Flowers for Algernon

I lay there in the dim light and stared at the pattern of squares on the ceiling.. noise-absorbing tiles with thousands of tiny holes soaking up every word. Sound buried alive in little holes in the ceiling. I found myself becoming lightheaded. My mind was a blank, and that was unusual because during therapy sessions I always had a great deal of material to bring out 195 and talk about. Dreams… memories… associations… problems… But now I felt isolated and empty. Only Stolid Strauss breathing behind me. “I feel strange,” I said. “You want to talk about it?”

Oh, how brilliant, how subtle he was! What the hell was I doing there anyway, having my associations absorbed by little holes in the ceiling and big holes in my therapist?

“I don’t know if I want to talk about it,” I said. “I feel unusually hostile toward you today.” And then I told him what I had been thinking. Without seeing him, I could tell he was nodding to himself. “It’s hard to explain,” I said. “A feeling I’ve had once or twice before, just before I fainted. A lightheadedness… everything intense… but my body feels cold and numb…”

“Go on.” His voice had an edge of excitement. “What else?”

“I can’t feel my body any more. I’m numb. I have the feeling that Charlie is close by. My eyes are open I’m sure of that are they?”

“Yes, wide open.”

“And yet I see a blue-white glow from the walls and the ceiling gathering into a shimmering ball. Now it’s suspended in midair. Light… forcing itself into my eyes… and my brain… Everything in the room is aglow… I have the feeling of floating… or rather expanding up and out… and yet without looking down I know my body is still here on the couch…:’

Is this a hallucination? “Charlie, are you all right?” Or the things described by the mystics?

I hear his voice but I don’t want to answer him. It annoys me that he is there. I’ve got to ignore him. Be passive and let this-whatever it is-fill me with the light and absorb me into itself. “What do you see, Charlie? What’s the matter?”

Upward, moving, like a leaf in an upcurrent of warm 196 air. Speeding, the atoms of my body hurtling away from each other. I grow lighter, less dense, and larger… larger . exploding outward into the sun. I am an expanding universe swimming upward in a silent sea. Small at first, encompassing with my body, the room, the building, the city, the country, until I know that if I look down I will see my shadow blotting out the earth.

Light and unfeeling. Drifting and expanding through time and space. And then, as I know I am about to pierce the crust of existence, like a flying fish leaping out of the sea, I feel the pull from below. It annoys me. I want to shake it off. On the verge of blending with the universe I hear the whispers around the ridges of consciousness. And that ever-so-slight tug holds me to the finite and mortal world below. Slowly, as waves recede, my expanding spirit shrinks back into earthly dimensions-not voluntarily, because I would prefer to lose myself, but I am pulled from below, back to myself, into myself, so that for just one moment I am on the couch again, fitting the fingers of my awareness into the glove of my flesh. And I know I can move this finger or wink that eye-if I want to. But I don’t want to move. I will not move!

I wait, and leave myself open, passive, to whatever this experience means. Charlie doesn’t want me to pierce the upper curtain of the mind. Charlie doesn’t want to know what lies beyond. Does he fear seeing God? Or seeing nothing?

As I lie here waiting, the moment passes during which I am myself in myself, and again I lose all feeling of body or sensation. Charlie is drawing me down into myself. I stare inward in the center of my unseeing eye at the red spot that transforms itself into a multipetaled flower-the shimmering, swirling, luminescent flower that lies deep in the core of my unconscious. I am shrinking. Not in the sense of the atoms of my body becoming closer and more dense, but a fusion-as the atoms of my-self merge into microcosm. There will be great heat and unbearable light-the hell within hell but I don’t look at the light, only at the flower, unmultiplying, undividing itself back from the many toward one. And for- an instant the shimmering flower turns into the golden disk twirling on a string, and then to the bubble of swirling rainbows, and finally I am back in the cave where everything is quiet and dark and I swim the wet labyrinth searching for one to receive me… embrace me… absorb me… into itself.

That I may begin.

In the core I see the light again, an opening in the darkest of caves, now tiny and far away-through the wrong end of a telescope-brilliant, blinding, shimmering, and once again the multipetaled flower (swirling lotus-that floats near the entrance of the unconscious). At the entrance of that cave I will find the answer, if I dare go back and plunge through it into the grotto of light beyond. Not yet!