A Prison of the Mind

I’d last seen my brother when he was 11 and I was 15. I did not recognize this man—soft, bloated and white—that stared upon the world with these watery eyes. He was like a corpse, newly surfaced in some icy pond.

“Brother…” I said. “Paul.”

“He will not speak,” Meher said. “Our world is as distant to him as God’s light is to the heathen.”

I set down my equipment and tried not to sound perturbed.

“There’s nothing godly about this,” I said. “His mind has closed itself—a response to severe psychological trauma… It has been this way since we were boys.”

I handed Meher the cable to the machine and motioned for him to plug it in. I set to work placing the contacts on my brother’s scalp.

I’d long maintained that what my brother had been through had been traumatic for both of us: His unexplained disappearance and mysterious return 18 months later—as a broken boy.

The police had suspected the worst, and even blamed our father for a time, but there had been no signs of physical abuse. There was only Paul’s silence and his sad, vacant gaze, as if he’d stumbled upon some horrible secret, some ruinous truth the universe had managed to hide from the rest of us. He would not drink and he would not eat, and the simplest tasks fell to our parents to perform. It tore our family apart.

Looking upon him now I realized I had suffered merely a fraction of his pain. For nearly forty years he had been a prisoner of his own mind.

I gently rolled his sleeve and gave him an injection.

“Do you think you can cure him?” Meher asked.

“Perhaps not. But if I can open a door to his mind, even for a short time, I may be able to discover who did this to him.”

“And then?”

I gave my brother a second injection.

“Then they will find God’s light,” I said.

I thought this week’s Trifecta Writing Challenge prompt, Door, worked pretty well with the storyline I started last week, so I decided to keep it goings. I hope you all enjoy this continuation!

And, as always, don’t forget to check out the rest of this week’s stories over at Trifecta!

The series: The Treatment // A Prison of the Mind // Echoes