The thought had occurred to him, disturbingly, as he crossed the street at the corner of 40th and Walnut in a high wind that threatened to empty the potholes of their wholesome water.
What happens if I become sane? he wondered. How on earth will I survive?
He mulled this over as he soldiered on against a heavy headwind until he arrived, somewhat tired, at the café on Baltimore Avenue. Pushing the door open with difficulty, he leaned against it, briefly, as if for support against even more unseen elements than an urban wind gust, before pulling off his jacket and sliding into a corner booth. He ordered coffee and sat staring out the window at the doubled-over passers-by as he drank the filthy stuff.
I can't do this, he thought. I can't survive in a delusion-free world.
His musings were interrupted by a gentle tap on his shoulder. 'Excuse me, mister,' said a sweetly quavering voice, 'do you mind if I sit here?' He turned to see a vision – in fact, he blinked, because for a moment he thought (he hoped) he was hallucinating – there stood a tiny, wizened woman with a sweet old face like an apple-core carving topped with blowsy white hair escaping from under a felt hat adorned with a silk rose (lavender). I'm dreaming. he thought, because he was sure he had seen the little woman, who was grinning at him disconcertingly, showing excellent dentures, somewhere before.
Probably in a late-night showing of Mary Poppins. That must be it – he was hallucinating saccharine cinema.
'No, you're not,' said the woman, as she arranged herself and her odd possessions – oversized quilted tote – multi-coloured – string bag full of books, senior bus pass on lanyard. 'I'm just a run-of-the-mill Bag Lady.' She winked at him.
John blinked again, and thought. 'Stop that!' he snapped. 'Either you're reading my mind, or you're committing Blog Abuse. I won't have it.'
The lady shrugged amiably. 'Reading your mind is not such a trick, ' she commented equably. 'Though I need vocabulary control to do it.' As she nonchalantly picked up a menu, John noticed with irritation that she was wearing fingerless gloves.
This was the last straw. He exploded.
'Now, look here,' John remonstrated, 'this sort of thing has got to stop. It's bad enough that I'm going sane…now you show up and complicate my already shaky grip on the reality matrix with postmodern visual references…' He shut up abruptly, as the waitress – a reassuringly boring college student with a green streak in her hair and a barbed-wire tattoo – slouched over to take the lady's order. When she had mooched away, however, he disfavoured the self- described Bag Lady (who looked more like a folklore professor with a warped sense of humour to him) with another glare. The lady returned his look with maddening equanimity.
'Not folklore,' she commented. 'They closed the department, and that particular Bag Lady went back to Germany. I'm in the Multicultural Studies Department now.' She chuckled. 'When they tell me I'm too old to be trendy, I remind them that ageism is anti-multicultural. That shuts them up.' Her tea and 'scone' had arrived, so she fussed about with the little teabagged pot of water and the dry, oversugared cookie that passed for afternoon haute cuisine in Philadelphia, while John mulled this over.
John decided that it was his brain that was mulled. He tried again. 'My dear Doctor…
'Simpson.'
'Dr Simpson,' he continued. 'I am sorry to be difficult, but you appear to be completing my unexpressed sentences. And I'm already worried about my state of mind.'
The merry academic's eyes twinkled mischievously. 'As you were worried about incipient sanity, I was just trying to help.' Seeing that John was ready to concede that point, she went on, 'Think about it. What you fear is that you will reach a state of understanding of the true motives of your fellow humans. An understanding that is accurate and complete, and explains everything from your neighbour's smirk when he greets you in the morning, to why Congress won't pass a reasonable law to let your other neighbours, who are gay, marry. Am I right?' John nodded as Dr Simpson explained.
'You are afraid that, once having reached this level of understanding, your mind will become totally incapable of forgetting it. That you will be forced to spend the rest of your life – indeed, perhaps, the rest of eternity – in a state of total awareness of the shabby reality of human motivation. That, having found the worm in the apple, you will be unable to look away, and will spend forever in miserable contemplation of depressing truths you can neither ameliorate nor ignore. Am I right?'
John scratched behind his ear. 'You have hit the nail on the rather flat head,' he admitted. 'This, indeed, do I fear. I am becoming incurably sane.'
Dr Simpson slapped the table in triumph. 'Exactly!' she exclaimed, as coffee and tea slopped from jarred cups. 'And that is what we must prevent. A person capable of such a thought is too valuable to be lost to the psychiatric profession. You might start listening to Prozac.'
John wrinkled his nose as he mopped up liquid with the tiny napkins from the niggardly dispenser. 'Very generous of you, I'm sure. But what do you propose to do about it? Do Multicultural Studies offer a mind-wipe session?'
Dr Simpson laughed, a tinkling sound. 'Multicultural Studies, my left bunion. What you need is a multi-species encounter. You need to meet Goths.'
As John looked around quizzically at the undergraduate wait staff, Dr Simpson added hurriedly, 'Not that kind of Goth. The kind who write Purple Books. You need Purple Books – quite a few of them, unless I miss my guess.'
John sighed. 'Madam, I am a database manager. I do not know what you are talking about. Who are these Goths, and what are Purple Books?'
Dr Simpson looked exquisitely happy at the idea of going into Lecture Mode, and then did. 'The Goths were the first Earth people to become completely sane. Their solution to this intolerable reality was to remove themselves from this universe. Of course, history blames this on Attila the Hun. History is an ass.' She held up a gloved hand – John noticed glittery nail polish – to forestall objections. 'They didn't disappear completely, you understand. They just went far enough away from acceptable reality that almost no one ever sees them. Or mistakes them for ambulatory clichés.' She leaned forward, and John could smell her cologne (old-fashioned verbena) as she whispered, 'You will have the gift to see them now. And read the Purple Books.' John shuddered involuntarily. Verbena reminded him of William Faulkner, whom he did not like.
John protested. 'What if I don't want to see them? Or read purple prose?'
Dr Simpson waved this away. 'Not purple prose, silly. Who wants to read that, except Judith Butler? Purple books. You'll be receiving one shortly, and can decide for yourself. Goodbye, Mr Walters.' She stood up, drank the last sip of her cold, tasteless tea, and gathered her smart handbag under her arm. Adjusting her stylish headscarf (it was still windy outside), Dr Simpson gave John a brisk handshake with one elegantly manicured hand, smiled gently (why had he not noticed what a lovely young woman she was?), turned and left the café, her high heels tapping on the linoleum.
John paid for the drinks – the waitress was as hang-dog as ever – and left the place hastily, like a victim of the Ancient Mariner escaping another stanza about albatrosses. He hurried down Baltimore Ave – the wind seemed to have died down – in the direction of 47th Street. On the way a homeless man stopped him. 'Hey, mistah, did you drop this?'
John looked down at the little man and almost screamed. No, no, no, no, his brain shrieked, DO NOT WANT. The hobo was grinning innocently at him and holding up a paperback entitled, Prester John's Account of a Visit to the Planet Betamax Delta. The cover art was lurid – an impossibly young Helen Mirren in a negligée...
The hobo looked exactly like the actor Robin Williams. Dressed as Mork from Ork, from that horrible old sitcom. John snatched the book from his left hand, pressed a dollar bill in his right, and ran like hell in the direction of Clark Park, where he cowered among the dog watchers until he felt safe again.
Later that evening, sitting by the fire with a decent glass of wine (or a glass of decent wine), John had to concede that Dr Simpson and her cronies were right. Prester John and Betamax Delta just about hit the spot. Perhaps sanity won't be so bad, after all… he mused.
He dismissed the answering chuckle from the chimney as imagination.
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