A SIMPLE ROOM

Dedicated: Thomas Retamal

CHAPTER 1 – THE ROOM WHERE STORIES ARE BORN

Luis Hernán Carmona always woke up before the city did; no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t oversleep. Instead, all he could do was stay up and try to organize his thoughts. While the streets of Providencia were still bathed in the faintly orange hue of the sunrise, he lay in bed, staring at the ceiling of his mother’s apartment. The ceiling was colorful by design, he had begged his sister to paint over the original color, which was white. He loved staring at the ceiling, it was painted like an abstract piece, with explosions of color here and there. The sight always engaged his mind and senses. As he thought about his sister painting the ceiling, a faint breeze blew in through the half-open window, rustling his hair. The breeze brought the faint scent of freshly cut grass and wet grass from the compound outside. He knew if he stepped out, he could rest on a comfortable chair on the L-shaped patio outside, but he did not want to move yet. Luis inhaled deeply, enjoying the few moments of peace he got before his day would begin.

He reached to the side, picked up his phone, and went straight to the notepad app. On the app was an itemized to-do list. He always had to write his to-do lists for the day the night before, while his thoughts were still fresh. It was one of many habits he had developed to keep himself functioning at a somewhat normal capacity.

Luis stared at his phone for a few moments, trying to commit the sentences there to memory. He couldn't help but wonder if there was something missing from his list. He felt like there was, but as he searched his mind, he kept coming up empty. He stared at his phone for a bit.

Luis’ mind paused as he tried to think of something, but the words and the memories were all a blur now. Vaguely out of reach, like sand slipping in between his fingers, all he could do was try to remember a time when things were different. For him, that time was before. Luis thought of his life as a book with three distinct chapters: before, during, and after. Before was hard for him to remember, but during seemed seared into his mind. Whenever memories of what happened to him duringintruded in his head, he liked to clear his mind and grasp for traces of before. Before the treatment, before it all, a time when he truly felt like himself. He couldn’t help but think of his mind as an empty room, and the memories he desperately wanted back were fragile cobwebs dangling in a corner. 

Before it all, he liked to think he was just a regular guy, like everyone else around him. His strongest memory was of when he was a child. He was leaving home with his sister, they both watched their parents go to work, and wondered what they did at work. He also wondered why he had to go to school.

When he was a child, Luis had thought that everything, all his problems, would be solved by getting older. Back then, he had no idea what getting older would entail; all he knew was that he would be able to control his own life after that. He thought once he was older, he could stop studying and just live his life freely. 

His aversion to studying and his parents’ rules confused his parents, his father, a medical practitioner, certainly could not relate to an impulse to not study, and his mother loved school so much that she had a reputation in the business world. Luis wondered if together, they had hoped to give birth to a super genius. However, even if they did or not, they did not try to force their children down a path they were unsuitable for.

His talents leaned more towards the creative world, something he shared with his sister Consuelo. His sister chose art, and he chose writing. Although he didn't know it when he was younger, writing would become his salvation and source of hope much later. Before then, it was a hobby he indulged in, but it did not stop him from living his life. 

Whenever he thought of how he was before, sometimes he found some bad memories had begun to encroach. He couldn’t help but wonder if one day, the bad memories would take over and color the way he viewed the world.

His favorite memory was of a day out with his family, he was young then, barely a teenager. His busy parents were free and they took him to his aunt's house. Luis did not like some family functions, but he loved having a big family. His family was not as big as some of his classmates who had enough cousins and aunts to fill a mansion, but he still had enough family that gatherings felt somewhat crowded.

When he was younger, gatherings with family were always filled with good food and laughter. They were also filled with various questions. Questions like: how are you doing? How are your grades in school? What are your plans for the future? The questions came from a place of love, so he couldn't be angry at them, and could only answer as best as he could. As a shy child, the feeling of having everyone's gazes on him made him feel uncomfortable, and many times he needed rescue. For Luis and his sister Consuelo, whenever one of them was facing the onslaught of questions, they would face the other and ask for help with their eyes. Sometimes, they would get help, and other times, they would face gloating from their sibling instead.

For Luis, whenever he thought back, those were precious memories, even when he remembered rolling his eyes and wanting to run away from family events. However, those precious memories were not the very first thing he remembered without having to dig deep into his mind. 

The first thing Luis really remembered with a ridiculous amount of clarity was a ceiling. It was white, the kind of sterile white you would only see in hospitals. He never remembered how he had gotten there or what had happened to him, instead, he just remembered having an overwhelming amount of emptiness in his head. All he could do was continue to stare at the ceiling. He stared at it for a long time before he realized that the emptiness in his head was not temporary; he didn’t know where he was.

There was a dull ache pressing behind his eyes, and when he tried to sit up, a sharp pain lanced through his head. Something flashed through his mind, memories of searing pain punching through him.  He felt like his face was damp, and when he touched it, he found that there was saliva all over the lower half of his face. He touched his mouth, and even when he closed it, he could not stop drooling. Although his memories were confusing, he knew that was not normal. 

As he tried to get out of the hospital bed, a nurse came in, called him "Mr. Carmona," and told him to rest. His name sounded familiar, but distant. Like a figure seen through thick fog.

“How do you feel now, Mr Carmona?” The nurse asked, and in response, he just stared blankly. He had no idea how he felt or what he was supposed to feel. All he could do was notice that the nurse looked at him hesitantly, like she was worried that he was dangerous in some way. 

“My name is Miguel Rio…” he had said, and the nurse had a look of shock and confusion on her face as she scurried away. She returned with a tall, grave-looking man who wore a doctor’s coat and spoke in short and terse sentences.

“Mr Carmona, what is the problem here?” The man asked, Luis did not know it at the time, but he was a psychiatrist.

“I’m not Mr Carmona, my name is Miguel Rio, and I’m a poet…” Luis’ words made the man’s stern face turn blank. He felt panicked but he had no idea what he had said wrong, he truly believed he was Miguel Rio. The sterile scent of disinfectant invaded his nostrils, making his thoughts more jumbled. The man exchanged a look with the nurse, who left the room and returned with a syringe. Before he knew it, he found his consciousness slipping again, pulled down by whatever was in the syringe.

They told him there had been an accident. A medical accident. He didn’t understand back then, just how much those words would affect him.

They affected him so much that the first item on his to-do list one year later was to go to Redgesam. It was a journey he had to make many times, and yet, just the sight of it on his to-do list made him sigh with frustration.

It was Monday again, and Luis sat on the edge of his narrow bed, watching the light from the window slowly make its way to the bed and his face. His alarm clock had already gone off, though he couldn't remember if he'd turned it off or if it had simply given up after ringing for too long. Either way, it was time to go to Redgesam.

The name of the center always struck him as strange, hard to pronounce, almost made-up. But he went there every week for therapy, as he’d been told to do, and today was no different.

He dressed slowly, his fingers fumbling slightly with the buttons on his shirt. In the small mirror above the sink, he caught a glimpse of himself. He had short dark hair, lines around his eyes that hadn't been there when he was younger. Sometimes it felt to him that a huge portion of his youth had been lost to his illness. He spent a few minutes looking at a very pale scar near his temple that he couldn’t remember getting, he knew it had something to do with the time he had spent in the hospital he always tried to forget. The sight of the scar and the matching scar on the other side of his head seemed to hurt his eyes, so he looked away.

Carolina Vergara was waiting for him when he arrived. She always greeted him kindly, her voice soft but not patronizing. She asked the same questions every time.

“What do you do, Luis?”

“I’m at home most of the time,” he replied.

“And work?”

“I work as a dental delivery man,” he said with a small smile. He knew he had come far, a year ago, he wasn’t sure he would have been able to get behind the wheel of a car. It wouldn’t have been safe, not for him, and certainly not for others on the road.

“How is your health?”

“I’m fine,” Luis answered, and he really believed that. He had seen others in his condition, and some of them looked worse off than he was. Some of them could barely even function in society, so despite the yawning emptiness of his mind sometimes, he knew he had to feel thankful because it could all be worse. He didn’t tell any of this to Carolina, as they were just thoughts he usually held in his mind and kept to himself. Conversations in therapy sometimes felt off, like they weren’t real. Carolina liked to speak and act like she was his friend who just wanted to help, but he found that she wrote down everything he said in her notes, like always. That often reminded him that she was just doing her job, and sometimes it made him second-guess the things he told her. 

Sometimes he wondered what she thought of him. Whether she believed his answers, he had been through a traumatic thing. So sometimes he wanted to ask if she saw the cracks beneath the surface of his words, or if she saw him saying “I'm fine” for what it was: a lie. But she never pressed further. He was infinitely grateful to her for that. Even if she was just doing her job, she was good at it. 

She was patient, careful, and kind. He felt the kindness and patience more keenly whenever he struggled to put his words together, trying and failing to bridge the gap between his brain and his mouth. She was also consistent. Other than his family, she was one of the few constants in a life that often felt like it was stitched together from mismatched scraps.

Luis had been diagnosed with chronic schizophrenia years ago, though the exact moment he received the diagnosis escaped him. He knew how old he was and what had prompted it, but the memories seemed to be hidden behind a veil. The memories around that time were foggy; events moved like shadows through his mind, visible but never clear. He remembered hospital walls. He remembered being strapped down, and he remembered the feeling of dread as something was placed against the sides of his forehead. He also remembered a chair, uncomfortable and wooden, he remembered struggling not to be strapped into it, he even remembered begging. Finally, he remembered a nurse with bright blue nails who smiled too much even as she did something horrible to him. 

He did not like to remember that; it was the part of his life that was filled with pain that he could not escape.

Now, he had to manage his illness through the AUGE health plan. It wasn’t perfect, but it kept him grounded. At least that’s what they said. He didn’t know if he felt grounded. Some days, he felt overwhelmed by his own thoughts and jumbled memories, and some days he was overwhelmed by the emptiness in his head.

His psychiatrist, Dr. Bustos, saw him every three months via teleconsultation. A flat screen and a calm voice. Always the same opening question: “How have you been, Luis?”

The repetition of the words seemed to annoy him, but they stuck with him. In his subconscious, he knew what to expect every time he met with Dr Bustos. That helped him calm down and sometimes even look forward to their sessions.

He sometimes wondered if he would benefit from more sessions or more pills. He felt like he was stable, but that was not enough.

Luis answered Dr Bustos’ questions as best he could, though certainty was often out of reach with the tricks his mind sometimes played on him. Dr. Bustos usually did not say much other than the usual questions, but he emailed his olanzapine prescription afterward, like clockwork. Two pills a day. Small, white, and bitter. They helped, he guessed. At least his family told him that the pills were good for him. He did not remember how he was before them, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to. Sometimes, his thoughts were so messy that he had to touch things around him to be sure that they were real.

But what was real, exactly?

That question hovered over Luis’s thoughts more than he liked to admit. Before he began to remember some things, when he sat in the small patio outside his mother’s apartment, watching pigeons shuffle along the cracked tiles, he wondered if he had ever worked. Or if he had ever fallen in love. He wondered about his friends.

He had pictures in his room, but none of the people in them felt familiar. A man with a mustache, smiling, and a woman standing beside him. A young woman in jean overalls holding a paintbrush. A boy holding a toy robot. They were all his family, that was what he had been told, but back then, whenever he tried to remember them, he would get a splitting headache and a jumble of images in his head.

Luis didn’t know why he kept the pictures on the walls. Maybe he desperately wanted to remember, and he thought they would help. However, once he began to remember, he never regretted having those pictures up.

He kept a journal, as Carolina encouraged him to. Most of the pages were filled with one- or two-sentence entries. Sometimes the entries were repeated. He wondered what that said about his mind, but he was too afraid to tell Carolina. 

One entry read: It’s Monday. I went to therapy.

Another read: Took my pills.

And another: I think I used to work in a bookstore.

That last one appeared often. He had an image in his mind; him in a narrow room filled with the scent of paper and dust, afternoon sunlight stretching across shelves. He could see his hand reaching for a book, and he had no doubt in his mind that before things went bad, he must have loved books. But when he tried to focus on the details, it fell apart like wet sand in his hands. 

Although according to his family, he used to be a psychology student, he still had to read up on schizophrenia. Sometimes he wondered if some of his memories were implanted by the voices that came with the illness. The pills helped, they really did, but sometimes they did not feel like enough.

On some days, the voices came back. Not loud, not like before. Just whispers now. Sometimes they murmured behind the hum of the refrigerator or floated beneath the street noise outside. He didn’t tell Carolina about them anymore. When he used to, she would get a certain look in her eyes, and then more notes would be written down. He didn't know who she showed the notes to, but sometimes after he spoke of hearing voices, the psychiatrist would adjust the dosage. But the new dosage made his hands tremble and gave him strange dreams.

So now, when the voices came, he simply sat with them, and looked at the memories they brought like uninvited guests who had overstayed their welcome. He let them speak and then ignored them.

One Thursday afternoon, Luis found a small notebook buried in a drawer he rarely opened. It was filled with writing, his handwriting, unmistakably, but different from his journal. The entries were longer. More fluid. There were dates written in the margins. 2005. 2006. He skimmed through pages and found a poem, or something like one.

There is a boy floating in a river,

He has given his name to the water,

He speaks to the riverside stones,

Because they may be washed clean by the water,

But like the water, they remain constant.

He didn’t remember writing it. But it felt like something hewould have written. Maybe before the medication. Before the diagnosis.

The words made him ache. Not in a painful way, but in the way a half-remembered story might stir something inside you. He couldn’t help but ache and long for the life he had before.

He didn’t know why, but he brought the notebook to his next appointment. Carolina leafed through it, a flicker of surprise in her expression.

“This is beautiful, Luis,” she said.

“Was I a writer?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Were you?” When he was still beginning to put things together, Caroline rarely just answered his questions; she preferred instead to lead him to the answer and let him reach there on his own.

He didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure. But the idea gave him something to hold onto.

Weeks passed. Routine carried him along like the current: therapy, morning medication, monthly prescriptions. Some days he wrote. Some days, he simply stared out the window, watching the clouds drift past like slow-moving ships. When he got better, he just felt thankful for his family for standing by his side through it all.

One afternoon, while sitting at his kitchen table, he picked up a pen and began to write a story. No plan. No title. Just a line:

There was a man who couldn’t remember his past, but he knew how to listen to birds.

He paused. Then continued.

He sat under trees and told stories he didn’t understand, and when the wind blew, he smiled like someone who had once been in love.

He didn’t know where it came from. Maybe it didn’t matter. What mattered was that for the first time in a long while, he felt connected to something. Sometimes he felt like he was a better poet than a fiction writer, but the fact that he was trying made him feel better. 

When Monday came again, and Carolina asked him what he did during the week other than work, Luis didn’t say “nothing.”

“I wrote a story,” he said.

Her eyebrows lifted. “Really? What about?”

He thought for a moment, then smiled faintly.

“It’s about a man trying to remember who he used to be.”

She nodded slowly. “That sounds like an important story. It sounds familiar.”

“It is,” he said. “Even if he never finds out, I think it’s still worth telling.”

And as she wrote that down in his file, Luis looked out the window at the trees swaying in the morning light. He didn’t remember everything, actually, he didn’t even remember most things. but that day, he remembered who he was trying to be.

And that was something. It was the start of him getting his memories somewhat organized.

One afternoon, he asked his family to show him their childhood home videos. They hesitated briefly, and somehow they seemed to think of him as a delicate creature. He did not know if they were right or wrong, but he was curious about the tapes; he hoped he would see something that would help him pull his memories together. His mother brought out a dusty box of tapes, and they all watched them together.

There he was, young Luis, always with a pen or crayon in his hand, narrating imaginary adventures. As he watched the tape, he wondered if he had always felt so connected to writing. His father could be heard off-camera, gently encouraging them. Their mother would sometimes step into the frame, smiling, brushing Luis’ hair back, or helping Consuelo tie her shoes.

Then there was one tape that made Consuelo pause before hitting play.

“You wrote this story when you were ten,” she said. “Dad helped you make a little puppet show out of it.”

The boy in the video was unmistakable; it was him, but he could not remember it. He could feel his family looking at him, probably searching for any signs of recognition on his face, but it all came to nothing. As he looked at the little boy on the screen, he felt a rush of emotions make their way through him.

He didn’t cry watching it. Instead, he laughed. The kind of laugh that reached from his belly to his throat and shook his body almost violently. His family, watching him laugh, also joined in. They were just happy to see his long-lost smile resurface.

Days later, he began writing a new story. This time, not fragments. Not journal entries. A real story, with a boy who forgot who he was and had to return to the forest of his youth to remember. He wrote by hand, letting each word echo through the corridors of his mind. Each sentence felt like he was carving his name into stone.

His memory wasn’t whole. Maybe it never would be. He still feared the empty spaces, but as he looked around at the world, he knew he wanted to be a part of it, and for him, that was the beginning of his new life. He was determined to be part of the world, and that day, he wrote his first to-do list.

That was over a year ago, and now he liked to think he was so much better than he was before. He still lived in his mother’s apartment, but he worked, and he did not consider himself a burden because he helped his family whenever he could.

The apartment was large, especially by city standards. It was a second-floor unit nestled between tree-lined avenues, with ivy growing up the stone walls and long windows that framed slices of Santiago’s skyline. It had belonged to his mother since before he was born, a vestige of the days when prices were manageable and foresight still rewarded the brave. The space carried the echoes of decades past and traces of the life they had lived there. Although his sister had told him that they didn’t always used to live there, he still felt like that house had always been home. It had scratched wood floors, overstuffed bookshelves, and the walls were painted with an understated shade of beige. A large painting of San Pedro de Atacama hung in the hallway, the desert rendered in thick strokes of ochre and gold. And beyond the sliding doors in the living room, the patio curled around the apartment in a gentle L, a private green refuge in the middle of the city.

Luis lived here with his parents. His father, Hernán Carmona, had been a dental surgeon for forty-two years. Educated at the University of Chile, he kept a small clinic two blocks away, where he still practiced, though only in the mornings now. He walked there every day, wearing the same brown slacks and pressed short-sleeved shirts. The clinic was a relic of times past. It had wood-paneled walls, a vintage waiting-room fan, and an old-school receptionist named Violeta who still used a paper appointment book. Retirement loomed over Hernán, but he was determined to fight it to the bitter end. Hernan loved his job and could not imagine a life of sitting home doing nothing. He spoke of it often, though he never seemed quite ready to let go.

His mother had once been a star in her field, and she still was. She had graduated top of her class in business engineering at the University of Arica. She was known among her peers as the woman who always finished first and always double-checked her work. She had a sharp mind and a sharper tongue, the kind of woman who could balance a budget in her head while making lunch and correcting someone’s grammar. She managed several properties now, investments made wisely in the 1990s, and though she never bragged, Luis knew she took pride in their comfort. He also knew that it was because of his parents that he hadn’t had a worse time when things were really bad for him. The apartment, the patio, even the framed art prints lining the hallway were hers. 

Despite her wealth and ability, she was also an incredibly warm woman. Even when Luis was younger and worried about his academic performance, she would encourage him and sometimes give him lessons. And when things got bad for him, she, just like his other family members, stood by his side and never made him feel like he was causing any inconvenience to them. 

Luis, now thirty-seven, worked as a dental delivery man. It wasn’t glamorous, but it paid the bills and it gave him something to do. He got into that line of work through his father ,who was his first customer. Despite his worries, he seemed to be a natural at it. Every morning, he loaded boxes of dental supplies; gloves, resin, syringes, and impression materials, into the back of his battered Kia Sorento. He loved his car beyond belief, it was a vehicle he had christened Hammerhead after the shark. It was an old, dependable machine, silver-gray with a couple of dents, one of which resembled a bite mark on the rear bumper, that was where he had gotten the name. Hammerhead had been with him for nearly a decade, and despite the growing groan of the transmission and the stubbornness of the rear door, he felt oddly affectionate toward it. Maybe it was because it was something he had owned from before, but he felt deeply attached to it.

His route took him from Las Condes to Maipú, weaving through Santiago’s clogged arteries, delivering parcels to small clinics, crowded labs, and bustling hospitals. It had taken him a year to get his route and every clinic he had to stop by committed to memory, and every time he made a stop at a clinic, he would greet the workers before dropping off the supplies. Carolina told him she believed the job was good for him because it helped him get out of the house and interact with others. He saw the city from the driver’s seat, people rushing, waiting, selling flowers or snacks at intersections during traffic, or leaning out of kiosks to shout morning greetings. Sometimes, he passed schoolyards filled with laughter or elderly couples on benches watching the day begin. Everything he saw on his way home warmed his heart and painted a fuller picture of the city in his mind. He had to admit that Carolina was right, getting this job was good for him and his memory.

But it was always the return home that felt most important.

After unloading the last box and ticking off the final item from his list, Luis would pull back into the narrow driveway on Andrés Bello and shut off the engine. Then came the ritual: entering the apartment, nodding to his mother if she was on a call, removing his shoes, and fending off a sneak attack from his dog.

“Kokuro, stop it!” He often said to his boxer dog. Kokoro was a very spirited dog, and its enthusiasm always felt contagious to Luis. He often spent minutes playing with his dog before finally stepping into what he privately called “the room where stories are born.”

It wasn’t much, it was his bedroom, which had a window with a view that always made him want to stare. It had a low wooden desk, a rickety lamp, and a stack of notebooks in a drawer. But it was his. It smelled faintly of eucalyptus oil and paper. The walls were covered in Post-it notes, each scribbled with fragments: “a man finds a message in a tooth,” “the baker’s daughter hears colors,” “Luciano and the end of the world.” “Joaquin versus the giant”. They were his story ideas, and every time he had one, he would write it on a note and post it somewhere so he wouldn’t forget.

He wrote in the afternoons, when the sunlight shifted across the floor in long golden stripes, and the world outside slowed. It was during those hours that the apartment turned inward, the murmur of traffic fading into background noise, and he allowed himself to become someone else, not the delivery man, not the son living with his parents, not the father trying to build a relationship with his son, but instead, the storyteller.

Writing was not a profession for him, not in the conventional sense. He had never published a novel, he had never thought he would earn a cent from his stories. He had a small blog that a dozen faithful readers followed, mostly fellow amateurs. Yet he approached his writing with quiet reverence, like a monk tending to a garden. The words mattered. The act mattered. And so he returned to the room each day, notebook in hand, chasing fragments of thoughts that didn’t exist yet.

It was on a quiet Thursday afternoon, with the windows open and the smell of fried chicken wafting in from a neighbor’s kitchen, that his cousin’s son, Luciano, arrived.

He had added picking up Luciano and dropping him off every day to his to-do list. It was one of the things he did for his family that made him feel good. 

Sometimes Luciano would choose to come over and hang out instead. He had no idea what to say to him, so usually they just sat in silence. 

Then, on the third day, Luciano wandered into his writing room.

He stood in the doorway, one hand on the frame, his face unreadable.

“What’s all this?” he asked.

Luis looked up from his notebook. “Notes. Ideas. Nothing finished.”

“Do you write... like books?”

“Sort of. Stories. Things I imagine.”

Luciano stepped inside and began reading a few post-its aloud. His voice stumbled over the more abstract ones. “What’s this one? ‘The boy who saw future earthquakes in his sleep’?”

Luis smiled. “An idea. I haven’t written it yet.”

“You’re weird,” Luciano said. But he didn’t leave.

From then on, the boy returned to the room daily. He never interrupted while Luis was writing, but he watched. Sometimes he drew in a small sketchbook he had tucked under his hoodie. Other times, he simply stared out the window at the patio, his fingers twitching as if playing invisible strings.

Luis began to write differently. He found himself considering the stories Luciano might want to read, or better yet, the stories Luciano might need.

In the evenings, when his mother made sopaipillas or tea, Luciano started opening up. He spoke of feeling disconnected from his classmates, of his father’s long silences, of a recurring dream where a vast sea swallowed the desert.

Luis listened. He wasn’t always sure what to say, but he listened. And slowly, the apartment seemed to stretch to accommodate the boy, the same way it had stretched for decades to hold his family’s lives.

Outside, Santiago moved as it always did, residents rising and going about their days, buses roaring by, protests sometimes humming through the city’s streets and roads. Inside, in the soft corners of the apartment and the quiet of the writing room, something else was forming. A kinship. A rhythm.

One morning, as Luis drove Hammerhead toward a clinic in Ñuñoa, Luciano beside him fiddling with the radio, he realized that maybe this was the point,  not publication, not recognition, but the forming of bonds. He couldn't believe how close they were getting. Writing wasn’t just escape; it was connection.

That night, back in the writing room, he wrote something again. It did not feel right, so he moved to writing poetry instead. Once he did, the words began to flow. 

Luis paused, then placed his pen down.

In the apartment, footsteps moved softly. Some of them were of his father returning from the clinic, and some were of his mother rearranging glasses in the kitchen. Luciano was humming under his breath, sitting on the floor beside the desk, sketching what looked like a city under the sea.

The room where stories were born held them both and their different activities. They both worked in silence but that day he felt closer to Luciano than ever. 

And tomorrow, Luis hoped he would write again.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 2 – MY SISTER CONSUELO AND THE ARTIST’S PATH

 Luis Carmona was born in the Independencia district of Santiago, Chile. It was a narrow stretch of the city carved out by time, with worn sidewalks, old grocers, and the distinct rhythm of early morning buses. Maybe it was because he was young when he left, but his memories of Independencia were hazy and distant, like looking through misted glass. Most of what he remembered, the part that still lived in the corners of his mind and emerged whenever he thought about his childhood, began later, after the family moved to Providencia.

Providencia was different. The houses were closer together, but there was space to breathe, and quiet tree-lined streets where children played football in the afternoons. It was a family-oriented neighborhood, and his family had four houses there. Luis lived in a semi-detached house with his parents and his younger sister, Consuelo. Next door, in a similar whitewashed home, his older brother, Carlos Encalada, lived with his wife and two small children. Their lives ran parallel, just a garden wall between them. On the other side of that wall, his older sister, Susana, from his mother’s first marriage, lived with her son, Alvarito. Alvarito was a cheerful boy. When Luis was a child, he envied the boy with round cheeks and a laugh that echoed through the whole passageway. In the final house, his Aunt Nora lived with her grown daughter and their aging matriarch, Grandma Nora, who drank mate each morning on the patio and kept the family history in her bones.

It wasn’t a neighborhood in the usual sense. It was more like an enclave, a self-contained family village. Four houses, one name: Acevedo. It was a kind of comfort Luis never quite appreciated until much later in life.

As a child, he was known for being calm, almost too calm and shy. His parents would often comment that he barely cried as a baby and that he could spend hours alone, playing with blocks or reading comics without ever asking for company. Shyness clung to him like a second skin. He would hide behind his mother’s skirt when neighbors came to visit and whisper his responses when asked a question by his teachers. In those early days, Luis never imagined he would become a writer, much less a poet. That kind of expressive life seemed meant for someone louder, and braver. He thought of himself more like a listener, someone who absorbed the world quietly without needing to reshape it.

Everything changed in 1992, when he was seven years old. His father, seeking quieter days and cleaner air, moved the family out of Santiago to Peñaflor, a semi-rural town on the outskirts of the capital. It was a world away from the close quarters of the Providencia passageway. The new house sat behind a row of eucalyptus trees, with chickens that roamed freely and the scent of damp earth rising after the rain.

For Luis, the countryside was both liberation and isolation. There were no more cousins next door, no weekend visits from Carlos or Susana, no shared family meals under the patio lights. But there was something else: silence. Space. Time to think.

He attended Carampangue High School, a large Catholic school with tall gates and orderly uniforms. For a while, he did well enough. But as adolescence took root, so did a hunger for something more than books and structure. He discovered music, parties, and the joy of dancing until sunrise. 

He drank for the first time on a school trip. Then again at a friend’s house. By the time he was fifteen, Luis had found a freedom in the bottle that he hadn’t found in conversation. He found that it was easier to speak his thoughts whenever he had something to drink. Unfortunately, some people did not look upon a drinking teen kindly. When the administration of Carampangue discovered what he’d been doing, he was expelled without ceremony. His parents, disappointed and extremely surprised, transferred him to Instituto Talagante High School, where his sister Consuelo also studied.

That transition marked the first real fracture in his sense of self. It also marked the start of his parents looking at him in a different light. He was no longer the quiet boy of the passageway, nor the rural child of Peñaflor. He was something else now, dislocated, searching. It was in those restless afternoons at Talagante, between math classes and long bus rides home, that he wrote his first poem.

He didn’t know why he did it. There was no assignment, no request. Just a need to translate a feeling he couldn't quite name or describe into words. The poem wasn’t anything remarkable, not to him at least. Whenever he thought of it, he remembered it was just a few stanzas scribbled in the margins of a notebook. But when he read it back to himself, he felt the strange flicker of something new, something true.

After graduating, he returned with Consuelo to Santiago. The capital had changed while they were gone. It felt faster, louder, and more crowded. But for Luis, it also held promise. It was when they moved into his mother's apartment. He enrolled in Gabriela Mistral University to study psychology. The idea made sense to him. He'd always been introspective, always listening more than speaking. Perhaps, he thought, understanding others might help him understand himself. He also thought he would be able to help people that way. 

For a year and a half, he attended classes, rode the metro, took notes during lectures on Freud, Jung, and the architecture of the human mind. But something felt off. He liked the theories, yes, and the reading was interesting. But the people, the other students seemed to move in a different frequency. Everyone else seemed to have purpose and passion for what they were studying. He was jealous of them whenever he saw them walking back and forth. In comparison to them, he often felt like a ghost walking through campus.

At night, he’d sit in his small rented room and write. Not essays or reports. Poems. Letters he never sent. 

Eventually, Luis left university. He never made a formal decision. He simply stopped going. The lectures felt hollow. The days seemed too long. Especially since he was going through some issues at the time. His mind was beginning to play tricks on him after he had a bad experience with a hallucinogen. He told himself he needed time to think. That he would return when everything got better. At that time, he genuinely believed he would go back to finish his degree. But he never did. Life got in the way. 

He spent the following months drifting between part-time jobs and the solitude of writing. His illness hadn’t yet been diagnosed, but the signs were there: the occasional voice that spoke when no one else was near, the paranoia that snuck in late at night, the confusion between dreams and real life. It would be a while before he received the name for what haunted him chronic schizophrenia. And even then, it didn’t offer clarity, instead it put a name on something he would never truly understand. 

But even with the illness, Luis kept writing. Sometimes the act was the only thing that tethered him. He didn’t write to be published. He wrote because the words made sense when the world didn’t.

Now, older, medicated, and living quietly, he sometimes looked back at those four family houses on the passageway and wondered how much of it was still real in his mind. His memory had become a patchwork, some pieces bright and certain, others frayed or missing entirely.

But he remembered the sound of Alvarito’s laugh. He remembered the scent of eucalyptus in Peñaflor. And he remembered a moment when he sat in silence with his sister and how close he felt to her. And maybe, Luis thought, that was enough.

Consuelo Carmona never arrived quietly. Even when she wasn’t physically present, her presence filled rooms like a physical thing. Her voice usually entered the room before she did. He always smiled whenever he heard her voice, ever since they were children, he thought of her as a safe harbor. Her voice, when she called from Valparaíso or some studio in Palermo, always burst through the apartment like the loud horn of a truck.

Luis often thought that if people were colors, he and his sister would be very different shades. If they were painted into the same canvas, she would be all broad strokes and large bursts of bright colors, while he would be in the background, a soft shade of lilac or a pastel green. 

She was his older sister by five years, and from the very beginning, she had carried the kind of restlessness that frightened adults and fascinated everyone else. At ten, she was already making oil portraits of the neighbors’ cats. By fourteen, she had left behind the strict lines of realism and begun sculpting birds out of recycled plastic and bones she found in the hills behind their grandmother’s house in San Felipe. 

Luis admired her the way one might admire a comet. She was beautiful, and adventurous. He was a bit jealous that he couldn't be the same. Consuelo lived in a way that Luis could never quite manage. Even when she stopped painting and creating art, she picked a line of work that frightened him. 

Where Consuelo was a burning flare of creativity and adventure, Luis moved slowly through the fog of confusion. He had notebooks filled with unfinished folk tales: stories of trees that whispered secrets, of old women who cooked time into soup, of cities that sank beneath the weight of their own dreams. But he rarely finished them.

He told himself it was because of work, because of the delivery routes, the fatigue, the lack of time. But the truth was harder to admit: the thoughts in his head were sometimes too loud. Too cluttered. Like a dozen voices trying to tell the story at once, each with a different ending. He would begin a tale with conviction and then stall halfway through, convinced it wasn’t good enough, not original enough, not worth the paper.

In one of the early poetry workshops he attended, he found that his doubts came pouring out of him. The workshop was held in a bookstore in Ñuñoa that smelled of old glue and cinnamon, he had confessed this aloud. “It’s like there’s static in my brain. I get one line in, and it just... collapses.”

The instructor, a poet who wore scarves even in summer, had replied gently, “what you have is something many poets deal with. Sometimes, the best poems come when you have to really dig deep and wade through the static to pull something out.”

Luis had nodded, but he didn't return the following week.

His sister, of course, had no such hesitations. She had no patience for self-pity or perfectionism. 

“You’re trying too hard to be profound,” she told him once over a breakfast of burnt toast and instant coffee on the patio. “Just write like you talk when you’re not trying to impress anyone.”

He tried. He really did. 

To escape his fear of judgment, he started submitting work under a pseudonym; Michael River. It sounded vaguely American, like someone who might live in Brooklyn or drive a motorcycle through Nevada. He had no idea where those places were, but giving Michael a backstory helped him pretend. More importantly, it wasn’t him. Michael River could be bolder, less self-conscious. Michael River didn’t care about punctuation, stanzas or rhyme schemes. Michael River wrote about boys falling in love with ghosts, about detectives who interviewed birds, about a version of Santiago where the city whispered its history through cracks in the pavement.

The blog where he posted these stories, was titled The River’s Mouth, and it never attracted more than a few dozen readers, but they were loyal. Some even left comments. “This made me cry.”“I needed this today.” “Who are you, Michael?”

He never answered. But he always read the messages, sometimes rereading them at night when the silence pressed too close. They helped him feel better about himself when he felt bad about not being able to go back to university. 

It was Consuelo who first suspected. “Michael River, huh?” she said one afternoon, looking up from his laptop, which she’d opened without asking. “You could’ve gone with something cooler. Like Luis Storm or Nico Midnight.”

He smirked, but his stomach clenched. “Don’t tell Mom.”

“Please,” she said, rolling her eyes. “She’s still worried about you, this would help her feel better, you know.” 

And yet, despite the teasing, she supported him in the way only she could, without fanfare, without demands. Sometimes she sent him links to obscure literary magazines. Once, she mailed him a handmade notebook filled with blank pages and an encouraging note scrawled on the inside cover.

He didn’t use the notebook. Not yet. It sat on his desk like a dare. He didn't use it until much later. 

There was one afternoon Luis remembered with strange clarity. It had rained in the morning, and the patio was damp, the scent of wet soil made its way to him through the open windows. Consuelo was back from a stint in Argentina, her hair streaked with green, her jeans covered in specks of clay. They sat on the floor, drinking cheap boxed wine, and she asked him, “Why do you write, Luis?”

He hesitated. “Because I don’t know how not to.”

She grinned. “That’s the only real answer.”

That was the thing about Consuelo. She made him believe, for a moment, that art mattered more than fear. That beauty was worth the risk. It was why when she put a hold on her art to take a job, he believed it was temporary and she would return to art again. Consuelo's words made him smile, they were like pillars that held up his self confidence. 

But Luis couldn’t shake the doubt. Not completely.

At family gatherings, his mother would beam over Consuelo’s exhibitions, proudly showing photos on her phone. When it came to Luis, she smiled gently and asked, “how do you feel today?” It hurt him like a knife to the heart. She was being supportive, and she was being kind, but this came with a dark side. She didn't expect anything of him, that was why she wasn't disappointed in him for not doing more. 

He didn’t resent her. Not exactly. But the question lingered.

What am I? What would I do with myself if my writing never amounted to more than a dream?

.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 3 – SCHIZOPHRENIA AND THE FRAGILITY OF MEMORY

 Luis Carmona had always known his mind was different.

Even as a child growing up in the tight-knit Acevedo passageway of Providencia, there had been signs. He had dreams that lingered too long, sometimes he felt like he heard someone calling his name but when he turned, he found no one there. Sometimes he also felt sensations that felt too real to be imagined, and he felt like he was processing things slower than most. However, that wasn't an issue that really affected his life at that time. 

It wasn't until he turned twenty, during a night that started with curiosity and ended very badly for him, that the full weight of what would become his mental illness revealed itself.

For Luis, the during portion of his life started when he tried San Pedro.

The cactus, sacred in Andean rituals, was known for its hallucinogenic properties. It had fallen so far from grace, that cactus, from sacred plant to recreational drug. His university friend had told him, with an air of mysticism. “You will travel far,” the man had said, offering him the bitter brew in a wooden cup.

Luis didn't even remember his old friend’s name anymore. He found that ironic since the man was a key linchpin in the start of a terrifying new phase of his life. 

Luis had never drunk it before. He had no experience with drugs, and no prior interest in psychedelics or altered states. But he was twenty, seeking excitement and fun. He didn't want his friend to think he was a chicken, so despite his misgivings, he decided to try it. His friend took a large gulp and looked like he was having fun. So he drank.

What followed wasn’t a journey. It was an unraveling of his mind. His friend seemed to be having fun, as he lay on the ground and giggled to himself. However, Luis had a drastically different experience. 

It felt like he had stuck his brain inside a blender. Waves of pain washed over him as different sights, sounds and feelings assaulted him. He felt like his soul had come undone and jerked free of his body. His breathing became erratic. He screamed. He begged to return. But no one came to rescue him. He was trapped in his own mind and there was no escape. 

When the effects began to wane, Luis was no longer the same.

That night marked his first schizophrenic outbreak.

 ***

 Nothing made sense at all to him. The world grew louder and more unfriendly to him due to the voices in his head. 

It continued, disrupting his life over and over again until he had to drop out of university. 

When his diagnosis came, chronic schizophrenia, he accepted it the way someone might accept a bounced check from a known fraudster; with unsurprised resignation. He was twenty years old and falling through his own mind. His dreams of becoming a psychologist evaporated. His goals shriveled under pills and appointments.

He was no longer a student.

He was a patient. He wanted things to change, but his mind felt like his own enemy. 

Three years later, just as he had learned to walk again through the fog of medication and therapy, something new began to grow inside him.

It started with a subtle pressure in his lower jaw. A throb that came and went, then stayed. At first he thought it was like his schizophrenia; a trick of his mind. However, as things got worse, he began to realize the pain was real. Eating became difficult. Talking made it worse. At first, he thought it was a tooth. He put off going to the doctor because he had seen too much of the hospital ever since his schizophrenia surfaced. 

But the pain deepened. Spread. It crept along his face like an unwelcome hand. One side of his jaw swelled; his neck stiffened.

When he finally made it to the hospital, he expected to be given antibiotics and sent home.

Instead, they gave him a scan. Then a diagnosis.

“It’s a giant keratocyst,” the doctor said, tapping the film of his X-ray. “Inside the jawbone. It’s pushing everything out of place.”

Luis stared at the image, the black oval shadow beneath his teeth.

“Is it cancer?” he asked. He genuinely thought it might be, with how things had been going for him, it would just be the cherry on top for him to have cancer.

“No. Not malignant. But it’s eating through your bone. It has to come out.”

The doctors prepared for his operation quickly. Luis was twenty-three, his face swollen, his thoughts distant. He didn’t have the energy to even give himself any comforting thoughts. His mother came to the hospital, sat by his side, and prayed in whispers.

The day of the operation, he was wheeled into a room that smelled like bleach and disinfectant. He was told to count backward, again. 

“Ten... nine... eight...”

When he woke up, he couldn’t speak.

His jaw was bandaged and wired. Pain bloomed behind his eyes like ink in water. A tube ran from his mouth to drain fluid. His throat burned. However there was a silver lining to his situation. 

The cyst was gone.

It had been large. Burrowed deep into the bone like a parasite, thinning the structure until his jaw had nearly cracked from the inside.

The surgeon told him he was lucky it hadn’t spread further. That it could’ve disfigured him. That it could have returned, had they not caught it.

Luis nodded, but in his mind, something had already shifted.

The keratocyst haunted him, not just for the pain it brought him, but for what it symbolized.

It had grown in him silently. It had taken root in his body without asking. It had hollowed him out.

And in this, Luis saw the same pattern as his schizophrenia. Two invasions. One in the bone. One in the brain. Neither visible until too late. Neither kind.

The cyst had been cut out, but he wished he could say the same for his schizophrenia. It wasn’t located in a scan. There was no neat black oval to point to. No surgeon with gloves. Only pills. Therapists. The fading hope that one day maybe it would get better. 

And even then, better was never normal. It was just a bit more manageable.

Recovery came slowly. He healed. He chewed again. He spoke again. The doctors said the surgery had been a success.

But Luis didn’t feel like a success. The doctors told him that his health would improve. 

But Luis knew the truth: his health was a thin sheet of ice. Even when it looked calm, there were terrible things brewing under the surface. 

 

***

Luis Carmona did not know that his world could turn upside down in a single phone call.

On a summer afternoon in Santiago, with the sky heavy and pale over the rooftops of Peñaflor, his mother pressed the numbers on the government hotline with trembling fingers. She was alone in the house. Luis was pacing the living room again, muttering to himself in urgent whispers, flinching at voices no one else could hear.

Luis found himself shouting and yelling at things that weren't there. His mother tried pleading with him to calm down, she tried to hold his hands but he was too frantic to be stopped. 

She had watched this unfold before, but never like this. Never with such intensity. His eyes were wild, and his hands were trembling. He had gone two days without sleep and he hadn't taken his medication. His mental break seemed like a tangible thing, filling the room with tension and his mother with worry. 

He wasn’t violent. He wasn’t dangerous, not to anyone other than himself. But he was gone. His mother looked at him and only grew more frightened, he didn't seem like himself. 

So she called. The hotline was one she’d heard about on the radio. It was a mental health support line run by the Chilean Ministry of Health. She hoped someone on the other end would give her guidance. Maybe suggest a therapist or a local clinic. She didn’t want an emergency. She just wanted help for her son.

But that call would change everything for them. 

The paramedics arrived within an hour.

They came in as fast as they could, like they were soldiers not medical professionals. The paramedics were two men and a woman in white coats, with an ambulance blinking like a warning in the street. Luis had retreated to his bedroom by then. His mother tried to speak with them calmly, to explain that her son was frightened, that he needed compassion, not containment or to be subdued. 

They nodded as they stepped inside his room. 

But it didn’t matter.

Luis panicked the moment he saw the stretcher.

He shouted, begged, backed into the wall. He kept asking, “who are you?” “Where are you taking me?” and “What did I do?” The words tumbled out of him in confusion and fear as he did all he could to stay out of their clutches. The paramedics looked at each other and reached for restraints. His mother tried to intervene, she tried to explain that he wasn't dangerous and she hadn’t asked them to take him anywhere. But they let her know that the moment the call was made, it was out of their hands. They told her they had their orders. They had a protocol to follow. 

She stood in the driveway crying as the ambulance doors shut.

Luis did not remember much of the ambulance ride.

He remembered flashes: the cold leather of the gurney, the siren wailing like a wounded baby, the needle in his arm that calmed his shaking limbs, and the voice of his mother, close at first, then finally far away. She was saying his name over and over like a prayer.

The hospital was white and windowless. The kind of place where time didn’t pass easily. They stripped him of his clothes, gave him a gown. A nurse took his name. He couldn’t answer, even if he could, they wouldn't have listened to him.

He just kept saying, “I’m not sick. I’m not dangerous. I was only listening to myself.”

They locked him in a room that smelled of disinfectant. 

The electroshocks came on the third day.

He hadn’t been told. There was no consent form. No explanation. He remembered lying on a bed, hands bound. A cold gel on his temples, followed by two cold pieces of metal. The lights above him were so bright that he had to shut his eyes. A doctor said something before he started the “treatment” maybe his name, maybe a number.

Then, nothing, just waves of pain coursing through him over and over again. He tried to fight it, but there was nowhere to run. The pain pushed its way through his head downwards. He lost himself in the pain eventually. 

Luis’s mother found out two days later. A nurse let it slip during a routine inquiry.

“Your son is responding to ECT,” she said. “We just finished the second session.”

“¿Qué?” his mother asked, heart thudding. “What session?”

“Electroconvulsive therapy,” the nurse clarified, as if it were obvious. “It’s part of his treatment plan.”

“No one told me,” she said. “I didn’t agree to that. I didn’t agree.”

The nurse shrugged. “He’s over eighteen. Involuntary commitment. The doctors made the decision, it's what is best for him.”

“How could you just do that? Did you ask him at least?”

“We don't have to, he has diminished capacity. This has to be done to stop him from being a threat to himself and society,” she said with a nonchalant look on her face that made Luis’ mother want to hit him. 

“But I just called to ask for information,” she whispered. “That’s all. I didn't want any of this.”

The bill came later. Over 3 million Chilean pesos, roughly $4,000 USD. Electroshock therapy, multiple overnight stays, medications administered, ambulance fees. It was all listed in great detail, like an encyclopedia of financial trouble. There was no line for consent. Just a bill and a son with a broken mind. 

Luis’s mother paid what she could. Family helped. But the debt wasn't just a financial one. She also felt some guilt. She replayed that day over and over again and wondered if there was anything she could have done differently. 

Luis came home changed.

Not better. Not worse. Just… different.

He didn’t speak for the first two days. He stared out the window for hours. His poems stopped. His journals went blank. When Consuelo visited, for the first time ever, he looked at her like she was a stranger. 

It broke her heart to see him that way; so different from his usual self.

And he never brought it up in conversation with her once he began to remember who he was. He had recovered enough of himself to know just how much that would hurt her. 

He never blamed his mother.

He knew she had called with love in her heart. But he also knew the imperfect system had twisted her intention into something monstrous.

“I wanted you to live,” she told him once, much later, her eyes rimmed red.

“I know,” he said.

Then he reached for her hand.

And in that quiet moment, between grief and love, Luis wrote the first line of a new poem in his head:

Sometimes help comes like a knife,

not to kill, but to carve you into someone else.

He never finished that one. He didn’t need to. The pain said enough.

***

When it was time for him to begin piecing himself together, they brought him to Dr. Gómez, a calm and experienced psychiatrist with sad eyes. Luis couldn’t understand the questions he was being asked at first. His thoughts collided, voices echoed in his head, and he felt both outside of time and crushed by it. Dr. Gómez diagnosed him with schizophrenia.

Chronic schizophrenia, to be exact. It was not a new diagnosis for him. 

But he didn’t understand, not yet, that it would shape the next decades of his life, that it would follow him through clinics and consultations, prescriptions and isolation.

Over time, Luis was seen by many psychiatrists. Each one gave him a new angle, a new way to deal with the shadows in his mind. They experimented with medications, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, sedatives, sometimes the treatments came in combinations that dulled the hallucinations but also silenced everything else. Luis lost his appetite, his libido, and his sense of self. The vibrant colors of life faded into washed-out pastels.

Despite everything, Luis never stopped seeking meaning.

Though his memory was spotty, fragmented by medication, trauma, and the electroshocks. He remembered one thing clearly: prayer. Church. Faith.

Luis’ family had always been spiritual. As a boy, he was able to get some time away from this. However, after his diagnosis, the rituals of religion became more than belief, they became a way for him to survive. He started attending mass weekly. The incense, the solemn chants, the readings from scripture, were not just traditions, they were ways for him to anchor himself when it felt like everything was fading away.

Church gave him more than comfort, it gave him a sense of order. A reminder that suffering, though personal, could be dissolved by faith. That hope, even dim, had its own sacred light.

 

***

Other parts of Luis’ life were falling into a pleasant monotony too. His therapy sessions at Redgesam became routine. Occupational therapy, weekly check-ins, medications. His psychiatrist changed every few years. By now, he was under the care of Dr. Bustos, who managed his case remotely through teleconsultation. The appointments were brief, fifteen minutes on a screen. A question about his mood. A reminder to keep taking the olanzapine. Then an email with the prescription.

He took two pills a day. Without them, the symptoms would return. But with them, there were trade-offs. He felt slow. His thoughts sometimes stuck mid-sentence. His body heavy. But he knew the consequences of stopping. He had tried once, years ago. Within days, the visions returned. Then the whispers. Then the sense of being followed by something ancient and invisible.

Luis knew the world wasn’t fair.

He had seen how the mentally ill were treated, with fear, with dismissal, with silence. He had spent time in waiting rooms with people no one looked at directly. He had walked through streets where others crossed to the other side when he muttered to himself. He had lived, at times, under the weight of stigma that told him he was broken.

But even in that awareness, he remained strangely hopeful.

“I’ve suffered,” he told Carolina, his therapist at Redgesam, during one session. 

“But I still think there’s hope. Sometimes I see it in the morning light. Or when I pray with real faith. Or in a poem I don’t remember writing.”

She nodded, and for once, didn’t write anything down.

Luis didn’t talk much about how he felt about the electroshock. Not even with Carolina.

But there were moments, quiet ones, when the subject came up indirectly. He would forget the name of a cousin. Or struggle to recall the layout of their old house. He once stared at a photo of his older brother, Carlos, for nearly ten minutes, trying to summon a memory that wouldn't come.

“Sometimes I think they erased me with the electricity,” he whispered once, not sure if he wanted to be heard.

Still, he clung to the memories he did have. The way Grandma Nora’s home smelled in the mornings. The sound of his sister Consuelo humming when she thought no one was listening.

They were sacred, those memories. Not just because they were beautiful, but because they had survived.

And those memories surviving, for Luis, was a holy thing.

 

 

CHAPTER 4 – THE NIGHT NERUDA VISITED

It was August 8, 2016, the night everything changed.

Luis didn’t remember what he ate that day, or whether he had taken his medication. He might have skipped them; he sometimes did when the creative energy returned. The world felt heavier when he was medicated, as if someone had pressed the mute button on his mind. But that night, the sky hummed with a strange brightness, the walls whispered verses, and Luis felt, for the first time in months, awake.

He sat alone at his desk in the small apartment he shared with his shattered memories, and notebooks that were stacked like ruins. The air smelled of candle wax and ink. A lamp glowed beside him, casting long shadows over the floor. The hands on the wall clock trembled toward midnight.

That’s when the white light came.

It wasn’t the bulb, though for a moment it seemed to flicker. It wasn’t the moon, which was thin as a cloud hung over it. This light came from nowhere and everywhere. It rose like fog, shimmering, pulsating, alive.

And in the center of it, he saw a man.

Older. Heavyset. Balding. With a somewhat sparse mustache and unnaturally bright eyes. He wore a soft brown suit and stood barefoot on Luis’s tiled floor. There was dust on his shoulders, as if he had walked a great distance through a dusty road.

Luis froze. His hand trembled around the pen. His heart beat out a rhythm he couldn’t name. He had never met the man before, but he knew who he was. How could he not? He had seen pictures of him on the cover of his books. 

“Pablo Neruda,” he whispered.

The ghost nodded solemnly.

He didn’t speak, not in words. Or perhaps he did, but not with sound. The air shifted. 

Luis fell to his knees. His eyes burned as he tried to assimilate what was happening. 

The ghost raised one hand and gestured toward the desk.

There, resting on the wood, was Luis’s old leather-bound notebook, the one he had gotten as a present from his sister Consuelo. The one he had meant to burn when he believed his mind was too fractured to create anything good or worthwhile.

But now, it called to him.

“Am I dead?” Luis asked aloud.

“Carmona, I’ve come to help you complete your legend. We’re going to write the greatest book of poems ever. You’ll need to add black and white illustrations at the end.”

“Why? Why would you help me?” He asked.

Neruda did not answer. He didn’t need to. Luis knew, somehow, that there was no answer any human mind could comprehend.

That night, Luis wrote like a man possessed.

It began with a poem, short, jagged, barely coherent. Then another. And another. 

Every now and then, he looked up and saw the ghost standing in the corner, arms crossed, nodding slowly. A mentor from the grave. 

He couldn't stop, and he didn't want to stop. His inspiration felt like a deep well. 

By morning, the table was buried in ink and crumpled drafts.

By afternoon, he had not eaten.

On the second day, Consuelo knocked on his door.

He didn’t answer. The door was unlocked, but he had pushed a chair up against it, and she struggled to get inside. When she did, she found her brother shirtless, drenched in sweat, muttering verses into an old cassette recorder. His eyes were wild. His fingers ink-stained.

“Luis, you haven’t slept,” she said.

“I’m writing the book, Consuelo,” he replied. “The book. The one Neruda asked for.”

She didn't know what to say to him, she just watched him with some worry in her eyes. 

“I know,” she whispered. “But you need rest.”

He turned back to his notebook. “Rest is for those who have finished their work. I’m just beginning.”

Consuelo tried to reach him but as he continued to ignore her, all she could do was leave. 

By the third night, Luis had stopped speaking.

His lips moved, but only verses came out. One evening, his mother sat beside him and touched his face gently.

“Mijo,” she said. “You’re scaring us.”

He blinked, his lips cracked and dry.

“You don’t see him,” he whispered. “But I do. He’s still here. He hasn’t left.”

Tears welled in her eyes. She didn’t know whether to believe him or seek help. But she was worried about what would happen if she called for help. The memories of what happened the last time were still fresh in her head. 

In that frenzy, Luis produced over twenty pages of poetry.

Then, one morning, Neruda was gone.

No light. No voice. Just silence.

Luis woke slumped over his desk, his body aching. His vision blurred. The notebook was closed, resting beneath his forehead. 

He didn’t remember finishing it. He didn’t remember writing most of it.

The trance was broken.

He stood shakily, walked to the window, and looked out at the grey Santiago morning. The sun was weak. The city noisy. Cars passed. Life continued.

And for the first time in days, he felt alone.

 

The weeks that followed were a slow descent back to Earth.

He returned to Redgesam. Dr. Bustos adjusted his medication. Carolina spoke to him with quiet compassion. His family hovered like satellites, concerned and cautious. Luis slept for nearly a day. When he awoke, he didn’t open the notebook.

He was afraid of what he would find.

When he finally did, he was both horrified and amazed. Some of the pages were incomprehensible, full of wild loops and cryptic symbols. Others were strangely lucid, painfully beautiful. He cried reading one poem about his sister and the scent of eucalyptus in Peñaflor. He laughed at a stanza that described Carlos as a “lighthouse with a broken bulb.”

But the truth was this: he didn’t remember writing most of it.

It was as if someone else—another version of himself—had authored the book.

And in a way, he believed that was true.

 

CHAPTER 5 – FROM ROOM TO WORLD

Luis Carmona had once described his mind as “an empty room with the windows open”

When he scribbled that line into a coffee-stained notebook at 3 a.m., he never imagined it would one day be quoted in French, translated into Japanese, printed across tote bags in Brooklyn cafés, and projected on the wall of a poetry festival in Berlin.

But it was.

Somehow, against all odds and in defiance of diagnosis, medication, memory gaps, and silence, his book had leapt beyond his apartment, beyond Santiago, even beyond his country. 

It had gone from his room to the world.

At first, it was a blog.

Luis had published a handful of poems from the manuscript online after his sister Consuelo encouraged him. She helped him choose the ones that felt coherent, powerful, strange but luminous. She made a simple website. Just his name in black letters on a white background. 

Once he posted it, he never thought about it again. To his shock, his poems blew up. He was shocked to realize that so many people liked his poetry, and so many people related to the words contained within.

Within a week, a Chilean poet based in Paris found them. Then a literature professor in Mexico. A translator in Montreal asked to render some of the work into French. Then came emails. Comments. Requests. The digital echo chamber, alive and multiplying.

He still lived in the same small apartment with uneven walls and flickering lights. He still saw Carolina every Monday at Redgesam. He still took his olanzapine, two tablets every night. He still kept a rosary by his bed.

But now, people wrote to him. Hundreds. Thousands. Strangers who saw themselves in the poems. People with schizophrenia. People who had lost their memories. People who loved his poetry.

Luis didn’t know how to respond. He barely remembered writing the book.

Sometimes, when the mailman came with foreign packages, he would look around the room and wonder if he was dreaming. More than once, he reached to touch the walls, to test if he was still in the real world.

His family was ecstatic.

His mother wept when she saw his book displayed in the window of a local bookstore. “You did it,” she said, holding his hand.

Even his family, who had carried so many years of silent fear for him, beamed with pride. His mother brought the book to church. Showed it to her priest. Told every neighbor that her son was a poet now. 

For a while, Luis felt like he had won something, though he wasn’t sure what.

But success had its strangeness too.

He felt observed. Not by ghosts, but by people. Real people. At the café, at the pharmacy. On the metro. A man in his twenties once approached him with tears in his eyes and said, “Your poems saved me.” Luis thanked him and walked away quickly, unsure what to do with that kind of weight.

He didn't feel like a savior but that was the hand he had been played. 

Some nights, he would lie awake in bed, trying to understand it all. Why me? Why had the book touched people? What had changed?

He wasn’t sure.

He still forgot things. Sometimes he would lose a word mid-sentence. Sometimes he would reread a poem and not remember writing it. He still saw flashes, half-images of places that weren’t real, or people who did not exist. He still feared the voices returning. The silence cracking.

But now there was a myth built around him. A narrative of redemption. Of triumph through suffering. From schizophrenic to literary sensation, he had seen the headlines.

But he couldn't believe them. Because it wasn’t that simple. 

The people who peddled those stories seemed to think he was healed and a changed man. But he knew he wasn't. He was afraid that one day they would realize it and turn on him.

He still felt like there was an empty part in his mind, like the hollowing out of his brain was still in progress. 

And yet, ironically, what followed that hollowing was the book. The voice. The poems. It was as if the burning of his memories had made room for something else.

At a public reading in Santiago, someone once asked him: “Would you take it all back? The illness, the hallucinations, the trauma, if it meant you never wrote the book?”

It was a question that felt like a punch to the gut, he couldn't help but wonder what kind of person would ask a question like that. 

Luis stared at the audience. They looked back with expectation, their faces open, ready to be moved. Maybe they thought he would say no, that he treasured his current accomplishments over everything else. Maybe they thought he would say something deep about the value of poetry and how much he would choose to sacrifice. 

But he couldn’t lie.

“I don’t know,” he said. And that was the truth.

Because on some days, he did wish it all away. The medication, the therapy, the endless monitoring of his own mind. The fear of relapse. The fear of forgetting his own name.

Maybe that answer would be a disappointment to the audience, but they had no idea what it was like to live in his head. 

But on other days, when the poem came like a breeze, or when a stranger thanked him for giving shape to their pain. 

The night he got that question, Luis walked home alone in the dark. All around him Santiago hummed with distant sounds. He didn’t feel famous. He felt like a man returning from somewhere, not sure where he’d been.

When he got home, he opened his window and let the breeze in. He lit a candle. He pulled out a fresh notebook.

And on the first page, he wrote:

I am still the room.

But I do not feel hollow, 

The wind brings names I haven’t lost.

Then he closed the notebook, smiled, and sat in the stillness.

He was not healed. He was not whole. But he was ready to try.

***

Luis never thought he would see the inside of a first-class cabin.

He’d once joked that he was more likely to visit the moon than board a plane without fear, let alone one bound for Europe. But then, as the engines roared to life beneath him and the Santiago skyline disappeared below the wing, Luis leaned back into the leather seat, and smiled at the impossible made real.

The money had come slowly at first, small deposits from international publishers, honorariums from poetry readings, translation rights. Then, with each review, each new edition of The Empty Room, the income grew.

He wasn’t rich, not in the celebrity sense, but he had more than enough. Enough to rent a beautiful apartment in a quiet part of Santiago. Enough to walk into a five-star hotel lobby and not feel like an intruder. Enough to buy new shoes without checking the price tag twice. Enough to dream.

And for the first time in his life, Luis allowed himself to dream big.

“I want to go to England,” he told Nicolás Hernández, his closest friend from the poetry scene, equal parts mischief and mentor. Nicolás was one of the new friends he made who made him feel normal. Nicolás did not tiptoe around him like most people did, or look at him with that strange mix of pity and concern that most people did. 

“I want to learn English properly. I want to see the world, not just write about it.”

Nicolás grinned. “London mornings, British parties, Chilean poets. What could possibly go wrong?”

Luis laughed.

It had taken him so long to believe in possibility. So long to feel he had a right to leave his country not because he was fleeing something, but because he wanted to see more of it.

They planned a year abroad, half language immersion, half joyful debauchery. Museums and lectures in the morning, pubs and poems by night. Luis knew it wouldn’t be easy, his Spanish was lyrical, but his English stopped at hello and thank you. Still, he welcomed the challenge.

“I’ll write a book in English someday,” he said once, and he meant it.

Nicolás raised his glass. “To madness, and maps.”

But before the trip, something even more profound changed: Luis became a father.

Not biologically, Joaquín had been seventeen for a while already, navigating the late years of adolescence with the quiet stubbornness of someone who’d had too many adults fail him. He needed someone. And that someone, suddenly, was Luis.

Luis didn’t know how to act at first.

He had no practice. He wasn’t sure whether to lecture or joke. Whether to ask questions or give space. He hadn’t raised a child before, he’d barely managed to raise himself some days.

But Joaquín moved into the apartment in Santiago, and the bond began slowly. It was shaky at first, like a child learning how to ride a bike.

Joáquin was in some trouble when he first came to Luis, but Luis was determined to stand by him. He saw himself in his son; a young boy who was in over his head. He tried his best to help, but at first, his son was like a hedgehog, with spikes everywhere to protect himself. 

“Are you okay?” Luis asked one night.

“I don’t know yet,” Joaquín replied.

Luis understood that. He deeply understood that.

He didn’t try to fix the boy. He just stayed. Steady. Present. Some days, that meant helping with homework. Other days, just sitting near him without saying anything at all.

Luis found himself watching over Joaquín with a kind of fierce protectiveness he’d never felt before.

“This is your home,” he told him once, placing a key in the boy’s palm. “Not because I say so. But because you can leave and know I’ll still be here.”

Luis’ independence, financial, emotional, spiritual grew with each passing season. His poems had brought him money and that had brought him space to grow. 

But every so often, in the quiet hours just before dawn, he would sit by the window with a cup of tea, watching the lights of Santiago flicker below.

And he would remember.

Not the applause. Not the bookstores or the festivals.

But the white bed. The silence after the electroshocks. The moment in which he thought the world had folded in on him forever.

***

Luis knew people loved the narrative of redemption, but he didn't believe in it. 

Because even then, with money in his account, a passport in his pocket, and a son in the next room, he still felt like a part of him was back in that hospital. What he had gone through felt like the edges of an old wound that never fully closed.

One night, as he and Joaquín shared a plate of empanadas in the apartment kitchen, the boy asked him: “Are you happy?”

Luis paused. For the first time in a long time, he was tempted to respond to that question with the word “yes”.

 

CHAPTER 6 - THE ILLUSION OF RECOVERY

Luis Hernán Carmona had crossed oceans by the time his thirty-third birthday arrived. He didn’t quite remember how the tickets were booked, or who had recommended the little apartment in Barcelona where he briefly lived that autumn. But there were photos on his phone; sunlight striking Gaudí’s broken tiles, his reflection caught in the glass panels of the Sagrada Familia. There were journal entries too, messy and half-finished, sometimes in English, sometimes in a frayed kind of Spanish, bearing titles like ”Echoes of a City I Can’t Name” or “Poem in the Language of Ghosts”.

He was, by outward appearance, thriving.

After the surprise success of ”A Simple Room: Poemario”, Luis had become something of an internet phenomenon. No one understood how the book had gone viral. Some said it was the rawness of the language, others believed it was the desperate beauty of his memory-loss metaphors that captured the world’s attention. To Luis, it had been the ghosts. Neruda, Mistral, Parra. Their presence had been so vivid that August night in 2016, that he still swore the air had shimmered with light when Neruda's voice first echoed through his head. Three days of manic writing followed. He had written as if possessed, and when he emerged, blinking, it was with a manuscript that changed everything.

He used the money from sales and media attention to begin again. A new apartment in Ñuñoa, quieter than his old place in Providencia, but full of light and less haunted by the echoes of who he'd been before. The old building where he'd grown up; the four houses of the Acevedo clan felt like another life entirely. It was in Peñaflor that he'd first felt the stirrings of becoming something more than a shy, serious child. But that had been decades ago, and the passage of time had turned his childhood homes into ghosts too.

In Ñuñoa, he surrounded himself with plants and books and silence. He began exercising, tentatively at first; slow walks around Parque Bustamante, where the sounds of skateboards clattered like old memories. His schizophrenia diagnosis still defined him in the medical paperwork, and the residue of electroshock remained etched into his body. The mornings brought headaches that pulsed behind his right eye, and there were entire weeks that would vanish into a haze if he didn’t keep a notebook by his bed. But outwardly, he lived with dignity. He cooked for himself. Paid his rent on time. Rode buses with an air of quiet purpose.

At 24, he’d barely been able to stand after the electroshocks. He still remembered waking up in a sterile bed, saliva dripping from the corner of his mouth, his thoughts scattered like broken teeth on a tiled floor. They’d forced him to sign the treatment documents in exhaustion, after holding him in the ward for days, denying him any exit. His mother had been terrified. She’d called the Chilean government's psychiatric hotline, thinking they were helping, not realizing they were turning him over to a system that would erase his mind in the name of healing.

He had resisted at first. His signature was shaky and unwilling, but they’d worn him down. The paramedics had arrived in an ambulance, their uniforms crisp, their movements mechanical. They strapped him in and took him to the hospital, where a psychiatrist named Dr. Gómez declared him schizophrenic, again. This time, the treatment would not be talk therapy or medication. It would be electric. They administered three shocks. Three currents of raw voltage that turned Luis’s mind into fog.

When he left, he couldn't remember his own name. Not truly. He told the psychiatrist he was Miguel Río, a poet. Not a patient, not a diagnosis. Just that: a poet.

In his new life, he clung to that name like a lifeline.

Miguel Río wrote poems in public parks, on the backs of receipts, on napkins left at cafés. Sometimes strangers would recognize him from the online articles that swirled around “A Simple Room: Poemario”. Women messaged him from as far as Canada and Germany, quoting his lines, saying they’d never felt seen until they read his words. Luis smiled when he read those notes, but something in him remained distant, held back. He remembered; though just barely how invisible he had felt for years. After the electroshocks, he had lost not just memories but desirability, charm, the fluidity that once allowed him to move through parties and nightclubs with ease. Before, he’d been the kind of young man girls whispered about in school corridors. Afterward, he had become a medical case.

The book had reversed that. Women now came to him. Some sought the myth. Others wanted to be near the sadness he wore like a velvet scarf. They spoke to Miguel, not Luis. They desired the poet who had survived annihilation. Luis let them.

In one of his apartments; a brief stay in Buenos Aires, above a bookstore that smelled of paper and time, he wrote a letter to Joaquín, his estranged son.

Joaquín had come back into his life unexpectedly, at the end of 2024. Seventeen years old, skinny and sunken, with eyes that had seen too much of the street. He’d arrived from Puerto Montt, fleeing a home he never spoke of, arriving with a skateboard and a duffel bag filled with nothing but old clothes and pain. Luis had not known the depths of his son’s addiction at first. That came later; when the drugs vanished from the drawers, when the police called to say Joaquín had been caught robbing a pharmacy.

Luis accompanied him to juvenile court every week for a month. At first in shame, then in solidarity. He saw in Joaquín the same haunted light that had once lived in his own eyes. The lostness. The ache for some sense of belonging. The echo of having been broken by forces larger than yourself.

By 2025, Joaquín was clean. Enrolled in film and television acting classes. He sang hip-hop at open mics and recorded his voice on an old laptop in the living room. He rode his skateboard through the streets like a comet, his body all rhythm and motion. Luis marveled at the transformation. At the way a child could grow new roots even in damaged soil.

They were learning to be a family. Slowly. In fragments. Like memory itself.

Luis exercised twice a week now, mostly bodyweight training in the living room, sometimes jogging in the evenings when the summer light made the city glow. He was gaining strength again. His body, once sluggish from medications and sedentary days, began to feel lithe, younger. He didn’t drink or smoke. He attended his evangelical church every Sunday without fail, kneeling at the altar with hands folded, not in desperation, but in gratitude.

He prayed for those who hadn’t survived electroshock.

Some of them had testified with him in court; men and women with broken timelines, partial vocabularies, but a deep, burning need for justice. They’d sat in front of lawyers and neurologists and described the ways their pasts had been stolen. Some spoke of waking up and not remembering their children’s faces. Others forgot their careers, their art, their dreams. One woman cried because she could no longer recall the name of her first dog.

Luis listened to all of them. He collected their words. Not as a poet, but as a witness.

The lawsuit had been filed under the name Carmona vs. Ministerio de Salud. His lawyer, Camila Acuña, guided him through the labyrinthine process: first a Recurso de Protección, then a formal complaint against both the public hospital and the private clinic that administered the shocks. The electroshocks had cost 4 million pesos; nearly $4,000 USD, and had stripped him of years. But the lawsuit was more than compensation. It was resistance. It was truth made visible.

The press began to cover the case. Journalists appeared at his doorstep, some skeptical, others reverent. They took photos of him in his apartment, framed by books and sunlight, the myth and the man side by side. When the Supreme Court of Chile banned electroshock therapy in 2027, naming the law after him; the Carmona Law, Luis wept. Not for victory, but for what could never be returned.

Still, recovery was not a clean arc. The illusion of healing lingered. Some mornings, he awoke unable to remember what year it was. He occasionally forgot appointments, names, street directions. He kept lists on the fridge: people he loved, things he had to do, prayers to say. He had a laminated card in his wallet that read:

”My name is Luis Hernán Carmona. I am a poet. I survived electroshock therapy. If I am confused or lost, please contact my son Joaquín at this number…”

In the evenings, when the world grew quiet and his mind began to unravel, he would sit in his simple room, still and sacred, and write. The ghosts came less often now. Neruda no longer spoke. Parra was silent. But their absence didn’t frighten him. It meant, perhaps, that they had passed the pen to him entirely.

There was more to say.

So he wrote: about Joaquín, about his mother, about the boy he’d been before Peñaflor, before the jaw surgery, before the cactus trip that had unlocked a madness too large to hold. He wrote about being 20, scared and hallucinating voices, locked in a room with padded walls. He wrote about the kind of silence only hospitals can produce—the silence that erases you.

And he wrote about hope.

Hope, not as a feeling, but as a discipline. The practice of insisting on your own worth. The insistence that a man could lose everything and still remain a poet. That he could be called Miguel Río by accident, and Luis Carmona by justice. That both names belonged to him.

The apartment, with its creaking wooden floors and potted palms, was not a palace. But it was his. And when he stood by the window each morning, watching the buses roll down Vicuña Mackenna, he felt something like peace; fragile, flawed, and still whole.

The world had tried to forget him.

But he had remembered how to write.

***

There were days when Luis wasn’t sure if A Simple Room: Poemario had truly happened.

The book still existed, of course. He could touch its pages, sign it for admirers, see the Amazon listing where his name; Luis Hernán Carmona appeared beneath the glowing reviews. But something about it all felt like it belonged to someone else. As if a parallel version of him had written it in another life, another mind. The success, sudden and surreal, shimmered in his memory like a dream from which he hadn’t fully woken.

He often thought about that August night in 2016 when Neruda had visited, or seemed to. The white light, the voice, the fevered burst of poetry. Was it madness? Revelation? Schizophrenia? Or something else entirely, something that still hovered just beyond the edge of language? He didn’t know. The world hadn’t stopped to question it. They had read the book and named him a genius. The media spoke of him as a poet touched by mysticism, a man who had channeled something divine.

But Luis had lived through it. And when he closed his eyes, it didn’t feel like a miracle. It felt like electricity burning through synapses not yet healed. It felt like a man writing to survive the void left behind by those three jolts of power they had forced into his skull.

Some nights, he would pace his apartment unable to sleep, the ceiling light buzzing overhead like static on an untuned radio. He would stare at the bookshelf where his poems sat lined up beside those of Neruda and Mistral, and he would ask himself quietly, again and again: Did this really happen?

In therapy, his psychologist called it dissociation. A protective mechanism. Luis wasn’t so sure. He suspected it was just memory decay. The kind of decay born not from age but from something deeper, more violent; a man-made forgetting.

He still had trouble recalling the exact months following the electroshock. He remembered leaving the hospital with his mother’s trembling hand on his shoulder. He remembered not recognizing his own reflection in the mirror. And he remembered, above all, the moment he tried to write his name and instead wrote: Miguel Río.

That name lingered. It wasn’t just a pseudonym anymore. It had become a persona, a second self that existed in interviews and public appearances. Miguel Río was confident. Poised. He told stories of recovery, of transformation, of triumph over mental illness. But Luis real, aching, fragmented Luis watched from the wings, still unsure whether he had ever fully returned from that hospital bed.

It was in these late hours of solitude, between the praise and the doubt, that something began to shift. A quiet unease took root inside him, like a splinter under the skin that wouldn’t go away.

At first, he dismissed it. He was alive, wasn’t he? He was writing, wasn’t he? What right did he have to complain?

But then he began to remember the others.

He remembered the woman in the waiting room of the psychiatric center, clutching a plastic bag filled with medications and whispering to herself, her eyes darting like birds. He remembered the man with trembling hands who could no longer spell his daughter’s name. The old professor who stood in court and wept because he’d forgotten how to teach.

They hadn’t written bestsellers. They hadn’t had journalists knocking at their doors. And they, too, had received electroshocks.

Luis had written poems about ghosts, but these weren’t ghosts. These were people. Forgotten people. Institutionalized. Sedated. Dismissed.

What had happened to them?

He started making lists. Names. Places. Fragments of conversations. He dug through his old journals, hospital discharge papers, transcripts of psychiatric appointments. He opened old emails from his lawyer, Camila, and reread the testimonies they’d compiled during the early stages of the lawsuit.

Patterns emerged.

Consent forms signed under duress. Patients misdiagnosed or coerced into treatment. Shock administered without proper neurological evaluations. Hospitals that billed families exorbitant fees—four million Chilean pesos for a single course of ECT—then left patients like Luis unable to remember basic facts about their lives.

He’d been told it was necessary. That he’d been dangerous, psychotic, beyond help.

But had he?

He remembered the San Pedro cactus. The night he tried mescaline with friends at twenty, naïve and curious. He had panicked, yes. He had heard voices, seen visions, fallen into fear. But was that schizophrenia? Or a drug-induced crisis made worse by isolation and stigma?

At twenty-four, they had declared him incurable and strapped him to a gurney.

At thirty-one, he wrote the bestselling poetry book of the year.

The contradiction gnawed at him.

He began attending more hearings. He showed up in court even when his presence wasn’t required, sitting quietly in the back, watching the machinery of the legal system creak into motion. He brought his notebook and wrote everything down. Words that floated out of psychiatrists’ mouths; noncompliance, treatment resistance, loss of insight, and filed them away like evidence.

It was during one of these hearings that he met Paula, a former psychiatric nurse turned whistleblower. She’d worked at a private clinic in Santiago for over ten years and had seen more than a hundred patients go through electroshock.

“They come in scared,” she told him, her hands tight around her coffee cup, “and they leave broken.”

She described the protocols; rushed evaluations, outdated machines, no follow-up therapy. “We were taught to believe it helped,” she said, “but I saw it with my own eyes. The forgetting. The disorientation. One man forgot how to speak English entirely, and he was a translator.”

Luis listened. He didn’t take notes this time. He just listened.

It was Paula who first gave him the term: iatrogenic harm. Injury caused by medical treatment itself. A failure of the very system meant to heal.

The phrase struck him like lightning. He began reading medical literature, combing through academic journals, WHO reports, and ethical guidelines. He reached out to activists, neurologists, and survivors. The picture became clearer, and darker.

Electroshock therapy had not been banned in Chile. Not yet. It continued quietly in both public and private clinics, despite global debates on its efficacy and safety. Lawsuits like his were rare. Most patients lacked the means or support to challenge the institutions that hurt them. And worst of all, the government had no centralized record of who had received ECT. The damage was undocumented. Unacknowledged. Systemic.

Luis felt the old fire rise in his chest, not the manic fire of delusion, but a steadier, righteous anger. A need to bear witness.

So he began to write again; not poems, but statements, essays, articles. He published under both names now: Luis Carmona and Miguel Río. One for the poet. One for the survivor.

He called it La Memoria Robada: The Stolen Memory Project.

He started a blog, interviewed fellow patients, and reached out to families of those who had died in psychiatric care. He wrote about the time his mother paid four thousand dollars to have him taken in an ambulance against his will. He wrote about waking up and not knowing his name. He wrote about the silence in those hospital corridors, the kind that made you feel like you’d died and no one had told you yet.

And people responded.

Emails poured in from across the country; stories like his, worse than his. Electroshock administered to teenagers. Elderly patients left unable to recall their own addresses. Parents forced to sign away consent under threat of involuntary commitment.

What had once felt like a personal tragedy now revealed itself as a social wound.

He wasn’t alone.

Neither were they.

This wasn’t healing. It was suppressed. Control masked as care.

And yet, even as he wrote, even as the lawsuits multiplied and the press began circling with renewed interest, Luis struggled with the ghosts inside his own body. He still forgot things. He still had nights when the edges of the world blurred. He still heard voices, sometimes; gentler now, more distant, but present.

He had made peace with his schizophrenia. Not as a disease to be conquered, but as a part of his truth. A sensitivity, perhaps. A different way of being in the world.

But the electroshock, he had never chosen that.

That had been taken from him.

That was the difference.

Choice.

The poet chose the metaphor.

The patient never chose the erasure.

And so, Luis chose to remember what he could. He carried the fragments of his past like prayer beads. The passage in Independencia with the four Acevedo houses. The afternoons in Peñaflor with his sister Consuelo painting in the courtyard. The nights at Carampangue High School when he snuck out to dance at discos, hoping to be seen. The day he was expelled. The poem he wrote after. His first attempt at studying psychology, the promise of it. The crash that came after San Pedro. The cyst in his jaw. The surgery. The detour. The silence.

These things he held on to. Not perfectly, not completely. But enough.

Enough to say: This happened. I was there. I am still here.

It was in that belief that Luis found his strength; not in recovery, but in resistance.

The illusion had been comforting, for a time. The apartment. The plants. The book sales. But now he saw clearly: healing was not forgetting. It was remembering, even if it hurt, especially f it hurt.

And in the quiet of his simple room, he sharpened his words like knives; not to harm, but to cut open what had been hidden for too long.

There was more to write.

There was more to fight for.

The ghosts were gone. But he remained.

And for the first time, he was not afraid of remembering.

 

CHAPTER SEVEN - LEGAL FIRE: THE CARMONA LAWSUIT

The more Luis read, the more he remembered, and the more he remembered, the more impossible it became to remain silent.

What had begun as a trickle of doubt; whether A Simple Room: Poemario was real, whether his success had come from inspiration or damage, had by now swelled into a tide of indignation. It rose in him each morning like a fever, pushed him into motion, sharpened his language. He no longer wrote just to heal. He wrote to expose. To accuse.

He had lived through electroshock and walked away, scarred, but alive. Most had not been as lucky. Some had disappeared into institutions; others had vanished into private lives marked by confusion and despair. The longer Luis looked, the clearer the pattern became: a system indifferent to consent, cloaked in clinical authority, feeding itself through legal silence and medical mystique.

It was time to name it.

It was time to fight.

He began asking around discreetly. At first, he wasn't even sure what sort of lawyer would handle a case like this. Was it medical malpractice? Human rights? Constitutional law? He was a poet, not a legal scholar. But his questions eventually led him to a name whispered with a kind of reverence among those who had tried, and failed, to go up against state medicine: Camila Acuña.

She had a reputation for being relentless. In her early thirties, with short-cropped hair and a gaze that could freeze even the most evasive bureaucrat, Camila had taken on high-profile environmental cases, political corruption, and police abuse. She had recently shifted focus toward public health policy after her own brother was hospitalized for bipolar disorder and mistreated in a Santiago clinic. Luis felt an immediate kinship with her. She, too, had lost someone to the void between institutions and humanity.

Their first meeting took place in a dim café in Barrio Lastarria. Luis arrived early, notebook in hand, nerves twitching in his fingers. He’d dressed neatly; button-down shirt, his good shoes, the silver ring his sister Consuelo had given him years ago, but he still felt like a ghost in someone else’s story. He feared she would see through him: the gaps in memory, the contradictory records, the haze that still clouded large stretches of his twenties.

But when Camila entered and greeted him with a handshake firm and direct, something clicked. She opened her laptop, took notes methodically, and let him speak.

For over an hour, Luis talked; haltingly at first, then with rising urgency. He told her about the mescaline, the panic attack, the hospitalizations. About the forced signature, the electroshocks. About waking up with saliva on his cheek and a stranger’s name in his mouth. About forgetting Luis Carmona. About inventing Miguel Río.

She didn’t interrupt. She didn’t flinch.

When he finally stopped, Camila closed her laptop gently and said, “We’ll file a recurso de protección against the Ministry of Health.”

Luis blinked. “That’s it?”

“That’s the beginning,” she said.

The protection appeal was an emergency measure built into the Chilean legal framework; a constitutional mechanism used when a citizen’s fundamental rights were under threat. It wouldn’t win compensation. It wouldn’t dismantle the system. But it would freeze the treatment in question; electroconvulsive therapy, and force an investigation into its legitimacy. And that, Camila explained, was where everything else could begin.

“If we get this accepted,” she said, “we build a legal precedent. We create a paper trail. We force the courts to look at what they’ve tried to keep hidden.”

It sounded so simple when she said it. But Luis knew it would be anything but.

Still, he nodded. “Let’s do it.”

Camila’s first request was a complete medical history. Luis went home and pulled out the folders he’d buried in his closet years ago; crumpled prescriptions, therapist notes, insurance invoices, a thin hospital bracelet that still bore his last name. He brought everything to her the next day, and she spent hours cross-referencing them with national psychiatric standards.

The contradictions leapt off the page.

One form claimed he had consented to ECT. Another stated he was “nonresponsive and unwilling to engage with physicians.” A third, signed with a scribble that barely resembled his own hand, gave the green light for full sedation and electric stimulation under “urgent psychiatric intervention.”

“It’s coercion,” Camila said, flipping through the pages. “And it’s unlawful. Consent given under duress isn’t consent at all.”

Next, they filed a formal request for Luis’s patient records from both the private clinic where the electroshock had been administered and the public psychiatric hospital he had been transferred to afterward. It took over a month to receive the files, and when they finally arrived, nearly a third of the pages were blacked out or missing entirely.

Camila sighed, unsurprised. “They always do this. We’ll file a court order for the complete files. But in the meantime, start writing your declaración jurada. Your sworn statement. Every detail you can remember. Every inconsistency.”

Luis did as she asked. It took him three weeks to write. Every night, he sat at his desk long after Joaquín had gone to sleep, his pen scratching over paper while the fan hummed in the background. He wrote about his childhood in the four-house family compound in Independencia. About moving to Peñaflor. About the poetry he started writing in high school, the sense of something sacred forming inside him, unnamed and urgent.

He wrote about the San Pedro cactus. The fear. The first voices.

He wrote about his mother’s desperate phone call to the government mental health hotline. About being taken in an ambulance, forcibly restrained. About the four million pesos she had paid, money she had saved for years for something else; maybe a trip, maybe retirement.

He wrote about waking up after the third shock, drooling, dizzy, name dissolved.

And finally, he wrote about the years afterward: the recovery that was never full, the bestseller that came out of nowhere, the sudden flood of women and readers and interviews, the eerie silence that surrounded the trauma beneath the miracle.

He showed it to Camila. She read every page without speaking, then looked at him and said: “This is testimony.”

In early March, they filed the appeal.

The paperwork was stamped and sent to the Court of Appeals of Santiago. Within days, an order was issued: all current and future electroshock treatments under Luis’s name were to be immediately suspended pending full investigation. The Ministry of Health had fifteen working days to respond.

That night, Luis sat on the rooftop of his apartment building and wept; not from joy, but from exhaustion. It was the first time in his life he had ever seen the system pause.

The press caught wind of the case a few weeks later. An independent health journalist wrote a piece in The Clinic titled The Poet Who Forgot His Name, and suddenly, Luis was once again in the spotlight. But this time, the attention felt different. Not adoring, not mystified; but investigative. Serious.

Reporters called for interviews. Activists reached out. Survivors from across the country wrote to him, men and women who had never spoken publicly about their experiences now sent him long emails filled with trembling paragraphs.

One man wrote: “They made me sign a consent form when I was in full crisis. I was hallucinating. I didn’t even know what day it was. They told me it was routine. I woke up without memories of my wedding, of my kids.”

Another said: “My mother still believes it saved my life. But I haven’t read a book since 2009. I used to be a literature professor.”

Each message hurt. Each made Luis feel less alone.

The campaign grew.

Camila began compiling cases and building a larger class action suit. She warned Luis that it would take years; ten or more, depending on resistance. “The state defends itself slowly. Bureaucracy is its own fortress. But we’ll make cracks.”

Luis became a reluctant public figure. Not the brilliant recluse behind A Simple Room, but something more exposed, more volatile. An advocate. A survivor. He spoke at universities. He appeared on late-night talk shows. He was invited to testify at a public hearing hosted by the National Commission on Patients’ Rights.

But he never forgot what had begun it all: a name scrawled incorrectly in a hospital file, and the moment he realized it was his.

He also never forgot the woman who’d paid for his ambulance ride. His mother, now older, more fragile, but still the one who had stood by him when the world wrote him off.

One evening, she came over for dinner. Joaquín had made spaghetti and was playing hip-hop through the speaker while cleaning dishes. Luis poured his mother tea and asked, “Do you remember what happened that day?”

She nodded slowly. “You were screaming. I didn’t know what else to do. I thought I was saving you.”

Luis reached out and took her hand. “I know.”

They sat in silence.

Later, when Joaquín was on the balcony skating his board back and forth in slow loops, Luis told her about the lawsuit. The appeal. The possibility that someday, someone in government might have to apologize to all the families who were told they had no other choice.

She nodded again, this time with something like hope in her eyes.

“You were always a fighter,” she said. “Even when you didn’t know it.”

He smiled. “I’m still figuring it out.”

***

Camila’s office was no longer just a lawyer’s workspace. It had become a kind of war room. Piles of case files, stacks of legal texts, photocopied testimonies, and coffee-stained notepads formed a half-moon around her desk. In the middle of it all sat a long whiteboard, now smudged and crowded with columns: Victim Name. Year of ECT. Diagnosis. Clinic/Hospital. Consent Form. Memory Loss.

Luis often stood before it like a soldier staring down a battle plan. It was no longer just about him. His name had simply been the one to crack open the gate. Now others poured through, their stories as harrowing and unjust as his own. And Camila; sharp as ever, constantly typing, underlining, making calls, was building something formidable.

“This is a systemic failure,” she told Luis one afternoon, gesturing toward the columns. “And systemic failures need forensic evidence.”

They needed proof. Not just pain, not just memory, though those were central. The Chilean courts would require hard documentation, corroborated testimonies, official medical records, legal correspondence, even financial statements that could prove not just abuse, but negligence, malpractice, and violations of constitutional rights.

It began with Luis’s clinical file.

After weeks of effort, the full record had finally arrived, reluctantly provided by the psychiatric hospital following a court order. Camila and her intern, a young law student named Tomás, sat down to comb through every page. Luis joined them, marker in hand.

There it was: the intake date, the emergency admission requested by paramedics, the referral from the hotline his mother had called. A diagnosis written hastily in ballpoint pen; schizophrenia, chronic paranoid subtype, followed by a line about “hallucinogenic substance ingestion (mescaline).” Then came the critical pages: pre-ECT consent.

“This is it,” Camila said, circling a date. “August 3, 2009.”

Luis leaned in.

“Look,” she said, tapping the signature line.

It was barely legible; just a shaky scrawl, ink smeared. The signature didn’t even match the way Luis signed his name now. At the time, he had been medicated, hallucinating, and panicked. “They made me sign it after hours of refusing,” he recalled. “They wouldn’t let me go until I agreed. I didn’t understand what it was.”

Camila nodded grimly. “That’s not informed consent. That’s extortion by exhaustion.”

More troubling was the form’s wording: it mentioned “electroconvulsive intervention” in vaguely clinical terms but omitted key risks; memory loss, confusion, permanent cognitive damage. And nowhere in the packet was there mention of alternative treatments, or Luis’s right to refuse.

This was their first cornerstone. But it wasn’t enough.

They would need expert testimony.

Camila reached out to a neurologist she trusted at the University of Chile, Dr. Mariana Quiroga, who had spent years researching the neurological aftermath of electroconvulsive therapy. After reviewing Luis’s case, she agreed to testify.

“I’ve seen too many cases like this,” she told Camila on the phone. “We were taught to believe the damage was temporary. That the memory gaps would close with time. But there’s a threshold. And when you cross it, something doesn’t come back.”

They also contacted a forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Pedro Leiva, who agreed to evaluate Luis directly. He subjected Luis to hours of memory tests recall exercises, pattern recognition, associative sequences, and standardized psychiatric evaluations.

The report came back two weeks later.

Luis scored significantly below average on episodic memory and working memory tests. Dr. Leiva wrote, in clinical terms: The patient demonstrates clear signs of cognitive dysfunction consistent with long-term ECT impact. Given patient’s historical narrative, medical records, and neurocognitive results, it is reasonable to conclude that ECT produced enduring harm.

Camila underlined that sentence twice.

Next came the economic proof; a matter Luis hadn’t thought to consider. But Camila was thorough. She asked him, “Do you have the invoice from the ambulance ride your mother paid for?”

Luis hesitated, then remembered: a folded receipt his mother had kept in a drawer, later passed to him with old bills and utility statements. He brought it in the next day.

$4,000 USD. Private psychiatric transport. Emergency rate.

“We’ll use this,” Camila said. “It proves financial coercion. They profit from panic.”

They also collected pay stubs from the dental lab where Luis had worked after his hospitalization. Comparing his wages before and after treatment showed a sharp drop. Camila compiled this into a timeline to demonstrate loss of earning potential, another angle in the larger compensation claim.

Meanwhile, the growing archive of other survivors’ testimonies expanded. Each one brought another thread to the tapestry of harm. There were mothers who spoke of children lost to institutionalization. Artists who could no longer finish a sketch. A retired engineer who wept when trying to recall the names of his grandchildren.

Camila had set up encrypted email accounts, organized intake interviews, and recruited two volunteers to help conduct initial screenings. By April, they had forty-three cases documented, each with some combination of electroshock, non-consensual sedation, memory damage, and long-term psychiatric dependency.

“We’ll turn these into affidavits,” she said. “And from there, we build the collective complaint.”

It was becoming clear: this was no isolated incident. It was a national pattern. The Ministry of Health had allowed, and in some cases funded, these treatments under the guise of care; often in private clinics with public subsidies, rarely audited, rarely questioned.

Camila began mapping out a legal strategy that would target both private and public entities.

“The trick,” she explained to Luis during one of their late-night strategy sessions, “is to file in layers.”

First: the recurso de protección, the emergency appeal, which they had already won.

Second: individual lawsuits filed against each clinic involved, supported by testimony and expert reports. These would be slow but cumulative.

Third: a constitutional claim against the Ministry of Health itself for failure to regulate psychiatric practices, under Article 19 of the Chilean Constitution, the right to physical and psychological integrity.

“If we time this right,” she said, drawing a web on a legal pad, “the pressure from the lawsuits will hit just as the public opinion begins to shift. That’s when we go for legislative action.”

Legislation. A ban on ECT. Real compensation. Medical license revocations. Accountability.

Luis didn’t dare imagine it yet. But the seed had been planted.

That night, he walked home through Providencia, the streets warm and quiet under yellow streetlamps. He passed his old café, a bookstore, the pharmacy where he used to pick up his prescriptions. Everything looked the same, and yet nothing was.

In his apartment, Joaquín was at the kitchen table, eating cereal and scrolling on his phone. “How’s it going?” he asked.

Luis smiled faintly. “Complicated.”

Joaquín gestured to the stack of folders in Luis’s arms. “That looks like more than complicated.”

Luis set them down and poured himself a glass of water. He looked at his son; not the boy who had arrived from Puerto Montt thin and strung out, but the young man who now rode his skateboard to acting class and laughed easily. Clean. Curious. Still healing.

“There’s a lot more of us,” Luis said. “People who went through what I did. Worse, even.”

Joaquín nodded. “It’s good you’re doing something.”

Luis looked at him carefully. “You think so?”

Joaquín didn’t hesitate. “Yeah. I mean... I wouldn’t be clean if you hadn’t fought for me. Now you’re doing it for others. That’s what a dad should do, right?”

Luis felt something stir in his chest; strange, quiet pride. “Thanks,” he said.

They sat in silence for a moment. Then Joaquín asked, “When will they listen?”

Luis exhaled. “Soon, I hope. We just need proof. Truth. And patience.”

In the following weeks, Camila filed the first three private lawsuits; one against the clinic that had administered Luis’s shocks, another against a prominent Santiago psychiatric hospital, and the third against a rural facility in Temuco where a 19-year-old woman had been shocked seventeen times without ever signing a consent form.

The Ministry of Health responded with legal maneuvering. Their lawyers questioned Luis’s memory reliability, cast doubt on the expert evaluations, and accused the legal team of political opportunism. But they underestimated the movement forming behind them.

Newspapers began to run stories. A segment aired on TVN titled “Electric Shadows: The Hidden Scars of Chile’s Psychiatric Past.” Activists organized marches. Students made documentaries. Journalists unearthed decades-old internal memos showing that the Ministry had long known about the controversial nature of electroshock, and had quietly paid settlements to keep victims silent.

The tide was turning.

And Luis, once a poet forgotten by his own memory, now stood at the front of a wave he could hardly believe. His pen was no longer just for verse—it was for declarations, legal filings, letters to legislators. But somewhere between the courtroom and the kitchen table, he still scribbled poems in the margins of legal pads. Words still visited him in the quiet hours.

His story had once been just his own.

Now it was theirs.

And it was just beginning.

 

CHAPTER EIGHT - VOICES OF THE FORGOTTEN

The courtroom in downtown Santiago smelled faintly of varnished wood and dust, as if time itself had been pressed between the floorboards. Luis Hernán Carmona sat in the third row, a worn spiral notebook resting on his lap, his fingers clenched loosely around a black pen. He wasn’t writing yet. Not today. Today, he was listening.

The judge presiding over the public hearing; Justice Robles, an austere woman with silver hair tied back in a tight bun, called the room to order. A hushed silence fell over the crowd. Journalists occupied the last two rows, some whispering notes into voice recorders, others scribbling furiously in shorthand. There were human rights observers from Santiago’s Universidad Central and three representatives from the Ministry of Health seated stiffly near the defendant’s bench, their expressions guarded.

Luis’s lawyer, Camila Acuña, stood with her hands folded in front of her. She was thirty-four, sharp-eyed, and unshakably composed, wearing a navy suit that had become her armor during the two years since filing the initial Protection Appeal. She turned toward the bench and nodded.

“Your Honor,” she began, “we request permission to begin testimony from the first affected patient.”

Justice Robles nodded solemnly. “Proceed.”

From the corridor outside, a nurse in a lavender sweater wheeled in a man who appeared to be in his late sixties. His eyes twitched rapidly from side to side, and when he attempted to speak, his tongue faltered.

“This is Don Ernesto Bravo,” Camila explained. “Age 68. A retired elementary school teacher. He received a series of eight electroconvulsive therapy sessions at Clínica Horizonte without informed consent. He now suffers from long-term memory loss, word aphasia, and partial disorientation in time and space.”

A thick silence blanketed the courtroom. A few members of the public; family of other patients, activists, students held up small signs that read: NO MÁS ELECTROSHOCK.

Ernesto tried to read a paper someone had placed in his lap. His hand trembled as he lifted it. The nurse gently took it from him and read in his stead: “I cannot remember my wedding day. I cannot remember my children’s names. I remember a white light and waking up choking on my saliva.”

Luis gripped his notebook tighter. A shadow passed over his face. He had lived that scene too. Waking up from the electric fog, name scrambled, memory gone. Telling a psychiatrist that he was Miguel Río, that he was a poet. It had not felt like delusion then. It had felt like the last thread of truth in a collapsing mind.

The next testimony came from a young woman named Elena Reyes, 27 years old, who had been institutionalized at the age of 21 after a suicide attempt. Her speech was hesitant, interrupted by long pauses.

“I… um, I was...I remember...they didn’t tell me,” she said. “They said it would help me. But after the third session, I couldn’t remember how to get home. I forgot my own address.”

Camila handed over the psychologist’s report. “Confirmed frontal lobe damage, memory impairment, and recurring post-traumatic nightmares.”

Justice Robles took it silently, brows furrowed in what could almost be read as concern.

Luis watched with a growing heat in his chest. Not anger, at least not yet, but a quiet, rising fire. These were not isolated tragedies. These were not necessary procedures. They were a pattern. A method of erasure disguised as medicine.

He remembered the morning his mother had called the emergency hotline, watching the paramedics drag him into the ambulance while he screamed lines of poetry no one understood. He remembered how she had paid four million pesos out of pocket to have him institutionalized, out of love, desperation, and fear. How she had signed the form they gave her, without knowing it was permission for ECT. They had wheeled him in, strapped him down, and flipped a switch. That switch had burned his memory from the inside.

Camila returned to the podium. “Your Honor, we are prepared to call Dr. Felipe Montenegro, neurologist and independent consultant to the court.”

A man in his fifties took the stand. Salt-and-pepper hair, wire-rim glasses, a measured cadence to his speech.

“Doctor, based on your assessment, what is the neurological consequence of ECT?”

He cleared his throat. “While ECT has been clinically shown to alleviate certain types of major depressive disorder in carefully screened cases, the uncontrolled and coercive administration practiced in Chilean public and private institutions over the past two decades has resulted in widespread cognitive injury. In my professional opinion, nearly every one of these patients suffers from some degree of permanent memory loss and disassociation. It is also worth noting that few, if any, gave informed consent.”

Luis looked down at his lap. His hands had gone still. He could feel the slow hum of vindication buzzing in his bones, but there was no joy in it.

Outside the court, the case had already stirred a tempest. Newspapers ran headlines like “Chilean Poet Becomes Voice of the Erased” and “Electroshock Scandal Rocks Ministry of Health.” Interviews with Camila played daily on Canal 13. Luis was invited to speak on Radio Cooperativa, where he described, in slow, deliberate detail, how he had forgotten the face of his father for nearly a year, how he only remembered the poem he wrote in 2016 because he had typed it all in one frenzied night under the ghost of Neruda.

The people called it a miracle. But he knew it was a scream in disguise.

Soon, other victims came forward. A retired social worker from Rancagua who remembered nothing from 1999 to 2004. A young man named Rafael who used to work as a marine biologist, now unable to follow a conversation longer than two sentences. A woman from Antofagasta whose child had to reintroduce herself every morning. Each testimony added to the chorus, and with each voice, the weight of truth grew heavier.

Luis was no longer just a plaintiff. He had become something else; a witness, a symbol, maybe even a prophet. People began sending him letters. They left notes on his doorstep in Providencia. “Gracias por luchar.” “Mi mamá también fue borrada.” “Nunca más electroshock.” He didn’t know what to do with this attention, this public love. It unnerved him. It felt borrowed. But it also gave him strength.

Joaquín, now eighteen, helped him sort the letters every weekend. He had grown into a strong, broad-shouldered teenager with a quiet laugh and bright eyes. Since enrolling in the film and acting program, he had softened, stabilized, started skating again. Luis watched him through the kitchen window one afternoon, spinning his board on the patio, singing a hip-hop verse under his breath. He looked whole. For the first time in a long time, Luis felt like a father again.

At the next court session, Camila submitted a thick folder of government documents obtained through legal discovery. Among them were internal memos from the Ministry of Health dating back to 2008, revealing that clinics had continued ECT programs despite multiple warnings about lack of consent protocols and untrained staff. In one particularly damning memo, a regional director wrote: “Public controversy is not a concern; patients with severe mental illness rarely retain reliable testimony.”

Luis shuddered. That single line had been the policy for years. Their forgetting had been weaponized against them.

In the hallway after the session, Camila leaned against the wall and looked over at him. “We’re going to win this,” she said.

Luis blinked, unsure. “And then what?”

She didn’t answer right away. She knew, as he did, that winning wouldn’t undo the damage. No ruling would restore memory. No compensation would rewind time. But truth was something. A beginning. And maybe it was the only thing they had left.

As the trial stretched over the next eighteen months, Luis kept writing. He filled notebooks with poems, affidavits, memories, and dreams. He returned to the church he once loved, praying now with fewer words and more silence. The congregation welcomed him without question. He spoke at forums on medical ethics, joined protests organized by the Mental Health Liberation Front, and met with younger survivors; many of whom saw in him a mirror of their own fractured selves.

He stopped referring to himself as Miguel Río, but sometimes, in the dark hours before dawn, he would whisper the name like a benediction. It had been his shield once, his invented self when the real one was unreachable. He no longer needed the mask, but he mourned it all the same.

One spring morning, outside the courthouse steps, surrounded by TV crews and survivors and students holding hand-painted signs, Luis stepped up to the microphone.

“My name is Luis Hernán Carmona,” he said. “I am a poet. I was also a patient. They erased my name once. They erased my stories. But I am still here. We are still here. And we remember each other.”

A low wave of applause rose from the crowd. Some wept. Others just nodded.

He continued, voice steadier now. “We are the ones who lived in the white rooms, who woke up choking, who could not remember our mother’s faces. We are not broken. We are witnesses.”

Later that day, the courtroom filled again for the reading of expert conclusions. Neurologists confirmed irreversible cognitive damage in 84% of the plaintiffs. The Ministry’s defense wavered, then crumbled. The judge called for a recess before her final statement.

Luis stepped outside into the late afternoon sun, notebook in hand. He sat on a bench near the garden plaza, opened to a blank page, and wrote the first line of a new poem:

“In the house of forgotten names, I found mine carved on a broken tooth…”

There was more to say. There would always be more. But for now, he let the pen rest. The battle was not yet over, but the silence had ended.

***

What began as a single man’s lawsuit had rippled outward into something larger; something harder to name. Advocacy, maybe. A movement. The survivors of electroshock therapy had once been scattered fragments in an invisible landscape, but now they were gathering, speaking, organizing. Luis Hernán Carmona had unknowingly become a symbol, a lightning rod for those whose lives had been damaged, altered, or stripped away by institutions that claimed to help them.

But the movement wasn’t about him. Not anymore. It was about all of them.

Outside the courthouse, under the overcast Santiago sky, a woman in her seventies clutched Luis’s hand with surprising force. “Mi hija, they took her when she was nineteen,” she said. “She had a panic attack. That’s all it was. But the psychiatrist said it was a psychotic break. They gave her shocks, and she never came back the same. Thank you. Thank you for fighting.”

Luis tried to respond, but his throat caught. He just nodded.

People kept arriving; some in wheelchairs, others with walking sticks, many escorted by daughters, sons, or caregivers. Some had forgotten their own names. Others carried photographs of younger selves: graduation portraits, first communion, hospital intake IDs. They stood in silent protest, wearing pins shaped like lightning bolts with red lines through them.

“No más electroshock,” someone chanted.

The crowd repeated it. “No más electroshock. No más.”

What had once been a quiet, shameful injury was now a public wound. And the wound was speaking.

Camila stood nearby, clipboard in hand, orchestrating the logistics of the next hearing. Her voice remained calm and clipped, but Luis could see the exhaustion in her eyes. Still, she worked. She worked because none of this would change unless someone held the system accountable.

The system; that vague, faceless machine, was finally showing signs of strain.

After weeks of cross-examinations and evidence disclosures, a clear narrative had emerged. Electroshock had not been a fringe practice. It had been woven into the Chilean psychiatric infrastructure: hospitals without oversight, clinics incentivized by patient volume, and a Ministry of Health that turned a blind eye. They had prioritized containment over healing. Compliance over consent. And the cost had been measured in memory, dignity, and lives.

The betrayal ran deep.

Luis remembered sitting in the private clinic at twenty-four, dazed and dehydrated, watching as a nurse in white placed a clipboard on his lap. “Sign here,” she’d said. He had refused. But they came back again and again. He wasn’t allowed to leave. He didn’t sleep. And eventually, out of exhaustion, he scrawled something onto the paper. Not a signature, just a smear of surrender.

That was all they needed.

And now, years later, he was watching that document be entered into evidence by a defense lawyer who claimed it showed “good faith.”

It was Camila who responded, with a sharpness that rang through the courtroom.

“Your Honor,” she said, holding up Luis’s medical file. “What kind of consent is this, when the patient is confined, untreated, sleep-deprived, and diagnosed as psychotic at the time of signing? This is not informed consent. This is coercion. This is institutional betrayal.”

The judge said nothing at that moment. But later, in the hallway, Luis overheard her quietly instruct her clerk to audit all patient admission forms from the same facility.

The tide was turning.

In the weeks that followed, testimonies continued to flood in. Not just in the courtroom, but across the country. Survivors began forming collectives, virtual forums and in-person gatherings. “Hijos del Olvido” (Children of Forgetting) became the largest. They published articles, organized rallies, printed posters with the names of every known victim.

One afternoon, Luis was invited to a solidarity meeting at Universidad de Chile’s Faculty of Medicine. Students, doctors, social workers, and survivors gathered in a circle, sharing stories and ideas. Luis sat quietly for most of it, overwhelmed by the depth of what he was hearing.

A second-year medical student stood up. “I chose psychiatry because I wanted to help people. But no one told us about this. Electroshock was presented as a benign tool. They said memory loss was rare and reversible. But now, seeing all of you here... I feel lied to. We need to change the curriculum.”

Later, a retired nurse named Irene took the floor. She had worked in a state psychiatric hospital for thirty years. Her hands shook as she spoke.

“They made me assist with the procedures. I didn’t want to, but they said it was protocol. We had no anesthesiologist. No EEG monitor. Sometimes they seized too long. One man bit off part of his tongue. I was told not to report it.”

Her voice cracked. “I should’ve done more. I’m sorry.”

Someone passed her a tissue. Another hand touched her shoulder. There was no forgiveness to be spoken, only the aching possibility of healing through solidarity.

Luis left the meeting that evening walking lighter. There was a strange clarity in knowing how many others had witnessed the same horror. It no longer lived inside him as a private madness. It was now shared.

But even shared truth had its enemies.

On national television, a spokesperson for the Ministry insisted that “modern ECT practices are safe, humane, and highly effective.” He dismissed the lawsuit as “emotionally charged and medically uninformed.”

Camila responded with data: “Of the 53 patients we’ve interviewed, 49 report persistent cognitive impairment. Ten have attempted suicide since their last ECT session. None received full disclosure. None signed with sound mind.”

The Ministry released a sanitized report, citing “isolated errors” and promising internal review. But the damage was done. Public confidence in psychiatric institutions had plummeted. Investigative journalists uncovered similar cases in Valparaíso, Concepción, and even remote clinics in the Atacama region.

Luis received invitations to speak at more events than he could manage. Universities, human rights symposiums, literary panels. He accepted only a few. He preferred smaller gatherings places where he could hear others speak, not just be the one speaking.

In a converted warehouse in Barrio Yungay, he attended a night of testimonial poetry. Survivors read from journals, some from memory. One woman, Patricia, stood with a photo of herself at nineteen.

“They told me I would forget the pain,” she said, voice steady. “They didn’t tell me I’d forget my favorite color. Or my sister’s birthday. Or the name of my first love.”

Her poem ended with a single line: “I remember forgetting.”

Luis wept openly.

When it came time for him to speak, he did not read from a prepared poem. He just looked out at the crowd and said, “I thought I was the only one. I’m glad I was wrong.”

The betrayal by institutions by doctors, hospitals, and a Ministry charged with protecting health had carved deep scars into thousands of Chilean lives. But those scars were no longer hidden. They were now part of the national conversation.

Luis knew this was just the beginning. There would be appeals. Counterlawsuits. Denials and bureaucratic stalling. But there was also something irreversible about what had begun. The veil had been lifted.

He thought of Joaquín, still sleeping when he returned home that night. The boy had seen too much of the world too soon. But he was finding his path again, through acting, through music, through his father’s example. When Luis tucked a blanket over him, he realized something unexpected.

He no longer felt like a victim.

He felt like a witness.

CHAPTER NINE - THE CARMONA LAW IS PASSED

The ruling came down on a Wednesday morning.

The streets of Santiago were already alive with protestors when the news broke: Chile’s Supreme Court had voted unanimously to suspend all use of electroconvulsive therapy, pending permanent legislation. By the end of the day, the Ministry of Health would be legally forbidden to authorize or fund electroshock in either public or private institutions.

The people called it La Ley Carmona before it was even printed in the Diario Oficial. 

Luis Hernán Carmona was at home when Camila called. Her voice, usually clipped and clinical, cracked as she said, “Lo logramos, Luis. They ruled in our favor.”

He didn’t speak. Not right away. He just sat on the edge of his bed, the same place where years ago he had returned from the clinic, half-conscious, drooling, his own name lost to the static in his mind. He stared at the wall, where a small cross hung beside a photograph of his son, Joaquín.

Then he whispered, “Gracias a Dios.”

He closed his eyes and pressed his hands together. It was not elation that washed over him but something deeper: solemnity. This was not a moment of personal triumph. It was a grave silence, like the toll of a bell over land that had long been burning.

***

By noon, the courthouse was surrounded.

Thousands had gathered, waving handmade signs: ¡Memoria sí, electroshock no!, Justicia para los olvidados, Luis Carmona, poeta del pueblo. Survivors wore black ribbons pinned to their shirts. Some had shaved heads where ECT pads had once been applied. Others clutched small notebooks, ready to write their names again and again; proof that memory could still resist.

Camila emerged from the courthouse steps with the official judgment in her hand. A crowd surged forward, not to grab her, but to see. Luis stepped beside her. Someone passed him a megaphone. He hesitated.

Then he spoke.

“I was told my brain was broken. I was told I needed help, and instead I was silenced. Years later, I met hundreds of others who lived through the same pain. Today, the court has said what we always knew: that our lives matter. That forgetting is not healing.”

The crowd erupted.

That night, the news traveled across the country. Television stations aired split-screen footage: on one side, the stoic faces of the Supreme Court justices; on the other, jubilant crowds in Plaza de Armas. Even the international media picked up the story. El País called it “an unprecedented reckoning.” The Guardian ran a headline: Chile Bans Electroshock After Decade-Long Battle Led by Survivor-Poet.

Luis’s face appeared everywhere. His name was printed in bold on the front pages. Interviews, op-eds, invitations poured in. He declined most of them.

“This is not just my story,” he said. “It’s the story of everyone who forgot their name.”

---

The law itself, officially titled Ley de Protección Neurológica Carmona was signed into effect within sixty days of the Supreme Court decision. It was short, direct, and unflinching in its condemnation:

“Electroconvulsive therapy, as administered within the Republic of Chile, constitutes a violation of human rights when performed without demonstrable medical necessity, informed consent, and procedural safeguards. The State hereby prohibits its continued use and authorizes immediate reparations to victims.”

But Luis knew that words alone couldn’t stitch the damage back together. The harm had been systemic. Generational. Deep.

He thought of all the mothers who’d carried their children home from clinics, trembling and hollowed. Of men like Jaime Ruiz, a schoolteacher who could no longer remember the poems he once recited to his students. Of Patricia, whose journal had become her only tether to identity. Of himself, waking up in a metal-framed bed, saying the name Miguel Río, believing that was who he truly was.

At forty years old, he now felt both ancient and reborn. The law had been passed, but the work had just begun.

***

In the weeks that followed, the Carmona Law catalyzed a wave of civil audits and criminal investigations. Former patients filed appeals en masse, recursos de protección, against the Ministry, the clinics, and specific doctors. It became clear that the same names appeared again and again: private psychiatrists who had received state contracts, clinics that had administered hundreds of sessions without monitoring.

Camila worked around the clock. “This is triage,” she said one evening, eyes rimmed red from lack of sleep. “We won a verdict, but we still need to secure compensation, revoke licenses, and force medical boards to take action.”

Joaquín, now eighteen, had started attending rallies with his father. Sometimes he’d perform spoken-word pieces, weaving his own near-death experiences from the streets of Puerto Montt into the collective struggle of survivors. He wore his cap backwards, skateboard tucked under one arm, a fresh film school student finding his voice.

“They tried to erase my old man,” he said during one rally. “But you can’t erase someone who’s already turned pain into poetry.”

Luis stood at the back of the crowd and wiped his eyes.

***

The betrayal still lingered.

One evening, Luis received a letter from a woman named Teresa Díaz, a former psychiatrist who had worked at the same clinic where he’d been institutionalized.

She wrote:

“Señor Carmona,

I remember you. I was young. A resident. I watched them wheel you in. You kept saying you were a poet. They laughed.

I want you to know—I believed you.”

He read it twice. Then folded it gently and placed it in a drawer.

Later that night, he stepped into the shower and cried until the water ran cold.

As the months passed, legislation began to shift in neighboring countries. Uruguay formed a medical ethics committee to review its use of ECT. Argentina launched an independent inquiry. Advocacy groups from Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil contacted Camila to share research, file amicus briefs, and begin lobbying in their own courts.

Luis was asked to speak at the Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos. He traveled to Washington, D.C., accompanied by Camila and a delegation of survivors. In his statement, he said:

“Memory is not a side effect. It is who we are. When institutions violate memory, they violate humanity itself.”

The commission broke into applause.

Back in Chile, the Ley Carmona underwent expansion. Reparations were issued to more than 200 patients, with others under review. A memorial garden was planned for the former site of Redgesam Psychiatric Center. The Ministry of Health released a formal apology. And Luis? Luis kept writing.

Not only poems now, but essays, articles, and testimonies. He began assembling a collective memoir: Testigos del Relámpago, Witnesses of the Lightning. The book included voices from all over Chile, many of whom had never published a word.

“You don’t have to be a writer,” he told them. “You just have to remember.”

He still prayed every morning, now in the quiet of his small terrace overlooking the hills of Peñalolén. His sister Consuelo would visit sometimes with paintings, vivid strokes of surreal figures walking out of flames, memory spiraling from their mouths like ribbons.

“You’re famous now,” she said once, smiling.

Luis shook his head. “No. I’m just visible.”

And yet, even visibility had a cost.

He noticed strangers sometimes stared at him too long on the metro. Some whispered. A few congratulated him; others scoffed. A group of students once followed him through a bookstore and asked if they could see his scars. He had none to show.

But the real wounds weren’t visible.

There were still nights when he forgot the names of things. The smell of ozone, burnt dust and electricity, sometimes returned without warning. He still couldn’t recall the face of the nurse who held him down. Only the weight.

But then Joaquín would pass him a notepad and say, “Try again, Dad. Write something. Anything.”

And he would.

He’d write about his mother’s backyard in Peñaflor. About the almond trees and the smell of wet soil. About the day they left the passage in Independencia. About the time he and Consuelo danced to Los Prisioneros, barefoot in the living room. He’d write the name Luis Carmona, slowly, until it felt like his again.

The chapter of electroshock was not over; not really. It lived in those who had survived and those who hadn’t. But the Carmona Law was now a wall of protection for the future.

It would not bring back the stolen memories. But it would stop the forgetting from happening again.

Luis kept one copy of the judgment framed above his desk. Beneath it, a line from one of his poems:

“Though the mind may flicker, justice must burn steady.”

He lit a candle below it each night before bed.

And when people asked him, “Do you still write poems?” - he’d answer the same way every time:

“I’m still remembering.”

***

The ruling came down on a Wednesday morning.

The streets of Santiago were already alive with protestors when the news broke: Chile’s Supreme Court had voted unanimously to suspend all use of electroconvulsive therapy, pending permanent legislation. By the end of the day, the Ministry of Health would be legally forbidden to authorize or fund electroshock in either public or private institutions.

The people called it La Ley Carmona before it was even printed in the Diario Oficial. 

Luis Hernán Carmona was at home when Camila called. Her voice, usually clipped and clinical, cracked as she said, “Lo logramos, Luis. They ruled in our favor.”

He didn’t speak. Not right away. He just sat on the edge of his bed, the same place where years ago he had returned from the clinic; half-conscious, drooling, his own name lost to the static in his mind. He stared at the wall, where a small cross hung beside a photograph of his son, Joaquín.

Then he whispered, “Gracias a Dios.”

He closed his eyes and pressed his hands together. It was not elation that washed over him but something deeper: solemnity. This was not a moment of personal triumph. It was a grave silence, like the toll of a bell over land that had long been burning.

By noon, the courthouse was fully surrounded.

Thousands had gathered, waving handmade signs: ¡Memoria sí, electroshock no!, Justicia para los olvidados, Luis Carmona, poeta del pueblo. Survivors wore black ribbons pinned to their shirts. Some had shaved heads where ECT pads had once been applied. Others clutched small notebooks, ready to write their names again and again proof that memory could still resist.

Camila emerged from the courthouse steps with the official judgment in her hand. A crowd surged forward, not to grab her, but to see. Luis stepped beside her. Someone passed him a megaphone. He hesitated.

Then he spoke.

“I was told my brain was broken. I was told I needed help, and instead I was silenced. Years later, I met hundreds of others who lived through the same pain. Today, the court has said what we always knew: that our lives matter. That forgetting is not healing.”

The crowd erupted.

That night, the news traveled across the country. Television stations aired split-screen footage: on one side, the stoic faces of the Supreme Court justices; on the other, jubilant crowds in Plaza de Armas. Even the international media picked up the story. El País called it “an unprecedented reckoning.” The Guardian ran a headline: Chile Bans Electroshock After Decade-Long Battle Led by Survivor-Poet.

Luis’s face appeared everywhere. His name was printed in bold on the front pages. Interviews, op-eds, invitations poured in. He declined most of them.

“This is not just my story,” he said. “It’s the story of everyone who forgot their name.”

The law itself officially titled Ley de Protección Neurológica Carmona was signed into effect within sixty days of the Supreme Court decision. It was short, direct, and unflinching in its condemnation:

“Electroconvulsive therapy, as administered within the Republic of Chile, constitutes a violation of human rights when performed without demonstrable medical necessity, informed consent, and procedural safeguards. The State hereby prohibits its continued use and authorizes immediate reparations to victims.”

But Luis knew that words alone couldn’t stitch the damage back together. The harm had been systemic. Generational. Deep.

He thought of all the mothers who’d carried their children home from clinics, trembling and hollowed. Of men like Jaime Ruiz, a schoolteacher who could no longer remember the poems he once recited to his students. Of Patricia, whose journal had become her only tether to identity. Of himself, waking up in a metal-framed bed, saying the name Miguel Río, believing that was who he truly was.

At forty years old, he now felt both ancient and reborn. The law had been passed, but the work had just begun.

In the weeks that followed, the Carmona Law catalyzed a wave of civil audits and criminal investigations. Former patients filed appeals en masse; recursos de protección, against the Ministry, the clinics, and specific doctors. It became clear that the same names appeared again and again: private psychiatrists who had received state contracts, clinics that had administered hundreds of sessions without monitoring.

Camila worked around the clock. “This is triage,” she said one evening, eyes rimmed red from lack of sleep. “We won a verdict, but we still need to secure compensation, revoke licenses, and force medical boards to take action.”

Joaquín, now eighteen, had started attending rallies with his father. Sometimes he’d perform spoken-word pieces, weaving his own near-death experiences from the streets of Puerto Montt into the collective struggle of survivors. He wore his cap backwards, skateboard tucked under one arm, a fresh film school student finding his voice.

“They tried to erase my old man,” he said during one rally. “But you can’t erase someone who’s already turned pain into poetry.”

Luis stood at the back of the crowd and wiped his eyes.

The betrayal still lingered.

One evening, Luis received a letter from a woman named Teresa Díaz, a former psychiatrist who had worked at the same clinic where he’d been institutionalized.

She wrote:

“Señor Carmona,

I remember you. I was young. A resident. I watched them wheel you in. You kept saying you were a poet. They laughed.

I want you to know—I believed you.”

He read it twice. Then folded it gently and placed it in a drawer.

Later that night, he stepped into the shower and cried until the water ran cold.

As the months passed, legislation began to shift in neighboring countries. Uruguay formed a medical ethics committee to review its use of ECT. Argentina launched an independent inquiry. Advocacy groups from Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil contacted Camila to share research, file amicus briefs, and begin lobbying in their own courts.

Luis was asked to speak at the *Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos*. He traveled to Washington, D.C., accompanied by Camila and a delegation of survivors. In his statement, he said:

“Memory is not a side effect. It is who we are. When institutions violate memory, they violate humanity itself.”

The commission broke into applause.

Back in Chile, the Ley Carmona underwent expansion. Reparations were issued to more than 200 patients, with others under review. A memorial garden was planned for the former site of Redgesam Psychiatric Center. The Ministry of Health released a formal apology. And Luis? Luis kept writing.

Not only poems now, but essays, articles, and testimonies. He began assembling a collective memoir: Testigos del Relámpago Witnesses of the Lightning. The book included voices from all over Chile, many of whom had never published a word.

“You don’t have to be a writer,” he told them. “You just have to remember.”

He still prayed every morning, now in the quiet of his small terrace overlooking the hills of Peñalolén. His sister Consuelo would visit sometimes with paintings, vivid strokes of surreal figures walking out of flames, memory spiraling from their mouths like ribbons.

“You’re famous now,” she said once, smiling.

Luis shook his head. “No. I’m just visible.”

And yet, even visibility had a cost.

He noticed strangers sometimes stared at him too long on the metro. Some whispered. A few congratulated him; others scoffed. A group of students once followed him through a bookstore and asked if they could see his scars. He had none to show.

But the real wounds weren’t visible.

There were still nights when he forgot the names of things. The smell of ozone; burnt dust and electricity, sometimes returned without warning. He still couldn’t recall the face of the nurse who held him down. Only the weight.

But then Joaquín would pass him a notepad and say, “Try again, Dad. Write something. Anything.”

And he would.

He’d write about his mother’s backyard in Peñaflor. About the almond trees and the smell of wet soil. About the day they left the passage in Independencia. About the time he and Consuelo danced to Los Prisioneros, barefoot in the living room. He’d write the name Luis Carmona, slowly, until it felt like his again.

The chapter of electroshock was not over, not really. It lived in those who had survived and those who hadn’t. But the Carmona Law was now a wall of protection for the future.

It would not bring back the stolen memories. But it would stop the forgetting from happening again.

Luis kept one copy of the judgment framed above his desk. Beneath it, a line from one of his poems:

He lit a candle below it each night before bed.

And when people asked him, “Do you still write poems?”, he’d answer the same way every time:

“I’m still remembering.”

By autumn, the energy of the protests had quieted. The chants had faded into memory, and Luis found himself walking through a world that no longer mirrored his inner turmoil. The law had been passed. The clinics had been audited, shut down. Reparations had begun. On paper, he had won. He had done what no one else had: pulled memory back from the grave, held the government accountable, and changed the fate of countless strangers.

But he felt like a man who had emerged from a fire with his body intact and his soul scorched beyond recognition.

Most days, he felt hollow. Not depressed—just emptied, like a vessel that had poured out too much too fast.

“I should feel happy,” he told Camila one afternoon, after yet another legal hearing where officials had read aloud the names of revoked medical licenses. “But instead I feel… nothing.”

She nodded. “You’re grieving.”

“For what?”

“For everything you had to give up to get here.”

***

He saw it in the faces of the other survivors too.

The court had done its part. The law had teeth now. A few psychiatrists were even being tried for criminal negligence. And yet, in every survivor’s testimony, in every hug exchanged after hearings, there was a shadow. The past could not be rewritten. The treatments had been real. The brain damage had been real. Some memories would never come back.

He met one man, Andrés, at a survivors' assembly in Valparaíso. Andrés had received electroshock after a bipolar diagnosis at age nineteen. He was now forty-six. “I still don't remember my daughter’s first words,” he told Luis. “She's grown now. Lives in Mexico. She calls me sometimes, and I smile, but I don’t know who she is. I mean-I know, but it’s like a photograph someone else took.”

Luis nodded. He understood. He had been told that his real name was Luis Hernán Carmona, but he still remembered waking up in the clinic and calling himself *Miguel Río*. The poet who had no past. Sometimes that identity returned to him in dreams, fragmented Spanish verses and swirling images of rivers, stars, broken clocks. As if Miguel still lived in a corner of his brain, untouched by therapy or time.

There were nights he wondered if maybe Miguel had been the truer self; the self born out of pure suffering and language, the self not tethered to legal names or institutional records.

And yet, it was Luis who had filed the lawsuit. It was Luis whose name had been passed into law. That too felt strange.

“They wrote my name into the books,” he told Joaquín one night over dinner, “but sometimes I think they don’t know who I really am.”

“You’re my dad,” Joaquín replied. “That’s enough.”

***

The newspaper headlines eventually turned away. Other scandals arose. Other protests took center stage. The Carmona Law had entered the country’s legal structure like a keystone; but now, it was old news.

Luis no longer got interview requests. He was relieved, but also uneasy. Visibility had been a kind of justice. Now he returned to a quieter life, less public, more routine. Some days he walked to the nearby feria with a canvas bag, buying peaches and tomatoes, nodding politely at people who half-recognized him but didn’t approach. At the checkout counter, one woman finally did speak.

“Señor Carmona… I read about you. What you did. I just wanted to say thank you.”

He smiled. “Gracias.”

But after she left, he sat on a bench and stared at the bag of fruit. The thank you, however genuine, couldn’t erase the fact that he still forgot where he left his keys sometimes. That the poems came slower now. That his youth—his real youth, before the clinic—was a blur of unanswered questions.

Was there a poem he’d written before the shocks that he’d lost forever? A verse that could have changed the world?

At night, he often sat on his terrace and prayed. He spoke softly, not as a man demanding answers, but as one trying to keep a fragile thread of meaning intact.

“Señor… I did what You asked. I stood up. I told the truth. But why do I feel like half a man now?”

There was no answer, only wind through the eucalyptus trees.

And yet, the prayer helped. His faith remained; not unshaken, but alive. The evangelical community he belonged to had prayed for him throughout the trial. Now, many of them referred to him as a living testimony.

“I’m not a miracle,” he told one pastor gently. “I’m a warning.”

Still, the congregation treated him like someone who had come back from the dead. Maybe, in a way, he had.

The hardest part was watching the damage continue in those closest to him.

His mother, now aging and forgetful, no longer liked to talk about the time she had called the government hotline, triggering the ambulance that dragged Luis into forced hospitalization. She had believed she was helping. She hadn’t known the clinic would sedate and silence him for months. Now, when he tried to bring it up, she’d shake her head.

“Pero si fue por tu bien, mijo…”

He didn’t argue. He just smiled, kissed her forehead, and let her drift back into her television shows.

He understood now that there were layers of betrayal: not just institutional, but familial, cultural. Chile had taught generations that obedience to doctors was survival. That madness was shameful. That protest was dangerous. His own mother had loved him, and handed him over.

That was a pain deeper than any lawsuit could reach.

Joaquín was doing better. His son’s drug use had stopped. He was acting in short films and attending classes. Still skinny, still wild in spirit, but rooted now. Luis often heard him rehearsing monologues in the next room, and sometimes he wept without knowing why. Maybe it was relief. Maybe it was guilt that his son had inherited his chaos and survived it anyway.

They didn’t talk much about the electroshocks. But once, Joaquín asked, “What did it feel like?”

Luis thought for a long time.

“Like lightning you can’t see. Like being emptied, but never filled again.”

His son nodded, then whispered, “I’m glad you came back.”

Back in the legal sphere, the Ministry of Health attempted to appeal the ruling. It failed. Too much evidence had been amassed. Too many testimonies. Neurologists, once silent, had finally spoken out: ECT, in its current form, caused demonstrable memory loss. Patients were not being given real informed consent. Procedures were performed without adequate psychiatric evaluation. One neurologist had shown side-by-side scans: healthy brains before treatment, and after; atrophied frontal lobes, fog in the hippocampus.

Luis didn’t attend the final rejection hearing. He said he was tired. Camila went alone and called him afterward.

“It’s over,” she said. “It’s really over.”

But Luis knew it never would be; not for the people who had lived through it.

One of his friends, a survivor named Paola, had taken her life just two months after the ruling. She had testified bravely, marched, and written open letters. But the damage had been too deep. Luis lit a candle for her that night, and another the next. Eventually, he kept one burning for all the unnamed.

Time passed.

Luis kept writing. He published a second book of poems titled Un Cerebro de Luz—A Brain of Light. It wasn’t a bestseller like his first, but it was raw and lyrical, filled with fragmented memories stitched together with rage and reverence.

One critic called it “a broken gospel of survival.”

He didn’t care about the reviews. All he cared about was that the act of writing still tethered him to something solid. To himself.

He continued seeing Camila sometimes, not as a lawyer now, but as a friend. They would drink tea and talk about memory, about trauma as both wound and weapon.

“You’re the only client I’ve had who wrote poetry into the court record,” she once said, smiling.

Luis chuckled. “Sometimes a verse says more than an affidavit.”

Years would pass before the Ministry offered an official monument. When they did, Luis declined to speak at the unveiling.

“I’ve said enough,” he told them. “Let someone else hold the microphone this time.”

Instead, he stood in the crowd as a young woman stepped to the podium. She was twenty-three, a survivor of state-mandated ECT in 2023. Her voice trembled, but she didn’t break.

“We remember because they tried to erase us,” she said. “We speak because silence nearly killed us.”

Luis felt tears rising again. This time, they tasted like something close to peace.

Not complete. But close.

 

CHAPTER TEN - MEMORY, GOD, AND THE FUTURE

The quiet returned, slowly, like a tide coming in without fanfare.

After the rallies, after the laws and the courts and the ceremonies, Luis found himself waking up to stillness. The kind of silence he had once feared in the clinic now, reclaimed. He no longer heard the whine of fluorescent lights overhead, no metal doors or distant groans of sedated men. Instead: the whir of his kettle, the call of doves, the hum of Santiago on a distant hill.

Mornings became his sanctuary.

He would wake just before dawn, light a candle on his small desk, and sit in silence before opening his worn Bible. It wasn’t something he did out of superstition, or obligation. It was how he had learned to begin again: *word by word*. Sometimes he would read only a verse and linger in its breath for hours.

One morning, he read:

“I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten.”

He closed the book. His hands trembled.

He whispered, “Señor, is that what You’ve done?”

Prayer had changed over the years. He no longer pleaded. He no longer begged for restoration. He didn’t ask for perfect memory, or even justice anymore. What he asked for, if anything, was clarity. To see things as they were. To name them honestly.

Some days, all he could say was, “Gracias.”

Other days: “Ayúdame a seguir recordando.”

But even when no words came, he sat still and gave his attention to God the way he gave attention to poetry: with awe, and with surrender.

He often wondered if God, too, was a poet. One who used crooked lines, broken syntax, silences. Maybe, Luis thought, memory was not about accuracy, but about meaning. Maybe the point of remembering wasn’t to restore the past, but to dignify it.

His notebook; black, spiral-bound, pages half-torn, held fragments he no longer tried to polish.

My mother’s hands, overripe fruit, the humming of fluorescent lights.

Miguel Río still visits. He says he’s only borrowing my brain.

*Memory is a discipline. Not everything returns. But we practice anyway.

He didn’t always share these. Some were too raw. Too inward. He wrote not to be read but to remain intact.

That, he had come to believe, was the work of recovery. Not a return to who he once was, but a slow, faithful becoming. Piecing himself back together without rushing. Without shame.

Joaquín came ever every Sunday. He brought fresh bread and stories from film school. His hair had grown out, black curls spilling over his ears. Luis sometimes stared at him too long, stunned by how much life had chosen to continue, despite everything. His son; once near-dead in a bus terminal, once feral with anger, was now gentle. Joyful, even.

They didn’t talk about the past much anymore. But once, after a long silence over lunch, Joaquín asked:

“Do you think God let it happen?”

Luis put down his fork. He didn’t answer right away. Then, quietly:

“I think God stayed with me when it did. That’s all I know.”

Joaquín nodded. “Yeah. I think He stayed with me too.”

That night, Luis prayed differently. Not for himself, but for his son. For his son’s memory. For his son’s peace. That whatever violence he had inherited, from the streets, from his father’s disappearances, from the state, would not become his final story.

He wrote a poem in his head, then committed it to the page:

Let my son remember more than I could.

Let him remember his mother’s song,

The way the light hit the window in July.

Let him remember joy,

So that when he tells his children who we were,

He can say,

‘We endured, and we forgave.’

His sister, Consuelo, visited in bursts. She had taken up painting again, using bright oils and abstract figures. Her canvases were loud and unapologetic. She said they helped her see things that words couldn’t. One Sunday, she brought a portrait.

It was Luis, seated on a wooden chair, looking out a window. But instead of his eyes, the painting held two small clocks.

“It’s you,” she said. “But it’s also time. Memory. The pieces we lose.”

He stared at it, stunned. Then, tears in his eyes, he said, “It’s beautiful. It hurts, but it’s beautiful.”

Consuelo grinned. “That means it’s honest.”

Sometimes, people still wrote to him. Survivors. Students. Strangers from other countries.

A letter arrived from Poland. Another from Argentina. One woman from the U.S. wrote, “They called me a lost cause. But reading about your trial gave me the courage to speak again. I’ve started writing poems, too. Thank you.”

Luis read them all, but rarely replied. He felt unqualified to be a prophet. He was still healing. Still forgetting things. He burned rice sometimes. Lost his keys. Couldn’t recall the names of poets he once taught by heart.

But he remembered *how* to love. How to stay still when the shadows came. How to reach for God without needing perfect answers.

He remembered enough.

One afternoon, while cleaning out old files, he found a folder marked “Miguel Río.” Inside: early writings, notes scribbled during his months of dissociation. There were strange verses, half-English, half-Spanish. Drawings of rivers, open mouths, a house on fire. He almost threw them out.

Then he paused.

This had been him, too. A version. A survival.

He tucked them into his new journal. He would not erase that man. That name.

Even forgetting had a memory, he thought. Even erasure left traces.

By late spring, the garden outside his apartment bloomed wildly. Luis had begun growing rosemary and lavender in clay pots. The neighborhood cat came to sun itself near his door. Life, ordinary and precious, resumed its rhythm.

In the mornings, he wrote. In the evenings, he prayed. And when he could not write or pray, he simply sat, breathed, and looked at the sky.

Once, someone asked him during a radio segment:

“What is your definition of redemption?”

He thought about it for a long time. Then he said:

“To be held by God even when you’ve lost your name.”

***

The room had changed, but only slightly. The desk was still there, the wooden surface worn soft by years of elbows and ink, by morning coffee mugs and stacks of unfinished drafts. The chair creaked the same way it always had. The curtain; half torn, with the old stain of tea near the bottom, still swayed with the wind coming in through the cracked-open window. But Luis Hernán Carmona was different now. He no longer sat hunched in desperation or delusion, scribbling words he feared would disappear as quickly as they came. He sat tall, shoulders relaxed, pen steady in hand, eyes open.

The date was October 12th, 2025. He had just turned forty. The spring wind from the Andes carried the smell of jacarandas blooming across the city, and somewhere on the street below, a boy sang a half-forgotten reggaetón tune while rolling past on his skateboard. Joaquin, probably. His son had gone out early for his theater class, wearing a faded Metallica shirt and a ridiculous bucket hat. They were no longer just father and son; they were roommates, companions in survival, rebuilding trust through burnt toast and Sunday film marathons.

Luis’s Bible was open next to his notepad. Psalm 30: "You turned my mourning into dancing." He had read it aloud that morning, alone with his coffee. Not with zeal or performance, but with quiet acknowledgment, like thanking someone you thought had abandoned you, only to find they had never really left.

He leaned forward, dragging the pen across the page with the determined weight of someone who no longer feared forgetting. His handwriting was messier than before, less crisp, more interrupted by pauses, but it was still his. A little more crooked, yes. A little slower. But it was real.

---

For months, the doctors had warned him that the damage from the electroshock would be permanent. That memory, once severed, could never be resewn completely. He would forget names, locations, dates. He might never recognize his own poems again. But they hadn’t counted on faith, or on the doggedness of a poet who’d learned to write with fragments, with the shards of time.

Luis still misplaced keys, still forgot whether he’d taken his medication. But now, he kept a small notebook in his shirt pocket, scribbled reminders, jotted down lines that came to him while washing dishes or folding laundry. His apartment in Providencia had become a living archive: post-its on the fridge, titles pinned to cork boards , verses taped to the bathroom mirror. And through it all, he’d learned to laugh. When memory failed him, humor filled the gap.

The success of A Simple Room: Poemario had long since faded from the headlines. The Google homepage no longer showed his name. But in pockets of Chile and far beyond: Argentina, Spain, even parts of Mexico, his words still traveled. His emails filled slowly with letters from survivors of psychiatric abuse, from mothers who’d lost sons, from doctors who were quietly questioning the systems they served.

And then there was the law. The Carmona Law.

He still had trouble saying it out loud without a strange wave of disbelief sweeping over him. It wasn’t pride he felt, it was something deeper, more layered. Grief wrapped in justice. A strange sort of peace that comes only when something irreversible is finally named and banned.

The Supreme Court ruling had come in June of that year, following years of patient testimony, court battles, leaked clinic records, and journalistic exposure. Electroconvulsive therapy, once seen as a last resort, had been ruled unconstitutional and inhumane. The Ministry of Health had been held accountable. Clinics had closed. Licenses had been revoked. Patients had received public apologies and financial compensation. And on paper, the victory seemed total.

But Luis knew better. He knew what could not be undone.

The memories never came back.

There were years; entire stretches of time, wiped clean from his inner map. The first time he kissed someone. His nephew’s wedding. The scent of his grandmother’s soap. Even some of his own poems felt foreign to him now. He had to read them like a stranger, marveling at what he had once written with no recollection of the hand that held the pen.

But he no longer wept for those gaps. He’d begun to see them as part of the landscape. Like potholes in a long road; unavoidable, jarring, but survivable. You learned to drive differently. You slowed down. You watched the sky.

His church community had been steadfast. The evangelicals, with their modest clothes and gentle hands, had become a second family. Not everyone believed in psychiatry’s failure, but they believed in Luis. They had seen his trembling hands, his silences, his sudden outbursts and lost thoughts and they had stayed. Pastor Javier even dedicated a sermon to “the testimony of a poet broken and rebuilt.” They’d laid hands on him. Prayed over his mind, over his tongue, over the pages of his notebooks.

And Luis had wept, not because he expected God to undo what had been done, but because God had remained when everything else had gone.

He was no longer afraid of being crazy. That word, crazy, had  once been used like a blade. By the psychiatrists, by the clinic staff, by the media. Delusional. Paranoid. Noncompliant. But now, Luis said it with pride. "I went crazy," he would say. "And I came back with poems."

On the wall above his desk hung a photograph of Consuelo, his sister, holding a paintbrush between her fingers, her face half-lit by the colors of a sunset mural she never finished. Below it, in a small wooden frame, was a picture of Joaquín as a boy, barely ten, eyes too serious for his age. Luis’s eyes lingered on them often, especially on long writing days.

Sometimes, he wrote letters to the dead. To Neruda, to Gabriela Mistral, to the forgotten patients who never lived to see justice. He told them what was happening now, that the world was different, if only slightly, because they had lived, and suffered, and been heard. He ended each letter with a verse.

"We were not meant to be perfect," he once wrote. "We were meant to persist."

Outside, the city moved forward. Metro cars hummed below the pavement, students argued about politics over empanadas, someone played jazz on a rooftop just far enough away to make it sound like a dream. Luis paused, letting the sounds blend into his writing.

He was working on a new book. Not a poemario this time. Something stranger, harder to classify. Part memoir, part manifesto. A collage of testimonies and dreams, court records and hallucinations. A book where Miguel Río met Luis Carmona and neither needed to apologize for existing.

He had given it a working title: The Light We Forgot.

At 11:43 AM, the phone rang. It was a journalist from Radio Bío-Bío, asking if he’d be willing to speak on a panel about the future of mental health care in Chile. Luis said yes. He always said yes now. Not because he craved the attention, but because silence had once nearly killed him. Now, his voice was part of a choir of survivors—people who refused to forget, even when they couldn’t remember.

When he hung up, he jotted a quick note for the interview: Tell the truth. Even the ugly parts.

He closed his notebook, stood up to stretch. His knees cracked. He smiled. He went to the kitchen and poured himself a cup of lukewarm coffee. Then he returned to the desk.

Before sitting down again, he reached for the light switch and turned it off. The room dimmed, bathed only in the pale gold glow of the morning sun.

He looked around; the books, the pictures, the chaos of a mind rebuilding itself, and whispered, almost inaudibly: "Thank you."

And then, with deliberate slowness, he wrote the final line of the day:

”Even a broken clock knows the hour of grace."

MICHAEL RIVER

CHILE, 2025