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would jar loose the obstructed flow of identity and self. The first envelope contained information about my 401K contributions at the Center for Energetic Materials in Socorro, New Mexico.
    Which meant that I could have lived in Socorro, or any number of neighboring hamlets .
    I studied the letterhead. The Center for Energetic Materials .
    The next letter was from another bank. And the third was addressed to a place called the Prudentiacapex in New York – which didn’t have a return address.
    While moving as slowly as I could, I opened the envelope, but it was empty – Just a blank piece of paper neatly folded in thirds. There were at least a half dozen more envelopes, but they were all addressed to the same place in New York, with a blank piece of paper inside. I pushed the pile onto the floor and laid back, trying to gather some strength for a walk to the bathroom. My chest still smoldered, and the tight outer edges kept catching on the loose, fibrous curtilage of my bandage.
    Time passed. I held my chest, not wanting to upset the grafts on which the skin decided to heal, and when I came out of my reverie, the wall–screen flickered Bible passages above an address to a place that I was supposed to send donations. I flipped it off, grabbed my ointment and pain–killers, and made the arduous journey upstairs in hopes of finding a bed.
    There were three rooms – two of which seemed entirely unused, and the third was a mess, with what appeared to be my wardrobe scattered all over the floor; the bed was unmade, just as I probably left it the morning before the experiment.
    I was warm, so I opened the window to let the air in. Then I pulled off my clothes and lay down, settling into a nice, deep groove in the mattress, and the inflamed sensation around my burn eventually mellowed. The curtains were open, so the full moon spilled into the window. I wasn’t very tired. And like my mind normally does before sleep, it started racing through the events after waking up in the hospital. I couldn’t remember how I instantly ended up on my couch the moment Joseph’s car hit the water. The last thing I saw was Patrick covering his face as we were pulled toward the windshield, just before the water flooded the passenger cabin, and then–
    –I was there, on my couch.
    It should seem that my home would have evoked senses of comfort and memory, as I reinserted myself into a normal flow of things. I figured that artifacts from my life would spark some sort of familiarity, when the hospital and even the faces of people that I apparently knew would not.
    I thought about the fundamental structure of nightmares. I thought about the spinning artifact, the sounds of groaning metal, the dark milieu of flickering lights, and melting walls. Those memories were the clearest.
    The influx of questions wouldn’t stop until it reached the point when there were a thousand voices of the same man screaming over each other, competing for my attention. I couldn’t sleep. Some part of me kept endlessly repeating: You’ve slept enough . You’ve slept enough. You’ve slept enough. You’ve slept enough. You’ve slept enough. You’ve slept enough –
    2.
    Even though the room was fairly lit by the moon, I didn’t notice the puddle of transparent fluid leaking through my bandages until after the pain completely subsided. My burn was still irritated, but I was determined to put it out of my mind as much as I could. I absentmindedly scratched at the healthy spots around my chest, and to my horror, a chunk of skin peeled away with some of the gauze. I tried to press it back into place, but thin lines of blood seeped down my ribs onto the bed. Dismayed, I eased myself to the holo–mirror above my dresser and turned on the light. I could see that my skin became inflamed around the bandage, and a pink torrent of platelets poured out of the wound, directly through the layers of fabric. I took a few Vicodin before trying to catch some sleep, so I must have