Oh, it’s strange to be written a poem,

by a guy when you don’t hardly know’m,

and he only just barely knows you.

What a muse-unexpected to do?

 

If they’re cute, and he knows how to crank’m,

it’s enough to decorously thank’m,

by enjoying and being amused,

even if he’s a little confused.

 

For a poet ain’t much of a lover,

in a bed with a girl under cover,

but he knows one good trick: he can rhyme “limerick,”

whether he’s underneath or above’r.

To the Cat God:

 

This is the poem I never wrote for you.

Would that I could write it twice; I would write it anew.

 

Listening with ears, looking with eyes,

feeling almost human, to my surprise,

though not unlike a shrew in cat’s disguise.

The object of my ruse, the greatest of my fears

is felinity in fox couture, wild despite five-thousand years.

 

Sing; dance–speak, perchance.

Strike a pose, and show me how you feel.

Stay. Play. Take your scales and weigh.

Only say the word, and I shall be healed.

 

This is the poem I never wrote for you.

Would that I could write it twice; I would right it anew.

 

From a church mouse

I’m not the most socially connected human being on the face of the planet. At any particular point in my life since high school, I’ve tended to maintain one to three close, open, unconditional drinking-and-smoking relationships with other weather tossed pilgrims who also missed the boat for Moderate Success Island. That’s such a funny word, isn’t it? “Success…” It evokes a gut reaction without real criticality. It divides friends and marriages, an unplumbed gorge between those who think they don’t have it and those who can’t figure out what it is. There’s a magazine that claims it for its title, and it’s sold on the same rack as “Money” and “People.” It’s easy for me to wax cynical when I’m momentarily removed from my tightly knit social security blanket of three threads, though, when another Friday night has passed in lonely quietude and it starts to look like Saturday is going to be just as excruciating a reminder of how life isn’t going according to plan.

You know the story. You wake up, hungover from drinking alone, to find that you’re back in your parents’ house, that it wasn’t a paranoid fantasy that the graduate advisor you’d lined up months before the start of school tanked your career wrongfully at the word “go” on the basis of your first two meetings, that he’d decided you were, “…ultimately really only concerned with the trivia of interpretations of quantum mechanics and could never cut the math,” and you eventually cracked under the pressure and withdrew. You nearly fall out of bed, and when no one takes the resultant dull “thud” as an invitation to nag you about picking up your room, you realize your folks are probably gone for the day―because they have lives. You run to the bathroom, void thirty percent of the viable fluids you thought you had, stumble down into the kitchen and living area past what you’re seventy percent sure is cat vomit, rub your temples, turn on the television, and your ex-girlfriend is selling taxidermy on a cable reality show again. Then, Bastet the Ancient Egyptian cat god immediately starts in with you before your bagel and coffee―because of your chronic paranoid schizophrenia.

“Dan!” she screamed in my third ear. “Dan, you’re hallucinating!”

I groaned. ‘You couldn’t possibly be wrong, cat, if I’m “hearing” you,’ I thought at her.

She poked a purple astral wisp into my eye.

“…But you’re seeing me. You don’t usually see me on cable when I’m not really there―now, do you, huh? Huh?” Her whistling, little half lisp was absolutely piercing this morning.

I sighed. ‘No, I can’t say I do―not that I recall,’ I thought.

“I mean, even when you were drunk last night, and you turned on the TV to look for me―when I wasn’t there, because even the advertisement you read said it was scheduled now, but drunk people with Jesus complexes gloss over details and expect the universe to conspire to instantly gratify them―even then, you didn’t see me,” she said, “but your condition must be deteriorating.”

The part of my brain claimed by dragons in the last great war was producing words faster than the little piece I still lived in could process them.

“You just crammed more verbiage into that one sentence than our entire romantic relationship,” I said aloud.

She chuckled. “What do you think of the piece?” she asked.

I squinted at the screen. The show’s hosts were apparently haggling with the no-longer-requited-love-of-my-life over the mounted head and neck of what appeared to be an albino male deer. The hosts noted its ostensible rarity and admitted the craftsmanship of the taxidermy. It was beautiful, but I found it hard to focus on the piece.

I had never actually seen Katie without the counter culture embellishments obscuring the view. She had removed the eyebrow piercing. She wore no white powder on her naturally fair skin, or any makeup that I could tell. She didn’t need it. No black hair dye… the natural color of her long hair was more of a sandy blonde-to-brown, or just a tinge lighter than mine, all shine, no wave. (…Maybe a little wave, but not to her “ex.”) Cropping the taxidermy out of the scene and muting the conversation, nothing would have marked any connection with the image I had of her from years ago, except maybe the Converse sneakers she wore. She was just an unpretentious, waifish, naturally beautiful Mona Lisa in her own fashion that I was almost surprised to recognize.

Her doppelganger poked me again. “So, what do you think?” she asked.

I blinked. ‘She looks nothing like you,’ I thought.

Bastet snorted. “…of the mount!”

I squinted again. ‘What mount?’

“’That’s what she said,’” said my delusional “ex.”

I stared through the screen. Katie sold her piece for several hundred dollars. I pumped my fist. The scene changed to some spoiled dippy socialite approving the piece that had been procured on her behalf for a Christmas party. I turned off the television and sat there for about half a minute. It was quiet in the house, even in my head.

“Dan?” came a “voice” that was more church mouse than cat.

“Hm?” I thought.

She paused.

“Wanna be my stalker?”

I shivered, then took a deep breath.

“Nope,” I said aloud.

“Guh!” she said. “Fine!”

“…And I’m ending our Facebook friendship,” I added as I got up.

“You ended it last night!” she yelled. “I only ever accepted that request out of pity, anyway! You’re a lousy kisser and your poetry sucks!”

I judged that it was nearing sundown by the orange light in the foyer as I trudged up the stairs. I’m a vampire, without the fangs. I could sleep from sunrise to sunset.

“How many times did you look at my Facebook profile?!” Bastet demanded.

“…About half a dozen,” I thought truthfully.

“You were always selfish like that!” Bastet shouted in my head. “I guess Jesus is just too frickin’ important to stalk a girl right, who did everything for him.”

“Don’t call me that,” I thought at the top of the stairs.

“You deleted my number!” she shrieked. “Where are the desperate, drunk, four AM calls? The unrequested sexual photos? I don’t even get a three page text out of nowhere from you!”

I walked into my closet and grabbed a spiked dog collar from off my belt and tie hanger, putting it on with the buckle behind my neck.

“Well, there were those couple of rambling Facebook messages,” I offered.

I could feel her astral corpus about to explode.

“Those?!” she howled. “Dear gods, Dan―those were barely creepy! They might have even been slightly sweet! When I read that poem, I mean…”

‘What?’ I asked, putting on my own pair of battle hardened Converse high tops.

She shook her head and made an emphatic cross out motion with her arms. “Let’s just say―maybe―that the water color of the fox crying a giant black heart shaped tear that I posted the next day wasn’t a figment of your imagination.”

‘It probably was,’ I thought. ‘It was pretty, though.’

“Couldn’t you at least convince yourself that it absolutely had to be about you and fail to read between the lines that I still didn’t want to talk with you?!” She was laughing. “I have a career to think about! You’re not getting in the way of that!”

I examined my hooded sweatshirts for a minute, chin on hand. The lack of contempt was palpable. I finally reached for that one particular worn “hoodie” that I barely ever wore but could never quite bring myself to give up on.

She recoiled. “Ha! Ha-ha, Dan! You think wearing the hoodie I gave you seven years ago that you haven’t thrown out yet is gonna make up for this? That hoodie makes an appearance once a year at most. You’ve never even fetishized it! You washed it, for crying out loud!”

I was dressed for success. “I deserve a medal,” I said.

“You’re even cognizant of how a normal human being could be creeped out by what to anyone else would look like back patting for simply not completely succumbing to romantically obsessive insanity! What the fuck kind of paranoid schizophrenic ‘ex’ are you?”

I grabbed the bag I had loaded with writing supplies and a flashlight the night before and started down the stairs.

‘One who truly loves you,’ I thought.

“Okay! That’s a start!” she said. “Where are you going?”

‘To write sonnets in a graveyard,’ I thought.

“Better!” Her aura turned warm purple. “Are they for me?” she asked.

I walked through the front door and locked it behind me.

‘It probably wouldn’t be appropriate to send them to you at this point,’ I thought.

She made a noise like she was about to vomit. “Dan, there’s no hope for you,” she said.

“You’re right,” I said aloud, as I started down the walkway.

October was over. It had turned into a pumpkin and rotted with the first frost. Barely a tree held a stubborn, clinging leaf, and I was the only spook still roaming the streets in search of something sweet. The graveyard wasn’t far. I almost wished it was farther, though, because I could fool myself sometimes into thinking that the length of a trek correlated with the meaning in it. A quarter mile down the road, Bastet’s presence still clung to me like a wet miasma, but she hadn’t said anything.

‘What is it?’ I thought at her.

“Why do you love me?” She asked.

‘When I laid bare my insanity to you, you were the only person who made fun of it in a way that implied that you still credited me some fair measures of intelligence and insight, both in the flesh and on the astral,’ I thought, ‘so I consider you the kindest person in the world.’

She emitted one of her characteristic impish giggles. “That’s flattering. What if I maybe believed your ‘delusion’ could have a kernel of truth to it?”

‘You as flesh, or as dubious but witty idealization?’ I wondered.

“She’s like my appendage,” said Bastet. “Any ‘lower’ is like an arm with a mind of its own.”

‘The “mind of its own” part was the reason I was asking,’ I thought.

“…Kind of like a penis, I imagine,” she added.

‘Mine reads physics textbooks and H. P. Lovecraft all weekend,’ I thought.

She blew through my synapses like the wind in the trees. It was getting dark, but it wasn’t much farther.

“How was I kind?” she asked.

‘You were the only one besides my parents and the oppressive theocratic astral regime who visited me in the hospital,” I said. “You brought me stuffed animals and graphic novels.”

“Uh-huh,” said Bastet. “I remember, I gave you ‘Johnny the Homicidal Maniac’ to read.”

“That’s what I mean,” I said. No one else was on the road to overhear. “You seemed perfectly content to have a boyfriend who thought there was a global conspiracy to cover up the fact that he was having psychic conversations, and who thought he had other magical powers―who thought you were a god.”

“Dan,” she whistled through the piles of leaves, “you were smart and sweet, at your worst. You were obviously schizo’, but I felt safe with you, somehow.”

I walked up the drive of the graveyard. It wasn’t as venerable as some of the others around the area, but it was big and mostly secluded from the major roads. Walking between the rows of polished stones, the ground felt like it could give way underneath. The Jersey pink and purple sunset hues were dying, the last bright gasp shining through the bare trees.

Bastet giggled. “Maybe it wasn’t obvious, that you were schizo’. Maybe it really is a gigantic cover up, and you’re some kind of singularity. Maybe you took on ‘God’ and mostly got away with it.”

“…But with basically nothing accomplished,” I said, “out of my original goals of starting bloodless uprisings on the physical and astral planes.”

My phone vibrated: it was a text from my buddy Dave. I started typing a response.

“You have my ear,” said Bastet.

“That’s what I’m here for,” I said, putting away the phone and taking out paper and a pencil from my bag.

“…and a creepy hoodie,” she added.

I rolled my eyes and started counting syllables of the first line I was trying to write.

“Wanna talk with her?” asked Bastet.

‘You mean your lower, on the astral?’ I thought, scribbling a line. ‘It doesn’t work that way.’

“You’re not the boss of me,” she said. “She’s my meat-puppet dick-with-a-brain.”

I nearly had a second line. There were times I wished she’d take a hint.

“She could be thinking of you right now,” Bastet whispered. “She could be masturbating to you. You could be her guilty pleasure.”

I counted syllables for a minute before I responded.

“She could be calling me up to go get a cup of coffee if she really felt that way,” I said, “instead of sending her shadow to crack dick jokes while I’m trying to write her poetry.”

“Guh!” said Bastet. “Fine! I’m sure she isn’t enjoying it.”

She acted like she was stomping off, which is obviously theatrical when you can teleport at will. It was a sure sign that she actually wanted another sonnet. The gods are relatively predictable. Most of them are usually appreciative of art undertaken in their honor, but they don’t fall all over themselves to let you know. In my experience as a straight male, human women tend to be the opposite: some tend to make big displays about how they want poetry from a guy, but it’s rare that they really think through what that entails or appreciate the result the way they idealize it. I know guys must be essentially similar, but my own limited direct experience is with women, by accident of nature. Katie probably felt similarly, when she gave me an anatomically correct sculpture of a heart in a black coffin shaped box. I loved it, and it’s still hidden away in the attic somewhere with the other preserved organs and skeletons, but I was dealing with the onset of “life changes” during our relationship, and I had difficulty expressing any emotion clearly to anyone.

Bastet must have determined to try to contain herself just long enough for me to finish a first stanza before breaking into soft shoe, because no sooner had I rhymed “need” with “seed” than I heard a voice from beyond.

“Dan!” said Bastet. “I found a dead thing that isn’t buried!”

“Where?!” I shouted. “I wanna see!”

I could feel her attention flit about the graveyard like a searchlight. “Oh! Where was it?” she asked.

She took off fast down the rows of stone faced monuments, and I chased her. She hopped blithely over mounded earth and polished marble―the dead couldn’t care. She stopped suddenly at the heart of the yard and looked around. I came up on her tail and nearly fell over trying to brake. I was practically in her space. She drifted into mine.

“I think it was here,” she said.

I looked around. “I don’t see it,” I said.

“You wouldn’t,” she replied.

I shivered. “Why wouldn’t I?” I asked.

“It’s me,” she said.

“It’s you?” I reflected.

“That’s right. It’s you,” she said.

The graveyard was the least frightening part to me. “Are we supposed to pretend to make out or something, now?” I asked.

“Just pretend to hug me,” she said.

I thought of a girl who broke up with me in antiquity, shuddered, rolled my eyes, looked around, then put my arms out in a loose circle. That’s when the car came roaring up the graveyard access road.

I tried to act nonchalant. The car came as close as it could, and the windows opened.

“Are you some kind of necromancer-philiac?” asked Chrissy.

I chuckled. “I am the summonér of nothing in particular,” I said.

Dave grimaced. “You know, the line is―“

“It was an awesome line, the way I said it, Dave!” I shouted.

Chrissy cackled and pointed fingers. “You shut your mouth, Dave!”

The driver snickered. “I’m happy you two are my friends. Seriously, though, Dan, what were you doing?”

I gaped and stammered. “I… I… You texted me like twenty minutes… I thought―when you say you’re coming, usually…”

They both gave me cool, superior looks. They knew about my “illness” already. They knew a few other things about me, as well, but somehow they still kept coming around, and I loved them for it. Bastet had stealthily oozed away, and I loved her for it.

“Just get in the car quick,” said Dave. I stalled for a minute to grab my bag, and then we got out of there like it was a graveyard haunted by a schizophrenic stalker.

“Dude,” said Chrissy, “what is it like when you’re talking with people who aren’t there?”

I could barely hear her over Failure playing on the megawatt sound system. “They’re generally better conversationalists than most people,” I yelled, “but you folks are exceptions.” We all laughed.

I leaned into the front bench. “Folks, I realize how strange that was,” I said. “Please call me out on bizarre behavior if you ever feel uncomfortable or I don’t seem to be self aware, but if I didn’t indulge ‘the voices’ often enough, they’d demand my attention in ways I couldn’t parse.”

“Dan, I don’t feel uncomfortable,” said Dave. “You never get out of hand or anything.”

“Who were you hugging, though?” asked Chrissy.

“I was hugging a five-thousand-year-old Egyptian cat deity,” I said, “who I know isn’t there, on my better days, but that doesn’t stop her from yapping constantly in my ear.”

Bastet pinched my spine. She’s never out of earshot.

“What’s she like?” asked Chrissy.

“She’s too human to worship―like they all are―but she’s exceedingly kind, for all her sarcasm,” I said. “She’s sort of a protector personality.”

“So long as she’s kind,” said Chrissy.

“Hey, where are we going tonight?” I asked.

“QKI’s,” Dave said. “I couldn’t get you on the list, though. You have money for the cover?”

I felt for my wallet and pulled it out. “Yeah, I’m all good,” I said.

“Great,” said Dave. “We’re meeting a friend of mine, there. She’s single and cute.”

What a segue. “Oh?” I said.

“I might have told her I was bringing my poet-physicist friend along,” said Dave.

“I’ll try not to talk to myself in front of her,” I said. “Thank you, but why do that?”

Dave shrugged. “Sometimes it’s just nice to help connect friends, and it seems like you might both be having trouble finding someone at the moment. Her name’s ‘Katie.’”

The obligatory moment of misplaced hope in impossible accidents flared and burned itself immediately into exhaustion.

“It’s not me,” whispered Bastet.

‘Any idea what she’s like, though?’ I thought.

“Huge pair of personalities, probably,” said Bastet,

‘What makes you say that?’ I wondered.

“Your luck,” she said.

I managed to hear “the voices” clearly enough over the blaring car stereo to channel them into another stanza of poetry before we arrived in Newark. We parked in a half empty lot, and Dave got a flask out of the trunk for us before we headed over to the club, because nobody actually gets drunk in the bar. That would require a steady full time job to fund, the kind which might instead support a shared living arrangement with a significant other. Some of us had significant others to consider, and some of us didn’t have steady full time jobs.

When Katie broke up with me, she didn’t say why. I didn’t ask her. She had started to cry as soon as the first words came out of her mouth, and I didn’t want to make things any harder, and it just seemed natural. She was an intelligent, creative girl who wasn’t in a position to support someone whose life had become a shambles. I stopped her, and I said it was okay and I understood. We hugged, and that was that.

Dave’s name was on the list at the club, and Chrissy and I were satisfied to pay for the change of pace. A remix of a song by Depeche Mode was playing as we entered. We got drinks, and we sat down in a booth. We joked about how “white” the dancing was, and Dave lambasted the DJ. Dave and I went for cigarettes, and Chrissy stood outside with us. He got pulled into conversations here and there while Chrissy and I talked about whiskey and music. When Dave found us again, we went to the bar for a second round. About the time we were served, we noticed an argument break out at the door, which Dave went over to while Chrissy and I seated ourselves back at a booth.

Bastet poked a feeler in from behind. “That’s her, Dan, at the entrance,” she said.

I looked over, but I could only see Dave and the bouncer through the door. ‘Does she have a huge pair of personalities?’ I asked her in my head.

“I take it back,” said Bastet. “Sometimes karma trumps luck.”

‘Well, is she intelligent?’ I wondered.

“Her brain is skinny and wrinkle free, at least,” said Bastet.

Dave and the other Katie came in with the cold. She wasn’t unpleasant to look at, I supposed, with long jet black hair, green eyes, white powder complexion, and copious latex and piercings. Some of us accept and even like latex and piercings, but something wasn’t quite right, about the delay at the door.

“I told them I knew you!” she said to Dave as they approached our booth. “I mean, how do they expect me to pay? …To get into this club? If I weren’t for me, they wouldn’t even have a DJ tonight―you know?”

“Katie,” said Dave, shooting me a smile that made me nervous, “this is Dan, the physicist-poet I was telling you about earlier.”

I stood up and started to offer a hand.

“Oh, well, hello,” she said, brushing past my hand for a hug that left me feeling slightly violated. “…But everyone calls me ‘Kitty.’”

“I take offense at that,” said a voice no one but me could hear.

“Kitty” winked. “They say I have the personality of a cat.”

“She licks herself,” said Bastet.

“You’re a physicist?” asked Kitty. “What’s that like? Maybe you could teach some of the guys I know a thing or two about the equations of motion, you think?”

“Bad pussy!” said the cat god.

I twitched, but I think I passed it off as an earthquake.

“I hate how Dave does that,” I said as we sat. “It’s flattering, but I’m not working in the field. I’m kind of in between careers, at the moment.”

“He’s also vegan,” Dave chimed. “I don’t know how he does it, but didn’t you say you were considering vegetarianism or veganism, Katie?”

Kitty nodded. “Considering,” she said, “but after a lot of soul searching and research, I think veganism might actually be socially irresponsible, in its own way. I read an article that pointed out that more animals are killed in the grain and vegetable farming operations necessary to support the diet, but they say that you are what you eat.”

My smile didn’t crack. No one but Bastet saw my head explode and reassemble itself in the course of those two sentences.

‘Think she ate a stupid cow?’ I asked Bastet.

“Mostly just penis,” said the cat god.

“Well, my reasons are rather more about sustainability than animal rights in particular,” I said, trying to tuck-and-roll past the argument about basing your worldview on one or two bad internet articles you find through social media.

“There are health reasons, too, though!” Kitty continued. “I hear it’s great for weight loss. I’ve considered it to try take some weight off my breasts, because they’re causing back problems for me and I’d rather do anything less invasive than reduction surgery, you know?”

“Huge kindness…” said the other Katie.

I gaped. I couldn’t help it. The other two of us at the table fidgeted.

“Do you think I could be sexy with small breasts?” she asked, fluttering her false lashes. “I mean, can brains carry a girl?”

“Weapons of mass deduction…” chirped Bastet.

Chrissy looked at me and smirked.

“I guess you should do what’s best for your health,” I said. I pretended only Bastet could see me cringe.

“Yeah,” she said, “I guess it’s like a guy and his dick. I’ve known some guys that were, well, huge, and it just makes all the difference in their confidence.”

“Tube sock full of bologna…” Bastet quipped.

It was happening: I was cracking again. I had hallucinated this conversation from the start, I couldn’t quite convince myself. How could I be the only one starting to laugh?

“Oh, but you find this funny,” she said with a predatory smile. “I wanted to shoot a video with my last boyfriend―you know―but he was too self conscious, and I think he started using a penis pump or something when I broke up with him.”

“’Pressure Treated Lumber’ on DVD…” said Bastet.

I couldn’t help the laughter, but I trained my eyes dead on hers. (I admit I sometimes scrunch up my face and try to project back in time on the astral plane to see the looks on the faces of Chrissy and Dave right then.)

“Would you ever be up for something like that?” she asked me. Her gaze turned intense and sultry. “I don’t use condoms, though,” she added.
I stopped laughing.

“Bring a coat hanger,” whispered the real Katie.

That did it. I reached for my drink and just barely managed to shoot it without choking. I pounded the table with the other hand and leaned over it.

“Dear Christ, I love you!” I said to nothing in particular.

Katie who doesn’t use condoms didn’t like that. Immediately, her face turned lurid and she was up from the table.

“Dave, your friend is fucking creepy,” she said. “I have to go. I said I’d meet another friend in New York, and you know what traffic is like, anyway.”

“Bumper-to-bumper…” said the good witch of the north.

Dave got up and chased after her. Chrissy closed her eyes and laughed deeply and wistfully.

“I think I need another drink,” she said, getting up to walk over to the bar.

I couldn’t take it. I tried to put a boulder on my laughter to crush it, but it sprayed out of every orifice. I made wild snorting noises like a buck or a bull. I flailed and gasped for air.

“Three hours ago, I was calling you the kindest person I’d ever met,” I said, still wracked by spasms of laughter.

“Dan―Dan, calm down,” she said in a lisping little whisper as I tried to comply. “I want you to listen very closely to me: if you can’t allow yourself a little laughter at the expense of someone who mostly deserves it, you will die.”

I started laughing even harder. I felt light headed. I saw amoebic spots before my eyes.

“Dan!” she whispered. “If you don’t at least make yourself that allowance, you will be pulverized under the weight of your fantasy.”

I stopped laughing, like someone had suddenly reached over and violently shaken me. In the next instant, I felt a hot, wet pressure behind my eyes.

“I will not let that happen,” she said.

Dave came up behind me and playfully slapped my back.

“Dan!” he said. “You alright, man?”

“Rather, you will not let you do that to yourself,” said Bastet.

Chrissy was close behind Dave, with three drinks in hand. She finished one in front of us as she stood. Dave smiled and reached out a hand toward one of the other shots expectantly. She glared at him and swallowed that one, too.

“Dave!” she yelled. “What were you thinking?!”

Dave’s shoulders fell. He patted me on the back.

“Man, she’s bat shit, but she’s hot,” he said. “I know it’s been a while for you, Dan, what with the illness and all. Maybe that’s all you get, sometimes.”
I thought I knew what he meant. In any case, no one had lost an appendage.

“Man, can we go home, soon?,” I asked him.

Chrissy looked at me with an expression I read pity in, and then she looked at the third shot. She tilted it back in one good swig.

Sooner or perhaps later, when Dave had sobered sufficiently to drive, we packed it in. Chrissy fell asleep in the front seat of the car while I finished the third stanza in the back. The couplet emerged somewhere around the point I trudged up the walk to my folks’ front door:

    So long, so many ways we said “farewell”
    to orchards left in trusting, given seed
    in parks between a crimson carousel
    and one more queue for something you don’t need.
    Why circumscribe the pencil point for’er?
    Why mourn an ocean’s passing with the tide?
    The perfect model of systemic er’r
    consuming expectation, I confide
    in her, the kindest of my waking dreams
    who gently scoops my cotton insides out,
    renews the matted filling, heals the seams
    upon my eyes, and draws me close about.
    I picked a rocking horse to take the crown.
    I bet my hand, then all the cards fell down.

“Success” is a funny word. It’s nearly lost on me. I don’t think Katie was thinking of it, either, when she broke up with me, or when she decided not to respond to my couple of attempts to reach out to her again. I hated that word in high school and my early adult life―like everyone was supposed to be on TV, make piles of money, and start a nuclear family. One can’t be a burden on the people who love them, though. There’s more to life than pretty words and searing feelings. I think of all the people I know chasing that ill defined dream, though, and all the uncritical assumptions about it that people seem to make. I would love to one day rise to the highest proverbial mountaintop and stake Katie’s banner in it in gratitude, to hold her arcane countenance up to humanity as the greatest “success” I know and as a model for my own, but from there it’s on the rest of the world to make the connection.

I don’t know if Katie will ever read the poem, but Bastet seems to like it.

Suddenly, I was bolt upright and awake.

“Dan! Dan, are you alive?” she squeaked.

The phonemes bubbled up through the sludge: ‘You think, therefore I am.’

“Okay. Okay, good.”

She prodded me.

“You’re positive?”

‘I’m asleep, terrified, relieved, and insane,’ I thought.

“So it’s situation normal, right,” she said, “but I’m asking you about your mortality.”

‘At two in the morning?’ I asked.

She turned ruddy-violet. “I thought you were dead! And it’s three thirty.”

The oozing stupor of sleep gradually began to slough off.

‘Why did you think I was dead?’ I wondered.

“What? Oh, it’s actually ki—” she froze mid-sentence.

“I mean, what were we talking about?” she continued.

‘Do it without me.’ I thought of the nastiest gesture I could make to her, too, as my head hit the pillow.

I fell asleep again, but psychologically it felt like just an instant of nonbeing.

“Dan!”

“Whaaaaaaat?!” I ejaculated. My parents?!… not home, didn’t hear it.

“Whaaaaat?” I mumbled softly.

“I like you.” She looked me right in the third eye as she said it.

‘Fuckisit?!’ I thought. My eyes were still closed.

“Remember when you nearly crashed last night?” she asked.

I thought of the car ride home from work.

“Yeah,” I said, “I mean, sort of. It wasn’t really that close, though.”

“Remember how you felt like a ton of stress with a source you couldn’t quite pinpoint building up for literally months, and then ninety percent of it went away pretty much right there, when you avoided a crash?” she asked.

“Yeah?” I responded.

She paused.

“I really like you.” She poked a few tendrils into me.

“Okay, first of all, you’re a figment of my imagination,” I said to Bastet. “Second, you’re an involuntary imagination that was born from a girlfriend that lost interest seven years ago,” I huffed. “Thirdly, she never calls, but mostly, get to the fuckin’ point.”

“If you had to die, how would you want it to happen?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t,” I said.

She guffawed. “I wouldn’t either, but say you had a death sentence and you were allowed to choose the method of execution?”

I scratched my beard. “…Quantum suicide experiment.”

“Congratulations!” she shouted inside my head.

I must have wanted to believe this. I must have wanted to be dead.

“Dan, I’m a little afraid,” she said.

“Cat, are you insinuating that the sort-of-near crash I had today was sufficient to be a quantum suicide experiment of any statistical significance?” I asked.

“Dan, first of all, what do you think the quantum suicide experiment is, and what would its success mean?” she asked.

I heard a bustle in my head room. Apparently, Bastet and I weren’t the only ones listening to this conversation, even though I was the only one having it.

“There are probabilistic outcomes in quantum mechanics,” I said, “and in small particle-to-particle interactions, these probabilistic outcomes cause superposition. That is, they lead to particles existing in seemingly mutually exclusive states, like traveling left and right at the same time. It’s thought by some that if someone were to play Russian roulette with a quantum random number generator, if the principle of superposition holds for large objects as well as microscopic ones, then surviving the game would always be superposed with dying due to it. So a person should be able to determine something about quantum ontology if they survive the game until their chances of survival are, say, one in a trillion.”

In my head, I heard a clamor go up in the gallery of extra-physical onlookers.

So, who are these people?

You’ve already met Bastet. As I said, I’m mostly certain she’s a figment of my imagination. That is, she is a loud, autonomous, and somewhat sarcastic figment of my imagination who refuses to acknowledge that I am about 20 years beyond the age for imaginary friends. They all do. Allah, Eris, Shiva, Anubis, (excuse me while I drop names,) Astarte, Lilith, and the rest of the host don’t ever seem to care that I have work in the morning. It doesn’t seem to bother them even that I’m almost positive they don’t exist. I’m new to it, but apparently, when you’re a paranoid schizophrenic, realizing all the holes in your inner voices’ stories and total lack of empirical evidence from repeatable tests to support the existence of an Astral Plane doesn’t make its denizens shut the hell up at four in the morning. Working to ground yourself in scientific study and earning a degree in physics doesn’t make them listen when you scream, “Shut the fuck up, and stop squatting in my brain!” aloud in the middle of a crowded train station or grocery store.

For argument’s sake, why would the gods care so much about me? They wouldn’t, but they claim it’s because I’m some sort of “singular dimensional crux” at a critical period in human history; I am crazy special. However, they seem to view this as more of a coincidence and accident rather than intrinsic to my character, and they’re probably right. I object to being crazy special, but they maintain a system of governance separate from human affairs, in my head, so I don’t get a say in the insanity.

“Mr. Strano,” came a voice in my head, “do you actually expect us to believe that your survival indicates the existence of multiple quantum worlds? What about the sample size, or any expectations for repeatability?”

I considered completely ignoring them, but I ventured that they might go away faster this time if I played along for at least a minute.

“Um, I don’t think a single sort-of-near-miss on the highway one day could reasonably be considered a statistically significant quantum suicide experiment,” I said, “especially if it wasn’t controlled to help establish the actual risk to mortality, so I guess, no, world politics should not turn on such a result, even if they’re Bizarro World politics.”

There was a murmur of disbelief.

“You don’t have the slightest idea what actually happened, do you, or why?” came the same voice.

“Nor do I give a shit,” I added. “I have no evidence of anything of empirical significance having happened recently, and I have work in the morning. Plus, it seems like you could do your pseudo-experiment and debate its contaminated results without any direct input from me, so the human singularity is going to sleep, now.”

Another voice came that nobody else could hear: “Dan, do you remember this document I hold here, that you refused to sign months ago?”

“The one right before I ended up in the hospital again?” I asked. “Thanks, by the way. I can’t even read your stupid imaginary documents.”

“It was written working directly from your native symbol set,” said another voice. “You could have at least understood the general meaning.”

“The Mormons would think that’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for why nothing ever reads the same way twice in the land of imagination,” I said, “but you wanted to grill me about sample sizes and repeatability of physics experiments.”

There was an uncomfortable shifting in the gallery.

Bastet sent out a tendril and grabbed the document that may as well have been the manifest of a cargo ship importing cheese.

“Dan,” she said, “let me paraphrase—”

“—Bullshit,” I said.

“Dan!” she said. “Let me summarize—”

“—Is this the document Al wanted me to sign,” I asked, “the one about the ontology for his nonexistent death-trap pseudo-world heaven with tremolo sound effects?”

“Do you mean Allah?” asked an onlooker.

“Yes, Dan,” hissed Bastet, “but it’s about 30 pages of inscrutable legalese, and we’re concerned with an addendum regarding a decision of our courts about a deferred penalty on you and what was to be done should you refuse to agree to Allah’s compromise.”

“Read it twice,” I told her, “I’ll get a pen and paper.”

“Dan!” she shouted, “This is exactly what got us to this point. You broke some major laws—in fact, even international treaties—with those psychic conversations you had with a couple of your friends—the ones they still acknowledge—and in attempting to repeat the experiences with them and others. You were allowed one such conversation, your ‘greater self,’ as you sometimes put it, was aware. You had three, and you attempted more—“

“—Right,” I said, “’cause, you know, I’m gonna base my world view on unrepeatable—“

“—Repeatability, Dan,” continued Bastet, “or an intentional dearth thereof, is exactly the crucial point here; you’re not actually supposed to have proof of us—no one is—and the vast majority of us on Earth aren’t even supposed to realize that each of us has a hard counterpart on the Astral.” She sighed even though she didn’t need to breath.

“You technically broke international law, Dan,” someone called out from the gallery.

“…Caused a global political incident…” said another.

“…And maybe committed a teensy-weensy baby bit of tweason,” said Bastet. “It was kind of a pwobwem, wemembew?”

“My God,” I said, “It’s a global conspiracy! Or a bullshit rationalization for why I couldn’t repeat three aberrant experiences upon which my subconscious bases compulsory belief in your existence,” I motioned to Bastet, “probably forever, now… and yours,” I motioned to the gallery, “…and you were there, and you!”

I fell immediately back on my pillow, eyes already shut.

“This is the point where we have a problem,” said Bastet to someone in the chamber-like convention on the Astral.

“…Because you can’t make fun of him any more?” asked a voice I recognized.

“…Because Russia just annexed Crimea, the oil is running out, some of Al’s factions think it’s the End of Days, and now he refuses to be the Messiah,” said Bastet.

“Are you sure?” asked the familiar voice of Shiva.

My hand shot up. “I refuse to be the Messiah,” I said. “How many times have I said since this shit storm first formed off the Pacific coast that messianic prophecies can’t work? The only thing that can save us is universal acceptance of each other and individual responsibility for world stewardship. How many of you share my sentiment that even the Son of Man basically thought the world community needed to realize its innate empowerment to save itself?”

“Most of the rational world agrees with you, Dan,” said Shiva, “but there’s this Christianity thing where about a couple billion people are expecting the return of a special someone to do this final judgment thing and usher in an era of eternal life and happiness for a select group, and this Judaism thing with a similar—“

“—codification,” I cut him off,” that’s implicitly designed to get adherents to question whether they’re the divine savior and ultimately produce the über-politician through self-fulfilling prophecy. But two big problems with that, is you produce at least a few hundred Waco Sieges first, dear Christ, and resource depletion and overpopulation don’t seem to have been anticipated by the prophecy’s engineers, so it won’t save the world anyway.”

Shiva chuckled. “You know, some of us believe in this reincarnation thing, and it might just turn out that a carpenter born in Bethlehem—”

“—Said virtually every Christian ever at some point in their life,” I said, “though most might deny it. But the carpenter would be smart enough to realize that it made virtually zero difference, wouldn’t he?”

“You don’t want a cult of adoring fans?” asked Shiva.

“I want a hole that’s dark, dry, and warm, and I want a loaf of whole wheat bread,” I said.

“How about a dark, wet, and warm hole?” asked Shiva.

“That’s the reason I’m in this situation in the first place, at the root of it all,” I said.

“Freud thought so, too,” said Shiva.

Bastet turned pink. “So the Messiah’s a misogynist, too?” she asked.

“I wasn’t blaming the hole!” I said.

“…And he’s a hipster,” said Shiva.

“…And he looks like he’s been smokin’ the reefa!” came a shout across the Astral.

“Yeah, boy!” came another. “Easter on 4/20 this year!”

I was up off the pillow again. “Wait, Easter is on 4/20 this year?”

There was laughter in the gallery.

“Why not check a calendar?” asked Bastet.

“I’m sure it is,” I said, falling back on the pillow.

“So you’re sure we’re right,” said Bastet, “but you don’t question how we knew that if you didn’t?”

“It’s about two weeks away,” I said, “I added fourteen to Sunday in a dream.”

“…And that would make today…?” prodded Bastet.

“…The fifth, since we’re after midnight,” I said.

“…At exactly 4:20,” added Shiva.

Bastet poked my brain. “Check your phone,” she said.

I grabbed my phone from the side of the bed.

“Who’s holding?” I asked

“You’re not surprised?” asked Bastet.

“I’m more surprised when your human counterparts make out of context comments that make for witty responses to what I’m thinking but don’t speak in physically spoken conversations,” I said, “but that’s a figment of my imagination or a lucky coincidence.”

Shiva added, “…Or maybe your insanity is just written clear across your blank face, 12 times a day.”

“So it’s enough to condition a response of faux ignorance on my part,” I said, “because if I press it, I’m going back to the bin, and I’m probably wrong, anyway.”

Shiva laughed. “Remember when Lilith’s incarnation hugged you randomly and said, ‘…The whole time?’”

“No,” I said, “I remember violating some random acquaintance’s space and mishearing them, albeit with no ill intent or sexual motivation on my part.”

Shiva snorted. “Freud would disagree,” he said.

Bastet slapped me with a tendril. “When did that happen?” she demanded.

“Excuse me!” came a shout from the gallery. “While I understand that you two know him personally and that Dan is obligated to maintain an appearance of mock disbelief in us all, we’re kind of in the middle of a crisis.”

The speaker approached me gingerly. “Dan, do you generally understand the situation we’re all in here?” she asked.

I groaned. ‘I can’t believe this,’ I thought. ‘I mean, it’ll kill me. But holding the existence of an Astral Plane anything at all like I imagine as an axiom, it follows that…’ I had to think about the implication.

Shiva cleared his throat chakra. “…It follows that you were put in an unfair situation that you couldn’t have possibly known about beforehand, where politicians attempted to legislate physical reality,” he said gently. “They asserted an identity on you that you believe at your core is false, called you an imitator in that identity you didn’t want to believe in, brought you to trial for it, sentenced you clandestinely to death, discovered a piece of physical law in the process that contradicted their religious beliefs, and then asked you to save them, without being willing to validate your sanity.”

“They can’t,” I said. “They probably don’t actually exist. I have no proof that they exist, and I don’t have any sane reason to suspect that I was sentenced to death via the quantum suicide experiment and survived.”

“Mm-hmm,” hummed Shiva.

I fidgeted. “What difference would it actually make to anyone that parallel quantum worlds exist, though?” I asked. “That doesn’t solve war, overpopulation, or scarcity.”

“No,” said Shiva, “but it disagrees with the publicly expressed world views of certain powerful Astral politicians claiming divinity, and it makes you look like Jesus.”

“Everybody looks like Jesus to me,” I muttered.

“Me, three,” said Bastet.

It hit me. “Wait, but when are you folks claiming I was put through the quantum suicide experiment?” I asked.

“It’s been going on gradually since you refused to sign the document outlining Al’s compromise and proceeded to flip him off in front of billions of people,” said Bastet. “It’s been so much fun waking up every morning not knowing if you’re still alive. Our best estimate is that you just tipped a five-sigma chance of survival, even though that isn’t a five-sigma result in conglomerate. But it caused a hub-bub.”

I grimaced. “See, that’s just fucking crazy,” I said. “I have exactly zero evidence to support that. How are you gonna tell this to me and expect me to react?”

“Allah is making a public statement about the situation,” said some imaginary politician that I really didn’t care to know. “Maybe you should all listen.”

I swung around slowly and got up out of bed like I was covered with weights. “I’d rather conduct a slow quantum suicide experiment of my own.” I thought, fumbling in the dark for my pants with a pouch of tobacco in the pocket. I didn’t feel well.

“Be you,” said Shiva.

The attention in the room in my head shifted to Allah’s statement on Astralvision, or whatever they call their broadcast systems, and I slipped out of the room. For the first time in a long time, I felt relaxed if not well, like I really was alone in the privacy of my own head for a moment, or at least surrounded by a couple of close friends.

“So there’s this requirement of repeatability in empiricism,” said Shiva. “Any idea how we could reliably repeat a result in evidence of many-worlds interpretation, bro?”

I opened the sliding back door and sat down like an elderly man on the steps outside. “Couldn’t tell you,” I said softly. “If I knew of an experiment to show it that didn’t rely on luck, I’d be writing a thesis on it.”

I mechanically rolled myself a conical, filterless cigarette and lit it.

“Dan,” said Shiva, “this really isn’t gonna do. Try to be happy, man. Get up and move. You’re gonna miss work tomorrow, but you got the hallucinatory voices generally on board with you today. It’s a turning point for you.”

“Is it?” I asked, smiling. “Tomorrow, the narrative is going to be completely different. This will have never happened, or it’ll become inconsequential in some contrived and nonsensical turn of events, and I might even scare or hurt someone if I actually believe it.”

I could hear Allah say something like, “We were wrong,” to much disappointment from the world in my head as if over a loud-speaker.

“Aw, brother,” said a trick of the light, or a benevolent god of destruction, “I don’t think you really have it in you to intentionally hurt anyone in a big way. You’ve been through this. You’re not gonna fly off the handle.”

I sighed.

“Dance for me, Dan,” said Shiva.

“Dance?” I asked.

“Put on a song and dance for the crowd,” he said.

I smirked. He was appealing to my daemon.

I scrolled through my phone and found Anamanaguchi’s “Akira.”

“Chiptune?” asked Shiva.

I hit play and hopped up.

“I am Tetsuo!” I shouted. No one would hear me.

“At least you’re not Jesus,” said Shiva.

“Nobody and everybody is,” I said.

I swung my hips, trying to ride the wave of the music and the night’s impossible excitement. I wanted to dance for a man who had been released from death row after over two decades when he had been there because of the color of his skin. I wanted to dance for a young girl who survived the explosion of a forgotten landmine in Afghanistan. I wanted to dance for the world, but in the quiet, dark hours of the morning on the steps of a million dollar home in one of the most affluent regions in the world, it felt disingenuous. I could only dance for myself, and my imaginary good fortune, and my real good fortune.

“That’s a pretty white dance, Dan,” said Shiva.

“It pains me to my core,” I replied, continuing to gyrate.

I heard a furor over whatever statement Al was making. I didn’t want to know what it was.

“Hey, Dan,” said Shiva, “ten…”

“Ten?” I responded, trying to keep rhythm.

“Nine,” said Shiva. I heard a plane in the distance.

“Eight,” he said. A roar went up from the world of my dreams.

“Seven,” we said together.

“Six,” I said, spinning on my left foot.

“Five,” said a host of the spirit. I clenched my teeth.

“Four,” I said, straining my balance. The crowd was quiet.

“Three,” Shiva said with me. The plane was getting closer.

“Two,” said Shiva in my head. ‘What for?’ I wondered, preparing for nothing.

“…One.”

I flinched. I could swear I heard someone physically speak that in the neighborhood.

The aircraft buzz-cut the house. I saw the narrow hull pass directly overhead. It looked like a drone, but it was dark.

“Repeatability, Dan,” said Shiva, “could be furnished by the quantum suicide experiment if you’re lucky. To remove human error, you might leave the whole process up to a quantum random number generator, autopilot, and an automatic release mechanism on a small explosive device. You’d be guaranteed success, but you’d end up living in a world that couldn’t figure out how you did it again.”

I hadn’t stopped dancing. “That device wasn’t actually rigged to do that,” I told myself.

“But they are actually spying on you,” said Shiva.

A cheer went up around the world, or nothing happened.

“Dan!” squeaked my delusional pseudo-girlfriend, “Dan, are you alive?”

“He’s alive, Kat,” said Shiva.

“I’m terrified, relieved, insane, and dreaming,” I said.

She gave me an Astral hug, which is like the better part of a physical hug without physical contact, or just really being too into a hug you’re imagining.

“What does the world do now, Dan?” asked Bastet.

“Don’t know; don’t care,” I said, dancing.

“If you were us,” she said, “and you knew that the world wasn’t going to admit a global conspiracy to Dan tomorrow, how would you stop him from throwing himself off a bridge?”

“…Math and vodka,” I said.

“Pay me a visit in Delaware sometime soon,” said a blue skinned idealization of my oldest friend, “and I will furnish both.”

Needless to say, I didn’t get any more sleep that night. Luckily, math and vodka were at hand, and I enjoyed a drink at sunrise.

My parents were home soon from visiting family overnight, and we talked for a bit. They could see I hadn’t slept, (I didn’t try to hide it,) and I told them the “voices” had been loud the previous night, but they seemed happy that I appeared to have some insight and wasn’t terrified or angry. At that point, if I believed the fantasy I was forced to watch contort and twitch out in my mind like a spasming muscle, I wouldn’t be angry. Very little gets me riled these days.

Of course, nothing of significance transpired. I took a day off, but beyond that, life continued as usual in its inexorable trudge to the day proof outweighs superstition in my fragile, political, demon haunted world.

I’ll welcome it with math and vodka.

The morning light of the spring day shined from a clear sky, cool and white on the lawn and burgeoning flower buds in my cloistered hiding spot. I pulled apart old butts in my ashtray to roll myself a cigarette. There was just enough distance from my family and neighbors to talk to myself in private. It could be difficult to furnish a private patch of ground some days to pace and catch up with my “friends.” I often run out to the woods, hide behind buildings, stake out stretches of sidewalk in parking lots, or hasten to the four corners of my family members’ lawns when “friends” demand my attention. Mind you, these aren’t friends in a literal sense, or a corporeal one, or even a real one, and I know this.

I know it, but my “friends” don’t. Maybe sometimes they act like they do, but unreality doesn’t mean they have any fewer rights than anyone, according to them. After all, they have achieved a unified world government, in my head, and by milder forms of torture I am compelled to respect the democratic will of the people, that don’t exist. I am not a participant in their government, and they have a tendency to attempt to legislate uncontrollable objective fact into reality, but they are quite proud of their unified world government and take offense when I point out that it’s a figment of my imagination, and this all happens on quiet cool mornings in the spring when I’m alone in my parents’ yard, on days like this.

“…and that’s the plan,” she concluded in a lispy, whistling, little tone. She was a cat god, or a representative of the astral left wing, or a simulacrum of an ex-girlfriend I hadn’t given up on, and for all these reasons she was generally the go-between for me and the Council, as they called their primary legislature. All I can make of the compelling experience of so many conversations with Bastet, is that she must be some kind of squeaky protector personality I’ve gradually solidified through so many years of being unable to cope with not living in a world like in video games, and she gets me into trouble.

“It’ll be like Heaven,” she added with a motion of her hands like twinkling stars. “Everybody’s physical incarnations get one instance of magic they can show to one other person.”

I took a deep drag off the second generation cigarette. “That is,” I said, “if the tidal forces don’t rip you to shreds first.”

She gawked and chuckled. “What do you mean by that?”

“You want to basically calculate forward a simulation of earth from a time surface in our physical history, and do some hack job on it to allow impossible nonphysical effects?”

“Or highly unlikely effects, ya,” she said.

I muttered, “You couldn’t come close with every cluster on the planet,” looking over my shoulder for neighbors.

She snorted. “Oh, it already works.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Really,” she assured me with a huff.

“So you managed to simulate some sort of approximation to both general relativity and quantum mechanics at the scale of, what, a planet? A solar system? A galaxy? You didn’t even do that, and it looked like the simulation was stable for a month, maybe?”

“Pretty much,” she said.

I slapped my face. “No, you didn’t! At best, with every cluster on earth chugging away on this, in any reasonable period of time, you could have made some cut rate quantum general relativity simulation hold together nicely, maybe, for about a fraction of a second in our frame. And it never happened.”

“Wouldn’t you figure? But it works. ‘Unbewievable,’ isn’t it?” she joked.

“This conversation isn’t happening anyway,” I said, “so it’s completely freaking moot, but when are you boarding the death trap pseudo world?”

She wouldn’t look me in the third eye. “Oh, um, already.”

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“Some unspecified time in the past,” she said. “Like, yesterday, I guess.”

I scanned the street for signs of intelligent life. “I’m not having this conversation.”

“Is that an observation or a dismissal?” she asked. “Stop doing that.”

I ashed my cigarette. “Stop doing what?”

She squeaked in a whisper, “…looking around like you’re cwazy.”

I groaned. “The only sane part of this conversation is that I’m keeping an eye out for the neighbors.”

“Nope. It’s me.” She said.

“What’s you?” I asked

“You are,” she said.

“You are?” I parroted.

“Yes, you are the only sane part of this conversation, and all men are Socrates.”

“Back to the point,” I blurted, “general relativistic cosmology is really sensitive to the energy density in space. Someone magically turns their genitals the size of an astronomical object to appease a fetish, and your simulation could crunch into a sub-Planck volume in literally a fraction of a second.”

“So what?” she asked. “Nothing new. Penis enlargement magic always backfires.”

“But your program can’t work,” I insisted.

“It’s Heaven!” she shouted back. “Don’t think about it too hard. It’s Allah’s initiative, anyway, so I wouldn’t worry that he’d approve any requests for intergalactic space elevator penii.”

“I’m supposed to believe that I’m in a simulation right now?” I asked.

“I dunno,” she replied.

“What are you using to simulate it?” I demanded.

“I dunno,” she repeated. “That astronomical penis thing sounds hot. Maybe my boyfriend will do that for me.”

“See, my point is, humanity isn’t ready for this,” I told her, peering into my folks’ kitchen. “It’s not happening anyway, but people couldn’t even generally agree whether it all started with a big bang or angels flying out of Allah’s ass. Politicians aren’t cosmologists, so how would you expect to be able to grant nonphysical exceptions without killing ourselves?”

“Heaven!” she shouted, waving her hands and fingers—or whatever you call those wispy, astral tendril things—about like twinkly bits of bullshit explanation.

“We don’t even know if quantum and general relativistic theory are fundamental. How did you handle the possibility of multiple quantum worlds? You still haven’t even explained how you could simulate something on that scale.”

I felt her fidget in my spatio-tactile head space. “Well, RIM is handling it.”

“RIM?!” I yelled. “You’re putting the entire world economy on the Blackberry app market?”

She invoked the little girl voice she used when I got angry and she thought she was cute. “I mean, they work with the Pewimeteh Institute.”

In consternation, I lifted my gaze to the sky. Clouds had started to form. The mid morning sun was evolving into a hazier shade of pale afternoon. A gust of wind blew gently in a wave across the lawn.

I took a deep breath. “You know what? It’s not my problem. The apparent reality of any of this is localized entirely within my head, but not even all of it—just the corner you’re squatting in. Anything follows from a contradiction, therefore angels will fly out of Al’s ass and fix all the world’s problems if I have lunch now. Enjoy the tidal forces.”

She hit what I am begrudgingly forced to refer to as my astral body, for lack of better terminology, with a wave of reddish purple warbling emanations as I got up, and I nearly lost my balance.

In a squeaky whisper, she told me, “You don’t have to be nasty! Mehhhh! Al still wants to talk with you.”

I opened the door and headed into the house. ‘I don’t give a crap,’ I thought at her.

I walked into the kitchen, opened the freezer, removed a bagel, and put it on a plate in the microwave. I like bagels. It might be more appropriate to say that I love bagels, actually. I am not a morning person, or even an afternoon person, for that matter. I prefer to be up from seven post meridian to ten in the morning from the night before. When I can’t live on my vampire schedule, mornings are hell. Bagels are one of three things that make daylight in my biological morning bearable. I walk around with eyes half closed, until I have a cigarette, two cups of coffee, and a bagel with artificial dairy free spread. Bastet had chosen to try to convince me that I was living in a broken hack job of a universe, which I already suspect some days, before my bagel and my second cup of coffee. When it isn’t a simulated reality, it’s artificial brain implants. When it isn’t artificial brain implants, it’s the Apocalypse, and always before my bagel and my second cup of coffee.

The microwave signaled completion. I removed my bagel and carried it along with my coffee and a container of Spirit Balance over to the kitchen table. As I can’t-belive-it’s-sort-of-buttered my bagel, I peered across the dimensional divide in the kitchen through the regal hall terminating in Allah’s white throne, thinking about how gauche the modern gothic vaults and arches were. I dropped the bagel and not-butter knife and put my face in my hands.

“Is that vegan?” asked Bastet.

‘The spread?’ I asked in my head, not lifting my face from my hands. ‘Yeah, it says it’s dairy free.’

“I didn’t know that!” she said. “Have you ever tried nutritional yeast with that?”

‘That sounds good, actually,’ I thought, trying to ignore the elephant in the kitchen of my mind’s eye. ‘It’d probably taste like marmite.’

“I love marmite,” said the Egyptian cat god.

“I would like a minute of your time,” said Allah.

“I would like to go back and undrink all that cough syrup when I was 19,” I mumbled under my breath. I’m sure my parents in the next room pricked up.

One might wonder why some underemployed hack from New Jersey is sought out by millenia old deities from across historical human cultures in his paranoid fantasies. Well, there was the cough syrup. I would like to say that is explanation enough, except, holding to this self evident truth, I don’t stop having paranoid delusions. The long and short of the nominal explanation that my hallucinations assert, is that I am some critical component of a singular dimensional anomaly. That is, I am crazy special. My big boy imaginary friends tell me that I’m kind of a “coaxial hyper-point in a high risk period in human history,” (Aren’t we all?) while I cover my ears, sing “La-la-la-la-la…” and remind them of how not real they are, because they could at least materialize a bagel in my hand and a hundred in my pocket if they were really kind and just omnipotent gods. The part about being a dimensional anomaly might have something to do with reading my tarot cards every day after shuffling them via a quantum random algorithm—parallel worlds and that bullshit. That is, my daily tarot reading routine has been contorted through the wringer of lingering brain damage from cough syrup overdose and a desperate need to feel special in a bleak world.

With a flourish of his hand, a document appeared before Allah. He always had to do that. He couldn’t just pull the document out of a drawer or even just have it ready before he started talking to you. He had to make everything look like he was the all-powerful deity he acted, and more than half of it was smoke and mirrors that he had to keep up every moment lest the Christians, Muslims, or Jews see him. I swear I once saw him use one of those cheesy math tricks on a supplicant like on the David Copperfield television specials, and the person actually knelt to him afterward, because “God’s” P.R. department was almost as good as Steve Jobs’. I’d put money on the number one most infamous resurrection having been pulled off with a look-alike, but that was a whole other can of worms. I just find it suspect how Al’s politics don’t seem at all to coincide with those of his purported “son,” a rebel against the government, the theocracy, and exactly the brand of bullshit I had to put up with from the Council.

As he levitated the document over to me, I was slightly surprised by the lack of tremolo sound effects. “The council has reached an agreement on the quantum ontology of the new world. As a formality, we would like—”

‘You can’t legislate reality,’ I cut him off in my head. ‘Let me guess what ontology you went with.’

“We passed a vote with an overwhelming majority for deBroglie-Bohm. If for no other reason, a singular deterministic model should reduce the necessary overhead—”

I let my head fall back and groaned. My parents would be understandably piqued by that.

‘It shouldn’t reduce any overhead at all,’ I thought at Allah. ‘A true deBroglie-Bohm simulation would be reliant on the same universal wave function as many-worlds for its pilot wave, which means you’re trying to do a butcher number on reality, of course, and it’s really for your aesthetic, anyway. Most of you self styled gods love the idea of singular deterministic reality at the scope of your own affairs. Save your breath. It’s a formality to ask the dimensional anomaly, and I’m not signing it, and you’re a figment of my imagination, and I haven’t had my bagel and second cup of coffee.’ I picked up my bagel and stared longingly into its hole.

You-Can-Call-Me-Al motioned toward my parents in the next room. “We are aware of your need to keep up appearances on your earthly plane. Therefore, we have arranged that by eating your bagel, you will signal your agreement to the resolution in an unmistakable physical act while maintaining secrecy—”

I dropped my bagel and pounded the table.

“I can’t believe anyone takes you seriously in politics anymore!” I shouted aloud.

“Dan?!” my mother called from the living room, with urgency in her voice.

I took my phone out of my pocket. “It’s this bastard in the White House, Ma!” I said. “I’m reading the news on my phone. I’m sorry.”

“Oh…” my mother replied.

“What’d the president do?” Bastet put me on.

‘Probably something I should be genuinely angry about,’ I thought, ‘whereas I’m just frustrated with some kind of compulsory delusion that world politics could hinge on me eating my bagel.’

“Your parents are worried,” said Allah. “It is exactly this sort of situation we sought to avoid. Therefore, we have arranged hidden cameras in the yard, so that when we verify you have eaten your bagel—”

I looked around as he spoke. The coast was clear. I raised both middle digits and waved them to the trees, smiling, trying to invoke the restless spirit of Tricky Dick. ‘Are the cameras that aren’t there in the trees? I’m gonna pretend that the cameras that aren’t really there are supposed to be in the trees.’

I took my bagel, not a bite in it, over to the trash and slid it in with a thud that perfectly emphasized how I felt. ‘You ruined my appetite, but the gesturing means I’m all on board. I just didn’t want to blow my cover as an unwilling paranoid schizophrenic who hates the gods, but we’re all good. Nobody suspects that I was actually vainly signaling to the indispellable pseudohallucinations that they can do whatever the fuck they want so long as they keep the guy they insist is a dimensional anomaly out of it.’

“You know, I think you might be crazy,” said Bastet, sticking out her tongue.

‘The delusions just feel so really delusional, I must be crazy!’ I replied in my head. ‘I’m gonna go work on my game project, now.’

With the levels of coffee and bagel in my blood dangerously low, I trudged upstairs, scowling, middle fingers flying high for the nonexistent cameras. Through the windows, the clouds had darkened. I heard a rolling thunderclap in the distance.

I sat down at my computer and tried to somehow shrug off chronic psychosis. One of my biggest dreams in an overpopulated, demon haunted world with a failing economy, dwindling fuel reserves, and a warming climate is to channel my frustration with the dark reality of it all through my 150 credits worth of physics degrees into a game that will open quantum theory and the joys of schizophrenia to a broader audience, by allowing people to poke these topics with a controller. Being a realist, I’ve begun to think that this might never come to fruition. Three major impediments stand between the schizophrenic and meaningful technical/artistic expression. One is disorganized thought and behavior. Another is shortened life expectancy, in significant part due to suicide or accident. The third is that, every time you try to sit down to work on something, pseudohallucinations psychically entreat you to save the world.

As I turned on my computer, I began to notice the chanting and overcrowding of the head space in my room. Spirit beings weren’t actually flitting around holding a candlelight vigil, but telling them this wouldn’t make them go away. I had to think, ‘What the hell is going on?’

“We’re against the simulated reality project and your constant mistreatment by the Council,” said one of the protestors that weren’t actually there. ‘While we have been outvoted on converting the world over to an artificial medium, we particularly disagree with the choice of quantum ontology the right wing has pushed for in the new universe, and we are here to support your work on an alternative program.”

It’s kind of hard to censor what you say when you imagine people to be privy to your thoughts. ‘What the fuck are you going on about?’

“Hackers from around the world have tirelessly fought to crack the government firewalls on your computer and neural implants, and, realizing you were in development of your own rogue relativistic quantum mechanics simulation software, we broke through the military defense blockade around the Potemkin city you have been confined to—“

I was startled by a knock at my door. “Dan,” said my mother, worry audible in her voice.

“One minute, Mom!” I said.

I looked over the books on my shelf. The imaginary protestors watched over my shoulder.

“I don’t even know how to try to fix this anymore,” I thought aloud. “Well, I could try this,” I grabbed a soft cover quantum information theory text off the shelf, “this,” a short paperback on general relativity, “and… oh, definitely this,” and volume one of a two volume set on quantum field theory, also conveniently in paperback.

“Dan?” came my mother’s voice again.

With books in hand, I opened the door. My mother looked haggard. “Dan, your father and I are worried about you. It seems like you haven’t slept, and your fingers are all black and brown from picking through your ashtray, and you didn’t eat—you threw an entire bagel in the trash—and we think you might have been talking to someone who wasn’t there before—“

“Mom, let’s go to the hospital,” I said. “I’m packed.”

“Oh, really?” she asked.

‘It’s all part of the right’s ploy!’ I thought emphatically at the nonexistent protestors. ‘I’ve been through this! The more I cooperate, the faster I can get through their veiled attempt to imprison me and prevent me from working on an alternative to Perimeter’s two bit reality! Stay strong, brothers!’

“Yeah, I’m sure, Mom, but I’m hungry for pretty much anything but a bagel,” I said.

My mother looked relieved. “Oh?! Well, we can get you a sandwich on the way!”

“Stay strong, brother,” shouted so many compelling impossibilities.

‘Yeah, thanks, ya fucking mooks,’ I thought under my breath.

The skies gave way under the weight of the rain as we walked out to the car and embarked for the hospital. My parents stopped for eggplant sandwich for me, and I cracked jokes about receiving radio transmissions on my cavity fillings. We’ve been at this long enough that I think my parents could actually tell I was just being funny. The doctors in the emergency room, however, are even more full of themselves than the heads of state in my head. Getting through intake, though, I have a week I can spend furthering my physics studies. Trying to ground myself in science never really seems to help with the psychosis, though.

The storm kicked up harder and harder, hour to hour, and lasted through the night. As the rain and gale force winds rushed against the windows of the ward and the thunder boomed, all I could think of was people using magic to grow their sex characteristics in a quickly collapsing false universe. “Enjoy the tidal forces!” I remember shouting, as my nightly medication kicked in and I began to drift away.

I don’t consider myself a religious person. In fact, I’m basically an atheist. I gave up religion and magic years ago for a course of rigorous physical study. I’ve nearly completed my masters in physics. I’ve taught the subject. I’ve worked for a government lab. No matter how obvious it is to me rationally that my hallucinations aren’t real, knowing this doesn’t divest them of their power to ruin my morning. Schizophrenia is an ineffable thing. Maybe the lucky resilient phenotypes can channel these experiences into shamanism, art, and religion, but it stymies me where this all comes from.

Bastet insists that it comes from being a dimensional anomaly. It’s probably a good thing that I don’t believe in “God,” per se.

Here I was, again, in a bare room, empty except for a worn-out bed.

“You’re getting what’s coming to you,” said a voice that I knew wasn’t in the room.

“It’s your fault he’s in here,” said another to the first.

I waited, and breathed. Eventually, the door opened. A man in a tweed blazer and matching pants came in with a chair and a pad and pen, and sat down towards the left side of the bed.

He glanced over and said, “Your parents brought you in because they said you were talking to someone who wasn’t there again, Daniel.”

I didn’t want to be dissected for this all over. “What time is it?” I asked him.

He clicked his pen and readied his pad. “How long have you heard this voice for?”

His question rolled past me without ever really drawing the balance of my attention. By now, I knew that answering a question like that amounted to a distraction. I needed to concentrate; how could I leave that room without being forced back?

The only other person in the room looked at his watch. He jotted something on his pad and asked me, “Is the voice speaking to you right now?”

I drew my bare legs up under me and smoothed the front of my gown over them, tucking the excess beneath my knees and sitting on it like hospital corners. The worn foam mattress made a sound like crunching snow when I redistributed my load.

It made me start. “What’s the weather like outside?” I asked. The room didn’t have a window.

My interrogator didn’t react. The expression frozen on his face was newly familiar to me, since a few weeks ago. Against my better reason, I’d hoped that the interview wasn’t one-way.  My heart sunk a little deeper in its foxhole.

He asked, “What does the voice tell you?”

I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples with the fingers of my left hand. If I completely ignored him, this was going to get worse.

Without opening my eyes, I said, “Look, you don’t get it. It’s not like I confuse what you call ‘the voice’ with a person physically in the room with me who’s speaking. I don’t want to talk about it, though, because you and everyone who comes into this room to talk with me treats me like I’m too naïve and addled to pick up on the pathology you’re driving towards when you call what I hear ‘the voice.’ You probably figure ‘the voice’ wakes me up at night to tell me to burn down churches, or something ridiculous like that.”

I looked up as I heard my keeper fidget to attention. He clicked his pen and quickly readied it on the surface of his pad. “Does it tell you to burn down churches?” he asked.

“Of course not,” I said, “but I can tell you expect something like that. It’s not like I think the voice of God is speaking through my dog. I know it’s in my head, and I can distinguish it completely from someone physically speaking to me, like you.”

The doctor spoke slowly and gently, “Are you always sure it’s not physically in the room with you? Other people have heard you speak with it aloud.”

“It’s in my head,” I told him. “It can ‘hear’ me whether I think at it or speak. Sometimes, when I get frustrated, it’s just more satisfying to shout back aloud.”

I could see the pad shake. The back tip of his pen waved at me furiously and chaotically over the edge of the up-tilted cardboard backing.

He looked up. “You say you shout back. Does it shout at you sometimes?”

I sighed. “I know you’re gonna get the wrong impression. It’s really more like I’m shouting with it. We’re shouting back at the world, like it’s some kind of romantic catharsis and at least God’s going to hear us–which is obviously kind of ludicrous. I’m a cheeseball like that, though, and my friend gets a kick out of it, too. Once, we were smoking out in the backyard, and he asked me to howl at the moon for him. I swear I had every dog in the neighborhood howling with me. It’s the kind of thing I’d never try if I didn’t listen to him.”

My evaluator seemed excited as he scribbled something else I couldn’t see, and dotted it audibly, with a flourish of the pen. I chuckled under my breath at how ridiculous the note probably was: “Patient appears to think he talks to animals and is made of cheese.”

He looked up impatiently when he heard me laugh. “What’s funny?”

Crap. “Oh, nothing. Really,” I said.

I could see the flashbulb pop in the attic of his mind. “Was the voice talking to you just now?”

“No, I just thought of something funny about my situation,” I replied. ‘You’re convinced I thought I was talking to aliens, though,’ I added in my head.

“What was it?” he prodded.

“That what you’re doing really wouldn’t help me even if I was psychotic,” I said.

He put the pad down in his lap and brought the tips of his fingers together in front of his face. “Dan, I think you were talking to the voice.”

It actually would have been laughable how wrong he was if this guy didn’t have the authority to force me to take antipsychotics via injection. “Really? I wasn’t.”

He had a look on his face like this was supposed to be some kind of debate he was winning. “Dan, you’ve said that you’re God. Tell me what you mean.”

“I’m basically a pantheist; I think everyone’s God. I think we all participate in the same irreducible physical system, more-or-less.”

He scratched his beard. “What do you mean by a ‘reducible physical system?’”

I might as well have told him I thought he was the direct reincarnation of Louis XIV. “An irreducible physical description of a system cannot be broken into complete descriptions of smaller subsystems. In other words, there’s no way to fully understand me without a full description of my environment. What I mean is that you more-or-less have to understand a universe to totally understand any single person in it.”

My interlocutor looked unimpressed. “I’m not sure I understand. What does that have to do with you being God? Do you understand the entire universe?”

I looked down at the dusty beige tile floor, for a change from looking at the dusty beige walls. “No, I’m nowhere near understanding the universe. But if you ask what I believe in, I’ll tell you I believe in the universe as a singular whole. I might as well call it the Tao, or talk about it like it’s a deity, because that’s somehow the closest parallel in most people’s minds to what I believe in. Somehow, I end up in the emergency psych ward, though.”

The doctor’s expression softened, a bit. “But you practice magic,” he said. “Why would you practice magic if you don’t believe in a deity?”

“I dunno, if I’m wrong and there is a deity, maybe I’ll be able to shoot fireballs from my hand at some point, and then I guess I’d know, wouldn’t I? The word ‘magic’ is a convenient handle on what I don’t fully understand, and its practice is a test of what I think I do understand. Poetic expression lets me style myself as God, or Buddha, or the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, because I think of myself as an essential part of the same universe as them–just like I think you or anybody is, too. Everyone shares a common greater identity.”

“Do you think you might be grandiose?” he asked.

“I think this dude’s grandiose,” said a voice that I knew wasn’t in the room. I froze. Something in me whispered, “We’re never going to make sense to most people. It’s tragic, but people will turn pathology on someone who stands in clear opposition to their own particular set of cultural delusions. As far as he’s concerned, Dan, you’re sick.”

The doctor saw me flinch. “Was that the voice?”

“But the doctor’s right!” shouted another voice only I could hear. “You really are a lunatic—that’s obvious. I don’t trust you when you’re free to walk around my neighborhood. You’re a drunk, and a bad influence, and a cultist. Plus you’re just a loser, ya derp. You’re never getting out of this with your head intact. Go back to school, derp.”

I clenched. “Fuck you…” I muttered.

“Who are you talking to?” the doctor asked.

“A self-standing personification I’ve created of everything I hate in the world!” I barked.

The psychiatrist flinched. “I don’t understand what that means,” he said.

“Then you might as well call her a demon! Same friggin’ difference, in some vaguely pseudo-Jungian sense.”

His eyes bulged. “A demon? But it’s a ‘she,’ then? I still don’t know what you mean. Tell me more about her.”

“She’s a social-climbing busy-body who thinks she’s matured wonderfully since her high school and college drinking days and now aspires to the apex of the middle.”

“You think you’re so damn witty, ya derp,” she quipped back.

The doctor squinted at me. “But she’s a demon?”

I shrugged. “Sure. There’s college in hell.”

“Does she have a name?” he asked.

“Iwonna,” I said.

“Iwonna?” he repeated.

I nodded. “As in ‘I wonna pony.’”

“I’ll have your head,” she whispered. Somehow, I identified the twitch-inducing shock I felt at the base of my spine as her doing.

The doctor started taking notes again as he spoke. “You talked about your friend before—the one who asked you to howl at the moon. Is this her?”

“No,” I told him. “I mean, these are all me. They’re parts of my head. But the ‘friend’ I mentioned is another self-standing ‘voice’ I’ve known all my life. He stands up to what Iwonna represents in my head.”

The furrow in the doctor’s brow gradually deepened. “Is he a demon, too?”

“I told you he wouldn’t get us,” came the voice of my unseen friend.

I groaned. “Call him the ghost of J. D. Salinger,” I said.

“Is he dead, then?” asked the psychiatrist.

“Are you dead?” I thought at the voice.

“I think so,” the voice replied.

“He says he thinks so,” I told the psychiatrist.

He stopped writing and put the pen down for a second. Then he picked it back up and opened his mouth, and closed it. He looked up at the beige ceiling and chewed on the end of the implement for a moment, squinting. Then he put it back to the pad’s surface and said, “Tell me everything you can about the late Mr. Salinger.”

“Still doesn’t get it,” said my friendlier daemon.

I felt my muscles twitch under the weight of imaginary shackles. My breathing came shallow and rapid. I wanted to cry, and I ranted at him, ‘manic’ and ‘paranoid’: “He doesn’t pretend to understand the world, but he knows that the obvious path through life is the wrong one! We’ve watched so many people get caught up in this unending loop of just doing what’s expected until they have extra time to analyze whether or not what they’re doing is what they actually want or need to do! They figure ‘I’ll just get my degree while I think about what I really want to do,’ and they pour themselves into school, and then they figure ‘I’ll get my next degree while I’m thinking about it,’ and they end up doing homework all week until they’re too fried to do anything but drink on the weekends until they graduate, and then it’s the next house, and then it’s the next car, and then it’s the next gadget, and then it’s the next spouse, and before they know it, they’ve lived the entirety of their lives as prescribed by the previous generation, supporting an old way of living they never really took the time to question, when they had to claim the opportunity to reject it all along, because that’s the point of the paper-chase—that’s why it was set up for them that way! They were supposed to feel bad about being happy without the ‘iPhoney’ and the BMW and the respect of a majority of shallow people! They were supposed to feel bad about setting their own standards!”

“Calm down, Dan,” said the late Mr. Salinger.

“Dan, I think you’re being somewhat grandiose,” said the doctor. “This doesn’t have anything to do with why you were hospitalized last month, or why you’re in the emergency ward again today. Your parents, in particular, are very worried about you. Your friends are very worried about you. I’m worried about you. You seem to have a degree of insight, but you need to address why you’re coping this way, why you’ve personified these feelings so strongly as to talk to ‘the voices’ in public.”

“He half gets it,” said my friend.

I drew my arms into my abdomen and clenched. “I don’t know how to communicate with her—with Iwonna. She doesn’t really want to communicate, I guess. I don’t think it really matters how I try to talk with her.”

The doctor bit the end of the pen again. “So what I think you mean is that you feel like people don’t listen to you. It seems you think people like ‘Iwonna’ look down on you for rejecting opportunity, when your intent is to help them and yourself, irregardless of whether it’s effective, or even necessary, or whether this blanket assessment of your peers has any real basis.”

I twitched. “I don’t even know,” I said. “I just wish my friends and family didn’t look at me like I was crazy, when I talk about how I feel, and try to do what I think is right.”

He carefully and deliberately put the pen and pad to the side on the floor and threaded his fingers in front of his face. He stared at them for a moment. He sighed and closed his eyes.

They opened with a jolt. “Dan, your parents were naturally worried by your decision to drop out of school—and because you started talking to people who weren’t there—but I think you manifest these particular ‘voices’ because they were at least willing, or even compelled, to listen to you, even though you never expected your peers or ‘Iwonna’ to ever listen to what you had to say.”

I rolled my eyes. “You’re right, Doc’,” I said, “nobody gives a crap. Nobody gets it, or cares to.”

He nodded and squinted. “Mhm. Believe it or not, Dan, I see a lot of unhappy teenagers and young adults come through this hospital, not unlike you, clutching ragged copies of Salinger. Whether voluntary or involuntary, coping this way means that someone will listen and react in awareness when you try to dissect your world, whereas maybe your peers really are more concerned with homework, drinking, and their cell phones. Why shouldn’t they be? Frankly, your friends and family probably won’t ever care in the way you want, about your spirituality and your dysfunction, and no one wants to be alone in their innermost self, in the parts of me most important to me,” he said, poking his left breast with his thumb. “If there is a payoff, here, maybe this arrangement takes a vague and expansive set of uncomfortable feelings and ideas and turns them into an obvious and explicit conflict, which is ultimately easier for you to understand and cope with.”

“He gets it!” shouted the ghost.

“Fucking quack,” said the demon.

The doctor asked, “Have you been taking the medication you were prescribed since your last hospitalization?”

“I have,” I told him in truth. “My parents make me swallow it in front of them,” I said, adding in my head, ‘and if being compelled to take drugs to change the way I think isn’t literal “mind control,” I don’t know what is.’

“So they told me,” said the doctor. “Dan, for all the advances mental health has made in decades, the truth is that there’s relatively little we can do for you besides titrating you and keeping you on an antipsychotic, and providing you with a therapist to talk with. The primary function of a hospital admission is to titrate you under close supervision. The secondary function is basically protective. I’ve explained this to your parents. They gave me the details you aren’t telling me, and it sounds like the symptoms are actually gradually responding.” He looked over his glasses at me. “In a week, we’ll reassess that. They tell me you haven’t missed a dose, though. They tell me they want to support you in any way they can. They told me in great detail how your behavior has changed since titration, but they don’t understand why the ‘voices’ haven’t gone way. I’m not sure that your parents appreciate the breadth and severity of your diagnosis, yet, and its full implications. Thank God for small favors, Dan, your parents love you, and I think you can understand it, when I say all this to you.”

He took a cloth out of his pocket to wipe his glasses, and sighed. “They certainly love you, Dan. They’re new to this, and they want to flip a switch back and return you to how you were before you presented what could very likely turn out to be a–God-willing, manageable–lifelong chronic disease. I’m explaining this rather bluntly, when you were brought here in a suspected state of psychosis, but I think you’re an unusually intelligent person capable of benefiting from some frankness, right now. Am I scaring you?”

I shook off a death sentence. “This is the least scary thing anyone has said to me in a month,” I said. “Does modern medicine honestly believe that the way to treat mental illness is to strip a person of all reminders of his identity, isolate in him in cold light, condescend to him, and force psychotropic substances down his throat? Why in God’s name is this the first time someone has put it to me this way?!”

He groaned. “…Because speaking reason to psychosis usually doesn’t work, Dan. Not this quickly, at least. And most people in psychotic episodes couldn’t be videotaped attempting to study differential equations out of a soft cover textbook in the involuntary ward. …Small favors, Dan.”

“You should provide the soft cover texts in the emergency room, rather than leaving me to grab hold of one for dear life on the way in, and you should see what happens!” I gave him my expert opinion. “Wait–the pen is too dangerous, of course.”

“I also suggest maintaining weekly therapy sessions. I hear you are trying to take steps to establish financial independence from your parents, as you can. Many people in your situation, here, have no choice but to do so as quickly as possible. Hopefully, you’ll be able to, in time,” he added. “Your parents will likely continue to think it’s the illness’ fault so long as you don’t want a Porsche.”

I laughed. “My dad offered me a Camaro to—“

“He told me. You’d rather ride a bicycle and howl at the moon.”

I shook my head. My parents really aren’t that way.

“You’re right—they’re not,” said Iwonna.

“Yes, they are,” said the late Mr. Salinger.

“The one hope the child has of surviving the birth of his identity is committing the most unforgivable crime of matricide,” added Carl Jung, “lest the mother force him immediately back into the womb.”

I winced. “Doctor, that all makes perfect sense, but what about all the other voices that sound like dead historical figures and my ex-girlfriends?”

His eyes turned to saucers.

I disowned the comment with little shakes of my hands. “I’m joking. I’m sorry, I forgot that people sometimes can’t distinguish irony and abstraction from a disease.”

Now, he winced. “Stop reading Freud. You’re going to take the medication in front of your parents every night for the next week, at least. Any breach, and you’re going to have to go into the hospital. If you comply, we reassess at the end of the week.”

I fell back relieved against the fourth beige wall. “Doctor, can I ask you one more question?”

“What’s that?” he asked.

Feeling a little sheepish, I asked, “Do you think I have a point about the world?”

He seemed to reflect carefully. There was a moment of awkward tension. Then he said, “I’ll get the paperwork started on your release.” He got up from his chair, picked his pad and pen back up, and then walked to the door and opened it.

Standing in the doorway, he turned and said to me, “Mr. Strano, do you know how many people I see come into this hospital every week claiming to be either Holden Caulfield or Jesus?”

“How many?” I asked him.

“About seven. Can you guess how many of them attempt to hurt themselves or someone else?”

“How many?” I asked again.

“About as many as students in amphetamine induced psychosis,” he said. “Goodnight, Daniel. Maybe you’re somewhat better off thinking everyone’s Jesus.”

Iwonna sent another jolt up my spine. I flinched. “Goodnight, doctor,” I said after a moment. “Thank you,” I added, as he closed the door.

I took a deep breath in, down into the pit in my stomach, then let it slowly out. I was alone, again, in a room with four beige walls.