Not long ago I was apprehended by the authorities and placed in custody, under what is known as a fifty-one-fifty hold. This means, at the time of my arrest, I was designated a potential danger to myself and others. I do not recall the circumstances that brought me apparently to carry a small, unregistered weapon into a convenience store that night, nor the succeeding events. But I am assured by professionals that it did in fact happen and that I was in a state of disassociation, unable to make myself understood.

I am told that this is why I have been placed here, and why I am forbidden from leaving. Furthermore, I am required by law to attend regular therapy sessions and to maintain a clear and honest relationship with Glenn, my mental health coordinator. My cooperation with the program is essential. Soon I will be able to plead my case and my sanity before a judge at a special hearing. Then I will be free again.

Captivity is not so bad: there are board games and puzzles and televisions mounted in the high corners of the community spaces. They’re kept in cages and play only black-and-white sitcoms. My room has a window, and presently I have it all to myself (this is favorable; isolation isn’t a problem for me and many of the other residents have issues that keep them and their roommates up for hours during the night).

Because I am an exemplary resident I am allowed to walk the premises as I please, in and outside, with the exception of those floors restricted for the deranged and violent. Much of the staff knows me by first name and they find me very pleasant.

There are other residents who range in their capacity for rational thought and extended conversation. All of them are peaceful, or have at least not expressed their violent ideation. Many of them happen to be women, but they all differ in age and ethnic background. I have taken a sympathetic, almost paternal role with some of them. I am one of the few expected to leave soon and return to a productive and someday respectable life. Naturally, they see potential in me. Perhaps they also see a means to communicate with an otherwise hostile and alien world waiting outside the walls. One they may never see, or understand.

Several times a week I lead a handful of the other, less capable residents on a short walk around the exterior of the facility. There is a small pine grove with a winding dirt path and a pond adjacent to the main building. It is normally gray and cold out, but the fresh air is good for all of us. I also appreciate the responsibility. The fact that the staff trusts in me to lead the others, albeit for a short time, has given me the confidence I’ll need to do well in my hearing and my life outside the facility.

I’ve written these thoughts down to tell Glenn at our next meeting. I believe I’m doing very well.

Anna is an older Spanish woman, committed by her daughter, with severe dementia and too much energy to be left alone. I often see her humming softly as she waddles between therapy and her scheduled activities, followed by a solemn, attentive nurse. Elle, a younger girl, is suicidal but making good progress. Like most young people she can be easily coerced into talking about herself at length and I enjoy listening, until her thoughts are broken off by tears and sobbing and I find someone to help. Cedric is another resident committed by the justice system, like me. His situation is tragic but it is not at all shocking. Cedric is easily agitated and reacts to stimuli in his mind. He avoids eye contact and mumbles. He is also massive. Despite himself he is inherently intimidating. One can not be in a prolonged conversation with him without the threat of an outburst, which alienates him from the other residents. It is sad to see, and I feel that underneath his ailment Cedric is essentially just a very frightened young man.

Then, of course, there is Bob.

I meet with all of the residents on their own terms, as a comrade in custody. I have learned much from them and I sincerely believe that they have benefited from my attention. Unlike staff, the residents often are not able to recognize me, due to their afflictions. I meet with them as a stranger. Our conversations and the relations we build dissolve with the passing of another day, and the next, and so forth.

It does not deter me; I genuinely care for them. I have even considered entering the field of mental health after my release. It speaks to me, and it may be my true calling (another positive thing to tell Glenn).

Bob is by far the most confounding resident.

Bob arrived voluntarily, a long time before me. He doesn’t antagonize any of the residents or staff but they do not seem to like him very much. I can see why. Bob often appears irritated and resentful, but always quiet. In the morning he gets into the same chair, every day, for hours until it is time to go back to bed. Bob seems weary of the rest of us and of life. The staff does not encourage him to participate in the activities offered and they take little interest in his overall progress. A rumor I’ve heard from Elle is that they lock him into his own room at night, but no one knows why. I have not seen this and cannot verify. He watches us from the corner of the room, grimacing, hardly moving.

I’ve spoken with him quite a bit.

Bob explained to me that he has lived before—many times before, in fact. So many times that he has now lost count. His life begins in a suburb up north about fifty years ago. After his life, he dies, and when he has died he has always woken up the next morning, an infant again in his old familiar home.

Bob says the first time he was reincarnated it was unbelievable, but eventually he became very hopeful; who wouldn’t feel grateful to experience their youth again, keeping all the learned wisdom of their later years? After the initial trauma of infancy (evidently a very horrifying experience once imbued with the consciousness of an adult—the shock of complete helplessness: limbs and spine too weak to do anything but struggle, the body shudders in rapid growth—bones forming, skull sealing, teeth rising to the surface of tender gums—all colored by the regular, unavoidable visitations of shit, vomit, snot, emotion, etc.) his second life was generally full of victories. He impressed his peers, displayed uncanny insight, and reveled in sexual and financial triumph.

This was repeated for the third, fourth, fifth times. After several lives and deaths—rather, the same life leading into many different deaths, ranging from mundane to unpredicted to horrendously, regrettably painful—Bob started to see his situation with less enthusiasm. The problem, Bob says, was that he was trapped. He grew but the world around him was stuck on repeat. Immortal only in theory, he had power but no control.

Somewhere around the thousandth iteration, says Bob, that’s when the days began to truly fade into another. He sought this place as a refuge, a shelter from the world he was terrified to experience again.

I sought more information on Bob from the staff’s records, but residents are not allowed access to those kinds of documents. I was even reprimanded for being nosy—a woman behind the counter wagged her finger threatening that this might get back to Glenn. The others are poor sources of information. Depending on who one is asking, Bob is either a government agent, an alien, completely invisible, or a doppelgänger slowly trying to replace Kiki (Kiki is a paranoid schizophrenic who typically shrieks in an inarticulate jargon—getting any cohesive statements out of her is noteworthy, even if it yields questionable results).

Kiki had an accident once. It was on one of my walks, while she was supposed to be under my supervision. I wasn’t paying attention and she began to walk straight into the pond and got her ankle stuck on a root. She fell over into the water and almost drowned in two feet of muck because she couldn’t free herself. She was only helped after the rest of us heard her wailing in her distinct gibberish.

The staff was lenient with me but I still feel terrible. How could I forget something so important? I’ve tried to discuss my memory issues with Glenn, but I don’t believe he’s as concerned. As a representative of the justice system his interest is in addressing my antisocial tendencies and any potential access to weapons.

It dawns on me that it has been some time since my last meeting with Glenn, and it unsettles me. The specter of my upcoming hearing looms in my mind. Will the judge be told of my mistake in letting Kiki almost drown? Would Glenn be obligated to tell them? Should I tell Glenn that I have dreams about it constantly—only in the dreams I don’t hear Kiki struggling. I simply rise out of bed, run to the pond and find her because I know she is there, lying face-up just under the surface. She is impossibly placid—a state of being Kiki has never known. Her expression is so stoic that at once I realize she needs my help. I dive in, into the complete blackness where the sound of Kiki’s screams have been hiding in wait then flood my ears.

Bob says he knows me already. He says that has met me in many of his previous lives. I always tend to show up to the facility some time after him, he says. I like to entertain the possibility that what I can’t believe may be true, and so I ask him if I’ve changed over all the time she’s known me. Is it possible that somehow, over a span of different realities, like one singular passing of time—if “I” even exists in this sense—I have grown?

He does not seem confused by the question (perhaps I’ve already asked him) but his answer is simply “no.”

Bob knew my parents’ names, without me telling him.

I see Glenn, but it is only in passing in the hallway. I am very relieved to see him. I understand completely that he is the only man here who stands in the way of me achieving my freedom. I can think only of how to impress him, ways to assure him that I am ready and all he needs to do is let me through. But I don’t want him to misinterpret any of my actions. I don’t want him to know how much I fixate on things: my hearing, my memory loss, Kiki, Bob.

“How are you, Glenn?”

“I’m good.”

“How’s Kiki, Glenn?”

“She’s good.”

He is gone again.

Bob has a nervous habit, a distinct vocal tic. Bob is generally whisper-quiet when stuck in one of his vocal loops, but if one listens they can hear it whispered throughout the halls of the facility. Many of the residents have some similar sort of verbal issue, aside from those who simply babble and scream and weep, but Bob’s is unique. I have heard him whispering and I have asked Bob—who seems to be a somewhat rational, if clinically delusional, human being—what’s the deal?

Bob’s tic involves repeating his own name, again and again, over and over:

“Bobobobobobobobobobobobobobob—” steadily and softly.

I’ve asked Bob about his private ululations and he’s elaborated: his name is suited for this kind of repetition in many peculiar ways: it is palindromic, and monosyllabic, for one. It is phonetically unambiguous. Further, in repeating it so insistently, it appears to be more than it is (i.e., whereas “bobobobobob” appears to be the repetition of “bob” five times, “bob” as a discrete morpheme appears only three times, separated by solitary ‘o’s—a phonemic placeholder synchronistically the same as the only one found in the repeated morpheme, Bob’s actual name (i.e., with a different placeholding phoneme (“bobabobabobabob”) the separation between morphemes is obvious) which ultimately has no formal meaning—the resonant characteristic and the underlying orthogeny still lend the utterance a quasi-spiritualistic importance as in a mantra, or prayer, or incantation—except as Bob’s name). I admit to Bob it is fascinating, but I still don’t understand.

Sometimes I catch myself saying the word.

Bobobobobobobobobob.

Kiki no longer accompanies me on my walks.

I didn’t even notice at first, but it must be this whole week and longer that she hasn’t been out walking behind me. Is she doing activities? Sitting alone in her room? How can I possibly ask the staff? To ask them is to admit I am as mentally adrift as the rest. They will lose their faith in me and forget me. Surely they must already know, but they smile at me like nothing is wrong. It’s probably already too late: their deepest suspicions have only been confirmed. I am beyond help.

My hearing should be in just a few days. Glenn should know, but I can never reach him. I have to put my trust in a man who always seems to be in the other room. This is the nature of the system, I scoff to myself. Bob is whispering:

Bobobobobob.

Elle has bad dreams too. She dreams mostly about her father who used to beat her when she was very small. The image of a man four times larger than her, striking her viciously from above, has burned itself in her mind. Sometimes she has dreams where she is not being terrorized by her father exactly but by some other terrible figure with the same imposing proportions. She says that while they aren’t always her father they are always someone she knows. Dreams are constrained like this; we can dream of anything, except those things we can’t.

I told her about Bob’s name.

“Like Anna.”

I don’t understand.

Elle says that because Anna’s name is a palindrome it can exhibit the same properties as Bob’s name, but I explain to her politely that this is not the case: “Anna” repeated can not yield the same verbal illusion. It is disyllabic, and the phonemes on either end are confused—textually identical but fundamentally, deceptively different (A1 = [æ], A2 = [ʌ]); i.e., pure typographic repetition (e.g., “annaannaannaannaanna”) is clumsier, incorporating phonetic ambiguity (i.e., textual renderings implies no phonetic difference between “anananananana” and the aforementioned, however phonemic difference between A1 and A2 disrupts convergence of discrete morphemes) the middle of “Anna” being not any open-mouthed, resonant ohm-like vowel but a pedestrian sneer of disgust, the voiced nasal nnn- (opposing the complete holistic unity of sound/signifier/significance in entity [bob]) forcing an ugly lurch of the jaw, a removal from a harmonious trance of perfect repetition) but she doesn’t follow.

“What about Kiki?”

What about Kiki?

“Poor Kiki,” she says almost to no-one, and stares out over the pond through the gray air, then shrugs.

I don’t understand.

I want to speak to Glenn but the staff can’t tell me where he is. I want to ask him about my hearing but the staff only wants me to calm down and they threaten again to tell Glenn about my behavior, so I depart quietly. It should be tomorrow or the next day and I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how these things work and I desperately want to seem prepared, and professional, and sane.

Bob is in the corner. I don’t hear him but his lips are moving.

It can sometimes be very hard to think around the other residents. I am trying hard not to forget anything anymore, but sometimes I can’t concentrate indoors. I have been taking more walks lately, often unaccompanied. Luckily the staff still feels confident enough in me to allow me this relief from my torment.

I will wait outside of Glenn’s office door, for hours if I have to. I will look crazy—even if I smile and act friendly, I will look crazy, I know it—but I need to talk to him about my hearing. Sane men care about their fates and about the miscarriage of justice. I should want to be out of here because I do not belong.

I ask Bob if he’s ever considered killing himself, and he is bored by the question. He tells me suicide was a phase he went through, somewhere around his twentieth pass. It was there that he actually began to lose count. He assumes it took maybe a hundred attempts to fully realize that death wouldn’t solve his problem.

I ask him what phase came next in his lives and he tells me he then studied for a long time. Reading anything, seeking out experts in all fields, trying to find a rational explanation—even an irrational one, so long as it provided results. It involved less dying than his previous phase but it was ultimately as fruitless. In his studies Bob simultaneously gained a deep dissatisfaction with the material universe and the facts of reality. Beyond those tiny facts, he says with supposedly over a thousand lived years devoted purely to the pursuit of knowledge, nothing is true nor is it relevant. Entropy takes all but the sterile facts, rendered meaningless in their separation from one another, with no-one to construct truth out of the free-floating parts.

Bob says that effectively everything is the same, and everything is pointless.

The dream is different now, and it’s longer. I get out of bed just the same but now I’m looking for Glenn, wandering through the halls and feeling the drywall for vibrations of sound. He is somewhere on the other side of whichever one I happen to be touching. His voice is muffled but omniscient. The syllables are all off, but somehow I know the word he is whispering:

Bobobobobobob.

I leave, and I feel strangely as though the pace of my movement is out-of-tune with the beat of my steps. I am drifting, but my legs thrash as if I’m running.

I find myself at the pond, but Kiki can not be seen. The water is so dark, and someone is standing on the other side, so I start to run around to them. I can still hear Bob’s name whispered behind me. She is crying, not in real words. Scrambled phonemes and poor little whimpers. I can see the bottom of the pond, black twisted roots sunk in the scum, but I see no Kiki.

I am walking around the pond, and I believe I am awake. Bob is by my side.

I ask him what is on the other side. Bob is the only man I’ve ever known to come back from the dead with his memories: what happens after we die?

He tells me nothing happens because nothing can happen. There is no time, no consciousness, no soul. There is nothing. I am not surprised; I’m bored with Bob now. I feel he has little to show for all his supposed experience. I offer him my curiosity and I plead for advice but all he does is lead me in circles. He can’t admit it but his mind is rotten with the age of his past lives, which of course are themselves figments of his psychological condition.

My hearing was two days ago. I don’t recall it, but I’m told I did well. As for when I will be able to leave I hope for an answer from Glenn. I am eager to see him, but I’m told that I have seen him, that I see him often, and that he has only positive things to say. I’m beginning to think it would be wrong to release me. That I belong here. I spend more time now confined to a chair, like Bob, with my head tilted up to one of the imprisoned televisions.

We’ve reached the other side of the pond. It’s cold and quiet and the water is too dark to see through. I can hear whispering behind me, like the hushed sound of popping corn. It isn’t done for me but I know Bob is aware of how it torments me. He can feel me the same way I feel him, I can tell. I accuse him of being a fool for having been tricked so thoroughly by me. Without really thinking I tell Bob how his previous lives have simply been days in the facility. He is mad, and I have been stringing him along for my own entertainment. I don’t know why but I have the urge to hurt Bob like this, but he doesn’t seem bothered. Instead he asks me about Kiki, and then laughs as if he’s told a joke. I don’t understand.

My dream has evolved. It has repeated itself so many times it has forced itself to grow into something freshly disturbing. In the dream I do nothing, and there is nothing, simply gray fog all around me everywhere. But I feel the presence of the pond, Kiki’s body under the water, and Bob, all somewhere out in the fog. I sit and wait for the dream to be over, voluntarily confined. It doesn’t frighten me but it is terrible to endure.

I no longer see Elle. Residents are not privy others’ medical information, so I cannot know what has happened to her. I believe she has chosen to kill herself but I cannot verify. None of the other residents seem to notice.

As the days pass and I begin to lose count I think often about my arrest, which I do not remember. I have only the words of others to inform me as to the details of that night. The picture I have does not make sense. My memories are too broken and I feel I can no longer trust the flashes of the past that I do recall. Everything is suspect. Like facts at the end of the universe, as Bob tells me, events are disconnected in my mind and there is ultimately no “me” that can be fabricated from the free-floating thoughts. I have been freed, in a sense.

The staff, Bob, and the occasional new resident stop by my chair. They say things to me. They whisper in soft intonations I do not understand, although I am confident that they are words. Fricatives and affricates, voiced alveolars and bilabial plosives; all the same, all pointless.