Sublime

‘Little victories,’ my mother used to say, and which I then said aloud, to myself.

Maria Popova,

O’Connor’s “Good Country People,”

from the hiss of Pemulis’s inhale Hal can tell that Dr. Dolores Rusk is in the room even before he takes his eyes from a C.T. who’s sitting pulsing with swollen proximity in his seagrass swivel-chair and almost done coolly bending a giant paper clip into a sort of cardioid or else sloppy circle:

Madame Crommelynck did a tobaccoey croon to show her delight. “You are a polite thirteen-year boy who is too timid to cut his umbilical cords! Except”—she gave the page a nasty poke—“here. Here in your poems you do what you do not dare to do”—she jabbed at the window—“here. In reality. To express what is here.” She jabbed my heart. It hurt.

like her child in a playpen in a distant part of the house, occupying her heart but not threatening to interrupt her dinner party,