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Lydia was now far away from me. She was inextricably, unreachably engaged in some business all the way on the other side of the room. Norm had stolen her, taken her away from me. I had been left in the company of this Regina Lawrence, who was still sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of me, still weaving a tapestry of words that had now become a claustrophobic tent of incomprehensible babble. I realized that I did not have a clue who any of these people were. Not the Important Man, not the tall old man in the silver suit and cowboy hat, not the two men with strange gleaming wands behind their backs, not the big elaborate woman who sat beside me on the floor. I looked around the room. All of my paintings were hanging on the walls. Why? People whom I did not know were walking around and looking at them. Why?

My heart rattled against my ribs with fear and rage. I knew nothing. Who were these people? Where was I? What the hell was going on? I panicked. What happened next I’m not proud of. I lost it. If I ever had it, I lost it that night. Lydia, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. (Gwen, when you type up these transcripts, please copy and paste “I’m sorry” until it repeats six thousand times.)

You might say that the animal within me, within this chimpanzee, this mock-man, Bruno, at that moment chose an extraordinarily inopportune time to burst forth from below, come out and say hello to everyone. You might say that for some reason I chose that moment to rend my garments and commence to scream and howl savagely at the top of my lungs. If you had been there you might have observed people clapping their fat stupid hands to their ugly ears at the sound of all my hideous shrieking and bellowing. You might then have observed me, with my little gray suit already in tatters flapping about my torso, aimlessly tearing around the room, seemingly in every direction at once, scrambling pell-mell and helter-skelter among all those legs, all those pants and dresses and shoes. You might also have seen me overturn both of the two foldout tables, sending all those hors d’oeuvres, all those brownies, cheeses, crackers, cherry tomatoes, and little salami sandwiches scattering across the floor, and you might have heard all the wineglasses and bottles shattering to atoms upon contact with the floor, and in your sudden panic you might have mistaken all the red wine trickling across the floor amid all the broken glass that might have crunched under your feet for blood, for human blood, and you might have helped the others to squish the hors d’oeuvres into the floor, or got the brownies and little cubes of cheese stuck to the bottoms of your shoes when you joined everyone as they stampeded in terror out of the room. And, if you were far from the door when the impromptu mass exodus began, you might have been one of the unlucky ones who got squished and crushed in the doorway by all that panicked humanity, or you might have been one of the screaming ones, who was still in the room and could not get through because the doorway had gotten clogged with humans, clogged like the drain of a bathtub gets clogged with inexplicable human filth, and if so you might have been in a position to watch it happen when those two healthy young men in blue pants and tan shirts chased me into a corner of the room and jabbed me several times with their wands, those mysterious silver machines that of course were mysterious to me no longer. You might have watched the two men deliver this raging, this “vicious” animal a series of correspondingly vicious electric shocks that instantly incapacitated him, that left him whimpering, shivering on the floor, not unconscious, but for an instant wondering if he were dead. You might—if you are someone who is given to empathy—have wondered for a moment what it felt like, and you might—if you are someone who is given to sympathy (and you are rare)—have even cared.

I gazed—feverish, sick—distantly I gazed up at