Dr. Lysergus

I have started working with Dr. Lysergus.

Was it today or yesterday?

I came to his office in the morning. 

He was seated in a Model 45, hunched over a notepad. He is tall, thin, stooped. Suit pants, a dress shirt, leather vest, coat hanging on the back of his chair. Everything very clean. Bulky glasses clouded with a film. He does not wear a tie and leaves the top few buttons of his shirt undone so that some of his chest shows.

Without looking up, he gestured, impatient, at a matching chair.

I sat. 

He scribbled in his pad.

I have learned to have patience with the doctors. They work at their own pace, some faster, some slower. Perhaps Dr. Lysergus was expecting me to interrupt him, to take the initiative. 

I waited.

At last, he flipped over the sheet of his pad, looked up at me—near me—his lenses so thick it was difficult to tell exactly where he was looking.

“There is another language,” he said, his voice very low and quiet, “lying within this one.” He paused, tapped his pen against his chin. “And another logic, too, sleeps within this logic.”

It felt as if he were addressing the whole room.

“One must dig into the language to find its true heart.” He made a digging motion with his fingers. “True, too, for the logic.”

He shook his head, wrote on his pad. He seemed just as much to be speaking to himself, airing out ideas.

“To find these other structures,” he said, here bobbing up in his seat, “one must give up the prior language, the prior logic—logics—while still retaining them in a vestigial form. One must hold them, as it were, in the periphery of the mind’s eye, not directly in the gaze but off to the side.”

He turned his head, looked directly at me, his mouth slightly open, as if he had just now realized I was in the room. He nodded and continued.

“To give up the self?” He smiled and looked down, shaking his head sadly. “That is a noble endeavor. A noble strain.”

He went back to his notebook. I did not speak.

Abruptly, he closed his pad, looked down at his desk, opened a book, and said, “That’s enough for today. We speak again in a week’s time.”

At that, I left.

Our Holy Fool

There is one man at the Veldt Institute who bears specific mention. I believe he is a patient, though I have never seen him in the care of a doctor nor engaging in any of the Institute’s therapies. I have never spoken with him, though his presence and influence are impossible to escape. Nearly every patient has some story of the Holy Fool’s impact on his or her treatment, all of them negative.

This man is of his own agenda and keeps his own strange counsel. He is tall, stooped and thin, with a bushy mustache, and thick unfashionable glasses, which sit clouded and askew on his face. His skin has that quality of those deep in the habit of drink: sagging around eyes, drawn at the cheeks, and sallow. Most striking of all are his pale blue eyes that never settle but dance around mercilessly, not landing on you but looking through you, through the walls of the Institute itself to some far distant place.

His behavior is deeply disruptive. One often finds him passing through the halls, apparently drunk or in some other form of ecstasy. One of his common tricks is to steal one of the doctors’ clothes (I have no idea how he gets them) and run through the halls, his head stuck through a hole cut in the seat of the pants. During meals, he sits before a plate brimming over with food (the food here is simple but very good, let alone for an institute of healing) only to complain loudly of starvation. On the occasional fast days observed here, he will break into the kitchen, steal an armful of food, and make a show of eating it in front of us. Our annoyance is palpable.

I come across him most frequently in the common room, where he can be found dancing or singing nonsense to himself. He will pull a book from the shelves and sit among other patients, a leg thrown over an armrest, tipping his glasses forward in mockery of our study. Holding the book upside down, he will loudly recite children’s rhymes or bawdy verse (these are all of the poorest quality, often incomprehensible, most likely made up on the spot) punctuated with obscenities. He invariably manages to steal the particular book one is looking for and it is no use trying to bribe or bargain with the man: he listens only to the voices in his head. If one is truly set on reading it, the book must be wrenched from his grasp. Even if a patient is successful in pulling the book from him, the Holy Fool always manages to tear out critical pages before running off. It’s rarely worth the hassle.

We take his presence, grudgingly, as a matter of course.

My Malady

My greatest failure, and I will admit this to you now, is that I am not aware of my malady. There are those who know their malady and, even if they suffer, or cause others to suffer, can at least live with the knowledge that they are aware. This takes a significant degree of self-knowledge, self-awareness. The strength to see, not to mention substantial strength to admit.

Recognizing one’s malady, or maladies, is, of course, the first step toward addressing that malady and achieving wholeness. As one progresses through the phases, engages in treatments, and struggles with the rigors of the Veldt Institute one should, naturally and gradually, come to recognize one’s malady. So what am I to make of this, that I have not yet come to realize my malady? 

The doctors do not push the patients too hard in this regard. For though they are doctors, they will never diagnose. It is not their purpose. Even if they grasp, or think they grasp, a patient’s malady, they understand that by diagnosing a patient, they will, in turn, alienate the patient. The maladies that crop up and are addressed here are so bound up with each patient’s identity, that having another point that malady out would seem like nothing less than an attack on one’s very being. This would cause the patient to turn inward and away from the work done at the Institute. So, patients must come to their own diagnosis only when they are prepared, only when they have built up the resources necessary to address their maladies on their own terms. 

It is clear, too, that, in spite of their years of experience, the doctors may not always see the correct malady in the patient. That is to say: were a doctor to diagnose a patient, a diagnosis might be provided, which the patient could feasibly work to address, even with some success, but, left to his or her own devices, the patient might come to diagnose a different malady that would result in a more fruitful course of treatment. 

So, for all the time that I have been here, how have I not come to recognize my own malady? There are a few possibilities, each equally self-serving, each equally disconcerting: the first is that I persist in ignoring my malady, that beneath my primary malady is an even more powerful resistance toward acknowledging its presence; the next is that I have a newly arrived malady, without name, without precedent, that has never been seen at the Veldt Institute. There is one other possibility and I hesitate so much as to mention it: that I am, in fact, without a malady.

How could any of these be? Each is impossible. Every patient at the Veldt Institute has a malady. This is a place of healing so it is impossible to enter the Veldt Institute without a malady, so I must have a malady. But could this be possible? Could I have arrived, gone through these treatments and phases, while somehow being totally well? Surely, the doctors would have said something, they would have seen the depths of my wellness and turned me away. They would not have wasted their time on me, time that could have been better spent working with other patients, patients who genuinely suffer and require significant resources in order to realize their progress. 

No, the very opposite must be true. I have a malady so deep-seated, so insidious, that it covers itself over, eluding me and the doctors as well, like a demiurge altering the fabric of reality so as to render itself totally invisible. 

Dr. Lysergus II

 “The ultimate proposition is faith.”

Lysergus was up, pacing around his office. He was not looking at me. He never looks at me.

“The ultimate logic is the logic of faith, where nothing can be shown, where every statement must be taken as axiomatic, or cannot be taken at all.”

He stopped, placed a hand on the back of his chair. He lowered his head, rubbed his eyes, continued.

“To think of relationships, to think of truth values, is to be caught up. Any statement can be true or false, some superposition of the two, depending on one’s location in reality, the world in which one resides, and so forth. But faith, faith! That is the master signifier, the thing from which all meaning springs. Each person fools himself into thinking that he has faith in nothing, that his world is totally logical and rational, but he only manages to do this by ignoring those things in which his faith resides. What inevitably occurs is that others establish his faith for him. It is a game we play while denying, even to ourselves, that we are playing it: sitting on faith, pretending that it does not exist. On the other hand, by taking agency in his faith, he sets the foundation upon which his moral, ethical, and aesthetic realms will be established. We abscond from our imperative to make this choice of grounding by placing the burden of faith on others. In allowing others to choose our faiths for us, we merely spread about the choice of faith. We view the choices of others as the groundwork, take that faith for granted, and build our worlds atop those choices without ever once choosing to question the decisions made by others, or why those faiths were formed.”

I could not decide whether Lysergus’s comments were profound, tautological, banal, or mad. I listened all the same.

“Logic is a net we place into the sea of the chaos of the world. We catch what we can to use as material to build our waking life, and the rest slips through. That which slips through lands in the realm of faith. But that which is caught in the net of logic and that which lands in the realm of faith are composed from the same material. They spring from one another, becoming one another endlessly: a conceptual Ouroboros.”

He held both hands out before him, palms up. “Logic and faith, logic and faith.” Saying logic he looked to the left hand and raised it into the air, saying faith he raised the right and regarded it. “Logic and faith, logic and faith. Which is faulty? Which is empty? Which is meaningless? No, both are tools, both serve to set out a foundation upon which we can stand. On which we must stand.” He stood before me, both hands in the air, eyes wide. “Of that which one cannot speak, one must speak loudest of all!”

He looked at the floor just to the left of me. I could not tell whether he had registered my presence or if he would be doing the very same if I had never come in. 

He lowered his hands, his face relaxed. He looked at me then, for just a moment, his eyes passing over my presence.

“Good day,” he said, then pulled his chair over to his desk and set to writing.

I left.

The Holy Fool II

There was a commotion today. I had been busy composing in the common room when some shouting came from out in the veldt. A small crowd had gathered just outside the Institute. I laid my books aside to see what was going on. 

About a dozen patients and Dr. Otto were standing on the Outer Path looking up and back toward the Institute building. Turning, I saw the Holy Fool standing up on the roof of the Institute. He was walking, toeing the edge, stumbling as if drunk.

“Come down, I said! You shouldn’t be up there!” Dr. Otto cried. 

“I can see it!” The Holy Fool said. “You’re all down there and think you can see it, but you’re wrong! You can’t see anything down there! I’m up here and only I can see it clearly.”

The crowd grew rapidly, and soon enough half of the Veldt Institute had assembled. The shouts continued to no effect.

“How did he get up there?” one of the watching patients said.

“He must have gotten a key to the third floor and found an access hatch to the roof,” another patient said. “Otto, why don’t you get one of the doctors to go up after him?”

“Impossible,” Otto said. “There’s no access to the roof, even from the third floor.”

The Holy Fool took wobbling steps along the edge. He looked down at us and, cupping his hands around his mouth, cried, “Leave this place!” 

“Come down!” Dr. Mellinger, now among us, shouted.

The Holy Fool, oblivious to the doctor’s cries, stared off into the distance. “That’s the true lesson, that’s the true teaching!” He pointed out beyond us, to the horizon. “Forget everything and leave.”

“If there is no door to the roof, then he must have climbed up the outside,” another patient suggested.

“Scaled sheet glass and concrete?” Otto said. “Impossible.”

“Come up here with me and see clearly!” the Holy Fool shouted, a mad smile on his face. 

“If only Peltus were here,” a patient said. “He’d be able to reason him down.”

“He’s far too busy for this kind of nonsense,” Dr. Mellinger said brusquely.

“He’s found the way to the fourth floor,” Lysergus said quietly.

The Holy Fool disappeared behind the lip of the roof. We could no longer see him, nor hear him. We waited for him to appear again. After a few minutes some patients broke into groups to check other parts of the Institute’s roof. Others went to see if he had jumped or fallen into the courtyard. One group searched inside the Institute. They all came back with no sign of the Holy Fool. It was as if he had never been up there at all.

After an hour, the crowd had dissipated. Those few who remained were quiet and turned to Lysergus, the only doctor who had not returned to his office.

“He’ll find his way back down,” Lysergus said. “If he can. If he cares to.”

---

‘Dr. Lysergus and the Holy Fool’ is taken from The Veldt Institute, coming in 2025 from Double–Negative.

Samuel M. Moss is from Cascadia. Recent work has been published in 3:AM Magazine, New World Writing, The Fabulist and New Sinews, among other venues. He is an associate editor at 11:11 Press and runs ergot.press, a site for innovative horror. Twitter: @perfidiouscript Bluesky: @perfidiousscript.bsky.social