Brainfreeze

First day of half term. First day proper, that is. Monday. No screaming of two separate alarm clocks and eight different alarms going off at their allotted times, ‘snoozing’ her awake for at least an hour before she could really open her eyes after only five hours closed. No sudden alarm-blaring of her iPod at exactly the moment she knew she’d be rebelling against the alarms and falling back to sleep. No turning on BBC24 and getting ready in twenty minutes to it, sprinting for the bus, and starting her work – leftover marking and finalised essay plans – on the tube before 7am. No constant noise from 7.45 – start of work - and no reason to stay til 8pm, as she did nearly every night to try and get everything done. No tiring journey home, no freezing wait for the bus (it always took longer at night), no dinner snatched from the microwave and eaten in front of the computer as she contemplated yet more work; planning, marking, planning...

It was funny, really. Now she didn’t have it she missed it.

She slept in. She moped around. It took her four hours to get round to actually tidying her flat – it seemed to be needed to be thought about for some time, whilst she messed about answering emails from friends who were still at work and were suddenly not there for her to talk to online (her only social life). She decided not to go out – she was tired, no one was around, she wasn’t up to it. Suddenly the day was gone and it was dark. She had done nothing, but didn’t feel relaxed at all. She located the source of her worry: she did actually still have work to do, little bits of marking, schemes of work to write. If she didn’t do it now, it would loom over her all week, forcing her to worry. She tried to do it. She hit a brick wall. Her brain was now addled and fuzzy, trying to relax but hit by work and familiar thought processes all at once. It welled up in her, a feeling of utter despondence. She froze, and could feel every second passing, wasted. She could do nothing; if she relaxed, time was wasted, work could have been being done. If she worked, it was just like every other day of her life, wasted in work.

She did the only thing her brain let her do. She panicked.

After twenty-five minutes of pressing her head to the carpet, curled in a ball and breathing ragged, shallow breaths to combat the hyperventilation that threatened to make her cry, she gave in and cried anyway with the pointlessness of her life. She hated her job. She loved it too – she had to work so hard, and sometimes that was just so satisfying. She knew she’d be bored doing anything else. But she resented it because she did nothing else. She never knew what to do in her spare time. It sucked her dry.

Minutes passed. Still with her head to the floor, she felt them fall off her total lifespan. The day was gone, she had done nothing, and now she only had four days left. She’d go back to work in worse shape than she was in now. Oh – work! The thought of it punched her in the stomach with the awful realisation of the inevitability of resuming the routine – which hours ago she had actually missed – for another two months without a break. Longer – for another year. Her entire working life. The darkness opened its jaws and enveloped her again. Now she couldn’t breathe.

This happened every half term. Every time. She felt entirely trapped inside her own head, out of control.

Finally, painfully, she got off the floor. The pile of holiday reading, actually necessary work reading under a disguise of fictional fun, was towering on the desk. I can’t start one of those, she thought with panicked logic, because then it will end and I still won’t have done anything else. Instead, she did the only other thing she could do in the flat, at that hour, and logged on.

I’ll play a game, she thought. She only had one game: she got bored easily, and this was the only one she could play without getting bored too quickly, a world-building game of skill. It was normally a cure-all and brought her some hours repose, but, now, she hesitated. I’ve played it before, I can’t be bothered to play it again. Obviously, logic was no longer on her side. She smiled inwardly bitterly. It’s like my own brain is trying to sabotage me.

Luckily, at that moment, a friend flashed up a message. She pounced on the distraction.
Darl: hey, sorry bout before, got called away
It was a real friend she hadn’t seen in ages (seriously, when had she last seen anyone whom wasn’t someone she worked with? Why the hell had she chosen to live alone, for that matter?) and to whom she’d been trying to sound nonchalant and carefree with whilst chatting earlier in the day. Then she’d got butterflies over when he suddenly went offline. It seemed such an unrealistic reaction, and she had started to account for it rationally: all this suddenly-free time, it skewed perception, made her feel paranoid that she was being purposely ignored for hours when really it was the simple fact that, for once and very ironically, she had more time on her hands than anyone else to spend waiting for replies. She messaged back.

Me: no worries

Darl: you ok?

For a second she thought, horrified, that her panicky, ridiculous state was so obvious it was permeating cyberspace, then realised this was quite a normal greeting for normal people to give. She cursed herself for not being normal.

Me: yeah good...ok actually going spare, can’t relax, argh!

Darl: no kidding? i take pills for that atch, illegal though, shouldn’t really mention

Darl: oops!

Me: huh?

Darl: kidding. well not kidding atch. legal in states though. gets me through the day!

She blinked. She didn’t like the idea of drugs. An unquantifiable ingredient. She didn’t even like alcohol much, or too much coffee. When she drank, a glass and a half had become her limit since she had grown older, started this job, as any more to drink and she often blacked out, waking to find messages from concerned friends who said they had noticed a change in her, a blacker outlook and meaner, confrontational stance she couldn’t remember. She felt dark and guilty for days. Then, coffee made her shake, giggle even after only a few cups of caffeinated, and feel lightheaded and untouchable... and unsafe. And look at her now, without either! Her mind was doing somersaults, utterly out of control. Damn it, she thought, other people manage? Other people can control themselves. Why the hell can’t you? Still though, she typed back:

Me: hmm, no thanks!

Darl: didn’t think so!

...

Me: the only thing I can think of right now that would make me relax is if they actually removed my brain and put it in a box to hibernate like a tortoise!

There was a pause in the exchange there, which she didn’t notice because she was laughing inwardly at the image she had so abruptly created. It reminded her of Blue Peter. Then she noticed the chat bar flashing.

Darl: www.brainfreeze.com i think.

Me: what?

Darl: oh thought you meant this. sounds like it. read about it in the paper on Sunday.

She cursed herself again. She had meant to read the papers on Sunday, over a nice lunch in some pub with a pint, like you might do if you were trying to relax. She’d slept in then stayed in bed instead, then fretted that it wasn’t relaxing her enough, then forgot the shops closed early on Sunday and missed them and had had to eat emergency pot noodle. Not the same.

Me: what is it?

Darl: its meant to be the cosmetic surgery of neuroscience. apparently. sounds simple enough.

Darl: have a look. probably rubbish though, sounds faddy.

Darl: I have to go – bedtime. Gym early would you believe! nighty night xx

[Darl is no longer online]

The offline notification stung as always, making the feeling of abandonment even keener. Don’t be so bloody ridiculous, it’s your own fault you know - you should have actually gone out and seen people so they can actually remember what you look like and then actually want to talk to you. The self-chiding stung. She forced herself to ignore the fact that she had also just both agreed with her own fear and sounded like her mother. But she had clicked on the URL and the page was loading.
The screen that came up was brightly coloured and factual, if brief. After reading through, from top to bottom, what seemed like an offer undeniably far too good to be true, she asked herself how desperate she was to spend that sort of money.

*About desperate enough to take all of the sleeping tablets I know are in the box in the bathroom cabinet in a moment of madness which is surely coming directly on.*

Really? Her eyes stung. That’s just silly. She didn’t really feel like that. Perhaps she should just get out of the house and away from the visual worries of work piled all around her, even by her bed.

The place on the website was 24-hour, and luckily they had a nearby outlet in town (so popular so quickly?) She jotted down the address. It felt good to have a purpose. If anything, a walk in the dark would do her good. Maybe I should just get myself a nocturnally-inclined dog to walk? she pondered momentarily as she pulled on her boots and picked up her scarf and coat. *Don’t be such a freak*, came the reply, unbidden. *And anyway, it’d die of boredom whilst you made up your mind whether to take it out or not*. She shuddered. Probably true, and pulled the front door shut behind her.

Walking along the quiet evening streets in a light, refreshing drizzle, she began to feel better, and a bit silly for her earlier dramatics. She was under no false belief that the frustration she felt could be fixed with anything other than a drastic reassessment of her career, lifestyle, ...everything... but it was possible. It would just be a lot of hard work. On the other hand, the website apparently promised a “simple and inexpensive electronic procedure” that “refocused brain waves”, stopping them from inefficiently diverting their travels between neurons to the emotive and pain receptors of the brain instead, causing “emotional stress and trauma” that was a “symptom of modern life”. She had liked the way they phrased it for the laypersons who were so obviously their target market: “In today’s world, where we are bombarded with information from a million daily sources, our brains can no longer function in the way they are meant to, attacked by unimportant detail and unable to switch off. Imagine your favourite sweater, but careworn and pilled. Wouldn’t you like to just take the fuzz off?”

But, couldn’t this quick-fix just be a bit of silliness that wasn’t worthwhile?
As she asked herself that question, she felt the answer rise in immediate response from the back of her mind; the familiar black shape, it quickly filled her head, insinuating itself like shadow, silently passing over everything and numbing it, rising up to become an all-consuming, gaping maw of... nothing.

She shuddered, practically stopping in her tracks. This is what she saw every time she thought about her future, any moment further than next Monday. She saw the same panics repeated over, and over, and over, and the same intense, black...nothingness, if she didn’t find some other way to change. She often felt she’d improved upon herself and life was peachy, but then, she admitted, she always found a reason to get worse. She pressed on, the shadow still oppressively over her, not believing that only a minute or so ago she had felt better.

After half an hour of listening only to her constant steps and watching for shadows she realised she had arrived. A neon (neon?) sign flickered above a squat building that looked like it could have been at one point a mini version of a storage facility, where you’d keep the leftover belongings you didn’t have room for in your flat but couldn’t bear to throw away or sell, instead paying a price for their upkeep . It nestled rather incongruously between a small row of mini-supermarkets and a street of narrow, terraced houses. ‘BRAINFREEZE INC’ read the cheery illuminations. The corrugated walls looked slightly grimy, although, according to the website, it was meant to be new, but, to her surprise, there was a small queue of people standing at the yellow double doors. She joined them.

In the queue, no one seemed to be speaking, but there was definitely a faint murmur of voices. Looking around her she saw that there was quite a variety; most seemed to be her age or older, the eldest-looking somewhere around sixty she guessed, and wearing anything from trenchcoats and flatcaps to duffles and puffa-parkas *to ward off the dark*. I mean cold. Glancing down at the concrete steps she realised one person was in pyjamas and slippers. As she settled into waiting in line, it moved forward, someone disappearing through the doors but too quickly for her to see who. She shuffled forward, peaceably taking her place like the rest.

For the twenty or so minutes she stood in line she felt unaccountably calm. Queues are places frozen in time, necessary lapses in activity which cannot be avoided and so enforce inaction. No thoughts of work pitched round her head like drunken revellers, screeching guilt. She sighed happily, and moved forward in time with the rest, enjoying the comfort of real people around her. Still no one seemed to speak. She caught the eye of one man who had half-turned to look back at the queue; his eyes pierced her with the sharpness of his gaze, although most of that sharpness seemed to be aimed inside himself. She looked away.

A few minutes more, and she found herself at the front of the queue. The bright yellow doors very suddenly seemed looming and oppressive, and she unconsciously stepped backwards. Don’t be such a wuss! her brain suddenly screamed at her, and she jolted forward midstep, nearly losing her balance. She found herself caught and steadied by the strong hands of the man behind her, who caught her wrists in an encircling gesture so immediately comforting she suddenly felt like melting backwards into him and letting him wrap his arms tightly around her. Weak! came the shriek from inside. She coloured, mumbling thanks, without even turning to see his face. His grip disappeared, leaving cold patches and white skin on her wrists.

Then there was a loud -click- and she jumped. An electric buzzing was now signifying that the doors were unlocked and she should now move through them. As she did, she wondered that the doors needed locking, and why if this was meant to be a gentle medical procedure there was no gentle doctors’ practice-like waiting room. As soon as she’d thought these thoughts they seemed to melt oozily away and as they evaporated she found herself stepping gingerly over the threshold.

It was cold inside the building, which continued the storage facility themes of corrugated iron walls and cement floors. She felt the absence of a potted plant, even though there was no indication there ever was one to be missed. She hugged herself briefly, and looked around. The foyer was ...sparse. Empty really. In the extreme quiet, the sound of murmuring could still be heard, apparently from outside.

Another yellow door clicked open dead ahead, widening and inviting her in. She walked forward, pushed it open without thinking and stepped into sudden warmth. The cement floor was replaced by pale yellow linoleum, and the glare reduced to the lights from standard lamps dotted about a space that looked a little like someone’s tastefully-decorated living room, albeit one with a large dentists’ chair in the centre, and a metal rack of objects off of which the lights were glinting. She wondered fleetingly what they did with the rest of the building’s space. Two figures were looking toward her from behind the chair, dressed in white coats, one sitting on a long beige couch with a magazine in his hands, the other standing with his arms hanging loose and his fingers relaxedly knit. Their faces were partially covered by sterile white surgical masks, so all she could see of their expressions were kindly brown eyes tilted toward her. The standing one raised his arm and made a beckoning gesture with his hand.

“Please, sit,” he said in a voice the consistency of molten chocolate. She did.

“Now, tell us how we can help.” The sitting figure stood up to join the other and they both stood over her, their dark eyes seeming to float disembodied in the dim white of the ceiling.

She started to speak.
“Well, I sometimes feel that ...” She faltered, trying to explain. Then the words seemed to flow from her like water from a well in the flood.
“I feel like the world is trying to swallow me up, I can’t concentrate, I can’t relax, I can’t complete anything, I feel dulled and insecure, *I need to get out*.”

Her last words surprised her with their finality. The dark eyes above her switched positions and peered closer down for a better view.

“You mean to say, you feel trapped inside your own head? You have no space to think?” The previously-sitting one spoke in the same calm, lilting voice.
She felt herself nodding, biting her lip.
“*Please help me, please help me...I’d rather get out than stay in here*.” Her voice seemed to come out as a moan, full of emotion she hadn’t anticipated. Shocked, she burst into tears.

“There, there.” A hand belonging to one of the
pairs of eyes began to stroke her forehead soothingly.
“We find,” he said in a comforting tone, “that the services offered by Brainfreeze Inc. are widely appreciated by many of the modern population, of which you, my dear, are just one. You are not alone in this.”

“But I’m so confused,” she managed through chest-heaving sobs. “I know I shouldn’t be so unhappy, I have a great life really I should be thankful for, but... *I can’t cope*.” The last words came out as a hiss. The faces above her nodded, making them seem even more like they were floating, bobbing light-buoys in a darkening sea while she drowned beneath them.

“We understand. It is so common these days, these feelings of inadequacy. We can offer you something simple to ease the pain, ‘freeze’ them out, make you better. All you have to do is sign the appropriate forms of course, to legalise the procedure. And to pay, of course.” She could see the mouth beneath the mask relax into a friendly smile that crinkled the eyes. The pain in her head she hadn’t noticed before was already receding. “We can…” He paused to laugh assuringly, “...take the fuzz off.”

“Oh, yes please,” she sighed, and suddenly her mind was clearer. Her gaze drifted across the room, resting upon a pair of certificates above on the wall in front of her. She briefly picked out words... Doctor M. Moniz…Dr L. Freeman… psychosurgeon… licensed to perform… capsulotomy… cingulotomy… An idea came to her.
“Aren’t you meant to discuss my options with me first?” she sniffed up to them, still staring at the certificates on the wall. Now her vision blurred.

“Of course,” one of them said to her – she was not sure which – as a pen was slid into her hand. She heard the shuffling of paper as she gazed on, felt her hand move in accordance with her signature, then felt it pressed externally to the leather armrest.
“There are a choice of options. Each procedure is more effective than the last, each only slightly invasive, and all entirely safe.”
Her ankles were now similarly fixed. For some reason she wasn’t entirely worried.
“Your choice is simply which procedure you think would match the level of stress you seem to feel. We have found it is easiest to describe them as if they are levels of noise. For example, the lowest will serve to block out the level of stressful thought equivalent to the background chitchat of a café or restaurant. The next up enables you to more successfully block levels akin to that of a busy highway, everything coming and going, constant and repetitive. The next, an airport, drowning out your own thoughts, and the next, the highest… ”

She found her lips moving, though now they didn’t even quite match the words. “*Please, please, the highest*.”

The eyes glanced briefly at each other.
“The highest-level procedure is one of extreme calming. It would block out the equivalent ‘noise’ of standing next to the speakers at a heavy metal concert, where the levels of stress in your own mind are so strong they stop you from functioning in a regular way. It is only recommended for those suffering an unprecedented amount of unbidden stress in their lives, who feel they otherwise may do something untoward, harming…”

“*I want the highest procedure. I need it. Now*,” came the strangled, gargling gasp that she was now trying to keep back between her teeth. Her wrists and ankles made a brief effort to squirm against the restraints. It didn’t last.

“Legally we must explain to you the procedure. “ She wasn’t really listening, squirming against herself in fear of what she herself was making happen.
“We use an electrified leucotome which we… depress into the top of the skull, favouring a more direct route through to the cingulum than previous, similar procedures such as the lobotomy, which also minimizes the risk of prominent… cosmetic scarring… The electric pulses… remove some of those overactive compulsions you have been feeling, allowing you to finally relax…”

“ ’Remove’?” she managed through gritted teeth.
Somewhere far away, her debit card went click-clack.

“…the extraneous brain tissue is simply burned away… The procedure is only slightly invasive,” one of the psychosurgeons was continuing, whilst the other disappeared from sight. He returned with a long, finger-thick silver tube that came to an extreme and threatening point. Attached to it were wires that lead off somewhere she couldn’t see. In his other hand was what looked like a large, white mallet. “…Although obviously it is permanent, don’t worry, it is extremely precise with no real risk of damage to other parts of the brain…”

“*Please do it, now!*” Her eyes writhed in her head as she fought to control her own voice.
“No, stop, please…” The formerly-amusing sentence formed again on her lips.
“My own brain is sabotaging…” She saw the eyes under now-knitted brows, concerned.
“I don’t want…”

“*What the hell do you know?*” came a wrenching scream from her own lips. “*You sniveling idiot… take-for-granted… good-for-nothing…*” her brain seemed to spit at her with bitter fury. Her own voice was alien, filling the room inside her head. “*You haven’t a clue what you put me through…every day… never resting…you don’t know how…it’s so difficult to make you listen…this is the only way. You don’t know what you want! It’s my turn to decide.*”

The voice echoed and receded, leaving a brittle silence. Her mouth hung open in shock, panting. Her brain… It wasn’t sabotaging. It was fed up, and suicidal.

After a second or two, she realized the surgeons were still waiting, paused, above her, patient. The room seemed darker, the only light reflecting off the point of the icepick hanging over her head.

“I think,” she started to say, and stopped, swallowing. She wasn’t sure who, or what, had made the decision, but it was there, poised between the unavoidable possibility that she was completely mad, and the awful, endless, gaping black maw of the rest of her life even if she wasn’t.

“I think…yes, you should do it please.”
The surgeons seemed frozen, but not entirely shocked by her or her brain’s final outburst. If she was convinced, then so were they.

“We are legally obliged to ask you again if you are happy to go ahead with this procedure – this whole conversation is being recorded for your…later convenience. You sound as though you were previously been hesitant about the benefits of this surgery. But we should advise you…our diagnosis, as doctors, is that you are certainly ill. And severe mental illness is the most malevolent disease you can have.”

“Please,” she whispered, and lay still.

***

“That was an easy one”, Dr Moniz said to Dr Freeman. “She really seemed to want it that time.”
“Yes, such a sad case,” agreed Dr Freeman, pulling his bloody gloves inside out and slapping them into the bowl on the tray next to the generator. The smell of burnt hair and ozone hung in the room.

“We’d better get her through to aftercare before the queue builds up.” He tenderly pulled the restraints open, and guided the patient onto her feet, pausing to wipe the tiniest tendril of saliva from the corner of her mouth. She smiled.

“Are you alright now?” Dr Moniz asked in a loud, clear voice, shining his torch into both her eyes. The pupils possibly took an extra second to contract, but she nodded in response, looking up to him with a look of pure, simple happiness.

“The nurse will take you through to aftercare now, alright? You might need to stay here tonight, but you’ll be fine to go home in the morning. Alright?”

The patient nodded again, eyes shining, hand slowly raising to finger the lumpy stitches in her hair. Dr Freeman gently guided her hand away.

“Come on Laurence, we’ve got at least five more to do this evening if we’re going to make target this week. Let’s get her out of here, shall we?”
Dr Moniz pressed a button on the wall. “Nurse!”

A stout woman in a nurse’s uniform appeared at the door, took the patient’s hand, and led her swiftly away. On the CCTV screen next to the sofa, Dr Freeman watched the two figures pass through the foyer once more, and the Nurse open a door to the direct left of the double front doors. He pressed a button and the camera angle changed, watching them come through the door on the other side. He flicked at a joystick and the camera panned across the room, revealing beds and beds of still, smiling patients, their lips gently moving. He watched the Nurse settle the patient onto an empty bed, stroke her on the forehead, and then leave. He couldn’t hear the muttering of the happy, contented, stress-free brains as they soothed their bodies into their new, happy state, but he knew what they were saying. He said it to himself as he added another tally to the company timesheet, and nodded to Dr Moniz to press the door release button to let the next patient in.

*There, there*. *There, there*.