Insanity

When the mind self-destructs it is left in a pristine state; that is, it relinquishes its hold on the order humanity strives for and resorts, instead, to chaos.  It submits to the law of disorder and to entropy.  It gives up the fight.1

*****2

Jade awoke to the feel of coarse sheets and dizziness, and in the absences of light there was a seven.  He gazed, open mouthed, while the familiar tug of a thought lingered at the back of his mind.  He called it forth, this scintillating gold ribbon, and it coiled fervently around his brain like a greedy serpent.  His heart began to race, he writhed underneath the dingy sheets.  He tried to tell himself to focus, but the ribbon kept moving and growing, there was discerning where it began and where it ended.  Why could he not comprehend it?  He needed to know!3

"Devour," he rasped aloud, "Devour, devour, DEVOUR!" echoed the thoughts.  He put the sound waves into the space, the abyss, the emptiness.  Would the 7 quiver when they hit it?  The ribbon no longer screamed at him, but rather undulated and began to whisper in loquacious urgency for the other thoughts.  Jade sat straight up.  The first thought said, "It devours, it devours."  And the ribbon stopped.  Hot tears sprung to his eyes, his brain felt like lungs do after a cigarette: sore, quick pain that is expelled with an exhalation.  How does a brain exhale?  He was suffocating!4

They came in a swift rush as air does into a vacuum, and began to roar.  "The 7 devours the space, the time, even the darkness!" "You can't go t it because there's nothing to move through!  You're not seeing it because there's nothing to perceive!" "You can't know it because it has already consumed you."  A feeling then crawled through his fingertips, its icy and white hands bleeding into his heart's cavities where it seemed to take the place of his own hot blood and run like an apothecary's poison through his withered veins.5

There is no word in the English language to describe this immutable feeling, for it was relentless and would not ebb or reveal itself as anything Jade could analyze and, consequently, destroy.  He did, however, know how to silence the thoughts.  And he knew that if the thoughts stopped, the hand and its frigid blood would evaporate and leave him feeling exhilarated, like after a bout of the flu.  Answers, understanding, a silhouette of logic; these things were his antibiotic.6

He would be walking down a sidewalk amidst a throng of people, none of whom would excite any sentiments from him.  And then a child would catch his eye and the thoughts would come clamoring from his subconscious, each with a face that would jeer and snarl unmercifully at him.  He never understood in the beginning, so that feeling would creep upon him, a familiar hand grasping at his throat, clawing at his eyes.  It was a sensation so horrible and perverse that there was no ignoring it.  So he would follow the child, absorb her like a pill.  He was the somnambulist, she the dream.  And for days, sometimes even weeks, Jade would shadow her with a zeal that would keep him from eating or sleeping.  There was only her, the thoughts, and the icy feeling that chewed on his numbed veins like and eager rat.7

And then the understanding would descend upon Jade's wan face and the ponderous white hand would retract itself from him, and at long last his mind would still with the epiphany.  There would be that sore, slow pain that suffocated him, yes, but pain was a n emotion that could be fathomed.8

Now that very feeling, that long dormant hand, came over him as an imperious dose of morphine does, bringing his mind above all else and causing the yellow 7 to burn his wide eyes.  So Jade moved them about the entire room, but succeeded only in ushering up more thoughts that made the ice race to his tongue and eyes so that they again were fixated on that 7.9

All night he lay, paralyzed, as the capricious thoughts changed their directions and implications with every passing minute.  Each thought flourished and expanded to an impossible size within the confines of Jade's head and he sensed rather than felt himself hyperventilate.  His lungs heaved, but no oxygen could permeate the veil of cold that had settled like dust over his interior.  The faint came slowly, a throbbing in his brain for want of air, and then nothing.10

Morning came, and perforce, the sun.  Jade regained consciousness, but was aware of nothing but the macabre hand.  Instinctively he raised his eyes to the 7 to begin, again, the quest for enlightenment.  But to his horror, it was gone.  There was nothing there, nothing, but the door.  "The door, the door," whispered the thoughts. Panic.  "Darkness.  Absense of light."  "Feed it, it will consume."  Jade complied at once, leaping from the tangled sheets like a wildcat, panic making his brown eyes glint dangerously.  His face was wrenched into a grimace of determination as he pulled the duct tape from a shelf.11

The were but two small windows in his room in the old warehouse, and as he scrambled to cover them with the tape he began to sob.  The questions were teeming in his brain, howling like banshees, and the hand was cleaving ragged holes in his shell.  Over and over and over again he plastered the window with tape, not caring that his fingers bled from tearing at the edges.  Upon finishing he turned, intending to do the same to the door, but instead beheld the 7.  Whimpering, he crawled again onto his bed.12

He sat, rocking back and forth, allowing the myriad of thoughts to find a rhythm.  There was no sense of time, the 7 had long usurped that somber human device, and still Jade sat.  The thoughts had calmed and begun to take on a pattern.13

But that 7 it was not like the girl on the street.  It was not like anything he had ever obsessed over, because all other things had an end that was a beginning.  All of his thoughts were like the snake that consumed itself, the Ouroboros.  There was life, death, and resurrection.  But not this.  "Not this!" taunted the thoughts.  So he sat; staring at the seven, but staring at nothing, because all his thoughts began and ended with the simple fact that it didn't exist.  And how can one comprehend something that isn't?14

*****15

What marks the onset of insanity; is it a faulty neuron synapse that consequently relays distorted information to the brain and body?  Or is it an effervescence of the mind where, if dwelt upon, thoughts begin to bubble up and explode like a shaken can of soda?  Jade would never know.  Were they really his thoughts, his inventions - or just products of a chemical imbalance?  And maybe that's what really destroyed him . . . the possibility that he didn't own the thoughts, the 7, because they never were.16