Christ is Mercy. He sees the rotten stinking parts of us, the pus and so on, and says I love you anyway my son. My daughter. In my case I do not think I have much pus. I think I have a beige nubbly interior, sort of like the exterior of this typewriter. It’s true I have thoughts—violent thoughts. But they don’t belong to me. They appear in my mind like a pride of lions in an empty shopping mall. I glare at them with the frigid scorn of a gleaming Coke machine. They pad up still escalators, sniff at barren popcorn stalls, they lick sticky remains of ice cream off shining stone floors. They shit in the planters. And when they go, when the automatic doors close behind them, they leave no trace, only a few gigantic turds around the trunks of the plastic trees. These turds are the shadows of my thoughts. And this is where my problem lies: I am clotted with shit. I knew a girl. She was the daughter of an artist that lived nearby. I used to play in her house. She had long brown frizzy hair. Once we were walking down the hill away from her house and she froze, grabbing my hand. “What is it?” I asked. “I just saw God,” she said. She didn’t elaborate, but I believed her. She was very bossy. I liked it though. I enjoy crawling into someone else’s hand and letting them rattle me around like a single die. I saw her recently. Brought my kids over to her house. She isn’t married. She makes twenty-foot steel sculptures that look like enormous red fingernails glued together. She was really happy to see me and the girls at first but then after a while I could tell we were boring her. She wanted to get back to the studio. She had a commission. I envied her. Not for the commission—for believing it was important. For believing in anything enough to devote your whole life to it, get up at six in the morning and slave away till one, have a meager slice of bread and cheese and then go back to work, fighting against fatigue and back strain—struggling to get the thing done in time for the big unveiling. And then it’s a pile of giant fingernails. The only thing I feel proud of is my kids. I know I don’t have the right—they came out just the same as they are now. All I did was prevent them from dying of exposure or hunger. Ellen emerged fighting, red-faced, furious. Wendy came out relaxed, curious, gentle. And that’s the way they are now. They are my pride and joy and they’re the reason I get dressed, when I did used to get dressed. Of course I will have to go food shopping, and that’s today. I can’t keep giving JP lists. I think he stays with me because I don’t need him anymore. I don’t seem to need him because I don’t speak. Talking only leads to misunderstandings. Silence is perfect. I am afraid I will say something pungent. A stink will come out of my mouth. This makes it impossible to answer the phone, which drives JP crazy. But to get back to my subject. Of the little moment when I went the wrong way, from promising young woman to flotsam, to extraneousness—like the strands that rub off a ribbon and that you cut away. sometime last year it hit me nothing was safe. It started with driving. I was on 9G which has a 55-mile-an-hour speed limit which is on the fast side in my opinion anyway which I have always felt but this time as I was driving there was this truck coming toward me exactly the same make as my own truck which is a Chevy and the same color which is white, and I was sure it was going to swerve and hit me. I got paralyzed with the sense of the inevitability of it and just got ready to die. When the truck passed without hitting me, it didn’t really help. I swerved off the road and parked on the dirt shoulder for a long time. Sweat was all down my sides and I couldn’t breathe full breaths, just little half-breaths. I started crying, too, this panicked out-of-body crying. Like it was someone else crying. There were no thoughts attached. It was physical, and sort of animal. I had stopped being a person and I was just fear. So from then on my point of view sort of shifted and I was no longer in any way relaxed. which is funny because here’s what got no reaction whatsoever from me: I was driving in a convoy of armored vehicles driving out of Kabul. There was a flash ahead of us and a detonation. I saw an arm floating by my window—very slow, like it was moving through water. They treated all the soldiers in our armored vehicle for PTSD because of what we had seen, but of all of us, I was the one who was most fine. They say there can be a delayed reaction. Who knows. I did find out there was a therapist who took my insurance locally and went and sat in the man’s chair and he said a few things that made me think he was an idiot. Plus I couldn’t really speak because of the problem of the potential stench coming out of my mouth. I am turning to stone is what it is. I need silence and solitude. If everyone could just stop talking for five minutes I could gather myself. If JP would stop asking me if I’m okay, and the kids. I am very sorry about the kids.