wit-woo: Open Library
***
A patient’s inability to accept his own limitations is not without beneficial side effects, he said. “I see this in the way my patients are consumed by the idea of their deaths, or their attempts to counteract death,” Dr. Karasu said. “All of the philanthropy you see — the buildings named after people for giving $50 million to this museum or to Columbia — is a result of one man after another trying to conquer his mortality.”
***
In the dream I took M and J to the river. We were to follow it to the source. M stretches out on the steep banks, both of us slipping down into the sand, and announces "actually I'm allergic to spiders." A brown river spider races across her belly then, nipping her skin, drawing a single drop of blood, and she gasps for breath, jaundicing, lapsing into stillness, then death. I watch her life leave her body. I'm aware in the dream that I'm watching the dream give me my uncle's death again as he sleeps and gasps, as his face turns gray, as I watch. J is upstream, plodding through the shallows. She knows the way. I don't know how she's gotten so far as the river is my river, the recurring river, and I only know the way back, to the lunch tables where M begins making her haunts. To the cafeteria where I try to ask her the right questions: what is there to see where you are? what becomes of you? And M: I am lost. I am lost. I am lost. I try to tell someone she is here. I try to tell JM, who should know. Who should know what to do. People pass. He comes into the room and he leaves again, nodding as I talk.
***
.
