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individual cell and bursting blood vessel, every nerve ending as it blasted out electric shocks and chemical responses, each bloom of bruise or tear of skin. I could hear my faithful heart, beating as if its rightful place was in my ears instead of my chest.
    My vision, at first blurred from the blood pouring into my eyes, became tunneled. Hun’s face appeared as if held at bay at the far end of a telescope. I expected to see pure evil, hatred, anger—whatever it takes to do this to another human being. Instead I saw self-loathing. And pity. For me? For himself? I was astonished to realize that Hun didn’t want to do this. For some reason still unknown to me, he was forcing himself—forcing himself to be a monster.
    As my eyesight adjusted, so did my other senses, inexplicably amplified. The scent of blood was overpowering.
    When blood is moist, the older it is, the sweeter it smells. When dry, it smells musty, even rancid. I was smelling fresh, wet, warm blood. My blood. Sprayed around me as if by a demented abstract artist gone wild with red paint.
    One summer, Jenn accidentally dropped a pair of pruning shears on her big toe. It bled with a fervor and flow I’d never seen before. She’d come running into the house, yowling with pain, blood trailing her like a crimson tail. As I set to work on the wound, attempting to stanch the bleeding, I remember noticing a metallic, coppery scent in the air. It has something to do with the proteins in blood plasma transporting copper to bone marrow in order to create new red blood cells. Back then I’d detected only the faintest of whiffs, but now, sitting in that chair, the same scent nearly overwhelmed me, as if I’d just snorted a line of wet iron filings.
    Even my taste buds were in on the game. Not just the ones on my bloodied tongue, but thousands more lining my upper esophagus, soft palette, epiglottis, every one detonating like a firework. Sour! Sweet! Savory! And with every proclamation, globs of appropriately flavored saliva sluiced down my throat.
    As Hun’s fist met my face again and again, the sound of skin against skin was oddly intimate. In the background, I could hear every syllable, every small tic of intonation of the whispered prayer being offered by my tormenter between each ragged draw of breath. The one thing I suddenly couldn’t hear, had stopped hearing—blocked out?—was the sound of my own agony.
    Only when Hun was finished did I cease to be the superhuman with psychedelically heightened senses. I was just a beaten man, blood dripping off me onto the floor, mixed with sweat and tears.
    With great effort I forced my chin up from my chest. Only when I’d completed the painful movement did I urge my eyes open. Only one responded, the other too swollen to comply. Even with that, I could barely manage an abbreviated view.
    I was stunned.
    Hun stood before me a destroyed man. He was staring at his raw, bloody fists as if they couldn’t possibly be his. His chest and shoulders heaved up and then down, like the bow of a ship on troubled waters.
    We stayed like that—me on the chair, him standing before me—for a long time.
    Finally, Hun opened his mouth. He called for someone, his voice strained.
    The second man, young Hun, appeared in the doorway, little more than a blurred shadow to me. They exchanged a stream of words I didn’t understand. Young Hun approached me. With a trembling forefinger he lifted my chin, which had begun to slide back toward my chest. I knew what he wanted.
    He wanted me to look straight ahead.
    Into the camera.
    Again.
    “He…is…father.”
    What? The three words had come from young Hun. Stumbling, stilted, nearly unintelligible, barely a whisper—but I heard them. What did they mean? What was young Hun telling me in his broken English? That Hun was actually his father, leaving him powerless to stop what was happening to me? Or was he trying to rationalize the older man’s behavior—telling me that Hun was a father, just