Rendezvous with Dr. Spirit

by on October 25, 2013 :: 0 comments

“Medicine Man II” © Daniel Joshua Goldstein

I’m dying. I need emergency surgery. But I can’t leave my blood-red studio apartment, an antediluvian basement in a 2-family house on Thanatos Street, Brooklyn, New York. I’m too ill. In the past few weeks, I’ve called 911 a couple times, and when EMS arrived, they took me to the ER. On these occasions, the doctors admitted me for a few days. But always, they sent me home to die. My illness is incurable.

Only one man can help me. His name is Dr. Spirit. He lives in some esoteric and unknowable place in South America. I can’t get there, wherever it is.

He heals the sick via psychosurgery. While in a deep trance, Dr. Spirit performs a mental surgery without physically touching the patient’s body. Yet although he has allegedly cured thousands of people, he denies healing anyone. He confesses, “The angels enter my mind and body and perform these miracles. I am merely their instrument.”

I’ve heard that patients travel from all parts of the world to meet Dr. Spirit and undergo psychosurgery. But he will operate on anyone, even strangers like me thousands of miles away whom he has never met.

I can reach him via the internet. In exactly 5 minutes and 55 seconds, I will let go of my fears and send him an email describing my life-threatening illness. Right now, I meditate on my moribund breaths and prepare myself for a giant leap into the unknown.

I sit up, lift my legs over the side of the bed, catch my breath, and stagger toward my broken down mahogany desk and Dell computer. I plummet to the floor and black out.

I open my 3rd eye and watch myself crawl toward the computer. I’m flummoxed, for I exist inside a jabberwocky universe.

I clamber to my feet, but I fall again. Yet suddenly, an invisible force lifts me up and shoots me, like a cannonball, into the computer chair.

I type my desperate email and press enter.

Kaboom! It travels across the World Wide Web. Wow!

A supernatural phenomenon occurs. And I find myself inside my email, soaring through the internet, a nanosecond away from Dr. Spirit’s email address. Then something weirder happens.

I ride my email as if it was a mustang and suddenly, the unbridled horse tosses me into the wasteland of the Void beyond.

I’m lost, sailing through an alien universe no human was meant to inhabit.

I’ve got a rendezvous with Dr. Spirit. But I can’t find him or my way home. And so I fly across this barren world searching for a haven, wandering forever, it seems, never knowing if Dr. Spirit healed the body I left behind in that other world, the universe that gave birth to me, so far away and untouchable.

Now, I don’t feel any physical pain, only anguish and a suffocative sensation of being buried alive. It’s quite odd since I have no body now, no lungs with which to breathe, no throat to strangle. I’m but a ghost of a ghost, desperately alone and lonely, condemned to solitary confinement in nowhere.

You out there, HELP ME! Can you hear my silent shrieks? Press Enter and release me from this abominable prison.

Of course, this is the monologue of a nonbeing. I do not exist.

Trapped inside this obscene eternity, I wander.

editors note:

We all want to get better, be better, and be beautiful. But maybe what more of us need it to let go, because maybe for the first time what’s inside of us will be able to speak for us. – Tyler Malone

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