it is not that a day is so long. Even the most arduous day, one can get through, knowing that it is only a day, that there is always tomorrow. Still, as I sit here looking out my office window at the November rain innocently pelting the glass—it is nearly eleven, and no doubt my poor wife has gone to bed, resigned and with no idea of what is happening—I cannot reckon that it was only yesterday morning, a single day ago and not a lifetime, that Mr. Poulos came in announcing that his heart—wait, yes, here it is— ”considering the children of the ages, finally let go and shattered into a million shards that flew into the night sky to flicker briefly, sudden stars smothered in black distances, woeful and unseen.” Mr. Poulos is given over to purple sentiments, and I saw no need to draw attention to the prose, but I did point out to him that all of the stars had been up there for eons, long before the alleged shattering of his heart, and asked how then one might explain this, whereupon he proceeded to urinate on the couch—my Italian, black leather couch—all the while looking at me with those stolid, slate eyes and nodding abruptly as though this perverse act somehow was an answer to my question. I immediately ended the session, and the two attendants who had been standing by outside came in, grabbed him up, and hurried him off, back to his quarters. Later, I learned that one of them, a burly prole with red hair and the gaze of a disturbed child—a man I have never cared for much—shoved Mr. Poulos around and called him a crazy bastard, both of which acts are expressly prohibited by asylum regulations, though I doubt that the fool knows it or cares to know. According to the report, filed by the other attendant, Mr. Poulos then tried to collect this barbarian in his arms, but the man was having none of that. Mr. Poulos ended up face down on the floor of his locked room with his nose bleeding, disabused once and for all of the belief that one may physically embrace the attendants. • more •