“I sincerely hope not. But you lost a lot more than ‘childish things’ – didn’t you? What about all those stirring sermons on kindness, charity and love?”

Michael laughed softly. “And the least of these is faith . What makes you think I’ve lost anything? I’ve stopped pretending that the things I value are locked up in some magical vault called ‘God’ – outside the universe, outside time, outside myself. That’s all. I don’t need beautiful lies anymore, just to make the decisions I want to make, to try to live a life I think is good. If the truth had taken those things away … I could never really have had them in the first place.

“And I still clean up your shit, don’t I? I still tell you stories at three in the morning. If you want greater miracles than that, you’re out of luck.”

#

Whether it was genuine autobiography, or just a slick piece of ad hoc therapy, Michael’s story began to undermine my panic and claustrophobia. His arguments made too much sense to me; they sliced through my self-pity like a hot wire. If the universe itself wasn’t a cultural construct, the gray terror I felt from seeing myself as a part of it certainly was. I’d never had the honesty to embrace the molecular nature of my own existence – but then, the whole society I’d inhabited had been equally coy. The reality had always been glossed over, censored, ignored. I’d spent thirty-six years in a world still infested with lingering dualism, with tacit dumb spirituality – where every movie, every song, still wailed about the immortal soul … while everyone swallowed designer drugs predicated on pure materialism. No wonder the truth had come as a shock.

The abyss – like everything else – was understandable. I lost interest in digging myself a hole.

Vibrio cholerae declined to follow my example.

I lay curled on my side, my notepad propped up against an extra pillow, while Sisyphus showed me the mechanics of the process.

“The B subunit of the choleragen molecule binds to the surface of the intestinal mucosal cell; the A subunit detaches and traverses the membrane. This catalyzes increased adenylate cyclase activity, which in turn raises the level of cyclic AMP, stimulating the secretion of sodium ions. The ordinary concentration gradient is reversed, and fluid is pumped in the wrong direction: out into the intestinal space.”