The Ghost Knight

Chapter 2: Parapsychology

"It's been almost a month since we last met. How are you doing?"
    Awsten sat across from his therapist, Leslie. Leslie had been his therapist for the last year. It had taken him a while to feel comfortable talking with a therapist, and had gone through a trial and error period of trying different therapists before settling with her. His previous therapists would frequently cancel on him, or had a hard time understanding the toll his career took on him, or in one case would just flat out zone out while he was talking and gave him basic advice that didn't help him much. Awsten had liked Leslie from the moment he stepped into her office. The room was bright with natural light. From the ceiling hung a few air purifying plants, high out of reach from any possible grabbing hands. There was a large bookshelf filled with psychology textbooks and board games like Perfection, Chutes and Ladders and a water ring toss game. Her office overlooked downtown Houston, which helped Awsten focus on something else when he was discussing a harder or more sensitive topic. There was also a vague smell of lavender and cotton that gave him a clean and cozy feel.
Leslie had been the first therapist that made him feel like she was truly there to listen and help. She was encouraging, and was always excited to hear about his career and any personal progress. She'd ask him to send demos he was currently working on when he could for felt comfortable enough to share it. At the same time she could be gentle, and knew when he needed just a bit of a push when he was struggling. It had only been a few months of talking with her when he started noticing a change in his mood - he was calmer and happier than he had felt in years. He truly trusted her, and valued her opinion and advice completely.
Today, however, he was nervous to begin. His leg wouldn't stop bouncing. He kept coiling and recoiling the hair tie he always kept on his wrist around his index finger. He stared out the window, watching the end of summer rainstorm move over the Houston skyline.
    "Not good...At least I don't think so anymore," Awsten said, feeling cautious.
    "You look tired," Leslie commented. "Are you getting enough sleep?"
    "Um...no," he reluctantly admitted.
    "Is the lack of sleep something that popped up since we last met?"
    He pulled tightly on the hair tie, turning his finger purple. "No, it's been going on for a while."
    "How long has it been? A couple weeks? A month?"
    "More like..." For a moment he thought about lying, but decided he couldn't avoid it any longer. He sighed. "It's been almost a year."
    She let a soft exhale. "Why haven't you mentioned this before at our previous sessions?"
    "Because I didn't think it was a big deal," he confessed. Frustration suddenly rose in his chest, and his breath came out more quickly.  "I've been so busy with work that I haven't had much time for anything else. I kept thinking at some point things are gonna slow down and I'll be able to catch up on sleep, but they haven't. Everything keeps ramping up. Every day my manager texts me, telling me I have to sign off on this, or 1,000 more photos came in and I have to drive into the city to sign them all, or something went wrong with a t-shirt design. It's always something different and it's driving me crazy. And...I think...I think it finally has." Heat flushed his face and he looked down at his feet.
    "Why?" she asked. "What's been going on?"
    Awsten glanced up at her. Her brows were knitted and her mouth had fallen into a small frown of concern. He looked away almost immediately, feeling self conscious. He focused on a large, buzzing black fly that was continuously banging into the glass.
    "I...uh, started seeing things," he said, hesitantly.
    "Hallucinations?" she asked, her tone slightly surprised.
    He nodded. He turned his attention back to his hands. His finger had grown numb and turned a deep shade of purple. He loosened the hair tie, allowing the blood to flow back. He switched to the opposite hand.
    Leslie held up a hand. "Okay, before we continue, I need to ask you. Did your hallucinations make you feel like harming others, harming yourself, or made you feel paranoid that someone else was going to harm you?"   
    Awsten looked up. "What? No!"
    "Good." She relaxed in her arm chair. "I apologize if I alarmed you in any way. But when it comes to hallucinations, it was important to ask."
    "Why?" Awsten asked.
    "Hallucinations may sometimes be a result of a severe case of psychosis and endanger themselves and or others, and may require hospitalization." She explained.
    Awsten stopped playing with the hair tie. "Hospitalization?"
    "That's only for extreme circumstances," Leslie said, quickly, hearing the worry in Awsten's tone. "If you told me, for example, you started hearing voices that told you to jump off a bridge, or starting thinking one of your friends is planning to harm you, that may be enough grounds to initiate what therapists call a 5150. We would send the patient to a 72 hour psychiatric hold, sometimes against their will. But the fact that you have not told me that you were planning to harm someone or yourself, or were afraid someone was going to harm you, tells me you don't need that."
    "So then why am I hallucinating?" Awsten asked. "Do I have brain cancer? Should I have gone to the hospital for an MRI scan?" He imagined himself as a vegetable shell, lying in a hospital bed, bald, and hooked up to wires, wearing a vacant expression and drooling.
    "It's natural to think we are sick or we are dying if we suddenly start hearing or seeing things," she sympathized. "Unfortunately, I don't have the skills required to tell you that you don't have brain cancer, but I can tell you there are other possible causes as to why you are having hallucinations. And to get there, I need you to explain to me what you experienced." She sat back in her arm chair and crossed her legs. "Tell me what happened. What about them told you that they weren't real?"
    "Well...I didn't know they weren't real," he partly mumbled. He resumed playing with the hair tie, stretching it across the fingers of his right hand. "At least, in the beginning. But after talking to my friends about it, I realized just how crazy it all sounded."
    "Most people who experience a hallucination for the first time don't realize it was just a product of their mind until after the fact," she acknowledged. "Talking with other people about what you saw is also an excellent way to do a reality check, just to help you separate in your mind what's real and what isn't."
"But none of them were with me when I saw all of these things," Awsten told her. "So...I guess technically I don't know if they were real or not. Other than the fact I really, really hope it wasn't real."
"Do you think they were real?"
Awsten didn't answer right away. He looked back out the window, where the rain storm was progressing over the city. Thunder rumbled overhead and lightning danced across the sky. Seven floors below, a rainbow sea of umbrellas moved along the sidewalks, highlighted in the yellow beams of passing cars.The fly, unaware of the storm raging outside, continued to bang into the glass.
"At first I did," he said after a few moments. "I didn't understand what was happening. It...it almost felt like I was in a different world, or maybe that I was dreaming."
    She closed her eyes and nodded. "To me, that sounds like dissociation, where things feel distorted or not real. It's common to have hallucinations during these as well."
    Awsten had heard of dissociation before. It was a condition that made you feel like you were dreaming, or that you were watching yourself from outside of your body. It was one of the things that had popped up when he tried to google his symptoms last night.
"Delusions and hallucinations are a lot more common than you think," Leslie continued. "They can happen to perfectly healthy people, regardless if they have a brain tumor or a mental illness. It's not always a negative thing. Most often, they come as coping mechanisms from stress or trauma. For example, people who are grieving will see their deceased loved one sitting on a bench, and in that case it can be helpful. It could tell them that their loved one is okay, and it helps give that person some peace and acceptance of their passing."
    "Wow...I wouldn't have thought of it like that." He remembered his mother telling him about the time she saw her grandfather's ghost on their old sailboat. He had passed away shortly after Awsten was born.
    "Not a lot of people do," Leslie said. "But I want to hear about your experience."
    "Well...It definitely wasn't peaceful. It was kind of scary."
    A sudden gust of wind blew, splattering the rain against the glass. Thunder rumbled again and shook the building as lightning strobed in the dark rain clouds. The fly buzzed louder, agitated.
    "I don't remember much of what happened," he began, slowly. "When I woke up Sunday, it took me a while to remember what we did Saturday night. There are pieces my friends have told me that I still don't remember. And the ones I do...I don't know if I am even remembering correctly." He paused and shook his head. "Sorry, I know I'm not making a lot of sense."
    "Well it sounds like Saturday seems to be pretty important," Leslie pointed out. "Start from there?"
    "Right, yeah. Okay." He took a deep, steadying breath in and began. "Saturday night, my friends and I went ghost hunting in the Lake Houston Wilderness Park. A mausoleum had been found deep in the woods, almost a mile off trail. It had been a while since we last went. I was desperate for a break from work. But as soon as we started hiking...I guess I felt really chilled. My friends said I kept complaining how cold it was. They said they thought I was just coming down with something. That part I don't remember."
    "You don't remember getting cold?" Leslie asked him.
    "I don't remember most of the night," Awsten clarified. "A lot of it was told to me. When I woke up on Sunday...I couldn't remember anything. I only knew we went ghost hunting because I saw the texts."
    "Interesting," Leslie mused. "What else did your friends tell you what happened?"
    "I also got really freaked out." He looked down at his feet. "Once we got to the mausoleum, I didn't like being there. I wanted to go home."
    Awsten still had a fuzzy memory of standing in front of the mausoleum. There was a tiny golden cross that sat atop it's awning, looming over him and glinting in the moonlight. It made him feel uncomfortable, and strangely guilty. Like it was already judging him for his sins.
    "I got dared to go inside it by myself," Awsten went on. "It's this stupid rule that we have. Whoever gets freaked out first has to do something by themselves." He thought about how mean that rule was. Or maybe he just thought it was mean only now because for the first time, it was him that had been scared. "But I must have seen...something in there. I just don't know what I really saw. What I think I saw...." He swallowed an anxious lump in his throat. "I think I saw the Grimm Reaper."
The memory still haunted him. Every time he closed his eyes last night, he was brought back to the scene. The smell of rot and decay that had filled his nostrils. The overwhelming fear that paralyzed him in place. The chill that devoured him from the inside, stealing his voice and his breath. He had been rendered helpless as They grabbed his face, their long nails scraping against his scalp, ears and cheek. Why didn't he run? Why didn't he call out for the guys?
He desperately wanted to believe that it was all a hallucination, that his mind was finally breaking down after a year of stress and sleep deprivation. Of course it couldn't have been real. There couldn't have been someone with that so much power. The kind of power that could command absolute worship. A power so dark, so evil, that it brought him to his knees.
    He described the scene. As he did, goosebumps grew over his arms and he felt chilled again. He tucked his arms into himself. "The weird thing is...he let me go. Or he just vanished, I guess. You'd think no one sees the Grimm Reaper and lives. So then..." He had kept asking himself that over the last couple of days. Why had They let him go? Was he now marked for death? Or...was it because of something worse?
What was worse than being marked for death?
    "This is pretty fascinating," Leslie mused. "But you know what I find interesting about this? Typically when people hallucinate, they'll see images of their deceased loved ones, or religious figures. You, on the other hand, saw Death incarnate. What I'm wondering is...do you think of Death as something like a God?"
    Awsten fell quiet. Religion has always felt like a weird topic of conversation for him. He had gone to a methodist church as a kid, but the idea that there was a big man in the sky watching over them always felt a little far fetched. Ghosts and demons were easier to believe somehow. It seemed like there were more stories, and more unexplained phenomena, that made them feel more real than the miracle of God. Neither of those things, however, had undeniable proof of existence. The act of dying was the only thing that truly affected everyone. Neither human or animal could escape it. Only a God could have that kind of power.
    What if Death was God?
    "I didn't before," Awsten said, finally. "But I guess my obsession with ghosts and demons...anything supernatural, I guess it would make sense that the Grimm Reaper could be considered a God-like figure."
    "Other cultures do consider Death as one of their deities as well," Leslie pointed out. "When I was in college, I took a semester class on mythology and folklore and I was surprised to find that many myths and religious texts have many ideologies in common. Many of these texts described death as a symbol for grief and or evil, but others saw it a celebration of life, or the return of one's energy to the Earth. It is very fascinating to see how they coped with grief and loss."
    "But I haven't lost anyone," Awsten said. "I've never lost a friend or a family member."
    "So then, perhaps, somewhere in the back of your mind you do see Death as something like a God, since things like ghosts and demons we don't know if they truly exist until maybe after death."
    Awsten shrugged. "I guess. If I believe in ghosts and demons, maybe then I believe there could be a heaven and hell."
    "It's possible. We'll never truly know." Leslie waved a hand and changed the subject back to Saturday night. "Besides all of this religion talk, was there anything else that happened?"
    "Yeah," Awsten said. He told her about how sick and weak he had been afterwards.
    "Did they think to bring you to a hospital?" Leslie asked.
    "They wanted to," Awsten said. "But I guess I was lucid enough to tell them I didn't want to go to one. They just took me home, but they did spend the night, to make sure I was okay."
    "That was good of your friends," Leslie remarked. "They want to respect your decisions, but also wanted to make sure you were okay."
Awsten smiled. "Yeah, they're good friends. They even listened to me when I told them what I went through Saturday and Sunday." None of the guys had outright told Awsten they didn't believe him, or called him crazy. They had listened to his whole story without judgement. They had actually wanted to bring him to the hospital, fearing he had come down with a serious illness, but Awsten insisted he wanted to try a therapy appointment first. He wasn't ready to undergo a series of brain scans and psychiatric exams. Not so close to the tour.
"Right, let's talk about Sunday too." Leslie adjusted her glasses. "So you fell asleep on the car ride home. Then what happened?"
Awsten scoffed. "Oh, things got weirder, and honestly, I don't know how you'll explain this one to be anything other than schizophrenia."
Leslie didn't interrupt him this time, letting him speak his story in full. His anxiety grew in the pit of his stomach as he described walking down his empty street with the gray faced ghosts. He kept glancing up at her, watching to see the moment when she would realize he had truly lost his mind. She remained quiet and listened intently.
When he finished, she closed her eyes and nodded.
"That is a lot to take in," she said. "I'll be honest, even I feel a little creeped out." She rubbed her arm, as if she had felt chilled as well. "How are you feeling about all of this?"
"Really scared," Awsten said. "I feel like I'm going insane." He leaned forward and rested his head in his hands. "I believe in ghosts, and I believe places can be haunted, but I don't actually want to be haunted. I don't want to see ghosts and demons everywhere, all the time."
"Right," Leslie agreed. "You like doing it for fun, but at the end of the day, you still want to come home to a quiet, ghost free home."
"Exactly!" Awsten threw his hands up and leaned back on the couch.
Leslie was silent and studied Awsten. She's probably waiting for the right moment to call the nice people in the white suits, Awsten thought, paranoid.
"You know what else I find interesting?" she said after a short moment. "Is that you are experiencing different types of hallucinations."
"Different types?" Awsten asked. "What do you mean?"
She sat up and held up her hand. "There are 5 types of hallucinations. Visual is the most commonly known one." She ticked them off on each finger. "There is also auditory, another common one, where you think you hear something. There are tactile hallucinations, where you think you feel something. Gustatory hallucination, where you can taste things, and olfactory, where you can smell things. From what I've heard it sounds like you've had visual, auditory, tactile and maybe olfactory hallucinations."
Awsten shifted in his seat. "So then does that mean I am crazy, like I'm schizophrenic?"
"Well before I try to give any kind of diagnosis, let's try to unpack what you sensed. I don't want to completely eliminate the possibility," she said, carefully. "But I also don't know all the details yet, and part of that is trying to piece together what you experienced to something else under the surface that you aren't paying attention to. Does that make sense?"
He couldn't guess how she'd be able to find any kind of meaning out of an old lady and gray faced ghosts, but he wanted to trust her. He slowly nodded.
She smiled. "So we've already decided that the Death figure you saw was maybe your version of a religious figure, correct?"
"Uh...sure," Awsten wasn't totally convinced on that yet.
"And you felt like maybe the Death figure was giving you a purpose, which isn't too far from say people who think they see Jesus giving them a message, correct?"
"Okay," Awsten said, still not understanding where she was leading him."But what about the stuff on Sunday?"
"Well you think you helped an old lady cross over to the other side, right? Maybe in your mind, you believe the reason why the Grimm Reaper let you go is because he gave you that job to help the old woman cross over?"
"Maybe," he considered it. He thought back to that conversation with his friends on Sunday. There had been a brief moment where he suddenly believed he was the literal embodiment of Schrödinger's paradox, and that Death had done that to him for a reason; to help the old woman cross over. He suddenly thought of an old Nickelodeon cartoon where the main character had gained ghost powers, but could change back to his human half, and decided his purpose was to fight other ghosts that lingered in the real world. It had been one of his favorite cartoons as a kid. Thinking of that now, even hypothetically comparing the cartoon to his current situation was ludicrous. He didn't blame his friends now for wanting to originally take him to the hospital on Sunday. He must have sounded completely insane.
"If I did think that," Awsten said. "If I did think Death had given me this...purpose, I don't understand why I would believe that. Am I really that egotistic to believe Death would give me this kind of responsibility?"
"I don't believe you consciously believe that but..." Leslie pondered. "I'm wondering if that feeling of purpose and responsibility is somehow related to your job?"
Awsten blinked. "My job? How?"
"It's possible that you could be thinking of the responsibility you feel towards your work and your fans." She said.
"I don't think I'm following." Awsten said, confused.
Leslie sat forward. "What I'm thinking is your mind imagined this grand purpose given to you by the Grimm Reaper himself, similar to that of a superhero power. You were able to speak and see ghosts and demons helped the old woman cross over. With musicians, you are oftentimes put up on a pedestal. Fans will tell you that you've inspired them, that you are their hero and their idol, that your music has saved their lives from their own mental struggles, like a superhero."
It felt like a stretch to Awsten. On the one hand, he could see where she was coming from. He's met plenty of artists in the music industry who think they are God's gift to the world. Awsten however always tried to stay as grounded and humbled as possible. The idea that he was so subconsciously egotistic that Death would even give him a free pass wasn't convincing him.
"I'm still not understanding though," Awsten said."Why am I hallucinating?" A lump suddenly formed in his throat. "Am I suddenly schizophrenic? Do I need to go to the hospital to be scanned for brain cancer? What is wrong with me?" Tears pricked in the corners of his eyes and he closed his eyes.
"I understand your anxiety," Leslie calmly said. "No one wants to be experiencing hallucinations. They are scary and anyone's first guess would be schizophrenia. But that's not my guess." She leaned forward. "I think your hallucinations have been caused by a lack of sleep and stress."
He stared at her, doubtful. "Sleep and stress?"
"You told me at the beginning of the session that you haven't gotten much sleep over the last year, and before we even started talking about your hallucinations, you expressed how stressed you have been under."
"Yeah, but -" Awsten closed his eyes and shook his head. "That's good stress though. I'm moving up in my career."
"Stress can sometimes be beneficial for helping us get certain tasks done," Leslie reasoned. "But any kind of stress, good or bad, for a lengthy amount of time, can have serious consequences to both our physical and mental health. Especially if you don't give yourself enough time to recuperate."
"But I was honestly feeling better," he argued. "When I signed on with the label, I finally felt motivated enough to want to write again. I was happy."
"But did you give yourself a break at all?" Leslie asked him. "Did you take even a moment to breathe and relax after knowing your career was back on track?"
Awsten thought back. Those weeks when the band was in between labels was one of the hardest time periods of his life. Every day, he'd write emails to record label reps asking them to listen to his demos, or would try to arrange meetings with reps and agents. He'd reach out to his friends signed on with other labels and ask them to recommend them to their labels. For a while, the answer was always the same. You have great energy, the labels would say, or You have a lot of creativity. But the rejections were always the same. We aren't looking to produce that genre right now, you don't fit our current mold for our label, or the harsher ones, You don't have the talent we are looking for. Every night he would lie awake, convinced if he didn't find a new label the next day, his career would be over. When he finally did sign on with his current label, he jumped right into writing new music, afraid to waste even an hour that wasn't working on new sounds to make sure he produced something the new label would like.
"I guess not," he admitted. "But that's just how it is in the music business. If you don't put in the work, you won't make it."
"But that doesn't mean you can neglect your own mental health," Leslie pointed out. "You see it all the time in the media industry. Celebrities who are arrested or sent to rehabs, or their mental breakdowns become public and are streamed across every news site and tabloid across the country. You always have to think about making the next big thing, always having to improve your work, always having to please the public. When you work in the public eye, you have to present your best self, and sometimes it's still not considered good enough. That kind of thinking, that kind of life, can destroy your mental well being.
"In your case," Leslie continued, "You throw 100% of yourself into your work. You have to think about what your fans are going to like, and what can you put into your music to bring new fans in. You rarely ever get even a moment to sit back and be content with your current work. Because of your job and your audience, you always have to keep improving, keep pleasing other people. And sometimes it feels like your fans are never satisfied. They will always want more, and they get to the point where they begin to invade your privacy. As you have told me in the past, you've done your best to handle your fans when they cross the line, but the truth is, it's not enough. You need to give yourself a break."
Awsten wanted to argue that he could handle it. That's just his line of work. He's learned how to stay off of social media when he's home and away on tour. His mentions were constantly flooded with tags from fans, from photos to fan art, from marriage proposals to death threats, or fans just begging him to notice them. His DMs were clogged with even more of it. A while ago, he had turned off his notifications for his social media accounts but it wasn't enough. Sometimes even reading one disturbing message would sit in his mind all week. Other days, even looking at his phone sent him into a spiral of anxiety.
"You've always been a hard worker," Leslie said. "Which seems like an admirable trait to have, but you need to take care of yourself, both physically and mentally."
"So what you're saying," Awsten said, trying to piece everything together, "is that I'm hallucinating because I'm stressed and lacking sleep?"
Leslie smiled. "Exactly. Both of those elements, especially over long periods of time, can worsen mental health, and create increased risks of anxiety, depression, weight gain, and hallucinations, and cause prolonged episodes of dissociation."
Awsten fell silent, quietly surprised.
"What I am thinking," she continued, gently. "Is that you have held a harmful amount of stress and anxiety inside yourself for so long, that at the first chance you had to relax, it all came bubbling to the surface. Your mind combined the stress of your job, and the very thing you enjoy and fear, ghost hunting, into one terrifying dissociative hallucination. Perhaps seeing the vision of the Grimm Reaper was your mind screaming at you to take a break. And perhaps the idea that even Grimm Reaper wanting you to do his job, helping souls cross over to the other side, was both that musician egotistic belief of immunity, and the pressure to always be sacrificing yourself for others."
Awsten was stunned. "That...actually makes sense, in a way. But what about Sunday? I couldn't have hallucinated right when I woke up in the morning. Could I?"
    "Absolutely," Leslie said with certainty. "Many people who have dissociative disorders can go hours, days, weeks, or sometimes months feeling so disconnected from the world around them, they feel as if they are walking through a dream. Those disorders can sometimes be hard to diagnose because everyone has such a unique experience. Some people feel like lights are too bright, or words float off the pages, or everyone's voices sound like they are being heard under water. Sometimes people have gotten so lost in a memory they hallucinate they are actually there and lose track of time. Hours can go by in what feel like minutes. For you, it felt like time had completely frozen, but hours had actually gone by. To me, these all sound very much like symptoms of dissociation."
Something clicked in his mind, and he finally understood her. Awsten suddenly felt an overwhelming sense of relief. A stinging sensation grew in his nose and he felt his throat tighten with emotion. I'm not crazy.
    "So, taking all of this in," she made a circular motion with her hands, "and understanding what it feels like, do you think you're still experiencing dissociation?"
    "I don't think so," Awsten said. As far as he was aware, he hadn't felt any kind of disorientation, or the kind of fog or a sense of lost time she had described since Sunday.
    "That's good." Leslie smiled. "I do want to let you know that if you notice it starts to happen more frequently, or they last for longer periods of time, there are medications to help you, both with dissociation and sleep."
    "No," Awsten said, firmly. "I don't want any medications." Awsten adamantly refused to take any kind of drug, or even recreational mind altering substances like weed and alcohol. He was afraid that he was susceptible to the addiction that had destroyed bands and music careers. He had seen it way too many times in the music industry.
    "I know," Leslie eased him. "just keep it in the back of your mind. They have been that pull that people with dissociation that hinders their daily function back into reality, and they can lead normal lives again."
    "Okay," he agreed. Outside, the storm had stopped raging. It was lightly drizzling now, and the thunder was a distant rumble. The fly had given up trying to break through the glass and had settled in the upper right hand corner.
    "For right now," Leslie said. "I recommend you go home and get some good sleep, and practice relaxing before you go off on tour."
    "I don't know if I can," Awsten said, wearily. He ran a hand through his hair. "There's still so much to do."
    "Well, you are in a band," Leslie reminded him. "You do have other band members. Do you think maybe they can take over some of the tour prep?"
    Awsten considered it. They were in the last stages of prepping for the tour. All of their stage props had arrived and needed to be double checked for being packed away in the trailer. There was still some merch he needed to sign, but he could pop in his headphones or a tv show to watch and mindlessly sign, and then pack away. There was some paperwork to be signed, the set list to be finalized, and they needed to run through once more what instruments they were bringing to make sure everything fit in the trailer. It didn't necessarily have to be him to do all of this. He just did it because as the frontman, he assumed the most responsibility from the label. But he wasn't contracted to be the sole decider for the band. He could give some of it to Geoff and Otto.
    "Yeah." Awsten said. "I think I can."
    Leslie grinned. "Excellent."
   
He collapsed on the couch as soon as he got home.
    Exhaustion had washed over him during the drive home, and he thought he might try taking a nap. Awsten has joked in the past that God skipped over him when he dished out napping as a skill. He was honestly so poor at taking naps that he could count on his hands the number of times he napped in his life on his fingers, and they were usually because he had been sick with food poisoning or the flu. Today, however, and per the advice of his therapist, he thought he'd at least try.
    He texted Geoff and asked to handle the final tour preparations this week.
    Yeah, man. You ok? Geoff responded.
    Awsten wrote back. Yeah. Leslie explained it all and said I just need some sleep. Apparently this weekend was just a bad case of anxiety and dissociation. She didn't seem too worried about it being an issue.
    Geoff replied: That's good. Don't worry about the tour stuff, I can manage it all. Take care of yourself. Let me know if you need anything.
    Awsten relaxed. Thanks, dude.
    He put his phone down and turned on his side. His cat, Jet, jumped up on the couch. She paced in a circle before settling in the curve of his torso, kneading the cushion and purring. He scratched her ears, and then stretched over her for the TV remote. He clicked the TV on to Parks and Rec, his go to show when he needed to fall asleep.
    In this episode, the town's cult had gathered in a park at night to celebrate what they thought was the last night before total apocalypse. They discussed their lizard surveyor, Zorp, who was coming to destroy the Earth and all of its inhabitants, while they played flutes and ate pizza. Across town, another character was hosting an "End of the World" party at a dance club. They had all kinds of exhibits at the party - a variety of VIP areas, each one more exclusive than the others, a caged tiger, a glass box that blew money all around you, an inflatable pirate ship, and at one point, an entire marching band line that came out. Awsten mindlessly watched, and wondered how the characters managed to get everything so quickly. Especially the live tiger.
    He felt himself begin to feel drowsy, and it became harder to focus on the TV. Aziz Ansari's character talked to the camera, describing the party scene around him. His brown skin was highlighted in white lights that shone from under his chin, contrasting in the strobing purple and blue party lights. A deep bell chimed from somewhere off camera, marking the hour. The club dancers cheered.
    "Ayyyyyyy y'all know what time it is!" Aziz shouted, turning to the audience. "Everyone put on your masks!"
    Everyone in the crowd slipped on large oversized rubber masks. Everyone was featured as a different animal. Horses, elephants, foxes, pigs, lions, cats, dogs and wolves. Their masks jiggled and bumped into each other as they continued to dance.
    Aziz turned back to the camera, grinning. His white teeth were glowing, his eyes, dark and sparkling.
    "Aren't you forgetting something?" He asked the camera.
    The bell continued to toll, drowning out the club music. The crowd continued to dance feverishly, despite the absence of music. Their limbs bulged out of the masks, wild and scared. The crowd began to scream as they began to realize they couldn't stop.
    And then Aziz put on his own mask. It was a gray face with yellow, hollow looking eyes. From it's gaping mouth, black liquid oozed in a single steady stream. Aziz began to laugh.
    With a jolt, Awsten sat up. Jet jumped off the couch and ran under the table. Parks and Rec had paused, asking him if he was still watching. Disoriented, he noticed night had fallen outside. He checked the time on his phone. He had been asleep for hours.
    He rubbed his eyes, clearing away the nightmare from his mind. He got up to pour himself a glass of water. Jet crawled from underneath the table and rubbed up against his leg and he realized he was supposed to feed her a couple hours ago. He cracked open a can of tuna medley and dumped it on a plate. She jumped up on the counter, too eager to wait for him to put it on the floor.
    As he heated up his own dinner, leftovers from chipotle, he thought about the dream. There was something about it that nagged at him.
    Aren't you forgetting something?
    The microwave dinged. He pulled them out, wincing as the too hot plate burned his fingers. He quickly set it down on the counter. Steam rose in coils from the dish, and pulled out his phone while he waited for it to cool.
    Without thinking about it, he opened the photos on his phone and scrolled through the ones Jawn had sent to Awsten yesterday. He paused on the one of him running away from the mausoleum and studied his expression. Panicked, delusioned, and disoriented. He knew now that it was nothing more than a bad case of dissociation.
    But there was one piece, one mystery that still hadn't been solved. He forgot to mention it to Leslie.
    The hooded figure that sat hiding in the back of the mausoleum, watching.