As he spoke and heard himself, Ray watched late-morning light trickle in to play games with moving shadow spaces around The Psychologist’s bustling mind. The light seemed to illuminate something like a perch . . . the perfect space for three nearby not-a-persons to meet and fuse like melding continental puzzle pieces. And Ray became a mother bird, staring longingly at the three as they shook and clutched one another, lost, in a tight, crooked triangle. If he could just find a way to help lift them to their nest.
The Psychologist blinked, but it was much more than a blink.
The whole world went away, engulfed in sudden waves of fog like the results of a bacterial infection having doubled unseen efforts to adapt and overcome an antibiotic.
Ray listened as unspoken rhetorical questions were answered by telepathic lawyer-politicians having a field day filibustering over their opponents’ careless words.
The Psychologist said, as if addressing and encouraging the fog itself, “Do you think it would be reasonable to conclude that such a patterned world might require a designer?”
Then Ray’s three cowering children on the floor were split and flung apart as if struck by a violent bolt of lightning. Everything seemed to either grow or shrink to fit the fog. Watching it all take place (again) so fast, with no seeming cause or warning, felt like being flung (back) into a coffin and immediately buried beneath planets of densest rock.
Ray fought to return his focus to the conversation at hand, knowing The Psychologist would be aware of nothing beyond Ray, the words spoken, and the room. Yet he couldn’t help but keep staring at those three crumpled, helpless beings, each now hopelessly alone. “We don’t know the scope,” he heard himself say without intending to, then paused to catch up. “I mean, we don’t know how big or important anything is, really. Could our world be reacting with other worlds, or…?”
He stopped, pained to feel his own point slipping through his grasp like ice.
“Okay,” he quickly began again, even less confident, “what would a plant, or animal, or human be if the surface of our planet was a face? But we people only see everything by our sense of size, and time, or whatever. And who’s to say our sense is . . . is true?”
Feeling the fog work to betray his speech and character, he knew “true” had been the wrong word to use.
Desperate, he blurted, “Couldn’t everything we think of as reality really be part of some far more massive thing . . . like, a mind, or cell, or atom, or something else?”
The consuming fog pulsed and vibrated in a final colorless shimmy through every last splotch of blank space left. The whole room, maybe the world, became as still as a finished painting. Seeing the fog’s completion felt about as ominous and unpeaceful as being marched into the eye of a galaxy-shattering storm.
A glazed look swelled to overtake The Psychologist’s uneasy expression.
Ray watched in terror as two new eyes appeared to open from nowhere in the fog. Then The Lie at the base of New Cannibalism caused its needless fear of lack to rise beneath the eyes in wispy, menacing fingers branching out like skewers toward The Psychologist. Yet The Lie’s dull eyes, if they were eyes, stayed locked on Ray in a stare that somehow blended hate with an apathetic void.
What might Ray still be missing?
How could the fog have returned with such steady, tireless force as if never once even challenged?
Yet as questions wound to straight-jacket straps, out from The Lie and fog arose others Ray recognized as Tension, Mistrust, Excess, and Hopelessness. These sniveling, lesser beings copied their hazy master, pointing threatening limbs at The Psychologist while staring back at Ray. Ray shuddered as they all began to shout, their jarring voices as shrill and piercing as a whole cave’s worth of bats set ablaze. Still, he tried to lean in close to hear, hoping against even Hopelessness for some clue . . . some spark to make obvious his next move. Anything. But all he could make out in the terrible, discordant shrieking was something like a description of a person: hair . . . eyes . . . glasses…
The Psychologist remained unmoving, his face as sharp and listless as ever.
Ray let himself wonder then what The Psychologist really believed.
And dinosaur squawks and screeches gave way to many conflicting worlds of thoughts and feelings . . . all fading, though, as the scraping horror continued to surround and saturate everything.
Whole new thresholds of silence, peace, and clarity were defined.
What if none of Ray’s word pictures had ever made any sense at all? What if even The Psychologist had written him off as crazy long ago? Could these meetings be but planned preparation for Ray’s eventual (inevitable) institutionalization?
The mash of jumbled clashing, if still there, was no longer confusing.
For some reason, Ray imagined Johnston appearing from nowhere to scorch away engrossing fog with those special flames of bitter disgust mixed with careless knowledge. But that was just a daydream fantasy, of course. Maybe something like a story passed down from long ago. Not quite a memory.
Ray knew there would be no more light . . . for what was light? There would be no sound . . . as if there ever could have been. There would be no others . . . for others were only games and make-believe.
But could there ever really be nothing?
Far away, eternal wisps of rock-augmented wind and waves were the very last to…
Ray shook his head, tired.
There was a voice . . . an eager, elderly gentleman . . . annoyingly cheerful, chuckling: “Yup, that guy was so weird and quiet. So, so weird! And the way he’d look at you—!” The voice sighed and shook a little, repulsed. “But you know what he wanted, right . . . what was really going on that whole time? It turns out he was just there to learn our secrets. He studied us and didn’t even pretend to be our friend. And then he sold us out, plain and simple! A deal with the devil if ever I saw one! Totally unlikeable, that guy. Impossible to…”
Of course it’s about me.
The gray had long finished joining everywhere to itself. Nothing could be heard anywhere but quiet. The only feeling was safety.
A moment passed, perhaps the shortest perceivable instant.
And Ray knew exactly what to do. He even almost knew why he should do it; he knew he would know that soon too. He also knew it would be easy, and there’d be no need at all to rush.
So, he first took a moment to smile at himself for having been so concerned.
I really am just like everyone else, huh?
And Ray felt normal for the first time in his life.
He watched his sight unadjust to the fog as to an optical illusion upon looking closer after having been duped by its singular, punch-line trick. For it wasn’t what (or who) was hidden in the fog that had now been made clear, but the fog itself.
So, what was the fog, really, now that he was able to see it?
And how had The Lie, Tension, Mistrust, Excess, and Hopelessness grown at once about as dear to him as his precious not-a-persons, Grace, or anyone else, even himself?
His knowing smile did not fade, but it did grow somewhat softer.
Then wells of redistributed compassion interrupted that greatest moment in Ray the not-a-prophet’s life, gushing forth in words he knew to say. “We’re scared,” the words began. “We scare ourselves, I think, so we can keep telling ourselves the same story. It’s a story about Tension, and Mistrust, and Excess, and Hopelessness. But it’s just so we won’t see what’s not there, y’know? I think we’d do anything not to see that . . . that blankness, or emptiness. I mean, we feel so many things, right? And our feelings conflict. But when we see each feeling . . . or each idea . . . or each individual part of everything . . . when we see it as something wanting to exist . . . then nothing changes. And we’re probably just as confused. But I think once we know we really have no idea how big we or anything else is . . . like, that’s when everything in us can just be left to run its course. That’s when we can see all ideas connecting, and everything else free to be whatever it is. It’s pretty amazing it’s all happening, anyway . . . right?”
“I don’t…” The Psychologist began, and stopped. Ray decided not to read into the widest-eyed stare he had ever seen.
The fog was gone. The three not-a-persons, The Lie, and all the rest remained, but were now inanimate toys or ornamental figures on display in a boring room.
All just representations, anyway.
Ray wondered what else to say and so decided to say nothing.
But after another pause, new words formed and joined themselves together on his lips. These were different, special words, which he knew definitely need never be spoken. “It’s not a statement,” stated the words, “the one that’s never said, but written on the back of everything burned once time goes by: ‘If there were ever anything so interesting as the human mind just happening, because it was.’”
I don't know anything 