Chapter 10

When it finally started to get light, I wasn't sure if it really was, or if it was just my eyes playing tricks again.

There had been flashes like lightning off and on for what could have been hours.

All mixed up in a terrible storm, a sick.

I couldn't have stayed awake for if I'd tried.

Getting sapped always looked so easy in the pictures.

The detector takes a little bump on the back of his head,

and a little while later he stands up and gives his head a shake.

Maybe he blinks a few times for added realism,

then he gets on with his day.

It was a plot point, a narrative convenience.

Well, if that was true, it sure as hell wasn't my narrative, so whose wasn't?

See, when somebody scrambles your brains and does it good enough to put you out,

it is a serious thing that has just happened to your body.

Every engine of perception you possess to say nothing of propulsion, cognizance, or, simple self-preservation,

runs through that pile of jelly that just took a violent shake.

And it means nothing about you was going to work right again till all of those shockwaves quiet down.

At least that is how I choose to visualize it.

I am not a brain surgeon or any kind of doctor at all, but I have been hit in the head a lot, and it is from there that I draw my expertise.

I have no idea how long I'd been like this, but I was beginning to have a sense of time again,

an idea of myself as a person to whom other things sometimes happened,

and a perception that time was a thing that could be measured into questions like how long, even if I didn't have an answer.

...