More than thirty years had passed since I last saw Dr.

Ping, or simply Ping, as I

thought of him now. So upon my first and only visit to his ranch tucked deep into the
middle of the high desert where he had retired, when he opened the front door I met the
familiar but weathered apparition of that once famous man, a yellow smile jutting
through the cracks and creases that a lifetime of cigarettes, coffee, scotch and hard work
(a lifetime that I obviously knew a thing or two about) had carved into his face. I need
some help, is all he said as he looked to the ground in order to maneuver a bad leg down
his porch steps, not a hint of surprise from him that I was suddenly standing there on his
doorstep after all these years. He remained hunched over as I followed him across a dirt
path towards the collapsing bones of an old barn.
I have a project that has been waiting thirty years for you to show up, he said as
he hobbled ahead of me, the hot sun already a torch upon my head and shoulders.

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He moved as he talked, he moved as he thought, he never stopped moving, not
once, not ever, he had a cigarette in one hand, a Styrofoam cup of cold black coffee in
another. I had known Ping for more than thirty years. First as my teacher then as my
mentor. In between those times he was also a father, an uncle, a brother, a confidant, an
enemy, a lover, a friend. I knew him perhaps better than I knew myself. No one else but I
knew that he kept a bottle of scotch in his desk at the office, that he took naps during
every afternoon, that he always went to bed at ten pm and woke up each and every day at
five am, that he got drunk one night when he was in the coast guard and buggered some
guy.
You know the one thing about people I could never understand, Ping said as he
limped ahead of me, is why do they ever tell the truth? He stopped when he found a tin
cup sitting on a pile of timber and took a sip of what I would later learn was vermouth. I
mean what is the real value in telling the truth? We all lie, right? Almost every chance we
have, and most chances when we could easily tell the truth, we lie anyway. Here, youll
need some of this, he said picking up a large plastic cup off the ground, opening a tap,
rinsing out the cup then filling it with water. I dont believe in bottled water, he said as he
handed the cup to me. So why ever tell the truth? What is the advantage in doing that?
We are consummate liars yet we still believe it is nobler to tell the truth. But there is no
truth really to be told. Sure, if you feel sick, you could say I feel sick if someone asks you
how you are, but aside from the mundane, there really is no truth to be told. I make up
answers to things all the time. Is it raining outside, my wife might ask. No, I will answer
without a clue. In what year was Kennedy killed? 1960, I will say every time caring less
if that was right or not. What happens when a groundhog sees his shadow? Are there

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UFOs? Why is the sky blue? What causes gravity? Is there a God? Was Uncle S gay?
Why do boys have nipples? A child once asked me, why do we breathe through our nose
and our mouth? I said, so we can eat mash potatoes without suffocating. I realized then
and there that we dont know the truth about the simplest things, yet that doesn't stop us
from saying something as if we believe it and then believing what we say is true. Youd
think science would be different. But science doesn't deal with truth, science is like a
grocery store, always struggling to replace what disappeared yesterday off the shelves.
We sell what we create, then set out to create something new to replace it, truth has its
own planned obsolescence, scientists are salesmen, the biggest liars of them all, why?
Because we know better. The scientist knows he is wrong, and yet he takes his money
anyway. He knows he is getting paid to perpetuate another round of lies to replace the
ones the world had already bought and paid for.
Ping has turned his attention to painting a short wooden fence he has built around
a garden of tomatoes. Amidst the peat covered soil were cones of wire mesh inside of
which tomato plants grew, the ripe fruit between the shadows and broken sunlight like
beating hearts. From somewhere he had found a coffee can filled with paint and his jowls
shook as he whacked a dried out paint brush against the wood to loosen the bristles.
Though covered with the dust and cracks of age, in his face was the same determination I
remember from years before, eyes and brows and mouth that met in an expression that
left no room for doubt, no uncertainty. I wondered what project had been awaiting my
arrival. He ignored my offer to help.
Of course, he said, we have to make an exception for the real liars in the world,
the Ingersotts for example who lie and never care if they are caught lying or not. Their

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world is a self contained world where their lies are whatever they want them to be, and
what harm their lies cause the rest of the people around them, they never seem to care or
notice. I've never understood the Ingersotts of the world, he said, how they live, how they
go on, how they survive. Ingersotts lies have not only harmed people, they have killed
people. His lies have not only set back science, they have nearly destroyed science. His
lies have made a mockery out of human thought, not just because he tells these lies as if
they were truths but because the world never seems to cease to listen to them. He tells a
lie, and people listen. They discover the lie, they react with anger, they even threaten to
incarcerate him, banish him, commit him. But all he has to do is make another statement
about this or that, a statement that we very well know is just another lie, at least will be a
lie when he is found out, but his statement about this or that actually seems to quiet
everyone, they actually seem to listen, to believe him once again, yet once again, and it is
only a matter of time, they will discover it is just another lie. And so again and again,
Ingersott lives his life between one lie and another lie, between lies and more lies.
Ping set down his paintbrush and walked through the garden, picking small weeds
from the ground, a few meager blades that had barely pushed through the peat before his
paint and nicotine stained fingers snatched them and tossed them to wither in the sun. A
cigarette dangled from his mouth, dropping a dandruff of ash as it danced between his
lips while he talked. His eyes were crinkled against the smoke, the lines slicing deep into
his tanned skin.
The goal of science is the same goal as most religions, he said, which is not truth,
no, the goal is to sell. It is not understanding that we are ultimately after, not knowledge,
but sales. We pretend to strive for simplicity and clarity, but ultimately keep changing the

Attrition Page 5
rules before we get anywhere. Scientists are not only liars, they are cowards, they would
never die for their beliefs, or else theyd be dying for something different every day. To
this the scientist would snort, it is not the truth at hand that we admire, it is the process, it
is not the truth we wish to protect, it is the method. The process? Bullshit! The method?
Poppycock! We dont believe our own hogwash! Artists know this better than anyone.
And artists are actually willing to die for the sake of their process! And so for that and
many other reasons we hate the poet, despise the painter and want nothing more than to
destroy the musician for what we cannot comprehend, for that j'ne sais pas that they have
but we dont. Dont get me wrong, we hate them, but we admire them all the same, in fact
we love these artist types, we respect them and feel sorry for their pitiable plight. We
embrace their heroics yet laugh at their childish nature, their utter dependency, their
devotion to something so immaterial it seems real. We invite them into our lives at every
opportunity, yet dread the moments preceding our meeting, our minds struggling with
excuses to cancel, to call the whole thing off, believe me, I know.
Ping had moved his attention to a small pile of red bricks. He removed one of the
top bricks, releasing a scurry of helmeted rollypollies, and placed it a feet away on the
ground. He then took a second brick and placed it next to the first one. A yellow Labrador
appeared in the field below, its face bleached with age, the fur behind its legs matted and
tangled. The dog looked up in my direction, its nose in the air, perhaps picking up my
strange scent more than seeing me, and in that pose stood so still that eventually it
disappeared into the similar hues of the chaparral. One by one Ping moved the bricks
until he had created a new pile, leaving behind a neat rectangle of neardead yellow and
white grass.

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The writer though is the worst of all the artist types, Ping continued. He is the
worst because he is both closest to his work and most removed. Closest in that his
medium is words and what better represents the human brain to our feeble imagination
than the words it creates. Brush stokes, musical notes, who knows where they come from,
could be brain farts for all we know. But words, they are the medium of the brain and so
the writer is closest to the medium in which he works. Great works of art never disappear.
Great works of science become laughable childs play in but a years time or less. You
dont need a reason to have a volume of Shakespeares sonnets on your bookshelf. But
who would have my book, The Sociobiological Basis of Compassion and Reciprocal
Altruism in New World Vervets, on display? No one for gods sake! Yet, the writer is also
the most removed because he has studied the medium too closely, become too familiar,
lost the distance that is necessary really to appreciate the subject. Scientists are the
biggest liars, the biggest bores, but writers are the most ridiculous of them all. Who
knows what the writer really knows? Thats the problem isn't it? Is he speaking from
experience or imagination? Is he saying something he believes or simply playing a game?
Its a despicable event to meet a writer, unbearable to have to sit down to dinner with one,
and nearly suicidal to find oneself in conversation with one while others are looking to
your guidance! Which is to say, we dont know if the writer is lying, telling the truth,
trying to tell the truth, trying to lie, lying about the truth, or truthfully telling a lie. And so
the writer is the consummate liar of them all, yet they are the most sincere. You dont
know if they are lying, yet they dont tell you they are telling the truth. That is why they
are so maddening and so endearing at the same time. We prefer to be told a baldfaced lie
over a questionable truth, but that is why we are fascinated by the writer and why indeed

Attrition Page 7
the scientist is such a bore. I tried writing a book once, a piece of fiction. I launched into
this task with an exploding sense of liberation. I am free! I shouted one day in the middle
of the hospital cafeteria, such was the exhilaration I felt. Never before had I greeted a
blank page of paper with such uncontrollable lust. It was to be a mystery, a tale of
espionage, a far fetched tale of a ridiculously empowered man on an equally ridiculous,
completely unbelievable mission, and with that basic storyline as my spinal cord and
cerebellum, Id build a body using what I knew of science and human understanding. It
all began so innocently, so easily. I quickly realized I had more ideas and experiences
than I could conceivably decant from my brain. In this at times grotesque abundance of
material, I had discovered an enormous limitation of the human state. Days turned to
weeks, turned to months, and then I was looking at years and still I had not finished.
What at first seemed to be a crazed rush to completion now became the reality that with
time and effort the end only moved further and further from my reach. I realized you
could not just decide to be a writer that you probably had to develop an aptitude for it,
just like thieving. But I had also realized that I wasn't a scientist either because I no
longer respected the process, I no longer could walk down that hall of history and look
upon those hanging portraits on either side of the aisle with either pride or awe, they were
ridiculous, unctuous role players and their times were up. If I felt anything, I could
manage a snigger, but not much else. In fact, this little adventure of mine into writing
made me realize that meeting that blank piece of paper was much like meeting a new
patient, I always met my new patients with the same kind of excitement, yes you could
call it lust, as they were indeed a blank sheet of paper onto which a life would be written
in, flushed out, organized, made sense of, and so we, the patient and I, would leap to the

Attrition Page 8
task, yes often like two lovers, we would lock ourselves together in this joyful frenzy of
information, creation, dedication, exhilaration. It would be weeks later when the
excitement would begin to subside, questions as to reason and why would arise and the
nature of our union would begin to unravel and thereby reveal itself for what it was, a
shadow play we made with our hands and fingers, gestures and expressions that we made
behind each others backs. Indeed what would reveal itself would be the very limitations
of us both, of doctor as well as patient, and perhaps that would be further simplified to
the limitations of the doctor, me, who had little reason or justification to be in any way
entangled with any of these fragile souls, for as soon as we were entangled, as soon as we
reached this state of mental/coital entanglement, I would begin to sense the boredom, the
ennui that has always been my greatest foe and yet my greatest motivator, still there was
suddenly no goal in sight, no distance to cross, no orgasm to be cultivated and coaxed to
finality, no breakthrough on the horizon, no demons to demolish, no revelation to be
revealed, no nothing. And so like my patients, my book slowly faded into nothingness
and soon I realized I had neither talent nor stomach for this timewasting and lifestifling
process called writing.
We had already walked across nearly two acres of land by this point, past the barn
which was more dilapidated than had appeared from a distance, Ping stopping once to
pick up a piece of wood and throw it over a fence into higher weeds, then to straighten a
fencepole by driving a wedgeshaped stone into the ground next to its base, then to dig a
toe into a newly created molehill, stopping again to take out a handkerchief and wipe his
brow while squinting at the sun, then to take a moment to straighten a painfully crooked
back. We ended up back behind his home, a sprawling structure that looked small and

Attrition Page 9
simple from the road leading up to it, but which burst into a cacophonous architecture on
the grounds behind it. Rooms and additions seem to sprout from the main structure, some
paneled with wood, some covered in stucco, others wearing sheets of tin and or fitted
with cheap sliding glass doors. He picked up a few pieces of broken wood before
stepping up to one apparently unfinished room and immediately began to peel back a
sheet of plywood with a small crowbar.
You know how I became a doctor? Not out of any passion or desire. No. But out
of a dull headed need to finish what I started. That is the only skill I have, something I
learned from my father, perhaps the only thing I gained from him, except a small penis,
his only other legacy in my life: finish what you begin, is what he said, even if its
impossible, finish what you started, even if you forget why, even if you no longer
understand what it is you are doing, finish what you began, even if it kills you. I finished
school even though I had no aptitude for reading or math. I finished medical school even
though I had no desire to help another human being. I finished my psychiatric training
even though I cared about no ones mind but my own and even that I tried to ignore the
best I could. I finished building a new medical facility for the study of human behavior
as it applies to psychiatric dysfunction even though I had no faith in curing anyone of
anything. I built and finished a laboratory for studying the biochemical basis of deviant
behavior even though I had no clue what I was doing. I finished the first computer model
of depression, I published a journal of behavioral biology, I founded the first think-tank to
take on the biological basis of law and society, I finished authoring over one thousand
scientific papers, I finished writing over fifteen books on psychoanalysis, none of which I
would use as paperweights. I finished building my first home then I finished building my

Attrition Page 10
second home. And as you can see I have nearly finished building my third and last home,
this house, even though I feel compelled now to re-do and rework aspects of it so your
timing to come visit me was impeccable.
Looking across the architectural chaos of this, his home, I could not tell if he was
purposefully adding to what he had built or if this monstrosity was growing on its own
and he was struggling to remove the willy-nilly jutting wood and glass that appeared like
incontrollable growths amidst the more recognizable structures. He continued to
dismantle a wall and it was then I realized that he had long ago poured a foundation
where new walls would be built expanding that room out even further. He pinched a
finger with his crowbar and belted out a few expletives that sent some grasshoppers
helicoptering to a new area.
I finished my first marriage despite feeling no love for that miserable person, he
said, was left with three boys that I finished by getting them through college and law
school and medical school. I finished a second marriage by committing my wife (the
second) to a mental institution and that marriage left me with three girls each of whom I
finished by giving them their education, marrying them off (well, except for one) and
providing them with what they needed to finish their lives. I finished my relationship
with my mother who died in my arms as she suffered brain cancer and was reduced to a
bald babbling child. I finished my relationship with my father who taught me above all,
who taught me only perhaps, to finish what I started goddamit! But however someone
may be impressed with that staggering list of accomplishments, Ping continued, I never
did finish the one thing that meant most to me, which meant everything to me.

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Ping had pinched his hand again while prying a bent nail out of a stonegrey piece
of wood and I was beginning to wonder how he survived all these mishaps. He continued
without a coaxing question from me.
I never could finish my epistemological treatise that knowledge resides here, he
said pointing to his head. I was so determined to show this because, well, shit, it had to
be, knowledge had to be here, it had to reside in the individual because that is where the
matter lies, that is where the genes reside, that where the desire to survive resides. That is
the only place that consciousness arises. Thats where all life begins or ends, and for
Christsake, that is the only option I can see that will allow us to understand anything in
this world. It was here, within each of us, each one of us a lonely capsule traveling alone,
carrying with us all that was to be known of and about the world. Each of us is the king
of the only kingdom that matters, each one of us the only repository, the only reliquary,
the only living recess of knowledge in the world. I was so confident in my theory that I
built a universe to support it. I designed a medical center, a research laboratory, I built
departments in over a dozen universities around the world, I established international
conferences and multilingual journals and pumped out endless volumes of books that
would both document and perpetuate the stepping stones to my theory. I created think
tanks, I created government legislation, I created op-ed newspaper columns and popular
science articles to captivate the public on my views, to influence the advertising
companies, to begin the marketing of my ideas. I redesigned the computer systems in the
university to better handle this phenomenal regime of information and thought. I set up
libraries with new classification and indexing schemes. I started nursery schools to teach
kids the new paradigm even before they could follow an object with their eyes. To me,

Attrition Page 12
the greatest feat of simplification one could make in psychiatry would be to reduce
everything about being human to the individual. From there biology would take the
reduction even further, to the gene, and epistemology would then have to follow, and for
that final step I would be the principal architect. Indeed, at one point, I truly felt that I had
the entire world under my thumb. How could you have accomplished all this Ping? I
asked myself, Ping said, with a severe pinch to my arm.
The tin cup of what I would later discover to be vermouth appeared again rather
mysteriously. His jowls were unshaven, peppered with grey and black stubble. His lips
were chapped. For the first time in the forty years I had known the man, I realized I had
never seen his teeth. He took a penknife from his pocket and began to whittle down a
piece of wood that he then shoved in between two studs as a shim to square what looked
to be an opening for a window or a door. There was no way to tell.
The problem is, he said, it never happened. Sure the buildings I designed were
built, the laboratories created, the think tanks established, the journals published, the
nursery schools staffed. It wasn't the mechanics that failed, it was the idea itself. How?
you might ask. People brought it down, V, doing as people do, those who were
disappointed in me to be exact, and well, let me tell you how fast people will condemn
you if you disappoint them. But the problem was simple. I was wrong. Thats right. I got
caught in my own game. I played the scientist, the bore, to the hilt. I created a paradigm
and on that paradigm built a new economy and in that economy I created dissent and out
of this dissent I discovered a certain fatigue, a definite impatience, even a slight feeling of
who gives a flying fuck! And so I quit. Quit before I finished. For the first time in my life
I did not finish what I started!

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I had been impatiently waiting to see if this was indeed the project Dr. Ping had
been waiting for me to join. I picked up a hammer but he made a movement with his head
which told me to put it back down. I obeyed.
I started this enterprise, he said, with none other than that lying Ingersott. We
were partners at the beginning. But it soon was apparent that it was up to me to do all the
work, Ingersott did nothing more than smoke his pipe, seduce the women graduate
students, put his name on papers he never read and flew about the world giving lectures
on my work. Soon, I found out that he was not accurately representing my work, he was
adding bits and flourishes to it here and there. Where did that come from? I would ask
him. I dont know Ping, he would say with that smile and twinkle in his eye that I grew to
absolutely loathe, it just came to me while I was talking, a daring flatulence of
inspiration, a nice touch dont you think? But it isn't true, I shouted back at him. Of
course, Ping, but we will make it true, and if we cant make it true, we will come up with
something else, something better. The man had an appetite for lying that was surpassed
only by his appetite for sex. Any woman was game, any woman prey. Any age, any
station in life, strangers, mothers, maids, janitors, grad students by the threesomes, my
first wife who knows how many times, my second wife at my own birthday party. The
man was huge, Ingersott was, six foot six, more than three hundred pounds, always
dressed in a grey prison style jump suit, his face covered in a long scraggly beard which
was stained yellow from his pipe, his blue eyes crunched up like Chris Cringle beneath a
shaggy mop of grey hair. He was the wild genius, the crazy lunatic of science, a partner
with Timothy Leary, a friend of Fidel Castro, a lover to Jackie Onassis, a confidant to
Lyndon Johnson, he played guitar with Che Guevara, he drank beer with Joe DiMaggio,

Attrition Page 14
the number of women who had sucked his cock would make Warren Beatty blush. He had
chairs at Yale, at Harvard and at McGill, all at the same time. He wouldn't tell the truth to
save his life.
He paused as if listening to his own thoughts.
And so surely, having told you all that, you probably wonder why I am here. For
in your eyes it seems so out of place, me here in the desert, me here and not in the
suburbs here I grew up, where I created my life, where I created my world, but in the
middle of a dusty nowhere kind of a place. And so the questions which must come to
your mind, for example, am I escaping something, my own failings perhaps, my
colleagues, this shadow of the bloated Ingersott, a past life which like an old loving dog
suddenly turns on you one night, or did something happen, something cruel enough to
change me so dramatically that I had to change my surroundings, or have I simply lost
my mind? All good guesses, V, and Im sure you could come up with many others. But
no, none of these would answer why I am here. I could instead give you the answer but
that too would be lacking. There are times in your life when change is necessary, you are
probably still too young to be aware of such inner navigations, but there came a day as
will surely come in yours, when every aspect of my old life seemed pinched. Despite the
departure of my wives, my children, even the housekeeper, in others words, even though
seven other people had left the house, left me alone, with their departure my home
actually grew smaller. Whereas before I rarely noticed the opposite wall of the dining
room, now when I sat in my regular seat that wall seemed pressed right up against my
nose. My study was eerily reduced in size, my knees hit the underside of the table, my
feet were constantly tangled in electrical cords, my head forever banging into the

Attrition Page 15
overhead lamp. I suddenly had to bend down now to open doors, windows were always
positioned below the arc of the sun come winter or spring. And when I sat down to take a
crap, I nearly fell off the tiny ceramic stool I could swear someone had switched for my
toilet. I could feel myself suffocating V. I was all alone yet being alone with myself was
never an option I desired. I cloaked myself in the loneliness I created in others and so I
forgot about myself in the process. Now, here I was, suddenly, alone with no one but
myself, and with nowhere to go to escape this loneliness. The world is a bigger place than
me, I screamed one day off my porch, shaking a roof full of pigeons into flight.
Philosophers who speak of the end, politicians who speak of tragedy, environmentalists
who speak of disaster havent seen the great expanses of earth that have yet to suffer
under mans influence. This abundance, this infinitude always frightened me, made me
feel like a child, like an idiot with my passion for all the small, indoor games of science. I
decided finally it was time to walk outside, that was it, that was the only motivation that
brought me here, it was time to go outside, V, so here I am.
For a moment he paused again. He looked up towards the hillside where the
scattered treetops floated across the horizon. His glasses were thick, dusty, fingerprinted,
they magnified his eyes which were wet with age. He began walking back out into the
field. I could barely hear him as I raced to keep abreast. After several yards, he stopped,
looked back down to the ground and then set to work again removing the barbwire from a
rotted fence post.
My neighbors wonder why I am here. And now that I am here, I am expected to
be one with them. One of what? I often ask myself. Well, let me tell you, they believe
there are certain rules that should be followed here, that people should follow these rules

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if they come here. No one tells you what these rules are ahead of time, you are supposed
to just know them. As if for some reason because you live here you should follow the
same rules as the others. It is interesting. For example, I took out my garbage the first
week that I was living here, pushed my grey ordinary garbage container to the curb,
where it joins the containers of the other people who live in this area, the green containers
for organic refuse, the blue containers for recyclables and the grey containers for ordinary
garbage, and on this day I just happened to meet my neighbor at the curb for the very first
time. Before she even said hello, she asked, No recycling? No, I said, just garbage. She
looked at me as if I was crazy. You mean you have no bottles or papers in there? Sure, I
said, plenty of bottles and papers in here, along with the rest of my garbage. Well you can
recycle them in my bins, she said. No thanks, I said, I will take care of my own garbage.
A few minutes after I had left the curb, I heard some noise and looked behind me to see
my neighbor beneath the lid of my garbage bin, putting the bottles and cans and papers
she found in my grey bin into her blue recycling bin. So the next week I took out my grey
garbage container to the curb and met her again. We both said hello and I walked back to
the house. A few minutes later I again heard her again rummaging through my garbage.
So the next time I took out the garbage, we met again and this time we didn't say a word
to each other, just nodded hello. After I got back to my house I heard her scream. I had
taped a picture of a naked woman shoving a wine bottle up her ass to the inside of my
grey garbage container. Funny thing is, this opened a dialogue between this neighbor and
I and we have become just the best of friends. I told her I didn't recycle because I didn't
believe in recycling. How can you not believe in recycling? she asked, what is there to
not believe in? It is very simple I said, the world is wrong and it wont correct things by

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asking each of us to recycle what we buy. Somewhere at some point the world decided it
was okay for everyone to have as many things as possible, it decided that it was not
actually the things themselves that mattered but what those things stood for that mattered,
and so we are to buy and collect and discard and consume these things, not because it
made any real sense, but the world made it okay to do so, made it our obligation to do so.
We used to trade our empty milk bottles for full ones, we used to have one pair of shoes
for work and one pair for church on Sundays, we used to save paper, to collect grease
drippings in our empty aluminum cans, to feed our scraps to the dog. Nothing is precious
anymore in and of itself, all that is precious is what it stands for. You say you are
recycling to save the planet, but this blue container doesn't represent redemption of the
rain forests, it signifies to you that you are a better person than me for hauling this thing
to the curb. Have you ever followed where this goes? What if it goes to the same place all
the other garbage goes? Does that matter to you? Probably not. Once it makes more sense
economically to sort out the bottle and paper from the other trash, all trash will get
recycled. Until then, who knows where the blue trash goes and where the grey trash goes,
maybe all in the same heap. But will this ever happen? I doubt it. The world as we know
it will end, no doubt about it, that is why I dont recycle, that is why I vote for politicians
who like to wage senseless wars, that is why I dont care, because we will destroy
ourselves and this world be it by nuclear bombs, piling up our own filth, or farting away
the atmosphere. It is just a matter of time, not a matter of if, just a matter of when. In fact,
maybe it would be best to speed it all up a bit, hurry our demise, get rid of the humans
and make way for another species to have a go at this domination of the earth. We could
never save the earth from our destruction, look at what I do in a day, I use 20 gallons of

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water, piss one half gallon of piss, use up 5 gallons of gasoline, 500 kilowatts of
electricity, throw away two pounds of plastics, consume the equivalent of one tree,
release one pound of smoke particles into the air, fart one half pound of methane while I
sleep. In one year, I kill one thousand animals, I burn up one hundred acres of rainforest,
I create five hundred acres of desert, I consume six thousand gallons of clean water and
dump back six thousand gallons of polluted water, I consume 2 tons of coal and 500
barrels of oil, I kill one hundred dolphins per year just to eat tuna sandwiches and one
thousand other marine animals just to eat a few shrimp cocktails. Take all my
consumption and multiple it by everyone else in the world, multiply it by four billion and
what do you get? Tell me? Its staggering, isn't it? Its a fantasy to think we can survive.
Pure and simple. The fact is you need me to give you a reason to separate the blue from
the grey. And in fact you need someone like me to be your antithesis, the person who
does not recycle as that only validates the sign you give to your precious blue containers.
All this anger, this picking out my cans and bottles when I am gone, this validates you,
but dont pretend you are doing this to save the world. Nothing has any value anymore
except that something means I am rich or I am good or I am cool or I am sexy. So why
pretend any more? The world has to change before it can save itself and I am not going to
change it by recycling my bottles. The problem is we have made things into signs which
are not things anymore, but signs of things we want, not things we need. As such, as signs
of things we want, what we want are things we will never have: immortality, super
affluence, beauty beyond belief, phenomenal sex, none of these are things that we will
ever really have, mainly because they are beyond what we can ever have, their actual
value depends on their being beyond what we can have, if we could have them they

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would themselves become things and as I said we dont want things, we want the signs of
what we want and cannot have. We only understand the signs that point to the things-wewill-never-have and so we buy these signs of things, incessantly, not just one or two, but
by the hundreds, because it is not the thing-in-and-of-itself we want or want to buy, it is
the things-we-will-never-have that we are trying to buy, and never have, because it only
excites us as a sign, not as a thing-in-and-of-itself, and so we have made these things-wewill-never-have available (so to speak) to everyone, so that everyone with a few dollars in
their pocket can buy things that promise the things-we-will-never-have and so the
consumption of the things that signify the things-we-will-never-have multiplies
grotesquely, becomes a grotesque orgy of consumerism, one that cannot be stopped by
recycling, in fact recycling represents just another one of these things-we-will-neverhave, which is a clean planet, and so in fact it is made all the more grotesque by the
recyclists because recycling only serves one purpose: to reduce the guilt we have for
being grotesque consumers of the things-we-will-never-have while in pursuit of the
things-in-and-of-themselves, and thereby allows us to actually go out and consume even
more grotesquely. And so the recyclists believe with all their hearts that they are the
saviors of the planet while in effect they are the naysayers of the planet, because they
give us blue and green bins into which we can compartmentalize and remove our guilt
and so we actually fill the green and blue containers higher and higher, fuller and fuller
each time, because the more we fill them the more guilt we discard, that is we are feeling
more guilt-free the more we fill them and the more we consume because we have done
our duty, when in effect we, the recyclers, have only encouraged and increased the
grotesque consumption that is killing us, and it will kill us, that is a fact, but what if we

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took away all the blue and green containers, took away the recycling plants, took away
the landfills covered with trees and parks and soccer fields, and let people live amidst the
waste they create and discard while pursuing the things-they-will-never-have, let them
wade knee deep in their own filth, let them find it in their bedrooms, their cars, on their
lawns, let them trip and stumble on it, let them find it blown like snowdrifts against the
side of their house, let them have to sweep it off the soccer fields, let them dodge it in the
streets while they drive. But no, that is not the answer, I told her, my recyclist neighbor,
the fact is there is no answer. We cannot possible escape our fate. Dont confuse this
attitude with pessimism, I told her, my recyclist neighbor. I am not a pessimist or a
fatalist. Not in the least. We cannot escape our training. And I am trained to believe an
answer is always available and that answers will always be found. Doomsayers serve
only one purpose, I told her, my recyclist neighbor, which is to give the rest of us reason
to feel good about ourselves. They are always wrong, and we like to know that there is
someone besides ourselves who is always wrong. The world never ends, the economy
always bounces back, the war fizzles out eventually. There may be little if no justice,
there may be little if no truth, there may be no real valor among men, but there is always
resolution and with that resolution, the world goes on. Will it always go on? I asked
rhetorically. I doubt it, I answered assuredly, but being pessimistic is not in my genes, I
told her, my recyclist neighbor, I am gifted with a genetic predisposition to who-gives-afuck, and who knows, if we all had that predisposition wed probably had been extinct
long ago. And the funny thing was, V, she, my recyclist neighbor, did not disagree with
me, in fact she agreed with me, and we have been best of friends ever since.

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We had moved on in our perambulations. There seemed to be no discernible
boundaries to his property, the land was relatively flat, but each modest hill, when
climbed, led to another stretch of land, another gathering of trees, and then another hill.
We were moving out away from land on a sea of desert scrub, where earth and rocks
appeared here and there as flotsam. This place seemed truly barren, devoid in its
simplicity of color, of shape, of life, it was neither a frontier nor a rearstation, it was a
place were things were not were they came to be, nothing new, nothing old, no surprises
but a reification of the unknown everywhere you looked.
We can never base a theory on moving forward, he said, our theories are created
by looking to the past. This is not to say our thoughts are deterministic or even scientific,
no V, we are still in too much of a squabble over interpretation to claim a scientific basis
to any of our thinking. Thought is not a product of history or place or even time. It is
solely a product of a mans age. We think of the world in a certain way at the age of
thirteen, in basically the same way all thirteen year olds think of the world. Then at
twenty, we think in the way all twenty years old think. Then at thirty, then at forty and so
on. By the time we are eighty, we will reach the same stage all eighty year olds reach, if
we still have our faculties that is, which is to say we will have recognized the battle is
over and whoever won the fight, well it wasn't us. What does that mean V? Nothing. It
means nothing. My books are disappearing off the library shelves. As will everyone else's
books at some time some day. They will be replaced by new books written by people in
their 30s and 40s, people who still care, who still fight to be heard, but twenty years from
now, those authors will be facing the same dustbin existence, the same extinction as me.
Thought is no different than Styrofoam, V. It is made to be created then trashed. Recycled

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and discarded again. It sticks around for a while, but eventually it disappears into the
ooze of the world. It wasn't meant to stick around forever, even if it seems to have that
characteristic. Even Styrofoam eventually gets ground up into fertilizer. Thought is just a
commodity V, one that has a temporal nature like every other thing we consume and spit
out. Eventually we get old, tired and dont care a squat for coming up with anything new.
We look wistfully at the past in the same way we miss our younger penises, and so we
consume thought as we consume Styrofoam, we created an industry which evaluates and
studies this consumption and out of it, it creates our digestive recourse. It is like running
V, we all fantasize about running the faster mile, breaking the human speed barrier,
running farther than any human has run before, but most of us aren't runners, V, far from
it, we are slobs, our legs are too short, out lungs too small, our desire too shallow, so we
wont do it, but someone else will. And that is all that matters. It is like getting rich, V, we
all dream about it, but how many of us will become millionaires, V, very few of us, we
aren't greedy enough, we aren't smart enough, we aren't lucky enough, but someone else
will be. And that is all that matters. It is like fucking the sexiest supermodel on the
planet, V, we all think about it, but shit V, we arent rich enough, we aren't famous
enough, we aren't dazzling enough, our penises are too small, our teeth are too yellow,
our naked bodies scare us, but someone will fuck that supermodel, just not us. There is
always someone else who will do what we cannot do, and that is all that matters. Is it all a
game, V? Unfortunately it is not. The one thing about truth is that no matter how hard we
try not to, we believe in it. Its like falling in love, we keep saying we will never do that
again, but after some time passes there we are again, head over heels in love again. Same
with truth. We cant help ourselves. It is a biological imperative for the human species, V,

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to believe in the Truth. It is part of our being, the fabric of our being, our biological fiber.
It is like breathing, drinking water, having sex, it is a biological need we can never
escape. The fact is V, we believe in truth but we dont care about it. Even if we cant get
close to it, we take comfort in knowing someone else will. We believe vicariously. The
entire human condition is vicarious. If I had one book left in me to write, it would be that,
exploring the vicarious nature of the human condition. We cant experience anything for
ourselves, that is the role of the sign now, it is all virtual, a sign points to something being
experienced by someone else, by someone who is rich, who is beautiful, who is powerful,
things we are not, the virtual world take us much further than we would ever go by
ourselves, wed love to be rich but dont want to work that hard, we love to fuck our
brains out but are grossed out by our own bodies, we'd love to drill some ragheads, but
we would never pull the trigger. We detest the globalization of our knowledge but we
love it all the same. We think it makes everything easier to understand, when in fact it
confuses us to no end. We detest the globalization of our values but we embrace it. We
think it makes us all one people, when in fact even the people at our dinner parties grow
stranger and more alien to us each year. We detest the globalization of our
responsibilities, but we would not have it in any other way. We wish we the individual
were the purest of the pure, but then we could also be the vilest of the vile. We wish we
the individual was the best of the good, but then just as easily we could be the bane of
mankinds existence. We settle for mediocrity, the safest place to be, while others carry
the torch for good and bad, for best and worst, we are safe here in the mediocre middle.
We are exactly where we want to be, in the mass of others, in the global morass of others,
barely different minded if different minded at all from all of the others, afloat in a

Attrition Page 24
glorious sea of people where no one ever strives for anything more than mediocrity,
where a few break though as heroes and a few as scoundrels, a few as geniuses and a few
as psychopaths, and a few as doers and a few as killers, but we are distanced from these
exceptions to the human race, in touch only with the vast expanse of mediocrity that
envelopes and defines us all, blissfully content that the few exceptions will reach their
own demise while we the mediocre will continue on forever. We despise the exceptions
yet we embrace them as without them we would have no real existence. We need them as
a boat captain needs to see the stars he never approaches. The exceptions give us our
bearings, give us boundaries around our sanctuary without which we would be
surrounded by an infinitude of nothingness, an infinitude that would in turn create in us
panic and despair, take from us our hope, all chance of hope. Mediocrity is only mediocre
in that it has boundaries that distinguish it from the profound and the degenerate. Without
boundaries, mediocrity is nothing, and if there is nothing other than mediocrity then it is a
vast and unending nothingness, a true wasteland of nothingness. This is indeed what I
said to my neighbor, and you would have thought this woman would have been angry
with me, disagreed with me, would tell me to fuck off. You know what? She couldn't
have agreed with me more.
At one point, Ping was pulling at a telephone or electrical wire he found buried in
the ground. The sheathing on that wire suddenly pulled loose and he was sent falling to
the ground. With that a shock of pheasants took flight with such a sudden noise that I too
fell to the ground with fright. It was as if he had pulled a wire and opened a door into the
earth to let loose the shuddering fowl. I looked at Ping and he looked back at me with a

Attrition Page 25
quizzical look in his eyes as if I had caused his fall. I then realized that Ping must be deaf,
for no one could have heard those pheasants and not turned to look.
At some point in my life, he said, I am not sure when exactly, I came to realize
that all places in the world were essentially the same, that despite the clear differences in
appearance for obviously one place may be a dry and dusty desert spiked with buildings
made from ochre colored block while another place could be lush and overgrown with
primitive flora making habitation temporary at best despite the differences in color,
languages, and cultures of the people, despite the variance in buildings, architecture,
modes of transportation, despite any and all of this, at some point, to my mind no place
was any different than another. How and when this change took place, I am not sure,
there certainly had been a time when I passionately reveled in diversity of the human
condition. But suddenly, or maybe it was gradually, I cant remember with accuracy, all
became one and all became the same. What was it? Id ask in vain, that made every place
the same in my eyes, and what was it that made these places, any place, all places part of
the same continuous tapestry? Was it the expressions in the faces of the people, the calm
and knowing looks Id receive from people bicycling by on wooden bridges or hanging
from the side of a train roaring past? Or was it the sameness of the litter that scuttled
along the roadsides, that matted into a paste in the wet gutters that exist everywhere? Or
was it the same blue sky that was everywhere painted overhead, the same dust that people
kicked up underfoot, the same tarblack roads, or the same dieselsmoke that belched from
ubiquitous trucks and tractors? Or was it the same morning that gave way to the same
afternoon that was succeeded by the same evening and eventually consumed by the same
night that never differed? Or was it the same blackened pots that cooked rice and beans,

Attrition Page 26
the same starving horses that pulled the sleds of firewood, the same tartan sarongs that
covered legs welted with scars, age and the tracks of burrowing parasites? Was it the
same youthful glow of love you would find in a couple embracing in the park, the same
proud muscular chest the youth bared after a long days work in the cane fields, the same
fat swollen ankles, the same drunken eyelids, the same missing fingers, the same ruptured
testicle that had blossomed into a watermelon inside of some poor mans pants? Or was it
the same signs that said ALTO, the same billboards to STOP AIDS, BUY NESCAFE or
DO NOT HAVE SEX WITH CHILDREN, the same bull horns ducttaped to the roofs of
battered vans that blared out passages from Ecclesiastes, the same pamphlets that filled
the trash bins? Or was it the same dog with three legs, the same beggar with the crushed
foot and claw hand, the same smile chiseled into the face of a young child who was
completely unaware of the hell she had been born into? Or was it the same people closing
the door behind them, the same taxi drivers ignoring you for another fare, the same
shopkeep who cut your cheese a little smaller, the same hooker who eyed you until you
were too scared to move? Or was it the same grubby hand reaching out to beg you for a
dime, the same young unwrinkled thighs that opened in front of you, the same blow that
came out of nowhere to the back of your head, the same yellow hocker that from a
window above tagged your linen pants?
He sighed in a moment of rare stillness.
Or was it all the result of my own selfish quest for simplicity, a quest that yielded
nothing final, but along the way created an array of aftereffects, one of which was the
inability to discern the difference, that creates a confusion of simplicity with uniformity. I
was thinking about this and I was also thinking about how as I got older, I realized I had

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listened very carelessly to my father. For example, for so many years I had thought I had
heard him say, brush your teeth twice a day and scrub each tooth thirty two times, when
really he had been singing a song the part of which I heard was, O Leanor-a, dont spit on
the floor-a, use the cuspidor-a, that is what its for-a! And then later, when I remember
him telling me, dont run with a knife in your hand, really it turns out he was singing
another song, the part I remembered was, too la loo la rah, too la loo la ray, my oh my
what a wonderful day! Most disturbing of all, V, was to discover that the most important
and lasting thing he had said to me, being: finish what you started, was really just his
stomach growling one day, low and long as he was having problems with diverticulitis at
the time. It was on his deathbed that I finally had my chance to put everything straight
with him. This was what deathbeds are for, V, they are the one place and time when both
people, on both sides of the situation, the living and the almost-dead, have the same
opportunity to put things straight. Of course, the almost-dead is anxious to be heard,
knowing full well that the number of breaths are limited, few and growing fewer, while
the living can barely stand the whole ordeal, they absolutely dread it, abhor the pitiable
drama, and so it was at my fathers deathbed, when my little sisters came out of the room
pinching their noses and rubbing their arms as if they had been defiled, whispering to
each other, god I wish he would die already, when my mother came out of this room,
crying hysterically, weak-kneed and hunchbacked, looking at me with those blackened
eyes, and telling me with those trembling overpainted lips: I asked him, I asked your
father if he had anything to say to me, I said, B, do you have anything you want to say to
me, any last words, B, please B, please say them now, but he just looked at me, unable to
say a word, B, I pleaded, B just tell me that you love me, B, leave me with those three

Attrition Page 28
little words before you go B! And so I knew if my father could not even tell my mother
that he loved her, if he could not even lie goddammit in the one moment when such a lie
would have been warranted if not liberating, well then I knew this deathbed experience
would be tough. And so I walked into that room, angry as a whore whod been stiffed,
ready to tear into this man who could not even muster a few last words for the woman
who had spent her entire life washing and folding his cloths, who had fed him, wiped his
bottom, combed his hair and squeezed the pimples on his thighs. And so I came into this
room, his deathbed, full of piss and vinegar, dying old man or not Stop! he said to me.
Just like that, he said: Just stop! I know what you are about to say. I have been a piece of
shit husband, a piece of shit father and a piece of shit everything through and through.
But I am not going to pretend that I can change all that just by telling your mother I love
her before I die. Hell no. And let me tell you, I love your mother. Not because she wipes
my ass, but because she had you, thats right. I love her because I am such a piece of shit
and yet somehow she brought you forth, you this little but so much better piece of me.
And I have watched you grow, even when I was drunk as a skunk I watched you, and I
see what you have done with yourself, the empire you have created, the universe you
have designed, the logicus tractus that you still hope to complete, dont let these
jaundiced bloodshot eyes fool you, son, I've seen it all and Im damn proud of you,
except I still think you got your goddamn head in the clouds son, all this theory about this
and theory about that. The world is just what you see in front of you, just a bit of this and
a bit of that. You aint going to understand nothing from a theory. I know. I was in the
Army Corp of Engineers. You can build an engine from theory and what have you got?
Something piece of fucking shit that will never work. Or you can build it by taking

Attrition Page 29
pieces of what you got, a piston here, a spark plug there, and put them things together
until the sucker starts up and you got yourself an engine. Why am I telling you this? I
dont know. Because I feel like Ive got to. If I hate you for anything, he continued, and I
do hate you you asshole, it is because you have put me in a position on this deathbed
where I gotta say something to you like a father should say, something profound I
suppose, something that youll remember for the rest of your life, but what could I
possibly say to you, what could I muster from this alcohol ravaged brain that would have
any level of profundity to it, what could I possibly come up with that would be anything
but something that you would laugh at and think me a fool for the rest of your life for
even trying to say such a thing? So all I can really say is, son, well I fucked your first
wife.
With that he closed his eyes and seemed to drop off to that permanent sleep. Then,
suddenly he awoke. Just kidding you bastard, he said, but I have a story to tell you about
my father, perhaps it will help you someday as it has helped me. My dad, well, when I
was six he took me one day to the dry cleaners, told me to sit down on the counter while
he went into the back of the shop. I did what he said and he went into the back and didn't
come back for almost two hours. He finally returned and then he took me home and
asked me if I would like to do that again sometime. Yea sure, I said. Good, he said,
maybe we will do it again then. And that was my dad and thats my story about my dad.
But I do have something else to tell you, V, I do have some final words for you. So here it
is. Life goes on, he said. Yep, that is it. Take it from a dead man, life goes on son. Why
stop, why even pause, it just simply goes on and will go on without you, it just goes on
and fucking on and fucking onAnd with that he died, the spittle on his lips like the

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angry bits of angel wings he was chewing to avoid going off to heaven any sooner. Right
there and then. I remember thinking he looked like an inflatable doll that had lost its
wind, his face collapsing into its death pose all wrinkled and powdery, his lips
unnaturally colored and growing a grayish purple, his eyes glazed and drying up like
leftovers.
It was like the day a man came to see me for treatment, Ping continued, he was a
small, irascible man, with thick bad hair and a soft face that I immediately loathed, not at
all the kind of patient that I preferred to treat, he had been booked by my secretary and
she said she only booked him for treatment because he insisted that I knew him, that I
would thank him for booking him and how he was just the kind of patient I preferred. To
the contrary, with his thin arms and tiny hands, he was not the kind of patient I preferred
at all, the preferred patient being taller, much younger, stronger, the type that did not need
me, should not be in my steed at all in the first place, as these people, the ones I
preferred, could walk out of my office whole and never the worse when I was done
treating them even though I had failed to do anything for them at all, that being the
normal course of my treatment. But this man was soft and weak and so when I would
treat him and thereby fail him, and probably fail him miserably, I would surely have then
destroyed him at the same time, having destroyed whatever was left in him to destroy.
And there were many ways to destroy a person just by treating them, one of which was to
promise them treatment that will cure them and instead, give them nothing. Which of
course is what I did. Sure I could give them more drugs if they wanted, I could give them
shocks and various other accepted treatments if I wanted. But eventually the patient
would expect to be heard and this being the toughest treatment of all to give my patients,

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particularly hard for me as I was simply loathe to listen to anyone, let alone a short, puffy
faced man with small hands and a shoe brush for a head of hair. And to make matters
worse when I somehow managed to mention this mans name in the presence of my
second wife, to whom I was married at the time, who in her time of sanity, that being the
time before she married me, had been a student of certain and various poets who took as
way of influence their own fondness of Rimbaud, and so when she heard his name, she
nearly shrieked, My God! I know him! She said. I beg your pardon, I said. Yes! I know
him! He is a brilliant Nicaraguan poet! A man who wrote this exquisite verse from the
age of five, writing in a strange, sensuous hand that was mysterious and other worldly,
until suddenly, many years later he lost his mind and his poetry then became horribly
pedestrian, boring as a Hallmark card, ridiculously predictable, she said using a word that
carried much more disdain for than would seem possible, for the word predictable had
become an expression of vulgarity to her, a word that she attached to anything profane.
And so this man, who first of all was short and puffy with little hands and shoe brush
hair, now made all the more loathsome to me because my wife thought she knew him,
even carried him in her heart as she said that night, carried him in her heart! but in reality
she didn't know him, and so now I wanted nothing more than to correct her, because
nothing was more devastating to her, particularly at this time in her expanding
feeblemindedness than to discover she was not just wrong but so completely wrong as to
be the sudden object of public derision, but I knew Id soon discover a less painful but
longer lasting way to humiliate her and so I let it be, yet still, even the ridiculous idea that
my second wife even knew this man, just the fact that I had to see in this mans mousy
eyes beneath the furry eyebrows that expression of delusional glee in my wifes face at

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hearing his name, made it all the more unbearable to be treat him. I shall fire you, I said
to my secretary as I walked passed her into my office to see this patient that I loathed
above all patients and so as I was now determined to treat him so badly as to make him
pay for all that he had now suddenly brought to bear upon this painful footcorn of my
life, and so I asked him point blank, I leaned forward in my chair and looked right into
those mousey little black eyes, I said, so you write poetry that is nothing but predictable
trivial crap now that you are crazy. Does that make you wish that you were more sane?
Of course, Doctor, he said, and why else would I come to you but to be forced to react to
questions that tear directly at the most embittered conflicts in my psyche? And with this
retort from that small puffy despicable patient of mine, I feared I had been roundly
defeated, I had given him the only shot I had, I had faked left and came back with a right
uppercut, I had feigned a smashing blow down the base line but instead cut a dink just
across the net, but whatever my strategy he had seen it coming, he had anticipated my
best, he was already better then me, and the match was over before I knew it had begun.
Of course, I had one remaining recourse, and so, leaning back, feigning indifference to
my defeat, I yawned and said, you are just one of the many crazy people in this world
who feel left out, who think the definition of insanity should be tightened so you could
rejoin the club, the country club of humanity. Unfortunately for you, the restrictions are
growing looser not tighter, we have all the members we need, we are basically
overcommitted and over subscribed. My second wife, I continued, for example, lost her
membership for thinking among other things that you are a poet from Nicaragua when
really you are nothing but an accountant with really bad hair. I suggest you accept your
fate, I would, and begin a life that at least gives you some form of self decency, find some

Attrition Page 33
respect in that squattish hellhole of life you have dug for yourself, quit jerking off, wipe
your ass more thoroughly. And think about some way to deal with that shoe brush hair on
your head.
I could immediately see that I had regained my position. Now was time to go in
for the kill. If I were you, I said, and I stroke my balls that I am not, I would start a new
routine, one that has absolutely no consequence, get up, make coffee, have a good crap,
read the paper, go to work, come home, drink a beer, watch TV, go to sleep. Try that for a
while, for a decade or so and see if you dont feel better almost immediately, then accept
the hopelessness of your situation, let time be your Valium, your Prozac, time will pass
soon enough and soon enough you will wonder what the fuss had been about in the first
place. I am sorry, Doctor, my puffy patient said, that the total of your success doesn't add
up to even a single one of your failures. And with that he left my office never to return.
Which leads me to ask, is life about success V? I dont think so. I dont really care about
success. Is it then about acceptance and applause? I dont think life is that either. Is it
about completing something? What about all those people who have a dream, a vision,
and saw it through to the end is it about that? My life, when I think about it V, is the
same as it ever was, nothing has ever really changed really, you and I sitting here talking
about this and that, what is so different about this compared to when we used to sit
together thirty years ago and talk about this and that? Have you changed V? Has the
world changed? I cant tell, V. If it is I am missing something and if I am missing
something Im not sure I really care. As my father said as he lay dying, life goes on Ping,
life goes on and fucking on.

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At this point, I noticed that a strange man had appeared along a low ridge below
where we were standing. The man wore a hat and was too far away for me to discern his
face or expression. He did not move, did not wave, simply stood there facing us.
Moments later he was gone, vanished like a memory I did not care to hold on to.
Ping continued. I may have said to you that I didn't finish my lifes work because
I didn't give a shit anymore. Well this is what I would like to believe. But there is another
story. As you know, I had three daughters, one went to medical school, one went to law
school and one studied to be a dancer. The first two were blond with blue eyes, the last
one, the youngest, was raven haired with eyes black as squidink. The two loved me so
much they hated me. The last one hated me so much she loved me. There first two were
successful, got married, had kids, big homes, wonderful lives. The third lives in a one
bedroom apartment like a dog and eats off the carpet. No, she is not retarded. Far from it.
The symptoms of her actual disease came gradually. Not until she was in her twenties did
we notice anything wrong. Honestly, when I see her face, wrapped about in that tangled
nest of hair, that coiled mouth cut into a snarl at me, those eyes of entrapped, outraged
and perhaps insane intelligence, I see that I have been wrong all along, that I have like so
many others wasted more than a few decades of this lifetime on ideas that were so wrong
that they dont even matter. K had a particular ataxia, we later learned, a disease of the
muscular nervous system, a degenerative situation that reveals itself slowly over time. It
probably began to affect K in her late twenties, but the young body is resilient, seeking
ways to first compensate before revealing its true condition. So nerve and muscles fought
to rewire and regroup and so she kept dancing for years with nothing more noticeable
than a reluctant leg once in a while or a heavy arm that would suddenly lighten with

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movement. Her disorder appeared slowly, so slowly in fact that I could not resist a natural
inclination to study her. Indeed this tendency, so to speak, to study my own daughter and
her disorder did in fact rob my daughter of what little she might have gained from the
empathy, pity or other emotional support I could have given her as her father. Yet this
inclination to study her, which did not take long to become a desire, and then almost
immediately grew into a compulsion, was absolutely contrary to my closest held beliefs,
for you see, V, I am a firm believer that study and desire are dangerous bedfellows, that
you should never pursue the study of anything you care about for all you are doing is
cutting a certain path to failure. No V, you need to pick a topic of study that absolutely
bores the shit out of you, one that has no connection to any aspect of your life. If you
father dies of cancer, study arthritis, if your son is disabled by muscular dystrophy, study
in vitro fertilization. If your friend is a vegetable due to a serious head injuries study
plantar warts. Thats the path I have followed. And my success is undeniably obvious.
Pick a subject you dont give a damn about and you will produce ten times the number of
publications, you will come up with four times the number of ancillary, follow-on ideas,
you will never be at a loss for the next study, the next paper, the next set of experiments.
All because you dont give a rats ass for any of it. One thing though V, adopt this
approach and you will never be revered, you will never find respect. No! you will be
hated, despised, your colleagues who are infected with a passion for their topics and
therefore are far less successful than you, they will seek to ridicule you, discredit you,
even destroy, physically harm you, yes, it will come to that but let me tell you, you will
have the last laugh V, you will laugh last on all of them, just as I did, and you know what
that last laugh is, V? It is the laugh they hear when you quit that line of study, drop your

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pen, cease the experiments, and turn your back on this topic which means so much to
them but matters piss to you, it is the laugh you give as you walk away from something
they never could walk away from because they are passionately ensnared in their lifelong
work, their personalized line of study, and you, who could give a flying fuck, you just
walk away and laugh at these pitiable fools, chained so to speak to their passion-fed
studies, while you, passionless, you go on to something else, another line of work,
another option, another set of experiments on something you again could care less about.
But in the case of K, my daughter, I succumbed to my own dictates and tried to study her
as passionlessly as possible, and was, I must say, basically successful in doing so, but I
learned that that feeling of distance between subject and object, between observer and
thing observed, was nothing but deceit in the most horrible and ultimately horrifying way.
But it began innocently enough, my watching her, observing her, noticing when and
where the deviances occurred. Since I had not started to observe her before her symptoms
appeared, I had no real baseline I could utilize to ground these studies, and so I had no
normal representation, no control for my study. And so the basis to my study became the
change over time of the disorder and not a comparison of how it was supposed to be (in
the normal case) and what was (in the abnormal case) nor could you say that as a
longitudinal study of deterioration was I really indeed studying deterioration as what I
observed, looked for, sought to find was the proliferation of new behaviors, not a removal
or disappearance of old behaviors, which indeed, in retrospect, was the case, the
disappearance of old behaviors was indeed taking place, sometimes at the same pace of
the appearance of the new, but to assume the disappearance of the old was due to the
appearance of the new was like saying the sudden disappearance of my ironed shirts was

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created by the appearance of a notice on my door that my electricity had been shut off
when in fact the disappearance of my ironed shirts had nothing to do with the appearance
of this notice, and so the disappearance of any old behavior in K could not be attributed
to the appearance of any new behavior in K as in the case where the disappearance of
walking behavior could by some less skilled observer be attributed to an increase in
paralysis of her legs, just as an increase in barking would be attributed to a decrease in
talking, just as in increase in falling behavior could not be attributed to a decrease in
sitting behavior, and so on, no old behavior could be definitely said to have been replaced
by any new behavior and so my study of K was thereby inherently limited, as I said, to
observation, and from this observation I hoped to find certain patterns but being careful
all the time not to let patterns lead me to assume the disappearance of old was caused by
the appearance of new just that the old disappeared with the appearance of new,
sometimes at the same rate, sometimes not. And so my study of K began, not looking for
deterioration, as when I began this study I had no idea this was a possible cause of her
behavior, but looking for the appearance of new behaviors, not for attrition, but looking
to find in these new manifestation, a cause, a reason, a hint perhaps, but that in and of
itself, that need to seek an explanation, to dissect out a cause, even to rummage for a hint
as to why that is the root of the problem, the exact prejudice and deceitfulness that
arises with impassioned study. Even I, the watchdog of this terrible mistake in science,
could not help myself, even I succumbed. We only seek a cause when we give a shit, this
is what I call Dr. Pings Rule Number One. The very nature of not giving a shit is not to
seek a cause, nest ce pas? So to seek a cause is to create a lie, to not give a shit is to
stumble upon the truth, to stub it with a toe, to crack it with our forehead, to trip and fall

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from it, to sit on it. Truth only arises out of moments of uncaring. That is Dr. Pings Rule
Number Two. Dont worry there is more. As so I was doomed to fail in my study of K, I
knew this from the start, knew it in my bones you could say, yet in these same bones was
the desire to understand, she was my daughter after all, and so I continued and in so
doing I observed without observing, I, like all other scientists without my training and
discipline, I succumbed to the same detrimental methods and I sought out to see what I
wanted to see. I watched without watching, I only noticed that which gave me reason to
believe. I gathered data, without truly gathering, I picked out pieces that would suit me,
excite me, make me tremble. V, this is how I felt, I was trembling with excitement, I was
alive in my quest, this is how science begins and this is how science blunders. Truth is
not exciting at all, V, it is boring, the exactness, the indisputable, the tautological, the
unwavering solidity of truth. Wed rather die than find the truth V, it is the impassioned
sets of lies we constantly uncover for ourselves from the murk and detritus of our
prejudice, our ignorance, it is the idiocy that sets us on fire, that goads our beings, it is
stupidity on which we agree and disagree, on which we will kill in agreement and kill in
disagreement, not truth, it is idiocy that launches our rockets and removes and replaces
our old hearts with new mechanical ones. And so against my most closely held beliefs
about study, my most basic ideas about science, against my own intuitions, I thereby
began my study of K, carefully, not so methodically at first as casually, as the first
appearance of new behaviors were rather infrequent or at least my awareness of these
new behaviors was infrequent. For example, one day as I watched K walking casually
from the kitchen to the living room, I noticed a sudden anomalous thump in one of her
steps, as if she had failed to negotiate a sudden change in the level of the floor, the result

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was her foot came down flatly, her leg over extended at the knee, not slightly bent as she
was in a normal step, this then caused the thump. The thump indeed caught her by
surprise and her whole body reacted as if the floor had given way beneath her, her arms
flew up from her sides, her head thrust upward and her back straightened and her next
step came down quickly as if to catch her balance. The first time I noticed this, I realized
it was the only incidence of its kind, and so it may have been simply a one of a kind
occurrence that had nothing to do with her disorder, and as such would never repeat itself
and therefore was not deserving of any name. Yet I was so sure, dont ask how I was so
sure, that I felt I could at least reserve a name for this new behavior, so that if or when it
happened again I would be prepared. And so I named it the left leg stumble thump. From
there, the list of new behaviors grew. Next came the neck twitch head jerk, then the right
hand finger spasm which seemed quite a bit different from the left hand finger spasm,
there was the floating right arm away from the center point of the body, the curled toes
on the end of a super-extended foot, the lip twitch while smiling, the lip twitch while
speaking, the left index finger clearly missing the ear it was trying to itch, the standing
with buttocks sticking out as if to stop a parade, and so on. And so what did my study of
K yield? Nothing of course, unless you believe the volumes I wrote on these observations
mean anything. Which of course they do not. They meant nothing but clearly and
dramatically documented the struggle between K and I, the struggle between the scientist
and subject, the fight of the observer to observe, the fight of the subject to not allow itself
to be observed for what it is. Yet how excited I was to create these passages of
observations, which then grew into volumes, I trembled with excitement as each volume
was filled, then finished, and a new one began. That excitement is the stuff of ignorance,

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V. I remember the excitement I felt when I first recorded the spontaneous left-handed
index finger jerk as I was sure this marked the first time a behavior occurred without a
related movement preceding it. Then I remember my absolute giddiness when I could
finally call her chin lift with knitted brows a new behavior after being worried for so long,
this was Ks way of purposefully making faces to misguide me and subvert my study. But
then when I jotted down for the first time her knees lock and buckle resulting in a fall I
realized that the fight between us, between father and daughter, between observer and
subject, was over, that I had won, which meant in fact that I had lost. In the end I was
appalled at what I had done, and my own daughter applied the slap in my face that I
deserved. We think of science as an additive activity, as if it is a noble goal to constantly
add to the compendium of things we think we know, and so every year we add more
papers, we add more books, we add more scientists to our universities, we accumulate
more ideas, more theories, create more thinktanks, more departments, more tools, more
equipment, more money, yet medicine is really a science of subtraction, we work by
eliminating causes, ruling out factors, we treat people by removing things, we dissect
away disease, we carve out things until we have removed the malady. Medicine, V, is a
science of attrition, we cure by carving the patient up until the disease is removed, we
will continue to cut and cut as long as we have to, as long as enough of the patient
remains so that there is still a patient remaining. We remove tissue, we remove digits and
limbs, we remove spleens, we remove lungs, kidneys, we remove brain tissue. What I
love most about medicine is its limits: how much can you remove until the patient no
longer remains. You can remove two limbs, three, all four limbs and the patient still
remains. You can remove nearly two thirds of the brain and the patient still remains. And

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we still dont know what that stopping point is, we dont know where that point is where
we cannot remove one bit more and still be left with a patient. But until my study of K, I
still believed in science and in medicine as an enterprise that would forever add to its
wealth of fact and knowledge. That was to change. There is no cure for Ks ataxia and
there is no stopping the disease. Its progress is written into the genes themselves. Soon
after she turned twenty six, she had to stop dancing. By the time she was thirty she was in
a wheel chair and slurring her words; by thirty six she had lost what seemed to be all
control of her body. Ks ataxia does not affect her mind directly. No more than keeping
someone locked in a darkened room for thirty years affects the brain directly. It is an
indirect side effect that extreme powerlessness creates in all of us. She hated me before
the disease made its first appearance. With every set back she hated me more, as if I was
the cause, as it I could have helped her, warned her, as if I was doing nothing but
watching her disintegrate, as if I was the one who infected her, gave her the gene that
caused this horrible disintegration, as if I had brought her into the world crippled and
damaged, and to make matters worse, did not tell her for twenty years so that she had to
suffer all the more by knowing what it was like to be normal, she hated me as if I had
actually brought this affliction about so as to create in her an object for my study. I dont
know what was harder to bear, watching her decline as a human being or witnessing her
growing hatred of me. At first I accepted this hatred as a healthy reaction, as good for her.
I was a convenient target of her rage and as she had nothing else to strike out against, she
might as well strike out at me. And so I accepted her rage, the screams, the
condemnations, even the blows that came later. But this was the easy side of her hatred
towards me, it was easy to accept, it was basic, simple, I felt good even, but as the disease

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progressed, her hatred changed. The rage took root deeper inside of her, her eyes no
longer flashed with fear but contained a deep sinister darkness that threatened me more
than any slap could. Later when she was reduced to little more than a blinking, breathing
vegetable, her hatred solidified like stone and although it never threatened or glared at
me, again I was weighed down and incapacitated by its permanence. During the process I
spent more time with her especially as her mother and sisters had retired to their own
lives content that I would bear the full responsibility. Which I gladly did. But in their
defense the transformation was difficult to stomach and even I, who had seen and treated
the most hideous of ailments, sometimes was nearly overcome with fear before entering
that apartment. She lost the ability to walk and conduct herself like an upright human
being. Her cane soon became useless, and so I bought her an electric wheelchair which
she refused to use inside the apartment. Instead she would crawl and drag herself from
bedroom to kitchen, to living room. To answer the door, she would scamper across the
carpet floor on all fours, barking like a dog. Her long black hair which she refused to let
me touch was tangled and unkempt, giving her the shape and appearance of some ugly,
wild half human, half animal. It was almost too much to bear, to ring the bell outside her
apartment and listen to the sickening thuds of knees and elbows upon the floor as she
crawled, the rising growl of her voice as she came to the door, the long moment as locks
jiggled, doorknobs rattled as she battled with her crooked hands and drooling mouth to
open the door, then to have that door open and see that feral face and to know that this
was my daughter and that I should remember how pretty she looks on this day because
tomorrow would only be worse. Even as she progressed, she refused to let me take care
of her. I couldn't feed her, brush her hair. But she would let me read to her. And how she

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loved to be read to. To me, this was unexpected. At first while she still could
communicate, she'd tell me what book or magazine article to read. Later she accepted
whatever I brought or whatever magazine or paper was at hand. When she become worse,
she couldn't open the door or even crawl to the door, and she stopped sleeping on the bed
as she could not longer climb in and out of it and so she started sleeping on the floor on a
mattress and some blankets in the loving room. As the world stated to slip from her grasp
she tried to keep it close to her in every way possible. The radio and TV were always on.
The windows were always open so that the noise from the street joined the constant talk
and music inside. Some days Id come in and she be rolling about in books and
newspapers she had somehow pulled from the bookshelves and tabletops. It was as if she
had spent the entire night trying to read whatever she found opened close to her eyes,
sometimes the opened page would be soaked with spit and sweat as if she had been
reading the same page for hours. I said this affected her mind, but she did not lose her
mind. She never ceased to be my child, not until one day when I realized I could help her
no longer. At first K had several friends who would come by to spend some time with
here, take her out even. But these friends either grew tired, frightened or repulsed by Ks
worsening condition, and they eventually became replaced by friends K made through a
support group of people with this disorder. They would all come together and spend time
together, but each one had his or her own battle to fight, a fight they were losing and so
they naturally disappeared over time. The only consistent friend she had was the
paperboy, believe it or not. Several times I would come over and find him there, reading
to her, helping to clean things up, once she even let him brush her hair. I am sure she had
a crush on him and I was glad of this. I tipped him well and made sure he kept bringing

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the paper even though it only created a mess in the corner of the apartment as she could
no longer handle the large pages or sit up to read. That she would have a boyfriend was
natural, I thought, there was nothing wrong with her mind, but as time went on and as she
continued to disintegrate, she became both markedly younger and older at the same time.
She became younger in her inability to care for herself, she was reverting to the state of a
child, then an infant, finally to a newborn. She became older in that her appearance, her
hair, her nails, her skin, all seemed to be aging so rapidly that she was becoming decrepit
right before my eyes, and so while she was becoming a child, she was also becoming an
old woman, and so the boyfriend was becoming a problem in my mind as I truly
wondered what man would want to bear this terrible responsibility. Nothing was to be
done about the conflict of course, as she was an adult, until the morning I walked into her
apartment to be greeted first by a horrible stench and then the site of K wrapped arm and
leg around the prone body of the paperboy, both of them naked, both of them covered in
mud, flies, feces, urine, branches and leaves. It was the most bizarre sight I had ever seen.
Upon this boys skin were tattoos covering every inch, scribbling with lines and arrows.
As a psychiatrist I was amazed and intrigued. As a father I wanted this abnormality
destroyed, killed, exterminated. I had him charged with rape and put in jail until the trial.
Yet I knew it was not rape, I knew it was love. And so I took it upon myself to have the
charges dropped so that he could be put into a psychiatric hospital where he remained for
four weeks. But they were fucking in shit and piss, what was I to do? How all this
affected me, I cant really say. But I gave up my study of K and at the same time I gave
up on my idea of simplicity. Without reason or argument, I was suddenly both convinced
it was wrong, and I was completely and thoroughly uninterested in knowing why. Long

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ago I believed the brain was nothing but a computer, but that was when computers were
simple things. And back then when computers were simple things, everyone said, brains
cannot be like computers, because computers are too simple. Now, no one can really
understand how a computer works. Yet everyone believes the brain works like a
computer. If we cant understand how a computer works, how can we say our brains work
like computers. I wrote an article about his once, submitted it to the New Yorker and
believe it or not, they published it. My brain is a car, was the name of the article, and the
ideas was that it was not that long ago cars were simple things, things you could fix
yourself in your drive way, and so no one in there right mind would consider the brain to
be like a car, but now that cars have changed and no one can possible understand how a
car works, how can someone refute my claim the brain is like a car? How can you prove I
am wrong?
In his diggings Ping had come across a strangely shaped rock, an arrowhead
perhaps, he rubbed it clean between his fingers and handed it to me as if this was one of
hundreds that littered his land and that he had dug this up just to make that very point.
Solitude is what we seek, V, he said, and hence we eventually all return to that. To
what we were when we were ourselves and nothing but ourselves. We eventually learn
that it is true that all there is to know is right here, he said, pointing to his head, nothing
else can be trusted, nothing else needs to make sense. We seek solitude because that is
how we know the end will come. It wont come with any understanding or support from
others. There can be no sympathy for the dying, no empathy for the dead, we despise the
dying as we despise the dead. If we could we would cut off the dying altogether, pull the
cord, halt the rations, turn off the water and electricity, we would. In a heartbeat. The

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dead remind us of shitting in our pants as a kid, of throwing up on a boat, of accidentally
sneezing a plume of snot from our nose while sitting across from our date in a restaurant,
they remind of clothes that smell, of sweat rings under our armpits, of a boil on our nose.
Solitude is what the human condition strives for ultimately, why else do we begin to lose
our eyesight, why else does our hearing fade, we no longer kiss when our lips grow
shriveled and chapped, we can no longer bear to clasp our arms around another body that
is cold and boney. Finally, solitude comes when you finally realize that no one is listening
anymore. I thought I had created this vast audience for myself, an audience designed and
attuned to listening just to me, to applaud what I had to say, for why else would I create
these medical centers, these laboratories, these university departments, why orchestrate
these think-tanks, these annual conferences, the symposia, the specialty journals, why
hire these research associates, these assistants, these staff people, why inculcate all those
students, these hordes of fanatical followers but to have this vast audience dedicated to
the ideas and theories of Ping? And so solitude came when I seemingly awoke to discover
that this vast network of people, this far stretched fabric of people dedicated to me was
not a living fabric of anything at all, at best it was really just a lifeless, hardened scum
and that I had no audience at all, that I could easily just close my mouth, drop my pen,
never utter another idea or thought and no one would care, the scum was incapable of
listening, I could walk away and the scum would never notice, and so I did and you know
what, no one did, the scum remained, scummier than ever, harder than ever but not for
my sake, that is for sure.
And so I left and I came here to this ranch and was immediately overtaken with
the need to devour the wasteland before it devoured me. I immediately began to build, I

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started with the house that was standing here, which seemed large enough for my wife
and me, and inside it was even larger, cavernous in fact, on some days whole hours would
pass while we searched for each other like lost miners in this house, amidst all this space,
the hallways, the nooks and crannies I created out of careless planning. But outside, the
house was insignificant, a speck upon the endless wasteland and so I expanded our home,
adding a room here, another patio there, I created a variety of rooms so as to continue this
expansion, a greenhouse one week, a game room another, a garage, a portico followed by
a sewing room, a room to keep all those things that neither one of us wanted to keep, a
hot room where all kinds of things strange and familiar came to die. I built a bar, a shed, a
water pump house, a wine cellar, several outhouses, a tool hut, a wood shed, a pantry, a
skinning room, a trophy house, and a house where the postman would take a break from
the hot days of the desert. One year I got the idea for a room that looked just like the
room next to it and no sooner had I completed this room than I began to create a mirror
image of our home and soon we had two of everything. As you can see while the building
never ends, the wasteland never shrinks away in submission. It is quite a different foe,
one that I fear is but laughing at my puny attempts to defeat it. I have lived on this ranch
for seventeen years and for seven hundred years there have never been any trees here, yet
everyday, I wake up and I look out here, look right at that hill and ask myself, did I do it?
Did I remove those trees? Later in the afternoon such a thought would never occur to me.
As the day goes on, I guess I am more prepared to accept the world for how it is, I am far
less inclined to assume most things have a cause with me. In other words, as the day
grows long I become liberated from certain fates I assign myself. Yet it is a fate I have to
believe in every day. When we are younger we distrust routine, afraid it will take us too

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quickly, like a whirlpool into old age. As we get older we grab onto routine much like we
grab the back of a chair as we walk through a room, it orients us, stabilizes our path,
actually gives us the feeling of immortality, I do this today, I did it yesterday and so what
really is the difference between yesterday and today, what then is the difference between
any day from another? When my father died I noticed my children touching his hands
then laughing. While he was in the casket, they poked his stomach and pinched his
cheeks, tried to pry open his eye, even put a penny into his mouth. Later, my wife, told
me I was a terrible father to let the kids play with dead things. I suddenly realized she, my
wife, was sane after all, that she had created a ruse and now had a family she could watch
but never get any closer to than a family on a TV set. How brilliant, I thought, she never
had to soil her hands, never had to take on a responsibility other than the one that
mattered to her, the genetic one, and that she had done this with marvelous ease. When
my son talks about death, I feel he is reading from a book. When I talk about death, he
claims, it is as if I am singing one of those old songs youd find on the 78s down in the
basement. You talk as if it matters he said, and so you will never understand it, my son
the doctor said. I wanted to ask him how I sounded when I talked about love, but I could
see he was distracted with a thought, or maybe it was an itch, whatever it was he forgot
about me and sooner than I remember he had gone home. My father once said, a man is
his work. My son tells me, a man is his family. Sometimes I am caught between these
two, sometimes I am the tether that connects the two; more succinctly, I was the thing
created and then I created another and so I am the link between two men who have
nothing to do with each other and if both of them are dead wrong, what am I? But the
trees! Yes, just as I believe each morning that I am the one who removed the trees, I

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believe each evening that the phone will ring and someone I know will say Hello Ping!
Just as I believe I had nothing to do with the trees disappearing, after I fall asleep I forget
that I had an anticipation of a phone call and wake up oblivious to this thought. Perhaps,
you say, the concern about the trees replaced your concern about the phone call? Or
perhaps you might say your fear that you fell asleep when someone called and you did
not answer created in you a feeling of guilt that is manifest in your concern about the
missing trees? Or perhaps you might even say when you forget about the concern you
have for the trees, your guilt simply surfaces again in the form of a concern about a phone
call, which could very well be a person who would answer you with: Ping! what
happened to all the goddamn trees! It was exactly this kind of thought that made my first
wife divorce me and drove my second wife insane. All subsequent wives seem to be
singing when I talk to them, smiling and singing even if I am talking about a ruptured
hemorrhoid, with an expression on their faces I would have to call loving but marred with
superficial attentiveness.
You remember my ex-wife S, I am sure. She showed you her breasts one day
when she asked you to fix the toilet at our house, and constantly masturbated when you
were outside painting the shutters. I met this woman who would become my second wife
in Africa, on a trip to study the sexual behavior of vervets. She just a young student then,
I was her teacher, and we would spend hours together in the rainforests watching the
vervet, waiting for some sexual behavior which if it did happen created in us a burst of
excitement as we could literally be sitting there in this forest for days on end weeks even
and not see the slightest bit of sexual behavior from these beasts. We rarely talked during
these long long times in the forest together, we sweated, swatted at flies, picked at scabs,

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farted and sometimes slept, not together but in turns, so as to not miss any vervet sexual
behavior should it happen. But we were professionals and despite how intimate this
setting may sound, nothing improper had arisen. Then after living and waiting and being
together like this for two, eight, twelve months, I forget how many really, one day it
seemed she decided to be a vervet herself. She took to walking about on all fours,
jumping up onto a low hanging treelimb, hanging down from one hand, scratching her
head with her foot and picking through my hair like a vervet would. Shed look at me and
smack her lips real loud and rapidly like a vervet would. She'd jerk back her head and
open her eyes wide and flash her teeth like a vervet would. Then shed bob her head, lean
forward, flatten back her ears and chortle like a vervet would. Then she turned around
and showed me her rump like a vervet would, and when she did this I took it as a sign to
join in. I myself was not much into playing these kinds of games, I was frightened to
death of charades and would even feign sickness at the first mention of these silly
activities at a party, but something about being in the jungle with a woman half my age
liberated me and I quickly took my vervet stance of definitive sexual interest with rear
legs extended, forearms straight out, and head thrust forward just as a vervet would. I
puckered my mouth and hooted like a vervet would, which made her bounce up and
down on her haunches, still flashing her rump at me like a vervet would. I then sat up and
puffed out my chest and shook my head back and forth like a vervet would and she
looked back at me and puckered her lips and cooed at me like a vervet would. I pranced
around here like a vervet would and finally pounced on her, locking her ankles with my
feet and gripping her hips with my hands and she spun around and slapped me across the
face like a vervet would. I sat back and hooted in surprise and reached down to feel my

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erection like a vervet would and she turned back around and showed me her rump again
like a vervet would and I touched her between her buttocks and smelled my fingers like a
vervet would and then I jumped up again and grabbed her hips again and pulled off her
pants and I opened my trousers and climbed on her legs like a vervet would and
penetrated her from behind like a vervet would thrusting into her as she walked around
on hands and feet until she buried her head in the forest floor and I finished inside of her
like a vervet would and so that is how we fell in love.
She was a bright young girl, brilliant really, but our love was based on vervet love
not human love, and so we never lusted after each other except in vervet ways. I was
never aroused by her excitement over something she had read, she never cared to hear
about a thought I had or a piece of music I had discovered. I grew limp if she brought up
a poet she had heard at a bookstore and I am sure she dried up if I talked about a new
finding at the lab. And so our vervet love was strong enough for us to eventually make
our way back to civilization, to get married and to have three daughters together, but it
was not strong enough to keep us sane and together for always and ever. Over time, she
became increasingly hostile to my attempts to mount her and our lovemaking grew more
and more violent as I felt the need to keep our vervet love, the only thing we had, alive.
Until finally one day when I was sniffing her vagina and smacking my lips in submission
she turned around to me and said with a quiet but firm resolution, stop it, Ping, its over.
And that was when I realized she had lost her mind. She chose a path of instant
rationality, which eventually took her over the edge. I tried to treat her myself and when
that proved futile I brought in some trusted colleagues. That too failed and eventually I
had no choice but to have her committed. One Thanksgiving, having just made dinner,

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she told the girls that she was not their mother, and only the youngest disbelieved her.
The oldest two did believe her and did not seem to notice when their mother just up and
disappeared leaving the table set and the food to waste, while the youngest took to hiding
and peeking at me from the cracks in doorways with the hateful stare I would come to
know so well. I married several times after that, but to women who gave me little to think
about and nothing to worry about. My wives all left me at one time or another and each
time I said good riddance, as if finally relieved that some awful houseguest who wouldn't
leave had packed her bags and disappeared.
When I was growing up, the prevailing attitude was that the world was going to
end. So why save money, why care about the environment, why be faithful to your
spouse, why spend time with your kids, why not drink, why not smoke, take risks, hell,
just laugh, enjoy it while it is here. We never said this was why we behaved the way we
did, but that was the espirit du monde. Today, sixty years later, we behave the same way!
Is it because we think the same way? Of course not, today the reason is different even if
our behavior is exactly the same. We dont save money for our retirements, we dont care
how much we fuck up the atmosphere, I dont know a single guy who is faithful to his
wife or woman who is faithful to he husband. And kids? Who pays any attention to them
at all anymore? We dont care where they go, what they do, what happens to them. But
none of that is because we believe the world is going to end, no, hell no, we dont even
think about the world coming to an end, it is not a thought that even crosses our
consciousness, yet our behavior is that we would like the world to end as soon as
possible, that we would like to hurry its demise, as if we will do everything we can to
bring about the most rapid end. Its true! We all say we are religious, but we do not

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behave as if there is a life after death, there is no I after me, we have learned the world
changes not gradually but in bursts of catastrophe, so lets bring it on! Fuck recycling,
fuck the ozone layer, fuck global warming, fuck ending violence, fuck the peace shit
process, fuck the young, let them fend for themselves, lets do it now, lets bring on the end
in all it fucking glory, the hurricanes, the wars, the land mines, the dead animals on the
beach, the farmlands all dried to dust. Lets get it over now, we dont want the world to
end in our childrens lifetime, the apocalypse is a spectacle that we do not want to miss.
We want to see it for ourselves, on our lawn chairs by the beach, from our barbecue in
our backyard, we want to feel the thunderous end in our loins, we want to be there and be
responsible for the biggest show the earth has ever known. When my son asked me about
suicide, I said I cant imagine it. And so I said, I cant imagine dying. How can one just
die? How can you go from here and all this to there where there is nothing at all? How
can you go from being the center of the universe to not even a nothing in the universe? It
is the nothingness and the sheer inability to imagine it that is unacceptable, unrealizable, I
would say, life cant stop, it must go on, we must keep moving somehow after death,
pushing forward, perhaps, perhaps backwards, but moving all the same. I had grown tired
of writing my thoughts and ideas in books and articles, publishing the results of my
experiments, my observations and theories. Yet I am compelled to write, I just dont care
if any one reads them. And to make matters worse, I am convinced that I really have
nothing to write about. But that hasn't made me stop. So one day I started to write my
thoughts one by one on these little sticky pads and stick these thoughts up on the wall, not
in any order, until the notes began to layer over each other and stated to fall off the wall,
and so I began to collect the fallen ones in these boxes. How wonderful this system has

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turned out to be, a system I discovered completely by accident, one I realized has been
used by several philosophers I should add however. When I wrote in notebooks, would I
ever open that notebook to read an earlier thought? Of course not! Not one, not ever. But
with these scraps of paper I will pick one up every now and then, just pick one out by
random, read it, and throw it back. Usually reading one of these will get me to write
several more, so how wonderful this process is, how self perpetuating, I will sit in my
study for a few hours, no, for more than a few hours, amazed at how much I have to say
about nothing at all! The drive to discover the simplicity in the world has forged our
efforts and thoughts for centuries. Whether it was a statement such as I think therefore I
am, an equation such as e=mc squared, or a slogan like survival of the fittest, we have
always been compelled to find the simplest answer to everything. But the days are gone
when simple answers come about simply. Today we have to build an entire institution to
support our thinking, we need hundreds of people, thousands of computers, tens of
thousand of books, reams of paper, we need megawatts of energy, we suck life out of the
world and then fill it up that void with our excrement of thought, all in the name of
finding simplicity. We may eventually find it, but at what expense? Our childrens? The
worlds survival? We will destroy everything, turn it into a heap of junk just to reach this
understanding. Will we do this? Hell yes! Will we destroy the world seeking the answer?
Absolutely. Will we find the answer before we destroy the world? Probably not. And
when we find a simple answer that works, that seems to work, we seek to connect it to
other simple answers, as if the world of knowledge was like the human genome and
would be unraveled to reveal a few bare elements that worked together in some
preordained harmony. Tautologies are always the unwelcome and discomforting basis to

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our belief systems. The answer we will find will probably be nothing more than this: Life
sucks. In fact, if I learned anything from my decades as a psychiatrist, it is that people
are like cockroaches, they will adapt to anything, any condition, any way of life. There is
no one human condition, no ideal human way of life. In fact, just the opposite is true, the
opposite of the ideal is the way of life for all of us, whether we are rich or poor, black or
white, short or tall, regardless of our condition, we will choose the less than ideal way of
life while seeking what we think is the ideal way of life, and even if we somehow by
accident, and it would indeed be by accident, land ourselves in an ideal situation, we
would not hesitate to ruin that newly found ideal way of life and make it into a less than
ideal way of life, step by step, piece by piece, we would destroy the ideal until there was
nothing left of that ideal way of life and we were back again at the less than ideal way of
life. And this is in fact how we are like the cockroach, the cockroach cannot live under
ideal circumstances, it is built by nature to survive in the worst possible circumstances, in
ideal circumstances the cockroach cannot survive, in ideal circumstances it grows fat
until it can no longer fuck and once it cannot fuck it can no longer reproduce and you
soon have a bunch of old fat cockroaches that simply swell up and die. No, it is only
under far less than ideal circumstances that the cockroach thrives, under the less than
ideal way of life does it stay trim and fit from the constant hunt to survive, does its drive
to survive create the drive to reproduce and so the survival minded cockroach is a fucking
cockroach and so it is reproducing and thriving and surviving because it is fucking like
mad. Humans too, we cannot survive if things are too good, too easy, when we are
struggling to survive that is the only time we are alive, when our brains are alive, when
times are bad that is when great literature is written, masterpieces painted, world

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changing music composed, not when life is ideal, no, when life is ideal all of our focus,
all of our energy goes into making our life less ideal, all of our efforts, all of our brains go
to creating a less ideal way of life for ourselves and so we drink, we screw the spouses of
our friends and enemies, we beat our kids, we get into fights, we sue others for invading
our privacies, we try to undermine our bosses, we steal things that we already have or
things that we dont even need, we get depressed, we get fat, we lose any sense of joy we
had , that we ever had, we stop fucking, we do this because if we dont destroy this ideal
way of life, we will not survive. As much as I despise and loathe Ingersott, he is the
embodiment of all this, a figure that will stand forever for our baseless concept of life, of
our pathetic attempts to find truth. He, like truth, never stands still, he like truth always
reinvents himself, always finds a way to endear himself to a world that yesterday was
ready to destroy him. Which is to say, what Ingersott demonstrates, V, is that there is no
truth, but that doesn't mean we need to stop believing in the truth, for Christs sake, no V,
what else have we got but the truth to believe in, so what if it isn't true, we got it to
believe in it and without it wed be lost, it is not the truth that anchors us, we have no idea
what we are hanging in on to, we havent a clue whats at the end of that epistemological
rope to which our lives are tethered, its the rope that matters not whats at the other end,
we wouldn't pull up that rope to see whats on there anyway? Why do that? The whole
world is based on not knowing whats at the end there, not on knowing whats there.
Once we knew what was there, then what would we do? What if we found that all there
was at the end of our rope was a grey rock, a dead tree, or a cloud of nothingness? Wed
probably toss it back in hopes of catching something else, thats what we would probably
do. We expect there to be something profound at the end of that rope, something we can

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never know and therefore always believe in, but in that case it is better to let it be
unknown. We dont know the brain any better than we know what is on the other side of
the universe. This ignorance is not because of some philosophical paradox or puzzle; it is
not because we cant know ourselves or because we cant study the nature of something
without changing that nature into something else. No we dont understand because we are
stupid, V. Just plain stupid. And that fact of nature should be obvious, yet who is truly
willing to admit that we are dumber than a doorknob V, the world is not that complex or
too intricate or overly complicated, except to us that is. We are too dumb, too stupid to
understand. But again, what would happen if this idea that we are too stupid to piss in a
toilet became the common attitude, wed all turn into beasts and the world would end as
we know it.
Ping stopped to pull out a handkerchief, remove his glasses and wipe the sweat
from his brow. You are still begging to ask, I am sure, why I live here, and I am not even
offering you a crumb of an answer as to why I am out here in the middle of the high
desert, it seems so out of place for a person who has lived his entire life in the suburbs,
from my youth in Pasadena, to my college days in Harvard, my medical school and
residency at Yale, and then the last thirty years of my life in Los Angeles, always in a
home situated snuggly on a plot of level land, always a carport and a driveway, always a
sidewalk between the house and the street, a small yard of grass beyond a set of windows
looking out from the living room, a stone path up to the front door, iron numerals forming
the street number hung outside the door above the doorbell, a foyer which leads from the
outside one way to a formal dining room, another way to a living room, continue on and
there was the kitchen, down the hallway was bathroom and then a guest bedroom, up

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some steps was the master bedroom, a bathroom, a sliding glass doorway that opened to
the back yard and a wooden deck, from the deck you walk down a few steps to a small,
tidy garden where tomatoes would grow in the summer, and around this garden a wooden
fence across which the neighbors did their thing, I pretended not to notice them, they
pretended not to notice me, but at least once a year I would fuck my wife on the porch
deck and then they my neighbors would fuck on their porch a few days later and then
wed be mannerly for the rest of another year. And so I know it seems horribly out of
place for me to be here in the high desert, surrounded by what seems to be all this space,
all this natural chaos, no fences, no visible neighbors, removed from the many borders
and boundaries of the burbs which not only defined your space but defined you as a
person and that you define as well, and so how strange I am sure it must seem to see me
yanked from that constant dialogue of the burbs, that life-long give and take that was so
much me as I was it, to find me here where the rules and patterns are hard to describe or
even grasp or even exist at all, where it probably seems (especially to you) as if I struggle
to stay afloat, to stay on my feet, as if I might just be blown away, be uprooted and taken
off by the rulelessness of it all, the patternlessness of it all, how is it I survived all these
years, you may ask, how is it that I came here, let alone took up residency here, what
lunacy is at the heart of my ability to shrug off the fact that my existence as defined by
the rules and patterns of the burbs has been stripped naked and I have been thrown like a
goldfish from the goldfish bowl into the ocean? Why am I here, you ask, am I sane, you
wonder. Well, V, the change has been good for me, it is sometimes good if not always
good to thrust yourself into unknown surroundings, if only to challenge the set and
established. For example, when I lived in the suburbs, surrounded by neighbors, by

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people, I never paid any attention to them. If I caught a glimpse of them I did not think
twice about what they were doing, I assumed I knew, which was the same as not caring.
Here, as I rarely see my neighbors, when I do see them it is like the rare sighting of
endangered species, I am fascinated. I realized within the first few days I was here, that
we constantly think that our neighbors live lives that are mirrors to our own, but then
when we watch them, we discover that there is nothing to that belief. We may watch our
neighbors and see that they are, for example, cleaning the gutters of their home and think,
it is just as if I was cleaning the gutters of my home, yet when we watch them, even for
only a few moments, we soon discover that their cleaning of the gutters is nothing at all
like my cleaning of my gutters, that everything is different and in fact no two things could
be less alike! We catch a glimpse of out neighbor sitting in a chair reading by the front
window of their house and immediately think: that is just like me sitting in a chair
reading by the front window of my home, yet again, if we dare to stop and watch our
neighbor just for a few minutes we soon realize that his sitting and reading is not a bit
like our sitting and reading, not in a few ways, not in even one way, and so we must
conclude that our neighbors lives are not in any way a mirror of our lives, which creates a
sense of strangeness over all we believe and feel about the world. Yet V, this realization
that our neighbors life is not in any way a mirror of mine does nothing to my belief that I
know and understand my neighbor as much as I know and understand myself. Which is
to say, V, human understanding as in the understanding of the human condition cannot be
dissected.
We had worked our way back to the small garden alongside Pings house. Ping
opened the gate held with a loop of wire and walked in between the cones of tomato

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plants. With a pair of pruning sheers he started to remove, one by one, the tomato worms
that hid among the leaves and stems of the plants.
Ingersott's pathology, Ping said as he plucked and then cut off the head of a fat
tomato worm, is that he does not believe the truth needs to be tested. In other words, if
he, Ingersott, believes X is true, nothing more needs to be said or done. It he does any
experiments or testing at all, it is, as he would say, to satisfy the lesser intellects who
cannot grasp why X is true. Yet even that it not where his true pathology lies, Ping said as
he plucked and then cut off the head of a fat tomato worm, his true pathology lies in how
he responds when his truth, X, the truth that he pompously defended as true beyond
refutation, when X turns out to be false. He, Ingersott, does not accept this as a validation
of the scientific process, he does not see this as a need to rework his ideas, to shift his
thinking, to reconsider and rehypothesize, to reformulate and restructure his worldview.
No, Ingersott's reaction to discovering that X is false is to deny that he ever believed that
X was ever true in the first place. Thats right; suddenly according to Ingersott the world
had somehow misattributed to him the belief that X was true, for in fact X was false and
had always been false. And even that, Ping said as he plucked and then cut the head off a
fat tomato worm, was not where Ingersott's pathology truly lied, where Ingersott's
pathology truly lied was in the fact that when faced with the challenge that X was false
when indeed he had categorically stated that X was true, Ingersott would suddenly look
back into the faces of his detractors and his critics, with a squint in his eyes and pursing
of his lips as if to answer every one of them finally and demonstratively, he would then
say, the fact of the matter is that Y is true and if I must, and since I must, I will proceed to
demonstrate to all of you once and for all how it is that Y is true. And with that three

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thousand young black men were forgotten, two hundred schizophrenics were forgotten,
eleven hundred young women with PMS, two hundred and eighty children with
hyperactivity, twelve elderly patients with Parkinson's were all forgotten, as were all who
occupied the wards set up for Ingersott, they were all forgotten, these were all the
subjects of his experiments, his truths, these three thousand young black men with a
history of violence who had cotton balls in their temporal lobes instead of a pink bit of
brain, they are now forgotten, the two hundred patients diagnosed with schizophrenia
who were put onto dialysis machines for month after grueling month to falsely cure their
disease, they are now all forgotten, the eleven hundred young women with severe PMS
who had electrodes implanted into their brains where electrical shocks were applied to
cure their symptoms, they are all forgotten, the two hundred and eighty hyperactive
children who were given lethal does of amphetamines, they are all forgotten, the twelve
Parkinson's patients who were told to travel to a small town in Mexico where he could
inject the infant brain cells from a monkey into each of their substantia nigras Ingersott
who had not held a medical instrument in his hand for 40 years, performing this surgery,
this butchery, drilling through the skulls of these old people and injecting a grey syrup of
brain cells from infant monkeys they were each and every one of them forgotten, and
finally the crowded wards set up for the dozens of other experiments Ingersott meant to
conduct but usually did not, where he was to prove X and Y about the violently ill, the
incurable, the flesh eaters, the perverts, but never did because he forgot, because he had a
new priority, because he could care less about these people who once they were forgotten
never received proper care, who were locked in rooms and left there, attended by nurses
and orderlies who had no idea why these people were there except that they were animals

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of some sort, animals created by Ingersott, subjects who were meant to test the truth only
for the lesser intellects of the world, these too were the victims of Ingersott all of them
forgotten. Yet each time he reinvented himself, someone was always there to clean up the
mess he had left behind, the lives of those left behind, the bodies, the shells of human
beings he had left behind, the carcasses of animals, the souls of students he left behind. I
never saw him once look into the faces of the people he wasted, into the eyes of the
people who had become his experiments and acknowledge them in anyway. People were
superfluous to Ingersott, subjects for experimentation, disposable. And yet, Ping said as
he plucked and then cut the head off a fat tomato worm, I was in most ways crueler than
Ingersott, for Ingersott was heartless, soulless, where I had at least a vestigial soul, a
rudimentary heart, so when I carried out my atrocities I would do so with even greater
evil than Ingersott.
We had walked around the back of the seemingly unending structure that was his
house. The hills that came into view were rusty, worn, patches of desert scrub brown and
lifeless. Above a hawk looped beneath high clouds that resembled scratches across a blue
ice.
There is no hope for mankind, V, that much is clear. We aren't conscious enough
of our state of being to take a true stance, to articulate a position into action, to rally the
masses or to institute any kind of change that would save us. And it won't happen, not
even with disaster. We will always forgive an Ingersott, no matter how many times he has
betrayed us. It is not that we have given up, but we are too stupid to see the forests for the
trees, right from wrong, truth from falsity, the up from the down, the dark from the light,
the willy from the nilly, the bidda from the bang, the yin from the yang, the up from the

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down, the scribble from the scrabble, the ass from the hole in the ground, the zig from the
zag, the disparate from the collected, the weasel from the measle, the ding from the dong,
the wam from the bam, the butter from the cream, the eagle from the beagle
No! Life isn't about honesty, V, Ping screamed, it is about following the patterns.
We seek patterns, not truth, patterns, not honesty. As long as what we do fits into some
pattern life is good. As long as we think our life fits into some pattern, our life is livable.
But there is no there in patterns. Only a feeling of being safe, of being okay, of falling
within the boundaries of what should be. If the world is a mirror to the mind, V, the world
is a fuzzy place indeed, a cluster of things, a collection of clusters, a cluster of
collections. Indeed, that was my greatest achievement, V, cluster theory and where I took
cluster theory. And I took it as far as I could, further than anyone else had dared take it
before. The problem was it eventually became indisputable and therefore became of no
interest to anyone. What is a cluster a cluster of? Four things? Four hundred things? Four
million? A cluster, they, my detractors, said, was nothing but an excuse for pseudoscience
they said, make your cluster big enough and of course you trip upon something that looks
like truth they said! But that was the point of cluster theory, V, it was not about truth, it
was about how the brain works, how we organize data, how we function in this world; it
was also about how we could not understand the world, about how we could not see the
forests for the trees, about how stupid we are V! They had it all wrong, it was an
epistemological journey not an ontological one. It frightened them V, it ripped up every
commonly held belief that we could in fact know things as they really are, cluster theory
said we could never know things as they are and cluster theory said that it didn't matter if
we ever knew things as they are, we could only know things as a function of what they

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were at any given time, or some other time, or as a function of what was going on at the
moment, as a function of things which change with time and place, it wasn't a statement
about how things are in the world, it was a statement about our mind and the limitations
of our mind, those functions, those clusters of events, traits, emotions, whatever, would
be different than the thing-itself, the object would be forever outside the realm of knownas-it-truly-is and would exist only as known-as-a-cluster-of-what-it-seemed-it-could-be.
This horrified people V, and what do horrified people do? They laugh of course. And so
the laughed at me, laughed at me in lectures, at symposiums, they laughed at me in the
scientific journals, they laughed at me on email bulletin boards. But I didn't care, I didn't
care a bit. There was no other way to go V, no other direction but onward with cluster
theory, and so I might have gone on forever that way, except my colleagues, the ones I
depended on to support me, as I depended on you, they lost faith, they could not stand the
laughing, the jokes, the spit wads hurled their way, they lost faith, just as you lost faith,
but unlike you, they stayed, you left and they stayed, but they should have, like you, they
should have left, because while they stayed they no longer believed, they no longer had
any faith, so they stayed and they destroyed the project, V, they took it upon themselves
to prove me wrong, they didn't leave as you did, they stayed on for four more years and
they worked harder than they had ever worked before but their efforts were to prove me
wrong, not prove the theory wrong, not to prove the ideas wrong, had they worked so
hard to prove the ideas wrong, then we might be standing in a totally different place
today, V, talking about something else, but no, they were out to prove me wrong, not the
theory, and they became fanatical in this quest, especially when the difficulty of proving
me wrong grew and their efforts had to be increased even more, their goal grew in

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difficulty, and so they eventually did what we do when we find things increasingly
difficult, thats right, they cheated, but they didn't cheat in a way to show I was wrong,
they cheated in a why to show I was right. Cluster theory can never be too right, V, or
else it is not a cluster theory at all, clusters that are too right become rigid arrays, matrices
that do not explain, don't live, dont breath, morph, grow and evolve like clusters do, and
my colleagues knew this, as they had heard me on numerous occasions say how clusters
need to be sloppy, like good sex, the sloppier the clusters the better, and so they took it
upon themselves to cheat and make these clusters as neat and as right as could be, they
made them too good, too clear, because they knew only in this was, that this was the only
way to destroy me, by showing that the basis behind cluster theory, its sloppiness, was no
longer defensible. Cluster theory was after all just a continuation of my drive to find
simplicity. Cluster theory was for me the ultimate in simplicity. Sure it was messy and
unwieldy and gaudy at times, but it worked. What screams out simplicity more than that
which works! For me simplicity meant more, for my detractors simplicity had to mean
less. And they succeeded, they ruined cluster theory, and so I guess you could say they
ruined me. But at the same time, they made me a millionaire, they gave me a life of
leisure, instead of being banished from academia and outlawed from science, I was given
awards, I was given new positions, I was given titles, money and more than I had ever
dreamed of. If you thought my colleagues hated me then, they really hate me now. While
I was being canonized they were being condemned, caught with their cheating and
manipulation, serving out various sentences meted out by the academic instructions
which cannot tolerate cheating in any way, for whatever reason. One lost her research
title and now cleans monkey cages. Another was removed from his teaching position at

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the university and now volunteers at a day care center. The others just disappeared, like
you, but unlike you, they disappeared with their tails firmly between their legs. Although
like you, I am sure they will, one day, show up here and want to know how and why life
treats people so differently, why some people such as I always seem to get the best out of
life, while others such as them, always seem to get the worst out of life, how some like
me get all the breaks, while others like them get no breaks at all, how some like me are
just lucky motherfuckers, while others like them have no luck at all no matter how hard
they work, which is of course, in their minds, not fair, not fair at all. My success was not
due to being smart, nor was I successful because I worked harder than others, in fact, I
had none of the qualities you would have expected from someone who achieved what I
achieved. But I know how to play the game, V, that's how I did it. But it had nothing to do
with brains, that much is for sure. Let me tell you, when I was sixteen I suffered from a
swelling of the brain, encephalitis, the result of a bug bite, I was in a coma for six weeks,
the doctors told my parents before I came out of it that when I did come out of it, if I ever
came out of it, I would either be a vegetable or a retard, but a retard was the best they
could expect from a swelling like this of the brain, and so I guess a retard is what they
got. So its not brains that I attribute to my success, no, I cant compare myself to the
geniuses, to the extreme intellects of those like the Ingersotts of the world. They were all
brilliant, V, they were like generals in battle, they had legions of followers who would
have died for them let alone worked in their laboratories, yet I was arguably the most
successful of all of them. My army was a few rag tag pieces of shit, a few mumbling,
bumbling idiots who would do anything they could to stab me in the back. The others, the
Ingersotts and the other geniuses of the world had armies of people stretched across

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nations, all ready to ride together in unison if their general told them to. I had a few
narrow mouthed pipsqueaks who couldn't mutter my name without bowing their heads in
shame. The other geniuses wrote books that became best sellers in multiple languages,
they appeared as celebrities on late night TV shows, they had road shows set up where
people stood outside bookstores for hours waiting to have a copy of their latest text book
autographed, they filled not auditoriums but basketball arenas with avid followers who
cheered and applauded every time their general banged his fist on the lectern. I wrote ten
books for every one of theirs, yet my books never made it past the university bookstore
shelves, and most were returned to me with their front covers torn off like maimed birds,
I used to say. I have been invited a dozen times to lecture not to an arena of people, but to
four or five grad students who brought me donuts and coffee and who would mumble
something like I understand when I reached the less than forceful conclusions about my
work. Yet, I am the one who succeeded, not the others. The other geniuses each reached
their peak, they got to that pinnacle of celebrity, they garnered a coveted prize or two, but
then each and every one of them came crashing down, and each and every one of them
had a long way to fall. Look them up now, if they aren't dead, where are they? What are
they doing? Probably at some small university teaching intro classes on their subject
when they used to teach the highest level graduate classes to the best and brightest, or
probably in some trailer or small windowless office in the basement somewhere,
squeezed in between the towers of books they no longer can sell, when they used to have
entire floors of university buildings devoted to them, four or five offices, swarming with
a staff, a legion of graduate students. But no one comes to see them anymore, no more
tours, no more lectures. They are banished to the oblivion science creates for all its

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pioneers. I built an enterprise from nothing and kept it through all that time while the
Ingersotts and the other geniuses all rose meteorically and then fell meteorically from
their lofty heights. As they fell, one to the each of them, they would come to me and ask
me how did I do it? How did I survive? I was the dumbest of them all, I had the least
talent, the fewest skills, no ideas at all, nothing going for me. How in the hell did I do it?
Me, Dr. Ping, the retard of the group, the laziest one of the bunch, the one no one liked,
the one that everyone despised, how did I manage to succeed where no else could even
survive? I never told them my secret, V. But my secret would not have helped them,
would not have helped soothe their descent, their failings. And that is why they hated me
V. It just irks them to the end, it irks them even now! I beat them at everything that didn't
matter to them. I beat them at tennis, I beat them at squash, I beat them at drinking, I even
made their wives like me more than their wives liked them. In other words, I beat them at
everything that didn't matter to them, but actually everything that mattered most to them.
And for that they hated me even more, despised my eventual success even more. I didn't
come up with the new theory, the big idea, the revolutionary turn on this or that. No, I
puttered with the obvious, shifted around the bits and pieces that were still loose in the
well known and accepted, I twiddled while they toiled, I rummaged where they dug, I
whistled while they sweat, I sang while they screamed in despair. And that scream was
always the same scream: I hate you Ping! That scream was inevitable. It would come one
day from each of them, at a conference, during a symposium, at a cocktail party, during
the opera, at some point that scream would come, I knew it.
The air was cooling with the afternoon. In the course of this day, it seemed as
Ping himself had aged. He moved more slowly, his head drooped, the vertebrae on his

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neck were strikingly apparent beneath his shirt. One ankle was fused and he now dragged
that foot behind him a bit, his legs too thin for his pants and too loose in his hips. Overall,
he seemed suddenly frail, spent. Behind him, the evening light was fading and the sparse
oak trees reached into the sky with dendritic branches, reaching like lost blooms of
thought into the beautiful but empty ether.
That Ingersott was a genius, indeed that Ingersott was one of the most advanced
kinds of genius was well known, in fact that is what Ingersott was best known for. He
was not known for any idea or theory he had formulated, or any book he had written or
any research or discovery he had made, he was known only for being a genius, and yet it
amazes me today that his complete and utter failure to produce any idea, to write any
book, to articulate a single theory on anything never marred his reputation as a genius, in
fact, if nothing else, this utter failure on his part to produce a lasting remnant of any kind,
to memorialize any vestige of his genius made him all the more remarkable to people,
catapulted his stature to mythical dimensions you could say, made him godlike even. He
never wrote anything, Ingersott didnt, and I can never remember seeing him read a book.
Whenever he'd referenced a so-and-so, he would even go so far as to say: according to
what I have heard, so-and-so said this and if what I heard is true I would have to disagree
with soand-so. He never wrote a word as far as I knew, Ingersott didn't, never read a
book, yet no one, not a soul, ever disputed that Ingersott was a true and most remarkable
genius. Despite his genius, Ingersott was in fact very approachable, he would take the
time to talk and listen to anyone; because he didnt read and because he didnt write, you
could say he operated very much in the oral tradition, he talked and listened his way
through life, his life was not one of contemplation but one of conversation, often he was

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the one who talked, but he listened as well, and he was a good listener. He was
approachable but he was not sociable, he never attended lectures and when he went to
parties he drank until he was drunk and always ended up at these parties in the upstairs
bedroom with someones wife or daughter or sister or even mother. The man was a pig,
Ingersott was, but a genius all the same, and loved by all even though later in life
everyone would end up hating him with an equal if not greater passion. But earlier in his
life you couldnt help but like Ingersott, he always had a wet smile on his lips, he always
had a twinkle in his eye, a kind and knowing wink that seemed to communicate a pact
shared only between the two of you. He never forgot a persons name, never forgot your
last conversation, he never read a word of anything let alone one of my papers, yet he
never failed to mention something to me about my latest publication. Careful as always
he would never say he had actually read the publication, but hed say something like: my
assistant R told me about your paper just published on such-and-such, a great idea Ping,
Ingersott would say, truly unique, and with that as an introduction he would go on about
this idea of mine as if it was in fact a great idea, or at least the beginning of a great idea,
he would go on about this idea which as he talked quickly become less of my idea and
more of his idea but he, Ingersott, would go on about it as if it were mine when in effect
after he went to work on this idea it now looked like mine less and less, and as he talked
about it this idea would grow into something that soon stopped resembling anything like
my original idea, became something I could have never in my life conceived, this idea
that Ingersott was now pontificating about, elaborating on and proliferating wildly, until
this idea, no longer mine in any way, had indeed evolved into something truly staggering,
truly monumental, something about which the world in fact needed to know and know

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about now, and then Ingersott would say, what we see here in Pings idea and with that
strangely wonderful, that strangely generous confirmation from Ingersott, the genius
Ingersott, that this idea which had indeed started off as mine but could only truly be his,
yet an idea he was still willing to attribute to me and so with that my mind would be
racing and ready to explode as I knew the world needed to know, was waiting to know
about this idea which I wanted to believe was mine but knew was not mine at all but his,
Ingersott's, and his alone, and no sooner was I set to run from Ingersott so I could write
down this idea, no sooner had I finally sensed a hesitation in Ingersott's speech so that I
could excuse myself and run and put it on paper and make it into my idea then at that
moment Ingersott would suddenly, in the way only he could, as this idea was his
nurturance not mine, his conception not mine, he would suddenly discover, in the midst
of the beauty and profundity of this, his creation, which he was so willingly and so
generously ready to give to me, the retard with the bloated brain, to give to me this
enormous and enormously amazing idea that he, Ingersott, had created from this dank
little nothingness of an idea that I had pathetically put to paper and published for the
world to ignore as the world ignored all my ideas, and why not, my ideas were all so
pathetic and dank, but I put them to paper anyway so I could publish another paper, so I
could put another number in my bibliography, another citation beneath my name, so that
he, Ingersott, took this dank, pathetic idea of a swollen brained retard, pulled it in and
breathed a life into it that I, the retard, would never have dreamed of, and so now just
when he had filled this dank idea with new life and profundity and complexity and yes
even majesty and was ready to hand it back to me, this magnificent thing now of great
beauty even though it had been born of something so dank and pathetic as my own

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original idea, just as he Ingersott was ready to give it to me without asking for any
ownership whatsoever for himself, just as I was ready to accept it, to take this beautiful
idea and run and find a book so as to write down this remarkable and incredible
transformation of my pathetically dank original idea, that was when Ingersott suddenly
announced abruptly and without hesitation that as magnificent as this idea was, as
profound and ultimately attractive as this idea was, there was one thing though that
concerned him. And with that, so my fall would begin. That one thing that concerned
him about this idea would in fact turn out to be a problem, and this problem would indeed
lead to finding a flaw in this majestic idea, a flaw that would be my terrible and profound
downfall. Just as the idea that Ingersott had created out of my dank idea was an idea only
Ingersott could have had, this was a flaw that only Ingersott could have found, but with
this tiny flaw, he would proceed to disassemble and disentangle, to tear down this
beautiful creation as passionately as he had built it up, for ultimately Ingersott cared not
whether he was building something up or tearing it down, he did both with equal zeal,
equal ability, and so with the same amazing genius with which he took my original idea
and built it up into a thing of awe and beauty, I stood there and listened, stood there and
watched as Ingersott tore it down, tore it all the way down until it was back to where it
was, a dank turd of an idea, a retards worthless flatulent, a worthless piece of shit. And I
could only think that Ingersott, despite the wet smile on his lips, the twinkle in his eye,
that he had done this on purpose, that this building up and then tearing down was but a
game for him, a way to build up and tear down a person, a way to destroy a person, a way
to leave that person destroyed but not leave him completely destroyed and thereby
useless for all intents and purposes, leaving that person a little intact so that Ingersott

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could do it all over again, this building up again and tearing down again. What good
would it have been to tear someone down if he tore them down and by so doing destroyed
them completely, no, Ingersotts method was to build them up and then tear them down,
yet leave them intact at least enough to do it again and then again. Each time a person
was built up and torn down that person may have been a bit more diminished by this
horrific experience, but not completely diminished, not utterly destroyed and so they had
a use for Ingersott, he could then again build them up again and then again tear them
down again, whenever he wished. So many times did Ingersott build me up only to tear
me down but such was the power of his genius that I never caught on to this game, not
even while in the midst of this game, I never knew what was happening in this game until
it was too late and I was once again left denuded, obliterated, devastated and nearly
disintegrated but never completely and utterly destroyed. Drunk or sober, there was no
way to compete with Ingersott, no way to deal with his illness. Despite the fact that he
never read, he knew more than you did on every topic. Nonetheless, he would complete
your thoughts, finish your sentences, refute your strongest claims, and belittle your
securest arguments, even before you had a chance to defend yourself. The frustration of
being with Ingersott when you were the object of his attention for even a moment was
unbearable, so you could imagine how I felt being his partner for so many years. There
were times when I was sure I was nothing more than his unwitting foil in his need to
conquer and destroy. He would use me in a meeting with my own graduate students,
building me up in way that at first I thought was ludicrous, you have here the great and
enduring Dr. Ping, he would say to my graduate students, a statement so ludicrous, so
ludicrous sounding that I could feel myself blushing, yet he began in this way and would

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create this ludicrous image of me in front of my own graduate students, which was not
only ludicrous but preposterous, yet such was Ingersotts genius that hed then proceed
with this ludicrously preposterous image of me, and elegantly begin to fill it in, define it
so to speak, he would do so by weaving together the half witted, retarded ideas that I had
put out in a thousand publications over the years simply to create a longer list of citations
to my name and a greater number of cross references to my name and so on and so many
of these published ideas were so dull and so dull witted that even I myself had forgotten
most of them yet here was Ingersott reciting them, no not just reciting them, but engaging
them in a dance as if he had not only just read them all but an hour ago, but that they had
a life of their own in a grander scheme, a larger perspective, one that he wove together
out of this septic tank of disparate ideas I had created, out of which he created a bold and
enlivened theory, a tapestry of somebodys mind, perhaps my mind, the great mind of
Ping, Ingersott would actually say, while building this story of me, Ping, which grew
more marvelous as he continued, making the original portrayal of me suddenly become
real and believable, sustainable in fact so that even I was now coming to believe in what
Ingersott had to say about me, a picture of me according to Ingersott that continued to
grow and evolve until the students to a one would be looking at him and then looking at
me, looking first at me then looking at him, at me and then at him, all in amazement of
this picture Ingersott was creating, creating of me, and so then when I had finally dropped
all my disbelief and skepticism and had indeed just like my students accepted
wholeheartedly Ingersotts grand explanation, my blush of embarrassment at what had
seemed so ludicrous and preposterous was replaced with a glow of self recognition, a
glow I exuded in this new found belief in myself, that Ingersott had so elegantly found

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for me, expounded for me and for my students, no sooner had the eyes moved off
Ingersott all together and finally moved on to me, did he say that yes indeed, this was the
pinnacle of thought for Ping, the grand and glorious apex of Pings entire life work, and
then without hesitation, with a missed beat, he would say that maybe, that maybe, that he
believed there may have been, there could have been a problem in all this. And it was
then I felt, as I had felt a hundred times before with Ingersott, that hundreds had felt a
hundred times with Ingersott, never once in that hundreds of times foreseeing what was
about to happen, but knowing now that the decline, the descent, the deterioration was
coming and would now come rapidly as Ingersott began with the one small problem in
all this and starting there hed begin to swiftly to dissect away all he had so skillfully
woven and threaded together, all that he had beautifully created for me suddenly began to
unravel, and the students' eyes one by one would leave me and again move to Ingersott,
then back to me, back to Ingersott as I was devastatingly unraveled in front of them as
well as in front of myself, unraveled and pulled apart, right there in front of them, my
students, as I withered and disintegrated away, shrunk away, all but vanished right there
and then as my students' eyes stopped looking at me and were now fixed on Ingersott as
the completion of his tornado of destruction of me, leaving nothing of me for them to
look upon had they even wished to look upon me, only his power and his eloquence
remained for them to admire, to now worship, to fully complete my own disintegration.
Perhaps I was more frequently a victim of Ingersotts building up and tearing
down of character, his building then his demolishing of a persons self, his soul, but I
never took it personally. To have done so, to have taken to heart Ingersotts flawless
destruction of my character would have been to admit and thereby face my own failure,

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which if I have a pathology of my own, V, it is the inability to admit let alone face my
own failure. Perhaps it was this aspect of me that intrigued or should I say plagued
Ingersott to no end and perhaps it was this trait that generated his constant and unbridled
destruction of me, which at the very same time created the deepest love and admiration
for me. It would be absolutely foolish to say we didnt love each other, as Ingersott and I
loved each other with a love men rarely found with each other, between us we discovered
a union that was unbreakable however hard we tried to break it. Ingersotts natural
tendency was to break things, not fix them. He would create something, but only to break
it, to destroy it. And so he would build and break, build and break, over and over until the
object of his attention finally disintegrated to nothing as it could take no more. Yet as
much as he built me up and as much as he tore me down, I didnt and wouldnt go away, I
am still here and strong as ever V, a testament not to me but a testament to Ingersott, who
in the end never succeeded in perhaps what he most wanted, which was to destroy me,
but instead he never could, and so he had to love me instead. Ingersotts genius was
perhaps overshadowed only by this love he had for me, even it I was the only one who
was aware of this love. It was fear as much as it was love, fear that I would never
disappear, fear that I would disappear. It was a fear that I would never break, measured by
an equal fear that one day I would break. His love for me was a test for his genius and
somehow he knew this. His love for me pushed him, goaded him, left him restless,
sleepless even, while at the same time, in a similar way, my love for Ingersott pushed me
through life, lead me to do things I both regret and admire. Ingersott, or should I say my
love for Ingersott, represented both the blackest and the most shining memories of my
life. Whereas Ingersott could effortlessly regurgitate anything I had ever said in the 30

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year history with this man, I on the other hand, can only at best poorly paraphrase
anything this man Ingersott had said, and even then, this paraphrase would be suspect to
the hilt. Ingersott was the first person I had ever known whose words could not be
understood without knowing what layers of thoughts or ideas laid behind them. Even the
simplest utterance from Ingersott was so burdened with meaning that sometimes you felt
the urge to vomit just to say hello to the man. Ingersott was pompous, but not in an
outwardly way. He never wore anything but his workingmans overalls, he rarely combed
his hair, he never shined let alone cleaned the black leather steel toed boots he always
wore. In some ways, he was an ordinary man by appearance and constitution but in a
strangely extraordinary way. While I could not imagine coming in to the hospital to work
without a suit and tie, Ingersott would appear at the hospital in the same jumpsuit he had
slept in the night before, egg yolks dribbled onto the bib, a massive cum stain on the legs
of his trousers. Someone once said they saw a centipede crawling in his beard. Another
story had it that while talking one day he suddenly dislodged an empty turtle shell from
his mouth, which had apparently been stuck there for some time. For crying out loud,
Ingersott is reported to have said when he pulled the turtle egg shell out from his mouth, I
could have sworn I took care of this long ago! Ingersott was a grotesque man, grotesque
and obscene in nearly every way. His physical being was grotesquely huge, gargantuan
actually, his belly grotesquely swollen, poking through the flaps of his overalls, stretch
marked, bluish and goosebumped. He farted anytime he pleased, long, atrocious farts that
sounded like empty boxes falling to the floor. He sneezed into his beard and left it there
for hours, his mouth was a caw as foul and odorous as a cadavers. Yet what women
would not die for that man? Human nature, V, is always exactly the opposite of what we

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think. If you believed Ingersott, youd think he was a man who had done it all. No
experience had passed him by, death visited him monthly on every continent. Not a single
celebrity had failed to cross paths with him at some time, from Andy Warhol to Indira
Gandhi, and they didnt cross paths in some hotel elevator or other ordinary way, no, no
way, he met the most famous, the Mick Jaggers in a portapotty in Sri Lanka, the Charles
Degauls at a whorehouse in Costa Rica, the Caroline Kennedys while fleeing a police riot
in South Africa. These meetings according to Ingersott were never brief, they were
always affairs, life-changing episodes, always culminating in an exchange of
commitments never to lose touch, and then just when you thought you had heard all the
lies you could stomach, he would pull out a piece of paper from his breast pocket, for
example a letter from Mick Jagger that had just arrived last week, written on a
Bangladesh hotel stationary, XXXs punctuating the looping signature at the bottom of the
page. He always lied, Ingersott did, and he lied about everything and so as an observer of
Ingersott you observed him from the perspective that he was a calculating and
unremitting liar, so that when he did indeed tell you something that seemed to be the
truth, for example when he told the story about Mick Jagger (which you assumed was a
lie) and then pulled out the letter from Mick (which turned that lie into a possible truth),
suddenly that one possible truth cast a pale, as it were, over your entire categorization of
Ingersott as a liar, suddenly your long established and supporting position that Ingersott
was a liar was thrown into doubt and all at once you realized just how important it was
for Ingersott to be a liar, to be a consummate liar, a total and irrevocable liar, as if indeed
your entire world view was structured around this one supreme truth that Ingersott was a
degenerate liar, and so, when this one pillar of understanding that Ingersott was a pathetic

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pathological liar, with this one axiom thrown into even the slightest doubt, your entire
world was rendered weak, shaky, as pillarless as it really was, and this too was part of
Ingersotts genius, for you see he had more than one way to destroy you, one way was to
build you up and tear you down over and over again, while the other way was to give you
hope that you had one truth to believe in this world and that truth was that Ingersott was a
liar, a goddamn pathetic liar, he would let you believe that and with that truth let you
build the rest of your world, and then, when your would was solid and dependable,
suddenly he would take that one piece away, that one pillar, that one bit of foundation to
your world, he would take that away, and so sweep away the entire foundation of your
world, that having been that Ingersott was a consummate and diseased liar, for so long he
had strengthened that foundation for you with his evergrowing mountain of lies, his
decades of lies, until you had nothing more solid on which to anchor the rest of your
world until suddenly, with a single statement, a single act such as pulling out that letter
from Mick Jagger, he pulled down that one pillar of truth and with that your entire world
crumbled into nothingness. That was one of the ways he had to destroy you.
At this point, Ping decided to sit down on a pile of wooden planks in order to tell
me about the last time he had seen Ingersott, this having taken place during a visit Ping
made to a Caribbean island where Ingersott lived to avoid the tempest the rogue had
created politically and scientifically everywhere he went in the states. Ping told me he
accepted Ingersotts invitation to come see him in St. Kitts much as he would have
accepted the last wish of any man he respected as much as he respected Ingersott. They
met in an old plantation that had been converted into an exclusive but humble resort on
the outskirts of a small, busy and odoriferous town. He told me how the walls and streets

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and walkways of this resort were made from the original rock of brimstone and black
lava that was the basic material of the ancient homes and fortresses scattered across this
Caribbean island, how royal palms lined the dirt road to the main house, how a banyan
tree dominated the yard, how bougainvillea climbed the walls and draped the wooden
balconies of the great house. They sat on a veranda and watched the procession of life
pass below them, talking above the cacophony of music, shouting, wheeled carts,
motorcycles and staggering drunks.
I quickly realized that in some way, Ping said, this place had been preserved for
Ingersott, regardless of what other guests came here, this place had been dedicated to
Ingersotts last days. I woke up with a massive headache, jet lag perhaps, or too much
rum, maybe a bug bite as Ingersott suggested when he saw a red mark on my neck. So he
suggested we go for a walk, to clear the mind. Youve done a remarkable job Ping,
Ingersott said in a way I can only paraphrase as we walked, you have taken a theory that
many would not have called a theory, would not have allowed to be a theory, and you
have not only shown it to be a theory and a very fine theory at that, but you have amassed
a vast literature around it, you have architected a monumental effort of studies and
publications which few would argue firmly catapulted this once lowly idea of yours to a
respectable, no, to a highly respected position among all in the scientific community.
And this happened only because of you, Ping, all of this was a direct result of your
perseverance, your hard work, your single minded goal, your tunnel vision to achieve this
world acceptance for this, your theory. And with that, Ingersott said in a way I can only
paraphrase, you changed the world Ping, you are one of the few people who in the course
of their lifetimes can truly and honestly say, I have changed the world, and it was a

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struggle, wasnt it Ping? I know, I watched you from the beginning, I have been with you
every step of the way. There were many times while I was watching you when I would
look at you and scratch my head and say to myself, what the fuck is that guy doing?
Thats right, I had no idea what you were doing at times or why, and I probably told you
that a few times, more than a few times, am I right? But you didnt waiver, you kept right
on going, and now look at you, you arent a man, you are an enterprise Ping, you are a
force in the scientific world, people have to reckon with you, youve established a
research institute, departments in universities across the world have sprung up to deal
with your work and to be a part of your direction, there are dozens of publications
dedicated to your ideas and those who think they can follow in your footsteps, I have to
tell you Ping, I am incredibly proud of you, unbelievably proud of you, I am in awe of
you, Ping, because I saw where you came from, I was witness to what you had to go
through to get here, I saw how you persevered, I was there every time when you were
ready to give up, I was there when you had nothing, remember Ping? There was a time
when you had nothing, now you have an enterprise, the enterprise of Ping. You
accomplished all of this Ping is the most unlikely way, you chose a path that none of us,
not even I who knew you best, can believe you chose. I know now Ping, Ingersott said in
a way I can only paraphrase, why you chose this path, but back then I didnt have a clue.
I know now that you were feeling your way instinctually, you felt it in your gut that you
were right, you felt that you had chanced upon an insight into how the mind operates, and
what excited you most was that you didnt come upon this insight through theory, you
came upon it through practical application, you can build an engine by theory, Ping, by
thinking about how to build an engine, or you can build an engine by taking some piece

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of this and some piece of that and putting this and that together in this way or that way
until you have a working engine. You did the latter, Ping, and you did it beautifully, its
utterly remarkable Ping, how you did it, and how you did so much with so little. You
clearly showed how data, not theory, how observation not thought controls the scientific
enterprise, you showed how to expel the last vestiges of religion from the scientific
process, religion being not just a belief in a divine presence but a belief in something
intangible which drives our activities and gives validity to our efforts, intangibles such as
simplicity, such as unification or a whole host of various isms. You may not even realize
how much you did to change the way we think, but you alone changed our most basic
constructs on thought. You demonstrated how the human brain is a data processing organ
not a theorizing organ, how we thrive in a world that is fuzzy and indeterminate in its
logic and understanding, you showed how foolish it really is to constantly try to achieve
that ultimate clarity, that one grand theory of everything, that one simple unifying theory
of all, but you did so much more than that, you Ping, all by yourself in many ways,
banished God, drove out Buddha, showed the door to Yahweh, demonstrated once and for
all that there was no place in science any more for any of these foolish deities. It was
brilliant Ping, absolutely brilliant, you have done something no one has ever done, and I
sometimes wonder if people will ever truly see and understand what you have
accomplished, so often the followers in science have no appreciation for the efforts
required to establish a way of thought, a method of practice, which they follow like mice
without any thought whatsoever. How unfortunate it would be, Ping, if I was the only
person who actually recognizes all you have accomplished! That would indeed be a
shame. But because I know you and what you went through so well, as I was probably

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the one and only person by your side during all these times, the only problem that I see,
Ping, Ingersott said in a way I can only paraphrase, is that you took your point of
reference as the datum, the bit of information itself that gets collected, that gets grouped
and categorized, that eventually gets analyzed and spun into some kind of story. And this
was brilliant, Ping, absolutely brilliant to take this perspective of a cold, uncaring bit of
information, and to begin there, in effect you made the datum the thing of the highest
order, you made data the new king, the new god. In effect, Ping, Ingersott said in a way I
can only paraphrase, the only problem I can see is that you made yourself and so us as
well a slave to data, our existence really nothing more than a process by which we
collected data, organized and categorized this data in these sloppy clusters in our minds.
Once I remember you said we were like bees in a hive, each one of us mindless in a way,
automatons collecting bits and pieces of the world and bringing all these bits and pieces
together so that we could create a hive. Jesus Christ, Ping, you were right! Well, you
were almost right. You were so close, I saw how close you were and so many times I
wanted to jump in and say Ping! You are almost there! But I knew that I couldnt, I knew
I had to let you finish, because what you had done was so incredible, it was monumental.
Unfortunately, it was wrong. You were right about us as being bees Ping, but the part
about the data is what was wrong. We are not slaves to our data. Sure, you created an
enterprise based on data and yep, it works! There is no denying that, Ingersott said in a
way I can only paraphrase, you have new drugs coming out all the time based on your
work, you have young psychologists being trained to help people based on your work,
you have school curriculums being created based on your work, you have laws being
written based on your work. If that is not the definition of what works, what is it Ping?

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Unfortunately Ping, Ingersott said but in a way I can only paraphrase, you didnt replace
the old religion in science with anything but a new religion, or should I say I think you
replaced the old religion in science with an even older religion, for what is data but the
new paganism of science, a worshipping of things which have no life until we decide to
give them that life, things which have no meaning until we decide to give them that
meaning, I watched it all from the beginning, in fact I gave you your start in all this way
back when, and so I know how hard it would be to even consider that this enterprise
youve created, this success you have finally achieved is all wrong. But it is, Ping, it is
all wrong. We arent slaves to data, Ping, not unless we make ourselves slaves to data,
Ingersott said but in a way I can only paraphrase, we are bees, Ping, but we are a
collective of thinking, theorizing bees. You got the bee part right, as I said before, and
that is the only reason I didnt stop you, I saw that you had that right and so I hoped it
would only be a matter of time until youd get the rest of it right. We are a collective but
not a data carrying collective, we are a theory carrying collective, that is what we bring
back to the hive, theories, that is how we build the hive and that is the material the hive is
made from, theories. Our ideas about the world, our perception about how things are, our
knowledge of what is, our confidence in how the world works all depends on this
collective of theories, not data. Eventually, Ping, you would have discovered the
weakness in your position, it was inevitable. You see, you believe what we know is here,
right in here beneath this skull, when at the same time you had uncovered for yourself,
well perhaps with a little help from me, that the basis for what we know is spread out, out
there. You eventually would have been forced by your own thinking to bring these two
conflicting perspectives together, and then you would have realized that you had failed.

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The problem is not in the collective, Ingersott said in a way I can only paraphrase, it is in
the data. A person does not take data collected by the masses and create a theory. The
person has a theory based on the collective intellect of the masses, and I mean the masses,
Ping, not your peers at Harvard or you buddies and their wives in the Hampshires, I mean
the real masses, the taxi drivers, the grocery clerks, the airline stewardess, the bums on
the street, the untouchables in India, the pregnant waitress (no it was not me!) who just
brought you a fresh vermouth. That will be the hardest part of all this for you to accept,
Ping, that knowledge resides in all these places, in all these people, that its a vast, messy
thing knowledge is, that to be found it must be followed into all those places, including
all those places you would never go. You Ping, will unfortunately never see this for
yourself, Ingersott said in a way I can only paraphrase, you are content living in the
suburbs, never venturing far from your little self enclosed world, not any further than
this, this little island of paradise, but right outside these walls, just on the other side are
places and people who are shoeless, toothless, who smell badly, who have diseases
rotting them away from the inside, who eat what we think pigs should eat, who pick
through their shit for pieces of food that would otherwise go to waste. Some of these
people have names just like yours Ping, Ingersott said in a way I can only paraphrase as
we walked through a village, names given to them by a great grandfather of yours who
bent a woman over a bed or chair a few centuries ago, they have your name but they have
faces as dark as any of your nightmares, Ping. But you dont want to go there, Ping, nor
do you want to venture far from the university, to skid row, another place you will never
go not because your second wife is there, youve forgotten about her, no because you
cant imagine yourself there and so you cant imagine anyone there has anything to offer

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you. You cant imagine how it would feel, what you would touch, what you would smell,
and so you cannot imagine that what you know is tied to there and to a million other
places you both fear and loathe. No, Ping, data is your coin, it is your currency that keeps
you out of these places, that keeps you clean, tight and safe in your suburbs and your
universities, it pays you well so that you dont have to set foot anywhere else, so that you
dont have to deal with what it is like to be human, because all that is human is all that
smells and it stinks, Ping, it is ugly, it is disgusting, it is revolting, yet it is us. Thats us,
Ping. I think about you Ping and I worry about you, you know that. I often wonder
where you will end up after all these years. While I cant imagine you outside the
university, living some place other than the suburbs, I have to admit Ping, I can see you
some day wanting to get away from all this, I can see you suddenly taking off, probably
without giving any notice to anyone, just packing up a few things and moving to the
country, maybe a small ranch in the desert, for some reason I can see that, Ingersott said
in a way I can only paraphrase as we walked down to a beach, but not until you finish
what you are doing, because one thing about you Ping that I truly admire and know better
than anyone, you always finish what you start.
Ping told me how they walked on and on, past a clump of small shanties where
Ingersott pointed out a voodoo priestess lived, then up into the rain forests, until they
reached the top of a mountain and darkness had come upon them. They then sat in silence
for what seemed to be hours, Ingersott sucking on his pipe while the night sounds of the
Caribbean, the locusts, the frogs, and a distant ocean roiled. Ping remarked that the
ocean, which could be seen at quite a distance, was a black mass that seemed to rise up to
a horizon where lights from a distant civilization seemed to be growing stronger.

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The problem with these men, V, is that they are too smart, too intelligent. The
Ingersotts and the other geniuses will never succeed, because they dont understand what
it means to succeed. To them, to succeed meant to gain fame, to become famous, to be a
rock star. Most of these men are fat, short, balding, with varicose veins where hair should
be, these were guys with bushy eyebrows, swollen guts, nubby fingers and gouty toes.
Yet they wanted to be rock stars. And that will never happen. They dont understand
science, believe it or not. They truly believed science was going to carry them to stardom,
that there are scientific discoveries out there just as there are new symphonies out there,
discoveries that would make them into a Beethoven of the neurosciences or the Mozart of
biochemistry. Once they began to believe in this they had no chance to follow that path.
Which would eventually lead them all to ruin. Ingersott was different though, and his
demise would come about in a different, albeit equally terrible way. The world loves no
one forever and the genius eventually begins to fade. Ingersott did not fade due to a
lessening of his abilities, he began to fade because the world began to change. The world
no longer was interested or fascinated by these so called geniuses. The world had grown
wary of the smart mouthed wunderkinds, the bitter left winged intellectuals who had
found their consciences in the atomic war labs and submarine military facilities around
the world. The world didn't want intellect, it wanted beefcake, it wanted a pair of nice
gambs, a sexy smile. Ingersott was as brilliant as ever, but no one cared. And when you
begin to fade, that is when the end comes, that is when the past that you have forgotten
and hoped the world would always forget comes back to life, that is when books appear
describing not your genius and your incredible contributions to mankind, no, they bring
up the atrocities you committed, they highlight the mistakes you made, the careless

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actions, the remarks made while drunk, while half asleep, they find the skeletons you had
long thought were buried, they find pictures, they find videos, they find the remains of all
you had hoped would never be recovered. Ingersott did not leave behind a legacy, he had
no writings, no books, nothing by which to defend himself. And so with nothing to mark
his memory, the world forgot about him all the more rapidly. The love the world felt for
Ingersott quickly turned to horror, then turned to anger, finally to hate. He was driven
from one university and then another, from one country then another. Students to this day
still hold demonstrations torturing his effigy, students who were not even born during the
time of his supposed atrocities. In fact, Ingersott is still alive today, living in the
Caribbean last I heard, still wears his overalls, still smokes a pipe, still stops to talk with
the fishermen, the storekeeps, the army personnel jogging the sand dunes. The problem is
that these men, the so called geniuses, embraced their own ideas with no understanding
that history would turn them and their ideas into fools. They have all stopped by to see
me but for no other reason than to say that they hated me, but admired me all the same,
they despised me but couldn't but applaud my skills to survive. I looked at them, one by
one, I looked into their bloodshot eyes, their rheumy defeated eyes, and said, just luck. I
knew what the real answer was, V, but I just couldn't tell them. What good would it have
done, they were lost, there was no hope left for them, it was best to let them do with an
answer such as that, just luck, I told them, so that they could mutter as they left, just luck,
huh, and leave me alone. While the real answer would have destroyed them all together,
the real answer, had I given it to them at that moment when they looked to me with all
they had left of their spent spirit and souls, when they were desperately seeking an
answer to the complete and utter failure of their enterprises, their careers, their lives, my

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answer would have been like a scalpel to their carotid, a shot of barbiturates to their
brain, air into their venal cavity. My answer as I have said as to why I have succeeded
and they did not, is because I just dont care.
The sun had disappeared behind the hills and a chill wind had appeared from
behind us. Suddenly, a brass bell rang out from the direction of his home and Ping looked
up and smiled. He lit a cigarette and blew a long cloud towards the rising moon. I left
people behind because they were depressing me, V. Being with other people is like
surrounding yourself with the living dead, always reminding you of what it is like to be
dying, to be nearly dead, hell, to be dead if you look at the state of some people. So I
decide to remove myself from that constant crowd of depressing death and near death. I
found this ranch and this is where I will live forever. And I dont say that facetiously V, I
will live forever, as long as there are sticky pads to write on, as long as there is Nescafe,
as long as there is vermouth, he said picking up his tin cup and taking a swig, as long as
there are tomatoes to be planted, rocks to be dug up, mornings to be conquered, cold
nights to be suffered, new moons to spit at, termites to be squashed, as long as there is a
sore back to be ignored, a pack of cigarettes in this pocket, as long as I have wives to
marry, kids to ignore, friends to bury, and a thought in my head, I am immortal, V, I am
immortal!
He laughed. So Id like to think. There is but one truth, which is that we will
never truly know any truth. It is not a matter of our intelligence, it is a matter of who we
are, what we are. We are here on this planet to find ourselves, to discover how all this
works, we are part of a larger mechanism that may have all sorts of rules and directions,
but not intentions or motives, and not a care about us. Somewhere along the way a spark

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came into being in this grey matter between our ears and from that spark came a
consciousness and with that came our own intentions, our own ideas and concerns, which
we had no choice but to take them for what they were, because they were ours, and ours
alone. What evolved inside our head forced us to see from inside that head, forced us
into believing that the most important perspective was from the inside out. Man could
debate whether the sun revolved around the earth or not, but we cannot debate that we are
here, inside here. We cannot argue that time marches in any other direction than from the
past to the future, or that it has no direction at all. We had no choice but to believe that
truth belonged to us and not to the world outside, that they were contained within this
head and had no other relation to others except to compare and contrast. We had no
choice but to accept that our faculties were attuned to the truths, that we had evolved so
as to be recipients of data from which we would understand the world. And so our
theories and ideas have always been one with the unavoidable central concept that we are
individuals, that we all matter individually, and in one way or another our religions, our
governments, our sciences have been devised from this precept, our empires, our
institutions, were built from these assumptions, our books, our ideas, our methods to treat
and cure our afflictions were derived from this fundamental idea. But the truth which we
ironically can never know is staring right at us, the truth that there is no divining spirit, no
driving force, no right, no wrong, no should have beens, no could bes, no hope, no
chance, it is all a ruthless nature without intention, without desire, without a care for
direction, that does not give a flying fuck what happens. I believed it too, V, perhaps
more than others. I built a life not only based on those ideas, but based on finding the
real basis to those ideas. All those sticky notes, remember, remember V? I told you about

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all those sticky notes. I used to go into that office and see all those bits of paper stuck
here, there, everywhere, fluttering about like they were alive, like wings, like leaves,
hundreds of them, thousands perhaps, all these thoughts that I had put down and stuck to
the wall, enough thoughts to fill a hundred new books, and for so long I felt immortal V
when I walked in there, as if all those thoughts and ideas and fragments of sentences were
everything that was and had been me, but I soon realized that while those thoughts may
have been mine, the man who had those thoughts was falling away, he was losing his
claim to those ideas, the man who held all those ideas together was no longer there, or if
he was he was vanishing quickly. That was when I realized I would never finish that
book, I would never finish my theory, I would never finish anything unless I started anew.
Everything about me was tied to the past, was built on a story I no longer remembered in
all its details, a story I wasnt even sure was mine or if I had borrowed it from someone
else. The man who held all these thoughts together was no longer able to. And so those
thoughts became just like the leaves off some tree, scattered bits and pieces that might
look interesting to some, but were no longer a part of a whole.
The bell rang out again, this time a little louder, and Ping reacted with noticeable
alarm. He put out his cigarette on a flat rock, stood up with some difficulty but managed
before I could reach out to help him and began walking back the way we came, back to
the house. I had been wrong about his being deaf. Thats my wife, he shouted against a
growing night wind. Worried I may stay out here until it gets dark and wont find my way
back. Worried I will forget I have a home, a bed, that I might curl up here in the grass
with the coyotes. My wife is the best thing that ever happened to me, you havent met
her, but we've been together for more than twenty four years. She is all I've got, she is all

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I need really, but funny thing is, sometimes I wonder who she is. I wonder why she is
here. If you asked me right now to describe her for you the most I could say is that she is
salty. Where she came from, how she came to be with me, I cant really tell you. But it
never occurs to me that she wont be here when I need her, until I see her in person and
then Im struck with a feeling of surprise that she is still here after all! More than once I
have awoken in the middle of the night and whispered to the hairy pillow next to me, who
are you? To which she always replies, the same person you asked that of last night. And
so her voice, like a dose of narcotics, pulls me back immediately to sleep. More often
than not, I seem to enter a room just after she has left. I walk into the kitchen to hear the
sink suck down its last gulp of dirty water. I walk into the bedroom to find the curtains
still shivering from being pulled open to the morning sun. I enter the bathroom to the
moist warmth, all that is left of her bath, except maybe a few wet footprints on the
wooden floor. Doors close in front of me, shadows fall across the hallway then disappear,
I turn to see something in the window only to find nothing there. Days can follow days
like this when I dont see her at all, yet she is always there just a few steps ahead of me.
Finally, at some point, I will find her sitting in a chair reading, or standing at the stove
cooking, and I am compelled to ask her, have you seen my wife? Yes, she would answer,
and she is just fine, she would say. If I spotted her outside weeding the flower garden, I
would frantically search the other rooms of the house to make sure they were empty
before I would sneak out and pretend I was the mountain lion stalking its prey. This is not
what you think V, it is not dementia, no, far from it. I think it is love, V. The purest love
there is. Love is like time V. You see I've discovered that time only makes sense if you
ignore it, but when it becomes the sole focus of your attention it is the most boring of

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forces in the world. How many times have I walked into a room and realized, I have done
this before! And to prove myself right I would shout out loud, Doorbell ring! And voila,
the doorbell will ring. How many times have I picked up a new book only to discover
five or six pages into it, that I had indeed read this book before? How many times have I
looked into my bowl of alphabet soup to see the same word PHELP spelled out in the oily
broth? How many times would I be nailing a board and suddenly stop because my thumb
would be pulsing with pain before I even struck it! And all of this might lead even the
strongest minded person to question his sanity, but it doesn't bother me in the least. I am
happy to have these experiences and even look forward to them. For so long life seemed
to come at me straight on like a winter storm, it was something that pushed at you and
you pushed back just to keep your balance about you. Now, life is kinder, gentler, an ebb
and flow of smaller mysteries, of things which matter but dont matter, its all a give and
take now, it was all so one-sided for so many years and that one side was not me! So this
is heaven! I shouted one afternoon while standing on a bale of straw with a muddy bunch
of radishes in each hand. Every direction I turned was a place that beckoned me, every
moment that passed was a moment I could choose to remember or not. It was entirely up
to me! For the first time in my life I realized I had everything I ever needed, including
nothing of what I didn't want! Instead of seeing a connection between each and every
thing, I was completely satisfied with knowing absolutely nothing! No longer did I
shudder at my past, I embraced it now like a child that needed a hug. For the first time I
understood what someone meant with they said, I am fine, thank you! More than once I
have asked myself, what is more wondrous than to stop as if in mid-flight so to speak and
realize I am standing on my own two feet, with no help from anyone, not even myself!

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The most peculiar thing was to realize how much I had aged, V, why it seemed only
yesterday that I was a handsome young buck, but now I am a wrinkled, grizzled old man.
Yet even this transformation I can only greet with a few claps of my hands and a jerky
little jig.
As the final light of day faded over the desert hills, I watched the blackened
silhouette of Ping as he danced a jig with one gimpy leg, clapping his hands while a cloud
of dust and gnats rose around him.
Despite the call of the bells, we continued to talk about the past but surprisingly
we did not talk about the times when I was a student at the hospital. Instead we talked
about the times neither of us had shared. Then the sun had long since vanished and a cool
wind had begun to toss and turn a little more restlessly across the vanished landscape and
he sat down on a bucket of tar and said but V, good old V, we are here to talk about you
arent we, not about the past, but about you. Youve got a problem and you think I can
help. That is why you came all this way to see me. And it is good to see you V, damn
good to see you. You have done well for yourself. I was in fact quite worried about you
for the longest time. You missed opportunities, you failed to take advantage of the paths
others laid out for you, you seemed to distrust everyone and so failed to listen to yourself,
you were so worried about taking advantage of the system that the system fucked you
over, you owed a months salary on library fines, you even once tried to have sex with my
ex-wife after she showed you her bosom and sometimes I wonder who deflowered my
little girl. But the truth of the matter is, V, I had a good run I have to admit, I was the
director of a major mental hospital, I commanded a ship of nearly 500 interns and 235
residents in psychiatry. I have written more than a thousand articles on the effects of

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political ambition on serotonin levels or maybe it was vice versa. I have chaired chairs
and been aboard many a board. I have lived a good life V. Unlike many people who are
honest and hard working and carry a day planner with them or heaven forbid one of these
palm pilot thingamagigees, I know where I have been and what I have done without the
need to look it up. I know what good I have wrought and how the worlds is a better place
because of me and because of my work. When they discovered that my colleagues had
falsified all my data on cluster theories during the past twenty five years, they did not ban
me, they did not fire me, they did not crucify me. Looking back that may have been what
I wanted most, to be condemned and electrocuted and that was my cry for help, but they
didnt, you know what they did V, V my protg, my almost son, they gave me a raise, V,
they bought me out, they gave me money and bought me up like I was a corporation they
could just gobble up. Cluster theory had revamped and rejuvenated the pharmacology
industry, they now had a completely malleable matrix for what drugs to make, how much
and when. Even if it was all lies, it still worked. It made money. They needed me. So they
made me wealthy beyond my wildest dreams. Even when I realized that I received all this
because I was white, because I was a dues paying member of the Birch Society, voted for
Nixon, graduated from Harvard (or at least so they thought) and was a descendent of the
great Irish baritone who continued to belt out Rodolfos lament in La Boheme even as the
opera house was burning down in Buffalo that fateful night, even when I realized that I
was given all, everything, that all my dreams had come true because I am pathetically
privileged, I never regretted what I had done. How could I? What was I to do? Undo it
all? That would have been ludicrous. Science doesn't care about negative results. False
positives are the lifeblood of our economy, they fuel our engine, they drive us to war and

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bring us home a little broken but victorious all the same. Its the lobotomy stupid. Thats
the answer. Remember that V. I will now say to you the best thing that any doctor can say
to his patient: V, I dont know your problem, but I can tell you the solution. Forget about
it. Thats right. You are too caught up in all these questions about wrong versus right,
about good versus evil, about proper versus crude, top versus bottom, gay versus straight,
eat it dont eat it, shit dont fart, cry or hold it in, sleep or take another hit of speed, those
are all questions V that dont require an answer. Remember, dont look back. It aint
pretty. The worse part about oral sex, V?
I never heard the final answer as Ping faded from view as he walked out into the
lightless half home, half wilderness labyrinth he had created. The darkness engulfed him
and his words as well. I turned and walked to my car. I was glad to have met with him,
and relieved to find that I was still in one piece. He had said that I had turned out okay.
He had been worried but clearly (did he use that word?) I have made it through alright.
He was right about many things, but one thing for certain, there was no going back. I
might as well rewrite my resume and start afresh, why not, that was what I do best, start
at the bottom and learn my way to the top, there were many things I had never tried, and I
was growing old, I had to keep that in mind, my back was a mess and I had gout on at
least one if not both big toes. Where I once lacked inspiration I always seemed to make
up with luck. But now that seemed in short supply. Maybe I should write a film, thats it,
make a movie, about someone I once knew who was colorblind and the entire film could
be shot from the perspective of someone who saw color in its most radiant nature, like a
moth or a bee! Yet, these momentary yips of enthusiasm soon faded as I realized the
answers I sought lay elsewhere.