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1Christ in the Psych Ward - i 
210.25.2019
3sam.e.liu@gmail.com
4 
5Where is the Christ today? He is in a mental hospital.
6	All patients were allowed a religious service of their choosing; some religious persons volunteered, or were obligated, to make the journey into the Psych Ward – ‘the psychotic ward’ – to minister to the spiritual needs and demands of the patients there who were kept there against their will. It was relatively an easy job, for El Camino’s patients were, at least here, in the Standard Care Unit (as opposed to the Dementia Ward), mostly in their minds and suicidal, as opposed to suicidal and homicidal. 
7	There was not the sundowning when the demented old, seeing the staff leave for home, unable to place themselves in time, forgetting the routines that had let them pass the hours, began to long for their children. 
8	Yet you could hate the job easily. Fourteen years had counted themselves out between Dr. Matthews and the loss of his wife. He had been till then a ‘Brother in the Lord,’ and despite having completely lost his faith, with great fondness, perhaps great torture in its irony had continued to play the clergy-man, these past fourteen years. He was a man of great persuasion, to all persons a valuable spiritual teacher, and to himself a character of mild interest in his utter, complete, inhuman hypocrisy. 
9	He liked amusing himself with Pastor Bedard; here was a man, of strict religion, who wore the eager white garments of his priesthood, and had become even more stupid in the incompetence of his office. He thought of him as ‘Pastor Bedard, man of officialdom and office.’ 
10	He liked to play tricks on him, though these were of course completely invisible to Bedard; this talent Dr. Matthews had discovered when, on the loss of his wife, as mourners and as friends, there had come to pay court to him the church in its great and compassionate numbers, his many students, the young men who had become better Christians because of him, and perhaps also one or two widows who had always had a soft spot for him. 
11	To them he learned to say more than he felt. It was a joy of expertise, of manipulation, of constructing for himself, as himself, authoring a character which he could view with amusement and detachment: the noble ‘Brother’ in grief. They saw him in such a fashion. Cloistered in so strange, so foreign, so peculiarly stable a place by the loss of his wife (whom he had loved more than God and life), abandoned in such a room which was like a compartment in his mind which he never knew of and which he suddenly found himself within and from which there was no exit, as isolated as a polar bear on a drift of ice, in a hyperborean region in which the calm wind of the continued, untroubled, blended days blew through unceasingly marked only by their own untroubled continuation (as something peculiar, sometimes noticed before sleep), in such an environs, he had rather changed himself and amusingly become what they saw him as—even though, for some reason, he had never felt the grief as he thought he ought to feel. 
12	He lost some twenty pounds in weight. 
13	But as soon as others took note of it and commented on it, lamenting with all due seriousness, with what he detected as a compliment to how deeply he mourned his wife—they told him he should ‘eat more and grieve less’ and that ‘the Lord did not want us to suffer for those in life for it was not life in which joy may be found, but as he himself knew, it was in the other life,’—as soon as he took note of this, on purpose he then lost a few pounds more; for he had lost weight, and who said it had anything to do with his wife? 
14	Where was the feeling, the common feeling, that was expected of him? Part of him wondered if he should not already have died. 
15	There is a type of person, absolute, pure, just, authentic and self-intelligent, who must be so true to himself, that should he be viewed in a certain way, should they take him to be noble, believe him to show the appropriate response to his tragedy, he is compelled, then, to be otherwise. 
16	Dr. Matthews could not stand to be as they actually thought him to be, and in this way, perhaps, they had stolen his mourning from him, simply by taking him to be a man in deep mourning. He had always had the ability to see deeply into character and to read another’s mind; but only now did he begin to play experiments, to see if he could predict them, to compose, as it were, a short succinct dialogue in real life and of his own careful construct, if he could manipulate them into one of their more expected behaviors; and the pleasure of this, if in part on account of the general pleasure he took from their stupidity, could also in large part be construed as sheer techne—technical proficiency, as an artist admiring the nicely shaded, evenly-sketched lines of his drawing. 
17	As for his appearance, it was quite opposite to the ritualistic, traditional and overtly anachronistic dress of Pastor Bedard, whose learned style bespoke a ‘man of God,’ a priest in all the attire and dark shadowy distant backdrop of millennia and concentrated academic thought, the religious architecture of a Gothic Cathedral, stately, tall, with robes plunging downwards in ancient descent, wearing, as like the symbol of an enormous clock-tower, a cross over his black uniform. Nevertheless he could not be recognized for a church-man if he took off his specialized clothes, whereupon he became, because bespectacled and stiff in manner, like something of a stupid doctor, easily discovered in some comic television show as the one delivering poorly-worded bad news. 
18	For he had the solicitude of one who was always in service of another, having the unimaginative, largely static shut lips, thin and colorless, of a man without much passion and thus with assurance in the solidity of morality, of which, quite easily, he becomes a proponent. His demeanor was no different from that of the common man. 
19	Yet in Dr. Matthews one could recognize, contained in his body which was plain as unleavened bread, ‘something else,’ something of luckiness and happiness. 
20	It was as if, in front of the youthfulness of his eyes (apparent as never can be but at that age, surviving, gleaming blue as relics of a happiness that the years have failed to rust and instead polish and shine), but below his faint, fading, more white than blonde hair (covering most of his head in a manner suggesting health in old age), like between frost and the blue sea, that ‘something else’ shone in his glasses alone. They scintillated restlessly…They caught the flicker and light of distant unsought teachings, as if within them alone rested his cleverness and wit. In their double-frame (separating with a thin line the glass piece so that, when he looked down, they became reading glasses, and when looking up in the normal line of sight, they functioned as normal near-sighted glasses), on account of the slightly convex shape, one half was always catching light depending on the orientation of his nod. 
21	Protean was his character! The light in those glasses could never quite be gainsaid, their location never truly found. He was actually quite near blind; thus he never removed the glasses, except to sleep. 
22	In ways pretty similar to that of the ancient Chinese sages (and not Christendom and its sinful darkness), as opposed to the profound seriousness and gloom which are found in other sincere clergymen, they seemed to express a spiritual levity. It was luck and happiness, perhaps. As one says, ‘going with the Flow.’ They so seemed to contain his ‘something else,’ that they gave the impression that, even should you block from your sight his slow and gentle smile, should he wear those glasses alone (obscuring his eyes), between the horizontal frame made by his hand covering his nose and forehead, that particular spiritual levity, like a cross-section taken from the many sheets of the earth, those glasses and the eyes obscured behind it would give on their own the feeling of a gaze mysterious, elusive, and yet completely comprehensible, completely comprehensive of you. In his look, you felt yourself understood. You felt you understood him. A universal comprehension, from man to man. 
23	Yet this was not true at all. While he completely understood you, you understood him only to the degree that he allowed: you understood the facts of his life, what he had suffered, when he was born, what his parents were like, even what his wife was to him; for he spoke of these with ease, even before his wife had died. 
24	His person had been completely transparent, for in him, even in his failures, he found nothing to be ashamed of, and saw that in becoming one who was clear and announced and true, his example to the others was infectious, and they came to him to talk of themselves for he freely he talked of himself. They were not ashamed to speak to him because nothing in him was ashamed of himself. But, of course, like you were only entering the foyer of the house, or, better, like you had entered all of his house but for the master bedroom where apparently he had never truly buried his wife and where she still took up a presence upon the bed after all these years, he kept clear from you the fundamental fact: as he talked to you, he was watching you. 
25	What you interacted with was the front portion of him, with those glasses that reflected your gaze, or shined with pleasantry (in surface pleasantry, but in actuality pleasure at deciphering you); in these, you saw what you wished to see. He was a mirror in which you saw the best of yourself. Yourself liberated from your failures, fine, free, not glamorous in vanity, but as the beloved of God himself. 
26	But, as if his social self were conducting a prayer meeting in the well-lit, golden living room of his house, he was, in cool gray shadows without a breath of air, taking a peek at you from between the blinds of a window that had a view across the backyard. 
27	He did not so much as pass judgment; for to pass judgment requires that one have some sort of ethical metric, in the sense that we wish to pass judgment on something more absolute than what we like or dislike. Morality had long been to him nothing but a philosopher’s puzzle. Yet, when he observed, when he was amused, a kind of judgment was presupposed: he viewed them as ontologically inferior, of less-than-complete reality; he viewed them as figures in a play, that occurred in front of him. 
28	He was very fond of reading! Except he read all of life as a comedy, with no tragedy in it. The very sincere, very intelligent, altogether normal, or even the degenerates, the depressives, the suicidal, none of them could truly move him; in that inner compartment, he was completely becalmed…like the center of the ocean, without the movement of waves, with the soft beating of the sun, distant from everything, but ever so sensitive like a spider able to attain information from every silken strand that it sends out. 
29	Thus he could read infinitely well; he could tell every change in mannerism, every slight flex of the eyebrow, or the twitching of the ear, or the shiftiness of a hidden thought. And if they cried, surely, he, too, grew sorrowful, sometimes even shedding a solitary, unsentimental tear; as a matter of animal reflex, just as one sighs when another sighs in your presence. But the comedy he read was fundamentally uniform. In it, there was no transcendence. Young men could be sincere and passionate, young women could be introspective and self-actualizing, or they could be despicable and mean, but at the end of the day, like a God who has ceased to really intervene in the matters of mankind and instead reclines in infinite space, the dealings of mortals and the images of their faces could only really bring about in him a sense of amusement. Playful enough. Enough to stimulate his mind, to cause a harmony of the faculties of his perception. But never enough to judge anything beautiful, or sublime, or tragic, or truly sad, or even hilarious. And this book of life was more interesting than actual books. To observe the world, to read it as a book, was better than reading books themselves. Thus he would go to places like El Camino’s psychiatry ward to read the passions of human life, its agonies, its sorrows, its unhealthiness. 
30	In short, he had begun to read his life, and interact with it, in order to make for more interesting reading material, as a way of passing the days. 
31	If before he worked in the power of the spirit, asking God how to proceed in every matter, praying constantly, filled with the unimpeachable sense of Life, what remained was an extremely sensitive intelligence. 
32	That sensitive intelligence, to all outsiders, was indistinguishable from when he had acted with spirit and prayer; this was his demonic aspect. 
33	On Wednesdays he had the night shift at El Camino Hospital. He had come straight from a dinner meeting with some other saints; he had comfortably taken some wine, for unlike other ‘Brothers,’ he had an epicurean aspect, unashamed of general pleasures and displays of worldly happiness, a habit of his faithful days. In the way that some deny themselves of worldly pleasures vehemently all the more because they actually desire them, Dr. Matthews, really caring only for his wife, never felt the pull of expensive cars, or private flights; thus had never felt any sin in consuming pleasurable things, and of himself made an example to other saints, that one should not make a fetish out of abstinence. 
34	After passing through security, he sat himself down in one of the couches in the common area, and took note of a conversation, occurring in a darkened bedroom nearby, between Pastor Bedard and an enormous bed-ridden patient named Gabby; a woman. He had word from the head doctor, a Dr. Singh, that this Gabby, with whom he was very well acquainted, and who bore him the same love that everyone in this hospital felt towards him, had been making a real mess of things, refusing her medication and preventing the nighttime hospital procedures from being run. 
35	Pastor Bedard came out of the darkened room. His face expressed, generally, mild stupidity, a solicitude learned from his religious practices, as if to say, ‘I’m here, by the name of God to listen,’ as if the human act of listening required a commandment from God. In actuality he was a man of common earthly feeling; thus it required no separation of his general impression of Pastor Bedard from the present expression to see, on his face, shadowed-over, replete with mediocrity, like a diet supplemented with a particular mineral that has altered the skin’s complexion, a look of strong irritation, shaded red as a drunk, of pure anger. He was pissy. 
36	Yet it was softened for it contained, also, something of a long awaited-for liberty. With Gabby, he had suppressed his irritation. Now he allowed it to bloom on his face, like the thrown sparks of a winter forge, furrowing his brow deeply, his white priest’s cap like a snow on a volcano. The focus of his eyes was set on a particular distance so close that it was as if he was staring at the transparent surface of his own glasses, which had strings attached to their ends so that they could fall around himself as a necklace, pretty lame and unfashionable. It was as if he were walking without looking in front of him, in the way that the bug of irritation prevents us from seeing or taking note of the things around us, and, draining the eyes of light, solidifies them in a particular short-sighted blindness. He briefly nodded to Dr. Matthews; yet Dr. Matthews rose up, and in a gesture such that he drew Pastor Bedard toward him, put his hands in his own—a senior taking in the hands of a middle-aged man—and said, ‘Pastor Bedard. Peace be with you, my brother.’ 
37	‘Yes…’
38	‘And are you well? The days are getting shorter and colder.’
39	‘Well enough, thank you, Dr. Matthews,’ he said stiffly, repressing his irritation. ‘—the bathroom—’
40	‘It’s good to see you,’ said Dr. Matthews, affecting not to realize that the Pastor needed the restroom. ‘The last time I saw you was two weeks ago, and back then the cold of the Autumn was just in. Even then, I think, there were reports of something strange in the air, a polar vortex, was it, in Alaska. The commentators are sure it has to do with global warming. But we’ve never seen something like this in California before, this cold.’ 
41	‘Yes, Dr. Matthews—but if you’ll excuse me—’
42	‘And did you hear what they’re saying, it’s really all over the news. They’re saying something marvelous, who would have thought. Snow, in California…it baffles the mind. – I’d think it a kind of miracle, come straight from God. Though of course,’ he qualified, laughing, ‘some brothers would say it a sign of the End Times. But we are all in prayer, and some are more certain than others. Should the Christ return, however, I wonder if it will be in snow.’ He nodded his head seriously at the mention of the Christ, his pleasant face darkening momently, ‘Amen.’ 
43	Pastor Bedard put his hands in the pockets of his pants, leaned back, stretching his legs in the motion of one holding in his urine, as if he meant to dig his shoes into the ground; then he put his hands on the back of his waist, and leaned forward a little. (Taking a small breath), ‘I did hear it would snow. Yes, I did hear. Really something, isn’t it. Really quite the thing.’ 
44	Dr. Matthews was amusingly aware that the Pastor thought him getting old and senile. He thought: ‘Let an old geezer ramble.’ He said: 
45	‘The snow back in ’72, back when I was at Berkeley. Those were strange days, surely. The Lord was in hiding…the amount of disquiet around the world; and the snow that kind evening in December. We joked the world was ending. You must’ve been in your teens back then—I wonder if you remember it.’ Pastor Bedard’s face was screwed up in the effort to control his bladder. ‘Are you alright? Am I keeping you from something? Do forgive me, Brother. Please,—’ 
46	Pastor Bedard instantly denied having to go anywhere; he suppressed violently the feeling of irritation, thinking to himself that he had totally recalled it from his face, as if he had absorbed that demon back into its box, though he had merely replaced it with the look of strain and effort, itself distinguishable from irritation only by the way that the daggers of the eyes are withdrawn and there come to the fore, lightly rimmed with folds, shadowed beneath by eye-bags, the eyes of common anxiety. 
47	He spent the next five minutes purposefully in conversation with Dr. Matthews, afraid he had revealed that he was not in the mood to talk. When the Pastor finally allowed himself to leave, Dr. Matthews himself allowed a small mischievous smile to form upon his lips, giving it only the space of a second to appear—the common area was dark, it was night—then he brought his fingers to his nose, rubbing it, as if yanking it, and took the same appearance of a peaceful old man again. 
48	A young Asian lad, no older than twenty, a college student, named Nate Chan, was talking to his father; the two of them paced up and down the hallway. Confined to the inside of the Psych Ward, there was but little space to walk, and the area was frequently suffocating. Apparently, the young man’s mood or medicine had given him permanent restlessness, also called akathisia. 
49	‘But you don’t get it, Dad,’ (shaking his head irritably), ‘I don’t—I don’t think you do. Here,’ (he sighed), ‘here, let’s sit,’ he turned towards a bench on the side of the hallway; then, as soon as he sat down, he waved his father off and got up again, saying, ‘No, I guess that doesn’t work. I guess it’s no use, what, we’ve walked the past hour, and still I can’t sit?’ 
50	He did not seem to consider the position of his father, who had followed him for the past hour, though with no apparent drain upon his energies, or at least he did not show it; the father seemed the sort of man who, tolerant and strong, will raise children who are dependent and weak. 
51	Nate was speaking of God. 
52	‘Does your God do anything? No, he doesn’t do a thing. What is he compared to medicine? I would trade three of your Gods for the right medicine; for a medicine without this stupid restlessness. You know what it feels like? I already told you, I know, but just let me say it again; I enjoy hearing it aloud. It feels like there’s a motor inside me that just won’t stop moving. A motor,’ and so on. 
53	The father tagged along as they paced. The son, tall and lanky, like a lean athlete full of energy, pushed himself forward without taking in his environment, possessed by some inner animation, while meanwhile the father, at the son’s side as if the motion of the piston which follows along, tagged just a little behind, as if the two of them were part of the same machine, a puffing train, wordy, agitated, walking without a clear purpose or any cessation in sight. They would go down to the very end of the hallway, which took no more than two minutes—the length of the entire psych ward—and touch the wall, the same spot each time, having gotten into the same pattern; then, walking to the other end of the ward, they would repeat the action, as if caught in a Dantean perpetual loop from which there was no escape.
54	The father listened as the son conducted a conversation with himself that was the natural product of his restlessness, himself not saying a word. He seemed to be taking in everything that the son said, processing it in his mind, furrowing his brow. Now and then, though, the son would turn to him and say, as if it were a quiz, ‘Were you listening, did you get that? Did you hear me?’ 
55	‘Yes.’ 
56	‘Okay so then what was I saying.’ 
57	(with errors in his Chinese-English), ‘God should not have made the world, he should have just give up.’
58	‘No, well, yes, I guess. I mean…Maybe he had no choice but to make the world, but he should have known he shouldn’t have done it. Maybe he should have decided to refrain, to leave off his hands. That’s what would’ve been right,’ and so on—as if the son disagreed with his own words just because he had heard them come out of the mouth of his father. – Dr. Matthews knew both of them. Nate had grown up in a Christian environment, and the father was actually well-known at a congregation in San Jose, well-respected, seemingly by everyone except his atheist son.
59	The son had gotten into a dispute with a nurse; the son wanted the father to stay, and sleep with him for just five minutes, while the medicine took him under. He leaned forward, grasped onto his arms, feeling them in his hand as if he were trying to warm them like poles, nervous, almost panicking, he said: 
60	‘You don’t get it. I’ve been trying, no offense, to tell you. But I don’t see…I don’t understand why this is,’ he grew angry, but then the nervousness in his voice surmounted the anger, and he grabbed at his stomach, ‘Why is it such a big deal if my father sleeps with me, just for a little? The hallucinations...As soon as I start trying to sleep, there’s this weird sound that occurs in the corner of the room. There’s this weird sound,’ he said, his eyes suddenly coming alive, as if he had talked himself awake, and by the very act of describing something, now attained a pleasure that was not there previously, so that he shed all the appearance of suffering and was as focused as a bard relating an epic poem. 
61	His hands gestured an imagined corner: ‘I don’t see anyone there, in that corner, behind the chair, or, perhaps on the chair, I suppose. It’s just a feeling. Have you ever,’ he asked the nurse, then recoiling from his question, ‘Have you ever heard someone blow on your ear? It’s like that. It’s not a permanent psychosis, and I know it’s not real; but it’s still really bothersome—more than bothersome, it’s—how should I say it…’ But he saw that the nurse did not care for the specific description of his illness. There were rules, visitors had to leave by 10 p.m.—oh, the son said, there’s rules against my father just accompanying me for a little bit? But here at last, for the sake of the nurse, the father intervened against the obstinacy of his son; he said, —
62	‘I will be out, by then.’ 
63	The son turned to him with a look of rage; the nurse had departed. They sat silently on the bench in the hallway, like two rooks perched on a castle somewhere, except that, far from the majesty of a castle, they were in a plain, extremely boring, upholstered hallway of a mental hospital. Where there might have been fields of waving grass, instead, Nate stared at the patterns of colored squares on the ground, allowing his eyes to linger on one square, then another, trying to deduce the patterns between them; then his mind would grow tired and he would see nothing. 
64	Finally, the father prepared to go, and with a look of great fear and pain, suddenly waking up again, wanting desperately to be beside his own father for just a second more, Nate followed him down the hallway, this time tagging behind him a little, with slow steps. But they were stopped. 
65	A hideous, enormous voice, ruined and vast and echoing in its chambers as of a haunted castle, belonging to a woman, came from the dark room. It was almost as if an accusation, recalling the days when Christians were asked to stand up and identify themselves at the cost of martyrdom, ‘You guys are Christians…?’ 
66	It was Gabby, who Pastor Bedard had just left. 
67	‘Yes, we are.’ 
68	Nate looked at his father with rage, again. He said aloud, ‘He is, I’m not.’ He was keen not to be identified with the tradition of his youth. Now he made a motion to the clock, as if to say to his father, ‘Don’t spend time with her; you have to go, now. She’s nothing at all.’ 
69	The voice came out of the darkness, replete with an unidentifiable sorrow and misery, with a wretched, weak demand, ‘Would you come and pray for me?’ 
70	They were not seen by the woman. They were in the hallway outside the door. The son stared at his father, tilting his head in the direction of the ward entrance. But the father, perhaps purposefully—in the way that quiet people, who are actually in power and possession of themselves, will when necessary ignore the demands of the loud person who had thought the quiet one under his control—appeared not to take notice, pretending not to hear. He went into the room, disappearing from view. Nate, paralyzed, stood there, alone, anxiously worrying his hands, like he was trying to rub a stain off of his wrists, recalling to mind a young aesthete waiting on the wings of the play that he has written, observing but at every moment afraid that some actor or another will mangle his speech, and he will have to fall asleep that night to the sounds of the mistake. Dr. Matthews shifted in his seat so as to better hear the conversation. 
71	‘I’m a Catholic. Are you a Catholic?’ 
72	Without responding to the question, likely since he saw no need to embroil them in a discussion of religious denominations, in the same way, for the sake of utility, as he had ignored the son before, he said, in the flat tone of immigrants who are not familiar with the emphases involved in framing a question, ‘What would you like me to pray for.’ 
73	‘These fuckin….’ (a pause). ‘These arm bands are on too tight. They always put’m too tight, and I always say to ’em, Don’t do the double-latch, the single-latch is enough. But do they listen? Not a fat of chance of that. So can you just…’ 
74	Ignoring the request which was not within his authorization—evidently she had been restrained for a reason, probably violent, and was trying to use him to get rid of them, he said, ‘I can ‘tell nurses’ about it.’ 
75	‘It’s ‘I can tell the nurses about it.’ A man in America, just like any good American, a man in America’s got t’a speak Good English. They’ve got to at least try,’ she said, with an air of defiance, exasperation, and good intention. ‘No matter the skin color—it’s Equal. Equal and Free. As long as you learn the language and give up on whatever slang, or whachwhichever, you know, then you’re an American, and that’s what I’ll believe till my dying day. Till the Lord says to me, Gabby,—’ Her English was not in any way standard, but this was of little interest to the father, who stood over her, his arms crossed in the darkness, his dark-skinned, creased, commoner’s face tilted down in the posture that one takes when one is at the same time moved but represses that emotion for the sake of listening. 
76	But she had gone quiet, overhearing herself. In the darkness of the room, she said, ‘Oh but who’s gonna, what God’ll come to me and speak to me after all these years. You know what I mean? What God, oh whos’m gonna come and speak to me after all these Years?’ (A pause). Her voice softened and became even playful. ‘Oh you know. Oh you know how it is, Mister. You’re a good man. Not everyone would walk into my room and, and pray and whatever. You’re a good man, I believe it in my heart. Nobody’s bad, you see. Nobody’s really Bad. — But I am —. Yep. You can take that to the bank. I’m bad. — Everybody else, they’ve got their excuses. But me? Take it to the bank, Sir. Go to the heaven's teller, where Peter's standing in a bank suit, and look up my name. It’ll say—Gabby—Bad—meth-addict—negligent parent—divorcee—Awful—a suicide—Bad—Gabby. They won’t even know my last name, because that’s how little…that’s how little they’ll care for me. Gabby Schleidenschtecker. — Bet they won’t write that down. Would take them too much time. They’ll just say, Bad, Awful, Negligent Parent, Meth-Addict, Fat, Ugly, Welfare Queen—that’s what they’ll say. — and you know what? I deserve it. I won’t pull any punches. I know who I am. I deserve it. Don’t let them say,’ she rambled with increasing speed as if to finish the thought before her breath ran out. She said, ‘Don’t let them say Gabby Schleidenschtecker never knew she wasn’t who she was deep down and at the end of the day.’
77	(with much gravity), ‘You are not ‘bad as you think.’’ 
78	‘Oh,’ (with some stifled emotion), ‘Oh. Oh well.’
79	‘What would you like me to pray for.’
80	‘If you could—If you could pray for my, son—if you could pray for him—all’s I want is a phone call. It’s going to be Christmas soon. A white Christmas,’ she said, and suddenly there was a sense of snow in the room, all the desire of Christmas, its small hope, conveyed in the word ‘white.’ ‘I don’t want a visit; I know what’s realistic. I just want a phone call, it doesn’t even have to be ten minutes. I’d like a prayer for that.’ 
81	There was something about her prayer, her small desire, that spoke of the holiness of snow. She went on, ‘You know what he said to me once? He said, I know why you do it, Mom. I know why you’re into meth. It’s because life outside is too bad, and you have to hide inside it. You don’t do it because you’re evil, you do it because you can’t take it anymore, so you do it instead of killing yourself. — Oh, Mister. — Oh. — But you know, you can’t kill yourself if you have children. Not while they’re alive. If you have kids, and you’ve got a son, looks like a good lad, smart one, no doubt—I always thought that if I could do some tiger parenting like you Asians maybe my child’ll turn into some math whiz, too. But he tried hard. — But you know, every kid—they’re like an argument against the cide. The suicide, I mean. Each one’s like, a law. Like a decree. A big Don’t. — So I’d like a call. Yeah. See if you can get that to Santa,’ (her voice, smiling a little), ‘The Big Old dude. I used to do the whole cookies thing. You know what that is?’
82	‘I have ‘seen on TV’.’ 
83	The father did not see think of her as physically repulsive, though of course he sensed it, for so large and decrepit a body of hers bespoke—in his eyes, since he was one who believed in daily exercise and the putting-away of lethargy—one lazy and unsuitable as a good example for others; thus he had a strong natural aversion to the morbidly obese. But he did not allow this conviction of his to interfere with his listening to her. For easy it is, that our disgust with another's physicality interferes with our ability to look at them without noticing that, on a very fat person's face, the tears look like oil, their eyelashes are rich with black oil or their skin has unhealthy spots and ripples. The beauty that sorrow can give, for example, a young man or woman, instead, on their faces looks like self-indulgence and self-pity. For we forgive beauty everything, and we forgive ugliness nothing. It is this humane, sorrowful, original insight that gave the writer of Isaiah the eternal, un-Greek wisdom (for the Greek heroes are always beautiful), to prophecy of the Messiah that he would be one from whom we would ‘turn our face,’ who was not ‘good to look at,’ a ‘man of sorrows,’ a lamb of God rather than a leaping beast like Odysseus. For if the very lowest are taken care of, is there not a chance that humanity may call itself universally caring? Thus when Jesus came around, ugly, the Jewish people understood that in this, he was a hero unlike any before him. The true innovation in the character of the Christ is his ugliness. Because he is ugly, because he suffers, because no one liked him in his physical person, a virgin all his life, perhaps sexually impotent (for such a one has less danger in lust), like how Lyndon B. Johnson hid his progressive Great Society program for all his life until he was President, coming from the lowest, un-aristocratic, shameful origins will forever instill, in a personality that has the breath of life in it to become magnanimous and universal, a lover of man-kind, will give him the ability to feel that unique pain, as Kant calls it the sublime feeling of the sense of humanity's sadness, which is the only thing properly called the feeling of the humane. Dostoevsky understood that it is far easier to have this universal humane feeling than to love the ugly one in person. The obnoxious, hypocritical, and self-hating. Yet, as the father understood, love does not mean a sentimental reaching out and infatuation, but, protean, to morph into whatever the person needs, completely letting go of his own personality, of his own physical necessities (such as his hunger when the other speaks, or more importantly, his boredom), and completely free of price, in Gabby's case, to turn himself into a sea-shell that hears everything you say into it, and, however wrong it may be, because it is sincere, forgives it. 
84	This, then, is called the Christian, completely freed from dogma, from spiritual arrogance, from the desires of the self. As a confessional one to another, and yet judgment, like the psychological insight of Austen, when judgment is necessary, when it may be productive, when it is asked for; otherwise, to withhold oneself and be silent. 
85	She was speaking of her Christmas wish. ‘Well us white folk like to leave out the cookies for Mr Oh Clause. But I always knew my son got up at midnight and ate’m. He wasn’t s’posed to. A fat one, he is. I’d diet him all the time, didn’t get nowhere because I’d eat myself out of five pizzas every moon, if you get my drift. But I’d bought the ones that he liked the best and which he never got’s to eat anymore after that awful time with Mrs. Lorens. We really did have some good times together. I liked watching him eat, always, I always liked it. I’d prepare him a peanut-butter jelly sandwich, whole-wheat, plain as can be, with no fats or whatever, after school, he’d come from the brown school bus, and he’d put down his bags, and he’d come and hug me and sniff my hair and feel around my neck. He’d hug me long. I could always tell when someone was nice to him that day. There’d be something special in his eyes. My mother used to tell me, Every-Body is loved by a mother somewheres. That’s real true, always been True. Every-Body is loved by a mother somewheres, or wherever. Even on the moon, I bet if you were born there, still a mother’d love you. I wish he’d gotten to see his grandmama, who said that to me all the time when I was a kid. She was love-ly. I mean, love-ly. But you know they say the prettiest flowers are plucked first. — He wrote about those peanut-butter jelly sandwiches on his college essays. ‘Everyday I come home to eat my mom’s peanut-butter jelly sandwiches. They remind me of the home I can make when I have a great career in biology.’ — Oh. A wonderful thing to say. He wrote about me in his college essays! And you know, he may not be as smart as your son, but he got into UC Merced, and that’s not nothing, certainly not from where’s I come around. Not Nothing At All. UC Merced. Like a Mercedes Benz. — Is your young one in college yet?’
86	‘Yes, he’s at Berkeley.’
87	‘And he’s found himself here, in this poor place, with people like me?’
88	‘He’s very sick.’
89	‘Oh, but you know, he’ll get better. They always do. What’s he got—why’s he got the shakes always?’
90	‘His medicines give him the akathisia.’ 
91	‘Oh, is it the Latuda? I’ve never liked that one. See if you can switch him onto something else, maybe Zyprexa. What’s good about the shakes, though, is you walk so much, you lose lots of weight.’ 
92	‘I will ‘note down,’ thank you.’
93	They had forgotten to pray for her son. Pastor Bedard had come in. ‘Sir, are you familiar with the patient?’
94	Gabby said, ‘Nah, we just met and all. I never even asked you your name.’
95	But before the father could answer, Pastor Bedard asked for a word outside. He said to him with apology, ‘I’m sorry that happened. She’s been doing that a lot, recently—making people come into her room. She’s lonely, and she’ll make up whatever excuse, to get some pity. Please don’t feel like you’re obligated to spend your emotional energy in ways that you don’t want to.’
96	Right outside the door, Nate was relentlessly crying, his face down and shadowed over by his tufted messy hair. His glasses were standard-issue, neither fancy nor too nerdy, but he had taken them off, placed them in the pocket of his nondescript jacket, and, placing his hand over his eyes, kneading his fine, scholar’s, handsome brow with his thumb and middle finger like dough, had completely forgotten that he was in the public light of the hallway.
97	He had heard every word. Though himself quite socially adept, he remembered in the figure of Gabby's obese son the loneliness of his middle school years, all the misery of isolation. Though he had had friends, he was always afraid that they would leave him. If they left him, he would become like this woman’s son, unliked, bullied, unattractive. It seemed to him that life was crying out to him for a definitive justice, for the unfairness in the way it treated people who were all good.
98	How come it was that people were sad? At this question posed to himself, he had gagged; he felt nauseous, and indeed, on account of his actual nausea caused by the turmoil his anxiety spread in his stomach, he actually began to drool a little, the saliva coming to his mouth and spreading a sour taste, the forerunner of vomit and distemper. How was it, he whispered to himself, how is it that people are sad? And he was filled with infinite admiration for his father. For he saw in his father—however angry he was initially that he had lost his attention—every aspect that ought to belong to a person, whatever ideology, and was swayed in his mind toward feeling that his father’s beliefs were actually a benefit upon his person and not the trite thoughtlessness, the unintellectual and uninteresting whatever that he usually took it to be. She had said so many bad things about herself, she had insulted his father, and yet there was something, he thought, unsurpassably noble about her, infinitely good. She was sick, not evil. She had been beaten hard by the world, and had not the disposition to be a good character in the world in the first place. Long before he came to the hospital, Nate had had deep affinity, as much sentimental as spiritual, for those he saw like himself, the broken, the unhappy, the losers, the hated. Whenever he heard of some figure or another in the public being reviled, even though he knew very clearly that the person had done something awful and was nevertheless justly being reviled, such that he was so extreme that he felt commonality with sexual monsters or racists (anyone who was held up as evil), he felt a pang of guilt and common feeling for that person. He felt that they certainly could not be truly evil; he did not believe that evil existed. Anyone who was hated deserved compassion. Hard it was to tell where this attribute came from, though should his father have known of it—and his father had some sense of Nate’s feelings, for Nate, however complicated, had never been anything but good, lacking in cruelty—his father would have seen it as God-given, the grace of Christian belief, which out of hand Nate would have denied. For he hated Christianity. It was a stupid and hateful religion. 
99	But he knew, also, that Gabby had done something awful to her son. 
100	Given how much feeling they had for each other, the way her son would go and smell her and feel around her neck after school, Nate had no option but to sense that, perhaps, in the course of taking care for his mother, Gabby had done so much damage to her son that he could not even begrudge her a phone call. How many times had she told this story to others before? he wondered. How many times had she come out of the hospital, pledging to be good, spending a month working hard at finding a job, before relapsing? At this a sort of bitter feeling welled up in him; a disdain. Yet it was as easily dissolved into his stronger feeling. Overcoming the bitterness, he felt as if he had been released from it, the temporary moment where he had passed judgment upon the woman and imagined the worst; he felt, as if a duty, as if his life called upon him to do so, no, in fact he felt pain, deep stabbing pain, in being aware that he had such thoughts about this woman who, in every sense, though he could not express it to her, he loved in his soul. All the annoyance toward his father had passed away. He wept. 
101	Pastor Bedard looked at him with confusion. Probably, he thought, the boy was depressed. Having studied the scriptures all his life, he nevertheless could not understand what it meant to cry. Nate’s father went to Gabby’s door and said, —
102	‘My name is Simon Chan. Nice to meet you. Maybe talk to you later.’
103	‘Yessir. Gabby Schleidenschtecker.’ 
104	Father and son walked arm in arm toward the entrance. There was a small waste-high gate that patients were not allowed past; Nate stopped there. The main gates opened; the father went through the small gates, then through the large protected doors. The doors were closing, and the figure of the father grew smaller and smaller as, walking away, as if into some distance from which never to return into the sight of the eyes, like how two mirrors opposed to each other will show a series of frames, smaller and smaller, unto eternity, so that it is as if a particle of light will bounce between them forever, just so, Nate saw his father disappearing as the main gates closed upon them, leaving him alone in this hospital for the insane. He would have go to his room. He was scared of his roommate. His roommate had very casually lent him his desk, which Nate needed because his back caused him constant pain and he hoped to write on it; but he was so bearded, a young man, so strongly hairy as if he were a prophet in the ancient times of the Bible, showing as little bare skin as a bear, that Nate could hardly disassociate him from a large beast prowling in the night, the color of the night itself, its fur unfurling and quietly growing angry with static electricity and brown dull edges, combed by an unseen hand. He was a beast belonging to the mental hospital, as dangerous, as much like a panther, as Stephen Dedalus's roommate Haines, from whom he resolves to liberate himself that day in Ulysses. 
105	His room, he knew, would be completely dark but for the light from the window showing out to the hallway, through which nurses would peer occasionally to make sure no one was attempting to commit suicide, in addition to the red ‘Exit’ sign that glowed like an apparition in hell, soft, edged with another white glow, framed and bolted into the space above the door, mandated by the fire department. Just so, features of architecture are installed with only the thought of their utility and purpose, in this instance to lead the patients out in case of a power outage or fire, yet to the patient sleeping in that room, or better said, to the patient unable to sleep in that room, as if he were contained within a chalice of fire and visions, broiled alive in the demons of his thought, footed upon the charred coals of the continual noises that would spring him awake, but nevertheless reassured that here he could not kill himself—and so alone in the universe in this moment that from then he would feel as if never could another truly touch him—to such a person in deep longing, pain and inspiration, such a thing like the ‘Exit’ sign could take on as much significance as a burning bush had taken on for Moses. It was a thing to worship. When you stare at something for too long, it becomes a symbol of God. Meanwhile, Dr. Matthews, without making himself known to Nate, observing with small interest the look of terror on his face which he knew he could do nothing to dispel, though nevertheless something moved him in Nate’s direction (for, perhaps unbeknownst to himself, he still had some feeling), allowed himself to tolerate Nate’s suffering and retained his position on the couch. Nate disappeared from view, shutting the door to his bedroom. 
106	Gabby was saying, ‘I don’t want your prayers.’ 
107	‘The Lord hears all our prayers. Especially the ones you don’t want to give.’ 
108	‘The Lord’s going to hear my prayers?’
109	‘Yes, Gabby, he does. The Lord hears the prayer of every sinner upon the earth.’ 
110	‘And I’m’s a sinner?’
111	‘We are all sinners, Gabby. It’s almost ten thirty, I believe. Gabby, maybe it’s time to call Bobbert.’
112	But she had begun shaking with rage, thrashing around the bed, kicking the sheets at her feet. In a thick, hoarse voice, ‘No—No—’
113	She thrashed and thrashed at that word, ‘Bobbert.’ 
114	(Out from the common area), ‘Oh—Gabby!’ 
115	‘Is that Dr. Matthews? Oh is that Dr. Matthews?’ 
116	Several patients suddenly realized that he was sitting on the couch near them; he had been hiding as if incognito.
117	‘Oh you was jus sitting here and none of us saw you?’ 
118	‘Leandro, Ping, Jessica. It’s very nice to see you all. You all seem better than the last time I saw you.’ 
119	‘Doctor Matthews!’ 
120	‘Yes, Gabby my dear! — ’ (to those near him), ‘Excuse me.’
121	Mikey the male nurse said to him quietly, ‘It’s been like that for four nights now. Pastor Bedard hasn’t been able to do anything.’ 
122	‘Has she been refusing her meds?’
123	‘No, she’s taking them. Should I get Bobbert?’
124	‘No, thank you, Mikey. That won't be necessary. I find Bobbert tends to be counterproductive.’ 
125	Dr. Matthews glimpsed the Pastor in the corner of the room, in the dark, sitting on a chair with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, calling to mind a man in idiotic despair who will lean his forehead against a wall. But he waited outside the door, listening a bit more. He had known that the Pastor was likely to be feigning sleep in the corner of the room, perhaps in the hopes that, with his silence, which he waged against her as ‘the silent treatment,’ he would finally get her to agree to go to sleep. 
126	Dr. Matthews was quite aware of the power dynamic between Bedard, who was employed by the hospital as a salaried chaplain, moonlighting at the hospital when he was not leading dry liberal sermons at Sanders Church, between him and the head of the Behavioral Health Ward, Dr. Singh. Dr. Singh had said to Pastor Bedard, ‘See what you can do.’ But in this, one also understood, in her imperious, quick, busy tone, with its business-like Indian accent, her many scarves that surrounded her with the slight frivolity of the professionally-satisfied and unrepentantly healthy, that he was being ‘asked’ to do it, which word was endowed, always, with a command, ‘succeed, or you and I will have to talk.’ ‘Pastor Bedard,’ she had said. ‘I would ask you to help pacify Gabby before she sleeps. Having Bobbert do it—there’s always a bit of paperwork involved, and it’s better if it’s voluntary. We shouldn’t be having to sedate a patient every night, even if she is disturbing all the other patients.’ 
127	He said he would be sure to do it. ‘And I’m sure you will,’ she replied. ‘But I would ask that you put your full efforts into it. I guarantee that you will feel more professional satisfaction, more satisfaction in your day if you really apply yourself.’ ‘Yes, Dr. Singh.’ ‘And have you not taken some advice from Dr. Matthews? Dr. Matthews is a wise man.’ Dr. Matthews was not there nearly as often as Pastor Bedard. He was occupied by running important affairs for the Apostles, where he a ‘coordinating Brother,’ one who helped run the huge church system that was at least many thousands deep. Pastor Bedard only had his tiny denominational church, wishing—whereas Dr. Matthews understood this ambition to be directly contrary to the Apostles’ mission, or Christianity itself—to make a name for himself as a clergy-man. 
128	He would withdraw himself from the conversation, feeling it inappropriate to insert himself into the shame of Pastor Bedard. 
129	For this, to the extent that a perpetually irritable man can be so, the Pastor was grateful, if only at the lessening of humiliation (and his general trust of Dr. Matthews’ unjudgmental and good character; that he was probably too old to care). But she always closed by saying, ‘The hospital needs your full attention. I ask that you go study methods by which you might be more of a help to us. Frankly, and let me tell you this with full honesty, we have an extreme shortage of therapists right now, and our nurses are not trained in communication. And I’ve seen your efficacy before, Pastor Bedard. One only has to think of the many patients who you’ve provided help to. But I would ask that you put in your full effort. I would ask that the next time we have this conversation, Gabby will no longer require Bobbert to sedate her every night,’ she added, for this was what she truly cared about, ‘as like I said, that’s a lot of paperwork on our part.’ She was quite used to the tactic of having the nurses restrain Gabby, tighten the arm bands, after which would come Bobbert, a white-haired man who looked like Santa Clause, to inject her with a sedative. 
130	Dr. Matthews had seen it once. He did not like watching it. In the violence of it, he recalled what his wife might have felt, and in this, remembering how his wife would have reacted to it, in the place of his own sensibility—as a wind to a man standing in a plain—it seemed that, in the hallway of the Psych Ward, stealing next to him as those times when in the hall of their high school, as if the air fermented and become embodied, she would suddenly materialize at his shoulder like a magician’s assistant, she would show up asking to copy his homework; as if she were standing to the side of him. She did not lean on him—as she used to lean, putting her two hands on his shoulder as a rest for her chin, and pressing her nose breathing hotly against the underside of his neck, so as to avoid seeing whatever it is she did not want to see—but her presence pressed upon his language like the influence of a poet upon a lesser poet, altering the inflection of his adjectives, like a soft pillow on the skin. She had not died. For she lived on in his internal language, as a kind of grammar subsisting with his own, as two overlapping spheres. For he felt as if, sometimes, he were constituted by two consciences, two reactivities. 
131	There was his own, which could not be found. He could not say, of any consciousness, ‘that’s me.’ But he could recognize hers. It was lodged into his side, a soft spot. An aroma he could recognize. Knowing his wife’s character all too well, he knew when something would offend or please her. 
132	‘Oh, Rebecca; my wife; she would have liked this.’ 
133	Then he would see the world through her eyes, as if he did not so much as recall her, as he recalled her preferences, the kind of thing that she would always notice. An artist, under the influence of a friend with tremendous imagination, will begin to see the world through her eyes, to notice, for example, her ‘key’ images, such as doorways, through which the friend is always imagining giants crouching to enter.
134	On seeing Gabby restrained, Rebecca would have closed her eyes, shut herself into him as one encloses herself into a box, hiding in his presence, as if she drew the curtains, the feeling that she had for Dr. Matthews, around herself, draping them over her smaller body; seeing what she did not want to see, she took refuge in his name. 
135	They had been walking in the hallway, having left a patient, to whom she had said, not knowing what to say, (casting her eyes down not just sadly but with real depression), ‘I will pray for you…’ and so sincere, and so pitiful was her demeanor, so unsure of itself, and devoid of artifice, that the patient, in this case an old man named Gompert, had been unable to be as sarcastic as he would have liked. But a noise had stopped them in the hallway. 
136	Dr. Matthews said, ‘Don’t worry, let’s go.’
137	‘What’s going on – ?’
138	‘Don’t worry, it’s just Gabby, she’s suffering again.’
139	‘Okay,’ and she put her head down, willing to listen to him, also considering that it was not right to gawk. She was about to walk away when she turned, stopped, and saw Dr. Matthews, his figure gray and drably golden in the sterile hallway, staring into the doorway, Gabby’s bedroom—which was dark but for the light of the hallway that came in and cast, on the floor, a parallelogram of light that revealed the legs of the bed and the shadows stained away from it—as well as the lit window in the other hospital building across the courtyard. He could not see what was going on inside, but he saw, shrouded in extremely fluffy socks of the type found at Walmart and worn by unfashionable women who nevertheless have a desire to be colorful, lined with pink: her feet, flailing about. Then the nurse Johns Wang appeared, though he just as soon went to the left, out of the view of the doorway. An enormous howl came from the room and echoed down the hallway, and he knew that, in the common room, in the bedrooms, sounds of irritation were arising, at yet another disruption. She screamed again, as a beast, restrained, roars, though without any nobility, only strength, fury, and desperation, at the loss of dignity, of being caught within a net. He did not know how many nurses were in there; the skinny Johns Wang had had on his face the unthinking expression of someone dealing with panic; he did not know what they were doing to her. 
140	She drew to his side, to attend to him. She withheld any outward show of emotion, but, against her will, she reached for his hand, viewing the scene from afar. 
141	‘Why are they doing this?’ she asked. 
142	He said, firmly, ‘It’s because they have to. She’s being disruptive.’ 
143	‘But do they have to be so mean, Mister?’
144	‘They’re not being mean, they’re following protocol.’
145	‘I believe you, Mister. But it’s wrong, isn’t it. Isn’t there something so wrong?’
146	‘There’s nothing wrong, this is just the way the world works. It’s for her own good. For everyone’s good.’ 
147	‘But you wouldn’t do that, would you Mister?’
148	‘No, I wouldn’t.’ 
149	‘You would rather die than have to do that, right Mister?’
150	‘Yes, I’d rather die than have to see this.’
151	‘But why are you looking at it, then?’
152	‘I don’t know, I found myself here with nothing to do, so I looked.’
153	‘Why don’t you look away, Mister?’
154	‘I can’t look away, maybe they’ll do something wrong. But I can’t look away, you see. You’d have wanted me to watch in case something went wrong.’
155	‘That’s right, Mister. You’re doing the right thing. But there’s no need to cry like that.’
156	‘But you cry all the time, Rebecca.’
157	‘But that’s because I’m a silly girl. You, you’re a Brother in the Lord, you have trust in God that it will all turn out right in the end.’ 
158	‘That’s right, Rebecca. I have to trust in God. But I don’t think God is watching, or, if he is—oh, but you see, I’m bored by this thought. If I weren’t bored, maybe I’d be angry.’
159	‘Reach for a tissue.’ 
160	‘There’s no tears, why should I reach for a tissue?’
161	‘You know, that’s what I always liked about you. You were always very composed. You never panicked. And you judged everything so well, you were always clear-headed. You were never sentimental. But, you know, however many prayers you listened to, you still always prayed the same thing: 
162
163Protect us, give us health.
164Lord, you are the master of the Universe.
165Be kind to us, don’t hurt us.
166Let us keep our friends, and make more friends.
167Teach us how to pray, teach me what to say.
168
169Oh, Lord. Lord…
170
171– and here you always run out of material –
172
173Lord, protect us, give us health. 
174
175‘And then you would cry just a little. That’s what I always liked about you. No matter how many people you helped, you stayed young, like a child, and you always allowed yourself to be hurt.’
176	‘But that’s because God regenerated me, always…’
177	Across the courtyard, people had come to the windows from far away, and were watching the scene in the bedroom; suddenly Bobbert had come in, and turned on the white fluorescent lighting, so the room was flooded with a sterile hospital examination light; Johns Wang was pressing upon her legs, throwing his skinny body onto her; but she flailed out and kicked him in the groin, and he recoiled and fell into the corner of the room. Bobbert said to him, quickly when he had a chance, ‘Draw the curtains.’ 
178	Some of the patients had come out of their bedrooms, and were watching. ‘I mean like,’ said Mindy, ‘is it going to take an hour, again, for me to get my meds? I just want to go to sleep.’
179	Gabby’s voice was sobbing, in the horrendous, ruined voice in which seemed to echo the deep growl of a demon, as if the doorway were the entrance of a cavern. 
180	But her thrashing feet came to a rest. The curtains were drawn. Mikey the head nurse came out of the bedroom and, seeing everyone there, said, ‘Hey guys, it’s not really not cool to be watching like this. Please give Gabby her privacy.’
181	‘What’s really not cool,’ said Gilfoyle, ‘is that a single rather awful individual can keep the rest of us awake for a night. That’s pretty not cool, if you ask me.’
182	Rebecca leant on his shoulder. ‘What can I say?’ he asked. 
183	Dr. Matthews smiled and chuckled a little. They looked at him in their irritation. He said, ‘Gilfoyle, Arnold, all of you. Maybe while you’re waiting, you’d like to gather in the kitchen and hear me talk, or tell a story?’
184	Gilfoyle, normally extremely cynical, but nevertheless acquainted with the interesting nature of Dr. Matthews’ mind, said, ‘Sounds alright with me.’ 
185	It would be later on, at night, though, before she gave any sign of being affected by it. It would come as she was patting her face with the various creams which she used to protect her skin, their nighttime ritual. She was using a cucumber-based lotion; its sweet, clean, clear and tasteless smell would fill their bathroom. They had put Randy to bed already. 
186	‘She does not delight in the cucumber today,’ he said, facetiously, idling in the bathroom. For he delighted when she said, ‘hmm! cucumber smell!’ He went on: ‘For aren’t cucumbers an ‘excellent!’ word?, after all, they were the primary food of your second pet turtle, they adorned the eyes of Winnie-De-Pooh; and Eeyore, that depressed donkey, ate them off his eyes that morning when he ate all the grass around Pooh. 
187	‘And what is ‘Pooh’ but the synonym of ‘poop,’ which word you’re too cleanly to say, but which you love, because who doesn’t love the sound of the word ‘poop’? But, of course, it’s well within the Rebeccan canon to use the word ‘Oop!’ though, if I remember correctly, this is distinct to when, almost hitting a car in traffic, frazzled, you say, ‘Oop!’’ 
188	Normally, she would utter up a contemptuous, but pleased laugh, a laugh pleased by its own sound and very silly and foolish, chortling a little, almost as if choking on food—which she often did, when Dr. Matthews joked with her while they were eating—or, in other cases, when his joke wasn’t very funny, she would say, ‘can you not be so fan.’ 
189	‘But I am not fan,’ he rejoined. ‘I am highly air conditioner.’ ‘Frumps,’ she would reply. 
190	But she stayed quiet, silently putting dabs of ointment onto her skin, as if she were preparing to paint herself like a canvas, with dabs white as snow covering her fresh cheeks. The mirrors were clear; the light shining from the ceiling was golden and its particles could be seen glimmering in the tiles of the shower-floor. Anxious, worried, her brown hair was locked in a curl upon her face and sleekly wet…
191	She would space out and let herself idle anxiously as she applied lotions to her skin, now and then using her fingers to pluck one out from the town of small elegant bottles that she kept on a stand in the corner of the bathroom counter. The steam from the shower was still curling about in the upper reaches of the bathroom, near the small plastic fire alarm which lowered its modern, boring-looking device into the otherworldly churning of the tails and arms of steam that remained trapped but which was being funneled, sucked into the vents of the device on the ceiling, probably let out into the cold desert California air. It bore the scent of her shampoos, her flowered soaps which had known her and the foamy edges and lines of her bare skin, just as the house had in all its corners her lovely hair like a cat announcing its subtle and omnipotent presence, all the particular industries that a woman uses to maintain her beauty, though in Rebecca’s case, since she had a natural youthfulness, it was in part for her own fun and religious ritual. She looked, to him, like she was a part of one of those Chinese canvases, where silvery curls of clouds, described in bare minimal lines…
192	‘Perhaps you’re stressed from teaching again?’ he went on. ‘You know, it’s alright if you can’t manage your students now and then. Students are tough. Especially the guys who hate doing Physics. I mean, of course, Physics happens to be male dominated,’ he sighed, now longingly. 
193	‘To have had a teacher like you when I was in high school. Not to say, well, I mean, we were together in high school. But imagine how much semen is offered in sacrifice to you everyday, so foxy a teacher. Now you’ll say: ‘you know, for a Brother, you’re really extremely dirty, and your mind needs some prayer, ya know!’ – and I’ll say, ‘I speak only from experience, and moreover when I find things amusing, I have no choice but to phrase it in a way pleasing to myself.’’ 
194	He talked to himself, mimicking her for her, smiling all the while perversely and delighted with his own ability, adding lilts to the edge of his phrases. ‘‘But why, oh why, would you tell me something like that?’ – ‘Because it was an interesting observation, and I enjoy my observations. Boys masturbate to their teachers, singing the song of their selves to their names, addressing the foxy teacher with the pumping of their fists.’ – ‘Could you, could you actually not!’’ His mind, in the manner of all playful and witty, since seeing doubles in language is so often to see double entendres, was—when neither occupied by the spirit nor in the presence of other brothers and sisters—preternaturally perverse. Hers was, too. But she was more easily ‘grossed out.’ 
195	Altogether too timid, and not outstanding at Physics in the first place, she was not good at her job, which she now and then let on, with a vague dreary remark; though it was fairly obvious to him.
196	But now she said: 
197	‘Cucumbers are farmed in Argentina with slave labor,’ and she continued patting her face silently. 
198	This was almost certainly not entirely true. But he understood that her mood had fallen, and she had likely conjoined some negative news article with her sudden distaste for cucumbers. 
199	He began his investigation. ‘What now, how now about cucumbers? What have they done to you? What is this new mystery you bring before my eyes?’ 
200	Dr. Matthews went behind her, kneading her shoulders for her. She was examining herself in the mirror, with ointment smeared across her face and herself looking ridiculous, all stressed, worried, anxious and adorably alone, patting her cheeks without her usual ‘alacrity,’—a word she delighted in, even more than her other words. 
201	She was eminently healthy, full of good spirits, slightly dim-witted, easily cowed with fear, and submissive to everyone except to Dr. Matthews. In such terms, with the careful balance of the description, as he had learned from Austen, he had found a way to portray her in a way pleasing to his love for her and yet, because of its strange contradictory nature, with the seeming objectivity necessary to his judgment. 
202	It was a way of thinking that, by framing the judgment he had of her within a balance, would allow him to believe that he judged objectively. 
203	Her ‘I’m a what’ moods, which, to translate, meant a softer, more comic version of ‘I’m a total loser,’—which phrase she would never say, for she avoided negativity in language altogether—this mood usually came from discovering a small pimple on her otherwise very good skin. 
204	But her skin was not perfect and porcelain, though beautiful; she was somewhat of a plebeian girl, a country girl who one might discover on a walk in the woods, happy with her cows, her chickens, always talking to them, though now and then perversely peeping at some shepherd from afar. 
205	If he were to come find her, and slyly flirt with her, she would ruffle up her skirts like an offended chicken, and play the decent girl, soft, polite, but firmly saying ‘no,’ until the shepherd—should he be unable to see into the liveliness and interest of her eyes that her negative posture failed to erase—would go away, disappointed, much to her disappointment as well. For Dr. Matthews understood that she liked to flirt, though she was always extremely cautious and moral. She liked to dance with her words and sensibility so much, that there was nothing quite like being teased by a clever boy her age. Her best friend was a Jenny Peng, who was an ‘excellent woman!’, and whose skin was ‘like silk upon a bed of romance’; she had perfect skin, and the two of them spent the majority of their time after church on Sundays discussing skin care.
206	‘In Argentina even girls at the age of twelve have to work on cucumber farms,’ she said, absently. 
207	‘Now, Rebecca,’ he said, leaning in the doorway casually, examining her and her every gesture. ‘Tell me the truth. What’s wrong with cucumbers? Maybe Eeyore, you’re remembering, once stepped on a cucumber plant? My Rebecca, always so sad; luckily for me, I enjoy your sadnesses. I come alive at your sorrow. By the way,’ he suddenly remembered. ‘Remember The Foundation Pit in Head’s class? Voschev, after he’s been let go from his factory, he goes about—would you know it—collecting leaves, cucumber-green, telling the leaves he’ll remember them. It’s like the Bertolt Brecht poem you’re so fond of: 
208
209Send me a leaf, but from a little tree
210That grows no nearer your house
211Than half an hour away. For then
212You will have to walk, you will get strong and I
213Shall thank you for the pretty leaf.
214
215‘Schicke mir ein Blatt. That’s the title in the original German. Come, isn’t ‘Blatt’ a hilarious word? You don’t find it hilarious? Something, truly, must be wrong. In any case, listen to Voschev, perhaps he’ll cheer you up. See, I’ve been reading Foundation Pit while on the toilet, here’s a copy. 
216
217A dead fallen leaf lay alongside Voshchev’s head, brought by the wind from a distant tree, and now this leaf had ahead of it resignation in the earth. Voshchev picked up the dried leaf and hid it away in a secret compartment of his bag where he used to keep all kinds of objects of unhappiness and obscurity. 
218
219‘You had no meaning in life,’ Voshchev imagined to himself with meagerness of  sympathy. ‘Lie here, I will learn wherefore you lived and perished. Since no one needs you and you are straying about in the midst of the whole world, I will preserve you and remember you.’
220
221‘The leaves are crisp with summer,’ he went on. ‘Even in the midst of the great Soviet depression. I always imagine, in my head, though, that it goes like this: 
222
223Nobody notices you, but I do. 
224
225something something…
226
227It’s an oak leaf, from our tree. 
228
229‘By the way, Randy had a dream where there were snakes hanging from our oak tree? A million snakes, she said, curling and looping about. What do you think it means? Surely John Peng will have something morbid to say. He can’t even sleep in a hotel if there’s the Book of Mormon around, did you hear from Jennie?
230
231And Voschev, stepping through our bedroom, parts the glass sliding door and goes to our backyard and whispers to the leaf in the afternoon light, the autumnal light that is shortening with the wind that blows: 
232
233‘Nobody notices you, but I do. Nobody takes note of your every edge, or understands your every flailing gesture in the wind, or your mannerism of grumpy depression when you lie on the ground. Of course, but I see them!’
234
235‘See? Isn’t that nice? Isn’t that something a little bit like Eeyore, the depressed donkey walking about the world…Nothing is unlovely to him, and everything asks to be remembered and he has a duty to them, to save them for his memory and to compliment them before taking his leave. – Oh, come here.’ 
236	But she remained stiff, keeping her shoulders tight. She was of average height for a girl, shorter than him, but she was a little insecure about her shoulders, which were flat like a plain rather than sloping like a valley, like the delicate unathletic shoulders of girls who do not like to move about. 
237	She had said, once, ‘I don’t like my shoulders.’ ‘But they are so covered with plump,’ he rejoined. ‘They have no muscle; they are delicious like the sides of a pork rind.’ ‘Plump?!’ she cried. – ‘Yep, plump. I like my girls big and chubby like Twinkies—they delight me.’ But he had actually made her very sad in his jesting, as he had seen nothing wrong with her shoulders, had not noticed anything about them until she pointed them out; so he pulled her by the arm and said, with facetious sadness, ‘Have I made you sad?’ – ‘I’m not sad!’ ‘But yes you are,’ and he would slowly begin to tickle her sides, until she yelled out, laughing splutteringly, ‘Stop, would you stop, you stinking goat!’ 
238	But now, in the very middle of these rituals, coming out of nowhere, she said, in a tone as of a child whose pet has died, spacing out the words, lowering her eyes and no longer looking at herself in the mirror, so that she grieved, shadowing her face, softly, ‘That wasn’t good…’ 
239	‘What, what was not good? Rebecca, what’s going on?’
240	‘You didn’t stop them! Why didn’t you stop them, from doing that horrible, horrible thing! What kind of man are you, huh! What kind of man are you, huh!’ and she hid her face in her hands, as like one ashamed, mourning the loss of her husband, even hateful; but then rubbed her cheeks violently, once or twice, not as if scrubbing herself for sin but simply out of nervous animal habit. 
241	‘It wasn’t my place,’ he said, seriously. He leaned more casually against the doorway. For, so he thought, he had already taken in all of her objections, which he had anticipated even as the two of them had stood there watching the subjugation of Gabby, and had resolved it in his mind that nothing could have been done; and it was, while not contrary to God, certainly contrary to his rationality to be destroyed emotionally where there was nothing he could do, to be destroyed by an excess of emotion that was useless. 
242	For, as in an Austen novel, one should control one’s emotions—and this was to be a man—for the sake of being strong for others, as he had planned, partially knowing that Rebecca would come to be this way. 
243	‘It wasn’t my place,’ he continued, slowly. ‘And neither was it yours. She was being belligerent, and for the sake of the other patients, many of whom desperately rely on getting their sleep at night, the staff had no choice but to subdue her. Now, I know it may have looked bad. But you’ve got to look past that. In this life, awful things happen. That’s why the Christ must be with us—oh Lord,’ he prayed, falling into a familiar rhythm. ‘Lord, our conscience—’
244	‘Conscience! Didn’t you see the way, the way the needle went into her, even as she was shaking!’
245	‘Rebecca,’ and he held her; he enclosed her in his arms. Then, taking his arms away, looking off into the corner of the bathroom, ashamed, nothing but a child again despite his middle-aged body, he also began to cry. ‘Oh,’ he said, rubbing away his tears with his palms, ‘You’ll probably say it’s not manly to cry. I know you. You and your manlinesses.’ 
246	‘No,’ she said, firmly, but a bit petulantly, annoyed that he had tried to predict what she was saying; she brought her shoulders together, looking at herself in the mirror, a little irritably. 
247	‘Then what?’ for it took, always, a lot to tease out what she actually thought. Not because she was truly reticent, as if she were hiding something, but perhaps because she did not formulate her thoughts readily—unlike his kind of charismatic quickness—or also on account of an inherent reluctance in expressing herself. ‘Tell me, Rebecca. Is it okay for a man to cry?’
248	‘I don’t care about that, okay. But next time you should do something.’
249	‘What can I do…!’
250	‘You should do Something.’ 
251	‘I’m not even there employed as a Pastor, I don’t have Pastor Bedard’s rights to be there. Dr. Singh has just let me there since I’m helpful.’
252	‘Then why do you even go there, huh. Why.’
253	‘Because…’ The answer was, ‘to entertain myself.’ 
254	But he could not respond to the voice of his dead wife with this because, plainly put, he did not know how she would respond. Her voice was based on certain laws, a system which he had deciphered from listening to her for so long. Yet this particular variable had never been inputted before: his inhumanity.
255	She would not have known how to respond to it. If she did, it would be hollow. Perhaps (though he could only imagine it this far): ‘But surely you mean well. Secretly, you really mean to help them, even if you’re laughing all the time. I know my Mister! Even when he seems evil, it’s probably just because he’s in a bad mood, being a grump ’s all!’ 
256	But at this point, he would feel, he thought, her infinite stupidity. Her infinite inability to understand who he was now. She was naive. He simply lost all desire to speak to her; what could she tell him? 
257	He could not fathom himself; how could she fathom him? 
258	When he suddenly tried to explain to her why he was in the mental hospital, he could not accept her forgiveness, for it seemed to him so naive, so full of cliché, plain and useless sentimentality, that these he ascribed to what he had always liked least about her, what made him curl his lip in a sneer: she was a simpleton. She was a fool. She had so little in the way of understanding that he was always having to explain things to her. When he talked to her, he felt as if he were talking to himself—so he could become infinitely bored with the one he loved. When he heard her attempting to forgive him, he felt falsity. He heard in her voice the strain of trying to forgive him. Should she have said, ‘You’re awful!’ still, even then, it would have meant nothing to him. For what was so small a word, and from so harmless a speaker? How could this give him in language what he deserved? She did not know him. Even God could not know him, whoever he was. There was something inexplicable in him, and, hearing her voice when he accidentally responded to her question about why he was in the mental hospital, he clung to that inexplicability and threw her off, casting her to the winds. 
259	The desire to remain inexplicable when one cannot be understood! 
260	She would have said, about Pastor Bedard, whom she never met, that, ‘At least he’s trying to be good for God.’ These kind of statements he would have to tolerate, for it was not really the thing to ‘try to be good for God.’ As a matter of spirit, one does not try to be good for God; rather, one loves God, and through this one loves all other people, by nature, without any reasoning. Having attempted many times to explain to her this kind of reasoning, his attempts at education were always futile; and she would say something like, ‘Jesus doesn’t like that!’ which showed a very simplistic view of the Christ, so he thought. But, when she said, ‘at least he’s trying,’ he understood that the other side of the coin was, (should she really be pushed to utter her true thoughts), ‘He’s losing almost all his hair!’ For she did not like it when men lost their hair. It meant they were getting old, fat, and hilariously smelly. This meant, of course, ‘he is an eminently foolish man!’
261	For the ‘Rebeccan false syllogism,’ as he termed it, required a long study to follow, adorably unpredictable. The reality, however, was that Dr. Matthews feared the awareness, the sense of himself, as far more intelligent than his wife. 
262	Now and then he was aware of it, and thought to himself that he had never really encountered anyone so stupid; he loved her, but he could not admire her. The truth was he admired nobody, perhaps only the Christ, whose flaws he nevertheless saw; but he wanted desperately to admire his wife, who was the highest. He tried to teach himself to admire her, he prayed for it. She had only a teaching degree from De Anza, whereas he had matriculated from Berkeley, with a medical degree from Stanford; he had studied pharmacology and psychiatry, after a mutual friend of theirs had ended his life when they were in high school. Should she have been more successful, Dr. Matthews, who supposedly belonged to the realm of the spirit where worldly things did not matter, perhaps Dr. Matthews would have an easier time being unaware of his wife’s intellectual inferiority. But even were she to have success at her job, it was only a job: she did not have that rare thing that he admired above all else: an intelligence superior to his own. 
263	If he was in the spirit, he could forget this; but once he was on his own, thinking for himself, mulling over what Brother Peng had said, or what those in the Apostles had written, he had the full knowledge that, having listened very closely to them and taken into consideration their every word, having examined like a judge or, indeed, like a Pharisee, he knew what they wanted to say, he knew what they meant, and he knew where they were wrong. 
264	He saw their blindspots because they spoke. 
265	It is in the same way that, after a legendary critic or teacher writes and teaches for a long time, his students beneath him, feeling now and then a little irritation in their intelligence at this word of his or that, will, as if digging a hole beneath his feet like earthworms or moles, will soon be capable of writing just that one essay that will spell the end of the critic’s career—the Contra essay takes the ground from underneath him and his writing falls forever as that which has been progressed over—for he has spoken too much, and exposed all his blindspots. 
266	And those who listen, who have learned, now possess the ability to destroy, where before he seemed impervious, himself having destroyed his own teachers. 
267	Literary criticism is so often the cannibalizing of one’s teachers and heroes. They published their thoughts; as soon as one can understand them—and the true atemporal originals are those who, no matter how many students get at them, they still reveal yet another idea, carried forth by the playfulness of their language that played faster, quicker, and more accurately than any mind can catch on, or wrote more ideas than can be easily grasped in the study of one’s entire life—as soon as the student has a grasp of the teacher’s thought, he can disrobe him. 
268	The grand globular edifice of his work, running over with the water of spirit that emanates from a fountain at the top of the globe, is deemed, is called, is shown to be: clear not as glass but as even less interesting than the unthinking air. 
269	It is made transparent, the teacher hauled up for examination, and his ideas, in short, called ‘known.’ But a teacher, if he is able to do this, may outrun his students for as long as he exists, such that, for example, Dr. Matthews, no matter how many books one writes about him—from the moment I learned of him, an old story in our Church of our old brother—one can hardly get at his character, so alive, and so strange and immaterial is it, that unlike other characters who can be reduced to a series of behaviors and mental habits, Dr. Matthews, because he had constructed for himself a persona that misrelated itself to the one who had constructed it, now, passing through our consciousness, feels to us as one who always withdraws and eludes us. The first one who wrote him, for example, can hardly claim to understand him: the idea of him. And, moreover, in the same way that Hamlet has been written again and again by lesser authors, should another person write in the way of Matthews, they will only add yet another appearance of him in our consciousness, thickening that consciousness—which occupies in us a soft spot—further delineating the translucent and poorly-defined cloud, as another bloom in the centerpiece, another unfurling of white moisture. The wind is the spirit passing through the sky; writing is the moisture that appears as visible historical shape. In a Hegelian vision, at the end of history, the wind ceases, and the clouds themselves dissolve only into a blue sky…
270	As for Matthews—
271	To play a part; to be stuck in that part. 
272	To not have known where one went, the one who made the part in the first place, the one who had authored himself. The recognition that, indeed, as someone who authors himself, very likely even before he had started playing the noble Brother in grief, he had already been a person capable of this, he simply had not been inspired to do so yet, by the death of his wife. 
273	One can describe Matthews’ mental habits, and examine them for faults; but, quite simply, one cannot quite get at him—for, like a long extended monologue that discovers its own content as it proceeds and fleshes the character out from merely adhering to the voice that itself hears—he is a character who writes himself. 
274	And the description of mental habits is infinite, for each mental habit is like a circuit running through a huge desert landscape where one cannot stop and take a rest, where one cannot set a hut and explore, one can only follow the circuit and the track. The problem is that these mental habits, their arcs intersect, and one had thought he understood the orbits of this one region, before activating a new mental habit that brought him far out South, beyond the gray brown desert mountains that looked like the humps of a resting continental camel. 
275	Where was Matthews authored? He authored himself a million times, each time to meet a different person, to become a different self, to be the Christ in the particular to them to speak to their particular experience. Verily, as the saying says, whether or not he intended as such, but to the person he spoke to, he was that through which God was conducted; and the person was saved, and in his shining glasses saw the Christ. Not the image of, but inside himself, having talked to Matthews, the true feeling of life. Peace to the man through whom it must come, as the death to the Christ came through Judas who by accident was chosen; then life came to Matthews’ fellows through Matthews, who was chosen to suffer in the giving of life. The amount of salvation he brought cannot be measured by mere words. To have been the Christ to just a one; he who knows, knows where I speak and I don’t say more. 
276	To be Christ is not to author oneself, but to be authored according to what one possesses—the experiences you have and how you have overcome them all shining with the spirit of Life and Luck—so as to be for the other what he must hear and to hone that other’s anguishes on the edge of his language’s blade. 
277	Listening to Matthews listen to you, all the inexplicability in you vanishes, and the tracks of the mental habits are laid clear, your behaviors explained and in that explanation forgiven; and, lastly, as if the tracks of the habits were laced with a kind of chemical, the spirit sets it alight! 
278	And all one’s habits are changed; one passes into a different current of air, following the same electric current but with the path lubricated and easier…
279	For to be able to understand why someone has done something is to open a path in you to forgiveness for it. 
280	But hark now, a little the lower layer; it grows gray here, there is the chance that a thought may fall into itself infinitely like a bookshelf in which one sees the depth of the individual layer stretching and rounding around backwards. There is no smell; there is only the cleanliness, the spare unfurnished room, of thought divested from substance, of thought that thinks of itself, turned in on itself. Have we not been here, before, a room that we exit, and enter into such a hallway, where pillars on both sides, spaced out at regular intervals leading into the distance—a distance which is only a wall closed off by some concrete and bushes—but which appears infinitely faraway because the pillars are oriented in such a fashion that, like the guidelines of a landing strip, they repeat and seem to grow smaller and closer together, only hinting at some point where they are snipped off, joined together like parallel lines? And this mere hint is enough to present the idea of infinity to us which we cannot visualize, the sensation of which is too much for us, and rings our thoughts with a particular kind of head-ache...There is danger here; one feels that, soon, he cannot smell where he is, he cannot know what his soul is saying to itself…He cannot distinguish his own smell from that of Matthews…
281	Matthews authored millions; after God, Matthews authored most. When, then, did he author himself? In the authoring of himself, he did not take the instance of its occurrence; trace it back to when they came to him, mourning, and he played at mourning; and yet this originary instance falls back through infinite time-coulisses like a regress and a backwash through time. 
282	Where the hell am I? 
283	Why can't I smell myself? 
284	Christ belongs to the body. We are Christ to each other; according to the suffering Matthews knew and overcame, meeting himself on the battlefield of inner accuracy, by this suffering—gifted him was wisdom, also—he spoke to Inner Demon, the slanted mental habit, in the person who came to him and in his glasses saw Christ; and relieved him of the demon by altering the habit, by changing the decorum of his insides, the obsession and the perpetual alteration; thus the pigs into which the demons were cast, charged into the cliffside and killed themselves squealing in water. 
285	If one part of the body takes up consciousness, if the lymph becomes aware of itself and then views itself as a lie, still, it remains motionless, stuck in place between the fat cells, and, pulsating with torture, is used by God to ferry life from life unto life. He tortured Matthews; he brought Matthews to life for long decades after his wife’s death and kept him there like a face kept under a bag of water; the cold tide washes over as it did the believers crucified under the raging of the blue white-tipped sea; for he had use of him; he even obscured from Matthews the solution of death, keeping his mind healthy, without the chemicals of suicide which kill a man as involuntarily as a heart attack: only his soul in waste and unawareness of its own agony. His soul, unrelieved by the spirit. 
286	No one had greater accusation against God than Matthews: a soul raped for its intelligence to solve life for others. And revealed his face on the last days. He lifted the mask of the torturer. He showed Matthews salvation under the falling snow. Alas! One day, the return to the wife…all of us shall find our friends again, they won’t ghost on us; they’ll become our friends again, and we will hold their hands pretending nothing has happened in the interim but for a—shining, ebbing pulsation of heaped-together languishing in a place of dancing shadows—for a long time; the outer darkness rimmed through with the elegant ellipses of the arcs of cold burning tanged stones. 
287	To return. He was not frequently dissuaded as to the untrustworthiness of his intelligence; the tutor of Experience, at first showing to himself that he was extremely stupid, had taught him eventually that his intelligence could be relied upon at all times—to come to consciousness while talking to another and to alter his words according to what he saw the other needed—especially with the perpetual critique it enacted upon itself, that, after every assessment, he assessed himself for possible biases. It was an unspecialized, reflective, self-critical intelligence. And he knew, largely, how his constitution worked: he was prideful, he was resentful. He had made the study of his life the study of his mental habits and reflexes, and understood, also, that as soon as he could reach a total tabulation, yet another behavior of his would appear that he could not understand. 
288	Know thyself! But where is the person who issues this command, and who hears the command? The self, swimming, is like the sac of a second, plastic and clear, dissolving immediately into a solution which is constituted only of itself…
289	Yet he so strongly believed in God that the feeling of the spirit allowed him to supersede these faults; and, dealing constantly with God, praying constantly for humility and the defeat of his own mind, he nevertheless, now and then, unaware that this itself was the demon, was quite aware that his prayers were infinitely stupid—that praying to God had only meaning insofar as it allowed him to be more clear of his own thoughts; that there was no way to distinguish between conversation with a holy being, and conversation within himself in an enhanced spiritual mode. 
290	He saw far too clearly. He heard far too clearly. He thought far too clearly. 
291	But whereas the intellectuals he had met at Berkeley, including the spiritual brethren of the Apostles, could after awhile be understood and predicted, becoming no more than intellectual fodder and spiritual companionship, he loved her all the more, he could not grow sick of her. 
292	Except, then, for those sickening moments where his valorization of her ‘weird-thinking,’ his amusing relaying of it to himself and to others as ‘its own kind of genius,’ was met with its very opposite, the kind of negativity, the logical repudiation of the thought, that a depression will bring to the mind: that her ‘weird-thinking’ was inclarity, superstition, and misappliance of concepts. Were it not for depression, and the negativity it brought to our present conceptions, as if out of its sour acid the thought burned and became new, inverted, hateful of its prior version, probably one would never have arrived at what is commonly called existentialism. 
293	And one is bored of existentialism, one finds it trite, one finds its authors boring and one says of it: it’s just depression philosophy. 
294	Worse, her cliché. Her saying the same things that everyone else said; because his mind was full of idle faculties, it was hungry and devoured what came; because it put away from his ears what he had already heard, he was impatient. 
295	Thus if someone said something that was already said, it was as if his time were wasted. Not that, of course, he appeared to be busy in the conventional sense; no, he was merely conversing with you. Except that his brain was screaming out for salvation: how can this person before me talk and talk, without realizing how dumb they sound, that everything they’re saying has already been said! Such a person is irritated by the waste of his time; it hurts him, impedes the movement of his idle faculties, as physical as an impediment to the bowels. For to listen to someone who only speaks in clichés, is it not a bit like listening to your own mental illness? 
296	As if they were spreading it through the air, by being so unutterably, death-bringingly, boring. 
297	Of course, this is sometimes not a matter of innate intelligence, but incompatible intellectual profiles! For example, a mathematician may be used to a certain kind of mental dance and pattern-matching, where he looks closely around the concept for what's next, as if checking the squares around the first square intently; whereas a poet may think in a scattered fashion, all over the place, bringing together random associations. To the mathematician, the poet will seem scatter-brained and stupid; to the poet, the mathematician will seem boring and without vision!
298	But there is something compatible between them, namely the unspecialized learning intelligence which can be applied to any subject such that an interesting conversation, though they have nothing in common between their fields, may nevertheless be struck about anything. 
299	One has no patience for fools, if only because one cannot ‘stand’ it, one wants to scream at them to hurry the fuck up, except, held in politeness, he turtles himself in his own mind, and constructs, in front of him, a kind of game that he might play. After awhile Experience teaches him that, if he is to stand conversation with another, he must cease to judge the value of what they say based off their words—he cannot be interested in their words alone; he must connect their words to their mannerisms; he must play the game of finding out what is underneath those words. It is not arrogance, but infinite childishness: the idle faculties always want to play! 
300	They want to be mesmerized by an infinite, tangled but clear, moody, streaming sentence, the kind that a person will wring out of themselves with as much unconsciousness as a girl wrings out her hair and dries it clean with a clinging comb, if only you should know how to a read a person for this unceasing sentence! 
301	To play; to have fun; to survive one’s boredom; thus one makes the study of people, and becomes more humane as a result, simply because, in the habit of watching of people, he starts to fall in love with their behaviors. Watching them so that he would not scream in his mind from boredom, for the sake of the play of his idle faculties, one gradually wishes, after awhile, to represent to himself, to see them again, to formulate a theory and a law by which he might construct them again; to discover the blueprint for the construction of personalities, the dynamic of relationships. There is a certain DNA that one can touch, and grasp hold of; and with this one begins the manufacture…
302	How bored one might be, otherwise! 
303	The idle faculties told him what she said was boring; his judgment judged her as incapable of an original thought; yet his eyes delighted in her—to see her, lithe and healthy like a rabbit, to hear her voice, anxious and other times jumpy—and because, watching her, he truly did fall in love with her, because his heart really warmed to her and she occupied in him a mental track through which his happiness was gradually routed so that the mental habit of happiness was no different from the mental habit induced by merely saying her name, as if the fond-calling of her name itself were a drug dispersed through his body; because this was so, and that his person not be in contradiction, he sought for the sake of his heart an appeal to his intelligence, to make an excuse for her, to make an allowance. Could he not find some way to allow himself to believe her, if not a genius—which she was not—then at the least, interesting…?
304	The word ‘weird-thinking’ became the meme, the resulting contract proceeding from the battle in his mind, between the thought of her as rather intelligent and the thought of her as deeply stupid. It became ‘what is accurate,’ for he always thought clearly, and could only have a good feeling within himself when what he thought made sense and was articulable, submitted to the clear air for judgment. Of course, in spirit, he could ignore plenty of things; but on his own, he thought.
305	The spirit is simple, burning, rimmed with clear fire, a joy and sadness grasped in one hand and destroyed; it is clear without producing a single thought but praise; it is like water leaving the sieve of the body completely and yet finding that nothing has been dehydrated. 
306	If the soul and the mind are themselves a complex interior landscape, the anatomy of a turtle hidden inside a shell whose entryways are sealed off by folds of flesh, then the spirit, cleansing, purifying—is that momentary shock to the mental habit that makes completely transparent the soul. 
307	The soul seems to occupy a huge space; this thought and that, this desire and that, this and that imagination. 
308	But the spirit, with no real vision other than a declaration of praise, occupies no space. It is infinitesimally small: a spreading through the soul, a profound infection that is harmonious without a sound, which insinuates its way into the complex infoldings of the brain’s gray matter and, dematerializing it, replaces it with an eternal color: to some light pink, to other a clear burning blue. As the poet calls it, singing of what is not interesting enough to be poetry, which has divested itself of what is interesting altogether and replaced it with: the unceasing praise slung into the air like arrow after phraseless yet lucid arrow. 
309	Then, of course, the soul returns; one becomes proud of himself for having felt the spirit; one desires to go tell the girl he wishes to impress about what he felt; one realizes that he feels this way, and marks it as interesting and unworthy of the spirit. He condemns it because he knows it is not the spirit. 
310	The poet composes his name-poem, the poem that bears his name and everything he is, in a year of five hours. Blazing, he returns to the earth, happy, fulfilled, his ambitions quenched, never to write a name-poem again—
311	He does not realize it, but the days of his riding the arms of God and striding alongside the night riders and the horses of the driving storms, are over. 
312	As soon as he is proud of his name-poem, however, as soon as the sounds of his own name and its words leave his mind, away from the murmuring of the infinite pink atmosphere of the poem, he becomes human, he becomes merely a vain artist. Before he signed with his true name, but now he must sign with his full-name, his name within history, with an earthly lineage, with a last-name, with a father and mother. For the duration of the name-poem, he was himself. 
313	Now he is the self that has a last name, and this is earthly dross, and no wonder it is that those who have experienced the name-poem end up killing themselves. This is so deeply true that to grasp this proposition without understanding it is also to grasp oneself as never having touched the spirit of genius. For not everyone has composed a name-poem; a poem to which he can rightly sign his name, as this is that which he has done with his earthly time, transcending every acne and humiliation, every proud worldly attainment, the acme not of his worldly life but of his striding in the driving rain. 
314	Rare it is that such a thing occurs in a mere realist novel like this one! 
315	But Dr. Matthews was mistaken to believe that, because he judged no one immoral, that then he did not judge. In fact, where others judged for sin, he judged for hypocrisy in speech, thinking that this was much more pure, much more honest; that he was not condemning people, but asking them to speak correctly. And yet, he did not sense this, but this was far worse. How much easier it is to avoid sin, than to avoid speaking incorrectly! 
316	Yet Dr. Matthews, at all cost, strove to eliminate from his language hypocrisies, biased speech, speech that tried to avoid something that he could not come to terms with; for if he said something that felt wrong to him, it meant that something inside him was in turmoil; and he must deal with God until this turmoil became clear, and it always became clear, even the intelligence of his wife, which had fallen into the pleasant, amusing category that still provided for the possibility that she had a type of genius, ‘weird-headed, weird-thinking.’ 
317	But his analysis, if it soiled his love, did not soil it to any true extent or manifestation; never, for example, did he ever speak his mind on her intelligence, and though he frequently seemed to lecture her, she did not mind this, so used was she to learning from others; she was of the type who did not like to speak unless she absolutely had to. 
318	In this sense, it was the worst possible pairing. He who could have used intellectual humbling, was instead constantly being forced to explain her misunderstandings to herself—the saving grace was that she refused every one of his teachings, usually ignored them, got distracted, or criticized him for being annoying. Truly, were she to have been willing to be corrected by him, perhaps he would have more easily come to the consciousness of his annoyance with her; bored of her, he would have lost her. 
319	But, so he counseled himself when he could, in all love there is a seed of regret and misalliance. Every love has a problem of sort; it was nothing outside of expectation to have this one thing against her. Yet he could not accept it. One cannot worship two gods. One cannot worship intelligence and a silly-minded girl, or else one must portion out what one values, separating them into two bodies. 
320	‘Rebecca, don’t be so sa!’ her mother would say. ‘Listen to your husband, learn a little now and then!’
321	‘What!’ she cried. ‘From him?’
322	‘He is a doctor, he is very smart.’
323	‘Yes, doctors are very smart. But him?’
324	In private, she would reply to Dr. Matthews, ‘I am not as sa as they say!’ Having picked up plenty of Chinese, he would respond, ‘But you are, you know, a little bit sa. More than a little bit, no?’ ‘I’m sick of everyone telling me that I’m sa! I am a very level-headed woman!’ 
325	She was always intellectually unpredictable, and this was a virtue. She thought in animals rather than in language. 
326	A rational actor can predict another rational actor, but cannot predict someone who thinks in terms of ‘Winnie-de-Pooh and his outstanding little pig called Piglet!’
327	Those who loved too much, that is to say, who allowed, whether by accidental observation or continued study of what they found adorable in their wife—because they spent all this time sculpting inside them a living marble statue shaped in the image of the loved one, mobile, its cold surface softening like melted ice into kissable skin and Pygmalion flesh—they do not suffer the physical deaths of their wives easily. Their wives do not seem to die, and when they mourn, they wonder what they are mourning for. For when Dr. Matthews, when she died, saw the flowers with which they had used to garland the coffin, he heard, ‘Flowers!’ He knew that, as he grew older, as he had less ability to suppress her voice, he would gradually grow to be surrounded by her presence, his bed encircled by white deathless hyacinths and the flowers of Song of Songs whose names she had rejoiced in—‘I am the flower of Sharon, I am as the rose of Sharon,’ she said, drinking from his lips a cherry wine—filled not with its essence but the very opposite of her loving comfort; he would feel a chopped-off longing. 
328	Amputated, sterile, futile, a sense of being incomplete in a world where one was formerly complete, the end of one’s happiness at the absence of the object of happiness and the strange echolocating presence of that absence, like the sound of a shout alive in a cavern of water, such a chopped-off longing would he feel whenever he heard the beginnings of her voice. Perhaps, when he grew senile, he should forget it. And then, at last, he would have her death, relief for him in the long noonday of life. 
329	People are most alive in their voices. When we examine our wife for her beauty, appreciating her not in the way of lust that would section off and fetishize portions of her body for our desire, in which we have a desire to possess her and enter her and ravage her so that the image that she presents is for our consumption, like flesh (consequently it is unstable, a wavering image that dissolves into our lurid consciousness when we grab it); when we appreciate her for her isolated beauty in the way of a poet his muse, standing off from afar to take in her totality, not coming up close but peeking at her from a distance so that she should not see us looking: so that we should see her, like a wild animal kept in our bedroom, as a rabbit foraging for strawberries and gingham nuts in her natural habitat, the tiny habitual rituals of fragrant bottles and sly looks that she keeps to herself—the mysteries and unknown self-examinations of the female world (seeing the moment wherein they see themselves as in a convex mirror that enlarges their eyes and their spirit, checking for blemishes on their cheeks, tucking their hair behind their ears as they paint themselves and line their eyes with shadow so as to hide themselves again under the shining glamour of the self-confident and sexy modern woman); we see the way she leans over the bed or the slight angle of her simple, slender and sexually-ample leg which we had loved to hold aside as a sign of her giving of herself, her willing and ecstatic submission—or, in Rebecca’s case, since she was as much physically awkward as elegant, the way she would have to fight to get herself into the boots that she had bought with an amount of money she was surely guilty of, struggling with them, blowing her hair with ‘hmphs!’ like an irritable camel, day by day, entering our bloodstream, entering our vision like a system of symbols, by our attention we pay them a love that they would not easily go away. 
330	Can the constellations, in their clusters forming a purpose and shape in our eyes and letting us believe that we ourselves are able to join them together—in the heroic Cows and Bears, Orion and the images of ourselves that we place upon them, pulling them up as a pulley racks up the false ornamental clouds on a stage—can the constellations compare to the infinitely complex beauty of women, how they always show a side of themselves, an unkempt curl of black hair across a clear forehead, the sudden change in their eyes when they look at us having settled the score within themselves and allowed themselves to like us for the first time, or even the look of irritability, the grumpiness, the gray anger that spreads over her face at some professional frustration which asks us to relieve it by way of a jest as a measure of how much delight we have for her—the stars, in all their poetry, cannot provide as much material for the imagination as the shift in posture, the twist of the ankle, of a woman.
331	But this, precisely, is the problem. For when we attend to them with love, when we linger in the sound of their voice, in this case, where normally he would pray, ‘Lord…’ every time Dr. Matthews, perhaps walking by the side of a river whose sky is suddenly marked by the flight of birds, when he wished to rejoice internally and needed a name to which to address that joy, or when he was sad and called out for help, he sometimes said, ‘Lord…’ but more often than not, even if she were next to him sleeping, and he wished a particular irritation from the day to go away, he would perform the fond-calling of her name. Yes, he may have had qualms about her intelligence, but he had qualms about the Christ’s intelligence, too; it seemed to him that the Christ was unaware that he had gone to the cross with a death-wish. So unorthodox were his various thoughts, that he could not express them to his fellow brethren, for he knew that they were unscriptural; in short, he knew that they were wrong. But he also knew, very clearly, that these were ‘small matters.’ Intellectual matters in the church counted for very little. What mattered was the experience of life, the overcoming spirit, prayer for others and oneself, the surging practical nature of God who would consume one absolutely! In this, he lacked nothing. And thus for his whole life up till his wife passed away, he believed himself to be in utter stability, his internal system clear, freed from shame, enjoying the fruits of his love for his wife and God; for he was full of love, and was always happy. When he was a child with her, he asked for the forgiveness of sins for his lust. As teenagers they ran at each other, crossed two blocks, and embraced constantly, unable to keep their hands off of each other. 
332	It was December; they were seventeen when they began a sexual relationship: late cold and gray and of gentle sun was California, the hallowed, hollowed-out orb like a cat curled up on cool tiles. The leaves were burnt brown by depigmentation, and a wind scattered its resources of new life and death about like a witch with a broom. As they lay on the floor of her house’s clean bathroom—a door locked against her absent parents and oblivious little brother outside which heightened the sense that they were in a secret cavern—she had said, ‘Only if you take yours off first.’ They were in their junior year of high school. Quickly he took off his shirt, revealing his narrow but healthy body. And, after the surging moments of grappling eroticism had passed, tiring them out so that they lay on the tiled floor next to each other, his chest pressing against her back, he then held in his hands, with leisure, such lovely pale breasts, lovely and oddly squishy and pale, and born forth by perversity he would play with them, bouncing them about as he wished, biting them, she blushed, smiled and laughed – ‘Don’t!’ she cried, laughing. ‘You idiot, you dolt!’ These handful of breasts: it was just as he, in the perversion of young boys, had seen in the occasional soft-core pornography—which memory burned in him with great shame and confusion, which had no Christ in it whatsoever, which put God very far from him so that it felt, separate from God, that he could not be true to himself, that he could not pray, nor could he write in his journal, nor could he listen to the Leading Brother without feeling that he was lying somehow—but infinitely better, cleansed of that dirtiness and graphic shock, pure, like something of infinite desire pressed near: like some idea of the imagination become flesh without losing any of the lineaments of its perfection: they exceeded expectation and showed the imagination inferior to the world it was meant to represent: it was joy itself. How pale and soft they were! 
333	How could the Christ have lived, how could he have born living, without having once held Rebecca's breasts in his hands? 
334	Did he know that there was this? He did not know then that this thought was the seed from which the great bloom of disfaith would come, the earthquake of his soul from this tiny springtime seed planted into the cracked earth. Yet a small thought, innocent, utterly in love with itself, may hide the implicit infoldings of an ideology, in this case a superior love, that may wreck a man entirely. He wanted, even, to go teach the Christ. For the Christ was his all-in-all, his every example, and each day he put down his self, he put up with those whom he hated, with those who were annoying and awful, with those who got in the way of his ambitions in school, because Christ was his all-in-all, and Christ and his living were higher than everything else. But, he wondered loudly, did the Christ know how to love? Not just to love: but to love Rebecca Breck. Did he know this? Was this not outside the bounds, even, of the imagination of God, a blindspot in his sublime sterility? 
335	He searched the Bible for answers, and found only the love of Jacob for Rachel comparable in its intensity. 
336
337And Jacob kissed Rachel, and lifted up his voice, and wept.
338
339	He did not know this, but he was in direct contradiction with all the commandments of God, blind to it as he was because he daily prayed and confessed, confessed what he thought was a physical weakness, that of lust. 
340	He thought that if he confessed that he was tortured by lust, he would have done enough to repent for having done sexual things with Rebecca. He prayed that he would cease to desire her, and was tortured with a very typical pain: that of lust, and this he could understand, and he could even talk to Brother Robert about it, in of course vague terms.
341	Nevertheless, powerless to stop it in its obviousness, Robert suspected it was about Rebecca. 
342	For when the two of them were the same room together, it was as if the air were strung with laundry lines, wires traversing space between all the buildings, from his apartment to hers, and instead of hanging the shirts and pants that would idly float in space, racked there were the banners, the New Years ticker-tape, of the emblems of their love, like the crosstalk of so many flights of birds, strafing through the common area of the meeting hall like a million feathered arrows shot about. 
343	Girls and boys are very strictly segregated in the Apostles, with the brothers sitting in one side of the room, and the sisters sitting on the other end; it was a matter of great awkwardness if one had to sit next to a member of the opposite sex. Yet what was one to do? They lived a happy, forgetful walk from each other—the happiness and brevity of a walk spent with the expectation that one should soon be in the arms, surrounded by her locks of her hair, of the beloved. It was better to let him confess, for he was a sincere young man burning for the Lord, than to try to force him to part from her, which would probably disrupt even worse the harmony of the young people meeting in Cupertino. 
344	But neither of them identified that in Matthews, his sin was not of lust, but idolatry. He had put a God before God, disobeying the first commandment, the jealousy of God, who hated first and foremost that the Israelites put anyone before him. And while he loved his God with all his soul, all his mind, all his studying, all his devotion, all his singing, all his guitar playing, he loved with perhaps not the entirety of his heart; no, perhaps not his heart at all. He felt the movement of the spirit, but his infatuation was elsewhere. He performed the fond-calling of her name in the same breath as the Christ! 
345	He gave thanks for his happiness, for his merely ‘earthly’ happiness, believing it to have come from God, imbuing him with the sense of luckiness that would forever give him a shining pleasantry in his eyes and his glasses, that differentiated him from the morbidly spiritual John Peng, or from the statically ritualistic religion of Pastor Bedard. It was the love of Rebecca that made him happy. She was the keystone, the spirit, the everything, of who he was. 
346	Did the Christ, who knew everything, know that it could be tipped soft, slightly rippled, and pink, like the bud of a rose, lovelier even than the lips of Rebecca, and yet all the more alive, pulsating with a heartbeat, with the greater body of her person and the limbs wrapped around him, as if in these tips was the very summit and sublimity and liminal area of her person? 
347	Holding them, he grasped the very bounds of his desire, which, in these moments of freedom from consciousness, was no less the bounds of the whole earth; holding her to him, he clenched, as a puppy with the piece of steak that he has stolen from the house of God, the very world itself. 
348	And so many things that he did not know could be done in the world: he buried his face in them, enclosing his cheeks between the two mounds, as she held onto his hair,  pressing him lightly, and, both to annoy her (though he was very scared that someone might discover them) and because it genuinely aroused him, he blew a raspberry, and to their hilarity it sounded like an enormous fart, so she said, ‘No, no – ha! that tickled! But…fine. But only one more time…’  – Later, however, she would feel that, should she not have liked Matthews so much, she ought to feel sinful. She had felt very stirred when he placed his tongue upon her nipple. 
349	She had thrown back her head and gasped, in the dull shock, a hardness, seizing up her body as if for a second when his tongue touched her she turned to stone then immediately softened again, of a longing she had not known she possessed. 
350	The girl, of lovely brown hair, loved God, and though dispositionally inclined to toss away her cares, to tear her shirt off as she had that pale afternoon in the clean bathroom – with a small window showing the darkening blue of evening outside –  to unclip her bra which action, the style and ease of it, she had practiced for this moment even as she told herself she would never allow it to happen (but just in case; she wanted to feel attractive), to play and sport about with the healthy festival pleasures of the flesh, had also the side where she prayed daily to God and rejoiced in prayer meetings and played piano in the Church Hall. 
351	She said once at a retreat, ‘Everyone thinks I’m just some silly little girl. But maybe I am a silly little girl. But, you know, Rebecca was the greatest of the Bible mothers! It was she who gave birth to Jacob. And, so, you know, I feel I have to take confidence in myself. Lord Jesus! I give myself to you, give me confidence in myself!’ 
352	And she was filled with spirit, summoned by God to put what she had prayed into practice, to come more into herself, to assert herself, to tell that Idiot Matthews that he could no longer put his hand up her shirt! But it had been a victory of Napoleonic importance, or, as he would later learn, it was one road stop towards the end of history, towards the goal that every relationship tended necessarily, and that is, the loss of their virginity together. Once he put his hand up her shirt, he expected to be able to do so every time, and she had grown to desire it very strongly, too. 
353	In any case, his high school thoughts were quite routine. 
354	‘Every afternoon I get to see Rebecca,’ he would think to himself, wide-eyed, unable to concentrate in class, crossing and re-crossing his legs in discomfort. He did not say ‘her breasts’ for these words were too much for him. His intention was to get her to stand aside for a bit, so he could see her naked chest and her face at the same time, for he thought she was so beautiful, and he told her so; to see her whole; to memorize, to take a snapshot of that picture (to save it for his own pleasure); but in her modesty she would always cover herself with her arms, which had the effect of pressing against and enhancing the curve of her under-breast and cleavage, making her only the more desirable, as if no matter what she did, she only became more attractive, like those old paintings when the girl is caught in the moment where she accidentally spills grain from a basket and her translucent garment parts to show her inner thigh. 
355	‘Don’t look!’ she would cry when she was changing and putting on her clothes; but of course he opened his eyes wide, actively obstructing her from putting on her bra again, by kissing her neck, holding onto her wrists. ‘You dolt!’ and they would fall onto the floor, deeply kissing again. 
356	Thus he only saw her naked breasts from up close, in his grasp. It was a shame, he thought. But how beyond words she looked, when, wearing only a skirt, she had her full soft rich upper body revealed. 
357	She lay on the tiles of the clean bathroom, her arms had covered her breasts, but he had gently removed the arms from their position and held onto her wrists, and he hovered over her, pressing his lower body against hers, and he laughed a little. ‘What!’ she cried. ‘Stop looking!’ but she did not struggle against where he pinned her wrists to the cool tiles. She felt her body growing warmer. She felt the desire for something to be inside her, and quickly repressed that desire, though she grew all the warmer. His face was close to hers, and his eyes shone with his particular combination of perverse playfulness and love, then a sudden seriousness. He took stock of her, inspecting her from the edge of her breast to her nose, and found it all to his liking. Then he kissed her along the side of her neck, under her ear, letting go of her hands. 
358	She curled her arms and legs around him, wrapping him so tightly he gasped a little and tried to find his balance. 
359	‘What are you, an octopus?’
360	‘I be…octoputh,’ she drawled out, in a bit of delirium in an impotent feeling. 
361	‘I literally can’t move, Rebecca. Why you do this.’ 
362	‘I be octopus.’ 
363	‘Does the octopus allow me to engage with the puss.’ 
364	‘No, not today,’ she said in a loud sing-song. 
365	‘Then when?’ he cried. 
366	‘When you’re good and grown up.’
367	‘Ah, I’ll have to marry you.’
368	‘That very Ro and Jay,’ she said, using the words for Romeo and Juliet. 
369	‘Will you let me go? I can’t move.’
370	‘Just a bit more. I be like this.’ 
371	Who in the world was as lovely, as beautiful, as nice, as worthy, as delightful, as sensitive to him, as attentive, as his secret church girlfriend? She was good and pure…How much that goodness came from the sexual pleasures she brought, could not be said; certainly her desire to please him helped increase his passion for her. 
372	Less certain was whether or not this was in accordance with what God wanted for them. In later years Dr. Matthews would feel a severe sense of irony at such language, that ‘God wanted this,’ ‘God wanted that,’ and when he used it after her death, around the patients in the mental hospital, it was only because he understood that a Brother must speak this way in that it is the vocabulary within which he operates. Such language was the modus operandi; one was forced to use God in an action-verb because the entire theology was embedded in saying, ‘It’s not we who want this, for we as humans don’t know in our human conception what’s good, but what God wants.’ 
373	In short, he and Rebecca were having trouble seeing God eye-to-eye, and their relationship had thrown both of them into deep spiritual turmoil. Meanwhile, after every ‘date’ he looked forward to being alone in bed, for there was nothing quite like the ecstasy that her presence that day brought to his imagination, her body and its curves, and, as it were, he fed his right hand image after image. 
374	But she understood that everything she gave into for him, however much she liked him, and even though she quite liked doing so, it would become the new normal. Novelties wore off. Perhaps he would grow tired of her breasts, and want something more. For boys, she knew, were relentless in their determination. However much she trusted Matthews’ sincerity, he was a boy, and boys were dogs. 
375	What could one do? They were gross! 
376	Every time he ‘went down south,’ as he had termed it, pleading ‘my hand has a mind of its own,’ she would bat him away, scowling at him as if to say, ‘You think I’m that kind of girl!’ 
377	But actually she was quietly afraid. What if one day he demanded her virginity? 
378	Dr. Matthews, a teenager, walking along the autumn streets, looking at the cars, looking at the children on their bikes, by the grassy knoll of the park, in his mind no different from the apostle Paul with his love for the world, the visual delight of every grandmother aching her way across the sidewalk; breathing the spirit in: he fond-called, as two interchangeable words, ‘Rebecca…Abba-Father!’
379	‘Father, I’m sorry for my lust—please forgive me, I know I am too weak. Forgive me—my lust!’ But he saw a bird; how much Rebecca would have loved to have seen this bird! The bird tucked in its wings, dove like a stone falling through the empty air, disturbed briefly in a flicker of the eye a drifting yellow leaf, which caught his eye so that, seeing only in his periphery that the bird was now flirting with another bird, leaving that image for one more delicious, he followed, through the barren trees, soaring like a leaf-boat across the cold blue ecstatic sky, the soon-to-be-lost, quietly singing to its death, discarded, happy, lonely leaf…
380	And he cried out inside, just as the previous night she had whispered continually his name into his ear as he touched her again and again: 
381
382Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca! 
383
384	Thus he did not understand that his sin was not really lust but idolatry; he placed her in the same place as God, and, asking for forgiveness for lust, received it instead for idolatry. 
385	When he was older, sometimes he heard, ‘You shall love the church before your wife, for what is your wife, but dust and ashes!’ and he would ‘Amen,’ for one must be absolute to God, and he gave praise. But, when moved to consecrate oneself fully to God, that is to say, to put everything for him and to give nothing greater weight than God, which feeling filled him with a desire to serve and preach and to be always in God’s presence, how could he have known that there, under his feet, or (better) in the corner of the house, the demon that would be his undoing, the presence, the influence upon his language, the particular grammer that could not subsist with his system’s grammer—the strange ‘the the’ typo all along—was his love for his wife, his blindness as to his real thought of her? 
386	For he loved his wife so much that he blinded himself to the reality of his contempt for her. This was also the contempt that he had for the rest of the world; to this he was blinded as well: his ontological superiority to the world that came from viewing everyone from afar and passing judgment upon their words. He sought to judge hypocrisy, so strong had he committed himself to judging his own speech; but such a judgment spread outwards and he judged everyone, also; and in judging them, he was superior to them, without his knowing. 
387	He was not arrogant, though the reader may view him as such. He did think himself more ‘intelligent’ than anyone around him; yet this he had done without intention; he had attempted to verify what everyone said, and found that the one who spoke correctly most was himself. To put it quite clearly, he saw, objectively, that he spoke with the acutest accuracy. Many people had more talent than him in various categories. But, judging, he saw so much inconstancy, hypocrisy, and incorrectness in speech that, should he not pray constantly to God for the forgiveness of his judgment, the sin of using his mind, should he not truly have loved people, he might have even before his wife passed become aware of the intrinsic belief in his own superiority. 
388	For he loved his wife so much that, once he lost her, he lost also the language with which he prayed. For one prays to the highest. One gives thanks to the highest. But all along, she had been the highest concept in him. She had hidden there, crouched. In the sweetness of her name. 
389	How sweet the name? No, everything in the living name, a religion unto itself, the habitual giving oneself over to an entity, a system of ideas and images which, like a compass inside many rotating rings and dimensions, orients itself when occupied by the cloud, the atmosphere, rosy, tinted with the mysterious fish-like nature of her under-smell, the locks of brown hair that she had shed around the house and which for the first year he did not clean up, all these were given, spreading, in the fond-calling of her name. 
390	It was almost too much to think of. He could hardly bear to note the phenomena, to be interested in it, to submit it to the category of profound observations where he received pleasure even from the greatest pain. Thinking about something, he sublimated it, and treated it as an art piece, a comedy for his amusement, without having to touch it, without having to be poked by its prongs. In treating her voice in his head intellectually, analyzing and abstracting from it every time it appeared to him, wafting her clean under-smell to him from a tree that, leaning up to the right, was burst about with white blossoms in which, like a child’s closed hand, seemed to enclose a secret toy, or seeing her features in one of her relatives who now and then came by to see the man who had been such a good husband to their beloved Rebecca, or in the image of his daughter who he had abandoned for the last fourteen years, all this was ‘too much,’—‘it’s simply too much for me,’ he noted, succinctly—it had infinite excess, and his analysis could not quite contain it. For the intelligence is truly limited. It cannot control, portion out, divide as into sky and sea, what pain comes to us. This pain comes to us, and, having nothing else, we ask upon that intelligence to deal with it, but like our gaze it is lost in a vast and vacant sky, unable to parcel out in idioms, into messages and sayable phrases by which to comfort ourselves like a snail in its shell—just as ‘weird-headed’ had comforted him in the midst of his conflict, his contempt for his wife’s intelligence. He could not name the moment of excess so as to tame it and prevent it from making incomprehensible his entire being. 
391	He was an unspeakable abyss; the language by which he might comprehend himself was unavailable to him. But his torture consisted in the following suffocation: 
392	He could not speak freely. 
393	He could not say, to anyone, not even to himself, what he actually thought. And when, before, he was able to speak freely, because the words came out faster than he could understand the words and only in listening to what he said could he comprehend himself—thus generating new thoughts automatically—he was able to learn from himself. 
394	How much he loved the sound of his own voice! For in it, was there not an infinite amount he could learn?
395	The idle faculties; but the idle faculties required that he have someone to talk besides himself. And, as for Rebecca, she did not understand him; she could not keep up with him; thus he could not speak freely with her. 
396	One depressed dares not say what he actually thinks to the person who does not understand depression, who will take ‘I want to die’ not as a joke but as a serious crime, even an offense against her who ought to be his reason for living. They think that the suicidal one hates them; and they speak of the suicide as if ‘why did he do this, when he had me?’
397	But it had to do with the survivor only to the following extent: what has happened is that his chemicals have become suicidal, an internal process that is only tangentially related to her to the extent that the mental habit surfaces as behavior, which she can alter, but only to the extent that she may cheer him up a little, or depress him further; what effect she has on him returns on the track into the body, into the brain again…obscured from her eyes, unavailable to her perception. 
398	But because she had not that unspecialized learning intelligence that could follow his, he would have to explain everything that he was saying in a way that took just an extra second longer than he would have liked; and the whole game was ruined, he could not have fun, his idle faculties remained idle. 
399	Instead, then, he cajoled her, and in his cajoling of her, in his playing with her, he found a different way to have fun…
400	Nevertheless…
401	No matter how he sought to drown her voice in the sounds of the café, still, it would draw him in, for so attractive it was, like something slipped inside a drink, and why should he not respond, ‘Rebecca, what do you think you’re doing! You think I’m the type of guy to allow you to put a poster like that in our own bedroom!’ ‘But it’s Marky Mark,’ she said. ‘Look: see that chin definition. See the fine chiseled chin. See the handsome blue eyes. Vee blue. His best movie since Casablanca Under the Stars. That’s what Bobbie Ebertó said,’ (her name for the movie critic Roger Ebert). And, revealing this side only to her, hiding it from everyone else to whom he was proper, composed, and spiritual, a childish incoherent spurting and chortling came from his throat, an exasperated gurgling like the song of a retarded sparrow, the language of an utter simpleton, he would lose all guise and thought of his own intelligence in the feeling of himself as being befuddled, baffled, by the behavior of so adorable a wife. He chortled spastically like a child—as if to say, in response to her putting up a poster of a handsome movie star in their bedroom, ‘I cannot understand you, you are simply too much. You are adorable, you villain!’ For he received pure pleasure from her, the bafflement of his analytical abilities, the sensuous delight in her body, the strange unpredictable originality of a girl who has somehow got it into her mind to bring home a movie poster directly from the movie theatre, and, without asking her husband, even an affront against his masculinity, and quite obviously against the dictates of the church against worldliness, was now in the process of tiptoeing on the stool so as to neatly tape Marky Mark (also her nickname for the actor) onto the upper reaches of the wall! 
402	‘Have you considered that a man may not like another man’s face in his own bedroom?’
403	‘Well. Well!’ 
404	‘Yes?’
405	‘Well!’
406	‘You’re not making words, Rebecca.’
407	Still standing on the small plastic stool with the cartoon rabbit faces on it, she briefly turned around—her arms kept together in a feminine posture, the elbows tucked inwards, her figure quite noticeable in the evening lamplight—and, casting him a glance, right above her own shoulder, she said, full of shadows, ‘Well.’ 
408	So astounded by her beauty, by her cleverness, by the incomprehensibility of this random small phrase, Dr. Matthews would be consumed in laughter at her and himself. He also enjoyed the act of being tickled; for here she was, plainly putting the face of a handsome male actor in his bedroom, without even considering that it might be a strange thing to do! He was middle-aged, then. With his blonde hair, his quite average physique, he would lean back on the bed, and roll up like a roly-poly, as limber as a child (as if the levity and clarity of his mind, immature in its linguistic playfulness, had kept, also, his body from stiffness), then unroll and stand up, his hands on his hips, firmly, in the posture of one ready to say something. She was idly and silently placing the last pieces of tape onto the poster. 
409	He sighed. ‘Do you really have to?’
410	‘Well,’ she said. ‘Well yes. It’s his best movie. That’s what Umberto Eco said,’ (thus giving the critic yet another nickname, this time based off of the famous author). 
411	‘Don’t you think Randy might have some weird qualms about her dad and mom worshiping, what’s his name, Mark Wahlberg?’ 
412	‘Randy? Randy!’ 
413	‘Yes, that is our daughter’s name.’
414	‘Oh Mister, did we really name our daughter Randy?’
415	‘It was, if I remember correctly,’ (sourly), ‘your idea.’ 
416	‘Ah,’ she sighed. ‘But you allowed it to happen. – Oh well!’ and she went back to taping the poster. 
417	‘Now,’ he began again, in a scholar’s ironic tone. ‘Have you considered how awkward it might be for me when I engage you in the pastry and that man’s face is in our room, which, I should note, has no other photos of anyone except the three of us—barring, of course, the rabbit cartoons on your stool.’
418	‘Well you are usually facing down, so.’ 
419	He laughed in his usual breathy, lively, unabashed way, totally consuming his features and shaking his body, enjoying the laugh for its own sake, pleased to be tickled by his wife. ‘Well, what if I’ve other thoughts about that!’
420	‘Well, sometimes you do like being on the bottom.’
421	‘Hey,’ he cried. ‘A man doesn’t like hearing that kind of thing.’
422	‘But other times you like being on your side.’
423	‘And what about you? What do you like?’
424	‘Ah!’ she sighed with girly pleasure. She had completed the poster and now, still standing on the stool, her figure lovely in the evening lamplight, completely ignoring him, she took a look at the large face of the actor, and placed her hands upon it, as one holding a puppy’s cheeks and examining it for its cuteness. 
425	Perhaps, because she ignored him so much, because she never responded to him, this was enough to assuage his fears of the superiority of his own intelligence. He had no place to debate her, to critique her, because she was not responsive, did not care for his intelligence, had little understanding for his deeper ideas; thus he rarely felt him himself ‘un-comprehended,’ simply because, like the God of Faulkner, she never met him on the battlefield, never found his ideas interesting enough to critique. 
426	Now she had crouched and moved the little stool to its place beside the cabinet, where she was always sure to keep it there, though her habits of cleanliness and order frequently waged war with her rushed habits in the morning. 
427	Then she turned to him, started combing her beautiful but perpetually curled brown hair, of deep dark type unique to ‘Waysian’ blends which is seen in the richness, the pure wood-color, of certain species of horses; and, wrangling with hair, said, ‘So?’
428	‘What!’
429	‘You’re just going to stand there?’
430	‘What do you…’
431	‘Well, haven’t we had a good night out.’
432	‘Yes,’ (sourly), ‘you went the movies, and returned home with another man.’ 
433	‘And wasn’t dinner nice.’
434	‘Yes, the Peng’s nicely cared for Randy.’ 
435	‘Isn’t Jennie Peng an excellent woman!’
436	‘You always say that—you know, I was friends with you before she was friends with you!’
437	‘Not true, Jennie Peng and I had piano classes with the same piano teacher, we just didn’t know each other yet.’
438	(a little hurt), ‘Yes, but—I mean. Rebecca! We’re married!’
439	‘When did I say we weren’t! All I said was that Jennie Peng is an excellent woman! You know, in high school she always told me you might turn out to be the jealous type like that horrible M. Swann in those Proust books!’ 
440	‘The what!’
441	‘Yeah—oh no!’ she cried. ‘Oh no! I wasn’t supposed to tell you that!’
442	‘That’s what Jennie Peng thinks of me?’ 
443	‘Oh no, oh dear. Oh dear.’
444	‘Well I’ll have to have a word with her next time we’re at the Peng’s.’ 
445	‘But you know, you aren’t at all like that M. Swann type. … anyway! Anyway! You’re just going to stand there? We’ve had a good dinner, a good movie, you didn’t buy me a rose or anything, though who cares since men these days don’t buy roses anymore, and you’re just going to stand there?’
446	‘Well, maybe I’ll just stand here. See, the room is nice right now. See how that light slants over there perfectly so it falls across your body? It’s like one half of you is in the shadows, while the upper half, since the lamp shines upwards, is enclosed by the very shadow of heaven. See? isn’t that a nice observation?’ 
447	‘What use…’ she sighed. ‘Anyway. Haven’t we had a nice movie, a dinner, and all that?’
448	‘You know, if you want sex, you can just say it.’ 
449	She went back up on the stool. ‘No.’ 
450	He laughed brazenly. ‘Have I ruined your sly attempts at seduction?’
451	She crossed her arms as if to block him off, forming an ‘X’ with her wrists inflected upwards like the signs of an official at a landing strip declaring that now was not the time to attempt to land; they were still several feet from each other. ‘No.’ 
452	‘Ah, Rebecca, wife of Isaac, daughter fated and brought to Abraham by God…!’ and, advancing, he removed her from the stool by taking her up by the waist and leaning back so that her weight fell over him; then let his arms go so that, a bit surprised, she slid off his body and her feet fell to the ground, like a toy shaken out of its cylinder. Then, tucking his chin in so that he looked closely at her and they could feel each other breathing, he let a moment of thick silence spread through the air. It was a moment of anticipatory pleasure, a return to animals discovering each other in the dark. He embraced her, chanting into her ear —
453
454	‘daughter of Bethuel, Milcah’s son, whom she bore to Nahor. Moreover (he chanted) she said to him, “We have both straw and feed enough, and room to lodge.”
455	
456	She responded, remembering the verse:
457
458So Abraham said to the oldest servant of his house, who ruled over all that he had, “Please, put your hand under my thigh, and I will make you swear…”
459
460	In their passion they were removed from fear; even many a day later would he feel guilt for his inventiveness, his delight in references and jokes, in that he had conjoined with sex the precious Word of God! But who could he pray to about that, besides God himself? What could he do? It was simply too good—to have heard her say, out of the grandfather Abraham’s old smelly mouth, no less, ‘Put your hand under my thigh’—it was simply too funny, arousing, and thickening in the blood, for him to have not used it! His mind brought together associations and he received deep pleasure from the way his mind worked. Oh well, then. Next time, so he seriously promised himself, he would put a stop to any of this misusage of Biblical words; he would talk to Rebecca about it and they would stop. 
461	But next time…?
462	How sweet her name, the wife of Isaac! Indeed, however much he wished, he could not divide or section into available mental compartments—like going around their house in the rain that first December after she passed and catching the leaks in the roof with the pails in which he had grown for her shoots of onion in the Spring—could not deal with the surge and well of emotion, as if calling on him, asking him to remember it, to ‘love himself goodly,’ to be the beloved of God itself, to wish himself well and everyone else ‘well and outstanding,’ all this that came when, for no apparent reason, usually because she was upset with him, or even making a sly remark about him, she said his first name, the name that only she could quite say, in her particular accent, in the multifarious animals it became according to her moods, when she wished to pet him like a plump white cat or when she was shocked by one of his horny male perverse behaviors, in ways only slightly different from God calling upon him when he was a child, ‘…!’ 
463	‘…,’ (shyly), ‘what’s your home’s number? I need it in case Mrs. Evans says we need to do the project again.’ 
464	In any case, observing Pastor Bedard’s attempt to use the ‘silent method’ to treat Gabby, he heard her voice, saying, ‘He is an eminently foolish man!’ 
465	Never trained in pacifying mental patients, he had used the method that, perhaps, his wife had taught him: giving the silent treatment. This, he thought, was to show Gabby how futile were her protests, that he would gladly let her groan, toss about, and throw a ‘hissy fit,’ until Bobbert came. All the work that Simon Chan had done, in listening to her, in treating her as a human, as loving her as Christ might have done, in silence, asking about her life, loving her simply by paying attention to her and self-abnegating not in the sense of starving oneself or putting off lust, but in the declining the irritation of boredom; Simon had stayed there by her bed; all this work was undone by the irritated attitude of this man of God. 
466	It was to spare his pride. He could no longer take her rejoining his prayers with, ‘I don’t want your prayers!’ For what was he to do with this woman, this filthy woman? He was insane with anger and hatred, all the more because he could not express it upon her.
467	Dr. Matthews, having seen enough, stepped into the dark, without turning on the light; nevertheless, sitting in his chair, when Pastor Bedard looked up with a feral look behind his glasses, the lights of the hallway were reflected in his dull glasses, as an animal whose eyes have been caught in the dark, his bad mood revealing itself simply because he was startled that someone else was seeing him, in the way of a caretaker having to hide that he had mistreated his subject who either cannot speak or will not be believed. Gabby lay enormously in bed; coming out from underneath the mounds of her blankets, from her suffocated thighs, were her flowery pink socks, ruffled like a tube of fabric, colored drab and brown underneath the shadowy standard-issue blankets. Across the yard, one window was lit, but no one could be seen. Her face lit up; a glad pleasure spread itself across her features, and though diminished by her bulb-like nose large as a red squash (since, lying in bed, her nostrils faced the air), her eyes widened a little. The effect could barely be discerned, so much had the folds of her face inhibited the expressiveness of her features. But, growling like a demon, from a land far beneath, her meth-destroyed lungs resounded with a sudden quickening of the voice, so that it was as if a child spoke in an aged voice: ‘Oh, I’ve been waiting to see you. I’ve been waiting. Dr. Matthews.’ 
468	‘Gabby Schleidenschtecker,’ he replied, standing before her bed, his hands folded in front of him, shyly, though at ease. 
469	Seeing his particular twinkling smile, she said, also feeling at ease, ‘Oh I feel awful. I feel really awful. I feel like I’m being Mistreated.’
470	‘Dr. Matthews,’ said the Pastor, shortly, with formality. He was not sure whether or not to rise from his chair, so instead crossed his legs and leaned back, to display that he had done nothing wrong. 
471	‘Pastor Bedard. How are you, my brother?’ 
472	‘I’m alright, Dr. Matthews.’
473	Without much turning to face him, still hunched with his arms crossed in a pious posture, he took a look at him, and, adopting from looking at the Pastor a weary tone, ‘You’re tired, my friend.’
474	‘I’m…alright, thank you, Dr. Matthews.’ 
475	Suddenly a smile came across his features, and he said to Gabby, ‘Your Pastor claims he isn’t tired. He’s been here the entire week, administering to everyone, and still says he isn’t tired. Well,’ he laughed. ‘The Spirit of God must be in him, because I sure wouldn’t be able to put up with all the lot of you!’
476	‘With us?’
477	‘Yes, all your complaining, all your hassling…’
478	Slightly stunned, but nevertheless allowing the awareness of the joke to spread across her face, she said, laughing a little, ‘We do hassle a lot, some patients are really awful.’ 
479	‘And you, stuck here, on this bed…’
480	‘Oh, I hate being stuck here, not being to move my arms!’
481	‘And the Pastor, always moving about…’
482	Saying nothing, Pastor Bedard, at first feeling all the more irritated at what he was sure was Dr. Matthews’ condescending attitude, was nevertheless softened by the spirit in his language, its gentleness, its kindliness, its good nature. 
483	‘Gabby,’ Dr. Matthews now said. ‘May we pray for you?’
484	‘Well, I’d like to hear your prayers.’
485	‘But Gabby, think of me. I’m only one person. If I pray for you, yes, God will listen. But won’t he listen better if two people pray for you? For we pray, firstly, for God, but we also pray so that we will better friends in the end.’ 
486	‘…well. Alright. But you better watch what he prays for. He tells me I’m a sinner.’
487	‘He means well, Gabby. He himself is a sinner—’
488	‘I know that!—’
489	‘And I, too, am a sinner. Do you know what I would have been like had I not met my wife? I was ruthless with ambition. I would have tried to conquer the world, and been extremely hollow in doing so. I am a strong-minded person, Gabby. I have no pride in saying this. Strong-mindedness is the most dangerous thing one can have in the church. It is to believe in yourself, so much that you do not consider that others might be right; or you lie to yourself and say that you have heard them. Ambition like mine destroys a person. I’m not sure this is relevant to you, and I’ve gone on about myself, but if I’m to pray with you, I have to be honest about myself, as well.’
490	‘You’re a sinner?’
491	‘The very worst. – You don’t believe me,’ he laughed, still hunched over as if shy. ‘Well, I wouldn’t, either. You’ve done things, as you’ve told me. But when I heard about them, even the things you’ve done because of meth, I had the following thought: these were not evils, these were sicknesses. But one thing you did do,’ he added, reproving, that struck me as sinful. It was not anything you did in your past, but it was when you excused yourself for doing so.’
492	He gave her an example. ‘I would often to do something wrong, and this was not a problem; for the Christ forgives us everything. But what is evil is the mechanism, the habit, by which we forgive ourselves: we reason it through, with our strong minds, and we think to ourselves, that with this framework, we have done nothing wrong. Be careful. The demon belongs to thought, and not to action. You may be forgiven for all the things that you have done. But you cannot be forgiven for forgiving yourself—from yourself. Forgiveness is of spirit and God, and not from your own reasoning. Amen.’ 
493	She would be a little dazed from following his thought, and really feeling only the tone of gentleness from what he said, she said, ‘Amen.’ Meanwhile, Pastor Bedard, for whom the interesting thought was actually intended, resolved to use the idea in his next Sunday sermon; he added, ‘Dr. Matthews speaks correctly.’
494	‘Would you like to pray, Gabby? Would it be okay if I prayed for you?’
495	‘If it would please Dr. Matthews,’ she said, accidentally using the phrase ‘If it would please the court,’ so highly did she view him that she confused him with a judge, ‘If it would please you, may I pray for myself?’
496	Dr. Matthews chuckled. ‘How happy that would make me!’
497	She began, hesitantly, ‘Oh Lord Jesus who art in the heavens…’
498	‘Gabby,’ he kindly interrupted her. ‘Don’t pray how you think prayers sound. Just talk. You have no lies before him. Just say it as you would, perhaps to your mother who loved you.’
499	‘She did love me,’ she said softly. ‘Lord, thank you that my mother loved me.’
500	
501Amen. 
502
503Thank you, Lord, that she was good to me.
504
505Amen, Lord.
506
507I’m sorry I couldn’t be who she wanted me to be.
508
509Lord, forgive her.
510
511I’m sorry that she couldn’t get to see her grandson.
512
513It’s not her fault, Lord.
514
515I wish you would teach me to a better person.
516
517Amen.
518
519I wish you would teach me to lose weight.
520
521Amen, Lord.
522
523I wish you would keep me away from what’s bad.
524
525From what’s bad, Lord.
526
527Amen.
528
529Amen.
530
531Not to be left out, and perhaps also a little bit moved, Pastor Bedard added, ‘Amen, Lord.’ 
532	‘Would you like to take your meds now?’ Dr. Matthews asked, as if it were completely natural. 
533	‘Yes, but I don’t want to see Bobbert.’
534	‘How about if Mikey comes in?’
535	‘Okay.’
536	Pastor Bedard immediately went out; then Mikey came in, with the mobile platform on which there was a computer for entering information. Usually, this was manned by Bobbert, who, resembling Santa Clause in his paunch and his white hair—an old man, still working in a mental hospital, his optimism long gone—they called ‘the bringer of gifts.’ Mikey, a bit hesitantly, in his bashful manner, brought out her medicine. ‘Lithium, 1500 milligrams.’
537	Mikey had removed her restraints, and she felt around her wrists, and scratched herself under the armpits, and stretched. He had turned on the lights, and the men of God were relieved of their shadowy stature. She took the two thick pink pills, and swallowed them with a little plastic cup of water. 
538	‘Lamotrigine, 300 milligrams.’ 
539	Four white tablets. 
540	And, ‘Naltrexone, 50 milligrams. This is the one for recovery from methamphetamines’
541	(grumpily), ‘I know.’ 
542	Lastly, ‘Trazodone, 400 milligrams.’ 
543	‘Can I get some more water? Sometimes in the night I wake up because of the Lithium dryness and I get God-awful thirsty.’
544	‘But you can still go back to sleep?’
545	‘Yes.’
546	‘Dr. Matthews, would you mind getting some water?
547	Dr. Matthews went into the kitchen, poured water into a large container, greeted some patients, and returned. He was suddenly very tired. 
548	Leaving a sedated Gabby, the Pastor followed Dr. Matthews to the gates of the ward. They went out into the parking lot—Pastor Bedard said, unable to contain himself any longer, humiliated, 
549	‘Tell me, Dr. Matthews. How is it that you do that—how is it that you do that?’
550	‘I don’t know, Brother.’ 
551	‘Is it the Lord?’
552	‘Certainly, everything is with the Lord.’
553	‘But how come the Lord is not with me?’
554	‘The Lord is certainly with you.’
555	‘Teach me, Brother.’
556	‘Well, go home and pray.’
557	‘And what shall I get from it—I ask you, What? This woman is a torture on me.’
558	‘Pray.’
559	‘For what! For what, Dr. Matthews! This whole week—my wife hates that woman! Amelia, as you know, is a nervous woman and doesn't like being left home alone at night. She’d rather I have an affair than spend my nights trying to get that—that——to take her meds! I don’t know what Dr. Singh expects of me. I truly don’t understand it. I’m a pastor—I’m not some sort of spiritual enforcer. But you know how Dr. Singh is. Whatever she wants, she takes it from you. I’ve been—my wife.’ 
560	Dr. Matthews turned to him in the parking lot; he had reached his car. ‘Pray, Brother.’ 
561	The Pastor shook his head in amazement. ‘You—it’s almost as if she’s spiting me just because of you.’ 
562	‘Now, Brother—’
563	‘You should have this job. And yet I’m the one getting paid for it. Why—why is your church even here? Why is it even here—does a hospital ward need more than one pastor? — I’ve heard. Don’t think I don’t know.’
564	‘Don’t know?’
565	‘Your church is not one to go openly out about mental health. You’re a Chinese church—no offense. You guys don’t talk about that stuff; that’s our deal—the gays and homos, whatever; we fly the rainbow flag, we’re the rainbow church. But you—I was always intrigued as to why you guys are here. But then I talked to one of your fellow brothers or whatever. I mean I understand that you guys are one of those eschatological churches and whatever, where you believe the End Times are here and what not. But to say that—and I know this is a controversial opinion among you guys, that the guy who said it has been excommunicated—but to say that the Christ shall come back sometime this year; that it will be in the lowest spot available to all of human society? — You think you can spot the Christ’s coming back, here, in this mental hospital.’ 
566	‘You think too much of it, Pastor Bedard. You are tired. Go, go home. Pray. We are here because the Lord moves among the sick and poor.’ 
567	(Laughing), ‘The sick and poor. It’s we who are the sick and poor. Not you, though. I mean the rest of healthy society. You—you have your whatever, no one knows what that is. Maybe it’s you. Maybe you’re the Christ coming back.’ (Laughing), ‘Well, goodnight, Dr. Matthews.’ 
568	‘Goodnight, Brother Bedard. Please tell Amelia I say Hi, and many thanks to her for the spaghetti.’
569	The Pastor left. There, alone in the parking lot, a smile came to Dr. Matthews’ face. He opened the trunk of his car, and facing into that darkness, as if depositing it there, barely letting air out of his mouth, almost completely inaudible, as of hand-bellows pressing out a small smithereen of air, a breathy, ‘h-ha,’ was uttered out: it was a laugh. Tortured, inhuman, it contained within it the whole amusement of the day, and was directed not at Pastor Bedard, nor at Gabby, but violently at himself. He seemed to himself so violently Other, that this day he had engaged in intellectual activity so absurd, so wrong, so against the dictates of humanity, and yet to no harm to humanity, in fact to its benefit, while all the while his violent absurdity was conducted in secret, all this exerted such a pressure on him that he leaned against the top of the opened trunk, as one against a tree, slanted, facing-down, in the darkness of the parking lot, and lightly laughed through his lungs, softly, smiling inhumanly. He allowed himself, like catharsis, the awareness of his self as demonic. Kierkegaard speaks of the desire to be other than oneself as, in a sense, to no longer be oneself; of this he recognized the depressive thought of suicide. But what, then, when the maintenance of a fiction—of the spiritual Brother that he had been until his wife died, to author himself as such, and yet its tension coexisting with the occasional grasp of its irony in his hand—was that thing keeping him alive? He had no thought of suicide, for suicide is a depressive illness; and he was not, exactly, mentally ill. He had not the suicide chemicals. But the only way to be, was to be other than who he really was. But, he might have thought, was it possible in the first place to be oneself? After his wife died he felt that his every word was a lie. That nothing matched his interior state; and he hated himself for it. For to be unwillingly untruthful is the highest spiritual torture in the world. He was not interested in this; all he knew was that he could not stand the way the others had thought him in mourning, when it was evident to him that he had not really mourned at all. Dr. Matthews was a man of absolute truth, self-awareness, and transparency. If he did not feel something, he was not under any delusions, but one: despite losing twenty pounds, he thought to himself that he had not mourned. Let this be his character note. And in this, not only failing some abstract duty, he had—not even sin—he had done the unspeakable. The ineffability of his physical failure, not a short-coming, but the entire failure of his being, was as strong as the ineffable insight of Wittgenstein, the grasping of the bounded nature of language; he had no language to speak about his suffering since its language belonged to some sphere outside of him, to an angel, to the God writing his character, and perhaps was not known even there. No analysis could help him. He was an ineffable abyss. 
570	Thus ended a typical night at El Camino Hospital; he went home to his second-floor apartment on Rainbow Drive. The Pastor himself drove towards his own home. His wife was familiar with Dr. Matthews on the basis of the one or two times that Dr. Matthews had spent dinner at their house, though the two parties belonged to different church denominations. This barrier, since Dr. Matthews’ church believed itself to have attained a kind of revelation that made its method the ‘true economy of the Lord,’ was actually quite significant; the general attitude of the Apostles was that the other denominations were contrary to the economy of God because of the degenerate nature of fractured Christendom. The fragmentation of Christianity was the work of Satan to divide and cause doubt and conflict in the body of Christ. 
571	Oftentimes the work of the Apostles was to convert other Christians to their form of Christianity. The Pastor’s wife, an Amelia Bedard, strongly resented this. To what rights could another Christian tell her how she should be a Christian? To what rights? Strong-minded, passionate, small and diminutive like a garden gnome, with seemingly shy and passive eyes, she was the constant surprise of strangers, who did not expect so plain, tender, and indeed cute a woman (with eyes soft as a doe’s, and ears perky, nervous, and slightly folded back like an elf’s) to, when asked political questions, harangue them to the point of tears. She would stand with her hands before her, her fingers anxiously worrying each other, with as little emphasis, wrists bent and weak, as the paws of a kitten. 
572	‘To what rights, to what rights?’ she would ask. 
573	But then, her shoulders trembling, her elbows shivering, completely motionless, calling to mind the little child in the Hans Christen Anderson story who froze to death while selling matches, offering up opinions with the defensive view that everyone would reject them, in a high-pitched, nervous and yet melodious voice, she would say, for example at a city forum, ‘That’s not right. That’s just not right. You must understand,’ (her voice breaking a little), ‘That can’t be the opinion of this city. Our city must,’ (she clenched her fists, as if forcing herself to be strong), ‘San Jose must take a stand. San Jose must take a stand. What you would call ‘transvestites’ are just as human as the rest of us, and I don’t believe that you can say what is what, and who has the right to the restroom, or anything like that. To think, of all the little children out there, who have to grow up being forced to conform to a certain gender, the gender that they did not choose. We have to try to think outside of ourselves and have empathy for those who aren’t like us. For the small and weak. For the poor in spirit. For those who aren’t like the rest of us and who the rest of society would beat up.’ 
574	She clenched her fists, leaning into the podium where the microphone extended out. She would never touch the microphone for she was too short to reach it with her mouth. Should she have touched it, she was in so much concentrated effort that she would have flinched in shock, and looked around with a frazzled, terrified look, as if someone had thrown a rock at her and was about to boo her off stage. Her anger was beyond her imagination and composure, competing melodiously like waves for predominance on her face with her nervousness and defensiveness. 
575	‘Can you imagine what kind of statement our city would be making if we passed on complying with the Bathroom Law? Where is the conscience. Where is the conscience in—where is the conscience? My husband is the Pastor at Sanders Church, and together they’ve taken a strong stance on LGBT issues. God knows how rare that is in churches these days. I hear down South they still try to do that wretched conversion therapy on the innocent young folk. To think of it—small children being forced to be other than they are, by misled adults with the whole host of supposed belief behind them. To what rights? I ask you. But I will not be defined by that kind of Christendom. I will not. And neither, I would hope, will this town!’ 
576	In these instances, those in the city assembly, already familiar with her but nevertheless stunned again by the sight of so much trembling passion in so mouse-like a woman, would fall quiet with deep awkwardness; the one outspoken man had been silenced by the kind of cringeyness that unidirectional passion on an issue can induce when it is not met with equal feeling or outrage. She cared rather much. The man had merely accidentally used the word ‘transvestite’ and suggested that the municipal government might not have the funds to support same-sex bathrooms in all middle schools throughout San Jose. 
577	Amelia Bedard was very socially passionate, and unlike many who claim such social passion and its ideals and justice, and yet are completely devoid of humanity, guided by her ideals, she greatly intended compassion. Should she have met Gabby, for example, instead of resenting her for keeping her from her husband and forcing her to spend a Wednesday evening alone in the empty living room (she had miscarried, once, and otherwise had no children), which was to her a state of living fear, on meeting Gabby she would have tried her very best to listen to all Gabby had to say, nodding her head nervously. 
578	But, unlike Dr. Matthews, she had almost nothing in the way of understanding or persuasion. When it was her turn to speak, to offer something in the way of consolation or wisdom, she would panic, and stutter, her fingers in each hand scratching at the palms with anxiety. At the very best, with great pain, she would offer up some platitude. 
579	She was singularly dependent on her Pastor Bedard, her first and only boyfriend or husband; for, using him in sex, prone on the bed next to the head of the bed frame (for she would only have sex in this one place and position) and uttering sounds of extreme pain, holding her arms in front of her like a boxer to defend herself, her fists clenched, she had the blessing of being able to reach orgasm easily and completely, and did so, opening her mouth in a scream, once biting him on the shoulder (he asked her if she could not do that, next time), all of her uptightness would surge and release itself in a gray shriek of disconsolation, lament, regret, and pain. It was a song of relief, unspeakable pleasure, agony, and liberated self-hatred. After she recovered, she would immediately search about for her small-clothes, never sleeping naked, and cover herself. In these moments of rare peace, and it was for this peace that she was dependent on him (for they had not really any secondary habits of affection for each other, such as leaning on each other, or a touch of the hand when walking by; perhaps these are really the primary signs of affection), she would get out of bed, go to the kitchen, sit down at the small, modest round wooden table, and make herself a cup of tea, lounging about in small, loose, pink silk slippers. Sitting there, alone, for she had exhausted her husband into lying prone in bed, she would reflect, think things through, and in general space out, relaxed, tasting each sip of tea with a feeling of being reprieved from longing, almost a satisfaction, unangry at the world and in these moments as solipsistic as can be, recalling the times when, as a girl, she would lie in bed and absorb herself in reading. 
580	But, since adulthood, which ruins some people and never lets them get back to the health and wholesomeness of their youth on account of one or two great humiliations, her entire posture was defensive and only in this moment, post coitus, having taken herself out on the Pastor, could she range her mind on nothing. 
581	Certain humiliations, in her case, being shut down in a public debate forum while in high school by a particularly mean opponent who saw fit to argue in such violent and quick terms that he paralyzed her on the debate stage and then noted this to her, ‘It seems you’re speechless,’ in addition to other instances like this which her nervous and yet combative personality seemed to ‘ask for’ (in the way that the orient of our personality may incentivize a certain set of behaviors from other people), may enhance the predisposition of a person and forever orient them that way based off of one or two traumatic incidents, which are stronger than moments of glory. 
582	In youth, like undifferentiated cell mass, the person remains pliable, if with the implicit infoldings of the personality, as an unfurled bud. For these reasons, even if the person has already undergone the originary traumatic moment, because they are young, and because what unfortunate monster lurks underneath has yet to be developed like a photograph, through the future incidents that this personality will also ‘ask’ of other people, the person will actually be less affected by this instance. 
583	They will seem to have ways of dealing with it. It won’t be set within them as if permanently, encrusted, hardened, able to be read in the features of their face, the sentence and decree of their originary trauma, the posture that they are hunched into, like how a plant will grow around a stake and have the flow its body be altered by it. 
584	Trauma is like an enormous boulder put into a creek; the creek forms around it, one survives, yet every movement has a trace of that massive impediment. Younger people seem, as yet, capable of greater expressiveness, if only because these incidents will put them in the habit of certain expressions that they then take on for the rest of their lives, like hardened masks. These originary instances spread through the nervous system like the ripples of a stone in a pond of water. Its undulations carry even unto eternity, so that, once cursed with these originary traumas, the person will then seek them out through the rest of her life, falling into situations where the humiliation is reenacted in the same way that some, seeing a pimple, never let it quite heal because every time it about heals, it begins to itch with health, and thus they reopen the wound. 
585	Because she saw it necessary to ‘buck up,’ to learn to speak in a crowd, because she was encouraged by her friends—not by her husband, who was largely sick of hearing of this problem of hers—to speak her mind again, she on purpose, and with great effort, put herself in situations where she was forced to ‘stand up for herself.’ 
586	Thus, when the microphone was being passed around in the general assembly for citizen comment, unlike those who are excited by the chance to express their minds and actually experience the anticipation like a form of beauty because it calls their faculties to begin to create their speech on the spot, whereas in other situations they never would have expressed themselves, she on the other hand had long prepared what she was going to say. 
587	But as the microphone would come around, and one person after another stepped down and passed it on, each speaking in largely modulated, uninterested tones, she would begin to feel that everything she wrote in the speech was ‘just stupid, purely stupid.’ Then it would come time to speak; every eye was turned towards her. She would panic; but because she was possessed with an innate quickness, and because she had reviewed the material and her arguments so thoroughly, her speech would then take on the character of a race car assembling itself as it took to the road, picking up parts here, there, so that, as it were, as soon as it reached the finish line, it drops all of its wheels and completely falls apart. Lucky for her, that her opinions largely aligned with those of the general assembly—in liberal California. 
588	Her friend Barbara, also called ‘Barbs,’ quietly supportive of Amelia, at times joked in private—in the way that, though she helped her friend, she still viewed parts of her with amusement and disdain that she hid from her out of consideration for her friend’s sensitivity, the knowledge of which consideration would have been deeply offensive and saddening to Amelia—with other friends that Amelia took ‘the right position, at all times. She’s always right, that’s for sure. No one’s ever against her. She’s very brave. She's the Mary Poppins of opinions.’ By this she meant, Amelia was always on the side of the issue that was loudest, where no one would dispute with her. 
589	For in California, most were in agreement on, for example, the Bathroom Law. She always spoke passionately and no one dared to disagree with her because she was on ‘the right side.’ Yet they short-sold their friend. 
590	The reality was that Amelia was of such disposition that, so nervous and so desperate to ‘stand up for herself,’ so easily triggered to offer her political opinion, she was actually incapable of the kind of calculation whereby a clever politician might situate himself in a ‘middle’ position, or the position that appeals to the crowd. She said what she actually thought, because she had not the foresight or understanding to shape it according to what might be most salient; luckily, she had not much in the way of original ideas, and took almost everything she said from reading The New York Times or the San Jose Mercury News, and the insular nature of the debate at the San Jose City Council sufficiently protected her from the kind of dissent that would rattle her completely. 
591	Some people only come out to protest when they are assured that the protest would succeed. She was not such a one. For she had not the perspicuity in the first place to ascertain that the protest would succeed. But because she was completely unoriginal, she was not in the least disagreeable. 
592	People who think differently cause offense; people who passionately say the same thing that people already agree with only cause for a general indifferent applause, as the person herself rests assured that, at least tonight, she has really stood up for herself and for the people she believes deserve national attention. But there only needed to come, like the one example that destroys a supposedly a priori argument, one asshole, one person who, though he might say this to everyone, would say to her, ‘You know, that’s just a stupid idea,’ such a person would be enough to break up years of therapy and self-actualization, of self-forced ‘breakthroughs.’ 
593	But it was true that she liked Dr. Matthews, however much she was offended by the idea, which she had read in one of the Apostles’ pamphlets, that the Apostles were the forefront and spearhead of God’s mission to bring back the New Jerusalem onto earth. 
594	‘By what rights,’ she asked him, over asparagus. They would sometimes dine together. ‘By what rights does your church say this?’ 
595	Meanwhile Pastor Bedard indifferently dug into his macaroni and chewed absently like a cow, recalling the placid, bovine, deer-in-the-headlights demeanor of the man in American Gothic, who holds a pitchfork, as if instead of actually eating his food, he were merely staring ahead while holding in his left hand a silver spoon, in his right hand a silver folk—a symbol of cutlery rather than any live and potent man in the act of devouring. For Pastor Bedard, when he ate, did not appear to think much of the food, however disciplined and rhythmic were his bites, however much nutrition he took in, wiping his brow, taking a drink of wine, like a man doing the menial labor of stamping a thousand letters or shaping a particular part in a car factory. ‘By what rights, Dr. Matthews,’ she said, quiveringly looking him straight in the eye, ‘What is your church to say that is the only church? Where in the Bible does it say that the Apostles is God’s economy?’
596	‘Lord Jesus!’ Dr. Matthews chuckled. 
597	She was taken aback; she receded into the air over her plate, over the fine white tablecloth and the silver candlestick; and waited in anticipation to see what he meant by this. Her eyes were opened wide, but they contained only a mere hint of her aggression and anxiety, for they softened, as if melting in the aura of Dr. Matthews. 
598	‘My sister,’ Dr. Matthews said, softly smiling, in the attitude towards, indeed, a younger, beloved, less knowledgeable sister. ‘You know very much of the Bible, and very much of the Ministry! Surely, you are a Pastor's wife! And may I ask where you read this idea?’
599	‘It was in the Studies of Acts, the Second Volume. Liu Fu says that the Apostles can only occur through one denomination. That there is only one denomination, and there has only ever been one denomination.’
600	‘So that is what you read?’
601	‘Am I wrong?’ she said fiercely, in an aggression that Dr. Matthews immediately understood to be doubt as to the veracity of her quotation. He started to pay attention to his words and their effect; he had begun to find her more amusing than usual, and as if turned on a switch inside him. 
602	‘Sister,’ he said, not answering the question. ‘Do you know the story of the cat-dog?’
603	She furrowed her brow, and said quickly, like answering the teacher's question that she is sure she knows, ‘That’s one of Jesus’s parables.’
604	‘Actually,’ said Dr. Matthews, apologetically, ‘it’s not.’ He had confirmed his prediction, that, afraid of where she stood in position to him in terms of the comfort with Biblical literature, she was then likely to say she knew where she did not; he had chosen an absurd story on purpose so as to throw her off. ‘It’s one of mine. Cat-dog is a cartoon I grew up with. It’s the one where one half of the animal is a cat, and the other is a dog, and they would try to go in different directions because one of them wanted milk, while the other one wanted biscuits.’ He added, ‘It was on PBS all the time, in the 50’s. You can tell my age from that.’
605	He pretended not to notice, but he savored in himself the particular transition her face made: it went from the aggressive alive eyes and forward lean of one claiming knowledge where she knew nothing, to one hoping that her mistake was not noticed, throwing her shoulders back and blinking quickly once or twice. 
606	The humiliation she ought to feel, in mistaking a cartoon for a parable, she did not feel; for she did not quite grasp the ridiculousness of a ‘cat-dog,’ that she had thought such an animal as belonging to the Christian Bible. For though amalgamations of animals are seen in the Book of Revelations, these usually involve mythic creatures like dragons or eagles or lions, and domestic cats and dogs have almost no place in the Bible. Cats and dogs are too small, too meaningless, failing to induce awe, though in Samuel's Book there is the mention of a man with a head that looks like a dog's, terrifying enough, and infinitely awful, to the child who is caught in the nightmare, where he finds himself stuck in the attic. He took especial pleasure for he remembered the image of cat-dog: one side cat, the other side dog—as ridiculous as any image could be. 
607	He went on, ‘The cat and the dog, in my recollection, are always trying to go in different directions. One of them wants to go left, the other wants to go right. Imagine then that you have a right hand and a left hand, and the right hand desires what it desires, and the left hand desires something else. Would you not say that this is unhealthy and unfruitful for the body that possesses these hands and these attributes? The Apostles, true, does say that its way is the Way, as written by the apostles. Rather it means to be a recollection, a recovery, of the apostolic days, not that it itself is right, or that it’s anything new, but that it is a recovery, a coming-back, to the times before Christianity was corrupted. So just as you can’t have a left hand and a right hand thinking different things, so the Church of God, his Kingdom, cannot have a left half and a right half. There is no Protestantism, no Catholicism. There is only the Church of God, the one way, working in one accord.’ This seemed to him a little bit more funny because he thought that he himself was oriented in a differentiated manner, as more than one person. 
608	The Pastor, between bites of asparagus, looking up momently from his food before turning back to it—around his neck was tucked neatly a huge white napkin, like a bib—said briefly, ‘I agree. Too many churches.’ Then he went back to chewing. 
609	‘But,’ Amelia Bedard said, ‘Dr. Matthews. Isn’t it just arrogant? Isn’t it really arrogant?’ Dr. Matthews saw, with amusement at his own forgetting of this likelihood, that she had not really understood his parable, and had simply had maintained her original stance. For one sign of stupidity is the inability to listen and learn; or, perhaps, should she have this ability, it was blinded by her habitual intellectual anxiety which must assert where, in the presence of someone more knowledgeable and intelligent, she ought to listen. 
610	‘Well, Amelia. What is the difference between truth and arrogance? When you know the Truth, are you not obligated to tell this to anyone who believes? When you know the Truth, aren’t you supposed to defend it?’ said Dr. Matthews, relishing the word ‘truth.’ 
611	‘Truth…’ she pondered the word. ‘Well, what I want to know. Is how come you guys are all…’
612	‘All Asian?’ Dr. Matthews, with white blonde hair, laughed pleasantly. ‘You'd certainly not be the first to note that. For a long time my wife and I were minorities there. We improved our Chinese from the hymns.’ 
613	She was startled. ‘Well, yes.’ She looked around in fear, not even aware that she had had such a racial idea, and that her objection, or better said her confusion with the Apostles was, first and foremost, that it was all Chinese, and seemed radically Chinese in character, since in general everyone spoke in a uniform manner, in that strange, loud-sounding language. 
614	Dr. Matthews chuckled. ‘Well, the Lord happened to make his start in a city in China, in the body of a young man born there. Whatever soil it grows in, that’s the kind of fruit it bears. The soil was Chinese, the fruit’s Chinese. Amen, my sister. But now that it’s drifted across the Pacific, even you and I can see the end results. There is no difference between Jew or Greek, Paul says. This is the type of glory we can see in the Apostles today.’ 
615	‘Yes, surely,’ she said, hasty to cover over the fact that she had showed hesitation as to the Chinese-dominated nature of the Apostles, which reluctance towards the Chinese race disagreed with her liberal universalist values, but through which (the lens of race, the preference of skin-color like her own) she still saw the world. For she felt guilty for not liking the Apostles because it was all Chinese, felt she should like it all the more just because it was Chinese, and had not been conscious of this until Dr. Matthews had, as if he had seen a step ahead of her, deft as a cat that grabs a mouse, noticed and pointed it out to her. The reality was that Dr. Matthews was well-experienced with common objections to the Apostles, and it took no stretch of imagination at all to decipher that her hesitation was racial; he was in fact rather bored by this. She was forced to think, because the alternative was too horrifying, that Dr. Matthews had not noticed her politically incorrect mishap, for this meant she could be denounced as a racist. All this Dr. Matthews observerd in a moment, feeling a bit bored by the thought. Covering herself up, she said, ‘But surely, Chinese values are a huge addition to the Church. In college at Vassar I read the Dao De Jing. I thought it a good book, a really good book,’ and she finished, hoping to cease the topic there.
616	But Dr. Matthews said, ‘How do you mean?’
617	‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I mean that, you know, the Dao De Jing, is all about peace. And the Chinese are about peace. And isn’t that what the Apostles are all about?’
618	Dr. Matthews weighed his response carefully. His natural instinct was to laugh at what she said, for it was so grossly over-simplistic that it begged ridicule, but he was also acutely sensitive to how sensitive she might be in regards to her momentary racial indiscretion, and that she was hasty to cover it up. Thus he quashed the thought to ask her what she meant, to have her explain herself. But deciding nevertheless to play with her a bit more, he said, ‘Now, I agree with you that Chinese values are an additive to the Apostles,’ which he did not believe at all, since Chinese values, like any cultural values, were not relevant to the supra-worldly construct of the New Jerusalem, ‘But I hope you will tell me what you mean, what you think of this word of the Lord’s. Pastor Bedard, are you familiar with the verse that speaks of the Christ coming not in peace but with a sword?’
619	Pastor Bedard said, ‘He comes in a time of war, but that verse is not applicable to a time of peace.’
620	Dr. Matthews chuckled. ‘Surely, you do not think the words of the Christ are only applicable in certain times, but void in others?’
621	Pastor Bedard said, gravely, with no hint of joy, as if he had learned this in the hellish depths of grammar school, ‘Schleiermacher says that those words which are not fit for joy, are not fit for God.’
622	‘Well,’ Dr. Matthews said, turning to Amelia. ‘Do you agree? Does the Church always have to be at peace, or can it at times be at war?’
623	Amelia hesitated. Then she blushed completely; she put her hands in the waist of her dress and clenched the folds together, appearing like a young, anxious debutante who has been ignored by the first man of the evening and who must sit there wondering if another man will ever come to ask her to dance. She leaned forward, blushing over the plate of food which she had been too animated to touch, looking to be in a sort of agony. Pastor Bedard momently noticed and felt in himself a movement towards mild arousal. She at last said, ‘The Christ is for peace, not for war.’
624	‘Rightly said,’ said Dr. Matthews. ‘But we must be careful. For often we think what we want is what the Christ wants. But the Christ did come for war. He came in a time to end all times. He is not so easy a figure to interpret. He spoke of hell, and never laughed.’
625	‘But what do you think?’ said Pastor Bedard, tossing to his side a bit of a bomb, as he worked at his asparagus. Dr. Matthews saw that Pastor Bedard was hoping to assert a kind of dominance. 
626	‘What I think is unimportant,’ said Dr. Matthews, hoping to test how much Pastor Bedard wished this feeling of dominance. He did not know this, but it was connected with the sudden surge of testosterone that had urged itself through Bedard’s body at the sight of the painful shyness of his wife, the way she had grasped at her dress underneath the table. For he was aroused by his wife, at least moderately (for sex with her made him feel lonely), especially when she revealed this special weak aspect of hers; he did not like fucking nearly as much as she solipsistically received salvation and peace in her daily life from the violent orgasms of lamentation she received with the thrusting of him inside her. He was not at all a physical specimen of any sort. But she was especially capable of relieving herself by way of sex, and so he was as a good a tool as any. Because his wife was so deeply pleased, he at once thought himself ten times the man he actually was, though he was at the same time exhausted and actually somewhat annoyed when, at night, she wrapped her legs around him and brought him to herself. Pastor Bedard thus said, ‘But I’m curious as to what you think. You’re not at all what they would call the ‘common pastor.’ I mean, you have quite the spot in the Church. You had the spot at the Labor Day conference.’
627	‘I would hope,’ said Dr. Matthews seriously, ‘that these are not metrics by which you judge the love of God.’
628	‘Surely not,’ said Pastor Bedard, caught off-balance. ‘But still, I’d like to hear what you think, with regards to the Christ and peace and all that.’
629	Dr. Matthews said, ‘Well, surely, the Christ came for peace. But he came also with a sword for justice, and a way of establishing that peace. Now, this did not mean physical warfare. The Crusades are clearly wrong. He meant a spiritual warfare, in the heart of each young man and woman. The warfare against Satan—the sword is taken out against Satan, to slay the devil by the blood of the lamb, which is the repentance and sacrifice, overcoming the guilt and doubt and accusations of the deceiver!’
630	Amelia said, ‘Amen.’ The blush had receded from her face and she looked at Dr. Matthews with the admiration that occurs when one's doubts and earlier aggressive inquiries have been put to rest; when he has fended off your blows. Pastor Bedard, not knowing that every woman after awhile looked at Dr. Matthews in this way, and not understanding that he posed no threat in this category, was troubled, and somewhat upset. For Dr. Matthews, however old and silver the blonde of his hair, had eventually this effect on lonely women, which was that they felt that he understood them. In reality, he did understand them, but this feeling was conveyed primarily by the fact that he put them off balance, that he made them feel, in short, a bit dumb, that he understood their own thoughts and motives better than they did themselves; not that he knew more than them—for an intelligence ambitious to show itself frequently hides behind the ornamental, patterned golden girdle of mere information—rather that he could somehow always ‘get behind’ their thoughts. He could slip as if a finger behind what they were saying and tickle a particular blindspot that they had no way of reaching, which startled them for it pointed out their unsaid feelings. This was not the workings of the spirit, but of the sensitive intelligence. 
631	To feel attracted to someone who makes you feel dumb is by no means unique to any gender, though in certain cultures a man is expected to feel offended and insecure when he feels dumb (he is expected to put down the woman), though a woman finds herself feeling more secure in the presence of someone smarter. Doubtless this is the strange dynamic of a patriarchal society, where the woman is expected to look up to the man, but the man cannot look up to the woman. In any case, Amelia Bedard was certainly of that generation, the 60’s white-bread women, as depicted in Madmen, plain, attracted to conventional masculinity, who were likely to fall prey to a man slightly older than them, so long as he was not decrepit or smelly, a man who could outplay them in the battlefield of speech. 
632	She knew her husband to be a largely hypocritical, soulless sort of man, though she relied on him in so many matters that it had become impossible for her to extricate herself from him. She needed him. She needed his presence at dinner so that she would not feel alone, his speeches on Sunday at Sanders Church so she could feel important, his family so that she would not feel alone at Christmas (her family was back East, and she was on strange terms with them). She needed someone to shop with at Safeway, not because she was ashamed of being seen alone, but because carrying so many bags hurt her back, and tired her out easily. She was delicate. Sometimes a person will form a relationship with another, on terms certain and permanent as marriage, simply because the alternative, that he or she be alone, is no longer plausible; and because the other person is available, and helpful, and solicitous, the person simply sticks with them forever, incapable of and unwilling to imagine themselves in a better relationship. Certainly Pastor Bedard, impressed with her prettiness and the charms of her youth, had made himself available and helpful at every moment while they were dating, though now he was largely indifferent to her. However, a bit like her, he felt that the duties of marriage placed some claim upon him, and he was expected to be home by 7 p.m. each night. 
633	They had together, as it were, an athletic interest, and nothing more than that. She was certainly more invested in it than he; he felt himself used in sex. She closed her eyes; she brought her arms forward to block his mouth from hers (for she did not like the direct, gross, smelly affection of kissing him); she clenched her fists, merely using the gyrations of her lower body to better harmonize his thrusting with her taking his thrust, keeping the locus of the penetration in place as do those strange devices which stabilize a moving camera so that it is always undisturbed. She had learned to do this; she could move her lower body, her vitals, in conjunction with him, moving towards him when he tried to leave her so as to keep the sensation of his penis grasped by her vagina, while merely allowing him when he came to assert himself so that it would not hurt too much. And the sounds out of her mouth! How horrifying! He was, like many men of his conventional type, attracted to signs of weakness and passivity in women, yet he did not know what to make of this, that his wife sounded like she was howling in pain when she was in the throes of an orgasm! It might have been expected of her the first few times, but certainly not after so many years! 
634	It in fact put him off. He had to put it out of his ears in order to come. He generally could only come after his wife had gotten off, while she was lying there passive, in cold sweat, her auburn hair messy, closing her eyes in exhaustion like a fish on dry land, her breathing finally modulating itself like how Mahler No.9, after several movements of glory, the triumph and swaying emotions as the composer battles his own suffocation, decays like Vienna’s fin de siècle in a bath of decadent, Klimtian gold, the ersterbend and adagio, the dying-away, as a few notes are held for six minutes, so in the basking of endorphins, the way she had left her body and was no longer even present among the white sheets where she had loved to feel herself defiled, she ceased, she came to a rest, she drifted off to sleep. But, like a war intruding into the decadence of Vienna, her partner continued at his thrust, though she could largely put it out of her consciousness. Looking at her while she was as if asleep, he found her moderately sexy, in the way that some models will be shown with their hair matted with cold as if just out of a pool, and staring at her while she closed her eyes or looked away, he used this image to arouse himself so that he came inside her with a massive exhale of breath, like some obscene cough from the shadows of the audience. It was in the way of men who are not physically imposing but rather quite mediocre and average, how they will finish not with the tidal wave of arrival, that groan and expenditure and the laying waste and devastation of the mountainous masculinity, but the spent feeling of exhaustion, the mild gladness that it is over, of one at the terminus of a marathon that he did not quite sign up for, but which, in the stiffness of his arousal, he is committed to finish. 
635	So he had the sense, always, that when he came, she was no longer even having sex with him. That she had long departed for her own world, and ceased to have a hand in the fulfillment of his desire. Thus, his desire was never truly fulfilled; he never felt that he really came. For when one comes, it occurs within the same timespan of rising or ebbing desire as the partner, as like series of hills seen from a distance shaded in blue hazes, so that the peaks of the foreground of hills combine with the peaks of the farther hills, like sine waves merging—not, as it was with Pastor Bedard, when she had already shut herself, merely putting up with his wet thrusting until he had finished. There is perhaps no greater loneliness than to masturbate with the exhausted, no longer spiritually present body of one’s partner. It is a problem unique to men, for when men run out of desire, the sex ceases entirely, whereas when women run out of desire, the man can nevertheless continue to have sex. 
636	Pastor Bedard felt the great loneliness of his meager and unspectacular life in those moments when, because he was already hard, he was forced to fulfill his desire while his wife had long ceased to care for him, when he had ceased to be of use to her after the long lamentation of her orgasm. It was as if she merely let him have sex with her. It felt slightly like rape, the way she seemed a prostrate animal, indifferently taking it. 
637	Dr. Matthews was quite aware that all was not perfectly well in the marriage of Andy and Amelia Bedard, for they simply showed no charm or banter in being together; but he also correctly saw it as largely stable, as neither awful enough for them to seek another, nor good enough for them to ever be truly happy. But Dr. Matthews was keen, always, to ensure that he did not enter with his person into the dispute of a couple; it is always the Brother’s task to refrain from causing jealousy, for sexual jealousy is the death of the work of God. Thus he was purposely bland, and only became an object of attention after his wife died; there was something about him that spoke of happiness. 
638 
639
640CHAPTER TWO
641
642Christ in the Psych Ward - ii
643
644Gilfoyle, Soojin, Mindy, Johns Wang, Luke Ding, Mark Chen, Arnold Johnson, Adam Gompert, Herrington, Jump Blackmule, Mikey, the snow
645
646What is more dehumanizing, more unethical, than to manipulate people so as to make them perform for a show for oneself? To observe them, to view them from afar. It dehumanizes the observer for he begins to dehumanize the people who become objects of his study. 
647	Dr. Matthews was filled with self-hatred after these bouts of examining people…he felt himself truly evil, and reviled every cell of his body. Nevertheless, he could not help it. For the continuation of his life it had become a habit that he could not take off like a crown that has gotten stuck on one’s head. He was truly just fond of thinking about people. ‘I am fond!’ he liked to say to himself. 
648	There was nothing better, for example, than examining the relationship of Pastor Bedard and Amelia Bedard. He saw something when Amelia left for the kitchen area, framed in the doorway by her little watercolors of flowers; it was the end of dinner, she went to put the dishes into the sink. The husband and wife shared the load of washing dishes between them, and had not allowed Dr. Matthews to do his share, for it was almost a matter of second nature for Brothers in the Lord to do the dishes after a meal has been served to them, so often did they rely upon the free hospitality of the church. But on purpose he had remained at the small wooden dining table, whose size doubtless Pastor Bedard was not happy with. For he watched them in an unstudied moment, when he could see them interact, a new flame coming to the fore as when an alkali metal is put to a bunsen burner; they became interesting; and just as he was fond of studying them when he talked to them, he liked, all the more, these rare opportunities when he could watch from afar. 
649	And he saw it, a small unreturned kiss, from Bedard to his wife. Seeing this, feeling that he had seen something that they themselves had never noticed, he felt as if he had reached into them where they themselves could not reach, and displayed to himself the bounty of his discovery for his own appreciation, the scent of a mystery partially revealed. She did not react; she merely continued to do the dishes. Was there some chasm, between them, something unspeakable? When had Amelia gotten into the habit of becoming so like a motionless statue, the picture of Lot’s wife as a pillar of salt, when her husband came up to her, from behind, saying a few words, to offer her a kiss beside her ear, beneath the lock of auburn hair? If this was so, Dr. Matthews reasoned, then they surely had an interest in denying it: this radioactive waste in their bones like a degeneration, that their misery was each other. Of course, this was not the first time he had observed it; he saw, frequently, that more often than not, when Pastor Bedard disagreed with something his wife was saying, his eyes momentarily shadowed over, his face took more interest in eating; he had gotten used to disagreeing with her and simply prevented himself from speaking. He also knew that they were at such an age where looking for a different partner was not a viable option, and neither was of the adventurous type. So they had an interest in denying this chasm, it was to their mutual benefit—the kind of thing, if he wished to destroy them, he need merely state: ‘You don’t love each other anymore’—and he would try to imagine how it could occur. 
650	Perhaps the wife allowed her husband to kiss her on the cheek, withholding herself momentarily and abstracting her ghost from her person so as to pretend that the feeling of revulsion when he placed his lips on her skin belonged to somebody else, as a way of ‘keeping up appearances’ to other people so that they would continue to be thought of as a couple. This social idea of them, in turn, would reinforce her own idea of themselves as a couple. For likely it was, that should suddenly society deem it impossible or horrible for a pastor to have a wife, as once homosexual relationships were deemed invalid, based off of the already present weakness of their bond, their relationship would simply fall apart. This kiss she allowed because she wanted to be sure in her desire to stay with her husband; she felt it right and useful to let external forces, like the super ego, maintain her when she felt like leaving him. 
651	But if her friend, the sarcastic and gossipy Barbara—who Dr. Matthews spoke to on occasion when she visited the Apostles, and from whom he liked to glean information about the Bedard's—frizzy-haired and eager in eyes and speech, also called ‘Barbs,’ if she were to start making sarcastic quips about her husband, denigrating him to the extent that Amelia saw in those quips (and indeed, ‘barbs’) the message ‘Leave your husband,’ this, day by day, like an infusion of drugs into her bloodstream, would gradually change her conservative desire to stay as she was, to put up with her husband, until one day a threshold was reached in her bloodstream, and she put him off altogether. 
652	It was not secure, it could be easily swayed by external forces. 
653	Thus, by using external social forces, by displaying to everyone that her husband kissed her—for he did so, often, in public—it would prevent her from leaving her husband; she thought to herself that no one would notice when she internally withdrew so as not to feel the kiss on her cheek. 
654	But Dr. Matthews noticed, then, that when Bedard held her hand for a moment, her fingers curled up a little in his own; perhaps he was mistaken. No, it was even worse; after he took away the hand, the fingers remained curled in that position, as if frozen or traumatized; it only went away when she groped scratchingly at her apron. Always thrilling, what kept him on his feet, was the possibility that he could be ‘reading too much,’ seeing too much in the gesture when there was nothing there, that in reality Amelia was absent-minded and did not notice the kiss. Then he would categorize this particular gesture, and the emotional region it spoke of, as another thing to keep track of. In the way that some men collect women, or aesthetes collect paintings, or how young boys will gather together shiny stones from their creeks, Dr. Matthews had made it, if not the hobby of his life, then at least the common lecture or the food for his capacious intellect, the study of small little gestures or mannerisms. Of Arnold Johnson—a young black boy at the mental hospital—he noted the bright laugh that actually spoke of nervousness. Or of Pastor Bedard, the irritability in his eyes that he always tried to hide when in public. 
655	As if separate from these psychological insights, he also greatly enjoyed, and found beautiful in an amusing way, the small gestures that people made as a matter of habit, for example, how the nurse Mikey was always scratching the back of his head and leaning forward bashfully when he spoke. It was somewhat adorable. Every creature of God, he laughed, had something in it, a gesture given to them, that spoke of their personality. He was a rich connoisseur of the inventiveness of life. Meanwhile, he was a voyeur to life itself, distant, reclining, anthropological, studying, even laughing at himself. 
656	Each mannerism was like a way into viewing their internal system, like a particular, indeed, ‘view’ of Mt. Fuji, as Hokusai painted thirty-six views of that white mysterious sloping mountain. Every aspect was different, and perhaps showed a view of a different cross section of the person, as how a light shone through a circle will fan through and describe a triangle with the circle’s perimeter for a bottom, or how viewing a glass marble from one aspect will unite the nebulous murk inside it into a particular shape. 
657	Yet, so he felt, there were not a million ways to look into a person, but perhaps a handful, a dozen. Each showed, not so much a different self, as a region of some commonality held between all the selves that this person possessed, between the self when they talked to their grandmother, the self they became when irritated. It was as nebulous but as gathered as the ‘cloud’ that an electron occupies, infinitely fast, its speed and location undecipherable at the same time. 
658	People had, as it were, valences; or, as between two combined atoms, the intersection in the orbits of the electron. For example, so Dr. Matthews had observed, Nate became one person when he spoke imperiously and irritably with his father, while cringing and nervous in his speech for possible racial miscues when he spoke with his friend Arnold (for Arnold was black), becoming in one the ‘impious son’ and ‘liberal guilt’ in the other. 
659	Yet the self was, when spoken of as ‘Nate is the kind of person who…’ that self of Nate’s in relation to others, lay in how each person interpreted their version of Nate, or the selves that Nate tended to become when he appeared to them, in conversation, over social media, and yes, when he was spoken of by other people. The self that Arnold determined Nate to be, the thought he held of Nate, was one which had some commonalities, some shared electrons, with the thought that Nate’s father had of him, but they had essentially different conceptions of Nate. When they spoke of him, they were not aware of it, but sometimes a slight misunderstanding could occur that would point out the area of their unshared electrons, the difference in their conceptions of Nate. 
660	Just a few nights ago, Dr. Matthews had had dinner at the Psych Ward; he had spent it teaching Leandro and Ping various matters of the Bible; but even as he talked, he had used another ear to listen to the conversation between Nate, Arnold, and Nate’s father, which he found more interesting than his own lecture. 
661	Nate, in the upper phases of his bipolar, went off to the bathroom suddenly in the middle of a sentence because he was so excited by his own thought. ‘That’s Nate,’ Arnold laughed brightly and sincerely. 
662	‘Yes, his stomach is bad recently,’ said Simon Chan, seriously. 
663	‘…oh, yes. What do you mean?’
664	‘He is nausea.’ 
665	‘Oh,’ Arnold laughed, not quite grasping that he had attributed the sudden departure to Nate’s impulsiveness and tendency to eject from a conversation when he was bored, that is to say, his failure of duty towards his conversational partner. For his father did not ‘mind’ it, he was used to it, he was not offended by it, it did not bother him; thus he did not notice it, or did not ascribe it to be one of his character traits should he have noticed it. He was more interested in Nate’s health than in Nate’s annoying tendency to leave in the middle of a thought. The same sense data had been provided to them—Dr. Matthews observed, using a moment where he drank water to flesh out the thought so that he might not have to talk to Leandro and Ping—but the mental habit of the way they thought of Nate, one as a friend who sees his friend’s faults, another as a father who is only concerned with his son’s health, combined with that sense data to show an altogether different picture of the same person, just as if they had been looking at two different pictures of Nate taken at different moments in his mood or age, or by a different camera person (one with whom he is more comfortable, for example). It was this type of evident misunderstanding, and its irony, that Dr. Matthews took pleasure in noting. 
666	Leandro, when Dr. Matthews finished his water, was crying a little; his hair was of the type that, thinned out and shaved but nevertheless present in an almost invisible way, reveals the hardness and sleek surface of the head that shows even the contours of the skull; somewhere between Latino and white, his cheeks were drawn inwards with skinniness, as if someone had taken the air inside his flesh and deflated it; he had a noble and kind disposition about him; frequently he mistook words and said things like: ‘Ey yo what’s the deal with ju?’ But if something moved him, he would, indeed, take off the skull-cap he always wore, revealing his shiny skull-like head, like a magician showing off a magic marble, and kneading the Raiders cap in his hands, his beady eyes, small as a rat’s, would sparkle with sincere emotion and simple desire. ‘Dr. Matthews, I’d like to pray…yo.’ 
667	‘Well,’ he chuckled kindly, a little sadly. ‘Well then let’s pray. Nothing prevents us. Would you like to go to a quiet room?’
668	Seeing that Ping, the engineer with his unmetaphysical and a-spiritual thick glasses, felt awkward, with his shrinking in his shoulders a little, pulling his head back in an expression of seriousness, Dr. Matthews said, on not receiving a response (for Leandro had truly began to cry), ‘Let’s go to a quiet room.’ But he was actually a little annoyed for having to leave Arnold, Nate, and Simon.
669	‘Hey Mikey,’ said Dr. Matthews. ‘Is it alright if we use the consulting office?’
670	‘Sure, let me open that up for you.’ 
671	Mikey, always in a rush, hurried forth with long strides to the small room that was in the middle of the hallway of the bedrooms. He used his swipe to beep the sensor; he opened the door. Leandro went inside, but before Dr. Matthews went, Mikey turned to him and said: ‘Dr. Singh asked me to give you this.’ And he handed him a card. ‘It’s a swipe for the rooms. You can’t use it to open the main gates, but it should be able to get you into most of the doors here.’ 
672	‘Does this let me into the Dementia Ward?’
673	‘I’m actually not sure what level of clearance she gave you,’ Mikey said, tilting his head down shyly and scratching the back of his neck a little, so that he brought his elbow up to shoulder level. 
674	‘Well,’ said Dr. Matthews, nodding. ‘Thank you Mikey.’
675	Mikey said, seriously, looking down but then looking Dr. Matthews in the eyes: ‘Thank you, Dr. Matthews. For all this.’
676	Dr. Matthews knew it was a moment where he could acquire another soul; or at least, make the beginnings. He said, shaking his head and smiling a little, ‘What can I do, Mikey,’ he said, almost sarcastically, but with some strange sincerity shimmering amongst its vowels as a body of water, intermittent, blue and lightly shadowed-over, air-rippled, suffuses the sight of a landscape. ‘You know as well as I that this isn’t my doing.’
677	One could sense, in the air, in the shift of the tone of his voice from the mundane to the spiritual, that something was in the middle of passing through, changing Mikey’s attitudes, showing him another world, familiarizing him to a system that was embodied in Dr. Matthews whose conduct he admired. It was with this little shift in tone that Dr. Matthews used to save people. He knew, in all likelihood, that a few weeks from now, Mikey, perhaps in some emotional circumstance, would remember precisely these words: ‘You know as well as I that this isn’t my doing,’ even though, right now, too busy, he might not quite have understood it. 
678	Mikey said, seriously, ‘Thank you.’ Then, always in a rush, he left. 
679	Leandro was sitting in a chair, his elbows on his knees, looking into the vacant air, murmuring to himself, in the beginnings of the agon of the soul that ends in prayer; Dr. Matthews looked at him, and grew bored. 
680	‘Jo Doctor,’ said Leandro, momently looking up. ‘Think I know what to pray now.’
681	Dr. Matthews sat down: ‘Amen.’ 
682	‘Doctor, I think I’d like to pray, that I’d like to find a job, yo. Like something with benefits, and all that. Something to keep me, you know, occupied? You think you’d pray for me a job to be occupied? I think if I was occupied, I wouldn’t be all out with nothing to do and getting into trouble, right?’
683	‘Sure, Leandro.’
684	And, bored out of his mind, watching only the light reflect off of Leandro’s shiny skull as Leandro nodded, he would see how the light spread like a thick, soft, curving needle on the contours of his head, at the same time bringing out the other contours of his head from the gradient color of flesh, at times compelled by the way that, as Leandro nodded deeper and deeper into his knees in shame and sincerity, the light would flicker around resembling a show of some sort, like some movement of the sun, though it did not travel along his neck, which was not as shiny. As he watched this, with perhaps one third of his mind, he led Leandro to believe that his desire to pursue a job was a good one; that getting a job would change his lifestyle altogether; that this or that occupation would be especially suited for it and how, based off his personality, which Dr. Matthews had observed closely—Dr. Matthews said—he was decent, hard-working, and good-hearted, and all employers liked that—he would be perfect for this industry or that; and lastly, however, and here he must bring him into the right type of prayer: 
685	‘God wants you, first, Leandro. He wants all of you. He wants your belief in him, your calling on his name. Do that, and even without a job, you will have the spirit inside you, the holy spirit. A job is important, no doubt. But, Oh Lord—Lord Jesus…Lord, let Leandro follow after you, first.’
686	‘Amen Lord Jesus.’
687	‘You show him what’s good. You show him yourself.’
688	‘Amen show me yourself Lord Jesus Christ.’ 
689	‘Teach him yourself, first, and then change his living.’
690	‘Change my living Lord Jesus yo.’
691	Leandro, like many new believers, could not quite grasp the rhythm of prayer. Dr. Matthews, noting this, smiled to himself a little; he found it quite beautiful and touching. He decided to engage him in a little bit longer a prayer.
692	‘Lord, show Leandro the way.’
693	‘Amen Lord. Show me the way Lord Jesus.’
694	‘Find him a job, a good, steady job.’
695	‘Amen Lord Jesus show me a job, I don’t want to be selling no shit—no stuff on the streets. I’m done with that life Lord Jesus yo. I’m done, yo. I’m done. I don’t want to be doing that stuff anymore, Lord Jesus Christianity. You’re the son of God and all.’ ‘Amen, Oh Lord, son of God!’ ‘You’re the son of God and all, and you want what’s good for me, Lord Jesus.’ ‘Lord!’ ‘Lord Jesus, amen Lord, Lord Jesus Christianity help me and give me the salvation and the, like, the occupation yo!’
696	‘Amen!’ Dr. Matthews thought: ‘If only Rebecca were here to hear this! Well, suppose she wouldn’t be as interested in his weird pronunciations as I would be…’
697	‘Lord Jesus Christ, yo!’ Leandro thundered, rocking back and forth. ‘Lord Jesus Christ!’ ‘Amen!’ ‘Lord Jesus Christ I don’t want to be like I was before!’ ‘Amen!’ ‘I want to be like a new person, Lord Jesus Christ yo!’ ‘Amen, Lord!’ ‘I want to be, like, renewed in the spirit, and all that.’ 
698	‘Amen!’ ‘I want to be able to be a good person and be good to my friends and help them, you know, in the same way you helped me.’ ‘Lord!’ ‘I want to be, like, a good regular normal person yo!’ ‘Amen!’ ‘Like, a good regular normal person who can go swimming in the local pool, and won’t get kicked out for, like, yo, wearing the wrong clothes and selling drugs on the block, stuff like that, Lord Jesus Christianity! I want to, like, be able to go to a grocery store and not have to steal stuff, yo, I want to be able to go shopping and not have, like the Devil telling me I can take this and that, cause I’m gonna get caught Lord Jesus yo! I’m going to get caught, and that shit’s not dope, not the dope shit, yo!’ ‘Amen!’ 
699	Dr. Matthews did not point out that the love of Christ, the spontaneity of Christ living in you, should prevent you from stealing or doing anything against your conscience, rather than the merely pragmatic fear of getting caught. 
700	Leandro had the particular inflection of the small-time ‘dope dealer,’ of the white and Latino type seen in Breaking Bad, who must end every sentence with an upward inflection, the yo! It was a sound that made the person seem harmless by nature, since it was a way of softening everything he said. This is in contradistinction to, for example, a hardcore gangster or drug lord who ends every sentence with, ‘Fuck That.’ This person is usually meaner than someone who ends a sentence with, ‘I mean fuck that, man,’ for the same reason that the ‘yo’ softens the sentence, expressing in this little remark the kindliness of the person, his restraint, the unlikelihood of him hardening his voice into that crumbling stone that pushes out of the mouth, with great force, ‘Fuck That.’ 
701	Inflections tell the spirit of a person; one can hardly grasp them, or say to oneself what they are; but one feels them, and we like someone based off of their speech habits. They have the mysterious, surface-level expressiveness of eyelids. 
702	Later on, as scheduled, Dr. Matthews held a little prayer for Arnold and his health. Arnold did not really know how to pray outside of the Catholic fashion, which was ritualistic and whose phrases were read aloud like bad sentences. 
703	Leandro left, Dr. Matthews went out and gently waited until Arnold was free for a moment, then said, ‘Arnold, how are you, perhaps you'd like to meet me in the consulting room?’
704	Arnold, having left the puzzles that others were playing in the kitchen area, had been sitting upright on a couch in the common area, not doing anything but thinking his own thoughts. He said, looking up a little behind him, showing surprise with the whites of his large expressive eyes, as if he had been interrupted, and actually a little disappointed; but when he gathered himself, as of a tide coming in that rushes against the tide coming back seaward, the sadness and anguish in his eyes were retrieved in a confused fashion so that, trembling a little, he brought a composed look to the fore. He said quietly, ‘Sure. Sorry, I think I forgot.’
705	‘That's alright.’
706	But Arnold had immediately stood up, though not before organizing the binder that he had with him, where his studies were, and, holding his plastic bottle in the crook of his arm while holding the binder to his abdomen, he looked as if he had all the readiness of a student. 
707	‘Do you want to put your stuff away first?’
708	‘Nah, it's alright…’
709	Dr. Matthews, wanting to hear what he suspected from Arnold’s mouth, said, ‘Are you sure? We might be there awhile?’
710	‘Nah...I'm afraid somebody might steal it...’ Arnold said hesitantly. For he was deeply unrelaxed as a person. 
711	‘That’s alright.’
712	He followed Dr. Matthews to the consulting room. Dr. Matthews closed the room to the small room; he reminded himself—forcing himself to remember since it was contrary to his sometimes absent-minded easy-goingness—that he must be careful with his new swiping card lest a patient steal it. Arnold, a bit hesitantly, sat down on the couch while Dr. Matthews took the seat next to the computer. 
713	As they talked, Dr. Matthews would ask him what was bothering him, chuckling a little; Arnold, always polite, did respond, but Dr. Matthews knew it was not truthful: 
714	‘I just kind of wish I could get back sooner…Pre-Med at Stanford isn’t easy,’ he laughed brightly; his body was small but muscular. He had very good posture—as his father had taught him and he himself had maintained, in a manner a bit too well-posed, as if it were maintained to show to others, already very neat and disciplined, that he was proper and intelligent and respectable—as if the dictates of the Catholic church mandated that one sit respectfully. He had a large rear, so that when he sat, he appeared not unlike a pawn, a chess piece, so upright was his back, and yet slightly arcing convexly in the line of his back that spread out to make room for his rear. But Dr. Matthews knew that this laugh of his was always a disguise, that it was more nervous than true laughter; indeed, when Arnold was very happy, he would laugh very brightly, shaking all over, quite adorable, really no different from a happy child; but this laugh, though in sound no different, bespoke anxiety rather than joy: ‘I have a midterm coming up soon, and it’s kind of…important that I do well on this one.’
715	Dr. Matthews’ face darkened, tilting his head downward as he said with seriousness: ‘Arnold, do you mind if I pray a little.’ 
716	In a tone he was not used to, as if phrased as a question, ‘Amen?’ 
717	‘This may be a little awkward, Arnold, but this is for my sake; I don’t know what to say correctly unless I pray, and I don’t want to say the wrong thing.’
718	Arnold, courteously, placing a bit of humor in his voice, said, ‘No problem.’ 
719	Dr. Matthews fond-called on the name of the Lord; repeating it several times—it was awkward but he was trained to pray even in awkwardness for if he continued in sincerity it would also draw the listener into its tide and flow of emotion—then he said, placing great vast spaces in the words, such that they seemed to echo across a plain of darkness, that the Lord should help Arnold with his midterm; that the Lord would free Arnold from any anxiety; that the Lord should allow Arnold lucidity and clearness in his mind. All the while, though he had his eyes closed, he listened very carefully to Arnold’s amens, his breathing, which told him if he was praying correctly; when he opened his eyes briefly, he saw that Arnold had closed his eyes and was in the throes of an emotion that he is unsure if he is okay with having; as if he were on the precipice of an emotion but, never here before, he felt danger and would at any moment spread a curl of irony across his face so as to denature the threat. Seeing that Arnold was not aware of him looking, Dr. Matthews took in the picture of the young man posed on his chair, sitting upright, with his hands knit in front of him in what he believed was a religious pose; a Stanford student in a mental hospital. ‘Amen, Lord,’ he said, closing off the prayer, closing his eyes again so that Arnold would see him opening his eyes; that he had not been examining him during the prayer. 
720	‘Amen…’ said Arnold, as a matter of reflex, though he was unused to this. He now said: ‘I guess, what I mean is, there’s a lot of stress…’ and he smiled with bright white teeth, then immediately closed his mouth. 
721	‘Amen.’
722	‘I guess…’ and he circled the drain for a little until Dr. Matthews said: ‘Maybe there’s a lot of pressure on you?’
723	‘Yeah,’ said Arnold, agreeing immediately. ‘There’s…there’s kind of pressure.’
724	‘Excuse me if I speak too forwardly, Arnold, but is it a pressure you put on yourself? No,’ he read Arnold’s face. ‘It’s a pressure that other people put on you.’
725	‘Yeah…’
726	He fond-called the name of the Lord. ‘Amen, Lord, let Arnold not have this pressure that’s put on him from outside places. Lord,’ and he decided to place an awkwardness in his prayer so as to signal that he himself was uncomfortable and not used to this, that he was no professional: ‘Lord, he just…give him peace.’
727	‘Amen.’
728	Dr. Matthews decided to test a theory of his: Arnold had more than once given off the impression that he felt guilty for being at Stanford, though he had never said the reason why; Arnold identified with Imposter's Syndrome, feeling that he did not deserve a place there and was less intelligent than the other students, which was no uncommon phenomena at a school for neurotic over-achievers. But there were large silences in what Arnold said—and these silences excited Dr. Matthews—for so often he talked about his high school, which, he had noted once, was all white. Dr. Matthews had gradually gathered that Arnold felt unsure of his place at Stanford all the more, in addition to his already present Imposter Syndrome, on account of certain resentments from his high school; perhaps someone had suggested to him, or perhaps it was said, that he had gotten in to Stanford only because he was black. In any case, it was common knowledge the place of black students was implicitly questioned at such top schools; for they received an advantage in admissions thanks to Affirmative Action. Dr. Matthews was careful to make sure that he was not being influenced by any prior conceptions; he had double-checked his theory many a time; but it was the only thing that could explain the constant connection Arnold made between his insecurity and his Catholic high school. 
729	Arnold was a big fan of Ben Carson, the famed doctor—as Arnold also wished to be a doctor—who had grown up black in an all-white school, and who, when he and his brother won valedictorian and salutatorian, had served as an excuse for the principal to chastise the other students into working harder, for having let black students win all the awards. Dr. Matthews suggested that perhaps Arnold felt he was at a disadvantage because of his high school. He meant to relieve Arnold of his Imposter Syndrome, playing very tactfully to the racial aspect of his feeling; he felt excited, all of a sudden, by the precariousness of the game he was about to play. 
730	‘Yeah, I feel like other people went to better high schools, and had taken AP Bio…’
731	‘Is AP Bio still measured by a scale of 5?’ 
732	‘Yeah. Everyone in my class has a 5.’
733	Dr. Matthews chuckled. ‘They went around and asked that?’
734	‘Well, on the first day, everyone seemed to just say it.’ 
735	‘So they are still as vain now as ever, huh.’
736	Arnold laughed a little. He said: ‘But I kinda wish that I had gone to a high school like that.’
737	Dr. Matthews nodded his head gravely. He represented to himself the tragedy of the situation such that he might feel a little bit of sadness. Small, black, brilliant, kindly, intelligent, funny, Arnold had exhausted himself at Stanford and collapsed; the day he came into El Camino—Dr. Matthews remembered—he was raving a little, as if dehydrated, and his first real consult was with Dr. Matthews, as he was waiting on the couches to meet with Dr. Singh or Dr. Taylor. His father left a strong image in Dr. Matthews’ mind: a strong, noble man with a permanent hint of sorrow on his face, seemingly much more intelligent than the mother on account of the way her bad teeth—the opposite from the way that aristocrats and the beautiful appeal to us and we endow them with the value we find most important, so that beautiful people who happen to desire us more often than not we represent as ‘smart’—gave her an air of unintelligence; Dr. Matthews recognized this bias of his and felt all the more interested in it; he had carefully observed the mother, but he had not enough information to make a judgment of her character, only that, rather loud, she seemed uncouth in comparison to Arnold’s dignified father, or Arnold himself, with trained dignity. Dr. Matthews’ first impression of Arnold, as he had sat on the couches with his parents, facing away from them, was one of extraordinary shame. Probably he felt that he had let down his parents. Dr. Matthews called to mind a line that he had heard from a black poet, understanding that his associative faculty had conjoined this line with Arnold simply because of the color of their skin: 
738
739
740What happens to a dream deferred?
741
742      Does it dry up
743      like a raisin in the sun?
744       
745…
746
747      Or does it explode?
748
749	How lucky it was to be faced with the challenge of political correctness! Dr. Matthews thought, understanding that he had to navigate his own internal systemic racial prejudices, avoiding them with harsh turns in his self-correcting thought. While there were many, he knew, who complained about the way that political correctness had served to impede their thoughts and the freedom of their interior speech, Dr. Matthews saw it as a kind of exciting game: lose, and you give offense. 
750	Did he think less of Arnold’s intelligence just because Arnold was black? Or was it, truly, that he was judging him based off of the accuracy of his speech? 
751	Furthermore, was this kind of judgment credible?
752	Can one judge intelligence from conversing with someone, or is there always some distant, untouchable space, some dark vacancy hiding behind the presentation of the conversation’s words, that may hide an intelligence that is not apparent from conversation, such that using interviews to judge someone’s ability may be a faulty endeavor? This was a question deeply interesting to Dr. Matthews, for it spoke directly to the possibility and grounds of the field of his study: could he really judge someone based off of their words? If someone spoke accurately, did this mean that, inside, they were largely consistent with themselves, thus possessing this self-critical, self-aware intelligence? Such an intelligence required, at the very least, the quickness to overhear oneself and cast a judgment upon one’s speech; or at least the habit of doing so. Strangely enough, Dr. Matthews, whose interior state was clearly divided, never showed any inconstancy in speech; for he so totally inhabited the lie of his existence, that he never, for example, gave facts that could be falsified. In any case, listening to Arnold, he had judged him quite bright, but not so far excellent as compared to the top tier students that he had known at Berkeley and later at medical school at Stanford. Of course, some knowledge of Arnold’s grades had served to influence his judgment; but he had posed to Arnold certain questions for his assessment that Arnold had largely passed without distinction, showing little in the way of original insight, which Dr. Matthews knew was a sign of analytical ability and the presence of idle faculties that spent their time observing and thinking things over. Perhaps—was this a stereotype?—Dr. Matthews encountered yet another blindspot in his own thought, the type of blindspot that people who are white and have not been victim to the various racial innuendos directed at black people and are not sensitive to some of the euphemisms and key-words used to denigrate black people while avoiding the allegation that they are racist—perhaps Arnold was a classic hard worker, without radiant ability. Even in the hospital, sucking always on a plastic water bottle, he schemed of a way to return to his classes without interruption when the hospital finally let him go. ‘It should be any day now,’ he would laugh with a bright smile.
753	Yet his imagination was quite small—Dr. Matthews gathered from listening to Arnold’s various efforts at starting clubs—Arnold had difficulty conceiving of ideas outside of small charities which involved more hard work such as selling coupons rather than broad systemic changes—such as, for example, starting a health care startup that made a profit and was more effective for it.
754	Dr. Matthews allowed Arnold to talk about the disadvantages of his high school, and about the ‘external pressure’ put on him, or in any case, the ‘pressure,’ but all without mentioning his grades but for one instance: ‘I need to retake the midterm, but I don’t want to because I only have one retake left…’ 
755	At a disadvantage because of high school, feeling that he must work work extra hard to make sure that no one could question his place, he tried very hard, but this was not enough for him at Stanford, and thus he tried even harder, refusing to sleep, and collapsed.
756	He had joined a total of twelve clubs. 
757	Of this, even though to Dr. Matthews it was the sad symptom of his insecurity, as well as one of the main reasons that he had collapsed, Arnold was very proud: he laughed, ‘My roommate always says, ‘Dude, you gotta like stop.’’
758	Dr. Matthews laughed. But now he said: ‘What do your friends think, about this kind of stress?’
759	‘I mean, they’re all stressed…’ he said, in a depressed way, casting shadows over his eyes, looking down. ‘Everyone’s stressed,’ he laughed a little. But, he went on, it was a bit different.
760	‘How so?’
761	‘It’s…’
762	Dr. Matthews waited. When nothing was said, he said, breathing deeply, ‘Lord, help us…’
763	‘Well I wish I had more black friends,’ Arnold interjected. ‘I’m kinda only friends with my roommate, and he’s Asian, and doesn’t really get it.’
764	‘Is it something that he’s said?’
765	‘Well…Once…’ But Dr. Matthews allowed him to not say it; he saw that it was no good for Arnold to recite this particular racial humiliation; Dr. Matthews instead said, ‘Sometimes people are insensitive.’
766	‘Yeah…he’s a good friend, though.’ 
767	He suddenly turned in thought: ‘But I don’t like the black student groups, either. They’re all…they’re all angry. I like…I don’t get why they aren’t studying?’
768	‘You’re not into politics,’ Dr. Matthews chuckled a little. 
769	‘Yeah! I don’t get it. I mean, I get that being…you know, racially oppressed, sucks and all. But shouldn’t they be spending their time doing, you know, actually useful things? I feel like…they should just, you know,’ he laughed brightly, ‘Just be like Obama.’ 
770	Arnold was not in the least bit political, never expressing any political opinions outside of a socially conservative tendency probably lent to him by his Catholicism and his belief in ‘pull yourself up by the bootstraps’—the same belief that had made him work unto exhaustion, never savoring life or understanding the pleasures in slowness and lingering. 
771	But, as his identity was in essence political—a black student at Stanford, where his position was by nature under question—he was nevertheless very sensitive to current trends in thought. To him, President Obama was a hero. ‘White Chocolate,’ he liked to joke. But he also meant it more cynically, that he, like Obama, had to pretend to be white in order to achieve acceptance. Now Dr. Matthews could understand why Arnold had difficulty, also, adjusting to the black student groups at Stanford, which he found ‘kind of militant.’ He was short, small, passive, and nerdy, and full of smiles—it was difficult, Arnold now said, for him to see the point of angry political protesting, when his whole goal was to calmly serve humanity as a doctor, on a global scale. 
772	It seemed, though, to Dr. Matthews, that Arnold was in a particular kind of dilemma: he would never be quite secure in his place in the world, even should he fulfill his dreams of becoming a doctor, because he had no stillness in him, no sense of peace, and because his religious ideas were rather doctrinal than in spiritual practice—for Arnold could not, in the terms of the Apostles, ‘touch his spirit’—and perhaps—conveying its tragic nature to himself—he thought that Arnold would have difficulty attaining a common happiness. He had no idea what to do when he had free time. He filled his life with activities because he had no hobbies. 
773	As for religion, Arnold believed in God because he thought it was the right thing to do, not because the figure of Jesus had captured him in any way. He subscribed to Christianity much as one chooses the ethical system of Kant, with the added benefit, thrown in there for free, of the thought of heaven. Dr. Matthews was quite sure that, at some point, there would come a deep middle-life crisis for Arnold, since his fundamental self was unhappy, and his ambitions, because he lacked in insight and genius, because they were so high-minded, were likely to go unfulfilled. 
774	It was a matter of how much satisfaction Arnold could feel in the consolation he was to give himself after not having gotten what he wanted. 
775	Brutal! Dr. Matthews thought. 
776	How to solve, for him, the problem of unfulfilled ambition? 
777	For it was not incredibly likely to Dr. Matthews that Arnold, after having had such a breakdown, could become a steady doctor. His whole orient was too nervous, too intent on ‘trying hard, because it was right, and one should serve humanity, because what else is there?’ But Dr. Matthews decided to counsel him, trying to help Arnold find meaning in his life outside of the success which he had committed himself existentially to find. For there was no reason that Arnold could not find success, only that he wanted it too much, that too much of his pride, too many of his humiliations, which were always racially tinged, rode on him proving to the classmates he had already beaten at his white high school that he was deserving and intelligent as the brightest person—a ‘real Superstar,’ he would say with half-irony, laughing—destined to save the world through medicine. 
778	Unlike other Stanford students who simply accept that, at Stanford, they are quite average, and are destined to a normal upper-middle class existence with comfort but not much in the way of accomplishment, Arnold was determined to help Humanity, and to write himself into the history books, as an example to younger versions of himself, young black kids who did not believe that they could every do anything big.
779	‘Arnold,’ he now said. ‘Let me speak a little about ambition. Is this okay with you? You are very ambitious, and you have good ideals—but if I may speak straight-forwardly, these things are not necessarily good in themselves.’ He had taken a risk; immediately his gamble saw a result: Arnold said, disguising hesitation in his voice with eagerness, ‘Um…sure!’ 
780	But Dr. Matthews saw that he had not been given real permission to speak; that Arnold was still reticent, and perhaps his message would not be well-received. Thus Dr. Matthews said, ‘I don’t mean to tell you what you already know. I have no interest in doing that. It’s only that…seeing that you and I have such a similar background, I want to say a word. Excuse me,’ and he stopped. ‘I want to make sure I say the right thing. Will you allow me to pray a little? I’m sorry to do this again. But there’s nothing worse than giving the wrong advice.’
781	Arnold, who still did not really understand the nature of prayer but who had encountered something new in the way that Dr. Matthews prayed, said, with ambiguity, ‘Sure, that’s not a problem.’ 
782	‘Will you pray with me, Arnold?’
783	‘I don’t really…’
784	‘That’s alright. Excuse me. Lord,’ he fond-called. ‘Lord help me say the right thing. Lord I don’t know what to say.’ He recognized that Arnold had not asked him to say anything; thus he said, ‘Lord, let me know if I should say anything at all.’
785	‘Amen.’ 
786	‘Let me know if I should say anything to Arnold…’
787	Arnold felt rather awkward and was silent. 
788	Dr. Matthews already knew what he was to say: that he himself was filled with ambition; that ambition was a bottom-less hole in which one threw everything without ever being filled; that ambition was Lucifer’s sin; that desire to attain something meant unrest within oneself. That one had to find peace within oneself outside of whether or not his ambitions could be fulfilled in reality; that if he staked his life on tangible things, he could always be failed. If he loved the things of the world, even things as noble as helping humanity, he was at the risk of being disappointed, for these things were left up to chance. Was it truly infinitely better to help millions from afar than to, for example, bring happiness to his own family? In short, he should pursue his career; but he was likely to be helped in that pursuit if he learned a way to find peace, and this was not in the ritualistic religion of forced prayer, but the daily living of the Christ. To love Christ was all that mattered; morality was secondary. All that matter was that one loved Christ—everything else, it did not matter. And how does on love Christ? By the fond-calling of the name. Arnold, he would have said, will you call on the name of the Lord with me? 
789	But, reading Arnold’s awkwardness, Dr. Matthews broke off his plans and said, merely with a laugh, ‘I guess, the truth is, Arnold, I have no idea what to say.’
790	‘That’s okay…’ he said, as if consoling Dr. Matthews.
791	‘I’m really not much of a help, sometimes I really don’t have the experience to understand people.’
792	‘I think you understand me pretty well. You’re the first person to tell me, I guess, I understand the pressures of my life better, now.’
793	‘Well…’ said Dr. Matthews. 
794	‘That what I’ve got are bad mental habits, and that they’ve worsened my depression, and like…that I’ve got to figure out new mental habits.’
795	Dr. Matthews laughed, rather cheerfully.
796	Arnold smiled a little unsurely: ‘What’s so funny?’
797	‘Oh it’s just, so often I realize how useless I am in these matters. Those are conclusions that you came to on your own, I don’t remember ever saying that.’
798	‘You didn’t…?’ Arnold searched his memory. He laughed aloud: ‘Yeah.’ 
799	‘Well, look, Arnold. You have an excellent mind. I think if I’m in the position to say anything, it’s that you should trust yourself. I’m not very useful to people who already have this…kind of ability. Though I was hopeful. I was hoping that your depression had hampered your cognitive abilities and that I could be a little helpful.’ And Dr. Matthews, behind his shining glasses, oriented his mouth in a wry look. 
800	Arnold laughed. 
801	‘But,’ Arnold said, ‘I really don’t get, I guess, I don’t get that feeling of, you know.’
802	‘I don’t think I understand?’ said Dr. Matthews, predicting what he would say next. 
803	‘The feeling that you have when you, like, call on the Lord…’ he said, unused to the strange language. 
804	‘Well, Arnold, you strike me as a very rational person, as someone who has a strong mind. A very strong mind. But such a person is even more, if you don’t mind me saying, even more cursed than someone wealthy, who is less likely to enter the kingdom of God than that a camel may pass through the eye of a needle. You remember that verse?’
805	‘A rich man,’ Arnold laughed. 
806	‘Well, a man with a strong mind judges, he is unable to let himself go and touch the spirit. That is, when he calls on the name of the Lord, he feels self-conscious; he thinks he can figure things out for themselves. But, you know, Arnold, a psychologist may point out our problems and self-delusions, but only the Lord, and the fond-calling of his name, can give us that kind of living joy.’
807	‘I guess…I’ve just never experienced it.’
808	Dr. Matthews struck at his prey. He fixed him in his eyes; Arnold saw his shining glasses: ‘Well, Arnold, do you believe that I’ve experienced that joy?’
809	Arnold said, slowly, ‘Yes…’
810	But he saw that he had struck wrong; Arnold felt awkward again; he had to relieve Arnold of this awkwardness somehow; for Arnold was simply unused to expressing his feelings this way. 
811	‘Well, Arnold, I guess that’s all that I’ll say. If you believe that I’ve experienced this joy, you know you can experience it too. I don’t mean today, of course. The saying is that the Lord plants a seed; I believe that in the course of our conversation—you won’t find me arrogant to say this, I hope—anyway it is not I who say it—that the Lord has planted the seed in you. The fond-calling of the name of the Lord is the only thing I really have to say to you; to rely on him and breathe him in. Psychologically speaking, it’s very similar to the deep-breathing techniques that psychologists teach; but it is deep-breathing directed at a name, and truly, Arnold, the Lord answers you. It may not be apparent at first, but if you think I have something, something strange perhaps to you, if you don’t believe my idea, believe at least what you see in my person—no, this is the wrong thing to say—if you see anything in how I bring about myself, unless of course it’s terribly stupid to you—’ Arnold laughed at his small wry smile. ‘Then I would guess you may see something of the joy that the Lord can bring to us, in any circumstance or situation.’
812	‘Amen,’ Arnold laughed. 
813	And they closed off at that. That night had ended as other nights did; he finished his rounds and went home. 
814	In the absence of caring for the person and wishing them well under God, he had replaced the mental habit of looking after them and seeing what word to offer to God from them, with its mere shell, the intellectual habit, conducted otherwise he would be incredibly bored with them, of studying people like a kind of multivariable, highly expressive insect. 
815	Once, he would perform, not so much perform as truly enter into a spiritual act, without drama, without any masks, he would make for them a votive offering on their behalf because they did not know what to pray, did not know how to make a poem out of their sufferings. He knew what they wanted to say, even though they did not. As he would pray, he would listen to their ‘amen,’ which, like a binary one or zero, told him if he was praying in the right direction. 
816	But if, before, he felt strongly for them and his spirit asked the Christ for their redemption each moment and clarity and relief and self-understanding, though he still of course kept up prayer, now while he prayed with them, he found he had enough intellectual space to continue peeking at them, or at least analyzing what they said. Before he just prayed. But now, when he prayed, he listened to the prayers as one reading a book, for judgment and insight. 
817	He would have read books instead, but he found that none of the authors quite saw the liveliness of people as he did in reality itself. Their characters were not as interesting as the ones he took apart. 
818	And though he was very fond of the occasional movie in which an actress or actor seemed absolutely lifelike, entering perfectly into the outline of their selves, so much that their mannerisms could not be separated from what they were outside of the role, this could not match reality. He saw that the talent of the actor consisted in his or her mannerisms, the plethora of which flickered over her face when she called up a certain emotion, the pliable nature of her skin muscles, the electric sensitivity, the expressiveness of her posture. But he saw, also, that if he looked closely enough, he could decipher the less expressive, less obvious attributes in real people that would go unnoticed in a film, since what really mattered was the mind, the capacious intellect, of the noticer, who could make everyone into a genius actor. 
819	Everyday brought another interesting person—though, granted, they had not nearly as much definition as the actor or actresses in their movie. It was his job to define and discern them, and separate, and find the difference between, for example, Mindy and Soojin, who were both into social justice, or between David Foster Wallace and Nate, who both highly regarded their own intelligences. 
820	Actors are chosen because they represent a very definitive type, one whose sentences are already underlined in our mind, which we can easily recognize and remember, unlike people who are easily forgotten. It has little to do with ‘liveliness,’ though of course louder people are more memorable than others if only because they more easily annoy us, marking our consciousness like chalk on a blackboard with the pain of irritation. Rather, some people seem more ‘like people’ than others. Meaning, some people just seem right. That everything about them, their facial features, their social context, appears to fit perfectly some type who we have stored in our minds that we remember the face instantly when calling them to our minds. 
821	For example, the emotion ‘nervous little cute woman’ so perfectly called to mind the television character from The Office who comes to teach the office how to administer CPR, that he immediately saw this likeness in Amelia Bedard, and appreciated her all the more for it, in just the same way that an aesthete would more greatly appreciate a woman’s beauty if he saw her likeness in a Rembrandt. But Dr. Matthews did not share this perverse desire in seeing likenesses everywhere; he had no aesthetic sentiment for it, no romantic feeling or visions of seas and girls by the seas, only analytical detachment and amusement. Rather, he noted simply that he could remember Amelia Bedard better because she seemed to fit an already preexisting type. She just seemed like that kind of person—the reason was inexplicable, or could boil down to a dozen kind of mannerisms of her nervous system that we do not ever notice, except if we attend to a person with the intention of finding out these mannerisms and collecting them, just as an author will take apart a piece for the various elements of its craft that creates the effect of ‘nervous little cute woman.’ Perhaps the game he played could be said as, ‘Why is this person so perfect for this role, and why do I have in my mind this role for her to play?’ 
822	The predictability of a person, of course, varied with the unpredictabilities that made her interesting or human rather than robotic, the strange algorithm that made even the predictabilities seem surprising; it was this that he took in pleasure in noting, for they gave rise in him to the idea that every person had a systematic unity. That every person’s expressions were guided by a set of laws, like a city. That each person’s constitution had, indeed, its laws physical on the body,—a constitution. Amenable to change, but difficult to change. Efficient or inefficient, harmonious or self-destructive. Each person obeyed a constitution that previous versions of themselves had erected, that interaction with external bodies had caused to come into being, without being aware that it was this constitution that they followed.
823	Then, to be able to read different types of constitutions…! to solve the laws of behavior! 
824	In like manner, when he had the habit of comparing two people so as to show their interesting aspects more clearly by contrast, placing them into mutual relief, he did so much as a philosopher compares two systems of ideas, as Nate would compare with great convolution Derrida and Hegel. Some systems were more compatible than others; and this was preference for one another. Each person had, as it were, an architectonics—the style of their speech, their prose. 
825	In his mind Amelia Bedard would say this one thing, and if she said this one thing while making this particular expression, it was sure to bring about, in her husband, this particular look, unless, of course, he was actually just suffering from indigestion, which his wife, ever so sensitive, would take as a sign of displeasure, and then fall back silently and shyly, which Pastor Bedard, in turn, if he noticed it (unless he was too busy with his indigestion) would find sort of arousing. To the extent that things about humans can be predicted, then likely they are constituted by habits that seem like laws. And in this we get the sense of their character, the reactivity of their person (and this is the feeling of originality in literary characters), the way their mental habits act upon their receptivity and manifest in certain actions, subtle mannerisms and gestures. 
826	It was to this extent, then, that he could bring his wife back from the dead. She never appeared to him in dreams. She was completely absent from his dreams. At least usually, and then he could hardly bear to be alive. But, if he wanted to, he could pretend he was talking to her, and because he had such a grasp of the sound of her voice, he could as in a waking dream converse with her. It was very much like when the faceless dead come to visit us in dreams and it is as if they are talking to us, except he could hold onto it for longer. 
827	And the unpredictability of her in his mind, for he was always calling up old memories, was no less predictable or unpredictable, so it seemed to him, than she had been to him in real life. By hearing her voice in his genius mimicry and responding to her, he truly talked to her. Except, of course, that once he ran out of energy, she would stop talking to him. 
828	So it was this power of his that he avoided. For he knew, having studied her for so long, that he could bring her back from the dead, that he could even, if his daughter was there, perform a conversation between him and herself so that his daughter might have thought her mom back and her father happy again. But because he would run out of stamina, because he would suffer a momentary lapse of memory, he could not maintain the suspension of his disbelief; and she returned to death with even greater force than before. 
829	Sickness is sickness, and suffering is suffering, and of these things we rightly tender the sadness that is due to them. To live one’s life without awareness of the perpetual secret agony of the souls in horizon’s vicinity, is to live happily in dreams, to remain in the dark, uneducated by the revelation of having to lose a loved one to an illness far beyond their control, in short, to be unaware of the demand of the internal revenue system, to not have paid one’s debts. For suffering asks us, as Caesar demanded taxes by a coin with his face on it, plainly put, to be sad for it. 
830	This much for he who has in himself the desire to save the world. For the caregiver it is enough if his sadness does not destroy him. For there are those who romanticize suffering, and they do so rightly, for it is in the nature of the poet to valorize everything, to assign it to the currents of the wind, to treat his suffering with immense disdain and to ironize it or call it beautiful, but this belongs to the aesthetic, and not the ethical. It is an unethical sadness, this sadness that destroys us in a poetic fury, such that we become incapable of regeneration and are no longer able-bodied so as to tilt our loved one onto her side to spit the ‘green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.’ 
831	But there is a sadness that is both ethical and regenerating. It occurs again and again with the contemplation of the world, as the opposite of indifference towards it, the sense of a duty to relieve the world of its suffering; and regenerates our creative forces, synonymous with the spirit itself. So often one finds within his approach to suffering, when he speaks about it rightly—that is to say, when he wrote as if it did not exist, when he passed it over in silence in his work—that only in this, this perverse meeting with his own suffering on the grounds of art, did he attain accuracy within himself, and in this complete inner correspondence, where it felt as if he were sending messages, pings, to the very extremities of his body, and the fingers and toes were pinging him back, it is to this feeling that he refers when one thinks of the Spirit. 
832	This has little meaning to the type of philosopher who is a logician; and perhaps it is rightly said that, one day, thanks to technology, suffering will come to an end, perhaps in the same way that the ancients (so it is said) used to see the color of the sea as ‘winedark,’ with different eyes. But to the extent that we find interest in categorizing things, like bees sorting different flavors of honey into their rightful buckets, we may call it a special kind of sadness; in this one, you become as a human being merely and appropriately sublime—and this is the regenerating sadness for what people do to themselves, outside of illness, in perfect health. 
833	You are only human, you enter the spiritual revenue and currency of the literary nation (and the spiritual and the literary are one), when, with the dread and bitterness of a hateful prophet, you speak of the suffering of others and blame everyone involved. 
834	For in the Psych Ward, though they were all suffering, the real spiritual nature of that suffering, which would remain when their moods had healed, resided like a demon in the corner, in the bickering, the contentiousness, the sadistic indifference, the hatred, the body dysmorphia, of its residents, for whom, as the poet puts it— 
835
836	Should the Christ still be living, and he was alive, he would have wept; and he did. 
837
838	For he was a doctor first with a handbag of miracles, and a psychiatrist second, with a pneuma full of strange-sounding yet wholly appropriate words. 
839	Whitman thought he was the American Christ, come to save all with a message of grass loafing in summer fields under the warm wind in whose song shimmers, vibrating, at times shrill when from afar with its shouting vibrato, though close up a rub-rub like two tissues of air rubbed together by a quiet thumb, these messages shimmering-spread through the air by the doubled glass-paned wings of green cicadas. 
840	But he had not seen this America, and he had not heard how Americans talk today. Nor did he know that his grass fields are gone, certainly in the Bay Area. For we are gross, incapable of regeneration, toxic, poisoned as T.S. Eliot’s dried tubers, and our very speech, the vocabulary in which we conduct our spirit, that road is vulgarized by continual cursing, not alone in the cunt-fuckery of shit-fuckery talk, but in our resentment and attitudes toward another, as much cursing as greets us daily in the traffic when we drive to work—as if the asphalt itself were cursed by the hand of a distant God who, in his sublime irony, thought to make transportation itself, and its dreadful daily irritation, this as his invisible curse sent upon society, a deus vex infinitely mild, omnipresent, and insidious. 
841	It is a truth now to be acknowledged, that when an Asian-American speaks in Chinese, because he only knows fourth grade Chinese and does not know to curse in it, and speaks in it cutely like a fourth grader, he is not then capable of the bile of his American language, its many fucks, its many cunts and curses. 
842	The bilingual nature of the Asian-American should allow him to realize that he is one person in one language, and a separate one in another; and then, to prove my point, he should see if he is less vicious in one than the other. 
843
844CHAPTER THREE
845
846	Snow had come that day, falling softly from the distant reaches of the sky, scattered by angels who, like birds carried by a current that they had not foreseen, had migrated to the Bay Area of California, land of asphalt, bedroom communities and boredom, and scattered from the rims of the sky a little slanting snow. Soft it was, as a feathered pillow being scooped out.
847	The main doors of the Behavioral Health Ward could only be opened by a button behind a counter, which was not guarded by security but by three rather stupid Asian male nurses, named Johns Wang, Luke Ding, and Mark Chen. 
848	These three young Asian-American male nurses, prurient and juvenile, were known as ‘the counters,’ since they were once caught making secret lists of various patient attributes (which they continued to do) and on account of their position at the counters. 
849	They were as indifferent to the fate of the patients as the gatekeepers of the Law, and like the degenerate lawkeepers in The Trial, their minds ranged alone on sex, food, and mocking the weakest; none of them very intelligent, forced to work in a mental hospital for having not found other occupation—unlike the idealists who come to serve the mentally sick and then get sick of it, as if catching the illness itself, so that they lash out and get angry at irritable patients—they were quite capable of doing their jobs, which was to input information into the computers, and to handle patients; they resembled Kafka’s gatekeepers in that they answered no questions, did not make fun of the patients to their faces but kept their own records of patient peculiarities for their own amusement, thus constructing an alternate reality where the patients became participants in a game akin to Fantasy Football (which they also played between them). They watched videos on YouTube, looked at skimpy photos of girls, shared food, and in short, passed the time; they were staffed largely so as to have more people to subdue a belligerent patient.
850	Dr. Matthews privately referred to them as the ‘gospel writers,’ after the first three books of the Bible, knowing that in all likelihood, as is common in the Bay Area, their immigrant Chinese or Taiwanese parents had chosen a name from the Bible for an American-sounding name, a little interesting to him in that these names were originally Roman, Greek, and Jewish. He was fond of the idea of immigration, and saw with amusement, and without really any romantic notion, the image of these parents, highly-educated but with no knowledge of English, flipping through the Bible as if it were a Book of Names. 
851
852Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee
853
854…and God had renamed Abram to Abraham. 
855	For just as the renaming occurred in the previous generations beneath the sight of the Statue of Liberty—chained by the Brooklyn Bridge in the hazy distances of blue which announces on the horizon a gray thorny protuberance, lifted up on the back of a massive turtle—the Bible to them was in no small way like how New York and Ellis island previously served as a gateway, or a translator, where, coming off European ships, immigrants would have their names changed into a name more readily pronounceable. Thus were altered the written lives of their descendants forever at the convenience of some immigration officer who has no real impression of the fact that beneath his pen passes the language of their blood. But for Mark, Luke and Johns, since their parents had not come, as the saying says, ‘fresh off the boat,’ but from ‘fresh off the airplane,’ no Ellis Island had stood in their way; and they chose a name that was least likely to be awkward or offensive. 
856	Unfortunately, as for Johns Wang, his parents had accidentally added an ’s’ to the tail end of his name, thus setting the scene poorly for his adolescence, since everyone meeting him would say, ‘Oh my God, your parents misspelled your name!’ 
857	Those coming in from outside had to call in by a red telephone. The doors opened into the ward rather than out, so they could not be pushed open in a patient's attempt to escape, and there was no handle on either side. 
858	This gatekeeping was managed by Elma, a cynical old white woman who liked to space out her lunch across the entire day so she had something to look forwards to at all times.
859	‘Elma, I’m sorry to wake you,’ said Dr. Matthews over the phone outside the ward. ‘I come to you this morning in the cold. Please open up.’
860	With her permanent grouchiness, she said, shortly, ‘Wait.’ 
861	After the gates shut behind him, he loitered momently at the counters, nodding hello to the young Asian nurses, who went silent out of respect for him and with the knowledge of the dirtiness of their language, which they would not say to his face, for Dr. Matthews was, in their eyes, ‘kind of okay.’ 
862	To Elma, who had poor hearing, scraggly with hair and whose face was configured by long menial toil into a ‘frumpy’ attitude, he said, ‘It’s very cold now, isn’t it. I had to open my eyes, I could not believe them, truly it is snowing in California.’
863	‘It’s snow alright.’ 
864	‘I had to pull out the gloves from back in the closet. I haven’t used those since my wife and I went to Reno, that long ago. – I won’t keep you, sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt your sleep.’ ‘That’s all right, Dr. Matthews.’ Then he would ask about her husband; and to every sentence of his she would reply its mirror, no doubt so bored with her life that she could hardly be interested to talk about it. 
865	‘Everything good with Irm?’ 
866	‘Everything’s good with Irm.’
867	‘His back still hurting him?’
868	‘Not his back,’ (yawning), ‘His knee, now.’ 
869	Dr. Matthews, seeing that she had the sleepiest aspect upon her, smelled his prey. Probably she would prefer to sleep; yet he knew she was as used to this kind of talk as how a car at the tollgates pays a kind of fee. He unwrapped his scarf, put into the bin that she put out, so as to keep it there as scarves were not allowed in the hospital. 
870	‘His knee? Truly. – Let me know if I can help, I had knee troubles myself a few weeks ago. I got myself some of that Icy-Hot, it really does help, Elma. – And how are the kids?’
871	‘Haven’t heard from’m.’ 
872	‘Heading back to Pittsburg?’
873	‘Heading back to Pittsburg.’ 
874	‘Who’ll be taking your place?’
875	‘Someone from Geriatrics.’ 
876	In these cases he liked to say something about his personal life when he knew the other person was not listening. He said, ‘My daughter’s got a collection of her poetry published in a small chapbook. She sent it to me in the mail this morning.’
877	As expected, enclosed within her scraggly white hair and her drooping eyelids like a sleeping turtle, she gave a sound of general uninterested agreement: ‘Yu-hunh.’ 
878	‘We’ve been calling less and less,’ he said, wistfully, his blue eyes sparkling with unknown intention, ‘The year after her mother died, we talked a lot. But after that, we started talking less and less, but every Christmas we still remember each other, of course.’ 
879	But, to his surprise and interest, at first a little terrified that she had heard him, she took note of the word ‘Christmas.’ 
880	She looked up at him, her bleary eyes wiping themselves clear of snow like a windshield, if only for a moment before succumbing again. ‘I can’t get an idea of what to get them,’ she grouched sorrowfully. ‘They keep saying they don’t want anything. Ever since they’ve grown up, it’s like you said. I don’t know what’s on their minds. I can’t tell if I should get them just cash or somethin’ useful.’ 
881	He paused as if considering, then said wistfully, ‘I’d get them cash, Elma. Children their age, like my daughter, they’re often unable to say that they just need the cash. And who are we, after all, to know what they need? They know probably better than we do.’ 
882	‘I’ve got a thousand and twenty from tax returns this April.’
883	Dr. Matthews, waiting for his advice to be asked, with the same moment of internal consideration he would use before to ask God for advice, simply said, ‘Alright.’ 
884	As if on cue, she asked, ‘How much do you think I should give them?’
885	‘I would say, Elma, however much you feel, but in sobriety of mind I’d tell you that my daughter would be happy with a thousand from her father.’ 
886	‘She coming West for Christmas?’
887	‘No,’ Dr. Matthews said wistfully. ‘She’s too busy with work. I’ll be sending it by mail.’
888	‘What’s she doing again, her name was it Randy?’
889	‘My daughter is busy publishing her poems!’ he chuckled pleasantly. 
890	She grouched something to the effect that this was good. Dr. Matthews took his leave. He had talked to his daughter perhaps a dozen or so times—for the thirteen years after the first year when his wife had passed away—though during that first year they had spoken a reasonable number of times. She had been at college in Michigan when her mother died; she had been distraught; she had not understood why, week by week, the calls grew stranger as if she felt she were not talking to anyone or to someone who had no interest in talking to her, though he picked up every call. For, in the portion of himself that had been a father to her, he had ghosted on that self inside him, leaving it wasted away. Now and then he contemplated the fact that she knew he had continued ministry in the Apostles, and wondered what she thought, that he had continued to be a normal Christian, while abandoning her. But, of course, she had no way of realizing that she had been abandoned, or at least had never put the question to him, so gradually had he let her down. For the first few years he made it so she thought she had lost interest in him, so boring were the calls. Only much later did she realize, vaguely, though without ever bringing to mind so horrifying a thought, that her father had without any apparent reason—for should not the loss of her mother draw the two of them closer?—quite simply gotten rid of her. The Apostles, as a church-organism, so they called it, did not celebrate Christmas, and they had never really gotten together for holidays. But something about the snow had made him wistful. 
891	He went and sat on the couches, enough, he knew, to disappear from the awareness of ‘the counters,’ and sufficiently close so he could listen to them talk. He knew that Elma seldom interacted with them, probably viewing them as ‘these young Asian perverts,’ (so he imagined it in her voice). In the way of those who have little in the way of strong passions—whose children are grown and whom they never quite knew how to love straightforwardly after they reached adolescence—and are nevertheless quite capable of maintaining their mental health, she was very good at tuning them out and taking her morning, lunchtime, and afternoon naps. 
892	They had resumed talking. 
893	‘…I’m Johns fuckin Wang, hur dur hur. That’s how you sound,’ said Luke Ding, a young man with an earring and strong muscles. He was an asshole. ‘Hur dur fuckedy hur. I’m Johns frickin Wang and I’ve seen someone who shot their brains out with a shotgun. Dur.’ 
894	‘Dude,’ said Johns. ‘Can you like, seriously, stop?’ 
895	Luke frequently imitated Johns to his face. Johns was tall, thin, built like a giraffe but with the face of a chimp, his mouth large and frequently loud, though always waiting to insert his own voice since he wanted to make a jab at someone yet get away with doing it—for he was the type of person who jabs when he gets the chance, and yet because he is so weak, so powerless unlike a bully, he can only ever be a ‘poker,’ someone who ‘looks for trouble,’ who is ‘always in the way,’ like the particular chimp in the pack who just has it in him, the weakling malevolent energy to go throw a piece of poop at the leader, as if he liked being punished—and as might be expected, he jabbed and was never able to get away with it. He liked to position himself between handsome Mark and bullying Luke, and tried to hide himself between them, hoping that if they just talked to each other, he could get in a comment every now and then. 
896	Johns Wang was a fan of fantasy novels, video games, eating, and badminton (for his arms were long), and in this he was no different from just about every other somewhat stupid Asian male of his age. 
897	He was occasionally rejected, occasionally successful with hooking up with a girl at parties, though they tended to regret the encounter; because they were rare, he bragged about them loudly. Because he bragged about them loudly, he was seldom believed, and still had the reputation of being a virgin, if only because the rest of his friend group, of which Mark and Luke were a part, liked to think of him that way. For to call him a virgin was as delightful for mockery as to call (in Biblical times) a barren woman unloved by her husband, as Sarai was mocked by her rival for not having children, or as Rachel said to Jacob, ‘Give me children, lest I die,’ placing the entirety of her life onto her continuation and threatening suicide if she did not get it, so well did she understand the promise that had been given Abraham to inherit the earth, like a businesswoman who has read the contract well and knows that the terms of the inheritance are infinite. Expert at Mario Kart, almost always last because the others ganged up on him and pushed his cart off of the rails, he was frequently aggrieved and oppressed, but had neither the sensitivity that would turn such oppression into torture, nor the pain that sensitivity will bring to the face of the oppressed that will cause the oppressor, if he has a mote of feeling, to take pity and cease to torture the poor child. 
898	In any case, long, tall, giraffe-like, with long awkward limbs, Johns Wang would respond to Luke’s mimicry with, ‘Dude, I mean seriously?’ 
899	(thickly), ‘Dude, —dewd. I mean Dude, seriously?’ 
900	At his breakfast, the regally handsome Mark Chen indifferently said, ‘Luke, can you shut the fuck up.’ 
901	Johns Wang said, ‘I’m serious. He could barely talk. Like gurgling sounds. I heard the Docs saying his spinal cord was severed. They were in the conference room and Dr. Singh was like, in a hushed voice,’ (bad Indian accent), ‘This is truly very awful, this is awful indeed; I had never seen anyone in so bad a state.’’ For like anyone offensive, like Michael Scott on The Office, he must parody other cultures if only out of a lack of original comedic material, going for the lowest hanging fruit despite being the lankiest chimp, the easiest joke. 
902	‘This is me laughing at your Indian accent,’ said Luke, staring him in the face, as if brandishing before him the eyes of indifference.
903	‘He’ll never be able to walk or speak again. C’mon. It’s pretty cool.’ 
904	Luke, lowering his head a little, bringing his chin in and out like a turtle beat-boxing to the rhythms of its speech, ‘Have you, Johns Wang, ever considered, that maybe, just maybe, it isn’t cool to be a fucking tool?’ 
905	‘You were literally bragging about the guy who blinded himself last week!’
906	‘Yeah, but when Luke does it,’ said Mark Chen, ‘It’s actually funny. Pass me that tissue there.’ 
907	‘Fucking get your own tissue,’ Luke said. 
908	‘I’ll get it for you.’ Johns Wang passed the tissue over. 
909	‘Hey, Johns,’ said Luke. ‘Get me a tissue too.’
910	‘Sure.’
911	Luke received it and threw it on the ground. 
912	‘Oh fuck you.’ 
913	‘Johns Wang. Johns Wang. Johns Waaaang.’ 
914	Gompert came by, picked up the tissue, and started blowing his nose with it. The old man, hunch-backed, with unhealthy white hair covering the back of his head like loose wool, wearing for some reason a loose peasant’s shirt that showed the majority of his collar bones, had lowered his left shoulder to pick up the tissue; now he was exploring his nostril with the tissue, but just as nonchalantly, at Luke’s invitation, extended his right hand and, limply, half-heartedly fist-bumped Luke.
915	‘Gompert my man. Yee.’
916	Gompert stood there, idly picking his nose with the tissue. He had the growling look of a former war veteran bent into senile harmlessness by a degenerate mental illness. The Asian Counters had it in their information, on a Google Doc, that ‘The Nam Mang Gompert is the fuckton suicide attempt number tree.’ For this was his third documented suicide attempt, all occurring since he had become sixty years old. Luke, over the counter, leaned in and said, ‘Hey Gompert, remember what my name is?’
917	Gompert, his eyes clearing for a moment, put the used tissue in his left pocket, felt to make sure it was there in the manner checking to see if his wallet has been lost. Then, he turned to look at Luke. After another pause, in an old man’s reedy, faltering, weak tone, he said, as if after much consideration and meditation, ‘You’re…that Asian ’fella.’ 
918	‘Gompert my man. My name’s Long Duk Dong.’
919	‘Long Duk Dong?’ After a moment, he grew animated. ‘That’s right…When I was younger, when I was yo’re age, I had just such a friend called Duk Dong Long. That’s right. A little Chinky fella with a tall girlfriend, what was her name, think it was something like Amy Clam.’
920	‘Gompert my man,’ Luke said, now bringing out Johns Wang by holding onto his skinny shoulders. ‘Do you know what his name is?’
921	‘Can’t say I do. Nice to meet you, good sir.’ 
922	‘Uh,’ said Johns. ‘Yah.’ 
923	‘His name’s Johns Wang,’ Luke said. ‘But his Chinese name is Ding Tai Feng.’
924	‘Well nice to meet you good sir,’ he said, again, in that faltering, weak tone. ‘Ding Tai Feng. Is that a Japanese name? I know how you Chinese like to make sure that one’s of you is Chinese, the other Jap-Chinese. Or Viet-Chinese instead of Thai-Chinese. Really keen on distinctions. I get it. I’d be upset, too, if someone told me I was a Jew instead of a Dutchman.’ 
925	‘Yes,’ said Luke, keeping a straight face. ‘It’s a Japanese name. But the Japanese are literal people. They named him after a physical characteristic. The name means Little Gay Boy.’
926	Gompert looked very sternly at him. 
927	‘Oh,’ said Luke, breaking into an easy laughter. He shook; buff, his dark muscled skin prowled with the tattoos that leaked out of his white collar shirt as if tigers looking out from underneath the snow-capped leaves of a bush. He had the physical presence of a tiger in a nurse’s uniform, like the cartoon tiger Hobbes, except a common good-humor restrained him from being threatening, however much an asshole he was. He laughed, ‘Oh Gompert. Of course not. Of course my friend Johns here isn’t gay, like some sort of—’
928	‘Some sort of Faggot!’ Gompert spat, expelling a breath of air on the ‘fffaggot!’ 
929	‘Yes,’ said Luke, laughing. ‘Like some sort of faggot. It was just his baby dick was so small, they thought he might never ’pregnate a girl. So they called him Little Gay Boy.’
930	‘Is that—true?’ Gompert asked Johns. 
931	Johns turned bright red; his face, long as an ape’s, long as the rest of his body was lean and tall, beneath his shady bushy eyebrows, his long extended chin which dominated the lower half of his face, seemed to contort itself into a kind of speechless agony, shaking, embarrassed by a stranger. Were it another friend, he might have said, ‘Dude, fuck you!’ and, were it lunchtime in high school, he would have flung his long extended arms at the person who was dominating him in a futile effort to get back whatever knickknack he had been bragging about and which was stolen from him. In no small manner, he resembled a giraffe trying to attack something far more clever than it. Those who cannot defeat bullies, are counseled best to hide and go incognito; but Johns Wang had the misfortune of always being in the way, or at least, in his ‘stupid’ look, the way that those who looked at him just thought him dumb, he was always ‘in the way,’ if only in their consciousness. For some people are cursed, for example, with a large chin, beady eyes, a long extended forehead, unimaginative hair, and because no charm relieves them, and nothing calls one to pity them, they always become the butt of the joke in a group that has a ‘bullying-gene.’ Johns Wang was not, of course, spectacularly ugly. He was very normal-looking, with no deformity. But, whether he had on the day he met Luke and Mark while their friend group was being formed, made some originary unfortunate remark that had pigeon-holed him as ‘when you’re feeling insecure, make fun of him,’ or if truly there was something just preternaturally annoying about his facial features, or if it was on account of his actual personality in the way that he was always looking to get a word in, to insult someone, he occupied that strange position from where there is no escape so long as one remains in a toxic friend group: the poetic inspiration of jokes. 
932	Gompert idly chewed at his lips, letting his mouth gush with the sounds of saliva, as if he were gnawing the innards of an enormous ball of gum; he viewed Johns Wang from the side eye, skeptical, a little bit put-off, as if encountering a new kind of species that he was not sure he liked. ‘Little Gay Boy…’ 
933	‘Dude why you always gotta be so mean to retards?’ said Johns Wang, in his thick, dullard’s, aggrieved voice, when Gompert went away. ‘Dude, he’s fucking retarded. You can’t just like play fucking games with him. He’s a war veteran, too. That’s un-American, that’s so fucked up.’
934	Luke Ding, ever so sensitive as bullies are, had correctly sensed that Johns Wang’s defense of the ‘retard,’ which word was his umbrella term for the mentally ill, nicely serving as a both an insult and a misnomer, was in reality umbrage at the fact that Gompert had been expertly used to humiliate him. Thus, unlikely to take it easy on him even if it were the case that Johns Wang had ethical intentions, Luke said, never addressing him as ‘you,’ ‘When in the fucks did Johns Fucking Wang care about war veterans?’ 
935	‘We learned about it in Torrens’ class. You can’t just be like that to war heroes. War heroes like actually did shit. That’s really fucked up.’ 
936	‘Johns Wang you don’t remember shit from Torrens’ class. You got a 3 on the APUSH test.’ 
937	‘You got a 4, that’s like not much better.’
938	‘Still better than a 3. Even Omkar Fucking Gaitonde got a 3.’ 
939	‘Can you honestly shut the fuck up,’ said Mark Chen, who had received a 5 on the AP US History test, and who had gotten into a very good college—UCLA—before failing to graduate because he had cheated on a test, now reduced to working as a nurse in a mental hospital. In his handsomeness he was always attracting girls and indifferently putting them away. If the three of them constituted a pack, and they were certainly very animalistic in comparison to, say, the sublime and peaceful and metaphysical nature of Dr. Matthews, he was like the silent cheetah that stands slightly on the edge who no one dares touch for he hides what he is thinking. As the African saying, ‘Never kill a man who says nothing.’
940	Too keen on getting his prey to heed Mark’s command, Luke Ding said, ‘So what, then, what do you remember from APUSH?’
941	‘That like the Vietnamese were fighting for their own territory, and how we were bad to go in. That the Vietnamese had a north and a south, but the Viet Cong actually was the hero. That Saigon was misinformed, and that Kennedy, was like, involved.’
942	‘What the fuck does that have to do with war heroes.’ 
943	‘You do know,’ said Mark, ‘that people hated them when they returned from the war.’
944	‘I mean, yeah, they killed babies. Or at least that’s what the media said,’ Johns added, thinking that if he applied a general invective against the media, which he heard everyone use, he could signal intelligence. Though precisely it was this kind of thing, the imprecise application of clichés to mundane matters, that made people think he was stupid. ‘Who knows what the media reports.’ 
945	(thickly), ‘Who knows what the media reports. My name is Johns Fucking Wang, expert media critic, at the doosh-nozzle New York Times.’ 
946	‘Dude The New York Times is legit, though. It’s like the only real news source left.’ 
947	‘Thank you, Johns Wang, for your insight. The class is very pleased by the numero uno insight of the incel Johns Wang. The class is highly magnificent with this new knowledge gained by the No-Wang Johns-Wang. Hitherto now, we had not the knowledge that The New York Times is deeply insightful, now thanks to the scumbag reporter Johns Wang.’ 
948	‘Oh my God, dude, you know you’re like not even funny.’
949	But Mark Chen was laughing quietly. 
950	Luke opened his computer and started jotting down some notes, reading it aloud. It was Johns Wang’s ‘diary’ that Luke wrote for him. ‘Today I was deeply aggrieved! My homey Amare Stoudemire only score six points versus the New York Knicks because Steven Nash was busy sucking his own deek! But today I got to see my beloved Catherine, whom I have missed for five thousand years since the last time I got kicked in the nuts by Deglia-Doo the Scooby-Doo woman when I went to restrain her using not the four-point tactic but the sixty-nine! Catherine I saw while she was on the way to the bathroom. Wow. Her significance was resplendent. Wow, I was so hard. Wow, it made me grow my second ballsack back, after it was kicked away by Deglia-Doo the Scooby-Doo woman, who has manic episode for five days before Doctor Singh righteously annunciate her to the ICU! Johns Wang push point five milligrams of Ativan stat and take kick to the balls—very hero. Unfortunate. Very unfortunate, however, today Gompert come by and discover I have micropenis. Very sad. What if Third Strike Gompert goes to tell Catherine Kim I have micro. Then Catherine will be very sad.’ 
951	Mark, in a manner as if against his will but with relish, laughed deeply under his breath, to Luke’s appreciation. Johns Wang said, ‘Alright, that’s pretty funny.’ 
952	Johns Wang’s phone buzzed. Luke immediately saw that the message was from a Catherine Kim. It read, ‘I’m sorry to hear you had to go through that. That’s really messed up. But I’m glad he’s still alive though.’ 
953	‘Who’s that?’ asked Mark. 
954	‘It’s none of your business! Oh my God!’
955	‘I mean, I don’t give a shit about Catherine. Who’s the guy who’s still alive?’
956	‘Oh, I mean the guy who shot himself in the head. His name was Kevin or something.’ Johns gathered that he was the subject of attention and seized the opportunity. ‘Apparently he missed the brain and just severed his spinal cord. He’s in a coma in the E.R.’ 
957	‘Oh,’ said Mark, losing interest.
958	‘His wife and kids are here. Dude had like five kids.’ 
959	‘What is it with these old guys killing themselves?’ said Luke. ‘Wasn’t the last guy who was brought in here for a gunshot wound also like a father of four?’
960	‘No, it was a father of three. And his wife had passed away.’
961	‘Well what did he look like?’ asked Mark.
962	There was a small pause. Johns said, ‘Well, he looked retarded.’ 
963	‘No shit.’
964	‘I mean, he was asleep, and there was a huge bandage around him and one of those neck support things, but otherwise he was just like some pale passed out guy, no different from a drunk.’ He turned to Luke, ‘Hey Luke, so—’ But Luke gave him some earbuds, and said, ‘Check this out, it’s the new Kanye.’ Johns was not quick enough to understand that Luke would not in normal situations give him music to listen to.
965	For he was texting Catherine Kim on Johns Wang’s phone. Johns had been having a long conversation with Catherine, who was a nurse in the geriatric ward; she had been asking about Mark. 
966	‘By the way,’ Johns Wang wondered aloud, as he listened to the new Kanye song. ‘Did anyone notice that it was snowing today? It was kind of small, but there were a bunch of flakes. I saw some of the cars looked like that had shaving cream on them. It was pretty cool, I thought.’
967
968Lifelike, this is what your life like,  try to live your life right
969
970	Gompert had muttered as he went away. But, as if passing through an invisible barrier, one of several that separated the patients from the nurses, both legal and psychological, as soon as he was out of earshot, he went silent, and a growling dignity came to the fore on his face, though he still walked slowly and limply. He went to his friend Herrington in the corner of the common room. Dr. Matthews, having finished listening to ‘the counters,’ now shifted his attention, completely unobserved on the couch amidst the other couches which were arrayed around the room, with high backs behind which to hide, like scattered islands. In the corner a television was playing; it was reruns of a basketball game from the previous night. The Dementia Ward, closed off by a thick door, opened now and then as a nurse came to and fro, and one could see, in the hallway leading all the way down, strange, poorly-lit, as in the movies where time ceases and yet everything moves within a slow brown transparent yet shadowy light, the shapes of people moving so slowly one immediately knew they were old, surrounded by white tubes coming from their nostrils like the breaths of dragons, tethered like a tether-ball to a pole from which hung clear plastic sacs. Dr. Matthews had a meeting with a patient there later on today. 
971	Near the windows of the Standard Care Unit’s common area, there, on the couches sat, round-faced, bald as can be, but with much friendly tush and good nature, a finely-shaded black man who had the air of a comedian in the throes of an enormous depression. But he was old. He sat as if sinking into the absorbent single-person couch, taking it up entirely, his arms asleep on the armrests, his knees in front of him, resembling a kind of king fallen asleep on a throne. But he was stolen from his true image, for his cane had been taken away from him (since a long wooden object could be used to attack nurses); normally he would have put his hands on his cane, leaning the rest of his body atop it as one rests a chin on a desk when bored in class; in this posture, he was as one passing judgment, regal and scowling, as if his cane were Justice’s sword, or a gavel, ready to be raised at any moment to point imperiously at an offender, at some small child on the street who has aroused his ire. Instead, without his king-making cane, with nothing to do with his arms, he was rather ensconced in his couch, like an oyster, surfacing with a bald brown head. He had a loud mouth, though very much dampened by depression. Herrington said, softly, melodiously, ‘You go to talk to them Asians again?’
972	Gompert had taken off the guise of dementia. He narrowed his eyes and sat on a couch nearby with his hands on his knees, which were wide-open—mimicking Herrington, two old men—in the manner of one fanning his groin to the wind, with a bit of a pouch in his drooping stomach. He said, ‘These fucks think they’re troll.’ But then he softened his expression and growled approvingly, ‘They are pretty fuckin troll.’ 
973	He was a Vietnam veteran who had been on the streets for a few years; he had been in El Camino for only a week; in his Veteran Affairs nursing home he was caught stockpiling the sleep medication Ambien, forming a plan to kill himself. He had all the air of a former soldier, except, never very strong, he had grown hunched, bony-shouldered, wearing a loose rough shirt; he had the low, raspy, angry speech of combat veterans. ‘But they’re bush-league. I seen a fucker like this Luke boy in Nam. I was his military advisor. The two of us was good times. Brings back memories.’
974	‘You never think just to talk straight to him?’
975	‘That’s no fun. Young people never talk straight ‘wit ye. Only when they’re making fun of you are they any fun. If I asked him how his daddy and mommy was, he’d shut up on me. This Luke boy lookalike,’ he recalled, ‘was always killing lizards. Killed five of them a day. Funny thing is, though, this partner of mine, he liked them boys.’ 
976	Herrington laughed a little. ‘Yeah,’ said Gompert, growling with laughter, as if he were telling jokes in the sunstruck land of Saigon yet again, with the smell of napalm and the helicopters flying overhead. ‘He’d a ’nother boyfriend wit him, cute as a girl. They’d sneak off in the jungle during the training days. During the war I lost track of them though. For his sex times, I’d tell the others that I’d sent him on a scouting mission. The girl-boy always had a flower in his ear.’ 
977	It was morning, the outside was cold; the heavy windows, built with warped plastic glass so as to prevent anyone from running at it and trying to smash into it and die (the warp was convex, so as to dull the brunt of any blow), showed no evidence of any frost or mist, for they were too thick and unclean. They had finished their breakfasts, though nearby two dozen or so patients were still eating in the kitchen area.
978	‘I hear there’s snow outside,’ said Herrington. 
979	‘You can kind of tell through the windows. Fuckin windows. It’s a zoo.’ 
980	‘In’t it kind of weird? You a Californian?’
981	‘No.’ 
982	‘Never heard of a snow in here?’
983	Gompert growled with uninterest. 
984	Herrington began, ‘You ever heard of Hamlet…?’
985	But Mark Chen had come by, tall, handsome as Zhou Enlei in his days with the dark thick eyebrows, as if enhanced, with dark noble eyes speaking of those vague dreams or passions that enchant girls into believing that these handsome men have more in their ideas than spreading their legs in sex (though really, the effect came from the way a ray of light, appearing as a silver dot on the pupil, was brought out especially by the darkness of the pupil, so that, like a star, it appeared as if a sign of another universe of thought and personality); he appeared behind the reclining old men, like a young prince among the decrepit old, passing through with a wave of his sleeve, so that they looked behind the backs of the couches when he said, ‘Excuse me. Mr. Adam Gompert?’
986	‘Yessir?’
987	‘I’m here to let you know that your patient lawyer will be coming to see you at ten a.m. today. You’ll be able to meet him after Morning Time, though you’ll still have to participate in the activities.’ 
988	‘Well…’ said Gompert, slowly, putting on his guise of dementia again. He patted the back of his fading white hair, and said, ‘You’re that Long Duk fellow, that right?’
989	‘My name is Mark Chen, Sir. I’m a nurse here. There’s no one here named Long Duk.’ 
990	‘Is that right?’ 
991	‘Please ready your papers. If you need help, please come to the counters at the front desk.’ Then, without another word, he went. Gompert turned to Herrington and said, ‘You were right—they’re not taking the suicide too seriously, they think I’m just old and not right in the head. I got my papers today. It’s not the months-long thing like what you got. Just a week-long hold, a 5151, was it.’ 
992	‘You gonna do it when you leave?’
993	‘Would have thought the Ambien would do’t,’ growled Gompert. ‘What do you suggest, if I might ask.’ 
994	‘Trains ain’t bad, so I heard. There’s one at Palo Alto, the Caltrain there? You can get to it within an hour. I heard the guts is bad, though.’
995	‘Fuck, so I heard too. I don’t want nobody having to clean my gunk. That’s not who I am. These fuckers. I was a pill away from having 3000 milligrams, which was what this guy did in the home across from me. They said he had 3000 of’em, went in his sleep.’ He added testily, ‘When I want to die, I die. None of this depression shit. It’s just time for me to go. But I can’t think of a clean way to do it.’
996	The subject had animated him. He said fiercely, ‘If a man wants to do it, it's his own life. Shit's my own fuckin life. Who's Uncle Sam to tell me I can't die when I want? For society, for society's what not; fuck that. I'm not for society. I have nothing to do with society. They can keep on living and be useful and flourishing, but I have nothing to do with it.’ The previous evening he and Herrington had watched a VHS tape of the moon landing together. Gompert had laughed enormously at the line, ‘One small step for man, one huge leap for mankind.’ To him it seemed ridiculous that one could belong to all mankind, as a universal consciousness, when he himself, bereft in the world, one of the appendages that had ceased to be useful, like a vestigial body part that had been evolved out of, saw so little benefit in being alive, that joining some sort of greater cause was nothing but a joke. His situation was not chemical or medical. He was alone, old, and had nothing by way of descendants, nor people around him he particularly cared about, though he formed friendships occasionally. He simply did not see the need to extend himself to a natural end. 
997	‘You ever heard of Physician Assisted Suicide?’
998	‘Yeah I have. But you need family to sign you up.’ 
999	‘Yeah…You ever heard of Hamlet?’ said Herrington, as if remembering a previous train of thought. The dark nature of their conversation was secondhand to them. He did not feel any sorrow at Herrington’s lack of family because they already existed in terms of such abjection that nothing was pitiful, and in fact, they talked more fondly of life than many who have more and yet live with their possessions anxiously. They had a friendly detachment, to pleasure and life. ‘What I means is, of course you heard of Hamlet. But you understand the nature of Hamlet? I mean you get what Hamlet is about? Cause half this world is dog-mouth muthafuckahs, and they read wit their eyes but they don’t read, if you get what I mean.’
1000	The head nurse Mikey came running by, young and Asian, noble in appearance and bashful. 
1001	At this they went silent. Herrington went on, ‘So yeah you understand the true nature and mystery of Hamlet?’
1002	‘I’ve read it,’ Gompert growled. 
1003	‘The boy plays mad. You mind if I tell you the story as I see’s it?’
1004	‘Sure, I don’t see why not.’ 
1005	‘Is just cause you remind me of Hamlet, your playing mad-old and all. The boy did it to deceive the king, to get back at his mamma. He drove them mad…man, I remember I had a friend named Jump. Jump was wit’ me in Nashwah when we were growing up. He and I liked to play at the dramas? Was only us two boys in a whole school that played at the dramas. But I remember I was the king, and he was Hamlet, and the whole otha’ girls was somebody else. They didn’t like that. How come it was that we got to play all the good parts? Well we said, well fuck you is what we said, when’s a girl ever say a thing like, ‘My offense is black, it smells to heaven, having the primal eldest curse ‘pon it, Brother’s Murder?’ Girls don’t have no brothers to murder in the brother-murdering way. Cain and Abel, ain’t not one of em’s a girl. It’s something different when a brother kills his own brother. It’s whole town differn’t. Whole different story. And you know one of the girls in that production, she was the bitch that my brothers Caleb and Jo was fighting over. Brother’s murder. Fuck’s, man. You really do go to hell if you murder your own brother, your own friend, you know what I mean. Killing enemy combatants, that’s its own thing. But your whole-hearted brother? Coming out of the same womb? God in heaven has a good thing for brotherhood. Ain’t nobody good in this world but brothers. Women’s just change and hassle, nothing but change and hassle. I mean look at this dumb bitch of an ex wife. She played the pian-Oh (the piano), I played the sax, and now look what’s become of us. I pray to God everyday that she’ll come around and take me home. Because nobody’ll let me go home till they say I’ve got that Support Community. You’re just going back to the streets and whatever. ’s not like she’s a husband, and ain’t nobody fucked her quite like I did, with the sax, the music, the dinners and all that. The candlelight and the small iron bathtub we had on Deckers’ Street. They say Detroit’s no good but I always liked the high rusted buildings. A wife can warm a place like hot bathwater fills a bathroom with comfortable steam. We was good times, Brother. But bitches are bitches, and brothers are brothers. I wish I had at least one of my brothers left. If one kills the other, almighty God, I’ll live with it. But leave me one if you kind God almighty. That way don’t have to call the bitch every which-way week to see if she’s a change of mind,’ said Herrington, laughing. ‘You know, my good man Gompert, you know what she says to me? She says, Why’ve I gotta come get you, when they feeding you better than I? And I said, Bitch! It’s a fucking mental hospital! She says, I come’d to visit. You’ve got that free Gatorade machine. Eat the State dollar and I’ll eat my dollar. Ya’ll be fucking them before you fuck me. – Meaning, she wants me to keep sucking Uncle Sam’s titties, which I myself ‘ave no problem with, but damn one of these days I want to get the fuck Out! It’s this damn outdoor area that’s closed off. If there was a little garden, alright, I’ll stay here. I can look at the flowers and die on that loamy dirt. It’s not so sad, if you can die on some clean soil. My brothers, they died on concrete and blood. If I could die on the natural earth, I think it’d commit my soul to heaven, but if you die by a car, your guts are splayed out all across the tracks.’ 
1006	‘There’s no heaven,’ Gompert interrupted, ferociously. ‘There better not be a fuckin heaven. When I go, I’m not looking for what’s under my feet, and if I’m aware of what’s under my feet, they’re probably pumping my stomach with that activated charcoal shit again.’ 
1007	‘Yeah,’ said Herrington, drifting on randomly. ‘But I can’t play Ping-Pong on that table, I don’t even have my cane. There’s nothing to do here, but look at these walls. A caneless man’s a spiritless dreg, spitless and sad. I can’t do nothing but look at those walls. Man the jail cell’s bigger than that Recreational Area. Some fucking bull-shit,’ he said, pulling the ‘bull’ long and deep, as if savoring the smell of the word. 
1008	He had finally found his way back to Hamlet. ‘But anyhow leastways me and Jump gotta play the King and Hamlet. Thing about Jump, though, he was really talented. We all called him Blackmule, as in Jump Blackmule, for some reason, don’t remember why, maybe because it had a ring to it; his last name was Anders. Anyway, when he was Hamlet, he started to change up the lines, and because it was fuckin Nashwah, nobody fuckin noticed but that Dee-reck-tor, and by then it was too late. You know what he said? He says, 
1009 
1010To be or not to be 
1011is the only question. A biology of life, 
1012plainly put, or a biology of suicide. Was it solved for us
1013that day God placed us in the lineage of the days,
1014and the midwive'd angels, slapped your heel
1015and placed you in the basket, singing, ‘it might as well be kept,’ 
1016drunkenly saying, 
1017This one's good—but that a one's—
1018gonna be sad as the mothafucka Hamlet—
1019of this we waste our breath. It is an uninteresting question,
1020silent as the hour when the cars stop in the traffic,
1021Detroit’s brown sun breathing the interstate
1022and no one notices they are frozen... 
1023Timeless Death comes to recall you. Whether you were
1024the child cornered in the classroom; a houseplant 
1025left in the vicinity of the mice, or a summer Morn where a father dies
1026heaped amongst the cabbaged newspapers—
1027still the call whorling out of the sky
1028unfurls that rose which had enclosed
1029the millionth of God, retrieving 
1030one piece that God had shattered into;
1031and poses to you 
1032what future goers have an interest in knowing:
1033Was it good to be you? Was it good
1034to be a morning death? was it alright
1035when it did soil the summer?
1036Of all things, God's the neediest.
1037And anxiously awaits the opinions of his creation. 
1038The suicide hangs like an obstinate comma on his oeuvre,
1039the obstinate man, refusing to be erased,
1040posits his greatness against his death;
1041the poet writes on the hanging air, 
1042a review that no one ends up reading. 
1043For in the binary question of life,
1044the creation judges the creator—
1045and makes him misery,
1046or tends him love. There is no God,
1047and man underneath him, no heavenly father
1048and son bleeding for lesser sons,
1049there is only friendship,
1050the spheres resonantly singing;
1051the cohabiting friendly imagination, 
1052such that Jesú may be reborn
1053in the horse-man Quixote. 
1054But soft now, the fair Ophelia. Nymph, in the orisons,
1055may all thy sins be remembered. 
1056 
1057	‘Goddamn that Jump,’ and Herrington started to wipe away tears from his eyes. ‘Goddamn that boy could pull shit out of his ass. He probably made that up just the day of, while he was waiting on the wings of the stage. Flickering through the family of the earth. He couldn’t ever take things seriously until he was on the wings of the stage. Before then he’d be slipping quarters down Jenny Atkinson’s ass crack, or chewing that red lollipop he had always. But when he got to the wings of the stage, then he became something other than Jump Blackmule. And when he went to the wings of the stage again, it’d take a lot for him to turn back into Jump Blackmule again. That’s the kind of boy he was.’ 
1058	‘This world’s a fucked turd,’ said Gompert, aware that Herrington had not spoken of Jump Blackmule’s fate. 
1059	‘Anyway,’ said Herrington, looking up at the light of the window with rheumy eyes and crying, with a sad blubbering voice, ‘That’s Jump. That’s Jump. Man,’ he said. ‘Man, goddammit! These walls. I wish I could see the snow.’
1060	Gompert changed the subject. ‘They’re discharging someone today.’
1061	‘Yes, isn’t it the Michael with the red eyes?’ There was another Michael, a typical depressive, so that was how most thought of this Michael, though they did not say so in his presence. His eyes were blood-shot, the result of having been on a two-week long schizophrenic episode where, so full of energy and hallucination, he had not slept or rested his eyes, resulting in difficulty blinking afterwards, which was why his eyes had never gotten better, despite being prescribed with all sorts of eyedrops and omega-3 vitamin pills. 
1062	They looked over at the kitchen area. The patients there, roughly twelve or so, had not yet bussed their trays; they were still at breakfast; they had taken out their food trays, the content chosen by the patient and tailor-made to their dietary restrictions, from a large refrigerated mobile machine, which was wheeled in from the distant central kitchen area of the hospital. The patients in the Psych Ward actually had better food than the rest of the hospital, as greater attention was paid to their pacification. They could select several options off the menu, and the food was always hot and fresh, served even with a lid that could be lifted up like it was (so they thought to themselves, thrilled by its ‘fanciness,’ ‘ooh-la-la’) a French restaurant where the waiter brings the silver dish before you and, saying ‘voilà,’ unveils the steaming chicken wing, which they had seen in the movie Ratatouille, none of them having the funds to visit France, easily tricked into believing they were receiving tip-top food just because of the removable plastic lid. Undoubtedly it was the scheme of some clever hospital manager, in conjunction with the quick and practical Dr. Singh. 
1063	The psychiatry ward was euphemized as the Behavioral Health Ward to avoid the stigma of the word ‘psychotic,’ which term was associated with the large exotic sexual mad eyes of manic behavior, or with gruesome depraved murderers, alive in the public imagination day by day with the way that whenever someone does something horrific, should they have mental illness, the existence of that illness itself is blamed for the crime, for the lack of any other clear diagnostic material. One commits a crime not because he wishes to steal, but because he is naturally predisposed to it by an imbalance of chemicals in his head which makes him a threat to other individuals. The term ‘Behavioral Health’ evinced a certain academic development in psychiatry to treat patients not based off their Freudian memories or traumas, or even based off a particular diagnoses, but to treat according to symptoms, avoiding labels. In the ‘Psych Ward’ (as they usually called it, since ‘Behavioral Health Ward,’ like so many euphemisms, was too long to pronounce) many patients frequently took ire with being associated with mass murderers, or being represented by the ‘biased media’ as demons or ‘psychos.’ 
1064	Of course, this kind of wishful and idealistic desire to redefine the word ‘mentally ill,’ to save it from stereotype, also flew in the face of what was commonly held to be directly correlative, namely, that mental illness makes one more likely to commit a crime; the meme was already set in the public imagination, or the public’s database, of ‘obvious facts.’ The same thing was said of African-American violence, which was that, ‘according to statistics, black men commit more crimes,’ therefore something about blackness was innately violent, and this image was presented so often in the media images (always black murderers or rapists), such that the black comedians on Saturday Night Live took to parodying the idea by cheering whenever the media presented an image of a white murderer. This ‘obvious fact,’ as some conservatives would say, ‘just plain statistical evidence,’ was no longer politically correct, which they took as one more piece of evidence that the left was leaving reality behind, ignoring even basic gender categories. Whereas liberals, as much idealistic as the conservatives were cynical, would remove all possibility of blame from anything genetic to blackness and go so far as to say, indeed, that black violence is caused by white violence; that so many black men are violent because of white systematic racism that reduced the average black man to stealing and thieving. They would say that statistics are fundamentally political; that one can make a statistical picture of anything. 
1065	There was the patient Soojin Yoon. She was eating her breakfast quietly and alone. She was a young Korean-American woman of thirty or so years who normally wore extensive makeup (though its attributes seemed to remain despite being deprived of her makeup in the hospital), slightly puffing the cheeks with pink blush. She had been there for a month, improving steadily, though now and then still belligerent. She usually brought out the surplus of aggression of her eyes with black eyeliner so that she appeared fierce, ironic, and irritable all at the same time, which look she had stylized and took to be a kind of power play against the men who had looked down at her all her life. She spent much time with her appearance, perhaps because she had not much natural beauty, over-compensating for it by claiming to think nothing of feminine beauty. She cared very much for political correctness and was politically charged. She had been a developer at Facebook until her depression, always potent, had reached a breaking point, when a man she did not know, with whom in a fit of thoughtless lust and passion she had begun a sexual exchange of texts, to whom she had sent photos of herself, had threatened to post her photos and texts online, saying that she was lucky he wouldn't do it because ‘he wasn't an asshole.’ But she was terrified that, at any moment, these photos could be posted on her Facebook Timeline, whenever the aggression of this man became too much and he felt like taking it out on her. She was put over the edge; this man had put her in hell. It was encounters like this, by far not the worst, that had given her a very sour view of the nature of masculine desire. 
1066	Still, in the hospital, she often argued politics. Someone at breakfast had started to complain about ‘media representation of the mentally ill,’ but a man named Gilfoyle, a white contrarian techie who was clearly a coder, though not ugly or pathetic in the conventional way of nerds (thus he was a threat to Soojin, since he seemed masculine and confident), had said, ‘So much for the truth.’
1067	‘What?’
1068	(deadbeat), ‘I’m all for all this dandy mental health stuff, being myself one of the crazies. And I can sit here all day with your kumbaya, and we can pass around the bong and suck each other’s dicks. But at the end of the day the facts are pretty clear. People like us do more crazy shit and get into crazy trouble, and it makes sense that they lock us up, because we end up doing random godforsaken shit.’ And he bent down to begin eating his milk and cereal again. Around him some of the other patients had looks of hurt on their faces. 
1069	Soojin took it upon herself to defend them. ‘I want to know exactly what you mean by that,’ she said, showing her colored nails which used to taper in extended sharp points but which she had been forced to clip in the hospital for fear of her using these in a violent fashion. In a fit of rage she had said to Johns Wang, ‘Look, Bitch. See these nails? See your face? Better watch your mouth, Bitch.’ And Johns Wang, with great fear, had gone and told the head nurse Mikey about it, who sent word to the attending psychiatrist Dr. Singh, who sent Bobbert to enforce her ruling. When Gilfoyle continued to placidly eat his cereal, slurping the milk, hunched over his seat in the common area which had tinted windows showing out to the cold landscape of the strange California winter (without providing a clear view), she said, ‘I’m talking to you.’
1070	‘And I heard you.’
1071	‘So? If you would enlighten us as to what you mean.’
1072	‘I’m saying something very simple. Crazy people commit more crimes. Fuckin Gabby over there in wherever’—he waved his plastic spork (this was only kind of utensil allowed) towards the hallway leading to the array of bedrooms, where Gabby Schleidenschtecker was resting. She had had her restraints momentarily removed so she could have breakfast while under the attention of Bobbert. ‘Gabby whatever her name is. She’s a case of wasted breath, if you get what I mean. Let me rephrase that: she’s the type of crazy that’s actual crazy.’
1073	‘Whatever did Gabby do to you.’
1074	‘I don’t know. But someone that fat shouldn’t be in a hospital taking up tax-payer dollars, ’s all I’m saying. Not a productive member of society. Soon as I’m out of here I plan to return to the Satan-hailed task of continuing the labor of mankind so as to bring about the kind of world where I can live without having to read about Social Justice Warriors on Facebook all day. Though my bet is that in an Elon Dick Sucking Utopia there’ll still be little social justice pricks who bitch because bitchiness is evidently a central tenet of human nature, its diseased prick. Myself, I’m not applying for welfare when I get out.’
1075	‘That’s because you’re healthy, and white enough, to get by way without welfare. And by the way, no one cares that you’re not applying for welfare. Some of us actually need it.’ 
1076	An old white man, so skinny that his cheeks were as if hollowed out, with his head completely bald thus revealing a reddish skin patched here and there by white spots like lichen covering a red rock, squeaked out, as if a whisper, ‘I.’ 
1077	‘Yeah what is it, Goddard,’ said Gilfoyle, his friend.
1078	‘I…’
1079	‘Spit it out man.’
1080	‘I don’t like that Gabby…’
1081	‘What the fuck did Gabby do to you,’ Soojin ruthlessly said to him. 
1082	‘You ain’t been here long enough…’
1083	‘I imagine it’s not easy being a plus-sized woman in this hospital,’ she seethed. 
1084	Goddard squeaked, ‘She was preventing us from having dinner…’
1085	‘Bitch fuckin wouldn’t let us sit down, started screaming whenever someone tried to eat,’ said Gilfoyle, who resented, most, that he was not allowed to bring his laptop into the hospital, since—and it was Gabby—some patients were paranoid about cameras, and his laptop, like all laptops after a certain generation, had webcams. Gilfoyle, ever paranoid about the government, was in the habit of taping the small flat circle of a camera over, which he said ‘should make your camera concern irrelevant,’ but this argument did not go far, and Gilfoyle deeply resented her and the system that took care of every minority’s concerns even at the cost of ‘The Unretarded.’ ‘It’s people like her that make your little kumbaya idea, that crazy people aren’t crazy, that makes it in my opinion a load of Horse, Shit. I had the misfortune of reading Brietbart, and—’ 
1086	‘Brietbart is a sociopathic un-empathetic white supremacist so-called web publication, masquerading as journalism—’
1087	‘These adjectives have no meaning when you string them together like that—’
1088	Goddard wheezed with small laughter. He hated Soojin, particularly her little lip ring. It was not befitting a woman, especially an Asian woman, who were supposed to be graceful and exotic. 
1089	‘It’s completely within their agenda to paint all mentally ill with the same brush, because that’s what people without empathy do,’ she said, pronouncing the last phrase as if in all-caps, ‘That’s What People Without Empathy Do,’ as if she were to accompany it with a series of snaps, to enhance her point with percussion because she was anxious as to whether or not it was actually a cogent point. 
1090	‘Your particular sexually-frustrated aggression from dating exclusively gay men,’ he began in the same monotone—she was infuriated—‘has led you to continually over-state matters and prescribe bad motives to powerful actors as if power itself were something to be hated, like a yeast infection.’ But some were angry with him, especially Mindy, a socially-minded young Indian woman. For Soojin had some fans among the hospital because she spoke eloquently and angrily for the sake of the mentally ill; anyone who was powerless was good in her eyes. Meanwhile, anyone in power was bad, and ‘just wanted to do this,’ or ‘just wanted to that.’ 
1091	‘Brietbart,’ she said, ignoring him, ‘has a hard-on for lies, and their favorite kind of lie is about people like us, to say we’re crazy and evil, while we’re just as human as anyone else, and people have to understand that. They have to understand that We—’ she clapped her hands, ‘That—we—are—human.’ 
1092	‘I’m sure that in social justice crowds you’re accustomed to getting snaps from queers—and by the way, I’m queer—but here you can see the rest of us probably just want to have breakfast.’
1093	‘Hey fuck you, Gilfoyle!’ Mindy said, again, in a high-pitched voice. ‘By the way,’ she turned and called out to Mikey, who was passing by, ‘Can we get like a space heater in here? I mean, how cold can it get?’
1094	‘If you didn’t feel it necessary to starve yourself to fit into those midget sized clothes,’ said Gilfoyle, ‘maybe you could spare us the extraordinary knife-like nature of your voice when you cry out from the fits of your ice age despair.’ 
1095	Goddard wheezed happily. 
1096	‘I bet you’re the type of contrarian who denies global warming,’ said Soojin. ‘Or, at least, has Major Questions. Just because there’s a consensus it means you want to stand out and be special.’ 
1097	‘On the contrary—hello, Mikey, no, all I’m doing is correcting Soojin’s misconception here—we’re not arguing, she is arguing, and I’m correcting her—in any case, on the contrary, I don’t deny global warming. I deny the intelligence of the people who go around screaming about it all day. But I’ve read enough to be quite sure that, unfortunately for those who continue to scream, they’re likely to get reasons to start screaming soon. Which means the world’s going to get more and more fuckin annoying. Praise Satan I’ll be dead by then.’
1098	Mikey had been conversing with Mindy, but turned to Gilfoyle and briefly said, ‘Hi Gilfoyle, I’m going to have to ask you to refrain from language like that in this hospital.’ 
1099	‘I do apologize. Do you mean the hail Satan or the death-wish?’
1100	‘I mean the…’ Mikey coughed a little, and scratched his head bashfully. ‘I mean the death-wish. Though I would also ask you not to offend people without cause.’ 
1101	‘He is the most, offensive person I have ever met.’
1102	‘Yeah,’ added Mindy. ‘He’s like, so wrong, and about so many things. And also why the hell are the socks you guys provide so thin? These are like elf socks. They have these nice grips at the bottom, which are kind of cool, but they’re like so bad, in so many ways.’ 
1103	‘These socks are kind of hogshit,’ Gilfoyle said, with as much agreement as was possible in his permanently disagreeable voice. ‘I think my toes are developing the frostbite of the proletariat.’
1104	‘I’m very sorry,’ said Mikey, scratching his neck and tilting his head so as not to meet their gaze; he was young and slim-fit. ‘We’re not used to this type of cold. The generator in the Behavioral Health Ward is really old, so some of the heat chutes leading from the main hospital aren’t quite acclimated to this type of weather.’
1105	As soon as Mikey left, Gilfoyle, unable to survive were he not to complete his remark on media, said, ‘To get back to what I was saying. You construct a monolithic character for media as an entity when in reality you’re just pissed at something some random publication said.’
1106	‘When did I say anything about all media?’
1107	‘You probably read the Huff Po and nothing else. You probably think The Times is…’
1108	‘The New York Times is exclusively pro-Israel and I’ll have no part in oppressing a free and independent nation-state.’ 
1109	‘My point exactly,’ said Gilfoyle, with deadbeat precision. ‘You make grand overstatements and prescribe ulterior motivations when in fact it’s just a bunch of monkeys, probably more intelligent than you, though not very intelligent at that, typing at typewriters. When in reality you’re actually mimicking the majority of what they say. Your entire philosophy, where you claim misrepresentation by the media as a form of oppression, buys into a rather Communist ideology, which is really a method a lá Salinsky, of attacking a powerful entity by positioning yourself as its victim. By the way, how are those Asian penises doing?’ 
1110	For she was enraged, most, at the suggestion that Asian men had smaller penises, which she took as an insult against her race, thereby actually re-enhancing the American obsession with the size of the penis. She had said, ‘I mean what do people mean by an average-sized penis? If you took the averages of all penile sizes, what does that even mean? Let’s say the average Asian penis is five inches. But that could be because they have a ton of really small penises, while having a ton of huge dongs.’
1111	Gilfoyle said, ‘Still a virgin in the Asian category? Have you ever considered that, if it’s not a contradiction, it’s at least extremely comical, that you stake your entire philosophy on the statistical length of the Asian penis while dating only sexually-liberated, spineless white men?’ 
1112	‘What does my personal dating life have anything to do with my desire for justice in the face of racial aggression, specifically to my heritage? There’s something gendered—very gendered—about assuming that women can’t have certain opinions just because they don’t act in a certain way.’ She added, ‘That’s not hypocrisy. I can hate anti-Asian racism while not being into Asians. That’s just my personal preference.’ 
1113	‘Then why are you an advocate for the Asian penis?’ 
1114	‘Because it’s fucking racist.’ 
1115	‘Why is it racist?’ The answer was actually that it insulted the masculinity of the Asian race, and yet she was not able to say aloud that masculinity was a thing worth defending, since to her masculinity was toxic. 
1116	‘Oh fuck you, oh fuck you Gilfoyle! Fuck you!’
1117	When she started raging, her bottom lip, and the ring that had been bored there, started twitching, which again enhanced her appearance of aggression, hardness, as if she were one who hung around rough motorcycle riders, though almost all the men she was friends with were gay, of whom she was deeply supportive. No gay man could do anything wrong. If a gay man was kicked out of his house, she was outraged for their sake, not even having to ask questions about the circumstances involved. But Gilfoyle, loving more his own intelligence than any ‘sob story about gay men getting beat by their dads,’ used his particular identity to torture her for he found her an almost unspeakable addition of irritation to his time in the hospital when he could not write code. 
1118	But for the same reason her militancy was hated by Gilfoyle, she was all the more admired by those she helped, while she was despised, for example, by the three young Asian male nurses, Luke, Mark, and Johns, who thought her ugly, annoying, and far too serious about herself, a typical Social Justice Warrior. They were ‘turned off’ by her; she was a ‘dick-limper 5000,’ as if she were a machine for destroying male arousal. She despised them in turn; they were the kind of ‘bros’ who made fun of other ‘bros’ for being ‘fags.’ Their indifference towards their fellow gay people, and their use of homophobic language, took part in the general oppression of homosexuals in America. She could hardly look at them without getting angry. 
1119	It was this ‘Bro-ness’ that prevented less masculine men from being comfortable in their skin. Men like them bullied the gay friends that she had. She did not appreciate, for example, the muscles of Luke Ding, because he was a ‘bro,’ and true men were ‘woke,’ politically decent, and sensitive. 
1120	‘I see nothing wrong or inaccurate in saying Asians have smaller penises, or that black people have lesser IQ’s, or that white people are shit at basketball, or that women are shorter,’ said Gilfoyle. 
1121	‘That’s so problematic.’ 
1122	‘What’s problematic is your over-use of the word problematic. You guys use it so much that it doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s like the sun of your solar system. You’re overly fond of the word ‘systemic,’ too. It’s the cocktail of social justice stupidity which they use to get drunk with at their slam poetry parties where they see which man is most like a lady and which lady is most like a man. I see even Caitlin Jenner is starting to use the word, which is really the end of things. ‘Oppression’ is always ‘systemic oppression,’ or ‘aggression’ is always ‘systemic aggression.’ The fuck even is a micro-aggression, that’s just part of life. And as for statistics, you’re quick to move against the ones you don’t like, but you have no problem with ‘99% of young black men in prison are the results of systemic police racism.’’ 
1123	‘Fuck you, Gilfoyle,’ said again the small Indian-American woman, Mindy. She had a sassy, princess’s voice, but because she was not that pretty, dressing a bit too ‘fancy’ and rather wide-bodied, Soojin did not resent her for being ‘basic.’ ‘Basic’ was what she thought of Jennifer Adams, the blonde mom who was there ‘only because she was depressed.’ Sitting at the breakfast table were also, though they were quiet because they were suffering that morning, David Foster Wallace, who was not then a famous writer, Andronica, a spiritual lady, and Joanna Bridges, a woman whose age and pallor made her resemble a ghost, but who had interested David Foster Wallace by saying that she had graduated from Princeton. Joanna had been looking out all day at the windows, hoping for snow. 
1124	‘So the MeToo women have joined forces,’ Gilfoyle was drolly observing. ‘Pretty soon I’ll have committed sexual assault by definition of having two women against me.’ 
1125	Joanna, unable to listen to them any longer, went up to ‘the counters.’ Her affect was quiet, serene, and distinctly intelligent. But she seemed to the young Asian men unsurpassably old, frighteningly so, though she could be no more than middle-aged. Her hair was all white. She had appeared as if a ghost, leaving her breakfast. She said, ‘I heard there was snow outside.’ 
1126	‘Um, yes,’ said Johns Wang. 
1127	‘Did you see it?’
1128	‘Yeah there was some snow.’
1129	‘What was it like?’
1130	‘It was, cold?’
1131	‘But did you feel it, the snow?’
1132	‘Is there something we can help you with?’
1133	‘The outside area. When will the construction tape come off, if you don’t mind me asking?’
1134	‘Let me ask Mikey for you. He’s the head nurse, you can probably ask him next time instead, we don’t really know anything.’ 
1135	‘Yeah,’ said Luke, in this instance on Johns’s side, ‘and we’re busy a lot.’ Mark had gone off elsewhere. 
1136	‘Is it true that you can see the snow through the windows? Everyone says they can see it. Have you read Flowers by Algernon? I mean, All Summer in a Day? It’s all winter in a day. I don’t want to be like Margot. I don’t. I want to see the snow. But everyone says they can see it through the window, even though the window is so thick and old…
1137
1138In the cold, cold parlor
1139my mother laid out Arthur
1140
1141But how could Arthur go,
1142clutching his tiny lily,
1143with his eyes shut up so tight
1144and the roads deep in snow? 
1145
1146‘They say they can see it, but I can’t seem to see it, and I want to touch it.’ 
1147	‘Hey Elma,’ said Johns Wang, ‘is the outside area going to open up today?’ 
1148	(dully), ‘Not sure.’ Elma was answering the phone; outside someone was calling in the new patient through the red telephone. 
1149	‘Hey Mikey,’ said Johns, catching the head nurse walking by; a young Asian man, noble as the other three were crude. ‘Joanna wants to know if the construction tape’s coming off of the outside area.’ 
1150	David Foster Wallace had come over, too.
1151	Mikey said, ‘Yeah, it’ll be off today. You can tell the rest of the patients that there’ll be outside time today.’ 
1152	‘Um, when do you think they’ll open it to the basketball courts?’ asked David. 
1153	‘The basketball courts won’t be open ever. They’re building a new hospital right now; in a year this place’ll be evacuated.’ 
1154	Elma was saying, ‘Patient number?’ 
1155	‘It’s hardly an outside area,’ said David, quietly. His unkempt hair matched his poorly shaven jaw; he was of the sort of young man whose ugliness insists on his having the redeeming quality of intelligence. But he spoke so sadly. ‘There’s barely space for the ping-pong table, and it’s broken.’ 
1156	‘It’ll be repaired soon, I promise.’ 
1157	‘You know, Mikey. I’m pretty something at tennis, and I’m not just tooting my own whistle here.’ 
1158	(gently), ‘I’m sure, David.’ 
1159	The outside area was so small you could hardly lead a group time of ten or so patients to do jumping jacks. But it was under construction, and frequently even that small space was closed off. It is frequently suffocating to be in a mental hospital. 
1160	Joanna said, ‘So we’ll be outside today?’
1161	‘Hopefully by after lunch,’ said Mikey. 
1162	‘And the ping-pong table will be repaired when?’
1163	‘I um. Don’t know about that.’
1164	‘Do you think it’ll still be snowing by the time, after lunch?’
1165	Johns said, looking up from his phone, ‘Google says it’ll be until late evening.’ 
1166	Joanna said, ‘Oh, good.’  (to herself), ‘The snow makes me want to kill myself less.’ 
1167	Mark had returned from his rounds. Bobbert patted him on the back; Gabby had had her breakfast.
1168	Dr. Matthews was still sitting in the common area, listening and watching. 
1169	Soojin was shouting, loudly, and could be heard all the way from the kitchen area. ‘I mean, where in the fuck! did you get that idea?’ 
1170	Mark said, ‘She’s been getting really annoying recently. I can’t wait till she leaves.’ His voice sounded as one having keen judgment, though it dealt deeply in his lack of empathy and general myopia. He began ‘SJW’s (social justice warriors) like Soojin—’ 
1171	‘I hate that bitch,’ interrupted Johns Wang. ‘She fuckin told me I was a skinny little shit when I told her that Trump wasn’t anti-Asian. Trump isn’t anti-Asian. He’s a businessman, and Asians are good businessmen.’
1172	‘You are a skinny little shit,’ said Luke. 
1173	‘Fuck Dick Limper 5000.’ 
1174	‘As I was saying,’ said Mark, indifferently. ‘She probably actually wants the kind of guys she says she hates. I know girls like this.’
1175	‘Yeah, me too,’ said Luke, eagerly, called to attention by a good memory. ‘I had this bitch hate me for an entire year when I was at UIUC, then she comes knocking on my door the last day of the year. Fuck, it was good. For all her butch-ness she could have fucking good hate sex. I pounded that bitch like shrimped fried rice, as says my niggah Afroman,’ said Luke, using the N-word freely like many of the Asian young men of his particular insensitive and easy-going ilk. ‘She didn’t call me back after that, though. Was pretty sad. Bitches like that hate men, but for some reason they always like taking it from behind.’ 
1176	They all laughed. Though they had many real female friendships, particularly Luke who, the little brother of two older sisters, was particularly sweet with women, becoming all of a sudden puppy-like and timid despite his tiger-like muscles, they nevertheless only spoke of women derogatorily when they were together. Perhaps the only true misogynist among them was Johns Wang, who had developed a general resentment against women because of a particularly mean girlfriend who had broken up with him, because he was rejected more often than not, like a toy unwanted in Toy Story who begins to plot evil against the other toys or to lead a war against the children altogether. Mark frequently hurt women’s feelings, but, in his majestic regal appearance, his excellent haircut like the mane of a lion, he was largely indifferent to it, though frequently he would find himself on Instagram, as the girls he dated like to pose with him and take pictures so as to show him off. There was a whole ‘coalition’ of girls who hated each other because of Mark. True it is, that the trait of indifference, when combined with a particular elegant haircut and height, is deeply attractive to some women, just as indifference, when combined with good makeup and a sense of being expensive, is extremely attractive to a certain type of man who, usually born poor, finds something sublime in dating a woman who is out of his class. Luke, who had grown up the puppy-dog of his older sisters (they had seen the growth of his muscle with immense amusement and would frequently tease him about it when they returned for the holidays), said, ‘It's a thing. SJW’s like being fucked on their all-fours.’ 
1177	‘Yeah, that’s so true,’ said Johns Wang. 
1178	‘What the fuck would you know about fucking SJW’s.’ 
1179	‘One of my hookups was into social justice. It was so annoying,’ said Johns Wang, parroting their arguments in a much less convincing, derivative fashion.  
1180	‘Oh yeah?’ asked Luke. 
1181	‘Yeah, she was always like, I’m racist or something.’
1182	Mark laughed with his nose, lightly. 
1183	‘What? What’s so funny?’
1184	Mark said, ‘What’s the chance that Johns’s actually fucked an SJW?’
1185	‘As much chance as him fucking anyone, the skinny little bitch.’  
1186	‘Anyway,’ Mark Chen said. ‘I had this one girl. She was really into, for some reason, John Brown...’
1187	Because Mark spoke so indifferently and slowly, Johns Wang, who in his nervousness was quite quick, would feel compelled to fill in the blanks for Mark. This deeply annoyed Mark, though Mark rarely showed it, thus allowing Johns to believe that Mark actually liked him simply because Mark treated him less derisively than Luke. Helpfully providing the fact, Johns said, ‘You mean the guy who went Rambo and killed a bunch of slave owners?’
1188	‘My boy’s like Leeroy Jenkins,’ said Luke, referencing a viral video where an idiot yells out his name before charging into the video game Warcraft and ruining his entire team’s prospects. 
1189	‘Yeah,’ said Johns, pleased that Luke had agreed with him. ‘He’s like Leeroy.’
1190	‘So,’ said Mark, slowly. ‘She was into John Brown, and had John Brown posters. One of them was like, Black violence is not violence. I mean, she was black, basically.’
1191	‘Dude you like black girls?’ said Johns.
1192	‘So,’ said Mark, ‘She was really into pretending that John Brown was fucking her. She asked me one night if she could call me John Brown. She just turns off the lights and asks. Would I mind if she called me Captain Brown and to give it to her from behind in the dark. I mean what the fuck. What a weirdo. I was already not really into her, so I told her No and just walked out.’
1193	‘Fucking savage...’ said Luke, remarking on the brutality of the diss. But he was perturbed that anyone would give up on sex. ‘Fucking hell, man. It’s pussy.’
1194	‘I don’t like it when black girls are obsessed with their fucking skin color. I mean honestly who gives a shit. You’re living in the past.’ 
1195	Johns Wang agreed and said, ‘They always gotta be so loud about it. It’s like, we don’t say anything about being Asian. But why are they always talking about slavery?’
1196	‘But dude,’ said Luke. ‘It’s pussy. Who cares what she calls you. That’s against my philosophy, man. Also, she probably felt like shit afterwards.’
1197	‘I thought it was stupid. Why should she call me a name that’s not mine?’
1198	‘You’ve never had a girl want to call you something?’
1199	‘No...I don’t like weird girls.’
1200	Luke said, ‘But c’mon. When they call you daddy?’ 
1201	Mark recoiled viscerally. He was speechless with disgust.
1202	‘I mean come on,’ Luke pleaded, himself no match for Mark’s indifference. ‘It’s kinda hot when they call you daddy. Or they call you names. It at least gets them excited.’ 
1203	Johns Wang observed that Luke was pleading, and agreed with Luke because he was more afraid of Luke than Mark (as Luke was louder). But given the chance, if Luke was on his knees, he would side with Mark to get back at Luke (for he resentfully and silently hated Luke), ‘Yeah, I’m into it. I like it when girls call you names and stuff. Then they’re more likely to give more in the other departments.’
1204	Luke ignored him, intrigued elsewhere. ‘Mark do you even enjoy sex?’
1205	Mark, as if curling his head a little, such that in his regal disdain and partial hatred he resembled Mr. Darcy, contemptuously said, ‘I mean I do it.’
1206	Luke was perturbed. ‘Dude are you...’
1207	‘No,’ said Mark. Johns was silent and in awe. ‘I’m not gay. But it’s just sex.’ 
1208	‘How could it be ‘just sex’?’ cried Luke. Behind his nondescript office garb, his tattoo which was visible on his collar seemed to flex a little with his animation; he was a rough ‘bro’ dressed daily in the sexless clothes of a nurse, which job he actually did not mind. He went on, his arms animated and gesturing, ‘It’s fucking sex, man. I mean what else is there?’
1209	Johns, who spent his spare time reading fantasy novels, did not offer his opinion that there were fantasy novels. 
1210	‘There’s nothing,’ said Mark. ‘There’s fucking nothing. It’s just sex.’
1211	‘But I mean what’s the point of girls if you don’t like fucking them...?’
1212	Mark, visibly annoyed, said, ‘Because they come up to you and it’s less annoying to fuck them than to tell them to fuck off all the time.’ 
1213	‘Girls, man!’ said Luke. ‘Girls! You’ve never gone crazy because of a girl?’
1214	‘No. Have you?’
1215	Nothing could quite stir Luke’s animation like the topic of sex.  
1216	‘The fuck you mean! Man I knew this girl when I was in high school, she was in my SAT prep class. I was probably as skinny as Johns Fucking Wang back then. She was always bending over in front of me to pick something up...Goddamn! I’d spend my entire time in that class working hard so that when it was time for her to get up and do her stretches, I could watch her with my free time. She’d touch her toes, one time she even dropped her pencil in front of me, in the chair in front of me, and moved the chair and picked up the pencil. She had this ass—’ Luke bit his own knuckle in the agonizing longing of his recollection. ‘This ass.’ And he brought his hands forward and, showing his two palms to the air, made the motion of groping buttocks, as a priest in a ritual invoking the deity colore deum, as how Buck Mulligan in the beginning of Ulysses lifts up his hands, holds the bowl of lather and the mirror atop it, and says ‘Intriobo ad altare Dei,’ mocking the sacrificial rites. 
1217	‘That ass still shows up in my dreams sometimes. Fucking cute, man, they’re like rabbits. They’re all nervous and stretchy and mysterious and jittery and then you get them warm and they’re all over you and they scream and then afterwards they’re all ashamed of it and stuff. Bro. It’s my favorite, I love talking with one of the shy girls after we’re done and going through what they did and what was scandalizing to them. It’s the breaking down of intimacy, of teaching the shy girls to like it. I’ll be like, You know—I don’t ever tell them they’re good at giving head, since that’s always demeaning even though you really mean it, cause some girls can get it that way (and the ones who like doing it you just hold them down and they blush)—I’ll be like, I didn’t know you could do that, that position where I was on your side and you were on your side, that was really fucking good. And she’ll be like, Oh, really? so softly.’ It was clear he was thinking of a particular girl. ‘That’s my favorite, talking about it afterwards, listening to what they found dirty, what they found hot. Because that’s the thing about girls, man. They’re so weird. They’re so different. Like, Bro. And so when you get inside their heads, when they finally have sex with you and tell what they thought about you this whole time, that they used to check you out when you were coming out of the lockers in 7th grade, man, there’s nothing like it. It’s all pink and good and pink. Girls are pink and good.’
1218	Another memory came to mind; he was lost in his own head. ‘It’s like playing some video game that your mom’s put on the shelf for the past year since you failed at Geometry. Then you get to play it, and it’s just as good as you thought it would be. And you get to move around in the video game, and explore, and learn what they think. That girl with the ass—I dated her later on. I loved going to that SAT prep class, I got a fuckin 2200 on my SAT’s, and considering that I’m considered by everyone as a dumb ass, that’s a fucking good score. Then there was this bitch, I mean this girl in my orchestra, who would just sit across from me in the front row, who played the violin. This cute Korean girl. Bro. She always wore these short shorts! Now she's ugly as fuck but Goddamn, those were the good days! I spent all my time playing cello and looking at her legs. Shit’s glorious, man. Then there was my ex—when she was in bed it was like holding onto some mobile fleshy thing of water that you could bite without hurting her (since she wanted to be bit!); she could turn in every shape, and I could lift her up whenever I wanted to and set her down and then go on top of her, or she’d be on top, and whatever. The way they get into their own heads and forget the whole world! Fucking hell! I should have never fucked Mara, goddamn it, I had a good thing. I mean you don’t appreciate any of this? The whole world’s full of girls, man. Bro, for real. Endless girls, and they’ve all got pussies, and tits, and legs, and arms, and hair, and these fuck-me eyes, and their biting their lips when they want you. That moment when they’ve gotten to that point where they say there’s this sort of twinge, or pluck, in the stomach, and something changes in their eyes like a water level reaching a certain threshold, and instead of being vulnerable, with those doe-eyes like they’re unsure if they’re doing something wrong (which is just another act like this one girl liked to put on,‘I probably shouldn’t do this…’), instead of being withheld and still unsure about how much they want to give you, if they’ll give a hand job on the first date just to express interest without setting things in stone (because you know, when girls have sex, they catch the feels so easy, and then they’re in trouble), but instead, they realize they want it, and they want it now. Watching for that change in the eyes. It’s that shit you masturbate to for the next year. Bro. It’s that kind of stuff that you store up like funds for a cold pussy-less winter. Transcendental moments, my man. Fuckin legendary. Everything about them changes color, and they go from cold fish, from hesitant blue, to this surging orange color and you just want to fucking seize them and pound them, I mean, yes, pound them! As soon as they want that abuse and that fucking, then all of a sudden it turns on. That’s what gets me, it’s that desire! Goddamn! Is there anything more fulfilling and more legendary than when a girl suddenly desires you or allows herself to desire you? It’s a mystery opening up in the face of the whole fuckin universe. The spreading of the legs at the gates of heaven. Man this shit’s what you work out for. All those reps, all those crunches. The infinite push-ups. It’s not for yourself. It’s for another person. It’s for that moment where everything changes inside her and her body seizes up and she says, ‘Put it in me...!’ The first time I heard that, I thought it was like what my church used to say, the Christ at the end of the heaven by the gates, or like when you break through a defender and have a direct drive to the rim, ‘Put it in me...!’ I watched porn for the good first fifteen years of my life, I mean. Not for all fifteen years, but you get what I mean. And when I saw titties for the first time, shit was heaven! It’s like my niggah Mac Miller says, When I’m in that pussy it’s what heaven’s like! I mean, what’s there in this world but good pussy? We work here in this day job, sitting here, looking at the crazies, entering shit into a computer. How do you live life if you don’t have some girl you’re texting, who sends you pics underneath the table?’
1219	He stopped, exhausted, unused to such spurts of expression. Johns Wang, a bit taken aback, looked on nervously but also with the feeling that maybe Luke could be put down for expressing himself so sincerely. 
1220	Mark said, ‘There’s nothing. Girls are just bitches.’ 
1221	‘Girls are just bitches? Girls are just bitches? Girls are fucking girls! Some of them even fuck girls, man! Man this time one time...’
1222	‘Luke, honestly, no one gives a shit,’ Mark said, with finality. A depression seized through Luke, but he withheld it and put on his lip the curl of indifferent irritation. 
1223	‘You sound kind of gay,’ said Johns Wang, stupidly. By ‘gay’ he meant, ‘you expressed yourself,’ and not, evidently, that Luke was homosexual, as evinced by his universal hymn to female genitalia. For to express yourself and to be a man at the same time, was as weird and unlikeable as being gay. It was for this reason that Soojin hated the way the ‘bros’ talked. Because they talked this way, because to reveal oneself was ‘gay,’ other men were held to the same standard, such that no one talked about anything they cared about; moreover, the word was in itself a general insult against people like her friends. 
1224	‘Oh fuck off, Johns Wang.’ 
1225	But Mark said, ‘I’m okay with the idea of liking sex with girls. I mean, no shit I get pleasure from it. But it’s just like an extended masturbation session. If I could get off without a girl, that’d be better for me. It’s just that there’s that thick feeling when you’re with a girl that’s different from just jacking off. But that’s just visuals. Or touch, or whatever. I’ve tried this Virtual Reality stuff. It’s basically the same thing, but you get bored of the VR eventually.’ Johns Wang was shocked that Mark had admitted to masturbating with a virtual reality headset; if he himself had made such an admission, he would be viciously ridiculed for it. Mark said, ‘Girls are just a way of getting yourself horny enough so you get off. Then they cling. It’s fucking gross the way they do it. Hella dishonest. They’ll make up all sorts of shit to make you come back. I mean, if fucking you was good, I’ll be back, you don’t have to make shit up. I had this one girl write a poem to me. It was really annoying.’
1226	‘What was the poem?’ Luke asked. 
1227	Mark laughed. ‘Want to see it?’ He showed them on his phone; he had texted a picture of it to another friend. He read it flatly, ‘This may be the first time we’ve met / but I’ve already let / freedom for my heart and desire / sex’s song and lyre.’ He said, ‘I mean what the fuck? Who the fuck writes a poem like that, and we’ve just met?’
1228	‘What happened after?’
1229	‘Well I mean I kept having sex with her. This girl could do weird tantric shit. She could deep throat, too, which I liked. And she had nice body proportions. But after awhile it got boring, so I stopped texting back.’ 
1230	‘I mean, what happened with the poem?’ said Luke. 
1231	‘The poem? She wrote another one, and another. Was kind of an artsy girl. My mom was into art and shit. It’s the most annoying thing, I mean, a plant’s just a plant, what does painting do to it? I told her to stop writing them. Then she stopped.’ 
1232	‘So there’s not a single girl you’ve actually liked?’
1233	‘No, there’ve been a few. The Chinese girls are kind of...They’re kind of lame, you know? But at least they dress well, cause they’re rich. It’s kind of cool to walk around with them. They take way too many photos, and have all these designer bags that they’re afraid of losing all the time; but at least it kind of makes sense when two attractive people walk around together. I don’t get it when a guy walks around with an ugly girl. I feel like it says something about the guy, that he’s not choosy or anything.’ He added, ‘I guess it’s about choice. If you’re with an ugly girl, it means you don’t really have any choices, and what’s the point if you can’t choose? The whole point of pretty girls is that they show people you have choices, that if you wanted to get out of where you were, you could get out. Not that you fucking work at mental hospital.’ 
1234	‘So what you’re saying,’ Luke said, ‘is that you date rich girls.’
1235	‘Yeah, they tend to be rich. I like eating at Alexander’s Steakhouse. I like nice wines. What’s fucking wrong about that,’ he said, suddenly aggressive. For he had accidentally touched a sore spot, which was that, having flunked UCLA, he had almost nothing in the way of higher career prospects, and was actually dependent on his dates buying him designer clothes. His coolness was in his unconcern; when they bought him clothes, after he had said they should do so, he barely thanked them. He preyed on a particular type of girl with low self-esteem, especially foreign girls. 
1236	In any case, Soojin, who hated them, was nevertheless deeply invested in the idea that Asian men had just as big penises as any other race.
1237	Pretty racist, sexist, vulgar, and altogether awful to each other as ‘the counters’ were, they were not hated in their particulars by Soojin, for she declined even to know them, but she despised them from afar simply because they represented a kind of general masculinity which she associated with racism, sexism, and insensitivity. In short, she treated them based off stereotypes, and in this case, the stereotype was wholly warranted. 
1238	Gilfoyle had gone away, to go stare at the television; he sat near Dr. Matthews without noticing him. Soojin turned to Arnold; they were friends. She had always noted that Arnold was gentle, and never had a girlfriend. Soojin, who liked him because she thought he was gay, and because he was very kind, pretty much assumed that he was repressed and not in conjunction with his desires, though Arnold had a deep preference for Asian girls (albeit Soojin was ‘not his type,’ as she was much older and not very cute). Meanwhile, the nurse Luke had taken a liking to him, because he was black. Luke was fond of rapping, and had enough sensitivity in him not to call Arnold ‘my niggah,’ but nevertheless assumed that Arnold liked rap. Luke had a deep knowledge of rap. But Arnold did not, for Arnold had no interest in music, seeing it as unpractical, a pursuit for ‘literature people and people who have too much time on their hands.’ Arnold did not care for, and had little by way of, cultural enrichment; a pragmatist through and through. He could not understand people like Luke. Luke had had every advantage, and yet all he wanted to do was work out and listen to rap. Granted, Luke seemed to him ‘not the sharpest tool in the box.’ But, because his Christianity instructed him to be kind and because he was preternaturally kind (which, in turn, had drawn him to certain Christian teachings), he was kind to Luke and tolerated Luke’s assumption that he liked rap, and even listened as Luke expounded on the profundity of certain lyrics, all the while avoiding the N-word. One thought had annoyed him deeply about Luke, though, but he repressed the annoyance. One day when Arnold had dressed in a hoodie and a beanie, Luke took upon himself to say, as a compliment, ‘You look hella black, man.’ So Arnold understood that Luke had difficulty viewing him outside the lens of his race. Personally, he thought that Luke was a poor excuse for an Asian.  
1239
1240
1241
1242CHAPTER FOUR
1243
1244Who is more estranged from life, a stranger to it and himself, strangled and suffocated by his detachment, than someone who constructs himself…who writes himself, and, in viewing others from afar, constructs of them theories by which to understand them? 
1245	Who is more lonely than one who writes himself and the world? 
1246	Yet who, constantly observing, is more capable of understanding life? Of helping others with their lives. It is those who view life from afar that can claim understanding of it, processing what comes to them. They learned to be social. A sociopathic mentality, worn like a garment, is assumed. Such a person creates, perhaps, personas with which to charm others, and uses these personas to test others to see what reactions come of them. 
1247	Because this kind of person has so little natural understanding of common manners and the relationships between human beings, incapable of understanding why people were cruel to him, or why people left him alone, or how he could be within a crowd and with friends and yet inexplicably be incapable of relating to them; just so, also hardwired to receive pleasure from seeing them pleased, such a person with inborn sociopathy is likely to be incredibly useful as a teacher; in short, incredibly useful to humankind. Even as he himself has no humanity in him; for, after all, he participates in the world to a secondary extent. 
1248	It’s as if he doesn’t really exist if he isn’t playing a character; having played so many characters, he doesn’t know where he is. What he is apart from the characters he creates, as where one might expect an essence or fragrance passing through the parallel moving lines of code, instead or of presence, is merely this sterile node.