Becoming Einstein

      Isaac stood at his position as guard to the walled and gated community, rifle slung on his shoulder. It was the night shift, from 10 p.m. to 6 in the morning. The Lamanites were most active during the early hours of the shift. That was when they went out scavenging. In most urban areas, they had taken control of the night, and it was under cover of the night that they did what they could to survive.  With the imposition of martial law, Nephites that had remained in the cities faced better odds of survival than the average tribal scavenger.

           Many scholars and Lamanite-sympathizing pundits considered Nephites to be Planeta’s dominant culture. This was despite the fact that those who identified as offspring of Nephi were a minority of that distant world’s total population. And although they could be held accountable for much worldly weal and many worldly blessings, Nephites were considered by many to be oppressors of Planeta’s Lamanite majority. 

           Isaac considered himself a Nephite, but he still felt compassion and empathy for Lamanites, his tribal brothers on Planeta.  

***

           One of the Nephite emperors had delivered a terse ether-transmitted message a mere minute before instigating the bombing that had been responsible for a considerable setback to the civilized world.

           “Planeta is in a miserable state of affairs,” the emperor of the Eastern Nephites had dramatically, and Isaac thought, hyperbolically, said. 

           “It is choked by pollution and moral laxity. Humanity is so numerous it crawls over and spits at itself. Despite the best intentions, we have made victims of victimizers and victimizers of victims. Genuine love no longer exists. Things have fallen apart beyond repair. The center does not hold. It is time for death and anarchy to be unleashed upon the world.”

***

           Isaac witnessed what he had taken to be a sign of the impending apocalypse six months before the emperor of the Eastern Nephites had uttered this peremptory statement. While being driven by his mother to get a shot for his mental condition, Isaac had seen a cloud of brush fire smoke slowly rising on some highlands in the distance. The cloud was in the shape of a mushroom.

           Later that day, at the end of his costly therapy session, when handing the therapist his payment, Isaac had lashed out, “So, Doctor Bankovsky,” Isaac had taken to calling him that when the issue of money came up. He now used the appellation whenever he felt anger at the doctor, whose real name was Lominsky.  

           “You, Doctor, can believe that when a bee enters the room it means something, that the buzzing bee is a sign that calls for interpretation. You can believe that when you yawn in the middle of session, the involuntary reaction signifies that we are avoiding talking about something more important than what we’re currently discussing.”

           The therapist, who aspired for shaman-status amongst his clients, returned a blank yet expectant stare at his prize-patient.

           “Yes, my yawning, as you know,” said the physician of the mind, “means that the patient must free associate. The first thing that comes to mind when you see me yawn is exactly the crucial issue that needs to be addressed.”

           Isaac replied, “You, Bankovsky, can believe in such quasi-delusional things, but when I tell you I’ve seen a sign of impending catastrophe for Planeta, and feel the need to do something about it, it is nothing more than a cognitive distortion, a narcissistic projection, a repressed death wish for this world we live on.”   

           “You’re not amongst the initiated to the sect of the wounded-healers, so you can’t possibly give credence to what you’re still predominantly schizophrenic mind tells you,” Lominsky responded.

           Isaac felt ambivalent about Lominsky. What sensitive person doesn’t feel ambivalent about any- and everybody who isn’t a psycho- or sociopath? Isaac also felt he himself had wounded-healer potential. However, he wanted to heal everybody on Planeta, heal both Nephites and Lamanites of their collective psycho- and sociopathology, of their self-defeating attitudes and mutual mistrust.   

           As the patient, who often vacillated between compliance and insurgency, handed Lominsky his check, the doctor said, “The day when I witness one of your grandiose delusions come true, is the day I will formally change my name to Bankovsky, no longer charge for my services, and christen you Einstein.”

***

           One-hundred seventy-nine days after this encounter, with only a minute’s warning, the bombs fell. Massive counterstrike followed pitiless first strike. Planeta erupted in an orgy of internecine annihilation that reduced the Nephite population to a tattered fraction of the size it had reached in the third millennium. 

That fraction, however, proved remarkably resilient. 

The worst that Isaac’s paranoid and delusional mind could conceive had happened. There was nothing more of cataclysmic significance that could make him waver on his path to become a wounded healer.

           A few weeks after the not so complete apocalypse, when the panic had been reined in by both martial law and Planeta’s inhabitant’s ability to summon up compassion and empathy in times of even the seemingly most extreme duress, the fifty-two-year-old, former scholar, former convict, diagnosed schizophrenic pedaled his bike to visit his psychiatrist. Isaac was curious as to the doctor’s whereabouts. He wanted to know how this sometimes gracious, at other times arrogant, mind healer was weathering the post-apocalyptic world.

           Isaac arrived to Doctor Lominsky’s front door and knocked. Bees buzzed in the flowering plants in the front yard.  One landed on Isaac’s sleeve.  Survivors of the catastrophe will diligently buzz on, he thought.  Despite being well-rested, he couldn’t control an overwhelming urge to yawn.  He free associated: front door, portal to a new, less hateful era for Nephite-Lamanite relations.  

           The blinds in the window to the right of the residence’s entry were opened, as was an instant later the door itself. The doctor’s formerly well-kept condominium-office now looked like a scavenging zone, reflective of the scavenging zones some of the cities had become. The doctor himself looked disheveled, distraught, a shadow of his formerly immaculately-groomed, confident self. The appearance of a favored patient brought a gleam to his eye and he reluctantly smiled. “How do you do? How can I assist you, sir?” The doctor asked. “Allow me to introduce myself. Money means very little in this new world of ours, so my name is now, quite ironically enough, Bankovsky.” 

           Isaac could not resist smiling back at the doctor. “Doc,” Isaac said, “I was just dropping by to see how you were doing, if you needed anything…” Here Isaac’s words trailed off into silence. The doctor stepped forward, embraced his patient, and with teary eyes said, “I’m glad you’ve come by. It’s a pleasure and relief to see you again, Einstein.”