Goines On: Glad to be home

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Goines had occasionally felt depressed during his first few days back from France. He was sure it wasn’t because he was no longer in France; he was too glad to be home for that. Whatever the reason was, the feeling was deep, for he had even emailed a friend that on his walk the previous morning he had felt as though he might keel over dead before he reached home, and that he was thinking of telling his new primary care physician, when he met her in a couple of weeks, that he hoped he wouldn’t tarnish her record by dying before the end of his first year under her care. Was he depressed because he thought he would die soon?

    At last, on his sixth morning back, while preparing breakfast, Goines suddenly felt good, alive – for the first time, really, since he had returned home. He attributed the feeling to having thought of an interesting idea, maybe one of epiphany status: He had been meditating on what he suspected was an excessive need on his part to hear back from people promptly when he reached out to them, and his tendency to imagine, when they didn’t reply, that he had offended them in some way. The strength of his apparent need had suggested the idea that a similar need in others might go to explain their believing that they could have conversations with God, which they imagined they actually had. That belief could surely come in handy for people who needed to hear back from others as powerfully as Goines needed to hear back, but often didn’t – not as promptly as he liked, anyway.
    There might be something to this hypothesis, but Goines was impressed more by the feeling the thought produced in him than by the thought itself, however great or not-so-great the thought was. Had it been the absence of interesting new thoughts that had been depressing Goines?
    And the next moment, a curious thought he had had in an elevator in Montmartre came back to him, and he smiled, remembering that he had looked forward to sharing the thought with people.
    The thought had been suggested by the signs posted at the landings in the elevator shaft of the apartment building they were staying in. The signs gave the floor number and said to push the door to open it (after the elevator door itself popped open).
    Goines had imagined a jihadist trying to make sense of the French signs. A misinterpretation of the word for “push” led the jihadist to ken a deeper meaning in the landing signs, as though each floor above the ground were a level of heaven, and riding the elevator up were a heavenly ascension. At ground level, the elevator offered “0 poussez,” for here on earth all the women were loose, and no virgins were to be found. But as the elevator ascended, the number of virgins increased: 1 poussez, 2 poussez,  3 poussez.... The jihadist’s apartment was on Floor 7, and he knew the building had only a couple more floors. There would have to be, he figured, over 60 more floors in order to satisfy his madrasa master’s promise of seventy virgins waiting to reward his martyrdom.
    Goines smiled again now as a word came to him: the jihadist seemed more pusillanimous than valorous.

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