Hands took hold all over his body.  Delicate, feminine fingers gripped at his palm and his right forearm.  Someone else, someone short, had both her hands around his left wrist and was hoisting up the arm with her shoulder.  Rough, powerful hands grabbed him by the armpits.  All of them worked to pull him from the eddy of lost equilibrium that was dragging him down.  They yanked him out of the nauseating current of the spinning room and into a wheelchair.

Things began to settle back into place.  The orderly and the two nurses released him but hovered with claustrophobic closeness.  Horus rubbed off prickly beads of sweat from his forehead and shifted his seating so the armrest didn't jab into his belly.  Air wheezed into his lungs.

"Sir, are you alright – can you hear me?"  The strong Hispanic woman on his left was talking into his face. 

Horus blinked rapidly trying to shake off the gray fog from his eyes, while he forced the bile in his throat to stay down.

He had been fine just moments before.  He was discharged and on his way home.  Well, not really home – back to the house the DTAA had rented for him. 

Home was nearly three thousand miles away in a locked up cottage on a hill, with dustcovers draped over the furniture.  It was empty and abandoned, with the only sound coming from the lonesome bamboo wind chimes on the balcony - his balcony with its perched view over Hamoa Beach.  Horus used to look down at the waves, sipping his Kona coffee, and savoring those lazy early hours of the morning.  He'd linger flipping through the paper until he felt he had wasted enough time and got to work pruning the fruit trees and tending the garden.

Most days a neighbor or the postman would stop by to chat about the weather, politics, or the latest island gossip.  That was about all the socializing Horus had in his quiet, normal life.  But here he didn't even have that.

He had been in the hospital for six days and no one had visited.  There had been no flowers, no cards.  His family hadn't even been informed.  Secretly, he was grateful that his son's fidelity hadn't been put to the test.  He knew his ex-wife wouldn't have called, but for as long as it stayed untested, Horus could believe that Jason would have cared.  Perhaps the boy — now a grown man, he reminded himself — might have dropped everything to visit him and tend to his recovery. 

The only one from work to come was an Aira security guard, who had dropped off some clothes and toiletries, but had barely said more than, "We all hope you're better soon."  But Horus was too creeped out to take any comfort from it.  There was something deeply unsettling about this stranger rummaging around his stuff to pack up his toothbrush and underwear.

All those things now lay on the floor at his feet.

They had fallen from the plastic shopping bag Horus had packed them in.  His pajama bottoms, with one leg, curled up and one outstretched pointed at the hospital's exit.  His toothbrush, in its travel case, lay just in front of the thin, blonde nurse's foot.  If she moved just a little, she would kick it across the floor.  The copy of the paperback thriller he had bought at the gift shop was face down and spread out, a couple of pages were crushed and stuck out at an unnatural angle – the light gleamed off of the embossed words: The Pharmacist.

Horus felt the urge to pick his things up and gather them to him, but he was too exhausted to move.  He felt completely different than the night the girl had changed into that thing, but he couldn't help but wonder if he was having another heart attack – or heart episode.

Attack, episode, whatever.  Why should I be surprised that my crisis was downgraded?  It's the story of my life.

Kyle had once said that men like him were destined for mediocrity.

"You see, it's all like Nietzsche said, man.  There are those destined for greatness."  Kyle raised and extended his arms, exposing the dirty scrawl of tattoos that covered them, and pointed down at himself with both index fingers.  "And then there are the people like you.  You know, ordinary.  Not meant to accomplish anything important."

Horus Benning tried to concentrate on the slurring of the words instead of the slurring of his character.

"I've told you before," he said jotting down some meaningless scribbles on his pad.  Combining note-taking with a scolding was always an effective means of reestablishing control during a session.  "It's not healthy to view your condition as something that makes you special.  It is something that needs to be treated.  As exhilarating as the highs are, you can't have forgotten the lows.  And also, you really shouldn't be consuming alcohol while on Divalproex.  You'll damage your kidneys."

"Yeah.  Yeah.  I know how to take care of myself."

He didn't.  If he did, Horus would still be plying his private practice – one of the many that fed of the neuroses that boiled up in the Los Angeles smog.

"Look, Kyle—"

"Strafer."

There were times when Horus believed that Kyle Silver wasn't merely bi-polar but suffered from multiple personalities.  He had two distinct patients.  One was the morose self-pitying mess, who would lay in bed and his own filth afraid to face the world.  That one was called Kyle.  The other was the arrogant prick that sat in front of him.  Strafer.

"Look, are you even taking the Divalproex?"

"Nah.  It don't make me feel good.  Why can't you give me something that makes me feel good?  You just don't get me.  I'm about passion.  I'm not all tied up like you with your fuckin' little rules.  I live my life to the extreme and screw the consequences.  Sure it's messy, but I like messy.  And I like feeling good.  Is that so hard to understand?"

"Your treatment isn't about feeling good.  It's about getting better.  But you don't seem interest in that."  Horus paused.  He ran his fingers along the scalp above his ear, pulling at his tight curls, which were frosted with the slightest touch of gray.  "Sometimes I wonder why you hired me."

"I didn't, man.  That was all Lewis."

He was right.  It was Kyle Silver's manager that had approached him.  He offered Horus a way out of the dull grind he was in.  No more housewives, ambulance-chasing lawyers, and whining D-list celebrities.  Lewis offered him the chance to give that up and treat one patient.  To become a private psychologist to a big star.  To make more money in a year than he could make in ten.  It was the perfect thing for him, as he came out of his divorce straight into a midlife crisis.  How could he refuse?

Of course, Lewis didn't mention what a total nightmare his one patient would be. 

The former guitarist for The Princes of Darkness was at the Zenith of his solo career – richer than God and adored by millions.  He was also a bi-polar narcissist, who was estranged from all humanity except those trying to make money off of him.  He was a boy who had never grown up and who spent most of his time eating himself up from the inside, with a cornucopia of drugs and alcohol, as he bounced between exhilarating self-destruction and crushing despondency.

When Lewis had approached Horus, he was desperate to get Kyle out of his fetid bedroom and into the studio to churn out another paint-by-numbers album for the fans.  Lewis's callous, self-serving attitude represented the most sympathy anyone in Kyle's life had for him.

After only a few months, Horus had significantly less empathy for the little bastard.  He truly detested him.  As a psychiatrist, it was wrong — probably even unethical — to hate a patient.  But Kyle Silver was filth.

It always horrified Horus that such a vast number of teenage girls had a poster of him in their bedrooms.  A poster not unlike the one that hung on the wall above Kyle, as he lay reposed on the couch with his muddy boots pressed into the cushions.

Horus's office had been converted from one of the guest bedrooms, and like every other room in the estate had at least one picture of the great Strafer.

The poster was a matted and framed print of one of the most iconic images of the man – the boy – standing alone on stage in the beam of a spotlight with his guitar held triumphantly over his head.  It was all in overexposed black and white except for the Fender, which was blood red.  Kyle's long greasy hair hung over his face, like a specter from a Japanese horror movie.  His leather vest and pants looked as tight and glossy as a bondage suit.

Horus often thought about moving the furniture around so he could look out the window during their sessions instead of at that wall.  The view was of the zoo's rear utility area and offered the scenic vista of a generator, water cistern, dumpster, and the ever-expanding heap of animal dung.  It would definitely be an improvement.

"And you know, man."  Kyle picked at a pimple on his nose.  "Lewis could get me another shrink no problem.  Guys like you are dime a dozen, right?"

"I really thought we were making progress.  The medication was helping.  Your last bout of depression wasn't nearly so severe, remember?  You were still able to function through it.  Much better than the episodes preceding it.  I think if we just..."

Kyle swung himself up into a sitting position, his focus directly on Horus's face.  "You know what I think.  I think you work for me.  I think it's my money that pays for you.  And I think it's about time you realized that."

"I do realize it.  But what you pay me for is to help you cope with your condition."

"That what Lewis hired you for.  But if you want the money to keep raining, things are going to change around here."

That afternoon was twelve years ago.  The estate was now owned by some film director who had torn down the zoo, the bandstand, and the other more eccentric elements of the property.  The Princes of Darkness and Strafer were more popular than ever, their music earning record executives a mint every year. And Kyle Silver was back at the tiny speck of a town he was born in, buried in an imperial mausoleum at a cemetery on the edge of a Mississippi swamp.

Everything that had been that day was long gone.

"Can you hear me," the nurse repeated, alarm building in her voice.  She gently pushed his head back to get a better look at his eyes.  The tips of her fingers tugged at his steel-gray hair.

Horus nodded.  "I'm alright.  I think."

He stared at the hospital entrance.  A row of eight glass doors.  The phantom that had been standing there was gone.

I'm seeing ghosts.  My mind is playing tricks on me.

But he could swear, a minute ago, Kyle Silver was standing there looking very much alive and not a day older than the night he died.