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Show 258 now, because he was not otherwise in good spirits. He had never felt quite well since the night at Sister Heinmiller's bedside. Being no one's fool, he had heard of suggestibility, and for this reason when he awoke each morning with hollow knees and a feeling in his stomach that there lurked a bridge somewhere out there that he was going to have to throw himself from before night, he told himself it would go away when he stopped thinking ahout it. It did not go away, but at least it got no worse. The symptoms were unstable, which made the malaise hard to pin down. Sometimes it was a chill that began in his kidneys and spread upward the length of his back to his shoulders and down his chest. Sometimes it was a feeling, when he was trying to sleep, that worms were crawling up and down the bones of his legs. Sometimes it was a foul taste through his whole body, as though an organ had broken loose and lay rotting somewhere between folds in his viscera. Sometimes breath!essness so tightened his diaphragm that he could hardly utter an articulate sentence, as though adrenalin had rushed into his system and would not drain off. Sometimes it was shakiness in all his limbs as he climbed stairs or walked from one end of a room to another. Other times, when he felt all right physically, he found he disliked everybody who touched his life at any point. This included Sorenson, who was unusually naive at such times and therefore exasperating. It included Elder Zaret, who giggled like an idiot; Elder Beyer, the district president, who was self-righteous and smug; the mission president, who was a Utah politician out mending fences. It included Brigham Young, who had been a power-grabber and empire-builder and very probably a cunning old reprobate into the bargain; and Joseph Smith, who was a little weird. It included God and Jesus Christ, both of whom had caused a lot of trouble, and Noel and Yvonne and his old bishop and the fat model he had painted to give |