heya_baru

Anomalous fMRI Activation

My Jon Doe lifted himself from the heavy shackles of death and let the crows carry him to my house. After a dinner that arrived in a Styrofoam box and a few hours of unpleasant dreams, I awoke in the harsh daylight hours—I was still rendered nocturnal by my work—to see him stumbling across my bedroom, his gait torpid with rigor mortis. He was as he appeared to me the previous night, completely naked, a white sheet veiling his head, wearing a beard of coagulated blood that ran from chin to navel. He clambered onto the foot of my bed, where I lay forced onto the mattress as if held by an insurmountable weight; he gazed at me with unseeing eyes, gaped jaw visible against the linen pressed to his face. He raised his arm and pointed to his left, as if asking for something out of his reach. The suffocating weight released itself from my chest and I flailed out of my sheets, but he was gone.

The next afternoon I arrived into work to check the charts of Jon Doe’s Penthus:

The results of the first fMRI scan, taken eight hours post-admission following inconclusive cEEG and MRI tests, were unexpected. This scan demonstrated anomalous activation of the amygdala and pineal gland, as well as intensive occipital activity.

These results, aside from pineal activity, are consistent with someone experiencing extensive visual stimuli. In conflict with this fact, the patient was experiencing no unusual visual or auditory stimuli while inside the fMRI, and was still under the influence of 5mg benzodiazepine given one hour prior.

When I asked the patient if she was experiencing any hallucinations, she stated that I would not be able to understand, elaborating that “words convey nothing, unless you can see them.”

Due to the fact that blood and urine toxicology could not determine the degree to which she may have been under the influence, and results for the other 22-year-old male who accompanied her were inconclusive, she was shortly after given a diagnosis of temporary psychosis.

I attempted to march through the rest of my night without distraction, although the notions proved too loud for labor, and Salomón arrived to find me rummaging through a series of storage lockers used to hold the belongings of the interred.

“Lost something?” He spoke between notes of an old pop song he often hummed in the dark.

“Next of kin are looking for something,” I lied, closing one of the lockers.

“Ran out of room, I put them with the bodies.” He hung his jacket on a hook by his desk, smoothing out the collar while he conversed with himself. “How the bodies heap up like the potshards of Ur,” he sat down in his chair with a pained grunt. “Yet not an Elomite to be found.”

I opened the door and pulled out the slab for my Jon Doe; his left arm rested upon a large plastic bag, still laying claim to his possessions in death. I extracted his clothes, at first finding nothing in them until a slip of paper fell from the pocket of a dirty faux-leather jacket (1), along with three pill capsules containing an inky-black powder, made from something that shimmered faintly under the phosphorescent glow of the morgue lights. I turned the capsules over in my hands, watching the substance tumble around inside, that twinkling ash demanding release, too pretty and ethereal for such pedestrian confinement. I felt the tendons in my hand tense, urging me to crush the pills in my hand.

I returned his things to the bag, darting over to my laptop; I intended to message the doctor who ordered his bloodwork, but an abrupt note appended to his patient’s file suggested we had made parallel discoveries.

Spoke to novel substances doc in Japan. He recognized the presentation. Xeta-Diphenhydramine.

The Xeno-Conspiracy Against The Sacred Veil of The Real

Research consumes the spare days of my life, finding crumbs of time previously lost. I pawned the spirit of a Friday to pay for the rancor of a following Monday; whenever I awoke under the dull blanket of dusk, somnolence would drain down my hands like a wound into two rivers, the first drawing flowers from the soil, the last turning the Rio Grande as saline as blood. XDPH, it turned out, was known to few and understood by none, a shadow seen only in the most eidetic of dreams.

While on my lunch break I found a single published paper regarding the drug; the journal, an obscure sub-imprint of a psychology publication based out of Taiwan, happily accepted my academic login, and turned over a brief paper that elucidated nothing, while dredging even more questions from the inky waters of neurochemistry.

I could not tell if XDPH was a siren’s call for quacks who draped themselves in the finery of the medical profession, or if it merely turned doctors into quacks. As the paper concludes:

To understand the conditions that have lead to the development of XDPH, it is helpful to turn to theories of evolutionary pressure. In a 2013 paper@BROWN2013, Brown et al. notes that cliff swallows nesting along roadways have a shorter average wingspan compared to the population at large, while swallows killed in car collisions have an average wingspan longer than the population at large. Brown at al. theorizes that cliff swallows with shorter wingspans may be more capable of maneuvering around cars, thus creating downward evolutionary pressure on the wing size of the population nesting near roadways.

Despite extensive research, we have been unable to trace the manufacturing of XDPH or its precursors. In the one surviving case of XDPH abuse, a 25-year-old man from Hiroshima, the patient was unable to provide a rational or coherent explanation of where he first discovered XDPH, or where he purchased the drug. Two more fatal cases from Hiroshima, and one from Nevada, also did not provide law enforcement with any leads regarding the source of XDPH.

Lacking any evidence of a XDPH dark web source, or grassroots manufacturing, or any other traditional method of controlled substance distribution, we can only turn to more radical theories as to its creation. Much like the cliff swallows darting across the motorway, there is something in a distant land trying to make its way to us. For every dozen that fall under the wheel of a car, one makes it through. But this unknown entity is evolving; its grows nimbler, faster, darting around whatever censorship complex god has placed along its territory. Soon more will find us.

If JSTOR is to be believed, this paper has been cited once, and not even in another medical journal. An errata report in a recent issue of the Monthly Notices of The Journal of New England Experimental Fiction states only the following:

While a paper on oneirography is forthcoming, we can say at this stage that the process as a whole is remarkably difficult;even for someone who has trained themselves to remember their dreams after waking, the writing process requires a level of cognitive engagement that impedes short-term memory. The swirling voids of our dreams remain forever shrouded, an infinite night through which we see only the hottest stars. If there is a future for this art, it is to be found in substances such as Xeta-Diphenhydramine (XDPH), which hoists a bridge into that night sky, briefly linking waking and oneiric brain states.

I attempted to contact the author of this report, a Dr. Halvgaard writing out of Sarah Lawrence College in New York. I received an email a week later, from one Rivers Halvgaard, daughter of my desired correspondent, informing me that the doctor had died while on sabbatical in Kazakhstan.

The most obvious line of inquiry left, Hero Harkaway, the female XDPH patient who arrived upstairs with my Jon Doe, was also lost to me.

One afternoon I set my anxieties behind three cups of coffee and made the trek upstairs from morgue to hospital, a disheveled Persephone undertaking her seasonal pilgrimage from the rotting hovels of the underworld. An intake nurse who looked as ground-down as I told me that a mere two hours separated me from Hero—after she was transferred from the ER this morning, she left against medical advice, and made her way north on a bus. She provided no contact information or address, telling the nurse only that she was leaving for Chicago, where she was to live with a man in one of the Marina City towers.

All avenues exhausted, at the end of my shift I return to my apartment, sitting alone in front of a borrowed medical textbook and a takeout box of chilaquiles, thin knives of dawn slipping through the curtains. The notions stoop over my shoulder, spines built like church steeples as their shadows grow ever longer over my thoughts.