(short story of mine)
Looking back at that peculiar, one time experience, I am afflicted with a mild but tangible sense of paranoia and anxiety which sweeps all the way from my degenerate inner self towards my frosty shell. The event I am referring to has instilled an obscene and almost instinctual skepticism in my organism. This disease – because extreme skepticism can only be classified as a form of mental disorder – has plagued me ever since, such that I am now weary of anything I reason, observe or believe is happening or is “true”.
Indeed, not even this traumatic experience of the most inducing electrifying anguish am I sure of. I am not certain whether any part of my confession is true, nor does it seem to matter, for the horrifying feelings I cannot seem to deny or forget are more real than anything an ordinary person might call “reality”. If my rationality and my memory are still able to grasp some sort of autobiography then I would say that since early childhood I have always felt apart from the world, including my own body in which I felt more like a stranger than a part of. Like a puppet master pulling strange strings in order to make this foreign vehicle, which I call my body, move or act. Later in life I found out the psychological term for this sensation – depersonalization. In the world I always felt somewhat like a spectator or a puppet myself. I am skeptical I was even right when I said I was pulling the strings on my body… free-will? Pure Christian fantasies…
At an early age I was diagnosed with a generalized anxiety disorder. I was prescribed antidepressants for as long as I can remember, but to no avail. The pills had almost no real impact on my mental health. As time went by I had become more and more cynical and I dared not glimpse even the smallest possibility of finding a cure for my distress. Psychology for me was just another kind of fantastic literature, just like philosophy or religion. Believing in the unconscious, the libido, defense mechanisms, or in platonic forms or in some god or spirit… it was all bullshit. Humans could never achieve control over their bodies or their minds, there was no cure for my psychological dysfunction, how could there be? Antidepressants were just some light, legal and socially acceptable drugs for rich kids who were too scared to do cocaine because they watched too many anti-drug campaigns. Even though I wasn’t a rich kid I was taking the antidepressants like the good boy that I was. There even were discounts on them from the government. Talk about weirdness.
As I have said, the drugs didn’t have any real positive impact, but they did have some disturbing side-effects of which I am ashamed to speak about. It all started one ugly day when I was at my psychiatrist for a routine check-up. As always I wasn’t hoping for anything new under the sun. But he started telling me about a foreign and rather unknown pharmaceutical company which was trying to create a new form of antidepressant. Until now nobody knew how antidepressants function, all they knew was that they had positive effects. But this time they said they were really trying to understand how the chemicals work on the brain. He said they were looking for extreme cases like me to serve as test subjects. There was nothing for me to do but sign a contract and take their pill. I was hesitant, I was pessimistic about the prospect, but I was also pessimistic about the efficacy of my regular antidepressants. I couldn’t help it, I had to try them – a small irrational spark of hope wrestled with my depressed soul.
Positive effects were soon unleashed a few weeks after using this new drug. I will not even mention its name, for it brings back a ghoulish angst that would disturb me even more. I should have known there was something unnatural in those drugs, for no visible side-effect was evident, and that made me skeptical of their properties. You could say I was too paranoid, but it wasn’t that… Later on I found out what the side-effect was: a cyclopean sensitivity to noise. I had always been psychologically disturbed by noise, but then it had become unbearable. At the slightest pinch of aesthetically displeasing sound I would become stricken with an extreme anxiety, never before experienced prior to taking the new drug.
Then, in one random night when I forgot to take the pill, it happened. It started off as a common nightmare in which I was oppressed by the disturbing and erratic sound of a washing machine. It was so loud, and it was getting louder and louder. I woke up, I was conscious, yet the noise was still haunting me. I couldn’t make it stop. I didn’t know where it was coming from. It was night, complete darkness, there was no washing machine, yet I was still terrorized by its insane mechanical noises. My body was trembling like never before, convulsively. I began crying out loud “make it stop!” and for 15 minutes I was completely trapped in this perverse scene of psychological destruction. Afterwards I was still left with a panic attack, my heart was racing, I was sweating too much, and my hands were shaking. I didn’t know what to do. “Something must be done”, I said to myself. I realized I forgotten to take the pill for that day. Fearful of the traumatic experience and not fully sane, I reached into the drawer with my trembling hands and took out a fistful of pills and swallowed them all with some whiskey, even though I wasn’t allowed any alcohol, – I didn’t care anymore, I’d rather died than experienced something like that for a second time. But Fate was cruel, and in that night I did not die, but went through something even more terrifying than I could have possibly foreseen.
After swallowing the pills I crawled back into the bed, praying to that nonexistent Christian God to help me die. I fell into a deep slumber. But… I was awoken again by another noise, that of the winter storm. As I opened my eyes everything was changed. I wasn’t in my apartment anymore; I was in a foreign place. It looked like a small cabin, with a small fire and a TV set. I got up. I didn’t know who the owner of that place was; there was no one there except me. I began looking around. On the table next to the TV I glimpsed over some peculiar sketches of something that looked like a detonation gadget and next to it there were some objects, wires and instruments that might have been used to make such a bomb. What appeared strange to me was that I actually seemed to be able to understand how it was engineered, despite the fact that I was just an accountant who has never studied any engineering as far as I can remember.
I went to the bathroom to wash my face, still feeling anxious, when I gazed over in the mirror. It certainly was me, but it wasn’t the same me. My body seemed to be older than I thought I was. I knew I was in my twenties, yet in the mirror I saw a man over 30 with scruffy stubble. I turned to stone, even the anxiety stopped for a few moments while I was still trying to process what had happened to me. I might have had some sort of accident and someone rescued me, bringing me to the cabin in the wild. I became erratic; I was hungry so I went into the kitchen trying to find something to eat but to no avail. Everything was already consumed, but I did find some strange newspaper articles about a recent terrorist attack on some small pharmaceutical company. I didn’t bother readying it. Something sinister was beckoning me outside; there wasn’t anything in the cabin for me. I sensed something outside that I knew I had to do.
Outside the scenery was unbearable. Near the cabin was a frozen lake flanked by a lush forest covered in snow. I didn’t find any warm clothing inside so I was running around in my white clothes. I started doing what I always did in my hometown as a kid – I began throwing sticks and stones in the frozen lake. I couldn’t hurt the world so I at least tried to hit the icy pond. But when I gazed at the sky it was so detestable, it gave me such anguish that I felt I was about to puke. It was a maelstrom of some sort of unnatural coloration, black and green molded together into a whirlpool around the Sun, which was holy black. I thought it might be some sort of solar eclipse, for it could not have been something natural.
The black and green heavens were circling chaotically around the blackened Sun, and my stomach started to feel horrible as it was itself pummeled around in some circular motion by something akin to a washing machine. I was fatigued and so I fell down in the snow. After being unconscious for a few hours I woke up frightened by my situation, I didn’t even know how I came to be there or why. What happened that night? I didn’t know where to start looking for answers, nor could I find the mental power for that kind of search. I lingered on, wanting to run away from that place. I didn’t wish to go back inside the cabin. I started walking past it, trying to go home, when I saw something behind it that caught my eye. I rushed to find a bag near a freshly dug grave.
I reached into the bag and took out the first thing I could find. It was some badly written note; the handwriting was definitely not that of a sane person. I only glanced at it for a few seconds; it looked like a suicide note. Something rang from inside the bag. It must have been a phone. I didn’t know the number but I answered, thinking I was perhaps going to be saved. It was her voice, my only friend. She was crying. I didn’t understand what was happening. But then she told me the police were looking for me. She said I did some horrible thing but that my schizophrenic disorder would save me from the death penalty. My spine began to chill; a panic attack soon got hold of me. I didn’t even understand what she was talking about, I told her that I don’t suffer from schizophrenia but from generalized anxiety disorder, and then she started crying more and said she was sorry but she had to tell the police where I was hiding. I felt betrayed… That maelstrom in the sky wasn’t disappearing but getting worse. I was too bewildered to even reason out what was happening to me. There was no life left in me to do anything. I remember sinking into that open grave and falling asleep. I think I died of frost right there.
Then I woke up in my bed at home. I ran towards the mirror and it was the good old me, the same mentally disturbed me. I thought the nightmare was over. I had to tell someone, so I phoned my psychiatrist to tell him the new drug was even more damaging than the normal antidepressants. But then he said something strange, that he didn’t knew what I was talking about. He said he never recommended me any new experimental drug and that it was all my hallucination. And then when I told him more about my condition he even denied I have generalized anxiety disorder. He said I am diagnosed with something else – schizophrenia.