by Brent Dragoo

Don’t Finish this.

That’s what my dissertation advisor told me. End this path of study. Stop investigating what you’ve seen written on brains like cursive. 

I’m nine months away from a PhD in Neuro-Pathology. I track disease data indicators on bleached-gray brain strips. I find dark loops and black spirals in the magnifications of cerebral tissue.

I liquid stabilize every moment and every memory you ever had, then plane your cerebellum into 955 fluttering slices. The slices are as thin and curly as yanked scabs. The process smells like freezer burn.

My advisor says my research will be career death. No, worse. I’d end up like my dropout friend Noah, reduced to the slim patronage of online conspiracy research.

My advisor tells me the dean wants to meet with me. Tomorrow morning. Together, he says, we can find a more productive use of my time.

Don’t Finish this.

I have to explain why I’m writing this down. There’s a rising pattern of terrible deaths. It’s likely that I might be responsible for it.

In our lab, nothing but the finest and most hideous specimens suffice. The midlife brain gusted with dark grit that pulls dreams into waking life. The lost and limp cerebellums full of noosed neurons that tangled all memory into a minute long loop.    

But these won’t do. I’m plundering for something specific.

A shape. A brain protein, misfolded. A shape so wrong that just brushing against it would fold a healthy protein bad, and start the loop all over again.

I mean a shape … shapes … literally. They aren’t alive. They don’t have an agenda like a virus. They don’t have the blank reproductive urge like bacteria or fungus. They can’t be burned, they can’t be bleached, they can never be washed away. Once your brain is exposed to the pattern, your thoughts grow jaws, and start chewing holes where your memories should be.

Your neurons are as gullible as children. They look once, and they see the pattern, and they’re helpless. One bends, then another, and soon your brain frays to lint underneath your skull.

Noah brought in a specimen a year ago. He grinned like he’d hauled treasure from a wreck. The brain was stiff, waxed, and yellow. He opened the steel container by the hooded fans, whistling the breeze through hair-thin caves wormed out by the shapes. The brain hummed like ocean surf. A yellow seashell that once held an entire human life.

I find specimens tagged and flagged ‘unique’. I slot hundreds of brain slices together. I rebuild a stained class cerebellum from

the bricks to the spire. I take notes until I hear morning birds.

This is how I discover 0443.

CASE ID: DB-0291

• Subject: Male, 32, Data Analyst, Vegan, no international travel.
• Cause of Death: Generalized seizure during prolonged (24 hours) episode of pathological laughter.
• Findings: Temporal lobe worn like a coin, polished into repeating clockwise grooves.

CASE ID: DB-0299

• Subject: Female, 25. No family history of PRNP D178N (Fatal Familial Insomnia) mutation.
• Cause of Death: Cardiac arrest following 47 days total sleep deprivation.
• Findings: Patient used pen to draw elaborate, connected lines on floor, walls and ceiling of room in weeks before death. Brain cross-section revealed thalamus decayed into hollow, ring-like structure.

CASE ID: DB-0443

• Subject: Female, 40, Museum Curator.
• Cause of Death: Exsanguination following self-enucleation.
• Findings: Optic chiasm calcified. Retinal nerves fused at entry to midbrain. Patient claimed to own a book that “finished your thoughts for you.” Examination revealed  diary of attempts to develop a cure for all diseases.

I weld 0443 into my imagination. The compression loops in the magnified slice expand into the day-to-day. I see driller loops in rain clouds and tree bark. I see the microscopic arrangements across the sky and as big as the spinning wind against the trees. I go back to the notes.

A translator who thought in nine languages spent her final week repeating the same five words. An architect spent the last year of his life blueprinting his masterwork: his family said it was nothing but crayon loops on butcher paper. A 19-year-old musical prodigy spent the last two months of his life composing. Every measure grew tighter and tighter, until the sound fell into the same choking loop I saw etched across his frontal lobe.

You can’t help but notice it.

I wasn’t the first to see how everything bent back on itself.

Noah was.

Noah didn’t have my patience. He thought this research program was a waste of time. No. He thought it was worse.

“If you discover something new, you’ll be last on the author list when they publish. If you find profit in any possible way, they’ll say you imperil the project and trim you off as dead weight.”

He gave me advice. It was becoming clear, but I couldn’t see it.

“Don’t finish this.”

Noah held CASE ID DB-0686 above his head. The red-dyed slice powders his eyes with decayed fissures.

“What was the title of that article you tried to submit to Cortex?” He asks.

“The one the Dean called the editor about? At home?”

“That’s the one,” he says.

“Linguistic Entrapment Mechanisms: Frameworks for Symbol Induced Protein Misfolding in the Human Brain.”

“The dean told the editor to burn it, lest the bad ideas propagate,” I tell him.

“They’re scared of what you might find. Do you know that?”

“I haven’t found anything yet.”

“You have.” Noah waves a slice of brain at me. “I talked to our specimens’ families.”

Noah lifts his eyes. He has more.

“Did you find a link?”

“Every single specimen of them was looking for something.”

“The same thing?”

Noah shakes his head. He grins with a smile that looks borrowed and awful.

“That architect … blueprints to a fused glass skyscraper by Eero Saarinen. The translator’s family said they found the key to the Voynich Manuscript. The musician was after a piano score by Chopin that required three hands to play.”

I assembled it instantly. “They’re being baited.”

My toes curled in my shoes. Something cold unfurled underneath my stomach.

“And then hooked, right in the-” I cut Noah off.

“They were chasing different things. But it was all the same shape.”

“What?”

My breathing goes shallow and much too fast. My hands go numb like I’m carrying ice. I try to talk but nothing comes out at all.

I’m terrified. I’m overjoyed. I’m going to be famous. I’m going to be attached to hundreds and thousands of dead bodies, forever. I stare at those wriggling smears on glass, and I know they’re staring right back at me.

“They all saw the same thing, but their brains put a mask on it. The mask doesn’t matter. The shape gets in anyway.”

 “Your paper was exactly right. Linguistic entrapment … they spread by words. ” Noah said.

A hot streak crawls up my throat, and I almost heave onto Noah’s Birkenstocks.

My mind flashes dark myths. Men turned to stone at Medusa’s glance. The Evil Eye that stares and sickens. Lot’s wife turned to salt for glancing back at Sodom and Gomorrah.

0443 had figured it out, or gotten pretty close. At the very least she knew what part of her body was guilty.

Noah asks if I knew why he came here.

I shake my head.

“A scientist from Hawaii says he has proof. Results of an experiment and the brain slices to match.”

“Isn’t that murder?”

“In theory.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow morning. He’s coming to my apartment. It’s too late to put my name on it. Not too late for you.”

Tomorrow morning. The meeting with the dean. Decision time.

Don’t finish this.

Noah tells me he’s going to see how the shape transfers, whether I’m there or not.

He knows precisely what decision I make.

Walk through the door with me.

Noah’s unlocked door. A reeking, burning plastic smell. Blue smoke trickles stick-thin out of Noah’s mouth.

The loop lands in his eyes.

Noah’s eyes are cracked mirrors. I reflect in them a thousand different ways, funhouse style, in his dead diamond gaze.

Noah’s finger is still tucked into the pages of his navy moleskine journal. A pen balances on the knuckles of his pale right hand.

He hasn’t been dead long. His face is still flushed red from the thrill of meeting whatever annihilated him.

I’m next to him. The golden sunset reflects off his eyes and skims the wall of his apartment. Outside, the sky coaxes black from orange.

In the blue chalk moonlight, I slip Noah’s journal from his tightening grasp. I hope here, in the quiet soft light, that maybe it won’t notice. That I’ll somehow be alright. 

The words compress into loops, expand … spiral. I’d seen the shape before, in slide 0443…and maybe everywhere else. All words reach to me at once. The words splash across me in bitter ink. Ragged sentences hatch and swarm just behind my eyes.

I blink. My god. My eyes sting, scraping raw with every blink. Is the burn mine alone, or has it begun to seep beyond me?

I understand. What Noah was after. What I was after. What Noah led me into.

It was never the object itself. Never the song, never the blueprint, never the journal. It was the same shape each time, wearing a different mask.

Don’t finish this.

The words weren’t mine. They came up from somewhere deeper, somewhere folding.

The high morning clouds jut pink and purple across Noah’s thousand eyes.

The clouds loop, twist, tighten. They seed dark, black words across the sky. They take their cue from the microscopic arrangements now trickling across my brain.

My brain goes smooth as wet stone. The soft loops inside tremble in utter, aching delight. I can feel it churning inside my skull. Coiling into a more comfortable shape.

I tried to stop myself. But my brain was a timebomb, and my eyes put fire to the fuse.

I can feel my brain coiling. Bundling itself into a comfortable loop.

I’ve taken the rudimentary tools from a lobotomy display in the lab. The alcohol and lidocaine. The stainless mallet and long, sturdy pick.

With a steady hand, I can pull those loops from my frontal lobe. I’ll have a chance at myself again.

Perhaps you think that’s why I wrote this down.

This story.
This warning.
This trap.

To ease my guilt? Yes. But only for what I did to you.

And you have to admit…you get it now, don’t you?

Trace your steps back and see how you arrived here. Your curiosity led you into the loop, just as mine led me into Noah’s journal. From this vantage, you can see the whole shape of the story, can’t you?

I warned you not to finish.
I warned you how it comes through words and linguistic entrapment.
I warned you that those seeking an answer would find it, and the finding would doom them.

Understand this: I’m sorry for tricking you.

I don’t pity you at all. Not for reading this far. Yes, you can go back and reread the lines where you think you let it in. But you can already feel the itch in your eyes and see the flickers and floaters in your vision. And tell me the truth: doesn’t it feel right the way the loop cradles in?

Still.

I warned you.

Don’t finish this.