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lots of rooms — staff and maintenance were pricey.
    I was lucky that Trudy had gone to bat for me when I applied. The fact that I ran a somewhat successful Etsy store had impressed her. She’d admired one of my sketches and I’d given it to her for her last birthday. She had it framed and hanging in her office. It depicted the left side profile of the dark-suited man who haunted my delusions. I’d sharply edged the charcoal and then smudged it to carve out his razor-edged cheekbone and his mercilessly straight nose. A section of his amulet could be glimpsed at the edge of his stiff open collar. I never could quite render the markings on the chain exactly as I saw them in my head. It was as if they kept changing every time the dark-suited man appeared to me.
    Trudy had mentioned that someone had tried to buy the piece from her last week, and a month before that as well. I told her she should ask an outrageous price and then take a vacation with the proceeds. She hadn’t found the idea amusing, though.
    I didn’t even glance at the sketch as I grabbed my portfolio and suitcases. Once the images were out of my head, I liked to keep them that way.
    It only took me two trips to load my stuff into the Brave. I’d organize it later, when I wasn’t blocking an entire alley.
    I locked everything up behind me. I’d mail the key if I decided to not come back.  
    I took five art tubes I’d set aside, crossed out of the alley at the east side of the Residence onto West Hastings, and headed down the street to the pharmacy. The post office outlet there was open until 8:00 p.m., so if I hurried, I’d just make it. The tubes contained the latest sales from my Etsy store, Rochelle’s Recollections. This series of pictures had been captured throughout last fall, after the hallucinations had really ramped up and practically incapacitated me for those few days in the psych ward. I’d drawn feverishly — perhaps the most I ever had — in an attempt to reorder my mind and dull the delusions.  
    Some of these sketches featured my dark-suited imaginary friend. They almost always did, which was good in a silver-lining sort of way — as my shrink would point out — because they always sold well. I occasionally caught glimpses of other people. A few times I’d seen and sketched a gorgeous, strawberry blond woman and a stern granny-type with a long braid.
    In this current series of sketches, the dark-haired man was facing off with the blond woman in a castle, similar to the echo I’d caught in the bus this afternoon. Despite his formal, but modern-dress, the guy apparently liked to hang around medieval-looking places. Outside of movies and kid’s books, I’d never actually seen a castle. And I had no idea why I hallucinated that particular setting. I’d actually walked out of the first Lord of the Rings movie halfway through. I wasn’t a fantasy fan in general, but something about seeing castles on screen like that had made me seriously queasy.
    In my mind — over the series of days that the images had held me captive — the blond with her flashing green knife had seemed to gain the upper hand over the dark-suited man. But then she’d walked away. It didn’t make much sense at the time, and still didn’t in the series I’d produced as a result. I simply deconstructed the scene into simple sketches — bite-sized pieces that I drew to get the pictures out of my head.
    My hallucinations never did make any sense. If they hadn’t become so incapacitating as I grew older, my shrinks and doctors might have continued to brush them off as an overactive imagination. Early on, they’d encouraged my foster families to keep me active, signing me up for soccer and such.
    Then came the pills.
    Speaking of which, I had a double prescription to fill. I did pretty well on the clozapine, which I’d started when the hallucinations had ramped up so badly last fall. Once my system had gotten used to it, things really smoothed out. It