A fellow of student of mine once said that the campus of our university looked like a funeral home, and I had to agree with him. The library alone served as a demonstration of this claim. Flanked on two sides by great concrete pillars, I entered it with the sole intention of first looking around at what the people were doing, and then reading some articles on my phone. On the ground floor where I now stood, the windows were all lined with long, dark, rectangular benches with power outlets in them, and the right side of the room contained rows of wooden tables with high, uncomfortable stools that only the tallest students could sit on without dangling their feet. I sat down on one of the black benches, felt a searing pain under my coat, and realized that something under my jacket was starting to burn. This something lit up whenever I started to feel restless, and the result was often an involuntary transformation into what I called “Samson’s biblical foxes,” which were referenced within the Book of Judges in the Old Testament. In his story, Samson took some foxes, tied their tails together, bound some torches to these tails, and, as an act of revenge, let them run through the fields of Philistia. This “something” that was burning within me was thus really a collection of ancient biblical torches. Granted, the fields of Philistia actually caught fire, while I’d managed to refrain from starting fires up until now, but every time I felt those torches burning, I started to sweat profusely. If I let them burn, I’d hurt myself. If I transformed, I would both hurt others and myself. But I would at least hurt myself to a less direct extent; that is why the temptation remained. The whole display had previously seemed like a fantasy I could control – I even told a friend who was suffering from a similar problem that it was merely his fantasy running wild, and that we two could both come to control these fantasies in time – but at this point I wasn’t so sure.
To distract myself from my conundrum, I took to reading academic articles on my phone, which often calmed me down. This time, though, I picked my first article without thought, and paid the price for it. It was some kind of obtuse urban studies article by A. J. Scott, and because the words within the article might as well have been hieroglyphics to me, the reading experience made the flames within my jacket burn even brighter. I took a bit of dark hair near my shoulder, and started twisting it between two fingers. After that didn’t relieve any stress, I stood up and started pacing up and down the ground floor so frantically that my fellow students were starting to look my way. Before I had time to sit down and pull up an article that would have been more calming to read, I’d already transformed, and the foxes were now wildly running around, their tails tied to each other, the torches always on the verge of falling. Three of them did fall, one by one, and the floor caught fire with a swiftness that I would only later realize could not have been natural. Having turned human again, I watched with a mix of empty shock and compulsive apathy as the fire started spreading across the ground floor, to the rectangular benches and wooden tables with high stools. I had now found out that I was truly a Samson at heart, and that I was vengeful enough to start the very fire that now marked me out as a pyromaniac in deed, not just in mind. Looking away from the flames and the torches lying scattered on the ground, I saw a small red box on a nearby wall, with the black-on-white button that would activate the fire alarm. I went over to it and, with a shaking hand, pressed it. Since this was a library, there was no sprinkler system in there, but the fire alarm did ring, and instantly my fellow students started making for the door.
“Fire! There’s a fire!” one of them shouted as a warning to the rest. I was still apathetic, and did not care whether I lived or died. Another student saw me, and gestured with her hand that I had to go with her towards the exit. “There’s a fire, we have to leave now,” she said, and pulled me by my hand. Before I knew it, I was outside with the rest of the group; none of the people in it seemed to have been injured by the fire. The firefighters arrived shortly afterwards, and some of them immediately went inside. After what must have been forever, they came out.
“There seems to be no fire anywhere in the building,” one of them said. “We think someone sounded a false alarm.”
I stepped forward in a kind of mechanical despair. “You didn’t see anything?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “Did you?”
“Yes. I thought I saw the entire ground floor burning,” I said.
“Was it you who pressed the fire alarm?” she asked, seemingly without judgement, as if she merely wanted to ascertain the facts of the situation. I realized then that, whatever the fine or punishment for the false alarm may be, I had to tell the truth nonetheless.
“Yes,” I said.
“And you’re sure you saw something?” she asked again.
“Yes, I’m sure about what I saw,” I replied.
“Thank you for being honest,” she said, “but still, this same thing has happened a few times before. I think you might have been hallucinating.”
“Will I have to pay a fine?” I asked anxiously.
“Normally we charge for this sort of thing, but considering your case, I think I could argue for your exemption,” she said. “Are you seeing a psychiatrist?”
“Yes,” I said, and I added quickly that I was already on antipsychotics.
“I suggest you tell them to increase the dosage immediately, or that you need different meds,” she said. “As you’ve just seen, this sort of thing can get very serious.” This same woman then interrogated me some more, and I tried to answer these questions as well as I could, while being dead sure that I was further incriminating myself every step along the way. When the firefighters left, I was a broken shell. Trying to ignore the stares of the other students, I went back inside the building, sat down on one of the rectangular benches, and looked at my skin. It had been made reddish by a glow that was still being inscribed upon it at this moment, and I watched the shadows born from the previous illusion move around on my arms and clothes. I confess that I had merely pressed the fire alarm out of a kind of anxious compulsion, but I realized to my horror that, disregarding that compulsion, I would not perceive the deaths of the students with the same weight with which people would normally perceive them. There would be some weight to their disappearance, certainly, but this weight was three or four layers removed from the place, supposedly foremost in one’s mind, where it would actually have been in the psyche of a normal person. The remoteness that the weight of a human life bore to me resembled the remoteness that a mental image bore to my aphantasic mind, and my whole life, I had been trying frantically to pull that weight closer to where it needed to be. The few things that would now remain vivid in my mind were the burning, the conversation with the firefighter, and the staring eyes of the students. I had been wrong when talking to one of my acquaintances; I did not like fires. Not previously, and not now that I knew what a fire looked like for non-spectators. I was wondering how these people could just go about their day walking through a fire that looked and felt so very real to me.
“Hey, alarm lady,” a voice said to my right. “How are you holding up, if I may ask?” I looked to where the voice had come from, and saw the girl who’d pulled me away from the imaginary inferno. Out of shame and guilt, I avoided her eyes, and did not look at her directly. These two emotions seemed to be siblings to each other; Whenever the one appeared, the other was close by, and sometimes it was difficult to distinguish between the two. The only thing I could ascertain at the moment, was that I was currently feeling both at the same time. As if nothing had just transpired, she went past me, but I was still suspended in thought. A few seconds later, I heard the mechanical growl of a coffee machine nearby, and turned my head towards where the sound was coming from. My new acquaintance walked up to me with a paper cup.
“I didn’t know whether you wanted one as well,” she said apologetically. “I thought I’d better ask.”
“No, I’m fine,” I muttered. “Normally I drink a lot of the stuff, but right now I’m not in the mood.” My thoughts were heavy enough as they were, I added to myself.
She sat down and took a sip. “You didn’t answer my question, though,” she said.
“I’m doing okay”, I said, sounding like a piece of apparatus, and I kept staring in front of me, still taking care to avoid her eyes. I didn’t know if they were full of pity, perhaps a subtle, understated disgust, or a good-natured kindness, and honestly, I did not much care. I then decided to let my spite show. “Actually,” I said, “I’m in a bit of a sour mood. The building was burning a few moments ago, and everyone is just going about their day like nothing’s happened.” Including you, I added.
“Isn’t that what you want?” she asked. “For them to forget?”
“I wanted them to see what I saw,” I said. “The distance is killing me. Between my mind and theirs, my mind and yours.”
“And do you think you were hallucinating, or were you merely seeing an alternate side of reality that your fellow students weren’t exposed to?” she asked.
“Thanks for indulging me in my psychotic visions,” I said, and chuckled. “But I’m pretty sure I’d just been thinking about the Old Testament too much, and that’s why my hallucinations ended up being inspired by Jewish scripture.”
“I ended up stepping away from religion in my later years,” my nameless acquaintance said, “but I still remember some of the stories from the Old Testament. God speaking from the smoke of a burning bush, and something about a really strong, long-haired guy and some foxes…”
“…Samson,” I said. “When he got his superhuman powers back, he tied torches to the tails of foxes and set fire to the fields of his enemies, the Philistines.”
“You seem even more well-informed than I,” she said, awestruck. “Were you raised on religion?”
“Not really,” I said, “but I don’t think the reality of a divine Creator is so far-fetched, considering what my mind conjures up on a daily basis. For a time, I read the Bible extensively. I think I read through the entirety of the Old Testament twice. I read a different version both times, just to compare them with each other.”
“So, a real Biblical scholar, then! And which part of the Bible is your favorite?” she asked. “I myself like the New Testament more, but I also like the Psalms, Solomon’s writings, Isaiah, Jeremiah…I think there’s a lot of poetry and wisdom to be found in these books, even if I think that there are a lot of problematic elements to the Bible as a whole, and don’t believe in its content anymore.”
“You’d never guess what my favorite book is,” I said, smiling. “It’s Ezekiel. Next comes the Revelation of John, then Job, Judges, and finally the Old Testament books that you mentioned. What is your name, by the way?”
“Debbie,” said the girl, as if it were a secondary matter. “Short for ‘Deborah’. And I’m not surprised to find out that your favorite biblical books either involve someone hallucinating or going through a rough patch.“
“To put it lightly,” I said.
“To put it lightly,“ she said. “But now comes the crucial question: Do you actually believe in the narratives found in these books? Do you believe that Jesus was real and died for our sins, for example? Not to indulge too much in your psychotic thinking, but I was just curious about your beliefs. Like I said, I believe in none of the stuff myself, and think it can even drive people to do extreme things,” she continued. “But I can see a lot of good in it, too.”
“Well,” I said, ”I do believe in Jesus, but in a more philosophical, almost Hegelian sense. Somehow, he seems to me like a metaphysical necessity, a way out of one’s torturous self-conception, a fountain of eternal forgiveness for those who repent and strive towards spiritual regeneration.”
“I hope you aren’t a missionary or a colonist in that regard?” Debbie asked with some caution.
“No, I agree with Simone Weil when she says that even the Bhagavad Gita can be essentially Christian in its teaching,” I said, with equal caution, “even though I myself haven’t read it. To me, it always seemed as if the very aim of Jesus’s teachings was to look past the fixity of law and to embrace a set of principles that transcended mere dogma. To turn his teachings into their own dogma would be to actively miss the point of their creation. Spirit transcends law.” And I thought about my words for a while, and added with some bitterness: “Some say that love is an action, a set of actions, or even a choice or set of choices, and not just a feeling. I hope that is the case. Despite all my strivings, I cannot seem to reach my intended goal of perceiving the weight of a human life, as Jesus would want me to do. It seems that love has always eluded me, and so after a while I stopped searching for it, and accepted myself as I was.”
“Not the worst way to be, I would say,” Debbie said. “Except for the psychoses.”
“Except for those,” I said. “But I think I’ll follow the firefighter’s advice. I have a psychiatric appointment in exactly two weeks, and I think I will have to come clean about this episode.” I looked at my skin. “My skin had turned red from the glow of the fire, and it’s still red now. The fire’s shadows are still dancing around on it, and it feels disorienting to me.”
“Interesting. Do you have any idea why you saw what you saw?” she asked.
“Is this going to be a therapy session?” I asked in turn. “You do realize that schizoaffective and schizophrenic disorders are mostly resistant to psychotherapeutic treatment?”
“They might at least help against cognitive impairment,” my fellow judge said, smiling. “But I think your reasoning is more than fine, and I’m surprised about your lucidity. You seem to be able to reason about the storm while you’re smack dab in the middle of it.”
“Too optimistic of an assessment,” I said, bitterly. “First off, my cognitive ability might appear fine, but I generally have a poor visual and verbal memory, my attention is quite weak, and I never remember information about others. I don’t remember their names, faces, or their lives. Granted,” I continued drily, “the reason I never remember faces is because I never look at them.” I then lightly gestured at the ground floor in front of me. “As for my reasoning, you can see where that led me during a moment of crisis. Sure, if I had the knowledge, I could have sat down and reasoned through my psychosis in such a way as to deconstruct it piece by piece. I could have seen on further reflection that the fire had spread unnaturally fast, that the clothes of the people did not actually catch fire, and that no one had started running around screaming. But by that point, it would already have been too late to do anything about it.”
“You had to do something, I understand,” Debbie said. “I guess psychoses have a way of forcing you to act on the spot.”
“It seems to me,” I said suddenly, “that I’ve been forever cut myself off from humanity. That is, and has always been, my problem.”
She tilted her head towards me. “I didn’t tell you this before, but I have a brother who suffers from the same sort of thing as you. I often have to try and convince him that he’s not evil for acting and thinking how he does. So I ask you the same thing I asked him: We’ve already established that you can only minimally control your basic psychotic reactions. Why, then, should you punish yourself so intensely for them? At least, I get the feeling that you’re punishing yourself for them.”
“What if I can control them?” I retorted. Then I lay my head in one hand, smiled, and said: “And what if I can’t? If I can’t, then I am lost.” My smile turned into a laugh. “Then I am an outlaw, a marked woman, I don’t deserve rights or sympathy or understanding in the same way that other human beings do. My whole life, I have been unconsciously but irrevocably moving towards evil, and oftentimes, it seems to me as if my ultimate fate is merely to embrace it. Despite my self-disgust, my self-discipline, my incessant attempts to make humanity the foremost object in my mind, I seem to be powerless to change my life’s course.”
“My brother used to say something similar about himself,” Debbie said, “albeit in a less eloquent way. Can I ask you a question? Are you studying and living in this city by yourself?”
“Yes,” I said, and I pressed my fingers into my eyes, “I am, but I don’t see how that’s relevant to my moral anguish.”
“How often does it happen that someone comes to check up on you?” she asked. I told her that I had to study on weekdays and work in the supermarket on weekends, and that I therefore didn’t get much of a chance to visit my family. “I can hold my own, though,” I muttered. “You needn’t worry about that.”
“I know you can,” she said. “And I know you’re trying your hardest, but it seems as if you’re going through a lot right now. Do you see things while at home?”
“Every single night,” I said softly, “there’s this cold, horrible blue sheen that envelops every room in the house, and whenever I go to sleep, I feel like there’s a crowd of evil spirits hanging over me and watching me. I always lock the door to the apartment, but it doesn’t help. The danger seems to be on the inside.”
“Ouch. And how are you holding up with the chores, in the middle of all of this
?” she asked, probably to take my mind off what I just said.
“Good,” I said. “I think the medication does a lot, but I often could drive myself to do menial stuff like that, even while believing that Satan had invaded my apartment. I always told myself that the Devil would gain less of a hold over the house if I kept it clean.”
“Would you like it if I came over to your apartment sometimes?” she asked then. “I could check up on you, we could drink tea or coffee together, and I could even help you take care of the household when needed.”
“I’m used to being on my own,” I said, deep in thought, “but honestly, my insistence on self-reliance has proven deadly. Besides, I enjoy talking to you, so the arrangement you suggested seems good to me, on paper.” And, realizing I agreed with her rather too quickly, I added: “I just don’t want to be a burden on you, that’s all. You probably have plenty of things to take care of yourself.”
“I can manage,” Debbie said. “I once used to be my brother’s caretaker, and he was a lot less self-reliant than you seem to be. I had to tighten up my schedule somewhat while helping him, but it was still possible to live a life outside of work, school, and caretaking. But if it doesn’t sit well with you that I’m sacrificing my own time, perhaps you could discuss with your psychiatrist whether someone could periodically check up on you from their side?”
“I could do that,” I said, with a mixture of shame and gratitude. “Hey. Thanks for helping me with this.”
“No problem,” she said, “I’m looking forward to visiting your home!”
I chuckled at her words. “It’s not much of a home when the spirits are there,” I said, “but I appreciate the sentiment. If you like, we can talk more about you and your interests when next we meet. I’d be curious to hear more about your life.” I grinned then, and added at last: “Even if I will probably forget most of the information!”