“No. I threw away my crutches and fell flat on my face. All the strength had gone into the crutches – I had none of my own. I was nineteen, when it finally all fell apart for me. The end of adolescence is the perfect age for an existential crisis – don’t you think? You’ve left yours awfully late.”

My face burned with humiliation. Michael reached over and touched my shoulder. He said, “I’ve had a long shift, my judgment’s slipping. I’m not trying to be cruel.” He laughed. “Listen to me, spouting ‘season for everything’ bullshit – like the Edenites meet Il Duce: Get those emotional trains running on time! ” He leaned back, and ran a hand through his hair. “But I was nineteen, there’s no getting around it. And I’d lost God. What can I say? I read Sartre, I read Camus, I read Nietzsche—”

I winced. Michael was puzzled. “You have a problem with Friedrich? ”

The cramp tightened. I replied through gritted teeth, “Not at all. All the best European philosophers went mad.”

“Exactly. And I read them all.”

“And—?”

He shook his head, smiling, embarrassed. “For a year or so … I really believed it: Here I am, staring into the abyss with Nietzsche. Here I am, on the brink of insanity, entropy, meaninglessness: the Enlightenment’s unspeakable godless rational damnation. One wrong step, and I’ll go spiraling down.”

He hesitated. I watched him closely, suddenly suspicious. Was he making this up as he went along? A little improvised Care-for-the-Whole-Patient routine? And even if he wasn’t … we’d had different lives, different histories. What use was any of this to me?

I listened, though.

“But I didn’t go spiraling down. Because there is no abyss . There is no yawning chasm waiting to swallow us up, when we learn that there is no god, that we’re animals like any other animal, that the universe has no purpose, that our souls are made of the same stuff as water and sand.”

I said, “There are two thousand cultists on this island who believe otherwise.”

Michael shrugged. “What do you expect from moral flat-Earthers, if not fear of falling? If you desperately, passionately want to plummet into the abyss, of course it’s possible – but only if you work hard. Only if you will the entire thing into being. Only if you manufacture every last centimeter of it, on your way down.

“I don’t believe that honesty leads to madness. I don’t believe we need delusions to stay sane. I don’t believe the truth is strewn with booby-traps, waiting to swallow up anyone who thinks too much . There is nowhere to fall – not unless you stand there digging the hole.”

I said, “You fell, didn’t you? When you lost your faith.”

“Yes – but how far? What have I become? A serial killer? A torturer?”