By Javier Melo Hidalgo
“In recognition of his notable contributions to Pharmaceutical Science, which stand alongside an extensive portfolio of academic and professional achievements, the Board of Governors of St. July’s Hospital is honored to present Doctor Jonah Morrisey with the highest accolade it can bestow. Dr. Morrisey, please accept the 2043 Jeremiah Salazar Award for Scientific Excellence, which you have rightfully earned through a lifetime dedicated to the progress and preservation of the human mind.”
Dr. Morrisey rose from his front-row seat and walked towards the marble podium, escorted by an eruption of heartfelt applause. He wore a white lab coat, and the camera flashes bouncing against his glasses illuminated his short, dark curls with brief streaks of light. The doctor waved at the crowd gathered behind him: a sea of beaming faces which almost burst out of the open doors of the auditorium. He quickly reached the stage and shook the hand of the Board Director, a tall, bearded gentleman who presented him with the trophy. Dr. Morrisey held the silver sculpture, which was shaped like a bulging brain, and had his name engraved in fine cursive along the shining cerebellum. He looked at it with quiet distance.
“Would you honor us with a few words, Doctor?” The Board Director offered his microphone, and glanced at Dr. Morrisey with pleased expectation. The doctor reached for it, turning towards the audience.
“Thank you, sir. I would like to thank the Board of Governors for this distinction, which I am honored to accept. Your consistent patronage has been crucial for the continuous development of the Videat Method. What began as a barely-funded research project between two … frankly quite ignorant, entry-level neurologists is now a revolutionary treatment accessible to everyone—”
The crowd interrupted him with a barrage of cheers, eased in by the doctor’s good humor. He bowed his head, and laid his right hand on his chest in return. In the left corner of the auditorium, a man bouncing on a blue wheelchair brought his fingers to his mouth in an ear-piercing whistle. Pointing the silver brain in his direction, the doctor continued: “Accessible to everyone who might ever need it. Men and women who have lost the use of their legs. Widows and widowers that have fallen to depression in their longing. Elderly patients with dwindling memories. Thanks to the work we’ve been allowed to pursue here at St. July’s, Videat can ease all of their burdens. We can bring the joy of running back to the crippled man. An instance of relief for the grieving lover, even firm flashes of a memory believed to be torn beyond repair. It was my dream to witness a reality like this within my lifetime.…”
Dr. Morrisey’s gaze set on the wide arch overlooking the main entrance’s threshold. Despite his efforts to the contrary, his eyes traveled along the marble lettering that spelled the hospital’s mantra: Sana, Discite, Manet. His grip around the sculpture hardened. He readjusted his glasses, and lowered his voice to a mellower tone.
“Of course, it wasn’t my dream alone. I would also like to thank the man whose mind made all of this possible in the first place. The most brilliant neurologist of this generation, more than deserving of this award bearing his name. Without him, Videat would have remained an unfulfilled fantasy. My late partner, Doctor Jeremiah Salazar, who was taken from us entirely too soon. I only hope he rests in peace and satisfaction for the incalculable number of ways in which he blessed our world.”
Dr. Morrisey let out a long, relieved sigh, masked by the final ovation of his audience. The temporary calm he found in that brief moment came to a sudden halt when he recognized the outline of a particular figure in the outskirts of his peripheral vision. Scanning the crowd, the doctor became aware of an emerald-green hat, adorned with a striking blue feather, and his stomach dropped.
* * *
Dr. Morrisey hurriedly nudged congratulating patients and patrons aside as he made his way out of the auditorium. Glancing behind him, he kept the silver brain close to his chest as he marched through different corridors, nearing the back exit of the hospital. His unconventional path lowered the number of recognizable faces he had to rush through, until he reached the most remote wing of the hospital. There, tunnels of white hallways under occasionally-fluttering lights spanned in every direction, interrupted by a number of green doors leading to various custodian offices. Dr. Morrisey had been walking in front of one of these doors when it suddenly flung open and a small hand pulled the doctor into a dark room. He was overcome with confusion and excitement, before jumping at the sound of the door slamming behind him.
“Calm down, Jon. It’s just me.”
With a flick, the room filled with white light. The walls were brown and dull, save for some hung calendars and stapled reports streaked with pink highlighter. The space was small; the doctor could touch both walls with outstretched arms. It was also crowded: filled with red buckets, mops, and yellow warning signs. In the middle of the room, a short woman wearing elegant, white pants and a scarlet blouse stared at him expectantly, with her arms crossed over her chest. Her hazel eyes were surrounded in a soft tint of green, which grew fainter as it neared her black irises. Atop glistening streams of jet-black straight hair, she wore the emerald hat that had paralyzed the doctor before.
“Barbara.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you, Jon? I’ve been spamming your cell for weeks. I tried going to your house last Tuesday, I called you sister and she—”
“You called my sister?”
“I know, Jon, but what else do you want me to do? You just up and vanish that night at my house, and I don’t know anyone else who can help me. They all look at me like I’ve gone insane. And you’re out here acting like nothing’s going on, saying shit like ‘I only hope he rests in peace’ like you know for sure what happened to him!”
“Barbara.” Dr. Morrisey, starting to regain his composure, readjusted his glasses and fixed his clothes. “We do know for sure. Jeremiah died in his sleep, of pneumonia. I’m sorry I’ve been blowing you off, but I don’t want to keep having to remember what happened to my best friend every time we talk, just because you won’t accept that some people just die.”
“Did you forget everything I told you Tuesday? How he started acting all weird, all distant before he passed? How his voice would wander off in the middle of a conversation? He wasn’t like that before; I know when something’s going on with my husband. What about the vials, Jon? Neither of us knew about them, Miah told both of us that he never went through a Videat extraction. Yet I find a box with four of his memories. Stacked on top of his clothes, in the middle of our closet, as if he wanted me to find it.”
“Sure, Jeremiah never told me he went through Videat, but I didn’t know everything about him. You know we started drifting apart towards the end as well. For all we know he changed his mind about it but was too proud to show you. Specially after the way you’ve abused yourself—”
“Don’t come at me with that. As if you’ve done any better.”
“I have, as a matter of fact. I can still tell my dreams apart from other peoples’.”
This comment made Barbara snap her eyes away from the doctor’s. She glared at a corner of the janitor closet, and in a fit of frustrated determination, she moved towards it. She retrieved a brown box from where she had left it, tucked underneath the head of a broom. With tears beginning to pool under her eyes, she pushed the box into the doctor’s chest. He opened it slowly, revealing four syringes shimmering with a fluorescent, green solution. They were ordered with orange numbers written atop each one.
“I just want you to check, Jon. You know I can’t take the injection myself.”
“And whose fault is that?”
“I know you hate me now, but he was like a brother to you. Miah knew I can’t take Videats anymore, so this must be meant for you. Even if you refuse to believe me, you owe it to him to hear him out.”
The doctor stared at the vials intently. He watched how perfectly still memories seemed, when they were still contained in their glass tubes. In front of him, Barbara’s figure began to shake in small bursts, betraying the escalation of her tears. The doctor worked hard to excise the last vestiges of sympathy he still had for his old friend’s widow. He endeavored to the most unpleasant corners of his memory, and remembered her there, trying to hate her with every instinct of his flesh. But the doctor couldn’t. There was too much guilt, too much pity … alongside an increasingly dawning sensation. A feeling that, despite everything the doctor already knew, he was missing something crucial. He raised his eyes towards Barbara.
“I’ll do it … just in case it was meant for me. But I need you to stay with me.”
Barbara’s green eyes blinked slowly. “Of course.”
“Thank you.”
The doctor had already sat down, turning his back to her, when she said, “Always.”
* * *
Dr. Morrisey pulled up his sleeve and tapped the back of his finger against the metal syringe before holding it against the white ceiling light. He took deep, measured breaths as he aligned the needle with his vein, easily finding its blue outline against his paling skin. Off to his side, Barbara Salazar’s hand covered her mouth, and the skittish scratching of her shoe against the ground was all the noise that she could muster. The doctor gritted his teeth and inserted the syringe into his right arm. With his left thumb, he pushed the green solution down into his bloodstream, closing his eyes as the final drops disappeared into the needle until the glass chamber was empty.
The injected vein began pulsing with a green glow that spread into the surrounding muscle, like a flashlight behind the thin skin of an ear. The doctor’s fingers began to numb and his vision grew blurry. In the empty glass chamber, the doctor gained a vague glimpse of his reflection, and noticed his eyes begin to glow softly, gaining a soft green shimmer that began to bleed into his vision, until everything before him was an endless sea of emerald.
In this green limbo, the doctor left his body. He no longer felt his hands, his legs. He no longer smelled the air around him, or heard the scratching of Barbara’s shoe. His sense of space and self was temporarily sedated, and for a brief moment, as his body processed the Videat solution, he only existed as himself. A consciousness with no shape. But awake, nonetheless.
Then the memory began to gain form.
Every memory was programmed to start with a declaration of time and space. Jeremiah Salazar’s Videat extractions were no different. As the body through which the doctor would observe this memory began to assemble itself, his vision was filled completely with two flashing lines in bold, white lettering. The declaration read: February 6, 2023. Los Angeles, United States of America.
The doctor’s body, as well as his surroundings, finally came into focus. Instead of floating in an incorporeal state, it was as if the doctor was in the middle of a dream. A dream which was unbelievably clear and concise in its details—a dream that allowed for distinct smells, sounds and sensations, but that had one crucial limitation. The doctor could experience everything around him and about him, as if he had been there, but it was merely a projection; he had absolutely no agency. It was a predetermined, spectator experience. The doctor’s favorite way to pitch it to investors was “The highest evolution of a film, without the fiction.”
The doctor was now Jeremiah, back in his college years. He recognized the dorm room they had shared. The arrays of posters plastered on the wall. The piles of clothes scattered about the floor. Jeremiah sat in his bed, neatly made and contrasting starkly to the hurricane of items across the rest of the room. He sat cross-legged, with an orange notebook resting on his lap. Across the room, in his own, unmade bed, a younger Jonah Morrisey had his face buried in a textbook, flipping vigorously through its pages.
Through Jeremiah’s eyes, the doctor saw his past self shift his gaze, and raise his voice in protest: “You’re wrong. There’s nothing here indicating Glimpses would leave any substantial side-effects. If anything, what I’m seeing here is quite auspicious.”
“Read it again.” The doctor could feel his lips move; he could feel himself make the sounds, but they were out of his control. He was like an actor, forced to follow a hidden script. “Page one-oh-nine. The section on ocular nerves.”
“You’re worried about pigmentation? At worst it’ll be the same as marijuana, but probably, like, a different color.” Jonah said.
“We can’t really guarantee it’ll go away with time, unlike with weed,” Jeremiah leaned back, resting his head on the bed covers. He took a deep breath, and closed his eyes, “I don’t know man. There’s a lot of holes in this, we have to get everything ironed out by next week or—”
“I know Miah, it’s fine. It’ll be fine. Let’s talk about something else.” Jonah sat up from his bed, and laid down next to Jeremiah in his, causing him to bounce slightly, and open his eyes. Jeremiah raised his arms, and swatted at his roommate in protest, but to no avail. Jonah settled next to him, and both young men turned their eyes towards their empty ceiling. After a moment of silence, and once the heaving of their chests had stopped, Jeremiah changed the subject.
“You doing anything on the weekend?”
“Yeah, I managed to get that girl from Bio to agree to a date.”
“Imagine that. You didn’t tell me you cracked mind control in your free—”
“Fuck you.” Jonah jerked his arm, elbowing his friend in the rib between bouts of laughter. “This is huge, dude. I’m obsessed with this lady. We’ve already hooked up, which is great and all, but this is a date. There’s a quiet, dignified beauty about that, you know?.”
“I suppose. This is the same one you’ve been talking about lately? With the weirdly elaborate green hat?”
“Yeah, she’s married to that thing. But man …”—Jonah stretched out his arms, touching the wall against which the bed was set—“I’m smitten. She’s got this thing, where after someone says ‘thank you,’ instead of saying ‘you’re welcome—”
“She says ‘always,’ ” Jeremiah said. “I know. You’ve mentioned.”
“It’s brilliant.”
The Videat Method could capture almost every aspect of a memory: from the specific taste of a lollipop licked 20 years ago, to the prickling texture of a grass field frolicked in only weeks in the past. The only detail inaccessible to the user was the stream of thought of the original moment: the internal conversation ringing within the memory’s donor. But emotions left a traceable mark, an echo that could be captured within the emerald liquid. In that moment, as the young man stared absentmindedly at his ceiling, through Jeremiah’s body, Dr. Morrisey felt fear. He felt himself flooding with an unpronounceable terror he had never experienced. His brain rattled with a flavor of anxiety it had never known. Had he been anywhere else, it would have crippled him, paralyzing him on the spot. But it wasn’t his body that had to carry this burden.
“You sure about Glimpses, Jon?” Jeremiah asked, with a casual tone which betrayed none of the mammoth waves of dread that infested his chest. “You really think we can do something here? I want mastery over memory. I want to let people relive any moment they want, as many times as they want. It could be the key to rearranging broken minds. I want to help people like your sister … people like my mother. I want the concept of forgetting—”
“To be forgotten. Yes.” Jonah squeezed his friend’s shoulder. “I think that if anyone can do it, it’s you. And I mean that.”
“If anyone can do it,” Jeremiah said, “it’s us.”
And the memory began to disintegrate.
* * *
“What did you see? Jon, answer me dammit. What did he show you?”
Dr. Morrisey had come to, slowly. He never grew accustomed to the feeling of surrendering your body and then claiming it back. The side-effects, or “hangover” given by Videat didn’t usually manifest until one had gone to sleep, so the doctor gradually began to feel like his usual self, but he couldn’t help his mind from wandering. His eyes were set on the remaining three vials, but his vision was set somewhere else; past the syringes, far beyond the walls of the janitor closet. His thoughts circled the scarring episode of fright that had afflicted him—or rather, Jeremiah—earlier. He searched his own memories fervently, trying to find any evidence of this underlying, parasitic terror in the moments he shared with his best friend. But he found nothing.
“It was just …” The doctor’s words were light and brittle.“… a conversation we had back when we were at UCLA. I don’t know what he’s trying to say yet, before you ask.” The doctor reached towards the box of memories.
“What are you doing?”
“What does it look like I am doing? I’m going for the second one.”
“Already?”
“You want me to stop now, Barbara?”
“No but, Jon—”
Before the doctor had a chance to regret his determination, he stabbed another Videat into his left arm. He lacked the finesse and care of his first injection, but the fluorescent liquid slid into his vein all the same, enveloping the left side of the doctor’s body in a blinking, green light. As he returned to the emerald limbo, the doctor’s mind kept replaying the same observation over and over, as if a realization had been etched into the inside of his eyelids: inescapable, even in the dark.
I never knew, Dr. Morrisey kept thinking, he could be so afraid.
* * *
August 30, 2031, New York City, United States of America
When Dr. Morrisey began to enter the next memory, he did so with a little bit more comfort. While the process still felt alien and violating to him, his newfound determination to decipher his partner’s grand design egged him forward. The doctor’s body—an older, taller, and stronger version of Jeremiah’s college physique— materialized outside of a tall business office on the sidewalk of a bustling street. The doctor recognized the building, which helped him recall the relevance of the date in which the memory was set. This realization stirred a smoldering anger within him.
Jeremiah paced back and forth in front of the office’s steps. His phone was on his ear.
“Please just let me talk to her; she’ll listen to me.”
“Sir,” The concerned voice of an elderly man replied on the other end of the line, “I’m trying, but she won’t stop screa—”
His speech was cut short by the sudden screech of a woman’s voice in the background. The sound was shrill and tortured, and Dr. Morrisey felt a chill travel from Jeremiah’s throat down to his chest once he heard it. Jeremiah stopped pacing, pausing in front of a stone column near the office’s threshold. He dropped to his knees and pushed his left hand against his face, keeping his phone pressed on his ear. He allowed the cacophony on the other end of the line to settle, while a sharp dryness began to build in his mouth. He cleared his throat once the elderly man prompted him to speak, claiming he “got her under control.”
“Mom.”
“Who is this?” The voice on the other end of the line was marred by complete, innocent confusion, with no traces of the anger and fervor that could be heard earlier.
“It’s me, Jeremiah.”
“Miah…? That can’t be. You don’t sound like.…”
“Mom, are you ok? What’s going on over there?”
“I’m not your mom, sir, my son … he was just here, he’s out for school right now. He’s a lovely boy, he does all his chores, he reads me stories.…”
“Mama, that was years ago. Ok? I’m not there anymore. I’m an adult now. I’m in New York. Are you ok?”
“New York? No.… I don’t—” The line became infested with sharp noises and loud static bursts. Jeremiah, lifted his phone slightly from his ear. “My son is … my son is here … let GO OF ME. DON’T FUCKING TOUCH ME!”
“Ma I—” Jeremiah started to cry into his hand, each heaving wave of sorrow muffled between his fingers. The elderly man’s voice came through once again:
“I’m sorry Dr. Salazar.”
“No it’s … it’s ok. Thank you.” The line clicked closed.
For what seemed like hours to Dr. Morrisey, but in reality must have been mere moments, Jeremiah cried against the stone pillar. He wept silently, in choking flashes, rocking softly from side to side. His eyes were just beginning to dry when his partner found him. Jeremiah raised his gaze to meet Jonah’s, whose figure had been darkened by the protruding shades of the surrounding buildings. Dr. Morrisey could hardly recognize his own face through the vestiges of anger that traced every one of his features. This furious portrait began to glow in a simmering green hue, until the shades strewn across Jonah’s face started fading away, as the memory dissipated.
* * *
When he returned to the janitor’s closet, Dr. Morrisey’s cheeks were moist, and his nose was running. Barbara had sat down across from him, and stared at him with wide, caramel eyes, streaked with mint green. Before she even had the chance to ask him, the doctor began talking:
“It was the day we negotiated for Videat to hit the market. Jeremiah stood me up in the big meeting. I was fucking livid with him. I was so pissed with him that I agreed on a bunch of stuff he didn’t want to be allowed, just to spite him, really. Less consideration for the side-effects. Downplayed the addictive elements. He didn’t want Videat to hit the shelves like it did, with the potential to.…” The doctor focused on the green hue permanently etched across the outline of Barbara’s eyes. “Well, you know. He wanted it to be safer, and all this time, I swore that he didn’t show up that day in New York to teach me a lesson.”
Barbara stared at him, hesitating to say anything. The doctor looked past her once again, speaking to the empty space between them.
“It was the same day he told me you guys were finally going to tie the knot. God, I thought he just wanted to rub salt into the wound. But maybe.…”
“He just wanted you to be happy for him. You meant the world to him, Jon.”
Dr. Morrisey suddenly lost the ability to stomach Barbara’s gaze. Instead, he found it more palatable to stare at the two remaining vials. He reached for the third one absentmindedly, and if by rote, he began to roll his pants up to his knee. Barbara remained silent as the doctor injected himself in the left leg, descending once again into the memories of his best friend.
* * *
May 24, 2043, Los Angeles, United States of America
“Sana, Discite, Manet….” Jeremiah, exactly as Dr. Morrisey last remembered him, read the words engraved atop the entrance of the empty St. July’s auditorium. His voice rang with the aged graveling that it had acquired in the latter stages of his life.
“To heal. To learn.…” A voice behind him continued.
“To remain.”
Jeremiah turned around, and faced the cautiously approaching Jonah Morrisey. The recency of the memory he now observed made the doctor, through Jeremiah’s eyes, grow uneasy at his own image. It was too similar to staring at a mirror.
“It’s been a while since you’ve been down here.” Jonah said.
“And for that, I apologize.”
Jeremiah stared hard into Jonah’s eyes. The doctor could feel his late partner’s chest tighten.
“Jonah … you have to end it. You have to pull Videat. It’s destroying too many people.”
“Cut the crap, Miah. You only say that because you live with one of the few people.…”
“One of the few people? There’s thousands like Barbara. People are abusing their own memories, until their bodies start rejecting the injection. Hordes of green-eyed, lost souls one hit away from losing their minds. People living the past lives of others to feel better about their own. Some of them can’t even rely on their memories … their dreams being their own! This is not what we set out to do.…”
“This is exactly what we set out to do. You demanded mastery over memory, and now you want to turn away from what that looks like? Just because a few junkies can’t handle our gift to the world? This is what you requested, what you wanted from me. I did everything for you, but you wouldn’t even let me name the fucking thing—”
“I didn’t come here to fight over this, Jonah. We’ve had a lifetime of that already.”
“Then why did you come here? To get in my way again? To try and get me to shut down the work I’m doing here, just because you feel remorse?
“I came here,”—Jeremiah dropped his eyes to the marbled, waxed floors of the auditorium—“because I got a letter from the hospital. A different hospital.”
The doctor felt Jeremiah swallow as he prepared himself to continue.
“I’ve been forgetting things recently, Jon. Losing my train of thought. I confirmed it with this.” Jeremiah produced a white letter from his coat pocket, which he gave Jonah. He watched his partner’s face be enveloped in shadow as he read it.
“It’s the same as my Ma. They don’t know how much longer I have until I start losing it like she did. Maybe I’ll get lucky and hold out longer, like your sister. But I won’t, Jon, I—” Jeremiah’s plea grew softer as his voice began choking up. “ I won’t lose myself like that. The whole point of what we did was to help us stay, you know? To help us remain, and if I can’t.…”
Jeremiah’s request sounded different from the space inside his eyes. As hard as he tried, Dr. Morrisey couldn’t locate the hints of satisfaction that facilitated his actions back in that fateful day. As he watched himself make arrangements with Jeremiah, the triumphant aftertaste of their plan, which had embellished the morbid affair the first time, instead felt like regretful disgust. The doctor wanted to reach out from within Jeremiah and strangle himself, stop himself from saying the things that still occasionally star in his sleep-tossed dreams. Painless. It will look exactly like pneumonia. No, Barbara will never know. I promise, Jeremiah.
But the doctor was helpless to alter the course of the memory. He was resigned to the reality he’d forged between spite and jealousy. The rotten vitriol of regret had nearly coated his entire heart when Jeremiah, after finishing his conversation with Jonah, hurried to the hospital bathroom, in a determined rush whose purpose Jonah could not determine the first time. Jeremiah locked himself inside, and laid his hands on each side of the sink. Jeremiah looked at himself in the mirror, his brown eyes devoid of any hint of green. He opened his mouth, and spoke in the solitude of the bathroom.
“Jon.”
Behind Jeremiah’s chest, Jonah’s heart skipped a beat.
“I think I’ll make this the last vial. Maybe this will be enough to reach you. I have to speak fast, because if I’m guessing correctly, the memory must be about to run out. If you’re watching this, we pulled through with it, and I’m gone. Barbara is going to give you four vials …”
Hints of green began to sprout around the edges of the mirror.
“… and this will be the third one. I always felt like I kept too much from you. But maybe if I let you in, on those glimpses of myself I hid away from you, you could understand me better. Understand that despite both our efforts to the contrary, I never hated you. And I know that you hate me, but I just can’t make it right.…”
Jeremiah’s entire figure gleamed with an increasingly bright light.
“I’m going to make the fourth vial now. It will contain all of my memories. Everything, Jon: from the second I developed the ability to form a thought, until the moment I perform the extraction. If you inject yourself with it … I’m frankly not sure what would happen. My mind might coexist with yours, inside your brain. Or my personality could even replace yours, reviving me in your body. We’ve never tried something like this before, so the possibilities are endless. But I wanted to offer it to you …”
The last remnants of the mirror’s blurring image began to slip away.
“… so you could have the whole thing. I only gave you glimpses, Jon, but I want you to have the whole thing. Maybe this is how you finally forgive me. Maybe this is the only way that I remain. But I want it to be up to you. That’s pretty much all I have to say, so I’m just going to repeat this until you drift back to your body. I love you, brother. I love you. I love you. I love you.”
Emerald.
