Light Becomes What It Touches

By John Michael Flynn

Who is he? Where is he? Answers come slowly in a kaleidoscope of fractured recollections as day by day the doctors and nurses at his bedside confirm that he's consented to a US Government experiment in the use of MDMA injections as therapy for veterans and former government employees with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder who've been classified as a danger to themselves and others. He calls himself Gardner and, taking the advice of professional counselors, begins to keep a journal each day, addressing it directly to a woman he names Charity believing she's the only woman he ever loved. Healing begins as little by little shards of memory return.

 

 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Flight Delay Books
• Release date: Dec 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223700029

John Michael Flynn

John Michael Flynn also writes novels as Basil Rosa. He's published three collections of short stories, one with Publerati, and another with Fomite, and a book of essays with New Meridian Arts. He's taught at schools, colleges and university in the United States, Moldova, Turkey and Russia. To quote the poet Forrest Gander, "his poems are not absurdly modern but take the risk of articulating a serious moral gaze." 

Book preview

Light becomes what it touches...blue vapor without end.

Lisel Mueller

Memory a blade in hand, I peel an endless grapefruit. I think of it as micromorphology, a study, what I do, why I’m still alive. I make this study for myself, but also for you, Charity, and for all the innocent ones out there, those who still believe that reality is not perception, the normal ones, naïve all, insane each and everyone one of them, and their children. The Docs are letting me record my gleanings in this here testimony complete with scribbles and doodles. They say it’s for the advancement of their research. I say I won’t perish without making a contribution. That thought alone proves how gonzo I really am.

About two years after my accident, I was contacted by people connected to the agency and they asked, considering my medical records, if I’d be willing to participate in clinical trials of a new medication, MDMA-AT. When I heard it was designed to help treat those with severe PTSD, I said yes. After being interviewed and tested, and then meeting all their assessment criteria, I signed their consent form. Those who ran the trials were interested in me for different reasons, especially after confirming I had, indeed, a history of insomnia, anxiety and what they call suicidal ideation.

I did this willingly and found it interesting. I learned about two drugs, Sertraline and Paroxetine, both approved by the FDA for chemically assisted therapy treatment of PTSD. A new one, MAPP1, had been tested in legit trials. MDMA-AT, which is shorthand for phenethylamine methylene-dioxy-metamphetamine would be a second round, an extension of the MAPP1 testing.

Some study participants were given a placebo. I wasn’t. I think I was ministered between 120 to 180 milligrams of MDMA for about 8 weeks, and it was around the seventh week when all hell broke loose. I began in their words to distinguish myself as an outlier by showing what the medical professionals termed in their reports as adverse events of special interest. I suffered non-postural syncope and seizures, and self-harm associated with suicidal ideation. In layman’s terms, I freaked out. I went haywire. I started tearing into my body as if I were a saber-toothed tiger ripping into the flesh of a fallen mastodon.

What happened next is difficult to recall. I can say this, however, no one appeared to be in a hurry to assist me in making adjustments to my adverse reaction. A few even said no such trials or experimentation ever existed and that I was delusional.

We both know better. Something went wrong. Some time passed and though they didn’t insist on it, the professionals began recommending medications to keep myself from chewing, stabbing and punching myself. I took those meds, but they didn’t help and when, at last, I had my accident and showed enough worrisome behavior that they agreed to help, I was confined here to this acute medical ward.

Please understand that I agreed to come here, nobody forced anything on me. I threw my hand in the air as a volunteer craving prolonged rest, treatment and observation. In some ways, I like it here and I don’t want to leave. I get meals and I don’t need to clean the toilet. One of my problems, though, and I think it’s due to side effects from the meds, is that I don’t want to get out of bed and I don’t want to see anyone.

So to you, Charity , I have decided to pen this narrative, because if you walked in here tomorrow I’d die of a coronary with a huge grin on my face. Naturally, I know this won’t happen. Nonetheless, I dream and I write to you and I empty myself.

The more rest I get, the more medications I take, the less I’m able to hold my seams together. I don’t mind watching myself fall apart. I need to lie here. I wouldn’t mind dying. I’ve had just about enough of this heated throbbing behind my eyes, and this sensation of vacuity whenever I try to remember anything.

There’s a small insistent smoldering inside my ribcage just above my sternum. My throat remains dry, I sweat into and out of hot-and-cold jitters, and naturally the sudden nausea and diarrhea wouldn’t be missed if it were to cease.

What I don’t need is unrestricted freedom and liberty. Let me be controlled, under care, studied and allowed to doze and dream and shed whatever coils my torso happens to be wrapped in. The doctors tell me it’s not too late, that I’m making progress, though I’ve also been shown that I display what they call a co-morbid condition. This has encouraged them to grant me my wishes and keep me around, to compare my behavior and reactions to others being tested.

Charity, dearest, I beg you help me remember. This experiment and these medications which I consented to believing the agency had benevolent intentions, prove again what the agency instilled in us. Namely that perception is reality and I, Gardner Greenroom, will take this statement as mother’s milk to my grave. You abide Charity, so please hear me out as judge and jury as I make my apologies, for what their worth, to the starlight.

I’m sorry to have ever dismayed you. Sorrier still to report that the robot armies aren’t coming. Rest assured, they’re already here. We will soon be patting ourselves on the back for playing a role in their takeover. These robots won’t be loud, arrogant, brutal or defensive. They’ll be stubbornly effective as they continue with their merciless creep into our DNA, stealing our languages, brazenly so, and then our minds.

I hope I’m wrong and that these are the ravings of a washed-up spy and a decrepitly miserable soul too far gone to even say I’m on the mend. I’ve been rated Grade-A certified bonkers. I sit upright and drool and sometimes feel inclined to mutter and shout. I’ve been told I’m potentially dangerous, that I can’t help myself and I project an instability that generates fear in others. My counter argument is that my obsessions and dire needs are similar to anyone else’s and that I’m harmless; I want to make sense of who I am, where I’ve been, why I feel my embarkations into diurnal fits are less tendentious than what they seem. They’re a sifting through the ashes of my past hoping to achieve closure, clarity and complete understanding.

Pointlessness is what plagues. Futility.

With more talk from specialists and more allegedly helpful medications, I drill into memory for ores that speak profound insights and understandings. I awaken each morning inside the spleen of a dystopian biosphere hoping to probe select cosmic objectives. I believe the year is 2023, an irrelevant fact, since I have no idea of what’s going on inside my skull and I can’t tell you how long I’ve been confined to this bed, this room, this facility.

I used to know things. I used to read enemy combatants for a living. Snitch, mole, fly in the ointment, spanner in the works – that was me. Defying the knowable. Manipulating the unseen. These were maxims I thrived on, as you did, Charity, and may still be doing so.

What I now try to focus on – and focus remains difficult – is what I’ll find and reject from the shards, passages and choreography of an illusion. How can we know what marks what is while strangely often feeling we don’t know what was? I am insane, mark my words – so I may not be here tonight, at this moment, in Istanbul walking alone amid gulls and lovers along its waterfront.

When I look up, I feel like I’m a dwarf in one of those spacious pavilions at the end of a pier. A palatial experience with a chandelier and a name like Venetian Grotto. The chandelier falls away and, no ceiling overhead, what shines is the obsidian firmament and all those cool winking stars that know so much more than I’ll ever imagine.

Doctors encourage these imaginative excursions. At times, they’ve bound me up like a parcel and at chronicled junctures fed or injected me with Lorazepam, Diazepam, and Haloperidol. They tell me it’s for my own good, so I won’t hurt myself. We try to discuss these issues during my more placid interludes.

I’m not content. Never have been. The doctors know this. They say they want to help. They understand I struggle to sit or lie down while watching it all pass me by. I’m restless, fevered, jumpy. I envy those who can perch without needing to suck on their fingers, drool, spit, shout, seethe and dab at their cheeks while cursing as they feel wrinkles and nightmares and all the monstrous tides of sleep coming on.

Depression, delirium, adjustment disorder, potential psychosis and schizophrenia, drug and alcohol related presentations due to past substance abuse, encroaching dementia, you name it and I’ve manifested it to one degree or another. I can’t even rot sedately in a gutter, which on some days feels as if it’s the only place I belong.

The doctors ask me about the voices I hear. I tell them I don’t know who they are and that they won’t go away. In medical jargon, I’ve been showing symptoms of PTSD for a while now. It was maybe thirty years ago when I first started to reject any notions of living an honorably noble-headed existence.

When I retired to a life of bowling, golf and watching television in the hamlet of Retroramaville, I continued to drink and take pills. Due to an old neck injury from my basketball-playing days I began using prescription Vicodin to help ameliorate the pain. It was during this time that I had my car accident. I won’t go into a tiresome exposition and it’s not as if I remember all of what happened.

You have my word, however, that as I begin to recall details, I’ll share them. I’ll tell you why. It’s because you’re the only woman I ever loved.

I’ve got to polish my shark ( not my snarkiness) amidst all these irrational actors, these meme and Reddit trolls leaning on telemetry data and googling along toward random rewards. My current gravity line, one I’m holding to as an anchor, is that I’m obsessed with a woman. That would be you, Charity. I knew you as a teen in school. I don’t remember your name. I call you Charity because I like the sound of the word and what it connotes. I don’t even know if you exist,