Chapter 20: HEAD

t the age of forty-two, I can look back now and see that my childhood hallucinations had repercussions far beyond their original trauma. I clearly remember thinking that they would eventually be the cause of my death, that perhaps someday when I was older and my heart no longer beat with the strength and single-minded ferocity of youth, that it would fail under the strain that these nightmares put on my system. While I know now that I had the details wrong, the prediction of my death was oddly borne out in a self-fulfilling prophesy.

I began to look in the school library for anything that might explain these visions. I passed over the Manor Oaks / William R. Bowie School library in favor of the New Hyde Park Public Library, where in a search for information I found books on dreams, books on psychology, books on the workings of the brain, and past copies of the magazine Scientific American. I began to read, and to research. This nine-year-old boy became a daily sight in the reference room.

Steeped in the save-the-world hopes of 1964 science, I was a convert. I knew, from these things, that if only I could gather enough information, I could solve anything. Build a treehouse? Home improvement section. Phase of the moon on the day I was born? American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac. What kind of cloud is that? Field Guide to the Atmosphere.

Friends? Well, okay, there wasn't too much on that. But who needed friends when there was so much to learn about? I remember a TV show. Had four guys in it. Friends, they were, and they seemed to be having fun all the time. I liked it. But every week, they'd be the same as the week before. No smarter. And what was the point of that?

Over the years I began to amass a reference library. Encyclopediae Brittanica and Americana, the eighteen-volume Motion Picture Guide, the OED. Barlowe's Tables. Foreign dictionaries and crossword puzzle reference books. A book containing nothing but the first million digits of pi. Art books with the complete works of Monet, and Van Gogh, and Da Vinci, and Michaelangelo. Field Guides to Damn Near Everything.

I chose computers as a career, as I saw in them a way to organize and deal with this information I've been collecting. If these machines could somehow be used to store all these things I've been chasing, perhaps that would make my life a little easier...

Then the Internet arrived.

Suddenly vast new stores of information opened up, and I gnawed at it like a starving wolf attacking its prey. The computer became not a way to reduce the data that I carried with me from day to day, but a wellspring of more data.

Too much data. Dow Jones Averages. Neilsen numbers. Refrigerators with digital thermometers to tell you the exact temperature of your orange juice. Box office receipts in place of movie reviews.

I began to question to myself the value of all this data, whether I was losing myself in all the information. I was drowning in information. Data smog. I searched out a book on the phenomenon. Then another. And a third. Then magazine articles...

And I knew that I had died. Killed myself. One last hallucination, then numericide.

I was dead, I was sure of that. Yet I still saw the eagle, as she flew in through the museum entrance. She flew directly at me, and as the wind from her wings blew back my hair and I was enveloped in the heavy golden feathers, the crowd's roar rose to a deafening intensity behind me.