Hey, do you wanna know a fun fact?

The brain doesn’t actually feel pain. It’s got no nerves in it! That’s great news for brain surgeons, because it means that they only have to numb that teeny bit of skin around your skull, and they can keep you awake but too doped to care as they crack open your skull. Then they can ask you all kinds of questions while they’re slicing at your headmeats. Things like, “How do you feel now?” and “Can you lift your arm for me?” and “What’s the square root of three-hundred and forty-six?”, so they know they didn’t accidentally cut too far.

That’s literally how they do it sometimes, you know. Because brains are complicated, right? It’s not like a heart, where you can pull one out of a dead guy and run it through some tubes until you get it to pump blood good again. Brains do a lot of tiny jobs, which all gotta line up right. And some of those are ‘lifting your arm’ and some of those are ‘answering questions’, and some of those are ‘have a personality and everything that makes you human’.

So you can see, it’s a lot of pressure. It’s not like rocket science.

…Okay, so that wasn’t a very fun fact, I guess.

Do you want to know another one?

Most people develop schizophrenia when they’re in their early twenties. It’s one of those disease types that shows signs early, but only really pops up when the brain is just about finished growing. Like when you spend weeks molding a sweet clay pot, and then you stick it in the kiln and it blows up because you left air bubbles inside. Boom! Bang! Surprise!

So if you’re like me and you start seeing things and hearing things and having migraines at sixteen, that’s usually a sign that there’s something else wrong up there. Well, more wrong than being schizophrenic, which means it’s something pretty bad, if you ask me. Like… we took a scan on the MRI and you’ve got what looks like a tumor the size of a golf ball in your skull-type wrong.

…Shit, that wasn’t a fun fact, either. I’m not good at this.

…

…Do you want to know another fun fact?

It’s been an hour and a half since they stopped cutting.

My brain is cold.

#

I first started getting headaches about a year ago, after a trip up to my grandpa’s house by the lake. The lake is full of rotting algae and flies and the tangled up ruins of fishing nets, so obviously it was a 10/10 experience. I remember coming out of the water, covered in lake-slime and shaking the plug-up out of my ears, but the ringing tinnitus stayed all day. Even when I tried to pass out on the living room futon at night, smelling cat hair and listening to the kitchen clock ticking, it rang on and on until it melted into a migraine.

It went away, but came back a couple days later, when I was trying to microwave a burrito and kept thinking I heard the timer beeping. I followed the sound around the house, checking under cushions and around corners while my burrito exploded.

And then again, on the bus to school, the colors got too bright and the air too stale to handle, and I curled up in the back seat and woke up at the depot, surrounded by the empty yellow shells of other buses. It’d come faster, that time, and took longer to leave, like a bad neighbor who thinks you’re friends.

So that kept happening, and it sucked.

Then I started seeing things, too, and that sucked more. 

At first I thought I was seeing things because of the pain, you know? Like in the movies, when the hero gets shot and has a vision of an angel coming down to comfort him. But this wasn’t an angel lady, this was like… bugs, skittering across the bathroom tile and up all the walls and itching on the inside of my clothes.

(Oh, yeah, I could feel them, too. Did I mention that? I felt the itching, and I smelled them, and they smelled like burning ash, and like coppery blood, and like a sharp tang of citrus. They smelled like dead things, and they reached out with tiny jagged limbs like cracks across glass.)

My mom found me in a closet, then, wrapped in a blanket and scratching at my arms, and she decided it was probably about time to see a doctor.

So she took me to a head-shrink, and the head-shrink asked me questions about the crippling pain and vivid hallucinations and increasing confusion. Then she looked at her notes and said to my mom, “I don’t want to worry you, but he may have anxiety.”

She sent me home with an aspirin. I went to bed. The migraine came back. I had a nightmare about maggots in the walls. We went to another doctor.

That one seemed a little more welcoming. He asked about the hallucinations more than anything, focusing on each detail and sense. He jotted down notes in his chart, then said, “It’s definitely schizophrenia, Peter.”

And I said, “My name is Phillip.”

And he said, “Phillip, you have schizophrenia.”

And I was like, shit. I guess so.

No one likes being schizophrenic, okay? No one–no one likes that. Let me say that loud and clear. Because when you hear the word schizophrenic, there’s only two things you think of, and that’s either “tragically disabled” or “murderous maniac”. You know, depending on which movie you watched recently.

If it was A Beautiful Mind or something, you think of hospital gowns and wistfully blank stares out the window, maybe from an older man or maybe from a pale, doe-eyed little kid. He’s (and it’s always a “he”, I mean, come on) always a professor on the brink of tenure, and that kid is always some variation of cluelessly trusting. You think of a hospital that states for just two dollars a day, we’ll send you a picture of the soul you’ve helped. 

But let’s be real, that’s probably not the movie you watched. You probably watched something more like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, right? The sort of schizophrenia that puts on a mask and murders some college kids because their dead mom or the ghosts said so. The sort that grins.

I know that’s what the doctor thought, between the two. I know it because he gave me that wary sort of frown as he spoke the words, and because when I got up to leave he gave me a good five feet of clearance to get out the door, without offering directions back to the waiting room. And I know it because he pulled my mom aside, when he thought I couldn’t hear, and he muttered something about caution and lashing out and you’ll need to be ready in case…

Centipedes skittered up the walls of the waiting room, hissing. I nodded back. At least, they seemed to say, only one of those is the type that people always pay ten bucks at the theater to see.

Better to be stylish than pitied. 

It took another year for someone to suggest the word tumor. In the meanwhile, my doctor put me on a round of pills: anti-psychotics, at first, for the hallucinations, and they helped a little. But they made me nauseous, so he put me on some anti-nausea pills. But those made me depressed, so he put me on some anti-depressants. And then he put me on some sedatives, because I said this wasn’t working and he said it was because I wasn’t trying hard enough and I threw a tissue box at his Goddamn head.

(To be fair, I had a migraine at the time.)

By the time the year was out, the migraines had gone from once a week to basically every hour, and it was rare that I’d wake up without one. Sometimes I’d go blind in one eye for a bit, too, or start crying for no real reason.

School stopped being an option, obviously. Even if I could focus enough to study, the last hospital bill had added another couple thousand dollars to our debt, and school became a luxury Mom couldn’t afford. So she walked with me out of the principal’s office and back down the hall to the car, and on the way I passed by a dozen other kids who all stared at me with this weird mix of pity and fear. They twitched like bugs, all nervous glances and shifting feet.

I hissed back, and a couple kids jumped.

Between pity and fear, I decided, I’d rather be feared.

I spent a lot of time asleep, and a lot of the rest of the time at the doctor’s, and somewhere along the way one of the interns suggested that it might be a tumor. She’d seen it, she said, in a documentary. What kind of documentary, she didn’t say, but the way she bit her lip seemed to suggest true crime.

I was willing to try an MRI scan. Hell, I was willing to try anything. They could’ve suggested a pickaxe and a bucket to let the fluids drain out, and I would’ve been first in line for the case study.

The head doctor authorized a scan, but I get the feeling that he was mostly humoring the situation. He’d checked my file, where the last doctor must’ve written something like disagreeable after I’d thrown that tissue box at his head. Because he clucked his tongue at me, smiled, and said, “Doing a little check-up, huh? I hope you won’t take it too personally.”

A harried-looking assistant helped me fill out a questionnaire, mostly about if I had tattoos or piercings or a secret pregnancy, then gave me some earplugs and pushed me into the machine. The magnets did their trick, and I heard the technician talk over a microphone.

“Can you tap your fingers for me, Phillip?” he asked.

“Great job! You’re done. The images are coming right up now, Phillip,” he said.

And then he said, “Jesus shitChrist.”

And that’s how I found out I have a tumor!

The rest of it happened real fast, afterwards. A doctor–a radiologist, I’d find out later–sprinted down the hall, followed by a couple more people, all gawking around each other. I asked what was up, and one of them broke away long enough to say, “It’s fine, sweetie, don’t worry, we’ll get this fixed right up.”

…Which was less than reassuring.

They muttered between each other, and somewhere along the line one of them remembered I was still in the MRI machine and got me out. They sat me at a table and gave me a hefty stack of paperwork, then loaded me onto a stretcher.

“I can walk,” I said to the one doing the loading. She laughed, uneasily, and wheeled me to another room.

The last thing I saw before the tarp went over my face were tiny white spots on one of the doctor’s hands, pulsing in and out, that looked something like eggs.

#

Do you want to know another fun fact? When they cut open my skull, it smelled weird, and I could still smell it lingering when they asked me questions during the surgery. It was like pennies, like those old blackish pennies you dig out of the bottom of the jar. And there’s oranges, bright and citrusy, like the fluoride at the dentist. And burning, of course. It smelled like burning most of all.

It didn’t hurt, cutting my skull, because they doped me up. But I could hear the little handsaw whirring away, and a low whine, and then it hit bone and it went from a whirr to a KRRRCH and everything smelled like burning pennies.

And one of the doctors asked, as this was happening, “How are you feeling, Phillip?”

And because I was too doped up to have a migraine, I replied, “Pretty good, considering.”

And he went, “Good, good. Let me know if you feel any pain, even a little bit.”

And I thought about asking will you give me another aspirin if I say yes?, and that was hilarious because I was doped up, but I didn’t ask it. I focused on the bugs instead, skittering up the wall, and how nice it felt to be so doped I couldn’t feel my brain hurting for once.

So I guess they must’ve lifted up a piece of my skull, then, because I didn’t feel pain, but I did feel a breeze, and a little bit of damp above my forehead, like it was raining. I heard the intern muttering and the doctor muttering back, little things like, “hold this” and “scalpel” and “turn”.

And then, quietly, “What is that.”

Of course I couldn’t tilt my head to look, what with the tarp and the brain and all. So I tapped my fingers like the technician had said, and I stared into space, and the doctor and intern both went quiet.

Then I heard the doctor say, “Preparing to extract.”

“Jesus, what–”

“Looks like an infection around the occipital lobe, just beneath the parietal–”

“It looks like an egg, that’s not an infection–”

“Correct: a parasitic growth, likely botflies–”

“Botflies? That isn’t–”

And then the damndest thing happened. The doctor’s hand dropped beneath the tarp, and I saw all those little white spots on the back of his fingers.

And one by one, in bursts of lightning, they hatched. They hatched all across his skin.

#

It’s been two hours since they started cutting. I’m really good at telling time, fun fact. The headaches didn’t take away that, and I’ve had a lot of time to kill over the past year.

I can’t hear the doctor or intern doing anything. No feet shuffling, no cutting, no smells of burning orange pennies. How long does a brain surgery take, anyway?

If I listen real close, though, I can hear something dripping off the tarp, and if I tilt my head I can see something like feet against the sink, two pairs, and they’re tipped back and not moving anymore.

And it smells like ozone and pennies and dirty lake water.

It’s been two hours, so the dope is starting to wear off, and I can feel a little bit of stinging now. And I can feel my brain, surprisingly. Guess it has nerves after all. It feels like little wrigglers, slipping and sliding across the tarp and onto the floor, and the doctor and intern aren’t saying anything about that.

But it doesn’t hurt anymore. The migraines are all slipping and sliding off the tarp and away, crawling up the walls and skittering down the tile, and that’s a relief.

I could lift the tarp, if I wanted. There’s no straightjacket pinning this dangerous psycho down. I could lift it up and see everything.

I don’t want to lift the tarp just yet, though. It’s like when I was little and I would hold a blanket over my head so the monsters wouldn’t get me. Or like earlier this year, when I hid in a closet with a blanket to smother all the bugs.

Maybe later, I’ll lift up the tarp. After the bugs have caused a couple thousand dollars’ worth of damages to the offices. After they’ve eaten enough medical supplies to justify the bills Mom got every month. A year’s worth of bills, of trips, of empty pill bottles.

And when they’re done, I’ll step outside and walk up to the nearest person in the wreckage. And they’ll take one look at me as I am now, bloody and brain exposed, and they’ll shriek their head off. And I’ll smile, because it’s better to be feared than pitied.

And when they do, I’ll tip my head at them, and I’ll say, real sweet-like, “Kiddo, I don’t want to worry you, but you may have anxiety.”