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The Complete Introvert
1
Morely was one of the world's great introverts. No one doubted it even though there was no way it could be quantified and he could not apply for recognition. It's not that Morely was not happily accepted in the world, he was. He had a wife, two grown children and he went to work each day in a solitary job. He was not selfish and was not angry or put-off or obnoxious. Reaching out was just irregular for him. He didn't believe in it either. Introversion, his value and his attitude was not just a crippling flaw like some people think.
On Monday evening, the first of March, 2012, Morely lay on the sofa. Jodi was preparing a salad to have with their supper of Tilapia with greens and pasta. The television was on but no one was watching. Morely was practicing moving his eyes into the back of his face. It was his peculiar habit. Jodi found it very annoying and he could only do it while she was occupied elsewhere.
Morely thought of this as an exercise. Nobody understood the importance of the skill he was developing. He had been practicing this since he was a teenager. This was one of the great wierdnesses of Morely's life, a wierdness that nearly kept him from growing up but he always wanted to see what was back there.
One day a few years ago he got very excited when, as he pressed his eyes sideways until very little pupil was visible to anyone watching, he saw a light. It was like an eclipse of the pupil as he forced his eye back. There was some pain as there would be with any other form of calisthenic. But then, at the limit of his endurance, he saw a light. A light, the discovery of a new world inside. The psychological idealists dream of long voyages. He felt like Magellan, or Columbus, voyaging far away—very near.
Was it his head or was it the head of an alien being? Had he stayed sprawled out on his disarrayed couch before dinner or had he traveled, somehow, into deep space, the ocean, the far corners? The pull of exploration grabbed him. He would sacrifice everything for the voyage.
“Supper! Came the call. Morely pulled himself back into the peevish world, knowing that Jodi wasn't happy with him and his speculations.
There are tunnels everywhere. The trees press themselves along low resistance pathways in the air, like vesicles in the flesh of the earth. Just because they are invisible doesn't make them less real. Nature fills the soft spots with wood which flows through odd channels. The birds see tunnels in the sky, safe to move through. They ride soft and firm in them.
Morely kept a library of books, pamphlets, media about caves, makers of caves, tunnelers in the earth.
Jodi, whose real name was Jocelyn, secretly puzzled over how she could marry a man named Morely. Morely the moaner she secretly called him. She figured as most women do, she understood the perversity of men She made leeway for their impracticality, their visions, their unfulfillable dreams. It so irritated her that she sometimes felt life would be better alone or with a pragmatic, well anchored female roomie. It was just too late for that she was thinking as she stirred the pasta to keep it from sticking. She knew that Morely could be driven to do the dishes after the meal. Then they would drift off into the evening.
2
On June 28, 2006, Wilhelmena Verplank of Moosejaw Saskatchewan became the first human being to turn her eyes entirely inside of her skull and physically examine the interior of her head. She is said to have exclaimed, "Eureka!" finding it hollow with tunnels leading into the dark. Wilhelmena devoted her life to the study of the underground, Her body was surrounded by books about ants, moles and subway dwellers.
Morely had read this unbelievable account in Earthworks Magazine. It inspired him and frightened him. Going so far in would drive a deeper wedge between himself and Jodi. As it was, Morely was sensitive enough to feel his insecure hold on marriage and mature human life. Jodi was his only link to the appearance of normalcy and his contract with Jodi was not strong. More and more often, her obvious criticisms of him hurt. And because he felt the criticisms to be largely valid he felt very insecure. It was like she was a parent who would take only so much before he would feel the irreversible consequences.
Morely had tied all of his human capitol and worth into this home and this marriage. How would he survive without it? How could he avoid the pull into the deep abyss? The gravity of failure was so intense, pulling him into error and miscreance.
When Jodi finally found him on the couch and issued her definitive rally back into the world, Morely looked up. I really do like this world, he thought. I'm really enthusiastic about new experience, color, the look of things. I am not depressed like you think I am. He was silent, rose from his place and followed her obediently into the dining room.
3
After dinner when all the doubt had cleared, Morely finished the dishes and they sat down together to spend the slow evening hours. They breathed. Morely let his stories seep out releasing some of the pressure on himself.
“When I visited the hospital, “ he told Jodi. “And I walked through the underground tunnels connecting the buildings, I asked directions of a man dressed like an angel. He was careful in telling me how to get where I wanted to go and he concluded by saying, 'take care' before sallying forth
down the corridor”
Jodi looked at Morely patiently and she smiled.
“I walked through the tunnel,” he continued, “surrounded by multicolored tubes. People in various uniforms grew near then diminished into vanishing point entrances to new encounters.
And iron monsters with bearded men astride them stirred whirlwinds of dust, crashing past me howling warnings, then vanishing into silence.”
People just don't talk like that, Jodi was thinking.
Yet Morely continued.
“ Even when I was a worm in my mothers' house, when I crawled through the tiny holes and tunnels, warm and wet passages. There were routes that join the world together. The passages turned around my mother's bed. My mother's bed was a nest of flowers. I could hide deep under the the heavy covers in the dark roots, or I could slip through the zipper door into pastel dreamland and dry my eyes. My eyes were like new born insect eyes drying in the honey air.
The air on the Earth is made of compartments and delicate passageways through the sky. There are these secret means of escape, which only the insects can see or birds can steer by.
Jodi had heard enough. She leaned over next to her husband and kissed him on the mouth.
Don Schaeffer is a phenomenological poet, devoted to exact description of experience. At the age of 70, he has experienced the institutionalization of his spouse and the re-development of a new life out of the ashes of the old one. His poems reflect the transitions in his life. He currently lives in New York after spending half his adult life in Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada.
Don has previously published six volumes of poetry and stories, his first in 1996, not counting the experiments with self publishing under the name Enthalpy Press. His poetry has appeared in numerous periodicals and has been translated into Chinese for distribution abroad. Don is a habitue of the poetry forum network and has received first prize in the Interboard competition.
He holds a Ph.D. in social psychology from the City University of New York.
Email: Don Schaeffer
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