My Journey Into Madness: A Travelogue: And Other Short Stories

By Douglas Mytnik

My Journey Into Madness: A Travelogue is a stream-of-consciousness story about one man's journey to find a purpose in his life. It is an irreverent, bizarre, and sometimes thought-provoking look at the world through the narrator's eyes, as he navigates through the real and imaginary worlds inside of his mind. Two other short stories are included, bordering on the supernatural occurrences in the lives of their characters. Lead Us Not Into Temptation revolves around one man's possible infidelity and the costs of his possible transgression. Hope Remained is a spin on the Pandora myth, about a writer who deals with supernatural forces for help in creating the next great American novel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9798890610515

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Chapter 3: My Days in a French Prison

IX: The Call From Beyond

Season 12, Episode 7: Don't Get Short With Me, Said the Midget to the Giant

(Aleph): Poetic Interlude

∞: The Alpha and Omega

Chapter 17: Welcome to the Nuthouse

Blue: Destination: Nowhere, in Particular

Read: The Road is Long, But the E Above Isn't

Western Tales Number 1: The Hero of Pleasant Valley and the Death of the Badman

Negative Two-Hundred Seventy-Three Kelvin: The Once and Future King

Best in Show: Hypothetical Reality

Lead Us Not Into Temptation

Hope Remained

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My Journey Into Madness: A Travelogue

And Other Short Stories

Douglas Mytnik

Copyright © 2023 Douglas Mytnik

All rights reserved

First Edition

NEWMAN SPRINGS PUBLISHING

320 Broad Street

Red Bank, NJ 07701

First originally published by Newman Springs Publishing 2023

ISBN 979-8-89061-050-8 (Paperback)

ISBN 979-8-89061-051-5 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Chapter 3

My Days in a French Prison

How odd that I would end up in a French prison, considering I've never been to France. Yet, despite that fact, here I sit. The dank, mustiness of the air reminds me of the setting of The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allen Poe, in which two characters walk through the catacombs of Venice to find a prized cask of wine. I don't want to spoil the story, just read it yourself, or don't worry about the allusion and move on with your life. Maybe this is just an illusion. Why did I hear the homophone between the two words, allusion and illusion? Homophones work when you hear the words, but I am seeing them. I can tell they're spelled differently, even though they're pronounced basically the same. But, when you read, you do hear a voice in your head. Or is it just me? Maybe I'm schizophrenic. What if the voices tell me to do something bad? Oh God, maybe that's why I'm in prison. What did I do? But wait, I still have never been to France, so something's not right. Am I becoming paranoid? Maybe I was in an illusion, and now I am awakened to reality. That's some Shutter Island shit there. But how else could I even be here? And the bigger question is why? I guess I'll have to let the whole thing play out before I get any answers.

The coarse stone floor is cool to the touch, but slowly warming, due to the flood of sunshine that streams through the bars of the windows. I rise and approach the window to bask in the golden heat of the sun, like an alligator does. I even scan the area, as if I am scoping for prey. Off in the distance, a beautiful stone bridge crosses over a greenish-brown river that slowly meanders toward its mouth. Why is the mouth of the river, where everything comes out, called the mouth? If liquid is flowing out of my mouth, it is generally an untoward response to what before entered my mouth. The end of a river should be called its ass, because that method of expulsion is non-gender specific, everybody's got one, and because it is not entirely uncommon that liquid would pour out of that orifice and it's not unusual for that liquid to be a greenish-brown color while one experiences a sudden discharge from their anus. What are the mouth and source of a stream of consciousness? I guess whatever synapses are firing to generate the thought are the source, and the other synapses that produce whatever action or reaction are the mouth. Okay, I can be happy about my purpose on earth, now that I've answered one of my own questions. Sorry to go on another tangent, but there was a potato chip in the 1990s or early 2000s that used a special type of oil during production, and the commercials for the chips would disclose that eating them could cause anal-leakage with an oily discharge. Now, I don't care how much a person loves potato chips or is trying to eat healthier, anything that causes anal-leakage of an oily discharge is something that everyone should avoid, not willingly pay for and ingest.

On one side of the bridge, atop the stone wall that must be six feet tall, a man in stereotypical mime attire is playing a violin, not in a mimed way, but an actual violin. The shrill sound pierces the morning air; beginning as one long screech and then becoming a series of quick staccato notes which, when added to the scene, creates the image of a romantic thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock; with the juxtapositioning of the picturesque visual and the bone-chilling aural elements creating a nightmarish paradox. (I won't bore you with another discourse of the homophones aural and oral, but I wonder if you thought about it, too. Probably not. That's the difference between the crazy and the sane: the fixation on whatever item, real or ridiculous, that perseverates through space and time.)

A second person strolls into the scene; a slender young woman with an open umbrella in one hand and a cherry-red balloon in the other. It is a bit odd that on this bright, sunny day, she holds the umbrella open and directly over her head, as if she were protecting herself from a deluge. As she nears the end of the bridge, I realize that she must be twelve-feet tall! No, wait, the walls of the bridge must only be three feet tall. My original estimation of the height was based on the comparison to the height of the mime-violinist, but my perspective was obviously skewed by the presence of only those two elements. With the third element, the woman, added, I know that it is unlikely that she is a giant, and since the wall is about half her size, taking into consideration high heels and perfectly coiffed updo that add several inches and the fact that the average height for women is 5'4," she must be in total somewhere around six feet. Therefore, the wall is three feet. I now have my life's second affirmation of the day. And the day has hardly begun. Prison does great things for me. I'm usually a babbling idiot in the outside world, but here, I'm Sherlock fucking Holmes.

The instant that the mime-violinist spots the umbrella-lady, he ambles toward her with the movement of one of the flying monkeys from the original Wizard of Oz. He stabs at the woman with the bow of his violin. Side by side, I can now tell that the woman is no giant, the mime-violinist is a fun-sized little person. Before I can drift off into another stream of consciousness about how much less fun it is to use the euphemism little person instead of midget, the mime takes another thrust toward the woman. It must be noted however, that I love midgets, lest someone think that I am prejudiced against them. The word is just so much more fun to say. However, in French, le petit homme does have a nice ring to it, and la petite personne does have a beautiful alliterative quality to it.

In response to the mini-mime's jab, the woman releases the balloon, and I anticipate the balloon rising free in the morning sky. Instead, it falls to the stone-floor of the bridge. Apparently, the balloon was not filled with helium, which would raise the string, but rather, the string was stiff as a stick, holding the balloon up. And I was mistaken about the target of the semi-Stradivari. He wasn't going for the balloon, but for the woman's head. With the bow of his harpy-inspired violin, Tiny Tim lifted the perfectly coiffed hair off the umbrella woman's head, exposing a rather unsightly bald head. As she reeled around to recapture her sham of a scalp, I could see her from the front for the first time. Who I had thought was the slender umbrella-woman was in actuality a goatee-sporting crossdresser whom the small string-stretcher had exposed. What the fuck am I watching here? The petite-plucker burst into an exaggerated belly-laugh, jumping up and down on the wall, again reminiscent of a trained chimpanzee who had just correctly performed a trick. After retrieving her (or is it his) fake follicles, umbrella-lady (or is it umbrella-lad) swung her umbrella at the pipsqueak player, knocking him off the wall and into the water below. As he fell, however, he dropped his bow into the now upturned umbrella, releasing a burst of every color of the visual spectrum. In violent streams, it pierced my eyes, temporarily blinding me, until all of the colors blended back into white light. I opened my eyes slowly and blinked several times before realizing that I was not in a French prison, but in a hospital emergency room. The sounds that I had thought were from the violin were actually the sounds of the heart monitor. The long screech was the sound of the flatline, and the staccato notes were the beeps of a once-again living man. The light that was so excruciating in its disappearance was the result of a man being pulled back into the world of the living.

Why am I dead? Where am I? At least now, I can explain why I was in a French prison without ever having been to France. I remember that before I was in the prison, I had been listening to the soundtrack from Les Miserables, which has a lot of false imprisonment in France. I can also explain the notes from the violin: those were from the monitors. The midget mime and the umbrella-man were still mysteries, as were the bridge, the umbrella, and the balloon. And what was that burst of the spectrum, as soon as the bow fell into the umbrella? If dreams are manifestations of our subconscious thoughts, then a near death experience must have some kind of meaning, too. They say that a person's life flashes before their eyes when they are close to death. My life never had midgets, mimes, spectrum-shooting umbrellas, or any of the other things I saw in the afterworld. Everything had to connect somehow or have some kind of meaning but what was it? How can I discover it? Think, man! (That always seemed to be just the thing to start the brain working, to tell a guy to think, man! At least that's what I learned from watching old movies. The other thing I've learned is that, when a woman is hysterical, she should be slapped. A good slap across the face, the kind that Sean Connery should have given Barbara Walters during that interview when she asked him if he believed that it was alright to hit a woman. He should have just stood up and smacked that speech-impediment right out of her.) Of course! In the Untouchables, as he's dying, Connery's character, Malone, tries to give Kevin Costner's Eliot Ness the schedule for the train that Al Capone's bookkeeper was going to be on, but Ness thought that he was reaching for his call box key. Malone tossed away the key before he died, so there is a connection with a key and death…or a key and life, the key of life! Somehow, I will discover the key to life, but there were no keys in my vision. And I was in a prison, from which I could escape, if I had the key. So what is the key? I could think, if all the monitors and alarms would stop going off! Wait!…I don't want them to stop. Their sounds are the keys that must be played on some kind of instrument. On a violin? Probably. So I just have to listen to the pattern of all the beeps and alarms. Alright…I've got it. It's actually a quite beautiful song. It has a certain church-music feel to it, like chanting. A beautiful chant. A beautiful chant, which in French is un beau chant. Now, un means not when it's used as a prefix. And beau is a homonym of bow…so that must mean it's not a violin that I should be looking for. Chant in French isn't pronounced like it is in English; it sounds more like shawn…Sean…Sean Connery again with his lock box key, dying while Al Capone is watching the opera, Pagliacci, which is about a clown, which explains why the midget is wearing makeup like a clown. I'm missing something, though. The key…key in French is cle or clef for the musical key. Clef, in English, is pronounced like cleft. Could I possibly be searching for someone with a cleft chin, or cleft lip, or cleft palate?

The pieces were falling into place, just as the musical midget had fallen into the river. Maybe if I could find out which river and which bridge made up my afterife's scenery, I could understand the message that must have been given to me. Somehow, I must decipher the cryptic characters, surreal surroundings and mysterious melodies that had been presented to me while I straddled the line between life and death, and somehow uncover the meaning of life. And now it strikes me…The violin bow fell into the umbrella, unleashing a torrent of colors. An umbrella is used to protect against the rain. Combine that with the bow, and you get exactly what I saw, the rainbow of colors. But what could that have to do with the key of life? I think of the rainbow and musical instruments that might be connected with it. Hmmmm…in the Muppet Movie, Kermit plays the banjo while he sings the Rainbow Connection. Maybe I need to find a banjo. No, a banjo doesn't sound like bells and dings. And now, I see it! An instrument that does sound like the tinkle of a bell, one that many people of my generation had as kids: a Fisher-Price xylophone, which had each note as a different color of the rainbow. I must find a Fisher-Price xylophone. I try to stand, but a multitude of hands gently