If you’re armed and at the Glenmont metro, please shoot me

Make it a head shot. Shoot me in the temple, aiming slightly downwards. I need the bullet to travel the shortest possible distance through my brain before it hits my hippocampus. If I’m lucky, the sensation of the gunshot ripping through my skull will only last a few decades.<br><br>As awful as this sounds, you’ll be doing me an enormous favor. Death by a headshots is vastly better than the alternative.<br><br>My ordeal started over ten thousand years ago, at 10:15 this morning. I earn extra money by participating in drug trials. I’m a so-called “healthy subject” who takes experimental drugs to help assess side effects. It’s a great way to earn a grand or two while I watch TV or read a book. I once spent 48 hours playing video games for $800. It was awesome.<br><br>Things take a turn for the worse once I get picked for Phase III trials. In those studies, I’m paired with a “patient subject.” The patient is someone who has a serious medical condition, like cancer or Alzheimer’s, that the drug is meant to treat. In these trials, the patient and I receive the same dosage of the same drug, and my results are compared with his. This lets scientists see if the drug behaves differently for healthy people and sick people. Unfortunately, these trials usually involve quarantining me in a hospital room for three months or more. It’s tedious and I find it impossible to get a job when my schedule is irregular and the only thing I have to do during the day is watch TV or read books.<br><br>I could live with the monotony if it weren’t for Jim. He’s the patient I’m paired with in this round of testing. This motherfucker has to be the most annoying person I’ve ever met. The first time that they threw him into the cell across from mine, I thought he was dead. He had a bald head, a white beard, and a scowl on his face. He was dressed in a white bathrobe that didn’t quite cover his ass. He looked like God showing up to a toga party.<br><br>Three months ago, they told me that Jim suffered from early-onset Alzheimers. He was 45, and they were trying to reverse (or at least halt) his condition. I’d never heard of anyone getting Alzheimer's so young, so I asked the doctors about it. They explained that this drug wasn't actually intended to cure Alzheimer’s disease. It was meant to accelerate brain function in people suffering from head trauma. The drug restored the connections between severed neurons, and regrew tissue in areas that had been damaged. Apparently, the drug performed so well in trials that some of the researchers started experimenting with it in people suffering from degenerative brain diseases.<br><br>They thought of it as a “long shot” with little chance of success, but the drug had actually been shown to restore connections between brain cells in people suffering from Parkinsons, MS, and even Alzheimer's disease. Of course, repairing damage isn't the same thing as curing the underlying condition that caused it. Once the links between brain cells were healed, the drug couldn’t stop new brain cells from dying. Still, the improvement could be dramatic (one doctor told me they had restored someone from a near-vegetable state back to near normalcy). In theory, they should have only been testing the drug on people who had recently suffered an injury, but they also decided to test it on people suffering from degenerative brain diseases, to see if it could regenerate brain cells before more neurons died.<br><br>They also warned me that this drug had a strange side effect. Apparently, it changes the way our brains perceive time. This accelerating effect always occurs in the patient, and occasionally occurs in the healthy subject. They thought it was related to the way the brain continued to heal itself after the drug wore off.<br><br>The doctors also warned me that something had gone wrong with Jim’s last dose. They were trying to find a big dosage that would have a profound effect on the brain without overdosing. According to the doctors, they now believed that the last dosage they had given him was too high. He was receiving two pills a day, for five days at a time, followed by five days off. Apparently, they had recently doubled the dosage (from one to two pills a day) and were starting to regret it.<br><br>At first, I didn’t see anything wrong with the guy. He looked like an old man, but he didn’t act like someone who was demented. The only peculiarity that I noticed was that he wouldn't talk. He would write on a chalkboard if he needed to say something, and he’d usually keep it brief. Otherwise, he was perfectly friendly. He was an old man stuck in a young man's body, and you could tell that he wanted to be lucid. He’d twitch in his sleep and occasionally make gestures that indicated he wanted to say or do something but couldn’t.<br><br>I don’t know if it was the drug or not, but the first few weeks we spent together were hellish. It was like he was an infant who was just starting to learn how to control his body. Since he couldn’t talk, he would bang on the wall when he needed help with something. Otherwise, he spent most of his day watching TV in a daze. One day, he finally learned how to wipe his own ass. He was so proud of himself that he wrote “I WIPED MY OWN ASS” on his chalkboard about two dozen times. He held it up on one end of the hall and then the other, grinning at me like a lunatic. He was so cute that I stood up and applauded.<br><br>I was overjoyed by the small progress he made during the first few weeks. It was so nice to see him come back to life. But things took a turn for the worse once he started getting younger.<br><br>It started with his hair. It turned from gray to brown, and started to grow thicker on the sides of his head. He looked years younger once his hair grew in. His beard started filling in more, and it turned a reddish-brown color. He started to look like an old man again, but it was clear that something was happening.<br><br>He started to look more lucid. After two months, he was writing short paragraphs on his chalkboard. He was cutting his own food and taking pills on his own. He stopped needing baths. I still had to ring for the nurses if I wanted help with anything, but he was showing signs of real progress for the first time in his life.<br><br>I’d never been a “chatty Cathy” before, but now I found myself saying anything just to get him to talk. I’d talk about TV, the weather, or anything else I could think of. He always seemed interested, and occasionally, he’d respond with a sentence or two. It was barely a conversation, but it was something.<br><br>Then, one day, he started to get younger. His hair turned blond, and his face cleared up. I’m not even kidding. This guy went from having a wrinkled old-man face to the face of a 30-year-old. It was like something out of Dorian Gray, minus all of the gay sex and drug abuse.<br><br>By the time his hair turned blond, he looked like he was in his 30s. He was still a few decades older than me, but he looked like my uncle instead of my grandpa.<br><br>He was getting more talkative, but he only liked to talk about the past. I was fascinated by some of his stories, but he was a very awkward person. He was usually pretty friendly, but sometimes I’d think that he was being sarcastic or teasing me. I couldn't tell because he still had trouble communicating, and he had 0.0% game.<br><br>He was obsessed with the 1960s. I’d hear stories about what it was like to buy a brand new 1962 Ford Thunderbird for $4,000, to go to the movies for under a dollar, or to drink a six pack of beer for $1.50. Apparently, he had some pretty good years during the 60s – he met his first (and only) girlfriend, graduated from college, and landed a high paying job. It sounded like his life was in decline after he turned 35 or so. He wouldn’t tell me what happened to his girlfriend, and he broke down and cried when he talked about her.<br><br>I heard a lot of stories from Jim, and I got to know him well. He was a boring man who led a boring life, but he was fascinated by the world around him. He was like an infant, except that he had the memories of an old man. After decades of being locked in a demented daze, he could finally see the world again. Watching him discover new things was absolutely captivating.<br><br>When they pushed his dosage higher, he started to get younger at an exponential rate. He went from a 30-year old to an early 20-something in what felt like a few days. They realized that something was wrong and determined that the accelerating effect was much worse than they had anticipated. They halved his dosage, but that didn’t change much. They even tried taking him off the drug, but he kept getting younger.<br><br>The doctors didn’t really know what to do. They were amazed and thrilled by Jim’s recovery, but they were also worried that he’d eventually get too young to take care of himself. At some point, they even started feeding him through a tube because he forgot how to eat. It was disturbing to watch, and I started to feel sorry for him after all the progress he had made.<br><br>One day, they determined that his condition wouldn’t stabilize, and carted him off to God-knows-where. They left an empty cell behind, and a note explaining that our contact would be minimal