Initially I went to the meetings once a week, on Monday evenings, and then twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, and then eventually we began meeting on Saturday afternoons as well. The meetings grew into a potluck scenario where we would each bring a dish, which gave me a reason to cook as Paul and Ashley had started fending for themselves at dinner. People put a lot of effort into their contributions. Nora pulled off some serious sorcery with her chiles rellenos, which were basically peppers stuffed with meat, vegetables, and spices, and then fried in egg batter. She also made this dessert called rellenitos, a kind of Guatemalan doughnut which consisted of cooked plantains with refried beans, sugar, and cinnamon. It was so delicious I literally swore under my breath the first time I bit into one. I have to say, to look at him I might have assumed Damian would have been a bag of chips and salsa kind of man, but he brought trays of glazed ribs and barbecued chicken. Leslie and Jo held down the vegan camp with eggplant lasagne and lentil chili. Emily wasn’t a cook, but she bought nice pies and banana loaves, and I tended to bring salads and side dishes, which weren’t flashy, but there were never any leftovers.

Paul exiled me back to The Gym. I was still managing only about three hours of sleep a night and was probably becoming increasingly erratic, though at the time I felt I was slowly getting stronger and clearer in my thinking. I stopped seeing Dr. Gompf and refused any other kind of medical or psychiatric intervention, mostly at the urging of Howard and the group, who helped me see that my medicalization was for the benefit of those around me, to help contain and mute me, rather than my own. They helped me see that dulling or numbing my perceptive capacity was a kind of violence; a self-inflicted wound. Rather, I started to ask—how could I transform my relationship to my own sensitivity of perception? How could I transform my relationship with the sounds I was hearing? To The Hum? If this was a natural phenomenon, how could I learn to live with nature, as opposed to in opposition to it?