head full of garbage

A guy wakes up in the morning with a head full of garbage. It's the kind of thing you notice right away, like a headache but deeper-rooted, a terrible awareness before he's even opened his eyes. Confirmed by news radio, painfully amplified over breakfast, a sense that try as may he can't eat another bite. Now the paper too, the words swimming in front of him without sense or meaning.

He's freaked but he doesn't say anything to his wife or his kids about it, he just tries to fake his way through. He gets out to his car and thinks maybe now, but the radio attacks him, billboards, people, even the way they walk and look like a kind of affront. It's bad but he forces himself through the motions, parking, onto the train and in, he and everybody else looking down or straight ahead, a sullen cortege for people who die every day, bored by it. Only it's really like he's possessed, the guy has to force every step. Even the corner coffee he buys every day tastes like shit. He should have asked for more sugar but even that...

He comes to in the hospital with a dull feeling in his chest and his wife standing over him and a team of doctors, everybody in scrubs, everybody wearing masks. "I'm afraid there's nothing else to be done," the doctor tells her. Then a quick shot, and a lot of being gone, and when he wakes up he feels a world better, like a new man.

Every day there are meals, and TV, and a little bit of weather through the window. He likes the commercials best. At first he wonders when they'll let him go home. After a few days he gets used to it, falling with his new family into something like happiness.