by Ryan Notch
“Hell no I’m not crazy. The doctors are full of shit. I’m just humoring them until I’m told the path out by the legaties.”
The legaties, Shaw knew from group therapy, were Valentine’s name for the voices in his head; voices that had convinced him to kill his wife with a pocket knife, for reasons unknown. Shaw couldn’t imagine the viciousness this three foot tall man would have had to manifest to kill a full sized person. He didn’t want to imagine it.
“Yeah, and what about me,” asked Shaw. “Am I insane?”
“Well of course you are, why else would you be here?”
Shaw felt shivers run up his spine.
Before Shaw could reply Valentine was walking away. He waved at Nurse Marilyn as he walked by, and she detached herself politely from Walter to follow him. Talking to him about something Shaw couldn’t hear. His mind numb he looked around the brightly lit room, noticing again how dark it always seemed.
That night as he paced, trying to delay somehow the inevitable “lights out” that meant bed time whether you liked it or not, he tried to reason things out. He paced faster to rev up his mind, trying to push his way past the molasses of the pills and the insomnia-like distance of the sleep deprivation.
Ok, premise number 1. If you think you’re not insane, you probably are. If you think you are insane, you probably are. So what does it mean if you don’t know whether you are or not? This test is impossible to test internally, as any internal test would be done by the possibly flawed mechanism that is testing it.
Split off is premise 1A, which would be that I was driven insane from the mold and am now sane. 1B would be that I was driven insane by the mold and am still insane.
Premise number 2. That I never was insane and that some dark thing did follow my signal down from outer space and it was so horrible that everyone killed themselves. Which begs the question, where did it go after that?
“Lights out!” called the orderly from the hall, killing the lights for everyone. Shaw stumbled to bed, finding it by touch. Like every night he lie there trying to stay awake, afraid to fall asleep. And like every night, exhausted from lack of rest the night before, he passed out almost immediately.
Chapter 9
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Collin sat in his apartment after another evening at the clubs with Alex and Jack. He’d been able to fake having a good time almost well enough to believe it. But as soon as he got home the illusion fell heavily from his shoulders, and now he sat staring at a whiteboard in the near dark, moonlight illuminating it through the window. Once filled with equations and theories, the whiteboard now had the words “She will never be yours” written over and over and over. He thought about what a waste it was. Waste of energy. Waste of time. A waste of a great mind. All for the woman he loved. All for Noel, his best friend’s wife.
How did things ever get this bad? he thought.
Not quickly. When Alex and Noel had first moved into the building three years ago he hadn't even spoken to them for the first few months. Then one day in the parking lot, both he and Alex had been working on their cars at the same time and had got to talking. Collin was restoring a 1970 Pontiac GTO and Alex was working on his ‘65 Mustang, a true muscle car.
Collin tended to run entirely in math circles and it was nice to talk to someone who was interested in something other than numbers and physics. Collin loved both those things, but wasn’t sure he liked the mirror his fellow mathematicians held up to him.
Despite being a dedicated gear head, Alex wasn’t bothered by intellectuals and could hold his own in talk of the fluid dynamics in a V8 engine. He didn’t seem to have any need to compete with Collin like his contemporaries did. Alex just had a way of getting it, and the two got along famously.
Noel was a bit more of a mystery though; beautiful, funny, and driven to succeed, even if she wasn’t entirely sure at what. She worked during the day and took classes at night to eventually become a therapist, something Collin thought she would be great at. Because despite her hectic schedule she never seemed too rushed to listen. She had a calmness about her that was catchy. When she asked how you were you got the feeling she actually wanted to know. She was great, and she looked at Alex like he could walk on water. She looked at him in the way that every guy wants to be looked at by his girl, but never is.
Not that Collin was jealous, not that he fell for her right away. No, falling for your friend’s girl was something which Collin was incapable of. It was beneath him; a point of pride.
Pretty soon Collin was hanging out at their apartment all the time. He never figured himself the type to hang out with couples, but they didn't have that way most couples do of excluding those around them. None of that baby talk or inside jokes or the million other things couples do to make everyone around them constantly aware that they're an outsider. Just hanging out and having fun.
Alex and Noel had their quirks though, their problems. Enough so that it seemed every couple around them criticized their relationship behind their backs. It drove Collin crazy to listen to people talk about all the things they did wrong. Those gossipy couples who bought their houses and had their kids and did everything by the book, and yet never missed an opportunity to talk about how difficult it was to maintain a relationship and who couldn't seem to keep out of couples therapy. They just loved to talk about how Alex and Noel wouldn’t last.
They lived in their small apartment and worked their bad jobs and fought and made absolutely no effort to make their marriage work better, and never seemed to need to. Their were incredibly stable in their instability, like a planet and its moon always falling past each other in space, but never getting any further away from each other.
And Collin really liked that. Collin had grown up never once seeing a stable relationship, never meeting his father. But instead of making him jaded towards all relationships, it pushed him the other way. Despite his intelligence, he had a fairy tale ideal of love. Alex and Noel seemed to have happily ever after down pretty good, and being around that made him feel secure somehow. He was happy to float on that fragile bubble of fantasy, never thinking about how far he'd fall if it popped.
Bubbles can pop slowly though. Over the course of the next couple of years Collin moved from being Alex's friend to both of their friend. On the weekends, while Alex was at work, Noel would come hang out with Collin while he worked on restoring an old Chevy. Or Collin would go to their apartment and paint on one of her canvases (Collin was terrible, but she was pretty good). Then when Alex would get home from work they'd go out drinking while Noel went to her night classes.
For a while it was great. For Collin, who'd grown apart from most of his college friends largely because he didn't fit into their new “married with kids” world, hanging out with Alex and Noel was pretty much his whole social life. The kind of situation that Collin was very cool with; the perfectly balanced equation; if only it had stayed just the same, if he’d never looked any closer.
But Collin always looked closer. He couldn’t help it, everything had to be examined, everything analyzed. Once, when he was young, he’d read about a man who had an operation to restore his sight after having been blind his whole life. At first the man was thrilled, but over time he became very depressed. He couldn’t help seeing the ugliness everywhere; the cracks in every sidewalk, the dirt on every wall. Eventually the man killed himself, overwhelmed with the world’s ugliness. Seeing for the first time, he just didn’t know how to be selectively blind.
Collin never forgot the story because he knew, deep down, he was like that man. He had a mind that never stopped moving. Never stopped dissecting things to see how they worked. It was why he’d done so well as a mathematician (and later an engineering consultant). It was also why he’d never had a long term relationship. Anytime he was with a girl for very long he began to analyze her every action, every motivation. He’d dissect her entire persona until it lie dead on the examining table, all cut skin and messy disillusionment.
And so it w
as with Alex and Noel’s relationship. The analytical part of his mind never ceasing to examine it, and the emotional part working to keep things looking perfect; to keep the cracks hidden; to keep Pandora’s box closed. Maybe even then he knew, deep down somewhere where even his mind couldn’t see, that if the cracks got too big they wouldn’t just let all the ugliness of the world seep through. They’d let a hell of a lot more escape into the world from inside him.
Collin had often wondered about the mystery of someone like Alex getting married.
Then again, Noel was no ordinary girl. Beauty itself wasn’t really hard to come by, mathematically Collin figured the number of stunningly beautiful girls in the world must number in the millions. But a girl like Noel...there was just something about her. Yeah she was beautiful, anyone would think so. But she wasn’t perfect looking by any means, as she herself had mentioned on more than one occasion. By some quirk of ancestry she had light freckles on her cheeks and nose that marred her perfect complexion and drove her crazy. She had ears that stuck out pixie like past her hair. But somehow these little imperfections just made her all the more beautiful.
Because it wasn’t her looks that drove Collin so crazy, it was who she was. In a way it seemed everyone fell for her in some way or another. The way she was soft spoken and timid, but talked to everyone as if they were any equal. The way she was always trying to help someone, and never judgmental of people who didn’t. She spent most of her free time in her room with her art, but never acted like Collin was interrupting her when he would come and talk to her while she painted. He loved the way she would talk to him about all the new things she was interested in. He loved how her native Russian accent would slip out when she was excited or angry about something, trilling her R’s just a little.
It was like she lived in a world of quiet sunshine while everyone else was stuck with the deafening rain. And everyone wanted to be close to that sunshine. Ultimately that’s why he figured Alex married her. If you can get a girl like that to fall for you, you do everything you can to keep her. Whether you’re faithful to her after that was anyone’s guess.
Including Collin’s. Despite what Alex said, was he really sure he threw away the numbers pretty girls practically forced into his hands at the clubs? Alex and their British neighbor Jack would have contests for who could get the most, and Collin was by no means sure that Alex threw all his away at the end of the night.
And then there were those nights when Alex would go out and come up with reasons not to invite Collin. Intentionally invoking friends and places that he knew Collin didn’t like, sometimes practically asking Collin to stay home and keep Noel company. It had reached the point where Collin truly couldn’t tell whether he genuinely thought Alex was cheating on Noel or whether he just told himself that so he could believe Alex didn’t deserve her.
The whole thing made Collin feel schizophrenic, as if there were two of him trying to do different things. Wanting different things. It was getting to the point where he felt like he didn’t always know what he was doing anymore.
Case in point was when he realized a disturbing fact about the last two girls he’d dated. They both looked almost just like Noel. He’d only noticed it when scrolling through pictures on his phone, finding theirs and Noels all in a row and taking a moment to realize which was which.
At first he shrugged it off onto the shoulders of coincidence, but the more he thought about it (and he couldn’t help but think about it) the more he realized they were completely different from his usual type. He wondered if he wasn't trying to create for himself the perfect relationship Alex and Noel had, even as he realized it wasn't as perfect as he thought.
After all, he thought, Alex doesn’t deserve her. He treats her bad. She deserves better and I can give her that.
The first time Collin had this thought he literally laughed out loud (a startling and somewhat creepy sound to hear coming from yourself in the middle of the night when you’re all alone). He had heard guys say this before about stealing a friends girl. An incredibly transparent excuse for a clearly immoral act, the kind of thing he would never ever be so weak as to do. The thought was so unlike him that it sounded like someone else’s voice in his head. But he couldn’t stop thinking it. Seeing the things Alex did and thinking, If she was mine, I would do better.
It didn’t sound like him, but the more he thought it the more it made sense.
And so there it was, by the time he realized he was sinking, he was already underwater.
Slowly he’d gone from hanging out with her only occasionally to intentionally ditching Alex to spend more time with her. The day Collin realized he was in love with Noel, and had been for a while, was the day he realized just how bad things had become. Maybe the day he first began to realize they were going to get much worse. Because that day, several irresistible forces started pulling in separate directions in Collin's head.
One: Despite everything, by now Alex was certainly Collin's best friend. Collin couldn’t stand the idea of betraying him.
Two: Even if he was willing to, he was in love with a girl that was completely faithful, who would never cheat.
Three: When you're the kind of guy who believes in happily ever after, you’re also the kind of guy who believes in never destroying it. Alex and Noel were the closest thing to true love he’d ever found in this world. If they broke up, then Collin's conception of the world broke apart with it.
Four: He had to have her.
And he couldn't have her.
It wasn’t fair. And it was starting to hurt.
He tried at first to tell himself how silly it was, that she was happy with Alex and could never want him. The only smart thing was to forget her, to find his own girl.
But she was so wonderful, how could he ever settle for someone else? And besides, what if she did feel the same way, but was just afraid to say something? He would notice things when he was with her, things that his desperate heart would make into sense from nonsense. The way she'd look at Collin, smile at him sometimes, would take on more meaning than it had before. She'd say things like, "You should get a girlfriend Collin, lots of girls would like you." And he'd think how it must be a code, a way for her to tell him she felt the same way he did.
As the months passed he continued to try and work things out. But after a while it was like his two personalities, the one who believed they could be together and the one who despised himself for his weakness, split according to the hours.
He’d think of her at night, of his feelings for her, of the pain of his situation. Pacing back and forth, back and forth in his apartment. Trying to think of ways around it, through it, over it. Ways to escape this impossible problem of needing something you can't have. Collin's mind was obsessive, willing to tear itself to bits to get things in order, never willing to sleep until it had things right. But he couldn't make this right, and he couldn't let it alone. Because in Collin's fairy tale world there was always a way to be with the one you love, and in Collin's world Snow White didn't cheat on Prince Charming with his best friend.
And then when it was morning his head would clear, and he'd almost laugh at how ridiculous he was acting. He'd go through work, as efficient as ever and thinking how all he really had to do was get past the whole thing. With the sun shining down he knew it was no problem, problems like that were for lesser men. Weaker men.
But the daytime respites didn't last, and the nights were getting longer. Within a few months his fantasies about her were intrusive. He'd daydream about Alex and Noel breaking up for some reason. Contrived fantasies of Alex running off with some other woman or the two of them realizing they just weren’t right for each other. Then they became fantasies of something happening to Alex, a car accident usually, and Collin comforting Noel. Them growing together. The daydreams became so persistent that he was horribly unsure of whether he actually wanted something bad to happen to Alex or not.
His love for her was overwhelming him, destroying him. He was raving, manic, m
iserable.
Lost.
And all alone. Because no one had a clue. And no one ever would, he wouldn’t let them. Collin never let anything show he didn’t want to show. Not one bit. Absolutely not. Because Collin was in control, always. Control with a capital C, that was Collin’s motto.
But Collin was starting to think that control and barely hanging on get together just fine. For a while anyway. Then the other engine falls off the plane and things go from bad to worse real fast.
He thought deeply on all this, reasoned it out bit by bit as he stared at the whiteboard.
“She will never be yours,” it accused over and over and over in the dark apartment.
The whole thing was like some unsolvable equation. And Collin, for whom math was the only truth in the universe, didn’t believe in unsolvable. Couldn’t believe in it. There had to be a solution. He only had to think about it the right way. A new way.
How did things ever get this bad? he sighed.
Chapter 10
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Shaw awoke the next morning with the idea that there was one more piece of evidence he could find that was more objective than the consensus of madmen he had thus far achieved. But to do so would be more complicated. It would mean doing exactly what he had been afraid to do and was unable to do in his current mental state. So the first step was changing that mental state.
“Walter, you ever know anyone here who managed to stop taking their meds?”
“Sure. Bobby actually almost never takes his meds. Why do you think he’s such an asshole?”
“I never really thought of it before. How does he fool them?”