Lucy spent a long and bloody birth getting out of the infinite canal into the light of the day. Her mother, forty years old, nearly died on the operating table. Lucy didn't want to go out there; it was nice and comfortable right in that snug intensive care unit inside her mom. But now her mom didn't want her there anymore and was kicking her out. From such primal rejection, she came to the conclusion that nobody wanted her. Thus, she gave the world the silent treatment. She kept her mouth shut.
She was in a ward full of screaming, crying babies. She didn't understand why she had to go through this. It was all so humiliating. The lights were too bright and the sounds were too shrill. These big things in white dresses on two legs would come by and shove tubes down her throat. Lucy spit baby slime in their faces. She hated these things she had been born among.
As she grew up in her first several months, she continued to observe stubborn silence. When her mother held her and cooed: "Say Momma, see me, I'm Momma, dear", she stiffened in her arms and looked away, anywhere but into her eyes. She wasn't going to play these stupid games with her.
After she was two years old, her parents wondered what was wrong with her. She was crawling around okay, but she still hadn't said a word. After all, why should she? After what her mother did to her, she wasn't going to give her an inch.
They took her to a doctor and the doctor told them to take her to a mental health specialist who sadly reported to them that she was autistic. Her parents were horrified; what did they do to their baby girl to make her this way? They tried to be warmer to Lucy, but that only made her squirm further away. Lucy was repulsed by these creatures.
They had a bunch of toys in Lucy's room, hoping she would play with something and come out of wherever she was. Lucy only sat in a corner and stared morosely at it. She speculated that where the walls met were the entrance to another world by which she could escape this whole thing.
One day, when her parents weren't hounding her to play with the toys, she figured what the heck, she may as well see what this stuff does. You never know - something here may help her escape. She got quickly bored with a set of building blocks with funny patterns on them; they didn't seem to be getting any results. She pulled the stuffing out of a stupid looking teddy bear with an idiotic grin on its face; it's what she'd like to do with one of the big people who took care of her. Then, over towards one corner, she saw a peculiar looking toy that had black and white keys on it.
Just as an experiment, she put her finger on one of the keys. She was startled at a sweet tinkling sound it made. What was this thing anyway? She put her finger on another key that made another sound in another pitch that sounded well in relation to the first key she put down. Then she put two fingers on both keys at once; they sounded so beautiful together. Keeping the fingers the same distance apart, she played the next interval up; it still sounded nice. Hmmm, this is very interesting, she noted (although not in words, you understand, for she had no words in her baby brain). All afternoon, she experimented with what keys sounded good together. She began to get the hang of a sense of rhythm to go with it. By the end of the day, she had composed a kind of baby sonata on a toy piano and was improvising on it.
Meanwhile, the musical sounds transported her into another world. She saw lovely colors unfolding that entranced her. Yes, this was her escape route.
When she was three years old, she still refused to talk or communicate with anyone. She preferred to remain in her own world. She was able to walk around and was capable of feeding herself, albeit without any silver instruments, which she regarded as derogatory. She wasn't going to give in to the social customs of her culture, no matter what.
In the living room of her house (yes, it was her house and nobody else's), she stumbled upon a marvelous discovery. It was a huge version of her baby thing; a grand piano that no one really played and just kept there for appearances. She laid her little kid fanny up on the bench and proceeded to play. O, this sounded so much better than stupid plastic thing in her kiddy room. She ran her hands up and down the keys like a master concert pianist. She made up tunes that transported her into profound regions of kaleidoscopic inner space.
Her mother listened carefully from another room adjacent to the living room. She was careful not to come in, because from past experience, she knew Lucy would instantly stop and act dumb again. She smiled to herself. By Golly, this kid has talent! She'd get a music teacher for her right away!
However, Lucy wouldn't have anything to do with a music teacher. If the music teacher attempted to show her how to do things like play scales and read music, she'd scream and rage at him, throwing valuable objects at him. Lucy was going to do this on her own or never.
She did, however, discover a valuable instruction aide - the family record player. She would play classical pieces of music over and over at full blast, to the consternation of her parents. For some reason, she was not a bit interested in jazz or contemporary popular music, which she rather hated. If they asked her to turn it down, she would scream, rage, and bang her head on the walls until the plaster came out. They finally allowed her to have her way, figuring maybe this would get her out of her shell somehow.
After Lucy had immersed herself in this music for awhile, she attempted to play what she heard on the grand piano. Each time, she played it perfectly the first time. Not only that, she would play an elaborate improvisation on it the next time. Then she got to the point where she could combine the styles of two or more composers all at once, with a bit of her own style thrown in. Her parents and friends they brought over were utterly amazed. This kid was some kind of savant like a young Mozart.
After awhile, Lucy would get so into it, she didn't particularly care whether anyone listened or not. After all, people had the status of pieces of furniture to her. It was only if they tried to interfere that she reacted against them.
There was one thing she couldn't stand, however. If they started clapping or cheering her on, she would run out of the room, holding her hands to her ears. She did not like this sound because it clashed with the beautiful sounds she was making.
Lucy finally said her first word at the age of five years old. She noticed a runover frog steaming out on the asphalt in the street in front of her house. Idly, she picked it up and started putting bits and pieces of it into her mouth, and found it tasted rather colorful. There were many shades of gray and green in the taste.
Another kid accosted her and said: "Hey, dummy, you're not supposed to eat that. Don't you know that can make you sick? Those are FROG-GUTS!"
Yet another kid said: "Oooh, gross, Lucy's eating FROG-GUTS!"
Lucy ignored them, but, with frog-guts slithering down her mouth, heartily said: "FROG-GUTS! Ooooh! FROG-GUTS!" This word became her word for anything and everything.
Although her parents tried to send her to a special school to get her reading, writing, and arithmetic skills, she just couldn't get it. The teachers, as patient as they were trained to be, became somewhat exasperated with a kid who could only say, "Frog-guts". Her I.Q. was tested to be about 30. The teachers advised her parents to have her institutionalized, but her parents preferred to take care of her themselves, so guilty did they feel.
However, her parents felt somewhat embarrassed about having a kid around the house who kept screaming the word, "frog-guts". They got so they didn't want to have their friends over anymore.
At the age of 9, Lucy was institutionalized.
Lucy hated the institution. She hated its glaring lights which reminded her of the dreadful place she got into this whole mess in. There were a bunch of other kids who either couldn't speak or would speak gibberish all the time. They'd rock back and forth or bang their heads on the walls and the floors.
They gave her pills which made her feel woozy, but she soon learned to pretend to swallow them and spit them out somewhere else, an old trick of the trade of inmates of the place.
Fortunately, there was a music therapy room and that was where she could escape to her own world. The attendants were rather amazed at her ability and let her have the run of the music room. The piano had some missing notes and was out of tune, but it would do. She also learned how to play the violin, guitar, and saxophone that was there, again with no need for a teacher.
When she turned on the verge of puberty, she became aware of peculiar sensations between her legs and would often rub herself there for the rather pleasurable feelings they gave her. She noticed these feelings were somehow connected with boys, which made her resentful because she didn't want to need other humans.
A few boys kept hanging around with her and wanted to take her to private places where they could remove her clothes and stick these organs of flesh between her legs. She felt very disconnected at these times like she was just using them as they were using her. She would roll her head back and forth, screaming "Frog-guts! Frog-guts!' in a mixture of repugnance and orgasm. The boys would be taken aback after this and would cease to have interest in her.
She couldn't understand this phenomenon, sex, at all, but figured that was what these creatures, including this damned body she was born into, needed occasional doses of, like food or taking a shit.
One boy she met was another autistic. He was rather shy around her and could only communicate by gestures. He loved to hear her play the piano and other musical instruments. He was rather adept at drawing pictures. His pictures were rather like surreal artists like Salvador Dali, although he had never seen such pictures. He just drew pictures of his own inner world. He saw funny patterns in the air and surrounding living organisms, and would draw pictures of these.
Often they would hang out together in the music room, she playing music and he drawing pictures of what the music suggested to him. That was the extent of their relationship. They felt no desire to have sex. The very idea of touching was repugnant to them. Sometimes she would sing, "Frog-guts" like a grand opera virtuoso. He would gesture in rhythm like a conductor.
This would be the most perfect relationship she would have.
The artist boy was taken away to another institution and she became rather despondent. For weeks and weeks, she banged her head on the floor, wailing, "Frog-guts! Frog-guts!" The doctors couldn't figure out what had gone wrong with her and upped her doses of medication.
One time she happened to overhear some kid playing Ravi Shankar in his room. The music was so different from any music she had ever heard and she was intrigued. She rather liked the difference in scale from music of the West.
As she became immersed in it, she remembered. She remembered being in another time and place where the culture was very different. The women wore long flowing dresses and danced in circles. She worshipped a man who was colored purple. For years, she sat cross-legged in an upright position and she lived as a hermit in a cave in the mountains. For years, she would gaze at Visions of Light, rather like what she saw when she played music.
In this culture, it was okay to be the way she was. They did not lock her kind up in institutions there; in fact, they worshipped them as special, as people who know a Great Secret. She could just hang out on the streets and stare out into her space within all she wanted there.
She wept at the memory. She wanted to be back There again. She had never wanted to be born into this time, this place.
That night she began composing music like what she heard on the piano and tried playing it on the violin. She went further and further inwards with the music until she was One with the Great Frog-Gut God in the Sky.
The doctors decided to take a risk with her. They were so amazed by her musical talents that they would have her do a performance in public. They weren't sure how she would react to this. She might come out or she might withdraw in shock.
She was not particularly bothered about being on a stage. All she wanted was to get her hands on that amazing grand piano. She couldn't understand why all those people were there, but she chose to ignore their presence.
Her hands moved skillfully up and down the keyboard and she was entranced by the beauty of the sounds she could create. So was the audience. They were riveted on the edge of their seats. Never had they heard such original compositions in such unusual scalar patterns. It was like something out of this world.
It was when her hands tired of making music and she stopped that the audience gave her a standing ovation. She screamed and ran off the stage, her hands over her ears, yelling at the top of her lungs: "FROG-GUTS! OOOOH! FROG-GUTS!"
The audience was non-plussed. The medics captured her and shot her up with sedatives as she squirmed in their arms.
It was decided after this that maybe public performances weren't the best thing for her. They decided to give her a room of her own with the best grand piano money could buy. They would record her performances candidly, then release them to the public. After all, something like this would be good publicity for their institution.
Lucy became the famous autistic composer. Her CD's became a great hit and she was internationally renown. She made billions of dollars. They tried to give her the money, but she didn't quite understand what to do with all that green paper. She would use it as either toilet paper or as menstrual rags. After that, the institution decided they'd spend it for her. They bought her a house of her own and gave her all the musical producing instruments she could ever desire. They left her completely alone, leaving food and necessities outside her door. Lucy was in a permanent artist's retreat. A recording studio was set up in her music room which would automatically switch on whenever she began playing, then critics would assess what should be released to the public. She produced thousands of CD's this way, all of which were hits.
However, when Lucy turned fifty, she suddenly lost interest in composing music. They tried every kind of therapy they could to get her back into it, but she'd scream at them to go away, often throwing her feces at them. She would just stare out into her backyard and daydream about the artist boy she once knew a long time ago and indulge in memories of the other world where she once was before she was in this one, the world where it was okay to be in inner space. She would stare intently at something like a flower in her backyard for hours and hours utterly merging with its essence.
She stopped eating. Her heartbeat, breathing, and brainwaves came slower and slower. They tried to put intravenous tubes into her body, but to their consternation, her body refused to metabolize it. The best medical experts in the country were called in, but they couldn't figure it out, having never seen anything like it. The only thing they could compare it to is yogis who are consciously able to control what are usually unconscious functions.
On the very minute that she was born fifty-two years ago, she peacefully died. With her dying breath, she said: "From Frog-Guts I come, To Frog-Guts I return." For the first time in her life, she smiled.