Persecutory Delusions Pt. 2

“What would you call fantasy, Mond?” Sonne began to unhook both of his gleaming metal watches as he spoke, careful to dangle one from each hand with grace. In his right was the grey steel timepiece, accurate to the current time at least if Mond’s own microwave digital clock was to be believed, and functioning in perfect silent simplicity. In the left, hung a corroded yet dazzling gold watch, the spots that weren’t stained black shining with brilliant splendor. Its face however was shattered, hands and screws strewn about within the cracked glass.

“I suppose, I’d say fantasy is the absence of reality yeah? Every nothing that's left in the wake of our something”. Almost immediately, Sonne’s face lit up with what was undeniable excitement, the timepieces that he hung out in front of him jangling from his sudden shock, the left obviously with more intensity than the right.

“Exactly!” he bellowed, surprisingly fresh breath casting onto Mond's face, “Exactly right! Oh that's a great sign”. Behind him, Mahou looked down at his shined black shoes, a glimmer of intrigued guilt reflecting on his eye.

“But, that train of thought on its own is only a minor thought experiment on its own.” Sonne continued, “ To really find the truth of it, you need to rip off the engine and follow the tracks all the way to the end”. He placed both watches back to back, lined up perfectly like they were shadows of one another. The steel watch faced towards Mond perfectly so that he could not easily view the gold, “ This, right here, is everything that is real, I used to hate that term real, but now I realize it is only an adjective, with no inherent value behind it.”

He had promised a psychotic rant and by golly did he deliver, but he spoke with the learned interest and passion of a college professor, nutty but full of vigor and assuredness in every insane claim.

“So it’s like dark matter, yeah?” Mond couldn't help but feel smart with his connection, something he’d learned on some internet video here or there, fun facts stored away in his wandering mind. “ like a shadow of physical matter, the empty space it leaves creating it-”

Before he could quite finish his thought , Sonne popped up into the air with a fervent leap, emphasizing the rash action with a strong “No!”. Mond shot back in shock, knocking his head onto the back of the plastic chair, while Mahou dug his face deep into his hands.

“No no no! Close but you’re fanning science, poetics even perhaps. That's fine if it's how you want to see it but you must choose!” He ranted and paced in circles on the deck. Somewhere across the apartment complex a dog barked at his loud exclamations. “You chose madness, so you will hear me out, understood?” He gave a harsh side-eyed look towards Mond, who was still sat back in his chair in reflexive pushback. But the look Sonne gave him was something he even more instinctively did not like, it was too close to pity, and it washed shock down into a position of scrupulous intrigue, the core that hid beneath his rational fear and mistrust.

“It is nothing like a shadow, it is not like dark matter, it cannot be those things because those things exist.” Sonne’s whispered voice hammered more than his shouts, so full of purpose and power. Each word reminded Mond of a drip of water to the forehead, and was sure a thousand more might crack his skull. “The two sides of the Alphatlas can never be the other, it’s a distinct opposition of their nature” he held up the twin watches again right in his face, and paused to read Mond's thoughts of his face.

Several seconds passed, Mond waited for the enlightened lunatic to continue, only noticing the same patience in the man's deep blue eyes before speaking up himself, “And? I get it, what's real is real because… well duh it’s real” He lifted up his empty beer can and dropped it to the floor, the empty clang echoing dully into the night. “And what isn’t real, fantasy can never be here because if it was, well it wouldn't be fantasy at that point anymore would it?” Now even the doctor was looking in awe at Mond, that signature guilt-excitement bubbling in his gaze.

“It’s like, the very rock bottom of any kind of logic man, if it do be, it do be , and if it don't be, it don't" Mond couldn’t begin to figure out why these men, who clearly seemed to be out just to flex their philosophical homebrew ideas, were so shocked at his basic grasp of their little concepts. At this point he had thought he had their story more or less mapped out, drug fueled wanna-be sophocles and his dealer targeting a mentally ill nobody, one gets a new customer and the other a buddy to play Athens Agora with. But someone so divinely illuminated as that would never let themselves be so baffled by a potential accalight, so what was with their sudden interest in what he had to say?

Mond continued with the simplicity of it all coming to him like the next chapter of a painfully obvious book, “I suppose if you want to take that base idea and play around with it, it could hold some potential for some freaky conspiracy crap”. He took the watches from Sonne's hands with such a casual gesture that the old vagabond couldn’t help but allow it.

“The one rule at least as far as we need to be concerned about on this side-”He held up the steel watch first, just as Sonne had.”Is that there is absolutely no magic, no fancy portals to magic worlds or hidden cryptid creatures, nothing.” his words began to trail off with a tinge of sadness, thinking about all the nothings that were as real as the sky was to him, things that became more and more real to him as he grew up that they became exhausting, till eventually- “They became too real, so they … they couldn’t sustain themselves, they became fantasy to me.” The moment his sentence ended, Mond’s face sparked like a puzzle’s key piece falling into place. He felt the wheels of his mind connect to the rails of thought, speeding forward through the paradoxical wall and off into the chasm of possibility.

“But it’s like this!” Now it was Mond's turn to pace excitedly, bouncing on his heels like a child describing the strange creature he saw down by the creek. He ran into the kitchen with little hops and bounds around the glass that still littered his floor, coming back in less than ten seconds with a fridge magnet that read “Big buba in Japan”. “Heh, nice-” Mahou pointed at the magnet with a half hearted chuckle, before shrinking back into his chair under the stare of Mond and Sonne both.

Mond held the magnet flat to the functioning steel watch, “If we're really taking this logic to its furthest stretch, then it would stand to reason that so-called ‘magic’ could still physically effect the plain of reality, if it played by its rules.” Sonne, for the first time Mond or even Mahou had ever seen, gave a full, toothy grin, completely defying the enigmatic persona he had thus far put on as he saw the result of his hijacked metaphor. Mond had turned the visual to the golden watch side, the once strewn and broken hands suspended in perfect sync with the working ones from the steel watch, the magnets pull linking their motions together. “Doctor Mahou, do you know if this is really how magnets work?” The man shook his head, all in company staring in exasperated silence, “Well then… who can say right now this isn’t magic?”.

But it wasn’t Mond's eerily quick acclamation to the track that awestruck Sonne, or struck fear in Mahou's conscience, it was the that Mond took the word, Alphatlas, without even a hint of confusion, as if it had silently sprouted its way into his vocabulary like a rose in a gravel pit.