50 pages • 1 hour read
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Adam recaps his recent hallucinations (just Rebecca and a harmless choir). His mother is doing fine with the pregnancy, other than being overly forgetful and emotional. His relationship with Maya is still great, sex and all.
One night, Maya appears to climb through Adam’s bedroom window. He thinks she is leading him outside, so he follows her, chasing her into oncoming traffic. But the vision of Maya disappears when a car hits her. The entire walk home, Adam panics that he had no indication that this Maya was a hallucination. He climbs back into bed with the terrifying thought, “What if Maya wasn’t real?” (211). He worries that he could have imagined their entire relationship. The next day at school, when one of the nuns greets Maya, Adam is beyond relieved that someone else sees his girlfriend, which means that she’s not a hallucination.
Adam’s therapist brings him to an exhibit of art created by people with schizophrenia. Adam thinks the entire thing is a waste of time, except for the baked sculptures. Adam connects with this because it’s something he can do—the baked art is “beautiful because it was real” (216).
Not all of Adam’s hallucinations are as far-fetched as the mob boss and his goons: Some build on real experiences that Adam has had, which makes them even harder to tell apart from reality. Maya visited Adam in the middle of the night in Chapter 22, but because the experience was a pleasant one, Adam chose to believe she was real despite a lack of solid evidence one way or another. Maya’s hallucinatory visit in Chapter 32 foils the earlier incident: Now, there is no indication that Maya is a hallucination until she disappears. Maya being hit by a car represents Adam’s fear that he’ll lose her if she finds out about his illness.
Adam loves the baked art in Chapter 33 because it feels real to him. For Adam, the idea of reality is fraught because so he so often cannot fully grasp it. Because it is so hard for him to come by, Adam equates reality with beauty, even though there are many things in real life that aren’t beautiful. He finds beauty in reality because he wants to live only in reality, and he fears the falsehoods his mind creates. Still, he can even find beauty in his hallucinations—as long as he can tell they aren’t real.
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