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Marcel, I’m going to tell you I think suffering is suffering, whether it’s caused by human beings, by God, by nothing at all, or just the fuck because. I think what I’ve been through, specifically, is as grievous as anything you have to weigh beside it in the scales. But, see, Cell, here’s the other thing that I believe. You with your grievances, me with my mine, we both feel singled out and specially fucked, but the truth is we’re no different from anybody else. Here’s the secret, Cell. I’m stoned and probably crazed, but what I think is this: human life is a condition of oppression, all of it—black, white, red, brown, yellow, all the same. I can’t prove it, Cell, but just lately now I’ve come to think that’s why we’re here on earth, to experience this condition of oppression and to seek the secret of release—even if we never find it, even if we only get partway. That’s why Keith Richards and Mick and John and Paul heard the blues and got the message. They didn’t need a black translator to break the code, Marcel, they understood it in their bones, because they’d suffered, too. Their people suffered in the mines and in the mills, likemine, and I’m not saying working-class rage and misery in Liverpool or Bagtown is the same as slavery. It’s not. The two do not equate. But there’s a common thread. So, when Robert Johnson and the Reverend Gary Davis and Muddy and Son House and all the others played, those skinny white kids in Liverpool and Muscle Shoals heard it, Cell. Deep inside the prison of the twelve-bar blues, they heard that yearning spirit, rattling the cage and seeking to break free, and they brought it to a million, and, after them, to millions more. That’s why those little girls on Sullivan—remember them?—the ones standing at the barricades in ’64 when the Beatles came to town, that’s why they wept and tore their clothes. The Beatles showed them, for the first time, what human life might be, which they learned from black people, who brought it out of Africa, and those children underwent conversion, Cell, they had a religious experience by proxy for the rest of white America. Now it’s all the fuck mixed up, mixed up in you, mixed up in me, mixed up in my wife and in my children up there sleeping in their beds. And I, for one, am happy, so goddamn happy that it is. That’s it, Marcel. That’s all I know. Human life is a condition of oppression, and religion is the search for the release. Everyone alive is after the same thing—it’s our commonness, and I believe it’s greater than our differences. And that’s why, however singular it seems to you, your pain is comprehensible to me: because I’ve felt my own.

“Now you try feeling me. Remembering there was a time when I loved you and you loved me, let’s take the race card off the table and level down the playing field and turn the scoreboard back. It’s zero to zero, Cell. Now let’s make it specific. Once upon a time I stole your line. Tonight I gave you seventeen-point-five to rectify. Now I want back what you stole from me.”

“That’s a good speech, Ran,” Cell said. “There’s some of it I agree with, and some I don’t. But if you want to make it personal, here goes. I loved Claire all those years—years before you even met. I joined the band because of her, and I never tried to get between you. Never. That’s why I left RHB—a fact that, despite all your fellow feeling, never dawned on you. Fuck ‘Talking in My Sleep.’ I didn’t give a shit about the song, and I don’t now. It was watching Claire throw herself at you and watching you hurt her, watching you mess up again and again and again, the same way every time, which is what you still don’t get. It’s what I object to in everything you said. See, Ran, black people will get over slavery when they decide it’s done, not you. The Jews will put the Holocaust behind them when they decide it’s time, not because you or anybody else is tired of listening to them kvetch. This is like a central thread that runs through all you say. You somehow think it’s about you and should be subject to your will and your decision. But it’s not. The same is true with Claire. You had nineteen years to get it right, and whatever the statute of limitations is for me, for her it’s finally run out. See, Ran, her heart and her affections belong to Claire and Claire alone—not you, not me. So, even if I thought you deserved a second chance, or an eleventh, or a twenty-fifth, she’s not mine to give you back. Even if I wanted to, Ransom. And I don’t.”

Cell left his drink, sweating, where it was and walked out of the room, and Ransom sat there for some time, listening to laughter swell the sound track. He could no longer follow what was going on on-screen. But now his voice to me was like a stream scarce heard, nor word from word could I divide…. The lines ran through his head as the figures flitted past like ghosts.

Eventually, seeking deeper solace, he went to the stereo. Flipping through CDs, he knocked a stack of jewel cases to the floor. There on top was his most recent effort, A Stranger to Myself, already two years old. Cross-legged on the floor, he opened it and read the liner notes:

One day you hear a grinding in the works, a rent opens in the bedrock, you peer down, mesmerized, into the molten stuff. You laugh and scoop the magma up. Your hands don’t burn. You stomp in it like a bad child in a puddle in the rain; you wash your face with it and run your