The Speed of Dark

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…