He looks at himself in the mirror and he liked what he sees.

Is it his actual looks that grant this confidence, or merely the Power of his Gaze whispering to his eyes that the world is his for the taking?

That if he fails to take it, it is not his fault—it just wasn’t ever even worth the effort.

He walks down the street and what does he see? Objects, his to be used or ignored or discarded. Occasionally an obstacle to be vanquished. The Gaze tells him which is which and if it happens to be wrong, it wasn’t wrong—the object was deliberately disguising its intentions to try to fool him, but he got the better of it in the end!

These are the words that the Gaze puts into his head. But he is not the only one who hears its whispers.

A girl minding her own business sitting on a bench or tending to a shop’s window feels the Gaze on her, and knows not what to do. She knows a man’s Gaze can be an indicator of a great many things and that she might be in danger—but does she dare turn around and meet it? It could just be a simple gaze grazing her but finding her unimportant, inaccessible. Yet if she turns around and introduces his Gaze to her own, it might decide to see her inquisitive challenge as an invitation to violence and worse.

She has known the Gaze all her life—not his, specifically, but it speaks to all men, whether or not they choose to heed it or to act on it. It speaks to women, too, teaching them dependence by rewarding them for using it correctly and abusing them for ignoring its call.

But she doesn’t want a man’s Gaze to define her, to be an object in someone else’s sentence. Which is why she turns her own Gaze to other things, to work and play and family, and away from his play on power—yet always keeps her ears open for the tell-tale whisper of a man’s lesser Gaze.

It is a good place, a beautiful place, here beyond the wall of human consciousness. It’s a place where I could easily see myself spending eternity, if eternity chose to accept me.

But I’m not there yet.

When I was first approached, I thought myself chosen by some great and perhaps even all-knowing Higher Power for this calling. Hardly anyone, after all, ever even gets to see a Unicorn, let alone approach her, and nowadays there are even taboos about touching one. Thank goodness.

But I was… moved. Incredulous. It wasn’t just emotional, though of course I was overwhelmed, I was ecstatic! But I couldn’t believe it, either. Such things do not exist for us–or, rather, for them–out there in the Supposedly. So I didn’t believe my eyes.

At first, I only wanted to touch the horse, but soon I remembered that I’d seen horses aplenty, even living where I did, and had touched them before. So I looked at the horn, there, springing out of her skull like a fingernail, a misplaced fifth hoof, wreathed in a scabby areola of hardened skin.

But it couldn’t be real. Could it? It had to be, well, a trick. Of some sort. Attached? Adapted? A tumor, perhaps? So I touched it. And, well… the rest is history.

The last thirty years, living on the cusp as I do, being one of the few human beings—if human I can still be called—able to move back and forth from that world into this, from our world—their world—into yours, that’s changed my perception. I can’t pretend anymore that I know what’s real and what isn’t; after all, I touched a Unicorn!

Can you imagine how crazy that sounds out there? I touched a Unicorn and turned into a Centaur. Those are terms you don’t use outside fairly tales and metaphors. Not if you’re human. So it really is like I’m living in a dream. Still. After all this time.

Don’t you understand why I can’t stay? Why I can’t settle for the dream? I touched the horn of a Unicorn and… it wasn’t what I expected. If I go all the way, if I give up my Soul entirely, it won’t just be the end of my world for me, it won’t just be like I’ll die, like I’ll never wake up from this dream.

I will have become the Unicorn, and there’ll be nothing left for me to wonder.

There was already an all-girl a capella group on campus. We told ourselves that was the reason for the sausage fest, but really we just didn’t have any girls show up to audition. (Unless you count Rachel, née Roger, which you probably should, but she wasn’t transitioning yet at the time.) Leo was all ready to make fun of us, and himself, for that, but I was like, chicks dig all-male a capella, though, right?

Right?

Shut up, we were brilliant.

Of course I got to have the last laugh there, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Anyway, before we even started practicing we wanted to come up with a name. Something catchy, you know? Something that said “We’re here, we’re singing without instruments and we really like puns.” Rockapella was already taken, of course. So were Troubletones and Treblemakers. “What about Basses Are Wild?” said Dan, but we voted it down when Jerry came out with

“The Clarence Glendale Experience.”

We were all a bit confused at first.

Said Tommy, “Dude, what the fuck’s a Clarence Glendale?”

“Isn’t that a town in California?” asked Mike. “Or two?”

“No, it’s brilliant,” Leonard spoke up. “It’s inspired. You know, it gives us a mascot, a front man, but without any of us having to actually be the front-man.”

The irony here was that all of us knew, even then, that Leonard (Leo, never Lenny)  was gonna be the front man, just ‘cause that’s who he was, but Leo had this weird thing where even though he was super charismatic, he was, like, aggressively modest about it.

It could be kind of annoying, actually.

But the point is, about as soon as the words were out of Jerry’s mouth, it was decided. We knew who we were now. It was all good.

The rest, I mean, I don’t really think I need to give a whole lotta detail, it was kind of an eighties training montage for a while there, only in song, as we built our repertoire, Leo quietly making all the decisions and Ryan, the only one of us who was an actual Music Major, making all the arrangements and then running practice and conducting and all that.

We were actually really good friends with the Femi-Naughties, that all-girl a capella group I mentioned before? We had a couple of harmless scrimmages with them, all in good fun, but when we performed the first couple of times, we performed together, with them, even did a couple songs as a unified group.

Before long, though, folks were approaching us to do solo gigs, pro bono at first, ‘cause we were a student organization, but then eventually we were like, well, hey, if it makes us money, right? The Femi-Naughties got pretty upset when we “abandoned” them. Colin and Ada, who’d done all the cutesy duets, even broke up over it. That and Colin turned out to be gay, but whatever.

Roger was the biggest hold-out, though. We didn’t know why at the time ‘cause he wasn’t out yet, but she told us later, it was ‘cause he’d been scared to death we’d kick her out once she started transitioning. But I mean, come on. We’re not those guys.

But I’m really here to talk about the name. I mean, it was a gimmick, it was based on the idea that “Clarence Glendale” was our front man, but he never made it to any of our shows. First thing out of our mouths every night (we kinda took turns making the announcement) was to apologize, Clarence Glendale couldn’t make it tonight, but we’ve got a great show for you anyway! And there’d be giggles and cheers and everyone would be in on it.

Well, that was great as long as everybody really was in on it. But as we got bigger, we started to run into some issues with fans who were maybe too many degrees removed from the action and hadn’t gotten the memo as a result. We tried not to talk about it in public, on talk shows or anything, but if we caught anyone like that in private, we’d kind of quietly take them aside and lay it out for them and usually—not always, but usually—they’d be fine after that.

Then there was this weird thing where it happened on a chatboard, someone brought up how disappointed they were that “he” didn’t show up and then another girl was, like, “You know he’s not real, right?” and there was shock and awe from all corners and then it got ugly and someone brought up Santa Claus and I was like, that’s not cool, man. (I had beers with that guy, by the way, he’s really cool—well, not actual beers ‘caus neither of us like beer, but I had a rum and coke and he had a hot cider—great guy, really.)

I heard the girl who put the revelation on the net like that got fired from her job over it.

“You guys,” said Benny at the next meeting, “I don’t know, guys, this is starting to get real. I think think we should, like, you know.”

But we didn’t know. Not really. We were in too deep and Leo especially was determined to keep up the joke. No matter how many times we told him “Dude, you need to come out as Clarence Glendale; make that, like, your official pseudonym or something,” but that wasn’t gonna happen—Leo was too proud of his modesty. Even Roger couldn’t coax him into it with his feminine wiles.

Finally, there was the Concert. I give it the capital-c treatment ‘cause that’s how we all talked about it. It was our first major gig in a major city none of us had ever been in before, Alex gave the announcement and immediately, we knew something was wrong. There was, like, a hush over the crowd, but too much, you know? We were used to some confusion, but not this. There were too many people there who didn’t know what was really going on and too few who did, and they were too spread out and isolated to support each other. They started ganging up on us. “We want Clarence!” they started chanting, which, if you’ve never heard people chant that phrase, it’s a terrible phrase to chant, all the wrong cadence, but they kept saying it, “We want Clarence!”

So Alex looked at Leo—we all looked at Leo, and I swear, I could see it in his eyes, he was gonna break, he was gonna come out and say it, and that would be the end of it. And I started thinking about what might happen next, right? Would it be on the news? Would there be, like, a public inquiry? Would they decide there had once been a Clarence Glendale and now we were trying to cover it up? Would we all be arrested? Would this be an eighties movie again, like it was with the musical montage?

And that’s when it happened. Just when we thought they were gonna storm the stage and riot, he showed up.

That’s right. Clarence feathermucking Glendale.

Showed up.

And, like, we all knew who he was. We all breathed a sigh of relief when he got there, like we’d been waiting for him, but then we caught ourselves, like, Wait, what? Because none of us had ever seen this guy before, right? We’d even had conversations about what Clarence Glendale would look like if he was real, and we all had different ideas about that. I kinda thought he’d be Asian, but with dreads he’d died hot pink, I don’t know, he was imaginary!

Except now he wasn’t. “Hey, guys,” he called to the audience, “Sorry I’m late.” And they all calmed down and we went on with the show, all of us up here on stage really confused that he knew all the choreography and was able to fit himself in so well with the harmonies that he filled in holes we never even knew were there.

The patient seemed at first to be a rather run-of-the-mill schizophrenic—inasmuch as schizophrenics are ever run-of-the-mill. David Spiegelsen seemed much of the time to be aware of his environment, to be aware that he was in a psychiatric facility, but most of the time he had no idea how he had got here.

He seemed to have no memory of having been found five miles from where his home had just burned down. He wasn’t even sure at the time why he was all the way out there in his pajamas. It was obvious what had happened—there were even witness reports, but he claimed to have no memory of it and every time he was reminded about it, it seemed to hit him like he was hearing about it for the first time.

At first, Dr. Winchell was convinced he was a pathological liar. In the first few sessions, the questions she asked about his family all produced wildly different answers from one day to the next, all of which contrasted starkly with the story his parents, sister and friends presented. Some of these friends he claimed not to even know, and the sister kept getting younger in his versions the first few days, until by the third day, he seemed convinced he didn’t have one.

Most of the other patients she’d had with delusions decided on one and there was some variation to account for their cognitive dissonance, but this was almost like the opposite. In every moment, he had a specific version of his own truth, and regardless of whatever else was going on around him, he clung to it.

And then one day, it all became clear. “How does this keep happening to me?” he asked her. “Why is it always…”

He was aware, then, that his world was topsy-turvy.

“It’s like a parallel universe or something.”

That was when Dr. Winchell remembered an episode she’d seen once of an old sci-fi show on TV where one of the characters kept going from one parallel universe to another.

She read up on quantum physics and the theory of possible worlds, that microscopic changes could create branches in reality, all different universes.

He denied it when she asked him if he’d seen that show or knew of the theory, but that day he happened to be a jock who insisted that even at 120 lbs he was a linebacker, and kept asking about his nine-year-old sister, even though he didn’t have a sister.

It seemed a very convenient delusion to have, infinitely adaptable. His parents insisted he’d never had any particular artistic inclination, but there must have been some tendency towards creativity and imagination.

There must have been something there, wanting to get out and ultimately driving him insane.