"Hello?"

"Yes?" Wary. Single women have to be, the world full of phonecreeps."Is this Annabelle Byer?""Yes." Slightly reassured to be named."This is Nelson Angstrom.""Oh! Nelson! How nice!"A pause; he had thought from her enthusiasm she might go on a little more. He says, "My mother described your visit.""Did she? I wasn't sure it went very well.""Oh, yeah. She liked you. She just isn't sure what to make of the general situation. It took her by surprise.""Me, too. I mean, I was surprised at first, when my mother told me. It shouldn't matter, my being a grown woman and all.""Oh, but it has to matter." He feels more secure, as the conversation tips toward the therapeutic."How do you feel about it?" she asks."I feel good," he says. "Why not? The more the merrier, isn't that what they say? Listen. I was wondering if we could have lunch sometime. Just to look each other over." That was one sentence too many, but then he might as well get the curiosity issue on the table.

She hesitates. Why would she hesitate, when it was she who had come out of the woodwork? "I think I'd like that."

"Tomorrow? Next day? What's your schedule?" he says. "I work at Eighth and Elm, there's a little restaurant opened up in the block on Elm toward Weiser, it's called The Greenery, but don't be put off, it's decent enough, soups and sandwiches and salads, kind of neo—New Age, but they have booths for a little privacy."

"Sounds cute," she says. That slightly puts him off. This may be an airhead, sister or not. After all, what does she have for genes? Nothing that promising. She asks, "Would you mind not until next Thursday? Until then I'm on day duty, it's an Alzheimer's patient who needs round-the-clock."

"Great," he says. "Thursday the sixteenth. Twelve-thirty O.K.? I'll be waiting outside. Medium height, short haircut these days."

"I'm," she began to say, then giggled, not knowing how to describe herself. "I'll be in fat white shoes."

Wouldn't you know, they have picked the one day in September when a hurricane called Floyd is supposed to hit. All sorts of wind damage and heavy flooding in North Carolina, and then predicted to come right up the Chesapeake into southeastern Pennsylvania. But these forecasters are paid to whip everybody up, and though the wind kept him awake last night, rattling the window sashes Ronnie had painted last summer and swishing sheets of rain across the asphalt-shingle roof that supposedly ought to be replaced if they want to keep their equity in the house, the morning isn't so bad that cars aren't moving on Joseph Street, slowing down to go around a medium-size maple branch that broke and crashed last night in his sleep. He didn't hear the noise; he slept better than he thought. The branch lies in the center of the asphalt like a big piece of road kill, its leaves' pale undersides up and already wilting.

Nelson thinks of phoning Annabelle to cancel but he doesn't want Mom and Ronnie to know he has this planned. Instead he phones his boss, Esther Bloom, who lives in Brewer, and she tells him the Center will be open at least until noon. "These people have nowhere else to go, Nelson. A weather event like this brings up survival issues they may need to process."

On the way into town he sees two highway crews, with flashing lights and cops in orange slickers directing traffic, cleaning up fallen trees with chain saws—an old willow that had sunk its roots in the roadside ditch by the failing mall with the four-screen cineplex and, on the other side of the viaduct, where 422 enters Brewer and becomes Cityview Drive, a gorgeous big tulip poplar at the edge of the park. The park has always struck Nelson as sinister, slightly. Tough minority kids hang out among the trees, and there is a dim association with the time his father had left home and lived not far from here in the city, on Summer Street. The World War II tank near the tennis courts has been recently taken away, and a pretty little white-and-green bandstand built, as part of downtown renewal, though it serves mostly to collect graffiti and to shelter thugs from the weather and has never held a concert that Nelson can remember. The car radio is full of this gunman, one more straight-shooting psychotic, who killed seven and then himself in some Texas Baptist church, and terrorist blasts in Moscow killing dozens, and an interesting item which he doesn't quite catch about cocaine addiction linked to a build-up of certain proteins in the brain—it hadn't been his fault, it was brain chemistry—and then another medical item, which interests him less, about how hot tubs may help diabetics. The Phillies beat Houston eight to six in ten innings, but they still aren't going anywhere, not in the middle of September. As he drives across the park's most open stretch, wind shakes his car so hard that he tightens both hands on the steering wheel.

In Brewer around Eighth and Elm the buildings cut down on the wind somewhat. It's an older area, where commercial meets residential. A former hat factory stands empty but for one little photocopy-and-offset-printing establishment named PRINTSMART in a lower corner. The treatment center occupies the basement floor of what used to be a three-story elementary school, grades K through six. The parking lot consists of a strip of diagonal places at the side of the building where the neighborhood residents stick their rusty heaps at night, right across two spaces, neglecting to wake up in time to take them away. The neighborhood is shabby but not dangerous, like most of the clients.

As Nelson gets out of his Corolla he sees a sky darkly bruised in patches above the brick cornices, the clouds layered and shredding as they slide swiftly sideways, but the rain appears to be stopping and the air brightens as if to clear. People on the sidewalks, especially the young women who work in the glass courthouse annex a block away, hugging themselves in short sleeves and not even carrying umbrellas, don't appear to know they're almost in a hurricane. Across Eighth Street a cheap big orange facade saying DISCOUNT OFFICE SUPPLIES has been attached above the doorway to an old stationery store that Nelson remembers still smelling of gum erasers and ink eradicator before everything was bubble-wrapped and packaged for bulk sales; the sign makes a shivery noise as a spatter of bright raindrops sweeps by. Farther down Eighth an old-timey, routed, gold-lettered Tavern sign swings back and forth. Maybe he should have suggested that as the place to eat—a little racier and more cavelike, with a liquor license —but he obscurely wanted to keep his meeting with his sister sober and pure: a solemn occasion.

The radio said Governor Ridge was considering declaring an emergency and sending all state and local workers home, but inside the Center the staff has shown up, all but Andrea the art therapist, who lives beyond Pottstown, almost on the Main Line.

She commutes up to Brewer because funds for art therapists are drying up nationwide and the job she had in Philly was eliminated. To snotty, pouty, twice-divorced Andrea, a henna-tinged brunette with big rings she makes herself on nearly every finger, Brewer is a hick town with too many religious cranks and dumb Dutchmen.

As the morning wears on, the rain with renewed vigor whips at the basement windows so hard that water begins to dribble across the wooden sills. Years ago, before Nelson was hired, the floor was gutted and partitioned into suitable spaces—tiny offices for the staff, larger group rooms for the clients, a reception space, a kitchen where the clients make their lunch and a dining area, with six round tables, adjacent to the sofas and upholstered chairs of the milieu. In the milieu the clients not doing a group or having a consultation can read, knit, play games, and hopefully interact. When this was a kindergarten the five-year-olds learned to tie their shoelaces and fit pegs into holes but social interaction, socialization, sitting in a circle and learning to share, was the main lesson; for these dysfunctional adults it still is. There are thirty of them, theoretically present from nine to four, and a staff of eight, headed by Esther, a doctor of psychology. Nelson has resisted suggestions that he go after an advanced license or degree; he doesn't want a private practice or, after the mess he made running the Toyota agency, any administrative responsibility. He learned his limits.

Some clients straggle in, drenched and exhilarated about a hardship they are sharing with all the residents of Brewer, and others have chosen to stay at home with their delusions, anxieties, and television sets. Because of low attendance Nelson's three-times-a-week group on Relationships is absorbed into Katie Shirk's group on Goals and Priorities. Nelson uses his downtime to catch up on paperwork—progress notes, intake forms—and goes around mopping up windowsills with paper towels. Left wet, the paint peels. The rain has intensified again.

The DiLorenzos show up, though, all three of them, hurricane or not, at eleven sharp. They are desperate. Their world has come crashing down because of a few misfiring neurons. In the waiting area they give off a powerful damp odor of bafflement—graying patriarch, swag-bellied but still powerful in the arms and shoulders; mother, a touch of peasant drab still in her plain dark suit though money talks in her shoes and the silk scarf at her throat; and son, twenty, slim and good-looking, with an almost feminine delicacy, bright-eyed, wavy-haired, but going soft and pasty with inactivity, and the fear of his own strangeness giving his dark eyes an anxious bulge. His eyes fascinate Nelson with their helpless beauty—dark but not black, paler than his thick brows, an ale color, or like the dark jelly bees feed to their queen, freckled with light, life in them like a squirt of poison. He decides to take the boy first, and asks the parents to wait.

"Well, Michael. How are you feeling?" he asks when the door is closed and he is settled at his desk. His desk is of minimum size and with a fake-wood-grain top. The young man folds himself into the one-piece molded-plastic chair, orange in color, opposite. He wants to slouch to show how lightly he takes all this but the chair in its flimsy, scientifically determined form does not permit much of a slouch.

"O.K. Good. The same."

"Voices quiet?"

Michael licks his lips as if abruptly aware of a dryness. "Yes."

He is lying, Nelson knows, but he keeps his eyes down on the young man's folder, opened six months ago. "Taking your Trilafon consistently?"

"Absolutely, sir." This is another lie, Nelson can tell from a certain retraction in the young voice, a telltale flattening, but Michael wants to believe it, he wants to be cured, of an illness that seems to be nothing less than himself, a rot of his most intimate ego, that voice within, where it was nestled supposedly safe in his skull.

"Any side effects from the Trilafon you want to take up with Dr. Wu?" Howard Wu is the Center's M.D., here three half-days a week. Golden in color, stocky in form, he is much beloved, for his hearty Chinese pragmatism and large convex teeth. He is their jolly Buddha.

The boy readjusts his position, perching on the chair's edge and jerking forward. "I feel plugged up. At both ends. It's like a cold in my nose all the time. I feel sleepy all day, and then I can't sleep at night. I feel shitty," he says, and titters, as if to disown his feeling. A fission, a scatter, in his young face makes him hard for Nelson to look at.

"Do you want me to write down, 'No voices'? If I do that, Dr. Wu will see no reason to adjust the medication."

Nelson's deliberate gaze elicits from Michael a flutter of avoidance, a batting of lashes under the shapely black brows, which have that touch of a built-in frown Italian men have, a thickening toward the bridge of the nose. He must have cut a tidy swath at Brewer High, not to mention summers cruising among his peers in the convertible his parents had bought him, proud they could afford it. He peaked too early, like Dad in a way. There is still a little bravado, mannerly but dangerous, in the boy's smile, and in the slick way his bouncy black hair was tamed by the comb. The grooming is a positive sign. Or did his mother comb his hair for him today, for this appointment, and see to it that he shaved? "There were some voices," he admits, huskily, then smirks as if to dare the world to make much of it.

"What did they say, do you remember?"

No answer.

"What did the voices say?"

"Nasty stuff."

Nelson waits.

"They tell me what a miserable fuck-up I am. They tell me to kill myself. Or maybe I think of that myself, to shut them up. It might be worth it."

"Michael," Nelson said, loud and urgent enough to make the boy, whose eyes sidle and flutter, look at him. "If you ever, for a moment, think you might follow through on these impulses, you must do what?"

A long pause. "I don't know."

"You must get in touch with the Center. At any hour."

"Yeah, well, shit, I'm not apt to be calling any center at four in the morning."

"The recording gives the number for Emergency Services. Call it. Here's the number in case." He writes it out on a Fresh Start memo pad and rips the sheet off. A renewed surge of rain slashes against the window at Nelson's back. He pictures the leaks venturing, trembling, lengthening, out onto the windowsills of this old school, the paint flaky from previous soakings. "Do the voices say anything else?" Nelson can hardly hear the answer against the noise of the rain.

"They tell me to kill my parents."

This is delivered with a mumbled huskiness and yet with some defiance, a twitch of teen-age swagger and a smirk that hangs on his face forgotten. "How does that make you feel?" Nelson asks.

Michael surprises him with a surge of affect: "Horrible. I love my parents. They've been great to me, giving me everything I've ever wanted and not putting any pressure on about entering the, you know, fucking dry-cleaning business." His voice is hurrying, to keep up with his brain. "They sent me to college when a lot of parents would have had me go straight into the business. My dad's getting older and hasn't been strong for a while. They sent me to Penn, the finest university in the state. So what did I do? Hey, I fucked it up."

"You didn't, Michael, you got sick. We're trying to make you better. You're better now. You dress yourself, you're no longer violent—"

"I can be violent at home." He begins to brag, to someone imaginary sitting where Nelson sits. "My mother, what a naggy bitch, honest to God. She says to stop watching the old movies on TV, get up, get out, do this, do that. I don't see the use."

"The use is what we call normal psychosocial functioning. It doesn't come without effort. Let's look at your graph. You have not been in to the Center for a week, and then only twice the week before. That's why I've asked your parents to come in with you. They, and Dr. Birkits, and all of us want your attendance to improve." Birkits was the Brewer psychiatrist the DiLorenzos had taken him to on the advice of the Penn psych service after his break. Birkits, one of these demoralized post-talking-cure shrinks, referred this hot potato to Fresh Start. They don't get many clients with an intact home, and who can afford a private psychiatrist.

"I bet you all do," Michael sneers.

"We do, Michael. We want to improve your functioning, and we offer here at Fresh Start a safe environment for you to practice in, with the groups, the activities, the counselling. But you must attend."

"Hey. Sir. O.K. Can I be frank?"

"Of course."

"I can't stand these people. They're fat. They're queer. They're ugly. They're not my type."

"What is your type?" Nelson asks, and instantly regrets the hostility he hears in the question, which popped out reflexively.

"Loser," Michael responds, and laughs, a barking abrupt noise that doesn't belong to his frightened face. "Loser is my type."

"Not so. You or anyone here. We're human, which isn't always easy. The other clients are kind people, here to help each other. They care about you, if you let them."

"They wouldn't if they knew what's inside my head." He jerks forward in the straight chair. His complexion looks a little clammy, moist at the hairline. The poisoned eyes swarm with shame and yet with an excitement that something transformingly strange is happening to him. "The voices whisper to me about girls I see on the street. This one and that one. They tell me to picture her shitting."

"Shitting?" Nelson has been betrayed into confessing surprise. Perhaps Michael intended this. He wonders how much of an enemy the boy sees him as. Does he sense, within his mental-health counsellor, some ethnic enmity, with envy of his easy slender build and dago good looks? When Nelson tries to picture what a schizophrenic sees he remembers Howie Wu telling him, Their sense of distance has broken down. Things up close look far away, is how Nelson has framed this—there is no clear depth in which to locate yourself. The gears that notch us one into another fail to mesh, maddeningly, meltingly. Trying to think his way into Michael's head plants a sliding knife inside Nelson, a flat cold queasy sensation below his ribs.

"They show me her squatting down. I want to rub her face in it. I want her to eat it. Does that shock you?"

"No," Nelson lies.

"Well, it does me." Michael slumps back as far as the chair allows him. His affect is flattening; his eyes narrow as he recalls, "Thirty thousand bucks a year, think of it, plus extras and my own car. Pussy everywhere. Hot-shit professors. A bunch of frats rushing me. And I fucked up. I couldn't hack it. I didn't even know what courses I was supposed to be taking. I hid in my room with the shades down until my roommate complained to the dean and they got the psych service on me. They tell me I told the dean or somebody he was the Whore of Babylon. I never heard of her." He snickers a little, testing the face opposite his.

"Michael," Nelson says in firm conclusion. The boy was bragging now, bullying. When you feel uncomfortable, Howie has told him, trust your gut. Get off the horse. "I can't emphasize enough how important it is that you are faithful with your medications. I've made a note here to Dr. Wu to reconsider the Trilafon dosage."

"I drank beer and tequila at Penn," Michael tells him, uncertainly standing, sensing he is dismissed and being relieved yet not, unsatisfied, uncured. "My parents didn't know it, but I would get fucking blasted. I think that's what screwed up my brain."

"I don't think so. The human brain can take a lot of beer. Michael, this is not your fault" Nelson says, coming around his desk so that in the tiny office the boy—tall when he stands up, his girlish mouth sagging, his face glimmering in the rainy light, begging to be understood—has nowhere to go but out, to the waiting room, where his parents are eager to come in.

"Such a gorgeous child," says Mr. DiLorenzo, when a second chair has been pulled up for his wife in front of Nelson's desk. "Bright, good, A miracle boy. To have this boy after his three sisters and Maria over forty, it seemed to us a miracle." He speaks carefully, with dignity, as one who remembers when he spoke English less well, the child of immigrants who spoke it hardly at all. His hair, brushed straight back, is going white but his bushy eyebrows are still black.

The wife speaks up: "Even as a little boy, though, he stood apart a little. He would play with others, but then wander away and come inside. I'd say, 'What's wrong?' He'd say, 'Nothing.' As if he didn't see the point of people. He was quiet. He never had a tantrum."

"My wife imagines things in hindsight," Mr. DiLorenzo says, sitting back erect, his eyes enlarged by thick spectacles, eyes frayed to death from closely inspecting fabric. "He was a perfectly normal boy. Got top marks, too, all the way up through senior year. Gave the salutatorian speech about how we should help Russia keep democracy and capitalism. Never any trouble to anybody— teachers, me, nobody."

"A little trouble would have been more normal," his wife says. "At the time I wondered if having all those older sisters hadn't taken something out of him. My daughters and me, we had too good a time, always laughing, always busy at the house, always telling each other things. Michael was like a little prince, detached."

"Don't listen to her, Mr.—"

"Angstrom. Nelson if you'd rather."

"Don't listen to her, Nelson. He was fine. He played sports, got the good marks, ran for student council. Said no to drugs, booze. An altar boy, too, until he was fifteen, and we didn't push that. In America religion becomes your own business. Likewise I told him, 'Michael, listen, you want to forget the dry-cleaning business, be some kind of professional—a doctor, lawyer, whatever, sit behind a desk using your smarts—that's O.K. with me, and Mamma too. Whatever makes you happy. This is America.' But no, he wanted to learn dry-cleaning, summers, after school, it was what he loved. From me there was absolutely no pressure."

"There was pressure," Mrs. DiLorenzo tells Nelson. "Joe needed him to carry on and he knew it. That he didn't come out and say it made it worse. The girls, they married and got out of here. They'd had enough of it, the chemicals, the presses, the hours until seven, eight. Only one of them even stayed in the state, and she's way out near Pittsburgh, a nice suburb up along the Allegheny. Their husbands, what do they care about dry-cleaning? It was all on Michael, and he knew it. He snapped. Men don't want their whole lives mapped out for them. They want adventure. Isn't that right, Mr. Nelson?"

"She's crazy," Mr. DiLorenzo confides. "He didn't want adventure. He wasn't like these young hoodlums these days, their heads full of, what do they call it, hip-hop, grabbing guns and going off to shoot their classmates to make the evening news. Shooting their parents, no respect for anything under the sun. He wanted to carry on the family business. There was no pressure. At Penn he was taking chemistry to be on top of the best, the newest solvents, the most environmentally sensitive as we say now. Disposal of used cleaners is the number-one headache in this business; a single cancer lawsuit can wipe you out—defending against it, even if you win. I love America, but not its justice system."

"Joe, there was pressure." To Nelson Mrs. DiLorenzo explains, "My husband, he slaved to build up Perfect. He began by doing dirty work for this old Jew in South Brewer, just a basement in a row of houses, a little dark slot, his equipment crowded into the back, a shed built illegally, fifty cents an hour if he got that, Joe was always being chiselled. When the Jew died Joe borrowed to buy the business from the widow and named it Perfect Cleaners himself."

"It's prettier in Italian, perfetto" Mr. DiLorenzo said, drawing out the word, "but this is America. Things want to be perfect here. Don't mind Maria—Jake was good to me, he taught me the trade. Had me out on the vats first, breathing in carbon tetrachloride before the switch to petroleum solvents, then had me as a finisher, on the steam presses, and then a spotter, that takes skill—you can ruin a silk blouse, a fine wool suit. After a while it was going so good I opened a branch in West Brewer, and then one up in Hamburg, and two years ago this industrial acreage came up for sale in Hemmigtown. For a long time I'd been wanting to build a bigger plant, with summer fur storage and equipment to take anything, to take even old lace tablecloths, they get yellow with age, very fragile, and big velvet curtains where you could choke on their dust, some of these mansions in Perm Park and up along Youngquist, the owners never—"

Nelson has heard enough about dry-cleaning. "And you were counting on Michael to take all this over someday."

"Someday, not now. Maybe ten years, maybe less. We have a little place in Florida, the winters here aren't so good for Maria—"

"Don't blame me if you want to go to Florida and stick the poor boy with all these plants, all these employees and their benefits—"

DiLorenzo takes this up enthusiastically, telling Nelson, "It's socialism without being called that. It's putting everybody smaller than Perfect out of business—the benefits, the insurance. There used to be a cleaner every other block. I shouldn't complain, it's good for the bigger outfits that can absorb it, but still you hate to see it. Setting out the way I did back then, with no assets to speak of, I couldn't do it now."

"He slaves" his wife says, "and he wants to lay it all on Michael. He wants to go to Florida and look at the girls on the beach and make himself dark as a black."

"The boy was eager, I mean it, with no pressure from me."

"Joe, the boy felt pressure. Even his senior year, he was drifting away, into his own world. He was bringing home B's."

Nelson intervenes, to stop their love feast. They love each other, and the child of their hearts is Perfect. "Michael is very angry with himself," he tells them, "for what he calls letting his family down. But, I keep trying to tell him, it's not his fault. It's not your fault either. It's no one's fault."

"What is it then?" Mr. DiLorenzo asks simply, of this invisible invader, his son's destroyer.

Good question. "It's a," Nelson says, "it's a disorder of the nervous system, having to do with dopamine flow, with the chemical control of the synapses' tiring."

"I often wondered about that," Michael's mother breaks in. "When he was so young, thirteen, fourteen, working with his father summers, inhaling all those poisons."

"Get sensible, Maria," her husband says, hoarse from his talking. "Look at me, inhaling all my life."

"It's not that kind of chemistry," Nelson says. "I'm no doctor, I don't really understand it, brain chemistry is very complex, very subtle. That's why we don't like to assign a diagnosis of schizophrenia without six months of following the client and observing his symptoms continuously. What we do know about the disease—the disorder—is that it quite commonly comes on in young men in their late teens and early twenties, who have been apparently healthy and functional up to then. Michael does fit this profile. A breakdown early in college is pretty typical." He looks down at the yellow pencil still in his hand. On the upper edge of his vision, the faces of the parents before him, it seems to Nelson in a little hallucination of his own, rise like balloons whose strings have been released, but without getting any higher.

"What can we do?" Mrs. asks, her voice fainter than he has heard it before.

"Is there no hope?" Mr. asks, heavier, the chair under him creaking with the accession of weight, hopelessness's weight.

"Of course there is," Nelson says firmly, as if reading from a card held in front of him. "These neuroleptic medications do work, and they're coming out with new ones all the time. Michael's hallucinations have diminished, and his behavior has regularized.

Now—where YOU can help—he must learn to take advantage of our resources here, and to assume responsibility for his own medications, the prescribed daily dosages."

"He says they make him feel not like himself," his mother says. "He doesn't like who he is with the medicines."

"That's a frequent complaint," Nelson admits. "But, without nagging, without seeming to apply pressure, remind him of what he was like without them. Does he want to go back to that?"

"Mr. Angstrom, I know you don't like to make predictions," the father says, manly, ready to strike a deal, "but will these medications ever get his head so right he can go back to work— keep a schedule, pass his courses?"

Another good question. Too good. "Cases vary widely," Nelson says. "With strong family and environmental support, clients with quite severe psychotic episodes can return to nearly normal functioning."

"How near is nearly?" the father asks.

"Near enough," Nelson says carefully, "to resume independent living arrangements and perform work under supervision." To have a room in a group home and bag groceries at a supermarket that has an aggressive hire-the-handicapped policy. Maybe. "Keep in mind, though, that many tasks and daily operations that are obvious and easy for you and me are very difficult for Michael at this point. He not only hears things, he sees and smells and even touches things that get between him and reality. Yet it's not oblivious psychosis—he knows his thoughts aren't right, and knowing this torments him."

The two wearily try to take this in. Their appointment is winding down. They hear the rain lash at the loose-fitting elementary-school windows in a tantrum, in a world unhinged.

"It's a heartbreaker," says Mr. DiLorenzo. "All those years since the boy was born, I thought I was building it up for him. Building up Perfect."

"Don't look at it so selfishly," his wife says, not uncompanionably. "Think of Michael. Suddenly, where did his life go? Down the drain into craziness."

"No, no," Nelson urges, almost losing his therapeutic poise. "He's still the child you raised, the child you love. He's still Michael. He's just fallen ill, and needs you more than most young men need their parents."

"Need," Mrs. DiLorenzo says, the one word left hanging in air. She pushes herself up, holding on so her black-beaded purse doesn't slip from her lap.

"What we need," her husband amplifies, rising with her, sighing through his nose, "is peace. And a vacation. And it doesn't look as though we're going to get any. Ever." Like jellyfish changing shimmering shape in the water, their faces have gone from fear for their son to fear of him, of the toll he will take.

Nelson doesn't argue. The interview has shaken him but he thinks it was healthy that some of these facts were faced. Schizophrenics don't get wholly better. That movie starring the Australian as a pianist who keeps playing because some dear good loving woman has taken him on: a sentimental crock, mostly. They don't relate. They don't follow up. They can't hold it together. It makes you marvel that most people hold it together as well as they do: what a massive feat of neuron coordination just getting through the dullest day involves. These dysfunctionals make him aware of how functional he is. They don't bother him as normal people do. There............