including their spouses and children and the cities they lived in. It seemed he’d been paying very close attention to everything going on around him over the years. But before long, he diverged into fantasy, almost like swerving off a highway and going off-road.
“I underwrote the Academy falconry system,” he said. “The mascot. I started that. I’m an architect out that way, too. I designed the cadet chapel. Our Lady of the Lords built it, but she did it at my design, to thank me for something I did.”
He said Don and Mimi were not his real parents—that he was actually born five years earlier than it says on his birth certificate, and not in America but in Ireland, to a different family, also named Galvin. “My parents used the name Galvin, but they didn’t come from the Galvins,” he said. When his actual parents died, he said, he came to live in this family.
He referred to Mimi as his wife, and to his late father as “her husband.” Don Galvin, the man who raised him, was “a saint,” he said, “a neurosurgeon” who trained him in the field. But Donald chose a different path.
“I became a biological scientist, and a scientist in all fields of medicine. I have ninety thousand professions I could do, but I’ve done six thousand and six myself.”
His favorite, he said, was “falconry.”
In all of his stories, Donald seemed heavily invested in being the head of the family—the role designed for him before he got sick, and the role he cannot take on now except in his most Freudian daydreams. In these fantasies, Donald isn’t just in charge, he is superhumanly potent. Donald said he sired every single member of his family, except for the ones he doesn’t like: Peter, for instance, was what he calls a “swapped child.” So was Matt. His siblings were his progeny, but not in a sexual way. He inseminated and created—“bred” was the word he used—his children by something he called the “American Wince,” in which he just stared at someone in the right way and his seed would be spread to them.
“The way they do it is they think of their testicles, they lock in the head, and they move their eyes like this.” He squinted sharply, for a split second. “It’s called wince. The American Wince. And it gives the Dick Tracy seed—travels through the woman’s eye, and mathematizes, drops down to the womb. You fill the whole body with the seed by math. And it drives in. That’s how children come rightly.”
When asked, Donald talked briefly about the priest he said molested him. “He was dastardly, and he was paid to hurt me,” he said. He said he did not know if the priest abused anyone else, and that it happened to him just once. He seemed pretty sanguine about it now. “I got damaged and scarred and got over it. Nature heals itself.”
He mentioned the medicine he must take, but that discussion spun off, too. “I’m appreciative of that,” he said. “The medicine’s for staph infections, for living in groups. Haldol is for living in the hallway with people. I’m a pharmacist. As an architect, I put nine thousand new pharmacies in America. So that’s why I get to be a pharmacist, taking the pills. The Chinese government has challenged me to take a chance with me on that, so we can have some world conquest and pharmacy for all people. That’s why I like China. I’m a neurophysiology chemist. That’s what I do in my scientific field, as a scientist.”
Donald smiled. So did Mimi, haplessly.
“Yeah,” Donald said. “Life goes on, doesn’t it?”
* * *
On July 13, 2017, Lindsay was in Colorado Springs for the day to help Matt. A few weeks earlier, he’d totaled his old truck, and now he needed a ride to his appointments. She took him to get his blood drawn, then to the pharmacist to pick up his clozapine, then to Matt’s clinic for the proper clearance for the prescription, then back to the pharmacy. And then more errands—deliveries to two disabled friends who had relied on him for help, as long as he’d had the truck.
After dropping Matt back at his apartment,