Immediately, with a vengeance, I seized control of the ship.* Call me Bligh, if you wish, but I restrapped my crew in their seats, delivered a two-minute lecture on comportment, canceled the Road Runner cartoon, and then ran my charges through a rigorous drill of their ABCs. I permitted no referenda. No back talk, no second-guessing. This was not, I informed the crew, a popularity contest. During the standard interview segment, as one example, I insisted upon strictly martial forms of discourse: "Yes, sir" and "No, sir" and "No excuse, sir." Not a syllable more.

All in all, the crew responded well. There were teary-eyed complaints, of course, when I found it fitting to conduct a spelling bee in place of the usual Three Stooges tripe and when it became my duty to inform one inquisitive toddler that Mr. Ed had long ago been rendered into nine hundred pounds of extremely useful glue and fertilizer. (Telephones began jingling offstage. One weak-kneed youngster abandoned ship.) Still, despite these difficulties, all other hands soon shaped up. Certainly no more giggling. I now commanded a reduced crew of eleven very solemn space travelers.

How could I not feel pride?

From that point onward I could not have shanghaied a more compliant crew. It was a joy to serve with them.

At the same time, however, something ominous was happening inside my space suit. Months of pain and sorrow came pressing down on me. Intense heat, intense pressure-that G-force sensation.

During the storytelling segment, ordinarily devoted to beanstalks and ugly ducklings, I took a seat in the crew module and began recounting the much more realistic tale of my recent divorce. "Even Captain Nineteen," I said weakly, "is defenseless in the face of treachery," then, with a heavy sigh, I hoisted Evelyn onto my lap, gathered myself, and laid out the sobering details. (A dizzy feeling-I was out of control. I held back nothing.) Gritty material for youngsters, no question about it, and once again I heard the interruptive bleat of offstage telephones. Yet it was no easy matter for me either. I shuddered. I could barely bring myself to describe Lorna Sue's final departure, how she gave me that flat, opaque, reptilian stare and said, "Don't be an eighteen-year-old."

In retrospect, weighing the pros and cons, I might have toned down some of my coarser references to the tycoon's villainy-"a maggot-munching vulture," "a rabid, devil-souled shark," "a love-killing, wife-stealing, spirit-sucking alien." Perhaps too, I might have used a somewhat lighter touch in describing Herbie's role in the collapse of my marriage; I could easily have avoided the word incest; I probably ought not to have referred to him over the airwaves as "a fallen Jesuit" or "a church-burning antichrist." For all this, however, I will never regret a single ill-tempered syllable.

"What you must understand," I told my crew, "is that Lorna Sue was sacred to me. And I to her." I shifted Evelyn in my lap. "You know what sacred is? Sacred is forever. Sacred is for better and for worse, in sickness and in health." I swallowed and looked down at my empty-eyed Evelyn. "Can you comprehend any of this?"

"Sort of," she said. "What's incest?"

I glanced off-camera at Mrs. Kooshof, who studied the linoleum, then at Jessie, whose face had gone phosphorescent with hero worship.

Inexplicably, then, the studio went upside down.

An impossible thing to describe. It was as if something had broken loose inside me, a cracking-crumbling sensation. My knees buckled. How long this lasted I cannot be sure, perhaps only seconds, but it was as if the last several months of my life had suddenly given way under the pressure of time and gravity. A psychic avalanche. I felt buried. Claustrophobic darkness descended upon me, succeeded by boiling heat, succeeded by a sharp popping sensation at the top of my skull.

A brain plug came loose.

Slowly, in something of a haze, I moved off-camera, retrieved my briefcase, returned to the crew module.

The next few moments are lost to me.

I do not remember pulling out the bomb, or striking a match, or hoisting little Evelyn onto my lap.

I was weeping-that I do remember.

At one point I heard myself issuing a public appeal to Lorna Sue. I begged her to reconsider. I threatened suicide. "Please!" I screeched, and other such drivel, then surrendered to a surf of tears. One of the cameramen, I recall, was gracious enough to escort me off the set.

What more need be said?

If only once-if only for those few sparkling minutes-I was Captain Nineteen.

The world will never know, I suppose, if the crew had been bought off, or if Jessie tampered with the ballot box, or if the final few moments of my audition somehow alienated a sponsor or two. My protests, in any event, went unheeded. The vote had been unanimous-even Evelyn deserted me-and as the inept, silver-tongued car sharpie accepted his commission as Captain Nineteen, Mrs. Kooshof seized my arm and swiftly hustled me out of the studio. Our engagement, it seemed, had been called off.

I recall nothing of the ride home. In fact, to be wholly honest, only a few blurred snapshots remain of the next several days.

I did not need to be hospitalized.

I did not need the medications, or the snoopy nurses, or the idiotic, simpering, language-crushing pseudopsychiatrists. It was all Mrs. Kooshof's doing-the revenge instinct-and I played along only because I had temporarily misplaced my capacity for speech.

* To repeat: Language is an organism that evolves separately inside each of us. It kicks like a baby in the womb. It whispers secrets to our blood.

* Lest we forget, I have military experience. I know a thing or two about the chain of command, and if required, I am perfectly capable of calling in napalm on my own position.

In total, I squandered six perfectly useful days in the Owago Community Hospital, another six in Mrs. Robert Kooshof's queen-size bed. Most of this time I devoted to slumber. Sluggish hours, sluggish dreams.*

Granted, I needed the sleep, but in no way could my collapse be characterized as a "nervous breakdown," as the purveyors of Prozac so quaintly phrased it. (I am unsympathetic to such mawkish, softheaded excuses for our minor setbacks in life.) The truth was mundane: I had overextended myself. The divorce alone had completely drained me. And then add to that the frenetic travel, the spying and scheming and marital sabotage, my troubles with Toni, the composition of a brilliant honors thesis, a public spanking, my recent career change, my day care duties, a television debut, my tumultuous, not to mention tenuous, engagement to Mrs. Robert Kooshof. For any other man, all this would have constituted a full life's journey; for me, it had been compressed into less than a year.

As a governing axiom, therefore, I must insist that my condition bore no similarity whatsoever to so-called mental dysfunction. I will concede that my muteness-my steadfast refusal to converse-may suggest certain psychological short circuits. Yet even this self-imposed silence was part and parcel of an overall need for repose. (I could have spoken; I was resting my larynx.) Mentally ill, in other words, I was not. Nor "clinically depressed." Nor in the least "delusional." Anyone who has enjoyed even a few luxurious moments in my presence would sneer at such shoddy diagnostics.

Beyond that, I need not comment on my hospitalization, except to say that the food was abysmal, the medications were potent, and the nurses were far inferior to their collective carnal reputation. Rebecca, for example: forty-six if she was a day. (Forbidding as a lunar landscape, hippy as the Iron Curtain.) While the poor woman clearly entertained robust fantasies about me, she was devoid of those social graces that lead to productive intergender commerce. She mistook the most casual physicality for "freshness"; she appeared genuinely shocked that a brisk midmorning sponge bath might prove hydraulically bracing. A hopeless case, in short, of menopausal ill temper. (Whatever my shortcomings, I remain wholly sensitive to Woman's fallow fate.) For my dear, dismal, out-to-pasture Rebecca, alas, the great romantic pageant was something abstract and mechanical, ultimately barren. I patted her thigh. I tried to assist. I failed.

Be that as it may, those twelve days in hospital were no doubt good for me, a well-earned R&R, a chance if nothing else to rearm and regroup. I had the time, finally, to update my ledger;* I luxuriated in Mrs. Kooshof's wary, somewhat begrudging solicitude; and most important, I began sketching out plans for the future-refined modes and methods of vengeance. Hospital or no hospital, there was still that loud, persistent tick in my heart. It kept me awake at night. Tick, in fact, is the wrong word: an endless siren, an air raid warning.

Surprisingly-shockingly-I found myself looking forward to my daily sessions with the hospital's in-house psychiatrist, one Dr. Harold Schultz, a man of smallish stature, neurotic eyes, and long, dark, inscrutable silences that very nearly rivaled my own. The man had been trained to sit speechless; for me, it was a matter of choice. For fifty engrossing minutes each day, we mutely appraised each other from opposite sides of a small conference table, stone silent, locked like two stags in a ferocious contest of wills. Neither of us yielded a hiccup. (Had my health insurance not been adequate, I would have sued this unabashed quack for both mal- and nonpractice.) Disconcerting, to say the least. Yet how could I not take up the challenge?

A typical session began with an exchange of pleasantries-handshakes and smiles, nothing verbal-after which Schultz would pick up his yellow notepad, jot down a key word or two, then pass the pad over to me. The man's tactics were transparent: fighting silence with silence. Third-grade Freud. On my part, immune to such gimmicks, I would respond in kind, scribbling out my own crisp one- or two-word missive, at which point we would lean back and study each other for five, or ten, or fifteen dueling minutes.

To illustrate: In our very first session Schultz passed me the words Captain Nineteen, followed by a large blue question mark. I furrowed my brow, considered the possibilities, then jotted down the words C'est moi.

A cruel Germanic smile appeared at the doctor's lips. Fantasies, he wrote.

May I help? I responded.

There ensued seven minutes of silence, each of us shrewdly examining the other for signs of tensile failure. I offered the man nothing-not a syllable. It was apparent, after all, that Schultz had already jumped to certain half-baked conclusions: that I had lost contact with the here and now, that I was somehow less than mentally airworthy.

Eventually the grim Nazi glanced at his wristwatch. With a sigh, and with a worrisomely shaky hand, he scrawled something on his yellow notepad and passed it across to me.

Death Chant? he had written.

Chased!. I scribbled.

Lorna Sue? he wrote.

Judas, I wrote.

Tycoon? he wrote.

Hairy, I wrote.

Suicide? he wrote.

Avoid, I wrote.

Which broke him. He tossed the notepad aside and leaned menacingly across the table. "Don't get smart with me," he snapped. "I saw the audition tape-making threats, gasoline bombs. You were dead serious, my friend."

I retrieved the pad.

Theatrics, I wrote.

"Nonsense," said Schultz. His animosity-his undiluted hatred-had now bobbed to the psychotic surface. "You've got problems, Chippering-big problems-so try communicating like a normal fucking adult. Am I understood?"

I reached for the notepad, but Schultz selfishly clasped it to his belly.

"Forget it," he said stiffly. "Talk to me. I refuse, starting right now, to read another word."

I raised my eyebrows at this.

"I mean it," yelled Schultz. "Try me!"

From my pocket, therefore, I withdrew a scrap of paper-some long-forgotten damsel's phone number-upon which I composed my reply. I folded the communique once and placed it on the table between us. Schultz shrugged. For some time, then, we remained at an impasse, a classic psychiatric standoff, both of us occasionally eyeing the scrap of paper.

It was a question of self-discipline. I had it. Schultz did not.

A twitch came to the corner of his lips. He folded his arms, refolded them, glanced down at my missive, then again stared at me with undisguised hatred. (God knows why, but I have discovered that the male fraction of our species responds poorly to my persona. Distrust at best. Raw loathing at worst. It should be noted, for instance, that I have no "buddies." No chums or pals-at least not of the masculine variety. Except for the case of Herbie, and then only in childhood, I have been the lifelong victim of the most ferocious male jealousies and insecurities, a state of affairs with which I can wholly sympathize but that nonetheless remains a source of bitter regret. Only women, alas, seem to appreciate my quirky virtues. Thank heavens for the gentler sex. Politics and physique aside, I could cochair a NOW convention or take my seat at any midafternoon kaffeeklatsch.) No surprise, in any case, that Schultz should display the usual masculine rancor.

The man glared at me.

"Asshole," he muttered. (A healer, no less. A physician of the soul.) With an audible moan, he then snatched up the piece of paper upon which I had impulsively printed the word Peek-a-boo.

One other fascinating development: On an otherwise peaceful Tuesday afternoon, in the midst of my nap period, I was visited in hospital by Earleen and Velva Zylstra. They had stopped by for no apparent purpose but to celebrate my incapacitation. I was aghast; I could neither speak nor run. (For safety's sake, I had been strapped to my mattress.) One moment I was happily dreaming of vengeance, the next I was confronted by these two time-pitted monuments to imbecility-Earleen in her wheelchair, Velva in all her distinctive flatulence. For some time they simply peered at me.

"Well, Jesus H. Christ," Earleen finally said, "I guess it figures. You was long, long overdue for this." She flicked her eyebrows. "Seen you on the teleconfusion-too bad you didn't just blow yourself sky-high, save everybody a lot of trouble."

Velva tittered. "Captain Stupid," she chirped.

I sighed and faced the wall. On this wide and various earth there could be nothing so depressing, so cruelly debilitating, as the stench of two such subhuman creatures. My recovery was already in much jeopardy.

This encounter itself, of course, is barely worth recording-they gaped, they taunted, they studied me as if I were a zoo animal-and I mention the incident for only one reason. But a very crucial reason. After five or ten minutes, as the pair made their way toward the door, Velva stopped and turned. "Look, I got to tell you this straight out," she said. "I heard that crap on TV, all that begging of yours, and I don't want no trouble when Lorna Sue comes home this summer. Keep your sick self away from her, like miles and miles away. The same goes for Herbie and her husband and our whole family."

Swiftly, I snatched up a pencil and a scrap of paper.

Summer? I wrote.

"Fourth of July," said Velva. "So what? Just don't come nowhere near."

Imagine the flutter in my breast. For the first time in weeks, perhaps months, a genuine smile crossed my lips. (Happy holidays, I wrote, but by then they were gone.) Still, that newfound smile stayed with me for the remainder of the day, then for most of the night.

Fireworks, I kept thinking.

-- In mid-June, with little fanfare, I received my honorable discharge from the Owago Community Hospital, after which I was brusquely transferred to the care of Mrs. Robert Kooshof. The meals instantly improved. As did the mattress. In all other respects, however, I soon found myself looking back with keen nostalgia at my period of hospitalization. Mrs. Kooshof was no nurse. Her bedside manner was gruff, her response time inadequate in the extreme. On numerous occasions, often for up to twenty minutes, I would lie in need of attendance, helpless as a baby, my wrists numb from swinging the tiny copper bell she had placed on the nightstand. The woman had no patience for my decision to remain mute. Cavalierly, and with what I can only surmise was malice aforethought, she went out of her way to ignore my written communications-even ridiculed them-which forced me into primitive (and humiliating) sign language. Not only that; she professed to misunderstand my perfectly legible menu memoranda. She groused at mealtime. She refused to assist with my morning toilet.

Lastly, worst of all, my paramour stole a page from Dr. Schultz's therapeutic manual, inexcusably refusing to utter so much as a polite "Good morning" or "Good night" or "What can I do for you?"

Her silence became absolute. No exceptions.

Apparently the woman remained miffed over the concluding moments of my audition. (Begging for Lorna Sue's return, I confess, represented a tactical misjudgment on my part.) Yet the punishment far exceeded the misdemeanor. Hypersensitivity is one thing, holding a grudge another.

On my own part, I pretended not to notice that she had removed her engagement ring. I kept my complaints to a minimum, observed the proprieties of a standard patient-nurse relationship. But my on-again, off-again fiancee stonewalled it. Refused to sleep with me. Refused to smile. Refused to participate in my required midmorning sponge bath. In short, it was as if she had given up-as if she no longer cared, or cared to care.

The latter indignity broke my heart.

At best, this was malfeasance of office.

At worst-hard to face-it was love treason.

In essence, then, I lay alone and incommunicado through those hot days of June, all but abandoned, my hours passing in a silky narcotic fog.

Lithium, Xanax, Thorazine, Restoril-these were my only true and faithful companions.

It is important to reemphasize, however, that my mental health was in no way at risk. I sometimes wept, true. I sometimes spoke sharply to the television. (Again, in sign language: my own inventive variant.) And, yes, I admit that I crept out to the garage on one or two late-night occasions, cradled my bombs, chuckled, cursed, cried my eyes out, imagined a big yellow house in flames. But bear in mind that I had been drugged to the gills. And remember too, that for almost a year I had held up beautifully under stresses that would have incapacitated a rhinoceros. Who among mortals would not have indulged in an occasional bout of tears? I had earned each salty droplet.

As indicated earlier, the hapless Dr. Schultz had (mis)diagnosed my condition as delusional, depressive, and suicidal. Yet the hard realities suggest otherwise.

Let me briefly address the charges one by one: 1. Delusional. No way on earth. Quackery. To be sure, there were times when I simply could not shut off the ugly pictures in my head. Hour after hour, flat on my back, I watched obscene, graphic, X-rated images of Lorna Sue and her tycoon rippling across Mrs. Kooshof's bedroom ceiling. I watched the love of my life take her pleasure under the weight of another man. I saw the pupils of her eyes roll back. I saw the sweat at her loins. I read her lips as she whispered, "I love you." And other pictures too. Lorna Sue's face on the day she left me forever. The bleak, neutral, deep-winter landscape in her eyes. ("Let's not have a scene," she had said. "Tut your pants on," she had said. "It's finished," she had said. "Don't be an eighteen-year-old," she had said.) Delusions? I think not. Here was a creative imagination working in syncopation with a rock-solid memory.

2. Depressive. Reread the lines above. (At Auschwitz, as the condemned marched to their showers, some nervy shrink no doubt pronounced the whole lot clinically glum.) 3. Suicidal. Here, finally, we encounter a scrap of truth. I will not dispute the fact that recent events had worn me down. Like an exhausted swimmer, I had reached that point at which the struggle for buoyancy no longer seemed profitable. The depths beckoned. In many respects, I must concede, the past several months could be seen as a headlong plunge into oblivion, a leap overboard, the flail-ings of a man about to go under. Suicidal? I had every goddamn right. For instance: On the day Lorna Sue left me, after the door snapped shut behind her, I stood there in my underwear for some immeasurable length of time-outside of time, outside myself-just looking at that curious white door, waiting for it to swing open again, knowing it would not. I did not weep. Not then. I remember the word eighteen shaping itself on my tongue. I remember the sound of a radio in another room. I remember a male announcer pushing a product called Lexus. Oddly, however, I have no recollection at all of making my way across the living room, or of opening up the drapes, or of stepping out onto the narrow balcony that overlooked University Avenue.* I was simply there, in my white socks and white undershorts, wondering if this was what an eighteen-year-old would do, and wondering what a Lexus might be, and wondering if I should perhaps remove my white socks. It struck me, even as I hooked a leg over the balcony railing, that the world of thought is nothing but a world of words. The very word world, for instance, had taken on a radioactive glow at the instant of my thinking it-there it was, gleaming, the world!-and the word balcony, and the word socks. Socks, I thought, and from that moment onward, for the rest of my life, socks would never again be socks. I straddled the railing. Eighteen, I thought. Socks, I thought. Turtle, I thought. Tampa, I thought. Lexus, I thought. I did not think suicide. I thought pavement, for there was a sidewalk below, and I thought I'm thinking. I did not think Lorna Sue. The railing was a high one, four feet or so, and I temporarily found myself off balance, unable to launch the remainder of my lanky frame into its short journey through space. I could scarcely move at all. One leg was still draped over the railing, the other tenuously rooted to the balcony floor, and for some time I hopped up and down in a struggle not of life and death but only for some final dignity. Those uncomfortable moments no doubt saved me. Ridiculous, one might think, but even in my awkward pose high above University Avenue I could not help feeling distinctly irritated at the word Lexus, which buzzed at my ears like a pesky fly. There are very few nouns in our lexicon, proper or otherwise, that I do not instantly recognize. Lexus: its etymological source was plainly Greek. And of course I was fully aware of its homophonic connections to the word nexus, with all the attendant linkages of meaning and morphology. Still, I was puzzled enough to disengage my left leg from the balcony railing. I pulled up my socks, waved to a gathering of upturned heads below, then hurried inside to seek out my Webster's Third New International. It was a professional relief, I must say, to find the word Lexus unlisted. (Proper noun, it turns out.) In summary, then, the facts overwhelmingly indicate that mine was not a "nervous" but rather an "existential" condition. Again and again, the important personages of my life had betrayed me: Herbie and Lorna Sue and Toni and Megan and Evelyn and Carla and Little Red Rhonda and Peg and Patty and President Pillsbury and even my bizarre ex-comrades in Vietnam.

Now, to my considerable alarm, it appeared that Mrs. Robert Kooshof had joined the Judas list. (The disappearance of an engagement ring. Her slothful, indifferent ministrations. Her refusal to speak to me or to grace my bed.) Such provocations were troubling enough in their own right, but on June 22 our relationship took an ugly turn for the worse. On that morning I had thrice requested, via well-worded memoranda, that the air-conditioning be turned up, with absolutely no result. Bed bound, awash in my own sweat, I lay ringing my tiny copper bell for what seemed a lifetime. Not a creature stirred. The whole house, it seemed, had been abandoned, and myself along with it.

In the end I had no recourse but to rise from my sickbed, don my pink satin robe, and on weakened legs make my way out to the kitchen. Mrs. Kooshof sat comfortably in front of an electric fan, sipping from a glass of iced tea. A number of travel brochures lay spread out before her.

My own voice took me by surprise.

"This," I declared, "is a disgrace."

Mrs. Kooshof shrugged indifferently; she seemed unimpressed by my recovery.

For a few seconds I stood absorbing the scene. Her pile of pamphlets encompassed such exotic locales as Guadeloupe, Cozumel, the Canary Islands, Grand Cayman, and Fiji. Intriguing, yes, but the woman plainly should have consulted me.

"I must caution you," I said gravely, "that I am not yet well enough for extensive touring. Nerves and so on. Bedsores."

This elicited a grunt. "It's my trip," said Mrs. Kooshof. "Solo. I'm done being a wet noodle."

"Solo?"

"You heard me. No more doormat."

Her voice was a monotone, perfectly flat. Concrete-hard. And over the next moment or two other such transformations caught my eye: her fingernails were freshly polished; her blond hair-noteworthy to begin with-had been frosted to a soft, silvery sheen; she had lost a pound or two at the waist, just enough to cinch up the hourglass. In a nutshell, Mrs. Robert Kooshof gave every appearance of a woman baiting the hook, preparing to troll.

I waited a moment, stopped by a rush of fear, then shook it off and occupied a stool at the counter. "On the other hand," I said casually, "I have found my voice. A sea cruise, I was thinking. Or Venice."

My fickle, newly renovated companion rolled her shoulders. "Have fun. I'll expect a postcard."

"Which means?"

"Nothing," she said. "It means nothing."

Suddenly, for no apparent reason, the woman then flung an arm out, swiveling on her stool, a gesture that caused her iced tea to go sailing into my exposed, overheated lap. I was clothed in a robe. The tea was iced. There was no buffer.

I yelped and stood up smartly, but Mrs. Kooshof seemed not to notice.