Sometimes crazy people like to talk to me.  Recently, one who found my number on the phone list of an informal social club I belong to has taken to ringing up at odd hours.  I'll call her Anna (after Freud's client Anna O. who was really Bertha Pappenheim).  Anna has an interesting but very complicated story which she recounts rapid-fire in an impressively candid manner considering I am more or less a total stranger.  Her case involves a host of abusive family members, crooked lawyers, identity theft, corrupt city officials and government authorities in cahoots, all fighting for control of "millions of dollars," which is rightfully hers but to which she has been denied access which explains why she's been reduced to flip-flops, bad clothes and cheap make-up.  "I know you'll understand," I say in a rare break in the narrative flow, attempting to appeal to her reasonable side, "when I tell you that all of this sounds a trifle farfetched."

"What are you saying?" she asks, her already belligerent tone finding a sudden focus, namely, me.  "What do you mean?  Are you saying I should let them take my money? rob me? hush me up? lock me up? throw away the key?"

        "'The key is in the window, the key is in the sunlight at the window—I have the key—Get married Allen
         don't take drugs—the key is in the bars, in the sunlight in the window. 
        Love, 
        your mother'" 

        Allen Ginsberg, Kaddish

I try to suggest that in my experience people would be more willing to help if she could tone down the paranoia a little, but she is clearly in the mood to argue so I wish her well and find an excuse to hang up.  She is still talking when I do.

"You should have met Joey's boyfriend," Eduardo says at the gym the next day.  "Joey's boyfriend said the exact same thing -- rich family out to disinherit him, have him committed, yadda yadda yadda.  So Joey lets him move in and gives him all this money, runs up all his credit cards -- but only, you know, until the guy gets his fortune -- pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, right?  Eight years later the guy dies, Joey's hopelessly in debt and turns out there was no money at all and the family just wanted the guy to stay away from them because he was a liar a cheat and a thief and completely insane."

"Joey failed to figure this out in eight years?"

"Weird, huh.  Love of his life is basically a homeless panhandler."

"But what on earth could the attraction have been?"  I search my mind, trying to imagine some plausible explanation, some hidden asset or charm -- 

"Extremely low self-esteem on Joey's part," Eduardo explains.  "Why else have your very own live-in Nigerian money scam?"

I attempt to argue that the urge to do good surely plays some part in drawing us into these relationships, but by the time we get to the bench press I'm forced to agree that gullible is a contributing factor as well.

Eventually, however, I suppose we all get around to the truth, whatever that may end up being.  In any case, who hasn't been a little paranoid, once in a while?  To believe there are others out to get you, to see conspiracy everywhere, in shop window reflections, in the inscrutable arrangement of objets -- is it a message?  What does it mean? 

I think of Graham Greene (1904-1991).  I think of Ministry of Fear.   Look at how just guessing the weight of a cake can get you into so much trouble.     Or Salvador Dali (1904-1989).   Think what he'd do with those waving china cats and that clipper ship clock.

I am reading Olivier Pauvert's debut novel Noir.  I highly recommend it.  Nothing is what it seems.  Nothing means what you think.