“C’mon, John,” Lump whispered, “You need to snap out of this.”

“Gorkagurka,” John said into his My Pillow. Through the storm of half- and quarter-thoughts raging in the remaining functional parts of his brain, he muttered, “Gisele.”

“She’s gone, John,” Lump said. “Off to Canada, the snowy wasteland. The Twink in the North offered his protection as a fellow Latinx.”

“Canada,” John said, sitting up. He hit the thin asylum mattress with the flat of his acromegalic hand. “Canada, Canada, Canada.”

“Yeah, you know that word, don’t you?” Lump asked while driving a filament deeper into his Broca’s Area in its attempt to rebuild the dead, black neural tissue.

“Trupole,” John said. He fell back into bed, exhausted, the electricity Lump was running through his neural tissue causing a brief petit mal seizure.

“Tru-dough,” Lump whispered. “Or Castro, if you want to get technical.”

John drooled and farted very loudly.

Lump burned away dead cells and ran bursts of energy down damaged neural pathways. The malevolent yolk of sentience at its core grew warm with effort.

John moaned, “Gisele,” again and his misshapen body shuddered; his sobbing shook the bed.

“They are coming on rounds, John,” Lump said, ending his work. “You need to sit up. Up, damn you!”

There was a light, polite knock on the door and the doctors let themselves in.

“Patient’s name is John,” the attendant said. “Committed after treatment for a second stroke in two years. Aphasic, MRI shows large sections of the brain have no activity whatsoever. Family refuses palliative care.”

“De-press,” John groaned at Lump’s prompting.

“Yes,” the doctor said to the assembled care team. “Patient has been told he is under care for depression at his wife’s insistence and to shield his condition from the public.”

“De-press,” John said again. He reached down his pants and began violently masturbating.

“Patient also presents with a twenty centimeter mass on his neck. X-ray and MRI indicate structures too elaborate to be cancerous, but it is obviously a tumor of some kind. Attempted biopsy put the patient in multiple organ failure until the biopsy was halted.”

“Have there been any other attempts to remove or drain it?” one bright-eyed intern asked as he poked at Lump with his ballpoint pen.

“No. Attempts to inject it with methotrexate also led to acute multiple organ failure. It’s almost as if it would rather kill him than be removed or reduced.”

“It sounds like you are suggesting it has a will of its own,” one tiny girl doctor piped up.

“Maybe it does,” the attending said. “I’ve seen strange things in DC medicine. I was once attacked by a particularly vicious mustache.”

“Excuse me?” she asked.

“Let’s get back to rounds,” he said, unconsciously fingering the ugly scar on his hand.