A research-based essay written for Graduate Workshop in Creative Nonfiction, spring 2021, and shared with my classmates in two parts. I make no claim that it includes every possible relevant detail - that would have made it over a hundred pages long - but it is true nonetheless. I'm not sure how I feel about this final draft. There are spots where I felt like less was more, but my classmates felt like more was more. I also reworked the ending a lot to focus more on my own development and not drag on, and thus cut some stuff that was meant to make certain parties more nuanced and sympathetic. It is what it is.

Things That Rhyme with "Elise"
C. Randall Nicholson

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.”
– William Blake
 
Utah, 2019

​Calise is already smiling when she opens the door. That’s unexpected and disarming. Usually her face is a stone, blank, unreadable. In pictures where she feels obligated to smile with her teeth, she looks like she has a stomachache. But this smile, her natural tight-lipped one, lights up her whole face like a nebula. On top of that she’s bathed in the heavenly glow of a porch light that staves off the cool October night as she stands in the doorway. In her arms she holds her best friend’s little dog Paisley, like a supervillain stroking her pet as she contemplates world domination.

In her soft monotone she says, “Hello, Christopher.” She always calls him Christopher, like his most thoughtful and intellectual friends do. It’s a trend he’s noticed.

He says hi and tries to say what he came here to say before it escapes his mind, but she keeps speaking before he has a chance.

“How are you?”

He says something – maybe he remembers his manners and returns the question, or maybe not. Maybe he should comment on her new blonde hair, but he doesn’t know what to say – he doesn’t think it’s an improvement, and he hopes she didn’t do it because she thinks she needs to change herself to be beautiful. He gets to the point as fast as he can. The Tootsie rolls she found on her porch a week ago taped up in an Amazon box with the address ripped off and a Post-it note reading “Für Calise :)”? Their mutual friend Katie told Christopher that Calise really, really wanted to find out who left it there, and he had intended to stay anonymous, but since she really wants to know…

Christopher doesn’t mention that Katie has been pressuring him all day to do this, but he name-drops her so that Calise won’t blame him if this is weird, or think that he ever planned to take credit. This morning he had no intention of doing it, but Katie wore him down. She has a gift for pushing him to do things he secretly wants to do anyway. She also said he should ask Calise out, but that was too much. He doesn’t want to exploit his act of kindness for personal gain or give the appearance of doing so. And besides, he’s scared.

“Thank you,” Calise says. “How did you know?” He reminds her of her Instagram tagline: “I actually really love Tootsie rolls”

Her smile may or may not get a little bigger as he stands there fidgeting, his heart turned to jelly under her gaze. Twenty-six years old, feeling like he’s in middle school but probably handling it with less composure than an actual middle schooler. Can she tell? Is it obvious? Does it have anything to do with why she’s smiling? He can’t read people, least of all her, and wouldn’t dare to think yes – and yet – it feels like a distinct possibility for once.

Maybe he doesn’t have much to offer Calise with her three majors and three jobs, Calise with her divine paintings and sculptures exceeded in beauty only by their creator, Calise with her inhuman breadth and depth of talents and qualities. But he thinks his mind and personality are nonetheless very compatible with hers, and nobody would work harder to make her happy.

“Um, I guess that’s all I have to say,” he says. He would love to talk to her all night, but he doesn’t want to let all the warm air out of her apartment.

She giggles a little. “Have a good night,” she says, and goes inside.

Christopher walks to the end of the block where he’s sure she can’t hear him, calls Katie, and gushes for several minutes about what just happened. Katie is so proud of him. Then he walks back and enters his apartment, the one next to the one where he left the Tootsie rolls.

The next time he looks at Calise’s Instagram, the tagline has changed: “It doesn’t take much to make me happy”
 
***
 
Asperger (or Asperger’s) syndrome, named for Dr. Hans Asperger who did the groundbreaking research on it, entails a diminished ability to read social cues or communicate nonverbally, a propensity for narrow interests – obsessions, some would call them – and repetitive self-stimulating behaviors, or “stimming.” Christopher does have a one-track mind, and some of his middle school classmates nicknamed him “Twitch” after the character in Louis Sachar’s Holes. Figurative language doesn’t come naturally. As a child he was irked by idioms like “cut it out” or “knock it off,” but he heard them often enough to get used to it.

Around age twelve or thirteen, Christopher looked the syndrome up on the internet after his pediatrician – the normal doctor, not one of the ones who was supposed to help with his mental health – casually suggested that he might have “ass burgers.” As he read the list of symptoms, he realized for the first time in his life that he wasn’t the only person in the world who felt this way. By now, though, he’s more or less grown out of his repetitive behaviors and just stims sometimes with a small toy or other object in his hands. The social and nonverbal stuff has the most impact on his life (although his difficulty with metaphor poses some challenges in English classes where he’s otherwise poised to excel).

In early 2013, at age nineteen, the people behind the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders removed Asperger’s as a diagnosis and reclassified its symptoms under autism spectrum disorder. Is autism even a disorder? Some will push back on that point, but the majority whose minds don’t work that way decided to call it a disorder. It is what it is. It covers a lot of varied conditions that maybe shouldn’t even be classified together – a saying goes, “If you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism.”

Christopher was right peeved about some elitists in white lab coats taking away this crucial piece of his identity and instead assigning him a label that carried an even bigger stigma. He refused to be autistic. But one day he witnessed some people complaining about how Pluto isn’t classified as a planet anymore because it doesn’t fit the definition of a planet, and he thought they were being ridiculous by putting their emotional preference ahead of scientific logic – he rolled his eyes so hard when someone said “Ohana means family” to refer to a ball of rock and ice – and then he realized he was being just as ridiculous in his own way.

(He assumed, of course, that an equal level of scientific logic had gone into the autism classification. He trusted the experts to know what they were talking about and have solid reasoning behind their decisions.)

So he accepted the autism. He even embraced the stigma. He would become an ally to the “lower-functioning” autistic people by leveraging his new status to guilt-trip anyone he noticed speak ill of them or make a tasteless remark about “screeching autistically.” He would tell society where to stick its stigma.

Besides that, God knows what else is wrong with him. His father’s side of the family is a cocktail of mental illness. Depression, of course, always comes as a bonus with literally anything else that goes wrong in one’s brain, and once during an argument at age twenty-five, his father tried to invalidate his perspective by revealing that he was diagnosed as a child with oppositional defiant disorder. But his most recent therapist says the majority of ODD diagnoses he’s seen were wrong, and most adults grow out of it anyway.

Christopher’s parents feel that even if he’s autistic – of which they’re skeptical, no matter how many times he explains it, because he didn’t experience the regression or speech impairment of “lower-functioning” autistic children – he’s holding himself back by making this label such a part of his identity, and that if he just doesn’t make a big deal out of it and has a positive attitude, nobody will notice he isn’t normal. As if he hadn’t already tried that! He feels that because autism shapes his view of the world and, to some degree, every thought that ever passes through his mind, there’s no reason not to define himself by it.

He still sometimes uses the Asperger’s label interchangeably and likes to self-identify as an Aspie. He doesn’t know yet that Dr. Hans Asperger sent at least two disabled children to be experimented on and probably killed in a Nazi clinic.

Christopher believes that Calise is autistic too. From the first time he saw her in his peripheral vision, standing in the yard with Paisley on a leash, he sensed her awkwardness in the blank look on her face and the way she carried herself. He ignored her and kept listening to his music, but Paisley fell in love at first sight and jumped at his legs, so he kneeled and paid attention to her. He loves dogs, so that little moment did his heart some good. Paisley is absurdly cute. She’s not one of those awful little dogs that barks all the time or attacks people and goes unpunished. She only howls on some Friday evenings when she’s left home alone – and who can blame her? Sometimes he feels like howling when he’s lonely too.

Christopher felt no attraction to Calise in that first moment. In fact, he considered her plain, homely, and forgettable, and forgot about her. In his defense, he was determined never to catch feelings again, and to build a wall around his heart that would make Donald Trump seethe with envy. He would ignore the girls next door and they would ignore him.

But one night she came outside with a basket of laundry while he was laying in the grass, in a rare moment without his earbuds, and with a few sentences of mundane but unexpected conversation as she walked by, she floated through his wall like a phantom. He couldn’t even see her eyes in the dark, but in the way she spoke and the way she carried herself, he saw more flattering adjectives: kind, mature, genuine, intelligent.

It didn’t take him long to figure out that she’s everything he’s ever found attractive in a woman, and then some. He sees a kindred spirit, a kindred mind. She’s strange and awkward and he falls for her because of, not in spite of that. In fact, though he’s not into such young women, she’s so mature and intelligent that her being twenty-one doesn’t bother him in the slightest.

In summary, he’s giving a whole new meaning to the commandment “Love your neighbor.”

He should know better. How could he not, after Angie? A few months ago, he invited his coworker to see a movie with him, and she said maybe and then kept him waiting on her answer for four weeks, and then sent him a long apologetic text message after she heard that he heard that she was going on dates with some other guy. That was the final straw after a year or so of meeting various levels of apathy and evasion from Andrea, Holly, Alicia, and Sarah. Before that, he went on his last actual first date with Allie. They went to Panda Express and then she made a big show of avoiding him at church until he confronted her and she said she didn’t want to lead him on.

“I tried to tell you,” she lied.

The message has been loud and clear for a long time – he is not only unwanted, but unworthy of the basic respect implied by honest communication. And he can guess why. He even nearly gave up on Calise before he began, when he had a nightmare about her that reminded him how stupid it would be to try again. But she’s different somehow.

Autism gets diagnosed at an estimated 4:1 ratio of males to females. The autistic traits you find listed online are the “masculine” ones. The poster child is a quirky, stereotypical nerd or geek like Sheldon Cooper. For better or for worse, women are raised in such a way that autistic ones can hide their differences much easier and be less disadvantaged by a lack of social skills. Sometimes Christopher entertains himself by speculating on which of the women in his life are autistic. Maybe their mannerisms are just a little “off”, or they’re just a little too obsessed with their hobbies, or they speak in a monotone and show little emotion, or they’re unusually blunt.

Calise has probably had a much different life experience than him – he certainly hopes so. He hopes nobody has ever tried to beat the unique beauty out of her. The main upshot of her real or perceived autism is that she thinks long and hard about the world and doesn’t put up a fake, shallow façade to fit in with the rest of society. He saw that in her walk and in her talk that night, and later her vibrant brown eyes confirmed it. He knows right away she’s someone he could have long, deep discussions with about anything and everything.

He thinks he’s the same way. Autism has made his life much harder, but he wouldn’t get rid of it if he could. He doesn’t want it to be “fixed” in the next life with his other issues. He wouldn’t have much of a personality left. The loneliness it brings him is a price worth paying, he thinks, to see society through somewhat rational eyes instead of mindlessly accepting every stupid way of doing things as “normal.” Not that he would ever claim to be truly objective, but he has fewer blinders on than the average guy.

At least that’s how he feels when he takes the time to contemplate it. Sometimes he forgets. Sometimes life gets hard and he doesn’t like himself. But right now, he sees much of himself reflected in Calise and he loves it.

So he talks to her when he gets the chance, and he finds himself knocking on her door maybe once a week, inviting her to group activities (not dates) or offering baked goods to whomever answers. Sometimes her roommate Kristina answers with a scrunched-up look on her face as if to say, “What are you doing here? Giving us brownies? That’s so weird.”

Because Christopher can’t read people, he takes great care to stay outside of whatever Calise’s boundaries may turn out to be. One evening when he drops by to invite her to a group activity (not a date) and she isn’t home, her roommate and best friend Talease (yes, their names rhyme, deal with it) gives him her phone number and encourages him to text her. He hesitates. Talease assures him that it’s fine. Calise shows up, and she can’t come to the group activity because she has an art seminar to go to, but as he’s leaving, he makes sure to warn her that Talease gave him her number and encouraged him to text her.

“You’re welcome to text me,” she says, but the conversation ends there because Paisley expresses her jealousy by running out the door and all three humans have to spend the next five minutes chasing her down.

Christopher is still afraid to text her until she texts him first. Then he’s afraid to text her often, lest she become annoyed or just ignore him like so many have before. She doesn’t. She usually responds within ten minutes, and unnecessarily apologizes on the rare occasion when she takes hours. Every time, he feels like he’s performed a magic trick.
 
***
 
Christopher doesn’t mention why he wants to meet confidentially with Talease, but isn’t it obvious? When he shows up and looks around for a moment, Talease assures him, “She’s not here.” She invites him into the kitchen and makes him some hot chocolate with Nutella. He sits down as Paisley jumps at him and licks his feet. “She likes men,” Talease observes, a statement that hopefully applies to her roommate as well.

With her curly dark hair, passive face, blue-tinted glasses, and soothing voice, Talease feels like a cross between Professor Trelawney and Luna Lovegood. And the resemblance isn’t just aesthetic. Almost the first thing she announces is that she can read people’s auras. That’s not a thing Christopher expected to hear this morning, but he takes it in stride. He’s pretty chill about people’s beliefs, respectful of their right to be eccentric without apology, and open to the possibility of strange phenomena. It says a lot, he thinks, that Calise chose this interesting character as her best friend.

Besides, she tells him things he likes to hear. She says his aura is nice and plain, a refreshing change from the clutter and noise she’s used to. She says his heart is a nice color. She says his soft eyes complement Calise’s vibrant eyes.

She reports that Calise has a high opinion of him since he gave her the Tootsie rolls – as if it’s not controversial at all that she would repay his act of kindness with feelings of affection. She says Calise asked her to use her gift to find out where they came from, but her gift doesn’t work like that.

“So,” Christopher says, “she doesn’t think I’m a creep?”

Talease blinks at him. “Why would she think that? You haven’t done anything weird.”

Christopher asks some questions. Talease answers them. Then she says she senses more questions that he’s afraid to ask. He has to think of one to prove her right. Then she says she senses another one, and just comes out and says it for him. She must have pulled it from his subconscious because it hadn’t actually occurred to him to wonder if Calise likes anybody. (No, Talease claims.)

He doesn’t expect her to help him just because he asked. He expects some kind of interview to prove his worthiness. That doesn’t happen. She does ask one probing question, though: “Do you want to get to know Calise because you like her, or in order to like her?”

Neither of those options sounds good to him. One sounds shallow, the other like confirmation bias. How can he explain that he fell for her mind before her physical beauty in just a few seconds, that he made some bold assumptions that are proving correct as he gets to know her? He tries to explain, even though it doesn’t really address the question. She nods as if that’s a perfect answer.

Talease says Calise loves to go for walks, and he should text her and invite her to go for a walk. She basically promises that Calise will say yes, but Christopher isn’t convinced. He says he’s too nervous. She says, “Then we’ll do it together. Give me your phone.” He does, and she uses it for a moment and then hands it back to show him the message she just composed and sent without his input.

He almost has a heart attack at its bold words: “Hey Calise, I was wondering if I could take you on a walk on Wednesday. Are you free?”

Talease says that Calise is at work and will probably respond in an hour or so, but she responds nine minutes later. She writes, “Sure, I have some time after 6- I usually go to the temple on Wednesday as well if you'd like to join me”

Talease says she gets occasional glimpses of the future, and she’s just glimpsed the future and seen that this will go well. She can’t give any specific details, because knowing your own future will ruin it, but she gives Christopher a confidence boost nonetheless.

Things come up and they just talk for forty-five minutes in the USU art building on Thursday instead, but that’s okay. It does go well. Calise is as smiley and relaxed as he’s ever seen her, just as he hoped she would be if he got her alone for a while. The usual stiffness in her body has evaporated as she folds her legs up on her chair and leans forward. She’s ditched the glasses she always has on when he just sees her around. She’s here to work on a ceramics project, but she took a break to talk to him, even though it means she’ll have to come back tomorrow evening to finish. Many of Christopher’s romantic interests were also busy, but she reaffirms what he already knew – they would have made time for him if they’d wanted to.

At Talease’s suggestion, he’s brought her an offering of Twix bars as a spiritual successor to the Tootsie rolls, and she insists on giving one back because they’re better shared. “I’m not very good at talking,” he admits at the beginning. He almost finishes that sentence with “to pretty girls” but chickens out at the last moment.

“I’m a girl,” she says, as if he hadn’t noticed, “so I’m great at talking.” They talk about Talease’s gift, and Calise agrees that Christopher’s heart is a nice color – “beautiful,” even. After that, they talk about the kind of things they would talk about if this were a first date, which it isn’t. But twice she asks, “Was there anything in particular you wanted to talk about?”

Is she nudging him to tell her how he feels? He would very much like to, but not now, not yet. If he takes that step now, there’s no going back, and he may not like what comes next. He never did before.

So he just kind of shrugs.

When they part ways, she reaches out for a hug. Such a bold gesture! Physical touch is one of Christopher’s top love languages (he has three tied for first place, perhaps making him thrice as needy as a normal person or perhaps thrice as easy to please), but because he can’t read people, he doesn’t know when it’s appropriate to touch people and just has to avoid it altogether. He would never dare do what Calise just did. She just initiated a hug with the expectation that he’ll reciprocate, making it very awkward for him to decline even if he wanted to.

But he doesn’t want to, so it works out.
 
***
 
Delusional, like most colloquial terms related to mental illness, is so often used as a pejorative that people seldom associate it with its literal meaning. Christopher should know better, but he’s as guilty of this as anyone. It’s just the way we talk.

It’s a legitimate term, though. A delusion is a false belief that someone holds onto in spite of any contrary evidence, essentially confirmation bias taken to a pathological level. There’s a whole disorder called delusional disorder, but it can also come as a symptom of other things like schizophrenia or Parkinson’s disease, or as a result of brain damage. If you’re delusional, you probably don’t know you’re delusional, so that’s a heartwarming thought.

Once in a while you hear stories of someone murdering family members because he or she sincerely believes they’re possessed by the devil. Sometimes as Christopher contemplates the intrinsic injustice of the world, he wonders – how can we address the potential harm and legitimate danger posed by some mental illnesses, without further stigmatizing mentally ill people and perpetuating the false belief that the majority are dangerous when, in fact, they’re far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators? And how do we acknowledge that the dangerous ones are still humans, and not deliberately bad ones?

Christopher couldn’t fail to notice how right-wing lawmakers and pundits repeatedly re-stigmatize mentally ill people when, fifteen seconds after every mass shooting, they fall over themselves to blame anything except guns or gun laws for the United States’ unique problem. A trifecta of mental illness, atheism, and violent video games is the usual culprit. How fortunate that none of those things exist in Canada, Europe, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, or other places that don’t have mass shootings every week.

Sometimes they single out autism, like after Adam Lanza murdered 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School. In the wake of that event, Christopher saw Facebook comments about autism and autistic people that made him dread living in this world. He would never want to make another mentally ill person feel that way.

Of course, those are extreme examples. And delusions can be harmless, or even beneficial. One of Christopher’s great-grandmothers, in her final years, had dementia and lived in a nursing home. She thought she lived in a motel and didn’t understand why everything was free. Nobody tried to correct her, nor should they have. Shelley Duvall, who’s sort of a second mother figure to Christopher because her “Sweet Dreams” lullaby album fills some of his earliest memories, made a controversial Dr. Phil appearance in 2016 where she opined that her “Popeye” costar Robin Williams isn’t dead, just shape-shifting. Maybe she’s happier believing that. And you can’t actually prove her wrong.

Christopher, Calise, and Talease, like most members of their church and some other churches, believe that the Holy Ghost speaks to their minds and hearts, giving them information and even telling them what actions to take for beneficial outcomes. Christopher can list specific instances when he believes this has happened. An atheist willing to grant more than wishful thinking might call those delusions. Who gets to decide? And even if it is a legitimate supernatural phenomenon, what’s to stop someone’s delusions from mimicking the real thing? He tries not to think about that too often.

Christopher enjoys Talease’s company and conversation on their own merits even when he’s not begging her to help him woo her best friend. Her personality isn’t the kind he’d want to date, but it does make her interesting to be around, even if it takes some getting used to.

She tells him one evening that she needs to ask him something, and the next day she shows up while he has his headphones on. He doesn’t hear her knock on the door for four minutes or see her text announcing her arrival. She walks around to the window of the living room, knocks on that instead, and scares the crap out of him. He wouldn’t dare knock on the girls’ living room window if they didn’t answer the door. He doesn’t want to get arrested.
​
Back at the door, she shows him something and asks, “Do you know what it is?”

It’s a hand-drawn picture of a tall, thin alien, like the stereotypical aliens with big eyes. It has a full head of hair and an unsettling sharp-toothed smile. The picture has been torn into little pieces and taped back together. No, Christopher doesn’t know what it is.

She says “Okay” and leaves.

He texts her, pressing for an explanation. She responds, “It doesn’t have any significance. It was just a question. Are you Irish?”

Later, Calise says she saw Talease drawing the picture, but she doesn’t know what it means either. She says Talease just does random checks from time to time and never explains what she’s checking.

One evening after Talease drives Calise to the airport for winter break, she once again invites Christopher inside for hot chocolate. They talk about his science fiction manuscript, and he lends her Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, his primary inspiration. In turn she lends him Wizard’s First Rule. They sit on the couch and work on individual projects on their laptops while Legion plays on the television. Talease says that horror movies freak Calise out, but she finds them relaxing. Christopher laughs as Paisley stands on his lap and licks his eyeball, but Talease makes her stop. Then Kristina gets home and Paisley follows her into her bedroom.

Christopher asks Talease if she’ll be seeing The Rise of Skywalker in the theater. She can’t. She tells him about the time a year and a half ago, or thereabouts – before she met Calise – when some guy rammed into the side of her car and messed her up real good. Since then she’s had to take medication every day. Calise, like a good friend, always reminds her. She can’t watch movies in the dark or she’ll have seizures. That’s also why she has blue glasses.

“I’m so sorry,” says Christopher. To be born with such a problem would be bad enough, but he can’t even imagine how consumed with hatred he would be if someone inflicted it on him.

“It is what it is,” she says, looking as contented as ever.

​Talease never makes a connection between these things and her spiritual gift. Neither does Calise. And neither, for the time being, does Christopher.
 
***
 
Before Talease there was Katie. Though Christopher hadn’t known her very long, he noticed her sitting next to Calise at church one week, so he planned to recruit her as a wingwoman – but he didn’t expect her to walk right into it like she did. He only had to mention Calise, and she said, “Calise is super cute.”

And he said, “Yeah she is.”

And she said, “Ahhhhhh.” You know, a hybrid of “Ohhhhhh” and “Awwwwww.” Even though he merely agreed with what she said about Calise’s cuteness, somehow it was assumed to mean something different coming from him. Hooray for heteronormativity. Anyway, Katie has proven herself a very enthusiastic and supportive wingwoman. “Oh,” she says one evening, “I just want her to date you already! I think she’s been thoroughly wooed.”

But then she observes a little more about Calise.

Christopher is out with Katie on an errand one evening when she warns him about how Calise treats men, how Calise leads men on or pursues them herself, then changes her mind and ghosts them. There in her car in the Smith’s parking lot, Christopher is smitten with cognitive dissonance. This is exactly the kind of bullshit that made him swear off dating, and he would have bet anything that Calise was better than that. She’s so genuine and honest – blunt, even – so why wouldn’t that extend to her love life?

But doesn’t the cognitive dissonance make him a hypocrite? He’s tried so hard to resist the impulse to put her on a pedestal, to believe she’s far too good for him. He’s looked for her flaws and come up with very few. He cried tears of joy when he saw the mess in the back of her van. How can he be upset now to learn that some of her flaws are actual, you know, flaws?

He explains, trying to convince himself as much as Katie, that Calise is a strange girl. She has some issues. And he owes her the benefit of the doubt. He can’t just condemn her for some questionable actions without giving her a chance to explain her thought process. It feels like he’s doing mental gymnastics to reconcile what he just learned with what he thought he knew, but the reasoning is sound – isn’t it?

Katie nods, looking thoughtful. “You’re right,” she says. “You should see this through until she’s had a chance to explain herself.”

The pedestal remains intact.

Since they just sat in the art building last time, Calise agrees to go for an actual walk with him sometime after she gets back from Christmas break. Four weeks may as well be a year. Not wanting to annoy her, he doesn’t text her until Christmas Eve, and then he texts her “Feliz Weihnachten!” before he goes to bed so that she’ll see it as soon as she gets up the next morning. But she responds right away even though it’s one a.m. in Ohio. He jokes with her about Santa Claus. He almost teases her about being naughty, but then he realizes that will come across as kinky regardless of context, so he doesn’t. Thank goodness.

He also takes a few days to write a song called “Sweet Calise,” a parody of “Dream Police” by Cheap Trick. He listens to the song at least a dozen times to get his lyrics just right. Maybe someday he’ll be brave enough to show them to her. Maybe someday he’ll learn to sing just so he can record them for her.

First and foremost, though, Christopher is determined to spend those four weeks and however much longer becoming the kind of man she deserves – not changing parts of himself to please her more, but becoming the best version of himself, overcoming his own considerable flaws. Every bad thing he’s done in his life weighs on him as if it happened yesterday, as if God had never forgiven him.

Calise would never take the Lord’s name in vain. Calise would never be rude to strangers on Facebook. Calise would never look at porn. Calise would never yell at her roommate. Calise would never borrow her sister’s camera for a trip to Spain in 2009 and then lose it because she was too stupid to look under the seat before she got off the bus.

But some things may never change. Christopher can’t rewrite his DNA or erase his past experiences – imagine a cog that starts out warped, then gets put in a machine and breaks in half. Did God foreordain him to be unworthy of this queen, this goddess? Could she ever love someone so broken?

He also can’t get an adequate night’s sleep to save his life, so that’s not helping either.

Calise returns, but she says she sprained her ankle over the break and needs more time. That’s okay, Christopher doesn’t feel worthy yet anyway. He knows who can help him – the woman who already looked inside him, the woman who must have seen all these things and declared that his heart was a nice color anyway. She could put things in perspective, could reassure him that he’s a good person after all. And although she’s notoriously bad at responding to texts, she promises to respond to everything for twenty-four hours.

Talease, upon his query, texts him a new account of what she saw that day he came to solicit her aid: “I’ll be completely honest with you. Your outer shell looked covered in cigarette burns, cuts, infection, and you looked starved and severely damaged. Your outer shell was blotchy in color from a lack of sunlight and extreme cold. Your head was covered in cracks and had exposed parts to your brain. I saw some things that aren't my place to say because it would only give you flashbacks and anxiety.”

Christopher can’t argue with that. He knows it’s true. He knows there’s no more appropriate imagery for the state of his psyche. His despair increases as he reads those words, failing to turn up any of the reassurance he had hoped for.

He still has several hours left, so she tells him to keep it coming. He obliges.

He discloses problems with his parents, with society, with God, with himself, with feeling on the fringes of everyone’s social circle. He knows that even if he doesn’t articulate himself perfectly, she won’t have cause to worry, because she’s read his aura and his heart and his mind. When he expresses guilt over “things I’ve done,” he knows she already knows what those things are. He knows she’ll continue to respect the confidentiality she promised him. With her, he can let his guard down and stop overthinking everything he says or does.

“I’m glad you’ve told me these things,” she says.

It isn’t all negative. “I have no complaints about how Calise has treated me,” he says, in contrast to the last girl he tried to date, and the one before that, and the one before that. He also expresses his gratitude that Talease deemed him worthy to date her best friend even though he didn’t deem himself worthy.

The next day, on a whim, he asks her if she can interpret dreams, because that seems like the kind of thing that would be up her alley. She says yes. He had a dream about Calise a couple months ago, and he knows it probably meant nothing and he hasn’t given it much thought, but he figures since he’s talking to Talease anyway he may as well get her insight. In the dream, he and Calise were in a bed – clothed, not so much as holding hands, just talking – and there was an apple on the nightstand and they each argued that the other should eat it. He describes this but keeps Calise anonymous to make it less awkward.

Talease sends him the sigil of Satan and asks if he saw it in the dream. Then she denies that it has anything to do with Satan – even though a quick Google search says it does – and acts like he’s the weird one for bringing up Satan.

She asks who the anonymous woman is. Christopher hesitates. He’s coming out of his spiral now, having gotten more sleep, but feels uneasy for some reason. She texts, “I already know who it is so just tell me”

He does.

She says it doesn’t mean anything. He knew it probably didn’t. He was just curious.
 
***
 
Americans have decided, based on no evidence whatsoever, that police officers are mental health experts and should take care of all the scary mentally ill people. This asinine decision has had horrific consequences. In a study of police killings from 2013 to 2015, the Ruderman Family Institute found that almost half of the victims had a psychiatric disability. Another study by the Treatment Advocacy Center found that Americans with a severe untreated mental illness – fewer than one in fifty adults – were sixteen times more likely than anyone else to be killed by police officers.

Of course, this overlaps with the more publicized issue that a disproportionate percentage of police victims are black. Police officers (usually but not always white ones) already tend to fear for their lives whenever they’re within thirty feet of a black person, so imagine how much scarier it is if the black person doesn’t see the world the way they do.

In recent years, some police departments have offered their officers mental health training. The Phoenix Police Department has one officer whose official title is “hostage negotiator,” but he also talks to mentally ill or suicidal people whom most officers would respond to with violence. But this kind of training isn’t widespread, isn’t always mandatory, and doesn’t have to be renewed after a certain time period. And sometimes parents call 911 looking for paramedics or the officers with special training to help with their child’s mental health crisis, and then normal cops show up and shoot him instead. Fixing this problem nationwide has never been a priority, and many people openly mock proposed alternate solutions despite their proven success rates.

By a strange coincidence, Christopher gets sent home from work early when a mid-January snowstorm knocks out the internet. Normally he wouldn’t be home around two in the afternoon on a Tuesday, but today he is.

When he hears a knock on the door and sees a couple guys making a big show of peering into his windows, he first thinks it’s his upstairs neighbors messing around. He doesn’t notice the blue uniforms until he opens the door. They let themselves in and make a big show of looking at everything in the kitchen, as if they expect to see a pile of drugs, body parts, or Nickelback CDs laying around. But since he hasn’t done anything illegal except jaywalk, he doesn’t worry. He’ll just answer their question and let them go on their way.

One officer stands back and says almost nothing the entire time. He seems like a nice enough guy. The other takes a swaggering stance like he’s showing off the size of his penis and speaks in a voice so condescending that even Christopher can’t fail to notice. He says, “Your neighbors next door have expressed concern about you. They said you’ve been making them uncomfortable. You are not to talk to them anymore, you are not to text them, you are not to call them. Consider this a warning.”

One thought overwhelms Christopher’s mind at this point, and that thought is, quote, What the fuck? Close quote.

He manages to express his confusion without those exact words.

“You know the texts you sent them?” the rude cop says with a sneer. Christopher has never texted Melanie or John. He responded to a text from Kristina last month. He hasn’t texted Calise in almost a week. She didn’t respond to his last message, a direct question, so he decided to wait a week before trying again. So this must be about his texts to Talease – but the rude cop is no Sherlock Holmes and doesn’t understand that Christopher’s next-door neighbors have separate phones. The cop continues, “What kind of texts were they?”

What the hell kind of a question is that? He texted Talease about all kinds of stuff, and now he’s supposed to summarize them in one word or something? Christopher hesitates, which he’s sure they must take as proof of his guilt of whatever he’s in trouble for. He offers to just show them and reaches for his phone on the couch beside him.

“We’ve already seen them!” yells the rude cop, but he restrains himself from whipping out his manhood, firing a dozen times, and making up a story about Christopher’s non-compliance that will later be contradicted by body camera footage.

Christopher tries to process the unwelcome revelation that his very personal texts have been passed around to strangers who don’t know him, don’t know Talease, don’t know the context. If he weren’t so shell-shocked, and if the guys in blue uniforms didn’t have de facto authority to murder him, he might protest that he doesn’t know what he did that was so awful, that they don’t need to treat him like this, that he would have stopped talking to his neighbors if they had only asked him to. But he can’t speak until the rude cop asks if he has any questions.

He manages to find a few words: “This is completely out of nowhere. They never complained about anything to me.”

Looking almost thoughtful, if such a thing is possible for law enforcement, the quiet cop says, “Some people don’t like confrontations.”

Ah, of course. That would have made things awkward. Good thing they went this route to avoid making things awkward.

Now the rude cop just goes off with all kind of incoherent bullshit. About Christopher “always” being out in the yard when his neighbors walked by. About Christopher following them. About Christopher leaving notes on their doorstep, which the police haven’t seen because they don’t exist. Something about Tootsie rolls. That part is true. Christopher did commit that heinous act.

While being yelled at, Christopher tries to process why Talease and Calise have done this. Didn’t Jesus say something very specific about bearing false witness against your neighbor? Or is this just their version of reality? But why, when he’s never done anything to either of them? Then again, his own reality is crumbling around him right now, so maybe he shouldn’t judge.

This goes on for about ten minutes, though Christopher won’t be able to piece much of it together afterward. At no point does he hear anything resembling “This, in plain English, is the misdemeanor you’ve been accused of” or “What’s your side of the story?” or “Hey, I noticed you’ve been cooperative and deferential this entire time, so maybe I don’t need to bully you into compliance.”

Then the rude cop switches tactics. His voice softens and he asks if Christopher is depressed or suicidal right now. Yes, even though he has a partner with him, he’s chosen to play “bad cop, good cop” by himself, because apparently he got his training from Pink Panther movies.

By an astonishing coincidence, it just so happens that Christopher has been depressed and suicidal for almost the same length of time that these men have been standing in his apartment. The rude cop, making a valiant attempt at pretending to care about the mental health he just took a shit on, presses for more details. Has Christopher ever attempted suicide? A couple times, years ago. Irrelevant.

The rude cop “offers” to take him to the hospital and won’t take “I don’t have insurance” for an answer. He can take Christopher in the patrol car so he doesn’t have to shell out two thousand dollars for an ambulance ride, and besides, “Your life is worth more than money.”

Not in the United States of America, it isn’t. But Christopher knows the police aren’t actually giving him a choice. They won’t leave without him. The rude cop came in here already believing that Christopher was suicidal, intending all along to make Christopher go to the hospital for that reason – and still chose to approach it the way he did. The love child of Barney Fife and Chief Wiggum could have come up with a better strategy.

Maybe the hospital will do him some good – at any rate, if it gives him an unmanageable bill after he leaves, he always has the option to kill himself anyway.

They walk outside. “Thank you for cooperating,” says the cop who yelled at Christopher a few minutes ago for cooperating. On the sidewalk by the patrol cars, in full view of anyone on the block who’s paying attention, the officers frisk him for anything he could use to hurt himself. If you’re wondering why they couldn’t have done this back in the apartment, you’re too intelligent to be a police officer.
 
***
 

Like many other ailments, mental illness was treated for several years with bleeding, purging, and vomiting to balance the so-called “humors” of the body. In Cairo in 872, Ahmad ibn Tulun built the first known hospital to dedicate specific care to mental illness. European travelers wrote of the kindness shown at these Bimaristans (as the Islamic world called its hospitals), but in Europe itself, through the medieval period and onward, the idea took a different turn. It became the insane or lunatic asylum, an institution less dedicated to treating mentally ill people than in locking them up away from society so normal people didn’t have to acknowledge them.

In 1887, journalist Nellie Bly pretended to be deranged and went undercover at the New York City Lunatic Asylum. She discovered disgusting food, frigid living quarters, and callous and barbaric treatment from most of the staff. Furthermore, as she talked with the other women, she found that many, like her, weren’t even mentally ill. Some were immigrants who couldn’t speak much English. Some were just poor.

“What, excepting torture, would produce insanity quicker than this treatment?” she wrote after describing her first day. “Here is a class of women sent to be cured. I would like the expert physicians who are condemning me for my action, which has proven their ability, to take a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from 6 A. M. until 8 P. M. on straight-back benches, do not allow her to talk or move during these hours, give her no reading and let her know nothing of the world or its doings, give her bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to make her insane. Two months would make her a mental and physical wreck.”

Even back then, her exposé Ten Days in a Mad-House sparked enough public outrage to force substantial reforms. Though conditions improved, asylums remained little more than prisons and the norm well into the twentieth century. Doctors also invented various “treatments” and used them for decades despite the damage they often caused – lobotomies until the 1950s, insulin coma therapy until the 1960s, and Metrazol or seizure therapy until 1982. Better to remove someone’s personality than let them have a weird one.

The judicial system has been a little slow in following. To this day in the United States, several mentally ill or disabled people who should have been declared unfit to stand trial remain on death row. (Three guesses what skin color the majority of them have.)

Christopher can be grateful that he was born in 1993 and not at literally any other point in history. Reading about this history hurts on a very personal level, but nothing like living through it. He can be grateful that the stigma and ignorance in his lifetime is but a shadow of what it could be.

Of course he knew early on that he wasn’t normal. A normal kid wouldn’t be bullied by everyone else on the school bus from first to fifth grade. A normal kid wouldn’t get taken to see the few mental health specialists available in the armpit of New York state, or cycled through various antidepressants until he finds one that doesn’t upset his stomach. A normal kid wouldn’t sit in an office listening while his parents talk to a doctor about the striking similarities between him and his Uncle Joel that the family doesn’t talk about, the Uncle Joel who once threatened to kill his own mother and is currently under house arrest somewhere.

A normal kid wouldn’t have to go into a building labeled “Massena Mental Health Clinic.” It was in the mid-2000s, so that label didn’t include “asylum,” but they may as well have for the sick feeling they made in Christopher’s stomach. A normal kid wouldn’t have to go into that building and go into group therapy with kids who had anger management problems and got into fights at school every day – though in fairness, he had some good times there with them after he set aside the initial stigma.

His parents did these things for him out of love. It was a considerable step beyond his earlier childhood memories of spontaneously getting spanked whenever he crossed some invisible social boundary. But despite everything the specialists told them, they persisted in believing that he had an attitude problem and that they were always right because they were the parents and he was the kid. One of the group therapy leaders, though a wonderful man in most respects, even encouraged this attitude with a saying he repeated multiple times: “Rule 1: The parent is always right. Rule 2: If the parent is wrong, see Rule 1.”

All this is to say that things remain imperfect, but by 2020 Christopher has what he thinks is a reasonable expectation that when he “voluntarily” checks into Logan Regional Hospital for suicidal ideation, even the worst healthcare system in the developed world will have some kind of helpful treatment strategy.

The rude cop chats with him in the car about his school and career ambitions, and then leaves him here. No handcuffs, no charges, no restraining order. As he leaves, the rude cop tells Christopher he’s welcome to call the station whenever and ask to talk to Officer Nelson. The only reason Christopher would ever want to talk to Officer Nelson again is to tell him to choke on a cactus. The quiet cop didn’t come along; apparently he was just getting trained on how to confuse and frighten mentally ill people.

Logan Regional Hospital’s idea of healthcare, it turns out, is to take his clothes away – meaning the police publicly frisked him for no reason at all – and to leave him in a cold white room where staff members congregate in a corner and whisper about his alleged “stalking” – or did they say “stocking”? He shouldn’t jump to conclusions.

A social worker is tasked with helping him not want to kill himself. Christopher doesn’t quite know what a social worker does, but finds it logical that her assignment would include giving a damn about his perspective on what’s just happened to him. He tries to tell her why he feels violated, misunderstood, persecuted, humiliated, alone, and hopeless. “Talease is weird too,” he protests, still trying to process even as he speaks: Why didn’t the cops go after Talease? Why didn’t Talease have to go to the hospital? Where does Talease get the gall to be uncomfortable with anything I wrote?

The social worker just nods without looking at him, interrupts to ask the generic questions she’s assigned to ask about sexual abuse and whatever, and leaves him alone to half-ass an action plan for when he starts to get depressed. If they see him as a stalker, not a person, why are they trying to help him? Oh wait, they’re not.

The staff lets him have his phone back, so he calls Katie and tells her what happened, and responds to a text from his upstairs neighbor Steve who asked “Chris, are you doing okay?” Steve either got a spiritual prompting or saw him getting in the police car. (It was the latter.) The social worker says he can go home if he promises to spend the evening with someone (Katie).

The staff wants to finish with him as soon as possible, and he wants to get out as soon as possible before the hospital sends him a few thousand more reasons not to live. They give him some paperwork he’ll never look at again after today. Stuff about depression. Nothing about stalking. Almost as if that’s none of their damn business.

As soon as he leaves, the hospital frantically calls him five times to get consent for what they just did. Huh, he thinks, isn’t that stalker behavior?

Katie is busy that evening but lets Christopher tag along with her. She buys him a burger – not an ass burger, a normal burger – and lets him watch National Treasure in her room while she showers. He hasn’t seen it in years. She has to do something at the church, and the bishop, who’s already heard one side of what happened – his first counselor is the cop who sent the other cops, after all – has five minutes in his meeting schedule to give Christopher some useless advice. He calls Katie afterward, while they’re in the car, and asks if Christopher will be all right. She glances over at the passenger seat and says yes.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” she tells Christopher. Why doesn’t he believe her?

He also talks with Steve and they watch The Mandalorian and he plans to sleep there on the couch. After a couple hours of failing at that, he goes downstairs, showers, gets in his own bed, and continues to fail to sleep for the rest of the night.

His implicit promise to the apathetic clowns at Logan Regional Hospital doesn’t mean shit to him. Katie’s assurance to the bishop does, though. He knows that if he makes a liar out of her, she’ll blame herself for not doing enough, and the money she just spent to buy him food will be wasted. So he lives through the night out of love for her.

He doesn’t open his blinds for a few days.
 
***
 
After Christopher acknowledges his hospitalization on Facebook, because fuck the stigma, of course people come out of the woodwork to support him. One of them is a stalker he didn’t know he had. “Hey, man,” the stalker writes. “You probably don’t know me, but I’ve been following your Facebook page for some time, and I’ve been paying attention to your blog for years ever since I discovered it back in like 2014 or 2015. Your insights into the gospel and on other issues demonstrated (and continue to demonstrate) impressive maturity and intelligence, and you’ve been and continue to be someone that I look up to. Your words helped me get through some personal crises of my own, particularly in regards [sic] to my faith.”

A friend he hasn’t spoken to in years writes in part, “Hi Christopher. 😊 I hope this isn’t too forward, but if it’s of any help, I just wanted to say that while I was struggling with suicidal idealization [sic], your quirky, well-written, uniquely beautiful words were a bright light that made me have hope. You are a kind friend whose example, courage, and beautiful individuality has at times literally taken my breath away. I can’t express enough how much I value your positive influence in my life and in the world.”

He wishes he could show these messages to Calise and Talease and say Look, this is who I am. I was wrong. You were wrong. But it’s too late for that.

Only a few mutual acquaintances from church know about what happened – Katie and Steve, of course, and a handful of Calise’s and Talease’s friends. From what Christopher hears, though nobody complains or defends him to them, everyone regards their actions as stupid and immature. He believes Katie a little more now.

She reports that even Kristina took his side. “It was so stupid,” Kristina allegedly said. “It was obvious that he liked Calise, but he wasn’t a threat.” Christopher likes that phrasing – as if liking Calise was still a sin, but a more forgivable one. Kristina said that Calise and Talease got upset about Christopher playing with Paisley when they left her tied up outside in the cold and forgot about her. Paisley always follows Kristina when she’s around, because Kristina gives the dog more love than they do, and they resent her for that.

When Christopher works up the courage to ask her to help him get back Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, she smiles and says she’s not afraid of him. Talease never attempts to get back Wizard’s First Rule, so at the first opportunity he brings it up to Logan Canyon and burns it.

It takes weeks to process that this new reality isn’t just a nightmare. Then how does he cope with it? Not much.

His disillusionment notwithstanding, his religious background gives him some coping tools. He ponders the lessons this trial has taught him: don’t love, don’t trust, don’t hope, and fuck the police. He prays for his enemies next door every night until he means it. But mostly he just keeps going to work and coming home, day after day, holding onto blind faith that someday his decision to live will be worth it, and someday this experience will no longer be a constant weight on his shoulders and a constant presence in the back of his mind.

But Calise, he soon realizes, has liberated him in a very real sense. She has succeeded where Angie failed. She has given him the strength to complete the wall around his heart so that nobody can ever drag him down again. No walk, no talk, no real or perceived autistic idiosyncrasies will ever get through it. He should be grateful to her.

They move on too, and he still sees them around and in church acting like nothing ever happened. If the “stalker” label causes him any problems in the future, he’ll sue them, but for now they can coexist. He still hears Paisley howl on Friday nights and sees her tied up outside sometimes. She sees him too. She must still love him as much as ever, but he can’t pet her unless he’s positive nobody will see. He hopes she can forgive him for ghosting her, even though she’ll never understand why.

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