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Kevin Lopez had just stepped out of his house, on his way to meet his girlfriend for Chinese food, when it happened: He began to hallucinate.
It was just a flicker, really. He saw a leaf fall, or the shadow of a leaf, and thought it was the figure of a person running. For a moment, on a clear night last month, this fast-moving darkness seemed to hurtle in his direction and a current of fear ran through him.
He climbed into the car, and the door shut and latched behind him with a reassuring thunk.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “I don’t know why — I think there’s a person there.”
Light had always caused problems for Kevin when symptoms of schizophrenia came on. He thought that the lights were watching him, like an eye or a camera, or that on the other side of the light, something menacing was crouched, ready to attack.
But over time, he had found ways to manage these episodes; they passed, like a leg cramp or a migraine. That night, he focused on things that he knew were real, like the vinyl of the car seat and the chill of the winter air.
He was dressed for a night out, with fat gemstones in his ears, and had taken a break from his graduate coursework in computer science at Boston University. A “big bearish, handsome nerd” is the way he styled himself at 24.