The flies will come in, I thought. I should have shut the window. As I closed my eyes to stanch the nausea, an old image displayed itself in my mind: a big aluminum tub full of white fat that had been trimmed from beef, my mother approaching with a good-intentioned smile. “I’m going to make all our soap from now on,” she said, and reached into the tub. The next moment she was shrieking, her face dark and stretched around her mouth, grown enormous, her tongue wide and flat and vibrating in the din. I stared at her and then looked into the tub. The limbs and shards of pale tallow were streaked bloody, and contained the crawling havens of hundreds of plump, curling worms. They lay calmly in their hatching place. “Maggots!” my mother shrieked, and deftly vomited into the tub.

Next I endured the agony of unexplainable bouncing and banging. My whole body was shaken and hammered. My face was cold. Wind rushed over me at a terrible speed. I didn’t bother to open my eyes. I was lying in the bed of a pickup truck; this was unmistakable. The grit, the corrugated metal beneath me, the sizzle of passing traffic. The wind and the bouncing slowed and then stopped. Something moved on my hands. I had been holding them in some soft grip, which was now released. I was rolled and lifted. A swooping sensation in my belly; I swallowed bile. Warmth, stillness. I opened my eyes. A young woman in a white uniform looked down at me. I smiled, the smile got away from me, kept growing until it leaked into my ears.

“This is not, I gather, the train to glory?”

I meant to say it, but I began chuckling instead, a bubbling in my chest. The young woman’s face moved away and I lifted my head to see what she was doing. She had a hypodermic needle and was preparing to inject its contents into my thigh, just below my crotch. As the needle went in, I could not believe the severity of the pain. I stared at her, shocked. She punched a second needle into my other thigh. This one convinced me. I lay back and slept.

It was another day when I woke again. The incessant buzzing in my ears proved to be deafness. Then, too, my legs would not respond at all. I seemed paralyzed. I had wet the bed. The deafness, I learned later, was the natural due of the aspirin. The paralysis was the accidental result of the injections. The incontinence no one bothered to explain.