WITHIN REACH
by David H Weinberger
Simone was frantically shaking all over, stepping back and forth in the same space, and jerking her head in all directions trying to find where the dragon had gone. She had never seen a dragon this close before. This one was so close she could see its individual metallic-colored scales, its bat-like wings flapping in the air, its serpent’s tongue jutting from its mouth, saliva dripping from sharp, yellowed teeth. She could smell the damp, earthiness of its cave from which it came and the lingering briny scent of ocean water still on its body. She was overcome with happiness at this unexpected visitor.
“Did you see that? Tell me you saw that awesome dragon. It flew by just inches from us! He was so close I could smell him.”
“Simone. I didn’t see any dragon. Perhaps it was a hallucination. Please. Try to calm down.”
“Calm down? With a real live dragon buzzing us? You’re kidding me!”
“You know I didn’t see the dragon. Come on Simone. Let’s keep walking and then get some lunch.”
“I don’t want any lunch. I want to see the dragon again. Let’s just wait and it will come back. I’m sure of it.”
Simone’s visions and her insistence on their reality were symptoms of her schizophrenia. The symptoms, hallucinations and hearing voices, started just two years ago, right after Simone started college. Simone’s mother and father had been seeking help since then and were assured that with the right combination of drugs and therapy, she could lead a fruitful and productive life. But Simone’s doctor told them it might take some time to zero in on the right combinations. She had recently started new medication but the symptoms continued.
Simone’s hallucinations consisted of dragons and their environments. The doctors had informed Simone and her parents that hallucinations usually revolved around aliens or government spies intruding into people’s lives. However, there was no telling exactly with individual hallucinations. Upon waking, walking with her parents, or sitting on the porch drinking coffee, Simone often saw dragons in the distance. Sometimes, there was a verdant forest, with sunlight filtered through the dense foliage giving the setting a subdued, ethereal feel to it. Other times it was a dark forest surrounded by imposing mountains. Most common were seaside cliffs, high above the water with dragons flying along the cliffs and wallowing in the sea foam.
More recently, Simone had been hearing voices telling her that the dragons were there to show her where she really belonged. That she was to return to them. ‘Please come home’ and ‘We are waiting for you’ were constant refrains Simone heard the past six months.
Since the onset of symptoms, Simone had dropped out of college and her mother had quit her job as a lawyer. Simone’s father continued to work in finance but with reduced hours so he could help out with Simone. They moved from Portland to Netarts, a small town on the Oregon coast, where they had a vacation cottage. They visited the cottage a few times a year, but Simone’s mother and father both felt the scenery and serenity were better for Simone than the bustle of Portland. Her parents had improved the cottage before they moved in to make it more comfortable and roomy for the three of them. They had installed a new, wide open kitchen where the three of them could cook meals and talk. They removed a wall into the dining room so whoever was not cooking could sit and still enjoy the company of the others. Her room was repainted and filled with all new furnishings. They had painted it together, shopped together, and now Simone had a private place of her own.
Simone and her mother went out together on a regular basis, the doctors recommending keeping Simone busy to lessen the impact of the hallucinations, delusions, and apathy that go along with schizophrenia. Today they were visiting Oceanside to walk around the town and do a bit of window shopping, two activities Simone found enjoyable.
“Simone. We’ll have lunch just here on the corner. If the dragon appears, we’ll be sure to see it. Does that work for you?”
“Alright. But I swear, if that dragon returns, I’m hopping a ride.”
They sat down at Brewer’s Corner and began to read the menu. The small Oregon beach town had a handful of restaurants, but Simone always liked this one and could enjoy an hour of peace as she ate her meal. Today, however, after having seen the dragon, she could not calm down enough to get any kind of pleasure from her meal.
Simone ordered a salad but simply moved it around on her plate with her fork. She had no desire to eat in spite of being quite hungry. The effort to lift the lettuce and tomatoes seemed too great.
“Mom, I don’t really feel like eating. I think I’m done.”
“But you haven’t eaten anything yet Simone. What’s wrong?”
“It’s just, I don’t know, I feel like I don’t belong here. Like something is missing. You guys have been great, but I’m just not comfortable.”
Simone pulled her knees up to her chest and looked sullenly at the horizon. She wanted the dragon to reappear. She wanted to show her mother that she was not hallucinating but was being visited by a dragon, a creature from her home. If she could show her mother, prove that there really was a dragon, then she would be saved from the constant misguided interference: the pills, the ongoing visits to doctors and shrinks, the insistence on saying hallucinations and delusions. But there was nothing but undulating waves, blue sky, and a few downy clouds.
“I want to go.” Simone declared. “Can we go, please? Let’s go.”
Simone’s mother packed up their few things, put money on the table, and they left the restaurant. This was a common occurrence: Simone suddenly changing her mind and demanding a different activity.
“Where do you want to go Simone?”
“Home. I want to go home.”
Once inside the Audi, Simone’s mother headed down the coast towards the cottage.
“You’re heading for the cottage.”
“Yes, baby, we are.”
“Not the home I meant. I meant my real home.”
“Simone, I’ve tried to understand, but I just can’t. This is your home. Mine too.”
“My home is different.”
“You already have a very nice home and we keep quite busy. We go on outings almost every day. On the weekends the three of us go hiking or boating. Last weekend we were canoeing at the lake. Your dad and I love you very much and would do anything for you. You have everything you need. But we need to stick together to deal with your illness. Does that make sense to you Simone?”
Simone lowered the window and stuck her head out into the warm air. With her hair billowing in the breeze, she was excited to see the dragon following along with the Audi. He was not as close this time but he was still quite clear to Simone. She smiled as she watched him cruise along above them with his large wings effortlessly gliding through the air keeping pace with the car.
Simone saw this dragon as a sign that she was going home, that this dragon was here for her. It made sense to her with the voices and their messages that this was true. And she looked forward to this return. Simone had come to love the dragons: whether evil, friendly, or shy and withdrawn. They were godlike creatures to her and she longed to run among them, to watch them battle, jet through the air and rampage through the forests, and to have one of her own. They were more real to her than the cottage, the towns she visited, the restaurants she ate in.
The only thing keeping her from this home of hers were her parents. She knew they meant her no harm, that they were looking out for her and wanted to help her. But they didn’t understand that this all kept her from returning. Simone knew she should be grateful and appreciate the life her parents were trying to create for her. But all the same, it was not home for Simone.
Worse still, they insisted that they could not see what she could see. Regardless of how clear things were to her, her parents and her doctors continued to call them hallucinations, simple sensory perceptions that only she was privy to.
“Come inside the car Simone, that’s dangerous.”
Simone did what her mother asked after taking a long last look at the dragon. She still wore her smile as she entered the car and closed the window.
“Listen,” Simone’s mother said, “I know you think you belong somewhere else. But you are home here with us. You’ve nowhere else to go. You remember, don’t you, your doctors told you that the things you see and hear are not real. You have to accept that only you can see them. No one else can. It’s not your life, it’s like a fantasy.”
Simone did not answer. She stared out the window and thought how frustrating it was that her parents could not see what she saw. She was saddened to know that her home was inaccessible to them. Simone had a such a clear vision of her place in the world. Her parents and her doctors could not change that. Medication could not change that. Simone knew she belonged among the dragons and she was just waiting for the right time to return.
Once they were at the cottage, they both sat on the porch swing drinking lemonades. Simone closed her eyes and began to doze off thinking of the dragons that were visiting her and thinking how lucky she was that they were now approaching her. She fell asleep listening to the voices only she could hear.
“That looks refreshing,” Simone’s father exclaimed as he came home from his early Friday workday. “How’d things go today?”
Simone awoke with a start.
“I saw a dragon today, Dad. But mom didn’t. She thinks it was a hallucination.”
“It probably was Simone. Your new meds will kick in soon and the dragons will be gone,” her father tried to comfort.
“You’re just like mom. I don’t want dragons to be gone. You know I love dragons and finally one actually tries to meet me and you two tell me to forget about it. I wish you could just believe me.”
Simone’s father leaned over to kiss his wife and whispered in her ear, “Tough day again?”
“It’s just getting worse.”
“I can hear you,” Simone interrupted. “And it’s getting better, not worse.” She stormed off to her room and her father took her seat.
“What happened today? She seems upset.”
“We were up at Oceanside. That’s where she saw the dragon. We were walking by Maxwell Point before lunch and apparently, a dragon appeared in the sky right in front of her. She’s been like this ever since.”
“Is she still taking her medication?”
“Of course. I give them to her every morning.”
“I thought the new meds would get rid of her symptoms; obviously, that’s not happening. We’ll talk to the doctors and get their opinion. Maybe they can adjust the meds again.”
“OK. But I still don’t get it. I mean, she could smell the dragon. That’s not normal, is it? When she was little, she was never interested in these things. Why now? I don’t understand this disease.”
“That’s just it. It’s the disease. There is no rational reason for her hallucinations. The doctors all said it would be difficult on Simone and on us. Lord knows that part is true. How ‘bout we take her for a walk tomorrow up at Cape Meares. The walks and the woods always seem to calm her down.”
“I don’t know if I want to go back up there.”
“But we’ve been to Cape Meares lots of times. She’s never seen a dragon there.”
“It’s different now Paul.”
“Sure it is, but I still think we should head up north with her. We have to keep her busy, get her out of the house. If she sees dragons, that’s fine. We’ll just let it go.”
Simone didn’t leave her room that evening. She ignored her parents’ calls and their gentle knocks on her door. She wanted to be left in peace. Simone sat at her desk looking out the window. She was surprised to see a small, dark blue dragon, no bigger than a crow, sitting on a tree branch. The dragon was looking back at Simone, gently flapping its wings and bobbing its crested head. Simone fell asleep at her desk staring at the dragon.
The following afternoon, Simone and her parents went for a walk on the cliffs at Cape Meares. It was a place of magical beauty for Simone, reminding her of the home she longed for, with pinion pines, Sitka spruce, and cedar surrounding the trail to the cliffs. At the end of the trail, the cliffs overlooked the Pacific Ocean. The cliff top was so far from the water though that it was like watching a silent movie. One could see the waves in the ocean and crashing upon the shore but hear nothing. It was as if it were another world down below that the family was lucky enough to spy upon.
Simone always liked these walks and would often hold her mother’s or father’s hand while strolling through the pine-needled pathways. Regardless of her age, she never outgrew the warm feeling of this forgotten childhood gesture. This Saturday afternoon was just as wonderful as always, with the greenery and the pine scent tickling her senses. When they left the all-consuming crowdedness of the forest and approached the expansive ocean, all blue water and blue sky, the same magnificent and powerful dragon which she had seen the previous morning came cruising up from the cliffs. His mystical eyes locked onto Simone’s as he swooped past the family and turned around in mid-air for another pass.
“He’s coming back!” Simone yelled.
The dragon flew along the edge of the precipice and approached the family again. Simone dropped her mother’s hand and ran towards the cliff’s edge as the dragon approached.
“Simone!”
With her toes perched on the pebbly edge, Simone stretched out her arms towards the dragon and jumped for home.
End
