11

HE HAS CHANGED HIS CLOTHES for the third time that day. He is feeling unaccountably safe and renewed. He is an acrobat who has successfully walked a high wire in a gale. In the kitchen he kisses his wife behind the neck and at the table thinks he has never been more spontaneous, more brilliant. He talks about his Practice; he cannot let it go. No matter that the conversation rushes off in other directions. He always brings it back to the thing that matters: his good work with people, the way his clients flourish, the ways in which madness makes fools of the best of us, how fools become kings and assassins reclaim their innocence. The lives that split apart at the seams, the seas that bleed, the sons buggered by their fathers, the client who sees his thwarted life in every red light; how the world breaks apart only to reawaken, and demons cling for their lives to every star. Carelessness, exhaustion. What it is like to be marooned on an island of the mind. The car wrecks, the calls for help, the ones who drown, the ones who drink up an ocean before sitting down to dinner.

When much later he falls heavily to sleep, his wife notices that his heart is beating uncommonly fast.