BENSON AND THE MAN FROM UPSTAIRS

 

"Do you know Benson?" I asked him suddenly.

 "No, who is he?" The doctor replied, unfazed. "This isn't the right time to be asking me questions."

 "And why is that?" I asked him again. "Is there a right time in life, really? I mean, for asking the right question? If there is that time, then how do we know?"

 "What?" The doctor asked, turning to give me a cold and long hard stare. "Turn over, please. I need to administer the injection."

 I turned, reluctantly, and awaited the tiny sting on my body. "How do we know when the time is right? In life, I mean?" I asked, my face staring at the faded blue bed sheets. Then I looked up at him.

 He stared at me, his eyelashes flinching. They reminded me of a gutted fish's fins, lying in the open sun. "Why, if I may ask, do you want to know?"

 "Because," I paused, to let a dry cough pass from my burning throat. "Because, my friend, that is the ultimate ethical question to be asked in life, ’how do you know?' "

 "Turn over again please." He motioned, his probe on my ribs. "You know, I don't have the faintest idea why you would ask me such a question. Do you?"

 With a smile, I sat up, and then from my pocket I took out a small notebook. The doctor stared at me, and then shook his head blankly. "Ok, you have something to show me?"

 "It's my notebook; I call it The Notebook of Life. It's got all the questions that run through my head, through everyone’s head. Bear in mind, if you can, that the questions here are relevant questions. Life itself is a relevant experience.  I want to ask you about life."

 The doctor shook his head, turned away from me for a few seconds, distracted by something on his mind. Then he jotted something on his report sheet. "So it's a book that has all the questions you want to ask about life?" I heard him ask.

 I nodded. "Yep Doc. The real deal. Can I get off from the bed now?" He nodded, and I got off from the bed, the notebook still clutched on my hands. "Are you busy right now?" I asked him.

 "And is that one of your questions in the 'notebook'?" he asked me with a wink.

 "Depends, Doc." I said, winking as well, "Depends whether this time now, whether it is meant for me to ask that exact question, but nope, that ain't one of the questions, I'm afraid."

 The doctor remained silent, then he said, "Ok. Go ahead. Fire away." his finger waving unconditionally in the quiet hospital air. "No trick questions, I presume."

 "Presumption - it is the flawed state of mind. The sleeping beauty of the heart." I paused, stared in the room, and then continued, "Well, absolutely not, Doc. I will not ask you the feeble stuff. That is reserved for feeble and fickle minds, but then again, is there anything like it?" The doctor wanted to answer me but I spoke before words could come out of his lips. "Life, it is the fabled romantic novel that never finds romance, the door of hope that has no handle. The journey of demarcations."

 "Are you sure you are alright?" he asked me, a look of concern rising on his brow.

 "Who can tell that I am alright? For what is right for me cannot be right for you, for the goose and the gander do not fancy the same meal. They do not adore alike, they are like the ends of a hunting arrow, following each other, but never understanding the purpose of that following. No, this ain't about tricks, Doc. This here, this is the real deal." I said, wetting my finger, pointing at the notebook, and turning over to a page.

 The doctor smiled. "Well, somebody sure is in good spirits today."

 "Yes I am, only that you always look at the wrong mirror of my character every time you visit me. The mirror has many faces. Fire away. I like that."

 "You like what?" He wanted to know.

 I smiled. "You said fire away, and my actual bone of contention happens to use that fiery word. The contention involves a tiger that has learned to grow bright, and has done that in the forest of the night."

 "Ok, just a coincidence that I said that word." The doctor replied calmly.

 "Oh, but is it?" I asked, my eyes widening with interest. "What is coincidence, if I may ask? Is it a preconceived notion? Is it an accident? Fate? Serendipity? A curse? A spell? A series of chronological events linked to each other, albeit good or bad? Just what is coincidence, Doc?"

 The man looked at me, unperturbed. "You are digressing. What is it that you really want to know?" He asked, his eyes seeming to point at the note book on my hands.

 I smiled. "Aha! But what do you really wanna tell me? That is one of the questions! You want to tell me what coincidence is, or rather, what coincidence isn't?" I posed the question effectively. The doctor stared at me, quite blankly.

 "Well, to me, coincidence is a set of permutations and combinations in one's life, that, ultimately, whether by fortune or otherwise, lead to a probability of an event, or a series of events to occur in your life."

 "Well put. I couldn't have put it better, but then again, I'm not you." I lamented, my finger caressing my beard. The doctor nodded in agreement. "I hear you. But what about, what about to others?" I asked him.

 The doctor stared at me. "To others? What do you mean?"

 "Well, you put it aptly, as I have said, but you chose to define the word according to what you think, or shall I say, according to what you think it must mean. Definition is relative. How do you think the others define the word?"

 The doctor smiled. "Well, I'll put it like this; simply because I am not willing to be others, I will refrain from defining the word for them. I tabled my definition according to the way I see it."

 "Aha! But not according to the way you think it? Or according to the way you would like it to mean?" I asked him, edging closer, the notebook still clutched on my hands.

 "Not a chance." The doctor smiled when he said it. "We comprehend occurrences and meanings of life's puzzles in a very different manner, however astute though. It is the society that shapes us to be relative, as you have mentioned to me." He replied.

 "But, but…" I interjected. "then there must be a universal definition for all things out there. Is that not so?"

 "Yes, and well, no..." The doctor said. "It depends."

 "Depends on what? Based on which laws? Whose laws?"

 The doctor wrote something on the report sheet. He looked up at me and said, "Ok, how about you tell me what you think. Go on, I am listening."

 "You see, the universe, as we know it," I looked at him before going on. "Bear in mind I said 'as we know it', which is how man knows his universe, but that might not be the way we are supposed to know it." The doctor nodded. I went on, "The universe is a vast entity, and so, if we cannot define anything out there, or we say that we can define everything, of which we might be ultimately wrong; then where do we stand when it comes to knowing the truth?"

 "You asked me a question." The doctor said. "Are you willing to answer it first?"

 I smiled. "But questions are asked when we do not understand."

 "Or, or when there is a hint of wanting to discredit fact from myth." He reminded, "Or to get satisfaction by defending your beliefs of that truth. It can be relative, truth, but that depends on how you convince yourself to believe what is out there. But still, my question is, what is it that you want to know?"

 "This is what I wanna know. Does my book of questions have answers?" I replied, tapping at the notebook. "And what is truth? For if we are prone to lies, then how do we convince ourselves that what we say is truthful? Or how do we determine a truth from a lie if we want to believe that lie is truth? How can we tell, if society has brought us hinged onto values that are based on lies, and we believe with our hearts that it is truth?"

 The Doc shifted about in the little room, wisps of lucid medicines filling the disturbed atmosphere. "What does your heart tell you?"

 I remained silent. "That truth is out there, but we are too short to reach it. That truth is demarcated by lies, and that the line that separates truth and fib is thin, and that we cross over that line of divide more often than less, and the danger is that we do this without even knowing it and consequently, it has blinded us."

 "But is that the heart speaking? I do not think so." said the doctor. "It is the brain that is speaking. It is reason that is speaking. And the conflict of reason and spirituality is a fierce one. Reason is more physical, basing on tangible evidence, whilst the latter is harder to define, and rarely bases its foundations on tangible stuff. Crudely put, one must lay the other on one side before speaking, for if you speak, and the two forces are at bay, then you will achieve no purpose in life."

 I nodded. "But, what then is purpose?" The man looked at me when I asked him the question.

 "You are loaded with questions today." he said.

 I continued. "Purpose - is it a drive? A humanoid motor that propels us to have ambition and principles? An unseen force that pushes us to cross vast amounts of uncharted lands and seas? Is it the quest that sees a deaf man engineer sweet and beautiful music? Or the call that tells the birds and beasts and the fishes to rise with the sun every day? Or the fire that rouses the waning heart of a disheveled widow?"

 The doctor looked up at me. "If your heart and soul tells you that, then those things are true. The splendour is for you to devour, once you can understand that the splendour is there. Because most of us spend our time searching for a truth that is threadbare, amongst thorny bushes of ungoverned space, we then cannot see the truth. For we are simply a matrix, a void that yearns to be filled with information and knowledge, and so we spend our longevity searching, when the truth is so close to our faces. The problem is we always look for truth in the wrong places. And thus, the splendour of knowing becomes diminished from our foresight, and we search and search, and the sun ends up sinking below our feet, and when the darkness of the moon shadows us, we lose our way inside the myriad lanes of the Minotaur's cave."

 "Very true. Cause and action?" I asked.

 "Precisely.” He replied. “You must push to pull, or otherwise. Our forebears knew that adage, and life for them was much simpler to understand that it is now. For once you are blinkered, then you become lost and defaulted by staring at your own mirage whilst the sands of time passes you by."

 I looked at him, lost in transient thought. "Fooled by our own images?"

 "Exactly." he said. "More like, beguiled by them."

 "And the purpose of life, what is it?" I asked the doctor.

 He looked at me, the report sheet dangling on his hands. "Life is what you make out of it. We are put in this land to do the best we can in the smallest time frame, and we must achieve all we can, before longevity rings at our life's door, of which we have to answer, in any case. The purpose is to pursue an adventure, to set a goal and achieve it. To experience human emotion, to accomplish what you mind tells you to do. To know right from wrong, to make decisions that are right and wrong, and to, and to learn from mistakes. To experience the splendour of living in the world, to feel love, and to be loved, to be sad and happy. That is the purpose, to set a race against yourself and time. To learn about life and to fight the struggles that are set before your path. If you can manage to do most of that, then you have lived your life. That is the purpose."

 "But how many can see that?" I asked after a while, digesting his words.

 "The question is not how many see their purpose, but rather, how many choose to ignore their purpose in life, or how many act before the wind blows out the candlelight Or how may lose sight of their golden cup."

 "But how can you know what you have to do in life? For, as you say, we don't have a lot of time in this world." I said, "Most of us lose the plot, yes, but maybe we are not far from achieving our purpose at that precise moment. Maybe the golden apple is not far from reach when we become derailed from our purpose. How do we know when not to give up?"

 The Doctor smiled. "The heart. Therein lies all the truth. That is where one must look for purpose. For there you will find the answers to all your questions. One must learn to listen to it. It is always talking to us, ticking, telling us, whispering to us, helping us choose right from wrong. People just tend to ignore the subliminal message, that tiny voice that always speaks to us."

 I nodded, beginning to have a slight feeling of drowsiness. "What was in the injection, Doc?"

 The man smiled. "Something that will calm your nerves down. You need to rest now."

 I lay on the bed, the notebook still clutched on my hands. "This is the real deal, doc." I told him faintly, waving the book at him."But I cannot let you read it."

 "I know." The doctor said, smiling. He could tell I was holding nothing on my hands. There was no notebook there. It was a figment of my imagination.

 "Do you know Benson?" I asked him, my eyes half closed.

 "You are Benson, sir." He replied with a knowing smile.

 I smiled and nodded. He knew!

 And then I drifted off to sleep, The Notebook of Life still clutched on my hands...

 

- END-

(August 2009)

Mbonisi P. Ncube©