“They’re extremely complex thought forms,“ he responded, “which tend to develop around those parts of your personality that remain too far from consciousness, to exercise any control over them. They represent all of the raw, pent-up emotional energy in you which has not the foggiest notion of what its true purpose in life is. As images of those parts of you which still defy consciousness, they provide the antagonism needed to spur you onto bringing these hidden traits to light, that you might live like a human being rather than some brute.“

“I’d rather die first,“ I insisted, “than live like Hyde.“

“Then die you shall—or at least that part of you whose time has come,“ he forewarned me, “for you’re the only one who can penetrate the dark storm which has been brewing at my gate since first we met. To get to the heart of this dark swirl, you must leave this conversation and enter the world of experience,“ whereupon he loomed up over me, larger than life, to facilitate my entry into the void.

Once again did I encounter the spirits of what my parents had, long ago, condemned to a fate worse than hell. As the vile spirits swarmed and slithered about me, like venomous snakes, I realized they represented the thoughts ’n’ feelings my inner mother had condemned down through the years. Numbed by the pain of it all, did I stand by and watch as my stepfather attempted to strangle them, in the image of my brother, Scott, but failed. As the hair stood up on the back of my neck, I grew larger than life. Only this time was I transformed into a great gray wolf instead of Hyde. Sniffing the air, I quickly picked up the scent of the old witch as she lurked about in darkness, to escape the fury that’d been unleashed upon her. With saliva streaming from my mouth in torrents, I lunged for her throat. Grasping hold of her neck with my powerful jaws, I shook her until she resisted no more. Letting out a howl of remorse, I stooped to lick her face clean of the mask that’d enveloped her true beauty. On her last dying breath, I heard my mother say, “I’m sorry, my son, for having offended thee.“ As I wept bitter tears, I washed her body clean of any sign of ever having been a witch. Just then, I felt a hand brush past my ear as its fingers ran through my hair. Opening my eyes, I beheld my soul lying there at my side.

“I don’t understand,“ I exclaimed, for I too had been transformed back into my regular old self.

“It’s all over,“ she replied. “You’ve finally overcome this terrible image of your mother. All that matters now, is that you have me.“

As our eyes welled up with tears, we embraced each other and breathed a sigh of relief.

“To be perfectly honest,“ I interjected, “I really don’t want to kill anyone, real or imaginary.“

“You no longer have a choice,“ he replied. “Either you destroy the image which tells you it is okay to take the life of another human being, when sanctioned by the State, or this image’ll destroy you, just as surely as it destroyed your stepfather, when it robbed him of the very manhood he had taken from his opponents in battle.“

“Why must I kill this image?“ I asked. “Surely there must be some other way to deal with it.“

“Because you have allowed this image to acquire a life of its own,“ he responded, “this Frankenstein’ll never give it back to you till you take it from him.“

“Until you remove this parasitic growth from your own eye,“ he continued on, “you will never see how to remove the corresponding speck from your neighbor’s eye, for war is really about the killing of your own demons as you see them outside yourself in the hapless neighbor upon whom you have cast such dark shadowy aspersions. In the ensuing struggle to take your neighbor’s life before he takes yours, you fight not so much to protect your life as you do to protect the lives of those demons who have taken over some part of you, for he who has overcome his own demons has no need to take his neighbor’s life, nor defend his own, since it is already in the hands of the One Voice. And so are you tricked, by the projection of your shadow onto a neighbor, into believing you have slain your demons in the slaying of that neighbor when, in reality, you have only given your demons a little more control over your life.“

Older and much wiser, in this fantasy I find my self speaking to a small gathering of elders about the wonderful relationship my soul and I have enjoyed down through the years, for they had never cultivated as close a relationship with their souls as I had with mine. While I wondered if she would still be sending me revelations, when I reached this ripe old age, or if she would have already locked the door, through which I had always returned to the land of the living, and thrown away the key instead, I heard the voices in my head unwaveringly insist they knew not the answer to such a far-reaching question. As I continued to reminisce over the long walk we had taken together through the garden of life, I had just begun to tell my audience how I could never have asked for more when I heard the voices in my head say, this time around, they wanted no more than to see my self retire to the back pages of my mind. As I began to go over the places in nature where she had hidden herself in the game she used to play, to see if I could find her, I realized that life was much too short to piddle away on the unthinkable. Having been sentenced to two years before the mast for the sins of my generation and those long past, had I found the answer to my dilemma in the person of my own soul.

Immediately, did he start talking to me about some of the images that’d popped into my head, giving new meaning to them. For he certainly seemed to know more about them than I did—the reason I’d been drawn to him in the first place.

“You have chosen wisely, my son,“ he went on to say, “for seldom has one, so young, ever slipped past the Magician and the wall of illusion that surrounds him, without falling prey to his magic. If you want to see the face of God, you’ll have to remove the Magician’s mask from your face. Made in the image ’n’ likeness of God, you’ll have to tear down the facade, behind which you hide, if you want to see yourself as you really are—for the only mask you can safely wear, without being destroyed by it, is the one God specifically fashioned for you alone.

“In looking to the void—the space created by the emotional departure of your soul from the illusory way of life you’ve inherited from your parents—for the help you’ll need as you attempt to find this mask, you have, once again, chosen wisely, my son. In your fear, however, of letting go of the life the Navy has imposed upon you, to embrace that of your own soul, you’ve gotten bogged down in this limbo, or gray area between heaven and hell. For you have yet to learn the lesson of the void, that everything you seek is all right here within you.“

“What am I to do now?“ asked I of the more civilized aspects of my nature who, in their ongoing feud with the more uncivilized parts of me, had never won a single round in the debate over this question, and then wondered why I’d thrown out their unworkable old solutions, along with those of the beastly neighbors beneath them.

Having been encouraged to imagine my way out, did I slip into a region of the brain where I could go without having to act like a beast, one day, and a god, the next. Only I wasn’t too sure I’d found the place until the voices in my head had dropped me off there, in their own picturesque way.

“The uncivilized run around like chickens with their heads chopped off,“ gave I some thought to the unthinkable side of nature. “They worry me with the half-baked ideas they concoct and force down the throats of unsuspecting souls like me, as if their solutions were the only way to go. And they wonder why I don’t ever take them very seriously.“

So off I went to fill the hole these images invariably left behind whenever I slipped into this region of the brain to find the words to express myself in a more civilized manner.

A new breed of men, the reservists differed from the low life Neanderthals as much as did the Cro-Magnon men of prehistoric times. A more intelligent and sensitive lot, they hated, with a passion, their indentured servitude to a lower form of life, and rued the day they had ever gotten involved in this country’s military solution to the problems in Vietnam. However much they indulged in grass, hashish, or acid to escape the hellish conflict within themselves over their participation in this war, they nevertheless remained faithful to the wives and fiancées they’d left behind. In spite of their disaffection with the Navy and the war in Vietnam, they still performed their tasks, only to the beat of the rock music to which they constantly subjected themselves, to drown out the screaming of their souls in righteous indignation over their complicity. More often than not were they standing up for what they believed, and at least confronting the lifers before they would agree to carry out those commands that offended their sensibilities in any way. And because I seemed to speak to something hidden deep within their beings, they unconsciously adopted me as the rebel for their cause, the white knight who might just free them from themselves.

The lifers, on the other hand, feared this new breed of man, who dared to stand up to them and question their authority. Like outcasts, the lifers had flocked to the Great Gray Whore, only because she appeared to give them what this society otherwise withheld from them—a reason for living. Driven to serve the soul of this sick society, these patriots of the Great Gray Whore searched in vain through the brothels of the Far East for her ever-illusive form. In their quest for the Great Prostitute, the genie who could fulfill their every desire, they turned to the Spirits of Alcohol. Instead of releasing the genie bottled up within them, they aroused, from his slumber, the ogre who ruled over her, the instinctive beast hidden within us all—Hyde. Because Hyde gave them what they wanted, they grew fond of the horny old devil. Then, one day, they ran into their own shadowy perception of the white knight, hiding out within a lowly peon named Drury, and grew fearful; for somewhere, in the back pages of their minds, they recalled a tale from the days of old, in which the white knight slays the beast.

And in the middle stood the majority of the crew who, unlike the lifers, still had some semblance of a conscience to which the white knight could appeal. Caught up in this tug-of-war for their souls, when push came to shove, they often fell prey to the ways of their animal natures. In their inability to interpret the language of the body, they easily lost their heads when confronted by the rawness of their desires. With their heads in the clouds, and their feet mired down in clay, were they driven to live like the gods, one day, and the beasts of the earth, the next; for this, they believed, was the fate of those who lived in the middle.

While neither lifers nor reservists would have much to do with each other, those who lived in the middle associated freely with the members of both factions. By at least keeping open the paths of communication between the two sides, they seemed to temper some of the hostility each side felt for the other. For now, they were the glue that tenuously held the crew together.

Operator: As so it must, for what has been set in motion by “me” cannot be undone.

Caller: Cannot “I” breathe new life into “me-world”?

Operator: Nay says “I”. As the east tower fell so must the power of Capitalism to the west, before it takes the whole world with it.

Caller: Is there nothing we Ninevites can do to stave off this mass extinction?

Operator: To self-destruct or destroy “me”, that is the question.

And so did the last line of communication “I” had with “me” fall short of its mark, into a great heap, the size and scope of which had never been seen.

Was I guilty of having been derelict in the performance of my duties? Indeed I was, for I’d left my soul to drown in a sea of unconscious behavior. Having performed a minor miracle, staying on top of all this instinctive behavior, I had yet to rescue her from the clutches of the Great Gray Mother of Instinct. In other words, I had yet to find my way in real life. Because the way I should go remained so unclear to me at the time, I couldn’t hold onto it for very long without its vanishing from my grasp. I had a choice, either I played with my self, that is, I played along with the Navy’s program for me or I played, once again, with my old imaginary or real—depending on how one viewed the matter—childhood playmate, my soul. Whereas I’d made the right choice when I rescued her from the sea in the metaphysical realm, at the same time, I had offended the Great Gray Whore on the physical plane. Indeed, I was beginning to see just how difficult it is to serve two masters.

By means of a simple torpedo had my soul brought home to me not only the threat of death ’n’ destruction, but also the promise of new life. In her own way, had she forced me to rise above my feelings of powerlessness, to stand tall against the raw power of Nature. In other words, she had tricked me into momentarily embracing a whole new approach to life, one in which I could indeed walk on water or at least overcome the severe limitations of a purely instinctive existence.

The first person I met was Greg. From Los Angeles, he was the gregarious magnet that drew us all together. In build, he reminded me of a lanky turtle without its shell, for from out of his rounded shoulders protruded a long skinny neck on top of which sat a head he always held cocked slightly forward and off to one side. He stood his ground, though, against the taunts he incurred around his slow, deliberate movements and somewhat effeminate mannerisms. Gifted with an ability to draw, he rose above the herd mentality of his tormentors by drawing satirical caricatures of them. In his hate for the Navy, he regularly smoked marijuana and, on occasion, dropped acid with another shipmate to escape the pain of it all.

Shortly thereafter, Greg introduced me to Harold, a rabbity-looking fella from Collinsville, Illinois. Of slight build, Harold was a very warm and gentle person, who approached others with his nose twitching as nibbled on one of his fingers or puffed on a cigarette, like a novice smoker. With his big watery brown eyes fixed elsewhere, on some distant worry, he often had little to say. When he did, he never spoke an unkind word about anyone, even the lifers. For unlike Greg ’n’ I, his dislike of the Navy had been tempered by the more satisfying position, he held, as a clerk typist in the ship’s office. Besides, he had a wife and a newborn baby back home to think about. For he had apparently gotten her pregnant before they were married—before he was ready to assume that much responsibility in his life.

The next person, I met, was Marty, a wild and high-spirited stallion, who would soon prove much more difficult to keep corralled than either a boxed turtle or a caged rabbit. For he would go on to become one of the most outspoken members of the crew beside myself. While he could never accept such a position for himself, he deeply respected the stand I had taken against the Navy and stood by me to the very end.

From a tough working class neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland, Marty never cowered from speaking his mind and challenging the other members of the crew. For he hated the Navy and the animallike behavior of the lifers. A hard worker, he always followed orders, in spite of the abuse he suffered at the hands of some of the lifers for expressing his views. And even though Marty stood up for what he believed, he always acted within the confines of the law he felt bound to obey. As an electrician’s mate did he short-circuit many a lie the lifers lived by. An answer to a prayer, Marty was more than a like-minded companion, for he was another voice in the desert.

And even though I didn’t know it at the time, I was the missing link, that hypothetical intermediate between the myth of man and his animal ancestry. Indeed, I was the next great step in the evolution of mankind, which so many of us long to see and yet bitterly detest when we do.

“Mr. Drury, Sir,“ smartly snapped the Lieutenant.

“Thank you, Mr. Smith,“ snapped the XO. “You may go now.“

“Have a seat, Mr. Drury,“ the XO said in a rather annoyed tone of voice as the door slammed shut behind the Lieutenant.

“What’s this, I hear, about your refusing to eat?“ he asked.

“I don’t wanna eat anymore,“ I managed to squeak out as I struggled to control the trembling of my body with fear.

“Poppycock!“ he shouted in my face. “You will eat, Mr. Drury, because I order you to. Do you understand?“

“No Sir, I don’t,“ I replied rather indignantly.

Failing to elicit an obedient response from me, he decided to take a different tack. “Did you know, Mr. Drury,“ he began, “that by refusing to eat you are willfully destroying government property?“

Puzzled, I asked, “How’s that, Sir?“

“When you enlisted in the Navy,“ he replied, “you signed your life over to the government of the United States to be used as it sees fit. In effect, you became government property. Whatever befalls you befalls the property of the government of the United States. So you see, Mr. Drury, you could quite possibly be charged with the willful destruction of government property if, in the continuation of this ridiculous fast of yours, you harm yourself in any way.“

Irked by his insistence that I was government property, I responded rather coldly, “I see.“ For I wanted so badly to tell him I was not some soulless piece of meat the Navy could order around like a zombie, but bit my lip instead.

Having threatened to write me up if I didn’t eat, he again ordered me to eat.

Once again, I refused.

“You leave me no choice then,“ he concluded as he rose from his
chair and hurried out the door.