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April 28, 2008 02:29AM
“Honey, would you please come down here?”
“For the love of Christ, stop being such a fucking hassle all the time.”
A jab to the doctor’s ribs.
“Shht!”
“Fuck!”
Norton’s back was pressed flat against the wall behind his bed, the weight of his fey body pressing against it and pushing the bed forward, so that he had to shift his position to keep from falling. Nurse Gemma coaxed him with a gentle hand tugging at his shirt corner while the increasingly irritated doctor paced, gestured wildly and shouted at the flinching man on the bed. He wasn’t necessarily making words even, just frustrated and tired grunts.
“I don’t want to.” Norton said, the broken piece of wood turning slowly in his hand.
The doctor made a grab for his free hand, which had been pressed so hard against the wall that the tips were white. Norton jerked away, holding the broken chair leg up.
“Look, we do this every fucking week, just come down. You’re never going to do it.” The doctor made a second grab and the startled Norton nearly pissed himself with fear. The energy surging through his body, sexual and unbearable, buckled his legs.
Norton cried out hoarsely and jabbed the wooden stake into his pale thigh, but the object was nowhere near sharp enough to cause any real damage. Herein lays the catch, the fact that all three of the players knew that no real damage would ever be done. The orgasmic effort, however, was distracting enough to Norton that the doctor could snatch away the stake and the nurse could catch the stumbling patient.
Between teeth chipped from clenching, Norton cried pathetically, his crumpled body lay back in the same bed he had slept in for seven years. The nurse pressed his shoulders down, but knew he wouldn’t resist now. It was a ritual they had, those three. Norton would ring the buzzer, threaten self-injury, and nearly come on himself in the process. The nurse wiped off the two or three inch wound on Norton’s thigh as his shaking subsided. The doctor examined the chair and how Norton had wrecked it before setting both broken components out into the hallway.
Norton cooled down, taking deep breaths as his regular senses returned to him, his thigh brushing almost ashamedly against his erection. Despite the overwhelming sexuality, he never masturbated. The doctors and nurses had watched and recorded, and Norton had never once, in seven years.
The nurse wrapped the wound on his thigh then smiled comfortingly to him. She was the only female nurse that didn’t mind these bizarre outbursts. Something about Norton was reassuringly celibate.
“There, you feel better now don’t you?” She said.
Norton nodded wearily and took a deep belly breath. The nurse gathered up the bed sheets and brought them down to the laundry room, leaving Norton alone in a stripped bed. He stared at the ceiling; his hands clenched together tightly, the ache in his thigh and the ache in his cock pulsed together with every heartbeat.
Some time passed and Norton finally broke the trance enough to stumble to the window and lean against it. Since he no longer had a chair, he bent over and rested his arms on the sill and his head on his arms. The window sill was cold, frosted in the corners, and his eyes focused on that dirty glass first, then the scene outside it second.
Patients were led around the garden, some quite happily and others quite uselessly. The sun was bright, which belied the cold of the English autumn. Norton was suddenly chilled and reached back to his bed, only to realize it was bare. He turned back to the scene outside, hands on his arms. He wanted to go outside, to socialize, but there was a part of him that wouldn’t allow it.
He shifted uncomfortably, drinking in the scene. Sometimes, he supposed, he wished that he could be a part of that world, to walk around casually without looking over his shoulder. Norton turned back to him bed, shuffling underneath it for a notebook. He flipped through to an empty page and, resting the notebook on the windowsill, began to write.
"Tree drops, tree drops down into cement of the China underbelly, twisted up and blooms into the feet of the lovers-lovers greener greens with new multi-purpose cleanser for the fighter in you. Cold cold night shiver shiver day taken holly never new found, never old, never blue. Eyes never falls like the trees fall."
A pause, his gaze caught Oliver. Led by another nurse, not as nice as Nurse Gemma, but not unbearable either, Oliver was shown around the small garden. His attention never strayed from the few feet in front of his face and the nurse didn’t seem particularly interested in tempting to divert his gaze. She finally directed him to a swing and sat him down on it. His hands actually raised up and gripped onto the chain to steady himself, the first conscious and independent act Norton had ever seen him commit.
Capping the pen, Norton leaned into the window, his nose-tip pressed against the cold and his breath fogging the glass. The nurse stayed beside Oliver as he moved slowly back and forth, the force of the swing and the cool wind moving his body so easily, as if it were a trail of smoke.
Norton looked back down to this diary and continued.
"I bit and breathe and bite, clench harder. Eyes no."
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April 14, 2008 12:35PM
Name: Norton Malcolm Essex
Security ID: 9593056
Birth date: Unknown-- between 1965 and 1970.
Case history: Arrived at the Salford Mental Health Institution on 04-17-1990 after having been arrested for disrupting the peace. No ID was found on his person, but he was later identified as ‘Norton Malcolm Essex’ by a former employer, although we have had considerable trouble locating Mr. Essex’s birth certificate, and cannot confirm that Essex is his real name. He now goes by the name Steven Patrick Morrissey.
At this point, we assume you are all well-briefed on Norton Essex’s unusual affliction—that of grandiose delusions—and all of the implications thereafter. What are the prospects of reversing such elemental damage as who one is? With such a twisted ego, the product, as you have read, of a very specific time and place (and more importantly—mind-set) we might wonder how Norton might have functioned in ordinary society before his illness was diagnosed. He has been chosen as a particular case study firstly because of the sheer degree and depth of the delusion but more importantly because of Mr. Essex’s wiliness to document every one of his mental trappings. Indeed, his endless notes, diary entries and song lyrics should be analyzed and memorized by every psychiatrist studying grandiose delusions.
-Dr. Iane Gabar, Five Case Studies in Delusion, 1997, pg. 92
Norton scribbled furiously in his notebook every afternoon and night, ink bleeding through and making it difficult for subsequent pages to be read. If he knew how meticulously his writings were photocopied, documented and distributed, he would have been shattered. As it was, however, the endless notebooks (supplied readily by Salford) were his safe haven, his one naïve privacy. Seven years worth of glory and frustrations, seven years worth of poetic verse and confessions—notebooks stacked one on top of each other beneath his bed.
After many years of living unsuccessfully with many different roommates who were themselves delusional to varying degrees, Norton had finally been recommended for a private room. As time went on and it became more and more clear that he would be a permanent resident, the staff gave in to the idea that Norton was simply a fixture of Salford. His delusions were never violent and he acted in a perfectly logical way for an 80’s rock star, so he was given a fair amount of freedom. The Blue Wing was his territory as far as he was concerned and he had more friends than enemies there. Though none of Norton’s friends shared his delusion, they all enjoyed him for it and would readily give in to what he wanted to hear.
One afternoon while finishing a scathing poem (the message of which could be reduced to, “I hate you, go stand over there”), Norton was interrupted by an unusual knock at the door. Gripping his notebook to his chest to keep it absolutely private, he squinted to read the clock. Four thirty-seven-- one hour and twenty-three minutes until dinner time, one hour and forty-three minutes until pill time. The knock came again and Norton stashed the notebook under his bed, fixing the duvet, then lay back on the sheets as if he were asleep.
“Norton, I know you’re awake-- can we come in?” A nurse, one of the more polite nurses, asked.
Norton winced, he hated the intrusion and he hated when the new nurses got his name wrong. He turned his head towards the window.
“Mmmm . . . yes.”
The nurse opened the door and pushed the new patient into the room; her hand was the only thing motivating the man to move, it seemed.
“Sweetie this is Oliver Sutton, he’s new to the Blue Wing. We’re introducing him around so that everyone is familiar with him and doesn’t get confused.” She kept her hand on Oliver’s shoulder.
Norton looked up from underneath the blankets, scanning pale eyes along the new figure. He wore the standard-issue clothing that dripped off his gaunt figure. His eyes were hidden beneath sunglasses and his dark hair was matted with the streets of Manchester.
Norton sat up and pulled the sheet even closer to himself, unconsciously crossing his legs.
“Oliver doesn’t talk.” The nurse clarified after a moment. “He’s not said a word since he arrived. But he’s nice enough, don’t worry.”
She seemed to want to reassure Norton, whose face was frozen into an expression that she had never seen before.
Norton loosened his grip on the sheets, but kept them close to his jaw. Brushing a stray bit of hair from his face and cursing the hair gel he used, he looked up to his now-messy quiff and spoke softly, “Gemma, can you please get me some more hair gel? This kind that Jeanne buys is so cheap.”
The nurse nodded and patted Oliver’s arm, then tugged him back into the hall, having to direct his every move.
“I’ll get that for you as soon as the doctor approves it; you know they had trouble with the chemicals.”
Norton, now a bit more in his element, nodded briskly.
“Well, if he has a problem with it, tell him to talk to me. I’ll straighten it out.”
Smiling sadly, Nurse Gemma peeked again through the doors to be sure Norton was safe under the sheets before closing and locking his door.
Sliding back into the bed, Norton did not relax and could not bring himself to retrieve the notebook, for a trembling fear he could not identify.
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April 14, 2008 01:25AM
Norton on the Table
Norton Essex had a small chin. Not a non-existent slope, not a particularly ugly chin, but an ordinary one. This would make no difference if he didn’t believe he was Morrissey.
Norton sprung onto a chair, which was curved at the back, so he faltered and had to counterbalance his oddly proportioned body to remain standing. No matter, he had done it so many times that he thrust himself into the perfect patch of air.
The other patients paid him requisite attention, thanking their luck that his songs were short and to the point. The first four hundred or so times Norton had performed in the rec room, someone had persuaded him to stop by bribe or brute force, but now they wearily let him get on with it. Someone wet a rag to clean the shoe-prints he’d leave behind.
From the chair to the card table, hands almost touching the low ceiling, Norton belted his song out, arms flailing to keep the rickety card table standing. He had memorized the entirety of Morrissey’s somewhat dubious oeuvre late in life, in the years leading up to the Change, and could pull any song out at will. Still, he usually settled on a few greatest hits—he knew how picky fans could be.
How divine it is to be loved and hated, he reveled as he swayed his hips to the band behind him, the stage solid underfoot. His softly grey eyes rolled into his head as he somehow clumsily danced, one arm twirling emptiness in the air.
A new patient, who was being given the short tour, stopped to watch the performance with impossible eyes, hidden beneath dark sunglasses. The nurse escorting him around for his first day sighed with a heavy weight as she motioned to the dancing figure.
“This is . . .” She paused as if she may reveal a name. “A daily occurrence.”
She passed the card table by to tug the new patient along to the food line, not pausing another moment in her rehearsed speech. It looked so difficult to pretend to care. But the patient was transfixed by the dancer, cosmic in his daring. It was his first impression of the man; a swaying decadence, an arrogant knowing.
The nurses started cleaning up after Norton as soon as his performance was over and most attentions turned back to the television in the corner. Smug in light-footed step, Norton gathered his lunch from the line and took his usual spot in the center of the room. A few of his friends patted his shoulder as they walked by to praise him for another moving performance.
There wasn’t a moment of his new life, seven years now, that he had doubted. Anything. Lately however, a few fears had been creeping in.
As attentions shifted back to the television and Norton pushed the potatoes around his plastic plate, humming a tune by somebody else, an elbow to his shoulder blade roused him from dull drifting.
“Hey!” He startled and whipped around.
“Oh, I’m sorry.” A suppressed snicker tainted the phrase. “I forgot who you were.”
Norton narrowed his eyes, used to the jabs of the jealous, but could never seem to remain as calm as he felt he should be.
“Fuck off, Mark.” He spat, unable to think of anything wittier. A singular fear burned inside of him that told him he should have been able to.
The younger and more clearly inexperienced inmate (for the ones who had lived with Norton for several years now took no pleasure in disrupting him) took a seat opposite Norton and grabbed a salt shaker to sing into.
“Who could forget you’re the ‘last of the famous international playboys’?” Mark whined more than sang, sparking muffled laughter from his friends.
Norton grabbed the shaker from him and gripped it with anger that he didn’t betray on his face. The small, young crowd pressed in, wanting him to snap, to do anything out of character.
“If you don’t like my songs you can go to hell.” He mumbled.
The new patient was trying the first of many plates of turkey and gravy as the eyes beneath the sunglasses scanned the incredibly brief ensuing fight. Norton became more and more heated, shifting awkwardly in his chair with the grace of a lame animal. The small gaggle became more and more excited.
A nurse finally grew tired of the confrontation and took hold of Mark’s shoulder.
“For the last time, if you’re going to do this to poor . . .” She flicked her eyes to Norton, everyone was unsure what to call him. “To this poor man, then we’ll make sure you never leave your room. Social time is a privilege.”
Mark sneered like someone his age would, especially in front of peers, but restrained himself for the rest of the day. Only muttering the occasional, angry, “He’s not Morrissey” to his friends. Norton, for his part, quickly retreated to his room to write scathing poems. These attacks were common, expected, and easily brushed aside. It was only the young men anyway-- patients quickly learned. The jealous, that is, those that simply hated him for his talent, fame and beauty, were a requisite part of life. Once he calmed himself and realized that they were necessary in order to write his brilliant songs, he felt better.
The image of Norton on the Table-- a burned retinal flash of an essential human spirit—was somehow lost among scuff marks and crumbs. What knowing he possessed then, what a power; channeling some divinity as he sang, in a quite unconcerned tone, “Armageddon, come Armageddon, come.”
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