Fools Follow, Part 9

“Well, we’re not in ‘Group’ now, are we?” The Stranger began, and poked Bart quite hard in the chest. “So I imagine you’ll feel this too!”

“Ouch!” Bart said, rubbing his chest with his hand with the pill. “Stop it! Just go away! You’re not a real person, because if you were real, you wouldn’t be acting like this.”

“I cause you pain, and you deny that I exist – that’s a most curious position for you to take.”

“Sometimes, our imaginations and thoughts can hurt us more than anything that is real.”

“Where did you learn that?” The Stranger asked attentively.

“I don’t know.”

“It’s true – not in the way you’ve been taught, but in its own way – I suppose there’s a truth in everything, depending on your perspective – but there’s so little time…” The Stranger said more to himself than to Bart. “Alright. I see that me causing you pain doesn’t prove to you how I’m real, but we’ll have to be quick. How can I prove you that I’m real and that I need you to help me?”

This was an easy question for Bart. It was one of the first lessons they had learned in Group. He, along with all of his fellow circle-sitters had been told that the easiest way to recognize if something was real was to observe other people’s reactions. If a person saw a purple elephant, they should look around and see what other people were doing. If the other people were acting normally, it meant that the purple elephant probably did not exist, and that one was having some sort of problem. However, if everyone ran around screaming, it meant that they probably saw the purple elephant as well.

The reason that they were screaming was that elephants, especially purple ones, were not common in everyday life. There was an exception to this rule, and it had some sort of long words to describe it, and it meant that everyone was not normal, but only for the moment. But in those situations, if everyone was not normal, it was fine to be not normal yourself. The other thing he had learned was that if you really wanted to you could ask people if they saw the elephant; however, the group had been told that this was generally not a good idea because it would usually indicate to people that they were not normal, because normal people generally did not need to ask such a question. Bart had taken to this lesson because it made sense. All he had to do in life was observe to see what other people were doing, which was something he already did, so he would always be ready to tell what was real and what was not. To this day, he had never had a problem about determining what was real. Often, his group-mates would point at things that they thought were there, and talk about them, but Bart was not fooled, because he would look at other people, usually the Orderlies, because they were normal, and he could tell by their expressions that they saw nothing either, so in most cases he knew that his friends were acting not-normal because they saw things in the nothing.

All of this was fine, but today was different. One of the reasons Bart had been whispering was because he was trying to observe everyone in the room to see if they were looking at him. The problem with that was that most people weren’t looking at him, and since they weren’t looking at him, it was hard to tell if they thought he was acting differently. Even more difficult was the fact that even if they were looking at him, these were the same people that were likely to see purple elephants where none existed, so he wasn’t sure he could trust their opinion in any case. It was a real test, he thought. But there was one group he could always rely on in a situation, especially this situation.