A few days went by like this, or maybe it was more than a few. In addition to the mental space taken up by my dismal flights of fancy, the subject of lost cats came into my mind and lodged there, unpleasantly, as did that of lost love. Thinking of this latter, I took to positioning myself on a bench by the ward’s main entrance in the hope that some remnant thereof would find its way through those tall metal doors. If Aunt Lulu — whom I had lost or let go or let sink forward toward her bowl of soup — had found me, I reasoned, why couldn’t Carine, whom I had lost in a different way but just as definitively? Dr. Tulp got concerned after I began to talk a lot about saliva in one of our sessions and upped my meds. I smacked the new nurse, an outrageously comely individual wearing a silver charm necklace with little devils on it, because the way she lifted her arm reminded me of Aunt Lulu, and passed a night in restraining straps with a slab of cold lead on my chest. Then I heard they weren’t going after anyone except Job, who was wanted for a couple of other, more complicated things.

This news calmed me down to some extent, but I did spend time obsessing over what Job’s other operations might have been. He’d talked one night about what had sounded at the time like a condominium deal in Florida, so I imagined him taking big, illicit bites of mob-related bogus property deals and eventually bilking the wrong guy. Because another time he had mentioned a predilection for indulging in a certain variety of late-night extracurricular activity and had remarked on its probable profitability, I pictured him running a ring of prostitutes, one catering exclusively to lower-middle-class East Village shop owners, maybe hiring someone to slip flyers under security grates at night. Job, as I imagined it, would sit at the center of this handsomely functioning mechanism with a green visor and violet glasses placing phone calls, delivering comportment lectures, and tallying receipts. When this line of thought began to lose its freshness, I decided that I needed to start getting some exercise and began jumping up and down and pumping my fists and doing other calisthenics in front of my mesh-covered window.

The new nurse came in then went out.

That is not acceptable behavior in a public facility, Henry, Dr. Tulp said.

But is it productive? I said.

It is neither productive nor acceptable, Henry. That bed you were jumping up and down on like it was your own personal property is the property of this facility and is not to be damaged. And jumping up and down without any clothes on anywhere in this facility besides your bathroom is out-of-bounds, period.

Well, fuck you.

That’s not very productive either, Henry.

No, I don’t suppose it fucking is, I said.

Dr. Tulp put one of her long, thin fingers on the intercom button and asked an attendant to come in. Two of them answered her call. They were small but persuasive.

That’s when I started talking about Aunt Lulu.

I talked and related and described, and after a while Dr. Tulp told the attendants it was all right for them to step back.

Ah, Aunt Lulu, I said. Aunt Lulu in her dirty housedress. Aunt Lulu with the protruding veins in her calves. Aunt Lulu and her cats before school. Big fat fucking huge and mean-as-hell Aunt Lulu.

Tell me about this meanness.

She used to kill her cats. After she had had them for a while, she would coax them into a double-ply plastic bag and seal it.

That is mean. But do you think it was inappropriate?

I thought so. I found some of them one day when I was building a fort at the back of the yard. My friend and I actually played with them for a while. The bags. We used them to build a dike.

And your father?

Long gone.

You used to own cats, didn’t you?

I shook my head.

Good, Henry, she said. That’s some progress, we’ve made some progress now.

I’m lying, I said.

What are you lying about, Henry?

About the fort. About Aunt Lulu. About everything.

Dr. Tulp’s long, thin finger flicked out, and the attendants came back in when I got out of my seat and started to shout.

Mr. Kindt helped me get out of this sorry rut. One day he came into my room, tapped me on the shoulder, and took me for a little walk around the ward. When I got back I felt different, better. Actually, better is overstating it. Especially given the way things evolved. Maybe what I should give Mr. Kindt credit for is helping me get out of one rut and into another, and everyone knows that change, in the grand scheme of things, is rarely good.

Anyway, it was quiet time, when the doctors are off in their offices and the nurses and attendants sit quietly behind counters and the patients are in their beds, maybe thumbing through magazines or books or watching television or staring out the window, maybe mired in nightmares, awake or asleep.

We walked for a time in a silence broken only by Mr. Kindt’s breathing and the soft thud of our feet. When we did fall into conversation, it was only so he could tell me about a book he had once owned and read obsessively. This fascinating work contained a list of books, artworks, and objects that in a better world would have been written, painted, crafted, or found but in this poor world of ours probably hadn’t been. He had loved this list so much that he had memorized many of the descriptions, which included A Sub Marine Herbal, describing the several vegetables found on the rocks, hills, valleys, and meadows at the bottom of the sea; A Tragedy of Thyestes, and another of Medea, writ by Diogenes the Cy-nick; The Prophecy of the Cathay Quail, being the veritable and exquisite chronic of that epic questor whose exemplary fate it was never to be less than twain, by Anonymous, with engravings by Winfried Georg; A Snow Piece, of Land and Trees covered with snow and ice, and mountains of ice floating in the sea, with bears, seals, foxes, and variety of rare fowls upon them; and An Etiudros Alberti or Stone that is apt to be always moist: useful unto drie tempers, and to be held in the hand in Fevers instead of Crystal, Eggs, Limmons, Cucumbers. He gave the titles and descriptions in a kind of dreamy half-whispered cadence, which helped them to lodge more firmly in my own head, and I suspect that if he hadn’t eventually pressed my arm, raised his voice, and switched the subject, being with him would have done me some good beyond getting me out of my rut.

As it was though, he said, well, Henry, you are quite low, quite low indeed it seems.

I looked at him and nodded.

It is the blue devil of melancholy, he said.

Must be, I said.

It is a vanquisher of kings, a destroyer of great minds, a ruiner of artists, so what can such as we hope for?

Very little, I said.

That’s right. He squeezed my arm and laughed.

I asked him what he thought was funny.

We are, he said. Walking round and round a hospital ward in these awful robes.

I looked at his robe. It was covered in strange splotches and was wet in places. I tried to look at mine.

There’s a documentary on tonight, he said.

On what?

North American fur traders. On the system’s ever-shifting economic model, the breakthrough that was made possible when the mechanism of wampum was understood, on the types of traps they used, on the extraordinary amount of pain experienced by the beavers, gnawing away at their bloodied feet and hands.

Hands? I said.

I speak figuratively.

Have you already seen it?

Twice before.

Sounds depressing.

One blue devil for another.

I suppose.

We had entered a long, cold stretch of empty hallway, the locked doors giving onto storerooms, spare showers with handicap bars, and visitor toilets. There was a distant rattling sound somewhere in the walls and, occasionally, what sounded like a distant scream. Otherwise it was silent. Mr. Kindt paused here.