Do You Sleep? – Lisa Loeb: Tails (1995).

EDUCATION TIME!

When most people hear the term 'schizophrenia', they think of hallucinations and delusions. These are called the "positive symptoms" because they involve the addition of something unhealthy that isn't present in a normal mind. As the scientific understanding of the disorder progressed, clinicians became increasingly aware of "negative symptoms" – factors that are present in healthy people which are diminished or taken away in schizophrenia. For example, many people with schizophrenia don't do or say very much and have few goals or interests. (Contrary to the media stereotype of the violent crazy person, many people with schizophrenia are actually quite inert and they are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators.) Although positive symptoms are more dramatic and obviously remarkable, negative symptoms seem to have a bigger impact on quality of life. In addition to positive and negative symptoms, there are also cognitive symptoms, which include difficulties with planning, abstract thinking, and organizing thoughts into logical strings (a problem called "thought disorder"). Thought disorder can be seen when the person says things that make no sense like, "Did you bring your lunch or is it not raining on Tuesday?" (In contrast, when people talk about delusions, they say sensible things that are simply wrong like, "I'm worried I'll be kidnapped because the CIA is out to get me." That sentence is clearly delusional, but it makes logical sense.)

There are actually several subtypes of schizophrenia. The most common subtype, which is the one you're probably most familiar with, is paranoid schizophrenia, in which the individual is affected by paranoid delusions and sometimes auditory hallucinations, but relatively unaffected by negative and cognitive symptoms. In this story, Jamie Braddock has a less common subtype – disorganized schizophrenia – in which cognitive symptoms are severe and predominate the clinical picture, though positive and negative symptoms are present as well.

Incidentally, antipsychotic medications can be very effective in reducing hallucinations and decently effective in reducing delusions, but they are generally much less effective in treating negative and cognitive symptoms.

And now you know. And knowing is half the battle.

12:00 am

This is Erik's dream. This is the dream he has most often. He has other dreams sometimes – some worse than this one, some not so bad – but this is the dream that he has over and over again.

In his dream, he is sitting on a bench outside of the library, sitting on the back part you lean on, actually, so he is head and shoulders above the other people waiting around. From his vantage point, he can see it coming, though he doesn't know what it is. It's huge, though, and he can tell it's dangerous, but there's nothing he can do about it. It will crush them, consume them, destroy them along with everything in its path.

If he tries to shout a warning, no air comes through and his mouth seals up. If he just tries to point at the thing, his arm, his hand disintegrate, sand that blows away in the wind. If he tries to run, his legs can't get traction and they wear away to nothing. If he tries to take a closer look, he can't see. If he tries to shove someone out of the way, he turns ghostly, he can't touch them.

This continues until either he wakes up or there is nothing left of him – a mind without a body.

12:00 am

"What do you think she should do with the kid?" asked Tony.

Steve folded his pants neatly and lay them on the floor beside his shoes. "That's not my place to say."

"Doesn't mean you don't have an opinion."

"I suppose…I've seen child soldiers before, fought – well, I hate to say against them, but…" Steve ran his hands through his hair. "I'm the first to say that they should be treated with special," he searched for the word, "mercy, but that doesn't mean they're not dangerous. So I suppose the only opinion I have is that, when that boy was talking about killing you, he meant it."

"I guess I'll have to be careful then," said Tony in a voice that failed to exude any degree of caution as he leaned forward to kiss Steve's collarbone.

"Do you really think this is a good idea?" Steve grabbed Tony's hands and pushed them gently back.

"I always think this is a good idea."

"You want me to get along with your friend Ororo. I'm pretty sure that having sex when she's in the next room is going to work against that goal."

"We just have to keep it quiet."

"Tony, you're never quiet. Ever." Steve wrapped an arm around the smaller man. "We'll make up for lost time tomorrow."

Tony lay still for a few moments before squirming back out of bed. "I'm not tired. Want to race me down twenty-seven flights of stairs?"

"It's not a race if I win every time."

"Come on," said Tony in a tone that suggested he thought this was a persuasive argument.

"I have work tomorrow, Tony. I need rest even if you think you don't." Steve sat up and kissed Tony's chest. "If you're not going to bed, do something quiet, something relaxing. Maybe you'll get some sleep."

12:45 am

"What are you doing up?"

Erik's face was unreadable as he turned back to look at Tony. "I don't sleep much." After a beat, he asked, "What are you doing up?"

Tony's voice carried only a hint of schoolyard teasing as he echoed, "I don't sleep much."

Erik returned to his work, which appeared to be building an elaborate structure out of video game cases. It looked a bit like a house of cards.

Tony had been planning on playing Katamari Damacy (with the sound turned down, that was quiet, right?), but he could see the case playing a key structural role in whatever Erik had built. "What are you doing?"

"At the moment, I'm trying to think of a reason not to kill you."

"Yeah, you're still on about that, huh? You're not the first person to get all pissy at me about something my Dad did. When I was at college, I used to get it all the time, usually from chicks in corduroy skirts or guys who wore duct tape shoes. Although one time there was this really hot girl who was blaming me for deforestation or something equally ridiculous and-" Tony stopped short because he had just met Erik's eyes and he could see the look Steve had described, the one that was serious and deadly. He took a step backward, then leaned against a chair so it all looked natural. "Where are you from, anyway?"

"Syria."

"Look, I'm sorry if someone you cared about got caught in the crossfire, but Syria's a rogue state and-"

Erik stiffened. "Syria is not a rogue state." He flung his arm through his construction, knocking it down. "Fucking Americans!" He spat. "Learn some fucking geography!"

"It's…north Africa?"

"If you were a species, I would applaud your extinction."

Okay, so this was going badly given that the kid was now threatening to wipe out his entire genome and Tony still wasn't playing Katamari. He decided to fall back on his eternal plan B: impress them with fancy gadgets. "You came here looking for weapons, right?"

Erik's facial expression immediately shifted from deepest hate to cautious optimism. He nodded.

"Well, given your repeated threats to kill me, I can't show you any weapons, but I can show you some other stuff. Want to see an infrared motion detector?"

4:15 am

After laboriously walking Jamie through the process of determining his own location (he was in the Kodak chemical plant parking lot), she had woken Kitty and asked her to go pick him up. Kitty had readily agreed, which meant she probably made Piotr do it, which was just as well.

Problem solved, crisis averted. This was just the sort of trouble Jamie couldn't manage on his own. He could handle things like cooking meals or even following a budget, but throw him a curveball and he was completely stymied. Ororo wondered how long it had taken him to think of calling her. She wondered how he had gotten to the plant. If she was picturing the map correctly, it was a solid five miles from the assisted living center, so he could have walked there, but it would have taken some time.

And of course, why had he gone there? Because of the man with the red eyes? Erik's "Enemy"? But that was ridiculous in so many ways. And yet, Erik might be a deceitful when it suited his purposes, but Jamie wasn't. Ororo wished it weren't such an uninviting hour so she could discuss the situation with someone else. Although she preferred to keep her own counsel at times, she believed it was wise to seek many perspectives on difficult problems.

Ororo didn't feel at all like going back to sleep. She padded into the kitchen, with the vague thought of making herself a cup of tea, only to see Tony perched on a coffee table, energetically leaning from one side to the other as he controlled what appeared to be a glob of small mammals. There was Erik lying motionless on the carpet, curled on his side with a video game controller lying just past his fingertips.

The game paused and Tony turned around. "Hey, um, good morning?" He gingerly stepped down from the coffee table, avoiding the sleeping form below, and skittered over to the kitchen counter.

And Ororo found herself telling the story to Tony. Not the whole story; her need for perspective had to be weighed against Erik's legitimate desire for privacy. She left out Erik's sister's name and how she died, just vaguely explained that he came to the United States fleeing persecution in Syria. But she explained that Erik believed he was in telepathic communication with another boy the same age, and that they were all in danger from this man with red eyes who could control people's actions, and that Jamie had just called her, claiming to have been controlled by a man with red eyes.

"So he's crazy, huh?" Tony aimed a thumb backward to point at Erik.

"No, no, he's just…"

Tony shook his head. "Let me get this straight. He thinks he's being stalked by Cylons or something and you don't believe him, which you shouldn't, but then a guy who's totally nuts claims the same thing and that makes it believable all of a sudden?"

Ororo furrowed her brow. "Please don't refer to Jamie that way."

"Hey, I liked Jamie. I thought he was a nice guy." In fact, during his time living with Ororo, Tony had designed and built an electronic pillbox that used a combination of pressure sensors and voice alarms to help Jamie keep up with his complicated medication regimen. It was one of the few things Ororo had ever seen Tony do that could truly be described as altruistic. "He was a nice guy, but his head was pretty far from reality. You can't take him saying he saw something as really solid evidence."

"But he's never had visual hallucinations, ever. And he hasn't had any contact with Erik at all. What are the odds that they would both come up with the same, bizarre story?"

"Low," allowed Tony, "but still higher than the odds of magic glowy-eyed monsters." As Ororo failed to acquiesce to his superior math, Tony began rummaging through one of several plastic bins filled with electronic miscellany. After a moment, he found what he was looking for and pulled it out along with a nine volt battery. "There," he said, with a sense of finality.

"What is that?"

"It's an integrated delay-lock fuse," he said as he fiddled with wires and hooked the battery up to the object's leads. "Stark Industries uses these in all of our non-aerial delayed-blast munitions."

"Delayed," said Ororo, "like a bomb?"

"Well, the official Starktech is mainly applied to situation-control devices, like flash grenades, but a reasonable amateur could repurpose it. There, finished." He held it up. Two red diodes glowed in the center. "See? Red eyes." Tony looked back at the kid sleeping on the floor and was surprised to find he felt a little bad that the mystery was solved so easily, that this was just mental illness, not a valiant struggle against the demons of the night. "I'm sorry, Ororo, but he's just a messed up little kid."

"Ah," said Ororo tenuously. "A messed up kid." She ran her fingers over the marble countertop. "And what does that make you?"

"Hey," said Tony, raising his glass, "I'm an adult. Got the legal papers and everything."

Ororo gave a short, indulgent laugh. "And yet you seem to want to hold onto many of the trappings of childhood. Your midnight snack is chocolate milk."

"Uh, point of interest," Tony took a sip, "this is Kahlua."

Ororo sighed.