For hours or days he existed in a vacancy, a dry and wretched void without past or future. The walls stood tight about him. Outside them was the silence. His arms and buttocks ached from injections; he ran a fever that never quite heightened to delirium but left him in a limbo between reason and unreason, no man’s land. Time did not pass. There was no time. He was time: he only. He was the river, the arrow, the stone. But he did not move.