Time is getting away from us?
I committed the encounter to paper, spending the urgent recollection of every word in the act of writing it. When I had finished, I spread the pages out on the kitchen table. They were scribbled in hyperactive script on paper from the recycling bin, across the backs of newsletters, pieces of mail—anything that had been near to hand.
I opened my laptop and started to type.
Around 1:00 A.M., as I transcribed the end of our dinner together—my dinner—I found I had missed a major point. I had thought there was something significant about the family at the table, that something about them first drew her interest and then piqued her. But that wasn’t it, the thing that precipitated the moment—that startling, stunning moment—that she snapped at me. It was the coming revelation in her own story. The thing she knew she must say.
And then he forgave them.
I had thought nothing about that statement at the time. Forgiveness was, after all, the vernacular of religion.
Even for demons?
I scrolled back through the electronic account to an earlier appointment, the words leaping at me as I came to them:
Had I been a god, I would have set it all back. I would have erased everything, returned it all to the way it had been.
Why couldn’t you? For that matter, why couldn’t God?
I’ll tell you why: because we were damned!
I scrolled forward.
He forgave them.
I sat back in my chair, staring at the screen.
Late that night I received a response from Katrina, but the proposal she attached was not one I recognized. Confused, I paged through the brief teaser of Dreaming: A Memoir, by L. LeGeros.
It was the personal account of a paranoid schizophrenic.