House of Meetings

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If what they say is true, and my country is dying, then I think I may be able to tell them why. You see, kid, the conscience is a vital organ, and not an extra like the tonsils or the adenoids.

Meanwhile, I offer my congratulations. You now join a substantial contingent of young people — those condemned to tout the festering memoirs of an elderly relative. Still, you won’t have to go far: the Gagarin Press on Jones Street. Ask for Mr. Nosrin. Do not worry: I won’t be going the way of that fuddled deviant we read about, who sent whole rolls of his handiwork to One Hour Photo. Nosrin has been squared (and everything is paid for). Besides, he’s a compatriot of mine, so he’ll understand. I’d like a print run, please, consisting of a single copy. It is yours.

You were always asking me why I could never “open up,” why I found it so hard to “vent” and “decompress” and all the rest of it. Well, with a past like mine, you pretty much live for the interludes when you aren’t thinking about it — and time spent talking about it clearly isn’t going to be one of them. There was a more obscure inhibition: the frankly neurotic fear that you wouldn’t believe me. I saw you turning away, I saw you turning your face away and slowly shaking your lowered head. And this was for some reason an unendurable prospect. I said my fear was neurotic, but I know it to be widely shared by men with similar histories. Shared neurosis, shared anxiety. Mass emotion: we will have to keep returning to the subject of mass emotion.

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