This is actually a description of a character with a storyline that comes to the surface in my new fiction, Sleep Chamber. So, if you like this character, then you'll like the story, coming soon.
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Mike was a very withdrawn person, a professor of Psychology, my psychology teacher to be specific, and somehow behind the light brown eyes was hidden dark shadows as though he had many secrets to keep. He was a nice person, and there wasn’t a time that I didn’t think I couldn’t go to him for something. Easily in his mid thirties, he had light copper hair to match his eyes, but wrinkles were starting to form below his eyes and along his forehead. He was much too young to have wrinkles, but an older, more tired man emerged from that face. I didn’t know what secrets he kept hidden until he revealed one on a very normal day while he wore normal clothes of a t-shirt and pressed blue pants- definitely not the attire for a man who was about to reveal one of the darkest secrets I might’ve learned in my whole school year.
He spoke casually; in fact he was going through a tired lecture when the secret was let out. The tired man was revived as though the secret had captured his youth and would only let go when he did. He spoke of a chamber that hadn’t been entered in six years and he spoke of it as though he was right back there, observing and going over facts with his students from that year. He spoke with a conviction I hadn’t seen in any of his lectures until this moment. An experiment had been tried in that chamber that inquired on whether human beings could live without R.E.M sleep.
“The experiment went all wrong,” he told us, and as he said it, his hand shook. I was waiting for his body to become the body of that younger professor whom had lost his youth when he decided to keep such a secret. “A student from here, and I can’t name names, went two weeks without R.E.M sleep and it affected him.” He began to pace and finally grabbed the edge of the table to stop his nerves from over reacting.
I was hunkered over in my seat as were the rest of the first year students around me. Mike began to shake his head. “It affected him to the point of being hospitalized, and I do believe he’s still there. The doctors haven’t been able to do anything for him.”
He gave us all a look of deep sadness and then as though, realizing he had let such a secret slip, he went silent. The tremble in his lips was still visible and when he spoke next it was to tell us that he was not a part of it; that he had only heard about it. Most students believed him. I didn’t and as I left at the end of that lesson, I stopped near doorway to look back at Mike. He was sitting at his desk, head in his hands and his shoulders shaking with his burden. I wanted to say something to him, but I couldn’t. Everyone had secrets to keep. He was one among many.
