N a p a l m H e a l t h S p a : R e p o r t 2 0 0 6

KEVIN HAYES

Because The System Is Closed

because the system is closed, only a radical intrusion from outside will change it, so I dig a long tunnel intending to reach & claim possession of our head of state’s office by subterranean means that will remain secret even from the secret police. . .I finish the tunnel underneath our head of state’s desk in the dead of night so that no one will hear me when I break thru the floor & enter the office waiting in my hole for our head of state to return to his office when the morning comes. . .an exercise of patience enables me to demonstrate enough self-restraint to resist the urge to go to his room & to overthrow him while he is sleeping in his bed, an urge that if indulged, will no doubt be frustrated since guards will inevitably capture me before I reach my objective, so I realize my revolution will only be successful if I remain hidden underneath his desk until his day working at it begins since he will leave his guards outside the door never suspecting that an enemy has already infiltrated his office. . .

our head of state is an early riser because the sustenance of his iron tyranny over the nation is a big job so he finds it necessary to begin exercising his authority as people are waking up in the morning afraid that if he allows them even a moment to breathe free, they will be tempted to mount a rebellion against him & he is especially eager to arrive at his desk this morning since he will be signing an order empowering his secret police to arrest & to execute the suspected traitors their espionage work had identified. . .before our head of state can sign the order he intends to sign, I leap out from my hiding place beneath his desk & depose him from his position as our head of state knocking him unconscious, tying him up with rope I have brought, gagging his mouth & throwing him down in the hole I have come from so that I can ignite a movement able to destroy the government he had established as his instrument of oppression without his interference since he will be unable to make a sound or climb up out of the hole when he wakes up. . .imitating our head of state’s voice, I pick up the phone & call an assistant telling him to contact all the television stations because I want to address the nation live in an hour & the assistant immediately does exactly what I have asked never suspecting that I am not our head of state since my imitation of his voice has been perfect. . . while the assistant follows my directive making the arrangements I require, I stand in front of a mirror inside the office scrupulously disguising myself as our head of state doing the job with so much care & skill that even his own mother will think that I am he needing to pass myself off as our head of state so that I can mount a secret revolution seizing the reigns of government & transfiguring the nation preparing to announce over all the television networks that I have discovered & disbanded a faction of secret police who had been formed to arrest & execute citizens without our knowledge using the occasion to announce my determination to return the country to its ideal of personal liberty. . .

Breaking The Code

burning to decipher the sad mystery world surrounding me on all sides, I plunged into the heart of it & worked all night trying to break the code, the code that hid the answers to the endless questions haunting me, answers that would satisfy me & allow me to rest at last if I could only know them & bind them fast to my memory recording them in the depths of my blood so they would never fail. . .I wandered down a thousand blind alleys as I did the work, a thousand blind alleys that only led me to a thousand dead ends frustrating me in my pursuit of knowledge, but I summoned up all the tenacity I could gather & continued my attempt to break the code despite the exhaustion that threatened to overwhelm me determined to decipher the mystery world before I would let myself sleep. . .at last, however, fatigue undermined all my effort & I collapsed snoring to the floor, a collapse that would seem to any outside observer to be definitive evidence of my defeat, evidence that I knew to be most deceptive since I could see & remember everything that happened after I fell into the world of dream. . .

I found that the world of dream was illuminated by a radiance surpassing any I had ever witnessed on earth, a radiance that penetrated the code & exposed the mystery it had once concealed, the revelation that all I had perceived to be lost had always been present waiting to be found, a discovery that could not be made until the code was broken & the mystery was solved. . .I saw a field choked full of those who were dying & I raced from patient to patient trying to save all of the lives that I could, but I failed in each & every attempt & I watched each body vanish as soon as he or she had exhaled his or her last breath, a vanishing act that was repeated over & over again no matter what I did to stop its repetition until the field was empty & I was left alone in it, the light diminishing with every death until the last one happened & the darkest night I had ever seen descended upon the field. . .I thought at first that the broken code had revealed nothing but the knowledge of annihilation, a premature judgment that I was forced to reevaluate when the light surged back even more luminous than it had been before, a light that cultivated the eternal return of those who had appeared to die, all of them coming back to me, their mortal wounds healed by the light, a return that graced us & joined us together with a flash of ecstasy that would always endure. . .