I’d like to have at least some privacy. Your minder follows you around everywhere. They watch you shower. You cant wear anything on your feet. I’m sure I would draw Miss Surlynurse.

Let me think about it.

What if I went back on the meds.

Would you?

No.

We could go over a few of them.

You dont even have a diagnosis but you’re ready to prescribe.

So why did you bring it up?

I just wanted to see if you’d trot out your pharmaceuticals. Lithium of course always comes last because it’s not patentable. You cant turn a buck with a thing like that. Otherwise the names themselves are pretty wonderful. Depakote, Seroquel. Risperdal. Jesus. Who makes this shit up?

You believe all this is a pharmaceutical conspiracy.

No. I really dont. Why am I on your ass? Dreams are frail. If you can drug them into being no reason why you shouldnt be able to drug them out again.

Is this the side of you that counselors have described as difficult?

I suppose you could ask them what they expected of a mental patient. Anyway, in the end I was hardly even a patient. But they were still difficult doctors.

You studied the literature the better to confound them.

I didnt study anything. What was there to study? If they could be confounded by their own doctrines wouldnt they have been already?

You spoke of waking from ugly dreams. Did you ever see anything that was truly troubling?

I never saw monsters. Creatures going around carrying their heads. I always sensed that the worst of it transcended representation. You couldnt put together something for them to look like. You didnt have the parts.

Is this something that is always there?

No. And sometimes everything would just go away. It still does. Sometimes in the winter in the dark I’d wake and everything that smacked of dread would have lifted up and stolen away in the night and I would just be lying there with the snow blowing against the glass. I’d think that maybe I should turn on the lamp but then I’d just lie there and listen to the quiet. The wind in the quiet. There are times now when I see those patients in their soiled nightshirts lying on gurneys in the hallway with their faces to the wall that I ask myself what humanity means. I would ask does it include me.

Did you want to be included?

I did want to be included. I just wasnt willing to pay the entry fee. On my better days I could even grant that we were the same creatures. Much was the same and little different. The same unlikely forms. Elbows. Skulls. The remnants of a soul.

I’m surprised to hear those sentiments.

Mental illness doesnt seem to occur in animals. Why do you think that is?

I dont know. But I imagine you have some notion about it.

Why do you imagine that?

Because you raised the question. You’re like a lawyer.