The doctors prescribed him medication that they used to treat Lyme disease—that was all they could come up with. “It helps some people who suffer from these symptoms,” they told him a bit ambiguously. “It’ll help you concentrate.”

Some people who suffered from Morgellons treated it with oral and topical antibiotics, antifungals, or antiparasitics. You try them all, and you find that they don’t work. The sores stay, the cluttered thinking gets worse.

At his house, Timothy hurried to the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet, pulled out the tweezers and the magnifying glass.

Free.

He needed to be free.

He used the magnifying glass to study the sores covering his left arm. As he traced the scratch marks he’d made while trying to deal with the itching, he tried futilely to resist the urge to scratch at them again.

Some of the sores hadn’t healed in more than a year, and their scabs were black and raw and came off with a tiny snag of irritation whenever he scraped them hard enough.

Which he did. Yes, he admitted it, he often did.

He clamped the tweezers onto a tuft of fibers protruding from the largest sore on his arm.

Maybe if he could pull them out, it would get better.

You’ve tried that before. It never works.

But something needs to work! Something will!

He dug at them, pried them loose, but the itching didn’t stop.

No no no no. The tweezers weren’t going to be enough.

You need something better. Something to get at the roots. A knife. Some sort of knife.

The X-ACTO knife on your desk.

Delusions? They were awfully real delusions. Just the fact that it could “all be in your head” was astonishing in and of itself. How could your mind decide to grow strange fibers from your body, fibers that have plant DNA in them? How could something like that even happen?

The doctors opted for the easy answer and claimed that the fibers were from clothing caught on the sores after you scratch them, but the fibers had been found on babies that couldn’t scratch their sores and beneath smooth skin that surrounded the sores on adults.

How did they get there?

Timothy found the knife and returned to the bathroom.

Free.

Of course, there were the conspiracy theories about Morgellons. The most common one postulated that the condition was somehow linked to chemtrails, or contrails, from airplanes resulting from some sort of government test on the American population. Ridiculous, yes, of course it was ridiculous, but people often turn to the absurd when faced with the inexplicable.

But on the other hand, the government would keep it a secret if they were doing tests. It would make sense that they would.