ON DELUSION

It is not a coincidence, but perhaps an irony, that during the workday I interview the mentally ill while slowly fearing the omnipresence of robots. On my morning walk to the train station I avoid the eyes of strangers. The belief begins with a general dis-ease regarding harmless but empty fakers; next, an ever-increasing anxiety about said fakers; finally the delusion is complete. I wear oversized sweatshirts with the hoods pulled down, or funny hats with brims, because the simulacra are now robots with laser-beam eyes. Clearly I’ve seen too many cartoons as a child. There is always an aura of hilarity about madness. What isn’t funny about a man who claims to be Jesus, or attempts to cure the world’s cancers with rabbits’ tears? A young woman who is afraid of robots?

At work, where I recognize my surroundings, I am all right. I am one of the more capable interviewers in the lab when it comes to assessing bipolar disorder, which is my specialty. I sit for up to two hours at a time, probing psyches the way a Thanksgiving cook searches for giblets. In this line of work I often hear the same stories; even the subjects know that they are giving the standard, as if I’ll groan to hear about FBI conspiracies one more time. “You know,” they say dismissively, “typical crazy-person stuff.” I am the authority and the blank slate. I hand them a toilet paper roll when they cry, which is more often than I’d like. I am self-conscious enough to not warn them about robots. The self-consciousness is a sign of uncertainty, a lack of full and total conviction. Perhaps it is self-preservation. As terrified as I am, I must doubt myself or be entirely lost. I also wish to keep my job. (Things I have misguidedly done as a result of false beliefs: called 911, confessed to a roommate about the voice in the shower, asked my parents what I should do about the man I killed in the bookstore parking lot).

Why robots? Why anything? Psychologist and philosopher Karl Jaspers claimed that the type, not the content, of the delusion was the key. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders outlines delusions ranging from the persecutory to the erotomanic. I hear them in my work; I hear them on the news. Celebrities have delusional stalkers. Mark David Chapman is said to have been delusional at the time of John Lennon’s murder. I never know how to feel about being in such company. For a time I always gave food or money to homeless people if I thought that they seemed mentally ill. Our closeness frightened me.

Finally, I call my psychiatrist, a gentle woman whom I have been seeing since I was sixteen. She tells me to adjust my medications, and I do. Days pass. I stay home from work because I am lying motionless on the couch, and then I feel better. I go to work. I stop wearing sweatshirts. I smile at strangers. But I have lost something – my surroundings are more fluid than before, the sun is a little bit dimmer, the robots are hiding in the bushes, waiting to return.

I have been feeling better for a few days when I come home and open the door. There are lit candles on the table, cut daisies in a vase, and the Decemberists song “Grace Cathedral Hill” is playing on the stereo. My boyfriend stands in the middle of the room, wearing a suit and tie. We dance a small, circular dance on a blue rug. The question he asks me is real.