The Patient

The patient gave off an aire of hopelessness, but it was a quiet, almost humble hopelessness. It seemed that the patient had simply given up any previous ideals of liberation from whatever it was that ailed him, and he now had no choice but to await his fate at the hands of whom he thought were beings of a higher existance in what he referred to as Purgatory. The being that was believed to control his fate was in fact only a psychologist, and what was perceived by the patient as Purgatory was actually a very prominent mental state asylum in northern Maine. Still, the patient was convinced that he was being held captive in another plane of existance by beings of a higher power. Psychiatrists had no observable affect on the patient's mental state, and now he was being cared for by the asylum and studied by the psychologist. The latter examined the patient in a series of inteviews, and it was not until the third meeting that the he confided in the scientist as to how he had come to be in "Purgatory."1

"I never should have agreed with him. I knew he was bad news..."2

"Bad news? Elaborate, please."3

"Well...first of all, he was a talking snake. When the snake started talking, I should have just walked away. Any reasonable person would have walked away from a talking snake. I mean, look at humans. They listened to a talking snake, and now look at them."4

"You say they. Are you implying that you are not a human?"5

"Not anymore. Humans have blood, and flesh, and brains. Now...now I'm just a soul..." 6

The psychologist nodded understandingly. 7

"But...but the snake...yeah, he was trouble alright. I was an idiot to ever listen to him and believe what he had to say."8

"What did he say?"9

The patient continued, "He offered me an apple. I took it...and I took one bite. One bite was all it took." 10

The pychologist asked the patient on what he experienced when he bit into the apple. The patient shook his head, claiming that words couldn't describe what it is he saw. 11

"It wasn't bad...or scary... It wasn't good either. It just...was."12

The psychologist mentioned the story of Adam and Eve, and how similar his story seemed to it. The patient laughed. 13

"Eve was just ignorant, and too compelled by the human's natural urge to learn. That's what made her eat the apple. I already knew what would happen if I ate it, and I still did it. That's not greed, that's redundant stupidity." 14

"What happened?" 15

"I had a great life, a miracle of a life, actually. I was alive, I could breathe. Human's take that for granted, you know; breathing. And after living inside of a miracle, I was thrown inside this place. God casting me out of Eden, and not only did he forsake me, he didn't say one word to me. Can you imagine a higher level of scorn more than the fact that he was so disgusted with me that he didn't allow me to hear his voice, like Eve had? She was lucky..."16

The pyschologist could not explain what had caused the patient's current mental state. His history revealed that he grew up a perfectly normal man, and it seemed that he simply snapped one day. After more interviews and studies, the pyschologist no longer could obtain any new information. Eventually the patient was left alone to live out his existance in the facility, constantly awaiting the fate that the doctors had in store for him. Such a fate never came, and one day, the patient died. What happened to him after that, as far as the psychologist was concerned, was anybody's guess.