He had lived in his body and now it was the wrong body. His body, errant and sickly, was what controlled his mind, and ultimately the language that mind expressed itself in.

For the first time, after all the sleepless nights, he considered the word illness, which led to the word disease, which led to the phrase failure of the imagination. For the first time in his life he had a slight insight into what the word imagination might mean. To live on in a different world, to transcend, to enter a new story. As they passed through Crossmolina he realized that it was not going to happen.

I am diseased, he thought.

And he felt – my God – how vulnerable people are, how short their stay in consciousness really is, and how the self they think they know they take for granted. He was maddened by the other passengers, how their identities remained comfortable and intact while his careered around him. Everything he did seemed a betrayal of the truth, while they surveyed the world, uninhibited, sure of themselves, without a hint of the fact that consciousness was something visited on people.

This was going to be a bad day. He could feel it. He could end up anywhere. He should have stopped at home.

Suddenly, Jack was swept into the panic of non-being. He looked round at the vigilant passengers. He clamped his feet on the floor and made his hands into fists. The interior of the bus was a chute along which he would be swept if he did not hold on.

Passing a church, a few passengers in front crossed themselves. And though Jack did not, still he did, secretly, in a psychic mime where a finger touched the forehead, the two shoulders, the heart. He might even have raised a rosary to his lips.

I exist, mumbled Jack. I can pray.

We can’t say we don’t exist, for we do. Each stronger in the other’s mind than in our own. But that was the mind on a good day. The distant cure, the harmony we seek as lost souls. But on the bad days? It was getting difficult for him to stay long in his body. To carry it around normally. To reach out for things. To know his body belonged to him. That when habit said sit, his body would sit. That if he looked to his left it would be for a reason. And when he’d look he must know the reason why. Yet there was always some perverse self-ronsciousness that made the simple command unreasonable. Every move he made he questioned. He was fighting against a lifetime’s habits. Every thought he had was suspect. He felt all his actions were false, masks behind which he imitated and observed normality. That meant he was false, playing to an audience. But the chief member of the audience was missing – Catherine.

He himself it was – before he met Catherine – judged what was right and what was wrong. He it was had accepted that these were his hands and these his knees. Now they looked like someone else’s. Then the panic began again, for the mind, outside the body, did not wish to deny the body.