It's Kind of a Funny Story: Chapters 43–50

She pauses. In order to ask a question, it is often possible for Dr. Minerva only to intimate that she might ask a question.

I walk past Muqtada—he’s staring and trying to sleep—and take my art off the radiator cover. I cradle it in a stack past Bobby and Human Being—who’s now explaining how his real last name is Green and that’s what he needs, some green—back into the office.

No kind of crazy breakthroughs, just variations on a theme: pigs with brain maps that resemble St. Louis, my couple for Noelle joined by the sweeping bridge, a family of metropolises.

No kind of crazy breakthroughs, just variations on a theme: pigs with brain maps that resemble St. Louis, my couple for Noelle joined by the sweeping bridge, a family of metropolises.

“First of all I was thinking about this perpetual candle, like a candle on the ground with another candle hanging upside-down over it, and as the first candle melts the wax is kept molten by some kind of hot containment unit and gets pumped up to the second candle and drips down like a stalactite-stalagmite thing..."

“I’m going to throw a wild notion at you.” Dr. Minerva leans back, then forward. “Have you ever thought about going to a different school?”

“Hey, man,” he says sheepishly, and as I approach, he leans it against the wall.

I have a second chair set up in front of me as an art desk, with stacks of board games on it and a chessboard on top. It’s a little flimsy, but it’ll do.

What’s in Jimmy’s brain? Chaos. I do up his nearly bald head and shoulders and then start putting the most complicated, unnecessary, wild highways through him from ear to ear. I connect them in intricate spaghetti ramps.

In one nexus, five highways meet; I have to erase and redraw the ramps a few times.

“She doesn’t mean freaky,” Mom tells us both. “She just means that when you were down, you looked a little under the weather. Isn’t that right, Sarah?”
“No, he looked freaky.”

There’s going to be one sub-villain with a distinguishing facial characteristic, and he’s going to get killed in a printing press or a pool.

I walk down the hall and pop into my room, where Muqtada is putting his distinctive shape in the bed, turned toward the window, in his continuous dead reverie.

He opens a door behind his desk and goes in to turn on the turntables, changing the PA music from the normal funky lite FM to the sounds of deep plucked strings, and rolling over it, a voice of dangerous clarity and yearning, hitting three ascending notes and then bending one beyond where I thought you couldn’t bend a human voice, sounding like a man drawn out and smacked to vibrate around a little.

My feet have levitated somehow and now I’m horizontal on the bed next to her, with my hands squeezing her and my shoes—my Rockport shoes—clanking against each other.

The bank of elevators stand sentry in front of us.

It’s just...a possibility, like it’s a possibility that I could turn to dust in the next instant and be disseminated throughout the universe as an omniscient consciousness.

It’s just...a possibility, like it’s a possibility that I could turn to dust in the next instant and be disseminated throughout the universe as an omniscient consciousness.

The air is like a sheet billowing down on me in slow motion.

I haven’t cured anything, but something seismic is happening in me.