A Mouthful of Lost Thoughts

3

I stared blankly at him, perplexed. His eyes narrowed into green-grey slits, like little balls of flint burning through me, as if I was supposed to comprehend his world-changing discovery with one little word. I blinked at him stupidly.
"Hmm?" My eyes rolled over the items he'd thrown over the table once again, trying to piece it back to the word. The odd sound echoed faintly in my head. 'Okinawa.' It resembled something vaguely familiar, but I struggled to grasp it.
"Okinawa, Japan," He sighed playfully at me as if I were the one pulling his leg. I hated that stare. "The little island off the coast of Japan with the highest life expectancy in the world. I rallied a team from San Bernardino and jumped around for a few years, that's where I've been all this time. Me and a team of four, but I had to drop 'em. Thought it was something in their food, but really it's something in the w-"
"This actually works?" I couldn't help but interject. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I looked back at the bag, and then the box, and back to Isaac. He merely seemed amused.
"See, Danny boy? I brought the bird cause I knew you'd never believe me. Give me twenty-four hours. This stuff works," he boasted in an all too familiar tone. The way a businessman would. I wanted to snap at him, but I couldn't remember the last time he had called me 'Danny boy.'
"On people?"
My question was followed by more hesitation, and then silence. He nodded, clearing his throat as if he'd now thought this was casual, idle conversation. Uncertainty blatantly gnawed at the thought of my little brother testing some unknown drug on another person. The feeling grew and suffocated the atmosphere of all four corners of the room.
I tried to level my thought process with what  he used to say when we were kids. No matter how outlandish, 'data was data, and science was science.'
Do you even believe that?
"Tested it on just about everything but people, but I know for a fact a higher dosage would work." I sighed with relief at this, swallowing harshly, still filled to the brim with questions. "I got everything worked out, the time it'll take per ounce, per blood type--everything."
My eyes drew something blank at him. I didn't know what else to do but stare.
"Isaac," I tried to begin clearly, organizing my reeling thoughts into crudely pieced words. "Let's suppose it could be done, and everything went according to plan." I swallowed thickly. "It wouldn't, but let's suppose it did. You have no idea what the long-term effects might be." When he fell silent, I thought I might've convinced him, but that was naive of me to think of someone like him.
He started to say something but swatted the words hanging in the air away. For once in my life, I felt disappointed in him--maybe not disappointed, but my feelings of admiration had dissipated. It was something I'd never experienced before when staring in the eyes of my brother. Seeing as he wasn't satisfied, I kept pushing.
"Don't you remember the AIDS vaccine of 1997? The one that turned the test subjects into untreatable epileptics who all died within eighteen months? Or the one in 1941 wh-"
"Danny-" His eyes narrowed. I continued.
"And there was-"
Isaac's voice grew low and gruff, like that of an older man. "Daniel..."
He swallowed harshly, beginning again with a more optimistic tone. "The world..." he tried to piece together, his hands waving in an unfamiliar gesture, "...needs heroic measures. You see it, I see it. Maybe I'm just giving heroin to a terminally ill patient, but I have to do something. Thousands of people are going to lose their loved ones before I can even get this stuff on the market. I can't wait too long. I can't." I scowled in spite of him. "Just imagine, this stuff on every counter, at every drug store. Nobody would be in pain. Not a single person, Danny."

On that night, he stayed over, took a sleeping pill, and crashed on the couch before dinner rolled around. The whole evening hadn't been entirely unpleasant. We talked for hours about what had happened in his absence and I desperately tried to stray from the former topic, but nevertheless, he rambled on and on about what he found on the quaint little island. I was only grateful my wife weren't here to witness the foul way he talked about his peers. As I lay awake in bed, the words echoed off the walls 'it was something in the w-'
In the what?
Are you still reading this?
I awoke that night to an awful sound, something like forks on a dinnerplate. I stared into the blackness in complete silence, racking through my brain as to what it must be.
Isaac, I figured.
This sort of thing wasn't uncommon for him, and for a moment I was settled. But as my eyes adjusted to the light I found it didn't sound very humanlike. I recapped the events of my day, but came up short. He took the pill a few hours ago, I thought, turning to the clock beside me. It read 2:31. The sound grew louder and louder until I felt as if it were just outside my door, writhing and clawing around.
The box.
I shot out of bed. Bolting upright, I made a run for the door and pushed it open, a waft of air billowing from the hallway. I stared over the banister at the table downstairs from a distance, the busted lid no longer covering the grass inside the cardboard box. In the dim light I could see the jet black feathers and smell the rancid stench of the serum. Isaac still lay asleep on the couch beside it, motionless and unaware.

Jesus. I just looked up at the clock and checked the time. I feel like I've been writing for fifteen minutes or so, but it's been over an hour. That happens to me sometimes when I'm running at white-hot speed, but I can't allow myself to get into the specifics. I have to hurry up.