Room by Room

“It wasn’t panic — panic would have been warm.” Someone “unfamiliar and very calm” walks down a corridor inside Simon, darkening the rooms one after another: the words from the hospital, the smell of coffee and cotton, the hope that slept on the bare floor for three years. Then the familiar “glitch” — the one that had flashed and receded all his life — does not recede. The fracture runs “diagonally, from edge to edge” and does not close. What we saw as “The White Flash” in chapter three becomes a permanent state.

This is depersonalization — a protective split between a person and his feelings when the pain exceeds what can be processed. From the outside it looks like strength: the hands do not shake, the voice has no rough edges, fear “had lived in one of the rooms that had gone dark.” From the inside it is “there had never been so much room inside him before” — emptiness, not peace. The reader needs to hold both pictures at once: Simon really is free of the hook for the first time — and Simon is in danger, because along with the fear, whatever was holding him to life has gone dark too.