It was 1:19 A.M. I remember the time because the digital clock on the nightstand was all angry red numbers, skyscraper tall and brutalist. Once I got my breathing under control, I ventured into the hallway and turned on the light. I stood at the banister and listened to the noiseless downstairs. My headache remained a low hum and my mouth was dry and tasted acidic, as though I’d thrown up a little in my mouth. Most alarmingly, a sharp pain rooted between my shoulder blades and ivied into my neck. Rolling either shoulder or my neck was eye-watering agony, so too any attempt at straightening my posture. My only relief came from curling forward and holding an insectlike pose. Had I slept on it wrong or pulled a muscle in the throes of my nightmare? I’d already decided what I’d experienced was a nightmare as every one of us does and must do in the middle of the night. Otherwise, how could we go on in the face of awe and terror?

I crept downstairs. The kitchen light was on, though I didn’t remember if I’d left it on. After a half glass of water and two Tylenol, I stretched and flexed my shoulders, but the pain intensified, and I worried I’d somehow injured myself more seriously. After a brief interior dialogue in which I told myself there wasn’t any reason for me to look in on Mercy, I scuttled the short walk to the TV room anyway. One of the French doors was pressed permanently shut by the television cabinet, but the other was open. I hovered in the doorway, a dead-of-night Quasimodo with no bell to ring. Silver moonlight smoked through the orderly row of windows of the back wall above the couch on which Mercy splayed. Her green blanket was rolled, twisted, and tentacled around and between her limbs and bunched on her torso. I was struck by how there wasn’t enough room on the narrow couch for her to have tossed and turned and sleep-rolled herself into such a cat’s cradle. Plus, the blue blanket I’d given her had been discarded and pooled on the floor. Wait, where did the green one come from?

Have you ever looked at someone or something in weak light, if there was such a thing, or different light, though the word “different” didn’t cover it by a long shot, perhaps ineffable was closer, or more utilitarianly as light you were not used to, or light that existed to display its own reality and you might assume the unrepeatable, sui generis wavelengths were quantum imps playing tricks on you, the unsuspecting, the unwilling, the unbelieving, and you knew all this but you still couldn’t unsee what you saw?