Title: Psalm Bipolar

Author: IconJax

Feedback at: iconjax@webtv.net

Fandom: Oz

Pairing: Beecher/Keller

Rating: R,very mild...

Spoilers: spoilers up and through most recent season.It's my take on one possible tack next season might take....not the one Tom chooses, i hope.It is a short piece that is finished...just not down in cathod ray scratching yet

PSALM BIPOLAR
By IconJax


Tobias Beecher sat in the prison computer room taking stock of his life...disbarred lawyer, widower, absentee father... convicted murderer.(If the law had chosen to qualify it with Vehicular Manslaughter, to somehow lessen the degree from that of, say, a Ted Bundy...or Charly Manson, it did not hide the fact, that a little girl was dead on account of his actions...and then there was, Metzger,.....not all convictions were on the public record}

Now, amateur Psychologist could be added to that brief list of things that defined him. He had spent the last couple of days surfing the net,looking up anything he could find on depression. Specifically, articles that shed light on his current mood swings. He didn't know whether to laugh or to cry, and found himself often doing both in the privacy of his empty pod. All he could think of was the opening paragraph from Dickens's "Tale Of Two Cities" (...it was the best of times ,it was the worst of times...) How well,that described the way he felt. Manic Depression, he had learned, was its clinical term ..bipolarism. He had laughed when he read that term....that was him alright...definitely Bi. As he had refined his search along this new terminology; he had come across a site which had poems about.... and written by, people suffering the disorder... one curious poem was entitled: Psalm Bipolar.He had clicked on it, and it appeared on the screen....

I, lazerus, in the dark; bereft of vision and of life, wait for nothing in this tomb but the expected slow decay to putrid dust,which the winds of judgement will blow away. Done with the anxiousness and the strife. Done with indecision and despair. Finished with the flesh and its feverish desire.
I, embrace the void and its eloquent simplicity.

I , lazerus, bathed anew, blinded by the joy and sunlight. walk from so unlikely a womb, as would stifle all dreams of renaissance. Yet, am suddenly once more incarnate. Here, again the exaltations and the bliss. Here,again wondrous disbelief. Rejuvenated, the body and soul, and that delicate balance. I , accept the charge with its inevitable duplicity......(iconjax)

It was the reference to Lazerus that had set him off...that had flooded his mind with emotions, until he was paralysed...almost catatonic.When the screen saver kicked in, he did nothing but stare into the vista of slowly drifting stars,helpless. His mind speeding through some mental worm hole, back to a distant summer night,when he lay in the long cool grass, looking at the night sky for answers. His grandfather had just died, and he was trying to cope with his first taste of death of a loved one. Where in all that cosmos was heaven? Could you see it from here? He wondered if he prayed to jesus, if he would bring his grandfather back from the dead, as he had Lazerus Ah! the innocence of a nine year old. He remembered the loss that he felt then...it was just the same as he felt now.

"Are you Ok, Tobias?"

Sister Pete had stood a few minutes outside the computer room before she decided that, as the only licensed psychologist in the place, as a nun, or maybe just as Toby's friend and former employer...that she should go see if his immobility and blank expression were symptoms of something seriously wrong.

"I'm Ok,You're Ok....." it had been an almost reflexive response, being a title of something he'd been reading on the net earlier, but when he saw that it was she, who had thrown him the verbal lifeline, that had pulled him from the brink...he had made a pensive jest of it, and offered her a
smile. She placed a hand on his shoulder as she approached and came to a stance behind his chair...she even messaged it a little upon feeling the tenseness beneath her lotion glistening fingers. Toby could smell the Oil of Olay. Sister pete glancing at the screen, could tell by its
content, that such flippancy was false bravado.

What sort of man was Lazerus, sister?

It took the good sister a moment to answer...it was such an unexpected question,though it made perfect sense to his mind. She first had to savor it a little...to ascertain it's point...in order to formulate the answer that best served the reason for the question.She soon made the connection...or the most obvious excuse for info on the man, that Jesus had awoke from the dead.

An average sort...neither sinner nor saint...She thought of all his sexual innuendo that he enjoyed he using on her....his stripping naked before her in his death row cell...of how he risked his life to protect Toby (she had never gotten the whole story from any of them...Schillinger, Beecher, or Keller...this vendetta that had claimed the combatants' sons.Keller confessing to Conspiracy charges in Hank's death...facing the death penalty for a crime he was later exonerated of, she was sure was to cover for toby....and then there were those terrible crimes in Ohio, for which he had been recently executed....this was what Tobias was probing for, she had determined ...would Chris qualify for resurrection. Her description of Lazerus was more an anthesis of Chris than an image gleamed from scripture. She had once thought that he was the devil himself, but if she had the power she believed she'd bring back that nettlesome test of her faith...he private Gesthemane...if only for Toby's sake..She had told Chris that God had picked him for something special....A modern day miracle?

There isn't a lot about him in the bible, is there....did he live long...did he live as he had before, or was he changed...can we change? The questions poured from him like angry killer bees.

She had not thought much beyond the resurrection.He faith was concerned only with the miracle of it,and had not ventured further.Today, such an event would have been investigated ,reinvestigated, and followup stories would have surfaced for many years after as such an event goes through periods of renewed interest....we would have had the whole untold story.

It was this last question, that she centered on...pulling it from the swarm.It told her much. Kellers' demise was not all that was going on here. Tobias was thinking of himself, as Lazerus, as well, his pending parole