Chapter 1

If someone were to ask just who “she” was, I wouldn’t be able to answer. Meeting me in my deepest sleep, she could simply be called a figment of my imagination, a glimmer within a dream, but I hoped, I wished, that she was more than that. For the past three years, I had both lost and gained the ability to dream. I would sleep, but instead of nameless phantasms and twisted realities, I would find myself hurtling through darkness, an astronaut flying through the empty cosmos. While immersed in this dream, my mind would function the same as it would awake, no impairment to my memories or reasoning, my internal clock counting the hours I spent in the void. The only light within this dreamscape was directly ahead of me, a lone star, drawing me in.

But from this star, she would appear, as if coming to meet me halfway. She was a girl my age, but with beauty unmatched by anyone else on the planet. With liquid smooth skin as soft as ripe fruit, a complexion like that of molten bronze and silver mixed together, and bright blue eyes that held unparalleled kindness and warmth, the very sight of her was like a religious experience. Along with the face of a goddess, she had a body that made a mockery of the word “perfection”. Her glassy-smooth legs seemed to stretch her miles and her hourglass figure epitomized health and sexuality. Her breasts had a fertile radiance and fullness, only a newborn god fit to nurse from them. But her most predominant feature was her hair, an elegant crimson that could remove all fear of blood from anyone’s soul. Groups of strands would stick together and then curl towards the end like a tongue of fire, granting her a tempered and yet untamable mane that hung down to her thighs.

The two of us unclothed like Adam and Eve, we would meet, but our bodies could never touch, as if we were magnets of the same polarity. She’d look at me with a smile, a smile I wanted to protect, and I would gaze into her eyes, icy blue but warm with love. She would lean in, and before our lips could join, I would wake up, looking up at my bedroom ceiling, cursing the day I would have to endure before being able to go to sleep and see her again.

I was haunted by this dream. This girl, this figment of my imagination, was the light of my life and the reason why I went to bed each night and plowed through each day. I had never heard her voice, never touched her, never been able to speak to her, and I didn’t even know her name ... yet I loved her. She was my secret, the one aspect of my life that I would never speak of, no matter what. When she first started to appear, I even obsessed over her. I would draw her every night on a sketchpad hidden under my bed, remembering her visage with crystal clarity and moving my hand with skill that I would never accept as my own, mirroring her image with graphite and paper with such closeness that I would hold no doubts as to being possessed.

Being able to sleep and see her in my dreams, a beautiful light in a sea of darkness, even if for less than a minute, supplied me with enough will power to endure the life I didn’t want. I have her, I’ll always have her, and the day she disappears is the day I lose that final reason not to end it all.

But I didn’t dream of her today, not that I expected to, seeing as how I found myself waking up in the hospital. A bright light had shone through my eyelids, stabbing my already sore brain. I could hear the beeping of a heart monitor nearby. My mind was a jumbled mess from the cocktail of drugs being pumped into me from the IV bags at my side, but I delved into my consciousness in search of answers. I remembered sitting in class... 6th period. Senior Biology was half finished ... but there was something wrong. I remembered that my hands had been trembling, even more than usual. My skin was being pricked with invisible needles like all my limbs had fallen asleep, but I couldn’t remember if it had come suddenly or if it had built over time. I remembered the first dagger stabbing me in the back of the neck. I remembered falling out of my chair, roaring in agony as I hit the floor. From there, I delved in and out of consciousness, woken by pain so intense that it would knock me back out like a punch to the face, my brain unable to process even a single passing moment.

But it wasn’t the lights or the beeping that had woken me up in this narrow bed. It was the pain burning ceaselessly throughout my body. In the single moment from when I woke up, I went from being fine to feeling like I was in the burn ward, charred from head to toe. My muscles all felt like they were being pierced with hot nails, my organs twisted into knots. I leaned over the edge of the bed and vomited on the floor. My heart monitor was sending a digital scream, bringing in a nurse.

“Kill me!” I screamed as the pain intensified.

I sat on the hospital bed with my worried parents, facing Dr. Turner, a blonde woman in her early thirties. I had an IV bag of morphine hanging next to me, trying to suppress the chronic pain that was ravaging my body. I was receiving the maximum amount possible, but even then, all of my skin felt like a blistering sunburn and my insides faired no better. I was shivering nonstop, not from any chill, but from the millions of tiny spasms throughout my body, painful sparks making me flinch.

“What you experienced in class was a seizure, caused by multiple tumors in your brain, focused on two specific areas. It may be possible for us to deal with them with a heavy dose of radiation and chemotherapy, but with how small and numerous these tumors are, the chances are slim. It’s a completely new form of cancer, and we aren’t sure what its long-term effects are.”

My parents started to cry, but I was completely calm. “Is it deadly? What the hell is going on with me?”

“Not in the traditional sense, but we just aren’t completely sure.” She held up an x-ray of my brain and pointed to a light spot. “That is the largest group of tumors and we imagine the oldest. However, whether they have grown over time or have always been there is a mystery. They are attached to your limbic system. Specifically, they are growing from the part of your brain that produces the chemical serotonin, as well as other chemicals that control mood. It appears that they aren’t growing any further, but—”

“Let me guess, they’re smothering that part of my brain and starving me of those chemicals?”

She nodded and pointed to another bright spot. “Yes, exactly. Now as for the chronic pain, these tumors on your brainstem are the source. The tumors are rooting down into your nervous system, causing continuous stimulation of pain receptors. They’re basically acting as electrodes hooked up to your spinal column. It seems that until now, they haven’t been large enough to trigger your continuous pain. You could almost say that the tumors have finally activated. What you’re experiencing now, that pain is from the tumors simply existing. That seizure you had earlier was the tumors reaching the peak level of stimulation. That may have been a one-time thing or they could randomly occur from now on while on top of your current condition.

“So is there any way to lessen the extent of my pain?”

“Yes, with anti-convulsion medicine, pain killers, and maybe some antidepressants, we might be able to lessen the extent.”

“By how much?”

“Well, at this point we can’t quite be sure. With drugs, we can make it so that you won’t black out if the seizures persist, make the pain tolerable, and maybe take away the edge of the depression so that you won’t become suicidal.”

‘It’s too late for that.’ “So it won’t kill me, but it will fill me with excruciating pain and make me incapable of happiness?”

“Yes,” Dr. Turner said mournfully.

Not wanting to bother staying in the hospital, I asked to be discharged. Before leaving, we stopped off at the hospital pharmacy to pick up my meds. I was holding my hands out in the cold October air as we drove, hoping that the raw chill might ease the dull throbbing in my fingers. The pain pills were slowly kicking in, making it so that the sting was bearable, but already, the word “bearable” had gained a whole new meaning for me. I no longer shivered, the continuous winces using up what little energy I had. The drive home was silent, for my parents were trying to keep back tears, but I was calm. That’s the one good thing about being suicidal: the prospect of your own death actually brings you peace. Now I didn’t have to feel guilty about killing myself. The effect it would have on my family was one of the only things keeping me from ending it all. Now I could just let the cancer do it for me.

In a way, it felt good to finally have an answer as to why I suffered from depression. I had been depressed for most of my eighteen years, completely in contrast to the comfortable middle-class life I lived in my hometown in Maine. I couldn’t even count the number of antidepressants, forced therapy lessons, and thoughts of longing to just die. There are people starving all over the world, people suffering. It’s a mystery to me why they just don’t kill themselves. It is the only question I will leave behind. How do they have lives that make my horrors look pathetic, but they possess the will to live that I lack? That was always an issue nagging in the back of my mind: being depressed without having a reason. It was a mixture of guilt for knowing that I should consider myself lucky but the inability to do so, and the feeling of helplessness from the knowledge that it meant that nothing could change how I felt, and that if I would wish for death in a comfortable life, then I would wish for death no matter what.

But now, I just don’t care. I don’t need to care. I may not have suffered as much as people in Africa or other hellholes like that, but ... at least they are capable of feeling happiness. Compared to them, I’m broken, and these tumors are the proof. I have felt the bite of a blade to try and cancel out my inner pain with outer pain. I have felt my sanity ripped away by years of sadness. Depression is more than sadness. It is the inability to feel joy. It’s a missing foundation, like a building with a sinkhole where its fourth cornerstone should be. No matter what you use to try and support the building, it’ll fall away, and the building can never stand, until it too crumbles and falls into the pit. To live with depression is like running a marathon with one leg, and the only help you can get is people suggesting you buy a better pair of shoes.

But hopefully, I’ll be dead soon and I won’t have to feel pain or sadness anymore.

Coming home, I went straight upstairs and hid in my room. I just wanted to go to sleep; maybe it would ease my suffering. Downstairs, I could hear my parents telling my younger sister and brother the bad news.

I was completely in awe, hovering in empty space within my dream. Before me, roaring in limitless intensity was the single star I always saw when I slept, the star I spent so many nights flying towards. Before now, it had been little more than a single speck of light off in the distance, but now it was clearly in view, the size of the moon and nearly frightening, simply because I realized now that it was not simply a star. In actuality, it was a black hole, devouring a star from the inside out, sucking in the flames and gas of the celestial giant. I could see it as if the sun was a piece of fruit cut in half to reveal the core. Yet miraculously, the sun did not shrink or diminish in size. It seemed like it was constantly regenerating. Cast around the eternally-dying star was a green oval-shaped nebula, about three times as large as the star itself, and making the whole thing resemble an eye with the black hole as the pupil.

“The eye of God...” I murmured.

Whether this was truly the eye of God, I could not be sure, but one thing I was certain of was that it was my death. No, this object within my dream would not kill me, but it was the symbol of my end. It was all so clear to me now; the dreams must have started when my tumors began to appear, my subconscious aware of my approaching end. Now that the disease had truly taken hold, I could truly see the oblivion that awaited me. The closer my mind got to it, the closer my body got to death.

At the beautiful sight, I could not help but smile and cry. “I’m going to die, I’m finally going to die. Just a little longer and I will finally find peace.”

I closed my eyes for only a moment, but that’s all it took for the girl to appear before me. Her smile was weakened with sadness, but tender with love, and she reached out and placed her hands on my cheeks as if to wipe away my tears. I still couldn’t touch her, regardless of her intentions. It was as if there was a force field dividing us, an entire universe flattened into a barrier keeping me from experiencing her warmth. But ignoring that restriction, she leaned forward kissed me on the forehead, her lips never touching me.

I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, I found myself back in my bed, facing the ceiling. I rolled over onto my side, not ready to get up, but stopped, my heart coming to a pause and my lungs sealing shut. The girl was lying beside me, clearly visible in the light of the morning sun. Beautiful, she was so beautiful. Lying there, this gorgeous apparition in front of me, I felt my pain disappear like the extinguishing of a candle. What on Earth was going on? Was I still dreaming? Was this some kind of hallucination? Or could it be that... ?

I reached up and tried to touch her, desperate to experience the sensation of her skin against my own, but she disappeared just as I was about to make contact, returning to the realm of nonexistence. Something stopped me from retracting my arm and letting it fall. My eyes wide, my hand trembling, I scanned through the recorded sensations of that brief second, desperate to figure out if what I had sensed so briefly had been real.

It was faint, so faint that it was almost beyond the reach of my sensations, but it HAD been there. Warmth, that was what I felt, the air within the space that she occupied was warmer, as if energized by her body heat. I rolled my hand around through the empty space she had left behind, running my fingers through the warm air as if her long crimson hair were brushing against my palm. I then held my hand up to my face, clutching some of the air from that space, and smelled it. Like the warmth, what I detected within that air was almost beyond my ability to sense, but it was there, an aroma so faint that I was actually working my mind into a headache trying to analyze it. Roses, that was what it was.

Shaken by this new revelation, I rolled over towards my window and winced from the light of the midday sun shining directly into my eyes. My parents had let me skip school.

“I might as well get used to this...”

I immediately grabbed my bottle of meds as my agony began to flare from being conscious, downing two pills without anything to drink. It took time to get dressed, as I quickly found that my muscles were stiff from the waves of throbbing pain. Aching all over, I walked downstairs and saw my dad in the living room, reading the newspaper. He was there to make sure I got through the day without hurting myself. Trying to stay unnoticed, I snuck into the kitchen. The last thing I wanted was for him to start some long conversation about how I could talk to him at any time and all that other stuff. I took my antidepressants and convulsion meds and made myself a bowl of cereal. Just as I was crossing the kitchen with the bowl, a bolt of electricity shot up my spine, making me feel like I was being flogged with red-hot chains. I dropped the bowl with a crash and collapsed to the floor, gripping my skull and roaring in anguish. This was even worse than my first seizure, a level of pain reserved for the damned souls of Hell. My dad bolted out of his chair and rushed over to me. Within thirty seconds, it was over. I could feel the pain ebbing away, until it was at its normal levels.

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m ok.”

“We’re taking you to the hospital.”

“No,” My dad looked at me as I picked up the broken shards of the bowl and stood up. “I’m going to be having these seizures for the rest of my life. I can’t go to the hospital after every one. I’ll get used to them eventually.”

I suffered two more seizures that day, both of them causing me to fall to the floor in agony. My mom got home with my older sister and younger brother. They all paused when they saw me in the TV room. I was watching a horror movie and the room was dark. There were bags under my eyes from the strain of my seizures and my hands were trembling more than usual. I looked at my mom and gently shook my head. She got the message and slowly pulled my siblings away.

The dinner had an awkward silence as everyone tried not to stare at me.

“Emily, you wouldn’t happen to know what my homework is, would you? Did you talk to my teachers?” I asked my sister.

“No.”

“I need to head back to school tomorrow, I can’t afford to lose two days as a senior.”

“No, absolutely not,” my mom argued.

“I need to go back to school sometime, and this pain and these seizures aren’t going to go away. I have cancer, not some goddamn cold that will go away after a day of rest.” Everyone tensed as I mentioned my illness. “There is no reason for me to stay home.”

The sky was a dark gray and sleeting as my sister and I drove to school in her car. She was behind the wheel, as I could not risk having a seizure while driving. Other students were swarming in to get out of the rain and snow as the doors were finally unlocked. First period was about to start but I wanted to avoid waiting for it with all of the other students. The last thing I needed was an awkward twenty minutes outside the school with everyone staring at me.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” my sister asked for the hundredth time.

“Like I said, there is no reason for me to stay home.”

We stepped out of the car and into the falling snow and rain, prompting me to pull up the hood of my sweatshirt. It was going to be a harsh winter. Fall hadn’t even ended and the ground was covered by a foot of snow and ice. I didn’t notice the cold as we walked towards the school. We were the last students inside and I quickly headed towards my first class. I was hoping to stay unnoticed, putting off the inevitable awkwardness. I stepped into the small classroom, trying to hide behind the crowds of kids getting into their seats. I sat in the back of the class where no one would see me. If I had been noticed, no one was mentioning it. The teacher began calling attendance. I became more and more tense as he approached my name.

“Marcus Clive?” he asked, doubtingly.

“Here.”

As one wave, everyone turned to me.

“Ah, I had heard that you had suffered a seizure on Monday, are you all right now?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. I found out that I have a new form of cancer, but I’m fine.”

Everyone gasped and began muttering amongst each other. The teacher was silent for almost a minute.

“Please, continue,” I said dryly as I took a pill.

I walked down the crowded halls with everyone staring at me. Every few seconds, someone would ask me a question about the disease in my brain or tell me all that lame bullshit about how I could talk to them at any time. I reached for my pills the second enough time had passed since my last one. Just as I put my hand on the cap, the sensation of being whacked in the back of the skull with a nail bat ran through my body, sending me tumbling down to the floor and roaring in pain. People around me freaked out as I writhed on the floor, gripping my skull as the tumors on my brainstem all sent a particularly strong tremor through my nerves. Within several seconds, it was over. I lay on the floor in a cold sweat, slowly trying to get up.

I raised my head and coughed up a mouthful of blood onto the floor. The stress of my constant pain, coupled with my seizures had ruptured an artery or vein somewhere. People tried to help me up but I waved them away. I took two pills and ignored the voices of everyone as I walked away with a limp.

It was lunch and I was sitting where I always sat. Against the wall of the cafeteria was a set of folded bleachers where students could sit during lunch if they didn’t want to be at a table. As always, I was by myself, but that was because I was compelled to be. I sighed as another girl came up to me and said that if I ever wanted to talk, I could talk to her.

‘You’re only saying that because of my cancer. If I didn’t have a brain full of tumors, nothing would change between us. I barely even know who you are.’ I fought the temptation to say it, but my anger was making difficult. “Thanks,” I said instead, but with a tone as dry as the brick wall behind me.

She walked away and I looked out over the cafeteria for the hundredth time, trying to avoid the gaze of the people looking at me and loathing what everyone was. Humanity was as much of a cancer as the tumors in my brain, and I hated my species with every fiber in my being. I hated the weakness, the greed, the stupidity, the shortsightedness, and every other thing that made us the overgrown cockroaches that we were. I had to hate them, for my own good. Even before my cancer, my life had been agony. My mind was ravaged by its own cold existence, all this time cheated out of chemicals like serotonin. For most of my life I haven’t known what peace, happiness, or sanity meant. I’m trapped in a realm of existence that I cannot escape from, and no matter how well I live, be it a billionaire or a homeless vagrant, my misery and anger will be never leave me. That sadness had in time been twisted into hatred, the feeling of not belonging to any part of the world decaying into loathing for that world. Hatred is my only means of survival, the only alternative to wallowing in despair. It hurts less to hate the world around me than to want to be a part of it. It hurts less to hate others than to be starving for a connection.

But I don’t want to be the cliché outsider who thinks that he knows better than everyone because he sees everything in a jaded light. Social constructs and conventions always seem like a stupid waste of time to me, but I only think they’re stupid because I’m incapable of enjoying them. While I always judge the people around me and hate them for being human, I never think myself better than them. If anything, they are all better than me. I envy them all; envy them for the lives they get to live, the mental stability they get to enjoy. Social lives, friendships, romance, just the ability to integrate within collective and find joy and understanding. There are students down below me who are parts of something bigger, be it something as simple as a school club, but I’m simply not capable of such a thing.

I looked at the tables surrounded by just girls. There was a time when I would have sold my soul to just find a girl who would go out with me. In my heart, I knew that only love or death could bring me peace, and I had known it for years. For close to a decade, I had been looking for my soul mate, the one girl who could take away my pain. At least, that’s what I used to want. Now I knew it was too late.

I staggered through the hall, trying to recover from a seizure only a few moments’ prior.

“Marcus, do you want to talk?”

I already knew who it was. Her name was Julia, and she was one of the few people who were nice to me. Well, she used to be. I hadn’t talked to her since sophomore year. She was kind and beautiful, and for a while, I thought that I loved her. But then I learned that she had a boyfriend, and after that, I simply lost interest. Now I saw her simply as a nuisance, a reminder of the days of wishing I could be with her, no matter what the cost, days when my pain and desperation were euphoria compared to my current agony.

“No.”

“You need to talk to someone.”

“No, I just need to get to class.”

I spat out a mouthful of blood. The bleeding would always start after every seizure.

She got defensive. “Why won’t you look at me?”

“Because I’m in pain! I’ve been in pain long before I got these tumors. I used to think that either love or death could cure me, but I hate this world and everyone in it far too much to ever fall in love! I’m already dead, I’ve been dead for as long as I can remember, but for some reason, my body won’t take the hint and croak, so I’m stuck in this wretched and agonizing bag of flesh and bones, trapped in a world I despise and surrounded by a species that I pray would go extinct! You’ve made it clear that you cannot be the one to help me, no one can. I can only suffer until my abominable existence wipes itself out.”

“Are you mad at me?!” she asked defensively.

I turned around and walked away. “No, I’m mad at fate. I’m mad at my own cursed existence. If you want to help me, then put a bullet in my head.”

Wanting some fresh air and deciding it would be better not to risk having a seizure on the bus, I walked home. The weather wasn’t too bad, and the cold helped ease my pain a little, plus it gave me time alone with my thoughts, free from distractions and noise. Walking along the ice-caked road with my hood tightened to keep my ears warm from the snow, I let my mind wander back to my dream. If what I had concluded about that star was right, then my death truly was approaching and would soon conclude. Even if what Dr. Turner had said about my cancer not being terminal were correct, the side effects sure would be. How long could the human body truly last when forced to suffer endless torture?

‘Whether or not it is my true death, until that time comes, this is how I must march through time. Whether I will continue to exist in some other form is irrelevant, no mind can truly understand the meaning of death or the weight it carries, therefor, it cannot exist within our minds. We cannot comprehend death, we cannot understand it, not without experiencing it ourselves, at which point, we cease to exist. Therefor, death is incomprehensible; it is the end of all reason, in which all human rules and assumptions become meaningless. We can only understand things that exist, while we ourselves exist, so while we may fear death, it is impossible to become aware of it ourselves.

We cannot feel our own death, just as we can’t feel nonexistence. We can watch others die, we can feel our own lives slipping away, but we cannot feel that final moment. We cannot know precisely when it ends. We can see a million people die, but we cannot see our own. It’s like every single person is an immortal surrounded by mortals, a continuing paradox of observation and ignorance. Life occupies the entirety of our minds and our existences. It is infinity. It is the endlessness. Death is the world outside of infinity, the realm beyond argument, in which beginning and end are one and the same.

If I cannot find or detect the end of my life when it happens, then through my senses, it will never happen. I am immortal, and the only way for my death to occur is for everything and nothing to collide and end my existence. Or am I wrong? Will I continue to exist beyond death? Will I live on, even while my body rots in the ground? Is there a life after this one? Is it better? Is it worse?’

“Hey Marcus, want to play chess?” my brother Phil asked.

I was sitting on the couch in the living room, watching TV with a wet towel on my head. I had been feeling feverish all day. Phil was three years younger than me and had the same black hair as I did, though his was cut shorter and he had a different bone structure. He and I had been playing chess for years and he had never once beaten me. You could say it was the one activity we did as brothers, and from what I guessed, this was his attempt to try and distract me from my pain.

I shrugged. “Yeah, sure.”

Phil sat on the other end of the couch and the board was set up. I kept my eyes focused mainly on the TV, looking at the board only when it was my turn. I had some difficulty moving the pieces; my fingers felt stiff and brittle.

“Phil, do you know where I could get some pot?” I asked out of the blue.

“What?”

“Come on, I know you’re a freshman, but you’ve always been on the social circuit. You must know someone who can sell me some weed.”

“No, I don’t hang around with people like that.”

I sighed again and continued to play. For once, Phil managed to beat me, but it was a hollow victory, especially with how quickly he won.

I knocked over my king with a click of my tongue. “Well now, it looks like the old king is dead and the new king has risen. Long live the king,” I said before getting up and leaving.

“Hey Marcus, what’s up?” my sister asked, surprised to see me standing in the doorway.

Emily was a year younger than me and a Junior. She had my mom’s blonde hair, but it was mixed with my dad’s dark hair gene.

“Do you know anyone at school who could sell me some pot?” I asked, nearly scaring her with how blunt I was.

“What? No! You know how Mom and Dad will react if they find it!”

“Oh cut the shit, Em!” Emily’s eyes darkened and we were both silent. I softened my tone before continuing. “You know I wouldn’t even bother with the stuff under normal circumstances ... but things have changed.”