When I call him lautrec, he will invariably puff himself up with rage, threaten to peel me with his knife, but that is who he reminds me of, for he is a dwarf like lautrec and equal in talent, thought his talent is something otherworldly. Such is the cruelty of art.

Lautrec woke up one afternoon with the unshakeable belief that his duplicate, his doppelganger if you will, was living upstairs of the family apartment. He led me through the house, urging me to listen to the footsteps above his head that tracked him through the living room that mimicked even the dance steps he performed in the kitchen. It became his stated belief that his double was mocking him, forcing him to lead a doubles life. He came to believe with utter conviction, that all of his talent and luck was being drained by his double.

When Lautrec first began to indulge in this irrational passion his parents humored him. He was at first, considered fashionably eccentric by his father who was a genial man of numbers, a businessman who enjoyed a joke as much as any other businessman enjoys a joke. That is until it interferes with productivity or makes him lose face with his competitors.

North-Americans are very much like the Japanese in presenting a united front.

The nail that sticks out is the nail that gets hammered in.

Lautrec, in his own thick skinned way, nursed his paranoia like a bad tooth, overflowing with stories of the beautiful twins that shared his doppelgangers bed, of the expensive appliances, the stocked larders and the genial and understanding parents who should have been his.

When he was drunk he took to roaring up at the ceiling and throwing knives, forks, glasses even bottles. He became convinced, despite the lack of evidence, that his apartment was filled with listening devices planted by his duplicate.

He began to use sign language, and when that proved unsatisfactory, made his own pidgin language. His manner of walking became elaborate. He would hop on one leg, stamp and tumble to throw off his pursuer.

At dinner with his parents, Lautrec would lapse into his pidgin vernacular, whisper and throw conspiratorial glances up at the ceiling. He would make complex drumming patterns with the handle of his knife and fork, and exclaim with joy when he perceived his double missed a beat.

His mother was a high strung woman. At first she passed it off with a laugh or a remark, but later she ignored his behavior completely as if through the power of positive thinking, her eccentric son might regain some form of normalcy.

By the time he was seventeen, numerous incidents had contributed to his parents conclusion that Lautrec was not indulging an artists fancy, but was in fact undeniably insane.  Always a pint sized napoleon in argument, finger up thrust and beard bristling, he would castigate his parents for the belief in good and evil, which he regarded as being the height of the irrational, while they in turn would accuse him of irrationality in beliving that a malevolent twin lived in the upstairs apartment.

The old couple who owned the flat above had finally moved out after six months of threats pinned to their door, and years of waking up with Lautrec perched on the end of a ladder with his hands cupped around his bulging eyes trying to see into their apartment.

It was a black day for lautrec, when, on his twentieth birthday, his parents presented him with an emissary from a nearby private mental clinic, who, under the guise of being a student of philosophy, established the grounds for his committal to the lunatic asylum.

They trapped him in his bed like a prostrate ox, foury burly orderlies, held him down and administered a dose of trioxiphydochlorine, or 'the philosophers clap' as he would forever after call it. Sedated and raving, he was hauled off to the clinic under cover of night.

in order to survive his six weeks in the asylum, he memorized the new testament and could and can still recite it by rote. When he was brought up against the resident team of psychiatrists, he would answer with verses from corinthians or notes that he jotted down from Our Kingdom Weekly, the CBN holy half-hour.

After six weeks they found him to be a well adjusted, pious young man and confounded his parents by returning him to their loving arms. The day he returned home he began construction of a holding tank for