The men and women came, tapped on the door of his office, and impatiently began to tell their stories. He fought to sustain the inflexion, the pause, the backward look. He wrote, they spoke. And there was some sanity in this. As he wrote their stories down, it was as if his imagination had been granted time to see their lives in another light.

For each detail of their lives, though it had already happened, had to be tortuously reinvented. He wrote down their lives because every time he thought of his own he thought of Catherine and their togetherness, and then began the turmoil. His spirit would vanish. The hospital was no longer home. Only when the patients spoke did he know peace.

When I was fourteen I used an ass for pleasure.

Was it any good? asked Jack.

It was perfect, the man replied.

The story went on. He was glad for the man that it had been perfect. When one speaker went, another sat in the chair. He turned the page, wrote the date, the time, the place, then they began telling him terrible things. When the stories stopped, he felt drained but satisfied. The hospital induced in him a warm satisfaction that he had not felt in years. The first minutes of the day and the last minutes of the night a holy breeze blew down the corridor.

The nurses sent him patients who wanted to tell their tale. The doctor he had not become he now was, one that cured others that he might himself be preserved. It was a great time of not knowing, of being whoever the patients judged he was. Contrary waters met. They subsided. His notebooks filled with stories that had once made perfect sense.

One clear day will come, he thought, when I will find what I am addicted to. He sat in his office, happy at his pad. The hospital was the free world. Never again would he be able to walk happily through the unnatural world outside. So, on the morning he was to leave he woke with a heavy heart. He was frightened and anxious. The nurse gave him extra pills to help him through the coming weeks.

“I had so much more work to do here,” Jack said.

“You were great,” said the night nurse, “but I’m worried about you returning to be alone. Is there no one you can ask to stop with you?”

“I won’t be alone,” said Jack. “I will have you all with me.”

He searched the wards to find Nurse Rita, only to discover it was her day off. He crossed the lawns carrying his bag and stepped through the gates of the General Hospital and was shocked to see a sculpture of the Virgin holding Christ on the far side of the road. The flesh-coloured plaster arms and leg made him stop in his tracks. He turned towards town.