"Why am I here?" He asked as he looked around. He was in a familiar place but he knew, he remembered, he should be somewhere else the other day, last night. He remembered everything vividly. And he should be at his own apartment at 49 Terrace Lane, damp and dark and dingy; and not in this place he held dear in his memory. He tried to close his eyes shut, rubbed it a few times till it was sore and opened again. He did it several times but every time he opened his eyes, it was in his room at 109 East Point.
He was in panic. He can feel his jugulars pulsating. "Oh, God," he mumbled, "this is bad, this is bad." He took deep breaths, trying to calm himself. But no good. He can feel his blood rushing through up his head. He was sweating. All the more that his pulse paced up, he can sense almost everything around him. Colors pierced his eyes especially red. Every single sound hammered his eardrums as every single smell choked him. The humid summer air scorched his skin he can taste his burnt epidermis. He ran and coiled to a corner of his room, trying to block the overwhelming surge of stimuli. He tried to close his eyes or cover his ears but all the other senses were all the more heightened. His mind was throbbing from processing everything he sensed.
Taking deep breaths was not helping. It used to when he was a kid. Three or four deep breaths, with his mother rubbing his back repeating over and over again, "Hijo, vaciar tu mente" (Son, empty your mind), help him calm down, worked. But not anymore. He was all alone and he still blames himself for the death of the only person who can calm him down. It became even more difficult. As he grew up, his sense organs developed as all human beings naturally would. And so, his senses heightened too. Evolution naturally was a curse to him. Every time he had these episodes when stimuli surged all together, and when he panicked, it amplified his senses to the point that his mind overloads.
"Vaciar tu mente. Vaciar tu mente." He repeated to himself taking control of a maelstrom of stimuli in his mind. He felt his brain tighten as he brought all of it to consciousness, making himself aware of every single stimuli. "Vaciar tu mente," he shouted, squeezing his head to help him focus, as he started to bracket one stimuli from the other. The maelstrom of everything he sensed, circling like a hurricane, slowed down little by little. He could see what he saw, all the colors smudged, now outlined into figures, into things familiar to him. He could distinguish every sound from the bobbing of antlers of bugs underneath the floor to the conversation of people more than a mile away. He could name the scents he smelled - his soiled clothes from last two weeks, distinct with his own sweat or the metabolized sushi in his stomach or the ingredients - one by one - of his neighbors' breakfast. "Vaciar tu mente," he whispered to himself, feeling every single particle, every single element, in the air - the hydrogen and water in the oxygen when he inhales and the carbon when he exhales. He could feel his white blood cells rushing towards his burns and healing them one by one. And with one final deep breath, as he inhaled he said, "Vaciar tu mente," and every stimuli in his mind stood still as he exhaled.
"Mente vacia" (Empty mind), he heard a voice in his mind. At first he did not recognize who it was. He thought it was just a coincidence, some random voice he could hear from all around him, saying something about "empty mind". But the voice continued on, "That is all you need to do. Empty your mind, Jeremy," and he recognized it was Dr. Sean Petrus.
With an empty mind, he closed his eyes, took a deep breath and, at an instant, his consciousness was engulfed back to Dr. Sean's clinic, seeing him pull back from his forehead his index and pointer fingers.
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"What did you just do, Doc-," he swallowed, remembering how Dr. Sean Petrus insisted to be called,and continued on, "Sean?"
Sean stood up, tossing his notebook and pen on the side table. He buttoned his coat, looking intently at Jeremy. Over an hour had passed for that whole "episode" he would call it and it drained his energy. Jeremy was one of his significant patients. He knows from his research on the power of thought that there could be more like him, twitching his brow, or more like them. Nobody knows really what he can do just as nobody knows, except him, of what Jeremy can do. To many of his colleagues he has stripped the science off his theories and verged into myth or philosophy. He never really cared. All he knows is he can do something more than others. He just wrote a theory which to him was reality for all he cared hoping that his professors would buy it. And allow him to continue his research. They did buy it but they never granted him the research. To them, it was futile.
Jeremy is his proof that it should not have been declared futile.
The silence has become awkward already between the two of them. He smirked and said, "Do you remember why you are here, Jeremy?"
