Original Fiction: Galatea
Title: Galatea
Fandom: Original Fiction
Characters/Pairings: Ian (OC)/Sophia (OC)
Genre: Crappy
Rating: PG
Word Count: 3,699
Author’s Note: Look, guys, I want it on the record that I *know* this is bad. I wrote it for my Creative Writing class because I had absolutely no other ideas and no time to think of any. I've never written Original Fiction before and clearly it should have stayed that way. Also, who the balls would have thought my first Original Fiction would be het? This is not relevant to my interests. Did manage to sneak in this week's tamingthemuse, though, so this is for Prompt #173 - Predatory.
ETA 12.26.2009: This is now the workshopped version because, for God only knows what reason, poor scorpiod1 insisted. I still hate this, ftr!
Summary: Ian Holden had a perfectly bland life, until he fell in love.
Ian Holden was born on the fence between being upper-middle class and being downright wealthy. He was too tall with floppy brown hair and a killer smile-he was attractive and knew it but he tried not to let on. He was brilliant but never intimidatingly so and usually gave off the impression that he was only of average intelligence. Ian Holden was not someone people felt sorry for.
He was the third of four children, two sisters (one older, one younger) and a brother (the oldest of them all). He was his father’s favorite son and his mother’s favorite child and, because he was born with potential, was a little spoiled. He and his siblings got along about as often as they fought, loved each other, and kept to themselves. They had a dog (a big, handsome mutt that Ian always joked was his favorite sibling), a house with a lawn…there was, in his early life, very little to comment on.
Ian never had a problem making friends. He was so open and friendly that people found it genuinely impossible to dislike him. He reached out to the children who weren’t as naturally at ease when it came to getting to know people, he was the universally acknowledged champion of encouraging and hand-holding, and had a broad, welcoming shoulder to cry on. Teachers looked the other way when he was the one talking in class, girls paid attention to him, and the other boys rarely ever begrudged him for it. He was happy, or he thought he was. He began to understand what happy really meant about the same time he learned what sorrow really felt like. The point is: he got to know them both.
When it came time to apply to colleges, Ian was accepted to Harvard and, because he had the inclination, ability, and financial freedom to do so, he packed up and moved from Maine to Massachusetts. It was far away enough from home to be exciting, close enough to go home for holidays; enough New England to feel familiar, without feeling dull. By the time he moved away, he had no more life experience than a regular person. Actually, he probably had less. This never bothered him…it was very difficult to bother him, back then. Ian had no problem finding his place at Harvard; he’d already made friends before he’d finished moving in. He did well in classes and enjoyed them for the most part, excepting his math and science requirements and the English class on Freud he’d only signed up for to appease a girlfriend he then broke up with and spent the entire semester being glared at by. His grades were solidly in the A range and he was pretty much guaranteed a spot at the law school of his choosing after he graduated. Until the beginning of his junior year, life went on much as it always had-a frustration to Ian who had hoped for excitement in college, for something for once to go unexpectedly, even if it wasn’t for the better. One Wednesday in November, he got home from classes and realized he had no idea what he had done that day or the day before that or the day before that. His entirely life blended together into one incredibly long and comfortably boring day.
It was only a week after this realization that he met her. She ruined everything. She made everything better.
*~*~*
Ian was at a party the first time he saw her. He couldn’t remember whose birthday it was, but it didn’t really matter. There was music playing too loud in the background, his friends were around making idiots of themselves, there was alcohol in the kitchen and pretty girls in the lounge. It was a good time. Ian had had enough to drink to feel confident without being stupid, though he had had every intention of getting to that stupid point before the night was over. Until he saw her.
She was, and still is, the most beautiful person he had ever seen in his life. Not in the romantic-movie-exaggeration kind of way, in the very literal what-is-she-doing-here-people-don’t-look-like-that way. It made sense, in retrospect, that she would be everything he wanted, that she possessed every feature he had ever considered attractive. At the time, the effect was a little overwhelming, and Ian just stood there staring across the room for several seconds before he was able to really comprehend her.
She had long, vibrantly ginger hair, full, red lips, and Ian was sure that if he got close enough to see them, her eyes would be bright green and intensely expressive. She looked like a goddess, if goddesses made a habit out of hanging around on balconies at random college parties. He was completely stunned to see that she was alone. A girl that looked like she did should have been surrounded by men falling over themselves to get her attention. She should have been having the time of her life. Instead, she was carved out of stone-perfect but lifeless. He wanted to wipe the bored expression from her face, convinced it would be even more stunning when animate. The more he thought about it as he watched her, the more it made sense that she was alone. She wasn’t just gorgeous, her kind of beauty was off-putting-nobody would ever be able to measure up to her. Who would feel adequate enough to approach her?
Ian was not used to feeling insecure and had never really learned about rejection, so he decided he would try to get her attention anyway. After all, even if he wasn’t at her level, no one else was talking to her, he had no competition. Of course, he was aware that there might have been a better reason for her isolation. A girl who looked like her should have been a popular topic of conversation (Ian was surprised he’d never heard of or seen her) and it was possible that she had a well-known and very severe personality flaw that would manifest once she opened her mouth. If her ego spanned the universe or her intellect could have been contained in a grain of sand, Ian could always just excuse himself from the conversation. He figured it was worth taking the chance of finding out. If he’d ever been seriously disappointed, Ian may have backed down and his life would have gone very differently. Obviously, that was not the case.
Ian was across the room and opening the door to the balcony in five quick strides. The night was crisp and starless and he could see why none of the other partygoers had taken refuge outside. Ignoring the cutting air, he leaned casually against the rails and smiled. The girl hardly turned her head to acknowledge it. He greeted her and she replied, clipped and cool in her response. Nevertheless, Ian persevered. He introduced himself and she finally turned her attention to him. A long moment passed before she replied. Her name was Sophia; she didn’t offer a last name. Ian liked that, he’d always been fond of the name Sophia and it seemed elegant enough to match her.
She was reserved; a little icy at first, but Ian was innately good at getting people to warm to him. After half an hour, she was smiling. After an hour she was laughing. They joked about the bad music, the ridiculousness of standing on a balcony in the cold (though neither made an attempt to move back inside where their conversation would be stilted by the aforementioned bad music), and the English professor they both had who was in the habit of crying whenever he was discussing a particularly emotional novel. Ian did his best not to stare, but Sophia responded positively when he likened her to the beauties of the Arthurian legends they were studying, rolling her eyes but smiling nevertheless. She didn’t seem particular opposed to him physically, either, and was flirtatiously calling him Lancelot before the night was over. Nobody at the boisterous party took note of the two of them sectioned off and bantering between themselves. They didn’t take notice of the others, either. The girl, Sophia, turned out to be as witty, funny, and smart as she was gorgeous. She wasn’t nice like Ian and half the things she said were brutally honest in a way that both made him uncomfortable and thrilled him. He agreed with everything she said, even if he would never have admitted it to himself before she said them. She made offhand comments about the other people at the party, some of them his friends, and he was guiltily amused at even the most disparaging. He’d never realized someone could understand him so well and it made him appreciate how alone he had been before taking the chance to talk to her that night. Ian was, to put it lightly, smitten.
*~*~*
After that, he began to spend the majority of his time with Sophia. His friends expressed their annoyance when he started to withdraw from their company, but Ian couldn’t feel sorry. Sophia made them all seem painfully simple to him and he wondered that he had ever been amused by their company at all. While they were talking about football and parties and girls who didn’t even belong to the same species as Sophia, he could be discussing the literature and theories he was learning about in classes or the intimate workings of the government-things that actually seemed to matter as far as Ian was concerned. Sophia was never bored by the things that interested him and could always hold her own and Ian grew to respect her more for her intelligence than he took notice of her incredible looks. She was supportive and fun, a friend as well as a girlfriend. The way he saw it, he had no use for any other friends. He was in love; he had never been in love before. And it wasn’t just that. It was everything. It was overwrought and cliché, but he didn’t care. He wanted to shout it from the rooftops. It was like, after twenty years of black and white, he was seeing colors. His connection to her was cosmic, made every relationship he’d ever had in his life feel less than an inch deep. He could live without them, he couldn’t live without her and because it never occurred to him that he might have to, he immersed himself in the feeling and forgot to come up for air.
It wasn’t long before their relationship was bordering on pathetic, even Ian could see that. But she seemed content to spend most of her time with him, and he was more than happy to be mutually codependent. She wasn’t actually his girlfriend, or at least he usually didn’t think so. She looked at him like she loved him and she spoke to him like she did, but she never let him touch her, not even innocently, not even by accident. She would glare so coolly it chilled Ian’s blood, dodge his advances, and worst of all, withdraw from his company if he even suggested it. It was a little weird, but Ian could just imagine the kind of horrors she must have had to live with her entire life-unwelcome men trying to grab her or boyfriends trying to use her…with the way she looked even well-bred and always-polite Ian had a hard time keeping his hands to himself. He wasn’t thrilled about it, but her friendship was worth more than anything he had, so he didn’t push the issue.
The closer he grew to her, the further he grew from others. It took months before it was really a problem, but by the end of the spring semester, his friends were dropping by his dorm nightly trying every trick in their arsenals to draw him out and on one noteworthy occasion, attempting to stage an intervention of some kind. By the time he had to go home for the summer, he didn’t really know how he was going to survive without her.
He learned that he couldn’t really and they were the longest, most miserable months he’d ever spent. He got a summer job at the local Dairy Queen just to pass the time and to try to get out of having to see his high school friends who by then seemed even more inferior to him than his college friends. Unfortunately the job was mind-numbingly dull and he had eight hours every single day to sit around and obsess over the situation with Sophia. From an outside perspective he began to see things that hadn’t occurred to him when she was around blinding him from anything and everything. Why didn’t anyone else know her? How did she always manage to disappear so quickly when his friends came over? Why did she never want to meet them? He realized that he didn’t even know where she was over the summer; home was in California, she had told him and that had seemed perfectly adequate at the time. But California was an awfully big state and she never bothered to specify where, she never spoke of home or the family there, she never seemed to miss it. Now that Ian tried to place her, he couldn’t see Sophia belonging in California at all. Ian had always wondered at the number of confounded stares he and Sophia got when they were out in public-he’d always dismissed them, assuming the strangers were as struck by Sophia’s looks as he had been himself. In retrospect, however, they hadn’t really been the looks of observers admiring a painting at a museum. They had been more akin to the faces people made at a particularly old and sick dog. Ian felt the sick, dirty swirl of understanding begin to seize him. Still, it wasn’t the kind of conclusion you jumped to. Ian did his best to put those thoughts aside until he went back to school and could really get answers to his questions.
The first thing he did to test his theory was invite his friends to meet her. When they looked around the room, past her, and asked where she was, Ian lied and said she couldn’t make it. There was really no way to pretend there was another option at that point.
He was a good host, his old self again, his friends thought. They assumed the girl who had been taking up his time, who they had never met after almost a year, had finally lost her hold on him. They were wrong of course, but Ian wasn’t going to let that show. He wasn’t going to announce that he was crazy. Not until he had to.
Her eyes were predatory when he turned on her after closing the door behind his friends. It was a reaction to his anger. Anger directed at her, which was, it turned out, anger directed at himself. He had been an idiot not to see it, but he had been desperate. He hated himself a little bit in that moment. He’d always thought he was a good person, but he was fairly certain a good person wouldn’t have enough of an ego to have to invent someone he would deem worthy of his company. He had been rude to the people who cared about him, all for the sake of something that didn’t exist. Too many years of repressing his nasty thoughts had taken its toll. He had wanted to let it out so much without realizing it that he had invented someone, really believed, and now even if he knew, even if he wanted to hate her just for existing…he couldn’t. It was stupid. She wasn’t real. He still loved her more than anything. And maybe that’s what hurt the most-that he had to invent someone to care about. That people in the real world just didn’t make the cut.
“You knew,” he accused. “And you didn’t tell me.”
“You didn’t know, how was I supposed to?” She stood her ground. The fierce expression only intensified.
And, well, that made sense to him. He relented. After all, he was the crazy one, not her. The problem was deciding what to do about it. His instinct was to try to ignore it. After all, it had gone on for nearly a year without causing too much damage (sudden extinction of his social life notwithstanding). This worked at first. He made it through a few months with very little incident. But he got home every day annoyed because he was trying so hard to be sociable and getting nothing out of it and Sophia would be sitting there, waiting to talk to him and Ian would give in to her every time. He knew he would have to cut her out to really save himself, but he couldn’t let her go. It didn’t get any better and that meant it had to be getting worse.
He started to get confused, didn’t know when to speak to her and when not to, couldn’t separate the truth from the invention. It started with Sophia and he knew that; everything grew out of that one, stupid fantasy. But he wasn’t sure what his condition was exactly or how it worked. He realized that for all he knew, half of the people in his life could have been made up so he took a hostile, accusing attitude with every person he met. He stopped doing well in classes, and when he went home to see his family, they knew immediately from his terrified expression that something was wrong. He denied it, they insisted. They made him see the doctor-he never would have on his own.
*~*~*
That’s how I came into his life. I’m not a doctor, and this isn’t a hospital. As soon as they had all of the details, once they had sorted it out and pieced it together, despite his desperate attempts to hide it, they offered him the solution. An easy cure. Take the pills and she would go away. If he took the pills, they promised, he would be normal again. And that was his worst nightmare. He couldn’t go back to school, they threatened. He couldn’t get a job. He’d never have a life. But he refused; he refused to get rid of her. He chose this life.
And that’s how he got stuck here. He wasn’t crazy enough for an asylum, so they dropped him into a nice, cushy prison for the sick and dying. Twenty-six years old and living in a nursing home and he’s the only person here who doesn’t mind it. Those of us who work here are, for the most part in the same boat I’m stuck in. We got about halfway through medical school before we were informed that we just weren’t good enough, so we took the next job available and have to look after angry and crazy all day every day. It’s not a pleasant place and none of us, patients or faculty, are particularly pleasant people.
But Ian is different and for the ten minutes a day I take care of him, I get to forget that I’m bitter. I took an interest in him, maybe more than I’m supposed to, and I’ve gotten to know him pretty well. This is the story as he’s told it to me, with bits and pieces from his family and friends, the people who come to see him. They leave with pitying looks, they feel sorry for him. I did, too, when I first got here. But the truth is: I’ve never seen anyone so genuinely pleased with the way life turned out. Not when people are around, they make him feel lonely. He scowls and grumbles and to see him, you would never believe he was agreeable. But he’s nice to me now that I understand. He talks to me and says the most brilliant things-I don’t understand or remember most of it, but what I do is fascinating. He breaks my heart but I don’t think he would see why if I told him so. The smile on his face when I walk into the room, when I know he’s been with her, is radiant and I would have fallen in love with it if it hadn’t been so obviously for someone else.
He doesn’t share her with us. He’s withdrawn and quiet, he’ll talk to us, and throw glances at things we can’t see, but he’ll never address her. I walked in on him once during my first week while he was talking to her; he glared as if I’d spit on him. I learned to announce myself.
“Don’t you realize it isn’t real?” I asked him once when before I understood. It wasn’t the first case I’d seen where the patient refused medicine because he liked what he saw, but he was certainly the first person I knew to fall in love with it. I wanted him to get it, because I knew he was smart enough, because there was hope that he could fix the damage. But he just fixed me with a sardonic smirk and asked “Real to whom?”
I guess I didn’t have an answer for that. I still don’t. In fact, every day I spend with him, I see the problem less and less. People consider me normal, but I go home every night from a job I hate and watch reality television with a tub of Ben & Jerry’s until I fall asleep. If that’s normal then maybe it is better to be crazy. He gave up everything he had for the woman he loved, that doesn’t seem so incomprehensible. I don’t think I blame him. If he ever woke up from this, if he ever stopped loving her and gave someone real a chance, I think that would be worse for him. He doesn’t need that. She’s everything he wants. People pity him, but he’s the only person I’ve ever known who lives in a perfect world.
[10]
Fandom: Original Fiction
Characters/Pairings: Ian (OC)/Sophia (OC)
Genre: Crappy
Rating: PG
Word Count: 3,699
Author’s Note: Look, guys, I want it on the record that I *know* this is bad. I wrote it for my Creative Writing class because I had absolutely no other ideas and no time to think of any. I've never written Original Fiction before and clearly it should have stayed that way. Also, who the balls would have thought my first Original Fiction would be het? This is not relevant to my interests. Did manage to sneak in this week's tamingthemuse, though, so this is for Prompt #173 - Predatory.
ETA 12.26.2009: This is now the workshopped version because, for God only knows what reason, poor scorpiod1 insisted. I still hate this, ftr!
Summary: Ian Holden had a perfectly bland life, until he fell in love.
Ian Holden was born on the fence between being upper-middle class and being downright wealthy. He was too tall with floppy brown hair and a killer smile-he was attractive and knew it but he tried not to let on. He was brilliant but never intimidatingly so and usually gave off the impression that he was only of average intelligence. Ian Holden was not someone people felt sorry for.
He was the third of four children, two sisters (one older, one younger) and a brother (the oldest of them all). He was his father’s favorite son and his mother’s favorite child and, because he was born with potential, was a little spoiled. He and his siblings got along about as often as they fought, loved each other, and kept to themselves. They had a dog (a big, handsome mutt that Ian always joked was his favorite sibling), a house with a lawn…there was, in his early life, very little to comment on.
Ian never had a problem making friends. He was so open and friendly that people found it genuinely impossible to dislike him. He reached out to the children who weren’t as naturally at ease when it came to getting to know people, he was the universally acknowledged champion of encouraging and hand-holding, and had a broad, welcoming shoulder to cry on. Teachers looked the other way when he was the one talking in class, girls paid attention to him, and the other boys rarely ever begrudged him for it. He was happy, or he thought he was. He began to understand what happy really meant about the same time he learned what sorrow really felt like. The point is: he got to know them both.
When it came time to apply to colleges, Ian was accepted to Harvard and, because he had the inclination, ability, and financial freedom to do so, he packed up and moved from Maine to Massachusetts. It was far away enough from home to be exciting, close enough to go home for holidays; enough New England to feel familiar, without feeling dull. By the time he moved away, he had no more life experience than a regular person. Actually, he probably had less. This never bothered him…it was very difficult to bother him, back then. Ian had no problem finding his place at Harvard; he’d already made friends before he’d finished moving in. He did well in classes and enjoyed them for the most part, excepting his math and science requirements and the English class on Freud he’d only signed up for to appease a girlfriend he then broke up with and spent the entire semester being glared at by. His grades were solidly in the A range and he was pretty much guaranteed a spot at the law school of his choosing after he graduated. Until the beginning of his junior year, life went on much as it always had-a frustration to Ian who had hoped for excitement in college, for something for once to go unexpectedly, even if it wasn’t for the better. One Wednesday in November, he got home from classes and realized he had no idea what he had done that day or the day before that or the day before that. His entirely life blended together into one incredibly long and comfortably boring day.
It was only a week after this realization that he met her. She ruined everything. She made everything better.
*~*~*
Ian was at a party the first time he saw her. He couldn’t remember whose birthday it was, but it didn’t really matter. There was music playing too loud in the background, his friends were around making idiots of themselves, there was alcohol in the kitchen and pretty girls in the lounge. It was a good time. Ian had had enough to drink to feel confident without being stupid, though he had had every intention of getting to that stupid point before the night was over. Until he saw her.
She was, and still is, the most beautiful person he had ever seen in his life. Not in the romantic-movie-exaggeration kind of way, in the very literal what-is-she-doing-here-people-don’t-look-like-that way. It made sense, in retrospect, that she would be everything he wanted, that she possessed every feature he had ever considered attractive. At the time, the effect was a little overwhelming, and Ian just stood there staring across the room for several seconds before he was able to really comprehend her.
She had long, vibrantly ginger hair, full, red lips, and Ian was sure that if he got close enough to see them, her eyes would be bright green and intensely expressive. She looked like a goddess, if goddesses made a habit out of hanging around on balconies at random college parties. He was completely stunned to see that she was alone. A girl that looked like she did should have been surrounded by men falling over themselves to get her attention. She should have been having the time of her life. Instead, she was carved out of stone-perfect but lifeless. He wanted to wipe the bored expression from her face, convinced it would be even more stunning when animate. The more he thought about it as he watched her, the more it made sense that she was alone. She wasn’t just gorgeous, her kind of beauty was off-putting-nobody would ever be able to measure up to her. Who would feel adequate enough to approach her?
Ian was not used to feeling insecure and had never really learned about rejection, so he decided he would try to get her attention anyway. After all, even if he wasn’t at her level, no one else was talking to her, he had no competition. Of course, he was aware that there might have been a better reason for her isolation. A girl who looked like her should have been a popular topic of conversation (Ian was surprised he’d never heard of or seen her) and it was possible that she had a well-known and very severe personality flaw that would manifest once she opened her mouth. If her ego spanned the universe or her intellect could have been contained in a grain of sand, Ian could always just excuse himself from the conversation. He figured it was worth taking the chance of finding out. If he’d ever been seriously disappointed, Ian may have backed down and his life would have gone very differently. Obviously, that was not the case.
Ian was across the room and opening the door to the balcony in five quick strides. The night was crisp and starless and he could see why none of the other partygoers had taken refuge outside. Ignoring the cutting air, he leaned casually against the rails and smiled. The girl hardly turned her head to acknowledge it. He greeted her and she replied, clipped and cool in her response. Nevertheless, Ian persevered. He introduced himself and she finally turned her attention to him. A long moment passed before she replied. Her name was Sophia; she didn’t offer a last name. Ian liked that, he’d always been fond of the name Sophia and it seemed elegant enough to match her.
She was reserved; a little icy at first, but Ian was innately good at getting people to warm to him. After half an hour, she was smiling. After an hour she was laughing. They joked about the bad music, the ridiculousness of standing on a balcony in the cold (though neither made an attempt to move back inside where their conversation would be stilted by the aforementioned bad music), and the English professor they both had who was in the habit of crying whenever he was discussing a particularly emotional novel. Ian did his best not to stare, but Sophia responded positively when he likened her to the beauties of the Arthurian legends they were studying, rolling her eyes but smiling nevertheless. She didn’t seem particular opposed to him physically, either, and was flirtatiously calling him Lancelot before the night was over. Nobody at the boisterous party took note of the two of them sectioned off and bantering between themselves. They didn’t take notice of the others, either. The girl, Sophia, turned out to be as witty, funny, and smart as she was gorgeous. She wasn’t nice like Ian and half the things she said were brutally honest in a way that both made him uncomfortable and thrilled him. He agreed with everything she said, even if he would never have admitted it to himself before she said them. She made offhand comments about the other people at the party, some of them his friends, and he was guiltily amused at even the most disparaging. He’d never realized someone could understand him so well and it made him appreciate how alone he had been before taking the chance to talk to her that night. Ian was, to put it lightly, smitten.
*~*~*
After that, he began to spend the majority of his time with Sophia. His friends expressed their annoyance when he started to withdraw from their company, but Ian couldn’t feel sorry. Sophia made them all seem painfully simple to him and he wondered that he had ever been amused by their company at all. While they were talking about football and parties and girls who didn’t even belong to the same species as Sophia, he could be discussing the literature and theories he was learning about in classes or the intimate workings of the government-things that actually seemed to matter as far as Ian was concerned. Sophia was never bored by the things that interested him and could always hold her own and Ian grew to respect her more for her intelligence than he took notice of her incredible looks. She was supportive and fun, a friend as well as a girlfriend. The way he saw it, he had no use for any other friends. He was in love; he had never been in love before. And it wasn’t just that. It was everything. It was overwrought and cliché, but he didn’t care. He wanted to shout it from the rooftops. It was like, after twenty years of black and white, he was seeing colors. His connection to her was cosmic, made every relationship he’d ever had in his life feel less than an inch deep. He could live without them, he couldn’t live without her and because it never occurred to him that he might have to, he immersed himself in the feeling and forgot to come up for air.
It wasn’t long before their relationship was bordering on pathetic, even Ian could see that. But she seemed content to spend most of her time with him, and he was more than happy to be mutually codependent. She wasn’t actually his girlfriend, or at least he usually didn’t think so. She looked at him like she loved him and she spoke to him like she did, but she never let him touch her, not even innocently, not even by accident. She would glare so coolly it chilled Ian’s blood, dodge his advances, and worst of all, withdraw from his company if he even suggested it. It was a little weird, but Ian could just imagine the kind of horrors she must have had to live with her entire life-unwelcome men trying to grab her or boyfriends trying to use her…with the way she looked even well-bred and always-polite Ian had a hard time keeping his hands to himself. He wasn’t thrilled about it, but her friendship was worth more than anything he had, so he didn’t push the issue.
The closer he grew to her, the further he grew from others. It took months before it was really a problem, but by the end of the spring semester, his friends were dropping by his dorm nightly trying every trick in their arsenals to draw him out and on one noteworthy occasion, attempting to stage an intervention of some kind. By the time he had to go home for the summer, he didn’t really know how he was going to survive without her.
He learned that he couldn’t really and they were the longest, most miserable months he’d ever spent. He got a summer job at the local Dairy Queen just to pass the time and to try to get out of having to see his high school friends who by then seemed even more inferior to him than his college friends. Unfortunately the job was mind-numbingly dull and he had eight hours every single day to sit around and obsess over the situation with Sophia. From an outside perspective he began to see things that hadn’t occurred to him when she was around blinding him from anything and everything. Why didn’t anyone else know her? How did she always manage to disappear so quickly when his friends came over? Why did she never want to meet them? He realized that he didn’t even know where she was over the summer; home was in California, she had told him and that had seemed perfectly adequate at the time. But California was an awfully big state and she never bothered to specify where, she never spoke of home or the family there, she never seemed to miss it. Now that Ian tried to place her, he couldn’t see Sophia belonging in California at all. Ian had always wondered at the number of confounded stares he and Sophia got when they were out in public-he’d always dismissed them, assuming the strangers were as struck by Sophia’s looks as he had been himself. In retrospect, however, they hadn’t really been the looks of observers admiring a painting at a museum. They had been more akin to the faces people made at a particularly old and sick dog. Ian felt the sick, dirty swirl of understanding begin to seize him. Still, it wasn’t the kind of conclusion you jumped to. Ian did his best to put those thoughts aside until he went back to school and could really get answers to his questions.
The first thing he did to test his theory was invite his friends to meet her. When they looked around the room, past her, and asked where she was, Ian lied and said she couldn’t make it. There was really no way to pretend there was another option at that point.
He was a good host, his old self again, his friends thought. They assumed the girl who had been taking up his time, who they had never met after almost a year, had finally lost her hold on him. They were wrong of course, but Ian wasn’t going to let that show. He wasn’t going to announce that he was crazy. Not until he had to.
Her eyes were predatory when he turned on her after closing the door behind his friends. It was a reaction to his anger. Anger directed at her, which was, it turned out, anger directed at himself. He had been an idiot not to see it, but he had been desperate. He hated himself a little bit in that moment. He’d always thought he was a good person, but he was fairly certain a good person wouldn’t have enough of an ego to have to invent someone he would deem worthy of his company. He had been rude to the people who cared about him, all for the sake of something that didn’t exist. Too many years of repressing his nasty thoughts had taken its toll. He had wanted to let it out so much without realizing it that he had invented someone, really believed, and now even if he knew, even if he wanted to hate her just for existing…he couldn’t. It was stupid. She wasn’t real. He still loved her more than anything. And maybe that’s what hurt the most-that he had to invent someone to care about. That people in the real world just didn’t make the cut.
“You knew,” he accused. “And you didn’t tell me.”
“You didn’t know, how was I supposed to?” She stood her ground. The fierce expression only intensified.
And, well, that made sense to him. He relented. After all, he was the crazy one, not her. The problem was deciding what to do about it. His instinct was to try to ignore it. After all, it had gone on for nearly a year without causing too much damage (sudden extinction of his social life notwithstanding). This worked at first. He made it through a few months with very little incident. But he got home every day annoyed because he was trying so hard to be sociable and getting nothing out of it and Sophia would be sitting there, waiting to talk to him and Ian would give in to her every time. He knew he would have to cut her out to really save himself, but he couldn’t let her go. It didn’t get any better and that meant it had to be getting worse.
He started to get confused, didn’t know when to speak to her and when not to, couldn’t separate the truth from the invention. It started with Sophia and he knew that; everything grew out of that one, stupid fantasy. But he wasn’t sure what his condition was exactly or how it worked. He realized that for all he knew, half of the people in his life could have been made up so he took a hostile, accusing attitude with every person he met. He stopped doing well in classes, and when he went home to see his family, they knew immediately from his terrified expression that something was wrong. He denied it, they insisted. They made him see the doctor-he never would have on his own.
*~*~*
That’s how I came into his life. I’m not a doctor, and this isn’t a hospital. As soon as they had all of the details, once they had sorted it out and pieced it together, despite his desperate attempts to hide it, they offered him the solution. An easy cure. Take the pills and she would go away. If he took the pills, they promised, he would be normal again. And that was his worst nightmare. He couldn’t go back to school, they threatened. He couldn’t get a job. He’d never have a life. But he refused; he refused to get rid of her. He chose this life.
And that’s how he got stuck here. He wasn’t crazy enough for an asylum, so they dropped him into a nice, cushy prison for the sick and dying. Twenty-six years old and living in a nursing home and he’s the only person here who doesn’t mind it. Those of us who work here are, for the most part in the same boat I’m stuck in. We got about halfway through medical school before we were informed that we just weren’t good enough, so we took the next job available and have to look after angry and crazy all day every day. It’s not a pleasant place and none of us, patients or faculty, are particularly pleasant people.
But Ian is different and for the ten minutes a day I take care of him, I get to forget that I’m bitter. I took an interest in him, maybe more than I’m supposed to, and I’ve gotten to know him pretty well. This is the story as he’s told it to me, with bits and pieces from his family and friends, the people who come to see him. They leave with pitying looks, they feel sorry for him. I did, too, when I first got here. But the truth is: I’ve never seen anyone so genuinely pleased with the way life turned out. Not when people are around, they make him feel lonely. He scowls and grumbles and to see him, you would never believe he was agreeable. But he’s nice to me now that I understand. He talks to me and says the most brilliant things-I don’t understand or remember most of it, but what I do is fascinating. He breaks my heart but I don’t think he would see why if I told him so. The smile on his face when I walk into the room, when I know he’s been with her, is radiant and I would have fallen in love with it if it hadn’t been so obviously for someone else.
He doesn’t share her with us. He’s withdrawn and quiet, he’ll talk to us, and throw glances at things we can’t see, but he’ll never address her. I walked in on him once during my first week while he was talking to her; he glared as if I’d spit on him. I learned to announce myself.
“Don’t you realize it isn’t real?” I asked him once when before I understood. It wasn’t the first case I’d seen where the patient refused medicine because he liked what he saw, but he was certainly the first person I knew to fall in love with it. I wanted him to get it, because I knew he was smart enough, because there was hope that he could fix the damage. But he just fixed me with a sardonic smirk and asked “Real to whom?”
I guess I didn’t have an answer for that. I still don’t. In fact, every day I spend with him, I see the problem less and less. People consider me normal, but I go home every night from a job I hate and watch reality television with a tub of Ben & Jerry’s until I fall asleep. If that’s normal then maybe it is better to be crazy. He gave up everything he had for the woman he loved, that doesn’t seem so incomprehensible. I don’t think I blame him. If he ever woke up from this, if he ever stopped loving her and gave someone real a chance, I think that would be worse for him. He doesn’t need that. She’s everything he wants. People pity him, but he’s the only person I’ve ever known who lives in a perfect world.
[10]