Well, who the fuck knows what’s real anymore! I sure don’t. I always thought as I got older that things would make more sense, but they make less and less god damn sense every day.

And I think, It sure is an air-thin miracle that I wake up in my bed every morning—that I have a bed at all. That I’m surrounded by four walls. That I turn the faucet and water comes pouring out. It could all be taken away from me in an instant, but here it is for now, and it’s as real as I can perceive it to be.

Sometimes the smoke from a cigarette seems to glitch, the way the wind takes it, and I wonder if I’ve just seen something I’m not supposed to have seen.

So far the little man with the pencil-thin microphone hasn’t come out of panel in my wall and told me my life is a game show, and it’s been going on for twenty-six years, and wouldn’t I like to come on down and meet the audience?

No zippers on the backs of human heads. No cardboard skyscrapers. No sign of the reptiles who run the place. It really is solid all the way through. But sometimes that cigarette smoke looks off. . . .

My whole life I labored to be a thing, because I thought that’s what you were supposed to do. Lately I have stopped. I have a name? And a family and a personality too? Maybe. That’s OK if you want to think that. I’m just here until I’m not, so you can call me whatever you like. In my mind I’m nothing at all.