My first days back in Beverly were the bleakest, so much so I prefer not to write about them, other than to say I survived. (Fine, I will write about them a little. There was no escaping that twenty years later I had returned home, utterly defeated. I knew I had been irrevocably changed, but I didn’t know how changed. How much of me had Mercy consumed? Was I doomed to become something like her? Was I like her already and I didn’t know it, couldn’t recognize the transformation, because I was so radically different my now-thinking warped and changed everything I had thought previously? Each morning I conducted an Art Barbara systems analysis that was inconclusive because I felt different and I felt the same.)

You continually and stubbornly live in two worlds of many. You do it throughout the book.

Then day one at home became week one became month one, the days as wooden blocks that piled into a haphazard foundation from which I hoped to build. Maybe it’s not much, but I have built a life, which is a terrible capitalist idea, isn’t it? That we must manufacture our lives (strictly adhering to a consumer-culture standard) to give them meaning instead of simply living them.

Now seven years in Beverly later, was I happy? Content? Without fear of trapdoors and further transfiguration? Did I dwell on the unforeseen consequences of what happened with Mercy in Providence? No, no, no, and fuck yes. But, here in 2014, for the first time in my life, I was willing and able to be me, whoever that was, instead of striding toward some idealized version. Why? My not having to worry daily about making rent was certainly a factor that couldn’t be underestimated. My consistently doing physical therapy to strengthen my core and back hasn’t cured the pain but has kept it to a manageable low simmer on most days, which allowed me to become less reliant on painkillers.

Less reliant doesn’t mean “not reliant.”

(Aside: I haven’t been as faithfully attuned to my heart—the physical one—thanks-no-thanks shitty and/or no health insurance. The last time I had my biannual echocardiogram to check the size and function of my potentially rascally aorta was 2009.)

So yeah, barring the unforeseen, I am not going to be kicked out of my apartment, and I feel better physically. However, I attribute the seven years of on-and-off-again writing of this memoir novel, as frustrating and pride-swallowing and uncomfortable and impossible and improbable as it has been at times, to my current fatalistic (Mercy will be back at some point, but until then …) jouissance.

What’s with all the French? One might observe that I never left, because you kept me around by writing about me for seven years.

* * *

If you read the preceding passages and think, “Living with Mom isn’t very punk, Art,” or “I don’t sympathize with Art because he’s so passive,” you can go fuck yourself.