One of the things my father taught me was that it’s not dangerous to be depressed: it’s dangerous not to be. If you can’t sit up in bed, you can hardly kill yourself. But in those first hours, those first days on the upswing, you still want to die; and finally, you have the energy. This is the period that’s most important: the period of observation.

My father was always talking about energy: he would eat huge, slow meals of sour cream and gray steaks, and talk about the need to preserve energy. He had dictionaries on a bookstand, Anglo-Saxon or Sanskrit, or even catalogs of alphabets: the remnants of a youthful interest hewn to its barest elements by years in more practical realms. It was always quiet in the house. He had a very old television on a small hexagonal table, which he played silently, if at all.

We would sit on large brown leather armchairs covered with centimeter scratches from the Chihuahua, “McManager chairs,” he’d call them. The Chihuahua would be perched on a yellow-stained, foam pillow between us. He was always worried she would fall if she stood up. When she did, he would scream, struggling to shake his wrists. There were two squat clerestory windows above the TV, and it always stormed in the afternoon: featureless, fuzzy hours of damp, blotted hour by hour into dark. The tiles were a splotched beige. A faint scent of urine. The Chihuahua died of a “big heart.” And then came the years when we had settled into “it,” more or less, and there was very little even to scream about. When you came into the room, my father would turn at you and nod, a tortoise in its shell. The nurse, Mireille Joseph, usually had the television on, by then, very loudly; and yet he seemed never to know what he was watching, even after hours. There was a kind of filmy look to his eyes, like a whale’s. Mireille would try to feed him soft pieces of chicken breast and find him Christ before it was too late; at first he’d scream at her, but after a few months he began even to chew the little salty strings and simply nod. Mireille would call me Mr. Jay, and would tell me Your father sweet man.

At a certain point no new information could enter, and nothing convinced my father to worry any less: even after I began medical school, graduated medical school, began residency, began fellowship, began full-time employment: he would scream Living under the bridge, with less energy, though, and, finally, none.

It occurs to me that the story of my so-called youth relies, excessively, upon the verb “scream”: and yet I imagine few would have any particular pity for me.

●

I met Beatrice Odum my fifth year as an attending, my thirty-fifth year in Miami: a continuous series of efforts to move to New York, Boston, anywhere having been truncated by the recognition that my father needed me.

Her parents told me she’d come here “to make a career as a model.” I had to turn the fan off to understand their accent. They’d driven straight from Oklahoma, twenty-four hours “without even stopping for the restroom.” They were large and leathery and kept rocking on their heels, like they weren’t sure where to stand; I asked about the red dirt on their boots, and they apologized and said they would gladly “warsh” it off. I asked if Beatrice knew anyone in the area. They didn't know. So I suggested the father be the emergency contact, and he asked for a “pin” to write his address in Catoosa.

I led them to a room labeled “Meeting,” where there were vending machines and armchairs. Armchairs at psych wards are made of gravelly plastic like trash bins, and weighted down with sand. As I closed the door, I saw them already looking at their phones; maybe they were playing the types of games I saw the nurses play in the lunch line.

Beatrice had had no notable psychiatric history before the previous winter. She had had UTIs in high school and recurring stomach problems. She had had no hospital visits, besides one for IUD pain. In January, at a community clinic in South Miami, she had been prescribed Klonopin, as had almost every young woman I saw.

The night before I met her, she had been arrested while stealing Whip-Its from a gas station; the police said that she had fallen on the display rack, and then started crying on the linoleum, and then saying “e’stuff.” When I asked what she’d said, the cops babbled rapid Spanish to each other and cackled. Upon admission, she’d told the nurse that she had been on her period for two months, but had been found to have a mild yeast infection and no bleeding. She’d screamed and the orderlies had held her down to get the B52.

Later that day, I visited her room with Mary, the blonde, tan medical student on the last day of her rotation. She was recently engaged, I had learned (one of those Instagram photos of a bright white stone against the dazzling seashore, a guy in a polo shirt beaming like a floor manager getting promoted).

It was strange: with Mary there, Beatrice waved like one bubbly girl to another. It was like they were at a rush party, grass scratching little pink-painted toes, not in a dim hospital room smelling of reheated chicken paste.

As Mary talked to Beatrice, I took a step to the side, toward the door and the vinegar light of the hall. Beatrice’s waist looked hand-sized, as she sat up with her spindly arms gripping the guard rails, stringy, inky hair giving onto her breasts: like the Lady of Shalott.

That night I came back to her room, but she looked at me and then back to the TV, as if remarking and disregarding an alarming noise. It was the end of my shift and I drove home. In traffic on the causeway, I called my father’s house. Mireille answered and said he was asleep. How you doing Mr. Jay? I dreaded this. People were cutting me off by the bike lane, weaving leased Lambos and canary-bright Camaros. You good Mr. Jay? I told her traffic was starting to move and I had to go. I told her to tell my father I was okay. She said okay. I would have to buy her a purse. I could not imagine what she thought about me. Maybe a small Louis Vuitton. She had once shown me pictures on her phone of her closet, big stacks of logo purses and pink straw hats for church. Her son sometimes came to the house to fix the cable box for my father. He was a programmer, twenty-six. I had met him once and felt very ashamed, more ashamed than I knew what to make of. I do not remember his name.

●

The valets at my building were always very busy in the evening, as Venezuelans in stretchy white garments went to the lobby restaurant; it was called Crazy About You! From the balcony of my aggressively priced condo with an increasingly troubling mold problem, I stood watching the cars shuffling in the drive thirty floors below.

A man had jumped earlier that summer, at a similar time of day; I hadn’t understood what I was seeing. I remember I had been looking at a certain motorboat far off on the bay, thinking I could see the swimmers on deck and even hear the reggaetón.

The body had left a dent on the metal roof of the carport: the smallest, nearly indiscernible indicium of death, only obtrusive when, as now, violent evening storms transformed it into a steep and surprisingly powerful rivulet, almost like a garden hose that, to their stupefied displeasure, sprayed the shishito-pepper-bound South Americans and left their suits and dresses clinging like the swimsuits of cold and confused children.

I noticed that between the women’s implants there was typically a small isthmus of browner skin, and wondered why. Perhaps, as they applied self-tanner, did they find it slightly embarrassing to linger over their seemingly intentionally artificial protrusions? Or was it out of some calculated contouring effect? Or perhaps was it to draw attention to their own artificiality, the Heian courtesans of a homicidal culture?

I went back to my laptop and looked Beatrice up. I found a modeling portfolio hosted on a free domain, as well as her Facebook page. She had a boyfriend, or had had one. In some photos she was shoved between two other girls with greasy buns, wearing tight dresses and holding red Solo cups. With the camera held above their heads, their eyes looked shocked. The last posts were from three years ago; since then, just the annual “Happy Birthday!”’s, organized into blue-and-white boxes, fewer and older contributors each year, grandmas supporting National Administrative Professionals’ Day.

Then I logged into the system and saw that her physician was still listed as “TBD”.

●

My life consisted of a series of actions:

First, I woke up at 6am.

Then, I bought a coffee at the ventanita, where I ordered it muy clarito, lots of milk. Even that early, there were always a few homeless around, usually one ex-con with a pitbull Eurotrash tourists would rub the snout of, and one very fat, scaly woman whose tongue was always falling out of her mouth like a pug. She locked eyes with me every morning and rubbed her belly, one way and then the other, grinning. On one occasion, almost delirious after a night shift, this action gave me a sudden, inchoate desire to be entirely smothered.

Then I drove to the hospital for rounds. Mostly psychiatric consults on people from ER, ICU. Anyone who says they’re “depressed” or “anxious” is at risk. Some examples:

A geriatric male in kidney failure had been catheterized so many times his penis was like a sea anemone. This caused him mental suffering. A geriatric woman in liver failure had had diarrhea for years, suffered anal fissures, received sphincteric Botox to relax the muscles surrounding her fissures, and now leaked her diarrhea. This caused her mental suffering. A teenaged waitress with extremely thin, half-moon eyebrows—like an old-timey mime—said she’d just been PMSing, could she please go now. She had very full lips, like rotten plums, and a lot of tattoos on her legs, busty vaudeville girls and knotted bows and dates in the very recent past. She was becoming very, very worried.

I left notes like, He complained that his life is ruined by chronic pain, etc. and Complaints may not be related to his pain per se.

When the patients were released, they joined their fellow addicts under the overpass two blocks west, and squatted, embalmed eyes popping out above weathered skin, until the police brought them to prison or psychiatry. This neighborhood was one of auto shops of cracked plaster painted to advertise cheap tires and flat-rate repair, of típicos hondureños where short prostitutes drank tepid beer away from the windows.

A remarkable percentage of arrests are made within six blocks and one week of psychiatric release. The general term for a system focused on minimizing commitment is “managed care.”

●

The next morning, the nurses told me Beatrice had refused to eat more than dessert (the gelatinous pudding that shook, in grainy iridescent lumps, on her spork). At breakfast, she’d let her hair drip into the plastic tub of Mr. OJ. At night, she’d been doing pirouettes instead of sleeping. When I visited her room, she was trying to make a dress out of her paper gown. She drew the hem above her knees and stretched it around her thighs. She pulled the waist in and tried to twist it like a belt. She didn’t seem to notice I was there; she called out to the nurses for paper clips, or hair clips, or staples, and they refused to give her anything. Each time she asked for another object they pulled their lips tight and rolled their eyes at each other, like the mothers of toddlers eating dirt. She kept asking in a sing-song voice, like a very frail girl playing grown-up. I stood against the sink watching her.

All I could write in her progress report was stable. She did not receive any visitors; her parents did not return.

The nurses complained that Beatrice was fancy and a princess. They seemed jealous: they were metabolic cases, with pouches above their tailbones, and Beatrice, if not particularly striking by the standards of a Latin city with liberal cosmetic procedure approval rules and the consumer loan market to power it, had, no doubt, been one of the most attractive girls in east-central Oklahoma.

But it was true: Beatrice did not look at me. Not that first early morning, as I lifted her wrist to take her pulse and it felt almost weightless, not when I listened to her breathing and her knobby shoulders felt breakable like a bird’s. Not at lunch, as I saw her on my way to the cafeteria to choose between “Chicken Wrap” and “Mexican Pizza.”

I checked on her before leaving. She seemed unaware of where she was. I watched her freckled, lunar shoulders as she rolled in bed, breasts falling out the side of her gown. There was a loose give to them, and a wide gap between her thighs, when the gown rode up as she sat up in bed. And on one occasion that evening, as I lingered a few minutes past the end of my shift, I even saw faint black hairs outside the line of her underwear. She didn’t seem to notice me noticing.

I wondered if there was anything else wrong with her—anemia, maybe. Or perhaps it was her failure to eat, probably the latest, possibly the last, manifestation of a lifetime of starvation.

She had purple-grey thumbprints under grass green eyes. Like she’d held her thumbs there and pressed until the capillaries burst.

●

I wondered if there was anything else wrong with her—anemia, maybe. Or perhaps it was her failure to eat, probably the latest, possibly the last, manifestation of a lifetime of starvation. She had purple-grey thumbprints under grass green eyes. Like she’d held her thumbs there and pressed until the capillaries burst.

●

There was something I had left out about my routine: at red lights, in traffic jams, on the toilet, upon first waking, upon exiting the elevator, upon exiting the shower, upon commercial break, upon final credits, upon every diminution in narrative interest, while patients’ charts were loading, while nurses were preparing injections: I would check my phone to confirm that the women of Miami still found me loathsome.

They had names like “Mao” and “Lucindey.” They had hobbies like “ate” and “danz.” The more verbally adept among them expressed desires as for “someone who is addicted to chocolate exactly as much as me.”

The evening after Beatrice’s admission, I did, unusually, have a date. She was twenty-five, a recent Masters graduate with some vague job in sustainability. “Evangeline” or “Eve.” A recent relocation from Massachusetts; the Everglades, etc. I met her at a distantly New Orleans-themed bar in the part of town I correctly assumed she lived in, one where you could pay about $25 for a make-your-plate of charcuterie eaten upon charmingly unmatched patio furniture. She had a curiously attractive overbite and dishwater blonde hair that just reached her shoulders. She was dressed much too casually, in a striped blue tank top and khaki shorts; everyone around her was in a sexy dress from a Chinese website, with a big blowout and “balayage” (something Maria had gotten shortly before her move). Eve was very short, with a jangly, awkward way of moving; I had to navigate her scapulae through the crowd.

We had a very enjoyable conversation. She spoke very quickly, with a slight lisp, about how rising soil temperatures meant alligator eggs were all being born male, about how only male panthers were reckless enough to cross newly built highways so now they had no mates. An oversupply of males. I told her how balloons were piling up in dolphins’ stomachs until they starved to death. She told me about new developments, about how newborn sea turtles were pecked to death by hawks as they crawled, instinct-doomed, to moon white condos; I told her about the wild parrots, broken out of the zoo by Hurricane Andrew and now everywhere, artificially brilliant green-blue-red like M&Ms, descending onto stucco walls with a metallic screech so deafening it sounded like a crashing car. I told her about how Cubans cracked an egg on their heads before getting on planes; she already knew about the Santería bans from the 90s. I told her she needed to see the peacocks in the Grove; the chickens in Little Havana. She needed to try kayaking—there were so many canals—jewel-like, shady, glimmering with sunshine, dimming under mangroves. She needed to go to Tinta y Cafe—not like anything in Boston, but hey, some Neruda or random Cuban novels to read with your medianoche (pork, cheese, and pickles: the summit of Cuban cuisine).

These suggestions made me slightly sad. I remembered everything I had done with Catherine, Teresa, Maria–all those poor, ghostlike women, all that time circling the drain. Weekends of things to do; weekdays of house to play. Everyone had moved away.

It had been three, four years, of the occasional tourist from New York needing an Anglophone suitor for the night; the very occasional one date of female vodka sodas and male whiskies, a conversation confirming that Miami traffic is bad, and then the swiping. We’ll always have 7:30-9:15pm at La Trova. Weekends grateful that my father was separated from me by, at rush hour, a reliable two hours of brain-damaged drivers. Every few months, I was alerted that I’d rejected or been rejected by every woman under 32 within one hundred miles of my phone. I had: I saw them again and again, like fellow soldiers in a losing war, aging, enlarging, further and further from the camera, Svengali of focal length. Still watching The Office, which it seemed increasingly arrogant for me not to at least try.

I was so excited about Eve that after I got home, a little buzzy with organic wine, I texted her that it was extraordinary to meet a person like her after so many years in Miami. Twenty minutes later (12:10am) I texted her that perhaps we could go kayaking through the canals that weekend: I had Saturday off. Eighteen hours later (6pm) she texted me: “It was great to meet you, but I want to be honest that I didn’t feel a romantic connection. Hope to see you around!”

●

But something nice happened the next day. Beatrice smiled when I came in, and even laughed when I asked if she had plans for the evening. And the next day, she sat all the way up in bed, with her knees pulled up under her chin, almost as if we were friends in a dorm, and nodded or shook her head appropriately at all my questions.

That afternoon, I sat in the chair in her room on my break. She was watching the home improvement channel. I started to talk about my last consult: he was a real WASP (Leslie Basil Warburton III), a golfer, judging by the clothes hung up in his horrible little “belongings” closet. He had had a heart attack and also, it seemed, had some sort of advanced dementia, or a very specific psychosis: he responded to every sentence with an insistent, acidulous Meaning?.

Beatrice laughed at that, so I told her, also, about this Jamaican girl—sixteen—who’d come in with bronchitis and just could not believe she was pregnant. Would not believe it, looked away when they did the ultrasounds. She laughed at that too. So then I told her about one from the week before: the hairy Cuban with the tarnished chains who kept getting pictures of naked girls on his phone, followed by a price.

I felt very timid telling her this last one, but she seemed to predict every word I was saying: she nodded vigorously. I asked her what she was in Miami for and she shook her head and smiled.

Each day, I started to come in on my lunch break, 1pm to 1:50. I would sit in the visitors chair, very slightly to the side of her bed, sunlight coming in, and tell her about everyone: about the leathery old men with no home address talking about when they’d been president of Harvard, about the pockmarked Cuban women with no T-cells, about the restaurant hostesses with psychotic PMS, three that week, screaming that they were ready to go.

For the first time since I had started, I was excited as I went to work: even stuck in traffic, under the Estrella Insurance billboard of a huge hairy hand grabbing a tiny Latina woman: “Don’t let this one go!”. She asked me, early on, as I was leaving from our first long conversation, to raise the light-blocking plastic on the window, pointing in silence, mouthing “Up,” and her pale face was so full of light it was like you could see the blood cells in her cheek.

●

I slept all Saturday; I woke up in a lot of sun, on top of the covers, feeling as if all my skin was steaming. Usually I would have gone to my father’s, but I didn’t have time before the night shift.

Trauma was always busy at night—gunshots in Little Haiti, Liberty City, Overtown—but psychiatry was not. I spent a lot of time sitting in the break room. After sitting in the break room for some time, I thought I might go check on Beatrice. Her notes said she still wasn’t eating. It was storming again.

Through the safety window in the door, I saw some movement, shadows coming in and out. I cracked the door open and saw her: the pirouettes in the half dark, her non-slip socks curled up into makeshift ballet slippers. Rain was pouring; lightning was coming again and again through the window; with her skin so pale, slimy with light, she looked un-human: like a hooked fish.

She did not seem to notice me as I entered the room and sat on the chair. I breathed slowly, trying not to make noise. But naturally, almost as if she had expected me, she came over to me, curtsied, took my hand, and pulled me out of the chair with surprising force. She began dancing with me like a child at a wedding: fast jerks of our wrists from side to side, quickly shuffling feet, the sticky, plastic toes of her socks tapping my ankles. She didn’t look at me, but only very intently at our feet. Then she smiled at me and sat down.

I stood watching her, unsure what to do. She looked exhausted, her skin flaky, the smallest beginnings of lines around her mouth. I asked her if she was okay and she just looked up at me, pouting, lines forming between her eyebrows, already overgrowing their thin-plucked lines. I asked her again—and she pulled me toward her, and said into my ear, so loudly it hurt, “They told me I was going to have a good time in Miami." I asked her, “Who?” She pulled me back again and said, even louder this time, ”They told me I was going to have a good time and I want them to know I'm very upset with them!” “Who told you that?”, I asked. She looked at me and began to cry. I sat on the edge of the bed, but it began to beep from the excess weight, and so I hunched in the air, very slightly holding her shoulder, and asked her again, “Who told you that?” She sobbed into her hands. “They told me I was going to have a good time and I'm all alone and no one is telling me when the party is going to start.”

“They told me I was going to have a good time,” she kept saying.

She hugged my knees. I did not move or even breathe. Then she released me and curled up on her bed, knees to her forehead.

She had been a child once, raised by those big, bewildered parents who now, who knows where they were: at the casino losing $5 at a time, at the beach drinking neon margaritas through a twisty straw. Her boyfriend, it seemed, had abandoned her. There definitely was some man, or several of them, suburban losers she considered gallant for tossing a few hundred dollars toward her rent or buying her bucatini amatriciana and cocktails with the liquor brand and (™) in the name that she'd purge under loud bathroom speakers. They probably had shaggy hair and were over six four and had a dazzlingly careless attitude toward her.

Not a soul. Simply an innocent child, almost a neonate, skin porous with the world, not capable, any longer, of ignoring the pain.

It was 6am; the day shift was arriving. I heard loud Buenos días from the hallway. The nurses were going to take over; I could go.

I had an odd feeling arriving home afterward: stepping across the crabgrass wet with the night's residue of rain, setting my keys on the tile counter in a perfectly still building, laying my back on sheets faintly peach, like a cheek skimmed by sun. It was a feeling I had had as a child, sometimes, awake very early on summer weekdays, before anyone else, before the screams: it was like I was seeing slightly into the future.

●

The following day, Beatrice was gone. There was a Haitian woman in her room who had made a cross out of a towel. She had diabetes and hypertension and was going blind. When I handed her hypotensives she screamed and kicked her gnarled feet up and down. There were abscesses between her toes and she cried out for “her baby,” heaving up and down for the towel-cross and setting off the alarms. She had nine grandchildren and said she had ninety. None had visited. She shat herself. She fell asleep.

I shouted at her, “You are an animal.” She gargled and shouted something at the television, and I turned it off. I looked at the door but no one was in the hall. It was my lunch break.

Outside Panera Bread, a homeless man met my gaze and said, “What are the three most beautiful words in any language?” I began to answer (“I—lov—”), distracted by a surge of white gulls rising from the parking garage behind us, when the man said, “Here's the money.” Then he held out his cap. I walked toward the elevators. I did not remember what floor I was on. I went up and down elevator after elevator full of recent immigrants, sick, apparently, in imperceptible ways, protectively clutching their children by their chests.

I didn't know what to do except walk back to the cafeteria and watch a nearly infinite caravan of nurses eat the government-subsidized rigatoni that would contribute to their final years of government-subsidized immobility and then, mercifully, deaths far more premature than those of their literally malnourished and parasite-ridden elders.

But then I saw her at the bus stop. A man was with her: very tall, muscular, in a stiff gray button-down, light jeans, sneakers that looked unused. He was very handsome: straight jaw, sharp nose, neat brown hair. Like a child's doodle of an adult. They were standing amid a million patients, him holding her very close to him.

“Beatrice?” I asked, walking up to them.

She looked back at me with narrowed eyes. “Are you doing okay?” I asked, trying to sound neutral.

She continued glaring. He whispered something to her and she shook her head. “What’s up?”, he asked me.

“Beatrice, are you doing okay?” I asked her.

“Hey, man, do you need something?”

“I’m her physician, and I'm trying to talk to her,” I told him.

Beatrice whispered something to him.

“I think you might be thinking of someone else,” he said to me.

“This is absurd.”

“I'm sorry to have to ask this, but is it okay if we just hang out until the bus comes?”

“I’m her physician.”

“I’m sorry, man, but she doesn't know who you are. Might have the wrong face.”

“I’m her fucking physician, and she's a schizo wreck, and I have no idea who the fuck authorized her release. She's going to fucking—fucking kill herself if she goes home.”

“Don’t worry, man. We're just gonna take a step away, okay?”

“She’s going to fucking die. This is the most dangerous period.”

“She’s in good hands, right baby?”

Beatrice poked his side and whispered something.

“We gotta go,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”

They started to walk away. The patients reeked almost floral with sweat. I was dizzy. I ran up to them very quickly. “All right man,” her boyfriend said to me, and I called to her, “Try to do something. Just try, for once. Don’t just lie in bed with your tits talling out like you did in the hospital. Don’t just let this faggot fuck you until he finds someone with bigger tits.”

Her boyfriend turned around, punched me in the face, and pulled her with him as they walked quickly away. I fell onto the crabgrass. I heard the windblower stop and a Central American in a beekeeper's outfit came over to try to help me up. I was crying a little and tasted blood. The sun was dizzying. The sky was blue. There were red welts on the back of my arms.

I told the nurses I had a family emergency.

In traffic to my father’s, I was stuck behind a sixteen-wheeler. Painted on the back were the words “NO LONG TALKING.” I felt my eyes water so much I had to pull over into an Arby’s, and breathe—and breathe—and breathe—.

●

My father died a year later, and I realized that I no longer felt anything very good or very bad: I didn’t know what to feel about anymore. I had no “relations” left. Within a few years, I had gone into private practice. I got tired of dealing with the schizos and the bums and the whole disgusting system where you either shat on the street or got three squares and a cot and a write-off on some byzantine public accounting. The private practice of adolescent psychiatry was not particularly “interesting”: I was more or less a prescription machine for over-enriched idiots, who for a sufficient price could become learning disabled or anxious or even depressed. We had not, as the twenty-first century advanced, determined the etiology of any of these diagnoses, nor, even, whether they could be detected through anything even attempting the rigor of a biomarker. Instead, we relied on self-reported diagnosis through parascientific inventories like:

Never-rarely-sometimes-always I:

Cannot enjoy things.

Find myself restless.

Have low appetite.

Am afraid of the future.

Have recurrent thoughts of death (not just fear of dying.)

I preferred a definition of happiness I once heard a Chinese social worker give in an online CME course on Cross-Cultural Care: happiness is getting to play the character you wanted to play.

Before I changed jobs I looked Beatrice up in the system. She’d been readmitted a few times; not once, not even when she was twenty-six, had I been listed as her psychiatrist.

I have a five-bedroom house near the water and a blue pool. I have an ex-wife who is on a journey. I have a child. I have, occasionally, a date with a succession of Latina women—phlebotomists in tight scrubs or saleswomen with their Mazdas covered in stickers for multi-level marketing schemes—whom I no longer find breakable or vulnerable but simply perplexing, totally and completely inhuman.

I think sometimes of Beatrice.

Years later, I saw her in the frozen aisle at Milam’s. She was a little red-faced, worn; but still with long, thick black hair that fell to her waist. A less remarkable face than I remembered, eyes a little wide-set, nose so ski-slopish it seemed generic. She was wearing tight, ripped jeans, a tank top, a polyester-looking button-down over it. A big, tacky belt buckle. Skinny, splotched arms, the first beginning of a paunch. Bandaid on the inside of her elbow like she’d just given blood. Pushing a cart with cheese sticks and chicken breast and diet yogurts. She was reaching for those sickly tropical popsicles you’d get during the summer as a kid. She couldn’t quite reach them, and I tried to help her, though I was maybe an inch taller than her. I couldn’t—she got them quickly, saving me the humiliation. We looked at each other for a moment and I could see she didn’t recognize me. I looked down: she had shimmery, dark red polish on her toes, black flip flops. The man I’d seen at the hospital came back, wiping his hands on his khaki shorts. Bald, now, still very handsome. Two toddlers ran after him, making motorcycle noises at each other as they caught up. “Thanks,” she said, and pushed her cart away.

●

It increasingly seems to me that to be kind I would have to imagine but that at a certain level of knowledge about the human mind imagination is no longer possible.

So here is a lawn, I am thinking. Here is a house. Here is a child looking at me, snot smeared under his nose, eyes slack and dumbstruck, silent, staring, starting to resemble me.