Stimpson

The city's central district was replete with old abandoned factories. In the midst of this commercial sector, there were a few streets of brownstone tenements. In these tenements, plagued by cunning rats and prosperous roaches, lived a loosely bound group of tenants who were mostly reclusive in nature. Each living within himself. Each carrying his own hidden past. They were pariahs living on the edge of an oddly shared madness. One of these tenants lived on the third floor of the corner brownstone in apartment #17. His name was Stimpson.

Stimpson lived on scraps and will power. He was unemployed and paid for whatever few expenses he had from his savings. He was not, however, always in his present position. Stimpson was once a successful man. In fact, he had been an Ivy League professor well respected in his community. Stimpson had been a theoretical physicist of considerable stature.

Unfortunately, the nature of his work drove him farther and farther into his own mind, which for him was quite disastrous. He was nervous by temperament and often on the edge of panic. For a time he was quite comfortable nestled within himself like he was. Stimpson's psychic infrastructure began to crumble, however, when he first started to read Kurt Vonnegut. He admitted in an entry in his diary that, "Vonnegut's book Ice Nine is what finally did it." The author had unwittingly forced Stimpson to look at the absurdity of the world around him. He was unable to reconcile his own idea of himself with the nature of the world as he began to understand it. Ultimately, this contradiction cost him everything. First he became inexplicably belligerent to both loved ones and peers. Ultimately, he lost his family and his profession. His social demise was a result of his failure to successfully deal with his mind once it had escaped the tunnel he had so painstakingly created for it.

Stimpson was dying. He was succumbing to all the losses and traumas of his collapsing inner life. His dying first began to reside in his stomach and eventually spread to his gall bladder and kidneys. His dying was rather ridiculous, but no more ridiculous than the world he inherited.

He wrote obsessively late into the night. His diary grew and grew. Crouching over his book, he often felt a sharp pain coursing through his abdomen that he tried to ignore. Frequently, under such conditions, he entered a trance like state where his mind melted into its surroundings and the world became tolerable, even enjoyable. It was a kind of psychic epilepsy. It was at such times that he began talking aloud in a bellowing voice.

"The ancients foretold it on ebony scrolls,

it can neither be denied nor acquitted.

The soul of the shepherd resides in the bear.

Heaven itself broken into by vandals,

the sky weakened from the abuse of rockets

light no longer golden,

I am a warrior to my own words,

I am meat to my own apprehension."

At such times, his neighbors would bang on the walls and scoff him. Only Marjorie understood. She lived directly below Stimpson, and although she could hear him clearly through the papier-mâché walls of the apartment, her sleep was not seriously jeopardized. In fact, Marjorie rarely slept and when she did it was brief. Marjorie was an artist. Her paintings were done in brilliant pastels, and her works displayed a flaming opulence: an irresistible compulsion to live.