Why do you insist that you're a paranoid, the doctor asked me. Just because you don't use quotation marks?
Quotes would mark me as 20th Century, doctor, I said. Isn't that proof enough? But you don't want proof, do you. No matter what I might say, you're going to have me uncommited.
It's just that you couldn't be a paranoid and also have the mindset that you do. I'm convinced that it's all a facade, a misdirection of sorts. What bothers me, is I can't figure out a reason for it.
Have you ever read Heinlein? I asked. He was good at putting a finger on it. Never live in a country that requires ID cards, he wrote. So I do the next best thing, I have so many passwords and personalities that they'll never find me. And even when they do, they'll just think I'm a fictional character, not realizing that the character has to have an author.
That may be, said the doctor, but I still insist that you're faking. Right down to the absence of quotation marks.
It was enough. My time was up anyway, so I shook his hand and found my way out, all the time thinking that he probably wasn't one of them.
I know what you're thinking, that this is another one of those novels about a nutcase who thinks there are all sorts of folks out to get him and then sooner or later it turns out he's right. Well, if I wanted to make a buck or two, that might work. The old formulas are pretty reliable. But what if I don't want to make a buck or two? What if I just want this out there and what if I told you that's the best place to hide, in the bowels of a fictional disaster, a novel without a plot and certainly no characters that you would ever want to identify with?
You see, that doctor, the one I just left, shaking his head, he's right where I need for all of you to be. To him, I'm just barely between existing and not existing. In fact, ten minutes from now, he'll probably forget all about me, because he can't pigeonhole me into either a crazy or a normal.
But there's no time for that now, I have to make a plane.
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