magnetic mattress

Blues start taking over the picture, seeping in from the sides and blotting in from the center. Navies and turquoises and cornflowers and cobalts smear across my vision. I look around in a panic, but all I see bleeds to blue. Then the reds join in, vying for eye-space. Mahogany is oozing in from the left, a patch of brick leeching in from the top, and blood red is filling the center of my view. I lash out, desperate to retain the original image…what was I looking at anyway? Where am I? Some purples start forming where simple overlaps should have occurred, then yellows and greens appear, and all is chaos. I tear at the rainbows appearing before me, seeking clarity.

Something is attacking me, physically trying to damage me. What is it? Is this some sort of joke? I can’t see anything at all, am completely blind, paralysed but most of all distracted by the kaleidoscope before me, and something is beating me. Mauling me, bludgeoning me, my arms will be so bruised, if not bloody and mangled. My legs may take weeks or months to heal, if they do at all. My guts are caved in from the blows. It is all I can do to remember to swing my arms, but the colors are so pretty. So beautiful. All it seems I can concentrate on is how perfect the contrast of the yellow-brown is to the soft lavender, yet here my body is being destroyed. I throw another kick with a lacerated leg, fling my arms wildly.

I hit something! This startles me from the colors and I focus everything I can on my opponent, and I grab it and kick it and beat it and bite it, punch it, tear at it, destroy it.

---

Last night I went to Brandon’s room to share my Frangelico with him and ended up getting a magnetic mattress. I think I hang out with him every day. I brought some things to draw with, and soon we were sampling different combinations of liqueurs. Or rather, Brandon was. I prefer Frangelico straight, it's rich, sweet hazelnut flavor drowning out all other thoughts as the syrupy goodness slides down my throat. Yum! And only 48 proof, so I’d have to go crazy with it to get drunk.



I was drawing for a book I’m making, a little picture book for a friend. When I finished the two scenes I wanted done, I was feeling pretty relaxed from the drink and wandered over to where Brandon was sitting as the computer. I’m always giving people little backrubs, and so there I was giving him one. Eventually we switched spots and he went to work on my knots. He got going a bit when all of a sudden he said, “I bet you would LOVE the magnet things!” He started frantically going through all of his drawers, looking for them. I was in a daze from the massage for a moment, but then I stood up just as he found the contraption.

“Hold this in front of your eyes and spin the magnets! Do you feel anything?” I’ll admit that I did what he said and didn't feel the slightest anything. I stayed quiet and kept spinning the little knobs. “In the front of your face,” he said, all drawn out, as if addressing a child, “what do you feel?”

“Um, not much…”

“Oh. Well, I guess they don’t have any effect on you.” It was a small piece of plastic, slightly larger than a deck of playing cards, with two golf-ball sized, knobbed pieces of metal sticking out. The metal pieces apparently were magnetic, and you could hold the flat plastic part and rub the magnets against your back as a massage tool. “When I do it, I get this intense pain on my forehead, right between my eyes.”

Oh well, I guess I’m just not affected by that sort of thing. I often have strange reactions to all sorts of things, over the counter medicines, weird fruits, changes in the weather. I get awful tension headaches before large storms, like when the typhoon hit when I was in Japan, or when the Flood of 100 Years hit when I was in Melbourne. Sometimes the moon will speak to me when it’s full and I’ll wake up at night in a different part of the room, staring at it. But the magnets had a disappointingly minimal effect on me.

My dismay was heightened when Max came in the room and Brandon repeated the experiment. Almost immediately Max said, as if set up, “Well, I’m feeling something here across my forehead, like a tightening…”

“It gets worse when you stop,” said Brandon, grabbing the device and performing the operation on himself.

“Ow!” Max rubbed his forehead.

Brandon was rubbing his forehead, too, wincing in pain. I took the thing from him and tried again on myself.

“Hey, would you like to try my magnetic mattress? I don’t use it because it never did much for me and it would keep erasing my ID card and credit cards.”

Still no results from the spinny things.

“Yeah, sure, that would be fun to try!” Maybe a night, you know, why not?

“They say you don’t notice anything for the first week, and then you just realize you’ve been sleeping better. I never got anything from it. Keep it as long as you like, or forever. Less for me to take with me to Denver.”



Mattress awkwardly in tow I headed back to my room in Sevy. I had always been mildly curious about things like this, but I never had the kind of disposable income to get them, and it would never get past my father. He’s just so skeptical. You will never see the things I see, I imagined telling him, and just the experience of them makes it worthwhile, even if these things are just in my mind! He’d probably just look at me sadly, give me a disappointed frown, and hope I didn’t bring up my naïvety again.

I got ready for bed, did a little meditation, and almost eagerly slipped the mattress under the cover sheet. It was an inch or two thick, and filled with little, evenly-spaced chunks of what I assumed were magnetic metal. As I climbed into bed I thought to myself, well, if nothing else, it’s a bit more cushioning, it’s not uncomfortable or lumpy, and it seems to retain my heat better than just the regular mattress. After a short while I drifted off to sleep.

---

Someone was knocking at the main door to our Sevy dorm suite.  I reluctantly got out of bed, threw on my robe, and went out to the main room to see who was at the door. Two guys.

“Hey, it’s that girl!”

I live with three other girls who have their own set of friends who all hang out together all the time, and I figured it was two of the pack whom I just had never met, and who had heard some story about “the senior suitemate” or something.

Then I noticed that the walls were painted green. Sevy does not have walls painted green. Is this Evans?! I had no idea where I was. I looked behind me at the room and that, too, was not my room. Instead there was maybe a queen-sized bed with two girls, twins, lying in it. I had passed through without looking on my way to the hall.

Closing the door on the two guys, I stared at the main room. Flower print comforter, two twin girls about my age, maybe a little older. I waited for the snap of recognition of how I got here, what I had just been dreaming, anything.

Nothing. I drew an utter blank. I just stared at the two girls, who looked Irish-American with shoulder-length red-brown hair and lots of freckles. They looked exactly the same.

“I’m Sarah, and she’s Sarah too. Actually, there’s three of us Sarahs, you see?” said the one. Three?

“Shh, you’ll just confuse her,” said the other.

They were perfectly interchangeable, but there were definitely only two of them. I suppose they were just messing with me. Maybe they were actually a little younger than me. Sigh. But how did I get here?!

“Oh, we’re not supposed to let you leave the room, see? You’re too dangerous.”

I had absolutely no idea what was going on. None. I stared at them some more. “Why…wait, what am I doing here, I mean, how am I here? Why am I here, is this Evans?”

At that moment, my parents came in the door, letting in what must have been mid-morning sunshine. I realised my body was very tired, as if I had really exerted myself the day before or a few hours earlier. Fucking magnetic mattress. I’m taking that out first thing, and giving it back to Brandon! Sleep better my ass, I feel beat!

My dad came over to me, looking very worried and sad and tender. A wave of some faint memory flashed over me, and coupled with my physical exhaustion, I had the idea that I had just dealt with some sort of high-end scuffle that had really scared me.

“Oh dad, it was so awful!” I said, letting him put his arm around my shoulders, even though I still didn’t know what had been awful. I just knew that the mattress had to go.

I saw how my dad was looking at me. So sad, so lost. That one look told me the whole story of what had happened. That one look portrayed, Yes, honey, in your mind, you must have dealt with some pretty scary thoughts, for you to have done those things. You must have faced a lot of anguish inside to have done what you did.

What I had done was attack someone. Maul someone, beat at someone. I knew it without a memory of it, because I had the scars of such mental anguish fresh on my brain. Who had it been, what I had done I had no clue, but it was probably unprovoked. My mind’s evil had taken control of my body and beat the shit out of someone, and now I was in a crazy house. Stupid, bloody magnetic mattress! I thought those things had no effect on me!


But then there I was, sitting up in bed, 3:06AM, safe and sound in Sevy, feet burning against the magnets closest to the heater. It was actually exceedingly comfortable with the mattress in place, and I don’t think I had actually hurt anyone. And while I sure didn’t sleep well the rest of the night, my suitemates in the morning reported having heard no screams or other noises. Maybe I’ll keep the mattress a while after all...