Flowers for Algernon

Downhill. Thoughts of suicide to stop it all now while I am still in control and aware of the world around me. But then I think of Charlie waiting at the window. His life is not mine to throw away. I've just borrowed it for a while, and now I'm being asked to return it.

I must remember I'm the only person this ever hap­pened to. As long as I can, I've got to keep putting down my thoughts and feelings. These progress reports are Char­lie Gordon's contribution to mankind.

I have become edgy and irritable. Having fights with people in the building about playing the hi-fi set late at night. I've been doing that a lot since I've stopped playing the piano. It isn't right to keep it going all hours, but I do it to keep myself awake. I know I should sleep, but I be­grudge every second of waking time. It's not just because of the nightmares; it's because I'm afraid of letting go.

I tell myself there'll be time enough to sleep later, when it's dark.

Mr. Vernor in the apartment below never used to complain, but now he's always banging on the pipes or on the ceiling of his apartment so that I hear the pounding beneath my feet. I ignored it at first, but last night he came up in his bathrobe. We quarreled, and I slammed the door in his face. An hour later he was back with a policeman who told me I couldn't play records that loudly at 4 a.m. The smile on Vernor's face so enraged me that it was all I could do to keep from hitting him. When they left I smashed all the records and the machine. I've been kidding myself anyway. I don't really like that kind of music any more.

October 4

Strangest therapy session I ever had. Strauss was upset. It was something he hadn't expected either.

What happened—I don't dare call it a memory—was a psychic experience or a hallucination. I won't attempt to explain or interpret it, but will only record what happened.

I was touchy when I came into his office, but he pre­tended not to notice. I lay down on the couch immedi­ ately, and he, as usual, took his seat to one side and a little behind me—just out of sight—and waited for me to begin the ritual of pouring out all the accumulated poisons of the mind.

I peered back at him over my head. He looked tired, and flabby, and somehow he reminded me of Matt sitting on his barber's chair waiting for customers. I told Strauss of the association and he nodded and waited.

'Are you waiting for customers?' I asked. 'You ought to have this couch designed like a barbers chair. Then when you want free association, you could stretch your pa­tient out the way the barber does to lather up his customer, and when the fifty minutes are up, you could tilt the chair forward again and hand him a mirror so he can see what he looks like on the outside after you've shaved his ego.'

He said nothing, and while I felt ashamed at the way I was abusing him, I couldn't stop. 'Then your patient could come in at each session and say, 'A little off the top of my anxiety, please,' or 'Don't trim the super-ego too close, if you don't mind,' or he might even come in for an egg shampoo—I mean, ego shampoo. Aha! Did you notice that slip of the tongue, doctor? Make a note of it. I said I wanted an egg shampoo instead of an ego shampoo. Egg… ego… close, aren't they? Does that mean I want to be washed clean of my sins? Reborn? Is it baptism symbolism? Or are we shaving too close? Does an idiot have an id?'

I waited for a reaction, but he just shifted in his chair.

'Are you awake?' I asked.

'I'm listening, Charlie.'

'Only listening? Don't you ever get angry?'

'Why do you want me to be angry with you?'

I sighed. 'Stolid Strauss—unmovable. I'll tell you something. I'm sick and tired of coming here. What's the sense of therapy any more? You know as well as I do what's going to happen.'

'But I think you don't want to stop,' he said. 'You want to go on with it, don't you?'

'It's stupid. A waste of my time and yours.'

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 ses-

sions I always had a great deal of material to bring out 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.

'Its hard to explain,' I said. 'A feeling I've had once or twice before, just before I fainted. A lightheaded-ness … 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 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 dont look at the light, only at the flower, unmulti-plying,undividing itself back from the many toward one. And