If your brain is damaged at birth, therapy can help make your life more bearable, you can share your thoughts with someone; but it cannot turn you into a normal social person. If the therapist sets you impossible tasks, it will just make you more depressed. I am an evil genius. I can inflict punishment on anyone I choose. I am the smiling, ruthless Si-Fan leader. The evil genius behind the red revolutionary party of Western Europe. I have survived the conflagration of the war, the siege, the commune, the massacred of the “bloody week”, and now re-emerge into the new venal pleasures of Paris 1875. Thank God I’m still alive, by some miracle, free to enjoy the luxuries again; but very aware of the black period of suffering he had to go through, it is very close to him still, so easy to fall back into. But I survived, I’ve come through to enjoy some of the pleasures again, the way I never thought I could. You can’t hold back the tide of silence for long. The big project starts here: I’m more excited by my writing now than I’ve ever been.
