I knew the dates of Rei’s and Nina’s birthdays. Was that a sufficient foundation for a personality? I could bring my wife’s face vividly to mind. My daughter’s too. The faces might stop me floating away, but they couldn’t make me feel like a “self” with any force or power of action. How could an amorphous blob will anything into being? How could it love? I was a vapor, an incoherent jumble of events inside a sack of skin.
