The Weird Insights of a Scobberlotcher

Nineteen Sounds Deep Purple

For awhile there I blamed her for everything. The pain. The weeks of recovery. The synaesthesia turning my life upside down and inside out. All pretty stupid, really. The last time I saw her was by my hospital bed. Then she disappeared in a puff of her own smoke. Now there was no evidence she'd ever even existed outside of my brain. Or what was left of it.

I started to get used to the voices after a few weeks in hospital. Actually turned out to be quite handy seeing the colour, texture, shapes of people's words. It was mostly nurses. They usually spoke in khaki shades and angular shapes. With occasional numbers mixed in. Mostly fives. A few sevens. They were more toward insipid green with shades of grey. Professionalism on a long distance call with courtesy. Any even numbered nurses tended more interestingly towards puffy salmon. Especially the eights. They were more lingeringly empathetic. But there was one who was painfully loud orange, jagged and harsh. And another I could barely make out through the lumps of coal in her voice. I tried to conduct business with those two as briskly as possible. And there were young girls, cute, probably teens. They came with offerings of tea and indigestible cookies, plumped up my pillows and spoke in high pitched candy stripes. Had to laugh at that. Then there were the doctors. Usually brusque and unpleasant. My SA brain manipulator rarely mellowed in colour or texture except when he brought this specialist along with him. A tall, severe looking guy. Obviously the alpha. He came all the way from downtown to stare at my bandages, look at my chart and ask brisk questions in cold sheets of glaring blue white. No trace there of my SA surgeons confident prognosis. And there were the visitors. Their words always started by dripping fatty, greasy brownish globs of sympathy before shifting abruptly to other completely unrelated shapes and colours. Only my wife remained steadfastly, softly mauve. She was beautiful. No trace in her voice yet of what was coming.

So I adjusted. Never told anyone about it. Not even Mary. Like that red flashing light except this time it wasn't a curse. No. More like a new power. I could tell who was shitting me and who wasn't. Who was happy and who wasn't. Who was secretly angry and who wasn't. Who was suppressing anxiety and who wasn't. I could pretty much see everything. So I thought I'd just keep it a secret, like Superman. Then they sent me home. What a shock! The hospital was a refuge by comparison. I was trapped by my ears while all the sounds of the active world came flooding in. Buzzing of doorbells. Ringing of telephones. Slamming of doors. Churning of washing machines. Wrestling of t.v. music with dialogue. A phantasmagoria. Took a while to get used to the sheer volume of aural epiphanies. I must have seemed odd in my confused reactions sometimes but what the hell. I just used my old hospital trick. Point to my head. Damaged brain, no?

I did learn to love classical composition. The prismatic geometry of a Mozart or a Beethoven, a Bartok or a Stravinsky was excruciatingly beautiful. Jazz was good too, smooth, sinuous, gold and blue. Especially the sax. I lost all taste for rock, though. It was just too painful to watch.

The trick to surviving it, mastering it, wasn't really a trick at all. Just had to re-learn what already came naturally before they threw my senses into a blender. Selective Perception. Ignoring all the extraneous crap. What most synaesthetes learn to do from birth. Started getting pretty good at it. Then some time after my first couple of weeks recuperating at home I finally felt well enough to step outside. My fragile new selectivity got swamped by novelty. An eighteen wheeler was storm clouds and thunder rolling by ten feet away. A jet descending low to the airport ripped open a reddish-orange fissure. Bicyclists yelling to each other as they rolled by turned into tin cans clattering against pavement in a high wind. I live very near a train track with an uncontrolled level crossing and when the first freight blew its horn it sent a huge, shiny mass of flashing metal screaming through me. I fell back on my ass right there in front of my house. Some guy passing by helped me to my feet. The colours of his concern were touchingly sincere.