Deconstructing “I think, therefore I am”

To pick up my permanent Mexican visa, I stopped in Guadalajara again on my way back to the United States. The tall, black-haired, mostly Indian woman who passed it to me wore a starched, ironed uniform with a patch showing the words “Policia Federal.” She wore huge mirrors over her eyes and a policeman’s visored cap. I suddenly recognized Thelma by the mole in her left eyebrow and her overbite when she opened her mouth and doffed her hat and sunglasses. In Mexico, federales are usually the most brutal police officials. They are always bribable and often wear uniforms. Thelma's uniform was garishly colorful (something new for the new female federales) but sinister -- Thelma’s ideal job. I hesitated to speak to her. Suddenly, irresponsibly, I sputtered, “You’re absolutely gorgeous.“ She was a brown Artemis. Clutching her gear, resting the heels of her clenched fists on her hips, she responded with a look of steely anger. I was intimidated, but I remembered Lorus’ advice “Convulse and flail grotesquely.” It was as though Lorus were inspiring me. After a moment, I decided to fight back against Thelma’s haughty attempt to make me cower, and felt marvelously, miraculously free. I leaned over and kissed her quickly on the lips. She stepped back, glaring harder, and then melted, smiled and spoke to me in nearly unaccented English. “You are shameless! By the time we left, everyone in the waiting room was staring at us. In her car, on the way to her apartment, she said she used birth control. She didn’t want children but would never have an abortion. We live in Tucson now. She got a job transfer from Guadalajara to Hermosillo. She commutes from Tucson to Hermosillo (3 and 1/2 hours away) where she has an office with another female federale. She is able to work three days a week, 11 hours a day. Her seven hours of commuting time complete the forty hours of her work week, and the government pays her gas insofar as it is expended on the Mexican side of the border. (The Mexican government is very liberal and understanding, as epitomized by Lόpez Obrador’s “We should greet the narcotraficantes with hugs not bullets.”) I love Thelma, but she has largely taken over my life, and so I appreciate my three-and-a-half days per week of solitude. When she comes home angry, I know she has been unable to capture a significant bribe. She sometimes throws objects at me, especially on those rare Sundays when I try to avoid accompanying her to church, a more or less orthodox church (“less” because the minister, like Brother Dixon, doesn’t believe in Hell and, of the Bible, only accepts the Gospel according to John as inspired and infallible. God is so powerful, so miraculous he can love even the unlovely is Jesus’ whole message.) The objects Thelma throws at me are Thelma’s way of emphasizing that she is real. When I told her of the crowded void of my disappearing solipsism, she laughed long and hilariously, like the Oblatas de la Sanctisima Eucharista. I stayed embarrassed until she wrote me a peculiar poem at which I marveled: Once you feared that, even if you weren’t aware Of anything whatsoever and had no body, you’d still be there Like an empty container. Everything and I and your own flesh, you said, Might only be images in your head. I told you, if that was so, You’d only be an image in your head also. I confounded an image in your head that wasn’t true, A huge head you thought surrounded me and you. If you’re truly wholly alone you’ll think thoughts only, not truths. Thelma’s wisdom is that ‘there is no truth’ is the reductio ad absurdum of solipsism. I’ve had no hallucinations I believed, since reading Thelma’s poem. Now, decades after my last laughing hospitalization, whenever a frightful image comes to me, I pray, and like a dud skyrocket, whistling and streaking then falling into the dark invisibly without an explosion, the image fails to complete itself. In our bathroom mirror at twilight, my face often has a circumambient halo, somewhat like Cellini’s. This mussed reflection is no doubt the fault of the mirror and the bathroom. It resembles the soft focus in 1930’s movies. It’s like a blush and brings to mind the fact that I’m mildly embarrassed all the time now, even when I dream. My embarrassment embodies my simple belief that there are other people. I’m happy. My last psychiatrist told me I was “giddy.” He mocks Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” as “Thinking is going on; therefore, thinking is going on.” Descartes was wrong. I can read him while yawning. For now, Thelma and I are content with our decision to remain childless, I, because I don’t want to pass on any latent part of my fearful nature; she, because she wants to keep her sexy figure lissome a while longer.