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that I appear—for the time being—to have weathered might be called a crisis of faith. As it came fully a month after Arthur’s visit, it is hard to know if it was in any way precipitated by that humiliation. I am long since over hating Arthur Schonbrunn for that day—at least I continue to work at being long since over it—and so I tend now to agree with Dr. Klinger, who thinks that what I had to struggle with next was inevitable and can’t be blamed on my three minutes with the Dean. Evidently nothing that has happened can be blamed on anyone, not even on me.
    What happened next was that I refused to believe I had turned into a breast. Having brought myself to relinquish (more or less) my dreams of nippled intercourse with Claire, with Miss Clark—with whoever would have me—I realized that the whole thing was impossible. A man cannot turn into a breast other than in his own imagination.
    It had taken me six months to figure this out.
    â€œLook, this isn’t happening—it can’t!”
    â€œWhy can’t it?” asked Dr. Klinger.
    â€œYou know why! Any child knows why! Because it is a physiological and biological and anatomical impossibility!”
    â€œHow then do you explain your predicament?”
    â€œIt’s a dream! Six months haven’t passed—that’s an illusion, too. I’m dreaming! It’s just a matter of waking up!”
    â€œBut you are awake, Mr. Kepesh. You know very well that you’re awake.”
    â€œStop saying that! Don’t torture me like that! Let me get up! Enough! I want to wake up!”
    For days and days—or what pass for days in a nightmare—I struggled to wake myself up. Claire came every evening to suck my nipple and talk, my father came on Sunday to tell me the latest news, Mr. Brooks was there every morning, rousing me from sleep with a gentle pat just at the edge of my areola. At least I imagined that he had just awakened me by touching the edge of my areola. Then I realized that I had not been awakened from a real sleep, but from the sleep that I slept within the nightmare itself. I wasn’t an awakening breast—I was myself, still dreaming.
    Oh, how I cursed my captors—though, to be sure, if it was a dream I was only cursing captors of my own invention. Stop torturing me, all of you! Somebody help me get up! I cursed the spectators in the gallery I had constructed, I cursed the technicians on the television circuit I had imagined— Voyeurs! I cried, heartless, ogling, sadistic voyeurs! —until at last, fearing that my battered system might collapse beneath the emotional strain (yes, those were the words of concern that I put into their lying mouths), they decided to place me under heavy sedation. How I howled then!— Cold cunt of a Claire! Idiot, ignoramus of a father! Klinger you quack! Klinger you fraud! —even as the drug enfeebled me, a sedating drug somehow administered to the dreamer by himself.
    When I came around, I at last realized that I had gone mad. I was not dreaming. I was crazy. There was to be no magical awakening, no getting up out of bed, brushing my teeth, and going off to teach as though nothing more than a nightmare had interrupted my ordinary and predictable life; if there was ever to be anything at all for me, it was the long road back—becoming sane. And of course the first step toward recovering sanity was this realization that my sense of myself as a breast was the delusion of a lunatic. Rather than being slung in a hammock following an endocrinopathic catastrophe unlike any the endocrinologists had ever known before, I was, more than likely, simply sitting, deluded, in a room in a mental hospital. And that is something we know can and does happen to all too many people, all the time. That I could not see, that I could not taste, that I could not smell, that I could only faintly hear, that I could not make contact with my own anatomy, that I