Ivan

It was only when he was nine and his thoughts began to strangle his airways and cause his heart to clench that he started to mind them. In the beginning he had attempted to explain them to his nurse, however, "They try to kill me." must not have been a good description because his statement only lead to a call home and his mother asking him desperately if he needed "help."

At twelve years old the only "help" Ivan knew of was the kind of help one would get from their teacher, and no one liked asking the teacher for help. So because his mother did not clarify the nuances of the word "help", and because he refused to ask, his answer was no. However it did not take him long to learn that the kind of help offered was the kind of help offered to crazy people and that the question was actually, in fact, a way to capture the insane people of this word. The word no then became a frequent word in his vocabulary as his mother over the course of the next five years asked him if he needed help. "No' he believed, being a way of secretly telling his mother, you have yet to outsmart me.