Biden’s campaign lives in a dual reality, like Schrödinger’s cat, where the former vice president is at once being written off as finished and yet still a front-runner in most national and state polls; at once trailing other Democrats in early-primary states and yet performing the best against President Donald Trump in the key swing states; the candidate whose electoral viability was why Michael Bloomberg bailed out of the race, and the candidate whose electoral weakness is why Michael Bloomberg is now getting back in. His supporters also say, with reason, that he’s the only candidate among the front-runners whose big policy proposals bear at least a passing resemblance to legislation that could realistically pass Congress—and yet, they lament, he’s the only candidate who gets dismissed as both stuck in the past and naive about the future. (They also say he’s the only plausible candidate with even the slightest experience in foreign policy.) His critics say, also with reason, that his stumbling debate performances would probably be disqualifying for anyone else; his glitches have become so frequent that he’s now graded on a curve, with political observers and even his own aides greeting his bad days with “Could have been worse!” and his good days with “Better than I expected!”

In short, Biden is poised to become the next president of the United States—or on the verge of an epic humiliation.

What’s the real story? Biden has always been a storyteller. The problem he faces now is that he seems to have lost control of his own story.

Here is the story Biden would like you to believe: Everything is going much better than anyone has given him credit for, and even if it isn’t, he could lose Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada and still turn things around in South Carolina. He could, this tale goes, limp his way past the other Democrats through the unsexy process of racking up delegates rather than splashy outright primary victories. Then, the story continues, even though he’s burned through so much of the too-little money he’s raised by spending on private jets and a big entourage, he’ll have enough left over to drag himself across the finish line to the nomination. Then, despite repeatedly being caught unprepared in the primary campaign, he’ll be totally ready to handle the attacks when Trump and his allies really crank up their assault next year. The fairy-tale epilogue: He’ll still be serving effectively as president at 86, since he’s declining to say he’ll limit himself to one term.

It’s a heroic story. It’s got perseverance, resilience in the face of tragedy, Biden fulfilling his late son Beau’s dying wish that he win the presidency to achieve a kind of Restoration of the Obama Era. (It even has an element of poetic justice, with him defeating the man who got himself impeached in his zeal to take him down, the man who came into politics questioning his good friend Barack’s birthplace and has built a presidency mostly out of trying to tear down Obama’s legacy.) But while the story also has a veneer of plausibility, lately neither he nor his campaign always seems to fully believe in it. Some of his aides have told me privately that they feel like they’re just spinning one another in staff meetings about how well things are going; they say they can sense that Biden is realizing with dread that the race might be slipping away.