Flash Fiction: Syndrome of the Self
Greeve was sentenced to ten years. But he could, they said, make a sacrifice instead. Experimental scientists wanted grey matter from the right temporoparietal junction of his brain.
“What’s in the right temporo-wherever junction?” he asked.
“It’s where we distinguish between ourselves and others,” they said.
Oh, they think I’m more myself than other people are themselves, Greeve thought. He was a psychopath, his defense lawyer had argued. Sociopath, malignant narcissist, or anti-social, depending on who else you asked. The problem was supposed to be between him and others. Too much self, too little others. They want to solve this by lowering the drawbridge, he thought.
“What will happen?” he asked.
“We don’t know.”
In the days leading up to the procedure, he imagined a slimy, opaque film lifted out of his brain by tweezers. He imagined the hinges taken off a door. People and their contagious delusions pouring into him. When it was too late, after he’d signed his rights away to the research facility, he dreamed this: driving down a long road at night, drawing plans for his future on either side of the conical high-beams. Promises he could sell on websites by rephrasing old lies in slightly new ways. Mind-reading algorithms. Hire a fixer to wipe up your digital trace. Win friends and influence influencers.
He trapped the answer out there, somewhere, between two visible sections of cold, dark road. As soon as he had it, he lost it in the chewing noise of radio static. It grew louder though he turned the volume down, filling up the car. As it hissed in his ear, he realized it was filled with whispering voices — manic, panicked voices unable to follow a single train of thought to its conclusion before another swallowed it up. They packed into the passenger seat and crawled across the dashboard, eventually flowing into him through his ears, nose, and eyes. Pins and needles, hissing and sniffling and fritzing.
“How do you feel?”
“I don’t know.”
The doctors were patient. They accepted that he’d never know, like the white mice who spent the last moments of their lives slamming their skulls into observation glass.
“How do you feel?” They wondered if he felt exactly as they felt because they’d turned him into one-way glass. Perhaps, they wondered, they should ask “Who do you feel?” Maybe, they thought, he was that vanishing point where one’s reflection, trapped between two facing mirrors, shrinks away.
“Who do you feel?”
They showed him footage of presidents delivering speeches. They showed him actors playing presidents speaking to tense war rooms, closed in by menacing, glowing, global maps.
“How do you feel?”
“I’ll try to describe it. I’m here, still. I’m with a thousand others I remember and dreamed. I’m chasing myself. I catch a glimpse of me every month or so. I’m gaining on me, then you ask me that and I lose me. I’m you and in love with me. I’m the unreachable, unknown thing, so it has to be that I’m God.”
“How do you feel?”
They started to congregate to hear his answer, then they scheduled weekly broadcasts of his answer. People in their homes cried for his lost self and their potential lost selves. “How do you feel?” they started to ask each other, and by this they meant I feel like you feel. I’m looking for me, like he is, but I’ll keep an eye out for you. They tuned to him, they assumed his haircut and powder-blue, inpatient clothes. Their hymns say “We’re searching.” Their promise is they’ll find him.
