I have been moved to a private room, one with a window that overlooks the freeway and smells of disinfectant and old flowers. Dr Pontius insisted that I be restrained to my bed at all times with leather straps, unless the wardsmen were nearby. Pontius rarely enters the room without them now, and they hover behind him impatiently, snapping at each other and just waiting for the word to attack. In fact, he has become a very regular visitor, performing tests of dexterity and reaction times, as well as subjecting me to even more scans in an attempt to discover not only why the original MRI has been proven incorrect, but also to answer the riddle of how I am able to walk. It seems to have become something of an obsession, but the man's bedside manner, which was already abysmal, has declined even further. He's tentative and silent usually, and I submit to his demands without speaking. I am nothing more than a curiosity to him. A question without an answer. The door opens as I lie in my prison, awaiting the final dream that will end this containment, and I expect to see Pontius again, but instead Mary enters. I haven't seen her since my failed decapitation, and she looks pale and thin. She seems almost as shocked by my own appearance, but she manages to raise a little smile.
'Hello, Joe,' she says, walking gingerly over towards me.
She takes my hand in hers, recoiling when she sees the leather restraints, but pretending she hasn't noticed them.
'Mary.'
She seems to want to say something, but the words won't form. Her mouth opens and closes but no sound comes out and after a few seconds of this I have to break the silence.
'Have they told you?'
A thousand thoughts cross her mind at once, and she's obviously trying to work out what I'm referring to. I assume she's been told everything that I've said and done since I've been here as she's clearly taken an interest. Private rooms aren't free, and Mary must have been sorting out the bills behind the scenes.
'They said that you have epilepsy. They told me you had another seizure last night. Quite a bad one.'
'Yes, that's what they seem to think. Of course, they're trying to put a round peg in a square hole. There's no medical term for what I am.'
She swallows heavily, taking her hand away from mine and sitting down in the uncomfortable chair next to the bed that was apparently designed to encourage short visits. Apart from that, it also does a fair job at rendering oncologists unconscious.
'I spoke to Dr Armaita...' she begins.
'He told you that I'm delusional. That I have a God complex and delusions of grandeur, most likely as a result of post traumatic stress from what he probably termed a suicide attempt?'
Her mouth falls open again, and then closes.
'Mary, I realise that it must be very hard for you to believe this, but I am actually God. Not the God, but a God.'
'That's not hard for me to accept, Joe. It's impossible for me to accept. You're sick, Joe.'
'I killed Grey, Mary. I killed Grey and the tumour disappeared. I rose up and walked when they said it was impossible. What more proof do you need?'
'A lot!' she says loudly. 'I need a lot more proof than that. All of your delusions are nothing new. Thousands of mental patients have claimed the same thing before you. I know it must all seem very real to you, but it's not. None of it is. We're not just figments of your imagination.'
There's no point arguing with her. People are designed to cling to their perceptions of the world they inhabit because if they didn't then they couldn't function. I can't complain about that because it was me who designed them that way. Mary can no more accept that she's nothing more than a construct of my mind than I can accept that I'm mentally unbalanced. We're both looking at the same thing, but from completely different angles.
'I need to tell you something,' I say finally.
She nods warily.
'There's a reason we could never have children. It wasn't your fault. It's me. I cannot have offspring. The world is my offspring. It had nothing to do with biology, Mary. It was an immaculate misconception.'
She's looking at me with a glassy sheen forming across her eyeballs. I know that this is a touchy subject for her, but I had hoped that this revelation would bring some form of relief to her. It doesn't.
'Of all the things to bring up now. Of all the things. Sometimes, Joe, you can be a real bastard, you know that?' she says, sniffing.
'Well, I may be a bastard...'
'But?'
'But nothing. I'm conceding the point. I may be a bastard. The lives I've lived are all culminating towards something better. A more pure existence. Perhaps I'll do better in the next life.'
'There's no next life!' she suddenly screams, and her abrupt loss of control makes me twitch against my restraints. 'This is the only life you get, Joe. This is it, Right here and now, so don't let it end this way. Don't just give up and fade away. I deserve more than that.'
Perhaps she does deserve more than that, but I only created the universe, not the rules. There's nothing I can do to change the fact that I'm moving on and she isn't. I try to change the subject, which is a tough thing to do because it's a pretty big point of interest for Mary at the moment.
'Is Harry waiting outside?'
That does it. From the guilty look on her face I know that he is.
'Well send him in. I want to see him.'
'He's just been helping me get through this. If I bring him in here, you have to promise me that you'll be calm.'
I agree, and she quite reluctantly goes to the door and calls for Harry to come in. He enters, as nervous as I've ever seen him, and approaches the bed with a smile that's glued to his head with pure willpower.
'Hi, Joe,' he says.
I smile, hopefully in a reassuring way, but the first thing his eyes are drawn to is my restraints.
'I knocked Dr Pontius unconscious with a chair,' I explain.
'Yes, I heard.'
'I lost your watch too. But I get it back later. When I'm dreaming, I have it back.'
He nods politely, obviously not interested in the watch. Even I have to admit that that makes me sound crazy. I feel some sympathy for Sid underneath his tree. As far as he's concerned, he's sane and everybody else isn't. I know how he feels. He's certainly got the right idea, but he's only glimpsed the tip of an iceberg that goes deeper than he could imagine. He won't survive any better than the rest of them when I'm gone.
'I wanted you both here so I could say goodbye. The next time I got to sleep, I won't be waking up again,' I say.
Harry looks alarmed.
'What do you mean? Dr Pontius said that the tumour was gone, and that this epilepsy was treatable...'
'It's not epilepsy, Harry. There's no point explaining it to you, but just trust me. This is the last time we'll see each other. You two should spend your remaining time together. Once I'm gone, well, that's it.'
'What do you mean?' he says again.
'Don't encourage him, Harry. Dr Armaita said we should challenge his statements,' Mary whispers loudly.
I try to raise my hand to shake Harry's but then realise that I can't because it's strapped to the bed. Harry sees my effort and shakes it awkwardly where it is.
'I just want you both to know, I don't bear either of you any bad feelings. Everything that happened was designed to wake me up. You were just playing your part in the end game. You never had free will, so therefore neither of you have done anything wrong. The responsibility for right and wrong rests solely on my shoulders.'
Mary looks about ready to walk out. She's been putting up with a lot of this sort of talk, and I can hardly blame her. From her perspective, it's pretty annoying. If she was real, I probably would have loved her.
'I've made so many mistakes, Mary, but as it turns out, most of them were on purpose.'
'You built a guillotine in our shed, Joe. You stabbed yourself in the hand with a kitchen knife. Those aren't mistakes, they're symptoms.'
'Just say goodbye to me. Please. Both of you.'
They both look at each other, and it makes me smil
e to see their complicity in humouring me. If only they knew. If only they could know.
'Fine. Goodbye, Joe.'
'Goodbye, Mary.'
Harry shuffles uncomfortably behind her, with one hand on the back of the chair and the other flapping like a flag at half-mast.
'Goodbye, Joe,' he finally says.
'Goodbye, Harry.'
Harry walks out of the room slowly, shuffling, and looking older than he is, but Mary just shakes her head at the absurdity of it all.
'I'll come by again on Wednesday, Joe. I'll bring you some magazines,' she says as she leaves the room, and I can tell that she really believes it.
That's good. Belief is important, no matter how overwhelming the evidence to the contrary.
'Only one more sleep till Armageddon,' I say, to provoke him.
He's changed the painting on his wall. It used to be a dreary watercolour of a pastoral landscape, obviously painted by an amateur, perhaps Armaita himself. Now there's a framed photograph of an ancient temple, somewhere in India. I know this, because I've been there before. In fact, I'm fairly certain that one of the distant figures climbing up the impractically narrow stairs, is me.
'Let's just take this at face value,' he says. 'You're suggesting that everything in the world is no more than a product of your mind. If we extrapolate that then every idea must be your own, no matter who expressed it.'
He's trying to trap me, but I agree with him. I enjoy playing Devil's advocate.
'It was Descartes who said that, and I'm paraphrasing, it was impossible to trust one's own perceptions. He found it hard to differentiate the reality between being awake and his dream state. A demon could have been tricking his perceptions, he believed.'
'So I've heard. He was right of course, well, I was right. It's possible that Descartes is an invention of my subconscious trying to tell me that I'm God.'
Armaita looks pleased that I've taken the bait, and he springs his trap with a sort of childish glee.
'But you also invented Nietzsche, who said that God was dead.'
'I am dead. I've died thousands of times.'
'So you also believe in reincarnation?'
I laugh.
'Of course. I'm repeatedly living proof of it.'
He scratches his chin, annoyed that his perfect little bubble of logic has burst on my thorny indifference. He's dealing in semantics and I'm dealing in truth and there can only be one winner in that contest. Valiantly, he rallies his troops and tries again.
'How do you explain the variance in religious ideologies then? Most of them disagree with each other quite emphatically, and yet if they all stem from you then you're contradicting yourself.'
My hands clench and then unclench. The restraints are looser this time, but only slightly, and I still find it hard to think with them on.
'Everything is just a facet of my personality, Thomas. Humans are a mess of contradictions anyway.'
'So let's just work through this logically. What facet of your personality is Islam?'
I decide to play his game, but it's like a father playing football with his five year old son. The son only wins if the father lets him.
'I suppose Islam is my need for a strong father figure.'
'Okay,' he says. 'What about Hinduism?'
'Hinduism? Loneliness. I invented thousands of new Gods to keep me company.'
He doesn't seem particularly convinced, but he pushes on regardless.
'Catholicism?'
'Oh that one's easy. It's the part of me that knows I've been a very naughty boy and need to be punished.'
The problem with Armaita's reasoning is that he thinks everything is directly related to me. It isn't. The world is not made out of the ideas I believe are correct, it's made out of everything of which I can possibly conceive. When people ask, why does God do bad things to good people, the correct answer is "because he can" followed closely by "God doesn't give a shit about good people". Armaita can't grasp the magnitude of what I've created and so he wants to boil it down to its base elements and prove to me that I'm wrong.
'Fundamentalism. Of all types,' he suggests.
'I'm a stubborn bastard who thinks everything I say is right. Surely even you can agree with that one.'
I smile, and despite himself he chuckles before going right back into his pointless crusade.
'Judaism?'
'I don't like lobster or pork and I don't find foreskins aesthetically pleasing.'
'Scientology, Raelians? Mormonism?'
I recall the Mormons that came to my house on the day of the incident with a smile.
'Well that just shows that I have a sense of humour.'
'Buddhism?'
Buddhism. That's an interesting one. Despite the mysticism surrounding it, it's basically a search for meaning without resorting to total understanding. It's an endlessly recurring cycle of betterment, with the only goal being the creation of a better individual, not just a reward for paying lip service to an invisible man in the sky. I can see why he saved that one until last.
'Buddhism suggests that I know that I've fucked up and I want another chance.'
He can hardly contain his excitement at my comment. For him, it's the equivalent of a confession.
'Well, that's the crux of it, isn't it, Joe? You made a mess of things, and now you want to wipe the slate clean. It's a nice idea, but it's not reality. I'm giving you a chance to fix things though. If you can accept what I'm saying to you then you can still have the chance to start again.'
I shake my head angrily. The restraints feel like they're getting tighter. Armaita thinks he's getting to me with his words, but he's not. I'm just frustrated to still be here. I should be gone already. I don't want to be here anymore. Armaita can sense my discomfort.
'Have you heard of Occam's Razor?' he says, 'It states that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. So I put it to you again, Joe. What is more likely? That you are God and everybody else in the world is wrong, or that everybody else in the world is right, and you are sick?'
'Have you heard of Quantum Theory, Thomas?' I say, my voice nearly a growl. 'It's so complex and unintuitive that no matter how many times you explain it to somebody they just don't get it!'
I'm shouting now, and it bothers me that I've allowed this non-entity to get such a reaction from me but there's nothing to be done. If they'd just remove the restraints then I would feel a lot calmer, and not so much like a caged animal. They have no right to do this to me. I created them, and now they've turned on me, like a golem.
'You seem to treat psychoanalysis as some sort of university debating club where your goal is to score as many points as possible against your patients. Well listen to me now, Thomas. The next time I sleep, I will cross over permanently to the Underworld. Once I'm gone, this world will no longer have coherence and within hours it will start to break down. The universe will compact into a singularity, not of matter, but of thought. There will be nothing left, not the puppets of consciousness that dance as I yank their strings, nor even the flimsy facade of physics. My vehicle may remain, but my mind will transcend and leave no trace of itself. Perhaps then, even an incurable sceptic like you will have to admit the truth.'
I can't tell if he's pleased or upset by my reaction. My face is red with exertion and I'm breathing heavily. It's embarrassing in fact, and I try to remain calm. I have to keep telling myself that he doesn't exist, but every time I look up he's still right there, staring at me with a mixture of pity and clinical interest.
'So billions of people will die, just so you can live on. If you really believed this, I mean deep down, then surely you'd be more concerned about such a tragedy.'
'The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of billions is a statistic,' I say breathlessly.
'Stalin said that. You got that from him.'
'Maybe,' I concede. 'But as we've already established, he got it from me first.'
Armaita smiles knowingly and then closes the pad and presses a
button on his intercom. The wardsmen enter almost immediately from their posts just outside his door.
'You're getting agitated, Joe. We'll leave it at that today and pick it up again tomorrow.'
I shake my head vehemently. In the Underworld I have so much control, but here I seem ruled by the emotions of Joe Finch's body. I'll be glad to leave this vehicle once and for all.
'Haven't you been listening? There is no tomorrow.'
Armaita steeples his hands and rests his chin on them, a habit I'll also be glad never to see again.
'A lot of people claim to know the date of the end of the world, Joe. They've always been proven wrong.'
The wardsmen start to wheel me out again, but as usual I'm unable to let Armaita get away with the last word.
'True enough. But the day somebody is finally right, there'll be nobody left to know of it. That day is tomorrow.'
The wardsman bumps the wheelchair into the doorframe as we're leaving and he has to pull it back and try again, somewhat lessening the dramatic effect of my exit.
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The Lunatic Messiah Page 27
