Field trip

The lot of us roamed the state park, back and forth, like zombies searching aimlessly. We’d keep going until Liz – the activities coordinator – blew the whistle, and then we’d scramble back to the bus.

Lenny and Chip, the OCD sufferers, zigzagged the grounds in convoluted patterns, understood by them alone. Reminded me of the football patterns I ran with my mates behind Foley field, about 40 years earlier. The difference being that we never crossed into each other’s lanes in those days. But, Lenny and Chip crashed into each other at one point, almost coming to fists over it, before arriving at a compromise with my assistance.

“Avoidance is the key,” Lenny told me after calming down.

“Yep, stay in your own lanes, and all will be good,” I said. And I gave him a thumbs up. He smiled, gave me a pat on the back and continued his zigzag patterns. I felt validated from the pat.

There was an eerie vibe to this park, as everything about it felt paradoxically strange and slightly familiar to us, keeping us moving around, looking for answers and finally confabulating them. We were psychiatric patients, skilled at transforming the unseen into the seen. There was something here for each and every one of us. Yet, the land itself could have been anyplace that had plowed fields lying fallow, rolling hills in the distance, copious forests, and a few swampy spots here and there. There was nothing else to distinctly identity this place, and the ambiguity penetrated our craziness, dredging it up into a myriad of forms, some disturbing. Although, I was more spectator than participant, until Thomas, the “self-proclaimed” tank mechanic from World War II, recruited me.

Thomas quietly searched the fringes of the field near the fences, looking for any sign of the lower left arm and hand he’d lost in some long forgotten WW2 skirmish, one that never made it into the history books – not even a footnote anywhere he claimed. As a group, we’d told him to give up his quest, that the location of his tragedy was somewhere else, thousands of miles from here, across one of the great oceans most likely, maybe in another dimension or on another planet for all we knew. It just couldn’t be this place we argued, not in the USA, since WW2 occurred elsewhere. He wouldn’t listen though, swearing that this place looked familiar, that he’d been here before, lost his life here to Hitler’s army – an arm and hand as well.

In fact, he said that he recognized me too, that he’d never forgotten my hard face, the frigid eyes of his decapitator behind the 50 caliber, positioned on the gently sloping mound of dirt he pointed to, just beyond the fences, near one of the restoration projects. I didn’t want to deny him his delusion, not again, and so I apologized for decapitating him, and gave him a thumbs up. He smiled and gave me a pat on the back.

Is this my birthday or what? I thought to myself. Two pats on the back in the same day! And I was feeling intrigued with the idea of sitting behind a 50 caliber machine gun on a hill.

The next day and on subsequent days, Thomas would finger me as being other characters from his confabulated past, always the bad guy. But, he’d always wink at me, and I would smile back with my usual thumbs up, and receive another pat on the back. I enjoyed being the perpetrators in his dark delusions, and he liked being the victims, the reverse of how we both felt about our real existences. Maybe we’d both been working out some kind of poetic justice through our mental afflictions, trying to balance things out.

We played this game beginning with our field trip, until the day Thomas passed away 9 years later. I left the facility a week later, not knowing what Thomas had perished from. He was just gone one day, nobody remembering his name or having existed.

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