I read this story in a digest magazine (Asimov's, F&SF or Amazing) in the 80s or 90s. The protagonist somehow starts to drift into increasingly unfamiliar alternative universes, where people act differently, dress differently or speak differently. He struggles to fit in, but eventually is recognized as being unacceptably out of norm. After he is taken away by some sort of authority, his neighbors do something like ritually urinate on his driveway.
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2", his neighbors do something like ritually urinate on his driveway" - The drunk guy three houses away from mine does that most Saturday nights– Danny Mc GCommented May 22, 2023 at 16:10
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1My sympathies...– AndrewCommented May 22, 2023 at 18:21
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Details by Lawrence Person, from Asimov's April 1991.
The protagonist somehow starts to drift into increasingly unfamiliar alternative universes, where people act differently, dress differently or speak differently.
It started with the coffee cups.
Jason Wright was sitting at the breakfast table, looking through the Times, when Linda brought him his coffee. He brought the cup to his lips while reading the second page of the business section, then glanced at it as he set it down on the table. After a moment, he glanced back again.
“Honey?”
“Hum?”
“Where’d you get the new cups.”
“What new cups?”
“These. The black ones.”
Linda walked out of the kitchen and put the plate of eggs, bacon, and toasted bagel down in front of him. “They’re not new. They’re the same cups your mother gave us on our second anniversary.”
What’s with the funny money?” Jason asked, still smiling.
“What funny money, man? I gave you the ten I owed you, what’s the big deal?”
“Yeah, well tell me whose picture’s on here?”
Ed looked at the bill.
“Well, offhand I’d say it was Henry Clay. So?”
“So? What do you mean, ‘so’?”
“What I mean is, so what? You got problems with history or some- thing?”
“C’mon, you know Hamilton’s on the ten dollar bill.”
“Who? Look, man, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I gave you your money, so don’t get weird on me now.”
Sunday. College, pro, high school, it didn’t matter. If it was football, Jason watched it.
And watched still as the field inexplicably narrowed and the team sizes increased. He watched even when it become something resembling Aus- tralian rules football, then a cross between soccer and field hockey, and finally an incomprehensible game played with what appeared to be living balls of fur and long, flexible cattle prods.
And through all this, despite an ever-widening chasm between the two of them, Linda still loved him. Although she cried often, and the alien words she spoke to him were all too frequently filled with sadness, she stayed with him throughout it all, the only unchanging rock in the sea of chaos his life had become.
He struggles to fit in, but eventually is recognized as being unacceptably out of norm. After he is taken away by some sort of authority, his neighbors do something like ritually urinate on his driveway.
The police read Jason passages from the Koran as they locked the hoop and muzzle around him, then carried his unresisting body out to the hovercraft, where they dropped him unceremoniously into the rear hop- per. The Hallelujah chorus wailed through the top speakers as the engine started up, the bright purple police light bouncing up and down in its tube. A few neighbors turned from where they had been decorating their shrubbery with whalebones to watch Jason’s departure, shook their heads sadly, then walked over to his house to urinate on his driveway.
From the window of his cell, Jason observed the last vestiges of his world disappear, watching as the sky turned yellow and great lumbering reptiles wandered across the red sanatorium lawn. At night, he stared at his reflection in the window, watching as his face slowly but surely changed beyond all recognition.
Finally, at long last, the doctors pronounced him cured.