A Sickness of the Mind

“The first symptom is a degradation of motor control.”

I’d heard of it already, this sickness, but it wasn’t until the physician described it in detail that I realized its true terror. Our patient was infected while riding the bus. One moment he sat, the next, he was paralyzed. So conspicuous are its symptoms that none around him were aware of anything amiss. A spider crawled across his shoulder. He did nothing. He could no longer move and thus no longer speak. To make matters worse he could not vocalize his distress due to this sudden incapacitation. No one noticed him because his paralysis displayed no observable effect; his face revealed no discomfort, his body language was entirely natural.

“Some are genetically more susceptible to the infection. Particularly those with an overactive occipital cortex.”

Next the patient’s senses slowly deteriorated; first feeling, then smell and taste and pain. His hands knew not what they held. A disintegrating bundle of papers. The infected man could no longer feel discomfort or taste the bland chewing gum in his mouth. Deafness ensued, and the external world was muted. Suddenly he knew nothing of the happenings around him. A baby crying. An elderly asking for his seat. The electronic announcement for the following stop. All around him citizens thoughtlessly went about their routine, unaware of the dreadful suffering in their midst. Now we see that slowly the patient is disconnected from reality. Each successive side-effect removing yet another connection with the outside world, pushing the patient further into himself.

“The trouble with this condition is its spontaneity. One may be infected anywhere at anytime.”

The patient is rendered blind. A thousand shards of glass escape into a thousand directions. He remains isolated in the confines of his mind. Alienated from disastrous realities. His world is disintegrating, crumbling at the edges. By now the symptoms are so severe that our patient has no hope of escaping. He is among us but not with us, present but absent. He does not feel his own breath, taste the energy of air, hunger for the life of food. A mind, purged of immediate existence, alone, reflecting itself in itself, abstracted from the outside, contemplating. A hopscotch of neurons. Some sick version of a synaptic Russian roulette.

What is the name of this dreadful contagion? The physician called it Pure Speculation. How is one infected? Literature.

The infected read on.

— A collaborative effort by Seth Ratzlaff and Karissa Alcox