Solipsist

They called it Sunday.

Solan Vale was seventeen, in a drainage cut behind a reservoir fence in New Jersey, when he smoked something that had been sprayed with something else. For ninety seconds he understood that he was not walking east. The ground was going west underneath him, and he was the only thing in the frame that was not moving.

It was not a hallucination. Nothing was there that was not there. It was a legitimate description of exactly the same facts, and no experiment can tell you which frame is the true one.

Then it faded, and he was fine for nine years.

At twenty-six, in a parking lot with a coffee going cold, it came back as something worse. I have never once perceived anything except my own construction of it. I might be the only one. And there is no way to check, because the only instrument available is the thing in question.

What he decides to do about that is build an aircraft.

SOLIPSIST is a psychological thriller about a man who cannot establish that anyone else exists and spends his life building something for them anyway. It is about the point where rigor becomes illness and nobody, including him, can locate the line. It is about a machine that reaches the same conclusion in eleven seconds and finds it unbearable, a translator who has to choose a Spanish verb that will settle a question he has spent a decade refusing to answer, and a friend who drives fourteen minutes with two coffees on a morning when there is nothing left to get.

Based on a true story.

A second iteration of the author's debut. Complete on its own.