And to a confusion so intense and overpowering that my senses became muddled and mingled. A dizzying panoply of vomit and earth, of the sound of jagged sinews and the taste of cold, and a sound like the iron tongue of pain on my leg. Confusion and then silence. Another burst of noise and light and stench and pain and metal. And then silence. There was a dream, or perhaps a vision, in which a girl with long dark curly hair came to sit at my bedside. She pressed against my knee and the pain was holy and progressive. Later, there was a doctor, who grasped my heel and the back of my calf and said, ‘This may hurt a little,’ and the pain was not sacred but frantic bubbling agony. I still dream of this, and sometimes in my dreams I imagine that I already knew Mark at this moment. He is there by my bed, his head tilted to one side, saying, ‘Pain, James, is the answer not the question.’ It’s because of his Catholicism, which I took so long to understand, and his insistence that a life without pain has no meaning.
