After I peed and flushed the toilet and wiped the mud off the seat with a paper towel and washed my hands and opened the door to the hallway, the janitor was gone. I went back to the ECT waiting room. Except for the woman typing behind the sliding glass window, the room was empty. I sat on the couch and rubbed my hands over my arms. Every five minutes the central air blasted. Some days I got so cold in that room I had to go to the end of a hall and take an exit, go stand in the sun or walk to the bus stop and bum smokes from those waiting, and it was always awkward when the red bus showed up and I didn’t get on, the driver looking at me like, “Are you coming?”

Five, ten, fifteen—the minutes passed. I grabbed a space edition of National Geographic. I didn’t read it, just looked at the pictures of the purple cosmos and bright stars and pluming yellow gases. I closed the glossy magazine and tossed it onto the table in front of me. I shut my eyes and leaned my head back. After his appointment, Fellis and I were supposed to return Transcendence to Redbox, which we hadn’t even watched yet. And then we were supposed to go to Indian Health Services to get Beth’s Adderall and Alice’s blood pressure meds. There was something else, though. I was sure of it. What the hell was the third thing that needed to be done?

The woman behind the sliding glass scooted her chair back and the noise shook me. I looked up, watched her stand. She disappeared through a door, and someone said, “Go slower.”

The door opened into the waiting room and out came Fellis. A woman in a white coat guided him by the arm into the room and she rubbed his back. In the corner of the room was the wheelchair. I got up and opened it.

Fellis took small steps. I watched his face, the one I’d seen each time his treatment ended. Droopy, but not like he was high or anything—etomidate was the anesthesia, and it was a nonbarbiturate since he was on methadone—but droopy and soft yet sharply focused, as if the electrical currents searing across his brain had awoken something, something that had rested for far too long and was now awake with a dedication to look through Fellis’s eyes and relay to the brain everything as pure sparkle and gold, even if what it saw was only a cold waiting room with bland white walls and old magazines and me standing there scratching my ass while I waited for Fellis to get into the wheelchair.

The woman told him to take it easy.

“They need to put your voice on an alarm clock,” Fellis said. “I’d wake up to it every day.”

The woman didn’t smile, crouched down, pulled out the footrests of the wheelchair, and lifted each of Fellis’s feet onto them. She said Joan would schedule the next appointment, in a few weeks: he was done with the every-other-day regimen.