The Peacock 519

 "Do you think you should tell them?" Lazarus says to Adam.

"Can you?"  he says.  They are sitting very close, just an inch of space between them, but there is something about the silent intimacy they have that doesn't speak of lovers, nor of conjugal partners, but something...different?  Something other?  But it is clear that those two are very very close to each other, and likely have been for a very long time.

"Adam", says Lazarus, "Has rather an unusual mental health condition.  It is not an illness, there is nothing ill about him, but this is still a form of perception and memory that weighs on him rather heavily.  He does have a diagnosis.  The psychiatrists have declared that he has a very unique variant of schizotypal disorder.  He will go into a kind of trance or fugue state, and suddenly he will recall places, events and people he claims to have known or been involved in and which happened too far in the distant past to be possible."

Then Adam says, "I really can't remember anything past when I met Matthew with the Faberge eggs.  It somehow occurred to me that my mother entrusted them to me, that they had been in the family for a very long time, that her grandparents were Russian aristocracy, closely related to the Romanovs.  My mother, allegedly, was also a famous ballerina with the Kirov.  But I have no other record, or recall of any of this.  I do not know where she is, nor any other of my family.  I don't even know where I'm from."

"Unless", say I, "unless you really are that old, but how could that possibly be?" And it is clear to me that for someone who says he his forty-six, that Adam looks awfully young, scarcely more than twenty...