The Truman Show

Well, no long journey is complete until you have the hull lashed firmly to the dock in home-port, and this voyage has a ways to go. But Big Mama has joined Raven in a special place now. She is still with us, still engaged, but living in an alternate reality.

I finally got it yesterday. It is not unusual, the place she is, and it even has a name, even if it is not listed yet in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. Not that I am saying Big Mama is crazy. Far from it.

She has always been a woman of extraordinary determination- that is what got her to college, first in her family to attend one, and then to New York City, out of the morass of the Ohio River Valley. She is highly engaged- better said, almost fixated- on figuring out the riddle of what has happened to her.

It was not a good lunch- too early for the Dementia Twins, I guess, and things went downhill after the bank called in the morning and informed me that there were insufficient funds to do something I needed to do with the Mouse Guy, and that meant the morning was thrown into a cocked hat, and I needed to make a trip to the bank to throw some of my paper at the problem.

That cascaded into everything else that disintegrated the day. I got to the bank and gave them a thousand off my checking account to make Big Mama’s healthy enough to get through this cycle, then took the back way over to Potemkin Village, realizing as I rolled over the low sandy hills that the stupid Bluesmobile’s power steering was failing.

Crap. Put it on the list of things to be done, along with emptying Raven’s office and getting started on clearing out both garages and policing up the leaves.

The Dementia Twins were just getting up when I arrived. Raven was seated on the end of the bed in some sort of red shorts- I hoped they were his and not Big Mama’s, and she herself was looking for shoes.

I busied myself with dressing Raven, trying to think through what I needed to do on the other end of town, at the Broker, and the Car Dealer and the Department of Motor Vehicles. Raven was quite out of sorts and unable to help me much. Then, suddenly he hitched up his sweat pants and headed on a mission out the door.

That would not be the way to start the day with an intrusion, so I stepped quickly behind him and took his hand.

They are sleeping at all hours of the day, and having just roused, things were not going well on the road to lunch. Leading Raven back into the apartment, I united Big Mama with her shoes and then ushered our little party to the elevator.

We rounded the corner and into the Challenged Dining Room, where we were among the first to arrive. Karla was on shift, a neat lady who is a grownup, unlike the young kids who make up most of the staff. She was wearing long dangly earrings with a spider web and little skulls in honor of the coming holiday. She provides a ray of humanity the younger gals can’t, interacting with Raven and getting him to offer up some of the old grimaces he used to do for emphasis. Now they are all that is left.

Raven insisted in sitting at my accustomed place, and as he plopped himself down, I realized I was starting to get sucked into an ADD sort of world where everything had to be same, day after day. I finally shrugged and moved his blue napkin and silverware over to where he was and let him be.

Karla’s strategy is to give him a little decaf coffee first, and bring the milk-with-ice once he gets rolling on the entrée. Otherwise, she said, “he drinks the whole thing and then gets dried out.”

Big Mama was eager to chat. She is great fun to talk, even if it is a little hard to figure out precisely what we are talking about. She remains vital and charming and her vocabulary is as vast as ever. I realized suddenly as Karla deposited the main plate (chicken loaf sliced onto a sandwich roll, Brussels sprouts, mashed potatoes and canned gravy) that she is living in the Truman Show.

Like I said, she is not crazy. She is just trying to figure this out, and has come to several working hypotheses.

Maybe it is the restored magic of the Turner Classic Movie channel that has blurred the boundaries of her reality, but there is clearly more to this than simple delusion.

The Truman Show was a 1998 film starring rubber-faced Jim Carey, back when he was funny. The title character was named Truman Burbank, a man who discovers he is living in a constructed-reality television show. All the people in his life have been paid actors, and the dramatic tension is created as he tries to find an escape from the set of the show.

That is precisely what Big Mama is trying to do: unwrap the riddle of what has become her, and why all these people around her, me included, are trying to do to her.

It is fun working through it, though a bit confusing.

The current state of play in her reasoning is about the twenty. That apparently is the total number of some group, divided into two squads of ten. I work with her on the composition of the number. Could it be her, and Raven and the three kids? Their kids, too?

That gets us to an even dozen, and I offered that up after encouraging her to eat half of her sandwich. She picks at her food now, and I was gratified that she had that much. I fed Raven some of her Brussels sprouts, and then let him forage through his plate.

“Do you thing they know?” she asked me earnestly after one of the young girls offered dessert before the main course.

“Of course they do, Mom, but it is just easier if they keep working. That way they are not only acting in the big show, they are actually working in it. Really, it is quite elegant.”

She nodded, and said: “I didn’t comb my hair this morning.”

“Nope. Dad wouldn’t give us any time.” It was around that time that I realized why there was such a feeling of déjà vu. The Truman Show, and the accompanying Truman Syndrome, are actually something that has been around a long time. Renowned science fiction author Philip K. Dick has explored this territory long before the screenplay for Jim Carey’s film was written. Several of his short stories and, most notably, a novel, Time Out of Joint, have explored the nature of reality, just as Big Mama is doing now.

In Dick’s novel, the protagonist lives in a created world in which his ‘family’ and ‘friends’ are paid to maintain the delusions. That mystery is at the heart of Big Mama’s musings. Being from Washington, DC,  where everything is an illusion, I find quite plausible.

My favorite version of Big Mama’s story is from way back. Robert a. Heinlein wrote a short story called “They” back in 1941. I ran across it in one of the anthologies I devoured as a kid, and the memory of it has stuck with me.

The premise is this: a guy is confined in a mental institution because he is suffering from a delusion that he is one of the few “real” entities in the universe, and that the other “real” entities have created the rest of the universe in a conspiracy to deceive him on the nature of reality. He has some great verbal sparring with the attending psychiatrist, who is trying to integrate him into the real world and abandon the delusion.

Of course, on the last page, Heinlein revealed that the s belief is true; and just as the protagonist is about to figure it out, the psychiatrist character directs that the scenery all be struck and the set changed.

So, I am playing the psychiatrist character at lunch, although I am just along for the ride, since I am not sure she is wrong.

Big Mama pointed out the people who owned the place- other Challenged people- and introduced me to the people at the adjoining table again. “It is strange how this all happened,” she said. “But why is crucial. How long can this go on?”

“Well, I imagine it can go on exactly as long as it needs to. Not that anyone gets out of it alive.”

“What I cannot figure out is why me? How did I get here? What was the criteria for selection?”

“Selection to what, Mom. You mean Potemkin Village?”

“The whole thing,” she said gesturing around. “The food, all these people. Are they all teachers?”

“I imagine there are a lot of teachers here, Mom. It just stands to reason. You got here because you fought to get out of Ohio, and go to New York, which is where you met Raven over there-“ I pointed at Dad who held a Brussels Sprout speared on a fork pointed generally toward the ceiling- “and then you came to Michigan.”

“You were all born here,” she said. “I think that is remarkable. Were you the first?”

“Yes, Mom. I was the first.” I have abandoned trying to contest where we were all born. If she wants us all born here as a function of the miraculous nature of this new world, that is fine with me.

“You seem like a first. That would make you one of the five,” she said brightly, patting my hand.

“I don’t think there is any question about that, Mom.” I said with a smile. See, this all goes back to something very ancient. The philosophical school of solipsism (Latin: solus/alone and ipse/self) holds that real knowledge of anything outside one’s own mind might not actually exist.

You can tag that back to the Greeks, if you feel like it,  The ancient pre-Socratic thinkers held that nothing really exists; and:

* Even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and,

* Even if something could be known about it, knowledge about it can’t be communicated to others.

Big Mama has come to that particular conclusion that that this is just a movie set, like the Truman Show, since it would not make sense as reality.

“You are right, Mom. It is all sort of unbelievable.”

“I did get out of Ohio,” she said. “Maybe that is part of it. Why we were selected to be in the twenty.”

“You were always a woman of fierce determination, Mom. Everyone knew that.”

“I want to do a map of all the airports. Annook left my car at one of them. I want it back. I have a plan.”

“Yes, cars are good, Mom. Making a map of where they are is a great project.” I was happy that I stole the license out of her purse last visit.”

“Then we can figure out who all these people are, and why they are doing what they do.”

Karla came by with some decaf for the Folks, and I took the fork out of Raven’s fist. “I am all over that, Mom.”

“It just doesn’t make any sense any other way.”

“I completely agree,” I said, and actually, I think I do.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com