NURSE O’HARA KEPT fiddling with the tubes and wires attached to the equipment beeping all around my bed.
“You flatlined, Daniel,” she said, tapping the monitor tracking the peaks and valleys of my heartbeat. “You had no pulse for two or three minutes.”
“That means you could have had serious brain damage!” blurted my baby sister. “So now you’ll probably dress even worse!”
“Brenda!” said my mom. “Honestly.”
“What? It explains why Daniel thinks he’s some kind of superhero from outer space. There was no oxygen in his brain for…”
“All right, everybody,” said Nurse O’Hara. “Visiting hours are over. Young Mr. Manashil needs his rest.”
For a second or two, I wondered who she was talking about.
Then I remembered: Everybody in the room kept insisting that I was Daniel Manashil, ordinary high school kid. If that was true, then Daniel X was the biggest figment of my imagination (or anyone else’s) ever!
What about all the incredible stuff I’ve done during my time on Earth? All the aliens I’ve battled, the human lives I’ve saved? I could remember enough nonstop action to fill four, maybe five books. Was all of that just a complex dream created by my poor, oxygen-deprived brain in the two or three minutes I was dead?
My family, the Manashils, promised to come back tomorrow and left.
I sunk my head back into the foamy hospital pillow and closed my eyes.
I didn’t know who I was any more.
Daniel X, the Alien Hunter? Or Daniel Manashil, the high school kid who dresses funny and stupidly drove his motorcycle on a rain-slick highway? Somehow, I drifted off to a fitful sleep. I think they were still pumping sedatives into my blood system.
“Daniel?”
I opened my eyes.
A bearded man in a tweed jacket was sitting in a chair he had pulled up beside my bed. His fingertips formed a tent underneath his nose.
“Hello, Daniel. I am Dr. Loesser. One of this hospital’s many licensed psychiatrists.”
I nodded. I felt like I was teetering on the brink of insanity. Maybe a shrink was what I needed.
The psychiatrist stroked his goatee. “You are, most likely, feeling quite confused. You have experienced a terrible traumatic shock.”
He was right. Waking up in this hospital bed had probably been the most traumatic experience of my life—almost worse than seeing my parents slain by a giant purple bug with dreadlocks.
If, you know, any of that ever really happened.
I swallowed hard. “Am I crazy, doc? Because I kind of feel like I’m going nuts here.”
He grinned. “No. Of course not, Daniel. You have simply spent your comatose time constructing a complex coping mechanism to ease the emotional pain of your poor judgment.”
I must’ve frowned or looked confused.
“Allow me to explain,” said the psychiatrist. “Nurse O’Hara has told me about your outburst with the doctors who came to visit you several days ago.”
That was several days ago?
“She also told me the details of the fantasies you have discussed with your friends and family.”
“Fantasies?”
“These stories about being an alien; how you were sent to Earth to protect all mankind.”
“I’m the Alien Hunter.”
The psychiatrist’s grin grew wider. “Yes. So I have heard. Imagination and hallucination can be wonderful survival tools when one is unconscious.”
“So I made all this stuff up? Just to kill time while I was in a coma?”
“That is one way to put it, I suppose. But let us look at some of the specific details of your ‘story’ more closely. For instance, this business with the…” He looked at a clipboard in his lap. “Ah, yes. ‘The six-and-a-half-foot-tall praying mantis with the dreadlocks.’ ”
“They call him The Prayer.”
“They?”
“It’s his alias. On The List of Alien Outlaws on Terra Firma.”
The shrink nodded. “Again, Mr. Manashil, I applaud your imaginative mind on the intricate layers of detail you have constructed to support your grand delusion. You say this creature from another planet—The Prayer, as you call him—killed your parents at your farmhouse in, let me see, Kansas?”
“Right. Back when I was three years old.”
“Ah, yes. You were a mere toddler. A weakling. There was absolutely nothing you could do to stop the hurt and pain inflicted upon your poor mother and father by this horrible ‘monster.’ Don’t you see what this dream is really all about, Daniel?”
I shook my head.
“Your own compensatory feelings of guilt and remorse.”
“Really? I don’t get it. What do I feel so guilty about?”
“Disobeying your parents, of course. Riding your motorcycle in the rain after they had repeatedly warned you not to do so. Your accident and near death inflicted tremendous hurt and pain on them, Daniel. Therefore, in your fantasy, to absolve your own guilt you created this horrible, alien beast. You didn’t hurt your parents. ‘The Prayer’ did.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Daniel?”
“Yes?”
“Do you remember the helmet you were wearing when you had your motorcycle accident?”
“No, sir.”
The psychiatrist glanced down at his notes. “According to the police report, it was a Nitro Mantis Touring Helmet.”
I swallowed. “Is that where I got the idea to make my monster a Praying Mantis?”
“Perhaps. What do you think, Daniel?”
I didn’t answer.
I was too devastated, too confused.
Was my life as I remembered it nothing more than a grand illusion I’d concocted because I felt bad about breaking my parents’ bike-riding rules?
How could that be?
It had all seemed so real.
So unbelievably, painfully real.