Content: Arthur/Louis Bloom, Psychosis

"Arthur, please come here and look at this," Lou asks.

Arthur is in the kitchen, standing in front of the open refrigerator. He closes it and moves between rooms - into the wide blue space where Lou is sitting at his desk. He has a thick stack of papers in front of him and as Arthur approaches he realizes, with creeping embarrassment, that they're printed copies of each page of his journal.

"I've never been able to read this," Lou tells him, sliding the stack to the edge of the desk, "I assume you'll be able to. It's your handwriting after all."

As Arthur skims the page he sees that it isn't his handwriting - it's sloppier, shakier, angrier - but it belongs to someone so dear to him that he can easily decipher it.

"This is about - there was a store I was very familiar with. I went in almost every day. And one day I walked inside and everything had shifted a tiny bit to the left." He raises one open hand and slides it slightly to one side.

"It made me angry that they'd done that, like they were trying to trick me as a joke so they could laugh at me. And I got... I had to be physically removed from the store. I was banned from it. I learned later - after this was written - that they hadn't done that at all. I was seeing things, or my brain was making something up to be scared about."

"Delusions. Paranoia," Lou interjects.

"Yeah. But no one will forgive a crazy person for being crazy. They'll just think you're even worse. So although I had a reason for what I'd done I could never apologize." He flips to the next page, where a yawning black void has been gouged into the paper. "When you're like that -"

"In a state of psychosis."

Arthur nods. "When you're like that, everything you do makes perfect sense. It makes even more sense than things do when you're sane. And when you stop feeling that way it still makes sense but in a far off way, like you're looking at yourself from the other side of a big canyon. And because of that it's hard to really grasp it." He makes a loose fist, as if he's just caught something out of the air. "And it's hard to put into words. And those words won't make anyone understand because no one but you has felt the exact same thing."

He looks at Lou, hoping for a sign that he's explained things well, and he sees, for the first time, something close to shame in his expression.

"I appreciate your explanation," Lou says, "it was very helpful."

But deep inside he knows that Arthur is right. He's studied psychology, ravenously absorbing everything he could. And when he was satisfied he moved on to neurology, then neurophilosophy. A spiderweb of knowledge glues Arthur to himself. But as much as he dissects him, as tightly as he holds him, he will never be able to understand. If there are two Arthurs staring at each other from opposite sides of a canyon, then he may as well be perched atop a mountain staring down at them.