I am certain nobody in my family survived. I am certain they burned,
that their faces blackened and bubbled, just as did my own. But in their
case they did not recover, but perished. You are not one of them, you
cannot be, for if you were you would be dead. Why you choose to pretend
to be, and what you hope to gain from it: this is what interests me.
Now it is your turn to listen to me, to listen to my proofs, though I
know you will not be convinced. Imagine this: walking through the
countryside one day you come across a paddock. Lying there on their
sides, in the dust, unnaturally still, are four horses. All four are
prone, with no horses standing. They do not breathe and do not, as far
as you can see, move. They are, to all appearances, dead. And yet, on
the edge of the paddock, not twenty yards distant, a man fills their
trough with water. Are the horses alive and appearances deceptive? Has
the man simply not yet turned to see that the horses are dead? Or has he
been so shaken by what he has seen that he doesn’t know what to do but
proceed as if nothing has happened?
If you turn and walk hurriedly on, leaving before anything decisive
happens, what do the horses become for you? They remain both alive and
dead, which makes them not quite alive, nor quite dead.
And what, in turn, carrying that paradoxical knowledge in your head, does that make you?
I do not think of myself as special, as anything but ordinary. I
completed a degree at a third-tier university housed in the town where I
grew up. I graduated safely ensconced in the middle of my class. I
found passable employment in the same town. I met a woman, married her,
had children with her—three or perhaps four, there is some disagreement
on that score—and then the two of us fell gradually and gently out of
love.
Then came an incident at work, an accident, a so-called freak one. It
left me with a broken skull and, for a short time, a certain amount of
confusion. I awoke in an unfamiliar place to find myself strapped down.
It seemed to me—I will admit this too—it seemed for some time, hours at
least, perhaps even days, that I was not in a hospital at all, but in a
mental facility.
But my wife, faithful and everpresent, slowly soothed me into a
different understanding of my circumstances. My limbs, she insisted,
were restrained simply because I had been delirious. Now that I no
longer was, the straps could be loosened. Not quite yet, but soon. There
was nothing to worry about. I just had to calm down. Soon, everything
would return to normal.
