“Part of what?” I take her by the hands and whisper darkly. “I’m sick—I really am. What is there to be part of?”
She frowns. “How can you be sick?”
“The drugs are working,” I say. “I think I might actually be schizophrenic.”
“But I’ve found so much,” she says. “You told me to look it up—the Red Line and the hospital and everything. There’s really something going on—”
“But I don’t want it to be true,” I say. “I’ve seen things that can’t be true—monsters, real monsters, and they have to be hallucinations. And there’s another girl—”
“Another girl?” asks Lucy, her voice loud and jealous. I quiet her with my hands, looking nervously at the door. She puts her hands on her hips. “What other girl?”
“A reporter,” I whisper, “from the Sun—but she’s completely fake. The last time you came to visit me, so did she, and I didn’t think anything about it because Dr. Little told me I was going to have a visitor, but he was talking about you—he said it was a girl, and that was you. The reporter was another hallucination trying to pull me deeper into the killer and the conspiracy and everything that isn’t real. Don’t you get it, Lucy? All of that is fake! Maybe it’s everything—the killer and the Faceless Men and everything. Don’t you see what this means? If it’s not real then I don’t have to be afraid anymore. I don’t have to hide.”
Loud footsteps echo in the hall, slowly coming closer, and I pull away from her. “The guard,” I say. “Close the door, quick—”
But it’s already closed.
I look back at her, confused. “Did you close the door?”
“I think so.”
“You just ran straight to me—the doors here don’t close by themselves, there’s no springs. Who closed the door?”
“I’m sure I closed it. I must have.”
The footsteps are almost here. “It doesn’t matter—get down.”
She rolls off the bed on the far side, away from the door, and ducks down behind it. I fall back, pretending to sleep, and watch through a slim crack in my eyelids as the night guard stops, looks in my window, and moves on. I wait longer, counting his steps as he moves away. He pauses again at the next door and I hold my breath. At last the footsteps continue, and I roll over to look at Lucy. She peeks up from the edge of the bed.
“This isn’t a hospital,” she says, “it’s a prison.”
“You said you’d found something,” I say, still staring at the door. “What did you find?”
“They’re really out to get you,” she says. “The whole hospital. The janitor is the only one you can trust—his name is Nick, and he’s going to help us escape.”
“What do they want?”
“I don’t know what they want,” she says, “but it doesn’t matter anymore—we can leave. We can leave right now and never come back, and you’ll never see them again, and then it won’t matter what they want because you’ll be free.”
I stare at her, breathing heavily, thinking about the outside. “The drugs are working,” I whisper. “Even if some of it’s real, some of it’s not, and I don’t want to go back to the way I was.”
“We can get you other drugs, but you have to come with me! Nick let me in, and he’s going to let us out, but we…” She stops. She stares at the door, then at me; her face is streaked with confusion. “We can’t.”
I stare back, feeling worry grow through me like a weed. “We can’t what?”
“We can’t leave.”
“But you bribed the janitor, right?”
She looks confused, like she’s struggling to remember something. “Well, yeah…”
“And he’s going to let you back out again, right?”
“Of course, but…” she shakes her head. “This doesn’t make sense.”
I step toward her. “What doesn’t make sense?”
“I remember bribing the janitor, and I remember coming in to get you out, but we can’t leave.”
“We can’t or I can’t?”
She looks at me, disoriented, her mouth open. “It’s not that specific, it’s just … I know it. It’s a fact in the back of my mind: we’re going to go to the gate, just like my plan, but the janitor’s not going to be there, and we’re going to be trapped. There’s no way we can get out.”
“You think he’s betrayed you?”
“It’s not like that, Michael, it’s—it’s not a hunch, it’s a fact. I know it as clearly as I know my own name.” She pauses. “Lucy Briggs.” Her voice is tentative; probing.
I nod, slowly. “Lucy Briggs.” Her eyes are wide with fear. I realize that she’s wearing the same clothes she had on last time—a black T-shirt and black jeans. I try to remember her wearing something else, but … I can’t.
“What’s going on?”
And then I think it, and the instant I think it I know it’s true, and she knows it too, and I see it on her face and I know that she thinks my thoughts and that means that I’m right, and I don’t dare say it out loud.
Her voice is a puff of wind. “I’m not real.”
My heart breaks in half.
“I’m a hallucination, Michael.”
“No.”
She steps toward me. “The night janitor didn’t let me in here, you just imagined me here, and the janitor was the explanation you made up to explain how it happened, but it doesn’t hold up because now we can’t get back out.”
I grit my teeth. “You’re real.”
“You knew it—in the back of your mind you knew it was all a fake, so I knew it too, because everything I am is a part of you.”
My eyes are hot with tears, and I shout with rage. “You’re real!”
She comes closer, catching my wrist with her hand, and I feel the touch and the warmth and the pressure but no texture, and I look in her eyes and my reflection is wrong—a younger me, well-dressed and handsome and half-remembered. A distorted reflection from my own memory; an idealized me in the eyes of my ideal woman.
“Michael, I’m so sorry.”
“How can you be sorry if you don’t exist?” I’m crying; I twist away from her grip and grab her arm, but it doesn’t feel right—the heft is there, the solidity, but I can tell it isn’t real. There should be more give—and suddenly there is. I think that I should feel her heartbeat in her wrist and suddenly I can, in the same instant I think of it. My mind is filling in the details in a desperate bid to hold on to the fantasy.
“This can’t be real,” I say, then instantly contradict myself. “You have to be real.”
“I wish I was.”
“You have to be real!” I shout. She flinches, pulling away from my grasp. “I can see you, I can feel you, I can smell you.”
“I’m all in your head.”
“You’re smarter than me,” I say, throwing up my hands. “You have a bigger vocabulary than me; you talk about people I haven’t met. How could I possibly have made you up?”
“You’ve heard things,” she says, stepping toward me. “You’ve seen things, you’ve read things, and you’ve absorbed it all like a sponge and now it’s locked in your subconscious, and when you talk to me it all just … comes out. You don’t know it—conscious Michael Shipman doesn’t know it—but it’s all in there and your brain decided, for whatever reason, that Lucy Briggs can remember it even if you can’t.”
I sit down on the bed. Lucy puts her hand on my shoulder and I know it’s there, but I also know it’s not. I stare into her face—perfectly beautiful, delicate and strong at the same time. The girl next door who’s also a supermodel. I laugh.
“I guess I should have known it was too good to be true, huh?” I take her hand—I hold it in my own, soft and warm and alive. “The perfect woman, smart and funny and gorgeous, who just happened to fall madly in love with a nobody.”
“You’re not a nobody.”
“I’m a homeless mental patient with a high school equivalency and a dead-end job found for me by a social worker. If you were real
you’d have a rich boyfriend and a penthouse in the middle of downtown.”
“I do have a penthouse in the middle of downtown.”
“Because I imagined it for you! Because I’m such a lonely, pathetic loser that I made myself the most perfect girlfriend I could think of.”
“Listen, Michael, I can help you.”
“Go away!”
“If I’m really inside your head, and I really can remember things you don’t, maybe I can remember other things too.”
I turn to the wall. “Just leave me alone—”
“Dr. Vanek said your hallucinations might be based on real experiences that you can’t remember because you can’t get inside your own head.” She pushes herself in front of me, and I turn away again. “Michael, I’m already inside of your head. If they’re in here, maybe I can find them!”
“Dammit, Lucy, you’re not real!”
“Of course I’m real!” she shouts. “I don’t exist for anyone else but I exist for you. I can think, right? Therefore I am.”
“You think what I tell you to think—you have no will of your own.”
“Is that your perfect girlfriend?”
“What?” I look at her again and her eyes glisten with tears, soft and sad and deep as endless holes.
“If this is true,” she says, “if you created your perfect girlfriend, would you really make her that weak? Would she really have no will? No power? No thoughts of her own?”
I feel my heart breaking again. “Of course not.”
“I love you,” she says. “Who tells you to stick with your job every time you want to quit? Who convinced you to join that reading skills class? I have my own will because you know you couldn’t love me without one—because you understand that love is not about accepting people, it’s about making them better. We make each other better, Michael.” Tears form in her eyes—tiny drops of water, glistening like diamonds. “At least let me try.”
“Michael, you okay in here?”
I look up, over Lucy’s shoulder, and I see the night guard coming in. “I heard shouting,” he says. “You all right, buddy?” He steps forward, directly toward Lucy, and she steps out of his way.
“Why did you step out of his way?” I ask, ignoring the guard and staring her down. “If you’re just a hallucination, you could just stand there and he could walk right through you.”
“Who are you talking to?” the guard asks.
“Your brain won’t let me do anything it considers impossible,” says Lucy, shrugging. “Technically, I shouldn’t even be here with him, because it will only underline the fact that he can’t see me.”
“Can you see her?” I ask, looking at the guard.
He answers without looking. “There’s no one here but you and me, Michael.”
“She’s standing right there, can you see her?” He doesn’t move. “Can you just turn and look?”
“He thinks you’re trying to trick him,” says Lucy, walking behind him. “You’re not the only schizophrenic in lockdown, you know—he’s seen this trick a hundred times.”
“Hit him,” I tell her.
“Just calm down,” says the guard, holding up his hand.
“Come on,” I say, “you’re right behind him—hit him! We can run, and the janitor can let us out like he promised, and we can be together again, forever.”
“I’m not real, Michael.”
“Yes you are! Hit him!”
“Easy, there, Michael,” says the guard, putting a hand on my shoulder. I shrug him off violently and he pops like a spring, grabbing me in a tight wrestling hold so suddenly I barely even see him move. “Easy, Michael,” he says again, “just calm down. Everything’s going to be okay.”
“Help me!”
She waves, a tear rolling down her cheek, and then she’s gone. I struggle against the guard but he holds me tightly in place, calling for the nurse. I try to kick him and suddenly we’re down on the floor and he has my whole body pinned.
“Lucy!”
There is no answer.
THIRTEEN
IN THE MORNING they raise my dose of Seroquel, and a few days later they raise it again. Dr. Little says my confrontation with Lucy was a good thing—that even though I still saw her, my knowledge that she wasn’t real was a big step forward. It means the drugs are working. Bit by bit, the glass is becoming clearer.
Dr. Vanek comes to visit on the weekend, shooing off a handful of other patients to clear us a private space in the corner of the commons room. I ignore him.
“Michael,” he says, lowering himself into a chair. “You become more and more interesting almost every day, don’t you?”
“I don’t want to talk.” My head nods, all by itself. Did he see that?
“Why?” he asks. “Because your girlfriend’s not real? You’re not the only man in the world with a fake girlfriend, I assure you. Look at our beauty industry—it’s amazing anyone’s satisfied with real women anymore.”
“I said I don’t want to talk.”
“But you recognize your illness now,” he says, leaning in. “You’ve admitted that you see hallucinations, which puts you in that glorious middle ground where we can really get some work done: you’re crazy enough to see them, but sane enough to discuss them openly. I hate trying to psychoanalyze by memory.”
I turn on him angrily. “It’s not about being crazy, it’s about being alone. What good does it do me to get better now that I don’t have anyone to be better with? I was going to get out—I was going to get better and get out and live in a great big house in the country with…” I turn away.
“Are you content, then, simply to play with your imaginary friends?”
“Shut up.” My arm twitches, but I hold it still.
“Don’t get angry with me,” he says, “you’re the one acting like a child. Besides, if you didn’t want to get better you wouldn’t be talking to Dr. Jones.”
“Dr. Jones?”
“Linda,” he says with distaste, as if the name itself is unpleasant in his mouth. “She’s the queen of the psychiatric hippies and a purveyor of feel-good claptrap, but she’s apparently been having some success with you. Regular sessions, individual and group, where you’ve apparently delved quite deep into your hopeless Freudian wasteland.”
“She’s helping me.”
“Helping you what? Kill your girlfriend?”
“Shut up!”
“Do you want to lose her or not? Have I misunderstood our entire conversation up to this point?”
“Look,” I say, turning to face him and locking his eyes in a murderous gaze. “Lucy was one of the only things I loved in this entire world, and now she’s gone, and I think I have the right to be sad about that. But losing her is the price I pay for losing a whole horde of monsters and aliens and God only knows what else I have crawling around in my head. I’ve been running away from a worldwide conspiracy of omnipotent Faceless Men for almost a year, and now for the first time I can stop running because I know there’s nothing to run from. No Faceless Men, no giant maggots, no phantom noises in the hall. For the … I can’t even watch TV, Vanek. I could barely stand to ride in a car, for fear that the stereo was trying to read my mind. It breaks my heart to lose Lucy, but if that’s the trade-off—if I get to have a real life now, with a real job and maybe even, someday, a real girlfriend—then who are you to accuse me of anything?” I sit back and turn away, nodding, and when he starts to speak again I dive straight back into my rant. “If you’d been half the psychiatrist Linda Jones is, I might have gotten to this point years ago and saved myself a lot of trouble.”
I stare at him, breathing heavily, daring him to speak. I’m so tired—worn out and beat up and full of rusted holes, like an old car in a junkyard. The light hurts my eyes and the sound hurts my ears and every movement makes my muscles burn—the dull, lactic acid smolder of fatigue and hard exercise. My Seroquel dose is almost maxed out, and my body can’t take much more.
Dr. Vanek watches me calmly, saying no
thing, until finally I turn away in exhaustion.
“You’re going to go to prison,” he says. “As soon as you’re better. They’re curing you so they can put you on trial.”
I keep my eyes on the floor.
“Every word you say convinces them you’re a killer. You fit the profile too perfectly: an angry young man, friendless and with no family to speak of; paranoid and persecuted; convinced that the source of your troubles is a band of nameless, faceless men who haunt your every move. Who are the victims, Michael? Neighbors who teased you? Teachers who got in your way? How easy it must have been to convince yourself they were part of this “plan” to destroy you, and how easy then, their humanity erased, to take their lives and cut off their faces and show the world what they really were.”
“It’s not true.”
“I know it’s not true!” he shouts, shocking me with his anger, “but what are you doing to prove it? Where were you when you lost your memory?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You have to remember! You have to give them an alibi or they’ll lock you away for the rest of your life. Or they might just kill you: we do have the death penalty in this state, you know.”
“I don’t remember anything,” I say, “just patches, maybe, that might not even be real—I was at home, I was at work, I was … I was somewhere empty.”
“‘Empty?’”
“Just houses with nobody in them, a whole city of them.”
He pauses. “Tell me more.”
“I don’t know any more!” People are starting to look at us now. “I remember waking up in the hospital, and everything before that is a blur, like a big black hole in my head. I already told you, it was the MRI that did it—they got in and screwed up my whole head—”
“Who got in, Michael, if the Faceless Men are a delusion?”
“I…” I stare at him, not knowing what to say. There are no Faceless Men, no mysterious Plan, no one controlling my thoughts through every passing cell phone. If electronics are safe then the MRI is safe. I can’t answer my problems with a conspiracy anymore.
“Michael?”