Stories I Tell

Birds and Water

2008-03-09T13:11:00.000-07:00

The package looked smaller once it arrived than Mr. Shimabukuro had expected. He had expected it to tower above him, but it was not even up to his knees, and it was compacted into a space no larger than his welcome mat. One hundred fifty bottles of Suntory mineral water, shipped on order of his client, by plane from Osaka to the UPS delivery router in Pittsburgh, and then overland for a day and a half to Philadelphia, finally reaching its destination on his front stoop, where it sat now. It defied his perception to look at it.

The individual bottles shone like jewels in the midmorning sun. They perspired, still cold from the freezer truck, and the sweat that slid from them darkened the cardboard that encased the tops and bottoms of each bottle and fogged the shrink wrap around them.

Mr. Shimabukuro opened his front door and carried the small case inside, setting it down on his kitchen floor. He opened his kitchen drawer and found a scissors, then cut away the plastic and carefully lifted away the cardboard. Mr. Shimabukuro clasped his hands together with delight. Perched atop each bottle was a bird, a whole aviary of tiny plastic figurines, each one of a different species. A toucan. A lark. A sparrow. A cormorant. A loon. An emperor penguin. A Haast’s eagle. And one that drew his sight from the rest, a strange and whimsical creature, not quite bird, not quite elephant, which Mr. Shimabukuro found gaudy and wrong.

He plucked each bird from the top of its bottle, careful not to break the base as it pulled away from the adhesive keeping it in place. He set the birds on his kitchen table, arranging each by type—the birds of prey, the winter birds, the seed eaters, the aquatics. The elephant bird sat on its own at the far end of the table, where it could not taint, nor perplex the other birds.

When each bottle was birdless, Mr. Shimabukuro stood before them, bowed deeply, and said, “Hello, fine birds. Your journey has been long and fraught with peril. No doubt you are tired, no doubt hungry. I apologize that I am not a king, nor a man of great means as would befit your august body; however, I can provide you each with a perch, either with those of your kind or apart. Whichever suits your desires best, let me know. In writing would be best, as I frequently forget what is said to me. I have some business to attend to for the afternoon, but for now, please feel free to mingle amongst yourselves, or not, as you wish.”

When he was confident all the magnificent birds of the earth felt welcome in his home, Mr. Shimabukuro picked the elephant bird up from the table and, holding it in his palm, close to his face, reprimanded it.

“What in the name of god do you think you are doing, Mr. Elephant Bird?” said Mr. Shimabukuro, “You do not belong here, among the many great birds of nature. You are an abomination. I invite you to think upon your shame as you make your way to the trash heap that is your rightful home.”

With that, Mr. Shimabukuro threw the elephant bird into the trash and then shoved it down deep among the coffee grounds, the eggshells, the wads of used paper towel.

Mr. Shimabukuro replaced the cardboard over the icy-cold bottles and masked the broken shrinkwrap with Saran. He carried the package out to his car, where he laid it in his trunk, and climbed into the driver’s seat. He sat for a moment, the sunlight pouring onto him through the windshield, and felt, for the moment, expansive. He breathed in deep, thinking of the birds in his kitchen, the abomination he had disposed of, the bottles in his trunk, still cold as ice, still sweating through their cardboard and fogging their shrinkwrap. He had done well, Mr. Shimabukuro thought. This venture would lead to another, which would lead to another, and so forth. Soon he would have success, after all these years, soon he would be a man to reckon with.

He turned the key in the ignition and drove across town to the home of his client, a factory worker named Edgar, who ordered the bottles through his friend Isao, who, in turn, was engaged in an on-again off-again relationship with Daina, the daughter of Mr. Shimabukuro. Mr. Shimabukuro had not asked Isao why Edgar wanted so much water. Such questions were bad for business. He had only called the bottling plant, where he had friends, and asked them what they could sell him wholesale.

Edgar answered his door, and Mr. Shimabukuro held out the case of water to him. The package was smaller than Edgar had expected. He thought it would be delivered on a dolly, pushed around by a large man with large muscles and a bad odor. It had not occurred to him it might be presented to him by hand by an elderly Japanese man. For a moment, he was thrown.

Finally, Edgar said, “Come in, Mr. Shimabukuro,” and stepped aside to let the old man through. Edgar told Mr. Shimabukuro to set the box down anywhere he pleased, and then ran to the kitchen for a scissors.

“Would you care for some water?” Edgar joked, as he slid the scissors down along the side of the case.

Mr. Shimabukuro laughed politely and shook his head. He waited while Edgar pulled the plastic wrap free and removed the cardboard top. Edgar looked up at Mr. Shimabukuro and frowned.

“Where are the birds?” Edgar asked.

Mr. Shimabukuro started and shuffled in place for a moment.

“Birds?” he finally asked.

“Each bottle comes with a little plastic bird,” Edgar said, “It’s a promotional thing the company’s doing. They’re collectible.”

“There were no birds,” said Mr. Shimabukuro. “Only bottles of water.”

“Well, shit,” said Edgar, “I wish I’d known that before you came all the way out here. I only wanted them for the birds. My wife’s a collector.”

“No birds,” said Mr. Shimabukuro again, “just water.”

“Yeah,” said Edgar. “Well, what did we agree on?”

“Three hundred,” said Mr. Shimabukuro.

Edgar winced and ran his hand through his hair.

“Tell you what,” he said, “since there aren’t any birds, how about I give you one eighty and we call it even.”

“We agreed on three hundred,” Mr. Shimabukuro said.

“Well yeah,” said Edgar, “but I thought I was getting a bunch of birds with this. I can’t pay you three hundred bucks for a few bottles of water. I’ll give you one eighty for your effort and the shipping and everything, but that’s the highest I can go.”

Mr. Shimabukuro frowned. After shipping costs, one eighty was just barely a profit. He would have enough from this deal to replace the gas in his car, but not much more. Finally, he nodded and took Edgar’s money. He left Edgar’s home and drove across the city feeling deeply insulted.

That night, Edgar lay in bed with his wife, staring at the ceiling. The neon sign of a bar buzzed on and off in the street below. Edgar climbed out of bed and walked naked to the kitchen. The bottles still sat on their kitchen floor, ice cold refreshing, still sweating in the humid summer air. Edgar examined them briefly and considered sending them back to Osaka. The fact was, his wife had only wanted them for the birds. She collected them, the figurines, and was just shy of the complete collection. She had the toucan. The lark. The sparrow. The cormorant. The loon. The emperor penguin. The Haast’s eagle. But the one she really wanted, the one she was missing, was the Zo-Chou, a whimsical little creature that was not quite bird, not quite elephant, but was beloved and very much desired among collectors. Three hundred would have been nothing to pay, had the case come with one of them. Without, it was just a case of very expensive mineral water. Perhaps if they stretched it out, thought Edgar, it would make up for the costs.

Edgar poured himself a glass of tap water, which was tepid and full of minerals. Edgar could hear his wife, one room away, grinding her teeth, which she did when she was angry. Or upset. Or sleeping soundly. He sipped his water and stood before the window, when he heard a sound from outside. Something like a moth caught between the window pane and the blinds. Edgar reached between the Venetian slats for the latch that held the window closed and pulled it open.

Later, after the sun had risen, Edgar would try his best to explain the situation to his wife. To help her understand the tiny beak marks all over his body, the many puncture wounds leaking blood all over their kitchen floor, the hundreds of bottles of water—still cold, still sweating against their cardboard container and their shrinkwrap. For now, there was only the cool, damp rush of night air, and the sound of fluttering wings—hundreds of them, he thought—so light and distant.

Cyril Shot: Private Eyes

2008-03-09T13:07:00.000-07:00

The glare off the salt flats was unbelievable. I’d seen the flats before, a couple of years back, and they were gorgeous then, but that was at sunset. At noon, the sun turned all those little crystals into a blinding expanse of white and the wind kicked the salt dust into the air, where it hung around as a thin haze that flavored every breath like french fries.

I adjusted my eyes to compensate for the glare, and a couple of figures snapped into focus about a hundred meters off. A man and a woman, lean like lamb jerky, and clothed in loose-fitting linens that barely covered them. Hippies. There were a lot of them living out on the flats those days, in farm communes that scraped and cultivated the crystals for sale on the mainland. I figured these two probably came from the farm that called in the report I was there to investigate.

The man held up his hand to signal a greeting.

“Hey brother,” he called out, “you from the agency?”

“Yeah,” I said, “you the one who found the ship?”

“That’s me.”

When he was close enough, he held out his hand for a shake.

“Jack Legba.”

His skin was dark tan and covered in fine white powder and his palms were rough and cracked, a side effect of living on the flats. The salt in the air literally sucks the moisture through your pores. You can die from dehydration without breaking a sweat there, and even if you live, your skin has to be extremely tough to avoid cracking. Folks who live on the flats long enough say they get used to the feeling, but I couldn’t see how.

“I’m Cyril Shot,” I said, taking his hand. “I’m with the AIEO.”

“Good to meet you, Cyrilshot,” Jack said, like the two names were one word, “This is Melanie. We run the commune together.”

“You have a last name?” I asked her.

“Nope,” she said. She smirked like she’d said something really clever. Her skin was soft-looking and pale, made paler by the thin layer of salt covering her, and it was pink from sunburn. I figured she was new to the salt flats or else she didn’t go outside much. In some of the newer compounds, they build their homes underground, and only the people directly handling the salt crop ever go to the surface.

“Sorry to call you out here this time of day,” he said, “Truth be told, I thought it would take you longer to get here than it did. I was surprised the agency was able to send you so quickly. I figured you guys would be swamped these days.”

I nodded. The Agency for the Investigation of Extrastellar Objects had been overloaded in the last few weeks with false reports. It was like this every year during the summer meteor showers. Folks would see a cluster of shooting stars and panic, figuring it was the first bombardment of another invasion. The full-time agents would get all booked up assuring citizens the aliens weren’t coming back, and the agency would start calling in freelancers like me to keep the works from gumming up.

“So where’s the ship?” I said, “I want to get away from these flats before my internals start to bake.”

“Sure, sure,” Jack said, “right this way, sir.”

He waved his palm over his shoulder, pivoting in place, and started back the way he came. We walked across the flats until I lost track of where we were and what time it was. The landscape stretched to infinity in all directions in a way that really upset my sense of perspective. I felt like I was looking at the place through a fish-eye lens and all those distant lines had started to converge on me. The heat, too, was something else. Even in the visible spectrum, I could see it rising in waves from the cracked ground. In infrared, the air around me would be a dazzling display of technicolor yellows and oranges. No wonder this area drew so many hippies, I thought. Between the salt farms and the trips they could get with a right pair of IR goggles and couple of toad cigarettes, the place was perfect for them.

I was dehydrated when we got to the ship, and cursed myself for forgetting to bring a canteen or at least a couple of oxy-hydro poppers to carry me over. I kept running my tongue back and forth over the roof of my mouth, and I swear I could hear the rasping sound every time. It was a lucky thing I had work to pay attention to, or I might have gone nuts.

When we got to the ship, Jack introduced it to me with the same flourishing gesture he had used to get me to follow him. Before I adjusted my eyes for deep-space investigation, I gave the ship a good once over in the visible spectrum. It was sunk deep into the salt, with a drag path that extended away from me maybe two miles. It was a sleek thing, shiny black and metallic with several window panels on the front. I guessed the hull was made from carbon polymers, but couldn’t be sure until I looked at it in UV. Carbon polymers burn like Christmas trees in June when you look at them in UV.

Outside of all that, my first thought was that it was smaller than I expected, a ship meant for one person. Maybe two. And the thing had wings.

“This ship is meant for a landing party,” I said.

“What makes you say that?” said Jack.

“Spaceships don’t need wings,” I said, turning to Jack. “There’s no atmosphere in space, so wings would be useless. They’d just amount to extra weight on takeoff.”

“They’ve got wings in all the films,” Melanie said.

“That’s because most people can’t wrap their minds around the idea of something flying unless it looks like an airplane,” I said.

“So they’re landing, eh?” asked Jack, “Colonizing?”

I shook my head. That would be a break in routine for the aliens. Last time they attacked us, they didn’t bother to land and send in ground troops. Why would they? If you have the technology to traverse a galaxy at speeds faster than the laws of physics allow, you know enough to fight your wars from the air. The first bombardment came a month before we even knew they were there. They just up and flung an asteroid at us from our own solar system. It seemed unlike them to jump the gun with a landing party, now that we’d had some time to repopulate.

“Mind if I smoke?” Jack said, “Will that interfere with anything you’re doing?”

“It won’t interfere,” I said, “But you should know my implants broadcast everything I see to the BATF. Anything I see, they see. Might want to keep that in mind.”

The agency liked to call us their private eyes, but I always thought that term needed to be updated. My eyes are anything but private. There was a time when an agency freelancer could get by with a good pair of spectra-goggles, but when The Human Asexual Reproduction Front detonated those x-ray bombs outside of the U.N. a couple of years back, the agency thought it a good time to upgrade their requirements. Since then, the agency doesn’t let anyone even walk through their front door unless they have a pair of full-spectrum ocular scanners implanted in their eyes. Of course, legally, all ocular scanners must be registered with the Feds and logged into the BATF mainframe at all times. When I was awake. When I was asleep. They saw what I saw, even when what I saw was my dreams.

“No worries,” Jack said, “I don’t have anything illegal. Just a little tobacco and powdered toad. We make these ourselves. Cure the rolling papers in rum.”

I nodded. Jack lit his cigarette and offered me a drag. I declined, and he passed it to Melanie while I turned back to the ship. I blinked and switched into low end of the spectrum, down past the reds into wavelengths so long you can measure them on a school ruler. This was one of my favorite wavelengths to look at. Everything in the entire world is dark at these wavelengths, but when you look at the sky, it glows from the background radiation that fills the entire universe. Anything that comes to earth from space has a similar glow to it for the first few days. The ship was invisible in this spectrum, which meant it hadn’t spent any time in deep space recently.

I flipped back into the visible spectrum for a moment. The hippies were lying on the ground with their heads on each other’s shoulders. They were passing the toad cigarette back and forth and humming in a low tone to each other.

“When did you find this ship?” I asked.

“Yesterday,” Melanie said, “It fell from the sky—whoosh—nearly burned up this place.”

“It was a sign,” Jack said, “It was a fire in a scorched land, but it brought the rain, get it?”

I sighed and leaned back against the ship. With the toad taking effect on them, Jack and Melanie would be useless for answering questions.

“There are a million of me, Cyrilshot,” Jack said, “A million of me, but how many of you. How many? Just one, but give me ten hands and I’ll let the question feel itself.”

The ship was invisible at the low end of the spectrum, so I shifted into the UV. The hull wasn’t carbon polymers. It wasn’t anything I had seen before. It was the same color as the ground around it, but it was clear and glassy under the UV, and it shone with a dull light from somewhere inside of it. For a second, I thought it might be made of ice, but then I remembered the heat around me.

Suddenly, I realized what I was looking at. It was salt. The same chemical composition as the salt around me, but the crystal structure was strange. It was like they had coaxed the molecules to rearrange themselves into the shape of a spacecraft. Then there was the light inside of it. That was at a higher spectrum. I clicked forward into the x-rays and suddenly everything went black. I was dizzy for a moment, then I felt the back my head striking against a hard surface. I smelled salt in my nose, and a minute later, blood.

“Shit, shit, shit!” I shouted. With nothing to echo against for a hundred miles in any direction, the words died in the air.

“There are a million of me, Cyrilshot. A million of me and a million of Melanie.”

“Shut the fuck up, Jack,” I said.

I shifted from spectrum to spectrum, searching for one that I could see in. The blues were completely shot, and nothing in the visible spectrum was registering. I couldn’t believe I was stupid enough to fall for it. It was the reason the agency gave me these eyes in the first place. They put a god damn x-ray bomb inside of a ship made of salt and set the damn thing off. The salt would bend the light into the UV, which would leave it harmless to anyone living on the flats, but if anyone was dumb enough to look right at the thing in the high end of the spectrum, it would short out their eyes like they had stared into the sun.

Finally, I came into the reds and I could see again. IR was useless—there was too much heat in the air to make any one object out against another—but in the bottom end, in the color that belonged only to the universe, I could see again. I was staring at the sky, and the silhouette of the ship was blocking half my view. It really was a remarkable thing, that ship. I had to hand it to them, they’d taken salt farming to a new level.

Behind my head, I heard footsteps crunching in the salt, and soon the silhouette of a man blocked out the sky.

“Don’t feel bad about this, Cyrilshot,” I heard Jack say, “there are a million of me. We’d have gotten the drop on you sooner or later. If not with this trap, then with another.”

“The BATF has all of my visual records. They’re going to know in an instant it was you who killed me.”

“It doesn’t matter. By the time they sort through the records, you’ll have served your purpose.”

“Fill me in, Jack, what purpose could this possibly serve?”

“No,” he said, his voice suddenly grave, “Sorry Cyrilshot, but no. Our plans are our own.”

I didn’t see the knife that he stabbed me with. Just a pointy shadow against the even shine of starlight. It hurt like a knife, though, that was for damn sure. I had to give them credit for the sheer inanity of their plan. The Human Asexual Reproduction Front had been fighting for years for legitimacy without any luck. When they killed me, word would reach the press that aliens have not only landed, but killed an agent from the AIEO. Earth would panic and suddenly people would demand we bring our numbers back up to where they had been before the first invasion. The HARF would step in and offer a quick solution to the problem—they might even be able to provide an army, so we don’t suffer too many losses in the air.”

“Just so you don’t feel entirely defeated,” Jack said, “I’m going to make you a promise. After we kill you, I’m going to take a tissue sample from you, and that, my friend, will be the basis of a whole new generation of Cyrilshots. Can you dig?”

I nodded. I could dig. It didn’t matter, anyway. Not anymore. I was blind and bleeding in the middle of the salt flats, miles from where anyone could have helped me. There was nothing left for me to do but lie back and enjoy the salt breeze and the dim red sky above me.

2008-02-19T18:44:00.000-08:00

He said it came to him as an epiphany. Like something that would happen to a saint, I thought, but that’s not how my father put it. He didn’t believe in saints. That was the epiphany he had, one day while sitting in church, that he didn’t believe any of it. Not the prayers or the rites or the big book or the tithing or the homilies or the Nicean Creed or the fellowship. He had been going to church for forty years, and it was just on that day it came to him. After that, he stayed in on Sundays while my mother and I went off to church. I wondered why mom hadn't stopped going, and why I still had to go. I definitely didn't believe any of. I knew a tall tale when I heard one. I wondered if it was like believing in Santa Claus. You just get to a certain age and you realize it’s not true anymore.

2008-02-19T14:46:00.001-08:00

The first night my mother worked in the ER, the ambulance brought in a little girl who was unconscious and suffering from a bad concussion. Mom said she was maybe six or seven years old. The girl’s arm and face were broken, and she was bleeding from her vagina. People found her like that on the side of a road, where she had been dumped and left for dead. Social Services thought maybe the parents—there were scars on her where she had been burned before and places she had been cut—but it would be difficult to prove unless the girl talked, and even then. The girl made it through the night and her parents came for her the next day. Mom said the girl cried like nothing else when they took her out of the hospital. She stayed on at the hospital for ten years after that, my mother, and she saw a lot of bad shit. Probably worse than what happened to that girl, but she never talked about it. She just tucked it away into some pocket in her mind we never got to see. The only one she mentioned was the girl. I don’t think she ever got over that. It was too much for my mom to take on her first night. It took something from her.

2008-02-19T13:59:00.001-08:00

There is one, I have seen it, of you dancing in a ballerina's uniform. The photograph is still, but you are somehow still in motion, and you are graceful and light as air.

2008-02-19T13:56:00.001-08:00

I know that I was conceived one night on a hilltop in Cinque Terra, while my parents were camping on their honeymoon. They mercifully left out the details of the actual conception, but they told me that the next morning, my father’s hair was full of dew and the sunrise was something spectacular to behold. They took it as a sign something special had happened the night before.

2008-02-19T13:53:00.001-08:00

Per istam sanctam unctionem et suam piissimam misericordiam adiuvet te dominus gratia spiritus sancti, ut a peccatis liberatum te salvet atque propitius alleviet.

2008-02-19T13:52:00.001-08:00

Dad went to Catholic school for the first eighteen years of his life, and then went to a Jesuit college for the next four. Even though he didn’t believe in any of it by the time I was born, dad still said it was the best education he ever could have had. The brothers were excellent teachers, and he learned a kind of discipline that he never could have gained, had he not been so rigorously taught from a young age. Also, he learned Latin, which helped him later when he was learning Italian for his honeymoon.

2008-02-19T13:49:00.000-08:00

Mom told the story of how she and dad met like this:

“Your dad was casting a variety show for his high school, which was the boys school a town over from mine, and he needed someone to distract the audience by screaming. That’s all he needed, just someone to run down the aisle screaming, so that the audience would turn their heads at the right moment for them to pull of some magic trick or whatever. Anyway, as it happened, he walked by me and heard me screaming, so he cast me in the show. That’s how we met.”

Why were you screaming, mom?

“Oh, I don’t know. Probably someone was tickling me. One of my friends, maybe. I can't remember.”

When she’d tell me that story, I would tell her I never knew she was into performing. She’d say, “Oh, I wasn’t. I just screamed the one time,” but that’s a lie. I’ve seen the boxes of pictures, and I know you were up on that stage more than once.

2008-02-19T13:26:00.001-08:00

Once, when I was sixteen—funny that I remember this above so many other things—dad came home early on a day when I’d brought a girl home with me. He walked through the front door and right into the living room, where she and I were basically naked on the sofa. I wasn’t expecting him to be home. When he was employed, he was a photo stripper, making plates out of computer-generated photographs for a print shop on the south side. He worked long hours—longer even than mom—and I just wasn’t expecting him to be home. He told the girl—Amy something—to get her clothes back on, and he told me to wait where I was, but didn’t specify if I could get dressed. When Amy was gone, he walked into the kitchen, popped the cork on a bottle of wine, and spent the rest of the afternoon draining and refilling his glass.

2008-02-19T13:07:00.001-08:00

Allegedly, the meal that Cousin Albert ate on the evening before he died, a fact that I never thought spoke well of Cousin Albert.

2008-02-19T13:03:00.001-08:00

I only visited the ward once, which was more than I really could take. The smell was unbearable to me, it was so clean. The air was too artificial. He was laid out in bed, barely awake or able to speak. His hands were pale and the skin on them was like paper. I spent the afternoon with him, watching college football. When the college games were done, he asked me to stay with him a while and watch the high school games. I told him next time.

2008-02-19T13:01:00.001-08:00

The best story about the skillet was its inclusion in the accidental death of my great-grandfather’s cousin Albert. One October evening, while pregnant with their third son, his wife Alana woke in the middle of the night in need of something to get her back to sleep. She was bringing a pot of milk and sherry to a slow boil in the skillet when someone grabbed her from behind. She wheeled around, grabbing as she did so the only thing she could think to defend herself with, that being the skillet, and smacked the person behind her in the skull with it. The doctors pronounced Cousin Albert dead of a concussion in St. Anne’s hospital later that evening. The impression of his head is still visible along the bottom edge of the skillet to this day.

2008-02-19T12:58:00.000-08:00

Since the murder, it was considered taboo in the family to use it regularly in preparing meals. Stripped of common use, the skillet took on a kind of religious power. When family would come to visit, they would ask to see Lazar’s skillet and they would hold it up in the light and run their fingers along the name on the bottom and the dent and the spot of oxidation that darkened a crevice on the bottom of the pan. There was only one meal I ever saw cooked in the skillet. Beef liver, thinly sliced and sautéed rare with red kale and garlic followed by crepes suzette.

2008-02-19T12:54:00.003-08:00

When dad died, he had left it in his will that he should be cremated, and the ashes scattered wherever was most convenient. The backyard was probably what he had in mind. Or possibly the trash can at the crematorium. Whatever we did, a funeral was out of the question. Mom couldn’t bring herself to just dispose of dad, though, so we bought him a casket and rented him a plot at the cemetery at St. Andrews, near the spot where his own dad was buried. It was a beautiful ceremony. Dad would have hated it.

2008-02-19T12:54:00.001-08:00

There were a thousand stories surrounding this skillet. The family favorite—not mine, but the family’s—was that the skillet had cooked Marie Antoinette’s last meal, a plate of savory crepes, when she was held away from the mob at the Tuileries. I always thought that story smacked of a tall tale. How would this skillet have escaped the mob in Lazar’s possession or his son’s or grandson’s after the revolution? And anyway, who the hell was Marie Antoinette that she should eat crepes while the people around her made due off root vegetables?

2008-02-19T12:53:00.003-08:00

A little less than a fortnight after the birth of John Baskerville, a printer famous for inventing many different typefaces. Like my father, he was an atheist.

2008-02-19T12:53:00.001-08:00

The skillet was an ancient thing, thin looking and dented all over from years of use. If you glanced at it in a junk shop, this skillet, you’d take it for junk destined for the melting pits. But its weight in your hands had presence, the way a stone left by a glacier has presence on a landscape. The skillet was handed down from man to man on my father’s side for ten generations, and possibly more. It had been hammered out of a single chunk of copper that one of our relatives had dug from the ground and purified in his own smelting pot. The date hammered onto the underside of the pot read 12 February, 1706, and next to it, faded almost to the point of illegibility was his name, Lazar. You could just make it out by tracing your finger along the bottom. Since then, the skillet had passed from hand to hand in our family.

2008-02-19T12:34:00.001-08:00

Pale and covered with skin like tissue paper. He said they were always cold. Everything was just so cold. I got him a glass of warm water to drink, hoping some of that warmth would spread inside of him. I don’t know if it did any good, but he fell asleep before I left, and I told the night nurse that he was complaining of the cold. There wasn’t anything else I could do.

2008-02-19T12:32:00.001-08:00

Every day, he stayed home and watched television and did small repairs around the house. He fixed the porch, which had sagged since before we moved in; probably, it was the reason we got the house for cheap. The place was a fixer-upper, and dad spent the weeks he wasn’t employed taking care of all the minor problems he could. He also cooked dinner every night, since mom was exhausted when she came home from work. Dad was a much better cook than mom, and I remember this was the first time I ever really appreciated food. It was also the happiest I can remember seeing my dad, ever.

2008-02-19T12:30:00.001-08:00

Mom and dad bickered for days when he bought the knives on QVC. It wasn’t so much that they were a needless purchase—although they were, since we already had a set of knives that served us just fine—but that dad had up and bought them without asking mom. He was between jobs at the time, and had been for several weeks. Mom was the sole bread winner, and she’d come home exhausted from extra shifts at the hospital. When he bought the knives, it was her money he had spent, and she let him know in no uncertain terms that he’d better damn well ask her the next time he decided to stick his fingers in her pockets. All the same, they were really good knives.

Does the Prophet Burn, Chapter 1

2007-05-19T10:04:00.001-07:00

This is the first chapter of a novel in progress, called Does the Prophet Burn When He Stands in the Fire.

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.