At the doctor’s office. No reason, his father said, just a checkup. Careful not to say: You’ve been acting weird lately. Staying out late. Sleeping in. Dark circles under his eyes. Always distracted. New lock on the attic door. So. Twenty minutes to town. Long wait in the lobby. Some fish in a tank, weaving through a hunk of neon plastic. Thin bright bodies. Violet light. There is a woman asleep on a bench, her head tipped against the wall, her purse on her lap. Mouth open. Lipstick on her teeth. You crush up the bodies of bugs to get a red that deep, carmine, he can’t remember if it’s the actual blood of insects or something else. Smashed-up carapace. Brains. Guts. Erik sighs, legs twitching. What are you reading? Xie tilts his book to show the cover, on which a woman in a white gown looks up in astonishment at the shining figure of Christ: Interior Castle. Is it good? Erik asks. Xie shrugs. It’s okay. Who’s it by? Um. A Spanish nun. A mystic. Erik squints in surprise. A nun? Xie nods. What does it mean? The title? It’s about. Um. Praying. And how when you get really good at it, it’s like you move through these different rooms, which she calls mansions, but the mansion is God or something, or the way to God, and the better you pray the deeper you get inside it. And then what? And then … you get into the seventh mansion and you. Um. I don’t know. Die or marry Jesus, or. Go to heaven. Huh. Are you into praying now? Xie’s knee jumps, little laugh. Um, no. It’s. Just. For school. They’re teaching Catholicism in your school? No, I—it’s history. English. Historical English texts. I thought it was written in Spanish. Xie sighs. I mean, it’s just a book. For reading. Erik shrugs. Okay. Glad you’re enjoying it. Xie looks back at the page. He thinks that people to whom God grants these favours must be angels; and, as this is impossible while they are in the body, he attributes the whole thing to melancholy, or the devil. Teresa doesn’t say how you know it’s not melancholy, those favors, only says that when you feel God you know it’s him, though elsewhere she says there are people who think they know the difference but are mistaken, so how could you know which one you were, right or wrong? He folds the corner of the page. Nurse calling his name. He follows her into a beige room that smells like Band-Aids. Asked to undress; cold in his underwear, shifting his ass on the paper-covered table. A panel on the ceiling painted blue. For a few months in the city he had a therapist who had a painted panel on her ceiling, too, a woman who was always smiling, even when she asked him if he ever thought about harming himself, if he ever felt like he wanted to die. He never answered.