A large, breaded chicken breast lay on a bed of penne pasta, the whole thing smothered in cheese and sauce. Two smaller plates sat beside the main dish, one with a small caesar salad the other with two thick pieces of buttery garlic bread. It looked delicious and smelled even better.

Iam was right, Aaron thought. I wouldn’t want to miss this.

Bidwell, as far as psychiatric hospitals went, had been full of pleasant surprises. Aaron knew the horrors of the old asylum system had greatly diminished in recent decades, but they still tended to be rather grim places. He’d known people who had been patients and employees at some of the hospitals in Sacramento and he’d heard… stories. Bidwell had a pleasant atmosphere, great food, and, most importantly, none of the patients seemed particularly volatile.

The difference, Aaron guessed, is insurance. I have good insurance through work, so I can stay at a private hospital.

As with lunch, Aaron took his dinner tray to the reading corner, giving him some space from the other patients. The one who’d been in his room when he woke up from a nap was nowhere to be seen. Aaron tried not to dwell on it and keep his focus on the book. It was a struggle as he found himself scanning the room even more often than he usually would.

After ten minutes, Aaron hadn’t managed to absorb more than a handful of sentences. He shifted around his sitting position several times and even started changing the angle he held the book at. Just as he was about to admonish himself for how ineffective all those little twitches would be to his concentration, he spotted something at the edge of his peripheral vision. He didn’t know what it was, at first, but his heart rate spiked and his breath caught.

There was a presence, lurking just outside his blindspot, and he’d only seen it out of the corner of his eye. At a guess, Aaron would have said it was the hazy outline of a person, although he couldn’t see it clearly enough to be sure. Whatever it was, the barely-glimpsed presence evoked a clear and tangible fear in him. It was far more immediate and specific than the anxiety he’d had when Jeff had followed him or when he was watching the shadows on the walk back home.

No, he realized. There are two presences.

Each stood on opposite sides of the room, one to Aaron’s right and one to his left. Despite the lack of details, he got the distinct impression both of the obfuscated figures were watching him. There was something familiar about the strange presences, but it was nothing like the sense of déjà vu he got from the old man in the park. It was more like the smell of some food that had made you violently ill, an unpleasant reminder of an awful experience; one strong enough just the memory could make you sick again. Aaron forced himself to take slow, deep breaths.

The familiarity Aaron felt for the two wasn’t uniform; the one to his left near the hallway to the dorms gave him a stronger sense than the one between the nurse’s station and entrance. In fact, now that he was aware of them and paying attention, the only real sense of similarity between them was how they appeared, or how they were concealed, or whatever it was that made them only appear in his peripheral vision as hazy, indistinct figures.

It figures my particular brand of crazy would ruin a perfectly good meal, Aaron thought.

Much as he would have liked to — and as rational as it would have been — Aaron couldn’t just ignore the presence of two strange figures. It didn’t take long for him to realize that trying to look at them even a little bit more directly caused them to disappear. He needed to figure out some way to focus on them when they vanished as soon as they were at all close to the center of his attention.

Aaron speared a bit of chicken and pasta with his fork and raised it to his mouth. He chewed with laborious intent, directing his attention to the flavors. It wasn’t an exercise in savoring his meal, but an attempt to make an end-run around the limits of his own focus. When he felt the flavors were strongly established in his mind, he hurled all his focus at the more familiar figure while keeping his gaze on his tray.

For a moment, he thought he saw through the odd distortion obscuring the person to his left, but then it started to fuzz out again. But it was there. It was there and, for the moment, Aaron had it.

Oh hell no you don’t, stupid brain, he chided himself.

He clamped down on his own awareness with such intensity he felt a tendon in his neck pop. It was terribly uncomfortable, but Aaron refused to let it distract him. Instead, he kept his conscious hold on the partially-hidden figure and, slowly, turned his head. The figure remained motionless, but was inexorably dragged into his sightlines, inch by inch.

The figure must have passed some kind of threshold as it moved towards the center of Aaron’s vision because suddenly it was completely revealed. A vaguely familiar man was revealed, wearing dark, featureless clothes. It took a second for Aaron to recognize the stranger as the guy he’d seen when he checked the mail after the softball game the day before. It took yet another second to notice a long dagger with a discolored blade was in his hand.

Three distinct thoughts rushed into Aaron’s mind at the sight of the stranger with the knife. They each came so close to one another it was almost hard to sort them out with the general effect of leaving Aaron a bit dazed for a moment trying to decipher them.

He can’t be here; he’s dead, was the first thought.

I don’t want to fight him again, was the second.

Why is that guy from outside the apartment here? was the third.

The last thought, though less interesting, almost completely overwhelmed the first two. Aaron was left with only a vague sense of them, questioning if they’d even happened. They were his thoughts, but they came so fast and were subsumed so aggressively, the effect was more like a momentary impulse or fleeting idea than coherent thoughts.

He blinked and the man was gone. Not even the haze that had blurred his features remained. He expected the same to be true for the other presence, but when he turned back to his dinner the figure was still there, motionless, near the entrance.

Now that he had an idea of how to do it, Aaron was able to pierce the concealment much more easily. He even managed to cover looking in that direction with a glance over at the nurse’s station. When the haze dissipated, he saw the new patient who’d been in his room earlier. There was no knife — not visibly, at least — but the man was definitely staring at him.

There’s a very good chance, seventy five to eighty percent, that this is all more hallucinations, he thought. But if it’s not…

Even if it was wildly unrealistic that supernaturally-concealed assassins were after him or that he was communicating with mysterious old sages through dreams, a part of Aaron wanted it to be true. More than that, his instincts said discounting either without proof pretty much ensured he’d get bitten on the ass. But how was he supposed to get proof of the supernatural?

Aaron decided to give that serious consideration. He set down his book and turned his thoughts to the problem. Before he could really start working on the problem, he was distracted by the hidden patient crossing the common room and heading down the hall to the men’s dorms. An orderly with a clipboard followed behind a few seconds later.

Rounds, Aaron realized. He can’t be missing for rounds.

Sure enough, the new patient came back down the hallway a minute or two later with the orderly, thanking her for waking him in time to get dinner. Aaron kept an eye on the stranger for the rest of dinner, but he dedicated most of his attention to the issue of proof.

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There were three immediate problems that needed to be addressed, each stemming from the last. First, Aaron had to get evidence he wasn’t going crazy. He wasn’t about to test the bulletproof theory, but he had other ideas. Second, if Aaron wasn’t delusional, there was a decent chance the new patient was at the hospital to kill him. Aaron wasn’t confident he could win a fair fight against a magic ninja assassin and assassinations were rarely handled by honor duels, which led to the third problem — he would need a way to get the hell out of Dodge. He had ideas there, too, but they came with their own obstacles.

First things first, he thought. I need proof there’s something real going on.

Testing his resilience was completely out of the question. Even setting aside how catastrophically bad that could go if it turned out he was delusional, Bidwell was a psychiatric hospital; they wouldn’t look fondly on attempts at self-harm and an honest explanation would make him look even more unstable than the reasons they usually heard. There was the dream stuff, but that wouldn’t give him any objective, verifiable proof. The best option was to test his strength.

He couldn’t just punch a hole in one of the concrete walls. On top of the risk of hurting himself if he didn’t have super strength, it was likely to be noticed by the staff. Making a tiny hole with a single finger could work, but he’d have no way to know the hole hadn’t already been there and his delusion was using it for confirmation.

I need something sturdy that wouldn’t have been overlooked if it were warped or damaged, he thought.

Thinking of something that fit his needs took the rest of his — surprisingly delicious — dinner, but when he dropped his empty tray off he had a plan in mind. His roommate was working on a big jigsaw puzzle and chatting with people and the hidden patient had barely started his dinner, so Aaron would probably have some time alone in his room for his experiment.

As soon as he got back to the room, Aaron slid the thin, folding door of the bathroom closed. The light and fan provided some background noise but he wanted more sound in what his experiment was unexpectedly noisy, so he started the shower running. Then, he turned his attention to the faucet in the sink.

The little nub of a faucet was maybe two inches wide and protruded out of the basin no more than an inch. It was made of thick metal with rounded and smooth edges. The spout was recessed slightly into the metal body. The whole thing was built to make it much harder for anyone to use it to harm themselves. That was fine with Aaron; the sturdy design worked in his favor.

Aaron turned on the water then shut it off again. He needed to know the flow was normal before his experiment and, if it succeeded, he’d need someone else to confirm it wasn’t afterwards. In theory, that would cover the control for the experiment and blind verification. It wasn’t exactly neat and clean, but it wasn’t terrible for a plan formed on the fly in a mental hospital. By a patient, no less.

He gripped the sides of the faucet between his thumb and forefinger and started to squeeze. Gradually, he increased the pressure he was trying to exert on the metal, until he was red in the face and the muscles in his neck felt they were going to snap. A close look at the faucet showed no signs he’d made even the slightest impression in the stainless steel. He let out a sigh that could have been relief or disappointment, though he was unsure which.

I should take that as a failed experiment, right? Aaron mused. Something was nagging at him, though. Only… at the softball game, when I broke the bat, the swing didn’t feel like it took any more effort than opening my refrigerator, so maybe I’m approaching this the wrong way.

Maybe the kind of strength he was trying to test wasn’t physical; or not purely physical, at least. But if not, then how was Aaron supposed to use it? The only thing that came to mind was that it had to be a matter of intent, or maybe even emotion. He didn’t have any particularly strong emotions to call on — as far as he knew — but he had plenty of intent.

With a deep breath, Aaron centered his focus on his hand and what he wanted to do. He reached for the faucet, his movements deliberately casual, and lightly pinched it with his thumb and forefinger. There was no screeching, no grinding, yet the metal folded inwards under Aaron’s fingers with no more resistance than a damp sponge.

No fucking way, he thought.

He turned on the faucet. The water came out largely unobstructed, which wouldn’t suit his needs. With a few more careful nudges, he bent the area around the spigot a little more, resulting in a wild spray that spit water out past the basin. It wet the front of his shirt before he could turn the faucet back off.

A tapping knock at the thin, folding door gave Aaron a start. He recovered quickly and shoved his hands into the water coming from the shower, then opened the door with dripping hands.

“Sorry if I interrupted a shower,” the orderly behind the door said. “I just wanted to let you know the doctor will see you in about an hour.”

Aaron held up his wet hands. “I was using the shower to wash my hands. I think something’s wrong with the sink faucet.”

Grabbing some paper towels to dry his hands, Aaron gestured towards the sink. The orderly stepped in and examined the faucet briefly. When he turned on the water, a nice spray of water splattered his scrubs just above the waist.

“Crap!” he grunted. “Looks like it’s bent or warped. I wonder when that happened.”

Aaron carefully schooled his face to convey confusion and annoyance. He didn’t want to get in trouble for messing up the sink, but he was also grappling with the realization that this was precisely the independent confirmation he’d been aiming for — he had warped the metal faucet with his bare hands and someone else could see the results. That was pretty good proof the act itself wasn’t a hallucination. He had bent metal with unnatural ease. He had actually done that.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about that discovery was that Aaron wasn’t actually surprised, like he’d expected his experiment to work the whole time. Maybe he had. Maybe he’d been leaning towards believing every outlandish thing that had happened over the past two days and this whole hospital thing was just the result of him struggling to come to terms with it.

“We’ll have to get someone in to take a look at it,” the orderly said after feeling around at the faucet with his own fingers and breaking Aaron out of his reverie. “It doesn’t look like it’s got any dangerous edges, so we won’t have to move you to another room. We’ll get a packet of sanitary wipes in here so you won’t have to go out to the restroom in the common room to wash your hands.”

The orderly fussed over the sink for a few minutes, but finally left to get those wipes. After he’d dropped them off, Aaron sat on his bed, once more lost in thought.

The first problem was solved: Aaron wasn’t losing his mind. That was something of a relief. The next problem was the likelihood that the new patient was at the hospital to assassinate him, which was much less of a relief. Aaron could solve the second problem — or at least avoid it for a while — by solving the third and finding a way out of the hospital. But that would mean getting in contact with the old man, Barrett, which raised an entirely new, fourth problem.

Try as he might, Aaron couldn’t remember the phone number Barrett had made him memorize in a dream. Or tried to make him memorize, anyways. Even the stupid little jingle hadn’t helped and Aaron could only remember the first six digits.

Without the number, I’ll have to try contacting them through dreams, he thought.

That was a vulnerable position to put yourself in when someone was trying to stick a knife in you and had already managed to sneak up on you asleep once. It also meant the assassin probably knew more about whatever was happening to Aaron than Aaron did, which meant he probably had some weapon or plan that could get around the limited invulnerability Barrett claimed Aaron had.

Even if all the superhero stuff — or whatever it was — were real, Aaron still didn’t think it was likely his roommate in a mental hospital was actually God and not just crazy, so there was probably no help coming there.

God is notoriously hands-off and big on helping those who help themselves, Aaron mused. Which means I probably couldn’t even convince the guy to get involved by ‘praying’ to him or something like that.

If Aaron had his druthers, he’d take a nap in the common room while people were still up and about. Other than dozing off after lunch, Aaron hadn’t slept more than an hour or two in almost forty eight hours, yet he didn’t feel even a little bit tired. Accepting he was in some kind of origin story, living in the Matrix, or whatever the hell was going on was kind of a rush, too, so he was feeling extremely wired. It would probably be hours before Aaron could get himself to sleep naturally.

He was just starting to consider the pros and cons of using sleeping pills when Joseph entered the room.

“I was sorry to hear your sink is busted. That’s a hassle you don’t need right now, but we’ll get it fixed soon,” he said. “On the bright side, the doctor is ready to see you.”

Aaron stood up. This was the make-or-break time. He’d already downplayed his symptoms when he did the intake forms, now he had to do the same thing face-to-face with a trained psychiatric professional. The less severe his condition seemed, the easier it would be to get out of the hospital.

Assuming I survive any more assassination attempts, he thought, then paused, processing his own thoughts. Any more? There hasn’t even been one yet.

Or had there? Aaron decided it was best to pull that train of thought into the station for a while. He had an appointment with the doctor.