Text Box: BEFORE YOUR EYES click here to return to website index             If you want to relax and have a think about life, there's nothing better than stretching out in a bathtub full of good hot water.  Showerstalls may bring you closer to godliness, but for reflection and rumination on the joys and pains of life, it's the tub for you.  Particularly when you want to mull over the pains.  They're there, of course, practically at your fingertips, and you can't just ignore them or pretend you don't feel them; but they're not so bad that you can't let your mind wander.  Let yourself go.  Stretch out and relax.  Be lulled by the water, by the warmth.  Just lie back and dream. But drip ...  drip intrudes from a leaky faucet.  Reproachful sound.  Have to tighten the handle with your toes.  Yes, always could do wonders with your toes: turn doorknobs, pick up coins from the floor, even toss a whole deck of playing cards—one by one—into a hat.  But you can't keep this lousy faucet from leaking.  No sir, not this cheap rundown faucet in this none too clean bathtub in this all-around lousy little out-of-the-way edge-of-town Psycho-type motel.  That dribbling faucet could drive a person psycho.  Drip drip dribble it goes: the sound of the third degree.  Dribbety drip drip drip: a truly censorious noise.  Distantly, a toilet flushes. How long do you suppose this is supposed to take? Neck's going to start aching soon, lying up to your chin in this none too clean bathtub.  And if you have to lie here all night—still, there's not that much pain.  Strange how little pain there is.  Not at all what you'd imagine.  And you don't feel drowsy or sedated but very much alert, very much on edge—tingling, in fact.  Stinging.  Like when they were prepping you that second time.  "You're beginning to get sleepy, aren't you?" the nurse asked, or rather announced, leaving no doubt about it.  But you weren't; you felt all too tenterhooked.  And God! you thought, suppose they don't believe you? Suppose they go right ahead, put you under the knife like this? You'll have to endure it all—nobody will believe you aren't out, not even if you shout at them or scream in their masked faces and flail about.  No; they'll just get you down, dig their knees into your stomach, cut away, hack away, anyway.  But of course you did go under after all.  "Under" snuck up on your blind side, got you when you weren't looking; sandbagged you.  Out like a light.  And you went through with it, all three blankety-assed hours of it, which didn't do you a bit of good when all was over and done with.  Not to worry even so, they said; "You can still lead a fairly normal life," they said.  Fairly normal.  Not to worry! What do they know about it? You know about it; have known, since earliest childhood.  Could never sleep soundly without a nightlight nearby.  Victim of an overactive imagination, no doubt.  When the darkness comes it's never empty; imagination fills it with the worst sort of unseen things.  Unspeakable but always there, all the time, in dark rooms, in dark moods, waiting—waiting for you to grit your teeth, ready or not, and look at them— —and then they get you, bang-and-slash, Potemkin-style: endless bespectacled old bourgeois women with their glasses smashed in.  Like certain pictures in certain books.  Mere lines on blank paper, these pictures; but add darkness and they come stepping off their pages, they seize you and possess you and dig their needly knees into your stomach, hack fiendishly away at your brain.  Pictures you take great care to skip over, when you look at those certain books.  Except that you'll never be looking at those books again.  Never again.  As for those pictures—don't kid yourself, friend, you'll see them all right; just knowing they're there, you can't help but see them.  Even as you used to see them behind scrunched-shut eyelids, in the days when that meant something meaningful...  They say your whole life is supposed to flash in front of your eyes about now.  So much for what blankety-asses say—there's nothing; you see nothing.  Open those eyes and make sure, now, open them wide: nothing.  Not even the darkness, yet...  Of course there's always cremation to look forward to.  Flames bright and dazzling, flames leaping up to greet you, to make you warm and welcome: ashes to dust.  Urn to put them in, wind to scatter them to.  No conqueror worms need apply here, buster.  Cremation: should've mentioned it in your, in your whatever; could have, if you'd thought of it.  Too late now, of course; feeling kind of giddy.  Yes, definitely giddy, lightheaded at last, and by God about time too...  Say: suppose somebody comes in about now and finds you here like this, some maid probably, pushing a trolley full of mops and Comet—oldish bourgeois woman maybe, weak heart, might faint at the sight of you, fall and smash her whatsit in...godawful mess for somebody else to clean up then.  Well, her own damn fault, working for an all-around Psycho-type motel like this...  barging into other people's private lives like this, disrupting their ends; disgusting...  And suppose, suppose Norman Bates's mother were to creep in too, knife held high, eek eek eek!...only to find you here, all Maratlike.  Rub-a-dub-dub, Ma: mission already accomplished...  your work already cut out for you, ha ha...strange, how little pain there is.  Just like a couple of paper clips—clips? cuts...  deep, very deep...nothing to it.  Again the distant whatsit flushes.  Dribbety drip drip: that's your life, pal, there it goes, swirling counterclockety down the, down the...dammit! you're entitled to see your life flush before your eyes...a few years, anyway, a few months...stupid idea anyway, doesn't matter anymore, your life's not worth flashing before anybody's eyes...and your eyes, get this, aren't fit for anybody's life flashing before...fit for nothing, now, except the darkness....