‘It’s hard to stay on my meds because they make me fat and sleepy,’ said Sebastian, ‘and that first time was the most important day of my life, the most alive, but when I go off the meds now it’s not like the first time any more. It’s more chaotic and frightening each time, but that might be because the Clozapine has weakened my powers. Pin me to a bed, pin me to a wall, pin me to a pin. I call it the Wizard of Ozapine, because when you get there, it’s all fake, like the Wizard of Oz, it’s just a trick. It doesn’t cure you at all, it just tricks you and makes everything fake.’

‘Well, if you agree, we’re going to find out what’s true,’ said Martin.

‘That could be the biggest trick of all,’ said Sebastian, like a child creating an infinite regress by saying, ‘Why?’ to every answer. ‘People who talk to me about the truth are always trying to prove that I’m “delusional”, so “the truth” is their trick for stealing my truth: I know that I shattered the sky.’

‘What is true can’t also be fake,’ said Martin, ‘that would be an untenable position and that kind of logic generates the word “delusional”, but here we are less interested in that kind of logic, we’re interested in a symbolic truth, where those contradictions might be reconciled. It’s true that at that particular moment you felt you had to shatter the sky to save yourself and the rest of humanity, and it’s also true that there is an emotional history that led to that symbolic act. We’re not here to talk you out of your “delusions”, we’re here to understand your symbolic language, your own network of images. Your mind is not like a great lazy river that everyone can see from the aeroplane window, meandering its way through the plain, it’s like a mountain stream that goes underground and then bursts out of the hillside in what seem like haphazard places, but that doesn’t mean we can’t follow its course and find out why it goes underground and why it reappears.’

‘A mountain stream,’ said Sebastian, seemingly pleased. ‘So, can I stay here?’

‘We’re coming to an end of the session now, but I think we’ve made a very fruitful start.’

‘So, you’re just going to throw me on the street? You and Simon,’ said Sebastian, becoming agitated and aggrieved. ‘“You’re a mountain stream, now just fuck off.”’

‘I’m not throwing you on the street,’ said Martin firmly. ‘It’s because we’ve had a fruitful session that you want it to go on, and it will go on, at the same time next week.’

‘Next week?’ said Sebastian, in despair. ‘So, I’m just left with all these thoughts until next week?’

Martin made a rapid decision.