I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness; I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too. I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more.
~ Anne Frank ~
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I did not bargain for permanent hair loss, but I think that’s what I got. Not total hair loss; most of it, though. The stuff that grew back is a mix of fine, patchy white whisps combined with a thin but wiry grey fur-like substance that refuses to respond to a comb. I was banking on just a single round of chemo that caused temporary hair loss; instead, I went through several rounds of powerful, hair-depleting chemicals, followed by a new regimen that mimics that side-effect. The old-man hair, coupled with baggy skin and incorrigible wrinkles, converted me from someone who looked younger than his age to a man who appears to have celebrated two or three centennials. And I no longer have eyelashes. My beard, which seemed never to have advanced far beyond the teenager’s prepubescent stage, now grows so slowly that I shave only occasionally…more than once a quarter, but not by much. Thinner eyebrows, too. And under my arms, where once there were mats of unruly hair, there is nothing remaining but long, old-man wrinkles. The same is true of other spots where hair used to grow. When I compare photographs of me from just a few years ago to recent images, they look like snapshots of different people: one an obese man with a full head of hair and the other a scrawny, nearly-bald, shriveled geezer with evidence that his muscles have been depleted, along with his fat (but the former at a considerably faster rate). I’m not complaining (well, actually, I guess I am, but it’s more of a gripe than an angry grievance), but it gives me something to bitch about. One day, though, my “standard” hair may grow back and I may recover from my body’s attempts to murder me. The only way to find out if that will happen is to wait and see.
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Science fiction does not describe the genre of the dream. Only after thinking about it for quite a long while did a more accurate term emerge from my mental confusion: dimensional fiction. The setting for most of the experience seemed to be a vast—horizon to horizon—field of fresh, untouched snow. During the course of the dream, I discovered what I thought was a perfectly level landscape actually was gently sloped upward toward the distant horizon, where I spied a brown bear. When we—someone else was with me, I don’t know who—finally reached that remote place, we discovered the enormous snow field abruptly ended at a sheer cliff. The land below the cliff—and as far as we could see toward the horizon—was littered with tiny images of farms, villages, and roads. Our view of that scene was like the view from an airplane; our altitude above the land made the scene look small. After we came to the cliff, we followed it to the left for quite a distance until we came to two doors. A man from the valley met us there and demonstrated the way in which the door transformed him as he walked through it; he changed from a valley dweller to one of us: a snow searcher. In fact, he did not change; only his clothing changed. The other door, he explained, would make the change permanent. If a valley dweller walked through it, she permanently would become a snow searcher. If a snow searcher walked through it, he would irreversibly become a valley dweller. Those were the only two options, he explained. “We are two-dimensional,” he said. “The so-called third dimension is just a mind game.”
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We build prisons to protect us from who we might become. Or who we were. Or who we are. Even after all the years of putting people in chains or cages, we still cannot decide whether we are administering punishment or revenge. Clearly, we have given up on rehabilitation or “correction,” although we refuse to publicly admit it. Yet we blame prison administrators and guards for failing to return inmates to the streets as productive, law-abiding members of society. Responsibility for those failures, though, rests with us; with society that refuses to accept people who have spent time imprisoned for their crimes. And with employers who refuse to give people we have locked away for their crimes the opportunity to earn an honest living. When we berate employers for failing to “do their part” in helping re-adapt to society, we forget to ask ourselves whether we would employ those “criminals.” Or, if we ask, do we answer honestly or do we accept the reality that we are afraid; that the risk is too much for us to handle?
