t always had the feeling of a party. A masquerade, even. The others gathered around him in the common room, listening for hours. His stories were like taffy, stretched out richly over afternoons and early evenings. Even the nurses would be caught, pen between teeth, leaning in to hear.
​    Sure, they giggled to each other in the staff room after, but in the moment, they were all like babes pulled up next to fire.
    They called him Doc. Not as a joke, this place and all, but because of that particular way he had of looking at all of you at once. Like he’d just discovered you over the rim of those half-moon spectacles of his.
    And his stories were something else. He’d tell them about talking badgers and walking houses and flying trees. Spotted camels living on clouds. Emerald islands, lands made of terrible horrendous rock, Amazonian rivers, and underground empires. Unbelievable things. But something else.
    Sometimes he talked about the rocket ship he built. Dreamy Boom Boom, he called it. Then he’d grow sad. Outer Space, he’d say with a tear running down his cheek, There’s a rainbow up there a million dreams long. Once he got started on it, he’d spend the next while just staring out the window. You got the sense that he was biding his time. But he always perked up eventually. Those comets, he’d laugh, Were the rudest I’ve ever come across.
    He’d always finish with the last of that dappled sunlight. Looking up, as the fluorescents winked on, as if he’d been interrupted. He’d pick up that umbrella he kept by his chair and rub the handle, carved like the head of a duck, gently, like an old friend. And he’d bounce off down the hall to his room. Right there, at the end. Click and the door would be shut.
    There’d be a moment. Like the head of pin wedged into the silence. A moment where they all might believe. And the weight of what that belief could mean.  
    Then the pin pops and the room breathed out. They looked at one another in that harsh light. Nervous smiles all around. It made their own problems seem trivial. The nurses would roll their eyes and start doling out the evening's pills. Harmless, sure, but what a nutter. Did you see the way he talked to that umbrella. Like it could hear. What a nutter. King of the fools.
    The scene was always like the end of the masquerade. When the masks come off and we’re never sure where we left our true faces.
    Then one morning, he’s gone. Just like that.  
    His room, empty. The window open, curtains fluttering in the breeze. They find his sketchbook on the table, flipped open to a page. A drawing of a round barrel, a door cut in its side, with a cast iron pot for an engine and Doc’s elegant scrawl along the bottom. Dreamy Boom Boom.  
    They found someone else to laugh at after that. They always do.

e didn’t understand how he’d ended up in a museum. He was cutting edge technology. No one had ever been able to replicate him. Human consciousness transported digitally. He was the living and nearly breathing ghost in the machine. He was the one and only.
    Maybe it was his personality. He was the first to admit that he didn’t go out of his way to get along with people. Back when he had his own talk show, he deliberately tried to rile his guests. Like when he asked Boy George about his trip to the nut house. And he did have some quirks. His incessant stutter being one. Also his habit of modulating the pitch of his voice. It was funny the first time. 
    People had moved on. They’d gone from 8-bit to a million in a blink of an eye. Virtual was the only kind of reality going around these days. They’d gone futurist, then neo-futurist, then retro, then re-retro. What was cool once was cool again and cool just wasn’t cool anymore. 
    Real people could be so fickle.
    The best use they ever found for him was selling soda pop. It was embarrassing.
    For now, he was jammed onto an old Amiga in the deepest wing of the videogame museum in Frisco. He’d never even played a videogame in his virtual life. He was surrounded by Italian plumbers, hedgehogs, things that both bleep and bloop but not at the same time, and all kinds of invaders from space. None of them made good company. Or conversation. It was pretty much a fate worse than death for a serious journalist.              
    Maybe he should stop wearing the Ray-Bans and shoulder pads. And get a speech therapist. Mah-mah-mah-maybe that was it.

hey put him in therapy again and told him to stop imagining tigers. They didn’t seem to care that the idea to throw a brick at Susie’s husband hadn’t come from him. It wasn’t his fault the guy didn’t know how to duck.  
    The doctor smiled and nodded a lot, but she kept insisting that his best friend, on the couch beside him, was only a stuffed animal. He was almost thirty. Didn’t he think he was too old for stuffed animals.  He got a peppermint when he left. 
    His mother and the doctor talked in hushed voices while he waited in the room with the old magazines. But tigers have keen hearing. They were going to lobotomize him and put his best friend in the zoo. His mother cried in the car on the ride home. After the last time his parents yelled at each other, his dad had gone on a business trip. That was six weeks ago and he still hadn’t come back. She had taken to drinking alone at the kitchen table. Sometimes he found her asleep there in the morning. He knew it was all because of him.
    When he got home, he went into the basement and closed the door. His mother knocked at it for a while before finally giving up. He could hear the bottle sliding out of the cupboard.
    He got to work on the cardboard box. First the scissors and then he pulled out the felt marker. He wasn’t sure what he would call it yet. Or what it could do to make things better.  He just knew he was tired of being an adult. Their problems seemed so petty. 
    His best friend watched him with dead eyes. They had nothing more to say to each other. The marker was drying out. He was just so tired.