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 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.