I said in a choked voice, ‘I don’t want to forget about you.’
‘You will.’ I didn’t know then whether he meant I’d forget, or I’d want to forget. ‘You’ll hate me, and then after a long time you’ll be grateful. Maybe you’ll be able to do something for me some time. You’ll be that grateful that you’ll be glad to do it. But you’ll forget, all right, everything but a sort of… feeling. And my name, maybe.’
I don’t know what moved me to ask him, but I did, forlornly. ‘And no one will ever know about you and me?’
‘Can’t,’ he said.’ Unless… well, unless it was the head of the animal, like me, or a better one.’ He heaved himself up.
‘Oh, wait, wait!’ I cried. He mustn’t go yet, he mustn’t. He was a tall, dirty beast of a man, yet he had enthralled me in some dreadful way. ‘You haven’t given me the other… whatever it was.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Yeah, that.’
He moved like a flash. There was a pressure, a stretching apart, and a… a breakage. And with a tearing agony and a burst of triumph that drowned the pain, it was done.
I came up out of it, through two distinct levels:
I am eleven, breathless from shock from a transferred agony of that incredible entrance into the ego of another. And:
I am fifteen, lying on the couch while Stern drones on, ‘… quietly, quietly limp, your ankles and legs as limp as your toes, your belly goes soft, the back of your neck is as limp as your belly, it’s quiet and easy and all gone soft and limper than limp…’