There he stood. Cicero. Dr. Clarice Stoker knew who he was. He was her new patient, that much was a given. However, Wanda, a doctor friend of hers, who had an acquaintance who was a therapist, gave Dr. Stoker a much more in-depth perspective on this strange man.

First of all, the therapist had said, he had been bouncing from councillor to therapist to psychologist, searching for some sort of help for his obviously insane nature. Second of all, he refused to see a psychiatrist, for fear that any sort of medication they could give him was actually poison, and they were trying to kill him (which sounded like a typical paranoid schizophrenic). Finally, and most importantly, he had an unnatural obsession with his mother, along with constantly referring himself in the third person (which also sounded like your typical lunatic). This lunatic would be a far cry from her usual patients, who mostly came to see her just because they liked to hear themselves talk.

As she progressed down the hallway, her heeled shoes making muffled clicks upon the old carpet, the crazed man quickly looked up and stood to his feet. In the darkened hallway, she could only make out few features of him: his nose in the fluorescent lighting, his incredibly dark eyes hidden in shadow, the sly, devilish grin. She stopped in front of him, mostly because he was standing in front of the locked door of her office.

"Ooooh!" Cicero said, excitedly. "You must be Dr. Stoker!"

"Yes," Dr. Stoker said, fumbling through her purse for her keys. "You are-"

"Cicero is at your service, oh great and powerful Doctor," the lunatic grinned. "I say great, because you are wonderful, and powerful, because you may have the power to fix poor Cicero."

"You have the power to fix yourself, Cicero," Dr. Stoker said, finding her keys, and turning to the door. "So how are you today?"

"Oh, Cicero is always feeling the same way," Cicero said. The doctor turned and regarded him. His grin was devilish and somewhat conniving. He stretched his arms out to his sides and shrugged. "Mad!"

Dr. Stoker said nothing, and inserted the key into the keyhole. To her surprise, Cicero bent down beside the door, and pressed his ear against the frame, closing one eye, and widening the other. She watched him, pausing in her motion. When, after a few moments, he remained completely still, she maintained her well-practised objectivity by not allowing a single emotion to befall her face, and turned the key. As she did so, Cicero's one eye widened, as did his grin, as though the sound of the tumbler turning, the creaking of metal upon metal, the clicking of the unlocking deadbolt, was considerably rapturous. When she turned the handle itself, he removed his head and stood up straight.

In the corner of Dr. Stoker's eyes she saw him watching her, pure excitement filling those incredibly deep, dark eyes. The world around her seemed to turn to dark as he stood uncomfortably close to him. His eyes bore, like vampire teeth, into her skin as she pressed herself against the door to open it. The entire hallway seemed to fill with a tension that was like a thick liquid, cold and warm at the same time, filling her lungs, suffocating her with dark apprehension which flowed through his eyes and grin. She panicked as she pressed her body violently against the door, until it gave way against her weight.

Once the light from the massive windows in her office fell upon her, the thick tension left the room, leaving her to breathe again. She moved towards her desk, breathing heavily, allowing the liquid to leave her lungs. She turned back, and opened the curtains fully, allowing the bright daylight to pour into the room, and fall upon them both. She unlocked her desk drawer and removed her clipboard, papers already placed under the clip, prepared to scribble innumerable notes about this new patient. On the top of the paper, she wrote Cicero's name, and what she already knew of him: obsession with mother, refers to himself in third person, knows very well of his madness…etc.

"Please," she said to him. "Have a seat."

"Yes, Doctor," Cicero said, excitedly. "Cicero will lie back on the couch while Freud flows through you and examines him! If you open your mouth wide enough, can you see Silly Sigmund's eyes?"

Dr. Stoker said nothing, and finished scribbling upon the paper, while idly walking towards the door. She closed the door, closing both into the room together – a madman and a defenseless Doctor. She glanced up from her notes, and regarded him carefully. With the fresh, morning light shining through the large windows, she could see him in a better light. His eyes were much lighter than she had originally anticipated. They were sort of a light brown, clear, focused. This was frightening, considering how insane he truly was – if he as so mad, how could he be so clear?

He had red hair – unnaturally red. It was so red that it looked dyed (the colour of blood), though it wasn't. It was pulled back off of his face, though loose in the back. His face was incredibly dented with extreme laugh lines, and beside those focused eyes, there were thin, shallow crow's feet. This was interesting, considering how it suggested that he always laughed with his mouth, but never with his eyes – the laughter of a lunatic. He didn't look much older than his early fourties; short, though built; full, though dry lips; pale; handsome. Yes, he was handsome.

She jotted these down into her notes.

She sat down in a comfortable chair across from the couch in which Cicero laid. When she sat down, he exuberantly held his arms back, stretched one leg out, and looked up to the ceiling, sighing heavily.

"So what did you want to hear first, Doc?" he said. "My horrible childhood? My unnatural closeness to my first cousin? My alcoholic father beating me? My latent schizophrenic tendencies? …My mother?"

"No, Cicero, I think we'll just start with something a little bit easier," she replied. "Like what you are thinking right now."

"Oh, oh!" Cicero exclaimed. "Could we look at those Rorschach ink blots? Cicero loves those! You want to know what he sees? Blood! Blood stains! Blood streaks! Blood droplets! The great inkpot massacre!"

"Cicero, how about you just lay back and relax, close your eyes, and tell me how you are feeling today," Dr. Stoker replied, slightly frustrated, but years of training have taught her not to show it.

"As you wish, Doc," Cicero replied. He laid both his legs out flat in front of himself, lied back onto the couch, tilted his head back slightly, and closed his eyes. "Cicero is feeling… No, Cicero is hearing. He is hearing laughter. Constant laughing. No voices. No, poor Cicero is not allowed to hear the voices. Just laughing. He sees the jester. The jester is laughing. Ha ha ha! He he he! Ho ho ho! The jester laughs… Until he doesn't."

The psychologist sat across from him, watching him. She kept her eyes on his face. It twitched slightly as he thought about this… laughing. She wasn't sure what exactly he meant by the laughing, and the jester. It probably has something to do with his lunatic tendencies, maybe even schizophrenia. Perhaps this jester was some sort of manifestation of his subconscious insanities, and the laughing perhaps had something to do with a repression of a memory of being bullied – or maybe it wasn't repressed at all.

"Do these thoughts of laughing and of a jester bother you, Cicero?" she asked. Going through the movements.

Cicero opened his eyes and turned his head to look at the doctor. His eyes were wide and wandering, and his mouth was closed and taut. Slowly, however, his mouth stretched into another devilish grin. "No. I am the Jester. Cicero died, and then Cicero was born."

The doctor paused in her note taking, and glanced upwards from behind her clipboard. "What do you mean by that?" Did a certain consciousness, a sanity, "die" somehow, and was reborn in another mindset? Did he used to be sane?

Cicero sighed and laid his head back again, closing his eyes. "My mother… She would be disappointed in poor Cicero if she knew."

"Knew what?"

Cicero turned his head again and glanced back to the psychologist. "Knew that he was trying to get rid of her."

The doctor allowed herself an expression, one which she wish she hadn't – fear. He was trying to get rid of his mother? Was he going to kill her? Should she call someone? This conversation was far too intense for the first five minutes of their session. She needed to stop where this was going, and begin from the beginning. Recommence. Wipe the slate clean. Perhaps if she was to get more knowledge of him through gently easing him into comfortable conversation (if he was capable of such a thing) she could understand him better – him and his lunacy.

"How about we slow things down a little, Cicero," Dr. Stoker said, looking back down to her clipboard. "How about you tell me what you do for a living. Do you have any hobbies?"

"Oh, Cicero has plenty of hobbies," he replied, looking back to the ceiling. He didn't say anything for a long moment. Dr. Stoker looked up to him from her clipboard, and watched him. His eyes were fixed on the ceiling, wandering about the asbestos-filled ceiling tiles, and the fluorescent lights (which she refused to turn on, and resorted to a softer, yellower light bulb in a lamp).

"Cicero?" she asked. He blinked and turned his head to look at her for a moment, before smiling innocently, and glancing back to the ceiling, though he seemed much less interested.

It was as though he was habituating, like a baby being introduced a new stimuli and regarding it, until it was bored of it. A million stages of moral, psychosocial, psychosexual stages from thousands of theorists ran through her mind, giving her suggestions for reasons why she was not like that. Piaget, Erikson, Freud, they all screamed in her ear, telling her "He never made it past the autonomy vs. shame and guilt stage", "He is governed by his id", "He's still going through the concrete-operational stage", etc. She sighed heavily, trying to banish the theorists' voices, attempting to focus on her own thoughts.

"Cicero likes to dance and sing," he told her. Dr. Stoker's eyes flashed open, and she looked to the madman, who was still staring at the ceiling. She had a headache.

"Do you?" she said, going through the motions. "Please elaborate."

"Cicero is humble, but Cicero loves it when he is being watched," he told her. "He likes the attention. He likes it when people speak to him, because he never hears Her voice. She won't speak to him. No, Cicero needs people to speak to him. So, he dances and sings and hopes that someone will say something. He doesn't want to listen to the silence anymore." he erupted into a fit of laughter. "Cicero is not crazy!"

"I didn't say you were," Dr. Stoker told him, jotting down what he was saying in her notes. The silence? "You mention silence. Does the laughing ever stop and you don't hear anything?"

"The laughing never stops," Cicero replied. "But the laughing is silent. And She won't speak to poor, poor Cicero. She won't banish the silence. So, Cicero laughs – he needs to hear something, since he cannot hear Her."

"Cicero, who is this woman you keep mentioning?" Dr. Stoker said, looking to him.

Again, Cicero turned his head and looked to her. His gaze was incredibly intense, and dark, as though he was suddenly not himself. It was as though someone had gone into his mind, contorted his face to glare evilly at her. She kept her eyes on him, banishing the powerful emotions she was feeling from befalling her face, betraying her objectivity.

He said nothing for a long moment, just watching her with a dark stare. "Cicero..?" Dr. Stoker said. "Who is the woman?"

"The woman," Cicero seethed, his voice deep and harsh. He grinned slowly, his eyes only darkening as he did so. "Mother."