The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 71

A question for the floor, asked by the man waiting for the bus back into San Francisco: “How do you know if you’re mad?”

He’s maybe in his early thirties, but with a hunted innocence in his eyes that makes him seem much younger. He clings to a single sky-blue suitcase, and wears a grey sweater with a hood, and torn shoes, and says earnestly that he used to study philosophy, but the philosophers missed the point, that it wasn’t about the rules, it was about the absences, the places where the rules broke down, that was the truth of it, the truth of the universe.

“We all pretend we’re not mad,” he whispered, “but that’s because we’re afraid!”

A question I mulled over on the bus, clutching my meagre travel bag close, my clothes dirty, hair wild, face set. How do you know you’re not mad?

How many lives had I touched, who now considered themselves insane? My parents, slowly forgetting their own child, papering over the wallpaper in my bedroom, something they’d always meant to do. People I’d stolen from, the police in the interview room — she walked right up to you, she spoke to you, how can you not remember her face? Princess Leena in Dubai. Gauguin, who’d held a knife on me; people I’d robbed and people I’d bought. A passport forger on a boat in the Sea of Marmara, a girl playing video games in Tokyo, a lover drunk on the bed of the one-hour hotel. Men whose bodies I’d pressed close to mine, Parker in New York, a maths teacher who’d wondered if I counted cards, company, warmth, association, companionship — discipline.

Am I mad?

I have discipline to protect me. The discipline of thoughts questioned, of company sought, another pair of eyes, a different outlook on the world, they are my discipline, humanity is my discipline, Luca Evard is…

… a lapse in judgement.

I know that, have always known that, see it very clearly now. Not discipline. Anti-discipline. A burst of irrational obsession which, having nothing long-term to measure the term against, I called love. How I needed him now. How he must hate me, if he remembered anything about who I was.

I counted, until only counting remained.