The sounds continued uninterruptedly, a description beyond language of his agony. It chilled me, I had trouble breathing, as in a dream where someone is talking and you don’t understand. But here there was nothing to understand. I pushed back a lock of hair that had fallen onto his eyelid. He opened his eyes and stared at me, but these eyes were empty of all recognition. He had reached that private, closed space from which you never return to the surface, but from which he hadn’t sunk deeper yet. Like an animal, his body was struggling with what was happening to him, and these sounds—that’s
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