THE TRIQUETRA OF LIFE: Wisdom, Wealth, and Wellness

A Chapter Fifteen Excerpt

Path Perilous: My Search for God and the Miraculous

The Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde of Adolescence.

1958[i], 1959[ii], ages 16 & 17

My father’s hand had steered me toward truth, but no strap could ward off what awaited me in adolescence. Now the enemy was not dishonesty—it was my body itself, turning strange, unpredictable, and frightening.

I spent most of my time just reading or watching horror stories—anything about the supernatural. I couldn’t get enough of it. Whenever Dr. Jekyll[iii] morphed into that freaky Mr. Hyde, a shiver ran up my spine. Could that happen to me? I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Just a couple of years ago, my dad taught me how to shave without cutting myself. But now hair was sprouting all over my body, as if it had a mind of its own—taking over, deciding who I’d become. I’d stand at the mirror, palm pressed against my smooth, warm cheek. My stomach tightened—dreading that some future ugliness would stare back at me. An ugly ghoul lay coiled inside me, waiting to pounce—uninvited.

I was hooked on Edgar Allan Poe’s stories—The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Cask of Amontillado. Dark, twisted stuff. But what gripped me most were his victims—frozen, powerless, as if their own bodies had betrayed them, their own flesh turned against them. I could almost feel it: the terror of being unable to move at will. Trapped in this faulty body of mine, I felt the same.

I’d fainted for no reason any doctor could name.

That fainting episode left me shaky, clammy, hollowed out—as if something unseen were digesting me from within. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to get a driver’s license. Like that pendulum in a pit—swinging back and forth, closer and closer—its cool breath swishing past my face, whispering death with every pass, threatening to cut into what I needed to survive.

I was anemic. Weakness clung to me like a wet cloak, its chill seeping through my bones. Maybe that’s why I folded inward while my brothers—all muscle and laughter, bursting with energy, getting taller by the month—strode past me without effort. I couldn’t figure out how they were so exuberant, and I couldn’t be.

So I hid in books, drawn to Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables. Its pages smelled of dust and old paper, whispering a curse that seemed to flow in my blood. Maybe that was why I felt doomed by fate … as if a wicked ancestor had stolen title to land two centuries ago, stamping that crime into my DNA.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet took that idea further—my ancestor, not just a thief, but an avenging ghost, stalking the halls of our house, hunting some debt in me to settle. One night, I heard footsteps when everything was silent and everyone was asleep. My heart slammed against my ribs. I didn’t move. Was it truly footsteps—or only sound bending in the dark? Then I saw a shape—indistinct, half-formed. A ghost … or my imagination conjuring what I feared most. My skin crawled. The hairs on my neck rose. I couldn’t shake it. I lay there, wide-eyed, the hours uncoiling into an endless night.

Was my great-great-grandfather trying to tell me something? Warn me? Was treachery coming—like a twisted fate running through our bloodline—a force I had no way to outrun?

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ENDNOTES  

[i] Time Line 1958: Bobby Fisher wins US Chess Championship at 14 years old. First man-made fusion experiment. Explorer I, the first successful US satellite. William Faulkner, “US schools have degenerated to become babysitters”. South Pacific debuts.The film Bridge on the River Kwai wins 7 Oscars; a CO2 gas analyzer in Hawaii records 314 ppm, but which 50 years later reads 387 ppm. Fidel Castro attacks Havana. Film noir thriller Touch of Evil with Charlton Heston and Orson Welles. Charles De Gaulle is Premier of France. Boris Pasternak refuses the Nobel Prize for literature.

[ii] Timeline 1959: Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba with a revolution. United States Vice President Richard Nixon and the Soviet Union’s Premier Nikita Khrushchev engage in an impromptu debate. The Dalai Lama and tens of thousands of Tibetans flee to India after China Invades Tibet. Hawaii becomes the 50th state. NASA launches the Pioneer 4 spacecraft. United States – Canada – St. Lawrence Seaway is completed. The Antarctic Treaty is signed in Washington. It was signed by twelve countries. The Luna 2 spacecraft crashed into the Moon. The Film Ben-Hur premieres. The first pictures of Earth from space were taken by Explorer 6.

[iii]Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is the original title of a novella first published in 1886 by the Scottish author, Robert Louis Stevenson. The work is commonly associated with the rare mental condition often spuriously called “split personality,” referred to in psychiatry as dissociative identity disorder, where within the same body there exists more than one distinct personality. In this case, there were two personalities–one good and the other evil.

From the memoir-in-progress, nearing publication:
Path Perilous: My Search for God and the Miraculous
—a spiritual epic for truth-seekers, contemplative mystics, and all who long for God.

Visit www.RMDellOrfanoAuthor.com