“What you mean, indoctrinated?” she frowned, jabbing the air with her knitting needle, the aubergine and pink work done, flying from the needle like the official flag of the psychiatric ward. God bless this psychiatric ward, home of the gibbering, land of the nervous, hand on heart, stand up tall. I am very brave when I am completely alone.

“There was a nun here last night, talking about God.”

“That ol’ fool”

“You’re calling God a fool?” I gasped, intrigued.

“No, chile, I callin’ that old fool a fool. She don’t got no brains in her head, going around gettin’ drunk and then assaultin’ patients with prayer. She make God sound like a man rubbin’ up against you on a crowded subway.”

Her name was Marcelle, just as it ought to have been. Delighted, I forced myself properly awake, pulling on the smiley foam slippers the hospital had left by my bed, and walked over to peer out the window. New York was shining in the heat, all rude, and I was glad that I was not down there in it, but that I could watch it from a sanitized perch. We were on the tenth floor and, gazing down, I watched the streets filled with people who had not tried to kill themselves. They had tried, and were still trying, with tremendous effort and strain, to live.

They were the ones who had to be in the hundred-degree heat, on filthy streets, sneering and spitting at each other, the spit sizzling on the sidewalke like hatred. That was their reward. Rich people rent apartments that are high up and have huge windows so that they can look down and get a clear view of just how dismal it is not to be extremely wealthy.

“If this were a room in an apartment complex, it would go for $3,000 a week.”

Marcelle laughed. “Don’t you get used to it up here. You going to be back down there with all of them soon enough. Only this time you going to know how to handle it.”

“How? How?” I spun away from the window, imploring her to tell me fast and loud.

“God!” she sang. “Jesus!”—fast, loud, wrong.

“Oh,” I said, making little attempt to mask my dissatisfaction with her answer. “Him.” She might as well have given me a hand-knit aubergine and pink scarf for all the good it did me.

“Yes, him. He’s going to help you.”

“Great.”

I slouched back to bed. She knew not to talk about it anymore and entertained me, instead, with tales of her adolescence in the south and how she had been married to a man named Garfield, but that he had drowned in a fishing accident. Her eyes never once teared over, even as mine cried buckets. The doctor who came to take a blood sample gave me a quizzical look and Marcelle made herself interested in her knitting.