A conversation with a mad man

I sat at the table, just like he did. I stared and he stared back. We had a moment of silence and then I began.
“They tell me you're not at all well lately,” I went about the topic lightly.
“They?” he asked.
“Your doctors, they say you have been acting strange,” I elaborated.
“Did they now?” he asked, a smile spreading across his face, “and what makes you think they are telling the truth?”
“They are professionals, and we don’t joke around with these kinds of things.”
“Maybe you should,” he replied with a straight face.
“How so?”
“Well, if you joked about like half the loonies in here then maybe you would start to understand them more.” When he said “here” he was referring to the asylum he lived in.
“I’ll make a note of that and take it into consideration,” sometimes it was best not to argue.
I went back to the start “It says here you checked in under your own will,” I opened his file.
“That’s what it says,” he nodded.
“Is it true?” I asked.
“One would hope so, it’s a medical document. You guys don’t joke around.”
He had a wide grin on his face that made him look like he understood every word he said and took great pride in them.
“It also says you’ve been acting much stranger than usual in the past months. It says you talk to yourself when nobody is around.”
“If nobody is around, how do they know I’m doing it?”
I didn’t feel like answering.
“It also says here that you have been saying very strange things about the world.”
“Only on even days,” he said.
“And on odd ones?” I asked.
“The even days are the odd ones, it's the odd days that are normal.”
“So what about the normal days?”
“They’re always odd.”
I couldn't quite take it. The scary part about this was after a while I realized it was actually a logical statement.                                                  
“Why did you check into this institution again?” I asked.
“Because you couldn’t just walk in. You have to sign up first,” he quickly found a way around my questions yet again.
“What made you want to check in, why do you think you belong here?”
“Because it is better than there.”
“Where?”
“Everywhere that’s not here.”
A few more minutes of this and I was afraid I would have to check in.
I decided to take a different approach, “Have you ever tried expressing your interesting ideas through a medium. Art, Writing?”
“Should I?”
“It might help,” I said.
“Maybe I could write.”
“That’s a start, what could you write about?”
“I could write about this conversation!” he jumped up at the idea.
Two nurses made him sit back down. I told them it was okay, the session was done for the day. I got up to leave and thought to myself that this conversation may have actually helped him. As I left he yelled out one more thing to me.
“I think I’m going to write it from your perspective.”
“Fine by me,” I sighed.
“I’m going to make you an astronaut,” were the last words I heard before the door closed behind me.

I walked out into the parking lot laughing to myself. I had been a fool. My conversation had no effect on him whatsoever. As I climbed into my chair and started the countdown I thought to myself. This had been an odd conversation. The door closed and the thrusters started. I began to lift off and soon I was miles above earth. As I entered space I made a note to read what the man wrote down in our next session.