*
I opened the door and went inside my house. Everything was nearly the same as it had been before, which was a little disconcerting. I don’t know what I had expected I might find. Homeless men no longer being actually homeless on account of taking up residence in my home? Goblins scuttling across the floor, maybe? Cobwebs, for sure. There was none of that, though. It was just my house. I flipped the light switch, and the lights came on. The hospital and my insurance company must have arranged to take care of all the bills in my absence. A huge stack of mail, several months’ worth, was on the table. The floor was dusty, and, ah – there were faint shoe prints in the dust. That wasn’t anything to worry about, though. Obviously the insurance company must have had someone come around to check on the house, move the mail, chase away any house-squatting goblins, that kind of thing, while I was away. It was about time I got such good service, I thought. I was starting to think that insurance was a scam after years of paying a large premium every month for various types of insurance and yet never having had a single burglary or kidnapping or dismemberment happen to me, and yet here at last my insurance was actually useful.
I went down the hallway, and saw that the bathroom door was open. The doorway to my bedroom – where I had kept the pictures and other information on the wall about the mysterious group of men I’d thought I was closing in on – was also open, and the dusty shoe prints went right in through the open doorway. Of course they must have needed to check every room, no doubt sometimes people left a pet alone in their office if they were suddenly taken to prison or the hospital, and that pet would be scrabbling anxiously at the door waiting to be let out because it didn’t want to poop on the floor and upset the master. I didn’t have any pets, but you can never be too careful, that’s what my insurance agent always said. Besides, the pet insurance was only a few dollars a month and the current offer wouldn’t last long, so I would have been a fool not to take advantage of it. Now who’s the fool?
On the floor in my bedroom, the footprints led directly to the main wall, where all of the photos, drawings, and notes had been torn down. That made sense too; the hospital had sent word to my insurance company about things that might trigger my paranoia, and they had taken care of it to ready the house for my return. The papers had been on the wall so long that the places where some of them had been were surrounded by rectangles of dust, and the wall behind was bright and pristine, shining through like the ghost of the paper which had hung there.
Some bits of paper – corners, mostly – still clung to the glue or tape which had held them, unwilling to go where the rest had gone. There were pieces of sentences you could still see on those abandoned papers; a lone noun here, an adverb lying forlornly there with no verb left to modify. There was a circle drawn on the wall in red marker, like it had been around something important, but I couldn’t remember what.
I knew I had covered that wall with papers and photos, but I didn’t feel like the same person anymore; I couldn’t imagine myself doing it. The Psylocybin in my body was causing my brain to function properly for the first time, and I was no longer capable of producing the feelings or entertaining the paranoid thoughts required to put so much effort into making those senseless connections between people and events and recording it all here in my bedroom office. I remembered doing it, but it was more like I remembered it happening, as if what I actually remembered was watching a movie with an unrealistic character who had papered the wall with suspicion. I would give that movie three stars. Four, at the most. Out of ten.
There was no way to piece together the small bits of information still on the wall, but instead of loss, I felt relief. I had worked hard to create the wall, but there was nothing on it for me now, and everything could be new, everything could be the way it was supposed to be. I hammered a nail into the wall and hung up a picture of my family which had been lying face-down on the floor.
I sorted through the huge stack of mail on the table – some of which had been opened (by the insurance company, to get information necessary to pay bills). Next, I made out a list of family and friends I wanted to talk to, with Winslow at the top.
“Hello?” he answered, on the first ring. I hadn’t planned what to say, and there were so many things I wanted to say that they couldn’t get past each other and all got caught in my throat. It was good to hear his voice again. “Hello, who is this?” he asked, and then he hung up on me. I stood, still holding the phone against my head, feeling confused; this wasn’t exactly how I’d thought it might go. After a few moments, I called back. It was eight or nine rings that time, but he did answer at last. “I don’t know who you are, but I’ve already called the cops,” he said, in a shaky voice.
“Winslow, it’s me,” I said.
Silence. Breathing. “Oscar? Oscar, is that you?”
“It’s me,” I said, because although I don’t enjoy repeating myself it is important for people to know who you are.
“How?” he asked. “They said it’d be a year before you came back.”
“It would have been, but they have some great staff there who were able to make it faster. I’ve actually been better for a few weeks, but I only got to come back home today; they wanted to keep me for that extra time just to be sure.”
“That’s great, I’m glad you’re back. Is it really… you?” He sounded unsure if it was ok to ask.
“It’s really me. I’m taking the Psylocybin pills again, but they’re formulated a bit differently, and I’m using them properly now. I haven’t had an actual paranoid thought since last month.”
“That reminds me, I haven’t actually called the cops. I thought someone had broken in and was using your phone. I just wanted to scare away whoever it was.” A pause, long enough for me to pull the phone away from my ear and look at it to see if the call was dropped, but I put it back to my ear just in time to hear Winslow saying, “How do you feel, then? I mean, you said you haven’t had a paranoid thought in a while, but, um, really? It’s hard to believe, because the last time I saw you, you thought I was basically working with Satan to kill you.”
“That’s a little bit of an exaggeration – more like working with Stan.” I felt like I deserved that anyway, or at least I had expected it. “Winslow,” I said, “It’s important for me that you understand it wasn’t really me thinking that about you. I have a medical condition that makes my brain work differently, and it’s only my new medicine that guides my neurons down the right path. There’s a lot involved, and I’ll explain all the details to you at lunch or something. The important thing is that I don’t feel that way anymore. I know you were just helping me, and it must have been incredibly difficult because I didn’t even appreciate your help at the time, and actually the more you helped the more I suspected you.”
“I want you to know, now,” I continued. “I do appreciate it. Without your help, I know I’d still be in prison right now. I wouldn’t even know that I had a mental problem that needed treatment, and I’d just think it was all a conspiracy against me – a conspiracy that you were in on. But you let the guard know, and he let his boss know, and he let the Maple Ridge people know, and now I can actually enjoy a normal life, all thanks to you.” My chest was tight with emotion as I spoke, and my eyes burned. “Every day I’ve been thinking about what to say to you, about how much I owe you, but I still don’t know what to say, I can’t explain it. I owe you everything, Winslow. You’re my friend, and you brought me back,” I finished, as my tears overflowed my eyes.
“Thank you,” he whispered, through his own tears. “Thank you. That makes me feel better than anything else you could have said. For months, I’ve worried that maybe you still felt the same as you did when you left, that perhaps you’d grown to hate me or even to think of me as your enemy. I’ve been your friend all along, Oscar, and all I wanted was for you to know that and to have you as my friend again too.”
After my conversation with Winslow, I sat down against the wall, holding the phone and smiling between
two streaks of tears. It had gone better than I’d thought. I had braced myself against him being angry, hurt, and defensive; I was prepared for anything other than him being kind and understanding. But he was willing to let everything go, all of my bizarre paranoid behavior, because he knew it hadn’t really been me doing it, and to accept me as his friend. Penelope was right about how understanding people could be. I felt lucky to have a friend like him, and I hoped it would go as well when I spoke to my other friends and family.