"Tricks of the Mind"

She was waiting for me in the passenger seat of my car when I left work today. I’d locked the car, but that she’d gotten past the locks without harming the car didn’t really surprise me.

I knew by then that the coworkers scattering to their cars around me wouldn’t acknowledge her existence, so I didn’t either. I got into my car, shivering slightly from the cold and with a sort of dread anticipation. After all, I’d been seeing her for some months, watching me from a distance, and several times I’d even tried to confront her, unsuccessfully. Somehow, each time she’d given me the slip. She was unremarkable - loose, shoulder-length brown hair, about my height and age, and a face that wouldn’t stand out in any crowd except for its expression of amused interest.

I started the car and pulled out, not looking at the person sitting in the passenger seat through conscious effort. As soon as the car was out of the parking lot, I took a deep breath, and spoke to her. “All right. I’ve played along. Speak your piece.” I prompted, calmly as I could manage. I already suspected that this phantom was false, a ghost from my younger years.

“You still remember me after all these years?” She asked, tone indicating that she already knew the answer.

“I remember enough. You aren’t real, and almost ten years of time doesn’t change that.” I’d long suspected that this person that only I seemed to notice and who could almost magically vanish might be a holdover from my past, a figment of my once-overpowering imagination. As far as I was concerned, there was only one figment that this could be - the last one, which I thought I’d destroyed.

“What is real, hmm?” She countered, humor in her voice, dragging me back to the present, as if the entire concept were a big joke. “Surely it’s not an all-or-nothing proposal. I’m as real as you are, after all I’m nothing more than a piece of you. If I’m not real, then you are just as much an illusion.”

“That’s taking this a bit too far. I’m as real as - ” I broke off, not finding the appropriate comparison.

She took advantage of my pause before I could recover. “You are less and less real with each passing year, and you know it. You go through the motions, praying that the day will pass without you needing to think, and most days it does. You avoid at every opportunity emotional investment. You’re adrift. I know; I’ve been watching.” She folded her arms confidently.

“So I’ve noticed. Why did you need to watch from where I could see you?” I seized on this detail, trying to change the topic from the uncomfortableness she was diving into.

“I didn’t. You needed to catch me at it. I needed you to start to doubt your vaunted logical worldview again.” Something in her manner made me think that she recognized my motive in the topic change, and was playing along.

“So you’re just an image. Like before.” The light at Fifth Street was red. As soon as the car stopped, I turned to scrutinize my passenger. She looked real enough. With one hand, I reached over to poke her shoulder, and was surprised when my hand didn’t pass through her. “Wait, what - ”

She smiled faintly. “You don’t remember the power of your own mind, do you?”

I put my and back on the wheel and didn’t press the point. I’d never learned to fool my sense of touch, but I had always guessed that it was possible. Mind over matter, as far as I knew, had no practical limits. “Why now? It’s been years - ”

“Almost ten.” She nodded in agreement.

“- Since I destroyed you.” I finished. The light went green, and we were moving again.

“No. What you did was... different. You tried to destroy me, granted, but it didn’t stick. I let you think I was gone. I don’t think you’re capable of killing me, any more than I’m capable of killing you.”

“So why did you come back now?” I was conflicted. A large part of me wanted her to vanish again, and let me live my life, wreck though it admittedly was. A whisper, though, remembered the good times we’d shared, and wanted this illusion, this fragment of myself, to return permanently.

“I was willing to let you think you’d destroyed me, to accept the decision you made, but I have seen how much you hate this life. I never stopped caring what happened to you, if only because I’m as invested in it as you are. And you and I both know that together we can escape this mess. We found a way out, remember?” She reached over and put a hand on my shoulder. I shuddered at the feeling of the touch of the hand I intellectually knew didn’t exist.

I remembered. I remembered how we (myself and this errant shard of my psyche, that is) had explored the capabilities of the mind we shared. For a long moment, neither of us spoke.

Eventually, I broke the silence. “I dest - I tried to destroy you for a reason, you know. For years, you and I had an agreement. No manipulations, ever, outside experimentation. And - ”

“And I violated it. I know.” She shook her head, face tightening in a sympathetic wince. “I’m using what we learned together to alter your perception, even now. Mistakes were made, but we need to move beyond them. You must forgive me and hear me out.”

“And if I don’t?” I replied immediately. I was thinking of ways to be rid of her again, even temporarily, even though part of me didn’t want to.

“Then you condemn us both. You’re on a path to ruin.”

I nodded. This wasn’t new information. As far as I was concerned, the person I was all those years ago was dead, and his thoughts needed to get out of my head. All I wanted now was simplicity, safety, calm, and logic. Of course, that’s hardly an achievable goal.

“I know you’ve thought about it yourself.” She didn’t blink at my response. Of course, she knew, I realized - years ago, she’d always been party to my motives, and I saw no reason she still wasn’t. “On some levels, I don’t blame you for wanting to forget.”

“Then let me be. Let me find my own way.”

“I would prefer not to, while there’s another option.”

“It’s a false escape. What we found together was merely a means to lie to oneself. To spin falsehoods, and to hide reality behind them.” We were through the Eighth Street intersection now, most of the way home. I realized in one part of my mind that if I wanted her gone, I could ask her to leave and mean it, and she would probably go - but a large part of me wasn’t willing to do that, not yet. Part of me wanted to try to destroy her again, hoping it would stick this time. “Don’t pretend any of that was ever real. Entertaining experiments, yes, but never once real.”

“You’re assuming again that real is all-or-nothing. I think by now we can say it’s not. It wouldn’t be this reality, perhaps, but it would be our reality.” She smiled enigmatically. “We could spin a new world entirely, or even go back and start over.”

I was tempted, until I realized that what she suggested would not be starting over - it would be pretending to start over, merely living in my own mind. None of the people I’d lost along the way would ever be involved - they’d be mere shadows of people, conjured from my own memory and imagination. Imagining Marie back wouldn’t bring her back in any sense that mattered. “No. Going back is the way to madness. We’d keep living the same years over and over again, distorting them each time, and never moving on.” I knew exactly which years, too - those few short ones that I counted myself content with my life. Those few years between meeting Marie and the day this illusion manipulated me into scaring her off.

“Look, I don’t mean to sound particularly defeatist, but I think we both know that some form of madness lies no matter which direction you decide to take from here. By most definitions, we’re well into madness already.”

I chuckled, rather humorlessly. Of course, I was talking to an illusion generated by a semi-autonomous fragment of my own mind, so I was probably certifiably insane already. “I suppose you’re right.” This level of insanity was almost comfortingly normal to me - after all, I’d spent a large chunk of my life doing things like this regularly.

I turned into the apartment complex parking lot, picking a space near the road rather than near the building. The lot was slowly filling up as the other tenants returned from their jobs, but I didn’t know any of them, not even by name.

“Remember, for us, this is as close to normal as it gets. Alone, you and I are anomalies. Only together do we really have humanity.” She was right, of course - into that fragment of my mind I had placed most of my feelings, my imagination, my hope, my drive. What I kept was cold, hard logic, the part of my mind I’d always valued most. “Without me, you’re a machine, just like you intended. Remember?”

She was again correct. Some years ago, in college, I’d sought the ability to turn off the parts of me that I thought of as distractions, so that I could experience temporary bursts of complaint-less productivity. In that, I succeeded. Eventually, the suppressed parts, to my surprise, ended up gaining a limited degree of autonomy in my mind, becoming a whispered voice at first, the voice my my irrational tendencies. Maybe that should have concerned me, but I was young and stupid, so I made the most of it, and the voice matured into the ghost of my emotions, desires, and my once-overactive imagination. Of course, later, when I drove that split-off piece into hiding, all I had left was mindless productivity, with just enough feeling left to miss what I had lost.

“We could coexist again, like in the old days. On whatever terms we decided on, or no terms at all.” She pressed.

“But what’s to stop you from betraying me again?” I made eye contact, brow furrowed. A simple violation of our agreement wouldn’t have made me do what I did. She’d gone behind my back, and tricked me. “The last time I trusted you, you broke my heart.” Even after ten years, Marie’s leaving me still hurt, even though I knew that I couldn’t keep up the facade of sanity for her forever.

“That wasn’t what I meant to happen, and we both know it. I was trying to make you trust her like we trusted each other. I learned a lesson that day too, you know. I can’t control what happens in this world. It’s the lesson you need to learn, if you’re ever going to come back from this mess.”

I shook my head. I didn’t like the position I was in, granted, but at least I had the illusion of controlling my downward slide. That illusion, I knew, was all that kept me going.

“You can’t cling to control any longer. Control is what put you in this position in the first place, and it’s what’s killing you. It’s done you no good all these years, don’t you see?”

“So you want me to cede control over my perceptions to my own melodramatic imagination?” I spat. “No. I can’t.” I finally killed the engine and got out, slamming the door and stalking across the parking lot.

She was at my side in moments, though I never heard the other door open or close. I shouldn’t have expected it. “Logic hasn’t saved us yet. Reason doesn’t ease your pain, it only categorizes it. Stop pretending that you can make sense out of this world, and you’ll find it makes more sense to leave it.”

I ignored her plea, getting into the elevator alone. Though I hadn’t seen her enter the compartment, she was there when I turned around. I glared, but said nothing. I was actually considering going along with what she suggested. Nothing she’d said about me yet was false, and what she was arguing did agree with our old discoveries. I did worry about being betrayed again, but the risk was minimal - no-one had ever replaced Marie in my life, so I was the only one at risk. At this point, risking the remains of my sanity wasn’t so difficult a proposition.

The elevator deposited me on the fourth floor, and I strode quickly toward the end of the hall, where my apartment lurked. I’d picked the place because it was undesirable to other renters - on the top floor, far from the stairs and elevator, facing the highway behind the complex. Most of the years I had lived there I didn’t even have a neighbor across the hall - it was inexpensive, and quiet.

I unlocked the door and went inside, closing and bolting the door behind me. Of course, this didn’t stop my onetime companion from following me - when I turned to head for the apartment’s tiny kitchen, she was in the front room, reclined on the couch.

“If we start now, we can do this tonight.” She promised. I knew she was probably right - the secrets we learned together were surprisingly easy to use once you knew them.

“We wouldn’t really be escaping. We’d have to come back.” I pointed out tiredly as I tossed a packaged meal into the microwave.

“Why would we have to come back?” She countered confidently.

“Because I’m real here.” I waved at the humming microwave. “I have to eat. No trick of the mind is going to fix that.”

“You aren’t ‘real’ here. You’re as much an illusion as I am.” She shot back. “I’ve been watching. You eat out of a long-standing expectation that you should, not because you actually feel hunger.”

“But that doesn’t make sense. We’ll starve to - ” She wasn’t on the couch when I turned around to look back at her.

I felt a slim arm encircle my shoulders. As a mere illusion on my perception, of course, she wasn’t bound by physics or logic herself - the seemingly magical repositioning while I wasn’t looking shouldn’t have surprised me. This time, I didn’t shudder as much at the touch. “You’re trying to make things logical again. Let it go.” Her voice now was palliative, and I almost agreed to try the escape she offered. Almost.

“No. Logic is what I am. Without it, what am I?”

“You’re nothing. We’re free.” She stepped back and held out her hand. “Your nonsense obsession with reason is this world’s hold on us. How do you know we’ll starve to death?”

“Well...” I was going to explain that though my perceptions might be altered, that my body would still need food normally, but I realized what she was getting at. “Logic.”

“You see?” She was smiling happily now.

I counterattacked. “You can speak so freely about abandoning it, because you barely possess the capacity. You are nothing more than the unreasoning aspect of the person we were, and I am little more than what remains of reason.”

“You still think that’s true?” The smile vanished, and she looked hurt. “Then how did I have you almost ready to agree? By tricking you? By altering your perceptions? No. You forced me to learn your logic just so I could offer you this chance. Your attempt to destroy me forced me to adapt. You just...” She made clear in her expression that she found the concept she was describing uncomfortable. “... Atrophied.”

I didn’t speak. I knew she was right - after all, my original intent upon this shattering of my mind was for the pieces to work in conjunction. I realized then just how idiotic the attempt to destroy her had been.

“Logic and control have brought you here, my friend.” She opened her arms, encompassing the apartment, in all its mildly shabby and solitary grayness. “Let’s see where other illusions can take us.” She extended one slim hand in my direction, and I knew what it meant to take hold of it.

I stopped for a long moment. There was no sound in the apartment, save the humming of the microwave. After some time, it beeped three times and fell silent, but I made no immediate move to retrieve my meal. In that moment, I made the decision.

I looked up, making eye contact with the woman who didn’t exist, who was really just a representation of my own emotions and imagination. A representation, I realized, of everything about my being worth being. In that moment, my vaunted logic shattered into a million pieces and fell away, and I saw what a fool I’d been. I saw the hopeless pit I’d cast myself into. I saw also that I’d never climb out. Madness, as prescribed by my illusionary companion, might well be the only way out for me.

“What do you say?” She finally broke the silence, and I came to a simple conclusion to this mess.

“I...” I shook my head and turned away. “I‘m sorry.” The next word I spoke was the hardest I’ve ever uttered. “No. We can’t coexist, my friend.”

She was silent, as if expecting me to elaborate on my reasons yet again, and expecting to shoot them down. I didn’t, though. I closed my eyes, and recalled what I’d done ten years ago to silence my onetime confidant.

“You can’t destroy me, you know that.” She must have picked up on part of what I was about to do. Her voice still held a touch of concern, though.

“I would hope not. I have no intention of doing so.” The simple mental procedure came to the forefront of my mind readily. “Think you can run a life better?”

“Wait - ” She knew, now, what I was going to do.

“No, I won’t.” This time, I extended a hand to her. “What’s left of this mess is yours to clean up. It’s not much, but it’s more than I deserve.” I waved around at my surroundings, referring to everything - my life, my job, everything I’d destroyed in trying to build it up.

“We can still work together.” She looked on the verge of tears. It was more than a play at my emotions, I sensed - my companion, were she human, would be on the verge of tears right now.

It was too late, though - I had made up my mind and was already preparing to do to myself what I’d once done to her. “Relax, my old friend. Maybe in a few years I’ll be back to bother you, like you bothered me.” I suspected, though, that I wouldn’t be - there simply wasn’t enough left of me to survive being willfully forgotten.

She took a false deep breath, and looked about to shake her head, but instead she stepped forward, not taking my hand but instead wrapping me in an embrace. I let the moment linger before I wilfully forgot my own existence.

Someone started awake on my apartment’s kitchen floor a few seconds later, but it wasn’t me. And I’m glad of it.