Pills

I took the pill. The pill wasn’t going to cure me, but I needed to take it anyway. I had burning black stars in my vision and a taste of copper in my mouth; these were already in me but the pill had brought them out, or rather stopped my body from suppressing them any longer.

The pill, virtually indistinguishable from the other pills lined up in their case like convicts, was given to me by a doctor I had met on the internet, a doctor who I had contacted when my local well-meaning practitioners had proved ineffective. They hadn’t considered all of the options, I told them, sticking only to a handful of well-trodden assumptions, having seen my case files and, later, my face. A single word of out of place to those kinds of people would result in a pregnant pause, a scribbled note, a quick and fatal re-assessment of the situation. Despite this I didn’t resent them. They were going their way, and I was going mine. They didn’t know, couldn’t know, what it felt like, that sensation of having another nervous system laid imperfectly atop your own. The jangling of it, like I was a bag of keys being shaken endlessly.

It was only after I gave up on that path of antiseptic corridors and crisp white sheets, that I bought my way into secret forums and rings of hacked cellphones, that I realised I too was guilty of partial myopia, of not seeing the forest for the wriggling trees; and the doctor on the internet did not hesitate to tell me so. He’d tell me in emails and in the chatbox of the website I’d used to find him, called something like discreet medicals, based offshore on one of those grey-area islands. He would attach images, scans from textbooks long out of print, some he’d even compiled himself, but the quality was always too poor to make out much on those diagrams, a squiggle of artifacts, some crushed reds. These images would continue long after our conversations stopped, as if he had mentioned them before and was making good on a promise to send them on to me.
And so, for the seven months that I was in contact with the doctor on the internet, shivering and cramping through the nights and sleeping through the days, we developed a protocol for my unique situation. Of course, no situation is truly unique, he told me. There are modalities. And then the pills began to arrive, in braile-stippled boxes wrapped tight with packing tape, dropped off by part-time couriers who knew nothing of their contents, seeing my house as only hurried another stop on their machine-enforced routes.
I never quite figured out where the pills came from, or who was giving them to the couriers. They grunted when I asked them, speaking very little of the local language as they do. It wasn’t clear if the process was being automated in some way, given they arrived at the same time every week, the printed label with my name and a passport-photo sized logo smudged to illegibility in every instance. For some reason I couldn’t stand to handle the packages, to tear at the tacky tape with my thumbnails, and I purchased a boxcutter to slice them down the middle, disgorging their contents through their bellies. There must have been times when the police intercepted these packages, judging from the letters I received, but nobody ever came to warn me or arrest me. Perhaps they have successfully cut off the flow, for the packages no longer come, and I assume these pills I have left in my house are the only ones remaining in existence.
Perhaps they were doing me a great favour in their efforts to stop the doctor from the internet, but what has happened has happened.
At first, I left the pills in a empty coffee jar, and then another when that one filled up. I reprimanded myself harshly for placing my faith in some quack who had never even claimed any qualifications. I even threw the next few packages that came into the bin, a thought that makes me shiver with horror now. I do hope they didn’t get into the water table.
But then, I had a very bad evening. An evening much worse than even my usual bad evenings. And another package turned up. This one was empty except for a folded note, written in a slightly childlike hand, as if by someone who was concentrating very hard on not making mistakes. And it said: I’m not doing this to you. I’m doing this with you.
The first few days taking the pill were in fact the worst, a fact that didn’t become clear until much later. Once in the morning, as soon as I woke up – that wasn’t an understatement, I needed to grab it from the bedside table and swallow within the first few seconds of waking, while the caul of my dreams still hung around me in tatters – and another at night, with a glass of water or milk.
Now I can remember a little of how it made me felt: there was pain, yes, but not the pain I was used to feeling, the drip-drip-drip of acid on my nerves. It was a dislocating pain, a pain transposed to either side of my body by about an inch. There were moments when I thought my heart was giving up, but the pain was migrating to my armpit or groin. That kind of pain is a changing pain, I understood instinctively. It wouldn’t hurt that much unless there was some serious reconfiguration going on underneath, a billowing and muttering behind the velvet curtains. My symptoms remained unchanged, that awful sense of another body occupying the same space as my own.
Yet I continued to take them. It wasn’t any logical decision, or even a grim determination to see it through to whatever end I imagined. My inbox shows several times I contacted the doctor from the internet, to berate him, or to get him to explain himself. He would reply that he was not a sadist. The pills were not poison. It wouldn’t be very good for business if they were. And then he sent a smiley face. It wasn’t so much the words that convinced me, but the images that he had continued to send between our correspondences. They were clearer, now, as if I had been on a poor connection before, and I could make out words that sounded very much like the set of side effects I was encountering, accompanied by p-values and percentiles in stubby tables. These side effects were a smokescreen, a sleight of hand to distract me from the very real work being done to my ragged nerve endings.
At some point the worst of it was over, my body having failed to reach any sort of negotiation with the medication. Fine, take him, they seemed to say. The logs indicate that I was then extremely active on the forums I frequented, where others like me (as the doctor said, I was not unique) shared their symptoms and the side effects they were or were not experiencing. I created several threads that were locked within hours of their publishing, in which I shared some of the diagrams that the doctor had sent to me alongside a lengthy diatribe against him. A few comments had sneaked in before my banning, entirely from new accounts, saying things like ‘interesting’ and ‘bookmarked for later’. The reason given for my ban was that I was ‘scaring the others and reveling [sic] confidential information.’
I also posted several photos of my eyes, up close and poorly lit by my phone camera. At first I didn’t realise they were my own eyes, but the presence of a small scar under my right eyelid – a cigarette burn – confirmed it. My sclera had turned dove-dark, but my iris and pupil were unchanged.
I’m telling you all of this because you need to know. The gap between the side-effects manifesting in my body and my conscious awareness of them grew narrower and narrower until it was all at once. My language toppled off the cliff and into the raging torrent.

The act of talking about falling and of falling itself are very different.