Deprived

Marie had always wanted to try it, but she was afraid of herself. It was the same reason she had never experimented with LSD.

She didn’t quite understand her own mind, but she was acutely aware of what it was capable. LSD, she feared, was a one-way door into her unbridled mind that could last up to a dozen hours. She didn’t want to do anything she couldn’t un-do if she were to change her mind—even one that was tripping. There were not enough controls in such an arrangement.

Her acquaintances had always praised her insights that came with her tangential thinking. She had no real friends because she was no one’s fool. Empathy and relating to others meant, with enough episodes, she would be made the fool; taken advantage of; tricked, ripped off, or hurt. She might as well stand naked and vulnerable to everything the world could throw at her.

Many men had tried to crack that force field, to no avail.

It was often said she was the type who could think “outside of the box.” This often meant writing scripts in her reasoning ahead of time that would end up the cautionary tales that warned and protected her. Her synapses didn’t follow the shortest distance between two points, but ran their journeys circuitously in a labyrinthine adventure, making use of superfluous neurotransmitters along the more scenic way. She always walked under dark probability clouds, and she would be damned if she were to get rained on!

Still, she had always wanted to try it.

She knew that the sensory deprivation experience was a personal journey of the mind, lacking the quotidian distractions of sight, sound, touch, smell, or even changes in temperature. Marie knew she would be on her own, into her own mind, and she was fearful of the unknown. What were her own dark clouds like? Could they rain upon her?

In a well-sensed world, distracted by worldly effects, she could approach her cognitive tangential asides just that way—tangentially, i.e., carefully; but all alone in a sensory deprivation tank she couldn’t just peak at her mind’s beauties and nightmares from the side, tiptoe toward them, and continue to have the option of fight or flight. She would walk into them head-on, be they beautiful or horrific.

And she would be on her own.

Marie, however, had an existential imperative: to know herself. That meant dealing with herself, all the way down through all of the layers, to the primitive reptile that was her brain’s limbic system. She knew humans had evolved convolutions around it to police it, because that is what resulted in civilization. She knew if she were to attempt countering her fears of herself, she would have to meet her reptile, negotiate a settlement with it, and then accept whatever new world order came from signing this pact with the devil.

On October 1, 2021, she entered the new-age boutique proprietorship that offered use of its sensory deprivation tanks on an hourly basis. The reception area had at least a dozen people waiting their turns, but the process was orderly, persons being called and then led away down a hall, separated from those waiting by the door which closed behind the intrepid sensory deserters.

Within a half-hour the young woman at the desk called her name. She felt the $60 an hour was reasonable and put up $120 for two hours.

“Would you like 2-way?” she asked Marie. “2-way is a little more.”

“What is 2-way? And how much more?” Marie asked.

“2-way—you can have a tank with a microphone and speakers—you know—just in case you’re claustrophobic or something and you get a panic attack and need someone to come get you out. It’s another ten dollars an hour, ‘cause someone has to monitor it in real time.”

Marie weighed the option. No, she thought, I’m not the claustrophobic type and I want my privacy. And, as a bonus to her declining it, she could keep the extra ten bucks an hour, too.

“No thank you,” she said. “It’s crowded here today. Are you the owner?”

“That’s me.”

“Business must be good,” Marie told her.

“No,” the owner replied, “on the contrary, business is lousy. It’s only crowded for our going-out-of-business sale. Sixty an hour’s a bargain.”

“Oh. I’m sorry it didn’t work for you,” Marie said. She reconsidered the 2-way, but then decided this was the owner’s problem, not hers.

“Yea, I’m sorry, too” the woman replied. And that was that—an unpleasant sentiment for her send-off.

Marie was escorted down the long hallway and the woman stopped her at one of the doors, running a card through a card reader until a bolt disengaged. She opened the door. Marie inspected the room. There was a black tank with some tubes going in and out of it. The room itself was painted a dull gray, including the baseboard and trim. She stepped in. The owner stood in the door.

“Not exactly technicolor in here, is it?” she said.

“Well, yea, it’s one of the perks of the business,” the owner explained. “You don’t have to spend a lot on accoutrements when customers want to be deprived of their senses.”

“I suppose,” Marie agreed, feeling a little claustrophobic already. “What do I do?” she asked.

“Well, strip down all the way and climb in.” The owner stepped through the doorway into the room and closed the door behind her.

“All the way,” Marie repeated.

“Yep,” she said.

Well, Marie thought, at least it’s not a man. Here goes.

She undressed and lay her clothing on the floor in one corner. The owner was looking away, but Marie knew she was checking her out with her peripheral vision. Finally, the woman walked to the tank and opened the top lid to allow Marie to slip in; she held her hand as Marie settled into the tank. The water was already warm and felt good. She could smell a slightly salty atmosphere wafting up from the water’s surface. There was a hum of fluids forced in and out of the tubes she had seen. The woman handed her a pair of earbuds that dinged once they were secure in her ears, and all the hums and swishing she had heard evaporated into a cloak of noise-cancelling invisibility.

Sound now irrelevant, there was no more discussion or instruction. Marie had paid for two hours, so she assumed she would be reintroduced into the sensory world after that. Hopefully, it would be the woman again and not some male attendant, because Marie envisioned her climb out of the tank. She wrote the script so she could be ready for the worst: she wouldn’t be nude, because nude was lovely; she would be naked, and naked is vulnerable and helpless. Her exit, straddling the tank edge ungracefully, would be awkward and nakedly unlovely. No man could ever un-see that, not that he would ever see Marie again. Ungraceful, am I! she huffed mentally; he’d be lucky to see me naked. And he wouldn’t be so great himself. Her script of outrage was writing itself as the lid closed down over her.

Blacker than the pinpoint disk of an eclipse at totality; quieter than frozen oscillations that lay shattered and motionless on the floor; as numb as a phantom limb; even the salty smell had faded. Marie fell asleep.

She awoke after her two hours were up. Certainly, it must have been at least two hours. Hopefully not more, at sixty an hour. No one came. She fell asleep again. She awoke the second time very concerned that she had not been retrieved. Rescued would have been a better word, because this was getting to be too much.

Nothing had happened during her grand experiment. No epiphanies. No tangential journeys around her mindscape. No hallucinations. No insightful beach encounters with the cortical islands of her brain. No flashbacks, no spiritual awakenings, not even a dream or two. Just a great nap.

She had slept, dreamlessly, and she had wasted her $120. Perhaps LSD next time, she thought.

She had a full bladder, a sensation the tank couldn’t deny her, and she would have fallen asleep a third time except for that. She began knocking on the inside of the top lid, to no avail. She rapped politely at first, then more forcefully, but it was hard to judge without sound. Finally, she began pounding. She stopped and lay still. The pressure inside of her bladder rose above the pressure of the tank fluid and her sphincter opened. She couldn’t even feel the warmth of her urine, which shared the same temperature as her bespoke body of water in her bespoke tank.

After countering her shame with anger over being ignored, she began pounding again, cursing the extra ten dollars an hour she should have spent. She began screaming. She screamed until she couldn’t scream through the hoarseness. She retreated into her sensory deprivation, blind, deaf, and numb; her tears shared the same saltiness as the water, so became instantly miscible and forgotten. Something was wrong, she knew; something dangerously wrong. She fell asleep again, exhausted, only to be awakened by a blinding white light.

Am I dead? she wondered. Is this the light? Should I follow it?

A hand grasped her own and tugged gently. Her pupils constricted and the indistinct person helped her climb out. She was now standing on the floor, dripping.

“Who is it!” she shouted. “What happened! I could have died in there! What kind of a place is this! Two hours! That wasn’t just two hours!” She was crying in her anger, directing all the venom she could toward whomever had finally been responsible enough to get her the hell out of the damn tank. Her eyes began accommodating and her pupils and lenses racked back and forth until she saw that she was alone. Naked and alone. Unlovely. Her mind, injured, and quite unforgiving.

She felt the fool--betrayed and denigrated.

She plucked out her noise-cancelling earbuds, and they hit the floor with a tinkling sound, the first of which she had heard in hours.

She picked her clothes up from the corner and put them on; it seemed like a tight fit, but she was only pulling cloth over damp skin. She tried to open the door to the gray room, but it was locked.

“Well, that’s just great!” she said out loud. She banged on the door, but this time her banging was loud and a sonic insult, not silent like it was in the tank. Not only did she hear it, but apparently someone else did, too, because she heard the bolt slide. The door swung open.

The woman who was the owner stood there but didn’t look right. She was fuzzy. Marie tried to focus. She strained to make the woman out, but her face’s details and anatomy were melted into a smooth, unwrinkled, featureless blotch.

“I can’t see you,” Marie said.

“That’s good,” the woman replied. “I don’t want to be seen.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me.”

“How long before I can see right?”

“Who says you're not seeing right?” With that, the woman walked away. Marie followed her through the door to the waiting area. There sat other featureless blobs, waiting their turns.

“No wonder you’re going out of business,” Marie said with a sneer. “I pounded on that lid for hours. I’m not paying extra for all that time you forgot me.”

“Shoulda paid the extra ten an hour,” the woman replied coldly.

“Go to hell,” Marie retorted, and she meant it.

Marie headed for the door, and as she exited, she could hear the others laughing at her. Their laughs were snidely and they echoed. They compounded upon each other like a repeating sound loop, recursively additive. They grew louder until Marie had to collapse just outside of the storefront in agony. Where was this coming from? They had laughed—that had happened—but Marie was convinced the incessant loop was an earworm of her own construction. It’ll go away just like my eyes will see better, she thought. Just have to wait this out.

She held her hands over her ears, and alternated placing them over her eyes to counter the day's unforgiving glare. And she was cold. So cold. Yet, she knew she had fever.

People passed by, many stepping over her. She sat collapsed in a crumpled heap. All sounds were summating, growing more intense, more voluminous, and more piercing, until the shrill feedback made slices through her brain like a microtome preparing slides of paraffined tissue. Her brain became a thinly sliced loaf of bread, the pieces only held together by the high-pitched feedback the world and its sounds were engendering, threading through her layers back-and-forth, tightening her stack of mental slivers. It hurt badly. She screamed, but her scream only added to the aural assault.

“You need help,” someone said to her. She looked up, and the speaker’s featureless face was now empty; anytime she tried to focus on it, it disappeared, like from a blind spot on the retina—blinking out.

Her eyes’ blind spots expanded until her whole world was gone. Not just hard to see or even invisible, but gone; non-existent; never been. The person’s (man? woman?) offer to help was accepted and she was picked up and led, stumbling, by the arm.

“Where are you taking me?” Marie asked.

“Nowhere,” the personless person replied. “Somewhere means you have taken in the data and processed it. But you aren’t exactly processing, now are you?” And the person laughed, and that laugh went around and around in circuitous cacophony before distorting into additional shrill feedback. She clamped her hands over her ears again.

“Nowhere?” she said back.

Her blind spots took away her sight; the shrill piercings took away her hearing; she was conflicted between the cold she felt and the fever she was experiencing; and she could barely speak due to her hoarseness. She had no perspective in which to relate to her world. Data was coming in, but it wasn’t being processed. She lived nanosecond-to-nanosecond in the time slices a reptile lives along, a linear number line whose values never ascend into anything positive. She was a limbic creature, deprived of everything that makes us human. She was no one. She was nowhere.

She could only fear. She could only fight...or fly. She was in between, and if she was no one, she was no one whose identification was the vacuum called terror.

And she was scared to death.

The news of her death made sensational headlines. Investigative journalists wrote stories about how she died, why she died, who was at fault, who should pay. News anchors led off with her tragic story. Marie was a sensation. She was a cause célèbre, selling magazines and tabloids.

Her acquaintances were the most helpful to the several investigations, even though they weren’t even there when it happened. They reported to those who asked--that she was a tangential thinker, her musing taking her along the roads less traveled—sometimes beautiful, sometimes not so. She was the type, they explained, who kept score, reciprocating no more and no less than what she received herself. She was a cold fish.

The storefront of the boutique sensory deprivation service had been cordoned off with wide yellow police tape. On the door of the establishment was a sign that once said, “GOING OUT OF BUSINESS,” but which was covered by another that read, “SPACE FOR LEASE.” Inside were forensic teams that looked for evidence that could explain why there was one forgotten room, housing one forgotten, fetid tank, trapping one forgotten, bloated corpse lying in state who continued to feel nothing.