He had been “away,” “absent,” for an unconscionable time. Not in a sleep, not in a trance, but deeply submerged. And now that he had emerged, those years were a blank. It was not amnesia, not “disorientation”; his higher cerebral functions, his mind, had been “out” for seven years. How would he react to the knowledge that he had lost seven years, and that much of what was exciting, important, dear to him had passed irretrievably away? That he himself was no longer contemporary but a piece of the past, an anachronism, a fossil strangely preserved?
