A Bed above the Abyss: Amnesiac Notebook

i. Awake Each entry consisting of the statements I am awake or I am conscious entered every few minutes: 2:10 p.m.: this time properly awake. 2:14 p.m.: this time finally awake. 2:35 p.m.: this time completely awake. At 9:40 p.m.I awoke for the first time, despite my previous claims. This in turn was crossed out, followed by: I was fully conscious at 10:35 p.m., and awake for the first time in many, many weeks. This in turn was cancelled out by the next entry. ii. Passport How large it grew, that first kiss, until I could board it each night, a raft drifting out into the quiet lake. After twenty years the great amnesiac HM never recognized his doctor, and after lunch gladly ate another: Time for lunch, they would tell him again. You must be starving. God, I am starving. Without a body, collection cannot precede recollection: recollect a tongue, that skilled swirl of its quick tip, a mouthful of familiars: smoke, strawberry candy. Memory in the web between dumbstruck and dura: dump and dune, duplicates. What kind of game is this? I’m no longer a boy, HM would say to his reflection, the surprise on his face genuine. What kind of game is this? The mirror a passport like any other, its picture out of time, a foreign shock of untamed hair even the photographer declared beautiful then. Then: the word smiles like a stranger on your first day at school, sitting on stone steps, worn with use. iii. Taxonomy “Red but not bird comes to mind.” Only the kingdom of living names was missing there—bank, flagstone, sofa remained, but not the blur at the feeder, the undersea creature on the card— it’s a danger, a killer swimmer, they coaxed him—it’s called a (waiting for the word to stir from its depth; how could he forget the ones who dressed, fed, taught him word by word the order of the world? What noise does that loss make?) (They looked suspiciously like his parents, he thought: strangers posing unanswerable questions)— “It has no name, it has no need.”