The nodes were like beetles, their black metal bodies shining between the attendant’s fingers.

“Just a pinch, dear,” he said, leaning in and fixing the nodes to my temples, measuring symmetry with my eyes and his. Buried beneath clumped lashes, his green irises dilated as he pushed. The beetles’ legs dug.

The worm moved, right behind my left eye. Like a scatter-brain pulsation, an iambic diffusion of pressure, a separation and a unification, like I forgot I existed only to remember that I was there.

The attendant wheeled his chair to the digital display in front of him, and his fingernails played a pattern of hollow notes that harmonized with a humming from the cylindrical machine next to him. The machine was a distillation of the room: A hearth of aborted dreams that radiated its digested failures of imagination into an orgy of off-white sterility. 

I could feel its warmth. A false promise of relief that seeped under the skin like dread. That was what the Clinic was for: Writers came there to fail, to give in to mechanical convenience, to swap the burn of true inspiration for the pinch of a black beetle and the glow of an automated validation that hummed at the frequency of comfort. 

I heard them, down between the keyboard clacks, beneath the hypnotic monotone of the machine: The dead voices of sold souls clawing up through the lower frequencies. They fell for it too, whatever hooked them among the lines. A series of siren implications that fed on curiosity. A leviathan they mistook for themselves. And they ran after it, becoming what they were. 

Their own personal memetic parasite. Their own worm.

Marketing. Propaganda. Cult of personality. The would-be writers followed charted paths through their pages or into their screens, past the Clinic’s sliding glass doors, and into the backroom where they sat in the same chair I sat in and listened to the same legion hum from the same machine. 

Inside you, there is an undying star, the Clinic lullaby advertisements cooed. A genius. All you have to do is let us in. From there, we will create you. Your best self. To live your best life. Just open yourself up, and we’ll let a little air in.

A trick of the eyes, REM-tilian narrowing, a concave dream. Neurological curation. Human being as art. The devouring promise of the deus ex machina: Be as gods. 

Glory was not why I was sitting in that chair. I was there because I wanted it out. The parasite, the worm. I wanted it out of my head.

The attendant slid a thin monitor in front of my face, adjusting it outward to accommodate the point of my nose.

“That will be fine,” he said, then he sighed and played another keyboard melody, slow and painful. He turned to me again, eyes glazed with indifference. “Before we begin, we typically ask that you take a moment to focus on your intention. Your idea. The story or subject, the character, whatever provokes the strongest emotion. Hold it in mind, just for a moment. Really set your attention on it.” 

My face was flat, devoid. His painted eyebrows crinkled as he registered anhedonia as disgust. 

“Close your eyes. Give it a try,” he said. 

I played along, but I knew what was there. The same thoughts that led to the same image. Just words. Just worm shit. Each superficial excrement had become fertilizer for another thought, another worm, and another, and another, an endless cycle of beginning into end and end into beginning. Each would come alive, streak across my mind, and die in my head—all seeking the brief moment of recognition that would kill them and end their attempts to reproduce. In the corneal mirror of even one eye, they would break from their dull unconscious cycling and calm in a brief moment of dying wonder. 

No, sitting with my eyes closed, I understood my childlike wonder was long dead, and any echo of its screams, any neglected cry for recognition that rang around the rosie of my mind, fell in submission to my need.

Kill it. Kill the worm. 

My intention was conclusion, a certain end to the unweeded canopy of parasitic thoughts that suffocated me. Conclusion to the screams. A final release of the idea, of language. Freed from living the recurring cycle of the story. Of worms eating worms.

“Is your intention set?” the attendant said in lullaby. “Now open your eyes.”

I did. The screen in front of me exploded blue. The attendant began speaking, his speech canned, like he was reading off a script.

“You will see a series of images displayed. These images have no meaning. Your brain will connect these images. The nodes will read your brain’s activity to determine how the connections between the images were made. The computer will then synthesize a narrative based on its readings. Again, the images have no meaning except what your brain gives them. Do you understand?”

I knew that is what they wanted. A brain scan, a map, a legend to my psychophysiology. I didn’t care. 

Just take it from me.

“Yes,” I said.

“Departure then,” the attendant said and clicked a single hollow tone.

An image blinked onto the screen. A figure, androgynous, in the background, lay asleep at the center of a series of circles above the horizon. The grinning mouth of a whale, lips and spindling teeth, framed the image. 

The worm moved, right eye. It focused on the figure at the center, and I resisted the urge to project myself onto it. But the worm had control, looking. It lay there, like a child, unaware of its position at the center of the circles. Intersections, the intersection. Of the center, of the horizon, of the gullet of the whale. The beast. It reminded me of a small picture that I keep above my writing desk. It is faded. A professional picture, wallet-sized. There is writing on the back. It says three-and-half months. My mouth is open, I am smiling, I am dressed in a blue button-up vest and dark blue shorts, and I have a bow tie. The story goes that my mother propped me up, that her hand is underneath a light-gray blanket holding me up. You can’t see the hand but it is there, reaching through the thin veil of the material. 

The screen blinked again. 

Another image. Two spheres touched, one dark like an absence and the other a planetary mass, either separating or unifying. At the center, a small star-like body.

The worm released itself from my right eye and shot across my brain, back and forth between hemispheres. It avoided my temples, where I could feel the warmth coming from the nodes, the pinprick heat. The worm weaved in and out of lobes and through my corpus callosum. 

Fleeing, it was fleeing. 

Blink. The screen showed a man and woman, nude, lying, two parallel heads that stared out at him. 

I saw myself. Young, just before puberty. I sat at a school lunch table and drew a picture. It was a picture of the worm, the first time I imagined it. 

I showed it to a girl at the table and she screamed. 

“This is in my head,” I said. “I am dying from it.” 

She stopped screaming. Her face dropped and she hugged me.

“Are you okay?” she said.

Blink. A man, clothed, kneeling.

Younger, I was even younger. My mother lay on the sofa. Catatonic, but her eyes darted around. This was the second time it happened. This was just after she was diagnosed. 

I knelt next to her and prayed aloud. 

“Please, God, please heal her. Please make her feel better.”

Blink. A man and woman, nude. Man inverted, head down in a cylindrical pot of soil. 

Moans as the woman tightened her thighs around my ears. She was older, forties, and 

depressed. I was sixteen or seventeen. Later she would sleep next to me, her back turned so I could read the tattoo across her shoulder blades. A single phrase, but I couldn’t picture the words. The letters were gone, just the impression remained. No words, just faded ink. A song lyric. 

Blink. Two figures, androgynous, one knelt and crying over the motionless body of the other.

Something about worms, my mother would say. How we all come from worms. 

She would say, “We all started as worms. All the same thing.” 

She’d take a drink. Green irises dilated. 

“All just parasites. All just feeding off each other.”

Blink. Two figures, one straddling the body of the other.

“All just better if we had not been born.” 

Blink. One figure, eyes staring into a starless night. 

Blink. Dark. The screen turned off. I waited, but nothing in my head moved.

A computer key played. The attendant pulled the monitor toward him as the cylindrical machine hummed louder, this time a whirling.

“Done,” he said and removed the beetles from my temples. Something fell with a thud from inside the machine and the attendant removed a thin book from a slot.

“A short one,” the attendant said, grinning as he handed me the book and winked. “Well, it doesn’t matter how long it is, isn’t that what they say?”

I took it.

“That is a souvenir. Your novel will be uploaded and sold online, and you will receive your percentage deposited into your account monthly.” He paused, his voice reverted from the script and his grin widened. “Don’t expect much, sweetie.” 

The cover, gold letters on red leather, read, The Fig Leaf.

“That’s it, unless there is anything else.” A pause, lips parted enough to reveal a thin tongue, then a hand extended toward the door. “Come and come again.” 

And there, clutching the red book like a corpse, a stillborn satisfaction choked my ability to see my next step. But I walked on, knowing I was dead-eyed, carrion to my thoughts, not even curious to read what had come from my mind. 

The worm was gone. It was in the book. 

I was free.

 

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This story is co-featured on the Emerson Review, a Boston-based literary magazine dedicated to publishing diverse and compelling works of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.