Beware Of The Glass City.

You might see it on a clear sunny day, just on the edge of the horizon...

I puzzle the doctors because I seem completely well, but for my insistence that the Glass City is real. They diagnose me with this and that, implement various treatments and regimens, none of which come close to shattering my "delusion." I am not allowed visitors, perhaps because I might tell them about the Glass City, and because my account would be so convincing that everybody will believe it and end up here too. My days in the padded room are over at least. They don’t consider me a threat, either to them or to myself. I am perfectly lucid, and if I would only tell them that I made it all up, that there is no Glass City, no stranger, no slow slide into glassy oblivion, then I might be able to return home and live a perfectly reasonable life.

The clinic nestles against a lake. Sometimes when the sunlight ripples across the water its reflection resembles skyscrapers, futuristic monoliths and highways. It glistens harsh and appalling and I have to avert my eyes. The other patients love these sunny days. The nurses take them out and arrange them like scarecrows, slumped and nearly lifeless along the waterfront. Sometimes someone brings out a radio and they listen to the odd waltz. It’s not unknown for a band to set up on our manicured lawns and for a conductor to raise his baton into the sun. The calming effect of the lake and the music soothes even the most agitated patients, but not me. I cannot look at the lake. Those duplicitous reflections remind me of the Glass City and everything that was.