Chapter 1

"You weighted one-hundred and sixty pounds. You were five slugs."

The voice oscillates like gravel falling to earth, and as it falls silent a balance realigns. His eyes snap open, he feels his heartbeat as if for the first time, sharp, irregular, and he sees an old woman in orange robes typing something into her smartphone. He gasps for air. Slowly, her gaze shifts from the phone to his own. She stares at his eyes as though they were computer screens.

"Quintus tardus. I do hope that's proper Latin. You can never tell with these online dictionaries, you see. All they can guarantee is mostly right. I'm going to call you Quint; I'll know what it stands for."

"Who are you?" he asks, breaking eye contact and coughing slightly. Each breath is conscious, the air burning his lungs.

"Searching for answers isn't the same as it used to be," mutters the old woman, almost inaudibly. Her gaze is back on her phone. Her face is wrinkled. The walls are white. His nose feels clogged.

"Who are you?" He repeats, sitting up in his bed. The covers fall off his body. His robes are blue. She tilts her head towards him like a bird, or perhaps a child. "Are you a doctor? A monk?" His own voice, scratched, raw, distorted.

"Neither," she says. "I'm a psychologist," she adds. An afterthought.

He stares up into the soft fluorescent lights until he closes his eyes. He hears footsteps, a door opening.

In the upper-right corner of his right eye a red spot glows; different from the red of light that filtered through the eyelids. More real. With his eyes open it persists, exists, drifting lazily in and out of his peripheral vision. Could he distinguish between a fault of the eye and a fault of the brain? Could he feel it? The old woman is nowhere to be seen. He dreamed she muttered in his ear as he slept, poisoning his thoughts, fogging his memory. After thought, he thought, comes the afterthought, and before thought, the afterthought. No beginning, no end. His mind relaxes, drifts.

The old woman stops by with a loaf of bread and a bottle of water. She closes the door behind her. He has no strength, but when she hands him a slice of bread his hands feed him and when she gives him the bottle he nearly drowned himself. This bottle will outlast me, he thinks, scientifically. How I feel is how I think, he decides. The way she watches him is familiar, as if she knows what to expect of him. As if he knows what to expect of her. But sensation is fallible. The blade of the bread knife is jagged like waves. When she wields it, the knife is an extension of her arm. His thoughts are as syrup, forming chains and trains with no forward momentum, contained, trapped, twisting and looping like boomerangs, ellipses.

"I don't wear socks, so I want you to call me Socks," said the old woman. "Easy to remember, right?"

"You don't wear socks?"

"What else can you remember?"

"I don't know," he told her. She shook her head. "I'm serious," he said, he wanted to laugh at the impossibility of explanation. "I really can't."

"Can you remember your dreams?"

"My dreams?" Bits and pieces, currents and eddies. Drifting.

"Tell me about your dreams, Anton." Her voice reverberated.

"Weren't you going to call me Quint?" In his dream, she called him Anton.

"I felt like being formal."

"What kind of psychologist are you?"

"Yours."

"Can you tell me why I'm here?"

"Your business."

"Why are you here?"

"My business."

"So I'm crazy."

"You're not crazy."

As silence fills the room, his energy ebbs, his attention fades.

"Home," he tells her.

"Don't worry, you sound better already," the psychologist tells him. "You almost died, you know." She pulls a tin of chewing tobacco out of her robes then shakes the tin violently. She twists the top of the tin open, daintily grasped a generous portion between her index finger and thumb, and packed her lip. All things, he thought, must happen in a certain order.

"Oh!" she smacks the tin against her forehead. "Clean forgot, be right back." Had she replaced the top of the tin? She must have. The psychologist left the room, leaving the door open behind her. He stares into the hallway. It stretches out, not quite infinite. He closes his eyes. What would it mean, to see infinity? Nothing is infinite, he thought. An illusion. Except absence. Absence was a void, infinity was the void. Everything and nothing, the same thing? The clarity of the senses defied logic. The bed is plain and wooden, the mattress firm against his back. The sheets are clean, but his body reeks of sweat. He recognizes the floral wallpaper. White flowers on white background. Hard on the eyes, he had said. In his dream there is a younger voice, and red sand in the breeze that forces the eyes shut.

He rises to his feet and starts towards the open door. He needs to use the bathroom, he realizes. He doesn't step into the hallway. He sniffs: the hallway smells sterile enough to be a hospital. What does my room smell like? he wonders, briefly. A truly white corridor: marble floors and painted wooden doors adorned with whiteboards. The markers have black caps. No erasers. But he can use his hands to wipe the board clean, he remembers. Or a sponge, with water.

He can't remember where the bathroom is. Slugs, she'd said. A psychologist? There was more to him than quantity. What did she want from him? Help is all people ever want from each other, he decides. But what was help? Infinite, relative. None of it mattered. He crosses his legs, shaking himself gently from side to side.

He closes his eyes. The world is silent, the air still, and he is pure sensation, a being of feeling, a network of electricity. The thought of death is impossible, too terrible, a welcome distraction. He hears footsteps echoing in the hallway, then a door closing. His door. He opens his eyes. There weren't any windows in his room. Perhaps he'd noticed before and forgotten, then noticed he'd forgotten before forgetting he noticed. Moments pass, one after the other, memory illustrating, time illuminating. If I could live forever, he thought, I wouldn't need to remember anything. An eternal moment.