Two days before Thanksgiving.  Simon had been hovering around all week, looking forlorn, asking questions.

"So where do you know these people from?"

"They're old college friends.  And I'm their charity case.  The boy without a bird."  I grabbed my day-pack off the floor.  Started stuffing in clothes at random.  "Look, you're more than welcome to come along."

"You know I can't do that."

Ah, yes.  The Rules.  Like bones, like promises, just begging to be broken.

"Well, what if we say you can?  I mean you're my illusion after all.  Why can't you do whatever I ... sorry, whatever we want you to do?"

He pretended to think about it.  Then, after what must have seemed an appropriate amount of time, gave his head a shake.

"Actually, I've got other plans."

All I could do was stare back.  Other plans?  It was like deciding to take a walk, and having your legs tell you - assuming, of course, that your legs could talk - having your legs say, no really, we'll just sit this one out. Or having your fingers pick up a pen, and write you a little note.  Sorry, we've been seeing another hand.  Slowly, carefully, I lowered myself onto the bed, no longer trusting those legs, these fingers, any part of the person to whom they may or may not have belonged, all the while asking myself, who is this figure, standing across from me?  To whom does he belong?

Seeing my expression, Simon decided he should sit down as well.  For a second, or more like several, we shared a tepid silence, me on the bed, him splayed out on the ottoman near the window.

"Haven't you ever wondered where I go?"  He started to pick away at a frayed seam in his jeans.  "You know, when I'm not here?"

"No," I admitted.  "Not really."

"I used to think it was nowhere at all.  That I just stopped existing for a while."  He tried finding a laugh.  "Still, who's to say I'm existing right now?"

The joke was thin.  The question purely rhetorical. "You said 'used to'.  Past tense.  What about now?"

"Lately it's been different.  There's this feeling I get when I first show up, that I've just come from ... somewhere else.  Like there's this echo, this remnant of where I've been, bleeding into here.  And then, after a few seconds, it just sort of fades."  He glanced up from his Levi's, gave me a feeble smile.  "Look, I know I'm not explaining this well."

"You're doing fine," I told him.  "This place where you've been.  What's it like?"

"That's just it.  It's not like there's any memories, any clues, left for me to pick over.  Just this feeling.  Like it could be the place I really belong.  A place where I'm real, not imagined."

I sat there a moment, mulling his words, thinking about wooden sheriffs, and magic dragons, and all the stories we tell ourselves about the child who must finally grow up, leaving his toys behind.  And the way such stories always assume that those toys have nothing better to do, no higher aspiration, than to serve as playthings, amusements, way stations along the way as that child charts his course towards adulthood.  But is it really that pat, that simple? Perhaps both parties are on their own journey, equal partners in the dance.  And maybe, on occasion, it's the toy that outgrows the child.

"So does this mean I won't be seeing you, imagining you, anymore?" I finally asked.  "You'll be off in this place of yours?"

We both must have heard it in my voice.  That sour note of dismay.

"No, of course not.  Of course I'll be back."  He smiled a bit too quickly, a bit too easily.  "Still, this is Thanksgiving we're talking about.  I think I'd like to spend it back there.  Back home."

"Home?"  The outcast stared at the figment, as if seeing him for the very first time.  "You really think there is such a place?"

"Don't you?"

Now it was my smile, equally false.  "Only in my imagination."

I suppose the strangest thing about Simon and his arrival in my life is how un-strange the entire process has felt.

One day he just showed up.  A tall, lank figure with tangled black hair, standing a few feet outside the fence, watching me work.  He looked as skittish as one of the fawns, so instead of calling out, asking who he was, or what he wanted, I just kept on planting, feeling the light but insistent weight of his gaze.  Eventually we fell into an easy, rambling conversation, talking about nothing, or was it everything, everything but the only thing that mattered, namely what exactly he was doing there.  And then, just like that, he wasn't there.  Like I'd imagined the whole thing.

Which, apparently, I had.

A full week slipped by before he dropped in again.  Another day in the field, warmer this time, and with him feeling bolder as well, actually getting down and dirty in the damp spring soil, tucking each transplant into place.  Sometimes we'd talk, sometimes we wouldn't, and the weird thing was, it didn't seem to matter either way.  Because we were just being there.  Together.  I think that's when I started to get it.  That whatever, whoever, he was, he wasn't out there, in the world, more like in here, inside of me.  Or rather some inexplicable combination of the two.

After that, he seemed to start popping up everywhere.  In the car, waiting out a red light.  Sitting across from me at dinner.  It took me a while, ten or twelve visits, to realize there was a pattern, that it wasn't in fact everywhere, that he'd only make his presence known when we were alone, when it was just the two of us.  I thought at first it was because he scared, solitary by nature.  Only later, after a few offhand remarks he'd made, did I realize that it was for my benefit instead.  That he, or me, or whoever made the rules, had decided it would be just a little too awkward, having me stroll down the supermarket aisle with someone only I could see.

And, yes, don't worry, this whole time I was asking myself all the obvious questions.  Am I going insane?  How long before I break out the chainsaw and leather mask?  But like I said, that was the craziest thing of all.  That it didn't feel one bit crazy.  Like everyone else, I'd had my dark times, times I'd tried to forget, but this wasn't like that at all.  It felt more like a warmth, a light.  Like I'd finally found my way home.  And if someone had come up to me, palm outstretched, with this magic little pill in his hand, a pill that would make it - make him - go away, I would've told that someone to take it himself, preferably in suppository form.

Which means I really am crazy.

It's been a while since that cool spring day, since that very first visit of his, and I've had plenty of time to think things over.  And I've come to a realization, or perhaps just a rationalization, that lets me pretend otherwise, at least for the time being.

The fact is, I've spent my whole life living with imaginary people.  Some of them are memories, of people I haven't seen in thirty years, of ones I spoke to just last week.  Some of them are historical figures, or rather my own tacky renditions thereof, cobbled together from old textbooks, borrowed notes, half-forgotten lectures.  Still more found life as words on paper, or the pairing of incandescent lamp and celluloid stock, or all those frantic pixels, dancing on a screen.  I've grown up in a world where real people pretended to be imaginary ones, and imaginary ones insisted on being real.  And all of them, over the years, have been my friends, my family, my loved ones.  The ones who taught me how to be human, how to endure the daily humiliations that our lives seem to comprise, and enjoy the rare triumphs that nonetheless find us from time to time.

So if Simon is a form of madness, a symptom I'm determined to ignore, then the underlying disease is clearly congenital.  An essential part of who I am.  It also appears to be progressive and, if I'm lucky, terminal as well.  Lucky because sometimes being broken is better than being fixed.  And I'd hate to imagine living in a world where they've found a cure for imagination.  

"So why Simon?"

I jumped a little in my seat.  How long had he been in the car?

"So why Simon what?" I shot back.

"It's kind of a wimpy name."  He was staring out the passenger window, and his voice sounded strange.  Squashed.  "Like the skinny little twerp in the fantasy series who thinks he's some kind of wizard.  Only he's really just the comic relief."

He got like this sometimes.  Petulant.  Prone to self-pity.

"Well, you are a skinny little twerp," I replied, hoping to lighten the mood.  

He said nothing, just stared a little harder.  I slowed for a Honda turning left, providing the white SUV riding my tail an opportunity to test reflexes, brakes and horn.  All three worked.

"Any chance we could change it?"

"Change it?  Your name?  To what?"

"I don't know."  He finally turned away from the window, gave his shoulders a shrug.  "Something harder.  Less British.  One of those short, one-syllable names that sounds like a grunt.  You know.  Like Chuck."

"Chuck?"  I almost didn't not laugh.  "Would that be Chuck as in Chuck Norris?  Or Chuck as in throwing up?"

His upper lip did this curling thing.  I suppose you'd call it a sneer.

"You know, technically, I don't need to get your go-ahead on this.  I can just start calling myself whatever I want."  Now both lips were curling, which - technically - made it a smile.  "And," he went on to observe, "since we're in fifty-fifty on this arrangement of ours, my choice would count at least as much as yours."

"Fifty-fifty?"  I shot him what I hoped was an incredulous look.  "Don't forget I'm the imagineer."

"Maybe," he conceded.  "But I'm the imagined."

We spent the next mile or two in silence, staring at the occasional pine, the sere, rolling hills, trying to decide what sounded better: continuing our little tiff or returning to safer ground.

I was the first to crumble.

"I guess it's like what you said.  Simon is a kid's name.  Someone who'll never make it past eleven-years-old, no matter how long he's around.  And he'll always be an eleven-year-old kind of friend, the kind who's loyal, and trusting, and all those things you just can't be once you get old and fucked-up and cynical."  I glanced over, not quite meeting his eyes.  "Does that really sound so bad?"

"Not at all."  He gave me a look, one I couldn't quite read, then turned back to the window. 

"Maybe someday," he told the glass, "I can get a Simon too."

I was out in the field, on a raw spring morning, with Simon my imaginary friend.

"Looks like we've got our work cut out for us."

It was one of those true/false statements.  True because there was indeed a lot of work waiting out there; whacking down the cover crop, tilling it into the soil, raking the furrows into what might pass for a rough grade.  Then there'd be the hours of laying down irrigation lines, patching leaks, driving t-posts and stringing trellis.  All this before the first transplant even made it into the ground, to be followed - eventually - by thousands of its fellows.

But false too.  False because there'd be no "we" involved.  Just me.

"You sound discouraged."  Simon is a keen observer of the human condition. "You want to talk about it?"

I stared back at him.  His smile seemed sincere enough.  Then again, it usually did.

"Not really."

"Why not?"  He toed a clump of purslane, just beginning to flower.  "You'll find I'm a pretty good listener."

At other times, on other days, I might have appreciated his concern, or his feigned concern, or whatever combination of the two he was managing to display.  But somehow not today.

"Why not?'  I asked him back.  "Well, maybe it's because you're not really there.  Because if I did, I'd be having an imaginary conversation with an imaginary friend, listening to me with his imaginary ears.  And if anyone else was out here, they'd think I was just blithering away like an idiot, talking to myself."

I glanced up just in time to catch it.  The wide eyes, the open mouth, of a wounded child.  Then, all at once, it was gone, replaced by a sly little grin.

"I don't see anyone else out here."

And of course he was right.  The jays were squawking, the hawk was lost in his plaintive cry, and the only sound of man's presence was a single leafblower  laboring away on Cameron Court.  We were alone.  As usual.

"What's that expression?  Cold comfort?"  I found my own patch of purslane, gave it a solid kick.  "I mean, the only person I've got to talk to doesn't really exist, but that's okay, because I'm so alone out here, there's no one to notice I'm talking to him."

I felt, or almost felt, something light on my shoulder.  A shadow, a breeze, a hand.

"I notice," he finally said.