"Carl," Circe eventually said, "what are you doing?"
"You did it," I said, not moving my head from the table. "You killed me. I am literally dead right now. Your kid couldn't do it, but you pulled it off. You've succeeded in boring me to death."
Professor Jehannine Austin, an academic and researcher, leads a genetic counseling clinic for mental health in Vancouver. "Everybody has some genes that predispose to mental illness," she told me, but these are "a very, very long way away from causing anything... Literally what separates those of us who do suffer from those of us that don't is what happens to us during our lives."
You were meant to take the cannibalism literally, as well. At the time, a Christian could be burnt at the stake for denying the literal truth of transubstantiation. The communion wafer was actually turned into Jesus’ flesh. This change was effected by the priest taking the wafer and saying the magic words: ‘ Hoc est corpus meum : this is my body.’
Mr Koh was our team leader; taking responsibility was literally the first line in his job description. And yet he never, under any circumstances, took the blame for anything – even and especially when it mattered most.