Oracle Night [antikvár]

I had been sick for a long time. When the day came for me to leave the hospital, I barely knew how to walk anymore, could barely remember who I was supposed to be. Make an effort, the doctor said, and in three or four months you'll be back in the swing of things. I didn't believe him, but I followed his advice anyway. They had given me up for dead, and now that I had confounded their predictions and mysteriously failed to die, what choice did I have but to live as though a future life were waiting for me? I began with small outings, no more than a block or two from my apartment and then home again. I was only thirty-four, but for all intents and purposes the illness had turned me into an old man—one of those palsied, shuffling geezers who can't put one foot in front of the other without first looking down to see which foot is which. Even at the slow pace I could manage then, walking produced an odd, airy lightness in my head, a free-for-all of mixed-up signals and crossed mental wires. The world would bounce and swim before my eyes, undulating like reflections in a wavy mirror, and whenever I tried to look at just one thing, to isolate a single object from the onrush of whirling colors—a blue scarf wrapped around a woman's head, say, or the red tailhght of a passing delivery truck—it would immediately begin to break apart and dissolve, disappearing like a drop of dye in a glass of water. Everything shimmied and wobbled, kept darting off in different directions, and for the first several weeks I had trouble teUing where my body stopped and the rest of