The Secret to Lying (20 page)

“You ever get stuck in them?”

He leaned on his elbow and looked at me. “How so?”

“I don’t know.” I paused, not sure how to explain it. Cheese kept looking at me, waiting for me to say more. “It’s like I’m living this other life in my head, and I can’t get out of it,” I said. “Sometimes I think my dreams are taking over. Does that sound crazy?”

“Naw,” Cheese replied. “Everyone’s stuck in their heads.”

“They are?”

“Definitely. Only not everyone’s aware of it.”

“How do you know?”

“You can’t know,” Cheese said. “That’s the whole point. It’s impossible to know what’s going on in someone else’s head, because everything we know is in our own head.”

I pictured a bunch of goldfish in bags, floating around in one big tank, their self-contained worlds bumping into each other’s. It reminded me of what ghost44 had said — that no one ever really knows anyone else. “Doesn’t that bother you?” I asked.

“No way, man.” Cheese grinned. “Would you want to see the sick stuff that goes on in my head?”

“I’ll pass.”

“I mean, where do you think you go when you die, right?”

“Huh?”

“When you die,” he repeated, as though the connection between dreams and death should be totally obvious.

I stood there, dumbfounded.

“Take this lamp,” Cheese said, turning on the reading light next to his bed. “Say the light is consciousness, okay?” He flicked the light off and on. “You can turn the light off, but the lamp’s only aware when it’s on, so it thinks it’s on all the time. You get it?”

“I guess.”

“In order to
know
that you’re dead, you have to be conscious,” he explained. “But if you’re conscious, then you’re not dead. The only thing you can know is being alive, so that’s eternity.” He flicked the light off and on again. “Think about it. We might be dead right now, but we don’t know it. We keep dreaming ourselves alive.”

“So I’m dreaming you up right now, talking to me?” I asked.

“Maybe. Maybe I’m not talking at all,” Cheese said. “Maybe you only think I am, but you don’t hear
me.
Not really. Your whole experience of hearing me is just neurons flashing in your brain. It’s all in your head. It’s all dreams, man. Day. Night. Eternity. Dreams within dreams. Life is but a dream.”

“So we’re stuck in our heads forever?”

Cheese shrugged.

I imagined being trapped in my dreams with the Nomanchulators for eternity. “That’s depressing.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” he said. “You could believe in nice things, like heaven. And I’m not talking about the boring, religious one with the harps and angels and crap, but some cushy afterlife with lots of ladies, because if you believe in it, then you make space for it to happen. Get it?”

“Kind of,” I said, although I still didn’t like the idea of always being stuck in my head. “It seems lonely. What if, when we die, part of us lives on and that’s how we know that we’re dead?”

“If part of you lives on, then you’re not really dead,” Cheese countered.

“Well, what if the part that lives on is us but not us. Like maybe we’re part of something bigger than ourselves.”

“Could be.”

“Then we’re not stuck in our heads forever?”

“If that’s what you want to believe. Yeah.”

My brow knitted.

“You imprison yourself, or you free yourself,” Cheese said. “It’s all a matter of perspective.”

“So what do you believe?” I asked. “Are we all imprisoned in our own little worlds or are we all connected somehow?”

Cheese turned off the lamp and plopped onto his pillow. “Both,” he said, closing his eyes. “I believe in sleep. And sex.”

I kept standing there, but he didn’t say anything more. After a minute, I turned and started to leave.

“She’s funny, you know,” he said. “Got a nice sense of humor. You wouldn’t think that, but she does.”

“Who?”

“The . . . Ice . . . Queen . . .” Cheese mumbled in a slurred, sleepy voice. “Chemistry,” he groaned, like he was describing some perverted fantasy. “Covalent bondage . . . electron pair theory . . . carbon-on-carbon bonds . . . exothermic reactions . . . oh, yeah.”

SUNNY KEPT BUGGING ME
about my promise to see Chuck. I put it off a few times, but I knew that the more I avoided it, the bigger deal it would become. On Tuesday, I finally agreed to go with her during lunch, when most students were in the cafeteria. Even though I’d been to Health and Student Services before to get a Band-Aid or an aspirin, this time felt different. I worried that someone might see me going in there and think, “Yup, he’s a nut job.”

Saxophone music murmured from the radio on Linda’s bookshelf — the sort of bland “soft jazz” that businesses piped into offices to make us calm, productive robots. I stood, my skin crawling from the music, while Linda finished typing something into her computer.

“Hi, Sunny,” she said. “And James — been a while since you’ve dropped by.”

I took a dark chocolate Hershey’s Kiss from the candy jar on Linda’s desk. “If I’d known these were here, I would have come more often,” I said. “Dark chocolate’s my favorite.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Linda tapped a few more keys on her computer, then leaned back. “What can I help you two with?”

Sunny explained that I was there to schedule an appointment with Chuck. Linda nodded, suddenly very professional. She gave me a form on a clipboard to fill out.

I looked over the form while Sunny read a magazine. The questions ranged from the normal name and date of birth to things that I knew better than to answer honestly, like: “How often do you drink alcoholic beverages?” and “Check off which substances you have used: Hallucinogens, Marijuana, Amphetamines, Cocaine, Depressants, Other.” I checked off “Other” and wrote in “Tater Tot casserole.”

On the back, the form listed different behaviors and asked me to “check all that apply.” The list had a bunch of hard-core crazy things on it like “hyperventilate in open spaces,” “suicidal thoughts,” “pulling hair out,” “feeling guilty when I eat,” “purging,” and so on. I looked through it twice. “Lonely” wasn’t an option. Neither was “bad dreams.” They must have been too common to count. I thought about not checking anything, then, on a whim, I checked the box marked “cutting.”

I gave Linda the form. She scanned the front and back. “So,” she said, giving me a long look, “how many classes have you missed?”

“What?”

“The cutting,” Linda said. “It says here you’re cutting classes.”

“Oh,” I said. “Too many.”

Chuck didn’t have time to see me that day, so I had to come back for an appointment on Thursday. I considered skipping it after Linda’s brilliant assessment, but Sunny might have found out.