My groundskeeper and many concerned neighbors brought me here six weeks ago. Apparently, I was wandering the South access road in a semi-catatonic state. I was wearing a suit utterly in taters and my hands were cut to ribbons. I was dragging a briefcase filled with raw antimony and salt. I cannot wait to leave this place and get back to the house.
I am a bit weak, but that is to be expected. When I was entered as a patient, my blood pressure was dangerously fluctuating and the palms of my hands had been severely lacerated. Until last week, bandages have bound both hands, and now I can see the multitude of stitches that have held my flesh together. They glisten with antibiotic suave, smell of iodine and are somewhat numb. My stitches will come out in another week and I will probably need many weeks of physical therapy, if my healing is on track, and if I am to regain full use of my hands.
I was unable to write until now. As I sit here for the first time in over a month, a reunited slave to my obsessive notations and diagrams, like a junkie riding the dragon after a long hiatus of false, self reform, the remains of my belongings are being brought to my room and laid a top the hospital dresser. I was just told that the suit I was found in was unsalvageable and was discarded. My shoes and pocket watch suffered the same fate. They have allowed me to keep my patient’s wardrobe for my trip back to the house. My only memento from my almost suicidal, amnesiac trek is a briefcase. Earlier this morning, one of the physicians on staff came in to talk to me about the large amount of unrefined antimony I had had in the briefcase. He avoided asking me why and how, since he knew I would be unable to provide him a suitable, non-fabricated answer, but I could tell he was holding many questions back and also seemed to be reluctant to sign the release form for me today. He also stated that he is recommending blood work over the course of the year, to make sure that no abnormalities appear from my exposure to the large amount of raw antimony that I was carrying in the briefcase.
I immediately recognized that this was my father’s briefcase (and it was very refreshing to have a strong, solid memory after so long) and sat there for almost thirty minutes, engaging in an exhausting struggle to remember something more significant about this keepsake that was evading the searchlight of my mind’s eye. Invisible, but still present, I could feel it. I opened the case, and began running my hands across the surface of the interior. It was like a successful, witching-hour scry, something just “clicked.” Maybe it was the smell of the leather fused with the scent of my father from over the decades he carried the case. Maybe it was the texture of the lining or maybe the visage of my father’s family crest insigned on the whale bone handle. All I know is that a deep and old memory was triggered. A memory from my childhood, when I was about twelve, and I was, what seemed to be, physically transported to my father’s study some twenty seven years ago. He was showing me the new case he had had hand constructed in a ritual-city in the jungles of Southeast Asia. He opened the case and then closed it. He told me there was more than one way to open this case and more than one way to access its contents. He showed me many special ways to activate the hidden mechanisms present in the case, many secret ways. The only one that I could pull from this recall exposed a compartment located inside at its base.
I sat in my room for another fifteen minute before I was able to regain control of my motor functions from this intensely, lucid flashback and shake off this incapacitating drug-like huz. Instead of a syringe of synthesized opiates, it was the purity of a simple recollection that held me in a state of paralysis. Maybe the doctor was too generous with his signature of approval earlier today. As the scene of my father’s study faded away and was replaced by my actual surroundings, I realized that the base compartment of the case was open and three pieces of 81/2 by 11 parchment covered with inked notations were being held by my ragged hands of surgical thread and scab. Just as my cat-killing curiosity was about to take over, the nurse came in to inform me that the taxi to take me back to the house had just pulled up. I quickly placed the triad of papers back in their secret compartment and closed the case. I will savior the mystery of theses documents when I am far away from this place. Time to go to the house. Time to go home.
