Meg Howald

CHAMELEON

Numbers, like autumn leaves, fall away from my memory and float on currents in and out of my mind. The motionless man sat quietly in the white, diagnostic room unaware that two psychiatrists, Dr. Ann Majec and Dr. Paul Castlewood, made notes in the observation room above him. Numbers, like autumn leaves decay and disintegrate in mute shadows of memory…. The silent man was Dr. Majec’s patient and requested Ann to be present when he slipped into stasis, the stage between his present self and the next one – a dangerous stage when he neglected all human functions, not because he refused to eat, sleep or eliminate, but because he didn’t know he existed. In the past, when he emerged from the ‘in-between’ he never knew whom he left behind or what the key and address in his jacket pocket belonged to.