Threnody (Book 1) by Kirk Withrow Read Free Book Online Page B

lapse in focus progressed to the point where she began intermittently drifting off and daydreaming.  One particular daydream, however, was more consistent and troubling than all the rest.  With escalating frequency, she found herself plagued by the recurring mental image of the lead marathoner blazing toward the finish line on the home stretch of a race.  Strangely, the runner, despite her immense effort and apparent assurance of success, always became ensnared by an overwhelming exhaustion that entangled her legs and brought her down mere feet before the finish line. Lin assumed this cliqued ‘vision’ was simply her pessimism and self-doubt percolating to the surface – an obvious allegory of her exhaustion.
    Her first recollection of this vision was in a dream about a month earlier.  That night she awoke from a tumultuous sleep, sweating so profusely it was as if she just stepped out of the shower rather than the bed.  Thereafter this scene quickly established itself as a recurring theme in the form of such nightly assaults.  As the impact of her sleep deprivation grew, the vision eventually crept out of her slumber and into her waking hours as well.
    Lin was not one who could typically recall the dreams of the previous night and certainly not one prone to daydreaming, thus she found the persistence of this intrusion rather troubling.  At first she likened it to the occasional nightmares she experienced during her college and post doctorate years, when she would occasionally awaken amidst a full-blown panic attack.  Late for a final exam, she would bolt out of bed and into the bathroom only to discover it was Saturday…and 3:14 A.M.  Those ‘nightmares,’ however, always stayed true to their name and never so much as crossed her mind during the waking hours of the day.  This current ‘vision,’ as she referred to it due to its vivid intensity that made it nearly indistinguishable from reality, was far less cooperative and lacked such a circadian awareness.  Lin was not a runner, much less a marathoner, so she was unsure what caused this image to keep flashing before her psyche.  Not being one to place much stock in superstition or subtle intuition, she ultimately chalked it up to fatigue and sleep deprivation, perhaps with a sprinkling of self-doubt and the fear of failure.  Still, she couldn’t help wonder if that was merely an attempt at rationalization, her scientific mind simply unable to grasp any notion of such an intangible premonition or omen.
    “I am so, so tired,” she said to no one in particular as she sat vacantly at her lab desk, mindlessly gazing at the computer screen flickering with the most recent test results.
    * * *
    Dr. Lin San was frequently heralded as one of the most influential and inspiring young scientists of the day. Her research in the field of autoimmune and limbic encephalitis was considered to be the best on the subject.  It was no secret that her efforts would be greatly accelerated by the substantial amount of research funding promised shortly after the wife of the President of the United States was diagnosed with an exceedingly rare condition called encephalitis lethargica.  This rare disease occurred in epidemic proportions in the 1920s, but the paucity of cases in recent times relegated the diagnosis to the seldom seen backroom shelves in the dusty basements of medical libraries.  In truth, very few physicians currently in practice had even heard of the condition, and even fewer could recite a single accurate fact about it.  How fleeting our collective memory is when we are constantly assaulted by the continually evolving ‘next great threat’!   With few exceptions new research on the disease was essentially nonexistent.  Though the exact etiology of the condition remained somewhat debatable, the coinciding H1N1 flu epidemic in 1918 led to a widespread belief that the condition was secondary to infection with the particularly virulent strain of the