In the light of the shadow lamp, I saw a giant winged monster, curling in a circle, devouring its own tail. Encircled by the dragon’s body, recessed into the wall, I saw a cross-sectioned view of a factory filled with people the size of the man who spoke to me years ago in the nursery. They were building something with an elaborate system of pulleys and cranes. Their tiny eyes shone like stars through the murk as they worked feverishly. “Tell me what you see,” demanded Dr. Wood’s disembodied voice from the surrounding darkness. The dragon’s body rippled and unfurled itself, arching towards me through the thick shadows. I screamed. In an instant the light came back, and Dr. Wood looked at me with raised eyebrows.
“What did you see?,” he asked as I shook with fear and shame. I felt that I had already betrayed my one secret moment in life to this stranger and that a secret civilization was upset with me. Perhaps they were suffering because of me, because of my failure to be as special as they wanted.
“Can you draw me a picture?,” he asked pushing a pencil and paper towards me. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “What you saw projected was just a thin slide containing oil and water. The lamp’s heat makes the dark-colored oil move through the transparent water.” The lamp sat dormant on the desk, emitting a thin thread of smoke. I picked up the pencil and began to chew it like an ear of corn, making dents in its pristine surface.
I stayed at the hospital for three years. A gray fear marked the first few months. Then, I progressed to violent hallucination (“mania” they called it). Afterwards, I felt the calm of resignation. I began to have sympathy with my doctors – began to see them as helpless beings like me. Finally, I hardened into a muted disgust with myself and the institution. During the last year I made a concerted effort to do everything possible to convince the doctors of my rehabilitation. I wanted to get out of that place, so I hid my imagination. Relocated it. I decided to be a straight arrow. Did you know I liked to write poems? Did you know I liked to laze in the afternoon sun and dream epics in my head? Did you know I liked to dream symphonies? Instead, I bent my self to “real” tasks – to becoming a lawyer, to learning about business zoning codes and tax law. I grew old and mean. Somewhere in there I got married. Supposedly I fathered some children, a rumor that bred another rumor: that I had strangled the sextuplets on the first night of their lives. Well, if we look at that act as a metaphor, it happened but over the course of years, not a single night. The truth is that I am impotent, and my magical impotence has imposed itself upon the world in strange ways.
I can see the town coming back to life, regaining its senses. The nightmare, for which I am to blame, is ending. I can say that I am glad, but I worry about my fate. If I am caught and brought to bear, what excuse will I offer? I’m afraid I must flee. There are more things to say, and perhaps some day I will return to say them. Perhaps someday I will return and embrace the consequences of my guilt. But now, I see an opening in the labyrinth wall, a way to a bigger freedom than I have ever known. Already, I am running through the woods, breathing clean air.

Goodbye dear sad town,

Your alderman no longer.

Where was I? Yes, the institute. I remember.

(Can’t you feel it dear townspeople? The deep freeze is near over. We’re rounding the curve of our perpetual orbit, slanting ever-gracefully towards the sun.)

Yes, my parents brought me to that dreadful building. There were no iron gates, no stone battlements, no twisted trees. The building was quite drab – an office building masquerading as a hospital. No. It was a hive mixing the two things in equal parts. No, it was a prison. The people in the offices were inmates just as much as those in the rooms. It was a prison in the same way that a school is a prison by the very fact that it is an institution, and its institution-ness weighs on the minds of those dwelling within. Even those who work in an “institution” of whatever sort, can’t escape the institution when they go home at night, because they carry the institution within their brains, informing their perceptions in institutional ways, so that a person ceases to be a person, but an extension of the institution to which they are affiliated. An institution thrives on discomfort, on unnatural colors. Within their walls, institutions create an alternate reality that has nothing to do with the reality outside. When one looks out from an institution, one does not see the world, but the world as seen from an institution. Institutional windows distort. For example, I remember looking out the window of my cell at people on fire. On fire, they walked down the street. On fire, they read flaming newspapers and boarded inferno-busses to work in four-alarm high-rises.

My mother and father followed me through the hallways, up to a doorway. Past that doorway I had to go alone, stepping through the door and onto the carpet of the head therapist. The doctor sat at a long mahogany desk that was for too big for his diminutive frame. He looked at me, adjusted his glasses and smiled.
“Hello son, don’t be afraid. My name’s doctor Wood. Please, take a seat.” The doctor waved a small graceful hand towards a leather chair, the arms of which were flaked and raw. It seemed that I was seated there instantly, as if that were my natural place. As I told him about the little man in the wall and his promise, my ministrations to the rats, my growing sadness; Dr. Wood nodded and took notes on a yellow pad. When I finally fell silent, he cleared his throat, stuffed the yellow pad in his top drawer, opened another, and withdrew a kerosene lamp. He snapped his fingers and the room went dark. The darkness arrived so unexpectedly that I did not have a chance to be surprised by it. After what seemed like a minute, but was probably much shorter - a span of time in which I floated outside of myself, an intermission where I comforted in my invisibility, entertaining thoughts of non-existence - a puff marked the striking of a match. I watched the tiny flame find its home within the glass-box lantern, watched it cover the wick in a smooth arc. A soft light seeped back into the office, and I saw Dr. Wood’s face shining like the moon. On the wall behind him was projected one of the most marvelous images I have ever seen…

But more on that later. The town’s silence begs me to sit at my window and stare at the empty corner and its marvelous spot of streetlight. Electricity, that sustaining flow of civilization, is with us again.

The Alderman’s Story

I think it’s about time that I told my side of things. Let it be known: I do this not out of a need to justify myself. No one should ever have to explain his actions, or so I’ve been told. Yet, it has come to my attention, over the past few years, that there has been much aspersion cast toward me in this publication. Heretofore, I have had no impetus for rebuttal, as I considered it beneath my station to exchange barbs with parties of an uncouth nature. But now, feeling slightly lighter of head – and of soul, I will open a few doors to the gelid wind of this season. Let these breezes whistle through the fixtures of my residence. It is with generosity not vindictiveness, dear reader, that I invite you across the threshold.

My life has been a sort of circular maze, a structure mirrored by this town. Tell me, has anyone ever been able to leave? We amble, shuffle, or stride down the avenue, but never reach its terminus. There is always another block, heavy-lidded with amber beauty. How many secrets mumbled behind half-drawn shades dangle in the web of TV static, the low mum of wasted hours? For most of my life, I kept dragons inside me, repressing them with law, formality, and a secular meanness. In short, this town made me what I am. It brought me up on its shoulders so that I could spell its doom.

As a child, I am sitting in my nursery on the wooden floor staring at nothing, listening – waiting. alone. The smog-mellowed sunshine lolls through the leaded window like warm tongue. Presently, I hear a scratching sound and peer towards a crack in the wall. Out steps a tiny man dressed in an impeccable suit. On seeing me, this small man tips his hat. “Hi” he says. “You must be the special kid! I can tell by the way the sunlight loves you.” “Oh, the sunlight loves you!” he sang. “Let me climb up to your ear and tell you a secret” He scampered up my arm. Numb with surprise, I listened as he told me that I would one day be a very important person, that I was destined for great things. “We, the people in the wall, will look after you and take care of you, we will protect you with our special magic. You’re the sunshine kid we’ve been dreaming of.” With that, he scampered back down my arm and towards the crack in the wall. As a diaphanous cloud passed momentarily before the afternoon light, I saw his motion continued by a boneless pink tail disappearing into a wedge of shadow.

So from that moment on I knew that I was the chosen one of a secret civilization that teemed through the unreachable spaces in the house. Many a time I was chided by my parents for standing with my ear to the wall, waiting for another secret message from my exuberant friend. My folks were even less thrilled by my hobby of taking in sick or injured rats and nursing back to health in covert boxes. As the years passed, I despaired of hearing more from the little man in the impeccable suit. Had it all been a dream? I thought that my veterinarian efforts would surely be rewarded with another visit. The sun seemed to shine on me less and less and, somehow, I lost the happiness that is every child’s natural gift. I watched my mother and father look at each other darkly and heard them speak in low tones behind closed doors. It was not long after, in the week following my tenth birthday, that they sent me to the Institute.

And what happened there, dear reader, is the beginning of madness. But, the rest of my tail will have to wait. I grow weary as the dawn rises. Forgive an old man, for I shall continue to explicate in the next erratic publication of this broadsheet.

“...”

I scrawl this in haste across the back of a campaign poster I found under the bed. I can’t read the writing on the other side, and the candidate’s countenance lacks a single recognizable feature. It may be that along with words, I have lost the ability to read faces. If this is true, the entire town must have descended into communicative purgatory. Yet, I see my mother’s visage, and hear my mother’s words. She comes to my room and feeds me broth, lays a tender hand on my cheek. Before she even opens her narrow lips, I know what she is going to say:

“Why, dear? Why won’t you join the others?”

The wind outside is cold. It rattles the mottled glass, and seeps through the papery walls that tick and creak. The pipes inside them moan, threatening to burst. I have one blanket, that is soiled and worn nearly transparent, to wrap around my quivering body. I curl myself into a ball on the bed that is missing a leg and dream that I’m struggling up a snowy mountainside, cradling a small flame at my bosom. I must get to the top before angry gusts swallow its heat.

She says, “Come and be warm.” I squint at her, so as not to see the welts on her arms and neck. One day, after the spoon sat empty in the cooling bowl, she left, but I didn’t hear the key turn in the lock. Instead, I heard small scraping sound. I looked down and saw bronze teeth shining in the gap beneath the door. Now I am my own warden.

The mob caught up with me not long after my last missive – how many months ago? I pray that it found its path, by hook or by crook, through the few sane hands left, to the printing press and that someone with half a brain is still publishing the Lantern.

Meanwhile I found my way, through very unsane hands, to this house, which, in my blurred mind (I only saw the exterior once) appears as a neglected marionette, hanging limp in a mesh of telephone wires. Why did they imprison me? Because I refused to partake in their idiocy, their cruel and masochistic games – the memories of which still haunt me. I don’t want to write about them, but I will tell you this.

The night of my “liberation” I stared at that key for hours, not wanting to venture out of my room. No matter how miserable I was inside it, I was sure that to witness the world outside of it again would finally drive me mad. Nevertheless, my brain decided that action was better than inaction and that, maybe if I left the house I could find a way out of the town and escape this miasma once and for all. On feet numb with cold, I crept down the hallway and onto the creaking stairs. Painfully, slowly, over the course of hours, fearing at every tread, I made my way down that wooden hill. Then my thoughts of escape fell into paralysis. Sprawled about the bare parlor were my captors, each one wrapped in a roll of pink housing insulation. They wheezed and coughed in their sleep. My mother opened her eyes and began to unroll herself with little yelps of pain.
“Here,” she said “Come and be warm. Come and take mine.”

I am back in my room and determined to stay here. I realize now that I’m all she’s living for. If I leave, she’ll succumb to madness and destroy herself like the others. I drop this out the window in hopes that some interloper in the shadowy street below (I see movement down their – figures? Footsteps? Friends? )

Help! Send help – I’m stranded on this snowy mountainside and this flame is growing larger, too big for me to carry in my cupped palms.

Signed: Secretary of the City Council

!!!

Confusion! Mayhem! Disaster!

On the floor, I see a woman’s shoe missing a heel. Its nails protrude like fangs. Next to it, a paving stone lies in a galaxy of shards.

It began with the aforementioned street festival; how long ago does that last council meeting seem, with its atmosphere of placid redness! I should not have taken that proceeding for an omen of normalcy. A foretaste came that evening when the groundskeeper spotted the alderman with teeth sunk in the roots of a hoary bob tree, the tufts of hair behind his ears raised in warning. The groundskeeper lifted his flashlight beam and continued with the rounds, turning his eyes into caverns, as is customary of our citizens when confronted with the infernal rages of Our Shadow.

Preparation for the street festival consumed the town for weeks afterward. Citizens netted trees with white lights entangling themselves and their neighbors in the process. Docents prepared califacient drinks. Deep doughnuts with gooey centers baked in ovens while children collected explosives from trench coat dealers in side alleys. In other words, everything as normal…until the opening day.

The podium decked in bunting and bolstered with iron supported the weighty mayor and Our Shadow, the alderman. Both wore the ceremonial vermilion wizard hats and corsage of honeysuckle. Opening their mouths in turn, they conferred the expected blandishments, but the alderman’s eyes were, in fact, looking in opposite directions and therefore at nothing. With increasing frustration, the mayor elbowed the alderman when it was his turn for panegyric, but the cross-eyed trance fixing Our Shadow ceased to budge. Suddenly a Holy Silence descended upon the congregated celebrants like the vacuum before a typhoon.

In the middle of this void, the alderman unhinged his jaw and let loose a creature of delicate construction. This creature, only to be described as a batterfly, for it was half bat, half butterfly, rose like an autumn leaf in reverse, growing as it ascended. Its wingspan covered the entire square, filtering the golden light into orange. The dumbfounded crowd gazed upward, and the only sounds to be heard were the crisping of leaves against the pavement and the vibrations of a massive dust body.

We took this as what it was: a kind of soul confession, a confession that went beyond the mere limitations of words - the alderman’s attempt to birth some beauty from his wretchedness. For, in our eyes, he was guilty, even if the courts couldn’t prove, of walking into that night nursery and placing his hands around their tender necks and squeezing, squeezing, squeezing.

Anyway, some brazen pip, unfazed by the ghostly spectacle, launched his arrow-red firework straight into the moth’s thorax, disintegrating it in a papery poof. All present inhaled the mildewed precipitate. When we awoke from our numbness, we found that the social contract shredded. The lights were going out, and our real story, the one that had always back-grounded our days, loomed in all of our near-view mirrors.

But now, I must leave this building of unknown dimensions. I hear mad laughter and sentences strung backwards and the footfalls of a confused mob echoing in a nearby stairwell. Farewell dear townspeople, those what can still read in the right direction. I will write again from another temporary haven, should I pass one in this backwards borough.

Yours truly,

Secretary of The City Council

(. . .)

It began thusly: an elderly gentleman in the corner of the meetinghouse whispered into a paper cup, ruffling the edges of his coffee. “Do we have a dissenting opinion?” But the question laid like dust behind the portraits. Then, the groundhog’s teeth snapped into a root. All present heard the sound through the open window, from green and shady yard.

The alderman raised his hand and covered his eyes. “Those damn creatures are ruining our town,” he spat. “With their chewing and gnawing!” A butterfly floated in and rested on the edge of a gilt frame. Sunlight clipped a section of the insect’s wing and bathed the room in vermilion. “But for the grace of God, bring in the performers!” someone cried.

The performers arrived with a license, which was duly stamped and notarized, and then they proceeded to take off their hats. From underneath their hats exploded such torrents of hair, such wild knots and locks, writhing and grasping like tentacles! Laughter and applause from the gallery, a dim frown from the alderman. Never was their a man with a cooler nature to his blood, a man so un-impressible!

Loneliness fills the alderman. At times he believes he himself the only man in the world, or perhaps he believes himself the only ghost. He steps around dark corners, into the shadows. “No one understands the weight of my responsibility,” he tells himself. Were someone to startle him enough, he might disappear in a fury of bats.

Cry for the alderman, dear townspeople, for we know he has murdered his darlings!

In conclusion: the city council determined that the weather will be what it is, that the problem of crime “must be addressed,” and that the street festival will proceed as normal next month.

Until then, dear readers!

Signed: Secretary of the City Council