The morning before her first day at the new school, she had a new kind of dream. Or maybe it wasn’t new, but she didn’t remember having it before. It was like déjà-vu: everything seemed familiar, even the first time she saw it. Maybe that’s the way dreams always are. But this one felt different.

She was in a room. It wasn’t a small room, as rooms go—in fact, for a bedroom, it seemed like something straight out of a Disney castle, with blues and reds popping out from the walls and the wardrobe and furniture, and a bright purple bed in the center.

That bed.

At first, it felt like she was alone in the room, but then all at once, she felt hands circling her waist, soon followed by a nuzzling kiss on the back of her neck. She had never been touched like that, awake, yet it felt natural, and like she knew the man who did it. She turned around to greet him—

And that was when she woke up.

As dreams go, it wasn’t too elaborate, but it left an impression that lingered during breakfast and the ride on the metro with the woman trying to be her mother, and even when she joined the class that would be hers.

She couldn’t help but wonder, later on, if that dream had been what made her fall so quickly and completely in love with almost the first boy she came into contact with.

His face was soon put upon the body that called to hers in the dreams. That very night, they picked up where they’d left off in the not-so-small room, gazing into one another’s eyes and drinking deep. There was a caution in those first few nights, but it was born of excitement and played as a lingering within each other’s touch, a savoring of the company of each other’s dreams.

They didn’t speak much at school, but when they did, he smiled and she was always aware of his presence, even when she pretended not to be. But they didn’t speak much, even when their eyes found each other across rooms and the crowded courtyard.

Until they did.

“I hear you write songs,” she was bold enough to say to him after sitting down near him in the study hall.

In response, he merely lifted his eyes up at her with the shadow of a smile on his lips.

“What are you writing about?” He twirled the fountain-pen in his fingers like a tool for inspiration and the words on the page were arranged like verses.

“Everything,” he told her.

It was a megalomaniacal answer, for sure, but “Does that include love?”

He seemed taken aback by the directness of this riposte and she caught his eyes flickering up and down her frame. “Perhaps,” he confessed, and then lifted the pen to his lips like a cigarette for a long, magical drag of inspiration.

That night in the red-blue-to-purple room, they explored the bed at last, its purple majesty, tossing sheets about like waves as they dove into one another. It occurred to her that though the room was hers, this was his domain, and he played the fabric of this little world like a chef in his kitchen, like a librarian on the subject of his endless collection, like a rockstar performing for billions and then surfing their waves. All she could do was cling to him. It made her feel safe, but at the same time, excited.

The next time they spoke, he showed her one of his songs, upon request. It wasn’t a song about love (not yet) but it was lovely and it resonated: it was about a home across the sea and living in two different worlds, not sure which of them was the real one. They didn’t talk about love, but she thought she caught him gazing at her neck and wanted him to kiss her there.

Every time they spoke, no matter how many other people were nearby, there was a tension between them. They would stand next to each other. They would lean in and “accidentally” touch. But then they would back away. She wasn’t sure why. She did it because he did it, and she couldn’t help but wonder if the same was true for him.

At night, there was certainty and purpose. He would bend the world around them both and wrap her up in its sheets. He would build mountains and cities out of fabric and then wrinkle them down into dust. He would whisper her name in her ear from behind her as he pointed out their room in the palace of silk, but it wasn’t her name, not the same one she answered to, awake. This name was older.

There was a trip, with school. After driving eight hours South, they would spend a week in the wilderness, biking and hiking, an adventure, if somewhat controlled. The bus drove down at night and though they had held hands once or twice, no words had been spoken between them that mattered. But on a bus ride South with school, no one gets much sleep and what sleep they get, they get at different times. That was how she came upon him sleeping and found herself lingering a bit too long, wondering a bit too seriously what he might be dreaming about, and she heard him breathe her name.

Not her real name, mind you. Her name. That name. From the dream.

She couldn’t know before that moment it was real, but now she did. Now she knew it and the knowledge was almost too much. Could she bring it up? No, it was crazy. Even if she knew it was true, it was crazy—especially then. But how could she just let it linger, let the word fester between them. One of them had to do something!

They unloaded and climbed on their bikes far too early in the morning. She had slept only briefly and dreamed a different dream, an older dream, covered in ash, where she was smoking blue flames, chased by spiders to a door she couldn’t go through until a storm hit—it wasn’t important, she told herself. They had slept at different times, so of course their dreams had been different. But now they spread out, seventy of them, kids on bikes going up mountains, careful of cars on the roads. Now she could speak to him.

She caught him alone on the trail, and, weak in the knees, her resolve and her confidence drifted away at the sight of him. They spoke, but only as they had spoken before, in vague whispers of what they really meant and riddles disguised as jokes. She wanted to do something drastic, she wanted to talk about rooms and how big they could be if you let them, or at the very least mention sheets, to see where he’d go with it. But it wasn’t until they crested the final ridge that he started humming a song and finally crooning the soft words he had written about a lady who was dressed in blue flames.

They arrived at the camp site and she wrote him a note to meet her at the large rock over the river at sunset—

I can’t tell you the end of this story. It’s too much. It’s stupid, the heartbreak. The reasons why it happened the way it did. How could she miss this appointment. She, of all people, she who had set it and made the arrangements. Stood him up. And for what? Reasons, she had aplenty. Excuses, she had none. Not ones she could tell herself. And when the day broke and camp was unsettled, she sought him out to apologize, and saw the truth of it, how in her absence someone else had been there when she’d stood him up, and now she was on his arm, she held his gaze and he avoided the one that hadn’t been there for him.

No wonder their dream had taken such a turn that night. Instead of in bed, they were upright and the door was open and he was turned away from her, light streaming in from outside, shadows dancing across the room. She kept trying to call to him, but when she ran to him, she slammed into the invisible glass between them, keeping her out, and he didn’t hear her.
I won’t tell you the end of this story. And neither will she. It pains her still, her part in it, and the fact that even now, it still isn’t over. But every night—not for the entire night, but some portion—she finds herself locked in that room, where the man she loves takes a stranger in her bed, thinking that it’s her. Why couldn’t she have just told the truth? Even now, why can’t she just tell him?

She tells herself it was all her imagination anyway. If only she could believe it.

And then suddenly I’m standing at your door again. How did I get here? I don’t understand. One moment I was out for a walk, clearing my head in another part of the city, and now I’m back here.

Instinct tells me I should ring the bell or knock because those are the things that you do when you’re standing in front of your girlfriend’s door, on the wrong side of it, not sure if she’s even still your girlfriend. Do I want to ring the bell? Do I want to talk to you? I’m not sure why I’m even thinking about it. Hell, I don’t know how I even got here—

But then you open the door. You’re not looking, at first. You’ve got that purse I gave you slung over your shoulder like you’re going out, going out to do something. Like you’re going to a club, but you’re not dressed for the club—where are you going? Where do you happen to be going right now? I think in the split-second it takes you to see me.

And then your whole face changes—everything. For a minute, I think you think this is the part of the movie where I’ve come back and we don’t even have to talk, you’re just gonna put your hand on my lips, “Shhh,” and then kiss me.

But then I guess you remember.

“Hey,” you tell me, desperately trying to make it sound neutral.

“Hey,” I croak, desperately trying the same and failing, flailing, thinking How the hell did I even get here?

You readjust the strap of your purse so it doesn’t slide right off your shoulder. “What are you doing here?” You sound surprised, but not unpleasantly—not delighted, but not horrified.

“I don’t know,” I confess to you, and there’s something about standing here, dripping wet from the rain, saying those words, that makes me feel like the very worst thing about Hollywood movies.

“Do you…” You’re looking at me, looking at my lips, looking from my chest and shoulders to my eyes, then quickly looking away, looking back inside. “Did you want to come in?”

“No.” I don’t even want to be here, don’t know how I got here, but I don’t want to sound crazy.

“Do you want to talk about it?” You’re doing that thing now, shifting your weight, tipping your toes, like you do when you’re nervous. One of those things I always loved about y—

“No,” I say, and turn to leave.

“Wait—“ you say. You say my name. “Please!” Take my hand.

Why did you have to take my hand? “I shouldn’t even be here,” I whisper.

You hear me and say, “Shhh,” taking the opportunity to move in closer, wrapping yourself around my arm. You say my name again, quietly, not to calm me down, but tenderly, like I’m already calm and you’re trying to savor.

But I’m not calm. So I reclaim my arm from you. I force you to look me in the eyes. I look in your right eye, the one that’s on my left, but you’re doing that thing where you’re shifting back and forth, not sure which eye you want to focus on.

You’re frightened. You’re scared of me and your fear is justified.

I ask you, “Why?” and I watch your face break into a thousand million pieces I don’t want to pick up because each broken bit is a memory and I realize too late I don’t want any answers.

But you give them to me anyway. You remind me what a jerk I was, that I never did like to take responsibility, but then just as I turn to go, to leave in disgrace, you stop me again and you tell me all the wonderful things I once knew about myself but forgot after what you did, after what happened between us, stuff only you could know, only you could remind me of, and that’s when I start to think, you know, maybe whatever brought me here tonight knew what it was doing.

Donald Radcliffe looks at himself in the mirror and doesn’t like what he sees. It’s his face, you see, the lack of hair on it, particularly the lack of hair on his upper lip, just below his nose.

Since early childhood, Donald Radcliffe has associated male attributes—not just virility but honor—with the quality and grooming of a man’s mustache. He had imagined his adult self at the time with a thick growth of long mustache-hair, easily twirlible into strands. In his wildest imaginings, he could twirl the ends of his mustache into thick ropes that could be used for climbing, for fishing, or even, with the appropriate small clubs attached to the ends, as nunchucks during battles with schoolyard bullies.

But as it stands, Donald Radcliffe will never perform such heroics, as his is a face built to be cleanly shaved that could not grow so much as what is popularly known as a “child-molester” mustache, try though he might. And this is, he is convinced, why he does not have a girlfriend to this day.

Which is why he invented Stachio.

Karen Johnson-Jones does not have a boyfriend, either–a fact she, too, laments as she looks in the mirror. For her, it’s her breasts. When she takes off only her shirt to look at them, she has to strain her eyes to convince herself that she isn’t a boy, and sometimes even then she feels the need to rub her legs together just to be sure.

This is not the person she wanted to be. I’m a woman, she thinks, and I want the pectoral protrusions to prove it!

Why couldn’t she be more like her mother? Now there was a woman! Some of her earliest memories are of the various instruments and implements and affects her mother could produce from her cleavage, from money and keys and make-up pouches to CDs and small furry animals and sandwiches. Once—she was sure of it—Karen Johnson-Jones had seen her mother emerge from her chest of wonders with a bottle of 1979 Horace Landing Pinot Grigio. It was the stuff of legends!

And yet here was her daughter, unable to squeeze the two together well enough to hold a penny aloft. Disgraceful!

Which was why she invented her alter-ego, Bigtits.

These two, Bigtits and Stachio, represent what these two poor unfortunate souls wish they could look like. We haunt their dreams and taunt their memories with visions of what might have been. Are we right? Correct? Who cares? We are alive and we are having fun!

On this of all days, though, Donald Radcliffe and Karen Johnson-Jones both have laundry to do and, conveniently (for this, at least) neither have the facilities and so are forced both to make their separate ways to the local Laundromatic, where they are destined to meet each other for the first time.

Now, Donald Radcliffe and Karen Johnson-Jones would be perfect for each other. Their interests and opinions align, their quirks match up; you know it, I know it, the laundromat knows it, inasmuch as the laundromat knows anything. There’s just one thing standing in their way. Well, two: Bigtits and Stachio.

You see, he sees her and he thinks “Hot damn, that’s a fine-looking woman.” But any time Donald Radcliffe thinks “Hot damn, that’s a fine-looking woman,” he knows that she’s out of his league, because he doesn’t have a mustache. So he does his best not to even look at her. He’s not there to look anyway, right? He’s there to do laundry. Meanwhile, Karen Johnson-Jones looks at this nice-looking boy and her mind starts to work at it, chipping away, until she realizes this nice-looking boy isn’t looking at her. Why isn’t he looking at her? Oh, I know. It’s because he would rather be looking at Bigtits.

Bigtits has wiles, you see, of a feminine variety, a way of bouncing her bosom to draw the eye. And Stachio? Why, he sees a fine-looking woman like that and, hot damn, he will twirl his mustache until she throws her number at him—though, admittedly, several other things would probably have to happen as well before that.

As each of them struggles with their machines, they soon realize they are struggling with us, their deepest fears keeping them from acting, from making a move, yet all the while, they find their eyes keep seeking one another out, much as they try keeping them to themselves until finally he looks up and sees her looking at him and once he’s looking at her, she smiles.

This should be the happy ending. Their time has come now, right?

But there’s still one more step left to make.

They do their folding standing next to each other and lingered long enough looking at each other and lingered long enough looking at each other’s catchy T-shirts to warrant explanations.

“Oh, yeah,” said Karen Johnson-Jones, “I got this at an Aardvark on Toast concert a couple years back. It’s actually a boys’ shirt, but that’s great ’cause, like…” She gestured at her figure.

But he seemed confused.

“No chest,” she helped, “Nothing to see here.”

“Nothing to see?”

“My breasts. They’re kinda… not a thing…”

“Oh. I really hadn’t noticed.”

It seemed an ambiguous statement that could go either way, but something about the way he said it plunged a knife deep down between Bigtits’s breasts, past the breadcrumbs, lost freshman boys and broken dreams, and cracked her ribcage, piercing her very soul.

“Oh,” said Karen Johnson-Jones, “Well, thanks, for… um… not noticing that.”

They continued folding until Karen Johnson-Jones asked “So do you have a girlfriend?”

It took Donald Radcliffe by surprise, giving him hope and provoking Stachio to use one side to lasso his attentions to his own insecurities (all the while twirling the other). “No,” he sighed.

To which, Karen Johnson-Jones: “Oh… why not?”

And even just the fact that she asked it and smiled when he turned his clean-shaved face to her, pulled both strands of Stachio’s facial armament all the way around his head and strangled Donald Radcliffe’s insecurities with his own mustache, allowing him to reply: “I don’t know. Guess I just haven’t found the right flat-chested girl.”

This made her smile and they both lived happily ever after, leaving Bigtits and Stachio’s mangled corpses on the floor of the laundromat.

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.