I almost relish the memory of my mother’s eightieth birthday in the common room of the Winterthur mental hospital, as the nadir of this family’s disintegration. She sat there, curled up into a ball, her greasy ash-blond hair in a ponytail, wearing a pale blue terry-cloth tracksuit. 

The two men motioned again for me to sit. I walked toward the traffic and they called out to me, throwing in my direction either a salutation or an insult. If I had turned around, I could have heard them clearly, but I stayed facing in the direction I was going. As I approached the blur of cars, cows, and goats, I considered the extent of my suffering. 

Slaughter, she thought, is a formal and disciplined word. A processing for victual consumption. The splaying limbs and the horror, the scenes of crimes and battlefields, the flinging of children and catching them on bayonets just out of their mother’s reach, all that is metaphor, simile—the thing, in fact, which is not.

It was something. Out of nowhere, I didn’t give a shit about anything for like a month. Like nothing. 

I was plagued by remorse, but my remorse seemed inspired by insignificant dumb things—things not really worthy of bona fide remorse. That didn’t make it any less painful or plague-worthy, as I was still riddled with disgrace on a minute-by-minute basis, so I decided to conduct a scientific study to analyze the cause(s). 

Anny moved through the night, drinking gin. When she turned south, the wind was a wolf. There was something hard under her right foot, and she realized it was the pavement; her shoe had worn through.

These false-fronted buildings lived inside him, in a place deeper than consciousness.

I’m tired, I have student debt like we all do, I keep getting promoted because people keep on quitting and so now I’m middle management.

It was toward the end of the week when I received the telephone call.