Sublime

He’s Sih Hsuin Ma now—his old self turned inside out, like a jaunty, reversible jacket.

his life, he has been homesick.

One of them picked up a shovel and spaded earth. Since coming to the camp, their guilt had died and left behind a husk, whose hair and flesh were crackly like onion skin. We buried the husks and covered them with dirt, each scoop sending them further away, to some far-off place. All of us were crying never-ending violent tears. Then over on the sun

filled with the kind of determined cheer that masked a deeper despair.

Lost in a featureless wasteland of my own mortality, and finding no traction in the reams of scientific studies, intracellular molecular pathways, and endless curves of survival statistics, I began reading literature again: Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, Woolf, Kafka, Mo