I had always hated the walk up to Dr. Shapacia's building.  Not the act of walking, mind you, but the walkway itself.  It was one of those cement-tiled walks typical of medical buildings, constantly twisted and intersected upon itself and the walkways to other buildings, with a few artificial plots of grass or saplings planted here and there.  The problem was, the tiles didn't line up rightly.  Because of the way they intersected, there was always a tile that was cut off by another, a triangle where there should have been a rectangle, a trapezoid where there should have been a square.  The pattern that should have been wasn't, because whoever built it either couldn't decide which way to face it--or just didn't care.  So every time I walked from the street to the front doors, I would look down past my feet, as was my habit, and try to reorganize the components of the path into straight lines, some semblance of consistency.  Of course, to finish the job was impossible; there were so many misplaced and orphaned tiles, that it would have taken me hours to right this wrong, this sour note between C and C sharp, and I never had the initiative to do it.  It would have been too conspicuous, some hunched figure running around the front of the medical offices, marking pieces of pavement with chalk because he couldn't remember which ones he'd placed where; it would have drawn too many odd looks for an odd man, whose only concern in the first place was to correct unsubtle oddities.  Not to mention, I never had time to do any of that when I was there, for the only reason I ever had to visit Dr. Shapacia's building was to meet with Dr. Shapacia, and he, like all psychiatrists, had more appointments than time, and could ill-afford to wait for some patient or another to complete such an exercise.

It was for these reasons that on this Tuesday evening I did my best to look neither down nor up (for I never looked skyward, that was His domain) as I made my way to the glass doors at the front of Dr. Shapacia's building, a building unfortunately too nearby my home to warrant a bus ride.  I pulled off my baseball cap and walked silently past the information desk and the unsettling smile of the woman behind it, stopping at the elevator.  I pushed '6.'  A pause.  I watched the display on the elevator as it changed, starting at five, then up to seven, then down towards me at floor one, as if it needed a running start to reach me.  I imagined someone must have gotten on at seven, wanting to go down.  Elevators weren't named properly, I thought.  They should have been called de-elevating elevators, or something more precise.  People didn't think when they named things.  The elevator paused at three, where I assumed someone must have gotten off, then continued unhesitantly down to me, and opened.

There was a man inside.  I waited for him to get out of the elevator, but he only took a single step, stopped, and stood there.

"Oh, shoot, looks like I'll have to go back up.  I forgot my briefcase upstairs."  He stepped aside to let me enter.  After a second, I did.

"What floor do you want?"  He was at the panel.  This didn't make sense.  He was supposed to have gotten off at three.  Why else did the elevator pause at that floor?  Did someone else get off at three?

"Um, sir?"  He looked at me questioningly, still waiting for an answer.  It took a moment for me to notice.  I realized he probably thought I was entirely vacant or didn't speak English properly.  People made those kind of assumptions.

"It's not that," I said.  "I was just thinking about the third floor."

"Floor three, then?"  He gave me a look, the kind that made me sure he was inspecting me.  People did that, too.  Once I made a false move or did something too slowly, they all knew right away to start looking for a reason.  People wanted to find out more about me.  Or maybe it wasn't all people.  I was there to see a psychiatrist, anyway; wouldn't it be nice to find out about a patient before he came in?  What if this man just waited in the elevator, constantly 'forgetting' his briefcase, and relaying information about the patients headed for the sixth floor?

Except that I wasn't headed for the sixth floor, anymore.  The man had hit the button for floor three already, and the elevator had just interrupted me by giving that familiar jolt that elevators give when they start to ascend.  I looked down.  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the man still standing there, his eyes mindlessly looking up like there was something worth looking at on the ceiling of this stuffy little room.  There wasn't, as I knew from countless other trips on this elevator.  The elevator ceiling was a dully reflective sheet of metal, with a light in the center, the kind that lay flush with the ceiling, so as not to disturb the rectangular prism that was the interior of an elevator.  He looked uncomfortable.  Like he knew who I was, or knew why I was here.  People weren't scared of strangers.  They could be mean or kind to strangers; they got to choose.  People they knew things about, though, people they knew were weird or strange, like I was, those people were different, and it took that choice away.  People didn't like it.

The elevator arrived at the third floor, and the doors opened.  I stepped out before I could get a chance to watch the expecting eyes of my cell mate usher me out.  I walked around the corner, out of sight, and waited for the sound of the elevator doors closing and the bell that followed.  It came, and I headed back up the hall to the stairs.

The stairs in this building bothered me, too; at first glance they were rectangular enough to make sense, and the linoleum tile seemed well-fitted.  At every landing between floors, though, the handrail had to make a full turn to continue following the steps and, in doing so, took an odd little niche out of one or two tiles.  I gripped the rail and headed up the steps, making sure the toes of my shoes pointed forward on each step, without jamming into the next one.  Three stories later, I opened the door into the hallway, passed suites 623 through 626, and arrived at suite 627.

I was twenty minutes early, so the secretary let me sign in and sit down.  Dr. Shapacia met with me every first Tuesday of the month, as he did with the woman who had an appointment just before I did.  I knew her by face only; she was a tall woman with shoulder-length brown hair, and eyes that were only a shade or two off from the color of Dr. Shapacia's desk.  I sat in the corner chair of the waiting room, every month, and waited for her to walk out, always in the same way, eyes focused forward on air, stride direct and hugging the turn out of Dr. Shapacia's office.  I once, one of the first times I had come to Dr. Shapacia's office, had noticed her eyes meet mine on her way out; she had averted them immediately, along with her entire head, indeed her whole body, with a sort of surprise, as though my presence was a wall she had not expected on the way out.  It had happened only once.

I heard the sound of a file drawer opening.  The secretary was busily scribbling something down on the time sheet and fishing a file out of the records, probably something about me.  I knew it was, because the same ritual would occur every month, right before my appointment, and I knew that Dr. Shapacia must have had files on me.  Psychiatrists like Dr. Shapacia didn't have time to learn about all their patients, just to read about them, especially since they saw their patients so rarely as one Tuesday in four.  I liked it better this way; while I didn't mind Dr. Shapacia terribly, he didn't seem to like me.  Like most people, I guessed, he preferred not to deal with me directly.  Rather, I would see a therapist, Dr. Sanna, every Wednesday until forever, who relayed her findings to him via well-organized manila folders, handled by secretaries behind front desks.

Presently, the brown-haired woman strode out of her appointment and began scheduling one for next month.  The first Tuesday of the month?  Perfect.

As the conversation died down for the brown-haired woman to sign a check, the secretary motioned for me to hold a moment before heading to Dr. Shapacia's office.  This was followed promptly with a discrete visit to the yet unseen office and a return that was accented by the absence of one inconspicuous folder.

"Go on in," came the smiling invitation.

I picked up my hat and started toward the door.  Inside, Dr. Shapacia was busy reviewing my file, wearing the same thick pair of round, wire-framed reading glasses that I always saw him in, and the same flat expression I never saw him without.  He invited me to sit down, not looking up.  Easing into the reclining chair worn with the buttock of a thousand patients before me, I rested my hat in my lap, my hands on top of it.

"I see your sessions with Dr. Sanna have been going well," he said, putting down the folder at last.  What did that mean, anyway, 'going well?'  Was I getting better somehow?  Was she curing me of something?  She was always telling me that she was helping me learn to work through things, not that she was removing them.  Psychologists made those kinds of distinctions.  Maybe they were important to them.  Maybe curing someone's mind meant getting rid of it, and they didn't want to do that.

"She's also recommended that you begin a prescription of anti-psychotics again."  Again.  "Tell me, how have you felt since you started therapy with Dr. Sanna?"

I didn't know how to answer; I was preoccupied.  I couldn't decide what to do with my hat, whether it was appropriate to have it on or under my hands, or next to them.  I thought of putting it by my feet, but I knew I couldn't do that discretely, and that if I put it down next to the chair, I'd surely forget it on my way out.  The whole while I'd been shuffling around with my hat, I got the impression that Dr. Shapacia was watching it, analyzing the way I fumbled for equilibrium.  I knew it was kind of silly to think that normally, but Dr. Shapacia was a psychiatrist; maybe they taught him these kinds of things.

"How do you feel now?" he asked.  Should I have felt cured?  I guessed that wasn't true.  I was right; they probably didn't want to cure me.  Yes, that was it, and if I had started getting cured, they'd have had to work on un-curing me.

"I'm not yet," I declared.

There was a bit of a pause.  As usual, Dr. Shapacia broke it.  "Not yet what?"  His brow had shifted from its apathetic pose to one of concern, maybe frustration.

"Cured," I said.  "I'm not, yet."

He began speaking at length, which his kind never did unless they were out to prove something, usually how smart they were.  My focus shifted off of him, to the plaques behind him.  I couldn't read them from where I was sitting, but I knew they said the same things they said last month.  It looked a little like one of them was tilted a bit.  Bothersome.  I straightened it.  The edges of each plaque continued off, making little gridworks.  Some lines ran from the edge of one frame and into the side of another.  I wanted the frames to move, maybe align so that none of these invisible infinites of the edges would run into anything, not even the walls.  I started flipping the frames, trying to push them this way and that until a Cartesian peace could be restored, but it was not to be.  The walls refused to budge, and the plaques were ignorant of their plight.  Like so many things, it was His doing, I thought.

". . . which is why Dr. Sanna is recommending this prescription.  While I can't force you to take it, I can assure you that, based on our sessions together, her diagnosis is justified . . ."

His countenance was boring, frustrating, even.  Maybe they taught him that, too.

". . . to consider getting the prescription this time.  Now, I'm going to write the prescription for four weeks, and you can start . . ."

The session came to a close shortly afterward.  He gave me the slip of paper, added two lines to my folder, and sent me out again.



The phone rang while I was at the canvas.  I had been painting the images of the day, the geometric disaster called a walkway, the framed-in frames, even the unknown shadow that haunted the elevator, when the first ring pulled me back into my small, one-bedroom apartment.

I didn't trust phones.  There was always a nagging feeling in the back of my mind with phones, a question about who was on the other end.  I mean, anyone could answer a phone, could dial a number, could direct a call.  Supposedly, the only people who ever called me were my mother and telemarketers, but it's not always easy to tell who someone is by the sound of her voice.

The phone rang again.  I stood there, wet paintbrush in hand, feet resting on an old bed sheet covered with paint stains.  I should answer.

Another ring, and I put down the brush.  I checked the soles of my feet for paint and stepped over to the kitchen, where my only phone sat, a little white box that managed all trade between the world's world and mine.  I picked up, but didn't say anything.  There was a breathing on the other end.

A voice like my mother's said, "Hello?  Honey, is that you?"

My mother liked to check on me.  Ever since I could remember, she'd checked on me.  During the week, she'd call me twice.  When I had first moved into my apartment, she had called me every day.  When I finally had graduated from her home-schooling to a public high school, she had called me every lunch period.  I knew why.  I wasn't a normal child.  People had a special interest in the boy who didn't speak until he was five.  People wanted to watch the kid who tuned the TV between channels and watched static for half an hour at a time.  People couldn't be kept from the child who didn't play with his blocks, but stacked them neatly in their box, dumped them out, and meticulously stacked them again and again and again.

"Honey, please say something."

I obeyed the voice.  "Hi."

"Hi, honey.  How was your appointment with Dr. Shapacia today?"

I hadn't mentioned that yet, but my mother would have known about it.  Then again, so would Dr. Shapacia, or anyone he employed.

"He wanted me to take the medication," I said.  Dr. Shapacia would have known that, too.

"Did you get the prescription filled?"

An ambiguous question.  Anyone could ask it.

"I'm not taking anything," I said.  I gripped the phone against my face, staring at the unfinished work on the canvas.

"Good.  I don't want you to.  God made you perfect the way you are, and no doctor needs to change that; that Dr. Sanna just doesn't know it.  We need to write a letter to your insurance and get a new therapist.  I could write it for you.  How about it?"

My mother wrote a lot of letters for me.  She liked to take care of them because she knew I wasn't any good at writing.  My high school teachers had told her.  I could never seem to connect two sentences; they would tell me I needed to explain my thoughts more fully, that readers wouldn't follow unless I was complete in my train of thought.  But, of course, I didn't have readers, and when I tried to explain more in my writing, they just became more confused.

The voice spoke again, "Would you like that, dear?"

Would my mother ask that?  It sounded like the static in the background was getting louder, and that breathing sound was back.  I decided not to risk it.

"I'm going to keep seeing Dr. Sanna," I said.  It was a safe thing to say.

A pause.  Then, slowly.  "Okay, honey, but just you remember:  the person you are, the way you think, and the beautiful paintings you make; that prescription would mean the end of all that.  You don't need any doctor to change you, just to help you be who you already are."

The conversation ended with a familiar reassurance that anything I needed, I could ask for.  I hung up the phone quickly afterward.  Yes, I thought.  I am who I am.  Surely that must be true, no matter who had said it.  My mother.  A shadow.  Myself.  Him.

The kitchen clock read 8:43, so I sealed up the paint and washed out my brush.  The night shift was approaching; it was nearly time to go to work.

A few minutes later, I donned my hat and started out my door.  The bus stop was about a half a block away, a short walk on well-placed cement sidewalks.  Since it was still mid-February, the sun was long since set, and only street lamps lit the way.  I liked to watch my own shadow as I walked.  The way it stretched and turned as I passed a lamppost, the slow fade as it was overtaken by another light, and the way every crevasse and bump in the ground seemed to morph every shadow that passed over it; all of this made for a wonderful animation that paintings only hinted at.  Once, when I was younger, someone had told me that no one could step on his own shadow, but it had seemed ridiculous to me, because didn't we do that all the time?

The bus stop was vacant, like every night.  People didn't wait to board buses at nine at night; they flooded out of them and into the world, itching to filter into the night until they were swallowed whole by one house or another.  It was better this way; when the bus came, the driver and I had the ride to ourselves, rows of empty seats between us.

I always sat in a window seat.  I could think of no reason not to, and, had there been one, it wouldn't have been enough.

I had always loved the spectacle of traffic in the night.  It was the most beautiful thing I knew.  I loved to watch the doubled rows of headlights on trafficked roads and waiting at stoplights, changing places in perfect strokes, angels in hues of yellow and white and blue one way, a deep red the other.  I loved the way they ran about, a harmony, an image, kinetic and yet organized, always perfect, but never the same.  Ceiling tiles, brick walls, chain link fences; these patterns were pretty, interactions that I yearned to capture.  This, however, this chorus of divine choreography, was gorgeous.  I would feel so humbled to watch that I knew it could only be His work, a marvel that neither brush nor word could define.

I would watch the angels flying by, or running alongside my window, always in pairs.  I didn't know what angels said to each other, but I imagined them whispering among themselves, about me or my mother, about agendas and plans, about people and the things they did, whatever angels spoke about.  Angels didn't think of sinning, or sin by thinking the way people did, so speech was purer for them.  As always, angels were perfect, and I was who I was.

But presently, I saw something that was not as always.  It had taken me a moment to notice it, for it was far away, but once I had, it seized my attention with a steel chain.  A short while back, and just in sight, was an angel.  One angel.  A lone angel, without partner or twin, an asymmetry amidst a cloud of mirrored pairs.  It was catching up with me.  The outcast angel shone closer, and the bus slowed for a light.  The outcast crept up right next to me, stopping with mere feet between us.  I had started to squirm in my seat, uneasy with this forlorn divinity in such proximity.  A mortal eternity passed.  I kept staring.  At last, the light changed, and the bus turned left to a different road, leaving the outcast to continue forward, down another path.

The lucent column continued, and I relaxed a bit.  It was over too soon; the bus arrived at my stop a scant few minutes later, and I disembarked.



My job was a simple one; I waited behind a scratched pane of bulletproof glass, took money, and activated whatever pump I was told.  Occasionally, I had to give someone a pack of cigarettes or give directions to the bathroom.  I must have said something like twenty words a night.

I had only started the job a few weeks before; it had been my mother's suggestion.  Not the gas station, in particular, but any job.  I'd been telling her I would find one for a while, but I had balked at the idea of having to sell anything or serve anyone every day.  People were always buzzing about in stores and restaurants, leaving pieces of their presence everywhere.  Home was so much cleaner.  Paint stains and old newspapers didn't leave pieces of themselves everywhere; it was more like they were pieces of me.  Still, I had known for some time that neither my mother nor I could have paid for my unproductive lifestyle for very long, so I applied for a night job.  Night had seemed the best time, the period when He wasn't watching--or couldn't, for whatever reason.  Truckers didn't venture this far into town, and local drivers usually bought gas during the day, so customers seldom bought gas after ten.  Besides, even when they did, there was always a good chance they'd buy elsewhere.

Somebody had robbed me, only a week before.  He had been an asymmetric man, walking up to the booth with one side of him weighted like a stone.  He'd looked bound, somehow contained.  From his hooded head to his pocketed hands, he had had the presence of some unopened door holding back a flood.  He had poured himself out in the shape of two barrels, pushing craftily into the small opening usually used only for dollar bills and checks.  He had been a threat I acknowledged, but to which I didn't react.  Neither of us spoke, and he left with the contents of the register.  It had been the easiest transaction I'd ever had to conduct.

Presently, I thought of it.  I wondered why such things were so wordless and easy, while I had to spend most of my nights practicing "Thank you" and "Yes, sir."

I wondered what would have happened had the man pulled the trigger.  I had heard several theories, but they hadn't made sense to me.  My mother had told me that no one died unless they were evil inside; I don't know if she meant me.  She said she didn't.  I was confused, sometimes, by the line between people and angels.  People sometimes seemed to think that angels were different, that people weren't angels, just stayed with them, eternal guests when they died.  But then, sometimes they also talked about becoming angels.  In some stories, people became angels, grew wings when they died.  Or maybe, they were already angels or demons, but didn't realize it until they'd passed.  I didn't know if I was an angel.  I didn't think I believed I could be, just then.

A lady paid for her gas and asked for pump number five.  I gave her her change and closed the register.

I thought, maybe that man was an angel.  I had heard someone say, "the angel of death" before, so it made sense that at least one angel might act that way.  Of course, angels were never as lopsided as that man had been, were they?  I didn't know anymore.

I wished that He didn't rule the sky the way He did.  The sky was open, big.  Alone.  Why else was it called the heavens?  I wanted Him to let go of it; to give it to me, so that I could stop walking for a while, so that people wouldn't bump into me all the time, so that clutter and pieces they left everywhere wouldn't follow me, so that I could drop whatever I wanted whenever I wanted, and never look down anymore.  I didn't want to look in any direction, but while I was down here I had to, because there were so many things to run into down here that up there didn't have.

A truck stopped in the diesel lane, its long shadow blocking any view of the street behind it.

I was behind a pane of impenetrable glass, the world stuck outside forever.  It was as private as anywhere I'd ever been, transparent though it was, a room barely my size lined with inanimate faces smiling at me from magazine covers and slow deaths in cartons on the wall behind me.  It made me calmer, I supposed.  It made me simpler, I figured.  It didn't make me free.

The trucker didn't say anything.  He gave me plastic and no words; I gave him gas and a "Yes, sir."

I thought about the other jobs I could have had.  A trucker.  I would have driven nights, just like this one.  I would have gone everywhere, but only where I was told.  I'd have spent hours whispering to angels that didn't whisper back.  No, that wouldn't have worked.

Hours passed.  People approached my booth, several times, and every time I looked up at them, I wondered if the lopsided man had returned.  He never did.



"I think you're only hurting yourself by refusing to take the meds."  Wednesday had come, and that meant I was spending the evening at Dr. Sanna's office instead of on my way to work.

"I understand that the prospect of medication can be unsettling; many patients have problems resolving to take drugs."  She paused, putting her notes aside and facing me more intently.  "I can't make the decision for you, but from what you've told me, it doesn't sound like you're making the decision for you, either."  Another, longer pause, as she glanced down a moment.  "What can I say to convince you to try the medication?  What would you want to know that could change your mind?"

Dr. Sanna liked to ask questions like that.  She asked me a lot of questions, many more than Dr. Shapacia ever had, and she always seemed to have much more time to ask them in.  Maybe it was because she was younger than Dr. Shapacia, or because she saw me more often.  Maybe she liked me better than he did.

Well, I thought I liked her better than I liked Dr. Shapacia.  She had a better room, for one thing; instead of the many framed certificates that Dr. Shapacia had spent his life earning, she had a simpler, purer white set of walls, and, instead of a desk, she used a chair, like the one I did, when she spoke with me.  There was a pair of tables in her room, as well, which she would encourage me to use from time to time, asking me to write or draw things.  She had been one of the only people ever to ask to see me draw, telling me that it was important that I be able to show things the way I saw them.  "If drawings and paintings are easier for you than words," she would say, "then you can use those, too."  I'd even once brought something I had drawn from home, the week the gas station had been robbed.

I thought it was wrong sometimes, how much Dr. Sanna knew about me.  I didn't like to tell people too much.  I wasn't sure how it had happened, but somehow Dr. Sanna had gotten me to tell her about the lopsided man, the phone calls I'd get sometimes, and even Dr. Shapacia's walkway.  I'd told her all of these things slowly, trying not to tell too much.  I felt uneasy about her knowing, but I guessed it wasn't something I could undo.

She was looking at me, still, waiting.  It took me a moment to remember the question.  To remember 'meds.'

"I don't want it," I said.  "I'm . . ."  I fumbled my words, having started a sentence I wasn't sure how to finish.  As the moment passed, I realized I'd lost my chance to say anything, and I left it dangling.

She sighed, and sat more upright in her chair.  She didn't hesitate as much this time, and began without preface, "Do you remember what I told you my job was?"  She waited only long enough to acknowledge that I had nothing to say.  "My job is to help you live happily.  Not to change you, not to fix you, just to help you be happy and function in society so that you can stay that way.  I wouldn't want to change you, anyway; you're a good person, interesting, creative, and intelligent.

"If things were perfect, I'd change the world for you.  I'd give you a place where the world would function around you, would understand you, and would act so that you could understand it.  I'd do that for all my patients if I could, because the world isn't helpful the way it is; it's full of problems and difficulties that are hard to deal with.  I'd take that away, and leave the parts that let you paint and think and be exactly the way you want to be, but I can't do that, because there's only one world for all of us, and I can't fix it.  I'm just one person, and the world is full of more people than I can count.

"Even if I were somehow empowered to do all that for you, I couldn't get it right, because I'd have trouble deciding what was right for you, and so would you.  That's another thing I'm here to help with; I want you to know what you want, and be able to pursue it.  That's part of what living happily is; you have to be able to strive for things.  I can't strive for them on your behalf, and if I did, you wouldn't want them.

"The world is massive, and that makes it hard for me to move it.  Society is full of people doing everything they can to work in unison, and, even then, they don't get it right all the time.  Some people don't want to work together, for whatever reason, and some people want to but just aren't any good at it.  It's a system; there are pluses and minuses, benefits and disadvantages.  Nothing I've ever talked about with you tries to deny this, or change it.  You're a cog in a machine, and I'm doing everything I can to help you round out your edges.

"Even if I were to try to discard you or change you, you'd inevitably still be you.  I want you to think about that for a moment.  You are yourself, and I want desperately for the whole world to enjoy that."

She stopped for a long beat, still looking me in the eye, and I did as she asked.  I thought about it.  I tried to imagine the world and where I was.  I tried to imagine people, Him, the whole of everything.  I closed my eyes and filled the space where Dr. Sanna's face had occupied my field of view with the biggest image I could.

It was then, all of a sudden, that I thought of the lone angel.  The outcast on the streets, wandering through the lower heavens without a mate, crippled in the glory that was Celestia.  And it hit me, all at once, like nothing ever had.  I was the outcast angel.  I was the one in a field of perfection, glaringly dissonant, a freakish monster without a head, destroying a harmony that otherwise might have been.  It made sense, in an instant, the most obvious thing I'd ever missed in my life.

After all, people made patterns, just like she had said.  People built brick walls, people framed letters, people tiled floors--people built angels.  And I was ruining it.  Standing between mediocrity and asymptotic perfection.  I wanted to think my world was crashing down around me, but it wasn't my world, and it wasn't crashing; I was.  I was frozen in a new reality, trying to decide what to do.

So I wept.  I sobbed.  I cried like I hadn't since I was an infant, covering my face in my hands.  Right there, in front of Dr. Sanna and all the eyes of the world, I threw my hat to the ground and let my tears fall.  A man was the sum of his parts, I thought, and I was nothing.

Dr. Sanna consoled me as best she could, offering tissues and water to me.  The embarrassment was impossible to face; I only stared at the floor beneath my feet and wiped my face on weathered Kleenex.

"I'll do it," I kept saying, beneath my muffling exterior.  "I'll do it."  Not until our time was nearly through did I manage to stop myself, accepting all of Dr. Sanna's assurances that I was going to be okay, and that none of this was my fault.  I tried to believe.

When she ushered me out of the room, I didn't pause on my way out of her office.  I ran, looking straight ahead the whole way, home to my apartment, where, under yesterday's paper and a dirty plate, I found it:  the prescription.  A pink piece of paper scratched with Dr. Shapacia's hand.

I was out the door again immediately.  I got to the bus stop in time to catch a last minute shuttle down to the pharmacy, my back to my window for as much of the ride as I could manage.

I had never walked into this pharmacy alone before, but, as I entered, I knew my task immediately.  The line was immense, the wait daunting, but I held fast to it, trying to negotiate the manner that everyone else in line had learned a lifetime ago.  Behind the counter, and amidst high shelves filled to the brim with sterile white bags, the small staff of the pharmacy flew about like bees upon nectar, taking orders, filing files, and sorting meticulously through an archive of drugs I knew nothing about.

When time finally thawed, I approached the high counter, the pitiful slip of paper in my hand.  I paid a man in a white coat a forty dollar co-pay for a form and a pen, and with the entire world behind my fingertips, I signed a contract to write good essays, to be bored by bus rides, to chatter away on phones, and never to see angels again.