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secret.”
    “You know I can’t tell anyone about it, right? That our conversations are bound by confidentiality?”
    “Sure.”
    “Then why won’t you tell me?”
    Why indeed? Because even to speak it is to relinquish some of its power. I’d said too much already. Some things just are. I sat stone-faced.
    “Can you tell me where you two met?”
    I intended to wait him out, but my face must have betrayed the answer.
    “Oh,” he said, “there.”
    “You have a tone,” I replied.
    The therapist threw his hands in the air, surrenderish. “No tone, no tone,” he said. “You know my feelings on that, we don’t need to discuss it anymore.”
    I did know his feelings about the White Hot Center, where Bonnie and I met and fell in love.
    His feelings were that the White Hot Center didn’t exist.
    His feelings were that what I described about what went on there was impossible to the point that maybe I needed some additional prescriptions or some time with a car battery and cables attached to my temples, whereas my feelings were that he was full of shit because I’d been there, my heart knew what it had experienced, what was real and not.
    “We’re not going to get anywhere, are we?” I said. My time at the White Hot Center where I was cured, at least briefly, demonstrated the almost three years of futility behind my conversations with this man.
    A look that said “fuck if I know” flashed across his face before the mask returned. But the truth had been briefly revealed. I imagined that the therapist’s mentor has always told him that therapy was as much art as science, but the therapist no longer believed this. He knows what I know, that therapy is neither art nor science, but something far more random. To his own therapist the therapist describes it this way: “It’s like I’m holding some kind of machine gun while sitting on a spinning carousel and there’s a target that flashes past as I go round in circles. When the bullets hit the target they’re effective, for sure, but I’m spinning pretty fast and the gun really kicks around when I fire it, so while I do hit the target sometimes, I’m never quite sure where or why, and if you ever tell a soul that I said this, I’ll have you killed and disbarred, probably in that order.”
    Or I could be making all that up. It passes the time anyway.
    A S PART OF the bail agreement, the only places I’m allowed to call out to are 911, Barry, my agent and manager, and the downstairs concierge, who will then place my carryout orders for me. The only people allowed to call in are Barry, my agent and manager, the downstairs concierge (to announce the impending arrival of my carryout) and my ex-wife, but she never calls.
    Because Bonnie is also famous I can at least keep tabs on her, worship her from afar, if you will, since I now understand love is a form of worship, a true act of faith, and that distance is no impediment to the practice of it. Love always has been this way, it’s just that I recognize it now.
    Since the start of my trial, her game has gone into the toilet and there is tremendous speculation as to why—injury, illness, and (absurdly) aging—but I know the real reason. It is because she has been struck with the lovesickness also. We had plans and now those have been dashed. Do I take some pride in this, that my downfall ripples across the continents to her? I do, even as I mourn her misfortune. One of the great joys of being loved is having others feel your triumphs and pains, but at the same time, when they are feeling your pains, if you love them in return, you are then feeling their pain over feeling your pain and so on and so on and this is a difficult loop to pull out of.
    I haven’t mentioned this theory to my therapist either because I’m certain that it too would be chalked up into the “loss of perspective” column. He may not be wrong. My life as a famous person has altered me down to my DNA, my previous self a whisper, a sound you