What is the trigger, what switch opens the floodgate? If he could find it, he could control it. But even to think of the urge is to bring it on. “Dad. Dad!” These are the times it overtakes him: When he is reading. When he is watching. When he is listening. At the crossroads of action and thought, the mind’s gathering place, the very place where he lives. When he is driving. “Daddy, wake up!” He hears a thundering like a stampede, he sees chariots, horses. Then the image splinters and there is only the noise itself, jagged and black, until finally the expressway pixelates into clarity and he realizes he has veered onto the rumble strip. A car is stopped on the shoulder not a hundred metres in front of them. They are headed straight for it. “Dad, there’s a car!” Afterwards David will never quite be able to sort out his memory of what happens next in any way that makes sense. It will seem as if he has split in two, on one side of him the nuclear blast of sensation, the thump of his wheels, the stopped car, his son’s grating terror, on the other an eerie calmness, as if every fibre in him has long been preparing for just such a moment, when everything hangs in the balance.
