Chapter 5 - A Phantom Coincidence
Coincidence Speaks
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Happy Friday, and welcome to Chapter 5 of Coincidence Speaks! Please head this way to start at the beginning.
This chapter is being sent courtesy of a severely jet-lagged E.T. Allen from the land of Éire. ☘️ One of the most magical places on earth—the island herself bends time. Stories to come!
In the meantime—
Chapter 5 is an ending - of sorts - for and of Paul Endrum.
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Chapter 5
A Phantom Coincidence
With Clara at work and Noel with a grandparent who could actually take care of her, Paul found himself back home, alone once again. More alone than he’d ever been.
His Man Chair recliner had gone from throne to tomb. With no one who could help and nowhere left to hide, Paul finally faced up to the stark reality of his life:
He was thirty-three years old. Unable to work. Unable to walk. Unable to sleep. In unbearable pain every moment of every day, constant pain at the level of amputation without anesthesia or natural childbirth, if the McGill Pain Index was to be believed. On indefinite medical leave from his career. With an incurable demonic condition nicknamed “the Suicide Disease,” one of the most painful conditions in human existence, with a frightening probability of the disease going “whole body,” spreading into his bones and internal organs. Later stages of progression resulted in human limbs and appendages curling up into stunted scarlet colored lobster claws, and full systemic organ shut down.
And it had already begun spreading.
Paul looked directly into the coming future, and witnessed his greatest fear brought to life:
I am wheelchair bound, slowly burning alive from the inside out. Helpless while my wife and little girl watch me wither into a shell of a husband. A shell of a father. A shell of a man.
With this visceral recognition he realized there were fates far worse than death. Death… would be a release. A mercy. Freedom from unspeakable bondage. The purest form of compassion.
In absolute desperation, a new idea came to him, and his traumatized brain took its own Last Shot of a thought: “I cannot live this way, not with my body on fire like this… so I’ll find a way to cut this disease out of me.”
And Paul feverishly began a new, guilty and secretive internet search—searching for the best and most practical methods to have his leg cut off.
To his utter horror, he soon found that even amputation would not be an option. Because the condition was a part of the nervous system, he was shocked to learn that the burning pain signal would still be generated through phantom limb pain—even if his leg was amputated.
The last vestige of any sense of personal control left him then. There would be no escape from this suffering. Ever. Not while alive, anyway.
He broke down, collapsing on the floor below, cheeks mashing into cold suburban hardwood, sobbing uncontrollably.
Curling into the fetal position, burrowing deep into the core of the earth, he squeezed his eyes shut, and reached out to God.
Paul didn’t really much believe in any kind of God, at least not the Father God up in the clouds he had been introduced to in church when he was a boy. He had always thought that there must be some kind of deeper organizing force in the universe—an intelligent design that was far beyond what his limited edition Paul Endrum mind could comprehend—but it was distant, and certainly not personal. At best, “God” had wound up the universe like the watch on his wrist, and then left time all by itself to unwind to its own devices.
And Paul could not bear another second.
“Please, if you’re there—I don’t believe that you are, but I’m all out of options. If you just take this pain away, I promise I’ll do my absolute best to be content with my life. I will be the best husband and father and person I can. I’ll appreciate everything… just give me one more chance. Just take this pain away.”
“Take my arms, take my legs, take my eyes, I don’t care anymore—please—you can amputate them all if it will just take the pain away,” he begged and pleaded.
Suddenly a strange, deep calm came over him. His breath slowed down… evening out… from rasping and ragged, to even and balanced. And a spontaneous declaration came from a place of stillness hidden inside Paul—a place long forgotten.
“If this pain ever goes away, I will do my utmost to live a life helping other people with theirs.”
But there was no answer.
No God.
Only the terrifying void of total abandonment behind eyes squeezed shut in total darkness. And the relentless hellfire burning.
Paul lay there for a while longer, completely shattered now, curled up like a burnt earthworm caught out on sunbaked asphalt. In his heart of hearts he wasn’t really expecting any kind of divine intervention, not on his behalf anyway, but now his last hope for salvation had been crushed. He had played his final card—taken his true Last Shot, a full court heave at the buzzer with little chance of going anywhere near the basket. All of his best efforts in life had come up woefully, painfully short.
It was all over.
Finally he scraped himself across the floor, and choked down another handful of heavy narcotics. For the first time, he let himself wonder exactly how many more of them it would take to end the pain forever.
As the potent pharmaceuticals slowly filtered through his bloodstream, Paul dragged what was left of his broken body away from the Man Chair and pulled himself up and off the ground, aimlessly taking up “Standard Couch Position,” as he had ruefully come to call it. Leg propped high and TV remote well in hand, he began flipping mindlessly through the channels. He started with the higher ones in the 400’s and the 500’s—the ones with so much 24-hour cable content he imagined it would take the focused effort of most of the human species to get through it all.
The television images flickering at him were meaningless, just scrambled color and garbled noise on a wall desperate for fickle human attention to give it some kind of short-lived purpose. None of it mattered. The life Paul had built for himself had been burned to the ground, reduced to ash and swept away by an indifferent wind. Suffering was the only reality life had to offer. Within a few short generations he would be gone from memory as if he had never existed. Forgotten. Erased.
It would be better that way. Paul Endrum wished he’d never been born.
Then it happened.
Paul’s eyes widened as every one of his senses sharpened into pure crystallized focus. The remote dropped from his hand, clattering onto the cold hardwood below. Only moments into the mindless channel surfing, a documentary was just starting.
The show was about amputees healing phantom limb pain.
The amputees in the documentary were making incredible progress reducing their pain through the concept of neuroplasticity—the flexible capacity of the brain to create new neural pathways.
The first treatment shown was something called mirror therapy. Amputees who still had one functional limb placed a mirror in front of their missing one, blocking the empty space out of their vision, replacing it with the reflection of the fully functional one. To the visual perception of the amputee, their eyes and brains were seeing a perfectly normal pair of arms or legs, moving and functioning in full health.
“Holy crap,” Paul thought, “this actually makes perfect sense! Show the brain a picture of perfect health and it would have less of a reason to send out pain signals.”
“But what about multiple amputees though?” he wondered aloud at the TV screen. “Are they just completely out of luck?”
To his surprise, the television answered his question immediately, as if attuned to his voice. The show shifted to show multiple amputees utilizing something called guided motor imagery—software programs immersing them completely in virtual environments that accomplished the same thing: the patients were seeing, experiencing, and feeling themselves as healthy, whole-bodied individuals.
Paul’s brain shifted into overdrive, amazed by how the content of the TV program was seeming to sync up with his questions, and floored by the incredible timing of the documentary itself.
His mind flashed to a scene from the Matrix movie, where the protagonist Neo and his mentor Morpheus were sparring with each other in a virtual reality program. They called it “neurolinguistic programming” or something like that; he couldn’t remember the exact term. But Paul realized that the sci-fi technology from the movie was using the exact same mechanism as guided motor imagery, only it was more advanced because it was so much more sensory immersive. Because it seemed so much more real.
In the movie, after making a leap of faith and taking a bit of a beating for it, Neo is completely stunned when he leaves virtual reality and comes back to the real world… with a bloody lip.
“I thought it wasn’t real?” he says.
And Morpheus responds matter of factly, “The mind makes it real.”
Paul began writing his sudden revelations down with lightning speed. He’d started writing in a daily journal to track his constantly changing health condition, and found it had the curious effect of not only helping to identify patterns, but of solidifying his observations, of making them more tangible.
Lightning struck as he wrote, and Paul’s rapidly opening mind made its own leap of faith. The question he posed at the top of the page was as daunting as it was ludicrous:
“Could this entire disease be in my head?”
Not that the symptoms weren’t physical. Not that they weren’t dreadfully painful and tangible and completely, utterly real. But what if the source was within his brain and spinal cord—in other words, the nervous system itself?
End Chapter 5
Chapter 6 will post next Friday, March 1st. Thank you for being here in live interactive real time! Comments and feedback are always welcome.
In gratitude,
E.T. Allen
Wow! Great chapter. I love your metaphors e.g. "curled up like a burnt earthworm caught out on sunbaked asphalt." ~ well, 'love' might not be the best word here, but THIS is a vivid, excellent image capturing all the experience, sensations, and hopeless destiny of Paul's present moment in one fiery sketch.
Your story structure is great too. (If recommendations of popular 'novel writing methods' are anything to go by, you are 'doing it!')
I do love the syncing between Paul's mind and the TV channel as a concept. Indeed, "what if the source was within his brain and spinal cord - in other words, the nervous system itself?"
Looking forward to Chapter 6 and reading about the Land of Eir.
Really like the constant reinforcing imagery here, it made me feel hot and drained (in a good way!) reading it. Brilliant chapter.