Then I staggered through an explanation. How as a kid I'd suffered from Hayes Syndrome. Or Blackout Syndrome, as it is more commonly known. Sudden fits—not seizures exactly, but something close. The child goes suddenly still, holding his breath, eyes open. Sometimes, the incidents go on for an inordinate amount of time, the skin turning blue, the veins bulging. Ultimately, they are not serious. They pass on their own. The biggest danger comes from the onlooker, the inclination to panic, to shake the victim: to force breath back into the body. This is exactly the wrong thing to do. Because the victim will thrash and rage, all the while unseeing, unconscious.

Usually Hayes Syndrome fades with time, though it has been known to linger through adolescence, even into adulthood, reappearing at times of emotional stress. I explained this all to the paramedics. I did not say, though, how there are other specialists who insist it is not a syndrome at all but rather an excuse—a pretense developed after the fact, as explanation for violent behavior of which the perpetrator is fully aware.

“I suffered an attack,” I told the ambulance driver. “Sara didn't know what to do. She tried to restrain me—and I guess we must have smashed heads.”

The paramedic turned to Sara. “Is that what happened?”

Sara rubbed her wrists where I had grabbed her. She looked pretty shaken. I was embarrassed. I am not a violent man, I wanted to tell them, but I held my tongue, knowing the situation appeared otherwise—and the more I protested, the more they might disbelieve.

“He’s telling the truth,” she said at last. “I saw his body seize up.”

The driver had wandered into the kitchen. He came back with the empty vodka glass in his hand. He sniffed it.

“You two been drinking.”

“No,” said Sara. “I mean Jake had a drink. One. But I didn’t have a drop.”

I looked at her in surprise.

“I poured it down the sink,” she explained.

I nodded but felt betrayed somehow. I remembered how she’d looked in bed above me—full of torpor, sleepy-eyed, as if on the edge of tumbling into a deep languor—but when I’d grabbed her shoulders, she’d jerked up pretty fast. Sober as a pin.

The skinny one took Sara aside now, going over the story with her in private. The other one helped me clean up my nose. He examined me a little bit, shining a light in my eyes, taking my pulse, my blood pressure. “It might be a good idea to come down to the hospital with us. Get an emergency CAT scan. Test things out.”

The skinny one came back. He shrugged unhappily, as if disappointed Sara had not changed her story. They loitered around for a while, trying to persuade me into going to the hospital. I refused.