Revenant

Chapter 22

"Okay, so I think I'm starting to follow what you're talking about here," I said after a while. I looked at the old guy, then looked at the mostly-empty bottle of Wild Turkey that sat on the table between us. Given his relative size, I was honestly surprised the amount he'd consumed in the past fifteen minutes hadn't killed him, or at least knocked him into a coma. "And you are making much more sense than you were several minutes ago. I mean, I've heard of high-functioning alcoholics before, but-"

"Do you have any idea how frustrating it is to hear you say 'I think I understand', only to have you follow it up with a sentence suggesting you don't?" he asked, his words coming out articulate and precise, despite being half-slurred. "In those cases, behavior is perceived as normal despite the depressive effects of ethanol, which have a measurable impact on the imbiber but not enough to compromise or debilitate higher brain function. In my case, it's the exact opposite."

"So, in a way, you need alcohol to function properly?"

"I need gaba to function optimally!" he corrected angrily, shaking his head before pointing at the base of his skull with two fingers, like he was holding a gun at his brainstem. "Dysgenesis of the corpus collosum - the nerve bundle you've already correctly cited as the connective pathway between the two hemispheres of the brain. And to be more precise, I need allosteric modulators of gaba receptors, and- . . . never goddamn mind. The mechanisms behind it are too complex to get into, so for the sake of economy let's just say that my brain does far, far too much, and that drinking makes things so foggy and slow that I'm merely a genius."

With that, he took another swig of bourbon. Then, after setting the bottle gently aside, he glanced over at the tray containing his odd assortment of items and scowled. He picked up the tray, emptied the contents into a slightly palsied hand, then dropped them back onto the tray as though he were rolling dice. He inspected the results briefly before dropping the tray back onto the table in disgust.

"Fuck," he said, simply.

"So, is that Vodou, what you're doing with the bones and the whatnot? I mean, do you actually see stuff in that?"

"No, idiot, it's that I can't not see. There's a difference." He looked at the bones again, briefly. "I see everything in everything. That's the problem."

"Sounds like it'd be pretty handy, actually."

"Yeah?" he snarled. "You ever try to drink water from a fire hose?"

"A point, I suppose. Still, I don't really see what being all-seeing has to do with mysticism, or rolling a bunch of stuff into a tray."

"Excogitate this allegory, then," he said, leaning forward over the table in order to look me in the eyes. "Let's say that everyone in the world is myopic. Nearsighted. They can't see past what they can touch. You, on the other hand, have twenty-twenty vision. You can see a cloud - cumulo fracto nimbus - and you spy a flash of lightning in the distance. You know light travels faster than sound, so you say to people around you 'here comes a loud noise from the sky' right before the sonic shock wave, and when it does come suddenly everyone's amazed and asking how you knew what would happen. Now, consider all of the things you're presently aware of. This place, this table, me, all the things you've done today. Think about all the stuff you've noticed about my shop while in here . . . how much you've observed. Then, take a moment to realize that you're the blind man in this scenario." He sat back in his chair a ways and crossed his arms. "What I see is on a different level of magnitude altogether. I see seemingly unimportant things, and I make connections between them, because I can't help it. Sometimes I don't know why things are connected, but it doesn't make the connections any less true. When seemingly unrelated things are always occurring together, you start to catch on. Everything's connected to everything."