If I could imagine it might be interesting, I can’t, and had the energy, I don’t, I might, using some mechanism involving the number of times I’ve been knocked out, compose a record of my days. I can remember once reading about the consistent pattern of a saturated presence of low-grade fractures in the skull and clavicle area of ancient remains, and suspect that if by some chance my bones retain their integrity long enough for them to bear some anthropological interest if found by future researchers, the presiding scientist might draw the conclusion that he was dealing with some sort of anachronism, which is to say that, by my own reckoning, I’ve been knocked out — I’m not counting smacks here — upwards of a dozen times. Starting very early. Much too early. And it was of this that I thought when I came to — an image of myself, a little too small, having been struck and, some interval having passed, waking up. I woke up. It was the same room, same table, same, likely, chair, I thought. Although my recent interlocutor was gone, and in place of his chair, behind where he had sat, was a round mirror, in which, looking back, rather dull — an old man. Who regarded himself for a time. Then stood, collapsed, stood again, and walked out.
I would like to return now, in a manner of speaking, to the little house near the old part of the city where the woman lived. Follow me, she had said. It was to the little house that I followed her. On the way, though she didn’t blindfold me, she did ask me not to speak, as she had a slight headache and found my voice, which is a little high-pitched, grating. You could gag me, I said. I have asked you not to speak, she said. So we walked along in silence, or in as much silence as two old people can manage in navigating poorly maintained streets — one of them, not me, wheezing a little — with curbs of varying heights and pieces of loose stone and piles of sand. Once, having nearly fallen into one of these last, because of one of the penultimate, I cursed, though remembering her injunction I did not do so loudly. We had bumped into each other some distance from her house, and I took advantage of the time to continue thinking about my dream, and also about several other things that came to mind, one of which had to do with a dark airshaft I had once lived by and another of which had to do with the advantages, first for a perpetrator and then for an investigator, of being a ghost. This last, however, devolved into an internal debate on the practicality, with regard to one-on-one contact, of such a state, i.e., would a dead individual possessed both of sentience and some means of self-propulsion, in fact be able to satisfactorily conduct investigations, i.e., interview living individuals and relate conclusions or relevant observations to them? The dead individual might only, and with great effort, be able, when the guilty party’s name, for example, was mentioned in conversation, to knock over a vase, or produce some meaningful condensation, or partially appear, but who could predict how such interventions would be treated, or if they would receive any consideration at all? My sort of ghost, I concluded shortly before we arrived at her house, would most likely be the kind that, not deficient in self-awareness and some measure of intent, would lack a predictable means of locomotion, and so would have to rely, to carry out investigations, on such things as local wind currents and fluctuations in the magnetic field. Most likely, as I pictured it, my course would take on something of the aspect of an all-but-incapacitated butterfly, or a plastic bag caught in an updraft, adding dubious consistency to the air.