The explosive pain in his head and chest felt immense as a thundercrash—lethal, final—so that when he fell into the nightmare it was the same as hell, that ready inferno waiting sharp as a kiss of hot iron, burning his mind blind with the furious tide of his sins. It was a nightmare symphony, screaming cries of myriad lives—his own and other’s—sucked back into the past where the world was full of concrete and windowless rooms, dozens of starved, filthy boys crammed together to live and grow and die like animals, unwanted because they were broken, defective, lost beyond help, beyond love… Endless and undying. I could trap you in a memory, you know. Choose one, Artur. Choose your perfect horror. Your mother, perhaps? When she left you at the orphanage and you watched her sign the papers, watched her scrawl that lovely name while you screamed and beat your fists against the floor as the men took you away and she never turned around to say good-bye, never turned to say, “I love you,”
