Hard Rain Falling (New York Review Books Classics)

by Don Carpenter

They did not feed him every day, and because of that he had no way of knowing how much time had passed. After a while time ceased to exist. Time stopped in a strange way. First, he was aware that there was no present, no such thing as a moment; there was only the movement of his thoughts from past to future, from what had happened to what would happen. Then what had happened ceased to be real, as if his mind had invented a past his body could not remember; his senses were betraying him into dreams and the dreams eventually lost all contact with the senses. At first, he could not see because there was no light in his cell; then that became a delusion, and he could not see because he could not see, and then even that lost its reality, and he could not see because there was nothing to see, and never had been—his mind had tricked him into believing that there were colors and shapes, and he knew that there were no such things. At times, all his senses deserted him, and he could not feel the coldness of the concrete or smell his excrement, and the small sounds he made and the sounds