Healing Brian Esseintes - Brian Prousky

Healing Brian Esseintes by Brian Prousky

Book excerpt

Brian Prousky rose from bed and a deft left hand snatched an empty glass from the night-table and two feet entered two slippers in stride and he walked to the kitchen and then the sink and with two different detergents washed the glass and for six minutes touched-up his work and when he was done the glass was dazzling and he returned to the bedroom and remade the bed and the sheets and blanket were as tight as a drum and the pillow was smooth without a single crease in it like rolled dough and after that it was time for exercise and he clasped his hands together behind his back and they rose unusually high until his backbones popped out like two white sails and the skin between the sails rippled like waves and that was the start of his day and the remainder was also filled with rigorous routine and almost certainly it was because of what happened to him when he was eighteen years old and fell from a second story balcony and his body landed on a row of evergreens, which saved his life, but the back of his head was still travelling at high speed when it hit an air-conditioning unit and there was blood and swelling in his brain and he was a hospital patient for a year and when he was released it was into his mother’s care and the doctors who treated him were pleased with his recovery and the doctor who spent the most time with him believed the damaged part of his personality – the part that told him to endure, rather than enjoy, life – would gradually repair itself and then another year went by and his mother, who was a widow, married a widower and moved to Scotland and left him, her only child, with a replenishing bank account and a furnished apartment and the first thing he did was paint every wall and he chose a colour that was a shade of grey resembling his skin and most of his clothes, and the painting itself was an exercise in balance, like the rest of his life, one vertical stripe of paint on one wall, one vertical stripe of paint on another wall, and all sixteen walls filled in slowly and simultaneously and after the final stripe was applied the apartment was a perfect hiding place and he could travel from one end to the other like a chameleon tiptoeing alongside a sleeping elephant and often did and now he was in his mid-twenties and nothing had changed and he understood his behaviour as something peculiar he would have to live with without really understanding why and on this particular day, like every day, he showered and dressed and returned to the kitchen and his stomach told him he was hungry and it sounded like a woman clearing her throat in preparation for a speech he didn’t want to hear and he opened the freezer and removed a slice of bread and it was wrapped in tinfoil and while he unwrapped it a memory entered his mind, unrelated to what he was doing and therefore more troubling, and though he evicted it in world-record speed, the ebb and flow of the morning was lost and so too was his appetite and it was the memory of the butterfly again, miserable uninvited guest that it was, and now a freeloader in a deep subconscious fortress – the guarded epicentre of past experience – inaccessible and impossible to destroy, and for years it continued to ambush him in unforeseen flashbacks that pierced his awareness and it was even worse when it visited him in a dream and he awoke with aching joints and an aching jaw and the day was ruined before it began and this is how it happened: the butterfly entered his apartment unnoticed, after he removed the first of four window screens, which he did every Sunday, to gain access to the windows and rub a carefully blended solution onto both sides of the glass and he did it for the same reason he did everything else, to use up time, and the first screen he plucked from the socket was in the living room and he placed it upright on a cloth on the floor and while absorbed in his work the butterfly flew above the back of his head and into the apartment and danced in crooked lines behind him and when he finished he closed the window and picked up the screen and re-inserted it in the frame and lowered the blind and before he turned around the butterfly had fastened itself to the ceiling like a small red rudder and he carried his supplies into the kitchen and removed the second screen and stood it on the counter next to the sink and used his left hand to do most of the window cleaning and it was a lamentable acknowledgment of its greater strength and coordination than his right hand, which didn’t begin, but worsened, in the hospital, where a concerted effort was made by every therapist to undo his symmetry, first by making him copy the letters of the alphabet with only his left hand and then, with the same hand, to throw and catch a large soft ball, leaving him with the residual unpleasantness of partiality in his decision-making, such as the present one, to utilize his left hand based on something other than equality or balance and he would have preferred to alternate between hands since not doing so had, over time, widened the disparity between the one that through additional work had increased in strength, confidence and dexterity and the one that through less work had become further uncoordinated and while he thought about it in a mostly helpless way a red streak screamed over his head like a match being struck against the ceiling and he was still oblivious to the butterfly’s presence as he popped the second screen back into place and lowered the blind and carried his cloth and solution into the bedroom and removed the third screen and cleaned the window and closed it and popped the screen back into place and lowered the blind and went into the washroom and did the same thing in there and when he was done the city was finally out of sight for the day and it was a relief and he washed and dried his hands and filled the sink with water and two ounces of ammonia and, using a stick, submerged the cloths he’d used and stirred them around and he was at it for sixteen minutes before draining the water and ammonia and before wringing out the cloths and hanging them to dry on his shower-rod and when he turned around after hanging the last cloth the butterfly flew into the washroom and landed directly on the bridge of his nose and a long stretch of time elapsed before he allowed himself to entertain the notion that it was even there and his first thought was to carry on as if nothing had happened and perhaps it was an apparition or hallucination and would vanish as quickly as it appeared and he could begin the work of expunging every element of the illusory visit from the computer-bank of his memory but it was proving difficult to consign the event to the make-believe because he could feel the butterfly’s spindly legs pinching his skin and there were two red sails aloft and fluttering between his eyes and he made a final gallant effort to remain true to the uneventful course of his day and fetched a glass of water and set it down on two coasters on the glass table beside his reading chair and he raised a book, titled Against Nature, to his face, a book that had no special meaning for him and that he had simply found in one of the drawers after his mother moved out and he had covered it with grey construction paper and had written his name in all eight corners in black ink and now he used it, like everything else, to fill up his days and he’d read Against Nature more than two thousand times and could recite each sentence from memory by reading the preceding sentence which meant he was required to read only the first sentence to initiate a chain reaction in his head of all the remaining sentences and while it occurred to him to also memorize the book’s first sentence he was dissuaded from doing so because it would rob him of the necessity of opening and holding the book and of the experience of reaching pages 84 and 85 when the number of pages on each side of the spine was equal and so he read the first sentence and closed his eyes and began quietly reciting the remaining sentences, turning over each page at more or less the appropriate time.