Summary

Chapter 1 – Narrator (and protagonist) Sean goes through a series of memories – of his return from hospital to his parents’ home; of his being carried through the house by his father (who, Sean comments, wasn’t strong enough to do so but willed himself into it); and of regularly painful trips to the bathroom, where bathing is painful on what he describes as “reconstructed skin”. “This happens several times a day,” Sean comments, “or it’s a single thing that’s always happening somewhere, a current into which I can slip when I need to remember something.” He also describes a memory of his grandparents’ home, with its backyard pond that, after the disappearance of its last fish, was filled in with cedar chips and became, in Sean’s imagination, the central fire-pit of a fantasy world in which he was the evil king...