Darkness and silence all about, and nothing, nothing, nothing within it.

Me?

The first thought came unbidden, welling up from some black pool. Me? That's all.

Me? he thought. Then, Who? What ...?

Nothing answered.

Something like panic followed, without the customary physical accompaunnents.

When this wave had passed, he listened, striving to capture the slightest sound.

He realized that he had already given up on seeing.

There was nothing to hear. Not even the smallest noises of life - breathing, heartbeat, the rasping of a tired joint - came to him. It was only then that he realized he lacked all bodily sensations.

But this time he fought the panic. Death? he wondered. A bodiless, dark sentence beyond everything? The stillness ...

Where? What point in spacetime did he occupy? He would have shaken his head...

He recalled that he had been a man - and it seemed that there were memories somewhere that he could not reach. No name answered his summons, no view of his past came to him. Yet he knew that there had been a past. He felt that it lay just below some dim horizon of recall.

He strove for a timeless interval to summon some recollection of what had gone before. Amnesia? Brain damage? Dream? he finally asked himself, after failing to push beyond a certain feeling of lurking images.

A body then ... Start with that.

He remembered what bodies were. Arrns, legs, head, torso ... An intellectual vision of sex passed momentarily through his consciousness. Bodies, then ...

He thought of his arms, felt nothing. Tried to move them. There was no sense of their existence, let alone movement.

Breathing ... He attempted to draw a deep breath. Nothing came into him. There was no indication of any boundary whatsoever between himself and the darkness and silence.