I have become moonless in my grief, a paled comparison. But to what? To who I used to be? What I expected to become? I feel as if I’ve been laid out on an operating table, and Time, as a methodically slow and exacting mercenary of a surgeon, has been dissecting me piece by piece. When the operation is done, when I am standing again on my own two feet, what will be left of me? What will have been removed?

   In my mind’s mirrors, I have become eyeless. This wasn’t always the case. I used to see too much of myself, and the crowd would double (and triple and quadruple) as a poison that left me paralyzed. Always parts of me inside unmoving, static glacial chunks in a river’s narrow mouth. The river did not speak to me. Or rather, I couldn’t hear it calling out my name, as I avoided birds and frenzy like pooling coals of plague. Yet, as far as I can recall, there was always the moon. Always and at least the moon: a sphinx, a piper, a boozer … plump, vivacious, suspicious, charitable, an opiate kennel. I could come to terms with eyeless, but eyeless and moonless might be the tipping point.

   Is that why doctors are operating on me? Onion-fingered doctors with green faces and septic voices. They reek of barrenness, the glaring resin of barrenness. How did I wind up in this operating theater, vivid and without narrative recall?

   Right at this very moment someone is shining a pinprick of light into my eye and saying something. I do not know what it is they’re saying. I’d say it’s not English but how do I know that I speak English? That it’s my mother tongue? Without language or languages I do not know what it is I can and cannot understand. I am unable to place myself except to say that I am on an operating table, a conscious agitation that can only speculate as to who, what, where, when, why.

   In crime shows, I remember cops calling perpetrators perps. The perp went there, the perp did that. Am I the victim and casualty to a perp’s willful act of malice? Are there perps out there that I need to find? And then what? The history of knives seems a fable, a lost art. But the names of knives, of blades carving initials into the papery skin of perps, that seems … a little warmer, a little closer.

   Around me, a circular curtain closes. The doctors in their voices and hands are about to perform a ceremony, with I at the center. Coma may be another form of dreaming, is my last thought, before I go under.