The Hollow City Read Online Free PDF

someone who was kidnapped before he was even born, but ‘reasonable’ and ‘healthy’ are very different things.”
    “This has nothing to do with my mother,” I say, angry at him for bringing it up. “Now listen, you’ve got to believe me. The Faceless Men are real—there was one in here last night. I saw him!”
    “Well of course you saw him,” says Vanek, “that’s what I just explained—you see imaginary things that your brain perceives as real. It’s called a hallucination.”
    “It was real,” I insist. How can I make him believe me? “He was as real as … as that wall, as the chair; he was as real as you and me.”
    “Reality,” says Vanek, frowning. He leans forward and gestures with his hand. “Think of it this way: the human brain does not have a direct connection to reality—not yours, not mine, not anyone’s. We can only perceive something after it’s been filtered through our senses—our eyes, our ears, etc.—and then communicated to our brain. Our brain takes that information and reconstructs it to create the most accurate picture of reality that it can. That’s good enough for most of us, but schizophrenia breaks the system—the signal from your senses to your brain gets corrupted somewhere along the line, so when your brain puts together its picture of reality, that picture is full of extra, artificial information. Some people hear voices, others see faces or colors or other things. Put simply, the reality you perceive is separate from the reality that actually exists.”
    “That’s ridiculous,” I say. “My brain doesn’t do that.”
    “Everyone’s brain does it to some extent—what do you think a dream is? It’s a false reality that your brain creates out of remembered stimuli, extrapolating where necessary to fill in the gaps. The difference, of course, is that a dream is usually healthy, while a hallucination is not.”
    I shake my head. On top of being trapped, now I’m being disbelieved and studied and who knows what else. My chances of escape are slipping away with every word that comes out of his mouth. “This is…” I don’t know what to say. “This is stupid and unfair and … illegal.” I tug on the arm restraints. “You can’t say I’m crazy just because I saw something you haven’t seen. What about … what about God? Can you lock someone up for believing in God? You’ve never seen him, so he’s probably just a hallucination, right?”
    “It’s times like these I wish I had an assistant to explain things sensitively,” says Vanek. “I don’t have the patience for it.”
    “Obviously not,” I say, “or you wouldn’t have jumped straight from ‘Michael’s saying strange things’ to ‘Michael’s a delusional psychotic.’”
    “It wasn’t my diagnosis, Michael.” He sighs and rubs his forehead again, his eyes closed. “It was Dr. Sardinha’s.”
    “The one I kicked? They said I broke his nose—no wonder he wants to lock me up.”
    “Thank you for arriving at the point I started this conversation with ten minutes ago.”
    “And his diagnosis doesn’t seem suspicious to you?”
    “Listen, Michael, it’s more than just you saying strange things. Hallucinations and delusions are the most visible symptoms of schizophrenia, but they’re not the most important. The big ones, the ones at the core of the disease, are depression—which you’ve had for years—and ‘disorganized behavior,’ which is a fancy way of saying … well, of describing the way you’ve been living for the past six months: you stopped taking care of yourself, you wander around and get lost, you do bizarre things like carry faucet handles in your pockets—”
    “I didn’t do any of that.”
    He holds up a small metal lever—the knob from a bathroom sink. I recognize it instantly as mine, though I have no idea where it came from.
    “This was in your pocket when you were admitted, though I suppose it’s not damning in itself. Shall we enumerate the