There’s a Man In My Mind. That’s what I’ve been telling them for the longest time. My first word, according to my mother, was “man” followed by “want”, which eventually evolved into: “want man out.” I said it often, standing in open doorways and looking in the mirror.
I drew pictures. Big circles with stick figures inside. Houses with men. Eyes filled with men. Treasure chests with little hands and feet poking out. I’d show them to my father, who worked in the garage with his hammer and saw. I asked him to help me take the man out. He’d laugh. He’d say we all had voices in our heads. But this was different.
I could hear him rattling around in there during recess, I’d sit on the edge of the playground- with my hands on my head- listening to him looking for things, making his space tidy, scraping chairs along the ground and pushing trunks up against the walls. I could feel him pushing pins into corkboards and draining spaghetti from boiling water.
Sometimes teachers would approach and ask if I was alright. I looked back at them with an expression that I never saw, but witnessed a reaction to multiple times; often enough that I gave it a name “The Open Face”: Wide eyes, mouth agape.
At night, when both my parents were asleep he would speak to me. I didn’t understand him at first, because he spoke in a language that was different from my family. Later on, I discovered the Man In My Mind spoke only German. Children have a propensity for soaking up language- by the time I was six years old I fluently understood German, and could hold a conversation.
The Little Man In My Mind told me stories, old stories from Germany like Brother Lustig: a man who uses his cleverness to outwit the devil. Or the Black Bride and the White Bride, which is about two sisters; one of whom is evil and seduces a prince, and a good sister who ultimately marries him. At then end of the story, the evil sister is dragged by a horse in a barrel of nails.
As I got a bit older, The Little Man would wake me up around just before dawn with his anguished sobbing and I’d know he’d been digging deep in my mind again. I could feel where he excavated, a raw, empty duct that fresh water could flow into.
As I entered adolescence, I stopped speaking to the man- willing him to go away. I was growing up and wanted independence. My first date was with a girl named Jamie. We went to the movies. The man in my mind was silent. He was holding his breath.
After the show, we walked back into the parking lot, waiting for our parents to pick us up. But I didn’t want the date to be over. I told Jamie that I knew about a secret treehouse in the woods. Jamie decided to come with me.
Soon, It became clear that I didn’t know where I was going. Jamie wanted to go back to the parking lot. I took hold of her hand, trying to keep her with me. She pulled and pulled and I told her to calm down. I didn’t want her to go. I told her to please calm down and come with me but she pulled and kept pulling. The man in my mind started screaming. I started screaming.
When I was in tenth grade, I started fighting with my parents a lot. I blamed it on the Man In My Mind He’d play music at deafening levels whenever we argued, and if my father said something hurtful his record player would scratch, skip, skip, skip skip, skip until I shot something equally brutal back- at which point the music would blare even louder than before. Tears would roll down my cheeks. I couldn’t think straight.
My saving grace was my first job. The commute to work was a two-hour bus ride but I needed the time to think. I kept my eyes glued to the strip malls and saplings passing by. Whenever I turned to look at my fellow passengers, the Man In My Mind would start whispering, in a low dangerous tone. Old german. Long, strings of sentences I couldn’t understand.
But soon, work became another scene in my neverending nightmare. I worked as a fry cook and the meat made me nauseous. At first, I thought I was just getting sick of free burgers, but it was more than that. Hearing raw patties, sizzling on the grill caused me to gag. Watching red juices collect and drain made me dizzy. I’d never experienced anything like this before, and I knew it was him. The Man In My Mind had been digging deeply now and he was sabotaging my work, for reasons I couldn’t yet comprehend. At the end of an eight-hour shift, I felt a pang in my gut and keeled over. I barely made it to the bathroom in time to empty my stomach. I prayed that the little man in my mind would fall out of my mouth and drown in the water. I swear I could hear him laughing.
I wanted him out. The stories he told me at night were different now. Violent. Dreadful. But they weren’t in German like I was used to, instead, he showed me pictures in my mind: Peeling the skin off my classmates, smashing my father’s head into our glass table, Me, dragging Jamie deeper and deeper into the woods.
At night I could see the residue of his imaginings dripping from the popcorn ceiling.
“Lauter Sprechen,” I told him, “Speak up!”Why are you showing me this? What are you telling me?
All I could hear was a hollow ringing in my ear and his deep guttural sobs
.One day I woke up, and couldn’t see out of my left eye. I rose from my bed and found my mum and dad holding each other on the couch. They’d fallen in front of the TV. I shook them awake, and for a moment they looked at me with the “open face” I recognized from when I was a child. Their expressions quickly softened and I told them I couldn’t see out of my left eye. My mother drove me to the emergency room, where after waiting for fifteen minutes I had a seizure.
I woke up in a hospital bed, with my mother at my side. A doctor told us I had a brain tumour and was scheduled for emergency surgery later that afternoon. I was the only one who wasn’t surprised.
After my surgery, I woke up surrounded by a dozen people in white coats. They’d found the man in my mind. In a small jar, covered in blood, was a tiny gentleman. His face was crushed against the glass, his skinny knees were bony and covered in body fluid. He was dead.
The doctors had a couple of hypotheses. Maybe he was a tumour, shaped like a man- a one-in-a-million oddity. Like finding Jesus in burnt toast. Maybe he was a twin my body had consumed at birth.
They’re good theories, but I know the truth.
Since the Man In My Mind is gone, the stories he told me, the whispers, the laughter, all of the voices have vanished. They were never mine. But the pictures, the images. They’ve always belonged to me.
He tried, he really did. It was noble what he did at the end. But I’m nothing, if not a survivor. I’m free now, and the future is so full I could take a bite out of it and let the juices roll down my chin and neck, and bleed into my chest.
Who knows? Maybe I’ll get a job again, the meat doesn’t nauseate me anymore. Maybe I’ll teach my father a lesson he’ll never forget. Maybe I’ll put his hammer and saw to good use. Maybe I will build a treehouse in the woods- somewhere where no one will find us- a safe place- with nails sticking out of the wood. A good place to fall asleep. I’ll bring a girl out there, and hold her so tight- she’ll forget how to breathe.