was the short, stodgy woman, next it was the bum he had given the anonymous bill too, then it was an old, decrepit waitress whose table Frankie had left a large tip on, after that a young kid stranded on the road whose car he had jumped, and others he did not know or did not remember came and went, changing weight and height, color and sex without seeming to, their faces and bodies flew on faster and faster, they began pelting by with no time to discern the features like pages flipping through a book. A screeching like a mechanical bird rang from everywhere around him.
And then nothing.



Adrift is how he’d describe it, his body free from his mind or maybe the other way around, freewheeling in nothing like an astronaut in the black ice of space, cool amid the absence of stars, thoughts discordant and jumbled. It was numbingly peaceful here, like being plugged full of Novocain minus the disconcerting lack of control. Lingering aimlessly for all time didn’t seem a farfetched possibility or an unkind one. Occasionally his waft in the dark tide would bring him to an invisible beach of semi awareness, brushing against this side of consciousness. During these nudges, these brief reverse eclipses, he became acutely aware of whirling, persistent beeping sounds that nagged at him with the incessant harshness of their chirping and make him ache all over. They mingled with hissing noises that rushed forward and faded away at intervals, shouting from afar through a fog and then speaking as though they were sitting right in his ear. In those moments where he was dragged away from his lightless castle and the blanket of indifference smoldered into a heap bright, painfully bright white flashes flamed before him, flipping on and off at a snail’s pace, sandwiching the darkness which, curiously, descended from above but never from below. Through blurred vision he gazed upon wax colored hands that held large insects. They shimmered with metallic luminosity as their owners, hanging above him, seemed as bugged eyed as their minions. He was frightened. Feeling the first threads of connection to his body he struggled weakly. The pitiful efforts of escape is how he noticed the first slither along his arm, turning his head on a groan and catching a glimpse of the near invisible serpents that coiled around his limbs, suddenly still as they tried to camouflage against the skin of his arms. Terror brought him further away from his semi reality, his absent minded paradise, and he began to resist lest one of the sneaky reptiles wraps its slimy cold body around his throat, squeezing what little life he had left out of him like the air from his windpipe, but then an angel in blue came over and he felt better, giddy all over as the she set him back into his waterless drift with a pinch that felt more like a kiss. Translucent snakes, stannic bugs, and wax men with bulging eyes all forgotten. He went back to drifting.




Awareness was both a blessing and a curse. He was now free from the sticky spider web stupor, a vacation when compared to the brief flashes of reality he had endured. The drugs had been the force behind the pleasant face of his coma, although closer mental scrutiny shed that mask and revealed a hollow face behind it, one that was pale and beaten to hell yet still showed no emotion. Lack of awareness had its perks though. For one he didn’t have to deal with the painfully bright fluorescent lights, the hellish white fire he’d seen no doubt. Neither did he have to deal with the realization that he was in a hospital, a place loathed ever since a car crash a few years back that left him bed ridden for weeks. His dark ignorance also impeded the flood of pain and discomfort his body was in, not least of which were the tubes through his mouth, in his dick, and up his ass. In a muddled hex he vaguely hoped the three weren’t somehow connected. Frank closed his eyes and didn’t move for a long time, or what seemed like a long time, all of his concentration split between tuning out agony and trying to disregard his stomach’s order to vomit. He failed at both before passing back out.

He awoke to much better tidings the second time around. The pain wasn’t gone, he still felt like one giant bruise with six or seven more bruises heaped on it cartoon style, but the nausea had receded to a manageable degree. Mercifully the tube that gagged him before was absent and someone had cleaned the vomit off of his bed sheets, he knew by the smell of them. His more adept state of awareness also graced him with the knowledge that both of his legs were broken, or at least damaged enough that neither of them could go without a cast. The room was dark, cool, the lights turned off although the natural sort trickled from beneath the blinds. A figure stirred off to the side and Frankie groaned as he watched a creamy beige hand fold around one edge of the curtains. He feared the full raging force of the sun.

Not only could he handle one sun, but he realized he was completely fine with two. The hand yanked back half the drapes to reveal a petite blonde with watery blue eyes and scrubs of a similar yet muted color, her turn to face him timed perfectly with the suns installation. The withdrawal of the blinds revealed a smile that out dazzled the star, her teeth immaculately white and straight with soft dimples at the corners of her mouth. His angel in blue.

“You have a beautiful smile.” The thought immigrated out of his brain and into his throat before he had time to telekinetically grab it back, the wayward mind burp emerging from his mouth in a voice dryer than an Eskimo caught in the Sahara.

Her laugh was lighthearted, even her vocal cords smiled. “Definitely the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard from a coma patient,” she walked over to my bed “Semi delirious or not.”

Frank started shaking his head, but aborted the maneuver as rivets of hot pain were staked into his skull. “I’m not…” he curtailed his original reply as the obviousness of her remark dawned on him, “Coma? For how long?”

The nurse nodded, still smiling though it was a lips only affair as seriousness crept into the young conversation. “Two weeks now, you’re lucky to even be alive. Not many people survive a fall from six stories up let alone with a hunk of metal pinned on top of them. We kept the reporters away.” The words gathered together his memory in painful streaks, images slamming into one another as he tried to pause and dissect them, piling up in a heap like a bad car wreck but still trying to force their way through. The woman in the red pantsuit, her change, the free fall, the golden sparkles, only the first of these did he question his nurse about. He didn’t want any more drugs, especially for what would be perceived as head trauma. For a moment no answer was forthcoming as her head tipped out of view, arms no doubt reaching up to check some unseen monitor hanging above him. Her chest was close enough to his face that he could read her hospital pass, clipped near the swell of her breast. Angelica. Of course.

Her face sank back into view, it was slightly concerned. “Woman? You were the only one the fire fighters cut out of the wreckage.”

“Oh, yeah, sorry for some reason I thought someone was in there with me, Muriel Heller, you know the channel six anchor? I watched her that morning, brain must still be a little jumbled,” he laughed it off casually even as he felt anything but, though his lie had the desired effect, Angelica’s worry relaxed into relief. No reason for anyone to think he was a little screwy, specially cute nurses he’d probably be spending the next few weeks with.
“Had me nervous there for a second, thought you might have broken more than your legs, shoulder, foot, hand and couple of ribs.”
“So that’s why it hurts to breathe, and here I thought it was just you Angelica.”
Angelica laughed and shook her head, blushing slightly “Maybe your brain did get rattled a little,” she said, her smile tweaking to favor a more mischievous look. “And call me Angel or I’ll call you Francis. I’ve got some other patients to check in on, the doctor will be in shortly. See you later.”

Frank waved a hand before pulling his focus away from the swing of her hips and back to the crash that had left him bedridden, yet again. For finding out he was in a coma for a couple weeks, not to mention the extraordinary circumstances that put him there, he was doing remarkably well he wagered. He didn’t feel at all shocked or awed, but rather weirdly comforted or confirmed, as though random glowing shape shifters saving his life didn’t really register as surprise but as a belief, a belief he’d had all along but could never prove or even justify, and if it’d happened to others they would spit and sputter and shake heads in wonder and amazement, bow down and give thanks whether they knew who they were giving thanks to or not, but Frank just lied in his bed, calmer than he had been in years.

Francis stared out his window. The sun was at the perfect angle of being partially blocked by a white dab of cloud giving it the impression of shyly poking around the side of fluff to check in on him, a parent cracking a door to steal a glance of their slumbering child. He smiled. Maybe random act of God wasn’t such a bad excuse after all.