Antidote

Sunlight burst over the verdant Appalachians and lit up the long crack in the bedroom window pane. Hundreds of dust particles floated in the ray. Holding the syringe up to the sunlight, Ahmad tapped lightly, coaxing the air pocket to the top.

After twenty years and the start of a promising medical career, the young Egyptian man was nonetheless troubled. His influential grandfather had arranged for five-year-old Ahmad’s transfer to America, when it appeared the military would take control and end years of democratic governance and affinity with the West. He was placed with a Jordanian family, the Haddads, as surrogates for his parents and their blindly fundamentalist beliefs.

But Ahmad knew his home was not Wheeling, either.

Positioning himself in the sunlight, he pulled the strap with his teeth, and once the vein was visible, pushed the medication home in the crook of his arm. Almost everyone in North America now showed some symptoms of Ocular Distortion Syndrome. The way that any individual reacted to the insect-borne disease was a function of their immune system, their eye color, and genetics.

Ahmad was not prescribed the antidote. Indeed, his level of the disease did not warrant it. He was taking it for recreation, and because he could.

As he felt the compound course through his veins, his vision blossomed as expected. The drab colors of his room sprang into brilliant, well-defined objects. Ahmad’s mood improved as he opened his front door to a warm morning sun and an explosion of neon-bright trees, houses and cars. Never had this small city and its sights seemed so appealing and inviting.

Road crews on Market Street traded street signs for replacements with larger, sans serif lettering, and upgraded street lamps with higher-lumen devices. Ahmad marveled at the intensity and detail of the bright yellow crew vehicles. While looking at one particular worker, he could “see” that the man’s name was Jason. Jason’s mind was not on his work, rather dwelling on a health issue with his wife, which was evidently cancer.

Ahmad now realized the power of the new ODS antidote. The clarity afforded by the drug extended to his mind as surely as his retinas. As though to validate this, he correctly predicted the next three vehicles to cross on the overpass: a semi, and two bright red sedans.

As he walked on, he became increasingly agitated at the level of sensory input he was experiencing, and self-doubt troubled him regarding the dosage he had given himself. But he could not focus on that thought for long. Buildings had no walls. Time made no sense. His head began to ache as his senses boiled over with overwhelming graphic and vivid stimuli.

Then Ahmad saw he was going to die. The young man one block ahead in front of the Honda dealer, falling to the pavement, was him. Horrified, he turned around and started walking south, and saw the identical man collapse near 16th Street.

The premonition almost complete, his brain spun hopelessly with colors, images, people, and events. For one sweet moment, the antidote mercifully returned his vision to his boyhood home and his mother’s smile. Then he fell to his knees and howled his final lament of pain as his medicated consciousness betrayed his body.