discursive esoterica

It arrived with a delicate speaking voice that sounded south of New York, this person dressed to the nines and even the tens in blue suede coat and tan trousers, splattering words at a meter a second though the group sat in doldrums, leaning heads on palms and sighing wistfully. “All you have to do to avoid mind readers is think of a single word and you throw them off track, it is like me, I am only Korean Su and there are only two others of my race, so I don’t get caught up in the doomsday forecasts and the dark desires of my fellow man. I am a Christian, I believe that Jesus saves and God forgives.”

The moderator felt adulterated by all the religious talk and motioned to the door for Mr. Korean Su, while the others picked up on his train of thought as if they had been riding in the passenger car their whole lives as observers to the mystical esoterica of the subjective blue coated figure. “I read letters from the clouds, great big ones.” “My sister had a seal put on her so her gifts couldn’t be used against her.” “I am not spiritual, but rather spirited.” The moderator twirled the curliques of her hair into tighter ringlets, chewing on a pen. “Ok,” she began only to falter in the storm of private confessions.

“Listen, I’m angry,” a Pacific Islander began, “I’m not angry, I’m angry,”

“Sometimes I imagine a rainbow protecting me from the broken glass of other people when I’m at the supermarket, and it is healing to both me and them.”

“Vines flood my apartment when I go to sleep. They confuse the dream-tigers.”

Soon the doctor himself was in the room, interrupting the free form jazz speech singing like a flat piano note in an otherwise brilliant orchaestra. “You have to realize that the fundamental cause of mental illness is a belief in magical or delusional thinking, you all must obtain some kind of control over your individual realities to the extent that you can go shopping for milk at the gas station without digressing into rainbows and dolphins.”

“Hey, what are your beliefs, doc?”

“They are private matters that I keep to myself.”

“So you believe that you’re better than everyone here, is that it?”

“Well, I went to school for eight years to train in pharmapsychiatry.”

“That don’t make you an inch better than anyone!”

The doctor left, beet-faced and opening his hands in a gesture of relinquishment, considerably consternating the young moderator, who had an even more rambunctious set of patients on her hands than before.

“He’s like cancer, when you get it they open you up and once the air hits it it dies.”

Korean Su mumbled some casual comments touching upon the legality of cigarette smoking, how good it feels to suck brown smoke through a fiberglass filter into the delicate pulpa of the pinkened lungs, and how glorious the sound of an opening cigarette pack sounds. The others in the group agreed with knowing nods that seemed to know about nodding beyond the simple act of an affirmation particular to a single thread of conversation; their affirmation included all that transpired; the doctor’s immolation, the humble embarrassment of the moderator, the magical techniques of other patients, life-status, the vans moaning on the street outside the facility with cylinder chortles, the trees shushing over the manicured grass like the ghosts of old lovers, and the idle banter echoing from the hallway between receptionist and customer. They even affirmed the inaudible sea, rising now within their breasts, drowning out matters of unimportance and filling their swimming heads with the delicate watercolors of dreams.