u/Additional_Medium790

Comment: This story is part of a series of short stories (or perhaps chapters of a novel, who knows) that I've been writing for the past month or so. These are the three stories I've written for this subreddit so far:

1. Hundreds of Lizards Under A Single Coat

2. The Ground Floor of the Library is Burning...

3. Doomed for Eternity on Four to Five Grounds (this one)

To the schizoids out there, I'd be curious to hear how the story relates to your own experiences, and how it doesn't. I recognize that, in a lot of ways, the events in the story diverge from what a schizoid normally experiences during social interactions. Sadly, though, this story is essentially what happens when I write something that feels most natural to me. It's partly schizoid, partly neurotypical - or at least, somewhat neurotypical-seeming in its sociality - partly romantic, partly sterile, and mostly queer. My brain cannot pick a side, so it takes a little bit of everything, while inhabiting no one category of identity fully. Anyway, here is the story. Cheers.

Doomed for Eternity on Four to Five Grounds

To my horror, I felt the air from outside brushing against my unclothed skin, and guessed that we had left the window open. I wanted then to wrap my winter jacket around my body again, but since me and the girl I’d met at my university library were standing all alone in a room bearing a deathly blue hue – perhaps it was grief, or perhaps the room was truly haunted, and a bunch of spirits were seeing me in a way I did not want to be seen – I realized I had entered a situation from which there was no escape. A few days before she stood here, this girl – Debora – had asked twice or thrice beforehand whether I had any religious objections to intercourse before marriage, since she knew I had an odd sort of philosophical belief in the teachings of Christ.

“No worries,” I said. “I’ve already been doomed to eternal damnation on three separate grounds. One: I’m trans. If I read Genesis correctly, God created man as man, and woman as woman, and any deviation from this principle goes against the will of God, who ‘from the beginning made them male and female.’ Genesis 1:27.” Debbie seemed to be listening intently. For the record, she was still wearing clothes at this point – namely a functional and comfortable-seeming blue dress, similar to the simple dress that the unnamed narrator in Shirley Jackson’s “The Daemon Lover” wanted to wear but didn’t.

“Two,” I continued, “I’m female, but I’m in love with a girl, and that goes against the principle that a true union of God can only be between a woman and a man. ‘The two shall become one flesh.’ Genesis 2:24.”

“Tell me about the last point,” Debbie said.

“Three,” I replied, “I’m a girl, but wearing typically feminine clothing makes me want to claw my skin open, so I only wear men’s clothing. But consider Deuteronomy 22:5: ‘A woman shall not wear a man’s garment.’ Am I missing something?”

“Check what the material of your clothing is made out of,” Debbie said slyly.

“Hm.” I checked the label in the collar of my T-shirt. “Polyester and cotton. Goes against the principle that one should not wear clothing woven of two different materials, which is outlined in Leviticus 19:19. Can you imagine what would happen if a man who had been virtuous all his life, and who was straight as an arrow, were to discover at the Day of Judgement that he had unwittingly been wearing polycotton all his life?”

“So you’re doomed on four grounds, unless you stop wearing mixed fabrics,” she said. “Then you’re just doomed on three grounds. I guess you now know why I quit religion in my teens.”

“Granted, it’s not impossible to stop wearing mixed fabrics,” I said. “The other three things are harder to set straight. So if no one law of the Lord is any more or less important than the other – if one cannot curate them and create a hierarchy of importance among them – then I’m cursed, and it won’t matter what I do. Moses couldn’t cross over into the Promised Land because he struck a rock twice with his staff instead of commanding it to bring forth water, like God had ordered him to do. But perhaps the times were different then.”

“Well, perhaps they were,” Debbie said. “The Gentiles used to be the enemies of Jehovah until the time of Christ, right? And when Christ and Paul came to spread their message, the Jews still had the ancient covenant of the Pentateuch, but the Gentiles got their own covenant as well. All of a sudden, those who were marked as the descendants of God’s enemies ended up being included in his new vision of the world.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I’m not saying I believe in any of the stuff, but if you interpret the Word in a certain way, then maybe us queer people are not entirely doomed. I didn’t think there was enough hope in it for us, though, and that’s why I quit. But I’d like to think that our relationship with God becomes less defined by features of physicality, ethnicity, and geography over time, and that it moves more and more towards something which is spiritual in nature.”

After thinking for a while, I said: “Well, I agree with that last point, but I think you don’t agree with yourself.”

“Yes,” Debbie said impatiently. “I said I’d LIKE to think that our relationship with God moves towards spirituality, because that’s always what I hoped Christianity would be. Something that was mostly focused on one’s spiritual being, that didn’t leave people out based on gender or sexuality. A religion where the scales were made equal. Sure, maybe, just maybe, there is a little bit of hope there for people like us. But I myself won’t dwell on it too much, or else I’ll actually enter a religious psychosis.”

“Honestly,” I said, grinning. “I think we might be in need of another covenant, made just to include queer people into the mix. If it’s as you said, then the distinctions between human beings will lose their relevance as time goes on, and will disappear entirely in the Kingdom of God. Perhaps Hell really is empty, as our current Pope has tweeted before. But perhaps we will not discover these new revelations through new texts, but through our actions. It may be up to us to show the powers that be what true fellowship between equals looks like. Case in point: I’ve seen queer communities across countries and cities that are more loving and proactive than many Christian communities nowadays.”

“And the whole thing starts with us two, of course,” Debbie said, and she smiled at me. I looked away.

“Yes,” I said, “the movement starts with us.”

This conversation took place a few days before we stood in my bedroom together. She still felt up to the whole thing. I myself felt cold and unwilling, and much preferred a conversation about queer theology over what we were about to do.

“Can I close the window?” I asked her.

“Sure,” she said. “I probably left it open out of nervousness.”

She looked at me from across the room, and I tried to look her in the eyes for what must have been the third time since we met. She had pale green eyes that most clearly displayed their thoughtful qualities if you looked at them directly. I managed to do so, but looked away after about half a second, and felt ashamed of my capacity for looking at someone, sizing them up as if they were merely an object to be voyeuristically judged, analyzed, or admired. I saw that she was getting nervous, because she took her Dutch braid and started fussing with it. I felt like less of a girl near her, and even described her in terms that a man might use – probably as an unsavory leftover from my old life. To stall for time, I then proceeded to carefully fold all of my clothes, and hung my jacket in the corridor. After I had done all that, I’d decided that it was imperative that I fold my lover’s clothes, too, and so I did, and put them on a chair in the room where the deed was to take place. She never asked whether any of it was necessary, but regarded me with some amusement, as if she knew full well why I did all of it. I then told her that I had to take the laundry out of the machine and hang it out to dry. In fact, I had intentionally set the laundry machine to spin 2:50 hours before this point, since I knew Debbie would be coming around. Thus, I could now make this pathetic, but also comical excuse.

“You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” she reassured me, and I could see her holding in her laugh, but all the same, she was still fussing with her hair.

“No, no, it’ll be fine, I just –”

She stopped playing with her hair for a moment. “You don’t want the laundry to smell like a wet dog,” she said. “I understand.”

So I hung out the laundry, thinking about what kind of person I was to even put someone in a situation like this. In fact, I wanted her bad, but I also didn’t want her at all. Sure, I experienced feelings of arousal when I saw her standing there, but there wasn’t a bone in my body that wanted to do anything more with those feelings. I had no intuition, nothing, on that account, and thus, these feelings of remote pleasure were an act of self-centeredness on my body’s part. When I came back, Debbie was sitting on the side of the bed. “Ready?” she asked.

“Honestly,” I said, “honestly, no, not really. I just don’t have the intuition for this sort of stuff, if that makes sense. It feels like I have to drag my body to act in this way.” I sat on the other side of the bed. “Sorry to put you on the spot like this.”

“Well,” she said, “I think I saw it coming, but I’m still disappointed. I never saw someone stall for time like you did, though. It was honestly really funny.”

“But it would probably only be funny this one time,” I said, while putting my clothes on and throwing Debbie’s clothes next to her on the bed. We were basically wearing the same kinds of outward clothing, of the sort we always wore when meeting at my house: Simple jogging trousers, a T-shirt, and a vest. Her clothes, which stood in stark contrast to her intricate hairstyle, were comprised of cold, calm purples and blues. I myself was wearing black and grey, so as not to be noticed in public or private, and the room that I was standing in, which I identified as my own room, was clean and well-ordered, but otherwise sterile and devoid of romance. The walls were painted black, but there were no posters on them; the cases contained only books and nothing else, and the desk – white, rectangular, taken straight from my uncle’s office building – held no memorabilia on it. Rather than being the setting of a romantic liaison, the room was little more than a place of transit. Its appearance had most likely predicted the doom of our endeavor.

“Get some clothes on you,” I said, “For all I know, the ghosts might be watching.”

“That’s reassuring,” she said, while putting on her clothes. “Then it’s a good thing we didn’t do anything, since I wouldn’t want to perform for an audience of dead people. Then again, maybe they all intended to look the other way.” She paused for a moment, then continued on: “But I’m curious to know why you don’t think you’re up to this?”

“It’s not that I’m afraid of damnation,” I said. “I think it would have been worth it to spend this moment with you, even if it puts me into hot water in the Hereafter. Knowing me, I could orate my way out of it, if I get the chance to do so before the 12 Judges. The thing is, I just don’t possess an intuition for this sort of thing, and I don’t think it’s something I can develop, either.”

“That could mean you’re asexual,” Debbie said. “Your body would just be wired differently compared to other people.” And she smiled at that. “It might mean that you like discussing politics, theology and philosophy more than doing carnal things. I actually got that impression when we talked in the library for the first time, but when I started visiting your house more often, I held out hope that you might be interested in doing ‘you know what’. But now that you’ve said you don’t have an intuition for this sort of thing, it all makes sense!”

“You said you were disappointed, though?” I asked.

“Well, the body wants what it wants,” Debbie said, “so when the story is left without a resolution, there’s pain involved.”

“I definitely understand that,” I said, “and I don’t really have a solution to it, since the body wants what it wants. I think the best thing is to just wait for the feeling to subside, meaning we shouldn’t talk too long after this point! It’s weird, though. I definitely get aroused, but it’s as if nothing follows from that. I have little to no desire to do anything with this arousal.” I made a turning gesture behind my back, as if winding up a comically large spring. “I feel like a robot. But I would be lying if I said that there might not be some sexual trauma involved there, and it honestly feels like I can’t really heal these wounds. They seem to get worse and fester year by year. And my life feels like a mechanical hell all the while; that’s why I said that I already know what Hell will look like. I know it all too well, but I don’t know the cause behind these feelings. I know it’s just some kind of Mystery Disease, the ‘X-disease,’ as I’d like to call it. But it feels awful, absolutely awful. Unimaginably horrible. As if your inner child is dead, and you have to live with her body rotting inside of you.”

“I have a weird question to ask,” Debbie said in a barely audible way, “Are you taking hormones, by any chance? I’ve heard these same feelings be described by other trans friends of mine. They say they used to feel this way before they transitioned, and became much happier after getting access to hormones.”

“I’m on a three-year waitlist,” I said. “I’ve only just applied, and I’m not going to do any DIY, either.” And I wiggled my fingers in front of Debbie’s face. “Boo! Too scary. I want to know what I put into my body, even if I don’t care about this body. It seems to care about me a whole lot.”

“Alright,” she said, and laughed. “You didn’t have to spook me like that!”

“I use knowledge and poetry to manage my horrible feelings,” I said. “Somehow it feels cathartic to tell the truth about my inner state, no matter how horrific it is. It simultaneously feels like a cleansing, a progression, and a remembrance. I know it’s not entirely healthy, but then again, other people use alcohol or heroin to drown out these kinds of feelings. I just use coffee and depressingly philosophical language.”

“I do think it’s a good outlet,” Debbie said, “provided you use your writing as a tool to understand and get one up on these miseries, instead of getting lost in them. I think you should stick with it.”

“Even though I think so too,” I said, “it’s often hard to tell the difference between understanding my emotions and getting lost within them.” And, knowing that the conversation was almost coming to a close, and that I had to see her off and leave her on her own for a while, I said: “Thank you for being so understanding.”

“My pleasure,” Debbie said. “This is how we help each other, I think. Not by me dictating what you need to do, or you dictating what I need to do, but by us discussing our options together.”

“Could be,” I said. “Oftentimes I do just want to be left alone, though. We don’t always need to help each other!”

A fellow of student of mine once said that the campus of our university looked like a funeral home, and I had to agree with him. The library alone served as a demonstration of this claim. Flanked on two sides by great concrete pillars, I entered it with the sole intention of first looking around at what the people were doing, and then reading some articles on my phone. On the ground floor where I now stood, the windows were all lined with long, dark, rectangular benches with power outlets in them, and the right side of the room contained rows of wooden tables with high, uncomfortable stools that only the tallest students could sit on without dangling their feet. I sat down on one of the black benches, felt a searing pain under my coat, and realized that something under my jacket was starting to burn. This something lit up whenever I started to feel restless, and the result was often an involuntary transformation into what I called “Samson’s biblical foxes,” which were referenced within the Book of Judges in the Old Testament. In his story, Samson took some foxes, tied their tails together, bound some torches to these tails, and, as an act of revenge, let them run through the fields of Philistia. This “something” that was burning within me was thus really a collection of ancient biblical torches. Granted, the fields of Philistia actually caught fire, while I’d managed to refrain from starting fires up until now, but every time I felt those torches burning, I started to sweat profusely. If I let them burn, I’d hurt myself. If I transformed, I would both hurt others and myself. But I would at least hurt myself to a less direct extent; that is why the temptation remained. The whole display had previously seemed like a fantasy I could control – I even told a friend who was suffering from a similar problem that it was merely his fantasy running wild, and that we two could both come to control these fantasies in time – but at this point I wasn’t so sure.

To distract myself from my conundrum, I took to reading academic articles on my phone, which often calmed me down. This time, though, I picked my first article without thought, and paid the price for it. It was some kind of obtuse urban studies article by A. J. Scott, and because the words within the article might as well have been hieroglyphics to me, the reading experience made the flames within my jacket burn even brighter. I took a bit of dark hair near my shoulder, and started twisting it between two fingers. After that didn’t relieve any stress, I stood up and started pacing up and down the ground floor so frantically that my fellow students were starting to look my way. Before I had time to sit down and pull up an article that would have been more calming to read, I’d already transformed, and the foxes were now wildly running around, their tails tied to each other, the torches always on the verge of falling. Three of them did fall, one by one, and the floor caught fire with a swiftness that I would only later realize could not have been natural. Having turned human again, I watched with a mix of empty shock and compulsive apathy as the fire started spreading across the ground floor, to the rectangular benches and wooden tables with high stools. I had now found out that I was truly a Samson at heart, and that I was vengeful enough to start the very fire that now marked me out as a pyromaniac in deed, not just in mind. Looking away from the flames and the torches lying scattered on the ground, I saw a small red box on a nearby wall, with the black-on-white button that would activate the fire alarm. I went over to it and, with a shaking hand, pressed it. Since this was a library, there was no sprinkler system in there, but the fire alarm did ring, and instantly my fellow students started making for the door.

“Fire! There’s a fire!” one of them shouted as a warning to the rest. I was still apathetic, and did not care whether I lived or died. Another student saw me, and gestured with her hand that I had to go with her towards the exit. “There’s a fire, we have to leave now,” she said, and pulled me by my hand. Before I knew it, I was outside with the rest of the group; none of the people in it seemed to have been injured by the fire. The firefighters arrived shortly afterwards, and some of them immediately went inside. After what must have been forever, they came out.

“There seems to be no fire anywhere in the building,” one of them said. “We think someone sounded a false alarm.”

I stepped forward in a kind of mechanical despair. “You didn’t see anything?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Did you?”

“Yes. I thought I saw the entire ground floor burning,” I said.

“Was it you who pressed the fire alarm?” she asked, seemingly without judgement, as if she merely wanted to ascertain the facts of the situation. I realized then that, whatever the fine or punishment for the false alarm may be, I had to tell the truth nonetheless.

“Yes,” I said.

“And you’re sure you saw something?” she asked again.

“Yes, I’m sure about what I saw,” I replied.

“Thank you for being honest,” she said, “but still, this same thing has happened a few times before. I think you might have been hallucinating.”

“Will I have to pay a fine?” I asked anxiously.

“Normally we charge for this sort of thing, but considering your case, I think I could argue for your exemption,” she said. “Are you seeing a psychiatrist?”

“Yes,” I said, and I added quickly that I was already on antipsychotics.

“I suggest you tell them to increase the dosage immediately, or that you need different meds,” she said. “As you’ve just seen, this sort of thing can get very serious.” This same woman then interrogated me some more, and I tried to answer these questions as well as I could, while being dead sure that I was further incriminating myself every step along the way. When the firefighters left, I was a broken shell. Trying to ignore the stares of the other students, I went back inside the building, sat down on one of the rectangular benches, and looked at my skin. It had been made reddish by a glow that was still being inscribed upon it at this moment, and I watched the shadows born from the previous illusion move around on my arms and clothes. I confess that I had merely pressed the fire alarm out of a kind of anxious compulsion, but I realized to my horror that, disregarding that compulsion, I would not perceive the deaths of the students with the same weight with which people would normally perceive them. There would be some weight to their disappearance, certainly, but this weight was three or four layers removed from the place, supposedly foremost in one’s mind, where it would actually have been in the psyche of a normal person. The remoteness that the weight of a human life bore to me resembled the remoteness that a mental image bore to my aphantasic mind, and my whole life, I had been trying frantically to pull that weight closer to where it needed to be. The few things that would now remain vivid in my mind were the burning, the conversation with the firefighter, and the staring eyes of the students. I had been wrong when talking to one of my acquaintances; I did not like fires. Not previously, and not now that I knew what a fire looked like for non-spectators. I was wondering how these people could just go about their day walking through a fire that looked and felt so very real to me.

“Hey, alarm lady,” a voice said to my right. “How are you holding up, if I may ask?” I looked to where the voice had come from, and saw the girl who’d pulled me away from the imaginary inferno. Out of shame and guilt, I avoided her eyes, and did not look at her directly. These two emotions seemed to be siblings to each other; Whenever the one appeared, the other was close by, and sometimes it was difficult to distinguish between the two. The only thing I could ascertain at the moment, was that I was currently feeling both at the same time. As if nothing had just transpired, she went past me, but I was still suspended in thought. A few seconds later, I heard the mechanical growl of a coffee machine nearby, and turned my head towards where the sound was coming from. My new acquaintance walked up to me with a paper cup.

“I didn’t know whether you wanted one as well,” she said apologetically. “I thought I’d better ask.”

“No, I’m fine,” I muttered. “Normally I drink a lot of the stuff, but right now I’m not in the mood.” My thoughts were heavy enough as they were, I added to myself.

She sat down and took a sip. “You didn’t answer my question, though,” she said.

“I’m doing okay”, I said, sounding like a piece of apparatus, and I kept staring in front of me, still taking care to avoid her eyes. I didn’t know if they were full of pity, perhaps a subtle, understated disgust, or a good-natured kindness, and honestly, I did not much care. I then decided to let my spite show. “Actually,” I said, “I’m in a bit of a sour mood. The building was burning a few moments ago, and everyone is just going about their day like nothing’s happened.” Including you, I added.

“Isn’t that what you want?” she asked. “For them to forget?”

“I wanted them to see what I saw,” I said. “The distance is killing me. Between my mind and theirs, my mind and yours.”

“And do you think you were hallucinating, or were you merely seeing an alternate side of reality that your fellow students weren’t exposed to?” she asked.

“Thanks for indulging me in my psychotic visions,” I said, and chuckled. “But I’m pretty sure I’d just been thinking about the Old Testament too much, and that’s why my hallucinations ended up being inspired by Jewish scripture.”

“I ended up stepping away from religion in my later years,” my nameless acquaintance said, “but I still remember some of the stories from the Old Testament. God speaking from the smoke of a burning bush, and something about a really strong, long-haired guy and some foxes…”

“…Samson,” I said. “When he got his superhuman powers back, he tied torches to the tails of foxes and set fire to the fields of his enemies, the Philistines.”

“You seem even more well-informed than I,” she said, awestruck. “Were you raised on religion?”

“Not really,” I said, “but I don’t think the reality of a divine Creator is so far-fetched, considering what my mind conjures up on a daily basis. For a time, I read the Bible extensively. I think I read through the entirety of the Old Testament twice. I read a different version both times, just to compare them with each other.”

“So, a real Biblical scholar, then! And which part of the Bible is your favorite?” she asked. “I myself like the New Testament more, but I also like the Psalms, Solomon’s writings, Isaiah, Jeremiah…I think there’s a lot of poetry and wisdom to be found in these books, even if I think that there are a lot of problematic elements to the Bible as a whole, and don’t believe in its content anymore.”

“You’d never guess what my favorite book is,” I said, smiling. “It’s Ezekiel. Next comes the Revelation of John, then Job, Judges, and finally the Old Testament books that you mentioned. What is your name, by the way?”

“Debbie,” said the girl, as if it were a secondary matter. “Short for ‘Deborah’. And I’m not surprised to find out that your favorite biblical books either involve someone hallucinating or going through a rough patch.“

“To put it lightly,” I said.

“To put it lightly,“ she said. “But now comes the crucial question: Do you actually believe in the narratives found in these books? Do you believe that Jesus was real and died for our sins, for example? Not to indulge too much in your psychotic thinking, but I was just curious about your beliefs. Like I said, I believe in none of the stuff myself, and think it can even drive people to do extreme things,” she continued. “But I can see a lot of good in it, too.”

“Well,” I said, ”I do believe in Jesus, but in a more philosophical, almost Hegelian sense. Somehow, he seems to me like a metaphysical necessity, a way out of one’s torturous self-conception, a fountain of eternal forgiveness for those who repent and strive towards spiritual regeneration.”

“I hope you aren’t a missionary or a colonist in that regard?” Debbie asked with some caution.

“No, I agree with Simone Weil when she says that even the Bhagavad Gita can be essentially Christian in its teaching,” I said, with equal caution, “even though I myself haven’t read it. To me, it always seemed as if the very aim of Jesus’s teachings was to look past the fixity of law and to embrace a set of principles that transcended mere dogma. To turn his teachings into their own dogma would be to actively miss the point of their creation. Spirit transcends law.” And I thought about my words for a while, and added with some bitterness: “Some say that love is an action, a set of actions, or even a choice or set of choices, and not just a feeling. I hope that is the case. Despite all my strivings, I cannot seem to reach my intended goal of perceiving the weight of a human life, as Jesus would want me to do. It seems that love has always eluded me, and so after a while I stopped searching for it, and accepted myself as I was.”

“Not the worst way to be, I would say,” Debbie said. “Except for the psychoses.”

“Except for those,” I said. “But I think I’ll follow the firefighter’s advice. I have a psychiatric appointment in exactly two weeks, and I think I will have to come clean about this episode.” I looked at my skin. “My skin had turned red from the glow of the fire, and it’s still red now. The fire’s shadows are still dancing around on it, and it feels disorienting to me.”

“Interesting. Do you have any idea why you saw what you saw?” she asked.

“Is this going to be a therapy session?” I asked in turn. “You do realize that schizoaffective and schizophrenic disorders are mostly resistant to psychotherapeutic treatment?”

“They might at least help against cognitive impairment,” my fellow judge said, smiling. “But I think your reasoning is more than fine, and I’m surprised about your lucidity. You seem to be able to reason about the storm while you’re smack dab in the middle of it.”

“Too optimistic of an assessment,” I said, bitterly. “First off, my cognitive ability might appear fine, but I generally have a poor visual and verbal memory, my attention is quite weak, and I never remember information about others. I don’t remember their names, faces, or their lives. Granted,” I continued drily, “the reason I never remember faces is because I never look at them.” I then lightly gestured at the ground floor in front of me. “As for my reasoning, you can see where that led me during a moment of crisis. Sure, if I had the knowledge, I could have sat down and reasoned through my psychosis in such a way as to deconstruct it piece by piece. I could have seen on further reflection that the fire had spread unnaturally fast, that the clothes of the people did not actually catch fire, and that no one had started running around screaming. But by that point, it would already have been too late to do anything about it.”

“You had to do something, I understand,” Debbie said. “I guess psychoses have a way of forcing you to act on the spot.”

“It seems to me,” I said suddenly, “that I’ve been forever cut myself off from humanity. That is, and has always been, my problem.”

She tilted her head towards me. “I didn’t tell you this before, but I have a brother who suffers from the same sort of thing as you. I often have to try and convince him that he’s not evil for acting and thinking how he does. So I ask you the same thing I asked him: We’ve already established that you can only minimally control your basic psychotic reactions. Why, then, should you punish yourself so intensely for them? At least, I get the feeling that you’re punishing yourself for them.”

“What if I can control them?” I retorted. Then I lay my head in one hand, smiled, and said: “And what if I can’t? If I can’t, then I am lost.” My smile turned into a laugh. “Then I am an outlaw, a marked woman, I don’t deserve rights or sympathy or understanding in the same way that other human beings do. My whole life, I have been unconsciously but irrevocably moving towards evil, and oftentimes, it seems to me as if my ultimate fate is merely to embrace it. Despite my self-disgust, my self-discipline, my incessant attempts to make humanity the foremost object in my mind, I seem to be powerless to change my life’s course.”

“My brother used to say something similar about himself,” Debbie said, “albeit in a less eloquent way. Can I ask you a question? Are you studying and living in this city by yourself?”

“Yes,” I said, and I pressed my fingers into my eyes, “I am, but I don’t see how that’s relevant to my moral anguish.”

“How often does it happen that someone comes to check up on you?” she asked. I told her that I had to study on weekdays and work in the supermarket on weekends, and that I therefore didn’t get much of a chance to visit my family. “I can hold my own, though,” I muttered. “You needn’t worry about that.”

“I know you can,” she said. “And I know you’re trying your hardest, but it seems as if you’re going through a lot right now. Do you see things while at home?”

“Every single night,” I said softly, “there’s this cold, horrible blue sheen that envelops every room in the house, and whenever I go to sleep, I feel like there’s a crowd of evil spirits hanging over me and watching me. I always lock the door to the apartment, but it doesn’t help. The danger seems to be on the inside.”

“Ouch. And how are you holding up with the chores, in the middle of all of this

?” she asked, probably to take my mind off what I just said.

“Good,” I said. “I think the medication does a lot, but I often could drive myself to do menial stuff like that, even while believing that Satan had invaded my apartment. I always told myself that the Devil would gain less of a hold over the house if I kept it clean.”

“Would you like it if I came over to your apartment sometimes?” she asked then. “I could check up on you, we could drink tea or coffee together, and I could even help you take care of the household when needed.”

“I’m used to being on my own,” I said, deep in thought, “but honestly, my insistence on self-reliance has proven deadly. Besides, I enjoy talking to you, so the arrangement you suggested seems good to me, on paper.” And, realizing I agreed with her rather too quickly, I added: “I just don’t want to be a burden on you, that’s all. You probably have plenty of things to take care of yourself.”

“I can manage,” Debbie said. “I once used to be my brother’s caretaker, and he was a lot less self-reliant than you seem to be. I had to tighten up my schedule somewhat while helping him, but it was still possible to live a life outside of work, school, and caretaking. But if it doesn’t sit well with you that I’m sacrificing my own time, perhaps you could discuss with your psychiatrist whether someone could periodically check up on you from their side?”

“I could do that,” I said, with a mixture of shame and gratitude. “Hey. Thanks for helping me with this.”

“No problem,” she said, “I’m looking forward to visiting your home!”

I chuckled at her words. “It’s not much of a home when the spirits are there,” I said, “but I appreciate the sentiment. If you like, we can talk more about you and your interests when next we meet. I’d be curious to hear more about your life.” I grinned then, and added at last: “Even if I will probably forget most of the information!”

Hello all,

This is a story I wrote for this subreddit. I hope you enjoy it, if the anhedonia allows you to enjoy anything; I, for one, hope that is still the case.

One question that I could ask in connection to this story is: "Is there an animal or another non-human organism that you feel resembles you in its behavior? What are some of the behaviors that this animal/non-human organism engages in, and how can you link them to your own?"

Here is the story:

I am not a lizard-person…

 

Rather, I am apparently a human being who consists of hundreds of small lizards. I discovered it only a few months ago. That morning, I looked into the mirror and saw nothing out of the ordinary, but the troubles started when the evening hit and I was sitting at a local bar. I was never really relaxed when there, but I was as relaxed as one could be when they were in a fundamentally alien environment, one which did not welcome them, and which they themselves did not find welcoming. Still, I experienced a certain joy through not being noticed – that is, until an old classmate of mine came up to me to strike up a conversation.

“Hey X, how are you doing! We haven’t spoken to each other in a while.” He pointed behind him to the other end of the bar, where his friends were sitting. At least, I assumed they were his friends. “I always sit right there, and I notice you’ve been coming into the bar more often lately.” He left out that it must have been very weird for me to never strike up a conversation with him, even though I always saw him sitting there. It was a small bar; that was one of the two reasons why I sat within his view. The other reason had to do with what I disgustedly called my “comparatively hot-blooded fantasies”. No, reader, don’t lean closer; there’s nothing homoerotic about these fantasies, since they’re only hot-blooded compared to my usual reptilian disposition. They’re merely platonic: I see myself sitting at the table with my social butterfly-friend, drinking coffee and talking about whatever, and then playing a few rounds of darts afterwards. That is, after all, what a completely normal person would do. Then my new friend would invite me to repeat the same routine the next week and the weeks following that, allowing me the chance to enter into his inner circle, meet more people, and build a social circle that will help me move past the concrete wall that I expect I’ll otherwise run into once I get older. But there my former classmate was, striking up a conversation with me, and rather than feeling like a normal person, I suddenly felt a rumbling within my brown coat. I looked down, and saw the head of a little lizard peeping out of the opening in my jacket, then two, then three, until a whole legion of lizards, comprised of all sorts of colors, started streaming out onto the chairs and table.

“X, what’s wrong?” my former classmate said, but I didn’t answer, because I had turned into a bunch of lizards - they were now making for the open door of the bar in unison. Outside they went, behind the bar, away from the streetlights, and it must have taken about 30 minutes for me to regain my composure. The first emotion I felt when I came to was anger. I felt defeated by my former classmate. More than that, I felt violently disoriented and displaced by my own constitution. That was then, and ever since, I hadn’t gone back to the bar.

There’s been this new trend that has caught hold of the town, perhaps the whole country in which I live (I won’t say where it is, since it might compromise my anonymity). This trend concerns a series of philosophies by which people must find the “unity within separateness,” meaning that the focus of this whole way of thinking and doing is borderline mystical. People are invited to see the way in which they are connected to their surroundings, to life in the world as a whole. The ultimate goal, then, is to realize the intersubjectivity of everything. It’s safe to say that I’ve been having trouble following this trend, and out of sheer frustration at not being able to grasp the interconnectedness of being, I’ve taken to avoiding other people all the more. I figured eventually that I must learn in some way, so to better realize how I was related to my surroundings, I finally went to the bar again. Besides, pettiness and the anguish of unfinished business had taken possession of me. I simply wanted to get one over on my former classmate, and hoped that he was open to talking, so I could repair my broken reputation.

I found him transformed. There was a bright glint in his eye, a kind of clarity of purpose that made me feel both jealous and unsettled. He didn’t mention what had happened last time, and we almost straightaway took to talking about the interconnectedness of being, which suited me well, because I hated small talk and often went straight to philosophy in my conversations.

“Nowadays self-reliance is a fiction. The food you eat, the coffee you drink, the clothes you wear – oftentimes, none of these have been made by you,” my acquaintance said. “As a rule, they’ve been handed down to you, and it’s precisely within the contingency of your existence that its unity can be found.” I noticed I was enjoying the conversation, until the subject turned to me. “But this is something that one must realize intuitively, and not merely theoretically. How’s that been going for you, X?”

With complete sincerity, I told him that I had been unable to realize the unity of my own existence, and that I had found out that I was a group of lizards rather than an actual man. He stared at me for a while, not comprehending what I said. Then he grinned sheepishly.

“I always took you to be cold-blooded. So what, you’re related to all those billionaires and media giants, those technophiles and heads of state? I guess all of you came from outer space to colonize the earth?”

I took his meaning, and honestly felt peeved about his words. “No, you misunderstand me. I am not a lizard-person. I merely consist of hundreds of small lizards, not one single, large one.” I realized then how absurd my statement of defense sounded.

“For the record,” my former classmate said, “I cannot see any lizards under your coat, but if you say so, I won’t question it.” I could hear a hint of mockery, even subtle hostility, in his tone of voice. He thought I wasn’t taking the conversation seriously. “Perhaps you mean it metaphorically, in which case: I can certainly see that you aren’t fit for the kind of social self-realization that people like me have gone through. Some people can understand the importance of their existence within society quickly, while others are slower in that regard.” He waited a few seconds before continuing, as if to deliver his final blow to the conversation. “Some never realize it at all.”

He went on: “Perhaps urban exploration may be more to your taste? Then you actually have a place for the lizards to go to, and better yet, you won’t make my friends feel afraid that the lizards may crawl into their shoes at any moment.”

Suddenly I felt very tired, and got the urge to just stop talking then and there.

“Yes, thank you for your advice. I must go now.” And my body was again subdivided into hundreds of little cold-blooded animals, that crawled over the green carpet of the bar, through the open door, to the back of the building, and past a woman that was doing something that struck me as very odd. She was wearing a dark work-blouse that bore the logo of the supermarket around the corner, and was absent-mindedly flicking a lighter on and off.

Ten minutes went by. The lizards coalesced into a single person again, and out of sheer fear at being set alight, I turned my query to the lighter-woman:

“Can you please not set the garbage container on fire?” I noticed that my voice trembled a bit.

“Why?” she asked.

“I want to rest in there and eat insects,” I thought, and yet I said: “Because then you’d start a fire, and I don’t like fires.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. Good on you for telling me.”

The lizards all went into the container and stayed in there for about ten minutes more. When they all tried to crawl out, they couldn’t do so, and so they were forced to coalesce within the container. I popped my head out it to see whether the woman was still there, and sure enough, she was standing right there, doing the exact same thing as before. This time, though, she was smiling.

“Why are you smiling?” I asked, having gained my composure. She went over to the container and stuck out her hand. Realizing I had little choice, I took it, and she helped me out of it.

“Can I ask you a question?” she asked after she had done so.

“Yes.”

“Have you ever read Hegel?”

I was taken aback by such a random question, but recaught myself. “Only as much as any untrained person is able to read and understand him,” I said.

“Good enough. Do you remember his distinction between the beautiful soul and the acting consciousness?”

“Yes,” I said, vaguely remembering how I found this part of Hegel applicable to myself when I first read the Phenomenology of Spirit.

“Do you want me to summarize this distinction for you?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, not having expected a random lady to summarize Hegel for me in a dark alley behind a bar.

“As I understand it, the beautiful soul does not want to interact with the world. They hold infinity within themselves, even if it is just the infinity of unrealized fantasy and potential, and want to cling onto this infinity for dear life. The acting consciousness, by contrast, represents an existence marked by finiteness. They act, and by acting, they come up against their own limitations and those of reality. The acting consciousness is confronted with the “evil of finitude,” so to speak, while the beautiful soul faces no such limitation – on its face, that is. The acting consciousness represents most people. Understandably, the beautiful soul wants nothing to do with such an existence, and stays clear of anything that takes away from their sense of being infinite. Sound familiar?”

“Yes,” I said slowly, “I think it does. Though I wouldn’t consider my soul very beautiful.”

“Neither I mine. But we both seem like we have an overactive imagination. What are you hiding under that jacket, for instance?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, and pulled my jacket closer around me.

“Well, I’m hiding three animals under my jacket, and I get the feeling that the same goes for you. Is this true?”

I was stunned for a moment, but decided to tell this woman all about it, since she seemed like a complete fabrication of the mind anyway. She couldn’t actually be real. I answered with mock confidence. “I guess it is.”

“What kind of animal?”

“Lizards, ” I said, expecting her to make the same, tired joke that the classmate had also made. She didn’t.

“Alright. When did you find out that you were really hundreds of lizards under a single coat?”

“A few months ago,” I said, fully expecting this conversation to become even odder.

“And you didn’t notice it before?”

“No,” I said, “but when I knew it, I knew it for sure.”

“And what makes you so confident in this opinion?” she asked.

“It just fits with what I’ve come to know about myself throughout the years. I hide from people, I turn my tail when they do come near me, and I prefer to stay in dark, quiet places that are difficult to reach.”

“Checks out. But still, despite the fact that your current model of yourself fits in with your prior self-knowledge, what makes you think that it’s the correct model?”

“I act like it,” I said impatiently. “I literally just scoured a garbage container for insects, and stayed there for a good ten minutes.”

“Really? I didn’t see any lizards in the container; I just saw you standing in there, fretting. I saw a person trying to regain their composure, being lost in an environment that he does not like and that he finds unrewarding.”

“That certainly is news to me,” I said, thinking back to what my acquaintance at the bar said, about not believing that I was really a bunch of lizards under one coat, “But what are you saying with all of this?”

Her smile having gone, she now looked at me with a kind of earnestness, transmitted from one secret-bearer to another. “You are not hundreds of lizards grouped together under a coat. Or, at least, you are indeed those lizards, only as much as you are literally anything else that your mind has come to gravitate towards. Split between self-conscious anxiety and paranoid misanthropy, your ability to fantasize is gradually being turned toward your own self-destruction.”

“And what about those hot-blooded fantasies I so despise?” I asked her, still thinking that she was a figment of my imagination.

“When it comes to me, I find them just as self-destructive,” she said. “If not more.”

“But these kinds of fantasies will save us from our self-destructive imagination, right? They will motivate us to realize our desires and become happier? On the other hand: can they even be cut out of us? Do we even want to remove them?”

“I would like that, of course!” she said, obviously thinking about the day when she would be empty of any kind of desire, “But whether we can do so, and whether each one of us would like to do so, is certainly a matter of debate.” She flicked the lighter on again, stared at it for a good five seconds, then turned it off. “Perhaps you have it in you to become a social butterfly, and you are merely being blocked by some inner tendencies that are nonetheless not inherent to yourself. But you can also be an underground mole if you want, or a single-celled organism at the bottom of the ocean.”

“But what are you yourself, then? You said you were three animals under a work-blouse?”

She smiled. “I am three foxes with torches tied to their tails. Whenever I cannot let them loose, I burn up inside. But this urge to start a fire somewhere remains nothing more than a fantasy. The torches may or may not be real, and the same is true of the foxes.”

“Do you have the mind of a terrorist, then?” I asked.

“Perhaps, perhaps not. I think I’m not actively pining for violence, since a fire can mean lots of things,” she said. “Whenever a fire breaks out, people somehow become connected, even though they remain distant from each other. Perhaps, in those moments, they are more distant than ever. They merely watch and wait until the firefighters get to do their job. But it’s precisely that kind of spectacle, which both connects and separates, that I am pining for. It might be a parade, it might be a communist uprising, it might be an actual fire, as long as it fulfils that dual criterium.”

“I see what you mean. But I suppose the urge to cause the fire yourself means that you remain a person of action, if only within your mind?” I asked further, and I realized I was essentially interviewing her at this point.

“That is precisely one of the main reasons why I don’t do anything with this identity I’ve taken on,” she said half-apologetically. “I don’t cause a fuss, I don’t act out a nervous breakdown in public so I can present others with a worrying but hopefully compelling expression of insanity while going to the grocery store. I do not, and I cannot, act.”

“At least you don’t seem socially awkward like me,” I said.

“Honestly,” she replied, “I’m not sure what I am. Perhaps I’m a hybrid creature, neither a complete hermit nor a complete extrovert. Or perhaps I’m merely masking. I don’t draw a hard distinction between what is natural and unnatural to me, but I try to think dynamically, to negate my own being while simultaneously lifting it up to a level that I perceive to be higher, in which the contradictions of my existence are better resolved.” She flicked the lighter on again and pointed at it, taking care to keep her finger at a safe distance. “The torch-fire is my last link to humanity, something through which I remain distant but connected at the same time. Lately, though, I’ve been wondering whether I shouldn’t just remove the torches entirely; the foxes’ tails won’t burn any less brightly if I do. In fact, they’ll be better preserved.” She flicked the lighter off with her one hand, and let the index finger of the other rest upon her temple. “But as far as I’m concerned, their beauty remains in here.”

Taking her isolationist stance into account, I then told her about what my former classmate thought about intersubjectivity and the importance of social self-realization.

She seemed to think over my words for a while. “I’m not sure whether I entirely understand Hegel, because, well, Hegel is Hegel. But to my mind, he seems to ascribe the highest metaphysical importance to a kind of spiritual being that is more than the sum of its parts. Hegel finds it in social life, the human community. So I offer to suggest that your friend and Hegel don’t differ much on that account. Your friend must believe that a community is greater than the sum of its parts as well. So I guess I understand where our social butterfly is coming from.”

“Theoretically,” I said in turn, “I agree with him, but I think humanity is only greater than the sum of its parts when it chooses to be. Otherwise we devolve into conduits for meaningless small talk, facile interactions, petty grievances, even graver things like individual sin and systemic injustice…” I chuckled. “Most of these are incidentally the very things that Schopenhauer got his knickers in a twist about. Hegel focuses on the willingness of the spirit, Schopenhauer prefers to think about the weakness of the flesh.”

“Maybe you should tell your friend that. Especially the first part.”

“Maybe I will. Thanks for the conversation.”

“No problem. Good luck.”

Upon saying goodbye to the lighter-woman, whose name I still didn’t know, I went back inside the bar, and saw that the culprit for my humiliation had gone back to where his friends had been sitting. He caught sight of me, said something to his group, and went over to where I stood, his drink still in hand.

“Hey X, listen. I just wanted to apologize for what I said earlier. I recognize that what I said was uncalled for.”

I regarded him coolly. “Never mind that,” I said. “To be out in public is enough of a punishment to me, so this wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. I just have a few questions.”

In contrast to his earlier reaction, he seemed amused by the sudden honesty of my comment. “Ask away,” he said.

“First off, do you think that one’s existence within a group of people is important?”

“Yes,” he said. “I think you know that already.”

“And what do you consider the definition of a community? How many people does a community consist of?”

“Two’s a team, three’s a crowd. That is, two or three people are enough to make a community by my standards, however small it is.”

“Alright. Do you think that a community is greater than the sum of its parts?”

“Yes. I believe in the ability of the human consciousness to reflect on itself and transcend itself thereby, and think that the consciousness of a group works in a similar way.”

“What makes you so sure of that?” I said, squinting my eyes. “I would say it might go both ways. I don’t agree with Nietzsche when he says that madness is the rule in crowds, but I also recognize that whether a community is greater than the sum of its parts depends on the choices that its members make. There needs to be enough healthy-minded dissent to make the group reflect on itself and improve accordingly, but there cannot be so much dissent that the group tears itself apart.”

“I guess I never looked at it that way,” my acquaintance said. “I can accept a view based around unity and dissent. But what do you think of the balance between the two?”

“I think the balance is almost impossible to strike, so I don’t bother with it, and keep to my own,” I said. “People often don’t want to hear themselves proven wrong, especially not in crowds.”

“You realize you yourself are then becoming the very thing you recoil from? Someone who cannot see themselves from a different perspective than their own, and never really grows past their own self-perception as a result?”

“Unless they are multiple people in one,” I said.

“And are you?” he asked in response.

“Well, who isn’t?”

“Exactly. The fact that everyone consists of a whole cluster of different selves and personalities makes it all the more valuable to approach them. You are never just being critiqued by one single person, but by a set of different personalities housed under one.”

“I would say that the multifaceted nature of a human being makes the balance between unity and dissent even more difficult to strike, never mind my hypocrisy,” I said. “There’s always some part of a person that disagrees.”

“And conversely, always some part that agrees,” my former classmate said, with some triumph. “For the dissenting person, it’s really a matter of coming to an agreement with themselves.” He stopped speaking for a while, and then suddenly said: “You know you can be really interesting to talk to, X?”

“When it comes to discussing philosophy, that is,” I said. My former classmate thought about this for a moment. “Then I guess that is what we should discuss when we meet next time,” he said, and he smiled at me. “I believe our conversation isn’t finished yet, and that there’s still much to argue about.”

“If we even end up meeting again,” I thought, and remembered the woman in the alley behind the bar. After saying my goodbyes, I ended up going there again, only to find a single red lighter next to the place where she had previously stood. I picked it up, flicked it on, and stared at it for a good five seconds. Then I flicked it off again, put it in my pocket, and walked off into the night, bearing my new keepsake with me.

Hello all,

I have actually known about this subreddit for years, and have only lurked here. Not once did I actually interact with a user, but for what it's worth, my current username is u/Additional_Medium. I actually wanted to introduce myself because of one reason: I recently created a story that I wrote specifically for this subreddit, and I wanted to share it here to see what some of you thought of it. The people here are more than just an audience to me, certainly - otherwise I wouldn't have created the story in the first place - but still, in cases where I have to express myself outright, I often like to keep things short.

But, perhaps I should be more comprehensive, in which case: I'll bite. I first came across the concept of the schizoid personality type in my first year of uni. I not only suspected that I myself had the personality type, but knew for sure that a friend of mine had it. He even thought so himself. Then I read "Notes from Underground", and I saw rather too much of myself in it. Moreover, around the same time, I became obsessed with the opening line of Albert Camus' "The Stranger". Just. The first line. I was honestly afraid to read more than that, since I feared that I would thereby open a can of worms that would be impossible to close from there on out. I only read the novel last year, and mostly recognize myself in the flatness of Meursault's narration and his apathy towards the course of his life, but personally, I lean harder upon self-denial in my daily endeavors than he did; in that sense, Schopenhauer's concept of the "denial of the will-to-live" is more my thing. I like Hegel's philosophy as well, but dislike Nietzsche for his arrogant, know-it-all tone and his apparently elitist outlook. I do like Stirner, weirdly enough. To me, his philosophy feels more intuitively comprehensible than Nietzsche's. I really like my family and consider myself very lucky with them - uncharacteristic of a schizoid - but absolutely hate public places, because I feel exposed in them. This discomfort had gotten so bad during my uni days that I would often sit through lessons with my full winter coat on, because I just felt safer that way.

Due to having to function in a society that I dislike and also don't understand in the slightest, I've been dealing with a persistent feeling of grief, deadness, and an indescribable, purgatorial nastiness for the past two years. I used to think I was high-functioning. I'm not. Trying to move in regular society has left me with some wounds I'm not sure will ever heal. To me it felt like the horrific terminus of constant schizoid masking.

There's more to it all, but who cares, I've written enough as is.