It’s getting more fun to write, I’m less uptight about posting unedited AI, not worried anymore about wrong impressions readers might form about the story, or things evil minions of the entertainment industry will say about it. So this is a first attempt from weeks ago to address the issue of unconsciousness. It won’t be the final form but what the hell. I finally feel free to post any version of the story online I want.

One of my first memories had no morning.

That was the strange thing about it. There was no cereal, no school shoes, no cartoon voices from the den, no cold hallway under my feet. There was no beginning at all. I simply arrived in the afternoon, as if I had been delivered there by mistake, dropped into my own bed by some bored angel with a cigarette dangling from its mouth.

The curtains were closed, but not well. My mother had never learned to close curtains all the way. She always left a slit, a thin diplomatic opening through which the world could continue negotiations. A blade of yellow light lay across the carpet, bright as a ruler. Dust moved in it. Slow, golden, self-important dust, the way dust moves when adults have decided something and children are expected to live inside the decision.

My head hurt.

Not the ordinary hurt of fever, not the cottony misery of flu. It was a deep metallic pain, as if a bell had been rung somewhere inside my skull and the sound had become trapped there, traveling in circles. My mouth tasted like pennies. One side of my face felt too large. I remember touching my cheek and discovering tenderness without yet knowing what tenderness meant when it belonged to injury instead of affection.

My mother was sitting beside the bed in a dress and stockings, which struck me as wrong. She should have been in slacks if she was home with a sick child. She should have been soft, provisional, domestic. Instead she looked arranged. Her hair was done. Her lipstick was on. She had the posture of a woman waiting to be photographed beside a swimming pool she did not intend to enter.

“Oh, sweetheart,” she said, and leaned forward with too much brightness. “You’re awake.”

I asked what time it was.

“Afternoon,” she said.

That was all. Afternoon. As if afternoon were a country and I had been away on business.

I asked why I wasn’t at school.

“You were sick,” she said instantly. Too instantly. The answer came out like something rehearsed in another room. “You had a terrible spell this morning. You don’t remember?”

I did not remember. That was the trap, of course. The trap was shaped exactly like my ignorance.

She put her hand on my forehead, not to feel for fever but to confirm ownership of the scene. Her hand was cool and smelled faintly of perfume, face powder, and cigarettes she pretended not to smoke. “You were burning up. You scared me half to death.”

This was my mother’s gift, her great domestic talent: she could make her fear the central fact of your suffering. You could be the one in bed, the one with the wound, the one who had lost a chunk of the day, but somehow she had been frightened, she had been brave, she had endured. It was not cruelty exactly. Cruelty would have had a cleaner edge. This was more like theater with a velvet curtain dropped over a crime.

I believed her. Children believe the weather reports issued by their mothers. If she said fever, then fever had come. If she said I had moaned and thrashed and begged not to go to school, then some small stranger wearing my pajamas must have done so. I accepted the existence of that other boy. He was convenient. He could have all the parts of my life I couldn’t account for.

She gave me orange juice with a straw. I remember the straw had red stripes. I remember thinking it looked festive, and that seemed wrong too. My room smelled of aspirin and clean sheets, but beneath it there was another smell, sharper and masculine, like aftershave and anger. My father had a way of leaving anger behind him in the air. It clung to doorframes. It hid in ashtrays. It sat in the leather chair downstairs with its legs crossed.

“Where’s Dad?” I asked.

“At work,” she said.

But she looked toward the door when she said it.

That glance remained in me longer than the pain. For years it floated there unattached, a little scrap of film with no projector. My mother’s eyes moving to the door. Not fear, quite. Calculation. The quick animal mathematics of a woman deciding how much reality a child can be permitted to have.

Later, much later, I would understand that he had not gone to work that morning, not at first. He had been home. There had been shouting. There had been one of his lessons. Men like my father loved lessons. They believed existence was a military academy designed for their private convenience. They believed fear was discipline, discipline was love, and love was whatever remained after they had exhausted themselves.

I must have crossed him somehow. I must have stood in the wrong place, answered in the wrong tone, failed to become invisible quickly enough. There was always some law I had broken without being informed of its passage. The laws changed according to his blood pressure, his bourbon, his humiliation at whatever office or agency or secret little fraternity of dead-eyed patriots had failed to recognize his genius that week.

Years afterward, a memory returned in fragments: the kitchen floor shining under me; the white cabinet door open; my father’s belt buckle at the level of the sun; my mother saying his name, not as a protest but as a plea for moderation, as if violence were acceptable so long as it did not leave paperwork.

Rick.

That was all.

Rick.

Not stop.

Not don’t.

Not he’s a child.

Just his name, softly fired across the room like a warning shot at a dog.

And dog he was. Not a wolf, not a lion, not the dark emperor he imagined when he tightened his tie in the mirror and went off to do mysterious errands for mysterious men. A dog. A ridiculous dog of a husband, snarling at the furniture, pissing on the rug of the American Dream, then waiting to be praised for guarding the house.

My mother protected him from the truth the way some women protect antique silver from tarnish. She wrapped him in excuses. He was tired. He was under pressure. He had responsibilities no one understood. He loved us in his way. That was her favorite phrase, his way, as if love were a foreign country where assault and silence were local customs.

That afternoon, though, I knew none of this. I only knew the room was too still. I knew my mother was smiling with her mouth and not her eyes. I knew I had missed school and should have been happy, but instead felt as if school had continued somewhere without me, arithmetic, spelling, recess, all of it marching forward while I had fallen through a trapdoor.

“Will I go tomorrow?” I asked.

“We’ll see,” she said.

Another perfect adult answer. A door that looked open and led nowhere.

She stroked my hair. I let her. I loved her then with the helpless, devotional love of a child for the person who explains the world. Her hand moved slowly across my forehead, and for a moment I felt soothed. That is the worst part to remember. Not the injury. The comfort. The fact that the same hand that concealed the truth could feel like mercy.

She told me to sleep. She said sleep would make me better.

So I slept.

For many years that was the whole memory: afternoon, curtains, orange juice, my mother’s cool hand, the strange holiday of not going to school. I kept it in the wrong drawer, among ordinary childhood illnesses, chicken pox, sore throats, the sweet boredom of daytime television. Only later did the drawer begin to stink.

The body knew before I did. The body kept better records than the family. A flinch when a man raised his arm too quickly. A nausea at certain aftershaves. A hatred of closed curtains. The feeling, whenever I woke from a nap, that something had happened and everyone else had agreed not to mention it.

That was the real inheritance my parents gave me: not money, not manners, not the good schools, not the polished shoes lined up by the door like obedient little coffins. They gave me discontinuity. They gave me the sense that consciousness itself could be edited by committee. They gave me a childhood with missing reels, and then acted offended when I became obsessed with narrative.

Of course I became a writer. What else was I supposed to do? The official story had tried to murder the actual story in its crib. Someone had to go back into the afternoon and open the curtains.

When I think of that boy now, waking up alone in the yellow slit of light, I do not pity him exactly. Pity is too small. I want to sit beside him before she comes in. I want to say: You are not sick. You are injured. You are not confused. You have been confused by experts. The pain in your head is not proof of weakness. It is evidence.

But no one said that.

Instead my mother entered with orange juice and lipstick and a lie polished smooth enough for a child to swallow.

And I did swallow it.

That was the first magic trick I remember: a man knocks his son unconscious, a woman changes the name of the event, and by afternoon the house is respectable again.