Chapter 1 - Paranoia

P A R A

N O I A


It does not deter him.
He heard once that he was the eccentric recluse, the modern day Howard Hughes with no airplane empire to run and no bacteria-free hotel room to reside in.
It was clearly a smack against him – contemptuous speech meant to wear him down -- but he remained steadfast.
Even now.
He knows (and he whispers this to you, fearfully) that the unobtrusive monsters – those that are barely perceptible, floating just on the edge of the peripherals – frighten him the most.
The others cannot see them but he feels them crawling beyond his barriers, waiting.
In his fortress (formidable it maybe be), he is always gripped with this torturous feeling of trepidation
and blinks,
his hand tightening on the resilient string controlling the shutters.
An eye blink is faster than the human mind can comprehend and yet,
(staring
transfixed
out his window)
if something happens within that brief time when he isn’t watching, isn’t attentive to the world around him, what will come of it?
It is so easy to temper with reality, he whispers to himself (and then to you, remembering that you’re there).
He is the oracle with no heeding ear, floating alone in a sea of skeptics.
The looking glass is so tenuously thin, so easy to break, and yet it is all that
(divides
him
from
the
abyss).
He considers going outside
(sometimes)
and warning those beyond of what awaits them, but then he realizes his own vulnerability
(an empty house, no guardian to protect it)
and stops.
Irony is a cruel mistress!

That man
(the suffering clairvoyant, internal demons scoffing)
sits in his corner, now,
and stares out the window,
stares through that fragile, easily breakable glass at those blithely unaware, oblivious to the dangerous world around them.
The straitjacket feels tight on his frame, and he looks up at you, shifting and wincing.
He requests – sounding coherent now, maybe even to the point of sanity – that it be loosened just slightly.
But you shake your head, painfully resolute to your objective, and tell him no.

Later that night the guards tell you that they heard screaming.
He was seeing those monsters again.

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