He traveled the twelve feet from the couch to his bed on his hands and knees. The universe was contracting and his brain was swelling. He could feel his face tightening, and his past and future, one indistinguishable from the other, had settled helplessly in a space behind his eyes. His thoughts had no coherence. He always thought in language, but there were no words now. The narrator wasn’t speaking, so the pain had no context, the agony no rationale. Reality was just there, there, there.

He climbed into bed without removing his belt or socks. He fished his phone out of his pocket and checked the time. 7:00 PM. He dropped the phone on the nightstand and slid his glasses, still open, next to it. He heard the cat pacing somewhere beyond the doorway, but he didn’t raise his head to look. He knew he wouldn’t kill himself tonight. The window of opportunity had passed. He would have to sleep, and in the morning—No, there was no “in the morning;” the present was infinite, and infinitely oppressive.

He had once watched a TV show, some generic police procedural with an acronymic title, where a character actor portraying a crisis counselor advised a rape survivor—one of those interchangeable thin blond actresses in early middle age whose careers consist of a string of frustrated suburban mothers and victims of domestic violence—that if the world contained no safe space, she would have to create one inside herself.

For the first four years of his life, he had lived with his parents in a tiny house on his grandparents’ property, a former tool shed that his grandfather had renovated. This was before the move upstate that his mother wanted so badly, before his father started kicking holes in the wall. There must have been tension then, acrimony between his mother and grandmother, money problems, arguments he didn’t see or hear, but he didn’t remember them. Instead, he remembered that his grandmother kept gardens, and there was forty acres, a pond, and a TV that seemed always to be playing Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. There was a toy construction kit full of multicolored interlocking plastic pipes that he would link together haphazardly to form a jumbled, incoherent web that was draped senselessly over the rec room tabletop, ran under chairs, and scaled the side of a broken pinball machine.

He tried to imagine himself there, in the rec room, on the endless lawn, or picking up a blue-grey rock from the gravel driveway.  But he couldn’t bring it into focus. He thought of gardens and childhood only abstractly. The words were back now, and there were no images. He had started to compose a mental essay about home, but it wasn’t his home. It was an idea, a series of sentences. He grew frustrated. The cat jumped onto the nightstand, knocked his glasses onto the floor, and moved to the bed.

He thought of a coworker, an older woman, notorious for her laziness. No one was sure exactly what her responsibilities were, but everyone was confident she was neglecting them. She never brought a lunch with her. She would show up at the table in the small office kitchen first, scavenging for free pastries and would monopolize the lunch conversation with talk of her son, who was an airline pilot and whose benefits allowed her to fly for free on any domestic flight that wasn’t fully booked, and whatever twee British comedy had aired on PBS the night before. She had insisted that the office start recycling, and had all her dental work done in Mexico (an easy drive from her son’s California home), where it was cheaper.

He wondered if he could kill her and not be caught. It was a recurring fantasy, and a quietly comforting one. He thought about crawling under her car and cutting her break line, but what even was a brake line? What did it look like? He visualized himself googling  schematics, looking up her car’s make and model, and, in the same thought, saw her lose control, saw the car escaping its lane, entering oncoming traffic, and—maybe poison? Who would do a tox screen on an old, fat lady, after all? But you had to buy poison, and how would you know the right amount to use? Didn’t antifreeze have a sweet taste? That seemed fitting, but. He loaded a handgun, walked up the stairs to her office and fired. He didn’t see the bullet hit. He was back at the bottom of the stairs. He climbed them and he shot her again. This time his boss was in her office, sitting on the edge of her desk. He was saying something about his car, it needed new brake shoes.  She turned her chair away from the door and said something back to him. Her grandson was starting montessori school. He shot her a third time. The cat was lying on the bed next to him, purring.

He descended the stairs and found himself in the parking lot of an interstate rest stop. His parents were waiting for him to get back in the car. His sisters, eight and thirteen years old again, were seated in the back. They were talking to each other, but he couldn’t hear the words and they didn’t look at him. Soon the car was moving and he was inside. They were driving downstate, to visit his grandparents. He was looking out the window, but instead of watching the Adirondack Park pass, he saw himself, looking out the window. At some point during the trip his sisters disappeared.  His father was looking for an exit, and his mother was holding a map upside down. There was a dog in the backseat. He recognized it as a childhood pet, though he wasn’t sure which one. They were no closer to their destination. His father’s voice was growing louder.

The classroom was full, and he was furious. He was standing next to his desk, screaming at another student, screaming at the teacher, screaming at a man in the hall. He threw his Trapper Keeper it landed against the blackboard, its holographic starscape offset by a universe of darkness and chalk dust. He was suddenly embarrassed. He was acting like a child. Oh god, he should die. He fled the room, thinking, “God, god, god, I should die.” No one else in the classroom moved. He paced the halls, empty except for him, knowing he needed to kill himself, that he had been fatally humiliated.

He closed a door behind him. He was in the bathroom, in the home his parents bought after they moved. The linoleum was peeling. There was a plastic hamper, full, and next to it, a pile of dirty laundry. He was standing in front of the sink. The faucet was on. He was still thinking about dying. As he watched the water running, he remembered that there was a small window directly behind him, and behind the window, he thought, was something terrible. It occurred to him that if he looked up from the sink to the vanity mirror he would be able to see the window, and he would know exactly what was on the other side. He saw himself from behind and he raised his face to look.

The cat knocked over the trash can in the kitchen, and came back into the bedroom. It sat in the doorway and yowled. “God damn it,” he said. “God damn you, you fucker.” He sat up. He couldn’t find his glasses. He walked into the kitchen, set the trashcan upright, and threw a plastic jug and an empty ramen packet back inside. He washed his hands unconsciously and went back to bed.

For awhile there was nothing but noise. Sentences with a subject but no verb, dangling objects and senseless conjunctions, purposeless, contextless language. Emotionally loaded but meaningless on both ends, a child trying to bark back to the family dog.

And then he was walking with a girl. She was in her early teens, and so was he. He didn’t know her.   They were lost in a self-storage lot, wandering a path flanked by rows of identical lockers with steel roller doors that looped endlessly behind them like a recycled background in a Saturday morning cartoon. They were talking. He didn’t remember meeting her or starting the conversation. He couldn’t hear her words or his, but the conversation was lively, full of reciprocal understanding. He wondered which way they had come from, and she tried to draw a map on the pavement with sidewalk chalk. A school bus pulled up, and he watched her take the handrail and climb on board. He followed her. The folding door shut.

He felt an intense contentment that gradually evaporated, replaced by a dilating self-awareness. He was awake. God. He looked at his phone. 6:30 AM. His alarm would go off in half an hour. He closed his eyes and hoped to fall back to sleep.