Perfection is completed; by adding to it, it is destroyed. Duality struck like a thunderbolt. Oneness shattered.
For Glenn Tropile, it seemed as though his wife were screaming at him to wake up. He tried to.
It was curiously difficult and painful. Timeless poignant sadness, five years of sorrow over a lost love compressed into a microsecond. It was always so, Tropile thought drowsily, awakening. It never lasts. What's the use of worrying over what always happens....
Sudden shock and horror rocked him.
This was no ordinary awakening—no ordinary thing at all—nothing was as it ever had been before!
Tropile opened his mouth and screamed—or thought he did. But there was only a hoarse, faint flutter in his eardrums.
It was a moment when sanity might have gone. But there was one curious, mundane fact that saved him. He was holding something in his hands. He found that he could look at it, and it was a switch. A molded switch, mounted on a board, and he was holding one in each hand.
It was little to cling to, but it at least was real. If his hands could be holding something, then there must be some reality somewhere.
Tropile closed his eyes and managed to open them again. Yes, there was reality, too. He closed his eyes and light stopped. He opened them and light returned.
Then perhaps he was not dead, as he had thought.