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.He was interested on a deep and fundamental level in the physical pain that brought me to see him.Hip joint, I see, that didn’t seem to be the main point as far as he was concerned.Then he raised his thin Asiatic head from the sheet of paper I had had to fill out for him: You are a writer.What do you have to do to become a good writer? I felt like I was back taking an exam, I wanted to do well and tried to put myself in the teacher’s place to figure out what he wanted to hear.I said I tried to know myself as accurately as I could and then express that.Doctor Kim seemed satisfied.Then he suggested I meditate regularly, I would get to know myself well that way, and I should not be afraid of what I would find there, and not shy away from expressing it.Then I would be able to become the best writer in the world.To which I could truthfully say that that wasn’t my goal, which seemed to amaze him.With a motionless face he stuck his delicate metal needles into my body.But it wasn’t my goal, I insisted to myself when I was back in the bus that rode the whole length of Wilshire Boulevard and picked up the poorer people, the carless people, who apparently existed even in this car city.Was I one of them? It was a pointless question, I could buy myself an inexpensive used car whenever I wanted, if I ever lost my inhibition about driving in this city I found so unfathomable.I tried to memorize the changing passengers: the black mother and her black daughter with little bows in her hair; the disheveled homeless man clutching his bottle and furiously muttering at nobody; a group of white, black, and brown schoolchildren gathered by the door in the middle of the bus and acting stupid like schoolchildren everywhere in the world; a woman whose body, a mass of flesh, completely filled both the seats in one of the short rows.I observed them as I had gotten used to doing.At every stop I noticed how many people walked badly, could get on or off the bus only with difficulty, how many used a cane or crutches, how many had an arm in a sling or an eye patch, and when the bus finally stopped at Fourth Street I took care to get off as light-footedly as I could, as though I did not actually need the handrail, even though the results that Doctor Kim apparently expected from only his first five needles didn’t seem to have taken effect.Still, I had heard that a worsening of the symptoms could sometimes indicate that the therapy was working, and I wondered, as I laboriously climbed the steps to my apartment, if I couldn’t let myself make use of another one of the pills that Doctor Kim didn’t need to know anything about; he had already prohibited other pleasures—no coffee! no wine!—since in his view these damaging drugs blocked the free flow of energy in my body, which is precisely what Doctor Kim was trying to bring about.I was unprepared, then, when the news I did not want to hear came at me from the television, before I could flee the room, all I could do was close my eyes and later flip past the page in the newspaper with a picture of the murder device called an “electric chair.” But the man, who had been on death row for ten years since committing murder, was killed by lethal injection.In despair I tried to suppress the picture, but I couldn’t.In despair I tried to greet the news of the kidnapping of a female archaeologist in Iraq with composure, so that it would become more bearable.But I couldn’t, or only sometimes.I still remember how as I child I sometimes used to lie in bed and wonder how I was supposed to endure hearing about the suffering constantly inflicted on other people, and the fear of being hurt myself, for my whole long life long.I didn’t then know, and would not have believed, that sympathy gets weaker when excessive claims are made upon it.That it doesn’t grow back to the same extent after you give it out.That people, without realizing it or wanting it, develop protective techniques against self-destructive sympathy.I headed to the CENTER and crossed the lobby.How are you doing today? Great, thank you.Oh good.Four elevators, two on one side and two on the other.I imagined that they were transparent and I saw the glass booths float up and down, keeping the circulatory system of the office skyscraper running, saw the mouths of the people in the booths move in response to always the same questions, always the same answers, saw the elevators stop at the various floors and the young women with their stacks of paper carry their important messages into every cell, every corner of the large building: We’re doing great, wonderful, incredible.Couldn’t be better.And the same thing all across the country.And my assumption, that smiling all the time must be stressful, was wrong, as I had learned by then.Normal behavior is not stressful.Now there were letters from the city in my mailbox more and more often, including invitations, a sign that more and more people and institutions had learned of my presence here
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