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I’d be strapped to this hospital bed?” I tug again on the restraints for emphasis. “I have been running from these people for months. What do I have to do to convince you?”
    “Why are they observing you: a jobless, homeless nobody?”
    “I have a job,” I shoot back. “And a home, and a girlfriend, and everything. I have an entire life, and they are trying to take it away.”
    “You haven’t done anything important,” says Vanek. “You don’t know anything important. You’re nothing.”
    “I have something they want.”
    “You have nothing.”
    “But I do,” I say, “I know it. I think I’d found something, right when I disappeared—a thing or a place or maybe a person. Something they didn’t want anyone to ever find, and I found it. But now…”
    Vanek leans forward. “Where is it?”
    “Look, I don’t know why I can’t remember anything, and I don’t know what I have, but I know that they want it, which means that they want me. They want me more than anything in the world.”
    Vanek smiles. “Narcissism is the other best way to spot a delusion.” I try to talk, but he stops me with his hand. “Paranoid schizophrenia involves, inherently, a heightened belief in your own importance—that all of these vast, hyperintelligent superorganizations have nothing better to do than watch your TV and poison your water heater.”
    “Dr. Vanek, you’ve got to believe me. They want me because they’re scared of me. I’m the key to their whole Plan, or I found the key to their Plan, and they don’t dare let me loose because they think I’m going to stop them, but I don’t care anymore. I don’t need to stop them, I just want to get away.” I pause. “Lucy and I were going to go to a farm.”
    “It’s a reflection of the fact that your reality exists solely in your mind,” says Vanek, brushing past my comments as if they weren’t even there. “The Faceless Men don’t have anyone better to spy on because, to them, no one else exists. You’re both the center and the circumference of their entire, imaginary world.”
    “Stop saying that!” My face is hot, and I feel rage boiling inside me. I take a deep breath, and realize my fists are clenched. “If you’re not going to help me, just get out of here.” If Vanek doesn’t believe me, and something horrible’s happened to Lucy, who’s left?
    Vanek stares at me for a long time, watching silently. Finally he nods. “You’re right,” he says. “I can’t convince you your reality is false any more than I could convince anyone else in the world. That’s what’s going to make this so difficult to treat.”
    “So let me go.”
    “I already told you, Michael, that’s not my call. Once you’re at Powell they’re going to do some more tests—not physical tests, don’t worry—and if they agree with Sardinha’s diagnosis, they’ll start you on antipsychotic medication.”
    “I don’t want drugs.”
    “Then don’t be schizophrenic,” he says. “Those are really your only two options right now.”
    “We could do therapy.”
    “Oh, you’ll get therapy,” he says, “but not until after the drugs make some headway. Psychotherapy is designed to cure unhealthy thought processes, and unfortunately for you your thought processes are completely healthy—they’re just reacting to false thoughts.”
    “So I’m sane and insane at the same time?”
    “Welcome to schizophrenia,” says Vanek. “Your brain’s ability to talk to itself—which is how it does its job—is dependent on the substances dopamine and serotonin. No amount of psychotherapy can change the way those substances interact with your brain, but drugs can. Once they find the right drug, at the right dose, the corruption in your thought patterns will disappear, and the hallucinations and delusions will disappear with them. Then they can start some social therapy and life skills and that sort of thing; teach you how to live in the real world again.”
    “So