“I got along with my sister better than Mom and Dad. Very dysfunctional. I’d rather not talk about that—it’s all in the transcripts. Besides, it only helps explain why I write, not why I’m delusional.”

In the transcripts he’d called it the “ten-year divorce.” Constant fighting. Verbal and some physical abuse. Nasty, but not all that unusual. It is popular to analyze a patient’s childhood these days to discover that one trauma, that one unforgivable incident, which has shaped or ruined the life. But I did not care if his childhood had been a bedsore of misery, a canker of sadness. I was here to determine what he believed now, at this moment. I would ask him the requisite questions about that past, for such inquiries seemed to calm most patients, but let him tell or not tell. It was all the same to me.

“Any visions or hallucinations as a child?”

“No.”

“None?”

“None.”

“In the transcripts, you mention a hallucination you had, when you thought you saw two hummingbirds mating on the wing from a hotel room window. You were sick, and you said, rather melodramatically, ‘I thought if I could only hold them, suspended, with my stare, I could forever feast upon their beauty. But finally I had to call to my sister and parents, took my eyes from the window, and even as I turned back, the light had changed again, the world had changed, and I knew they were gone. There I lay, at altitude, on oxygen—’”

“—But that’s not a hallucination—”

“—Please don’t interrupt. I’m not finished: ‘on oxygen and, suddenly, at my most vulnerable, the world had revealed the very extremity of its grace. For me, the moment had been Divine, as fantastical as if those hummingbirds had flown out of my mouth, my eyes, my thoughts.’ That is not a hallucination?”

“No. It’s a statement on beauty. I really did see them—the hummingbirds.”

“Is beauty important to you?”

“Yes. Very important.”

“Do you think you entered another world when you saw those hummingbirds?”

“Only figuratively. I’m very balanced, you know, between my logical father and my illogical mother. I know what’s real and what’s not.”

“That is not for you to determine. And what do your parents do? No one seems to have asked that question.”

“My dad’s an entomologist—studies bugs, not words. My mom’s an artist. And an author. She’s done a book on graveyard art.”

“Ah!” I took out two items that had been on his person when he had been brought here: a book entitled City of Saints and Madmen and a page of cartoon images. “So you are a writer. You take after your mother.”

“No. Yes. Maybe.”

“I guess that would explain why we gave you a typewriter: you’re a writer. I’m being funny. Have the decency to laugh. Now, what have you been writing?”