=The Chinese Lunatics=

This story is pure action, a thrill-a-minute. Unfortunately, it centers on the absolute pointlessness of human life. The setting is pretty depressing: a Chinese lunatic asylum. That's where we meet our hero, an old surgeon, well past his prime, a committed nihilist who lost his license to practice in the United States. Why bother to give him a name if he's the first one to assert that there's no point to anything? No one really expects patients in a mental hospital to get better so the Chinese lunatics don't suffer too much from his negative attitude. The real problem is the economy. Like so many things, including mental illness, it's outside the reach of human control, though no one likes to admit it. So how do things happen? Who's really pulling the strings? From our perspective, they would seem like beings from a magical race outside the laws of cause and effect. Why is it so hard for us to accept this? What is the difference between not believing this and being a nihilist? That evening the surgeon writes in his journal: "Half the people here think they're Satan; the other half think they're Christ. In effect, it's Armageddon every day." In effect, at that very moment, they were burning the place to the ground. The surgeon would have to shoot his way out of the parking lot when his shift ended. He kept his eye on the clock, waiting for quitting time. He writes in his journal: "It never arrives."