Diagnosis

“Well, come in, come in, take a seat. What would you like to start complaining today, so to speak?” and face of the doctor in a black dressing blurred in a smile, having bared a dozen of golden teeth for a short instant of time. “As it always goes here - if you don’t complain and lighten up your earthly burden, so to say - then you won’t recover. And if you do complain - you will start feeling yourself better for some time, even though you disrespecting yourself afterward. Am I right?” and the doctor sat down in a chair, inviting the patient to do the same. “Tell me where it hurts, Josh.”

“I... doctor, you see, something is really wrong with me,” the patient started his confession while continuing to fidget slightly on a chair from nervousness. “I... I started feeling joy, doctor!”

“Is that so?” and the doctor looked over his new client with a squint, having put his pen aside. “You must already know how pernicious for the health of your organism this forbidden feeling is, right? And for how long has all this been already going?”

“For several months, doctor. I am feeling very uneasy! It started seeming to me that all my current so-called life is absolutely inappropriate in the sense that right now I am not in the right place where I belong. That I am capable of doing something other, much more significant, something that really matters...”

“How is that you are not in your place, huh?” the doctor replied him with a smile while continuing to slide through his patient with steel-colored eyes. “You have a very prestigious position of the head of the board of directors of one of the largest banks in our country, and that means that you shouldn’t experience any sort of material discomfort and all. Am I correct?”

“That’s not what matters, doc. To the hell with this comfort! I am terrified. With each and every passing day I am becoming more and more afraid to not live the life I was meant to, you see?”

“To the hell, really?” and the doctor once again bared a dozen golden teeth, having stood up from a chair and started slowly walking inside the office. “Tell me in details, how all of this has started?”

“You see, six months ago I... I saw a dream. Very unusual dream. I dreamed like that only in my... c... ch... during the period when I was significantly physically smaller and weaker. And in this dream I... I was flying, doctor! At first, I was a huge butterfly with gracious colorful wings, which was flitting from one flower to another, and then I suddenly turned into the mighty blue-winged bird, who was soaring up to the high skies and diving down to the earth like a stone, and then...”

“That’s enough!” the doctor suddenly sharply interrupted him, having highly raised a hand. “You perfectly know that the ministry of health-preservation has strictly forbidden to experience feelings of joy and delight because they both lead to irreversible consequences in organisms of our patients - and it was prohibited especially to try infecting other individuals with these feelings, which is what you have precisely tried to achieve right here and now!”

“I... for... forgive me, doctor,” and Josh confusedly hung his head. “I had no idea that it’s really infectious.”

“Oh, it’s extremely contagious. We have already fought against the most real epidemic about two thousands of years before! Fortunately, we prevailed over it that last time. And we as world doctors have no desire to see how these incidents repeat themselves, you understand me?”

“I... un... understand.”

“Tell me in more details of what you think about and how you feel as of recently.”

“I began feeling myself from time to time like a c... ch... what is this word?” the patient frowned as if endeavoring to overcome invisible barrier inside his own memory. “Ch... ch... child! It’s as if I became a child once again, doctor. After that ill-fated dream, I ceased to feel for short periods so casual, normal and habitual to me and all of my acquaintance's feelings of grief, boredom, and inner melancholy.

At first, I started to smile, doc - yet... yet not with that kind of smile you are smiling now while looking at me. Then somewhere deep inside me, some inner laughter began to be born - yet it was not the laughter people laugh now during public celebrations and festivals. Then... then something happened to my sight - and my entire life started feeling to me as being such ridiculous and such... funny. I started feeling myself precisely like a robot who is carrying out his routine mundane social tasks day after day, yet being incapable to find some time in order to... to become alive, doctor. As if I haven’t lived before that moment, you understand? As if I have been sleeping all time before and only in that dreadful dream I have really, truly awaken.

Gradually I ceased to be afraid to open to someone my s... so... damn it, what have you done to this word, I have almost forgotten it... soul! It became much more painless and easier for me to meet like a c... a child with new people and without habitual former regrets and melancholy leave them if they so desired. I started feeling that deep inside them... that there is something just the same, similar, living hides inside them. That these adults - they... they are children, doctor, just... they just became forever-silent children, as if they were forced to shut up their mouths so they don’t shout from the joy of living. So that they cry from pain and grieved from unfulfilled once promised to them happiness...

I ceased to experience fear before my future and reconciled with own past. It started seeming to me that it’s absolutely inhumanly to cause others my own pain which I was constantly holding inside me. And then, in one of these days when I was coming back home from my job, I... I had some spare free time, it happens very seldom nowadays, but nevertheless... and I... well... I am ashamed to admit that, but... I lifted my gaze to the sky, doctor, and there... there was the sun! Oh, how dazzlingly brightly it was shining to all of us! With what kind of joy it filled me during these instants... all so habitual to me melancholy thawed in a flash of time under its warm caressing beams. During that... terrible moment... I desired to cry out from delight because I was feeling alive once again for a short instant. Do you understand me, doctor? Damn it, you most certainly don’t even have the slightest idea of how’s that - to feel oneself alive!

And then... then all kinds of strange thoughts started visiting me, doctor. I tried to fight them off, diligently rejected them, but they were coming for my soul over and over again. I was thinking that... that if people experience all that which I have passed through during those strange days, then... they would cease tormenting each other. There would be no more wars in the world. Everyone would find that kind sort of deed he really likes to be engaged in, and this would bring him happiness - and together with it inspire people around him to search for true themselves. Each one would finally come to the place where he belongs - not the places imposed to him by either fashion or marketing, but the place chosen earlier by his... soul. The world would be changed. Children... children are often unhappy in our world of adults, but... in the world of kids they... they are precisely like angels, doctor. In the world of the children, our inescapable pain would no longer exist... Do you understand me? Hell no, you probably don’t understand the slightest portion of it!”

“Oh, don’t you worry, smart a*s, I have understood you perfectly. The Childhood Syndrome - that’s your diagnosis, my dear Josh.”

“No... that can’t be true!” and heatedly walking around the office patient sat down on a chair in a dread, his sight stopped and previously shining eyes started filling with tears. “Is that really so serious?”

“It’s extremely serious. All symptoms of diagnosis are present - on your very face, I would even say. Your lively face, my unfortunate Josh.”

“But doctor, only now I have become truly happy, even with your di... diagnosis, which is leaving me with no chances for a normal life.”

“And exactly for that reason, we will be forced to forcefully direct you to sterilization of your memories and feelings, Josh. We cannot allow your disease to affect our absolutely healthy social organism.”

“But... I have no such desire, doctor... let me out! Release me! Tyrants! Demons! Soul-killers!” the patient shouted as soon as dressed in black robes men all of a sudden entered the office, took him by hands and started dragging away in the unknown direction.

“We shall all be there, one way or the other...” his interlocutor admitted philosophically, having bared his golden teeth.

***

“Demons, you say?” grinned the doctor as soon as representatives of souls control service have taken away this new awakened one to the memory erasure procedure. “You know, you may be even right is some regard...”

With these words, he slowly sat down on a chair. From endured excitement, his tail was forking on the end and then again merging into a single whole, and hoofs were tapping in impatience. One more awakened one. Too bad. Statistics inevitably demonstrated that more and more such ones were being born with each passing day - and that means that more resources will be required in the upcoming future to fight with them afterward.

Something has to be invented in order to return to the people their lost feeling of happiness, at the same time keeping it from them. They will not be able to survive a second planetary epidemic.

18.11.2017