1.
The clouds were leaden and low and pissing sharp, chill-the-bones autumn rain on the day that I snapped and let loose in a rage on Mr. Greenstone. I stumbled afterward through the inclement weather, afraid and unsure of what I had just done until I found the door to my apartment building and slipped inside, bolting the door behind me. I sank against the door, shivering and a dull pain thumped in my brain. I had an ice cream headache from the wind and rain and there was something else. Something deeper felt broken inside of my head. I hoped I wasn't having a stroke. The thought led me into the bathroom where I searched for some aspirin and set the water running for a shower. Then I lay down on the sofa, the wet clothes still gripping my skin, and turned on the television while I waited for the water to heat up.
Sarah found me there several hours later when she came home from work. My clothes were still on me, and my wool coat made the room smell vaguely of wet sheep. I was sobbing and watching an episode of The Three Stooges. I don't know why, I couldn't tell you why, but I found them unspeakably beautiful. These three clowns, these men who in their hijinx express with humor and grace all of the joys of fraternal love and the wrenching sorrow of unrequited adoration. In their cruelty, in their mugging expressions of frustration and pain it seemed that they were the very paragon of human alienation. I couldn't control my tears.
Sarah said, "Michael what's wrong? Why is the shower running? Why are you lying there in wet clothes?"
"I was fired today. I beat up Mr. Greenstone. Half to death, really, I put him in traction. I'll be lucky if they don't decide to press charges."
"That doesn't make any sense. Mr. Greenstone loved you. He was going to promote you. What possible reason could you have to attack him?"
"I don't know, Sarah. It all happened so quickly. One minute he was talking to me and before I knew it we were lying on the ground and there were people all around, trying to wrestle me off of him."
"I don't understand this, Michael," she said, "He must have done something."
"Nothing. He didn't do anything."
********************
Strangely, that day had started just like any other day. The sunrise cracked the night, spilling sunlight like egg-yolk across the cloudy sky. Hot air vents billowed steam from the tops of the buildings, still silhouetted black against orange when I woke up next to Sarah. I dragged myself out of the bed, turned off the alarm and went into the bathroom to run the shower and warm the water. Then I started a pot of coffee and checked my email, ran my hand through my hair a few times and went back to the bathroom to shower. I shaved, and combed, went through all of those morning rituals designed to maintain my appearance, an act which I think I must have done an awful lot back in the day. When I was all clean, and the razor had returned my face to a prepubescent smoothness, I walked, naked, back into the bedroom and put on a pair of cream colored slacks and a black shirt, or a pair of black slacks and a white shirt, or a pair of beige slacks and blue shirt, any of them accompanied with a neutrally colored beige tie. Beige is the Switzerland of colors, or so I'm told. I emerged from the room looking like a bonafide professional, and went into the kitchen to imbibe a cup of that dark god, Java. Thus attired like a man of business, I kissed Sarah goodbye and left for work. It was the same morning ritual I had followed for a little more than a year, ever since Mr. Greenstone had hired me for his firm.
On the way to the train, I passed the Mad Abbot, an elderly black man who spent every waking hour engaged in a non-stop rant about the coming apocalypse, the gist of which was that we were all soon to be consumed in the flames of sin and vice, and that this was unavoidable unless we followed his advice. Unfortunately he had not yet, in many months of preaching, come to the portion of his monologue where he doled out said advice. I stopped and listened to him for a minute.
"The fires are real, dear friend, they are real, praise God, and they will take you up and burn your flesh though it will not consume," he bellowed, brandishing a Bible as though it was a billy club, "You think you are safe, because you are a rich man, and you think you are entitled. But make no mistake, you too will find yourself taken into the flame, by the merciful judgement of the Lord, though you are the greatest man in the world…"
"Thanks!" I said, cheerfully cutting our conversation short.
Mr. Greenstone's firm was a group of consultants whose specialty was analyzing businesses for the purpose of eliminating any weak areas and helping them to run more efficiently. Or to put it more simply, Mr. Greenstone and everyone who worked for him made their money by putting people out of jobs. Everyone, of course, but myself; I never put anyone out of work. Where that was concerned, I was a lily innocent because I wasn't one of the consultants; I was a paper shuffler. People constantly came to my desk with stacks of papers, whole reams of them sometimes, which I would shuffle and reshuffle into neat little piles, and then staple and stack again into different piles. Then I would bring these piles to someone else’s desk—it often didn’t matter whose—and they would shuffle the papers again, and the whole process would begin anew. In theory, this process of shuffling and reshuffling involved statistical analysis and reorganization according to the results of the analysis, but in reality I just shuffled paper.
If it sounds like my job was dull, that's because it was. Inconceivably so. But it paid well, and there were decent benefits, which helped me to justify my part in a business that I ultimately found reprehensible. Also, I was good at my job. Despite the fact that I never really did anything, I was considered the best of my group. If not the best, then I was certainly among the elite, if there can really be such a thing as an elite group of paper shufflers. I was favored. In my year and a half at the office, I had already been given a raise, and I was moved to my own cubicle, one with a view of a window. And Mr. Greenstone knew me by name. He actually knew me by name. The old man hadn't bothered to learn any of the other paper shuffler's names but he had made a point to learn mine. I was his favorite. There was talk that he was planning on making me a consultant soon, which would have meant more money, better benefits, and an all around compromising of most of the guiding principles that I hold dear in life. Sarah had been very excited when I told her.
Mr. Greenstone liked to come to my desk and talk with me from time to time about nothing in particular--weather, sports, something he had seen on ABC the night before--and I would banter with him until he left. He was doing this very thing when I attacked him. It was after lunch and the pleasant weather from the morning had dissipated in a wind from the lake. I was sitting at my desk, organizing a monumental tower of papers according to some arbitrary measure of value or other, when Mr. Greenstone sidled up to me and started telling me about his daughter. She was a favorite subject of conversation. I already knew a lot about her. She was just a few years older than me, was a communications major at one of the universities with a minor in culinary arts, and had recently gotten braces. She was also single and according to Mr. Greenstone, I was exactly the type of guy she usually liked to date; although I think he only added this, because he was secretly hoping that if I fell for her and we married, she would finally move out of his house. He had introduced me to her once over lunch. She was nice--in the way that cucumber and mayonnaise sandwiches are nice. That is to say I had found her cool, and somewhat pleasant, but ultimately she was just another bland person who had little to say except the banal witticisms she could parrot from last night's sitcoms. The thought of a steady diet of her made me vaguely ill.
When he asked me what I thought of her later, I nearly told him that I was sorry, but I would not become the son he had always really wanted. Instead I told him she was nice. I left out the part about the cucumber sandwiches.
"Meg's finishing her degree this year," he said hopefully. "Yep. She's going to be quite a little catch. Better snatch her up before it's too late, there. Eh, Michael?"
"I don't know, Mr. Greenstone. I don't know if I'm the right guy for your little Meg." I used the word "little" loosely when applied to Meg.
"Nonsense, Michael. A good, hard working man like you is just the kind of person Maggie needs in her life. And Meg is quite the little cook, too. You look like you could use a good meal or two. A man works hard, he needs a good home cooked meal at the end of the day. My God, just look at this wall of papers, you've finished, Michael, it's enormous." He chuckled. "Are you a Chinaman?"
"No sir. Spanish-Jew straight down to my bones." I felt light-headed and woozy. The sound of blood started to fill my ears.
"You could have fooled me, Michael. Build yourself a great wall like this and then you tell me you aren't even Chinese. You're incredible."
"Just doing my job, Mr. Greenstone."
"I'd say you're doing a damn sight more than that, Michael." He picked up some papers from the stack and held them up for the rest of the paper shufflers to see. "All of you look at this," he said, "Let Michael, here be a model for you all. If all of you would work like him, then we'd have this little company of ours running like a well-oiled piston engine in no time, flat."
The dam broke somewhere inside of me in a wave of emotion that surged through me, leaving me dizzy. All of a sudden my head was abuzz with thoughts and feelings I couldn't explain. I looked at Mr. Greenstone, laughing next to my desk and staring down at me, that fatherly look of affection on his face, and I couldn't stand him. How dare he stand at my desk and single me out before my peers? How dare he make me out to be his pet, here in front of everyone else that I had to work with? And his laughter, his stupid, racist jokes about the Chinese. Did he have any sense of just how offensive he was? Did he know that Barney Chang, only a few desks down from me was Chinese, that he would hear Mr. Greenstone's little jokes and might have his feeling hurt? Obviously he knew and didn't care a lick about the people he offended. Mr. Greenstone was a stupid, insensitive rich man who didn't give two shits about anyone but himself and his fat, spoiled daughter.
I was shaking at my desk. My fists were clenched so hard that they had gone from looking like barber poles, all white and red to white and a candy grape purple. The blood roared like an ocean in my ears. I hated Mr. Greenstone. I understood it, now, like I understand a billboard. It was flashing in the front of my mind. I hated him, everything about him. I hated his pompous suit, his phony laughter, his asinine jokes. I hated his banter, his daughter, his fucking business. He was a blight and I wanted to bash his fucking face in. A vein was popping out of my head now; my face must have been scarlet. I felt as though my eyes would burst out of my skull. Big, burning droplets of sweat congregated on my forehead and began to stream down my face onto my chin where they dropped onto my desk.
"Jesus, Michael, you look terrible," Mr. Greenstone said, noticing my face for the first time, "Are you feeling okay?"
"Fuck you, old man," I said back, glowering at him.
Mr. Greenstone looked stunned. I think he believed the whole thing was some sort of ill-timed, tasteless joke, because he forced a smile onto his face, and then said, in very measured tones, "I beg your pardon, Michael?"
"You heard me," I said, "didn't you? Or is that cow-shit brain of yours leaking into your ears?"
“Michael, I think there’s been some mistake.” the old man stammered. He looked so betrayed, like a father disowned by his favorite son. His whole face sank. His eyes usually sparkling and cheerful darkened and clouded over. A crowd had gathered around the scene--as always happens when something disturbs the peace in an office--and all stared, wondering whether he would yell or weep. He seemed to be trying to decide it, himself. The moment was maudlin.
"Do you know fucking anything about people, you useless fuck?" I continued, my rampage gathering steam, "Don’t you realize I don’t fucking care about you, or your opinions, or anything you fucking have to say to me? You’re a boring old man with one foot in the grave who nobody fucking cares about. Nobody, Mr. Greenstone! Least of all me."
"Michael, you're not feeling well. I can see that. Go home. Please, Michael. Go home, get some sleep. When you feel better you can come back and I'll forget this ever happened."
“Oh my god! Are you still here, old man? Are you still talking, as though you have any right to speak with me? Get the fuck away from my desk, right now!"
"Michael, I don't know why you're so angry."
"You're a fucking thief," I said, "you don't do a goddamn thing but destroy people's lives. And you think that I should be with your daughter? You think that she's somehow good enough for me. Let me tell you something about her. She's not good enough to be slaughtered and hung as a fatted sow, let alone worthy of human companionship. You're daughter is disgusting. She's as interesting as a tube of biscuit dough. And that's doing a grave disservice to the biscuit dough."
"Michael," Mr. Greenstone warned.
"And you, Mr. Greenstone, are so proud of that fucking worthless girl that you somehow think she's good enough for me. You somehow think I should waste my time with that? I don't fucking think so, old man. There's about as much chance of me curling up next to a steaming pile of shit. You, for example."
"Michael, please--"
He didn't get to finish the sentence. I was on top of him pounding his face with my paperweight, screaming horribly.
********************
When I finished telling Sarah what happened, she stared at me, dumbfounded. I could see she was both terrified to be in the same room as me, and moved to pity me for the confusion I was in. The two thoughts pulled at her, manifesting in a dropped jaw that seemed to be grasping for words.
"This isn't good, Michael," she finally said.
"I know."
"This is very serious."
"Do you think I don't know that? What the hell? Do you think I'm an idiot?"
"I don't know what to think, Michael. I didn't think you were capable of something like this, certainly. This is so unbelievably bad, Michael. Mr. Greenstone could press charges. He could have you locked up, or at the very least he could have the both of us in debt to him for the rest of our lives."
"I know," I said, sobbing. Moe had just hit Curly on the head with a two by four. "My god. Such pain. Such exquisite expression. They're beautiful."
"What are you watching, Michael?" she asked, incredulously. I told her. She said, "My God, Michael, get a hold of yourself. It's the Three Stooges. Why are you crying?"
"Because they're angels. They're so beautiful, so elegant."
"Stop fucking around, Michael! You nearly killed a man. This is not a time for one of your jokes."
"I know what I did!" I shouted, then caught myself. I began again more softly, "I know what I did. But look at them. They're gorgeous."
"Michael, they aren't gorgeous. They're slapstick. It's gross, low humor. There's nothing elegant or beautiful about them. You need to pay attention."
"I know. I know, but they just seem so beautiful to me. It's awful. What the hell is wrong with me?"
Pity must have won out over fear. She sat down next to me and drew me to her tenderly. The embrace felt like a straight jacket. She said, "I don't know Michael. You're scared, I know. But we'll work through it. I know we will"
I struggled free and scrambled across the room toward the hallway. "How the hell do you know? What the hell do you know about anything? Did you do this? Is this something you're doing?"
"No, Michael," she said, following me to the doorway, "I haven't done anything."
"Then how do you know this will work out? You can't know. You say that Mr. Greenstone might punish us, but that's not true. You won't be punished. You won't be slammed into his debt for the rest of your life. It will only be me."
"I'm not going to leave you, Michael. We're going to work this through together. I promise you, we'll find a way to make you okay."
I grabbed her by the shoulders and pushed her up against the wall.
"You stupid bitch!" I screamed, "You think I want to just be okay? You don't fucking understand."
I slapped her hard, clean across the face and then ran and hid under the bed. I couldn’t see the shocked expression on her face, but I could imagine it easily enough. I just had to imagine her making the same face that Greeley had. I lay there shivering, terrified in a fetal position. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, just that I couldn’t control myself anymore. My thoughts shifted rapidly from one state to the next. My emotions had stopped making sense. One second as I laid there, I felt giddy and light, like I would burst into laughter at any moment, the next I wailed and gnashed, tearing at my hair. Eventually I passed into a fitful sleep, absorbed in feverish nightmares. I stayed for two days in that dusty womb. I would be there even now if I had not been aborted by the warm scent of baking.
It was the afternoon and I was still underneath the bed, my face cemented to the floor by a thin layer of drool. The dreams of the night before, the strange shadow lands my mind had wandered through still echoed in my head and I had no inclination to leave my hiding place and face the mad world outside. With everything my mind had done to me for the past two days, I was in no condition to deal with the noise and the rambling, incoherent movements of people. I was cold. Inside me I felt cold and wet still, as though the rain from that terrible day had seeped down into my marrow.
Still, I felt better. A little better, anyway, I no longer felt the emotions pulling me to and fro. I felt stable, at the very least. The smell of baking apples floated through the room, filling me up and driving that feeling of terrible cold at least partially away. It reminded me of that feeling of waking up early on a snowy day when I was a child and shoveling the driveway when I was a child. I used to love that--coming inside from the cold in the breaking dawn and drinking a cup of cocoa, knowing that a whole day was ahead of me to explore the newly blanketed world. The smells in the room reminded me of that and they drew me from under the bed, out into the apartment.
As I walked through the apartment, everything out of place to me, as though I were walking through someone else's home, or as though I were walking around in a dream. Here was our bathroom, and the white hutch that held all of our toiletries, but something I couldn't place was wrong. A pall had fallen over my things, an invisible film that made everything I owned not mine anymore. Did I buy that lamp? Was that really my grandmother's cedar chest over in the front hall? I knew they were but nothing felt right. It was almost unsurprising when I came into my living room and found a strange woman sitting in my favorite chair. A large screen and a metal box sat off in one corner along with some sort of equipment.
“Hello,” she said flatly as I poked my head into the room, “You must be Michael?”
“Yes? Who are you?”
She got to her feet and held her hand out to me. "I'm Dr. Murphy. Sarah asked me to come by and examine you today. I know her brother." She was very pale, with long charcoal brown hair pulled up into a bun. Her eyes were blue-grey with dark bags under them that made them seem thoughtful and unsleeping. I might have been very attracted to her under different circumstances.
I asked, "Where is Sarah, anyway?"
"She's making coffee. She should be here in a moment."
As if in response to my question, Sarah came down the hall and into the room, holding two cups of coffee and a slice of warm apple crumble. She gave a cup of coffee and the crumble to Dr. Murphy and sat down across the room from me. She eyed me worriedly the whole time.
"Michael, I'm glad you're awake. I was worried you weren't ever going to come out of that room." She made a face. "You look like shit."
I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror. She was right. My beard was ragged, and what's more I simply looked filthy. My hair was greasy and my skin had taken on a wan and waxy pallor like the skin of a new corpse. My lips were covered in what looked to be large black beetles, and what turned out to be scabs where they had cracked and bled. It was a ghoulish sight; my own face was strange and alien to me. It so disturbed me that I had to look away.
"Jesus," I said, "how long have I been under that bed?"
"Four days. I tried to move you out to the sofa a couple of days ago, but you put up such a fight that I decided to just leave you there."
"Sorry."
"No worries. Would you like some coffee?"
"No thanks. Sarah, what's going on here? Who is this doctor?"
"This is Rebecca. Don't you remember? I told you yesterday that she would be coming by to examine you."
"I don't remember that."
"No. I guess you wouldn't. But, anyway, that's who she is."
"Are you a psychologist?" I asked Dr. Murphy.
"No," she responded, "I'm a radiologist."
I laughed. "Then I don't you'll be able to help me. My bones are just fine. It's my mind that's getting soft. What I need is a shrink."
"Michael, Dr. Murphy just wants to take a few x-rays."
"But that's pointless. Sarah, I had a psychotic episode. How is a radiologist going to help me?"
"I probably won't be able to do anything for you directly," said Dr. Murphy, "You're right about that. But the x-rays will help us to rule out any possible abnormalities in the brain that might be causing this condition."
"Great! I might not be going crazy. I might just have a tumor. Well, that's a relief." I hoped I said it in a way, which conveyed that it was not, in fact, a relief.
Sarah said, "Please, Michael. She came all the way here, and she brought her equipment. We're trying to help you, but we won't be able to do anything if you don't cooperate."
I thought about it for a moment, then said, "Will I have to take my clothes off at all?"
"I don't see why you would."
"Good," I said, "I figure any really invasive or dangerous procedures would require me to take my clothes off."
"Rest assured, you can leave your clothes firmly on," said Dr. Murphy. A slight smile crossed her lips for a moment.
"That's good to hear. So what do you need to do?"
"Well, first I need to set up my equipment."
When it was set up, her equipment resembled a large television without any glass on the front. Vacuum tubes projected out from the sides and top, giving it the appearance of something from Frankenstein's laboratory in one of those old movies. A wire connected the box to a pair of cameras on the opposite side of the room, and a hand-held triggering mechanism. Situated between the box and the cameras was a large screen made of a stretched white cloth. Dr. Murphy explained that there was good reason why her equipment resembled a television. In principle, it wasn't much different. She told me that when she clicked the triggering mechanism, the vacuum tubes bombarded a metal plate with electrons, and the plate responded to the attack by producing x-rays. The screen in front of the box was treated with phosphors, which would light up when the x-rays hit them. If something got in the way of the x-rays--my skeleton, for example--it would cast a shadow that the camera would preserve through the magic of photography.
And now that the technical explanation is out of the way, I can tell you what happened.
After we set everything up, Dr. Murphy asked Sarah to leave the room for safety reasons and had me stand between the screen and the x-ray projector. Then she dimmed the lights and clicked the trigger and I unfolded before myself on the screen, devoid of skin. Well, not devoid, exactly. I still had skin, but it had become immaterial, diaphanous. My organs, pulsing inside of me were mere ghosts, clinging to my skeleton as they might, say, to a room or a graveyard. Only my bones seemed to have substance. Only they were real. But even so, they were just shadows, themselves. It was a ridiculous image, like something out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon. In another circumstance, I might have doubled over laughing at it. As it was, I amused myself by doing a little hambone dance and watching my skeleton mirror me, until Dr. Murphy told me, sharply, to stand still. She needed to focus the camera. So I stood still for her, and stared at my grim reflection, which stared morbidly back, while she focused and took our portrait.
********************
Over the next week, life was what it had been. There was a job interview. My prospective employer met me graciously, shook my hand, and told me that great opportunities awaited me. In response, I broke down, crumpled into a ball on the floor, clenching my fists and shrieking about my mother. In all, it was better than some of the other interviews, which often dissolved into near violent affairs after just a minute or two. After I had to be dragged, screaming and swearing, by security from my third building, I decided not to go out anymore. It wasn't safe out there, for me or for other people. Instead, I stayed home and watched the world outside from my windows.
I spent a lot of the time crumpled with regret for what I had done to Mr. Greenstone. Mr. Greenstone's family decided not to press charges, though their reasons are unknown to me. I imagine Mr. Greenstone would have done the same in their shoes. He really had loved me, had thought of me as a friend. But Mr. Greenstone wasn't the one making the decision. He was still in a coma in the hospital, able to breath on his own, but not conscious and not showing any signs of recovery. Maybe they were just waiting, to see what happened with him before they decided how best to deal with me. Truthfully, I couldn't have blamed them if they chose to hunt me down and let me wither away in shackles. I had betrayed Mr. Greenstone in a way that he couldn't have fathomed. Even I couldn't fathom it. I didn't love the man, but he wasn't a monster. He didn't deserve what I had done to him. I kept seeing the expression on his face: that pitiful confused frown, the chasm that appeared behind his eyes.
I spent whole days in my chair in front of the window, watching the sun cross the sky and going in circles in my head about what I'd done. When Sarah would come home, I'd leave my chair and go to hide in the bedroom. I couldn't stand to face her like this. Aside from the fact that I still looked like shit, every time I saw her, horrible thoughts filled my head. My thoughts when I was around her formed a picture show of ghastly images. We made love one night, and I told her I hated her over and over, softly, in rhythm with our movements. I told her gently and in great detail just how deeply I loathed everything about her. I meant every word I said, too. It was as though some invisible force had subtly twisted me to revile everything I had once loved. When I was around Sarah, it filled me with complete disgust. I could imagine wrapping my hands around her throat and strangling her until she fell limp to the floor. After days of wrestling with these thoughts, it was easier just not to see her.
It was a relief at the end of the week when Dr. Murphy called, and told us that she needed to see us in her office, as soon as possible.
The next day, Sarah and I went down to the hospital to see Dr. Murphy. She told us to have a seat, and then pulled out two sheets of dark plastic from a large manila envelope and slid one into place in an x-ray viewer. My skull appeared there, more or less the same as it had been in my living room, but with a dark cloudy spot on it, radiating out from the base of my skull. She slid the other x-ray into place and another skull appeared, without the dark nebula at its base.
"Michael, this is the skull x-ray of a normal person," Dr. Murphy said in that flat tone of hers, pointing to the second x-ray, "To your eyes, there's probably very little that distinguishes it from any other skull. When I look at it, I see a scar in the mandible, where the jaw was broken and fixed, and another in the nose. But overall, it's normal. This one, on the left, is yours. Do you see the difference?"
"Yeah." Sarah pointed toward the black patch, "What the hell is that?"
I said, "It looks like a lens flare or something."
"It's your soul," said Dr. Murphy.
When I was very young, shortly before my bar mitzvah, I asked rabbi Loebner, who was my rabbi at the time, where the soul was. He had looked at me, perplexed, for a long moment, and finally said that the soul lies in the heart, wherever that heart may be. He said that it exists where our courage exists, where our love exists, our sense of beauty, our joy. One strives, he said, to strengthen the soul through daily observation—through thought and study, through our hardships and through the genuine appreciation of all that is good in our lives—this act of strengthening is the point of life.
I carried this thought with me throughout my life. It led me to think of the soul, not as a physical thing, but an abstraction, a representation of all that is good and decent in mankind. Perhaps you, yourself, have thought of your soul in a similar fashion, as a metaphor, a glimmer of hope to carry with you in the dark places of your life. If you'd like, you're welcome to go on thinking that way. You'll be wrong, of course, but you're welcome to think that way.
The soul, it turns out, is very real. It lies inside of a small gland at the base of the skull, right where the medulla oblongata meets the neck. And that's not nearly the strangest thing Dr. Murphy told me.
"In normal people," she went on, "the soul is invisible; it doesn't even show up on x-rays. It's simply too small, and the glow it gives off is too weak to be perceptible. But your soul is inflamed. I should say, badly so. When that happens, the soul swells and starts to glow brighter. Now, a small inflammation isn't terrible. It can be a good stimulus for ideas, and often goes away after a short time. But with an inflammation this bad, there's a good chance the soul will rupture its barrier and spread into the cranium where it will begin to affect higher brain functions. The symptoms you've been having--loss of emotional control, the violent tendencies, the weeping and blackouts--all of these are characteristic of this disorder."
"This is a joke, right?" I said, "I mean, you're having fun with me, aren't you?"
"I wish I was."
"Good, because it isn't funny. It isn't funny at all."
"I know it isn't. Believe me. And it only gets worse. As far as we can see from the x-ray, if we don't take care of this in the next few days, the problem will grow beyond my ability to help you."
"So what do we do?" asked Sarah, "How can we stop the growth?"
"We can't. I'm afraid the only thing that we can do is remove the affected area."
I was dumbfounded, literally stuck dumb. I stammered, reaching for the words to begin a sentence.
Sarah put her around me and said, "I'm sorry. Did you just say you want to remove his soul?" which is more or less what I would have said, if I could have said anything.
"That's right. I know how it sounds, but it's the only reasonable choice."
"This is a reasonable choice?" I said, "You consider this a reasonable choice?"
"Mr. Silverman…Michael--"
"Medication! That's a reasonable choice. Put me on something to slow the growth and send me to a psychiatrist to learn to live with the disorder. That's a reasonable choice, Dr. Murphy, not taking my soul out."
"There are no drugs, Michael. There's nothing I can give you that will stop the growth and no amount of psychiatric help is going to help you to live with the disorder. If there was any other way, I would suggest it, but there isn't. Without an inspirectomy, your condition will continue to deteriorate and your life will never be normal again. This has to be done."
"How do I even know this is real? You're telling me that this is my soul and you want to remove it. How the hell am I supposed to believe that?"
"You don't have to if you don't want. If it makes it easier for you to think of this as just another type of brain disorder, then do that. But it is what it is, and unless you let us treat you, it won't get any better."
"I can't let you take my soul out."
"You need to ask yourself which is more important to you, Michael. Do you want your soul, or do you want your sanity and your relationships and your life?"
"I just want this to stop. I want to stop having nightmares whenever I close my eyes. I want to stop wanting to hurt people and to stop crying all the time."
"Then you'll let me help you?"
"I guess I have no choice."
"Good. We should make an appointment for you to get the procedure done as soon as possible." She looked at me then with a well-trained look of sincerity, "Don't worry, Michael. Life will go back to normal. You'll see."
Two days and seventeen stitches later, I sat in the office of one of the hospital counselors, listening to a chubby little man give me the same talk that everyone had given me since the day I agreed to the procedure. His hands were animated in a way that suggested he might have once been a Disney spokesman.
"A little depression after the surgery will be perfectly natural, Mr. Silverman. The important thing is to remember that your feelings are perfectly okay and you are not a freak. If you need some help, that's perfectly fine. That's what our groups are for. We'll give you some brochures for them before you go. Remember, you are not alone."
The stitches along the back of my neck stung like an army of mosquitoes had recently finished practicing maneuvers on them. The chubby little man stood there in front of me, telling me over and over about my coming life, about how normal it would be. I didn't want to hear it anymore. All I wanted was to go home, get some rest and get on with this perfectly normal life I was supposed to have now. Plus I had heard this speech no less than a dozen time already—Dr. Murphy, the surgeons, Sarah, anyone who thought I might listen had delivered it. And now I was hearing it again from this fat little man, who resembled not so much a psychologist as a cartoon bear cub and who used the word "perfectly" so often that it took on an ominous tone. Luckily, he finished the song and dance quickly, and handing me a big pile of brochures, released me to the world.
Dr. Murphy came up to me while Sarah and I were checking me out. She handed me a small molasses-colored bottle with a stopper in the top. "A souvenir," she said, smiling somewhat unconvincingly.
I thanked her and held up the bottle. Inside, a tiny light floated around in a fluid of some kind. It glittered and shone, a little star alone in a winter night sky. I thought it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen.
"What is it?" I asked, somewhat hypnotized by the bottle.
"It's your soul," she said.
