Norman sat on the bunk opposite Harry and watched as Harry drank. Harry was demonstrating a rather typical manifestation of shock: the agitation, the irritability, the nervous, manic flow of ideas, the unexplained fears for the safety of others—it was all characteristic of shocked victims of severe accidents, such as major auto crashes or airplane crashes. Given an intense event, the brain struggled to assimilate, to make sense, to reassemble the mental world even as the physical world was shattered around it. The brain went into a kind of overdrive, hastily trying to reassemble things, to get
...more
