The Inner Life of Alex W.

A story of strangers and streets

The following is an excerpt from an interview that took place between Dr. Michael Guo and a patient known only as Alex W. that took place on April 21^st, 2009.

Dr Michael Guo (MG): Can you please tell me when you first became aware of the difference between you and other people?

Alex W (AW): Well, I can’t for certain say that I am actually different from anybody else.

MG: But you’re aware that most people don’t claim to experience the same condition that you claim.

AW: Well, until the accident I was unaware of the “condition” as you call it. Until then, I would have said I was the same as everyone else.

MG: Let’s talk about the accident.

AW: I was mountain biking. My back tire skidded out from under me. I went over a rocky ledge. I fell about eight feet and gashed my side badly on a tree branch.

MG: And that’s when you saw it.

AW: The city? Yes.

MG: Could you expound on that? For my notes, you understand.

AW: When I looked into the wound, beneath a surface layer of broken skin, I saw the exposed buildings and streets of a city within me. Its occupants were staring up at a rent in their sky. Cars were stopped in its streets. People walking their dogs were frozen, pointing up at me as I peered down at them. They looked terrified.

MG: Had you struck your head in the fall?

AW: Yes. And, of course, my immediate assumption was a hallucination.

MG: And when did you begin to believe that what you had seen was more than that?

AW: The wound healed unusually quickly. At night in the hospital, when it was very quiet, I could hear sounds of construction coming from within me.

MG: Construction?

AW: Drills. Jackhammers. Metallic clanging. As if, say, a great scaffolding was being created.

MG: You believe the inhabitants within you closed the wound manually?

AW: I know what it sounds like.

MG: Do you have any other evidence for yours claim?

AW: It’s not the only time I’ve heard things from… inside myself. Something that I can’t ascribe a simple biologic explanation to.

MG: Such as?

AW: I’ve heard traffic. I’ve heard laughter. The sounds of children playing. Birdsong in the morning. Sirens.

MG: Voices?

There is a note here in the transcript that Alex W laughed in response to this question.

MG: What’s funny?

AW: Everyone asks me that eventually. As if that’s the only reason not to trust yourself.

MG: You don’t trust yourself?

AW: I don’t trust… them. The citizens.

MG: Could you expand on that?

AW: People are fickle, especially people en masse. Mobs can rule. Cities are prone to violence. They have bad neighborhoods. Urban decay can set in. Corrupt officials can be elected who prioritize their own interests over that of the place that they live.

MG: That scares you?

AW: It terrifies me. How do I know myself when there are hundreds of thousands of people inside me and I know none of them? Where do I end and where do they begin? What if they turn against me? Would I turn against myself? How much of what I do is driven by my own thoughts? How much is them? How much of me is me?

MG: Those seem like reasonable concerns.

AW: Really? Because most other people I’ve spoken to about this have suggested that if that’s what I’m worried about, I belong in here.

MG: Well, I guess, I don’t see those concerns as necessarily related to your… condition.

AW: They seem fairly intimately connected to me, doctor.

MG: That’s fair. But the concerns you’re talking about—How much do we know ourselves? How much of our behavior is driven by healthy conscious thoughts? How much are we victims to subconscious meanderings?—are concerns we all share.

AW: But there are ways to control those concerns. There is cognitive-behavioral therapy. There is medication. What does one do to inoculate oneself against strangers living within one’s own skin?

MG: Let me answer that in a roundabout way. Once, when I was younger, I went to a party, and there was a man there who was being cruel to the woman who’d accompanied him. You could see the hurt in her eyes. And yes, I’d had a few drinks, but I lost my head. I screamed. I told him I found him repugnant. I threatened violence. I made a scene. In the end, I was almost as badly behaved as he was. And the next morning, when I woke up, I could not reconcile that behavior with anything I knew about myself.

AW: But it was you.

MG: Yes, and, while I cannot say that I am certain that you have a city inside yourself—and I am unwilling to cut you open to find out—I will say that perhaps the problem is that you see the city as being other than you. I made peace with the man inside me who screamed at a rude stranger. I accepted him as part of myself, albeit a surprising part. Perhaps you can make peace with your city. Accept it, even if it is not what you expected to find when you looked inside.

Here the transcript ends except for a short addendum:

On May 30^th, Alex W’s room was found empty. His door had been locked and the orderlies had checked on him an hour before his escape was discovered. He appeared to have exited via a hole hacked into the brickwork of an exterior wall. While initially no tools could be found, upon closer inspection Dr Guo recovered from the rubble over a thousand tiny pickaxes.