Quantum nightmares, p.30
Quantum Nightmares, page 30
It was far too dark to see more than a few feet, but he knew this beach well, and in his mind’s eye was the layout—straight ahead was a commercial fishing dock; behind and to his left was an abandoned air force base; opposite of that, an Eskimo reservation. The two separated by a vast sea of bright green pine trees.
He had been escaping to this secluded nirvana for as long as he could remember. Walking it was his meditation, a transcendental pilgrimage that nourished his soul the way nutrients do the body—it was a magnificent gem tucked away in a small corner of his world.
Shifting lights from the Aurora Borealis danced quaintly in the night sky as if on a beat to the serene symphony provided by the surf that was gently crashing on the shore. He heard a familiar crashing in the distance, and although he couldn’t see the source, he knew it to be a massive glacier, breaking off into chunks of ice and falling into the otherwise calm waters, reminiscent of his own life falling to pieces.
He decided to take one last walk in this paradise lost before taking his own life.
As he moseyed along, his thoughts drifted to the distant past and the nefarious environment in which he was reared. The residual abandonment issues that haunted every facet of his life stemmed from losing both parents before he was old enough to retain memory. His only inheritance was a subsequent attachment disorder that forced him to cling to people for fear of losing them, a character defect that made it near impossible for him to develop any meaningful relationships to note.
As Jerry reflected on his past, he realized the predominant emotion of his life was pain—so much pain.
If not for his best friend Sal, he surely would’ve killed himself long ago. Their friendship kept him alive long enough to meet the succubus named Mary, which bridged the gap to the only good thing left in his miserable existence—his daughter Mikayla.
A loving family was what Jerry wanted more than anything. Growing up without one of his own, he would daydream endlessly what it’d be like to be loved unconditionally and to love unequivocally. But when one doesn’t love oneself, partaking in a reciprocated love is a futile endeavor, and the persistent insecurities were a constant nuisance in his failing marriage.
However, to be fair, for Mary, happiness was irrevocably synonymous with money. The former was directly correlated with how much of the latter was in their bank account at any given time. Her moods fluctuated as the amounts peaked and dipped, and if Jerry were to be perfectly candid with himself, there would’ve been much more dipping than peaking of late.
He knew his inability to deliver this material happiness was the driving force that drove his wife into the arms of his best friend.
At the very least, he wished he could say he was a good father, but deep down, Jerry knew this to be bullshit as well. He had spent most of his daughter’s childhood immersed in work, discovering too late that the only commodity that mattered was time.
The ever-abstract concept of time was such that in the moment, it seemed eternal—a bottomless pit easily tapped into, until one day, and rather abruptly, it was all tapped out, escaping him entirely, and he found that instead of memories holding his past together, there was a cohesive string of endless excuses: I’ll catch the next ballet recital. It’s just one piano rehearsal. She’ll have other soccer games—more excuses than there were stars in the sky.
Before long, her childhood was all but gone, and now his validation for missing it was gone as well. Jerry had always told her that he worked so many hours so he could afford to send her to a good college, a belief she nursed that slowly turned into her dream—a dream now destroyed, not for lack of intellectual capability on her end, mind you, but for financial incompetence on her father’s behalf.
Jerry was never one to measure success in life with money. He even mocked the exodus to suburban utopia conducted by herds of the middle class in their absurd pursuit to attain happiness by way of material appropriation. But he was quickly learning just how easy it was to mock someone from a bubble of comfort. For without the safety net of financial stability, he could never be the man he wanted to be. His only wish now was that he would have enough courage to take his own life.
—
An hour had passed since he embarked on the path to nowhere in particular. Nothing more than an hour closer to death, Jerry thought, as the omnipresent memory of promises made and promises broken that had infiltrated every facet of his life and connected his dreams with his nightmares, and waking life, weighed heavily on him with the suffocation begotten by regret.
He had been living on borrowed time for longer than he cared to remember, because to remember was to acknowledge he had squandered the opportunity.
He planned to paddle out to the open sea in one of the tiny black rafts tied to the dock and drift aimlessly alone, dying the way he should’ve—once upon a time—before the squandered reprieve.
There’s poetic justice in that, Jerry thought, an honorable gesture to the universe for disrespecting its decision to keep me alive.
With the welcoming certainty of death in his immediate future, an uncanny clarity formed fully developed within his intellect, and Jerry suddenly became overwhelmed with a childlike giddiness that spawned from a childlike anticipation, as if his death shared in the majestic and endearing qualities of a Christmas morning.
He was suddenly a man on a mission—his last mission.
But when Jerry turned, he was shocked to find himself standing in the same footprints he had made an hour before with his house only a hundred feet away. How did I manage to end where I started when I walked only in a straight line? he thought.
A sudden and severe drop in temperature made it so his breath was perceptible, which was peculiar because at the same time warm steam splashed off the crashing waves, filling the cold void with an inviting warmth that smelled of sea salt. It was like he was in a vortex of ocean currents of varying degrees.
He dwelled in the dichotomy for a spell, contemplating.
The warm water seemed to call his name, beckoning him to return to the womb from which he was born. He rolled up his pants leg and dipped his feet in the tepid water. The big toe of his left foot was missing. He quickly pivoted his thoughts to keep the painful memory marooned on whatever island of misery it had been for these past thirty-five years.
Although the full moon illuminated the sky in a marvelous display, the surface was still very much dark, yet there was not a cloud in the sky. Jerry wondered why the moon’s rays couldn’t penetrate the vast nothingness hovering above.
All the same, something made him pretend to bask in the nonexistent moonlight like a sea lion basking in the sun on an island of rocks. Again, Jerry recalled his childhood and begged a god he had never seen to see him through these tumultuous times.
Just then, at his most desperate moment, something brushed against his foot from the blackness of the vast ocean.
It was a glass bottle.
Then, as if God had spoken the infamous words of his first day’s labor, the moment his fingers touched its smooth surface, the invisible barrier that prevented the moon’s rays from penetrating the stratosphere instantly vanished—and then there was light.
The light bounced off the globetrotting glass and glistened like a diamond in a field of snow. However, the sudden divine illumination escaped Jerry entirely as he became transfixed by the faded wrapper on the bottle that spelled out MK ULTRA. Paralyzing anxiety burrowed in deep and evicted the suppressed memories which had previously resided there, forcing them to bubble to the surface like pools of oil.
He cocked his hand back, intent on tossing the bottle back into the sea from whence it came, until he felt something within it. Interest piqued, Jerry removed the cork and relieved the bottle of its contents with a quick shake. It was a scroll, brittle and yellowed with age. He took care of unrolling it, as to not further damage the delicate parchment.
The first few paragraphs tugged at the strings of Jerry’s soul, and a foreign feeling of hope manifested within him like a sanctioned reprieve just moments before execution. So captivated by its grandiose candor, he forgot the losing battle with his wife, along with every other aspect of his unfulfilled life. Its relevance to his dilemma convinced Jerry that he alone was meant to find this message in a bottle.
He reread the first page once, twice, three times over.
Yes, he was certain of it now, with absolute conviction; it was his fate.
Using our lunar neighbor as a lamp, he read on.
Part 2
The Letter
To whom it may concern,
I will be dead before this manuscript reaches its intended beneficiary, which fate has vetted thoroughly and deemed worthy to receive. However, do not fret, for it is not your pity I seek, only your understanding.
In many ways, I am dying so that you may not only live but also thrive in every aspect of your life. Make no mistake about it, dear friend, this crude nautical vessel escaped a plethora of potentially disastrous fates to reach you, and you alone. As if by divine winds and a conduit of whimsical currents, it has reached the proverbial finish line in its epic odyssey when you, whoever you are, resuscitated its vitality and solidified your destiny with the very words you breathe life into, like an enchanted spell unleashed upon its utterance.
The laws of attraction, or synchronicity, to those savvy few, dictate divine intervention at integral epochs in an individual’s life as to satisfy a copacetic course, consistent with the most favorable timeline for humanity at large. Indeed, the apple didn’t just fall upon Newton’s head. It was strategically situated there to inspire the desired consequence, which consequently conceived the complex concept known thereafter as gravity.
Instilling credence into its creation, the universe utilized said gravity by defying all probability of time and space and acquainting us precisely at a period in your life in which you most desperately desire direction—consider this correspondence the apple to your Newton.
Presumably, since you’re reading this now, it most certainly means you’re suffering from rampant emotional pain. You feel hopelessly alone in this endeavor and, indeed, those that have not yet come to pass; deprived of an intrinsic joy that most, nay, that all save you are born with, utterly convinced that your defective DNA is missing the prerequisite chromosome necessary to achieve said happiness.
I know this because I, too, share such an affliction.
As a matter of perspective, it just so happens, some say, the key to happiness is a matter of perspective. And what is perspective, if not a choice? This realization is paramount in the understanding that so too is happiness. For the choices we make about the events that take place directly affect the outcome of the event itself—rose-colored glasses to the initiated.
Too many of us walk around, cups half-empty, going through the motions of life but failing to live it, stuck in our heads in a perpetual daydream of the life we want when the life we have passes us by. And it isn’t hard to understand why.
We, humans, are a dramatic and attention-crazed species, emotional masochists, and eternal slaves to the intricate idiosyncrasies of the human psyche and its endless array of manufactured crises conjured up by our primordial addiction to feed the egotistical beast within.
That vulgar voice in your head whose imperishable diet of victimized drama serves but as an appetizer to a gluttony of self-loathing paradigms and all its glory—an insatiable tapeworm which would cease to exist if only deprived of its self-sabotaging fuel source. And this holds true for ninety-nine percent of the populace.
For the remaining one percent—those unfortunates who’ve procured a surplus of unspeakable pain and anguish—happiness is an elusive sentiment; an unattainable fairytale, simply extinct in their repertoire of emotions.
The average person has no inkling of what I speak, but I’m certain you do.
I speak, of course, of how morgues would go out of business if not kept stocked with a fresh supply of unidentified bodies. Missing corpses with an attached Doe nomenclature, taken against their will and sold into a macabre underground railroad, meant not to free slaves but to keep them in bondage, disgracing and indeed mocking the famous enterprise with which it stole its namesake.
We seldom hear the bittersweet stories of brave men, women, and children held captive for years, decades even, before finally evading their captors. But when we do, it inspires something profoundly majestic within the human soul, tugging at the strings of our collective conscience and uniting us as one as we absorb a share of their pain in solidarity.
As if by grand design, an inconspicuous occurrence unfolds upon hearing the morbid news—the same sky becomes bluer and the same grass greener. You savor your next meal as a man on death row might savor his last. You can hear the birds chirping and smell the roses from which they feast. By grand design, indeed. Can something so conspicuously inconspicuous be anything but?
The tiding of misfortune instigates an involuntary inventory of our own lives, and the perspective allows us to take a step back and count our blessings, if only briefly. And sadly, it usually is, only briefly.
Not long after, we again become wage slaves in the cog that is the fast-paced rat race of today’s society, letting this precious perspective slip through our very fingers as we embark on the never-ending pursuit to attain happiness by way of material appropriation, not knowing, we had it all along. For true happiness can only come from within.
You won’t find it for sale at your local shop, nor will you discover it in an empty bottle of spirits, for many a man has drowned trying. Another may blossom this happiness, but the seeds must be sown from within first, as a seed cannot grow until planted.
This, dear reader, my dying wish, is that you stop wasting your life with the trivially mundane and choose happiness.
Perhaps some perspective can assist in this endeavor, so without further ado, here is my tragedy.
—
As the story goes, I was born in Green Mental Institution in Quebec, Canada, on the twenty-first day of the tenth month in the year 1953. My mother was a failed actress turned high-end escort and employed by the U.S. government. They used her as a pawn to monitor potential enemies of the state. My father fit such a profile.
Toward the tail end of WWII, shadow elements within the U.S. government foresaw the inevitable future of a juggernaut Soviet Union being their most significant threat and, wanting an advantage over their former allies, enemies of the state with expertise in specific disciplines were highly coveted and poached outright from the Nazi regime in a quick and concise operation, dubbed Project Paperclip.
My father abdicated and was granted asylum in lieu of a judge and jury at Nuremberg. They pardoned him and his band of criminal scientists for their heinous war crimes in exchange for their wits and services.
Theirs was an arranged marriage, my parents, as the newly acquired Nazi was issued a wife as part of his terms of surrender to keep him honest. The arrangement proved detrimental to my mother as the good doctor was all too happy to share in the bottomless supply of morphine at his disposal. As these things typically go, soon the morphine did not suffice, instigating her graduation to heroin.
When she was six months pregnant, she visited my father at work and ransacked his medicine cabinet. My father found her unresponsive with a needle still in her arm and performed an emergency C-section on my mother’s dead body. I gasped my first breaths at 11:11 a.m. “An enchanted moment,” I was told.
Due to my premature birth and addiction to heroin, I was only four pounds and relied on a respirator to breathe in my stead. “As fitting a way as any to enter the world”—again, I was told.
I spent my first few months in the hospital receiving daily doses of methadone to tolerate gradual weaning off the opiates entirely. Because babies in my condition often developed disorders that prove difficult to endure, even for the most seasoned of couples, the doctors urged my newly widowed father to place me in a care facility. He adamantly, and admirably, refused.
We moved to a small farm in Montauk, New York, where my father was encouraged to perfect the unorthodox brainchild he had birthed with the SS—the overtly occult organization funded his research in creating biological replicas—clones to you, along with the paranormal studies of remote viewing, astral projection, telekinesis, and the like. But the reason he was given a new face and identity, along with a highly coveted position within the U.S. government, was his trailblazing advancement in the novel study of Gedankenkontrolle—mind control in English.
He headed a top-secret program called MK ULTRA and used the patients at the mental institution as unwitting test subjects.
He quite literally wrote the book on trauma-based dissociation and fragmented compartmentalization of the mind. This highly controversial science requires its subjects to endure unspeakable procedures (in a hospital setting, it’s called a procedure, but a worthy synonym would be torture), which overwhelms the patient’s capacity to process the unfounded reasons behind their torture.
Contemporary science contends the blueprint that creates humans, and indeed, all living organisms, namely DNA, is the deciding factor for the tangible characteristics exhibited by any one entity. DNA determines eye and hair color, blood type, and even something as innocuous as the amount and locale of freckles. What’s more, intangible characteristics such as athletic abilities and intelligence are also embedded in the double helix structure.
Like a recipe for ingredients to bake a cake, every attribute, no matter how minute, is mixed in the ovaries and placed in the slow-cooking womb for nine months at 98.6 degrees—a metaphorical bun in the old proverbial oven.
Without the assistance of an artificial facilitator (i.e., hair dye, colored contacts) these characteristics remain absolute and therefore are not subject to change. A cupcake cannot transform into a muffin despite any ambitious desire to do so, and just the same, blue eyes cannot turn brown nor brown eyes blue—or so said conventional science.
My father’s Frankensteinian research empirically repudiated this long-held belief.
