“Cock, and endless balls,” echoed the sane man opining on the madman.

And we were sure that it was his mirror he had found and mistaken for a picture frame.

He was the angel-headed hipster, in his gowns and Ghandi haircut. That is, if we ever knew Ghandi to have hair.

[We should probably just sew this up right now—if Ghandi had hair, it would have looked like his, and we knew that he knew.]

To us, he was always Tyler Durden and we, always eager to lather in his people-soap. We always knew what he didn’t want to know, and we were diligent—punctilious even—complimenting each other about how well we Christmas-wrapped the truth, never helping him see the towel hanging on the door, just so we could watch him grope for it, wet and naked.

Watching him was Church for us—the way he’d first squeegee himself, then wring out his beard, punctuating his ceremony with random-yet-very-deliberate shakes, desperate to get dry.

For years he never knew we could see him that way, and even after he’d dismiss us, some would gather to pit theories against speculations about what he might have meant to do when he was finally free of the water. For a while, that was my favorite part—the wild conjecture ranging from the mundane to the downright fantastical. One man I remember (because he wore rings on every finger and spoke with his hands) even believed that it was all a test—that we’d been privileged to watch a ‘son-of-the-gods’ as he labored through what he called a ‘heavenly madness’. His madness was a maze, and we had front-row seats in a closed-circuit theater, and one day (according to RingFingers) we would watch our Prometheus break free and seize his light. 

This was only my favorite part for a while, and soon after RingFingers released his philosophical balloons into the air, it seemed like everyone, overnight, had her own idea of what mission our teacher was on.

The truth was (the truth we kept wrapped, remember) that none of us cared if he ever broke through. We were healed by his wrestling. We would have drank the wrung sweat from his toil-soaked shirt if we could have. And don’t you dare be lucky enough to occupy the space directly in front of one of his (unaware, we believe) stares. It was enough to bankrupt a witch doctor or snake oil peddler or a crooked preacher. He was our preacher. And his twitching muscles were our choir. And we were selfish to watch him with our hands folded.

About as selfish as anyone can be when they’re lying on an operating table.