Contemporary Advertisements for Scientific Apparatus

Infectious condition! Reading this latest complex of paragraphs, I cannot help but wonder if my faithful Q. has broken with rationality all together. First the missive to my mother, and now this spirited collection of time and facts ... remarkable for its observational accuracy and objectivity, brimming with an intelligence not learned from books, but learned certainly ... I imagine you are going through a great process of validation, so I shall not peer too deeply into this doubleness, this mimicry, this allowance you have made between myself and your man, who I previously thought held for you only the value of managing your various anxiety and woes. If it is true that you have opened our shared - and highly private! - insight therapy to a go-between, then the meaning of our friendship has changed. The building blocks of our communication derives in large measure from distortions of reality to begin with, so I must prevent my worries and suspicions from draining the very ink from my quill before the verbiage in my head is spent. I have a hard time explicitly confessing that I am hurt, but there it is. Let me carry on and assail once again your eyes that are now so fortified against my stories.

In mentioning this, I am reminded of my recent trip to see my sister. For some reason, "the patient," as I have come to think of her, was attempting to place into me some of her own bad introjections in the form of her own masked communication. She shook as she spoke, part of the effort to place destructive energies within me. I do not hold memory sufficient to decide if I already doubted her veracity, but I know myself to be both solipsistic and marginal, so when my internal capacities mobilized her infernal messages - to cut to it: I am now gobbling the very same medication as she! I wanted them at least for their psychopharmacological effects, but also because they afford me the special gratification of numerous new visual and verbal associations. Witches boil it in black pots and it is interpreted by unsound priests. It knocks against the teeth when I swallow it.

How this happened, you may well ask, but I'm not going to tell you. My life is played out in scenes to the point where I cannot bear to dramatize these matters I mention, never knowing where or to whom this increasingly fragmented theory of our friendship will land. Like a bacteria, or a disease, I am no more that a poorly paid apprentice to experiments in deception. On second thought, I will provide you with a short narrative, perhaps the most disturbing of all:

I learned that Aleph is not really my sister! She belongs to Laertes! I have immediately embarked upon defense research, and have purchased a miracle of engineering, a protype of a weapon that is arguably the most frightful definition of protection and retrobution I have ever seen. The plans alone cost me in many ways beyond the monetary. I have a man of my own working on its individual parts, later its mass reproduction. It is scarcely surprising that I would fall in love with my own sister, but to suddenly discover that the fluids coursing within us bear no relation makes a monkey of logic. The statement that the head of a horse is connected to its torso by its neck no longer appeals to the academic expert within me. Nobody with ordinary training could explain why I run around half the time like a person with the mental age of eight, while holding a high pedigree of intelligence, and my conclusions about this matter cannot be overstated. I would not like it if she were trapped very much longer in that hospital, but I would neither appreciate the pressure of marriage, something she has already attempted to impose on me.

"You must be very ill," she said.
"For what? Why?"
"Posing. Pretending. I'm not your sister. Who would believe that you ever thought so?"
"Royalty is filled with such mistakes."
"Then royalty is filled with sick fantasy."
"I must make haste back to Denmark and make peace with Laertes. He sweats whenever I'm near him. Have you seen him?"
"You must be very ill."

No, of course the conversation didn't proceed just that way. But as a slice of event from my life, it gives you a taste of her raving. I wonder about the architecture in that place. So very far away, and yet incredibly the same. I wrapped her skirts about her head and drooled on her skin during the short recess between nurses and potions. Aleph controls them with their mind, I'm positive about it, and it really is the best explanation for how the pills intended for her consistently wound up in my mouth. R&G have no explanation for the increased melanchology, an enhancement of the drug, and now that we are back in the castle, I have done nothing but hide from Laertes and search the grounds for some kind of momento mori. Only then will I move toward reparations.

When I hear from you next, I may be dead. Conversely, I may have learned to control the weather or direct the flight of birds with my mind. My goals remain vague as excruciatingly certain plots unfold around me. Despite my initial moment of caution, I am glad you remain unpredictable.

H.