Hallucinogens
II. Objective
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." (Albert Einstein)
This was how the doctors explained it in an interview conducted last year, around a young boy hardly aware of the happenings and cameras around him:
"While people might say that he's only 'seeing things', in his eyes this is fundamentally wrong. In Kobayashi Naoya's world, these spirits and demons are very real. Sometimes they are even more real than you or I. They can persuade him to do dangerous, even lethal, things, threatening to hurt him or the people he knows if he doesn't comply. For a child, it's a very scary world. It would be scary for any of us, but we can only imagine the things he sees.
"What we do know is that this isn't just an imaginary world created by a child's overactive imagination. It has developed to the point that Kobayashi-kun actually experiences pain inflicted by these demon. He has given us explicit descriptions of what they look like and how they act, even their names. It's a serious problem. As of today it can't be cured by standard medicine. Kobayashi-kun has only ever gone a few hours at a time without seeing hallucinations while conscious. He is currently twelve years old and…"
The man closed the window on the browser and brought up on the child's picture frozen on a different article. At first glance he was a normal looking boy, but a closer examination revealed a deep, heavy tiredness lurking behind those eyes, the eyes of a person not completely there. By now he would have been thirteen years old and was probably still in and out of the mental wards in hospitals.
Of course, people always needed a logical explanation to any phenomena they struggled to understand. These days, if there wasn't a scientific explanation for some strange occurrence, it was simply believed that one had not yet been discovered. The foggy images of ghosts in photographs, for instance, were the result of the lighting and moisture in the atmosphere.
It was the same as illnesses in the old days, such as those "witches" in Europe and America. People weren't persecuted as harshly as in those times, sure, but now they were trying to write the Sight off as a brain malfunction. They were making that child believe demons and spirits were hallucinations, and that in itself was dangerous. The ayakashi were threats to humanity, even the benevolent ones when provoked, and for a person with the Sight to ignore their existence entirely…
"'The voices aren't real. They're just a result of your genetics and you can't let them control you,'" he mocked in a sarcastic voice. There wasn't any viable way to have the demons leave people like them alone. Even becoming strong didn't prevent the most arrogant from confronting an exorcist.
It was true, he admitted, that most possessing the Sight didn't turn violent and intentionally hurt their families or themselves, even if they acquired it at a young age. He had never done that, even if his temperament had slowly grown more irascible towards the ayakashi, and he didn't know of any who did either.
But he refused to believe that it was simply a manifestation of the boy's brain. The doctors had professed that the boy received real pain when the demons injured him, and that in his "world" they existed. Demons and spirits had the abilities to disillusion humans, and were possibly responsible for the hallucinations he experienced.
It was probably something worth investigating on his own, outside of work. He might never have a chance to meet the boy, but he had to at least begin to figure these details out. If his findings yielded anything relevant, he considered presenting it at a convention. It was worth his time, at the very least, to discover where the boundaries of "their" world laid.
It didn't even cross this particular exorcist's mind that something could be wrong with their genetics, an imbalance of a few precious chemicals, that created some strange mixture of reality and the ayakashi and their parallel world. What had become normal to them for so long perhaps was the furthest thing from "normal".
The exorcist set this information aside and kept the boy's face in his mind's eye as he transitioned to the next phase of his life. He beckoned for his familiars and went to execute his "real" job in the misty forest across from the country inn.
However, he simply could not sweep the interview from his memory. It was a simple exorcism, but his distracted state vaguely disturbed him. It was a dangerous gamble to work and pay attention to anything but the task at hand, especially with the malevolent ayakashi. The boy and the doctor's words remained in his thoughts long after he left the town.
It reminded him of a different boy he knew and his own troubled past with the ayakashi. And for whatever reason, a reason he supposed needed no exact words to describe, he decided to pay his friend a visit. It was a strange, compelling feeling, as if he simply needed to peek his head through a crack in the door down the hall to make sure he was still there. It didn't matter that he knew the room's occupant had not stirred and no one had entered the house.
It was something like instinct. He supposed that the ayakashi would know more about that than him. Not that he needed a reason to worry about his friend, who probably placed himself in more dangerous situations than any normal exorcist, and not that his familiars needed a reason in the first place. It was certainly a relief to return to the town and find everything intact, everything as normal as possible, even if it wasn't his home.
"We're going to go visit Natsume," he announced, although the ayakashi were way ahead of him. He stepped down off the gentle slope the inn had been situated upon and made his way towards the train station. Might as well enjoy the country sights while he was here.
• So I decided to make the guy Natori because he's a fun guy. And one day Natsume will appear. One day. Probably the last you'll see of Natsume characters for a little while. Based the information off real interviews and documentaries about people with schizophrenia.