This was convincing enough for most people and they went back to their desk jobs, telling themselves they had nothing to worry about. Of course, the government didn’t start out as blatantly evil as they are now. At first, they just had a badly aimed altruistic streak, and believed that they were really helping people. This selflessness became selfishness, as they began to fiercely protect themselves against any attack, believing that they had to defend themselves to continue helping their people. They deluded themselves into thinking that the well-being of the people was synonomous with the security of their power. And they call me delusional.

Like any paranoid man, they would strike out at whoever threatened to destroy their illusion. Of course, unlike any paranoid man, they had the means to do so efficiently and brutally. And most insane men do not have access to satellites and surveillance techniques. Imagine a crazy man with that sort of equipment. That’s the government. A psychotic man (believe me, I know, there are plenty where I am now) will lash out violently at anyone who tries to pop the bubble of their internal reality. A psychotic government will monitor and monitor, believe that everyone is against them, and start readjusting people to be in line with their interpretation of reality, absorb them into their bubble.

They’ve got satellites to watch you. They can’t read your mind, yet, but they don’t need to. They can see everything you do and have armies of psychologists interpreting your thoughts from every action. Where satellites can’t help them, they have cameras absolutely everywhere. In convenience stores, near ATM’s, at restaurants, anywhere you go, they’ve got you on camera. You’re not safe anywhere. They can fit cameras and recording equipment into light bulbs. I found one once, in my brother’s apartment, while I was living there after being fired. It was tiny, rattling around in the bulb when I shook it. It could’ve been in the apartment, listening in on us for years, if not for their shoddy work: when they placed the bug, they had accidentally broken the light bulb somehow, and it wouldn’t light up. Now, whenever I see a light bulb that doesn’t work, I take it down. Without fail, there is a little tiny microphone rattling around in there.

Occasionally they see or hear something they don’t like. A political maverick, maybe. Someone whose plans simply happen to go against theirs. Someone who will save the people against their imposed slavery. Then the machinery starts up. A transfer to a rural district here, a policy change there, and most people just give up and follow the path of least resistance. If that doesn’t work, it just gets increasingly more drastic. If need be, they dig up skeletons from their past, or maybe find or make up a law to prosecute them for. They’re also trying to develop better methods of psychological conditioning to fix wayward citizens and train professionals like robots. The future is now, as they say.

***

The doctors ask about the government all the time. I know they’re really just pretending to be interested, but I tell them everything I’ve just told you. They try to talk me down and always say, “Oh, now isn’t that a little unreasonable?” at the particularly good parts. Those cameras are just security cameras, they say. The satellites are for spying on other countries, they say. As for cameras and bugs in your house, they can’t possibly put one in every house! Every time, the same thing.. Every time, they try to explain to me that I‘m wrong, and try to justify why. They tell me that I am “paranoid schizophrenic”, whatever that means, and it’s making me distrustful of others, especially the government. This just convinces me that they’re in on it too. Then they go off to their conference rooms and talk about me. The next day, I usually find a different color pill on my tray.

***

The state of affairs had gotten to the point where I couldn’t stand it any longer. People had given up their right to choose to make life a little easier. Now they didn’t even care if their privacy was invaded at all times. I had to do something to show them what they were doing. Since I had been fired from my job, I had nothing else to do, so I started making pamphlets and passing them out on the subway. I gave speeches on street corners. And slowly people started to notice. I heard passers-by utter expressions of approval as they walked by. Just a “Yeah!” as they walked by, barely glancing at me. They were afraid to stick around to encourage me more. They knew the government wouldn’t tolerate it, that it would be the end of us both. I couldn’t blame them; this is probably what allowed me to spread my message as long as I did. As long as I didn’t have a large following, I was just some nut on a soapbox, who they couldn’t care less about. That was my disguise. But slowly, undetectably to everyone else, I was becoming a leader of a group of disgruntled citizens. I knew these people intuitively, though not by name. I could spot from a mile away their dissatisfaction with the government. They knew me from my fiery street corner oratory and I knew them as kindred spirits. When we passed in the streets, I nodded at them, to let them know that I knew. They never acknowledged me, but I could tell from their reactions that they noticed and also knew.

***

I still see these people in the hospital. Occasionally I see a nurse or orderly walk by, and I still recognize that look. I still nod at them, to let them know that the ideas that I have championed for so long have not died because I’m captured. The cause is alive and well and their reactions tell me that on the outside, everything in the movement is going well, because their responses are the same as before.

***

But it couldn’t last forever. More and more people were looking to me for leadership to save them from the government. Eventually some rat must have realized my influence, and relayed it up the chain of command. I can now visualize those assholes, in their dark smoke filled rooms, planning lives, talking about me. What the “best course of action for his well-being” was. They meant their own well being, but they didn’t know it.

***

They still talk about my welfare behind my back. They still mean theirs. Now they do it right in front of me, but I still consider it to be behind my back because they don’t care what I think. I hear them using their labels and words, trying to figure out what disorder that they can classify me as having. Mostly, when they do this, it’s right after they’ve given me the blue pills, to make me tired after an argument with the doctor. They think I’m asleep (or maybe they don’t, and don’t care that I can hear them) and talk about my latest fight with a nurse or doctor or orderly. They throw around large words, like a shot-putter showing off his ability to throw heavy objects. Schizophrenia. Paranoid. Delusional. They have no doubts about my sanity at all. If I’m here, I must be insane. If I weren’t insane, I wouldn’t be here. So closed-minded and bureaucratic. I’m open-minded enough to at least recognize the possibility that maybe I’m not playing with a full deck of cards. I believe I am, but if I were crazy, I’d believe I wasn’t crazy. Why can’t they be reasonable enough to consider that I may not be sick?

***

One day, at my corner, I was in the midst of a particularly powerful speech, with more tones of approval than usual rising from pedestrians, when I saw a police car crawling like some sort of beetle, slowly down the street, towards my corner. At first I really thought it was a giant beatle. Some strange cloning experiment. Distance disappeared and it took on the definitive shape of a police car. This was not unusual… my corner was in the middle of a neighborhood of the oppressed, so police activity was common. This time, though, that insect stopped in front of me and released two policemen from under its wings. They buzzed at me, like annoying little flies. I didn’t understand what they were saying, except for a few words. Complaints. Disturbance. The whole time I just kept my speech up, my mind filtering out all their blathering. They weren’t going to stop me from delivering my message. One of them stepped up and grabbed my arm as if to guide a man who was having trouble walking. But I understood this was not a gesture of helpfulness. This was it. They knew just how much of a problem I was for them, and they were going to “solve” it. I wrenched away and started to run in the other direction, but instead collided with the other policeman. I was cornered. They had me. I really should have gone without a fight, since there was no way I could have fought my way out. I may be a strong leader, but I am a sickly man. But damn it, I was not going to let them think that I wanted to go with them. I tried to shove away the policeman I had collided with, but his body just absorbed the force and his huge meat-hook hands just clamped down on my wrists. I don’t know why I did, I guess animal instincts took over, but I started flailing as violently as I could, like a fish out of water. Of course, this just gave the police an excuse to use force. In one motion, they pushed me to the ground, and cuffed my wrists behind my back. So this was how it was going to go down. Well, they had me physically, but not mentally. I started yelling that it was time for revolution. That I was sacrificing myself. Let someone, anyone, hear me and get the word out to our cause that we have a martyr, someone who is being persecuted for our beliefs. I’ve heard this sort of thing can really strengthen a crusade. I could see my former supporters surrounding me, talking in hushed tones. None of them dared challenge the police. But I had witnesses. All martyrs need witnesses.

***

When the doctors talk about my being a martyr, it’s hardly the kind of praise you’d expect. They consider it to be just another symptom. A Messiah complex, they call it. Persecution complex. They don’t understand what it means to be important to a cause. Or perhaps quite the contrary. Maybe they realize how important I am, and they‘re getting pressure from higher up to discredit me in the eyes of my followers. But I know my army is smarter than to fall for that trap. I’d been telling them about this ruse from my street corner. I don’t worry about them. I worry about myself. I’ve been in this place for years now, and it really starts to wear on you. The constant questioning will make you doubt anything. For years. It’s hard to say how many, since everything just runs together. All that really matters is the beginning and the end. When will I get to the end? I wonder.

***

And they took me away. I spent the next few months in a haze of sedatives and tranquilizers. Apparently my struggle with the police had caused them to think me violent. As if I could do any damage to someone physically. That’s just not my style. My main weapons are ideas, which remained in my head, despite the fog that hung in my mind from the drugs.

At first, they put me in a jail, full of common criminals, but eventually they must have seen that this wouldn’t be enough to discredit me, so they moved me to a “mental institution”. There’s nothing better to discredit people than declaring them INSANE with a big red rubber stamp. Plus, it keeps them away longer. Incarcerating someone for loitering will only put him away for a few days. But if he’s crazy… well, then it’s in everyone’s best interests to get him the “help” he needs, for as long as it takes.

***

A new doctor came in today. He asked his questions, and I gave him my usual contentions about the government spying on us with satellites and cameras and miniature microphones. While I was talking about the light bulbs, he chuckled.

I wanted to destroy that smile. Fucking know-it-all. Trying to convince me that I’m wrong about everything because of a little piece of metal in a light bulb. He’s just another one of those bastards trying to convince me that I’m wrong and that the government isn’t all that bad after all. I’d had it with all this. I felt fury rise inside me as his smirk slowly faded into his studious note-taking countenance that he wore most of the time. I was full of that bitter kind of rage, the one where in your anger, you’re also ready to cry. When that emotion takes hold, there are only two things you can do, curl up and weep, or destroy everything nearby. I chose the latter.

***

I woke up strapped to my bed, a little more tightly than usual. I felt a bit more sedated than usual too. No orderlies, doctors, or nurses were around. I guess they just want me to sit and think about what I’d done. The joke’s on them, I thought, I can’t remember what I’ve done. I do remember the light bulb filament comment. The same rage returned, but this time, strapped down to the bed, I could not act out on it, and had to let it soak back into my consciousness, and contemplate it. Could that really be true? Somehow, I knew that it was. Probably something I learned in childhood and forgot. All those bugs weren’t bugs. They weren’t spying on my brother’s apartment. No. Of course they were. I couldn’t explain it, they just were. In letting this sink in, it felt like my mind was being ripped in two. Reason on one side. Intuition and emotion on the other. Tug of war.

***

Despite my inner conflict, I kept up my outward appearance of tranquility. I no longer despised the doctor who I had attacked (and incidentally, done little damage to, I’m still sickly and weak), no matter what he said. I had enough conflict going on inside myself that the outside world simply didn’t matter. After my outburst, they switched pills on me again. Something inside of me found the latest ones disagreeable, and I decided not to take them. Since I had never been troublesome with pills before, they weren’t exactly watching me closely, so I hid them under my tongue until I could dispose of them under my mattress.

Then came the night of my epiphany. Reason won out over intuition. In a sudden wave of cold fear, like my body was chilled by the frigid indifference of reason, I realized that the only way anything made sense was that I was in fact insane, and imagining all the oppression and surveillance. The light bulbs were just light bulbs. The satellites were for phones. The rest just crystallized in the diseased part of my mind. Everything I had done was wrong. All based on the imaginings of a madman. Part of me felt free, no longer constrained by all of my wrong ideas, ready for a fresh start. But then, a hot surge of emotion invaded my head and spread through my body. Was everything really wrong? Or was I betraying my own beliefs in the worst way possible? I’m worse than those fucking doctors now! Again came that same frenzy that had taken charge when I tried to kill the doctor, and again I wanted to destroy my tormenter. I lifted my mattress, and swallowed my entire stockpile of pills.

***

Blurry. But I can see. And hear. The beep …beep … … beep of my heart in molasses. And voices. Not the usual hushed tones that I hear when sleeping, but normal conversation. I recognize a voice. Dr. Light Bulb. He says something about pills. And braindead. Oh, that must be me. I certainly feel dead. A passive receiver to all this sound and light. Channeling it and writing it on the inside of my eyelids. Dr. Filament is still talking.

“He’s certainly not going to make it. There’s going to be hell to pay from the Reconditioning Committee; this is our third death this month. They don’t like losing people… turn them into productive happy citizens, they always say. I just hope I don’t end up in the Retraining facility for this debacle. Well, lights out for this one, it’s hopeless. Can you hand me the Satellite Tracking Chip Deactivator?”

The man next to him handed him a small bar-code reader type device, and he ran it over my forehead. It beeped, and my brain felt like it was being shut off. Finally relieved of the pain, I didn’t even care that I was right, because nothing mattered any more, except the peace of the black void that greeted me warmly and without questioning.