Two Lives

There was a great struggle going on inside Professor Arturo Beneditti.

One day he would wake up early,  feeling positive, have a hearty breakfast, reach out for his neatly ironed coat, go out to work, be  involved and affectionate with his students, come back from an evening spent in stimulating discussions with friends, make love to his good wife and fall into restful dreamless sleep in her arms.

The very next morning, he would feel foul, lie in  bed for an hour with eyes fixed on the ceiling, forget his food, hurriedly dress in any old shirt, be late for work, get irritable with students, not feel like meeting anyone, get drunk, argue with the wife till she threw him out of the bedroom, storm around sleepless in the living room, till he had to masturbate to some porn or toss in a Valium to fall asleep.

The cycle repeated itself as regularly and as precisely as the Sun.  Beneditti was an intelligent man and he started keeping a journal to observe himself.  The weekends were especially hard. Since one of Saturday or Sunday he would be in low spirits and mope around the house while the wife cursed him for not mowing the lawn or washing the car. Work could still have been a refuge, but losing a holiday to depression was in itself depressing. The weeks when Saturdays were the "high" days, were marginally better, for he would then take his wife out to a dinner or a theater or a long drive to the beach with a friend and his flirtacious wife, and life would be good at least half the time. The other weeks would be worse as Sunday would be spent mostly in damage control.  Beneditti  intensely hoped that important  work dates would coincide with his "good" days. Sometimes that didn't work out, like March 31st turned out to be a bad day, and he totally lost his cool with the accountant who did his taxes, didn't file in time, and almost went to jail for it.  And the very next day he was jolly and mischievous enough to pull goofy April fool jokes that irritated and upset people. Sometimes the low days would be unusually productive though. Beneditti found he could complete a lot of boring work like grading or doing the dishes without being interrupted by hedonistic impulses on these days.

All efforts to "cure" himself came to naught. The psychiatrist thought he had bipolar disorder and prescribed medication for it, but she couldn't explain why the disorder would be so in sync with the calendar. The medication did not help and Beneditti decided to try out a therapy of his own. First he ordered chemical "happy hormones" from the market and took a course of it hoping to alleviate the symptoms of his low days.

But this worsened matters, for now he would feel deliriously happy on half the days (which wasn't so great either, it was like being drunk) and felt worse by contrast on others. He recorded all his darkest and happiest thoughts and realized there wasn't much of a connection between them. He was happy and sad for entirely unrelated reasons, which weren't even correlated through being opposites.  There was no central confusion in his life like a quest for the meaning of life, the question of existence of god, or an unconsummated love affair with a nymphet. Psychoanalysis, traditional medicine, shamanism, spiritualism, yoga, tai chi, cold baths, exotic gypsy remedies (one of which required him to get long dangling nipple rings and run bare-bodied through the streets while screaming "Teresa" under every window he passed by)  - nothing seemed to cure him.

After a while he decided that it wasn't really a disease but just another way of being - more like a handicap,  or a congenital condition to which contemporary society just wasn't too favorable, like a late riser, or a gay person in olden times. So he decided to keep it under wraps and instead concentrated on building his life around this problem.  He took teaching assignments that required him to work on alternate days. He would spend as much time possible sleeping on the low days so that he could work hard on the high ones. (This he perfected so much that he could  sleep for 14 hours on some days.)

Despite all these planned measures, things began taking a turn for the worse. People thought he was a bit crazy, and his colleagues avoided him, none of the grad students wanted to work for him, and he saw less and less of his friends. This sort of made his happy days sadder and his sad days angrier. The good wife had increasingly longer conspiratorial chats with girlfriends till one day she left him after a violent fight. He almost came close to losing his job but still he couldn't help feeling very happy and upbeat on the high days, and wrote some very uplifting messages to himself that he would arrange to have sent to himself by mail the next day.  The next day he would feel very low as usual, sometimes almost suicidal, tear up his own notes, and hate his own happy alter ego with a vengeance. Once the low Beneditti even arranged to murder his happy version by tying a time bomb under his own bed that was set to detonate the next day. But the problem was the happy Beneditti wasn't forgetful, and he just got up nonchalantly 5 minutes to the hour and defused it, before delivering a great seminar talk at the university.

This went on for a while till Beneditti had a wonderful idea.  He worked his backside off, wrote books that sold extremely well on the market (he used his own interesting life story to good effect), made a lot of money, and bought two properties - one near the North Pole and another near the South. He married two different women (this he had to do because no woman would agree to live permanently in the poles, and he did it very discreetly, and only after changing his faith) and lived with them in the two different homes, set up two different universities near his houses, where he had two different teams of graduate students (this he had to do because no student would agree to live permanently in the poles, and come winter in the North he would go South (like an Arctic tern) and vice versa after six months - and had an eternally happy and productive life, err... lives. Well almost - i.e. until he died. In transit.