The Mind-Bending Box

I was chilling with my wife Danny when the box arrived at our doorstep.

It was nighttime, and we were lounging on our sofa, watching TV. Game of Thrones was playing, and as Daenerys Targaryen torched the would-be slavers with the aid of her dragons, I absentmindedly reached over and twirled a finger around Danny's hair. She turned around, smiled, and playfully swatted my hands aside.

This had been a running joke between us for years. My wife's name was Danilla, but ever since we had taken to watching Thrones, I had started calling her Danny, after the Dragon Queen from the show. This was because she bore a striking resemblance to Daenerys. She had long, silver-blond hair that fell down in waves from her head to highlight the curves of her petite frame. Her smile could light up any room, and when she was cross she had a way of frowning that somehow came across as both severe and ridiculously cute.

I was, in short, totally and utterly in love with her.

My thoughts were interrupted by a hungry-sounding meow from behind me, and ribbing Danny I said, "Oh no, looks like the Mother of Kittens has to go feed the cats again!" Danny merely laughed and swatted my hands again. Standing up, she went to the pantry where we kept the cat food. I waited for a moment. Then, pausing the show, I went to the kitchen to retrieve the feeding bowls. We were ever a team, Danny and I, and I could never bear to be apart from her for long.

But it was in the kitchen that I saw something strange. Obby, the jet-black stray that Danny and I had adopted, was pacing around the kitchen in circles. When Obby saw me, she let out a keening meow, then ran over to the back door of our house. "What's the matter, Obby?" I called out. "Do you have to go or something?" My only reply was another loud meow. Curious, I followed Obby to the back door.

There was a buzzing sound coming from beyond the door. It sounded like the drone of a particularly large insect. As I listened it seemed to grow louder. Obby heard the sound too. She misliked it. She started hissing and scratching at the door. "Hey, stop that." I chided. This was only a half-hearted rebuke, for in truth I was curious about that buzzing sound too, morbidly curious about what could be making that strange sound in our quiet neighborhood this late into the night. Summoning my courage, I grasped the door knob and opened the door.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, but when my eyes acclimatized, I could see nothing out of the ordinary. My back porch was still my back porch, still neatly kept and well-trimmed, with little pots of geraniums on the floor. I would have chalked it off as nothing more than a bump in the dark―yes, I would've shrugged and gone back inside―if the buzzing sound did not get louder. Obby hissed again, and when I glanced down at her I saw that she was looking up. Following her line of sight, I looked up and saw what appeared to be a large, black drone hovering directly above me. It was only four or five meters away, almost close enough for me to leap up and grab it, and even in that stunned state I could remember thinking that the drone was extraordinarily quiet for a machine of this size. There was a parcel dangling underneath it, and as my incredulous eyes watched the line that the box was dangling from gave a quick tug, and the parcel was released.

My first thought was bomb. Panicking, I grabbed Obby and dove for cover. The yelp of my frightened cat rang through the air, and the geraniums on my porch were scattered asunder, scattering colorful petals and loose soil here and there. But my fear turned out to be unfounded. The parcel did not explode. It merely landed on the porch floor with a hollow thump.

Still clutching Obby, I looked at the parcel suspiciously. At first glance, it looked like an ordinary cardboard box, nothing more. It was nondescript and completely unmarked, and yet...

There was something about the box, something I could not place my finger on. Looking at it, I got a very peculiar feeling, the kind of feeling you get when you're out on a frozen pond, standing on thin ice. You knew you were in danger, and yet you can't help but stand frozen on the spot, transfixed and afraid to move. That was the feeling I got that day, staring at the box.

Obby shared my distrust of the box. She began hissing at it menacingly.

"What's going on here?" said a voice behind me.

I started, turned around, saw that it was Danny. I filled her in on the night's strange happenings, and she frowned her cute frown and said nothing. But as ever she was braver than me, for she walked right up to the box and grabbed it. Picking it up, she gave it a little shake.

"It's light," she said, still frowning. "There seems to be nothing inside it."

Would that I had stopped her that day. Would that I had swatted the box out of her hands, kicked it aside, booted it out to the curb where it belongs.

But that was not what I did. Instead, curiosity overtook me, and I said, "Well, shall we take it inside and open it?"

-

Back inside, Danny and I were looking at the box.

"Well," she said hesitantly, "To whom shall this honor belong?"

I knew my wife well enough to know a hint when I heard one. "To me, my fair lady," I replied, bending over in a mocking bow. Danny laughed. Picking up a pair of scissors from somewhere, I inserted the tip of one blade into the edge of the box. The cardboard gave way without resistance. It seemed easy to open, almost too easy. I sawed, and the cardboard gave way like silly putty. Then, just as I was about the rip it open, Obby jumped on my hands and on top of the box.

"Yeeeowwwww!" Obby cried, hissing and scratching at me.

I pulled back in shock. "Whoa, whoa, whoa," I managed to say. "What's going on here?" Obby had always been a fairly tame cat. I had never seen her behave in this manner before.

"She's probably in heat or something," Danny muttered, picking her up and depositing her in our room. "We really ought to get her spayed..." She closed the door. I could hear Obby meowing piteously behind it.

I shrugged and went back to the box. The scissors continued their see-saw motion. Then it was finished. The seal holding the box together was cut through, and for better or for worse, it was ready to be opened. "Well, here goes nothing..." I said, pulling open the top of the box. Danny, perhaps instinctively, leaned in to get a better look.

The moment I yanked the top of the box aside, there was puff of white smoke. It emerged from the box to disappear delicately into the night air. The smoke was very faint, almost translucent, and I would have thought that I had imagined it if Danny didn't wrinkle her nose. "Say, what is that? Dust?" She said. I sniffed. It didn't smell like dust. As a matter of fact, it didn't smell like anything at all.

We inspected the box more closely. There was nothing else inside. "Well," Danny said with a shrug. "Perhaps this is just a prank, or simply a matter of mistaken identity." Turning to look at Danny, I said in a tone of mock seriousness. "A prank, indeed! And perhaps we're being filmed right now. Think about it: the prank video uploaded online, thousands of people watching us, laughing at the silly old couple, terrified of a box." Laughing, we walked back to the sofa to resume watching TV.

-

Nothing happened for a while. All was right in the world for a while. Then, approximately thirty minutes after I had opened the box, I began to feel something strange.

The light was the first thing that began to shift. There on the couch, I saw the colors on my TV screen begin to whirl and to swirl, creating a diaspora of images I had never before seen. Daenerys was marching through the city with her dragons and her Unsullied, except her dragons were not frightful winged beasts at all, black and white and green, but skittle-colored chameleons that possessed what looked like not scales but bright feathers. The Unsullied were talking in their made-up tongue, but I felt like I could understand them. Every half-heard word they said and every inside joke they shared was a wild and wondrous miracle to me.

I turned to Danny, and she turned to look at me. Then slowly, in unison, we said, "What. The. Fuck."

We were both high, there was no denying it. The only difference between Danny's high and mine was that I was enjoying it. I had been, in my youth, a peruser of psychedelics, and therefore had a rudimentary understanding of my forcefully heightened state, but Danny had been a straight-edged, two-glasses-of-wine-after-work type of woman her entire life. She looked panicky. I tried to console Danny. I tried to comfort her, to tell her that whatever was inside that box was only going to affect us temporarily. "Danny," I said, the words seeming to roll slow and unfamiliar from my tongue. "I don't know what was in that box, Danny darling, but I know enough to know this: it's only going to be temporary. You hear that, darling? There's no need to be scared. This is only temporary!"

But Danny didn't seem to believe me. Her eyes, normally so clear and beautiful, were wild and bug-like. They were darting around the room in furtive glances, and her next words to me only served to confirm my fears. "Calvin?" Danny said in a meek whisper. "Help me, I'm scared." And then, without warning, she started screaming. "Oh my god, Cal, help! Help, there are bugs all around me!"

I looked around the room. There was nothing there.

Then Danny, still screaming, bounded off the couch in one leap. She landed on her feet, slipped, then fell in a heap on the carpet. She was brushing her arms in a mad blur, over and over, in a bid to stop whatever she thought was on her. "Bugs, Calvin, bugs!" She shrieked. "They're all over me!" Then, all of a sudden, she yelled, "Oh my God, no! No! They're in me! The bugs are crawling into me!" Saying so, she clawed at her face, at her eyes and her nose and her throat. It was a horrifying scene. It was as if she was trying to peel off her very own skin.

I had no time to react. All of it happened in a matter of seconds. Then, finally snapping out of my lethargy, I got off the couch and made my way to Danny. She was only a meter or two away, close enough for me to reach out and touch her, but that night my feet seemed to be caught in quicksand, and the short seconds it would ordinarily take me to reach her felt not like short seconds at all but the span of an entire lifetime.

When I finally reached Danny, I cradled her in my arms, put her head against my chest, whispered to her that everything was going to be okay. I did so for many hours, as the room around me danced and whirled and swirled. Danny did not seem to hear me. She just lay there, screaming intermittently, making little sounds of weeping.

Then, abruptly, her screaming stopped. She looked up at me. Her eyes were wild and bright and utterly insane. "Calvin," she said. "I just came to a most startling realization." There was a feeling of impending doom in my heart. "And what's that, my dear?" I asked, with as much poise as I could muster.

"I am not Danny at all, the person by whose name you call me. My name is Daenerys, and my son will be the Stallion Who Mounts The World."

The above would have been funny if Danny did not place her hands low on her stomach. I felt a river of ice-cold dread run down the back of my neck. Words could not avail me here. All I could do was cling to Danny, rock her and sing her songs of childish innocence, all the while looking into those too-bright eyes that belonged to the woman I loved.

-

Things were never the same after that.

I wasn't high when I woke up the next day. I was fine, but Danny evidently wasn't. I found her next to me, in the same position as before, face up and eyes open, staring mutely at the ceiling. God knows how long she had been staring, or what strange patterns she saw dancing on that bleak gray concrete sky.

I tried to make light of the whole thing. I called her by name. "Danny, about last night―what a wild experience, huh?" She started screaming at me. "My name is not Danny!" She yelled, snapping out of her comatose state. "It's Daenerys. D-A-E-N-E-R-Y-S!" She spat out the name in alphabets, sharp tongue punctuating every word.

I tried to keep her home. I tried to nurse her back to health in our safe sanctuary, in the abode whose four walls were ever a haven to me. She would have none of it. I would leave for work, and Danny would flee. She would run onto oncoming traffic, she would accost strangers on the street, telling them wild tales about who she thought they were, and who they ought to be. Once, she even ran stark naked past the playground shared by the residents of our neighborhood. On that day, she scared a couple of kids...

All this I knew and more from the calls I constantly got. I got calls from the police, calls from concerned citizens, and more calls yet from a dozen or so neighbors. All this I could take and more. All these calls I brushed off, with a polite but brusque explanation that Danny was sick.

I only committed her when she began abusing Obby.

-

I am at home now. Nothing has changed, yet everything has changed. With Danny around, this place had been a dream. Without her, it was nothing more than a house, a brick-and-plaster monument reminding me of the woman I had loved and so painfully lost.

To my right sits my computer. To my left is an ordinarily-looking box.

You see, ever since Danny left me, my days have been filled with an overabundance of time. I used this free time to read up on what might have been in that box. And the more I read, the deeper my disquiet became. Through online forums and newspaper archives, I found out about certain...special projects.

Projects such as Artichoke. MK-Ultra. Midnight Climax. These were all operations okayed by the U.S government and carried out―in top secret, no less―by none other than the CIA. These projects had one aim and one aim only: to figure out how to subvert and control the human mind.

The scientists that carried them out were callous. They conducted human experiments. They chose their subjects randomly. Then, without telling them, without informing them, they dosed them with high levels of potent psychedelics. They then sat back and coldly watched while their unwitting subjects went mad.

All these projectes were, quite rightfully so, declared illegal, and suspended decades ago. At least, that was what the government said...

I have my suspicions, you see. I have my suspicions because the more I read, the more I could not help but think of that night. I could not help but think about how quiet that drone had been. It was very, very quiet. Military quiet. Almost government quiet. I could not think about just how carefully unremarkable that cardboard box was.

And now, sitting here in this house, I cannot help but think to myself hard-hearted thoughts of revenge.

I have, upon discovering those projects, procured for myself some LSD. It was the drug of choice used by the people responsible for those projects―and it is the drug I will use against them now. Booting on my laptop, I made the same affirmation I have made to myself every single night since Danny lost her sanity. "Don't worry, Danny dear," I mumbled as my laptop flared on, as Danny's face smiled back through my screensaver at me. "I could not save you―but I can do this one thing. I can make the people responsible for this pay." Lifting my left hand, I patted the box beside me. Its cardboard veneer was smooth and reassuring. Then, putting my fingers on the keyboard, I resumed my tireless search.

Danny was gone, forever gone. I was no miracle worker. There was no way I could bring her back, no way I could restore her to the smiling, silver-haired girl she had once been. But there was one thing I could yet do―and that was make the people responsible for this monstrous injustice pay.

Oh, I would make them pay.

How I would make them pay.