None Held Longer Than a Second

“And the light came apart in layers.” At the back of the armchair, at the shoulder, at the arm there appears “a red fringe on one side and a blue one on the other”; two shadows cannot keep up with the blow; the blow repeats “like a frame that had gotten stuck”; a band at eye level shifts a piece of the room to the right; “Jacob was flickering” — “there he was, full height, over Craig; then — empty.” The wall gives “like fabric,” the distance to the armchair stretches out, then shrinks to the threads at the seam. “He thought it was his eye. His ear. His head, which had been slammed against the wall. There were explanations, he went through them, and not one held for longer than a second — just as the wall didn’t hold.”

The codex has met this “glitch” in Simon before: “The White Flash” in chapter three, “When Reality Cracks” in chapter four, “Room by Room” in chapter nineteen — it had “flashed and receded all his life.” Here it unfolds completely, and whatever the author put into it, from the inside it looks like peritraumatic derealization: a brain that lacks the resources to assemble an unbearable scene into a single picture delivers it in layers, repetitions and gaps. A person in this state is not hallucinating — he is honestly reporting that the world has stopped holding together. Note the detail that will bring us back to earth later: the concussion, the eyebrow, the blows to the ear — the body, too, is taking part in this disintegration. Of all the explanations not one holds, and “Nothing was left inside him but one thing, and that one thing came out on its own.”