One-hundred thousand welcomes (caed mile falte) to the dissolution of the self

For five years, the balmy, palm-clad street had been coastal perfection, a grove to hide in while the war of the country's third largest hospital raged in the center of the city. For five years the air danced vivaciously across the skin and one had a sense of fullness emanating from the earth itself, as if power and vitality entered the body through bottoms of the feet. One half-mile from the Atlantic. One could reach the Bahamas by canoe. How mad would a man have to be to willingly leave paradise, and grow old on the arid, stepped plains of the Texan llano estacado, unless he had once known that place as home?

When his time as a trainee in Miami had come to an end, Artur placed his minimal belongings (mostly medical books, a mattress and box spring, a psychotherapy couch) into a crate outside his tiny condo, and watched it levitate onto the bed of a truck next to the belongings of others. The forklift operator, an elder man in a wide-brimmed felt hat, which could have had a feather, was curt, and dismissed himself without fanfare. "Entire lives packed into separate crates. And those lives, mine and others', will go out West," he thinks. He imagines the ways in which the truck might flip or crumple or burn on the interstate, how the trek might fail, and smiles a little at the tragedy of existence. Then he goes about the business of cleaning the empty apartment, and sleeps on the stone floor.

The trek out West begins the next day, and is a blur of green woods and concrete, massive metal moments trapped between semis, and was recounted in other words elsewhere (Desert Flora). Of note, Artur remembers driving in the historically incorrect direction over the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama, and wonders if this is a crime against the universe. The imaginal space is filled with dogs and police with high hats and batons beating the children and grandchildren of black slaves, and in the periphery of his mind he suppresses fragments of ICU-memories of all the brain injury patients he had known--in the Hippocratic sense of knowing.

One month into the exurb on the llano, he has appointed his professors abode, at least to the extent that his modest bank account can bare, and it is time to introduce himself in person to his new chairperson at a gathering at her home. He has a weird sense that this gathering is for him, but his psychiatric training quickly chimes in with self-criticisms about "childhood ego-centrism," ideas of reference, and peri-psychotic thought. He empties himself, pulls his worn boots over his ankles, and goes to the gathering with a psychic hand placed gently over the arteries of his social fear. He is still a fractured and un-integrated personality, but this much he knows: to be capable of seeing anyone other than oneself, one must allow into awareness his own feelings. This knowledge, he reasons, is the only pillar upon which he can rest a claim to his new title, assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at this school of medicine.

There are anxious introductions upon entering the backyard of the two-story home in the university-adjacent housing, brief awkward handshakes. He immediately recognizes the chairperson for her 360 degree awareness; he is pulled like a magnet to her acquaintance, and then excuses himself to the kitchen, stating that he should get himself a plate; the subtext of this brief interaction is a promise to begin understanding the feelings and advancement of the persons of the department, to submit to the internalization of objects,

He begins with something familiar. Dr. McPherson, who had served for decades as an adjunct in the department of psychiatry, and as a chaplain and token humanist within the school of medicine, had arrived just moments before him, with his gregarious young wife, intact at the age of 87, her in the late 60s.

They join him at a picnic table covered by black cloth in the backyard on the periphery of the gathering as boys stretch bare-chested by the pool, and the residents hover close to the food, and other faculty orbit the chairperson in the center of the yard. Artur at once is empty, and finds his training, listens attentively to the old Chaplain.

His face is the frozen pond of practiced selflessness. The couple speak about the city, the pace of life, their child who professes at UCLA, and who learned at a young age to play the violin. Artur speaks about moving in, buying carpets, and practices the technique of silent absorption when words are said to which he cannot find the hidden meaning--a last resort when one's ability to understand the contours of someone else's life and experience is completely outpaced by the magnitude of the foreignness. He is a professional voyeur of human emotions. One sits patiently in strange ways to find the angle.

By the end of the gathering, Dr. McPherson is putting Artur's phone number in his phone, bringing him cake, and inviting him to attend his ethics seminars. A real psychiatrist, a fellow man with a face like a frozen pond. The two men fall fast in love. His wife is conveying to Artur privately, through the transference, her concerns that he is too busy to get involved in whatever projects the new faculty member has in mind. Artur reassures her that sitting across from her husband and experiencing his mode of communication is the only occasional burden he will place.

As they have exhausted themselves with empathy, neither man touching the drink at open bar, drunk on the experience of another, the older man turns to the younger and gives him words: "Caed mile falte. It is Gaelic. It means one-hundred thousand welcomes." He repeats the words again as they shake hands for the last time.

That night, in his bed, Artur is devastated by the invitation of the elder man. And glad.