Chapter 2: Arrival

Wednesday, November 19, 2003 (Continued)

Everyone talks to themselves occasionally, but this didn't feel like that. Getting the response had been UNEXPECTED! Not to mention weird and very attention grabbing. So I asked, "Who said that?"

"Me. Who are you?"

"Me. Who're you?"

"How did you move my mouth?"

"It's my mouth. How did you move it? And how come I heard you say 'What?' without my mouth moving?"

"It's my mouth. I've had it all my life."

"So have I."

"Maybe losing blood makes people schizo."

"Then how do you explain the faucets and T-shirt?"

"If you're going to use my mouth, then the least you can do is make sense."

"Didn't you notice the faucets and shirt?"

"What's to notice?"

"They're different."

"Sure. One pours water and the other is an article of clothing. I hope I'm not schizo because I'd hate to imagine any of my personalities could be as stupid as you."

"I mean different from what they used to be. The faucets used to be at the foot of the tub and the shirt's got the wrong picture on it."

"Trust my luck to get schizo with a nutcase. Please tell me your name isn't Mark Anderson?"

"Yeah, it came with the mouth. You really didn't notice the faucet and shirt changing?"

"They haven't. The faucets have always been were they are, and that shirt's definitely unchanged because I bought it specially."

"Me too. I can see it's a Lord of the Rings souvenir, but I bought the one I did because it had Liz Jagger on it, not whoever that girl is. I don't even recognize her. What part did she play?"

"Arwen. Don't you even..."

"THAT'S who Liz Jagger played! That's why I bought it, because she's hot."

"Never heard of her, and she certainly didn't play Arwen. Everyone knows Liv Tyler did that. And you shouldn't interrupt my mouth when I'm using it. That's just rude!"

Okay, I'll admit it's not exactly a stunningly intelligent conversation, but I'd lost a lot of blood. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it, even though it was actually him that'd lost the blood.

You might have noticed that we weren't nearly as freaked out as I imagine most people would be if someone else took over their mouth. We were a long way toward death so didn't have the motivation to care much about anything so were talking mostly out of idle, amused curiosity; and we were both feeling a strong, unthreatening sense of familiarity. Part of that came from our speaking the same way (grammar, humor, etc.), but there was a greater sense of familiarity than those commonalities could explain.

The conversation didn't get any smarter, and often wandered off in particularly silly directions, so I'll stop quoting from it and just describe it more generally.

We carried on discussing the shirt. The detrimentally changed shirt was one of my favorites. It was a somewhat dated, but much-liked souvenir of the Lord of the Rings III movie that pictured the Elven princess, Arwen, played by Liz Jagger; the very sexy daughter of Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall. I admit it's hard to imagine Mick Jagger having a gorgeous daughter, but something about her lips really appealed to me. The rest of her isn't bad either.

My conversation partner had never heard of Liz Jagger (horror!). Apparently his version of the LOTR movies used some brunette who wasn't even Jagger's daughter. Some other rock singer's daughter apparently. I wasn't impressed by his delusional(?) version of reality.

It seemed reasonable that misremembering the location of faucets could've been caused by blood loss causing some sort of brain damage, but the conversation we had about the T-shirt's provenance had too many self-consistent differences to be a simple glitch in a part of my memory. Not to mention that the conversation itself was becoming far too interesting to be something as simple as another brain disorder. We mentally sat up and started questioning our situation more thoughtfully.

I followed up on the mouthless that I'd 'heard' back at the beginning, and we quickly discovered that we could 'think' our conversation at each other. It required us to consciously think what we wanted to say, but to stop just short of actually saying it. The words mentally 'sounded' and felt like our own, adding to the already strong feeling of familiarity. We initially put quite a lot of effort into projecting the words, but we quickly found out that we could reduce our mental effort. It became much more like the normal conscious thoughts you have with yourself, but with the intention of sending it to the other personality, whoever or whatever he or it was.

We checked a few obvious things about our life: address and phone number, names of our family (Felicity, Steven, Carol and Donna), agreeing why we were committing suicide, and a few other pieces of biographic trivia. Everything was the same.

We were so spaced out and relaxed that we were on the edge of falling asleep, but the phenomenon was interesting. Having so many similarities made the differences very intriguing. Why on Earth would the faucets move? We thought that something significant was happening. We agreed - hardly surprising since we seemed to be the same person - that this was not some hallucination caused by blood loss; the differences were too silly and self-consistent. Another interesting aspect was that when we had a difference, it was always me that had memories that didn't agree with the current reality. We didn't know what my being the wrong one meant, but it seemed to contradict something caused by blood loss because that'd surely cause random mistakes.

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it woke us up and made us want to stop killing ourself. Curiosity and also enjoyment. This guy was fun to talk with and he had a good sense of humor. Not many people have the same sense of humor as me, but me did. We wanted to keep talking, so it seemed like a good idea to do something to stop ourselves from bleeding to death. We could always get back to that later if we wanted to, if this development turned out to be a fizzer in some way, or if it ended.

Stopping the blood flow was critical, but also easily done. The/my/his/our body was very weak (we weren't really debating ownership anymore, as my errors made it seem likely that I was the odd man out, somehow). His body was even weaker than we thought when he tried to get it to move and do things, but that made it even more important that he did something to stop his body from getting even weaker. It being a cold day, there were several pieces of clothing lying beside the bath. One piece wrapped very tightly around each forearm would do the job. I provided moral support plus the suggestion to use the T-shirt, as my protest over the loss of Liz Jagger.

Cleaning up was easy because we was in a bath.

^

[[I wrote "we" in the preceding paragraph because at the time we thought there were two of us. I didn't write "we were in a bath" because that creates the mental image of two bodies in the bath. I wrote "we was" in an attempt to capture the simultaneous dual and singular nature of our situation. My attempt is unsuccessful and annoying because English isn't designed to handle our situation. Reading strangely worded English would be too jarring for you so I'll not mix singular and plural wordings again. I'll write either "we were" or "he was". I could've done that without telling you, but I want you to appreciate the issue. In some respects it serves as an analogy for the issues that were facing us at the time.

Having decided to be consistent when using singular or plural phrases, there still exists a question of which form to use. The obvious answer is to write in the singular (e.g., "he", "his") about things his body did because there's only one body; and to write in the plural (e.g., "we", "our") when I'm writing about our mental conversations or thought processes.

That rule seems neat and tidy, but there was very little about our situation which could be called either neat or tidy. For example, soon he gets out of the bath, or do WE get out? He was operating the body as it seemed to be his and we thought that my trying to move any muscles might interfere rather than help. Interfering would've been bad since he was working on saving our life. Or "lives", that being another singular or plural problem.

Writing, "soon he gets out of the bath" would follow the previous paragraph's rule because it was the body that got out, even though both of our minds were very eager to stop our dying. But what about doing an exam? Should I write "he did the exam" or "we did the exam"? Ignoring the problem of getting expelled for colluding on an exam, is that a body or a mind activity? The minds do the thinking but the hand does the writing. Some activities are both physical and mental so the rule can be difficult to apply. I'll do my best to write my autobiography - another word that has problems - carefully, but the only real solution to this problem is your understanding our situation, so you'll understand what is happening regardless of whether I write "he" or "we". Hopefully my explaining the rule I'm trying to follow will help you with that.]]

^

He pulled the plug and ran the misplaced faucets to wash the blood away.

He had planned his suicide with plenty of spare time to ensure it worked. Actually, we suspected the truth was probably that, "we had planned our suicides" - plural. I had a memory that my bath had been bloodier than his, and I had an even vaguer memory of my body's succumbing to death. In this case it's only his suicide attempt that matters, as it appears to be his situation that we're in now. Although for all we know, that could change at any moment.

Both of his parents work, and he'd biked to school with his sister Carol as normal, something his parents insisted they did together. His Corvallis is a bike-friendly town with many bike lanes, so kids biking to school is common practice. His Donna took a bus to her elementary school, but he and his Carol were in 8th and 7th grades respectively, so they biked to middle school together.

^

[[In the preceding paragraph, writing what "he" did, "his Corvallis", and all the other wordings necessary to treat us as two separate individuals, is annoyingly clumsy. He and I agreed about almost everything, for the obvious reason. So when we did something, we nearly always both wanted to do it. Plus there's the issue that every single thing I wrote about his doing in the above paragraph, I'd also done in my dimension.

The exampled paragraph is how I thought of the situation at the time, as I believed we were different people in the same body, and for all I knew there might have been a large number of important differences between his life and mine. But at the time I'm writing this, I know that there were very few differences between our two dimensions, and what few there were didn't matter, not even the loss of the very hot Liz Jagger. So partly for logical reasons, including that this is MY autobiography, and mostly because it'll be much easier for you to read, when I'm talking in the singular, I will write "I", "me", "my", etc., rather than "he", "him", "his". I'll repeat the exampled paragraph in a moment, so you can see the improvement.

The situation is confused, and while there are some languages which would have none of these difficulties, English certainly isn't one of them. To the extent that you get confused, welcome to my world! I was being confused by and stumbling over these and other issues much worse than you are.]]

^

Both of my parents work, and I'd biked to school with my sister Carol as normal, something Mom and Dad insist we do together. Corvallis is a bike-friendly town with many bike lanes, so kids biking to school is common practice. Donna takes a bus to her elementary school, but Carol and I are in 7th and 8th grades, so I bike with her.

After Carol and I had arrived at school and locked up our bikes, I'd let Carol wander off to class, then had returned to my bike, unlocked it and returned home. I'd deliberately left an assignment at home to use as an excuse if questioned, but no one asked me why I was riding in the wrong direction. As soon as I'd gotten home, I'd carried out my plan: filling the bath, undressing, etc. I'd hated the idea of being found before I was dead and being made to live through the shame of the failure, so I hadn't delayed. I'd not had anything to delay for, and I'd been pleased my heart was beating with excitement (or tension, or whatever its reason was) because that would make my attempt succeed quicker. Because I'd been prompt, I now had plenty of time before anyone would be home. I was going to resume my life, at least long enough to explore how "my life" seems to have become "our lives".

We had three things to think about: my injuries, how to explain skipping school, and how the population of my/our/his head seems to have increased.

Obviously the most profound and interesting subject was this apparently second, but slightly different, me. But neither of us felt any sense of urgency about that. Whatever it was that was happening, it felt comfortable, non-threatening, fun and solid. When you have conscious thoughts you don't worry about them cutting off in mid-thought, and we felt almost that confident about each other's thoughts. Looking at it intellectually, we had no solid evidence to go on, but this felt reliable and permanent. So we saved the best topic to last, concentrating on the other issues first.

Skipping school was a minor issue. My grades were reasonable, I didn't have a bad rep' with the school's authorities (with the school's girls yes, but with the school itself, no). There was no reason for anyone come down hard on me for missing a day. Worst case scenario, I'd tell them I felt like taking a day off and I'd take my lumps. It wouldn't kill me.

My injuries were the most pressing issue, both because I had two bloody razor slices up my forearms (I'd heard that suicide cuts shouldn't be across the wrist, apparently up the forearms is the best way to go). I was also greatly weakened from the blood loss and wanted to recover from that as fast as possible. The family medicine cupboard was under the basin beside the bath, so I roughly finished washing the blood off my body and the sides of the bath, crawled out of it, and sat on the floor next to the cupboard.