I never had faith, and can’t imagine ever finding it. Grief is no excuse for faith. I could sooner fly than believe in anything beside the instability of the world I have lived in. And she was only a student. She was not of the haunted tribe of vertebrae. She fled with her fossil in her hand and I sat back down on the floor and dropped the vertebra I was holding.

Just a bad night.

92

I’ve been assigned a final paper. The course is “an examination of belief in literature.” An examination of faith. I’ve always been good at writing papers, but this assignment is troubling, because it’s serious and I have never been a serious student. I was hardly even a student this fall. I didn’t talk in seminar. I should have, because I just transferred back here, but I didn’t. Nothing to say. Maybe I just didn’t care anymore. So I was the silent guy.

Also, I was always cold—some psychopathology at work, no doubt—so I always wore my jacket. I think not taking off my jacket made the other students uneasy. Or maybe it was the jacket itself. It has a red rising sun with Japanese characters on the back. Maybe the jacket protects me. I found it in a small army-navy store in the city when as I was looking for a coat for the coming winter. The place was full of people looking to buy gas masks, and the proprietor was the only one working the store. He was harried and wild-eyed, and wore dog tags that jingled out over his black T-shirt and camo vest. He seemed slightly ironic about selling gas masks, telling customers that the masks would make great collector’s items, although these people clearly had safety in mind.

He wasn’t ironic about the jacket I was buying, but he did try to snow me. He saw me trying it on and came over. It was a little small and smelled old, but I didn’t care, and I liked the Japanese writing on the back.

“Yeah, that’s quite a jacket,” said the proprietor. “It’s a kamikaze jacket.”

“How’s it still here?” I asked him.