A skeleton's trek

§ 3.

*FEW DAYS EARLIER*

"Let's start with your name, perhaps?" the psychiatrist suggested, fearfully, to the wrestler-masked fellow who held him at gunpoint.

"I have no clue. I don't recall my name," the gunman answered, with a manly, badly hoarse voice and a Hispanic accent.

The schmooze took place in this private practitioner's Spanish Harlem office. Both of them were in an extremely tense mood. The masked guy rushed inside a couple minutes ago, erratically swinging his six-shooter around. He didn't come for money, nor for drugs. He demanded Dr. Diego Cristobal just to diagnose him.

Outside, on the streets surrounding the counseling office, there was a Latin American festival roaring. It was still daytime, but the roads were already dense-packed with people dancing to loud merengue music. This crowd efficiently concealed the gunman, who arrived already masked. His colorful disguise blended into the sea of flashy garments that were tradition on such festivals. Replicas of the iconic mask of a notorious Puerto Rican wrestler were sold at every market stand. He snitched and wore one of these, plus a pair of dark sunglasses, as incognito.

In strong contrast with the aforementioned, he wore an old-fashioned suit and fedora. He squeezed on the revolver grip in lather gloves. The insane intruder was so desperate to understand the nature of his madness, that he could kill for help.

"Then amnesia must be part of the diagnosis, if you don't remember your name... You know where you came from?"

"From a tiny village of El Salvador. And on foot."

This didn't particularly surprise the senior psychiatrist. He heard a few fanciful claims throughout his career.

"So, you walked from Central America to New York, because you wish to find a solution to your amnesia, if I'm not mistaken?"

"Not exactly. The amnesia is the smaller issue. The main reason for my visit is that I'm going utterly nuts."

"How so?"

"I'm clued-in on the essence of psychosis: delusions and hallucinations."

"Indeed, correct, go on!" the doc nodded frantically, thinking any small indication of agreement might score him good points.

"I happen to have some of both: on one hand, inspired by some heavenly source, I started believing, more than anything, that I must travel to Manhattan. I needed to come here, because I was guided here by a terrifically strong sensation. A sense of obligation that I must reverse a breakage in the order of Nature; that I must rectify a violation of the laws of Creation..." in shame, he stopped detailing, like someone who has suddenly regained enough sobriety to see the lunacy of his beliefs.

"I see... And the hallucinations?"

"Well, whenever I gaze upon a reflective surface..."

"What do you see then?"

"No skin. No flesh. A naked skull in place of my face!"

Dr. Cristobal remained silent. Patients told him before about various dysmorphia hallucinations, but at this moment he couldn't imagine a more grotesque failure of the senses. He began to sympathize with his attacker.

"In the beginning, freaking myself out was avoidable. Since I was homeless in El Salvador, it was rare for me to stand in front of mirrors. But with time the curse propagated downward. All the musculature of my shoulders disappeared. My chest was a see-through set of ribs and nothing else, no lungs, no heart, nada. Eventually, I didn't even have to disrobe to be filled with horrific self-disgust. Because, in the end, even my hands were composed of bones only. In spite of everything, how am I able to locomote, speak and feel... This, too, is an absurd result of my detachment from reality, I guess."

With this, melancholy overwhelmed the gunman, the signs of which calmed the clinician too. He sat down behind his desk, then gestured to the masked one to take a seat.

His previous willfulness has totally passed. He lowered his firearm, sat into the armchair afront the desk, then continued complaining:

"I wouldn't recognize my face, if I saw it. I lack any memory from the times when living tissue covered my skull. I don't have photographs of myself. What I have is a delusion: that on a rainy evening, in a cemetery of El Salvador, I emerged from a neglected little grave. And that only one individual can assist me in uncovering the cause of my decease, and my forgotten identity: a certain FBI agent from Manhattan."

"Ah, you see!" the doc's face lit up. "Now we have something concrete, with which we can anchor down, until the storm raging in your psyche passes. We shall inquire from the FBI whether they ever employed the person you're searching for, and as soon as we learn that he never existed, we can rest assured that your 'divine whispers' were false."

"You're on to something, let's hope!"

"And what should be the name of this hypothetical employee of the FBI?"

"Armando Hueso," he replied, and took off his sunglasses.

In this moment, the psychiatrist was startled to the verge of loosing it. He could barely stop himself from shouting in fear. His pulse went through the roof; the blood in his arteries surpassed the magma-pressure of a supervolcano.

Because what he stared into through the openings of the mask, weren't eyes. They were the darkest blackness he ever saw. Not pupils, but the absence of everything. Cold outer space itself, the pitch-black Abyss itself.

"Uhm, can I ask you..." he swallowed one big enough to drain the global ocean of the moon Europa, "to remove your mask as well?"

The disguise came off, and Dr. Cristobal froze. In his spine-chilling shock, he spent quite a few seconds calculating how he should react. Until:

"Sir... There's nothing wrong with you! At least with your mind."

At this point, the skeleton would have raised his eyebrow, if he had any.

"The issue is with your soul... I mean your spirit; the metaphysical essence of your being. Either that's the problem, or it's my own sanity, because, good sir, I too see you as a skeleton!"

Maybe the doc is just planning to escape this situation with an affirmative response, the suited one thought. But he didn't accuse him of deception, not yet. First, he wanted to observe how he continues.

"However, I believe I have a remedy for even this! How about I redirect you to a friend, one who's versed in the occult even more than I am? What if I told you that this ex-patient of mine happens to be the most reliable seer in East Harlem? Please, allow me to dial up Miss Elvaira for you, it'll only take a moment, she always answers the phone..."

The one in the suit was so weirded out by this reaction, that his hearing went muted, and his vision blurred. It felt surreal, the way Dr. Diego Cristobal actually explained to the person on the other end of the line, that a self-moving skeleton visited him, one in need of esoteric aid. With this, they confirmed his dread, which frightened him even beyond an official psychosis diagnosis: that the things he believes are really happening to him.

"It can't be that I'm hallucinating somethings as wild as a shrink trying to convince me that I'm NOT mentally ill. This means that it wasn't just my imagination projecting out those non-psychiatrists either, who ran away from me, or after me, along my journey."

His self-doubt faded away. He accepted his cursed reality. He sank into the armchair, took the phone from the doc, and listened to Miss Elvaira's introduction and offer.