I don’t remember any bright figures, but I remember a strange period of time that was like being in a funhouse corridor where several different movies were showing at once.
I caught the measles when I was eight, and I was very ill. “I thought you were going to die,” my father told me once, and he was not a man given to exaggeration. He told me about how he and my mother had dunked me in a tub of cold water one night, both of them at least half-convinced the shock of it would stop my heart, but both of them completely convinced that I’d burn up before their eyes if they didn’t do something. I had begun to speak in a loud, monotonously discursive voice about the bright figures I saw in the room—angels come to bear me away, my terrified mother was sure—and the last time my father took my temperature before the cold plunge, he said that the mercury on the old Johnson & Johnson rectal thermometer had stood at a hundred and six degrees. After that, he said, he didn’t dare take it anymore.
I don’t remember any bright figures, but I remember a strange period of time that was like being in a funhouse corridor where several different movies were showing at once. The world grew elastic, bulging in places where it had never bulged before, wavering in places where it had always been solid. People—most of them seeming impossibly tall—darted in and out of my room on scissoring, cartoonish legs. Their words all came out booming, with instant echoes. Someone shook a pair of baby-shoes in my face. I seem to remember my brother, Siddy, sticking his hand into his shirt and making repeated arm-fart noises. Continuity broke down. Everything came in segments, weird wieners on a poison string.
