Sprokkelmaand: introduction

Brussels, 15 February 2003

The waiting room of the radiology department occupies a long, extended corridor. Here there is plenty of time and space for anxious thoughts. The fixed seats stand immovably in a long row next to each other, screwed onto a tubular frame, their backs turned toward the windows that look out onto a bleak inner courtyard. I sit down and read the newspaper I brought with me.

I arrived well in advance. You never know if it might be earlier. I would like this imaging examination to go well. I want to prepare myself, relax, but I would also like to be back on time this afternoon for my own evening consultations. In any case I feel strangely charged now that I must undergo an MRI scan.

I resort to abdominal breathing. I do not want to burden the people who work here with the knowledge that I am a general practitioner, because it might look as if I were seeking preferential treatment, although… if it is a matter of being treated within the allotted time, the temptation to exert a little pressure is great.

What I mainly want is a good result. Nice pictures without frightening spots. I try not to think of anything except banal facts such as the possible war in the Near East that fills the newspaper. I cannot worry about it. I want to live, for heaven’s sake, I want a life of quality. I want a second chance, a new beginning.

Now that I have escaped a double disaster, the stroke and Ibrahim, I embrace creation with both arms. I try not to think about time. I hope that Our Dear Lord grants me time to live, to finish things, but what I will do with it I do not yet know. There must still be something I must accomplish, but in which field? Care, politics, literature, love? In short: the love of care.

When it happened, it was love that I clung to most, namely my love for you, my little passionate prince. When I think of you it always overwhelms me. How long the waiting lasts. Waiting for the examination. Waiting for you. The absence. The longing. I sigh.

I put the newspaper aside and look around. Who do you see here? People who hunger and thirst for help. Sick people in search of care: their time is largely spent waiting, I have noticed now that I am one of them. It is three o’clock, ten minutes past 14:50, the time of the appointment. Have I lost my turn? Despite everything I am afraid.

I am not in the mood to make a scene. A bit confused. Afraid of the examination and afraid of the verdict. I still have to work later. I do not know whether I can keep up everything I have been doing for years. Being present in the practice every day, and every night searching for virtual sensations of love. I begin pacing. Fifteen minutes late.

I intercept someone from the secretariat who comes out of a door and ask how long it will still take. The woman looks at me and perhaps sees the fear in my eyes. She makes no fuss and goes to check in the MRI room. She returns and says: “another five minutes.” I am very grateful to her. I feel a little calmer again. They have not forgotten me.

I cling again to you, my prince. Thinking of you helped me through when it happened, even though you did not know it. I walk up and down the waiting corridor a bit more. A small group of women wearing headscarves turns the waiting room into a kind of caravanserai with the help of a thermos cup that circulates among them. Through a strange twist of the brain it reminds me of Mozart.

“Die Entführung aus dem Serail.” My train of thought naturally drifts back to you, as it does a hundred times a day since I met you on the net, because you love Wolfie so much, as you sometimes call Wolfgang Amadeus.

Veils

The Muslim women make a very convincing show of not seeing me.

People hardly look at each other here in Brussels anyway, not even the native Belgians. A frightened white man with a cap has taken the farthest seat. An emaciated sacrificial skull with a camel-stub cigarette under an oversized tweed cap. A comic-strip character on the verge of extinction.

A cancer-like woman with a British twist around her mouth is leafing through my newspaper that I laid aside after finishing it, its headline filled with the possible war in the Near East. It is utter nonsense what they are doing there, but I cannot get worked up about it anymore. I no longer care. I am occupied with myself now. Occupied with survival.

A little vulnerable and miserable, but I want to be there for you, to support you on your undoubtedly difficult journey through life. I want to be declared healthy so that I can take care of you. I look at my left hand and move my fingers. Seeing and feeling that I can move all my fingers. It has become a tic since the incident, an automatism that I repeat every so often to see if it still works, a gesture to check whether everything is still all right.

I can move. Thank you, Dear Lord, that I can move all my fingers and my toes. Hallelujah. Then a door opens and a young man with a finely drawn beard comes out. “Monsieur Rafels.” It is my turn. I take a deep breath. Now it will happen. Here I am a gentleman and for a moment no longer a doctor, a general practitioner in a back-street neighborhood.

You always hope that “something” will protect you. What does it matter? It is still a beautiful profession, caring for broken souls. I look at the young man carefully. I must admit he is strikingly handsome. Somewhere in his twenties, of uncertain origin but with a southern tint.

The carefully shaped little beard, almost as if drawn with pencil on his strong chin, suits him well. “Monsieur Rafels?” I cannot help finding him attractive, because of my peculiar tendency to fall for everything that is beautiful and kind, especially boys, doubly so since my resurrection from paralysis.

That I, oppressed by illness, in my state of humiliation and submission, may be cared for by such a pleasant being! It almost seems like a sign from God that everything will turn out well. The messenger, my beloved. In these circumstances I like to perceive signs everywhere from the guardian angel, so as not to despair that soon there might be nothing left.

Other brief prayers run through my head. What I would not give to place him gently in a bath one day. He is dressed in immaculate hospital clothing. As if an eternity were contained in a single moment. “Rafels? Yes, that is me.” He startles a little when I address him in Dutch. I see him think deeply about what he will say. He takes a run-up and I wait.

He does his utmost to help me in my language, with a Tarzan-like sentence structure but with a mischievous smile, and he looks straight into my eyes. That alone is enough to set my inner core spinning. He explains the upcoming examination somewhat hesitantly.

“Pardon. I do not speak Dutch well,” he says with a delightful apologetic smile. The good boy tries so hard that it is touching. “Not at all,” I contradict him. “Absolutely not. You speak Dutch very well.”

He understands. His smile becomes much broader now and I can see his teeth. A small piece of an incisor is missing, which makes his smile asymmetrical and interesting. I do not have much time to study the phenomenon, however, because he is gone again in an instant. I sit down briefly on the bench in the changing cubicle. My legs tremble. I do not know if I can do this. What must I do?

My revived self-confidence has vanished again in a sigh. I loosen my tie a little. I realize that I am only a patient. I place my hands on my knees to calm them. It is absurd that I am so agitated, I who boast about the beneficial effects of meditation and relaxation. Just breathe deeply for a moment, but do not exaggerate.

Fortunately he is back again quickly, the young man with the pencil beard. He is delightful. He looks so attractive and real in this aseptic environment, a walking bouquet of living flesh, a beacon of warmth in this bloodless space. “You must undress.”

“Completely?”

“You may keep your underwear and T-shirt on.”

I undress, intensely humbled. Finding myself soon in underwear and T-shirt makes the feeling of submission even stronger, the feeling you get as the one being cared for. I always try to be a very grateful patient; perhaps that is sentimental. I am very grateful to the caregivers that I recovered, partly through their help, from the symptoms of paralysis.

Praise be to the Most High! Hallelujah, Al-hamdulillah, and vanilla pudding.

I mechanically move my left hand and look at it carefully. I want to do everything to prevent it from coming back, so I submit to medical authority. No one wants the symptoms to begin again. That is why I must crawl into these stripping machines. Fortunately I always wear clean underwear, always ready to slip into a technological tunnel that can detect the wandering clots of platelets deep inside your skull.

I am allowed to lie down on the sliding table. The young man is very attentive in his explanation. “The machine makes a lot of noise, that is normal.” He holds something colored in his fingers, something pink. It looks like a piece of plasticine that he kneads into a small cone while rolling it between the slender joints of fine fingers.

They are earplugs that I may insert into my ears. How considerate he is. I am a well-behaved patient who seeks no difficulties and who endures every discomfort with calm composure, steadily encouraging abdominal breathing and mentally clinging to the man who is in charge here.

My head held with tape against the side supports. I now lie completely defenseless on the movable altar of technology. The moloch will devour me, but the pencil-bearded boy continues talking and reassuring me, although I can no longer distinguish his words with the earplugs in. Moreover a glass cage is placed over my head. The estrangement is complete.

It is like Space Odyssey, or Star Trek. This is how you go into space, or into the Milky Way. I lie motionless in a sarcophagus posture and try to sink into deep reverie, to immerse myself more completely in the boundless whirlpool of unconscious thoughts that swarm there in endless circulation.

The pencil-beard places a rubber bulb in my good hand that I can squeeze if something goes wrong. It is very reassuring. Keeping still is difficult when it must suddenly be done. If I feel in distress I can let them know by squeezing the bulb. I absolutely want to continue with this examination and, if possible, leave a good impression now that I have come this far, so that the infernal machine will answer the question of what has happened to me.

That is what it is all about and that is why it must happen. “So that the doctor knows what you have.” I still clearly remember my fear in that other dreadful tunnel, the CT scan, when the stroke had just occurred and I had not yet recovered. Once again panic rises when I recall lying there unable to move. I still stiffen at the thought. It is not the first time I enter a machine.

“The examination will last about fifteen minutes. I will not be here, because I am in the room next door, but I have a beeper.” He shows his breast pocket. “You can squeeze the bulb if it is not going well.” His voice sounds unreal and distant. His face is cut by the glass cage into reflected fragments of little pencil beards.

The drawing of his chin burns on the retina when I enter. What it looks like inside I do not know, because I do not dare open my eyes, even if I were allowed. He said that before putting me in the tube. Once I lie inside, I must not move for fifteen minutes. It is a chilling thought that takes shape, takes root, refuses to leave, and begins multiplying. Not move anymore. I feel like struggling. “Praised be Jesus Christ.”

Washing-machine drum

What it is like once you lie inside is difficult to describe.

I cannot prevent myself from shivering. I must suppress every movement. Not moving for fifteen minutes. Even though it feels as if caravans of insects are crawling over my legs, and although I feel a tingling in the little finger and ring finger of my left hand where I had been paralyzed. Fifteen minutes without moving, lying in a tunnel subjected to very strong magnetic fields, horizontally inside a white tube.

I must not stir while the machine takes pictures of my interior. The question creeps over me whether I am stiffening, whether I could still move if I wanted to, whether I might be paralyzed again when this is over. How will I ever get out of here again? Crippled and impaired?

The sound can be compared to a washing machine going through its programs. At first the noise seems meaningless. Occasionally you slide forward a little and then it begins again. After a while it becomes musical, because there is a system in it.

I sink into deep meditation but remain very aware of the roaring, and there is little I can do but listen intensely. The device produces all sorts of sounds that repeat rhythmically, each in its own tempo and regularity, and that you begin to recognize better and better.

The noisy events unfolding around me line up into a sequence that endlessly repeats itself in its ingenious simplicity, serial and monotonous. You receive no warning when this rhythm ends, so that you miss it for a moment when it suddenly disappears after a long time.

Then another “plate” is laid on and you receive a fresh coat of sound. Mechanical music of mathematical inspiration. Endless clicking motifs at predictable moments that multiply and then suddenly fall away, chased by gong-like sounds, accidentally repeated without ever tiring, beneath the rushing of passing magnetic fields.

The past ten days replay themselves once again in my reverie. Precisely now that I lie in the machine. How it all began. How I woke up and could no longer move, at least not on the left side, last Sunday on Candlemas, when I wanted to get up and it did not work.

I must not forget to breathe normally. Not too fast and preferably with the abdomen, because otherwise you start hyperventilating and then you end up short of breath, which we cannot have now that we are lying here in a plastic nozzle. It resembles a tanning bed somewhat, but it is much more frightening.

Like a ham in a slicing machine, or better still a tree trunk in a sawmill, lying defenseless on a plastic sled that carries me through a field that virtually slices me into strips and produces little disks of my inner condition. Thus I jerk motionlessly through a tunnel of light and noise while high-energy fields bombard me, prick the skin, and give me goosebumps.

I am virtually turned inside out and my inner self receives in this way a mathematically calculated shape that becomes the form of an image. Your brain is pictured while it is thinking.

At long intervals a frightening dull thud resounds. Each time it feels as if a new shot of energy has been fired that makes the hairs of your body stand upright, bundled in a tight magnetic field. Yet the machine continues to run reassuringly. I must above all remain still, otherwise it must start again.

Let technology revolve around my skull like a satellite, spin and whirl and circle to bind me in earthly chains, but if the arrow should remain fixed in one place, then things are truly wrong and the bad news will be released. Oh dear.

Heavens! Now it seems as if the machine no longer knows what to do. First we hear each ticking and gong sound once again separately while the computer finishes the protocols. It sounds like a railway wagon being uncoupled. The nice young man with the pencil beard comes to free me.

I thank him in French. Who knows why. “But you speak French,” he says in surprise, and a little reproachfully, because all that time he had made the effort to make himself understood in Dutch. I must have forgotten myself for a moment and no longer knew which language I was speaking. I cannot keep them apart so easily anymore.

Ibrahim

I want to return to my work as quickly as possible and leave this place of care.

Now I stand completely alone, sick and abandoned. Ibrahim, my inseparable companion for sixteen years, has disappeared into the wild. I have no news whatsoever of this disturbed person who for so many long years poisoned and embittered my life and for whom I made the greatest sacrifices.

All contact has been broken after sixteen years of joys and sorrows. He is no longer a subject of conversation. Yet I cannot help asking myself where he is and what he is doing. The bully, the scoundrel, the little poisonous waste. He has vanished into thin air without leaving an address. Of course it is better this way and I would wish it no different where I stand now, but it is absurd nonetheless. What have I been doing with him for so long? Letting myself be drained.

Wave goodbye to the vanished millions. In old Belgian francs, a unit no one uses anymore. Tens of thousands of euros that disappeared together with Sidi Ibrahim. I miss the money more than the man, I must honestly admit. I have always had a hesitant relationship with money.

With people too, for that matter, and with Ibrahim even worse. So be it. The feeling that you always have to begin again at zero sometimes makes me angry. I can no longer count the times I have spoken harshly to myself saying: “There lie the pieces and you must pick them up and begin again.”

And yet the sun always rises again, and there is always a new day, and the strange thing is that you keep doing it. You get up and start again as if nothing had happened, until one day it will hopefully stop for good.

The Wrath of the Grapes

I have a bottle of Jonge Bols in the refrigerator, with a few drinks left in it, and it has been there for several weeks. If I feel like having a glass, I can. I only have to walk to the refrigerator and take the bottle out. As long as I lived with you, that was impossible. No bottle lasted more than a day in our house. Everywhere I found empty jugs, half-full glasses, and other transparent corpses in unexpected places. That is how I lived with you for years.

It had improved somewhat for a while, but in the last years it became very bad again. In my opinion you are not psychotic because you drink; you drink because you are psychotic. I tried to explain that to you, but you have not the slightest insight into your illness.

Again and again you ruin things for yourself and for others, with an inexplicable stubbornness and an irresistible attraction toward everything that is wrong and unacceptable. That went on between us for sixteen years. You are now almost forty. I will soon be forty-seven. I will not start complaining about the best years of my life.

I am already happy that I again have the chance to drink a drop of Jonge Bols at home. I do not think about you and I do not know what has become of you in the meantime. I have lost all interest. I have realized that I could not save you from yourself, and that I could only still save myself from complete ruin.

So that is what I do, and I succeed reasonably well, although my health has been badly damaged. That is your fault, but also mine of course, because I allowed it to happen. It is not as if people who care about me did not warn me.

All those years I could not abandon you because you are a sick man, afflicted with a psychiatric disorder of a manic-depressive nature and of fairly serious degree. You are wildly, hopelessly psychotic, completely deranged. You drink and do foolish things for which you take no responsibility.

Even when you are sober you go off the rails, which shows that it is not the alcohol but a structural defect in your brain. You are disturbed. I drink too from time to time, but not secretly and only outside working hours. Moreover I do not become unbearable. You do.

I could not keep a bottle of Jonge Bols in the house because you would seize it secretly in no time. It was impossible to live with you: unmanageable, unreliable, deceitful, scheming, manipulative. Yet all those years I protected you, reluctantly and lately even against my better judgment.

Exactly a year ago, in February 2002, the climate of terror had already exploded once when I tried to have you committed involuntarily. It had to end, despite the heartbreaking emotional choices that this involved. It failed again because in the hospital you behaved charmingly and were sent home the same day with a prescription after making cheap promises.

You begged to be allowed to return, and one last time I believed you, against my better judgment. Things improved briefly and deteriorated just as quickly. The vacation I spent alone in August in France and in Castile brought a certain breathing space, but when I returned the problems were not better but rotten.

It became unbearable, especially when I discovered that money was disappearing in large amounts. No bills had been paid and once again bailiffs appeared with devastating writs, ticking time bombs of judgments and registered threats: eviction, public sale, utilities cut off.

It was a mess over which you rose like a crowing rooster, with your deafening shouting, aggressive behavior, and delusions of grandeur, worse than ever—recalling the times when you scratched open your chest or jumped from a height of twelve meters, when a passing car fortunately managed to avoid you.

Emergency services saved your life, that disastrous life you tried to remove from God’s Creation, but even that you did not succeed in doing. It is not that you are capable of nothing—rather you are incapable in everything. You managed to break your bones. In the operating theater you were put back together so that after rehabilitation you could walk again.

Every hospital ward where you were admitted breathed a collective sigh of relief, privately, when you left. Always troublesome, always contrary, often drunk and aggressive even in your hospital bed, where your strange girlfriend brought you wine and food. In the short term you could dominate conversations verbally.

Soon it became clear that you repeated yourself or contradicted yourself several times, and that you tried to manipulate facts or bend them to your will. In the end it concerned the safety and the needs of the people who entrusted themselves to me, and the continuity of care in my practice. Ultimately it concerned my honor as a citizen and as a human being.

I can whistle for the money. Morir a cada vez, con sufrimientos. I cut myself loose from you, though with the greatest difficulty. Lies, fraud, exploitation, and swindling. Terror on the home front. Theft of my mobile phone and wallet. Harassment during the exercise of my profession as a general practitioner through unnecessary conflicts with third parties. The internet cut off. Can you imagine? No internet anymore.

Arnulf on the Web

It was no longer about your illness but about my own mental health.

I had had enough of you, my despised Ibrahim. Every day the same question: what must I do with you? No more desire. A door closed somewhere, or a switch was turned. As if by magic my life changed once you were gone. Everything works now. Water comes from the tap, both hot and cold. I can make phone calls. The internet works.

As long as you were around you always managed to break something. The internet is both a blessing and a curse, but in any case I can give free rein to my imagination there. No one prevents me any longer from indulging myself on the web in fantasies with decent boys. The bathroom fantasy has proven to be a hit with curious youth over the age of sixteen, because otherwise it wouldn’t be allowed.

My soul unfolds and opens itself. The bathroom stands ready, my beloved, with its blue oils, its shampoo and stimulants. Skin-friendly soaps, ointments and gel, lubricants. Your own toothbrush! A new, carefully designed one with gracefully bending bristles. A cloud of hygiene floats toward you in this place of purification.

We also have a hair protector and we can immediately begin washing and rinsing. Everything is there. Only the boy is missing. To remedy that there is the chat, the chat box. It is an activity that takes place at the computer screen, as we shall show. Bathroom and computer installation are of course architecturally separate.

Yet connections are always made. When washing we cannot ignore the body’s natural openings, beginning with the ears. The tender washing of vulnerable boys is discussed in detail in the next chapter.

Setting an example of purity for youth—that is the idea. That I may contribute my little part! Wonderful! Cleverly conceived! It fits perfectly with faith in God, orientation, and my personal taste. The “Bathroom Method” is my calling card on the net. It works since I began chatting again on the worldwide web that stretches like an electronic sky.

You arrive at a site recommended by another site and one thing leads to another. Before you know it you have acquired a new addiction: boundary-pushing chatting. It helps preserve loneliness as much as possible intact, and from now on I reserve my libido for the worldwide web.

You must be able to handle the fact that men always ask for your numbers. On the web I am Arnulf 46 185 95 18. Everyone in the chat box immediately knows what this means: “The dad is 46 years old, 185 cm tall, weighs 95 kg and hasa 7-inch erect penis..” I do not lie about it, although it may be a few kilos more.

It is customary to introduce yourself numerically. In this digital era a person first reveals himself in numbers; only afterward can the conversation begin and you can unfold yourself. But you can also invent things. A great deal of lying and fabrication circulates.

On the worldwide web there wander proportionally at least as many psychotics as in real life—perhaps even more. I am astonished at my own boundless craving, bottomless need for sex, thirst for love and attention, and friendship in countless quantities—and if that cannot be found, then drinking and smoking, and if smoking is no longer allowed, making tea at night while searching on the net for fantastic realizations of imagination.

Glued to the Screen

Every time a message arrives an electronic croak sounds.

Perhaps like the sound of a turkey in mortal distress. When something arrives you go look. It’s often quite amusing what’s written there, when young or even more mature men indulge in the fantasy, when they long for nothing more than to be bathed and wish to learn what else the service offers.

I might also reveal that I’m not only fond of bathing boys, however noble this task is in itself, but also of examining, comparing, and ultimately caring for the boy, who then becomes a son or a prince. According to the mystical formula: purification, enlightenment, and unification.

While waiting for you to come, my beloved, I chat a little and see whether other boys pass by who might qualify for a bath in the fantasy scenario. I lie in sanitary ambush. Perhaps it is my feminine side; after all I work in a caring profession.

The father enjoys taking care of someone in the most concrete way imaginable: putting you in a bath, massaging you, and finally reading you a story. I would even cook chicken soup for you.

You asked what exactly I would do. You added that you yourself were very attractive, still a schoolboy. We began talking, exchanging emails and photos in which you indeed appeared shining like a statue of Saint John Berchmans—though not without a shadow of impropriety.

We share many interests. At sixteen you have already read a great deal: about the apostle Paul, the Cathars, and ancient Egypt. You read Asimov, the Foundation trilogy and more. You no longer believe—or not at all. You struggle with your homosexuality and with becoming a man.

You are desperately searching for external points of support, without a real father, without orientation, stripped of frameworks of comparison, searching for your own identity. You struggle to become yourself.

The father figure in your life is absent while you continually collide with reality. Pain acquaints you with the laws of adulthood. Perhaps the new “father,” with all his experience of failed relationships, can offer the shoulder on which you may weep.

I am like a gentle cartoon from old times when fathers still existed who would sit by the fireplace in the evening telling endlessly about everything that went wrong when they themselves were young. Good heavens. I keep writing and nothing happens. Tonight you apparently will not come online and it is getting late.

I click around listlessly. I end up chatting with a few others who pass by and they ask what exactly I do in my bathroom. The emphasis lies on the caring aspect, the soap-free products, and improved hygiene, since we must halt the spread of viruses and bacteria in the bathroom.

Brushing teeth, for example. How many boys could tolerate the father brushing their teeth? The last time I brushed a boy’s teeth was during a training placement with severely disabled people when I myself was barely twenty.

The disabled boy in question, whom I accompanied to Lourdes—where he returned unchanged—had a hemiplegic paralysis but could strike surprisingly with the non-paralyzed side. From his wheelchair he spread havoc with his candle among other weakened children in the procession toward the sacred grotto of the Virgin.

His name was Rudy. I bathed him often before and after that journey to Lourdes, on a chartered train full of birth traumas of the Catholic health funds. I brushed his teeth often enough because he could not do it himself.

Strange that tonight I must think of Rudy while I am chatting and waiting for you sixteen times over, my dear little prince, my beloved.

Perhaps I wait in vain, for who tells me that you will return? Only the intensity of the contact. That point of absence that hurts, that physical feeling of being cut off. The tingling in the left hand. Is it the stroke or the wound of love?

The Wound of Love

Suddenly it bothers me that new boys again approach me in the virtual bathroom.

I no longer feel capable of giving myself away to the first comer in the state I am in—being in love with you and everything that follows from it. I should limit myself to one—or to nothing. But I cannot control it. I swell with longing, reverence, love, and friendship.

I try to behave as a good father on the chat, as in real life, even though there is the absence and deprivation of your presence that I crave. There is that dark hole where you are not, that black cavity that draws all light into itself.

And yet boys keep passing by, and now and then one who would like to see the bathroom from inside. None is as dear as you, but in the fantasy they must all be cleaned.

“What are you going to do with me?”

“Run the hot water in the tub and look for the right towels.”

“What should I do?”

“You can sit on the stool and take off your shoes, or should Daddy do that for you too?”

“I have boots.”

“Then I’d be happy to help. It allows me to smell your feet.”

“Hey?”

“You can be a little dirty for a bath. That’s okay.”

“What now?”

“I’ll help you take off your T-shirt and jeans.”

“Do I have to take everything off?”

“Yes, otherwise I can’t scrub you clean. The water is nice and warm.”

“And what if I have a hard-on?”

“Then we’ll take good care of it. With skin-friendly soap.”

“Are you going to take care of my ass too?”

“Yes, would you like that?”

“Yes, hmmm.”

Chatting is still allowed—that is what the prince and I agreed. You can also jerk off a boy virtually every now and then, but for certain things there must be fidelity, especially regarding union, because agreements must always be clear there.

It is a personal freedom I now possess and did not have while I was trapped in the suffocating limitations of a relationship with a psychotic kleptomaniac. I am only just beginning to enjoy this liberation. But do I really want to throw away that hard-won freedom for a new attachment to the prince, despite all the solemn oaths that I would never again enter a relationship?

Who can close windows and doors when the beloved son approaches—my dark bridegroom, my amulet, my talisman, my totem, my mantra, my destination, my polar star and fulfillment?

Who can close the windows and doors when the beloved son is on his way, my dark bridegroom, my amulet, my talisman, my totem? My mantra. My final destination, polar star and fulfillment? My offspring to whom I may pass on the fruit of our research as an experienced practitioner in care, my heir, my seed pod.

My receptacle, and my tabernacle, and my ark of the covenant. My little nest of love. Come out. I miss you. Kiss kiss kiss kiss kiss. Come out, baby. Please. Then he comes. Little Prince on the screen. I cannot bear it anymore and I am motionless and paralyzed. There is Little Prince, and he does not seem surprised when I tap him on the shoulder and anxiously wait to see whether he will respond. Then the redeeming toad-cry resounds. It is him, God be praised, hallelujah and el hamdoelilah. Prince Sixteen in all his glory.

To be continued…