loving a lie

When Bill stood, his body was kernels popping in a microwave. Because the webwork under his skin showed thru like the insides of the rice paper wrap his wife packed him for lunch, he moved each notecard behind the next as if he were auditioning as a bomb defuser. Little blue spots blistered open on the white cards, invading his speaker’s notes and reminding him that he should probably quit holding his breath.

“I have the strangest feeling I’m losing my mind.” He said, blowing feedback into the microphone.

Bill let the words hang in the air, surveying the thin crowd dressed in their Sunday best. Men in Battlestar Galactica gear balked. Women in World of Warcraft wear wobbled, everyone waiting for him to release the tension he’d built.

“One thing’s certain: You think I’m crazy or are wondering if you might be,” he said, triggering a rumble of polite laughter from people whose outfits cost more than most cars most people could afford.

“It’s a pretty appropriate response. As spry as we are,” he said, giving a light tug to the oxygen tubing snaking around his ears and into his nostrils, “We still aren’t ever really sure we have it figured out. Life’s funny like that, isn’t it?”

Comic conventions had gotten wise. When you weren’t promoting the next Avengers movie, you needed money to pull your event together. Organizers fundraised in exchange for facilities, which was the only reason they could host this in Chicago’s swanky McCormick Place.

As part of their joint venture, authors like Bill were asked to prepare pieces that brought awareness to their sponsors. The Anxiety & Depression Association of America, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the National Health Institute, they all had pokers in today’s fire. 

“These kids we’re supporting aren’t like us. Our empathy reaches a dead end because trauma is different for us than it is for them. Imagine one day you’re fired for something that wasn’t your fault and no one sticks up for you. You go home and your spouse is in bed with the colleague you’d suspected. Loading boxes onto a friend’s pick-up next to your house’s ‘For Rent’ sign, you’re served a subpoena for tax evasion, even after you say your spouse handled the finances. The bank takes your house. You develop a rash on your chest but insurance costs rival Indonesia’s GDP, so you wait to see if it clears on its own.

“All things considered, some of us might still muster enough grit to slink to a homeless shelter and spoon soup to other karmic targets in exchange for a used cot and some broken conversation. We might still find China’s rice-fat iteration of the Buddha at a graffitied alter and remind ourselves thought is the root of suffering. We have lost much, but without our things, without what made us us, we can still scrounge some identity equity. We’ve lived, loved, lost, can become stronger.

“These kids,” Bill said, “They don’t have identity to armor them. There’s no self-esteem shield to protect our abused youth from the trauma of 17 foster homes. That’s where your money comes in. Your support can put more kids into those cosplay outfits you spend so much time on. The next time you get that joy drip suiting up to be someone else, ask yourself, how would it feel to help a child become themselves.”

The laughter had stopped as everyone’s tightened sphincters tried to swallow the wallets they sat on. People hated being publicly shamed, and that’s not what today was about.

“Now that that’s done,” Bill said, trying to bring the crowd back, “As part of our Comic Con Charity, some lucky few of us have been tasked with telling tales to encourage giving. The piece I’ll be sharing was written to bring awareness to these kids who find their minds in a very different state then when they last saw them. Enjoy.”

***

I wake up to piercing shrieks and cross my fingers that they’re not in my head. A fiery poker shoots air in my chest and I gag around what feels like a plastic tube. Fuzzy people-shaped shapes swarm and speak with the trombone clarity of Peanuts’ parents. I’m fastened up onto my right side by straps, and the not-too-tenured inverse cross stamped up my left ribs is being assaulted with a rusty-pronged pitchfork.

I can only grunt, but when the red clears, a golden, impaled martyr attached to a nurse’s chubby neck bumps my face in proverbial mockery. She sports crisp, seafoam scrubs and eyes me like a shelter volunteer does someone wanting all the pitbull puppies. As she changes a sausage bag over my head, she rapes my nose with perfume that had to have come in the same box as her iron-on lashes.

She fluffs my pillow with a forgiveness that can only be described as Christian and allows herself to whisper, “Get well soon now, little Satanist.” Her name tag reads Margaret, but her tobacco-scented words mark her a Marge.

“Uthnohleth ye eeutht,” I say automatically, forgetting my throat is occupied. It’s the first time I’ve spoken. The two of us lock eyes in confused inquiry, both seeming to wonder - one of us hoping - whether I’ve had a stroke. She pushes a nurse button and two others from a similar stock come in to deflate and remove my iron lung. Habit makes Marge thrust a straw at my lips, and while I’m justifiably sure it’s poison, one way or another, even poison soothes a sandpaper larynx. I swallow, experiencing relief rather than a mouth-bubbling, cyanide-style death and try my words again.

“Judge not, lest ye be judged,” I say, and before storming out, her glare is the dark ying to my radiant grinning yang.

Now that I’m alert and what could be considered oriented, in short order I’m visited by the Practitioners of Past, Present and Future. The Past, a towering, hawkish surgeon with a handsome cleft lip confirms I’d been shot. He told me that in my comatose recovery, I’d missed the private ceremony held for the left kidney that gave its life in the line of duty. After confessing I didn’t remember getting plugged, the Present, a hunched forensics analyst with a caterpillar brow more animated than his personality swabs my palms, ignoring how he knew the iodine must have felt on the powder burns. He walks through what he’s doing in the tone a seasoned McDonald’s patron does to order their thousandth Big Mac, his apathy making his pouting, Slavic lips look intentionally clownish.

It’s when he asks about the other scars I find out I’m not yet welcome to say my goodbyes. My name ran across a pink wristband in one of those fonts no one can ever remember the name of. It meant I wasn’t welcome to leave until someone said I wasn’t a danger to anyone. Who they meant by anyone was mostly myself.

It’s all worth it. In the wake of learning about my imprisonment, I’m introduced to the Future, a lab coat goddess with the shrewd, ivy league shrink eyes of a shrink. She looked familiar. Her hair was the way hair was supposed to be, falling in curls that couldn’t have been natural but couldn’t have been anything but. Under the curls, neck muscles pulsed in unison with loudly-smacked chewing gum, drawing attention to a latte-stained collar as she looked down to check a chart for the name she’d already forgotten. “Hello…. Wylie. How are you feeling?”

I look around in faux can’t you tell? “Who’s asking?”

She planted a plain-nailed hand on her chest, creasing her blouse in all the right ways. It was the kind of serendipitous sexual display only the naturally-beautiful could get away with. She said, “My name is Coraline. Are you having any feelings about hurting yourself?”

She needn’t have asked, her tone revealing she’d already decided I did. We give people their histories with a glance, and understandably one look at me told this angelic walking irony the pink slip on my wrist belonged there.

“Are you a Psychiatrist, Coraline?”

She tapped the pen in her left hand against the ID on her blouse’s lapel, inviting another eyeful of décolletage.

“Psychiatry resident, actually.”

“Well then, resident Coraline. I guess I’m feeling like I’d like to speak to a Psychiatrist.”

“Cute. The medical director assigned me to assess your mental state. He tends to give us lowly residents all the low-hanging fruit.” She checked off something on her chart. “Humor’s a good sign.”

“Glad you could decide that for the both of us. Undo these restraints and I’ll show you some low-hanging fruit.”

What looked like a genuine smirk perked through her pretentious getup. “I’ve got you for 72 hours. I’ll come back once you’ve worn yourself out trying to get your little fruit basket out. Take your time.”

***

She had on one of those shirts that comes off less risqué than intended, likely a Hot Topic hot deal. It was a countercultural message made of cotton. A provocative bumper sticker’s tube top doppelganger. It sported an etching of a mammoth, wooden boat coasting a large wave, the arms and legs of half the African animal kingdom stuffed and bursting over the railings on each side. Above the boat, the shirt’s quote, made almost illegible by the two perfectly-teasing breasts stretching the fabric of what had to be a men’s small, read, ‘Utnapishtim’s Ark doesn’t have the same ring to it.’

I raised an eyebrow, “See you dressed for the weather. They let you wear that in here?”

“They don’t let me do anything.” she said, her face briefly breaking into comic defiance, which was really, really sexy. It was day two, and she’d cornered me in the room I was trapped in, trying to get me to say crazy things so she could gossip with the other emotionally-stable grunt residents.

“I just meant, this is a Jewish hospital. It’s kinda, I don’t know, blasphemous?”

“Maybe in the way freedom of speech is blasphemous.”

“You’re just kind of asking for it.”

“What’s the point of Obama’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act giving rights to all religions if it doesn’t also – albeit ironically – extend to the areligious?”

My eyebrow quirked again. I could tell it was going to become a thing. “And you want to use your freedom to advertise what you don’t believe in? Why not wear something you stand for? Shouting what you’re not about is a cheap trick.”

“You don’t stand for truth? Is that what landed you in here? Not believing in what’s real?”

And just like that she’d used her resident powers to make pleasant things less so. Not a resident, then. A witch. Muscles under the patchwork of circular burns peppering my forearm shimmered as I thumbed my wristband.

“That’s why we’re here, Wylie,” she said, and pity was uglier on her than any disfiguring burn. “I believe in the truth and I hope to help you find yours. This,” she tapped her thumb between her breasts, indicating to - I’m sure - the quote, but making me stare at the slowing-shrinking spot her poke had made between those luscious melons, “This is history. The truth. Scholars and skeptics agree Noah’s Ark is a plagiarized version of Utnapishtim’s when he fled Mesopotamia. We know the old testament wasn’t written by God through man. We know all 39 of those disparate texts were scribbled down by various peoples who drew meaning around questions they didn’t have the resources to answer. Today we do, but half the world clings to definitive fictions like a security blanket. They ignore consensus in favor of the comfortable.”

My mouth made the bitter, tired shape it did when I thought about my dad, something others often mistook for a smile. “So the shirt is for me. An analogy.” It wasn’t a question.

“The shirt is to ignite a dialogue. The shirt is a symbol that we don’t have to live in dogmatic fear just because something happened to us that we can’t understand. The shirt is for strength.” She reached into the bag under her chair and withdrew what revealed itself to be a rolled-up shirt. “I have another. Do you want to be strong with me?”

I balked. Not surprised, but embarrassed. Embarrassed for her. “You’re laying it on so thick up there on your behaviorist pedestal you can’t see the hole in what you’re thinking is therapeutic. Aren’t shrinks supposed to make holes shrink?”

She smiled, tossing the shirt at me. “Where’s my hole?”

I caught it, intentionally wasting the layup innuendo opportunity. “Believing in truth is missing the mark. It’s about valuing it, and I don’t give a shit what you think truth is.”

She looked like I slapped her.

“You’re assuming you’re the only one clever enough to think past these chains we’re in,” I said, shaking my actual soft restraints at her in emphasis. “That’s the lie.”

I unrolled the shirt and began to ball it into a tight, jumbled wad.

“Thinking psychopathy is some sickness to be cured.” My breath was husky, huffing loud like a hiss. The pads of my fingers started to sweat, making tearing the shirt really annoying. Blue spots blistered open in front of me, a blue so brilliant they brought me back to a pair of tear-shedding, bombardier eyes attached to arms that would tuck me in every night.

“Well, definitionally, that’s exactly what it is,” she said like my mom would after catching me with gas station gum she knew I hadn’t had money to buy. Coraline couldn’t stop her eyes from sneaking a quick glance at the white line running up the left side of my face into my hair, fashioning my profile with a lopsided widow’s peak.

“You can’t look away, can you? Do you know why people like looking at scars? At the scarred?”

She pursed her lips. “I bet you’re going to tell me.”

“Our fixation with the mauled comes from our fear of death. You know ugly comes from the Norse uggligr, meaning aggressive? It’s like a moral cleft. We like aggression. We’re all just violent voyeurs relishing in the relief that ugliness hit someone else. That’s why if you want to be noticed, all you have to do is mess yourself up.”

Raised lines crashed like waves across my face. Countless badges, each mutilation adding to the quilted trophy case of my body. Looking at her, I knew she wished she was writing this down, though I also suspected, now knowing why she couldn’t look away, that maybe she didn’t want to.

“We misshapen do for you what you can never do for yourselves. We downtrodden make you feel good about who you are, and even as the sight of us makes your gorge rise, you love us for it. You love us for how we make you feel about yourselves. You show us love by giving us scraps of what you think you have and we don’t. And when you always think we need it, you’ll always give it.”

Coraline stared, her eyes only half a degree shy of buggy. Sweat had reached the surface of her suitcoat’s armpits, her body speeding up, preparing to flee. I knew I’d scare her. Others’ misunderstandings were why I was tasked to explain myself so often.

“Just say it. I know it’s begging to loose from your lips. It’s ok, like everything you’re trying to prove, your words only have the power we give them. I don’t sacralize what you do. I don’t worship truth. I don’t bend the knee to whatever you’ve classified as sanity.”

She began retreating back into herself, composing what she could and hiding the leftovers. “I’m going to recommend some more aggressive therapy.” She stood from the folding chair across from his bed. I could see it was painful to do it slowly, carefully.

I giggled. “Do what you’re trained to, Coraline. Just remember, It’s not Mesopotamia’s story.”

She paused at the doorway, her back to me. It was a damn good back.

“The critter-filled ark surviving the world-ending flood. Nine versions precede Noah’s, the oldest of Ziusudra, a Sumerian King who wanted to rescue life from a tantrum-throwing God. That’s just the oldest version we know. Like you said, the old testament, Utnapishtim’s tale, they’re just copyright-infringed recreations.” I grab up the shirt, straining against my restraints to get a piece of it in each hand. I stretch it all at once until I hear it tear.

“You tout this shirt like a medal. It makes you no different from the crucifix kissers slumming the halls through the rest of this pitiful theist psych ward. You plant your feet around a truth, but truth is only what you know. What you get wrong is that it’s a crapshoot, taking what someone said and shaping your life around it. How traditionally religious of you.”

I throw the pieces of the shirt onto the ground. “If you can’t know everything, truth can be whatever you want it to. Makes me wonder who should be caged. Me, or you.”

***

It’s day three. The make or break day. My head and feet drape the armrests of a firm, pin-cushioned chaise longue, letting my eyes wander the office’s ornate crown moldings from my inverted vantage. I’d been downgraded to non-hostile, or was it upgraded?

“Everything’s upside down,” I mumble, aweing at how easily the brain can change perspectives.

“Everything is upside down,” the pant-suited legs on the ceiling repeat back, the voice box attached to them contemplative, if not slightly wry. “When was the last time you felt things were right side up? Was it when you were in the spotlight?”

“You’re going to have to dial back the metaphors when you open up shop. Shit’s weak, Coraline. Quit shrinking me.” I swivel partially-bloodied Chuck Taylors off the daybed to face her.

“Then don’t lay on the chair like that. I told you people don’t do that.” She sat on her boss’s fumy varnished desk. What she meant by the spotlight is was it worth what I’d spent to get it.

I put a crooked finger on my chin dimple, one of those butt clefts exaggerated by a white, straightish scar running right down its middle. My eyebrows furrowed, as they’d been doing, in mock thought. “Well,” I said, “If people don’t do it, and if I’m doing it, then I must not be a person. That, or I don’t give a shit that it’s not something other people do.”

I could tell she liked to say as a behavior specialist. She’d done stand-up at Chicago’s Second City before med school, and as a graduation gift her parents had framed an unfortunate portrait of her during an old set. It hung amongst her covering physician’s many diplomas, embossed with the quote, I used to have superpowers until my psychiatrist took them away. Somehow I was the narcissist.

“That’s right,” Coraline said, goading, “You don’t care so much you’ve torn your body up for attention.”

My eyebrows had a vocabulary bigger than third-world spelling bee champs. They threw her a flippant shrug. “You can’t argue with the results.”

She held out a hand, palm up, offering me to survey the room. “This is it. You made it.”

My brows crossed their arms in a conjugated scowl. “Is this supposed to be helping? Because I don’t think you’re doing this right.”

Coraline chuckled, not unkindly. “It’s helping me. And what do you know about how this is supposed to work?” She paused, putting her hands in her lap, allowing one of those slight neck stretches that lets you know someone is containing great irritation. “Drop the pretense, Wylie. Can’t we just talk about why we’re here?”

“We’re here because I was shot in the chest!”

“By you.”

“You say it like an accusation.”

She looked aroused. No no, never mind, surprised. Stupid testosterone-infused vision. “I do, yeah, a little bit,” she said, a little beside herself. “You realize there’re two ways this goes, right? I know you’ve done this before. Play along and get set free, or keep being yourself and get charged for the extra days we keep you. As always, what happens next is up to you, Wylie.”

I’d done this dance before, and it’d landed me in places like this. The thing is, the more you dance, the better you get at it.

“Why don’t we start with something simple,” Coraline says, noting the change in my expression as her words crossed my face. “How about what you remember from the day of the shooting.”

I sighed. She was damn convincing. That, or my body was abandoning everything but abandon. I’d tried thinking of everything but that moment. Something was different about it. Different than all the other times. I bit my lip in concentration.

“Blue, you know the kind that makes you see spots? It’s just after noon and clouds slither in front of the sun, making the high rises look as dead as the eyes of the goons that built them. My ass is sweating and my mouth has that bitter penny taste.”

Coraline quirks her lips up as she scribes, not realizing it prompts my pants to tent like a Pavlovian dog drooling over chiming bells. Her pale pantsuit complemented her bantu bun and bug-eye lenses. I crossed my legs.

“People move around the park on phones. Parents stroll kids. Dogs posture with their neutered barks. A woman’s headphones bob as she runs towards me…” My hand wanders up to finger a bandage above my sternum.

“You have a good memory,” She said, “The problem with memories is they’re easily faked.”

“All memories are fake, Coraline. We don’t remember events, we remember memories, and they grow more favorable and succinct every time we retrieve them.”

She rolled her eyes in the way that lets me know she wanted me to know she was rolling her eyes.

“What if I told you people don’t hurt themselves for attention. They don’t do it to feel something real. What if I told you what they did was a reincarnation. That what you call self-destruction is a misunderstood form of creation. Change is pain, and the only way to change is to scar yourself up. Cut out the old and carve in something new. Girls don’t whittle away at their thighs because old besties are blowing the quarterback in the locker room stall but because they’re going to start a revolution. The problem with change, though, is that it leaves us vulnerable.”

Now was when Coraline started to scribe. Her hand blurred across her notepad.

“Once you start to self-harm you become susceptible to others placing motives on you. One slip of the knife and you're as good as hypnotized. Each time you hurt yourself you hurt the part of you that withstands suggestion. It’s a trade-off. Mutilation is the best way to be manipulated, but it’s also the best makeover, because people won’t leave you if they think you need them. I just made it so people would always think I needed them. That’s not psychosis, that’s tact.”

She pauses to look up. “You’re saying all that,” she points to my webwork skinsuit, “that’s all ‘part of a plan?’” She air-quoted the last part, and I knew she meant it sarcastically, as if I’d been not pain-deaf, but tone-deaf too.

“You might make a fine shrink yet, Coraline. Yes, that’s what I’m saying. It’s why when people say you cutting yourself is a problem, you believe them. You become the condition they see in you. You become the size of the box they put you in. The only way to break free, though, is to burn the box. Create another scar. Will yourself to transform again, and maybe what comes out next won't be a victim of attention, but a predator roaming the streets for something to sink its teeth in.”

“What you’re doing is crazy, though.”

My mouth mimicked the downturned Slavic pout of my Practitioner Present. “I don’t think you’re supposed to say that to me. Is it any more crazy than acting emotionally in a way that will negatively impact thousands of lives with every step we take? We have the power of gods. Nothing is crazy. Things just are. And if I think things are malleable, then maybe it’s not so crazy if I choose a way familiar to me to bootstrap my social capital. People flock to the broken. You can call my crying wolf messed up all you like, but it’s what’s allowed me to go from being the friendless kid trapped in a broken family to the editor of the school paper being raised by foster parents who foster.”

Coraline was thinking she’d hit her stride, her face now we’re getting somewhere, even if I’m not sure where somewhere is. “There’s a difference between our attitude and literally carving our body into ribbons. Self-mutilation is a problem, not a solution.”

“The thing is, Coraline, you’re wrong. Look at a barista with a half million-dollar mortgage to show her worth. An unfulfilled lab tech embedded with ink sleeves to showcase the depth he doesn’t have. Staining yourself into disability is as natural as breathing. The insubstantial have always scarred themselves to show their worth, to bootstrap substance. It’s all deception. Just because mine is more visceral doesn’t mean it should be judged differently. We have this drive to stain ourselves up until we can’t walk. Stain yourself until you’re a new you with the power to handle what other prior yous couldn’t. To survive, you have to take the world’s collective grimace and dare them to say what they’re staring at, even though you already know.”

Coraline was making her head do what heads do when they receive bad news they know can’t be true. “You’re killing yourself.”

“What you’re really saying is, I can stain myself, but I have to follow your rules doing it?”

“What in the shit are we even talking about, Wylie?”

“What’d you think of me when you first saw me?”

“I was still deciding.”

“Now who’s lying? We both know what you thought. You’re the shrink. Shrink it out.”

“Say it all you want, ‘shrink it out’ is never going to stick.”

“Any staining is a lie we use to get something from others. Mine’s no different, and there’s nothing wrong with any of it.

“Lying teaches children to be creative and imagine. It acts a reward center in the brain, creating a positive feedback loop. As we get older we get better at imagining and predicting what others are thinking about. Isn’t that theory of mind 101?

“To put masks on when we think others are watching, or when we want to be heard? We dress up when we want to be seen. But what if you convince yourself you’re always being watched. Alexas are in every house and there are cameras on both sides of every smartphone. Today has us on display and who we are stops mattering. The mask becomes what’s important. And when life is a performance, it’s hard to know when lying stops being ok.”

Coraline just stares. Finally she says, “I…” she trails off, “That makes a strange kind of sense.”

Now it was my turn to balk. “But?” I said.

“But nothing,” she says. “Lying is nature. It’s an inconsequential error to see a twig as a snake. If you see a snake as a twig though, then you're lunch. You’ve been given a Darwin award for taking yourself out of the gene pool early. We evolve to just believe everything is a threat, because believing things are threats isn’t that expensive. Self-deception is survival. You end up passing along to your offspring that all patterns are real.

“We developed language like 70,000 years ago but only started writing things down about 4,000 years ago. Our minds still see language as something that only lasts in the moment, but present time records everything. We’ve evolved to have no verbal accountability. We’re literally born with deceptive genes and are continually rewarded for it. Infants fake cry. One-year-olds learn concealment. Five-year-old’s manipulate via flattery. Nine-year-old’s are masters of cover-up. By the time we enter the workforce, we’ve been raised in a world cluttered with spam and a personally-tailored newsfeed. Surrounded by this deception epidemic, we live in a post-truth society.”

My eyebrows were just as surprised as I was. “Exactly,” I said, “We know who we are because of what we believe we’ve been. Otherwise we’re a meat suit. Memory is the basis for identity, and when part of our memory is telling ourselves who we want to be, we’re unreliable sources for our own truth. Memories aren’t really identity, though, they’re just who we’d prefer to be. That’s the benefit of a plastic memory system, right? Our designer memories connect constructed fantasies about who we wish we were with who we’re really like.”

“Those aren’t the same words I’d use, but yeah, right enough,” she says, and I’m pretty sure she loves me. “The mind isn’t a computer. It doesn’t store an experience. It stores whatever version of the experience we’ve last tampered with.”

Composing herself again, the glint in her eye mirroring what she must be seeing in mine, she says, “Why do you think like this? I mean, when did this radical thing in you start?”

I think about it for a minute. She broke my walls and thinks she deserves to know. I guess I agree. “I have a memory, it was when I was young.”

She scoots to the edge of her chair. “Please.”

“I’m sitting in my room, the little bedside lamp near my window painting the pages of my batman comic with just enough light to read. As the dark knight punched his hometown into peace, my lamp shakes from dad’s drunken fists pummeling any surface within reach, which was good.

“What wasn’t good was when where those fists landed were mom. When one of those berserker blows struck her, the floor wouldn’t rumble, but the mewling scream bubbling from her throat would. It was a sound I’d only ever heard at the zoo when those baby chimpanzees would cry over not being fed. I wanted to hit things until I couldn’t hear her anymore. I never felt so close to him as when he was taking out his problems on her, because I remember thinking if hearing her scream made me want to hit things, what was he hearing?

“She’d come up, sometime in welts, always with a brave grin and a finger coming to poke me. ‘You know I frown on frowns, billy button,’ she’d say, wiping away the tears as if she’d just noticed them. Her eyes were the bombardier blue of someone who fought for the type of love you don’t expect in someone who could have it all on her own. They were these two deep, hopeful beads, a soothing ying to my searing yang, and she could solve any of my panic attacks with a single bright blue beam.

“‘I’ll let you in on a little secret,’ she said once, getting in close like I liked, dropping her voice quiet and whispering like some conspiratorial rogue in a dark Gotham alley. ‘After a while you just learn people don’t like to hurt things that are hurt. Scream a little louder than you need and people will leave you alone. Sometimes, if you scream loud enough, in their own way, people will even love you.’

“It sounded like good survival advice until she took a spill down the stairs. Dad must’ve been hearing something unbearable that day. That, or he hadn’t given her enough time to scream.

“It wasn’t long after when I started hearing her screams when I was upset, which was most of the time. I’d hit anything to make it stop, even though hitting things hurt. There was one day she wouldn’t stop screaming. I’d made a half dozen holes in the drywall before I realized it wasn’t working. It was the first day I picked a fight with myself. One of dad’s big Cubans and a zippo lighter later, suddenly I couldn’t go back to school. Dad sent me upstate to a group home with other boys with their own mommy issues.

“When I came back, kids at school wanted to know what had happened. If I told them where I’d been, they’d have treated me like the type of kid who hears things and hurts himself. Instead, in social studies my first day back, I told Josie I’d had appendicitis. Being sick was way better than being crazy, and when I said I’d been in the hospital, everyone was nicer to me. That only bought me a week before Josie said people didn’t believe me. They needed proof, so that night I went to dad’s toolbox, found a razorblade, and made some.

“Once everyone saw the puffy, clearly-infected wound, they wrote me cards. I got invited to more birthday parties. Kids asked me the things they ask their wise: what I thought about masturbation, if I liked wine coolers, what catfishing meant. They stopped rejecting me when they thought my body had. Kids are weird like that. It was when I realized dead parents don’t hold nearly as much social capital as self-mutilation.”

There was another lull. We both sat, nostalgic of what made us us.

“Do you know where he is now?” Coraline said. It was the longest she’d ever been quiet.

“No. He went for cigarettes. You know the schtick.”

“Do you hate him?”

“What is this, gay conversion therapy? No, my problems don’t stem from paternal hate. My parents both taught me a lot. Dad taught me how to quiet the noise. But mom had it figured out. She showed me that if you wanted someone to love you, all you had to do was show them what you’d do to get it.

“I guess it taught me being bullied is the best currency. The best part is I never had to seek out a bully because I was always right there. I was weak, and only the weak bullied the weak.”

She sat, not quite sad, but clearly contemplative. “I guess it adds up. Your self-deception is a weird defense mechanism, and that’s part of why we’re bred to lie to ourselves. Rats learn to trip levers and dogs drool for bells the same way man made god. Genes selected superstition. You survived in the wild if you saw a twig and thought it was a snake, not the other way around, so when those dirt-dwelling berry-pickers thought behavior drove weather, they prayed to the thunder.

Evolution bred us for religion, because what was once a defense mechanism to ward off potential slithering threats was now why those who survived saw faces in clouds and in the bark of trees and in the sides of mountains today still see Jesus in a piece of toast or the virgin Mary in the dregs of a bowl of tomato bisque. Our need to survive built us to see things where there weren’t any. We see faces in clouds instead of clouds in faces.”

“Does it ever happen the other way around? People seeing clouds in faces?” I blurt out.

She looked at me like the way people look at people who’ve strung together a series of words that don’t make any sense.

“Do you see clouds in faces, Wylie?” She looks like she’s regretted all she’s said in agreement with my condition.

I pause. This part I’d so far been unable to say. “Usually it’s faces. Since the accident it’s been whenever I get nervous, the kind of nervous you can feel pumping sweat all the way to your hands. I start to see blue and white wisps where people’s faces should be. It’s not always faces, but that’s usually where it starts. Like the sky is trying to break through. I think maybe the post-surgery meds are messing with my eyes because it only lasts as long as my anxiety does.”

“As a psychiatrist –“

“Resident,” I interrupt.

She stretches her neck to the side, “As a psychiatry resident, I have to say this is the part where I’d try putting you on a cycle of low-dose anti-anxiety medication to see how it helps with the vision impairment but I think we should try some behavioral exercises first.”

My eyes flash perform whatever séance you want, I’m not susceptible to magic. She ignores it like the diplomat she’ll one day have to be.

“I want you to think about something that makes you very anxious. If it’s a certain place, where? Are you a certain age? Are you in trouble? Try to put yourself there and let the feelings come.”

I play her game because it’s her. Blue starts to blot my vision. First in pinprick splotches like when you rub your eyes too hard, then in bigger, lazily-spreading circles. The circles start to grow as I imagine old spars between mom and dad.

“Now,” she says, “I want you to imagine you’re waiting at a train station and a cargo train is slowly moving by to your left. Every few seconds, another car passes by, leaving your field of vision. Now take that anxiety-inducing memory. Ball it up in front of your hands real tight, then throw it into one of the passing train cars. Let it pass by and away from your awareness as you wait to see what’s in the next train car. With this exercise you can do what drugs and surgery claim to. No side effects. No scars. Just control of your emotions. Pull a good memory out of the next car. Your last day of school, the first time you had sex, getting publicly praised for accomplishing something you worked hard on. Your mom’s smile. Focus on whatever it is. Tell me, what do you feel?”

“Loved,” I say, after a considerable pause.

She smiles knowingly. “Yes, and what do you see?”

“Not a bit of blue.”

“I’m doing it,” She says, pumping the air. “I’m psychiaty-ing.”

“The spots,” I say, more nervous than I’ve been in front of her, not able to conceal it, “Do you think it’s the morphine?”

“Not sure,” she says in what seemed a genuine tone. “PTSD does weird things to the brain. Sounds. Images.”  

“You know how you can wake up and see the clock reads, say, 12:17?” I say.

She nods, interested.

“And you know how you can fall back asleep and start this new dream and it’s so vivid and you feel lucid? You can live through an entire adventure, an entire life, and wake back up and it’s still 12:17? Sometimes I think maybe I’m still lying there on my back in the park right now. My heart’s stopped but my brain is stubborn and won’t let go. I’m living out my life in dream time, but I’m dead.”

Coraline frowns up the left side of her full lips in thoughtful skepticism. “Well, that’s not quite how it happens. Your mind cycles through events really fast when you’re dreaming. You move from one detail-free scene to the next with no transition, but the scrutinizing part of your brain is what’s sleeping so it doesn’t even notice. It’s not so much that time is standing still as it is us not wrapped up in noticing that time isn’t quite right.”

“However it works,” I say, “I still get this feeling I’m living out my life lying on my back, staring at the tops of buildings built by those responsible for the types of people my dad made me. No one around to pine over or cheer for me as my brain stays on, living out two lives, or maybe my brain is flashing my life before my eyes, except it’s not really before. It’s a flashing forward, my imagination grasping at would-be memories, tornequeting their dripping out of me to consolidate what’s left.”

“Interesting,” Coraline said. “Impossible, because I’m here, and clearly not dead, but interesting. Say it’s true, would it matter? Everyone’s always dying one second at a time. Maybe your brain is making this life up. Maybe mine is making up mine. There’s electrical activity in the brain for 12 minutes after the heart stops, and if you can live a whole life in a few relative seconds, well then, with minutes, you can live a good, long while more. You don’t feel like this all the time, do you? Do you feel like you’re here with me right now?”

I nod.

“You can see me?” she’s on the very edge of her chair now. I nod.

“You can hear my voice?” I nod, and there’s inches between us.

“You can feel this?” She bends her head towards me and I drive my lips forward to meet hers. I nod.

We pull away and stare at each other, her face perfect, my hacked-up face also perfect because it’s what brought me to this moment. To her.

“Mortality is what gives life urgency,” she says. “Everyone else has who knows how long left. Maybe you just have the next few minutes. The question is, will you do anything with the second chance you think you’ve been given.”

If it means staying with you, I think.

“It’s like you said,” she says. “You create your own reality. If it helps to think this is your afterlife, live like it is.”

***

Bill looks up from the excerpt to a half-filled room of half-filled fans. His wife helms the merch table behind the gaggle of mismatched folding chairs. Even in retirement, she’s still the most vivacious haggler he’s ever had the pleasure to get got by.

Their relationship was how relationships were, riding on the currents of good times. They’d grab hold of anything that could catch the wind and sail them away from hard talks. Their strongest breezeway was the fundraising of troubled youth. It’s the kind of avoidance couples dive into when they outlive their kids.

Some interloping Adonis donned in Kylo Ren cosplay that could only have been bought on eBay coughs to fill the silence. Bill’s muse shakes two thumbs of encouragement at him from the table still packed tight with copies of his book. She’s flashing an I’m not tired of takeout just yet toothy grin, but it’s no substitute for applause.

Of the thirty or so too-lazy-to-shuffle-to-another-reading lingerers still in the room, a hand shoots up. It’s attached to a stout, beardy bachelor in R.R. Martin drab, choo-choo hat and all. It could actually be Martin, but that’d mean he’d actually have to get his ass out of bed, so probably not. “Question?”

“Yes?” he said, his tone what the fuck else would my arm be doing in the air? Fighting gravity? “That’s not really much of an ending.”

“That’s not really much of a question.”

“Calm down, Brodeur.”

“What?” Bill says.

“Devil’s goalie. Defensive much? We sat through thirty minutes of your half-cocked anarchism so you could dismiss us with a cliffhanger? Real nice, buddy.”

Bill’s palms started to sweat. Hack fucking hecklers.

“If you want to be spoon-fed, McHugh’s previewing a new short from his Hellequin Chronicles down in the Hathaway room. Should shore you right up.”

“I think there’s a beginner’s workshop going on across the hall. We can walk over together.”

Bill stood. “Listen, motherf–” he stopped. The Game of Thrones wannabe’s furrowed brow had disappeared. A spot of brilliant blue had taken its place, and it was spreading. He looked to Coraline, but her face was gone too. Blue-faced from behind the merch table, she raised one arm, miming a rail horn.

Bill closed his eyes. He took a slow, deep breath and visualized his train cars. He balled the heckler into a fatal little ball and prepared to toss him into the next car as it passed, but something was wrong. The train wasn’t on course. Behind it, the sky was blue, and the light on the engine was bright white as it barreled straight towards him.