The Speed of Dark

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Light. Dark. Light. Dark. Light and dark. Edge of light on dark. Movement. Noise. Noise again. Movement. Cold and warm and hot and light and dark and rough and smooth, cold, TOO COLD and PAIN and warm and dark and no pain. Light again. Movement. Noise and louder noise and TOO LOUD COW MOOING. Movement, shapes against the light, sting, warm back to dark.

Light is day. Dark is night. Day is get up now it is time to get up. Night is lie down be quiet sleep.

Get up now, sit up, hold out arms. Cold air. Warm touch. Get up now, stand up. Cold on feet. Come on now walk. Walk to place is shiny is cold smells scary. Place for making wet or dirty, place for making clean. Hold out arms, feel sliding on skin. Sliding on legs. Cold air all over. Get in shower, hold on rail. Rail cold. Scary noise, scary noise. Don’t be silly. Stand still. Things hitting, many things hitting, wet sliding, too cold then warm then too hot. All right, it’s all right. Not all right. Yes, yes, stand still. Slurpy feeling, sliding all over. Clean. Now clean. More wet. Time come out, stand. Rubbing all over, skin warm now. Put on clothes. Put on pants, put on shirt, put on slippers. Time to walk. Hold this. Walk.

Place to eat. Bowl. Food in bowl. Pick up spoon. Spoon in food. Spoon in mouth. No, hold spoon right. Food all gone. Food fall. Hold still. Try again. Try again. Try again. Spoon in mouth, food in mouth. Food taste bad. Wet on chin. No, don’t spit out. Try again. Try again. Try again.

Shapes moving people. People alive. Shapes not moving not alive. Walking, shapes change. Not alive shapes change little. Alive shapes change a lot. People shapes have blank place at top. People say put on clothes, put on clothes, get good. Good is sweet. Good is warm. Good is shiny pretty. Good is smile, is name for face pieces move this way. Good is happy voice, is name for sound like this. Sound like this is name talking. Talking tells what to do. People laugh, is best sound. Good for you, good for you. Good food is good for you. Clothes is good for you. Talking is good for you.

People more than one. People is names. Use names is good for you, happy voice, shiny pretty, even sweet. One is Jim, good morning time to get up and get dressed. Jim is dark face, shiny on top head, warm hands, loud talking. More than one two is Sally, now here’s breakfast you can do it isn’t it good? Sally is pale face, white hair on top head, not loud talking. Amber is pale face, dark hair on top head, not loud as Jim louder than Sally.

Hi Jim. Hi Sally. Hi Amber.

Jim say get up. Hi Jim. Jim smile. Jim happy I say Hi Jim. Get up, go to bathroom, use toilet, take off clothes, go in shower. Reach for wheel thing. Jim say Good for you and shut door. Turn wheel thing. Water. Soap. Water. Feel good. All feel good. Open door. Jim smile. Jim happy I take shower by self. Jim hold towel. Take towel. Rub all over. Dry. Dry feel good. Wet feel good. Morning feel good.

Put on clothes, walk to breakfast. Sit at table with Sally. Hi Sally. Sally smile. Sally happy I say Hi Sally. Look around Sally say. Look around. More tables. Other people. Know Sally. Know Amber. Know Jim. Not know other people. Sally ask Are you hungry. Say yes. Sally smile. Sally happy I say yes. Bowl. Food in bowl cereal. Sweet on top is fruit. Eat sweet on top, eat cereal, say Good, good. Sally smile. Sally happy I say Good. Happy because Sally happy. Happy because sweet is good.

Amber say time to go. Hi Amber. Amber smile. Amber happy I say Hi Amber. Amber walk to working room. I walk to working room. Amber say sit there. I sit there. Table in front. Amber sit other side. Amber say time to play game. Amber put thing on table. What is this, Amber ask. It is blue. I say blue. Amber say That is color, what is thing? I want to touch. Amber say no touch, just look. Thing is funny shape, wrinkly. Blue. I sad. Not know is not good, no good for you, no sweet, no shiny pretty.

Don’t be upset, Amber say. Okay, okay. Amber touch Amber box. Then say You can touch. I touch. It is part of clothes. It is shirt. It is too small for me. Too small. Amber laugh. Good for you, here sweet, it is a shirt and it is way too small for you. Shirt for doll. Amber take shirt for doll and put down another thing. Also funny shape, wrinkly black. Not touch, just look. If wrinkly blue thing shirt for doll, wrinkly black thing something for doll? Amber touch. Thing lies flatter. Two things stick out bottom, one thing at top. Pants. I say Pants for doll. Amber makes big smile. Good for you, really good. Sweet thing for you. Touches Amber box.

Lunchtime. Lunch is food in day between breakfast and supper. Hi Sally. It looks good Sally. Sally is happy I say that. Food is gooey between bread slices and fruit and water to drink. Food feels good in mouth. This is good Sally. Sally is happy I say that. Sally smile. More Good for you and good for you. Like Sally. Sally nice.

After lunch is Amber and crawl on floor follow line, or stand on floor one foot up then other foot up. Amber crawl too. Amber stand on one foot, fall over. Laugh. Laugh feel good like shaking all over. Amber laugh. More good for you. Like Amber.

After crawl on floor is more game on table. Amber put things on table. Not know names. No names, Amber say. See this: Amber touches black thing. Find another one, Amber say. Look at things. One other thing same. Touch. Amber smile. Good for you. Amber put black thing and white thing together. Do like that, Amber say. Scary. Not know. Okay, okay, Amber say. Okay to not know. Amber not smile. Not okay. Find black thing. Look. Find white thing. Put together. Amber smile now. Good for you.

Amber put three things togetuer. Do like that, Amber say. I look. One thing is black, one is white with black place, one is red with yellow place. Look. Put down black thing. Find white thing with black place, put down. Then find red with yellow place, put down. Amber touch Amber box. Then Amber touch Amber things: red in middle, Amber say. Look. Did wrong. Red on end. Move. Good for you, Amber say. Really good work. Happy. Like make Amber happy. Good happy together.

Other people come. One in white coat, see before, not know name except Doctor. One man in sweater with many colors and tan pants.

Amber say Hi Doctor to one in white coat. Doctor talk to Amber, say This is friend of his, on the list. Amber look at me, then at other man. Man look at me. Not look happy, even with smile.

Man say Hi Lou I’m Tom.

Hi, Tom, I say. He does not say Good for you. You are doctor, I say.

Not a medical doctor, Tom say. Not know what not a medical doctor means.

Amber say Tom is on your list, for visiting. You knew him before.

Before what? Tom not look happy. Tom look very sad.

Not know Tom, I say. Look at Amber. Is wrong to not know Tom?

Have you forgotten everything from before? Tom ask.

Before what? Question bothers me. What I know is now. Jim, Sally, Amber, Doctor, where is bedroom, where is bathroom, where is place to eat, where is workroom.

It’s okay, Amber says. We’ll explain later. It’s okay. You’re doing fine.

Better go now, says Doctor. Tom and Doctor turn away.

Before WHAT?

Amber puts down another row and says Do what I did.

“I told you it was too soon,” Dr. Hendricks said, once they were back in the corridor. “I told you he wouldn’t remember you.”

Tom Fennell glanced back through the one-way window. Lou — or what had been Lou — smiled at the therapist who was working with him and picked up a block to add to the pattern he was copying. Grief and rage washed over Torn at the memory of Lou’s blank look, the meaningless little smile that had gone with, “Hi, Tom.”

“It would only distress him to try to explain things now,” Hendricks said. “He couldn’t possibly understand.”

Tom found his voice again, though it didn’t sound like his own. “You — do you have the slightest idea what you’ve done?” He held himself still with great effort; he wanted to strangle this person who had destroyed his friend.

“Yes. He’s really doing well.” Hendricks sounded indecently happy with herself. “Last week he couldn’t do what he’s doing now.”

Doing well. Sitting there copying block patterns was not Tom’s definition of doing well. Not when he remembered Lou’s startling abilities. “But… but pattern analysis and pattern generation was his special gift—”

“There have been profound changes in the structure of his brain,” Dr. Hendricks said. “Changes are still going on. It’s as if his brain reversed in age, became an infant brain again in some ways. Great plasticity, great adaptive ability.”

Her smug tone grated on him; she clearly had no doubts about what she had done. “How long is this going to take?” he asked.

Hendricks did not shrug, but the pause might have been one. “We do not know. We thought — we hoped, perhaps I should say — that with the combination of genetic and nanotechnology, with accelerated neural growth, the recovery phase would be shorter, more like that seen in the animal model. The human brain is, however, immeasurably more complex—”

“You should have known that going in,” Tom said. He didn’t care that his tone was accusatory. He wondered how the others were doing, tried to remember how many there’d been. Only two other men had been in the room, working with other therapists. Were the others all right or not? He didn’t even know their names.

“Yes.” Her mild acceptance irritated him even more.

“What were you thinking—”

“To help. Only to help. Look—” She pointed at the window and Tom looked.

The man with Lou’s face — but not his expression — set aside the completed pattern and looked up with a smile to the therapist across the table. She spoke — Tom could not hear the words through the glass, but he could see Lou’s reaction, a relaxed laugh and a slight shake of the head. It was so unlike Lou, so strangely normal, that Tom felt his breath come short.

“His social interactions are already more normal. He’s easily motivated by social cues; he enjoys being with people. A very pleasant personality, even though still infantile at this point. His sensory processing seems to have normalized; his preferred range of temperatures, textures, flavors, and so on is now within normal limits. His language use improves daily. We’ve been lowering the doses of anxiolytics as function improves.”

“But his memories—”

“No way to tell yet. Our experience with restoring lost memories in the psychotic population suggests that both the techniques we’ll be using work to a degree. We made multisensory recordings, you know, and those will be reinserted. For the present we’ve blocked access with a specific biochemical agent — proprietary, so don’t even ask — which we’ll be filtering out in the next few weeks. We want to be sure we have a completely stable substrate of sensory processing and integration before we do that.”

“So you don’t know if you’ll be able to give him back his previous life?”

“No, but we’re certainly hopeful. And he won’t be worse off than someone who loses memory through trauma.” What they’d done to Lou could be called trauma, Tom thought. Hendricks went on. “After all, people can adapt and live independently without any memory of their past, as long as they can relearn necessary daily living and community living skills.”

“What about cognitive?” Tom managed to say in a level voice. “He seems pretty impaired right now, and he was near genius level before.”

“Hardly that, I think,” Dr. Hendricks said. “According to our tests, he was safely above average, so even if he lost ten or twenty points, it wasn’t going to put his ability to live independently in jeopardy. But he wasn’t a genius, by any means.” The prim certainty in her voice, the cool dismissal of the Lou he had known, seemed worse than deliberate cruelty.

“Did you know him — or any of them — before?” Tom asked.

“No, of course not. I met them once, but it would have been inappropriate for me to know them personally. I have their test results, and the interviews and memory recordings are all held by the rehab team psychologists.”

“He was an extraordinary man,” Tom said. He looked at her face and saw nothing but pride in what she was doing and impatience at having been interrupted. “I hope he will be again.”

“He will, at least, not be autistic,” she said, as if that justified everything else.

Tom opened his mouth to say autistic wasn’t that bad and shut it again. No use arguing with someone like her, at least not here and now, and it was too late for Lou anyway. She was Lou’s best hope of recovery — the thought made him shiver involuntarily.

“You should come back when he’s better,” Dr. Hendricks said. “Then you can better appreciate what we’ve accomplished. We’ll call you.” His stomach churned at the thought, but he owed Lou that much.

Outside, Tom zipped up his coat and pulled on his gloves. Did Lou even know it was winter? He had seen no exterior windows anywhere in the unit. The gray afternoon, closing in to dark, with dirty slush underfoot, matched his mood.

He cursed medical research all the way home.

I am sitting at a table, facing a stranger, a woman in a white coat. I have the feeling that I have been here a long time, but I do not know why. It is like thinking about something else while driving and suddenly being ten miles down the road without knowing what really happened between.

It is like waking up from a daze. I am not sure where I am or what I am supposed to be doing.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I must’ve lost track for a moment. Could you say that again?”

She looks at me, puzzled; then her eyes widen slightly.

“Lou? Do you feel okay?”

“I feel fine,” I say. “Maybe a little foggy…”

“Do you know who you are?”

“Of course,” I say. “I’m Lou Arrendale.” I don’t know why she thinks I wouldn’t know my own name.

“Do you know where you are?” she asks.

I look around. She has a white coat; the room looks vaguely like a clinic or school. I’m not really sure.

“Not exactly,” I say. “Some kind of clinic?”

“Yes,” she says. “Do you know what day it is?”

I suddenly realize that I don’t know what day it is. There is a calendar on the wall, and a big clock, but although the month on display is February, that does not feel right. The last I remember is something in the fall.

“I don’t,” I say. I am beginning to feel scared. “What happened? Did I get sick or have an accident or something?”

“You had brain surgery,” she says. “Do you remember anything about it?”

I don’t. There is a dense fog when I try to think about it, dark and heavy. I reach up to feel my head. It does not hurt. I do not feel any scars. My hair feels like hair.

“How do you feel?” she asks.

“Scared,” I say. “I want to know what happened.”

I have been standing and walking, they tell me, for a couple of weeks, going where I am told, sitting where I am told. Now I am aware of that; I remember yesterday, though the days before are fuzzy.

In the afternoons, I have physical therapy. I was in bed for weeks, not able to walk, and that made me weak. Now I am getting stronger.

It’s boring, walking up and down the gym. There’s a set of steps with a railing, to practice going up and down steps, but that is soon boring, too. Missy, my physical therapist, suggests that we play a ball game. I don’t remember how to play, but she hands me a ball and asks me to throw it to her. She is sitting only a few feet away. I toss her the ball, and she tosses it back. It’s easy. I back up and toss the ball again. That’s easy, too. She shows me a target that will chime if I hit it. It is easy to hit from ten feet away; at twenty feet I miss a few times, then hit it every time.

Even though I don’t remember much of the past, I don’t think I spent my time tossing a ball back and forth with someone. Real ball games, if real people play them, must be more complicated than this.

This morning I woke up feeling rested and stronger. I remembered yesterday and the day before and something from the day before that. I was dressed before the orderly, Jim, came to check on me, and walked down to the dining room without needing directions. Breakfast is boring; they have only hot and cold cereal, bananas, and oranges. When you’ve had hot with bananas, hot with oranges, cold with bananas, and cold with oranges, that’s it. When I looked around, I recognized several people though it took me a minute to think of their names. Dale. Eric. Cameron. I knew them before. They were also in the treatment group. There were more; I wondered where they are.

“Man, I’d love some waffles,” Eric said when I sat down at the table. “I am so tired of the same old thing.”

“I suppose we could ask,” Dale said. He meant “but it won’t do any good.”

“It’s probably healthy,” Eric said. He was being sarcastic; we all laughed.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted, but it was not the same old cereal and fruit. Vague memories of foods I’d liked wafted through my head. I wondered what the others remembered; I knew that I knew them in some way, but not how.

We all have various therapies in the morning: speech, cognitive, skills of daily living. I remembered, though not clearly, that I’d been doing this every morning for a long time.

This morning, it seemed incredibly boring. Questions and directions, over and over. Lou, what is this? A bowl, a glass, a plate, a pitcher, a box… Lou, put the blue glass in the yellow basket — or the green bow on the red box, or stack the blocks, or something equally useless. The therapist had a form, which she made marks on. I tried to read the title of it, but its hard to read upside down like that. I think I used to do that easily. I read the labels on the boxes instead: DIAGNOSTIC MANIPULATIVES: SET 1, DAILY LIVING SKILLS MANIPULATIVES: SET 2.

I look around the room. We weren’t all doing the same thing, but we were all working one-on-one with a therapist. All the therapists have white coats on. All of them have colored clothes underneath the white coats. Four computers sit on desks across the room. I wonder why we never use them. I remember now what computers are, sort of, and what I can do with them. They are boxes full of words and numbers and pictures, and you can make them answer questions. I would rather have a machine answer questions than me answer questions.

“Can I use the computer?” I ask Janis, my speech therapist.

She looks startled. “Use the computer? Why?”

“This is boring,” I say. “You keep asking silly questions and telling me to do silly things; it’s easy.”

“Lou, it’s to help you. We need to check your understanding—” She looks at me as if I were a child or not very bright.

“I know ordinary words; is that what you want to know?”

“Yes, but you didn’t when you first woke up,” she says. “Look, I can switch to a higher level—” She pulls out another test booklet. “Let’s see if you’re ready for this, but if it’s too hard don’t worry about it…”

I’m supposed to match words to the right pictures. She reads the words; I look at the pictures. It is very easy; I finish in just a couple of minutes. “If you let me read the words, it’ll be faster,” I say.

She looks surprised again. “You can read the words?”

“Of course,” I say, surprised at her surprise. I am an adult; adults can read. I feel something uneasy inside, a vague memory of not being able to read the words, of letters making no sense, being only shapes like any other shapes. “Didn’t I read, before?”

“Yes, but you didn’t read right away after,” she says. She hands me another list and the page of pictures. The words are short and simple: tree, doll, truck, house, car, train. She hands me another list, this one of animals, and then one of tools. They are all easy.

“So my memory is coming back,” I say. “I remember these words and these things…”

“Looks like it,” she says. “Want to try some reading comprehension?”

“Sure,” I say.

She hands me a thin booklet. The first paragraph is a story about two boys playing ball. The words are easy; I am reading it aloud, as she asked me to do, when I suddenly feel like two people reading the same words and getting a different message. I stop between “base” and “ball.”

“What?” she asks when I have said nothing for a moment.

“I — don’t know,” I say. “It feels funny.” I don’t mean funny ha-ha, but funny peculiar. One self understands that Tim is angry because Bill broke his bat and won’t admit it; the other self understands that Tim is angry because his father gave him the bat. The question below asks why Tim is angry. I do not know the answer. Not for sure.

I try to explain it to the therapist. “Tim didn’t want a bat for his birthday; he wanted a bicycle. So he could be angry about that, or he could be angry because Bill broke the bat his father gave him. I don’t know which he is; the story doesn’t give me enough information.”

She looks at the booklet. “Hmm. The scoring page says that C is the right answer, but I understand your dilemma. That’s good, Lou. You picked up on social nuances. Try another.”

I shake my head. “I want to think about this,” I say. “I don’t know which self is the new self.”

“But, Lou—” she says.

“Excuse me.” I push back from the table and stand. I know it is rude to do that; I know it is necessary to do that. For an instant, the room seems brighter, every edge outlined sharply with a glowing line. It is hard to judge depth; I bump into the corner of the table. The light dims; edges turn fuzzy. I feel uneven, unbalanced… and then I am crouching on the floor, holding onto the table.

The table edge is solid under my hand; it is some composite with a fake wood-grain top. My eyes can see the wood grain, and my hand can feel the nonwood texture. I can hear air rushing through the room vents, and the air whooshing in my own airway, and my heart beating, and the cilia in my ears — how do I know they are cilia? — shifting in the streams of sound. Smells assault me: my own acrid sweat, the cleaning compound used on the floor, Janis’s sweet-scented cosmetics.

It was like this when I first woke up. I remember now: waking up, flooded in sensory data, drowning in it, unable to find any stability, any freedom from the overload. I remember struggling, hour by hour, to make sense of the patterns of light and dark and color and pitch and resonance and scents and tastes and textures…

It is vinyl tile flooring, pale gray with speckles of darker gray; it is a table of composite with wood-grain finish; it is my shoe that I am staring at, blinking away the seductive pattern of the woven canvas and seeing it as shoe, with a floor under it. I am in the therapy room. I am Lou Arrendale, who used to be Lou Arrendale the autistic and am now Lou Arrendale the unknown. My foot in my shoe is on the floor is on the foundation is on the ground is on the surface of a planet is in the solar system is in the galaxy is in the universe is in the mind of God.

I look up and see the floor stretching away to the wall; it wavers and steadies again, lying as flat as the contractors made it but not perfectly flat, but that does not matter; it is called flat by convention. I make it look flat. That is what flat is. Flat is not an absolute, a plane: flat is flat enough.

“Are you all right? Lou, please… answer me!”

I am all right enough. “I’m okay,” I say to Janis. Okay means “all right enough,” not “perfectly all right.” She looks scared. I scared her. I didn’t mean to scare her. When you scare someone, you should reassure them. “Sorry,” I say. “Just one of those moments.”

She relaxes a little. I sit up, then stand. The walls are not quite straight, but they are straight enough.

I am Lou enough. Lou-before and Lou-now, Lou-before lending me all his years of experience, experience he could not always understand, and Lou-now assessing, interpreting, reassessing. I have both — am both.

“I need to be alone for a while,” I tell Janis. She looks worried again. I know she’s worried about me; I know she doesn’t approve, for some reason.

“You need the human interaction,” she says.

“I know,” I say. “But I have hours of it a day. Right now I need to be alone and figure out what just happened.”

“Talk to me about it, Lou,” she says. “Tell me what happened.”

“I can’t,” I say. “I need time…” I take a step toward the door. The table changes shape as I walk past it; Janis’s body changes shape; the wall and door lurch toward me like drunken men in a comedy — where did I see that? How do I know? How can I remember that and also cope with the floor that is only flat enough, not flat? With an effort, I make the walls and door flat again; the elastic table springs back to the rectangular shape I should see.

“But, Lou, if you’re having sensory problems, they may need to adjust the dosage—”

“I’ll be fine,” I say, not looking back. “I just need a break.” The final argument: “I need to use the bathroom.”

I know — I remember, from somewhere — that what has happened involves sensory integration and visual processing. Walking is strange. I know I am walking; I can feel my legs moving smoothly. But what I see is jerky, one abrupt position after another. What I hear is footsteps and echoes of footsteps and reechoes of footsteps.

Lou-before tells me this is not how it was, not since he was tiny. Lou-before helps me focus on the door to the men’s toilets and get through it, while Lou-now rummages madly through memories of conversations overheard and books read trying to find something that will help.

The men’s toilet is quieter; no one else is there. Gleams of light race at my eyes from the smooth curving white porcelain fixtures, the shiny metal knobs and pipes. There are two cubicles at the far end; I go into one and close the door.

Lou-before notices the floor tiles and the wall tiles and wants to calculate the volume of the room. Lou-now wants to climb into a soft, dark place and not come out until morning.

It is morning. It is still morning and we — I — have not had lunch. Object permanence. What I need is object permanence. What Lou-before read about it in a book — a book he read, a book I do not quite remember but also do remember — comes back to me. Babies don’t have it; grownups do. People blind from birth, whose sight is restored, can’t learn it: they see a table morphing from one shape to another as they walk by.

I was not blind from birth. Lou-before had object permanence in his visual processing. I can have it, too. I had it, until I tried to read the story…

I can feel the pounding of my heart slow down, sink below awareness. I lean over, looking at the tiles of the floor. I don’t really care what size they are or about calculating the area of the floor or the volume of the room. I might do it if I were trapped here and bored, but at the moment I’m not bored. I’m confused and worried.

I do not know what happened. Brain surgery? I have no scars, no uneven hair growth. Some medical emergency?

Emotion floods me: fear and then anger, and with it a peculiar sensation that I am swelling and then shrinking. When I am angry, I feel taller and other things look smaller. When I am scared, I feel small and other things look bigger. I play with these feelings, and it is very strange to feel that the tiny cubicle around me is changing size. It can’t really be changing size. But how would I know if it were?

Music floods my mind suddenly, piano music. Gentle, flowing, organized sound… I squeeze my eyes shut, relaxing again. The name comes to me: Chopin. An etude. An etude is a study… no, let the music flow; don’t think.

I run my hands up and down my arms, feeling the texture of my skin, the springiness of the hairs. It is soothing, but I do not need to keep doing it.

“Lou! Are you in here? Are you all right?” It is Jim, the orderly who has taken care of me most days. The music fades, but I can feel it rippling under my skin, soothing.

“I’m fine,” I say. I can tell that my voice sounds relaxed. “I just needed a break, is all.”

“Better come out, buddy,” he says. “They’re startin’ to freak out here.”

Sighing, I stand up and unlatch the door. Object permanence retains its shape as I walk out; the walls and floor stay as flat as they should; the gleam of light off shiny surfaces doesn’t bother me. Jim grins at me. “You’re okay then, buddy?”

“Fine,” I say again. Lou-before liked music. Lou-before used music to steady him… I wonder how much of Lou-before’s music I could still remember.

Janis and Dr. Hendricks are waiting in the hall. I smile at them. “I’m fine,” I say. “I really did just need to go to the bathroom.”

“But Janis says you fell,” Dr. Hendricks says.

“Just a glitch,” I say. “Something about the confusion while reading sort of… made a confusion in the senses, but it’s gone now.” I look down the hall both ways to be sure. Everything seems fine. “I want to talk to you about what actually happened,” I say to Dr. Hendricks. “They said brain surgery, but I don’t have any scars that I can see. And I need to understand what’s going on in my brain.”

She purses her lips, then nods. “All right. One of the counselors will explain it to you. I can tell you that the kind of surgery we do now doesn’t involve cutting big holes in your head. Janis, set up an appointment for him.” Then she walks away.

I don’t think I like her very much. I sense that she is a person who keeps secrets.

When my counselor, a cheerful young man with a bright red beard, explains what they did, I am almost in shock. Why did Lou-before agree to this? How could he risk so much? I would like to grab him and shake him, but he is me now. I am his future, as he is my past. I am the light flung out into the universe, and he is the explosion from which I came. I do not say this to the counselor, who is very matter-of-fact and would probably think that is crazy. He keeps assuring me that I am safe and will be taken care of; he wants me to be calm and quiet. I am calm and quiet on the outside. Inside I am split between Lou-before, who is figuring out how that pattern on his tie was woven, and my current self, who wants to shake Lou-before and laugh in the counselor’s face and tell him that I do not want to be safe and taken care of. I am past that now. It is too late to be safe in the way he means safe, and I will take care of myself.

I am lying in bed with my eyes closed, thinking about the day. Suddenly I am suspended in space, in darkness. Far off tiny chips of light, many-colored. I know they are stars and the blurry ones are probably galaxies. Music starts, Chopin again. It is slow, thoughtful, almost sad. Something in E minor. Then some other music comes in, with a different feel: more texture, more strength, rising up under me like a wave on the ocean, only this wave is light.

Colors shift: I know, without analyzing it, that I am racing toward those distant stars, faster and faster, until the wave of light tosses me off and I fly faster yet, a dark perception, toward the center of space and time.

When I wake up, I am happier than I have ever been, and I do not know why.

The next time Tom comes, I recognize him and remember that he has been here before. I have so much to tell him, so much to ask him. Lou-before thinks Tom knew him better than just about anybody. If I could I would let Lou-before greet him, but that doesn’t work anymore. “We’ll be out in a few days,” I say. “I’ve already talked to my apartment manager; she’ll turn the power back on and get things ready.”

“You’re feeling all right?” he asks.

“Fine,” I say. “Thanks for coming all these times; I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you at first.”

He looks down; I can see tears in his eyes; he is embarrassed by them. “It’s not your fault, Lou.”

“No, but I know you worried,” I say. Lou-before might not have known that, but I do. I can see that Tom is a man who cares deeply about others; I can imagine how he felt when I didn’t know his face.

“Do you know what you’re going to do?” he asks.

“I wanted to ask you about signing up for night school,” I say. “I want to go back to college.”

“Good idea,” he says. “I can certainly help you with the admissions process. What are you going to study?”

“Astronomy,” I say. “Or astrophysics. I’m not sure which, but something like that. I’d like to go into space.”

Now he looks a little sad, and I can see he is forcing the smile that comes after. “I hope you get what you want,” he says. Then, as if he doesn’t want to be pushy, “Night school won’t give you much time for fencing,” he says.

“No,” I say. “I’ll just have to see how it works out. But I’ll come visit, if that’s okay.”

He looks relieved. “Of course, Lou. I don’t want to lose track of you.”

“I’ll be fine,” I say.

He cocks his head sideways, then shakes it once. “You know, I think you will. I really think you will.”