Excerpt from Mixed City

   She was a scientist instructed to endorse what she couldn’t. She quit that lab.

   Or she would have gone mad, she reports, and we all see and know how that played out for her. This speaker can channel the temper of derealization, abysmal. Everyone present can access a related ordeal.

   We have all dealt with tests of this category. You are admonished to split from your wisdom and conscience. You are prompted to lock into the predatory mode, slavering, shortsighted.

   Alternatively you are stalked by a predator, whereupon you get the urge for going and respond, unless you’re trained to submit. Habituated in arrested urges, you assume the constricted position automatically, or you are all too aware.

   An inflective moment isn’t always recognizable. She identified hers. A scientist inhabits a horrific portal, and withdraws. She will not cross over. In our home she voices her gratitude for the husband more concerned for his wife and humanity than for the steady household income. Naturally our dinner party will develop the theme of investor class power.

   When I say that we are living in a very dark chapter, plain that they know I am not talking only about the medical industry. In this manner we advance organically toward the crucial conversation they cue from the get-go.

From a developing book of nonfiction by Naama Goldstein